Bread from the Lion's Mouth: Artisans Struggling for a Livelihood in Ottoman Cities 9781782385592

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Figures/Maps/Tables
Preface
Timeline
Map
Introduction: Once Again, Ottoman Artisans
Part I: Artisans over the Course of Time
1 Tracing Esnaf in Late Fifteenth-Century Bursa Court Records
2 History, Meet Archaeology
3 Damascene Artisans around 1700
4 Mapping Istanbul’s Hammams of 1752 and their Employees
5 Surviving in Difficult Times
6 The Shoe Guilds of Istanbul in the Early Nineteenth Century
Part II: Intra-guild Problems
7 Blurred Boundaries between Soldiers and Civilians
8 Rich Artisans and Poor Merchants?
9 Gedik: What’s in a Name?
10 Punishment, Repression and Violence in the Marketplace
Part III: Artisans Confronting the Modernizing State
11 Some Observations on Istanbul’s Artisans during the Reign of Selim III (1789–1808)
12 Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire
Glossary
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Bread from the Lion’s Mouth

International Studies in Social History

General Editor: Marcel van der Linden, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam Volume 1 Trade Unions, Immigration and Immigrants in Europe 1960–1993 Edited by Rinus Penninx and Judith Roosblad Volume 2 Class and Other Identities Edited by Lex Heerma van Voss and Marcel van der Linden Volume 3 Rebellious Families Edited by Jan Kok Volume 4 Experiencing Wages Edited by Peter Scholliers and Leonard Schwarz Volume 5 The Imaginary Revolution Michael Seidman Volume 6 Revolution and Counterrevolution Kevin Murphy Volume 7 Miners and the State in the Ottoman Empire Donald Quataert Volume 8 Anarchism, Revolution and Reaction Angel Smith Volume 9 Sugarlandia Revisited Edited by Ulbe Bosma, Juan Giusti-Cordero and G. Roger Knight Volume 10 Alternative Exchanges Edited by Laurence Fontaine Volume 11 A Social History of Spanish Labour Edited by José Piqueras and Vicent SanzRozalén Volume 12 Learning on the Shop Floor Edited by Bert De Munck, Steven L. Kaplan and Hugo Soly

Volume 13 Unruly Masses Wolfgang Maderthaner and Lutz Musner Volume 14 Central European Crossroads Pieter C. van Duin Volume 15 Supervision and Authority in Industry Edited by Patricia Van den Eeckhout Volume 16 Forging Political Identity Keith Mann Volume 17 Gendered Money Pernilla Jonsson and Silke Neunsinger Volume 18 Postcolonial Migrants and Identity Politics Edited by Ulbe Bosma, Jan Lucassen, and Gert Oostindie Volume 19 Charismatic Leadership and Social Movements Edited by Jan Willem Stutje Volume 20 Maternalism Reconsidered Edited by Marian van der Klein, Rebecca Jo Plant, Nichole Sanders and Lori R. Weintrob Volume 21 Routes into the Abyss Edited by Helmut Konrad and Wolfgang Maderthaner Volume 22 Alienating Labour Eszter Bartha Volume 23 Migration, Settlement and Belonging in Europe, 1500–1930s Edited by Steven King and Anne Winter Volume 24 Bondage Alessandro Stanziani Volume 25 Bread from the Lion’s Mouth Edited by Suraiya Faroqhi

Bread from the Lion’s Mouth Artisans Struggling for a Livelihood in Ottoman Cities

Edited by Suraiya Faroqhi

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published in 2015 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2015 Suraiya Faroqhi

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bread from the lion’s mouth: artisans struggling for a livelihood in Ottoman cities / edited by Suraiya Faroqhi. pages cm. – (International studies in social history; volume 26) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-78238-558-5 (hardback: alkaline paper) – ISBN 978-1-78238-559-2 (e-book) 1. Material culture–Turkey–History. 2. Artisans–Turkey–History. 3. Turkey– History–Ottoman Empire, 1288-1918. I. Faroqhi, Suraiya, 1941– editor of compilation. HD6473.T9B73 2015 331.7’94–dc23 2014029069 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78238-558-5 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-78238-559-2 (ebook)

To the memory of Donald Quataert

Contents List of Figures/Maps/Tables

ix

Prefacexi Timelinexiv Mapxvi Introduction: Once Again, Ottoman Artisans Suraiya Faroqhi Part I: Artisans over the Course of Time  1 Tracing Esnaf in Late Fifteenth-­Century Bursa Court Records İklil Selçuk

1

51

 2 History, Meet Archaeology: The Potter’s Craft in Ottoman Hungary70 Géza Dávid and Ibolya Gerelyes  3 Damascene Artisans around 1700 Colette Establet  4 Mapping Istanbul’s Hammams of 1752 and their Employees Nina Ergin  5 Surviving in Difficult Times: The Cotton and Silk Trades in Bursa around 1800 Suraiya Faroqhi

88 108

136

 6 The Shoe Guilds of Istanbul in the Early Nineteenth Century: A Case Study 157 Nalan Turna

viii

Part II: Intra-­guild Problems  7 Blurred Boundaries between Soldiers and Civilians: Artisan Janissaries in Seventeenth-­Century Istanbul Gülay Yılmaz Diko  8 Rich Artisans and Poor Merchants? A Critical Look at the Supposed Egalitarianism in Ottoman Guilds Eunjeong Yi  9 Gedik: What’s in a Name? Seven Ağır and Onur Yıldırım 10 P  unishment, Repression and Violence in the Marketplace: Istanbul, 1730–1840 Engin Deniz Akarlı Part III: Artisans Confronting the Modernizing State 11 Some Observations on Istanbul’s Artisans during the Reign of Selim III (1789–1808) Betül Bas¸aran and Cengiz Kırlı 12 O  ut of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire: Protest, the State, and the End of the Guilds in Egypt John Chalcraft

Contents

175

194 217

237

259

278

Glossary293 Bibliography306 List of Contributors

335

Index340

Figures/Maps/Tables Figures

List of Figures/Maps/Tables

1.1

 rades according to frequency of appearance in Bursa T Court Defter A 8/8 (H. 895–96). 55 1.2 State agents and ‘experienced craftsmen’ according to frequency of appearance in Bursa Court Defter A 8/8 (H. 895–96). 56 2.1 Ottoman-­type vessels. sixteenth–seventeenth century. Buda Castle. Hungarian National Museum, Budapest. 76 2.2 Pots made on a hand-­turned wheel. Late sixteenth century. Ozora Castle. Mór Wosinszky Museum, Szekszárd. 79 2.3 Hungarian-­type pot. Late sixteenth century. Buda Castle. Hungarian National Museum, Budapest. 81 11.1 Shops and gardens by frequency (top 35 shown). (Prepared by Cengiz Kırlı)  268 11.2 Occupations by employment (top 35 shown). (Prepared by Cengiz Kırlı) 269

Maps Front Map showing selected manufacturing centres in the Ottoman Empire (17th to 18th centuries). (From Faroqhi, Artisans of Empire)xvi 4.1 Overall distribution of hammams in Greater Istanbul. (All maps in this chapter by Yasemin Özarslan) 128 4.2 Hammams on Istanbul’s historical peninsula. (For legend to numbers, see Table 4.1) 128 4.3 Historical peninsula, Eyüp and Galata, with hammams based on the real number of employees. 129

x

Figures/Maps/Tables

4.4

 istorical peninsula, Eyüp (partial) and Galata, with H hammams based on employee age. 129 4.5 Historical peninsula, Eyüp (partial) and Galata, with hammams based on employee origin. (Hammam no. 143 has been omitted since the origin of its only employee is unknown130 4.6 Number of employees originating from Üsküdar per hammam. 130 4.7 Number of employees originating from Avlonya per hammam. 131 4.8 Number of employees originating from İstarova per hammam. 131 4.9 Number of employees originating from Çemişgezek per hammam. 132 4.10 Number of employees originating from Sivas per hammam. 132

Tables 3.1 3.2 3.3

4.1 6.1 8.1 8.2 10.1 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4

 omparing the estates of merchants and artisan-­ C shopkeepers (in piasters). (Based on registers No. 15 and 19 of the Damascus qisma ‘arabiyya)97 The composition of artisan-­shopkeepers’ and merchants’ estates. (Based on registers No. 15 and 19 of the Damascus qisma ‘arabiyya)97 Estates after debt repayment, outstanding loans (credits) and debts in relation to the values of the relevant estates, before payment of debts. (Based on registers No. 15 and 19 of the Damascus qisma ‘arabiyya)98 List of hammams included in the İstanbul Hammâmları Defteri together with neighbourhoods where the buildings were located. 123 Shoemaking guilds in Istanbul. 159 Donations to the guild vakıf of the cauldron-­makers. 203 Some of the most important items belonging to Abdülbaki Çelebi.206 Background conditions. 250 The geographical distribution of Istanbul Esnaf according to the registers specified. 265 Religious distribution of masters/shopkeepers. 266 Religious distribution of boatmen, porters and peddlers. 267 Esnaf and titles. 271

Preface

Preface

In Turkish, something that is hard to obtain is said to be ‘in the lion’s mouth’. Artisans, in the Ottoman Empire as elsewhere, were often hard pressed when it came to earning their daily bread, and some of them may well have felt that this particular lion had sharp teeth indeed. Even in Istanbul, whose population in normal times had privileged access to grain, timber, firewood and other basic commodities, life was often hard and short. After all, normal times – such as they were – might be brutally interrupted by wars, bad weather, epidemics, fires and the occasional earthquake. This volume deals with the problem of how Ottoman and especially Istanbul artisans sought to survive under these conditions, together with their families and the communities, religious and/or professional, of which they were members. Books are the products of communal efforts as well, although the communities involved are of a rather different type. Scholars, editors, publishers, grant-­givers and other sponsors engage in collective enterprises which they hope, in the fullness of time, will result in publications. Edited volumes even more than other kinds of books require this investment of money and high hopes; and edited volumes that take a long time to assemble – when they finally do appear – owe their existence to the efforts and good will of yet a larger number of people. As all this is very true of the present work, a short account of the way in which it emerged is perhaps in order. It all began in 2004, when a workshop on Ottoman artisans and crafts (‘Crafts and Craftsmen in the Later Ottoman Empire: From Craft to Industry in the Ottoman Empire and its “Successor States”’) formed part of the 29th German Congress of Oriental Studies [Deutscher Orientalistentag] in the old university town of Halle. Seven of the fifteen contributors to this volume participated, although the chapters now presented are often quite different from the papers that they shared with their colleagues back in 2004. M. Erdem Kabadayı also participated as a graduate student; together with Leda Papastefanaki he is now editing the volume that will be the companion to the present one (‘Working in Greece and

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Preface

Turkey: A Comparative Labour History from Empires to Nation States 1840–1940’). But one of the chief figures in this enterprise was the late Donald Quataert, who was then still working on his book on Zonguldak coal miners, which appeared in 2006.1 His contribution will appear in the second volume of the present publication, as it is concerned with rural workers and not with artisans. Those of us who after the end of the conference participated in an outing to the town of Naumburg, still quite medieval in appearance, will not forget how Don, who was an enthusiastic birdwatcher, showed us a falcon standing stock-­still in the blustery air, wings spread out as far as they would go. Numerous are the people and organizations whose generosity brought about the Halle conference, and I can but cordially thank them. Most important among them was Jürgen Paul of the University of Halle, who was co-­organizer of the conference and knows so much more about organization than I will ever do. The Gerda-­Henkel Foundation of Düsseldorf, Germany, financed the conference in Halle and would also have supported publication if – mea culpa – I had ‘gotten my act together’ within a reasonable time span. But at that time, I am rather ashamed to admit, I was concentrating on my own book on Ottoman artisans, and later on other projects also pushed this one into the background. I therefore apologize to those colleagues whose papers have been delayed as a result. However the project revived once I had begun to work in the History Department at Istanbul Bilgi University in 2007 and M. Erdem Kabadayı had become a fully-­fledged faculty member in the same institution. My colleague’s concern was and is with early factory workers, and in 2011 he and Kate Elizabeth Creasey organized a workshop on ‘work’ (‘Working in the Ottoman Empire and in Turkey: Ottoman and Turkish Labour History within a Global Perspective’) that brought together scholars working on Istanbul and the Balkans, with a special emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We are very grateful to Diane Sunar, at that time Dean of the Faculty of Sciences and Literary Studies, for making this second workshop possible. Marcel van der Linden, who because of his concern with non-­ Western labour forces attended this workshop and suggested that it should lead to a double volume with Berghahn Books, has also had a major share in making this work finally see the light of day. Thanks are also due to the two anonymous readers who made pertinent suggestions, without – thank goodness – demanding that the whole volume be rewritten. I am also most grateful to Giorgio Riello and Anne Gerritsen, with whom we have organized two workshops on ­consumption – and as so many of the goods that Ottoman subjects consumed were the work of artisans, over the years these two projects have developed in tandem.

Preface xiii

But the workshop of 2011 was important also because new people brought us previously un-­used or under-­used sources and, more importantly, some novel approaches. In the years before 2011, Cengiz Kırlı and Betül Başaran had already made their mark through detailed work on Istanbul registers of the active population, which had been compiled around 1800 upon the orders of Selim III (r. 1789–1807). Apart from their role as a tool of the government, these data can also feature as early urban statistics, and Kırlı and Başaran have treated them as such. They were kind enough to participate in this project at very short notice, as was Nina Ergin, who has long been studying Istanbul bathhouses. At the same workshop our project was also discussed with Murat Güvenç, Eda Yücesoy and their team, now of Şehir University, Istanbul, who have for a long time been mapping Istanbul enterprises of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Without their inspiration and encouragement it is unlikely that I would have had the courage to assemble this volume. Ali Somay was kind enough to produce the graphs in the chapter by İklil Selçuk. In the last stages of the project I received much help from Özgün Deniz Yoldaşlar, Daniel Ohanian and Büşra Kösoğlu, without whose copy-­editing this volume would have taken even longer to come out. Of course, any remaining errors are mine.

Note 1. Donald Quataert, Miners and the State in the Ottoman Empire, The Zonguldak Coalfield 1822–1920 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006).

Note on Transliteration Ottoman-Turkish words have been written according to the conventions of modern Turkish spelling. When using Arabic terms, the different authors have conformed to the rules current in the scholarly traditions with which they are associated.

Timeline 1481–1512 Bayezid II reigns: the earliest comprehensive documents concerning artisans date to this period ˛ 1514 Victory of Selim I over the Safavid shah Ismail I: numerous artists and artisans carried off to Istanbul 1516–17 Victory of Selim I over the Mamluk sultans; conquest of Syria and Egypt 1526 Battle of Mohács: defeat and death of King Lajos II of Hungary 1541 Ottoman conquest of Buda: institution of direct Ottoman domination over the central section of the kingdom of Hungary 1550–57  Construction of the Süleymaniye mosque and appurtenances; the best-­ documented Ottoman construction site of the early modern period 1574–95 Reign of Murad III, known for his lavish patronage of the arts 1582 Circumcision festivities of Prince Mehmed, later Mehmed III: the festival book depicts the floats prepared by Istanbul artisans 17th century Gradual entry of janissaries into artisan life – and onwards artisans joining the janissaries 1611–unknown date Evliya Çelebi, travelogue author who produced after 1683  detailed accounts of Istanbul and Cairo craft guilds 1651  Rebellion in which Istanbul artisans played a major role 1686 Ottoman loss of Buda to an army of the ‘Holy League’ dominated by Poland and the Habsburgs

Timeline xv

1688 Rebellion in which Istanbul craftsmen participated 1703 ‘The Edirne Event’: Sultan Mustafa II (r. 1695– 1703) deposed in a rebellion in which Istanbul soldiers-­cum-­artisans took part, concerned about the loss of markets that a permanent move of the court to Edirne would have entailed After 1720 More and more artisans have to acquire ‘slots’ (gediks) before opening their shops 1730 Dissatisfied soldiers-­cum-­artisans in Istanbul force Sultan Ahmed III (r. 1703–30) to resign, and murder the grand vizier 1789–1807 Selim III attempts to phase out the janissaries, and replace them with a ‘New Model Army’ (Nizam-­ı cedid) 1807 Selim III dethroned 1808–39 Reign of Mahmud II 1826 Abolition of the janissary corps, accompanied by much bloodshed: cancellation of many coffeehouse gediks 1838  Anglo-­ Ottoman treaty of Baltalimanı abolishes monopolies including gediks; but in some crafts the latter linger on for a considerable time 1890–92 Guilds lose their official status in Egypt 1910–12 Guilds abolished in the central Ottoman provinces First World War The government forms artisan organizations to gain public support

Map showing selected manufacturing centres in the Ottoman Empire (17th to 18th centuries). (From Faroqhi, Artisans of Empire)

 

Introduction

Once Again, Ottoman Artisans

Suraiya Faroqhi

Who would have believed it thirty or forty years ago: with the beginning of the new millennium, the crafts and craftspeople of the Ottoman lands have become a popular topic; and while otherwise the present fashion for Ottoman history current in today’s Turkey highlights the 1800s and early 1900s, in the case of artisans the pre-­Tanzimat period (late fifteenth to mid-­nineteenth centuries) has also come in for its share of attention. We may speculate about the reasons: nostalgia for a defunct empire must be one of them, because in the mega-­city of Istanbul, the media and the public are fond of harking back to a supposedly more benign, less aggressive and less consumption-­oriented environment in which religion played a dominant role. As for provincial cities, the recent rise of an Anatolian bourgeoisie less dependent on the state apparatus than it had been during the first fifty years of the Republic of Turkey, has also implied a search for a ‘usable past’; and since apart from Izmir and to some extent Bursa, most Anatolian towns were not great commercial entrepôts, it makes sense to modern commentators to emphasize crafts and craft ethos.1 As even a casual visitor to medium-­ sized Anatolian towns like Çankırı or Kırşehir will notice, today’s local people like to picture their towns as the former – or even present – seats of mystical fraternities, and particularly stress male bonding in the groupings known as ahis. Nostalgia for the Ottoman past is probably also of significance in the Bosnian case, which is rather special because

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Suraiya Faroqhi

of the memories of recent civil war and the present difficult situation of the Muslim population. Much of this popular imagery is romantic and not realistic; for non-­ specialists this consideration is beside the point, but historians do need to remain faithful to their sources. As James Grehan has memorably put it, we must not imagine that people of the pre-­Tanzimat era had all that much time and energy to focus on religion or other intellectual concerns: keeping body and soul together and ensuring the survival of their families must have kept artisans fully occupied, all the more as the Ottoman elites were committed to keeping the profits of artisans very low indeed.2 Only in exceptional cases, when the work was especially difficult, could a craftsman count on a legalized profit of 20 per cent; 10 per cent was typical and, in official parlance at least, profit rates even below that limit were not unheard of.3 Furthermore, the earthquakes, scarcities, epidemics and, in Istanbul, the numerous fires that periodically destroyed large sections of the city, must have brought destitution to many artisan families. After all, romanticism is always a denial of the workaday world. As a result of this novel scholarly interest, a significant number of studies have appeared since the present editor completed the writing of Artisans of Empire in 2008.4 This fact of life was brought home to her when teaching a graduate course on the subject in the spring of 2012.5 As a result the present discussion is an update of her previous work: may the pace of research continue to quicken! Thus monographs on which the authors have spent many years of work may be out of date much faster than they used to be; and those of us who are of the older generation must learn to live with that unsettling experience. The present Introduction will begin with a discussion of research into the various urban hazards like scarcities, fire, and infectious diseases that shortened the lives of all Ottoman subjects but to which, because of their poverty and close proximity to one another, many artisans were particularly exposed. We will then survey the research covering those workplaces about which we have some information, especially the court ateliers and the manufactories producing armaments and gunpowder; here the study of artisans intersects with that of material culture and the recently emerging research on Ottoman consumption.6 As a next step, this Introduction will highlight the religious concerns of Ottoman guildsmen. For a long time this issue had occasioned very little interest; but given the resurgence of religion in public life in many polities the world over, historians are also taking note of the limited information that Ottoman sources convey about this matter. In the following section the focus will be on the observations and broadly based explanations relevant to the emergence and decline of Ottoman guilds, followed by a short section dealing with

Introduction 3

the features that Ottoman guilds shared, or did not share, with artisan organizations outside the Ottoman Empire, especially in early modern Europe but also in Japan. Moreover, three rather more specific research problems, namely the relationship of artisans to Islamic and sultanic laws, the question of market regulation, and the impact of migration into and out of Istanbul are all closely connected to the more encompassing guild problematic. At the end of this general discussion there will be a short review of the literature focusing on the connection between janissaries and guildsmen, an issue that has taken on a new urgency because historians concerned with nineteenth-­century Ottoman transformations have discovered the beginnings of the ‘statistical state’ in the reign of Selim III (r. 1789–1807). These transformations also involved a trend towards autocratic centralization; and Baki Tezcan has recently revived, with considerable verve and elaboration, the statement of the poet Namık Kemal (1840–88) that the janissaries once protected the common people against bureaucratic oppression.7 It is against this backdrop that hopefully readers will view the present work; fortunately quite a few participants in current debates have contributed their most recent thoughts and observations to this volume.

Artisans at Risk In recent years the hazards of urban life, especially in Istanbul, have found their historians. While Nicolas N. Ambraseys and Caroline Finkel had already, in the mid-­1990s, shown that the various earthquakes recorded in seventeenth-­century Anatolia and Istanbul in fact belonged to a single seismic chain, Ambraseys’ more recent massive study has allowed us to appreciate how often the sultans’ subjects, artisans among them, had to cope with earthquakes. The effects of even moderate quakes could be quite disastrous, due to the destructive conflagrations that often occurred when seismic movements overturned braziers or destroyed fireplaces.8 As for scarcities and famines, until recently they did not appear very clearly in the historiography. Perhaps this lack of interest was due to the fact that such catastrophes did not sit very well with the image of the ‘well-­ oiled military machine’ conveyed by Ottoman chroniclers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. After all twentieth-­century historians assiduously adopted this vision, largely because of their eagerness to rescue the Ottoman Empire from the opprobrium which the various nationalist historiographies of the 1800s and early 1900s had heaped upon it. But more recently, studies focusing on both the ‘classical period’ (1450–1600) and the crisis-­ridden late 1700s have demonstrated that such scarcities

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did occur; and the enormous mobilization of men and materiel during military campaigns did not exactly alleviate them. Thus recent work has ­vindicated the early observations of Lütfi Güçer, who already in the 1960s had briefly indicated that Ottoman warfare might endanger peasants’ livelihoods.9 Certainly it is an exaggeration to claim that the difficulties of the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were all due to harvest failures, epizootics, or the elite’s general failure to manage climatic change. Yet it is important to include scarcities as a major hazard in the lives of poor Ottoman townspeople, especially artisans. What did craftsmen and their families eat? Presumably their diets consisted of bread, bulgur, soup, yoghurt and some vegetables – but on this issue hypotheses are easy to formulate but difficult to prove. Probably the better off were sure of obtaining these basic foodstuffs while the poor struggled to obtain even a pittance. Charitable aid was available but only occasionally: as Ömer Lütfi Barkan and Amy Singer have both shown, many public kitchens catered mainly for the students of the schools associated with the pious foundations financing them, and also for religious scholars and dervishes. Certainly these institutions also served food to the poor, especially in times of scarcity, but quite often that was not their primary function.10 Moreover the texts that document the food eaten by Istanbul urbanites are not only few and far between, but they also concern the eating habits of the comfortably off, while the really poor remain in the darkest of shadows. A piece of anecdotal evidence survives from 1720, the year of the famous circumcision festivities celebrating the sons of Ahmed III (r. 1703–30). However the text at issue has nothing festive about it, being a petition from the blacksmiths working for the naval arsenal who openly admitted that they were not in a position to feed their families. Therefore their wives needed to supplement current income by cooking and selling sheep’s trotters.11 On the one hand we may surmise that the customers of these women were their neighbours, presumably also of limited means, who thus must have consumed, at least on occasion, the cheapest sources of animal protein. But on the other hand, the blacksmiths’ admission that they could not feed their families makes us wonder how often artisans, or perhaps their wives and widows, cued up at the gates of the major pious foundations waiting for charitable hand-­outs. Contagious diseases, which as Birsen Bulmuş and Nükhet Varlık have demonstrated were not necessarily bubonic plague though this sickness played a significant role, have also come in for renewed attention.12 For our purposes, in other words, for determining the impact of contagious diseases upon the lives of artisans, the exact diagnosis may be of limited importance; whether plague, typhus, or even severe influenza, they all left

Introduction 5

families without their breadwinners or disrupted workshop routines when masters, journeymen and apprentices fell ill and/or met their deaths. Other diseases, especially those affecting young children, have left so few traces in the primary sources that we can only follow Halil İnalcık, who many years ago pointed to their frequency, given the hygienic conditions of the times.13 At least where Istanbul is concerned, fires have become a significant object of study.14 Many conflagrations must have been caused by bakers of all kinds, but also by traders in timber and firewood, to say nothing of the ropemakers working for the arsenal, who laboured in sheds where the very air was full of tiny but highly inflammable bits of hemp. In addition, scholars have become interested especially because some of these calamities were probably politically motivated. While proven cases are rare, there were so many rumours flying around the Ottoman capital that this or that fire had been set on purpose, for instance by discontented janissaries, that one does wonder whether some of these stories perhaps had a factual basis. Also, even if a fire had not been set deliberately it might still have served a political purpose, sometimes quite a while after it had been extinguished. Thus Hatice Turhan (d. 1683), mother of Sultan Mehmed IV (r. 1648–67) had the Yeni Cami constructed only after the fire of 1660 had destroyed the Jewish quarter previously located on the site.15 Presumably once a given site had been cleared by fire, it was easier for a member of the elite to take over real estate previously inhabited by ordinary people, and use the land to build a pious foundation. Some recent studies of the Islamization of Istanbul in spatial terms have emphasized this aspect of great fires; in the aftermath, pressure from the Muslim majority tended to push non-­Muslims out of the city, as İnalcık already pointed out over twenty years ago. The expellees tended to settle along the north-­western section of the Golden Horn, for instance in Hasköy, or else along the Bosporus which was sparsely inhabited until well into the 1700s.16 Even more recently some scholars have expressed their doubts concerning the reality of this presumed process; but their work is not as yet available in print. Yet for a study of artisans, it is perhaps more relevant to figure out how these men reacted to the loss of workspace once fires had annihilated their premises. Evliya Çelebi has relayed a story of an Istanbul shop originally tenanted by a clog-­maker that miraculously survived a great fire.17 The author ascribed this fact to the saintly aura of this modest craftsman; and when the administrator of the pious foundation to which the shed belonged, aware of the high price that workspace of whatever quality now commanded, passed it on at a higher rent to a Jewish artisan, the latter was soon killed in an accident. An undercurrent of hostility to the

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­ on-­Muslim who dared to compete with a Muslim – and a saint to boot n – was surely implied in this tale. It was probably observations of this kind that caused the scholar Şânî-­zâde (d. 1826), at one time qadi of Eyüp, to view such conflagrations largely as public order problems. Struggles between artisans, even if they were all of the same religion, were bound to result from any fire in the business district, which was furthermore especially at risk because of the many flammable goods ­ including textiles and ropes – and also clogs – that were stored in the city’s workshops.18

Artisans at Work: Producing Ottoman Material Culture However difficult their lives, craftsmen – and occasionally craftswomen – did produce a vast array of items: unfortunately we only know most of them from inventories and other descriptions since few pieces in daily use have actually come down to us. Moreover in the long run the number of goods available to the urbanite with money to spend tended to increase. A recent study by Eminegül Karababa has shown that in Bursa between the mid-­sixteenth and mid-­seventeenth centuries, cheaper variants of previously elite goods became available, thus ‘democratizing’ consumption, at least to some degree.19 Given the relatively more abundant source base concerning luxury goods, many studies of material culture and the people that produced it unavoidably focus on these articles. Metalwork is especially rewarding because Orthodox artisans producing silverware for their churches often recorded not only the names of the patrons who had commissioned the work but also their own, in addition to dating the item in question. Thus the work of Brigitte Pitarakis and Anna Ballian has shown that there existed guilds consisting only of Orthodox artisans; some of these were wealthy enough to offer silver chalices and decorations to the churches and monasteries of their choice.20 The embroiderers, often female, who produced highly decorated textiles in the Byzantine tradition for liturgical use also often recorded their names and dated their work. Other manufactures, often of high quality, are on record because of their connection with the Ottoman court and high-­level dignitaries. Most attention has been paid to the painters of miniatures. While Ottoman gentlemen of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries regarded painters as subordinate not only to their elite patrons, but also to the authors whose works they illustrated, these personages still were important enough for their workshops and/or their meetings with patrons to feature in miniatures.21 Moreover they appear in official documents as they featured among the

Introduction 7

ehl-­i hıref or men of skill, a group including not only people that we today would consider artists, but also artisans in the narrow sense of the term; whether the latter had been selected on the basis of special skills remains unknown. In the 1500s apparently some six hundred to nine hundred men were in court employment of this type; and the historiographer and litterateur Mustafa Âlî even claimed that there were two thousand.22 An early register comprising the names and payment claims of ehl-­i hıref (1526) has been published: as it dates to the early years of Süleyman the Magnificent (r. 1520–1566), we find the names of certain specialists that the ruler’s father, Selim I, had brought back after his short-­lived conquest of Tabriz.23 However, as Süleyman had permitted those wishing to return home to do so, the Tabrizi contingent already must have been depleted; moreover during the intervening ten years or so, some of the artisans had surely died. Apart from the people whom the sultan expected to furnish models of Iranian-­style art and culture, the palace also employed some artists/artisans who probably came from the West, although their ethnic backgrounds remain unknown. Members of the ehl-­i hıref apparently received a retainer in addition to their salaries so that they would be at the disposal of the sultans whenever needed; probably when business was slack they would sometimes work for private patrons too. In the case of miniature artists it has been suggested that when palace patronage fell away during the later 1600s even highly qualified masters might work for foreign embassy personnel eager to take back mementoes of their stays in the Ottoman capital.24 At the same time, it was customary for members of the court workshops to make presents to the sultans at festivities and other special occasions, for which they may have received rewards. As a result, the relationship of ehl-­i hıref to their employer did not conform to market requirements as we understand them today, but formed part of a system of court-­sponsored redistribution. A major reason for the importance of ehl-­i hıref, concentrated in an atelier known as the nakkas¸hane, lay in the fact that they furnished models for a variety of luxury crafts: at least during the 1500s, designs in textiles, tile-­work, faience plates and cups, book-­bindings, and the illumination of books resembled one another quite closely. How the diffusion worked is less clear. In some cases palace officials may have sent drawings or even masters familiar with a newly developed design to the sites of manufacture. In other cases, especially where non-­royal patrons were involved, emulation may have been a key factor; after all, even in the 1900s and 2000s, the fashion industry has often copied the outfits worn by actresses or other figures in public life. The recycling of valuable items must have also contributed to design diffusion: thus there survives a Bursa silk caftan that in the early 1600s was redecorated for ecclesiastical use by an

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Orthodox bishop officiating in the Ottoman lands.25 In all probability, the patrons that commissioned Bursa-­style silks with ­Christian imagery but featuring the tulips and other florists’ flowers so typical of Ottoman courtly designs had not received a sultanic order to use these motifs. Perhaps, for the patrons, the designs had a purely aesthetic appeal; or perhaps these personages wished to impress the recipients of their gifts through their use of designs also favoured by the palace. Matters became even more complicated because Ottoman and Venetian producers of silk cloth tended to copy each other’s designs; at least in the Venetian instance the aim was obviously to make these textiles attractive to elite Ottoman consumers. Thus official orders can only have accounted for part of the popularity of nakkas¸hane designs. Our perspective is somewhat limited by the fact that craftwork in certain media has survived much better than in others: thus leather and wood have lower survival rates than faience, but these light and less expensive materials could be taken along on journeys, or even exported. The collection of the Habsburg archduke Ferdinand II (1529–95) in Ambras Castle, just outside Innsbruck, Austria, contains fancy leather shoes and food trays of Ottoman workmanship, in addition to highly decorated wooden plates and spoons from the sultans’ lands. Some of these items are still in mint condition and give us an inkling of the fancy but non-­ royal pieces that were once available on the Ottoman market, spreading the fashion for nakkas¸hane designs, even in faraway lands.26 Historians of art and material culture have also studied the manufacture of weapons, in part once again because so many luxuriously decorated items survive. A recent publication of the collection of the dukes of Saxony, in the 1700s also intermittently kings of Poland, has revealed weaponry going back to the sixteenth century when these princes, though not necessarily participating in warfare against Sultan Süleyman and his successors, managed to receive gifts of Ottoman mirabilia from the Medici rulers of Florence.27 Certain swords, scimitars and guns feature inscriptions, usually Qur’an verses, but occasionally also lines of poetry. Most importantly for us, in certain cases the manufacturers have left their names and the dates on which they completed their work. Typically these men were Muslims; but whether they worked in Istanbul, or else in some provincial shop, remains unknown. Moreover the man who inscribed his name must often have been but one of the specialists whose labour went into the production of such high-­quality goods: for gilding and inlays were presumably the responsibility of separate workshops. While it is known that certain Ottoman arms were revamped once they had reached the Saxon collection, we do not know to what extent such practices were current in Ottoman workshops as well.

Introduction 9

In addition to the small workshops, scholarly interest has also concentrated on larger enterprises such as the central cannon foundry, naval arsenal, and gunpowder manufactory.28 Ottomanist historians have been interested in finding out whether – and if applicable, to what extent – the Ottomans participated in the technological changes in weaponry and tactics that characterized the European scene during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.29 Gábor Ágoston has concluded that in the 1500s and 1600s the Ottoman army produced small-­and medium-­sized guns in quantities and qualities amply sufficient for the campaigns that the sultans conducted. After all, until the mid-­1500s these armies achieved spectacular successes, and even later during the Long War of 1593–1606 they at least managed to take a reasonable number of fortresses from the Habsburg ‘kings of Vienna’. In this context, Ágoston has shown that Ottoman gun-­founders, while not part of a technological avant-­garde, were not behind their competitors either. In addition his study makes it clear that down to the eighteenth century, the Ottoman armies were self-­ sufficient in the production of gunpowder; and while they lost this crucial advantage during the mid-­1700s, the sultan’s army recovered autarchy at the very end of the eighteenth century. Unfortunately Ágoston’s focus on logistics means that apart from the saltpetre-­mining villagers that the author does discuss in some detail, most of the men who actually made Ottoman weaponry have been pushed into the background. On the naval arsenal, the major work has been done during the past twenty years by İdris Bostan. While his more recent studies have focused on the types of ships manufactured in the Istanbul arsenal and the problem of Uskok piracy in the Adriatic around 1600, his in-­depth treatment of the naval arsenal also includes the many categories of craftsmen building the ships or ultimately manning them. In most cases the surviving sources only contain references to the number of specialized artisans mobilized for a given project; and the same limitation applies to the different categories of sailors that kept Ottoman warships going.30 Perhaps a search in the qadi registers of Galata will add some ‘flesh’ to these ‘bare bones’; for the quarter of Kasımpaşa, administratively part of Galata and located close to the dockyards, was a vibrant site, whose denizens surely often wound up in front of the local judge. A study of the social history of shipbuilders and seamen would also need to include prisoners, those in penal servitude and those who had been taken in warfare. Regrettably these slave labourers, both Muslims and non-­Muslims, have still not found their historian.31 As for everyday goods, Istanbul bakeries are easily the best-­known branch of production, due to the monographs of Mehmet Demirtaş for the 1600s and Salih Aynural for the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.32 Aynural has focused on the invasive regulations emitted

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by Selim III (r. 1789–1807) and Mahmud II (r. 1808–39), at a time when warfare with Russia had made it difficult to supply Istanbul from its ­traditional sources along the Black Sea coast. Demirtaş has emphasized that regulation of the bread supply had a long history, including the Byzantine period. He has also discussed in some detail the working conditions of the bakers, who in the 1600s were often either Muslim Albanians or ­Armenians, with the Muslims forming the great majority. While all bakers regardless of religion were members of the same guild, Muslim masters generally preferred to hire Muslim workmen, claiming that the non-­Muslims were not sufficiently careful about hygiene.33 Beyond this (at least supposedly) practical concern, many Muslims also seem to have felt that the men involved with the preparation of this basic food needed to be pious people who performed their prayers five times a day. In consequence it was probably with some astonishment that Evliya Çelebi noted that in seventeenth-­century Cairo the baking of bread was largely a domestic occupation, while women and girls sometimes took care of sales.34

Artisans and Religion or Denomination In the Balkans Islamization only began in the late Middle Ages, when the sultans had conquered that region. But in Anatolia, to say nothing of the Arab lands, this process was mostly complete by the time the Ottoman sultans took over, between the 1300s and 1517. However certain important Anatolian towns, including Diyarbekir, Sivas and Kayseri, held significant numbers of non-­Muslims well into the twentieth century, many of whom must have been artisans. Aleppo, Jerusalem and Cairo were also home to a certain number of non-­Muslim craftsmen. In Istanbul, the share of non-­Muslims in the population may at times have been over 40 per cent; and thus there must have been many Christian and Jewish artisans in the city.35 In the Balkans, Muslims often inhabited towns while the countryside remained Orthodox; but even so, at least in certain places, Muslim and non-­Muslim craftspeople co-­existed, in a proximity that was either relaxed or uneasy according to time and place. This situation has given rise to three different research questions, connected with the so-­called division of labour on the basis of religion, the question of mixed guilds and the role of Islamic mysticism and rules of conduct (fütüvvet) in artisan life. We have known for a long time that the adherents of certain religions or denominations sometimes specialized in a given craft, so that we may encounter guilds whose members largely or even exclusively were Muslim, Jewish, Orthodox or Armenian.

Introduction 11

In the late 1800s however, certain scholars reified these kinds of situations, claiming that in the Ottoman world, religious adherence overwhelmingly determined the kinds of jobs that people could or could not undertake. If applicable throughout, this principle would have significantly hampered production and trade, as members of a given religion or denomination would have exercised a stranglehold over certain branches. Put differently, if in a given town the number of artisans active in a certain trade and the number of people adhering to the religion or denomination with monopoly rights to the relevant activity had both declined, then bottlenecks must have ensued. After all, members of other religions/ denominations would not have been permitted to take the places of the men no longer active in the trade at issue. Presumably the concept of a ‘division of labour based on religion’ served as an argument for those who claimed that Ottoman social structure was impervious to development and reform. However Cengiz Kırlı’s study of over a thousand Istanbul enterprises functioning around 1800 has shown that for the numerous immigrants arriving in Istanbul searching for work, their place of origin was more significant than their religion or denomination.36 Serial migration often implied that older artisans ready to return to their places of origin passed on their positions to younger men from the same location, so that Muslim and non-­Muslim migrants from a given town/region worked in the very same fields when in Istanbul. In a more recent article, Betül Başaran and Cengiz Kırlı have pooled their knowledge of the different registers that they have unearthed so far, namely the records of mutual sponsorship or mutual guarantees (kefalet); for in the crisis-­ridden reign of Selim III, a valid sponsor was a prerequisite for living in Istanbul.37 Kırlı and Başaran thus are planning to look at migration into the capital transcending the putative religion-­based division of labour, which now seems to have been limited to certain places and trades, and not sufficiently widespread to determine the fate of producers and production. Relations between artisans of different religions/denominations who either were members of the same guild or belonged to similar and competing organizations have not been studied very often. To this question Onur Yıldırım has made an important contribution, by analysing a conflict between Muslim and Christian silk-­spinners, in which the parties disagreed about the way in which the Muslim members should behave towards their non-­ Muslim fellow guildsmen.38 However the conflict about ‘honour and respectability’, which as the author suggests may have been due to enriched non-­Muslims being less inclined than in the past to accept treatment as inferiors, to date has remained quite rare. Of course similar documents may well emerge in the future.

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By contrast, conflicts about ‘honour and respectability’ are conspicuously absent from the records on Izmir guildsmen that İsmail Hakkı Kadı has recently studied. This fact is worth noting because Izmir – and to a lesser degree Ankara, which the author also has discussed – are places where we would expect newly rich non-­Muslims to chafe under possible contemptuous treatment from their Muslim colleagues.39 According to the documents that Kadı has located, more often than not the lines of conflict were blurred. Some Muslim and non-­Muslim artisans might have been allies, not only when an outsider from Europe was the opponent but in other instances as well. Certainly there is no reason to claim that religion determined what stand the parties took, even in conflicts which, like the ones discussed here, were serious enough to warrant an application to the authorities in Istanbul. I do not know how much significance to attach to a single case discussed by Kadı, in which the archival records show that the carpenters of Izmir working outside of the European quarter were mainly Muslims, with a few others mixed in. On the other hand, a qadi of Istanbul whom the sultan had ordered to report on the dispute at issue considered that, differently from the artisans domiciled in the European quarter, the carpenters in the rest of the city were all Muslims.40 Was the qadi simply generalizing on the basis of insufficient data, or did he have a political agenda, maybe in the sense of neatly separating Muslims and non-­Muslims? Segregation of guildsmen by religion apparently was part of the zeitgeist; and a study of the stonecutters and allied specialties of late eighteenth-­century Istanbul has greatly enlarged our understanding of how people of different religions worked – or failed to work – together.41 In this case, the roles of Muslims and non-­Muslims needed redefinition, as Christian artisans in construction complained about interference from their Muslim colleagues. It is noteworthy that the central administration took the side of the non-­Muslims. On the other hand the sultans’ officials also had to deal with the complaints from Muslims working in the sultans’ gardens who stated that their non-­Muslim colleagues prevented them from doing their jobs. These documents and their discussion by Oya Şenyurt are especially interesting as her findings confirm the tensions that Yıldırım had analysed in an earlier article.42 When Muslim and non-­Muslim artisans were at loggerheads, the issue usually was economic opportunity. This observation applies to the Izmir cases studied by Kadı, but also to conflicts on record from eighteenth-­ century Istanbul. Thus Jewish and Muslim spice and drug sellers were involved in a dispute that must have been quite intractable, as the parties, probably due to their dissatisfaction with the qadi’s court, had turned to the central administration.43 In Istanbul, as in Izmir and Ankara, complaining artisans and shopkeepers typically claimed that their competitors

Introduction 13

professing a different religion intervened in their work or monopolized crucial goods, and thus prevented the complainants from making a living. In the cases discussed in this section, the two parties belonged to different religions. But the very same kinds of conflicts might involve artisans sharing the same beliefs, as apparently few people wanted to pass up opportunities for economic gain. As for the central government, it was primarily concerned with keeping the peace, often admonishing the parties concerned to live in harmony once their dispute had been settled. In spite of the near-­terminal crisis of the years around 1800, there is no evidence that the authorities were interested in removing the non-­ Muslims from the capital altogether and putting Muslims in their places. Inez Aščerić-­Todd has introduced yet a different perspective on artisan life and religion, namely the links of Ottoman guilds, Bosnian style, to the ‘code of conduct’ known as the fütüvvet, strongly informed by a mystical reading of Islam.44 An emphasis on this aspect had been central to the first publications on Ottoman craft organizations; but later on it lost most of its appeal, in part because archival sources do not have much to say on this subject. However many more – for the most part literary – sources on artisan fütuvvet are available for Ottoman Bosnia than for other provinces; here local authors did record the inculcation of a set of values based on fütuvvet as part of the training of young artisans. We even possess information on the manner in which craftsmen tested prospective apprentices for their willingness to conform to this ethic; the relevant text is a remarkable find, as Ottoman sources from the central provinces and the Arab lands say so little about apprenticeship.45 Another remarkable feature of the Sarajevo artisan scene is the existence of regular accounts concerning the ‘girding’ of new masters (s¸edd kus¸anma); one example is even available in print. The value of these sources lies in the fact that while Evliya has left us a description of one of the more dramatic Istanbul festivities of this type, which Murad IV (r. 1623–40) attended in person, where the Ottoman central provinces are concerned, as yet we have not found any serial accounts concerning these initiation ceremonies.46 From these primary sources and Inez Aščerić-­Todd’s remarkable discussion one comes away with a major question to which unfortunately I have no answer: to what extent can the situation in Sarajevo provide a model for other Ottoman towns and cities for which the impact of fütuvvet is less well documented? Or was there something special about Sarajevo’s situation on the Ottoman border that made local artisans especially concerned about integrating fütuvvet values into the exercise of their crafts? What did relations between Muslim and non-­Muslim artisans look like, assuming that they existed?47 Concerning this and other questions, there is so much that we do not know.

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Hypotheses: How Artisan Guilds Emerged and Declined It is difficult to say much about the emergence of Ottoman craft guilds because they seem to have formed perhaps in the late 1400s and ­certainly in the early and mid-­1500s. But at that time the qadi registers, our principal source for social history at least for the period preceding the mid-­eighteenth century, did not yet exist in most towns and cities; or if compiled, they have not survived. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that the terms hirfet and esnaf can both mean either a craft, such as tailoring or shoemaking, or else the organization of people practising one and the same specialty, or at least related crafts. As for the term lonca, which in today’s parlance definitely refers to an organization rather than to a trade, in the eighteenth century it seems to have denoted the place where the members of certain guilds used to assemble. Apparently the usage current today only emerged much later: the Redhouse dictionary of 1890 defines a lonca as a ‘club’.48 For the sake of convenience we will translate hırfet and esnaf as ‘guild’ when reference is clearly being made to an organization. When the texts refer to office-­holders such as kethüdas, sheikhs or yiğitbas¸ıs, the existence of an organization is not in doubt. Yet even when that is not the case, whenever ‘experienced masters’ (ehl-­i hibre) could turn to the courts – or even the central government – to defend artisan interests we can presume the existence of an organization, although it may have been a loosely structured one. It is also quite clear that once artisan organizations had formed, their members attempted to monopolize the exercise of the craft in question. While they may not always have succeeded, this aim of Ottoman artisans is not in doubt either. Ottoman guilds reached a novel stage in their history in the early eighteenth century when it became common usage to demand that a master must possess an ‘opening’ or ‘slot’ (gedik) before he could begin to exercise his craft. In seventeenth-­century Istanbul this practice must have been exceptional. While Robert Mantran claims the contrary, he for the most part refers to secondary literature that is not concerned with the 1600s at all but with the eighteenth century; in this sense Mantran reflects the temper of the 1950s when he wrote his book, and when the long-­term stability and even immobility of Ottoman institutions was nearly axiomatic. There is however one documented instance of seventeenth-­century gediks, involving the water carriers. Mantran has found relevant archival evidence in the Registers of Important Affairs (Mühimme Defterleri), in addition to references in Evliya’s great description of the Ottoman capital, which apparently concerns mostly the mid-­1600s; and in the qadi registers of the earlier seventeenth century

Introduction 15

Eunjeong Yi has located a few more guilds which had already instituted gediks.49 Of course the lack of formally recognized gediks did not mean that artisans were free to open a shop whenever and wherever they liked, the permission of the other masters always being a prerequisite. But even so, the institution of highly formalized procedures does seem to be a novelty of the 1700s. To Engin Deniz Akarlı we owe an early attempt to make sense of the emergence and growing popularity of gediks.50 In an important article, he has suggested that as a measure of self-­defence, artisans initiated the idea that they possessed an exclusive right to exercise their crafts or trades in a specified place. For when in the course of the eighteenth century the Ottoman financial administration, hard pressed by continuous wars, began to demand financial contributions from pious foundations, the administrators of the latter attempted to balance budgets by raising the rents of their shops, many of which had been rented out to artisans. In order make such increases more difficult, the artisans affected claimed that, by tradition, they possessed a right to these shops, which could only be transferred between members of the guild to which the original tenant had belonged. While some artisans certainly defended their tenure in these terms, Akarlı in a later article has admitted that their defence was a weak one, given the request of the pious foundations for a ‘fair rent’, a demand legitimized by Islamic law.51 In another very significant contribution, Onur Yıldırım has suggested that at least in Istanbul the institution of the gedik dates to the first quarter of the eighteenth century, in other words to a period of relative prosperity when war-­related demands were probably less urgent than they were to become later in the century.52 When he made this statement the publication of Istanbul qadi registers had not yet begun. But now that the relevant register is available in print, his claim has turned out to be justified in principle, even though many gediks apparently date to the years just following 1725.53 For between 1726 and 1738 the authorities seem to have considered the localization of shops and workplaces in Istanbul a matter of high priority, so much so that they took the unusual step of devoting an entire register to artisan affairs. Certainly not all Istanbul trades acquired gediks at the same time, but well before 1740 the trend of the times was obvious. Unfortunately we do not know very much about the motives of officials and artisans that set out to ‘institute gediks’. Presumably the officials wanted to intensify control over the artisan realm. As Yıldırım points out, Ottoman crafts had grown in importance with the spurt of population growth characterizing the 1500s, and had not substantially contracted once this process ground to a halt in the following century. After all, in

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good times and bad, there had always been substantial immigration into Istanbul, although as Betül Başaran has pointed out, we have no real evidence that the city’s overall population increased during the eighteenth century.54 But as this same author has also noted, for political measures to be taken it was sufficient that the Ottoman elite perceived them as necessary, never mind ‘conditions on the ground’.55 Thus even if the numerous immigrants mainly compensated for Istanbul’s population losses due to the sicknesses that spread easily in crowded urban quarters, if the elite believed that Istanbul was constantly growing and becoming unmanageable, measures of control, including the ‘fixing’ of artisans to specific locations, were likely to enter the official agenda. As for the artisans, we may assume that many established masters welcomed a situation in which they might avoid competition from the many newcomers that sought to make a living in the Ottoman capital. However there is no rule without exceptions; Oya Şenyurt’s rich and informative study of the Istanbul building crafts, which we have already encountered in our discussion of religious tensions, has also enlarged our understanding of how certain guilds might develop ‘agreements’ that in principle ran counter to the spirit of the ‘guild system’. After all, the boundaries between the different branches active on the construction site were often unclear, and we thus find people working on items that were not the speciality of their own guild. Given the possibilities inherent in this situation, some masters became entrepreneurs when they contracted to put up buildings ‘ready to use’ under their own responsibility. Such arrangements and understandings could even receive official sanction, at least as long as nobody complained. Apart from this relative fluidity, in the building sector it was common enough for gediks to be sold at the death of the master, and his heirs would receive the price as part of their inheritance.56 This last observation leads us to Yıldırım’s suggestion that the institution of the gedik may have led to the weakening of the guilds, as the owners of these ‘slots’ came to regard them as quasi-­private property that they could use wherever they wished.57 Such a statement makes special sense in the case of the so-­called havai gedik, which in fact was not tied to any particular location. However the situation is somewhat more complicated in the case of the many gediks that only allowed the owner to exercise his craft in a certain specified location. Certainly the owner of such a ‘slot’ could sell it, and the man who acquired it might not have been an acknowledged guild member. In Syria this process must have been widespread, for in the late 1800s and early 1900s the gedik, locally called kadak, came to denote a simple rent contract.58 However, at least with respect to Istanbul, I am not at all sure that the guilds lost all oversight

Introduction 17

over the gediks that had changed hands in this manner. If ‘wild’ transfers had been widespread, we would expect a slew of complaints, recorded for instance in the ‘Registers of edicts sent to the provinces’ (Vilayet Ahkâm Defterleri), of which a sizeable selection relating to Istanbul has been published.59 But the abuses committed by people who had acquired a gedik without being part of the relevant guild are not a very frequent topic, although references certainly occurred in qadi registers and elsewhere. Therefore it is problematic to view these transactions as the major reason for guild dissolution in Istanbul; however they may well have been a contributing factor. As a reason for scepticism we can point to the situation of artisans who around 1830, in other words towards the end of the period concerning us here, turned to the ‘Administration of Sultanic Pious Foundations’ (evkaf-­ı humayun).60 Nalan Turna has concluded that under certain circumstances, a connection with this newly founded official body permitted people to rent gediks and thus obtain the flexibility postulated by Yıldırım; in other words the monopoly of the relevant guild was much weakened. Yet in other contexts this same connection served to keep ‘outsiders’ out of a given craft. According to the study by Mehmet Demirtaş concerning the crimes and misdemeanours of eighteenth-­century Istanbul artisans, it was a punishable act to transfer a gedik without official permission, even if the owner merely wished to leave the capital for a limited time period.61 Admittedly, as the sultan’s officials decreed penalties for this act, it must have occurred, at least occasionally. In brief the results of gedik transfers were ambiguous, and it does not seem a good idea to assume that what happened in the Syrian provinces necessarily occurred in Istanbul as well. Another reason for hesitation is the story of the capital’s tobacco sellers, studied in great detail by Fehmi Yılmaz.62 While these salesmen had established a guild in 1726, their number increased by leaps and bounds in the course of the eighteenth century, as smoking became a widespread habit. In 1782 the tobacco sellers were subjected to a count intended to limit their number. However, by the early 1800s, it turned out that a significant number had avoided the attentions of the sultan’s bureaucrats; but some twenty years later, these men managed to gain recognition as ‘old and established’ (kadim), and most were awarded gediks. These counts were also an opportunity to eliminate a sizeable number of non-­Muslims who had entered a trade which had started out as a Muslim monopoly, although a small non-­Muslim minority did obtain official recognition. In this detailed history we do not find that many outsiders acquired gediks and thus became tobacco sellers independent of the guild, although the expansion of the trade and the widespread adoption of gediks seem propitious for such a development. Rather it seems that to obtain ­recognition

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as a legitimate tobacco seller, it was necessary to be/become a guild member. But in some cases, something resembling the scenario proposed by Yıldırım may well have occurred; and of course, it is always possible that new document finds will change the picture proposed here. Another guild monograph concerning the early 1800s ends with a similarly ambiguous conclusion.63 Nalan Turna’s fascinating study focuses on Istanbul barbers’ gediks, which were peculiarly unstable. For after the janissaries had been abolished in 1826 the government closed many coffee shops – they belonged to janissaries or, at least supposedly, were ‘janissary haunts’. However the owners of the relevant gediks, invoking their rights as proprietors, were often able to transfer their gediks from coffee houses to barber shops; put differently, this meant a decrease in coffee shops and an increase in workplaces occupied by barbers. Turna pays particular attention to gediks owned by well-­to-­do personages who invested often substantial sums in these petty enterprises. Most of these investors were from outside the trade; even female owners of barber shop gediks were not unknown. These investors, who typically rented out their ‘slots’ to actual barbers, under certain conditions escaped control by the guilds; but in other instances they did not manage to do so. In consequence the relevant guild’s oversight remained significant and so did the regulations it emitted.64 Turna’s most important conclusion concerns the fact that, in the early 1800s, barbers’ gediks really did form private property or something very closely resembling it. These gediks could be sold, purchased and inherited even by females, and certain owners tried to protect their investment by registering the gediks at issue with a newly created authority, the ‘Administration of Sultanic Pious Foundations’ that we have already encountered in a different context. Turna therefore concludes that nineteenth-­century centralization did not only happen ‘from the top down’, although presumably this direction was the norm. Under certain conditions, owners anxious to protect what they regarded as their property might be the first to demand measures of centralization and official control. The most recent contribution to this on-­going debate concerns the booksellers, on whose lives and activities İsmail Erünsal has just brought out an impressive monograph, covering the period from 1604 to 1909.65 As this close-­up examination of a very particular trade has appeared just as the present volume is about to go to press, it is impossible to do justice to its richness. Erünsal has given us a broadly based overview of the book trade in the major Ottoman cities, including not only Istanbul, Edirne and Bursa but also the older centres of the Islamic world that formed part of the Ottoman domains; his book encompasses the trade in manuscripts as well as in printed books. The special situation of the booksellers,

Introduction 19

who after all handled religious texts, probably explains an organizational peculiarity: until the mid-­nineteenth century, the guild head bore the title of s¸eyh, and only after that time do we find a kethüda in charge of guild affairs, as had long been customary in most other guilds.66 From our point of view, the section on the material and immaterial possessions of the booksellers are of special importance: after all, the gediks of the booksellers were a significant though immaterial source of wealth. For in the mid-­nineteenth century at least, the gediks of deceased booksellers, which ‘according to the rules’ were not saleable, might very well appear on the market, with the proceeds divided among the heirs; Erünsal has found many other nineteenth-­century cases of ‘commercially available’ gediks as well. Clearly at this point of our researches it is best not to generalize very much, as rules that were valid for one guild in a certain place might well not have existed in other cases, or honoured mostly in the breach. Given these ambiguities how did gediks come to an end? Ominous rumblings were already audible in the very early 1800s: while monopolies were a conditio sine qua non in guild life, in 1802 the authorities refused a demand from the Izmir silk spinners for an exclusive right to spin raw silk. The author of this sultanic command clearly felt that monopolies were harmful to the community at large. However, on this issue, members of the governing elite were probably of two minds, for in 1807 the same group of artisans did receive the monopoly they had long been lobbying for.67 Only in the 1830s, under British pressure, did the Ottoman government abolish monopolies once and for all; and in principle at least, this measure should have spelt the end of the gediks as monopolistic privileges, though not – as yet – that of the entitlement on foundation-­held property as studied by Akarlı. In the latter sense, gediks survived, and some new ones were even created in the mid-­nineteenth century.68 Moreover the guilds were to continue into the early twentieth century. While officially abolished in 1910–12, artisan organizations strongly resembling guilds operated throughout the First World War and even later.69 Incorporation into the European-­dominated world economy of the time was certainly an important factor in weakening the guilds. However it seems that the effect was largely indirect – and a point made by John Chalcraft in this volume with respect to Egypt is valid for other parts of the Ottoman Empire as well. As Donald Quataert’s seminal work published twenty years ago has shown, in the 1800s manufacture shifted from guild-­organized artisans domiciled in towns and cities to non-­organized workpeople, quite a few of them women, some of whom even lived and worked in the countryside.70 Given this decline in their economic functions, many though by no means all guilds lost so much of their power that their official abolition in 1910–12 was not a major bone of c­ ontention.

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Thus the end of the gediks was a direct consequence of pressure from the European-­dominated world economy, while competition from imported goods led to a restructuring of Ottoman production patterns that ultimately made the guilds irrelevant. In summary, we can discern four periods in the history of Ottoman guilds, although the large number of studies that have been and currently are being published means that this periodization may only be valid for a short time.71 Before the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, very little is known about guilds; and in many if not most places, organizations regulating craft practice and attempting to monopolize the market may not as yet have existed. It is best to admit that we just do not know. Brotherhoods imbued with the fütüvvet ethos were certainly active at least in Anatolia and later on in Bosnia; but it is hard to say to what extent these organizations had an economic role, and whether or not artisans had a say in them. After all, in some places some of these brotherhoods had some very rich members, who perhaps made the most vital decisions over the heads of their artisan fellows. During the 1500s guilds as organizations defending artisan interests appear more frequently in Ottoman archival documents, and by the late sixteenth century these associations were widespread. During this second stage, gediks were not a common feature; however by the early 1700s the Ottoman state apparatus seems to have played a significant role in instituting the monopoly rights of individual artisans to do business in predetermined locations. Given the central role of the gedik resulting from this intervention, the period from about 1720 to about 1800, the third stage in Ottoman guild history, may well have been the apogee of the guild as an institution. But in the long run and in some guilds at least, the holders of gediks came to treat these rights and obligations as private property and take guild decisions less seriously than in the past, to say nothing of the fact that the Ottoman elite of the nineteenth century was less unanimous concerning the benefits or disadvantages of monopolies than their predecessors had been.72 Mea culpa: when studying these questions in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I had been too inclined to generalize on gediks, basing my claims on limited data, while recent monographs have pointed out the great variability of attitudes towards exclusive privileges, private property, and gediks. Moreover the world economy, into which the Ottoman Empire was increasingly ‘incorporated’, contributed to the process in a major way by inducing transformations of the labour force that tended to make guilds seem less and less relevant. We may therefore, at least for the time being, count the years between the early 1800s and the end of the Ottoman Empire as the fourth and final stage, preceding guild dissolution.

Introduction 21

Ottoman Guilds and the Non-­Ottoman World During the last twenty years or so, scholars concerned with labour history throughout the world have focused on craft organizations, not only in early modern Europe but also in China, India and Japan. This renewed interest is due to the fact that in the recent past there has been a new emphasis on institutions as factors promoting or inhibiting economic growth. However it is remarkable that in the Ottoman context, major economic historians such as Murat Çizakça, Şevket Pamuk and Timur Kuran, while doing very important work on other institutions, have not made the guilds their major focus. Rather, Çizakça’s principal concern is with pious foundations, tax farming, and economic regulation by the state apparatus, Şevket Pamuk has studied monetary policies and compared the changes of European and Ottoman wages over time, while Timur Kuran has investigated the manner in which Islamic law and, in a wider perspective, historical power constellations prevalent in the Middle East may have constrained economic growth. But in this discussion, guilds play a very limited role.73 Yet the situation outside of Ottomanist historiography is rather different.74 While in the past, European guilds had appeared as organizations that hampered economic growth by enforcing monopolies and preventing competition, today they are seen in a more positive light. Historians now stress that guilds ensured the training of youngsters to form the next generation of artisans, and also that they guaranteed the quality of products in a market otherwise fraught with uncertainties. Furthermore, at least some guilds provided their members with aid in case of old age and sickness; and in some localities, guilds had a degree of political power and thus permitted artisans an input, albeit modest, into urban government. In this context, European guild historians have asked to what extent Ottoman artisan organizations may have played a similar role; and in response, a few specialists on Ottoman guilds, particularly Onur Yıldırım, have participated in international projects concerning this subject. Together with his colleagues at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Yıldırım is working on a database that will cover the guilds of the major Ottoman cities, with special attention to Istanbul, where the guilds have left the most obvious paper trail.75 When looking at the international context, we find that different schools of thought promote different definitions of guilds. At present the trend seems to be in favour of very ‘broad’ delineations; for they facilitate comparisons. Tine de Moor has used a definition wide enough to accommodate both European guilds and the – often informal – organizations of villagers using common lands, like woods or rough pasture, to

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s­upplement the income derived from often very small holdings.76 The editors of The Return of the Guilds have opted for a somewhat narrower definition that posits ‘more or less independent, self-­governing organizations’ with a membership of people who work in the same or related sectors and use their organizations to further common ends, of whatever sort.77 If the older assumption that Ottoman guilds were essentially extensions of the state apparatus still held sway – and some scholars do continue to see matters in this light – then these craft organizations would not therefore qualify as ‘guilds’, at least not in the sense of the definition underlying Lucassen’s, De Moor’s and Luiten van Zanden’s broad ‘international’ comparison project. But since today’s majority consensus seems to be that, in spite of the sometimes heavy-­handed interventions of the bureaucracy, Ottoman craft associations also defended the interests of the master artisans, there is no reason to claim any ‘Ottoman incomparability’ in this field.78 Even narrower definitions, which emphasize attempts to exert monopoly control over an often limited urban market, are of course current as well: the guilds of the seventeenth-­century French town of Dijon, which have been studied in detail, would fit such a definition rather nicely.79 However Ottoman craft associations also fit into this narrower and more exclusive concept, for while guild masters, like their colleagues of other times and places, did not always succeed in enforcing monopoly control, it certainly was not for want of trying. There are even some interesting parallels where relations of artisans with local power-­holders are concerned. During the seventeenth century in the papal city of Bologna, of all places, butchers had to sell their skins and hides to the tanners, while the latter were expected to supply the shoemakers. Only after local demand had been satisfied could leather be exported, a ruling often honoured in the breach; and the needs of the shoemakers, being last in the ‘food chain’, often were disregarded. To the Ottomanist historian this story sounds like a déjà vu, as cases of this type so often crop up in sixteenth-­or seventeenth-­century Ottoman documents.80 As we have seen, the gedik as a type of property that could be inherited or even sold is today very much at the centre of Ottomanist guild historiography; and in this context the Japanese ‘stock societies’ analysed by Mary Louise Nagata are an interesting subject for comparison.81 For once the Tokugawa shoguns were securely in power in the early 1600s, they instituted a strongly centralized regime that also attempted to control the market. Under certain conditions the shoguns were quite wary of artisan self-­organization; but in other cases, they saw the relevant associations as a means to keep prices down, a view that was quite familiar to Ottoman officialdom as well. Moreover the rule that artisans

Introduction 23

had to purchase stock in their associations, a transaction prerequisite for exercising the relevant trade or craft, does remind the Ottomanist of the gedik that sometimes – but not always – went together with a right to buy the necessary raw materials and that might also be available for money. Even closer is the analogy with the associations of dyers and other craftsmen, who needed to pool their capital in order to buy expensive implements such as copper vats.82 These similarities are so intriguing that I much regret my ignorance of Japanese history, thus not allowing me any further comparison. On the other hand, it would be unrealistic not to take the limits of comparability into account. Documentation, and to some extent gaps in the relevant historiography as well, are the principal limiting factors. Thus, for instance, Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly have recently come up with a lengthy study of the attitudes to work and workers in early modern Europe, which includes an extensive section on artisan self-­images and the ways in which the elites viewed artisans, especially the most creative among them.83 This text makes inspiring reading. On the other hand, the only ‘first-­person narrative’ written by an Ottoman working man that has become known, to date, is a text written by a miner who experienced the closing years of the empire and the beginning of the Turkish Republic.84 Moreover, the pictorial documentation on artisans before the introduction of photography into the Ottoman lands is virtually limited to a few manuscripts illustrated with miniatures, a particularly handsome item surviving from the late sixteenth and another from the early eighteenth century. In both cases we can be sure that the men depicted did not have an input into the images comparable to that of the guildsmen of Antwerp, who commissioned an altarpiece which gave them so much prominence as patrons that local churchmen objected.85 To summarize, there are indications that certain parallels between Ottoman and European guilds existed, which go beyond what is immediately apparent. In other words, they only become visible through carefully studying records of artisan practice. Thus only Evliya Çelebi has reported that Ottoman craftsmen also had holy patrons, whose existence came to his attention when describing a great Istanbul parade, which probably took place in 1638.86

Artisans and the Question of Law and Order One of the very few scholars to have spent much time and effort on the connections between Ottoman guilds and the law is Engin Deniz Akarlı.87 At an earlier stage, as noted, he was concerned with the reasons for the

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emergence of the gedik. More recently his interest has shifted to the problems of ‘common good’ and ‘social harmony’ to which the Ottoman elite and particularly the religious scholars among its members attempted to find solutions within the framework of Islamic law. By contrast he does not say very much about the conflicts of interest between the Ottoman elite and Istanbul artisans, which – admittedly not very often, as we have seen – have also found their way into the surviving archival documents. However, as a historian, Akarlı is well aware that there was a gap, often quite wide, between legal rules and practical procedures. In his most recent study, Akarlı begins with a discussion of the aims of Islamic law and the latter’s concept of maslaha or well-­being. With some qualifications, he admits the justice of the argument, first made by Baber Johansen, that Islamic jurists tended to formulate ‘governmental responsibilities in terms of God’s rights’ and thus made it difficult to establish institutions which might mediate between the interests of individuals and those of the government.88 However Akarlı believes that this problem, though real, remained manageable during the 1700s, and it was only at the end of the reign of Selim III, and certainly later on, that Ottoman officials came to consider raison d’état as a legal good which overrode the rights of the subjects. In the case studied here, a conflict between the government and the Istanbul bakers, two non-­Muslim artisans were summarily executed to terrify the others and were thus deprived of their right to a fair hearing in front of a judge.89 While Islamic jurists permitted such acts in order to protect the community as a whole, Akarlı concludes that the treatment of the two bakers bordered on zulüm or arbitrary power, which meant that the sultan and his vizier had undermined the very principles the law was designed to protect.90 However Akarlı was also interested in the role of the court as mediator; this aspect was of importance outside of the artisan context as well, as is apparent from the many works of Boğaç Ergene.91 Thus Ottoman law courts apparently operated according to what in German is called the ‘Subsidiaritätsprinzip’; in other words, if a lower-­level organization was capable of dealing with a given problem, higher-­level authorities were not supposed to intervene. In the artisan case, whatever guild members were able to settle among themselves did not concern the authorities; and so as these craftsmen employed ‘custom’ as a norm, in the eyes of the authorities they acquired ‘a legally recognized collective entity’.92 They could either act collectively to pursue their interests, or else they could appoint representatives to act on their behalf, the latter being accorded official recognition. In this roundabout fashion the courts took cognizance of the guilds as corporate bodies, although Islamic law strongly focuses upon individuals.

Introduction 25

Mehmet Demirtaş, whose work like that of Akarlı also concerns eighteenth-­century Istanbul, has approached the issue in quite a different manner. For Akarlı governmental abuse of power (zulüm) was always possible, though more likely to happen in the modernizing 1800s than beforehand. For Demirtaş, by contrast, the Ottoman state ipso facto represented the common good, and only errant office-­holders could lose their share in this intrinsic virtue. Since the period Demirtaş has discussed precedes the enthronement of Selim III, the question does not arise of whether or not the abuse of power became more likely with the formation of a more highly centralized state. In any case, in Demirtaş’s perspective, at least where Istanbul artisans were concerned, the eighteenth-­century state had already reached an apogee of centralization. Those artisans who failed to abide by the rules promulgated by officialdom thus amply deserved the penalties meted out to them.93 Following this line of thought, Demirtaş is also much concerned with the moral aspects of Ottoman craftsmen’s lives, in which as noted, the ahi tradition was of importance. He also stresses the close connections to the artisan world of certain members of the Ottoman state apparatus who having achieved high positions, came to direct the activities of the guilds.94 With only slight exaggeration, one may conclude that for Demirtaş, Istanbul artisan guilds were part of the state apparatus, which by definition represented the common interest; in consequence the problems posed by Akarlı lose much of their relevance. In his work on the guilds of sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century Bursa, Ömer Düzbakar takes a similar approach.95 For this author too the centralism of the early modern Ottoman polity, at least when compared to the decentralized set-­up of early medieval and feudal Europe, is the key factor in relations between the government and members of the craft guilds. Düzbakar emphasizes that Bursa’s proximity to the Ottoman capital ensured that local artisans obeyed orders from the centre, but also that the latter through their guilds could send their complaints to the central authorities and hope for a hearing. As a result, in Düzbakar’s view, an artisan discourse opposing the authorities did not emerge. Certain Istanbul documents of the mid-­eighteenth century also reflect a notable convergence between the authorities and craft guilds, apparently part and parcel of political culture in the longue durée. But due to the closeness of many artisans to the janissaries and urban militias, craftsmen in the late seventeenth and throughout the eighteenth century did find occasions to express their dissatisfaction, although perhaps there were more occasions for such actions in Cairo or Aleppo than in the Ottoman capital.96 Abdulmennan Mehmet Altıntaş also emphasizes that relations between the Ottoman bureaucratic apparatus and the guildsmen were on the whole

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harmonious.97 In his view, a major reason for this state of affairs was the relative autonomy that officialdom granted guildsmen in regulating their own affairs. Certainly the administration decided on rules promulgated in the name of the sultan without formally consulting with guild representatives. But such edicts (kanun) were few in number; and the much more detailed regulations known as nizam originated from within the relevant artisan organizations. In many cases, the judge and the market inspector intervened only to uphold regulations that artisan guilds had previously decided on. In fact, an errant guildsman might state in front of his fellows that he was willing to accept dire punishment, which only officials could administer, if he contravened guild rules again.98 On the other hand, an artisan could often count on forgiveness if he had not annoyed so many colleagues that the latter decided to exclude him from the guild – for in that instance, forgiveness was rare. In the sample of cases discussed by Altıntaş, a few executions also occur; but differently from Akarlı, he does not question whether these punishments sometimes involved the illegitimate use of arbitrary power.

Artisans and the Market: A Case of ‘Market Welfare’? Relli Shechter, economic historian of the contemporary Middle East, has coined the term ‘market welfare’ for an economic system that prioritizes economic stability and a degree of equity over competition and its – hopefully – attendant consequences of efficiency and economic growth.99 Shechter views the Ottoman political economy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a system of this type, which possessed considerable staying power, for it remained in place even when in the 1700s the Ottoman centre lost most of its ability to regulate provincial economic life. Local dignitaries, whom we may call mid-­level echelons of power, simply took over some of the functions of the central state. As partners in the Ottoman enterprise, provincial and local elites therefore upheld its central features – including the guilds, although the latter are not in the foreground of Shechter’s analysis. Even so, his article is of interest for our present overview. For while it was published well before the onset of the most recent economic crisis, it is an interesting testimony to the search for ‘alternatives to capitalism’ after Marxism and even non-­Marxist socialism have been discredited, at least for the time being. More recently, Linda T. Darling has continued this search in a book discussing the concept of the ‘circle of equity’.100 The search for a non-­socialist alternative to capitalism also casts a new light on the ‘statist’ emphasis in the studies of Aynural, Düzbakar and

Introduction 27

especially Demirtaş, which includes a rather extreme and probably exaggerated stress on the moral qualities of the Ottoman state elite and the apparatus that it had created. For while this emphasis on moral superiority on the one hand harks back to the tradition of Turkish nationalism and particularly nationalist historiography, on the other hand it draws some legitimization from the search for a non-­capitalist way of running economic life while still retaining a market, albeit not a free one. However the work of Eunjeong Yi has shown that even in the highly controlled atmosphere of the Ottoman capital in the early 1600s, competition between artisans was not at all unknown. Craftsmen formed partnerships with colleagues from other guilds or rented workshops belonging to a craft that was not their own; by such devices they circumvented the rules of their respective guilds that strictly limited the articles which members were permitted to manufacture and sell. It thus emerges that not all guildsmen had internalized the prescriptions of the ruling elite and the teachings of the fütüvvet, which if followed without exception should have made artisans’ pursuit of material gain well-­nigh impossible. Furthermore in Cairo, whose wealthier craftsmen seem to have profited from the distance separating their city from the Ottoman central government, in the 1600s there were long-­established family firms, particularly in the oil-­pressing business, whose owners made substantial profits.101 In this case as well, the flexibility of artisans and their capacity for cooperation might well have set Cairo on the path to economic growth; but in the later 1700s, the in-­fighting of the Mamluk power elite and the latter’s insatiable revenue demands wound up ‘killing the goose that laid the golden eggs’. Like other ideals devised by humans, ‘market welfare’ must have been pursued by Ottoman artisans with certain reservations – and sometimes not at all.

Craftsmen’s Migrations into and out of Istanbul As this summary shows, Ottoman guild studies mainly deal with the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, with a strong emphasis on the 1700s. While migration to Istanbul surely occurred throughout the history of the Ottoman capital, the eighteenth century records are the most comprehensive and so researchers dealing with migration tend to concentrate on this period.102 As a result, if we want to establish connections between migrations and guild life, the 1700s and early 1800s will be our period of choice. It is only with respect to this relatively late period that we can decipher patterns of migration that perhaps were typical of the world of artisans

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and labouring men over the longue durée. Thus there is evidence that immigrants from a given region clustered in specific jobs: in the district administered by the qadi of Eyüp, by the mid-­1700s quite a few grocers had come from a few small towns in today’s central Greece, while we find Albanians among the gardeners who were cultivating the vegetables sold in Istanbul markets. Furthermore, quite a few Albanians worked as bathhouse (hammam) attendants; by the mid-­1700s several thousand of these mostly young men were employed in this rather menial capacity. Interestingly, most of the migrants that have left traces in the Eyüp registers had come from the Balkans. Presumably people arriving from Anatolia often settled in Üsküdar, thus avoiding the controls that were more likely to occur near the landing stages than elsewhere. Betül Başaran has noted moreover that around 1800, immigrants from eastern Anatolia were especially at risk when it came to expulsion from the capital, perhaps because these people found integration into Istanbul society more difficult than immigrants from Rumelia.103 However Albanians also were often targeted by more or less obvious expulsion measures; one of the reasons was probably that migrants from this region who served in the houses of viziers and other grandees felt that they owed a special loyalty to their employers; as a result they might have been willing to fight out the battles of the latter and thus gain a reputation as troublemakers. In addition, they were the epitome of the young mountaineers that in the Ottoman Empire as in early modern France, by seasonal or long-­term migration, sought a living that was unavailable at home; moreover some Albanians may have come to Istanbul to escape the blood feuds in which their families had become embroiled. However Ottoman officials regarded migrants of limited resources as a risk to public order, certainly if they could not provide anyone to vouch for them – and sometimes even if they could. In any case, when studying a register of workmen domiciled in Istanbul that were drafted in 1716 to repair the remote fortress of Hotin, it is hard to avoid the suspicion that these workmen had been chosen not for their technical competence but for being juvenile Albanians, many of them domiciled in the business-­ related structures (hans) where they may also have worked.104

Artisans and Power: The End of the Janissaries and the Emergence of the ‘Statistical State’ As noted earlier, Baki Tezcan has viewed the abolition of the janissaries (1826) as the major event marking the end of the ‘Second Ottoman

Introduction 29

Empire’ which had been characterized by a limited yet remarkable expansion of the ruling class – there should be a better word than ‘proto-­ democratization’, but that has yet to be invented.105 Tezcan is certainly not the only recent historian to have focused on the janissaries; he and the young scholars that have published on this question have for the most part been inspired by the example of Cemal Kafadar, the author of two important articles on this topic.106 Moreover Donald Quataert has, through a brief but substantial study, inspired people to rethink the role of the janissaries in the world of Ottoman craftsmen.107 Thus it is not by chance that Quataert was the dissertation adviser of both Nalan Turna and Mehmet Mert Sunar, whose work we will now discuss.108 Both Sunar and Turna react against the assumption common in the historiography of the earlier Republic, namely that by turning into a hard-­ to-­mobilize militia and being impervious to military reform, the janissaries were largely responsible for the defeats of the Ottoman armies in the eighteenth century. In this discourse, janissaries who had turned artisans and shopkeepers were considered fomenters of corruption, as we have seen. It is worth noting that this claim is much broader than observations on the well-­documented fact that certain janissaries were involved in activities that we would describe as typical of mafiosi.109 Distancing herself from this moralizing rhetoric, Turna has studied early nineteenth-­century janissary activities soberly and in detail.110 Starting from the statement of Quataert and Keyder that, with the abolition of the janissaries, the artisans had lost their protectors, she points out that to a certain extent at least, the end of the janissary corps served the cause of centralization for instance where taxes were concerned.111 Furthermore, the disappearance of the janissaries opened the way for something we might call ‘state factories’: in 1827, a year after the abolition of the janissaries, officials opened a state tannery (miri debbağhane) that was to produce leather for the newly founded army, the ‘Asakir-­i mansure-­yi muhammadiye’. Traders were forced to sell skins and hides to the new enterprise, which was run by a scribe in the central government. This tendency toward centralization also implied for instance that the guarantees given by guild officials for prospective migrants into the capital were no longer necessarily acceptable. People who tried to enter Istanbul with such sureties might well have faced a blunt refusal. As for the ‘Ministry of the Marketplace’ (İhtisab nezareti) that was supposed to control the artisan world, it succeeded but intermittently. While some craftsmen were punished for bringing into Istanbul people of whom the authorities disapproved, perhaps due to their previous janissary connections, on the other hand both artisans and members of the elite urgently needed workmen. As a result prospective employers, both

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­ fficial and non-­official, sometimes conspired to bring in people who o might have been removed from the capital as ‘jobless’ and thus potential troublemakers.112 Sunar introduces his argument by a detailed discussion of the historiography, which emphasizes the 1940s and 1950s project of İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, Bernard Lewis and Niyazi Berkes in constructing a history of Ottoman and later Turkish modernization.113 As a story is much more convincing if it contains a villain, these authors chose the janissaries as an incorporation of everything negative about the Ottoman ancien régime; this choice allowed them to picture Mahmud II as a hero who successfully pushed through the modernization project, against heavy odds. However this narrative meant that the janissaries in their guise as the forces of evil were depersonalized or even dehumanized; and as a remedy against such tendencies, Sunar proposes a closer look at individual people. For this purpose he has analysed two registers containing the names of, and supplementary information on, janissaries that in 1826 and the following years were exiled and even executed. Certainly the surviving data are not sufficient to visualize these victims of Sultan Mahmud II, and the concerns that prompted them to act. But at least Sunar has shown that, contrary to what had often been claimed, Istanbul and Edirne janissaries did not merely practise unskilled or semi-­skilled trades, but also crafts demanding some skill, such as locksmiths and shoemakers. While pictured in the older historiography as parasites surviving on public hand-­outs, some of these men had in reality entered the very core of the artisan world. With this discussion we enter the nineteenth-­ century ambiance in which single men, now unprotected, could even more easily than under Selim III be classified as people who did not possess a protected private sphere and thus were subject to often arbitrary police intervention.114 But the emergence of the late Ottoman working class, which took place under these conditions, is outside the limits of the present volume. As this lengthy report has hopefully shown, a new discourse on Ottoman artisans has been emerging during the last fifteen or twenty years, and is still in the process of taking shape; above all, the last five years have been very productive. On the one hand, scholars have tried to approach these men – and very occasionally women – while at work, connecting them to the material culture that quite literally was the work of their hands.115 For scholars who study guilds in other cultural and political contexts, the present collection quite obviously foregrounds certain questions while leaving others aside; to some, our coverage may therefore appear insufficiently systematic. But in my opinion it is not a good idea to impose questions on researchers on which the relevant primary sources say very

Introduction 31

little: in the Ottoman case ‘apprenticeship’ is perhaps the most obvious example. As a result we cannot say much about the role of the guilds in the transmission of skills, an issue that as we have seen has a significant role to play in the current re-­legitimization of guilds among economic historians of Europe. In other instances, the present contributors have avoided certain topics because the necessary groundwork does not yet exist: thus for instance the history of science and technology in the Ottoman world is still in its infancy, so we cannot say anything valid about the relationship between skilled artisans and scientists, another subject favoured by today’s historians of European arts and crafts.116 Perhaps this issue was important in the Ottoman world as well; but it is too early to tell. At the same time, the current historiographical favourites, namely the history of law and religion, have had an impact on the study of the artisan world as well. The janissary–artisan link in the Ottoman central provinces, while sometimes referred to in the older literature as the source of all ills, has recently come in for more matter-­of-­fact investigation. However we still lack a broadly based study on the situation in Istanbul comparable to André Raymond’s work on Cairo and more recently that of Charles Wilkins on Aleppo.117 As for the guilds as forms of organization, monographs on individual associations or towns, like those undertaken by Amnon Cohen, Eunjeong Yi, M. Mert Sunar, Nalan Turna, Nelly Hanna, Inez Aščerić-­Todd and others, have brought out that all over the Ottoman lands, practices differed enormously from period to period and from place to place.118 In spite of its obvious focus on the central provinces and especially Istanbul, the present collection reflects these issues in their often mind-­boggling diversity.

The Contributors and their Texts As much of what is new in our understanding of Ottoman craft life comes from monographs on artisans working in specific towns or regions, or on individual guilds, the first part of our collection will be devoted to this topic. Most of our analysis will concern Istanbul, although Bursa, Ottoman Hungary, Damascus and Cairo are also represented. Not that the focus upon Istanbul was a conscious choice on the part of the present editor; it just so happens that many historians interested in artisans work on the Ottoman capital, probably because of the large number of primary sources, both published and unpublished, now at the disposal of researchers. Within the section encompassing monographs, we will proceed chronologically, beginning with İklil Selçuk’s study on artisans as d ­ ocumented

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in the qadi registers of Bursa. Extant from the 1480s onwards, these registers provide the earliest coherent documentation on Anatolian artisans available to us. However the information contained in them is notoriously troublesome to interpret. Firstly, it is not always clear whether a given shopkeeper had produced the goods found in his shop and thus should be considered an artisan, or whether he had collected his wares for resale and thus his primary activity was trade. Secondly, as all guild historians have discovered to their chagrin, the terms hirfet and taife – as well as the sixteenth-­century expression esnaf – can, as already noted, refer both to the trade and the guild. As Selçuk reminds us, it would thus be just as hazardous to claim that Bursa in the late 1400s possessed formally organized guilds as to assert the contrary. However the author has suggested a promising agenda that she intends to follow in the future, namely to check the qadi registers for the first occurrences of guild officials, especially the kethüdas that were to play such a central role in later guild history. Throughout her chapter, Selçuk focuses on the comparison of data from the 1400s with information concerning the late sixteenth century, when the guild hierarchy was firmly in place, concluding that the guilds must have emerged during the intervening one hundred years. But during this period, the record-­keeping scribes of the Bursa qadis changed their work habits as well. In the late 1500s they had largely given up writing the brief texts in Arabic that they had favoured earlier on, and now produced longer and more explicit accounts in Ottoman Turkish. In line with recent research, the author points out that the manner and language of recording had a significant impact on the information conveyed; however we are often not sure how to assess the social and political background of Ottoman bureaucratic practices. Thus the observation that the ahis, presumably a major force in many pre-­Ottoman and early Ottoman Anatolian towns, occur so rarely in the qadi’s records is open to two differing interpretations. Perhaps the ahis were no longer very important in Bursa during the late 1400s – this is the interpretation favoured by both Selçuk and myself. But it is also possible that the ahis did not show up in the qadi’s records because, for a reason we cannot presently reconstruct, they preferred not to appear in court. Moreover absence from court documents did not necessarily mean a lack of influence, for in the 1600s the rules of Bursa’s cloth-­producers did show a strong impact of fütüvvet ethics.119 Craftsmen engaged in physical work, in other words producing material goods, appear in this volume especially through the work of Géza Dávid and Ibolya Gerelyes, who focus on the craft of the potter. From two sixteenth-­century Ottoman provincial tax regulations (kanunnames),

Introduction 33

we learn that potters in Buda and Hatvan did not pay any duties on the products they manufactured and sold locally. This exemption must be one of the reasons why potters are so rarely recorded in the registers compiled by the sultans’ provincial administrators. It is also very difficult to estimate the quantity of pottery marketed in Ottoman Hungary. In contrast to this very scanty written evidence, we do have a comparatively rich stock of surviving Ottoman ceramics, derived mostly from the excavation of military and administrative centres, especially the castle of Buda and the adjacent right bank of the Danube. From about 1550 a new type of ceramics appeared in Hungary, significantly different from its medieval counterpart both in shape and in technical execution. Typically of good quality, the new products were bowls and jugs, whose archaeological context unambiguously shows that they had been produced under Ottoman rule. The long-­term impact of the Ottoman potter’s craft in Hungary, however, is hard to assess: while archaeologists have not found any direct influences, Ottoman features were interwoven with others linked to the traditions of various Balkan ethnic groups. On the whole it appears that interaction between Hungarian and Ottoman potters was limited, a situation quite different from what has been observed with respect to certain other crafts, including leatherwork. Colette Establet has summarized her and Jean-­Paul Pascual’s research concerning artisans recorded in the qadi registers of Damascus from the years around 1700. Parallel to what happened in Cairo, the interpenetration of soldiers and the ‘people of the marketplace’ had become a fact of life in Damascus as well. As artisans, military men typically favoured specialties needed by soldiers, such as the fabrication of saddles or spurs. Establet’s analysis also shows the different arrangements by which an artisan might acquire a place suitable for the exercise of his craft: some of these men owned their shops while others rented them, often from pious foundations. In this matter too, the craftsmen of Damascus conformed to a pattern well known from the central provinces. But probably due to their poverty, quite a few artisans apparently did not possess any locale at all. Presumably they did what their nineteenth-­century homologues were known to have done, namely they worked outdoors or even at home. Establet stresses the poverty of those people directly engaged with the material world, including even a medical man whose inventory forms part of her sample: only people with close links to the circulation of goods, money and precious metals, such as the men in charge of public weighing scales or goldsmiths, had a reasonable chance of leaving something worthwhile to their descendants. Nina Ergin is concerned not with artisans and/or pre-­ industrial labourers as individuals, but with a sizable group of people. A list of 2,400

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­ athhouse attendants forms the subject of her study: these men all worked b in the 177 public baths on record for Istanbul and environs during the mid-­1700s. On the basis of the record produced by an officially appointed inspector in 1752 and with the aid of Geographical Information Systems (GIS), she and her colleague Yasemin Özarslan have produced a set of nineteen maps showing the sizes and geographical distribution of the 177 bathhouses documented. In this context the term ‘size’ stands for the number of regular male employees, as the females who also worked in these establishments did not interest Ottoman officialdom. The count was not intended as ‘pure statistics’ but rather as a means of targeting and ultimately evicting numbers of Albanians, who had formed significant networks controlling the public baths, especially on Istanbul’s historical peninsula. It seems that the administration would have liked to replace these men, viewed as possible troublemakers after the rebellion of Patrona Halil, who had once been a bathhouse attendant; for the rebels had toppled Ahmed III (r. 1703–30) and also murdered his grand vizier İbrahim Paşa. Given these circumstances, immigrants from disadvantaged regions of eastern Anatolia, including Sivas and even remote Çemişgezek succeeded in establishing a significant presence in the public baths of the capital. Presumably officialdom regarded these newcomers as harmless, and tolerated or even encouraged their migration. However the ‘snapshot’ quality of the data collected in 1752 unfortunately does not allow us to judge the long-­term results of this policy. With Suraiya Faroqhi’s chapter we are once again in Bursa, focusing on the textile crafts of the years around 1800. Bursa’s textile industry seems to have done rather better than many other crafts of the time. At least the scholarly diplomat Joseph von Hammer, who visited the city in 1804, was impressed by the quantity and quality of textiles, mainly of silk but also of cotton, which local artisans sold to out-­of-­towners; and he did not say anything about joblessness and distress. Three sample inventories of textile artisans discussed in detail do in fact show that alongside weavers in dire poverty there were some craftsmen who managed to leave substantial estates. However it would seem that if an artisan wanted to do well, he needed to lend out money, for in an environment where cash was at a premium, such an enterprise could result in the accumulation not only of liquid capital but also of social power and occasionally real estate as well. Our last ‘artisan’ monograph, by Nalan Turna, concerns the shoemakers of early nineteenth-­century Istanbul. The fate of this guild differed profoundly from that of the barbers previously studied by the same author.120 For as we have seen, the Istanbul barbers expanded, when the gediks concerning janissary coffee houses were transformed into gediks

Introduction 35

permitting the opening of barber shops, attracting outside investors in the process. By contrast, the shoemakers were affected by the abolition of the janissaries because the state now directly taxed their products and, moreover, entered shoemaking in a big way so as to provide footwear for the new army of Mahmud II. Interestingly in the shoemakers’ guilds there occurred a process resembling that previously discussed by Yıldırım: it became possible for artisans to set up shop without necessarily obtaining the consent of the guild, even before the Tanzimat state put a stop to monopolies in general. Shoemaking was a craft with numerous branches that presumably, in the 1700s, had all possessed small-­scale monopolies. But by the early 1800s quite a few guilds amalgamated. Turna thus analyses a situation in which certain associations decided that their members were better off without monopolies, while others continued to cling to their privileges. The author concludes that the expansion of official demand played a significant role in the abrasion of guild privileges; for under pressure from the state apparatus the number of gediks first increased, and then the construction of a large workshop sponsored by officialdom made the monopolies of the shoemakers’ guilds virtually meaningless. It is worth noting that all this happened before shoes imported from Europe entered the Ottoman market, in the later 1800s. Part II of this volume concerns studies dealing with specific problems that historians of the artisan world have identified, namely the janissary penetration into the Istanbul market during the early 1600s, competition and attempted capital formation within Istanbul guilds during the same period, the enduring question of the gedik and finally the manner in which Ottoman artisans related to law on the one hand, and coped with raw violence on the other. Similarly to Cemal Kafadar and M. Mert Sunar, Gülay Yılmaz Diko critiques the notion that once the janissaries had entered the marketplace in the 1600s, they became ‘fomenters of corruption’. Adopting an approach which resembles that of Sunar and Turna in their work on the early nineteenth century, Yılmaz proposes to look in detail at the economic activities of janissaries.121 Admittedly this chapter is not only about artisans but also merchants; for it is all but impossible to neatly separate the two categories. In this context the author stresses that the mobility of janissaries allowed them privileged access to trade, including wholesaling. Some of these janissary merchants managed to leave great inheritances. However there also were soldiers of small means who had no alternative but to enter very modest trades. Thus we find janissaries among the butchers, but also in candle making and the cooking of sheep’s trotters – the latter a petty trade which, as we have seen, might also have been practised by women.

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Overall, the entry of janissaries into the marketplace and also the penetration of artisans into the janissary corps resulted in a blurring of the boundaries between soldiers and civilians. As a result the separation between members of the ruling elite (askeri) and the subject population (reaya) came to be less pronounced. For when all was said and done, the janissaries were askeri, though frequently situated at the lower end of this privileged group. If we remember that according to Ottoman political thought, askeri and reaya were to remain quite separate, it becomes clear why sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century authors viewed this symbiosis of janissaries and the marketplace with a jaundiced eye. On the other hand, for Istanbul artisans who were mostly quite poor and had no access to the governing bodies, it made sense to appoint janissaries as guild heads. Apparently in the early 1600s, soldiers who had purchased guild positions were not as yet commonplace, although this phenomenon, which brought in a slew of novel problems, was to become frequent in the 1700s. Eunjeong Yi’s contribution deals with several vexed questions at a time. On the one hand, she has queried to what extent the fütüvvet ethos that supposedly infused artisans, to the point that they were unwilling to tolerate rich people in their organizations, had consequences for their behaviour in everyday life. After all, certain fütuvvet-­texts taught that people lower in the social hierarchy should respect their ‘betters’, a precept that could be interpreted in the sense that ordinary guildsmen should properly submit to their guild elders, no matter that the latter were richer and more powerful than the ordinary artisan. In this manner the text might be read as sanctioning hierarchy, the exact opposite of egalitarianism. In fact, the life story of İdrîs-­i muhtefî (d. 1615), a sheikh of the Hamzavi branch of the Melamî-­Bayramîs, corroborates Yi’s claim that not all dervishes disapproved of wealth, far from it; for this sheikh had a second persona as a very wealthy cloth-­trader, which throughout his life permitted him to elude his persecutors for whom he was a dangerous heretic.122 Thus adherence to the fütuvvet ethos did not necessarily mean that riches were considered a bad thing, provided the owner was pious and charitable. The second vexed question concerns material equality and/or inequality within the Istanbul guilds. While the available documentation does not allow hard and fast conclusions, appreciable differences in wealth seem to have existed, at least within certain craft associations. It was rare for such groupings to expel a member because they regarded him as a merchant, and was not a frequent occurrence as had been assumed earlier. The third question addressed by Yi concerns the borders between artisans, shopkeepers and long-­distance traders – clear in theory but often blurred in practice. The author concludes that artisans and poor shop-

Introduction 37

keepers tended to protect their turf by very similar tactics; therefore the distinction between craftsmen and petty traders was somewhat arbitrary. Moreover a few artisans were so wealthy that they easily topped most traders, although it remains a mystery how they had amassed their fortunes. Seven Ağır and Onur Yıldırım have undertaken a careful analysis of gedik transfers in late eighteenth-­and early nineteenth-­century Istanbul, which builds on and refines Yıldırım’s earlier work on the subject. Conceptually the two authors differentiate between gediks as permanent tenancy rights and gediks as licences to practise a particular trade. It is because of the ambiguity involved, which has caused some confusion in the secondary literature, that the authors call attention to the limited usefulness of the term gedik. For analytical purposes it would be preferable to have separate terms for the two meanings at issue; however, for us historians, it is always a hard decision to throw out terms frequently used in primary sources. When discussing permanent tenancy rights, Ağır and Yıldırım start out from the so-­called double-­rent (icareteyn) contracts, which obliged the tenant of foundation-­held property to pay a large sum at the beginning of the contract, while once in place he was to enjoy a low rent in perpetuity.123 Gediks presumably emerged as a special type of icareteyn contract, which allowed holders more flexibility as they could sell them. In consequence, a secondary market in gediks emerged, and it was common enough for the possessors of these tenancy rights to sell them when they could not otherwise liquidate their debts. In consequence, artisans who rented shops might be paying more than the modest sums typically specified in icareteyn contracts, as they were mere sub-­tenants of the person who had purchased the gedik, quite often at auction. However, in so far as gediks were licences to pursue a trade, they remained subject to the authority of the relevant guild; and the masters concerned could decide whether, by means of the gediks, they should render the entry of outsiders or journeymen simple or else rather difficult. On this issue, Ağır and Yıldırım agree with the conclusions of Nalan Turna, discussed earlier. Furthermore they suggest that at the root of the gedik, there were the permanent icareteyn contracts, and only later on did gediks come to denote the exclusive right to exercise a certain trade or craft. Last but not least, the authors bring up the intriguing question of to what extent ethno-­religious identity played a role when gediks passed from one artisan/shopkeeper to another, the cases they located resonating with those previously brought up by Fehmi Yılmaz.124 To answer these questions definitively, they propose a systematic investigation of all gediks ‘in the market’ during a given time period.

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Approaching artisan life from quite a different angle, Engin Deniz Akarlı has pointed out that the majority of Ottoman artisans had a stake in political stability and public peace; for it was in times of disturbance, such as the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, that soldiers and robbers were most likely to extort money from defenceless artisans. Participation in violent acts was the craftsmen’s last resort. In reasonably peaceful times, by contrast, they used other means of defending their interests and airing their grievances. Primarily, they worked through the courts and the legal process, and it is this aspect that has mainly retained Akarlı’s interest. Whenever feasible, guildsmen also ignored those government decisions that they considered unfair. Petition campaigns that occasionally turned into public demonstrations helped artisans impress their concerns on judicial and executive authorities. They also targeted the proprietors of shops and khans, their creditors and, in addition, those individuals who wanted to practise a given trade independently of the relevant artisan association. At least as significantly, however, the guildsmen needed to act in sufficiently large numbers and in an organized manner. They petitioned, went to court, lobbied, or even, as a gesture of ultimate protest, closed their shops. Organized artisans and traders could and did tip the political balance in Istanbul, particularly at times of tension and crisis. With brute force at their disposal, the Ottoman government’s various agents certainly did not always use their power in legitimate ways. On the contrary, they were known to abuse their prerogatives so as to promote their own political or material interests. But the officials’ power had limits. Within the elite different factions opposed and/or balanced one another; and as a result, artisans and traders through their respective organizations and networks could limit abuses. Furthermore, the authorities wished to maintain a peaceful and stable public order, as required by long-­ established traditions of governance and legal culture. Limits on arbitrary power also derived from the institutional structure within which, willy-­ nilly, the Ottoman elite needed to act. Even in the troubled times before and after 1800, the guilds were part of this political and legal culture, so that adhering to the rules devised by these craft organizations must have made sense to most Ottoman artisans. The chapter by Betül Başaran and Cengiz Kırlı tackles yet another aspect of artisan life. It is based on a series of counts covering Istanbul workplaces and the artisans, shopkeepers and workmen employed in them, which date from the reign of Selim III. Given this kind of data, the authors study artisans as people that the administration considered potentially dangerous; and if need be they were subject to forcible removal from the capital. Başaran and Kırlı’s work thus takes up the story begun by Ergin

Introduction 39

on the basis of the 1752 bathhouse register. In accordance with a by now established tradition, labour migrants into Istanbul were subject to a great deal of official mistrust; and the sultan’s bureaucrats thus expanded the long-­established practice of demanding guarantors from newcomers or people otherwise regarded as suspicious, to the urban population in its entirety. People unable to find guarantors that the administration would accept thus became prime candidates for deportation. But in addition to such direct policy concerns, the registers compiled around 1800 also show that the Ottoman bureaucracy was intent upon making its subjects if not transparent – that ambition was not practicable before the computer age – then at least visible and thus subject to a degree of control. It is for that reason that, for the first time in history, Ottoman officials produced a comprehensive overview of Istanbul’s population, artisans included. We now come to the question of how the guilds met their end. In John Chalcraft’s perspective, these associations – at least in Egypt – broke up due to economic restructuring and adaptation, and not merely because traditional trades disappeared due to the competition of imported factory-­ made goods. Increased rivalries between producers furthered by market relations, as well as the loss of customary rights and duties, combined to undermine guild monopolies. The rapid expansion of certain trades further weakened guild organization. In the crucial textile sector it was ‘ruralization’, rather than economic collapse, which destroyed the guilds. New forms of production emerged involving intensified forms of exploitation. In short, economic changes, furthered by the adaptation of guild members themselves, were the major reasons for the destruction of Egyptian craft organizations. Even more important was interaction with the state, most of it contentious. Chalcraft has emphasized that nineteenth-­century officialdom sought to use the guilds for its own purposes, and artisans resisted as well as they could. It was this grass-­roots opposition which induced the colonial government to abrogate the guilds in 1890. Furthermore, the protests of guild members against local exploitation induced the state to meddle in guild affairs, fatally undermining the organizations’ autonomy. New forms of adaptation and protest created new arenas, especially sub-­ and extra-­guild networks. When successful, protests against new forms of colonial regulation and exploitation made for new kinds of social organization. Novel networks, some of them criminal such as racketeering, took the place of the apparently ineffective guilds. From the craftsmen’s point of view, if in the mid-­1800s they had been subjected to sheikhs that all too often cooperated with the ruling dynasty against the best interests of their charges, after 1890 they were pushed ‘from the frying pan into the fire’, facing the world economy and the colonial state without significant

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protection. It may well be that a variation of this model also applied to the central lands of the Ottoman Empire, but further research on this issue will certainly be needed.

Notes    1. I have ‘lifted’ this expression from: William James Bouwsma, A Usable Past: Essays in European Cultural History (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).   2. James Grehan, Everyday Life and Consumer Culture in 18th-­Century Damascus (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2007), 8–10.    3. Murat Çizakça, ‘The Ottoman Government and Economic Life: Taxation, Public Finance and Trade Controls’, in The Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. 2, eds Suraiya Faroqhi and Kate Fleet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 241–75.   4. Suraiya Faroqhi, Artisans of Empire: Crafts and Craftspeople under the Ottomans (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009). As present-­day authors have found out to their regret, once a book is in page proofs, it is almost impossible to make major additions/changes; therefore my bibliography in Artisans of Empire ends in 2007–8.    5. Many thanks to Said Salih Kaymakçı (doctoral student, Georgetown University), who not only located several articles that I had not seen but also generously shared his photocopies and computer printouts.   6. Donald Quataert, Consumption Studies and the History of the Ottoman Empire, 1550– 1922: An Introduction (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000); Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘The Material Culture of Global Connections: A Report on Current Research’, Turcica 41 (2009), 401–31.   7. Baki Tezcan, The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 1–13. Engin Akarlı has kindly pointed out that Bernard Lewis had already noted that both Namık Kemal and Adolphus Slade had made observations of this sort in The Emergence of Modern Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 125, 144.    8. Nicolas N. Ambraseys and Caroline Finkel, The Seismicity of Turkey (Istanbul: Eren Publications, 1995); Nicolas N. Ambraseys, Earthquakes in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East: A Multidisciplinary Study of 2000 Years of Seismicity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).   9. Salih Aynural, İstanbul Değirmenleri ve Fırınları, Zahire Ticareti (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2001); Sam White, The Climate of Rebellion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Lütfi Güçer, XVI–XVII. Asırlarda Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda Hububat Meselesi ve Hububattan Alınan Vergiler (Istanbul: İstanbul Üniversitesi İktisat Fakültesi, 1964), 40–41.  10. Ömer Lütfi Barkan, ‘Şehirlerin Teşekkül ve İnkişafı Tarihi bakımından: Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda İmaret Sitelerinin Kuruluş ve İşleyiş Tarzına ait Araştırmalar’, İstanbul Üniversitesi İktisat Fakültesi Mecmuası 23(1–2) (1963), 239–96; Amy Singer, Constructing Ottoman Beneficence: An Imperial Soup Kitchen in Jerusalem (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002).   11. Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Women’s Work, Poverty and the Privileges of Guildsmen’, Archiv Orientalni 69(2), issue in memory of Zdenka Veselà (May 2001), 155–64, reprint in eadem, Stories of Ottoman Men and Women: Establishing Status, Establishing Control (Istanbul: Eren Publications, 2002), 167–77.   12. Birsen Bulmuş, Plague, Quarantines and Geopolitics in the Ottoman Empire (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012); Nükhet Varlık, ‘Conquest, Urbanization and Plague

Introduction 41

Networks in the Ottoman Empire 1453–1600’, in The Ottoman World, ed. Christine Woodhead (London: Routledge, 2012), 251–63.  13. Halil İnalcık, ‘Istanbul’ in Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd edition, vol. IV (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1990), 224–48, 243.   14. Minna Rozen and Benjamin Arbel, ‘Great Fire in the Metropolis: The Case of the Istanbul Conflagration of 1569 and its Description by Marcantonio Barbaro’, in Mamluks and Ottomans: Studies in Honour of Michael Winter, eds David J. Wasserstein and Ami Ayalon (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 134–65.   15. The latter had re-­established itself on the site after Safiye Sultan, the mother of Mehmed III (r. 1595–1603), had been unable to complete her projected mosque complex, begun around 1600.  16. İnalcık, ‘Istanbul’, 240. See also Marc David Baer, Honored by the Glory of Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 82–96.  17. Evliya Çelebi b Derviş Mehemmed Zılli, Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi, Topkapı Sarayı Bağdat 304 Yazmasının Transkripsyonu –Dizini, vol. 1, ed. Orhan Şaik Gökyay (Istanbul: YKY, 1995), 157–58.  18. Şânî-­zâde Mehmed ‘Atâ’ullah Efendi, Şânî-­zâde Târîhi [Osmanlı Tarihi (1223–1237 / 1808–1821), 2 vols. ed. Ziya Yılmazer (Istanbul: Çamlıca, 2008). For a discussion of fires and the problems they posed, see vol. 1, 117, 119, 126, 233; vol. 2, 483–84, 731, 756, 848–49, 856–57, and 1066–67. I am currently working on a study of Ottoman subjects, often Istanbul inhabitants, and their material culture. This project includes responses to the challenges inherent in the city’s location.  19. Eminegül Karababa, ‘Investigating Early Modern Consumer Culture in the Light of Bursa Probate Inventories’, The Economic History Review 65(1) (2012), 194–219.   20. Brigitte Pitarakis and Christos Merantzas, A Treasured Memory: Ecclesiastical Silver from Late Ottoman Istanbul in the Sevgi Gönül Collection (Istanbul: Sadberk Hanım Müzesi, 2006); Anna Ballian, Relics of the Past/Reliques du passé: Treasures of the Greek Orthodox Church and the Population Exchange, The Benaki Museum Collections (Athens: Benaki Museum; Milan: 5 Continents Editions, 2011).  21. For an example see Çiğdem Kafescioğlu, ‘The Visual Arts’, in The Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. 2, 457–547; a major reference is Serpil Bağcı, Filiz Çağman, Günsel Renda and Zeren Tanındı, Osmanlı Resim Sanatı (Ankara: Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı, 2006).  22. Bağcı et al., Osmanlı Resim Sanatı, 16–17.  23. İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, ‘Osmanlı Sarayında Ehl-­i hıref (Sanatkârlar) Defteri’, Belgeler 11 (1981–86), 23–76; Bahattin Yaman, Osmanlı Saray Sanatkarları: 18. Yüzyılda Ehl-­i hıref (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı, 2008).   24. Tülay Artan, ‘Art and Architecture’, in The Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. 3, The Later Ottoman Empire, ed. Suraiya Faroqhi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 408–80, 434–37.  25. Nurhan Atasoy,Walter Denny, Louise W. Mackee and Hülya Tezcan, İpek. Osmanlı Dokuma Sanatı (London and Istanbul: TEB İletişim & Yayıncılık and Azimuth Editions, 2001), 245–46.   26. Some of these items have been published: Veronika Sandbichler, Türkische Kostbarkeiten aus dem Kunsthistorischen Museum (Vienna and Innsbruck: Kunsthistorisches Museum, 1997), 21–26. See also Luciana Martini, Cinquanta capolavori nel Museo Nazionale di Ravenna (Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1998), 112–13, for an Ottoman leather tray with spectacular calligraphy. Margret Rauch, ‘Holzobjekte aus dem Reich des Halbmonds’, in Alfred Auer, Margret Rauch and Katharina Seidl, Fernsucht: Die Suche nach der Fremde vom 16. bis 19. Jahrhundert (Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum, 2009), 45–58, has published two rather remarkable wooden plates with multicoloured decoration, on record in the Ambras collection since 1596.

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 27. Holger Schuckelt, Die Türckische Cammer: Sammlung orientalischer Kunst in der kurfürstlich-­sächsischen Rüstkammer Dresden (Dresden: Sandstein, 2010). The collection is also remarkable for its precious horse-­gear and tent fragments; however, the Saxon court used its Ottoman textiles during festivities, and as a result few of them have survived.  28. İdris Bostan, Osmanlı Bahriye Tes¸kilâtı: XVII. Yüzyılda Tersane-­i amire (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1992); idem, ‘Ottoman Maritime Arsenals and Shipbuilding Technology in the 16th and 17th Centuries’ www.pdfport.com/.  .  ./771574-­ottoman-­maritime-­arsena ls-­and-­shipbuilding-­technology-­in-­the-­16th.html (accessed on 11 July 2012) (copyright: Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilization, Manchester, 2007); Jean Louis Bacqué Grammont, ‘La fonderie de canons d’Istanbul et le quartier de Tophane. Texte et images commentés, I. La description de Tophane par Evliyâ Çelebi’, Anatolia Moderna 8 (1999), 3–42; Şafak Tunç, Tophane-­i amire ve Osmanlı Devletinde Top Döküm Faaliyetleri (Istanbul: Başak, 2005); Zafer Gölen, Osmanlı Devletinde Baruthâne-­i âmire (18. yüzyıl) (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2006).  29. Gábor Ágoston, Guns for the Sultan: Military Power and the Weapons Industry in the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Günhan Börekçi, ‘A Contribution to the Military Revolution Debate: The Janissaries’ Use of Volley Fire during the Long Ottoman–Habsburg War of 1593–1606 and the Problem of Origins’, Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 59(4) (2006), 407–38.  30. Bostan, Osmanlı Bahriye Tes¸kilâtı, 66–81 and 57–66.  31. For galley service as a punishment, see Fariba Zarinebaf, Crime and Punishment in Istanbul: 1700–1800 (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 164–68.  32. Mehmet Demirtaş, Osmanlıda Fırıncılık: 17. Yüzyıl (Istanbul: Kitap Yayınevi, 2008); Aynural, İstanbul Değirmenleri ve Fırınları.  33. Demirtaş, Osmanlıda Fırıncılık, 158.   34. Evliya Çelebi b Derviş Mehemmed Zılli, Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi, İstanbul Üniversitesi Kütüphanesi Türkçe Yazmalar 5973, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi Pertev Paşa 462 Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi Hacı Beşir Ağa 452 Numaralı Yazmaların Mukayeseli Transkripsyonu – Dizini, vol. 10, eds Seyit Ali Kahraman, Yücel Dağlı and Robert Dankoff (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2007), 195.  35. İnalcık, ‘Istanbul’, 234, see the entry for 1535 in the Table.   36. Cengiz Kırlı, ‘A Profile of the Labor Force in Early Nineteenth-­Century Istanbul’, International Labor and Working Class History 60 (2001), 125–40.   37. Nalan Turna, ‘Pandemonium and Order: Suretyship, Surveillance and Taxation in Early Nineteenth-­Century Istanbul’, New Perspectives on Turkey 39 (Fall 2008), 167–90; Cengiz Kırlı and Betül Başaran, ‘18. yüzyıl Sonlarında Osmanlı Esnafı’, in Osmanlı’dan Cumhuriyet’e Esnaf ve Ticaret, ed. Fatmagül Demirel (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı, 2012), 7–20, 19–20.   38. Onur Yıldırım, ‘Ottoman Guilds as a Setting for Ethno-­religious Conflict: The Case of the Silk-­thread Spinners’ Guild in Istanbul’, International Review of Social History 47(3) (Dec. 2002), 407–19.  39. İsmail Hakkı Kadı, ‘A Silence of the Guilds? Some Characteristics of Izmir’s Craftsmen Organizations in the 18th and Early 19th Century’, in Ottoman Izmir: Studies in Honour of Alexander H. De Groot, ed. Maurits van den Boogert (Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 2007), 75–102.   40. Kadı, ‘A Silence of the Guilds?’, 84. Among local dignitaries we might even find people allied to European traders, with whom they presumably made profitable business deals.  41. Oya Şenyurt, ‘Onsekizinci Yüzyıl Osmanlı Başkentinde Taşçı Örgütlenmesi’, METU Journal of the Faculty o] Architecture 26(2) (2009), 103–22.   42. Yıldırım, ‘Ottoman Guilds as a Setting for Ethno-­religious Conflict’.

Introduction 43

 43. Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Did Cosmopolitanism Exist in Eighteenth-­Century Istanbul? Stories of Christian and Jewish Artisans’, in Urban Governance under the Ottomans: Between ­Cosmopolitanism and Conflict’, edited by Ulrike Freitag and Nora Lafi (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 21–36.  44. Inez Aščerić-­Todd, ‘The Noble Traders: The Islamic Tradition of “Spiritual Chivalry” (futuwwa) in Bosnian Trade Guilds (16th–19th centuries)’, The Muslim World 97 (April 2007), 159–73.  45. Aščerić-­Todd, ‘The Noble Traders’, 164–65.  46. Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi, vol. 1, ed. Gökyay, 207. Rašid Hajdarević, Defteri Sarajevskog Saračkog esnafa 1726–1823 (Sarajevo: Istorijski Arhiv Sarajevo, 1998). I thank Cemal Kafadar for providing access to this publication.   47. I thank Said Salih Kaymakçı for coming up with this question.   48. I have used a later edition: James W. Redhouse, A Turkish and English Lexicon (Istanbul: Mateosyan, 1921), 1645.  49. Robert Mantran, Istanbul dans la seconde moitié du dix-­septième siècle, Essai d’histoire institutionelle, économique et sociale (Istanbul and Paris: Institut Français d’Archéologie d’Istanbul and Adrien Maisonneuve, 1962) – see references for gedik in the index. His source for the most part is: H.A.R. Gibb and Harold Bowen, Islamic Society and the West: A Study of the Impact of Western Civilization on Moslem Culture in the Near East, 2 vols. as one: Islamic Society in the Eighteenth Century (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1950–57). For a reference to a saka gediği in the Mühimme Defterleri from 1040 to 1630, see Mantran, ‘Istanbul’, 369. For Evliya’s references, also relevant to office-­holders and water-­carriers, see the index of Evliya Çelebi, vol. 1. It is noteworthy that Evliya uses the term gedik very sparingly in his lengthy enumeration of Istanbul craftsmen. For further cases, see: Eunjeong Yi, Guild Dynamics in Seventeenth-­Century Istanbul: Fluidity and Leverage (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2004), 56, note 56.  50. Engin Deniz Akarlı, ‘Gedik: Implements, Mastership, Shop Usufruct and Monopoly among Istanbul Artisans, 1750–1850’, Wissenschaftskolleg-­Jahrbuch (1985–86), 223–32. Akarlı has pursued his interest in this question with: ‘Gedik: A Bundle of Rights and Obligations for Istanbul Artisans and Traders, 1750–1840’, in Law, Anthropology and the Constitution of the Social, Making Persons and Things, eds Alain Pottage and Martha Mundy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 166–200, and in his contribution to this volume.   51. Engin Deniz Akarlı, ‘Law in the Marketplace, 1730–1840’, in Dispensing Justice in Islam: Qadis and their Judgments, ed. by M. Khalid Masud, Rudolph Peters and David S. Powers (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006), 245–70, 260–61.  52. Onur Yıldırım, ‘Osmanlı Esnafında Uyum ve Dönüşüm’, Toplum ve Bilim 83 (Winter 1999–2000), 146–77, 157. The same author has shown that some Istanbul guilds only instituted gediks at the very end of the eighteenth century: idem, ‘On sekizinci Yüzyılda Kurumsal bir Yenilik olarak Gedik: İstanbul’daki İbrişim Bükücü Esnafı Örneği’, in Osmanlı’nın Peşinde bir Yaşam, Suraiya Faroqhi’ye Armağan, ed. Onur Yıldırım (Ankara: İmge Kitaevi, 2008), translated by Uğur Albayrak, 373–95.   53. M. Akif Aydın et al. (eds), İstanbul Kadı Siclleri İstanbul Mahkemesi 24 Numaralı Sicil (H. 1138–1151 / 1726–1738) (Istanbul: İSAM, 2010). My thanks go to Coşkun Yılmaz and Mehmet İpşirli for providing me with a copy of this precious publication.   54. Betül Başaran, ‘Between Crisis and Order: Selim III, Social Control and Policing in Istanbul at the End of the 18th Century’, unpublished manuscript, 44. I thank the author for allowing me to consult her work, which has just appeared under the same title (Leiden: Brill, 2014).  55. Başaran, ‘Between Crisis and Order’, 38–39.  56. Şenyurt, ‘Taşçı Örgütlenmesi’, 108–9.

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  57. Onur Yıldırım, ‘Ottoman Guilds in the Early Modern Era’, in The Return of the Guilds, International Review of Social History, Supplement 16, eds Jan Lucassen, Tine de Moor and Jan Luiten van Zanden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 73–93.   58. Randi Deguilhem, ‘Naissance et mort du waqf damascain de Hafīza hānūm al-­Murāhlī (1880–1950)’, in Le waqf dans l’espace islamique, ed. Randi Deguilhem (Damascus: IFEAD, 1995), 203–25, 219–21.   59. Ahmet Kal’a et al. (eds), İstanbul Külliyatı: İstanbul Ahkâm Defterleri, 10 vols (Istanbul: İstanbul Araştırmaları Merkezi, 1997–98).   60. Nalan Turna, ‘Yeniçeri Esnaf İlişkisi: Bir Analiz’, in Osmanlı’dan Cumhuriyet’e Esnaf ve Ticaret, 21–42, 39. See also Akarlı, ‘Gedik: A Bundle of Rights and Obligations’, 199.   61. Mehmet Demirtaş, Osmanlı Esnafında Suç ve Ceza: İstanbul Örneği H 1100–1200 / 1688–1786 (Ankara: Birleşik Yayınevi, 2010), 108–11.  62. Fehmi Yılmaz, ‘İstanbul’da Tütüncü Esnafı’, in Osmanlı’dan Cumhuriyet’e Esnaf ve Ticaret, 127–42.  63. Nalan Turna, ‘Ondokuzuncu Yüzyıl İlk Yarısında İstanbul’da Berber Olmak, Berber Kalmak’ İstanbul Üniversitesi Atatürk İlkeleri ve İnkılap Tarih Enstitüsü Yakın Dönem Tarih Araştırmaları Dergisi 9(5) (2006), 171–88.   64. Turna, ‘İstanbul’da Berber Olmak’, 183.  65. İsmail E. Erünsal, Osmanlılarda Sahaflık ve Sahaflar (Istanbul: Timaş, 2013). I thank Nida Nalçacı who brought this volume to my attention just before I was going to make the final printout.  66. Erünsal, Osmanlılarda Sahaflık, 226–27.   67. Kadı, ‘A Silence of the Guilds?’, 85.  68. Yi, Guild Dynamics, 160.   69. Turna, ‘Yeniçeri Esnaf İlişkisi’, 36; Relli Shechter, ‘Market Welfare in the Early Modern Ottoman Economy: A Historiographic Overview with many Questions’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 48(2) (2005): 253–76, 272–73.   70. John Chalcraft, ‘Out of the Frying Pan, into the Fire: Protest, the State, and the End of the Guilds in Egypt’ (published in this volume); Donald Quataert, Ottoman Manufacturing in the Age of the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).   71. For a fine summary of the problems linked to gediks in 17th century Istanbul, see Yi, Guild Dynamics, 148–60.   72. On the tendency of some masters to use the gediks as a means of avoiding guild control, see Yıldırım, ‘Ottoman Guilds in the Early Modern Era’, 74.   73. Çizakça, ‘The Ottoman Government and Economic Life’; Şevket Pamuk, Osmanlı Ekonomisi ve Kurumları (Istanbul: İş Bankası, 2007); Timur Kuran, The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 132–33 and 312.   74. I use the term ‘Ottomanist’ for historians of the 20th and 21st centuries dealing with the Ottoman Empire.   75. Yıldırım, ‘Ottoman Guilds in the Early Modern Era’, 73.   76. Tine de Moor, ‘The Silent Revolution: A New Perspective on the Emergence of Commons, Guilds, and other Forms of Collective Corporate Action in Western Europe’, The Return of the Guilds, 179–212.  77. Jan Lucassen, Tine de Moor and Jan Luiten van Zanden, ‘The Return of the Guilds: Towards a Global History of the Guilds in Pre-­industrial Times’, The Return of the Guilds, 9.  78. Gabriel Baer, ‘The Administrative, Economic and Social Functions of Turkish Guilds’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 1(1) (1970), 28–50; however shortly before his death the author revised his position: ‘Ottoman Guilds: A Reassessment’,

Introduction 45

in Türkiye’nin Sosyal ve Ekonomik Tarihi (1071–1920), Social and Economic History of Turkey (1071–1920), eds Halil Inalcik and Osman Okyar (Ankara: Meteksan, 1980), 95–102.   79. James R. Farr, Hands of Honor, Artisans and their World in Dijon, 1550–1650 (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1988).  80. Faroqhi, Artisans of Empire, 213. For some telling examples, see Ahmet Kal’a, Debbağlıktan Dericiliğe: İstanbul Merkezli Deri Sektörünün Doğuşu ve Gelişimi (Istanbul: Zeytinburnu Belediyesi, 2012), 232.   81. Mary Louise Nagata, ‘Brotherhoods and Stock Societies: Guilds in Pre-­modern Japan’, in The Return of the Guilds, International Review of Social History, Supplements 16, eds Jan Lucassen, Tine de Moor and Jan Luiten van Zanden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 121–42.  82. Faroqhi, Artisans of Empire, 183.  83. Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, Worthy Efforts: Attitudes to Work and Workers in Pre-­ industrial Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 359–400.   84. Donald Quataert and Yüksel Duman (eds). ‘A Coal Miner’s Life during the Late Ottoman Empire’, International Labor and Working Class History 60 (2001), 153–79.   85. Nurhan Atasoy, 1582 Surname-­i hümayun: An Imperial Celebration (Istanbul: Koçbank, 1997); Esin Atıl, Levni and the Surnâme: The Story of an Eightenth-­Century Ottoman Festival (Istanbul: Koçbank, 1999); Lis and Soly, Worthy Efforts, 314.   86. Evliya Çelebi b. Derviş Muhammed Zıllî, Evliyâ Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi, Topkapı Sarayı Bağdat 304 Yazmasının Transkripsyonu –Dizini, vol. 1, ed. by Robert Dankoff, Seyit Ali Kahraman and Yücel Dağlı (Istanbul: YKY, 2006), 253–359.   87. Engin Deniz Akarlı, ‘Maslaha from “Common Good” to “Raison d’état” in the Experience of Istanbul Artisans, 1730–1840’, in Hoca ‘Allame puits de science: Essays in honor of Kemal H. Karpat, eds Ka’an Durukan, Robert Zens and Akile Durukan Zorlu (Istanbul: Isis Publicatios, 2010), 63–79.   88. Akarlı, ‘Maslaha’, 66.   89. Whatever the situation for male artisans, the sultanic laws concerning eighteenth-­century women were even less respectful of individual rights: Madeline Zilfi, Women and Slavery in the Ottoman Empire: The Design of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).   90. Akarlı, ‘Maslaha’, 76–77.   91. See for example: Boğaç Ergene, Local Court, Provincial Society and Justice in the Ottoman Empire: Legal Practice and Dispute Resolution in Çankırı and Kastamonu (1652–1744) (Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2003); idem, ‘Pursuing Justice in an Islamic Context: Dispute Resolution in Ottoman Courts of Law’, Political and Legal Anthropology Review 27(1) (2004), 51–71.   92. Akarlı, ‘Maslaha’, 72.  93. Demirtaş, Suç ve Ceza, passim.  94. Demirtaş, Suç ve Ceza, 366.   95. Ömer Düzbakar, ‘Work and Organization in the Ottoman Empire: Notes on the Trade Guilds of Sixteenth-­and Seventeenth-­Century Bursa’, Turkish Studies: International Periodical for the Languages, Literature and History of Turkish or Turkic 3–4 (Summer, 2008), 414–53.  96. ‘Abdul-­Karim Rafeq. ‘Craft Organization, Work Ethics and the Strains of Change in Ottoman Syria’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 111(3) (1991), 495–511.   97. Abdulmennan Mehmet Altıntaş. ‘The World of Ottoman Guilds: The Issue of Monopoly’, History Studies: International Journal of History 2/3 (2010), 11-­23; idem, ‘Artisans in the Court: Crime and Punishment in the Ottoman Guilds’, International Review of Turkish Studies 1/3 (2011), 94–109.  98. Altıntaş, ‘Artisans in the Court’, 101–3.

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  99. Shechter, ‘Market Welfare’, 254. 100. Linda T. Darling, A History of Social Justice and Political Power in the Middle East: The Circle of Justice from Mesopotamia to Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2012). 101. Yi, Guild Dynamics; Nelly Hanna, Artisan Entrepreneurs in Cairo and Early Modern Capitalism (1600–1800) (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011). 102. Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Migration into Eighteenth-­Century “Greater Istanbul” as Reflected in the Kadi Registers of Eyüp’, Turcica 30 (1998), 163–83; Kırlı, ‘A Profile of the Labor Force’; Nina Ergin, ‘Istanbul’s Hamams in 1752: Labor Migration and the Bathing Industry of the Ottoman Capital’, Turcica 43 ([2011] 2012), 229–54. 103. Başaran, ‘Between Crisis and Order’, 100–101. 104. Abel Poitrineau, Ils travaillaient la France: métiers et mentalités du XVIe au XIXe siècle (Paris: Armand Colin, 1992); Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Controlling Borders and Workmen, all in one Fell Swoop: Repairs to the Ottoman Fortress of Hotin (1716)’, in From the Bottom Up: Ordinary People in the Ottoman Empire’, ed. Antonios Anastasopoulos (Rethymno: University of Crete, 2012), 315–31. 105. Tezcan, The Second Ottoman Empire, 193; the term has a certain affinity with Murat Çizakça’s ‘proto-­pseudo-­socialist’, see Çizakça, ‘The Ottoman Government and Economic Life’, passim. 106. Cemal Kafadar, ‘On the Purity and Corruption of the Janissaries’, Turkish Studies Association Bulletin 15 (1991), 273–80; idem, ‘Janissaries and other Riffraff of Ottoman Istanbul: Rebels without a Cause?’, in Identity and Identity Formation in the Ottoman World: A Volume of Essays in Honor of Norman Itzkowitz, eds Baki Tezcan and Karl Barbir (Madison, WI; University of Wisconsin Center of Turkish Studies, 2007), 113–34. 107. Donald Quataert, ‘Janissaries, Artisans and the Question of Ottoman Decline’, in idem, Workers, Peasants and Economic Change in the Ottoman Empire, 1730–1914 (Istanbul: The Isis Press, 1993), 197–203. 108. Mehmet Mert Sunar, ‘“When Grocers, Porters and other Riff-­raff became Soldiers”: Janissary Artisans and Laborers in the Nineteenth Century Istanbul and Edirne’, Kocaeli Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi 17(1) (2009), 175–91; Turna, ‘Yeniçeri Esnaf İlişkisi’. 109. Ali Çaksu, ‘Janissary Coffee Houses in late Eighteenth-­Century Istanbul’, in Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee: Leisure and Lifestyle in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Dana Sajdi (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 117–32, 128–31. 110. Turna, ‘Pandemonium and Order’; eadem, ‘Yeniçeri Esnaf İlişkisi’. 111. Turna, ‘Yeniçeri Esnaf İlişkisi’, 36–38. 112. Turna, ‘Yeniçeri Esnaf İlişkisi’, 37. 113. Sunar, ‘When Grocers, Porters and other Riff-­raff became Soldiers’. 114. Ferdan Ergut, ‘Surveillance and the Transformation of Public Sphere [sic] in the Ottoman Empire’, METU Studies in Development 34 (December 2007), 173–93. 115. Enough occasional references to female spinners, embroiderers, bathhouse attendants and silk winders exist for a brief synthesis to be feasible; compare: Fariba Zarinebaf-­Shahr, ‘The Role of Women in the Urban Economy of Istanbul, 1700–1850’, International Labor and Working Class History 60 (2001), 141–52. 116. Lis and Soly, Worthy Efforts, 365–425. 117. André Raymond, Artisans et commerçants au Caire, au XVIIIe siècle, 2 vols (Damascus: Institut Français de Damas, 1973–74); Charles L. Wilkins, Forging Urban Solidarities: Ottoman Aleppo 1640–1700 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2010). 118. Amnon Cohen, The Guilds of Ottoman Jerusalem (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2001); Yi, Guild Dynamics; Sunar, ‘Grocers, Porters and other Riff-­ raff’; Turna, ‘İstanbul’da Berber Olmak, Berber Kalmak’; Hanna, Artisan Entrepreneurs in Cairo; Aščerić-­Todd, ‘The Noble Traders’.

Introduction 47

119. Cafer Çiftçi, ‘Bursa Kumaşçı Esnafının Sanat ve İmalat Nizamı’, in Payitaht Bursa’da Kültür ve Sanat Sempozyumu, ed. Cafer Çiftçi (Bursa: Osmangazi Belediyesi, 2006), 121–31. 120. Turna,‘İstanbul’da Berber Olmak’. 121. Kafadar, ‘Purity and Corruption’; idem, ‘Janissaries and other Riff-­raff’; Sunar, ‘Grocers, Porters and other Riff-­raff’, 176–84. 122. Nihat Azamat, ‘İdrîs-­i muhtefî’, in Türkiye Diyânet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi, vol. 21 (Istanbul: İSAM, 2000), 489–91. 123. Klaus Kreiser, ‘Icareteyn: Zur “Doppelten Miete” im osmanischen Stiftungswesen’, Journal of Turkish Studies 10 (1986), 219–26. Also published as Raiyyet Rüsûmu, Essays Presented to Halil İnalcık on his Seventieth Birthday by his Colleagues and Students. 124. Yılmaz, ‘İstanbul’da Tütüncü Esnafı’.

PART I

ARTISANS OVER THE COURSE OF TIME

Chapter 1

Tracing Esnaf in Late Fifteenth-­Century Bursa Court Records I˙ klil Selçuk

This chapter addresses a fundamental question concerning Ottoman artisan production: when and through what kinds of processes did formal, hierarchically organized guilds appear in Ottoman towns? Whether or not such organizations existed before the late sixteenth century is to some extent a ‘loaded’ question; for it relates to discussions, once quite heated among historians and sociologists concerned with the comparison between European and Islamic societies. Among other matters these discussions revolved around the question whether there was an ‘Islamic City’ that could historically and physically be distinguished from other urban types; in this context scholars debated whether professional guilds and corporate bodies recognized by law existed in Islamic societies prior to Ottoman rule.1 Roy Mottahedeh’s study of loyalty and leadership in the Islamic world also relates to this discussion on the nature of Middle Eastern cities, be they ‘Islamic’, ‘Iranian’ or ‘Ottoman’; for he has examined the question of whether, in the medieval Islamic world, organized artisanal groups were present, by analysing vocabulary used for social category, and for the professions.2 He has shown that in the declining years of the Abbasid caliphate under the government of the vizieral dynasty of the Buyids, artisans had leaders called shaykh; however, government authorities neither appointed nor authenticated them. Rather, these men seem to have emerged more or less spontaneously out of the urban population.

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­ ottahedeh also shows that professional groups had a certain kind of colM lective identity, or esprit de corps, which became more pronounced when they encountered outsiders. Even so, Mottahedeh has not found any formal officially recognized artisan organizations. Thus for now the issue seems to have been settled: it is generally accepted that the ‘classical’ Ottoman period, in other words the sixteenth century, for the first time saw the development of formal guilds. Part of the remaining problem is terminological: it seems convenient, but slightly misleading, to use the term ‘guild’ since for the period under scrutiny the level of organization adopted by Ottoman artisans is not very clear. The terms esnaf, ta’ife and hirfet refer both to craftsmen and to shopkeepers, with esnaf becoming current only by the late sixteenth century. Closely related is the technical vocabulary denoting artisan leadership and hierarchy. In the fifteenth century, Ottoman sources speak of hirfet and hirfet ehli denoting artisans, but do not seem to mention any kethüdas (stewards) or yiğitbaşıs, the latter term denoting an elder who enjoyed the confidence of his colleagues and assisted the steward. Yet according to Halil İnalcık, Cemal Kafadar and Eunjeong Yi, the mature guild system is impossible to imagine without kethüdas or yiğitbaşıs.3 In my perspective the appearance of a formal esnaf hierarchy in official Ottoman sources coincides with other early-­modern developments such as the systematization of the sultan’s bureaucracy, the emergence of specialized services among previously far less differentiated office-­holders, and record keeping in the Ottoman-­Turkish vernacular. I will argue that these developments may well be connected; but by the late fifteenth century they were all still in the process of emerging, and only apparent if we ‘think back’ from documentation covering the craft world of the years around 1600. In order to understand the nature of the transition, we must, of course, deal with the earlier situation, especially the status and functions of the ahi brotherhoods. In the literature, late medieval Anatolian towns generally appear as dominated by ahi associations. Many scholars think that the ahis were active in the economy, governance, and urban network of medieval Anatolia, representing local autonomy prior to Ottoman centralization. My larger problem therefore relates to the continuity and possible discontinuity of early Ottoman guilds with respect to the ahi phenomenon. More specifically, I will ask how the organization of artisans changed with the enlargement of the Ottoman realm during the later 1400s and throughout the sixteenth century. Centralization, often quite dramatic, accompanied this expansion as the sultans came to govern an empire stretching from the Western Balkans to Eastern Anatolia. By this state-

Tracing Esnaf in Late Fifteenth-­Century Bursa Court Records 53

ment I do not mean to say that the development of a state bureaucracy led to the emergence of artisanal hierarchies, but rather that the organization of craft groups, which by this time may have matured to a certain level, came to be on record for the first time as a growing and increasingly specialized body of officials produced documents more numerous and detailed than those penned by their predecessors. Having established that guild organization and political centralization developed in tandem, other problems emerge. What kind of leadership, if any, existed among early Ottoman artisans and what kind of authority did these leaders possess? Did esnaf leadership exist at all during the formative years of the empire, or did medieval ahi brotherhoods continue to play roles later assumed by the guilds? When it comes to the legacy of the ahi brotherhoods, I will show that certainly quite a few ceremonial practices – especially those linked to the reception of new masters – as well as the moral codes promoted by many guilds recall fütüvvet (Arabic futuwwa) ethics as upheld by the ahis. Yet the artisans of Ottoman times were only concerned by the ahi tradition within fairly narrow limits. This analysis can contribute to a more nuanced picture of the history of craft groups in Anatolia. Current studies of the artisans’ associations active in Ottoman cities between the 1500s and the 1800s emphasize variety in organization, and also stress the agency of such groups, especially ­vis-­à-­vis the state.4 In this chapter I will focus on the fifteenth century, of which much less is known. By emphasizing changes over time, I plan to demonstrate that artisan organization was a historical phenomenon. Even modest and in our view conservative craftsmen adjusted their manner of interacting when pushed to do so by changing circumstances. Unfortunately there are no documents providing a direct answer to the questions just formulated. Therefore I will attempt indirect approaches, focusing on the information provided by some of the earliest available Bursa qadi court records (BCR) dating to the late fifteenth century. Secondary sources will allow us a comparison with Bursa guilds during the late 1500s.

Bursa Artisans in the Light of Court Records The earliest available Bursa court registers reveal a considerable amount of information on labour in general, and slave labour in particular, but not so much on artisan groups (esnaf).5 The following analysis will attempt to determine what we can and cannot learn about these esnaf; we will then use this information to elucidate the emergence of the formally organized guilds so characteristic of the years around 1600.

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For this purpose, I will examine the Bursa sicil defter A 8/8 dated H. 896–97/1490–91, which contains a total of 6,849 cases, of which 734 involve individuals with professional epithets and record the market transactions that these people engaged in. The 734 cases on record also include transactions of state agents such as tax officials and their assistants (emin and amils), the appended graph showing the frequency with which each epithet appeared in the register. People engaged in large-­scale commercial activity do not feature in this graph, which only lists the epithets of individuals engaged in production and service while subject to the authority of the Ottoman market inspectorate (ihtisab, Arabic: hisba). Based on the earlier Islamic institution of hisba, which often included a broadly based oversight over public morality, Ottoman ihtisab rules fine-­ tuned the inspection of the urban market. These regulations were implemented by a government-­appointed official called the muhtesib (Arabic: muhtasib). Groups of artisans subject to ihtisab rules are on record in Ottoman sultanic law codes (ihtisab kanunnameleri).6 To delineate the organization of craft groups (esnaf or ta’ife), we will divide the artisans on record in the Bursa registers by the commodities that they made. These people produced either perishables (millet beer manufacturers, greengrocers, sheep-­heads’ cooks, and bakers) or non-­ perishable commodities (dyers, tailors, blacksmiths, tanners, silk spinners, velvet makers, cloth makers, shoemakers, brocade makers, calligraphers, soap makers, kalansuwa hat makers, and candle makers/wax chandlers). In addition the register also mentions a large number of service providers (bath keepers, bath servants, money changers, builders, porters, camel transporters, brokers, millers, architects, purchasing agents, physicians, and falcon keepers). Petty salesmen were subject to the attentions of the market inspectors as well; in shops or open-­air markets, these men retailed goods they had bought in bulk from wholesalers (perfumers/herbalists, butchers, grocers, sellers of melon and watermelon).7 Professions whose membership in esnaf is questionable, such as veterinarians or surgeons, can be categorized as service providers, as they were also subject to the rules of hisba. However there was considerable overlap between categories, as for instance perfumers might make up their own drugs as well as retail those bought from wholesalers. Which professions or activities appear most often in this register (defter)? Interestingly, the most frequent epithet is bozâ’î, or brewer of millet beer, which suggests the popularity of the slightly fermented drink known as boza in late fifteenth-­century Bursa, where coffee was as yet unknown. As the city already had a reputation for silk manufacture it is not really surprising to encounter, as the next category in terms of frequency, artisans and traders involved in textile and especially silk produc-

Figure 1.1 Trades according to frequency of appearance in Bursa Court Defter A 8/8 (H. 895–96) (prepared by Ali Somay, graduate assistant at Istanbul Bilgi University).

Figure 1.2 State agents and ‘experienced craftsmen’ according to frequency of appearance in Bursa Court Defter A 8/8 (H. 895–96) (prepared by Ali Somay, graduate assistant at Istanbul Bilgi University).

Tracing Esnaf in Late Fifteenth-­Century Bursa Court Records 57

tion (sabbağ, hayyat, dolabî, kadifî). The defter also includes state agents who were not artisans or salespeople, but connected to the sphere of the market as they were responsible for raw material distribution, tax collection, or coin standardization (hassa harc emini, beytülmal emini and gümüş arayıcıları). However these quantitative data are not very meaningful unless we address the following question: who and what do our data represent? To what extent did these court cases reflect the distribution of crafts and trades in the Bursa marketplace? Moreover, in what capacity did individuals characterized by professional epithets appear in the qadi’s court? Many cases that I have come across in fifteenth-­century Bursa court records are notarial approvals of transactions or else out-­ of-­ court ­settlements. These transactions include real estate sales, debt payments to individuals or pious foundations (vakıfs), deeds promising freedom to a slave (mükâtebe), emancipation documents given to a freedman (‘ıtkname), as well as records of divorces and credit deals. People with professional epithets appear individually as plaintiffs, defendants or witnesses (şuhûd’ül-­ hal). A wide range of social categories occur in the qadis’ records, including women and men, Muslims and non-­Muslims, Ottomans and foreigners, slaves and freemen, as well as emancipated slaves (‘atîk köle). To elucidate the development of Ottoman esnaf organizations, I will now look at terminology and epithets found in the court cases. I have occasionally encountered the expression ehl-­i hibre, meaning ‘experts in a trade or professional group’. One case runs as follows. The hospice (zâviye) and mausoleum of Gazi Timurtaş near Balıkpazarı (the fish market) were to be repaired. For this purpose, ehl-­i hibre were invited for their expertise to determine how much money was needed. After inspection, the ehl-­i hibre decided that the cost would be 7,000 akçe.8 Professional epithets or elkab (Arabic: alkāb) often appeared before the names of individuals in late fifteenth-­ century sicils. However, titles of guild leaders such as kethüda and yiğitbaşı, which signified the existence of an organized professional group in later periods, did not as yet appear in the late 1400s. Thus all we find is, for instance, a reference to ‘a dyer (sabbağ) named El-­Hācc Mustafa b. Yusuf’ emancipating his Bosnian slave Hamza b. Abdullah.9 In another record, ‘a tailor (hayyat) named Hıdır b. Hamza sold a piece of real estate worth 3,000 akçe to Ali b. Seydī’.10 Admittedly these cases did not involve long disputes and thus would not have necessitated consulting the leaders of any professional group. In another case, concerning a complaint against builders, the person addressed is the Bursa şehir kethüdası (city administrator), while there is no reference to the warden of an artisan organization. An order issued in the name of the sultan to Mustafa the kethüda of Bursa in the last days

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of July 1501 mentions unreliable artisans in the building trades (benna, neccar, nakkaş) who had left four or five construction projects incomplete.11 The order forbids these masters to start new enterprises without completing the previous ones. Of course our conclusions are based only on written documents produced by the qadis and their scribes; if certain artisans had informal organizations of which officialdom took no cognizance then these are fated to remain unknown. As the Bursa İhtisab Kanunnamesi of 1502 contains no reference to guild officials, Suraiya Faroqhi has assumed that, around 1500, Ottoman guilds were in their embryonic stage and only represented by ehl-­i hibre.12 Faroqhi adds that esnaf groups must have consolidated gradually, beginning in the early sixteenth century, a statement supported by the evidence put forward in this article.13 Moreover, a recent study by Özlem Sert has shown that even in the second half of the sixteenth century an individual who wished to become a baker in Rodosçuk (today: Tekirdağ) did not have to fulfil any preconditions put forward by the bakers’ guild. Sert’s observation suggests that the organization of the bakers had no monopoly over the exercise of the craft, and that the bakers’ collective identities may have functioned merely as a device for tax collection (on regulations concerning bakers in the eighteenth century, see Ch. 9 and 10).14 In the light of Roy Mottahedeh’s Loyalty and Leadership, one can suggest that the absence of titles did not necessarily imply the absence of social organization.15 Mottahedeh’s work shows that Iranian artisan associations under the Buyids who governed much of Iran and Iraq in the tenth and eleventh centuries differed both from Western guilds, as well as from the Ottoman hirfet groups of the period following the late 1500s. Considering differences in organization and the later appearance of formal craft hierarchy in the Ottoman world, esnaf bodies of late fifteenth-­century Bursa can be considered as ‘fledgling’. Rather than a lack of organization, the absence of esnaf titles such as kethüda and yiğitbaşı in official sources may indicate that disputes were settled and issues managed within professional groups without appealing to any outside intervention. This situation partially changed in the late sixteenth century, when the qadi’s court became increasingly involved in disputes among esnaf, although the peaceful settlement of disputes (musalaha) continued to be a significant practice within Ottoman law. Obligatory services to the sultans’ armies by artisans accompanying the soldiers on campaign (orducu), as well as the formation of craft groups serving as aides to larger and more powerful entities (yamak), probably called for the organized representation of artisans. These developments, documented for the

Tracing Esnaf in Late Fifteenth-­Century Bursa Court Records 59

1500s, also help to explain the rise or at least the higher profile of esnaf leaders in government records. Since it is not possible to provide evidence for the existence of artisanal hierarchies from late fifteenth-­century court records, we must look for related terms such as kethüda, ehl-­i hiref and ehl-­i hibre in other contemporary sources. For example, in the accounting book of the palace kitchen for the years 1489–90, published by Ömer Lütfi Barkan, we find a reference to an individual called Kāsım, the kethüda of the palace bakers (kethüda-­ı habbazîn). In this case, Kāsım must have been the head of an organization in charge of provisioning of the palace with bread, though not an esnaf kethüdası in the classic sense of the word.16 The term kethüda appears in the 1477 Kanunname of Mehmed II, and ehl-­i hiref and ehl-­i hibre occur in the 1502 Kanunname-­i İhtisab-­ı Bursa.17 Yet in these texts the term kethüda refers to a variety of different people, who often had nothing to do with esnaf; and the kethüdayeri that also featured in these records was no craftsman at all but had official duties. The kethüda mentioned in the Kanunname of Mehmed II most likely refers to a servitor of the sultan, whose job it was to enforce certain prohibitions.18 Fortunately there is another indirect route by which we can approach artisan organization in this early and poorly documented period. A survey of fifteenth-­century Bursa court registers carried out by Yakup Tuncer shows that among a total of 303 endowments, twenty-­four were pious foundations instituted by artisans (esnaf vakıfları). These men had endowed both real estate and cash for a variety of religious and charitable purposes.19 The craftsmen financing these endowments must have reached a certain level of wealth and prominence, so that they were able and willing to spend money on enterprises that would hopefully bring them not only religious merit but also esteem in the community. Tuncer’s work also documents the distribution of these endowments according to professions. Weavers of silk velvet were most likely to make endowments (6/24, or 25 per cent), presumably because these men needed to invest heavily and thus the trade must have been accessible only to the wealthiest of Bursa artisans.20

Fifteenth-­and Late Sixteenth-­Century Records in Comparison Official sources and court records fail to present evidence for the existence of artisanal hierarchy in the fifteenth century.21 But what was the situation in the late 1500s? Unfortunately we can never be sure whether we are dealing with differences in the record-­keeping mechanism or with

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the intricacies of esnaf organization. Whatever the reason, the language, length, form and content of the court records of the late 1500s were very different from what their equivalents had been a century earlier. The earliest court records of Bursa are striking in their simplicity and brevity. Cases recorded in Ottoman Turkish mostly address state agents such as silver controllers and tax officials (emin, ‘amil, gümüş arayıcı), and reflect these officials’ relationship with the government. A case dated 24 Cumāde’lūlā 896 (4 April 1491) thus records that silver controllers found fifty coins from earlier sultans in the hands of a certain Hızır b. Mezid. Presumably the unlucky man had tried to save the fees demanded by the mint for re-­coining.22 Among the witnesses to this transgression were a former slave and a market salesman. By contrast, transactions in the realm of private law such as debt payment, divorce or grant of freedom to slaves were usually recorded in Arabic. Thus a certain Muslihüddin b. Abdullah acknowledged having borrowed 5,000 dirhems of silver from the pious foundation of Hasan Ali Beg, while El-­hacc Mustafa b. Yusuf the dyer emancipated his brown-­ skinned Bosnian slave Hamza b. Abdullah, a man of medium height.23 By the late sixteenth century, dispute settlement apparently became more complicated and records were longer. By this time, when complaints were raised against professional groups, the judge consulted experts of the trade (ehl-­i hibre) and ruled according to their testimony.24 These cases were recorded in Ottoman Turkish rather than in Arabic. As a parallel development, the leaders of artisan and tradesmen’s groupings started representing the members of their respective organizations, while as noted earlier on, in the late 1400s craftsmen and shopkeepers had typically appeared before the court as individuals. Records now emphasize the presence of craft representatives: thus in a case dated 1 Şa’bān 990 (21 August 1582) the master manufacturers of the dessert known as kadayıf (kadayıfçılar hirfeti ustaları) chose Hüseyin b. Abdullah as their ‘assistant headman’ or yiğitbaşı, according to their ‘ancient laws’ (kanun-­ı kadim).25 The physical format of fifteenth-­century sicils differed quite sharply from those compiled in later periods, in that the earlier records were kept in the form of sentences that extended horizontally along the whole page of the record book, while by the late sixteenth century an arrangement of columns became the standard. In terms of language, Ottoman Turkish was now dominant, instead of Arabic, the language of most fifteenth-­ century records.26 Sultan Süleyman’s reign was thus seemingly a period of transition, with records increasingly kept in the vernacular. If the evidence of the registers is anything to go by, in the late sixteenth century Bursa artisans had become more variegated. By this time, fifty-­

Tracing Esnaf in Late Fifteenth-­Century Bursa Court Records 61

four separate groups of craftsmen were on record, while the fifteenth-­ century register had mentioned no more than thirty-­three. Shoemaking provides an instructive example: by the late 1500s four separate but interrelated shoemaking crafts included the manufacturers of various types of footwear that we have trouble describing in detail (paşmakçılar, pabuççular), in addition to boot makers (çizmeciler), and producers of what may have been shoes for the palace (saray pabucu dikenler). In the fifteenth century by contrast there had been only a single category of shoemaker, designated by the Arabic term haffāf. As the documents refer to a separate group of shoemakers working for the palace, the latter probably not only created demand but also had a role in determining the styles favoured by wealthy customers. Likewise, ten silk thread and silk textile-­related professional groups appear in the sixteenth-­century court records (dolabcı, devdâh, ipekçi / kazzâz, bürüncükçü, ibrişimci, kemhacı, gülistânî kemhâcı, seraserci, kadifeci, gülistânî kadifeci) as compared to only four in those of the fifteenth century, the earlier scribes all favouring Arabic terms (kemhā’ī, kadīfī, dolābī, and sabbāğ). These findings suggest increased craft specialization in the course of the sixteenth century. Moreover, as previously noted, late sixteenth-­century court records detail the esnaf that had to serve the armies on campaign as orducus. Throughout, late sixteenth-­ century Bursa court records refer to artisan leaders such as kethüdas, yiğitbaşıs, şeyhs, pazarbaşıs, nâzırs, emîns, and ehl-­i hibre. Among the linen-­drapers (bezzâz), for example, the şeyh oversaw promotions by designating those apprentices who would be allowed to open shops and become masters. Moreover the headman of the Bursa silk manufacturers (kazzâz-­başı) – and presumably other artisan leaders as well – appeared as the addressees of official complaints, while as previously noted in the fifteenth century these men had not been involved at all. On 26 Safer 992 (10 March 1584) an imperial order was issued concerning silk-­thread makers (ibrişimcis) of Bursa after the kazzâz-­başı of the Istanbul silk manufacturers had complained to the sultan: ‘In the past, the ibrişim which came to the kârhâne-­i âmire used to be of top quality. Nowadays, the ibrişim is of poor quality’.27 By this expression the complainants clearly meant to say that the silk in question did not have the appropriate number of filaments. This situation led to conflict among the silk-­producing masters of Istanbul, who may well have passed the blame on to their suppliers in Bursa. In the end the Istanbul silk manufacturers were summoned to the qadi’s court to reconcile their differences. The masters agreed to make bükük ipek ibrişim using four filaments, frengî ipek ibrişim with six filaments, and kuşaklık ipek ibrişim with eight filaments, pledging to maintain these standards. In order to prevent future complaints the Istanbul

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62

masters wanted their colleagues in Bursa to adhere to the same standards, and the sultan ordered the Bursa silk manufacturers to keep to the norms agreed upon in the Ottoman capital.28 As previously shown, expert artisans knowledgeable in their respective crafts (ehl-­i hibre) occur in Bursa court records with reasonable frequency. Thus on 20 Muharrem 990 (14 February 1582), Solomon the Jew took Abraham the Jew to court. Solomon stated that he had woven forty-­ two pieces of cotton cloth (bogasi) at five akçe per piece (for regulations concerning textile producers in the eighteenth century, see Ch. 5 and 9). However Abraham had not paid over the amount agreed upon, claiming that the pieces of cloth delivered were not worth the price. Expert weavers, who did not have to be guild headmen or their assistants, were shown the fabrics under dispute and decided that each piece was worth well over five akçes, the qadi deciding in accordance with their findings.29 Examples of many disputes found in sixteenth-­century court records show that in this period artisans became more diversified, more finely specialized, and involved in more elaborate market activities. At the same time, however, they were also more sensitive to the interventions of outsiders in their respective lines of trade. A major source of aggravation was the peddlers (koltukçu), who did not own or rent shops and probably managed to avoid the taxman more easily than settled esnaf. Thus upon complaints from the muslin makers (dülbendcis), the itinerant sellers of muslin were banned from sales ‘in front of shops, on the streets, and in the main street’.30 In brief, between the late 1400s and the late 1500s, a more formalized guild structure, and a greater tendency to limit the involvement of outsiders in artisan affairs, were concomitant with increasing differentiation among Bursa artisans, who must have been working for a larger and more sophisticated clientele.

The Ahi Question It is a generally accepted view that the economic principles upheld by medieval ahi brotherhoods influenced Ottoman esnaf organization. Furthermore, fütüvvet ethics continued to live at least in the promotion ceremonies of many hirfet groups, despite the ahis’ loss of political power in the fifteenth century. It is known that ahis were significant actors in early Ottoman Bursa as well. What, then, became of the once important Bursa ahis once Ottoman centralization gathered strength? And did ahis have any connection with the development of professional groups in Ottoman cities?

Tracing Esnaf in Late Fifteenth-­Century Bursa Court Records 63

In the earliest Bursa court records the presence of ahis can be detected from the elkab (epithets) preceding the names of certain individuals. The register under investigation (BCR A 8/8) includes thirty-­nine cases in which ahis appear as individuals before the court. I have not come across ahis acting in groups, or found any mention of ‘ahi brotherhoods’. A few representative cases will illustrate the kind of information provided by the court documentation: a record dated December 1490 relates that Ahi Mustafa owed money to the Habbe Ali Beg vakıf managed by Abdi b. Sinan. The latter acknowledged the collection of 1,100 flori; but this was only part of the debt, and Ahi Mustafa pledged to pay the remainder within a year beginning on 5 December 1490, his father Kemal acting as his guarantor.31 In another case recorded on 2 April 1492, an ahi appeared as a witness to a cash payment as a bozahane fee; the recipient was the officer of palace purchases (hassa harc emini) in Bursa.32 This witness was named Mevlânâ Ahi [. . .] b. İmam, and from the context it appears that here ahi may well have been a personal name, neither epithet nor an indication of the bearer’s affiliation with an ahi brotherhood.33 The same officer of palace purchases recorded on 24 July 1492 that he had received 13,241 akçe of Bursa custom revenues from the hands of Ahi Hacı Mahmud b. Abdullah, and used it for expenses connected with fee collection.34 Other examples exist, but none of these cases proves a systematic link between individuals whose names included ahi as an epithet and commercial or artisanal activities registered in Bursa court records. The question thus remains: what do we know about the relationship between ahis and artisans under Ottoman rule? The affiliation between ahis and tanners (debbağs) is well known and well documented, until at least the eighteenth century. Özer Ergenç cites a sixteenth-­century Konya court case including an order whereby the state authorities acknowledge the ahi tradition. In this ferman sent to the qadi of Ereğli, Şeyh Ahi Ali, whose ancestors supposedly went back to the time of the Abbasids and whose descent from Ahi Evran was regarded as ‘proven’, is appointed ahi ‘above the esnaf’ (esnaf üzerine ahi) by imperial licence (berat).35 It is difficult to decipher what exactly is meant by the expression ‘esnaf üzerine ahi’ and how the holders of this post differed from or cooperated with, the ‘ordinary’ kethüdas of esnaf. In many cases leading tanners are called ‘ahi babas’; and occasionally this term occurs in other craft organizations as well. Based on sixteenth-­ century Bursa court records, Özer Ergenç observes that the tanners had an ahi baba that the court called debbağlar ahisi.36 Haim Gerber’s study of the same city in the seventeenth century also shows that the tanners had an ahi baba; however, in time the office of the kethüda came to surpass that of the ahi baba in importance.37

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Later court records of different towns also contain references to ahis, but they do not indicate much beyond the respect for Ahi Evran as a holy man especially among tanners, and the survival of the ahi epithet.38 I have found the same pattern in the fifteenth-­century court records of Bursa. In some cases ahi appears merely as a person’s given name, thus the term probably no longer designated a functional or institutional category, but was merely a ‘residue’ of a bygone era.39 When dealing with the Ottoman period it is thus difficult to observe an organic link between ahis and craft organizations except where the tanners are concerned.40 A case I found in the late fifteenth-­century Bursa defter (A 8/8) is noteworthy in this respect. An emancipated slave (‘atîk köle) Ahi İlyas b. Abdullah, kalânisî (maker of the turban called kalansuva) admitted that he owed 115 eşrefî coins to Muhammed Çelebi b. El-­Hacc Düsturhan, and pledged to pay his debt beginning 10 Rebiyyü’l-­ āhir 896 (19 February 1491). El-­Hacc Muhammad b. Hasan, another turban maker from the neighbourhood of İsâ Bey, guaranteed repayment.41 It is interesting to note that the debtor is at the same time an ahi, a kalânisî, and an emancipated slave. Moreover, another kalânisî becomes the guarantor for the debt of Ahi İlyas. It would not be appropriate to assume a direct relationship between ahis and artisans based on this document alone; however, I find it noteworthy that a man who was not a tanner also used the epithet of ahi. How does the profession of a kalânisî relate to the ahis? Ibn Battuta described the outfits of the ahis’ as follows. He saw young men in long cloaks wearing boots and carrying knives about two cubits in length, which they had attached to their girdles. On their heads they wore white woollen bonnets, to whose tips pieces of fabric had been attached, about a cubit in length and two fingers wide.42 According to H.A.R. Gibb, ‘the cloth tube attached to the bonnet’ (A. kalansuva) later became a part of the uniform of the Janissaries in the Ottoman period.43 Given the frequency of references to kalansuva makers in the Bursa defter A 8/8, this craft could well have been popular among ahis. Bursa was not a city with many hospices established by ahis, at least in comparison to the large number of such foundations in the towns of Kütahya, Kastamonu, Tokat and Ankara. Similarly, the cadastral surveys of Hüdāvendigâr Livâsı (Bursa Province) indicate that early Ottoman military governors (begs) and sultans did not make many land grants to ahis; they preferred donations to other religious figures, especially şeyhs and fakihs. Based on my observations of the court records, vakıf registers and Hüdāvendigâr Livâsı cadastral surveys, I would suggest that although ahis may have been prominent actors in the towns of Ottoman Anatolia during the fourteenth century, they seem to have lost their influence

Tracing Esnaf in Late Fifteenth-­Century Bursa Court Records 65

in Bursa at an early stage, perhaps due to the systematic efforts of the Ottoman elite to construct an imperial capital and the consequent centralization of power.44 If we cannot establish an organic relationship between professional groups and ahi brotherhoods, what was the enduring legacy of the ahis, especially in Bursa? This question requires further research into the locations and functions of ahi hospices, and a look into the futuwwa/fütüvvet literature, which continued to be read and distributed among the urban population in the early modern period. However, these questions transcend the present analysis.45

Conclusion In terms of format it is noteworthy that fifteenth-­century court cases are brief and mostly recorded in Arabic. A comparison of fifteenth-­and sixteenth-­century documents has shown that in the course of the 1500s, Bursa sicils became longer and records of dispute settlements were written much more often in Ottoman Turkish. By the century’s end, court cases were uniformly recorded in the vernacular. Certainly legal traditions of Arab origin were still respected, but at the same time the Ottoman legal system began to produce its own Turkish-­language sources.46 In sharp contrast to what has been observed for the sixteenth century, Bursa court cases of the late 1400s do not reflect hierarchically organized or guild-­like bodies of artisans and traders. In the fifteenth-­century records, while professional epithets appear before the names of people, the latter operated as individuals in the qadi’s court. Although the relevant court records do not contain any terms signifying guild leadership, references to the ‘experts of the trade’ (ehl-­i hiref and ehl-­i hibre), especially in the sultanic law code of market regulation dated to 1502 (Kanunname-­i İhtisab-­ı Bursa), do exist and may reflect an embryonic stage in the development of hierarchically organized professional groups. By the early sixteenth century, the leaders of such groups began to appear in court records, for instance in Üsküdar.47 Consequently, it would be meaningful to look at court records from the early 1500s, beginning with the reign of Selim I (1512–20) to find the turning point when guild leaders appear in court cases for the first time. Moreover, the late sixteenth-­century Bursa court cases indicate that many artisans and traders were organized in guild-­like groups defined by their line of economic specialization and possessing an established leadership structure. The relatively detailed court records of this period provide information on group membership, the autonomous decisions of these organizations,

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and the interaction between leaders and members. Mutual expectations are also on record.48 Centralization, bureaucratization, specialization and a marked preference for records in the vernacular mark the transition from the fifteenth to the sixteenth century, a process which can be viewed as part of a larger context of early modern developments experienced by Ottoman society. As for the much-­debated question of whether ahis had any connection to the early development of Ottoman guilds, the court records do not show an organic link between these brotherhoods and urban esnaf, although some artisans or traders certainly were identified as ahi. A connection between ahis and tanners persisted through the centuries, probably due to the respect for Ahi Evrân, the master saint of tanners. This association is documented in Bursa court records as well. Some ethical teachings and ceremonial practices of ahis may have survived through the fütüvvet literature, but otherwise where Bursa is concerned the political and strategic significance of the ahis seems to have melted away.

Notes This chapter was initially presented in Turkish at the first TITAP (The Platform of Economic History in Turkey) meeting (Marmara University. September 2007, Istanbul). The present article is an expanded version of this original text. My sincere thanks go to the participants of the TITAP session for sharing their valuable comments.   1. Ira Lapidus, Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984); idem (ed.), Middle Eastern Cities (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969); Albert H. Hourani and S.M. Stern (eds). The Islamic City: A Colloquium (Oxford: Cassirer; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970). A critical approach to the concept of the ‘Islamic city’ vein appeared in the following decades: Richard Bulliet, The Patricians of Nishapur: A Study in Medieval Islamic Social History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972); Roy P. Mottahedeh, Loyalty and Leadership in an Early Islamic Society (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, [1980] 2001); Michael Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus, 1190–1350 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).  2. Tabaqah/tabaqat (asnaf), sinf, jins, ummah, ta’ifah. On esnaf/tabaqat, see Mottahedeh, Loyalty and Leadership,104–8; on ‘ayyarun, tujjar and simsar, 116–20; on ahdath or ‘ayyarun, 157–58; on factions-­fariq or ta’ifah, 159–61.   3. Cemal Kafadar, ‘When Coins Turned into Drops of Dew and Bankers Became Robbers of Shadows’, (Ph.D. diss., McGill University, 1986), 115.  4. Engin Deniz Akarlı, ‘‘Gedik: A Bundle of Rights and Obligations for Istanbul Artisans and Traders, 1750–1840’,’ in Law, Anthropology and the Constitution of the Social: Making Persons and Things, eds Alan Pottage and Martha Mundy (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 166–200; Suraiya Faroqhi, Making a Living in the Ottoman Lands, 1480 to 1820 (Istanbul: The Isis Press, 1995); eadem, Towns and Townsmen of Ottoman Anatolia: Trade, Crafts and Food Production in an Urban Setting, 1520–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); eadem, ‘‘Merchant Networks

Tracing Esnaf in Late Fifteenth-­Century Bursa Court Records 67

and Ottoman Craft Production (16–17th Centuries)’,’ in The Proceedings of the International Conference on Urbanism in Islam, 5 vols. (Tokyo: Middle Eastern Culture Center, 1989) vol. 1, 85–132; eadem, Osmanlı Dünyasnda Üretmek, Pazarlamak, Yaşamak, tr. by Gül Çağalı Güven and Özgür Türesay (Istanbul: YKY, 2003); Haim Gerber, Economy and Society in an Ottoman City: Bursa, 1600–1700 (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University, 1988); Eunjeong Yi, Guild Dynamics in Seventeenth-­Century Istanbul: Fluidity and Leverage (Leiden and Boston: E.J. Brill, 2004).   5. Halil Sahillioğlu, ‘15. yy’ın Sonu ile 16. yy’ın Başında Bursa’da Kölelerin Sosyal ve Ekonomik Hayattaki Yeri’,’ ODTÜ Gelişme Dergisi (1979–1980): 67–138; idem, ‘15. Yüzyıl Sonunda Bursa’da Dokumacı Köleler’.’ Atatürk Konferansları (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1983), 217–29; idem, ‘Slaves in the Social and Economic Life of Bursa in the Late 15th and Early 16th Centuries’, in idem, Studies on Ottoman Social and Economic History (Istanbul: IRSICA,1983), 105–74.   6. Ahmet Akgündüz, II. Bayezid devri Kanunnameleri in Osmanlı Kanunnameleri ve Hukuki Tahlilleri (Istanbul: FEY Vakfı, 1990) volume 2, 188–229; Ömer Lütfi Barkan, ‘XV. Asrın Sonunda bazı Büyük Şehirlerde Eşya ve Yiyecek Fiyatlarının Tesbit ve Teftiş Hususlarını Tanzim eden Kanunlar’, Tarih Vesikaları I/5 (1941–42), 326–40; II, 9 (1943), 15–40; II, 9 (1943): 168–77, see 340.   7. For categorization of esnaf, see Özer Ergenç, XVI. Yüzyılda Ankara ve Konya (Ankara: Ankara Enstitüsü Vakfı, 1995); idem, XVI. Yüzyılın Sonlarında Bursa: Yerleşimi, Yönetimi, Ekonomik ve Sosyal Durumu üzerine bir Araştırma (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2006); idem, ‘XVIII. Yüzyılda Osmanlı Sanayi ve Ticaret Hayatına İlişkin bazı Bilgiler’, Belleten LII, 203 (1988) 501–32; idem, ‘Osmanlı Şehrinde Esnaf Örgütlerinin Fiziki Yapıya Etkileri’, in Türkiye’nin Sosyal ve Ekonomik Tarihi, eds Halil İnalcık and Osman Okyar (Ankara: Hacettepe Üniversitesi,1980), 103–8.   8. BCR. A-­8, No. 1374 (enumerated as 1274), Folio 99.   9. BCR A 8/8 folio 43. No. 562. 10. BCR A 8/8 folio 40. No. 515. 11. Feridun Emecen and İlhan Şahin, Osmanlılar’da Divan-­Bürokrasi-­Ahkâm: II. Bayezid dönemine ait 906/1501 Tarihli Ahkâm Defteri (Istanbul: Türk Dünyası Araştırmaları Vakfı, 1994), 113, No. 408. 12. For Bursa İhtisab Kanunnamesi see Ahmet Akgündüz (ed.), Osmanlı Kanunnameleri ve Hukuki Tahlilleri (Istanbul: FEY Vakfı, 1990) vol. II: 121–229. See also Akgündüz (ed.), Osmanlı Kanunnameleri vol I: 378–80, containing the first market code from the reign of Mehmed II. Compare also, idem, II. Bayezid Devri Kanunnameleri (Istanbul: FEY Vakfı, 1990), passim. 13. Suraiya Faroqhi, Artisans of Empire: Ottoman Craftspeople Coping with the Market and the State, about 1500–1912 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 1–23. 14. Özlem Sert, ‘Becoming a Baker in the Ottoman Town of Rodosçuk (1546–1552): A Textual Analysis of the Records of Designation’, New Perspectives on Turkey 42 (Spring 2010): 159–78. 15. Mottahedeh, Loyalty and Leadership, 104–8; on the leadership of the trades see 130; on riyasah and factions, 150. 16. Ömer Lütfi Barkan. ‘Saray Mutfağının 894–95 (1489–1490) Yılına ait Muhasebe Bilançosu’, İstanbul Üniversitesi İktisat Fakültesi Mecmuası 23(1–2) (1962–63): 380–98, 397. 17. For kethüda see: Halil İnalcık and Robert Anhegger, Kānūnnāme-­i Sultānī ber mūceb-­i ‘örf-­i Osmānī (Ankara: TTK, 1956, reprint 2000). For ehl-­i hiref and ehl-­i hibre: Barkan, ‘XV. Asrın Sonunda’, passim. 18. The office of kethüdayeri is defined in detail by Ergenç, Ankara ve Konya, 76–77. 19. Yakup Tuncer ‘Mahkeme Sicillerine göre XV. yüzyıl Bursa Vakıfları’, unpublished M.A. thesis (Uludağ University, Bursa, 1992), 31 – based on registers A 3/3, 4/4, 5/5, 7/7, 8/8, 11/10, 14/12, 16/16, and 18/17. Not all endowers’ trades are revealed in the court

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records. Tuncer’s work shows that quite a few vakıfs had been established by endowers whose professions remain unknown. 20. Tuncer ‘Mahkeme Sicillerine göre XV. yüzyıl Bursa Vakıfları’. 21. Ömer Lütfi Barkan and Enver Meriçli (eds). Hüdavendigâr Livası Tahrir Defterleri (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1988), vol. 1 (no more published). 22. BCR A8/8, No. 894, Folio 66. 23. BCR A 8/8, No. 159, Folio 13; BCR A 8/8 No. 562, Folio 43. 24. Ergenç, Bursa, 218. 25. BCR B 4, cited in Ergenç, Bursa, 135. 26. This holds true for all kinds of records found in the sicils, excluding the imperial orders sent from Istanbul (emr-­i şerif), such as those concerning the imperial agent for palace purchases (hassa harc emini), or silver control (gümüş arayıcılığı). 27. BCR B6, 9, cited in Ergenç, Bursa, 211. 28. Ibid. 29. Ergenç, Bursa, 183. Footnote no: 752. Bursa Court Record B4, 17. 30. Bursa A 113, 117 b and B 10, 208 cited in Ergenç, Bursa, 212. 31. BCR A 8/8 folio 23 No. 277. 32. On the office of palace purchases, see: Arif Bilgin, Osmanlı Taşrasında bir Maliye Kurumu: Bursa Hassa Harç Eminliği (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2006). 33. BCR A 8/8, Folio 362, No. 5735. 34. BCR A 8/8 Folio 418, No. 6574. 35. Ergenç, Ankara ve Konya, 199, footnote 8. The document in question is the 17th-­century Konya court record XXII, 11. 36. Ergenç, Bursa, 194. 37. Gerber, Bursa, 39. 38. Ergenç, Ankara ve Konya, 199, footnote 8. 39. Even in the 1600s, certain inhabitants of Ankara continued to use the term ahi; see, for example: Taş, 17. Yüzyılda Ankara (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2006), 57. 40. Cafer Çiftçi has studied the impact of fütüvvet ethics on seventeenth-­century Bursa cloth-­ producers’ rules and regulations; indirectly this article also throws some light on earlier ahi-­esnaf relationships: Cafer Çiftçi, ‘Bursa Kumaşçı Esnafının Sanat ve Imalat Nizamı’, in Payitaht Bursa’da Kültür ve Sanat, edited by Cafer Çiftçi (Bursa: Osmangazi Belediyesi, 2006),121–31. 41. BCR A 8/8 page 48. No. 626. 42. Ibn Battuta, Travels in Asia and Africa, 1325–1354, translated and selected by H.A.R. Gibb (reprint New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1986), 421.The term qalansuwa denoted a head-­covering worn by Muslims in the time of the Prophet Muhammad. On qalansuwa (kalansuwa), see Yadida Stillman, ‘Libas’, in Encyclopedia of Islam vol. 5, ed. by Clifford E. Bosworth et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1986), 732–52. It is defined as a ‘pointed bonnet for men’ on 746, and as a high or medium high cap (külah) on 747. On the difference between the ‘imama (turban) and the caps like kalansuwa and takiyya, see 734; on the Persian hat called kalansuwa tawila, 737. 43. Ibn Battuta, Travels in Asia and Africa, 421, footnote 32. 44. İklil O. Selçuk, ‘State and Society in the Marketplace: A Study of Late Fifteenth-­century Bursa’ (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2009), 182–83. 45. Two fütüvvetnâmes are especially relevant to these questions: the Fütüvvetnâme of Şeyh Hüseyin ibn Şeyh Seyyid Gaybī (written in south-­eastern Anatolia c.1450–1482); and Miftāh el-­Dakāīk fī Beyān el-­Fütüvve ve’l-­Hakāyik, also known as Fütüvvetnâme-­i Kebîr, copied by a Şafi’ī qadi called Seyyid Muhammed b. Es-­seyyid ‘Alaeddin el-­Hüseynī el-­ Razavī in Bursa in 1524. Şeyh Hüseyin’s Fütüvvetnâme is significant foremost as the second-­oldest extant fütüvvet manual in Turkish after the thirteenth-­century Fütüvvetnâme of Yahyā Halil ibn Çoban. Secondly, it was probably written during the reign of

Tracing Esnaf in Late Fifteenth-­Century Bursa Court Records 69

Mehmed II (r. 1451–81), when Ottoman centralization had reached a high point. Thirdly, it contains numerous references to the relevance of fütüvvet ideals for artisans. Miftāh el-­ Dakāīk fī Beyān el-­Fütüvve ve’l-­Hakāyik, or Fütüvvetnâme-­i Kebîr, was written in Turkish during the first quarter of the sixteenth century, the authors of this fütüvvetnâme addressing craftsmen as well. The principal source of Fütüvvetnâme-­i Kebîr is known to be Şeyh Hüseyin’s Fütüvvetnâme. Copies of Fütüvvetnâme-­i Kebîr found in Bursa manuscript libraries suggest its popularity in this town, hence Abdülbaki Gölpınarlı has considered that during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Bursa was greatly favoured by the adherents of fütüvvet. See the Fütüvvetnâme of Şeyh Hüseyin ibn Şeyh Seyyid Gaybî published by Gölpınarlı: İktisat Fakültesi Mecmuası XVII (1955–56), No. 1–4; and Deodaat Anne Breebaart, ‘The Development and Structure of the Turkish Futūwah Guilds’, Princeton University, Ph.D., 1961, University Microfilms, Inc. Ann Arbor, Michigan; idem. ‘Miscellanea. The Fütüvvet-­nāme-­i Kebīr: A Manual on Turkish Guilds’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient XV, I–II (June 1972): 203–15, 207. 46. See the appended pictures: BCR A 4 and B 7. 47. Compare the indices of Kenan Yıldız and Recep Ahıskalı (eds), İstanbul Kadı Sicilleri Üsküdar Mahkemesi 9 numaralı Sicil (H. 940–942/M. 1534–1536) (Istanbul: İSAM, 2010); Rıfat Günalan, Mehmet Akman and Fikret Sarıcaoğlu (eds), İstanbul Kadı Sicilleri Üsküdar Mahkemesi 26 numaralı Sicil (H. 970–971/M. 1562–1563) (Istanbul: İSAM, 2010). 48. Yi, Guild Dynamics.

Chapter 2

The Art of the Potter in Ottoman Hungary

History, Meet Archaeology The Potter’s Craft in Ottoman Hungary

Géza Dávid and Ibolya Gerelyes

In this chapter, the craft of sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century Ottoman potters whose works have been found on Hungarian soil will help us to envisage the relevance of material culture for the study of social history.1 We are thus concerned with the meeting of two disciplines with different methodologies, namely history and archaeology. For it is when dealing with the Hungarian provinces that Ottomanist historians must face the incontrovertible fact that only physical remains can answer at least some of the questions that a social historian may ask. What did people’s houses and vegetable gardens look like, what sorts of food did they eat, and where and how did they prepare it? What kinds of changes occurred over time in these humble but indispensable accoutrements of daily life? Did changes in material culture result from contacts with ‘outsiders’? And if so, were these changes rapid or slow? In what sense was the social stratification typical of a given village or town reflected in the vessels which people used for cooking and eating?2

Archaeology and History: A Case of Symbiosis in the Ottoman World In the mid-­twentieth century, from Poland to France and England, there was considerable interest in the question of villages abandoned in the

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later Middle Ages, due to Fehlsiedlung or choice of a village location that later proved inappropriate, climatic change, the Black Death, enclosures – at least in the English context – or else, and perhaps most importantly, warfare between feudal lords or monarchs.3 Abandoned medieval villages were a research problem that historians could only approach with the help of archaeology. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, deserted villages were no rarity in Ottoman Hungary; and the interpretation of these ruined sites posed special problems. For a time, scholars assumed that Ottoman rule and the unfortunate position of the territory in a zone of continual warfare depopulated huge regions. However, when studying the Ottoman sub-­province of Simontornya, one of the present authors was able to show that in real life the number of abandoned villages was not high and that some of them were soon re-­populated.4 After a thorough excavation of the now-­ abandoned Ottoman-­ period village of Szentkirály in the Nagykunság (Greater Cumania) area on the Great Hungarian Plain, and after comparison of the results with Ottoman and post-­Ottoman written records, one archaeologist has concluded that up to the Long War of 1593–1606 between the sultans and the Habsburgs, the network of medieval settlements in this area survived reasonably well. He has also argued that the later disappearance of villages rather meant ‘an extremely high settlement concentration’, since people moved into nearby towns.5 Other historians stress not the abandonment of villages and depopulation, but rather the arrival of Southern Slav inhabitants, a phenomenon that will be of concern in the present study as well. Thus, the archaeology of the Ottoman period is closely connected with the ‘ethnicity question’. A number of historians have set out to explain how during the period when the sultans ruled over two-­fifths of Hungary, a part of the medieval kingdom came to be settled by Southern Slavs; moreover this process had already begun before the Ottoman conquest, when Slav populations fleeing from the sultans’ armies or brought in by local noblemen had entered Hungarian territory.6 However, written sources reflect the relevant settlement processes only in part. For in the Ottoman world from the late sixteenth century onwards, tax farming and the ocaklık system progressively took the place of the military tax assignments (timar), whose centrally controlled distribution had necessitated the compilation of the famous tax registers (tahrir defterleri), which form the principal source for the fifteenth-­and sixteenth-­century demographic and economic history of the Ottoman provinces in general, and, after 1541, of Hungary in particular.7 As a result, archaeologists working on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have attempted to ‘fill the gap’ and have developed a sustained interest

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in the different ethnic groups known to have been present on Hungarian territory.8 In this context of settlement history, cultural contact, and – as we will see – in some cases the exact opposite, namely the avoidance of goods ‘from the outside’, one of the present authors has looked at the ‘deserted villages’ question during the early modern, Ottoman period. In this enterprise, he has focused on tax registers produced by the sultans’ officials and has linked the results – and other factors – with data gained from the studying of pottery finds, especially but not exclusively from deserted settlement sites.9 For researchers focusing on the study of pottery, it is almost an obligation to try and find out about the people who produced these items.10 Here we should add that the archaeologist can do nothing other than analyse, according to the rules of his or her trade, those finds from past centuries which survive in the greatest number and which constitute the overwhelming majority of the finds recovered during excavations, namely ceramics. In the course of this analysis, questions of a fundamentally technical kind which relate to fabric, methods of turning and firing, glazes, and decorative motifs eventually yield answers to social questions as well. For these data provide information with regard to the appearance, movements, and disappearance of ethnic groups, the daily lives and eating habits of these groups, and even, in connection with eating habits, their religion. The data relate to those persons who once used the vessels – in other words, to those ordering and purchasing them. As we shall see below, some rare finds which were discovered unexpectedly also cast light on the potter craftsmen who made them. It is important to emphasize this at the outset, since the present volume is concerned with Ottoman craftspeople, both as producers and as social beings, at least as far as our sources permit. Yet from the very beginning, we must concede that we know almost nothing about the social organization of craftspeople in Ottoman Hungary in general, or of potters in particular. Some of the latter doubtless worked in full-­ scale urban settlements, or else in market towns (oppida) which in the Hungarian lands were ‘intermediate’ between urban and rural life. Other potters must have been village artisans. Yet it remains unknown whether, in some places at least, these potters operated in guilds. Recent studies have revealed, however, that in some of the market towns belonging to the sultans’ estates the original population continued their earlier corporative traditions in some fields of craftsmanship, especially goldsmiths and silversmiths.11 The latter had a rich late medieval tradition, and their activity flourished in the chief towns of the Great Hungarian Plain, even in Ottoman times.12

The Art of the Potter in Ottoman Hungary 73

The Source Base and Its Difficulties Collecting historical evidence on handicrafts and craftsmen in Ottoman Hungary, and therefore on pottery and potters, is rather difficult. Unlike their counterparts covering certain Anatolian and Middle Eastern regions, the tahrir defterleri (tax registers) commissioned by the sultans in Hungary mention no workshops of any kind. Moreover, we have very few qadi registers (sicils) for this region; yet it is the sicils which form the source in which Ottoman craftsmen and shops most regularly occur. The very low number of surviving probate inventories (tereke defterleri), also known as estate or inheritance inventories, hinders still more the description and statistical evaluation of Ottoman artefacts manufactured in Hungary. Customs registers are almost the sole sources to contain references to craft products, though often without indicating the origins of these pieces.

Name-­Lists: Tempting but Treacherous The name-­lists in the tahrir defterleri can, however, be of some help, since the scribes occasionally specified the occupations of the people that they listed. But even here we need to tread warily and make clear distinctions. For example, such references, for Muslims and Christians alike, occur only in registers covering territories south of the Drava–Danube line.13 In defters compiled north of these great rivers – on the territory of modern-­day Hungary – unequivocal references to people’s occupations are confined to blacksmiths, village headmen, priests, and literate persons in general.14 The historian’s task becomes yet more complicated as Muslims rarely feature in these registers; but even when they do, their occupations are not on record. To learn something about the occupational structure of the population despite all these difficulties, scholars have occasionally tried to draw conclusions from the Hungarian or German family names of the people who inhabited the country’s one-­time Ottoman and non-­Ottoman territories.15 In certain cases, and especially when the family name referred to a person practising a rare craft such as shield-­making, or the manufacture of tin jugs or needles or purses, this approach seems to have yielded promising results.16 Scholars have also focused on the practitioners of crafts demonstrably carried on in specified places, such as a fuller in a settlement where the operation of a fuller’s mill can be demonstrated.17 Other case studies, though, have led to discouraging conclusions. Namely, if more than half of the inhabitants of a given village bore a name meaning ‘tailor’, one cannot assume that all these people did in fact sew clothes.

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The analysis of a list of the inhabitants of Szeged compiled in 1522, just before the beginning of Ottoman occupation, strikes an even more serious blow against this theory. Of 133 sheep breeders featured in this text, just three had names corresponding to this activity; and of the 74 wine growers included, none had a name which could be linked to wine production. Indeed, the name of one such person meant ‘one who does not drink wine’ (i.e. a ‘teetotaller’). Similarly, although Szeged was famous for its goldsmiths throughout Hungary, none of the goldsmiths on the list bore the corresponding name of Ötvös.18 Actually, by the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, family names had become more or less stable; and, exceptions apart, they no longer indicated the bearer’s occupation.19 Although the analysis of family names thus remains speculative, and the results extremely doubtful, we can state that three names translating as ‘potter’ can be found in Ottoman registers covering Buda in 1546. Once again, three such names are on record for 1559, and two for 1562, the latter including a name meaning ‘jug maker’. By 1580, all of these names have disappeared from the defters.20

Ottoman Documents Mentioning Potters in Hungary Returning to our main concern, namely pottery and ceramics along with their production in Ottoman Hungary, we shall first discuss the very few primary sources which explicitly speak of potters. Two such examples come from the southern territories. Around 1570 a Muslim by the name of Veli appears as a çömlekçi (‘potter’); his name was recorded in D ­ imitrofça (today: Mitrovica, Serbia), located in the sub-­province (sancak) of Szerém (Sirem).21 Two of the Muslim inhabitants of the small town (kasaba) of Bács (today: Bač, Serbia), in the sancak of Szeged (Ottoman: Segedin), appear as potters in a document dated to 1578.22 The third example is from the seventeenth century and refers to the environs of Jászberény, an important market town. What makes the latter case somewhat ambiguous is the fact that the Hungarian term for potter, namely fazekas, features in the plural, allowing the interpretation that the text refers to a family of unknown occupation. However, the editor of the document in question has explained this expression as a reference to craftsmen.23 Needless to say, the paucity of direct testimony to potters in the documents does not necessarily mean that they were really such a rare breed. Indirect evidence in three Ottoman collections of mostly tax-­related rules and regulations (kanunnames) supports this contention, for it contains allusions to potters living in Buda, Hatvan (a sancak centre of secondary importance), and Érsekújvár/Újvár (Uyvar), which fell to the Ottomans

The Art of the Potter in Ottoman Hungary 75

in 1663. These artisans, as the kanunnames inform us, did not need to pay duties on the products they manufactured and sold locally.24 This exemption is perhaps the main reason why potters did not greatly interest the scribes responsible for drawing up the registers. Another factor can be that Ottoman officers and officials who had profited from the wars and had money to spend probably ordered their ‘best pieces’ from the central provinces of the empire, as the shards of valuable Iznik pottery and Chinese porcelain in the larger fortresses make quite clear.25 Thus, members of the sultans’ governing establishment were not much motivated to take note of the craftsmen active in this border province. To estimate the quantity of pottery appearing on the market is difficult as well. The scribes of the customs offices are not very careful or systematic when specifying the values of the various articles, or the rates at which duties were levied upon them. Even worse, different sorts of goods are often lumped together, with only their total value being placed on record along with the amount levied as customs dues. Neither do we know whether a given merchant brought with him ‘Turkish’ or ‘non-­ Turkish’ ceramics, although presumably Hungarian merchants favoured Hungarian wares, while Turks and/or Muslims were mainly concerned with the work of their co-­religionists. With regard to designations, only general terms were in use, such as ‘pottery’ or ‘plates’. It is remarkable, however, that Muslim traders appearing with such goods in Buda in the 1570s were reportedly carrying çanak, while Christian merchants brought in çömlek. The reason for this differentiation is unclear, since the two terms are often juxtaposed in contemporary texts and also in modern usage. On the other hand, in the customs registers for Szeged from the 1580s, the only term which can be connected to pottery is testi (‘earthenware jug’).26 In spite of these inconsistencies in the customs registers, there is much to be learned from the numerical data relating to pottery appearing in 1570s Buda. Muslim merchants brought some 2,500 pots and 7,700 plates to this major provincial (vilayet) centre, along with unspecified quantities of pottery of which we only know the total value, namely 150 and 180 guruş respectively. Christians, on the other hand, transported fourteen wagon-­loads of pots and sixty-­three of plates (18,425 plates in all), and in addition plates to a total value of sixty guruş. These figures are, of course, minima, to which we should add the pottery arriving in undetermined quantities.27 Only some of the goods paying customs duties in Buda also appeared on the local market, and it remains unclear where the merchants took those pots and plates that left the city. Even so, the amounts are more or less consonant with expectations, given the estimated population of the areas involved.

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Ceramic Finds as Historical Sources In contrast to the scanty written testimony, the archaeological evidence for sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century Ottoman ceramics is comparatively rich. Finds derive mostly from military and administrative centres. As for Hungarian pottery from the same period, it has been excavated in villages and towns without Ottoman presence. Needless to say, this evidence often consists of mere fragments of jugs, pots, or plates. We can ask: what are the criteria used by archaeologists to identify such potsherds as being of Ottoman, Hungarian, or any other origin? Are the forms different? Is the decoration indicative? Did the Ottomans use distinctive techniques or colouring materials? Are there additional factors of importance that can assist identification? Differing from Hungarian products in form as well as in fabric/raw material, technique, and mode of embellishment, Ottoman ceramics can easily be distinguished from locally produced types of the same period. At first sight, it is the differences in form that are really striking.

Figure 2.1  Ottoman-­ type vessels. Sixteenth–seventeenth century. Buda Castle. ­Hungarian National Museum, Budapest. Reproduced with permission.

With the Ottoman occupation, two ceramic types appeared that had hitherto been unknown, namely footed bowls and spouted jugs. During the period 1541–1699, these two types showed no change either in form or in the production technique employed.28 On the basis of parallels known from Anatolia and the Balkans, these vessels can be linked to Muslim civilians and soldiers arriving from areas where food, drink, and eating habits were different.29 They appeared only where there were Muslim populations, namely in Ottoman-­held castles and in the Muslim quarters of towns linked to these fortifications. As is apparent from the

The Art of the Potter in Ottoman Hungary 77

archaeological evidence, including for instance finds from the excavations at the Royal Palace in Buda Castle, these ceramic types were completely unknown before the Ottoman period.30 Moreover, ceramics of this kind were not in use in Hungarian territories outside the occupied areas, such as in castles that never fell into Ottoman hands.31 Nor did the Hungarians living under Ottoman rule use vessels of this type: nothing of this kind has come to light in the Hungarian-­inhabited market towns and villages of Transdanubia and the Great Plain.32 Due to the different functions of the artefacts involved, Ottoman-­ style and local pottery are quite dissimilar; furthermore, raw materials and decoration are also quite different. The well-­washed red clay used for Ottoman ceramics is quite unlike the gravel-­enriched material – light yellow, light red, or possibly pink in colour – which is typical of vessels considered to be the work of Hungarian craftsmen. Comparative scientific analysis of the materials in question will provide the definitive answers to these problems; but they are not available as yet. The surfaces of these vessels also show very dissimilar decorations: while Hungarian potters favoured red decoration applied with a brush, designs of this type never appear on the products of Ottoman artisans.33

Footed Bowls and Jugs: Ottoman Vessels With regard to technique, well-­ fired, good quality clay of lighter or darker red, covered by so-­called engobe, is characteristic of these items, which feature a yellow, brown, or green lead glaze on top of the engobe. These vessels have been made on a fast, foot-­driven potter’s wheel. The shape is rather uniform, usually hemispherical. A bowl of varying depth sits on a foot of varying height. Nor do we encounter great variety in the field of decoration. The vessels are coated either by a single-­colour glaze or by glazes of different colours poured on so as to create stripes. A third type of decoration involves a footed bowl with so-­called sgraffito embellishment. In this case, simple geometric repeating motifs have been scratched into the engobe coating before firing, after which the vessel has been glazed and then fired a second time. This type of vessel appears in the archaeological record in the mid-­1500s (i.e. at the beginning of the Ottoman period in Hungary), and disappears in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Furthermore, finds from those settlements and castles which passed into Ottoman hands in the late sixteenth century do not feature this type at all. Spouted jugs, and jugs without a spout but with a broad brim, appeared everywhere in Ottoman-­inhabited regions from the early s­ ixteenth century

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onwards. With respect to technique, their characteristics accorded with those of the footed bowls. Their fabric consisted of red or light-­brown clay; a yellow, brown, or green glaze, applied on top of white engobe slip, coated the upper third of the outside surface of these vessels. Beyond these two main ceramic types, we know of other, rarer, vessels and articles whose use was mostly connected with the era of Ottoman occupation. These artefacts were made from the same kinds of clay as the two types described above, and the two-­handled storage vessels (amphorae), candlesticks, and beaker-­shaped stove elements glazed on the inside that come to light together with footed bowls are likewise coated with a single-­colour lead glaze. These stove elements clearly came to Hungary from the Balkans, since in Anatolia heating solutions did not involve their use. Similarly unknown in Hungary prior to the Ottoman occupation was the ceramic production method known as the reduction-­firing technique, used only in the manufacture of jugs. On the basis of shape, archaeologists distinguish two basic types of jug, both fired to a black or grey colour and with polished outer surfaces. Vessels of the first type have a body resembling a flattened sphere and a long cylindrical neck, while those of the second type feature an egg-­shaped body, a shorter neck, and a stubby spout. Reduction firing appeared in Hungary in the 1530s, becoming general, however, only in the second half of the sixteenth century and in the course of the seventeenth. Since the use of these jugs was characteristic primarily of southern Transdanubia, their appearance may have been linked not just to the Turks, but also to the groups of Southern Slav origin that settled in Hungary during this period.

A Simple, Newly Recognized Type of Pot There remains a group of ceramics that cannot easily be connected to any of the above-­mentioned ethnic groups present in Ottoman Hungary, namely pots that are thick, roughly executed, and made on a hand-­turned wheel. Only in the second half of the twentieth century did researchers even recognize the existence of this group, an archaic type, as the use of the foot-­driven potter’s wheel had become general in Hungary by the first half of the sixteenth century.34 The close connection with archaeological and ethnographic material from the Balkans clearly indicates its origins in the peninsula.35 Probably the pieces belonging to this group were made in situ, since their production did not require technical training of a higher order.

The Art of the Potter in Ottoman Hungary 79

Figure 2.2 Pots made on a hand-­turned wheel. Late sixteenth century. Ozora Castle. Mór Wosinszky Museum, Szekszárd. Reproduced with permission.

Distribution was restricted to southern Transdanubia, as these artefacts are unknown north of Lake Balaton on territory belonging to Royal Hungary, or east of the River Danube. A few such pieces have turned up in Buda Castle, but these could easily have arrived there with Ottoman soldiers, who were drawn from many different nationalities. As we have previously argued, this archaic-­seeming type can be associated with the Vlachs (Eflaks) who appeared in Transdanubia in 1570, mainly in the sancak of Koppány and, in smaller numbers, in the sancak of Simontornya as well. In these two administrative units, the Vlachs, who had Slavic names, settled principally on the sites of villages abandoned earlier on, but their products could easily have reached the nearby towns or castles from which our examples originate. Engaged mainly in semi-­nomadic animal husbandry, the Vlachs had a material culture less elaborate than that of Hungary’s Southern Slav groups, who had settled

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elsewhere in the country beforehand.36 In recent years, archaeologists have suggested that the appearance of this type of ceramic was linked to Balkan soldier-­peasants arriving from a village environment, garrisoning castles in southern Transdanubia and the surrounding areas.37 Baking dishes are a vessel type characteristic of Balkan ceramics: roughly worked, unglazed, flat, round artefacts on which dough for bread and other baked goods was cooked on open-­air hearths. These and baking-­dish covers – larger hemispherical or bell-­shaped artefacts made in a similar way and from identical material – facilitated the preparation of bread in the absence of baking ovens. The widespread use of these two types of artefact can be demonstrated across the whole of Ottoman-­ruled Hungary, right up until 1699. For this reason, we are at present unable to link these pottery types to any particular ethnic group.

Pottery as Evidence Concerning the History of Settlement Since so many ceramic types are in fact linked to Hungarians, Ottoman Muslims, Vlachs, and others, the pottery excavated is of great importance for the history of settlement. In certain cases, especially military and administrative centres, the Hungarian population disappears from the Ottoman registers. Sometimes it is difficult to decide whether its absence was permanent or only temporary. If we are lucky and modern settlement on the site is not too dense, pottery permits the researcher to find indications of Hungarians returning to sites they had previously abandoned. This was the situation in Babócsa, a small fortified town in southern Transdanubia: after 1566 its Hungarian inhabitants left their settlement, which had come to be located in a strongly fortified area. On the other hand, away from the original centre of habitation, which became a purely Ottoman site, evidence of a Christian settlement characteristic of the period has emerged, including glazed tiles and other ceramic products. Archaeologists have also identified traces of a new church and a cemetery.38 Similarly, according to the tahrirs, Visegrád, a nahiye centre on the Danube north of Buda, had no Christian inhabitants. In the area of the medieval town, however, Hungarian pottery from the 1500s has been excavated along with other objects, allowing the tentative inference of a Hungarian presence in this locality. The inhabitants either returned to their original place of habitation or, perhaps unbeknownst to Ottoman officials, had never left it.39 Through investigation of settlements and castles together with their environments, rather than individual sites in isolation, the issues raised

The Art of the Potter in Ottoman Hungary 81

above may become much clearer. In recent decades, researchers have compared registers of soldiers serving in certain Ottoman castles with the local ceramics, and found that the composition of ceramic finds in Turkish-­held fortifications reflected the ethnic make-­up of the inhabitants living in the vicinity. Characteristic Ottoman ceramic material, containing the types described above, almost never occurs by itself, but instead is found mixed with Hungarian ceramic material from the same time, in d ­ ifferent proportions depending on the period and the site. Put another way, finds from the various sites show significant differences in composition. The soldiers and civilians in the castles and settlements occupied by the Ottomans also used artefacts made by Hungarian potters. The ratio of these local products to Ottoman ceramics depended on the geographical environment, the composition of the garrison if the site was a castle, and the ethnic make-­up of the inhabitants of the supplying area.40 Where villagers and townspeople were Hungarians, local Hungarian ceramic products appear in significant quantity. Thus, the garrisons

Figure 2.3  Hungarian-­ type pot. Late sixteenth century. Buda Castle. Hungarian National Museum, Budapest. Reproduced with permission.

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and/or inhabitants of small stockades of no strategic significance that were located deep inside Ottoman-­occupied territory used local Hungarian pottery on a significant scale. At such fortifications, Turkish ceramic types might even be very rare, as, for example, at the stockade at Békés. Moreover, in the mid-­sixteenth century the population of the sancak of Buda remained Hungarian.41 This fact is reflected in the high proportion of Hungarian ceramic finds in the archaeological material recovered in Buda and Visegrád. In a similar vein, the composition of the ceramic material recovered from the Turkish fortifications in southern Transdanubia reflects the ethnic changes that occurred in this region. For example, at the Ozora stockade in Tolna County the pottery finds changed entirely once Serbs had begun to settle in the area. By the end of the seventeenth century, the use of local Hungarian ceramic products had fallen by half, while the proportion of Turkish ceramic ware increased from approximately 2 per cent to 27 per cent, and the proportion of ceramic artefacts made on a hand-­driven potter’s wheel grew to 27 per cent of the total. The same process is reflected in the finds from the Hamzsabég and Bátaszék stockades along the Danube. Located south of Buda, the Turkish stockade of Hamzsabég, as well as the fortifications of Ercsi, Adony, and Pentele, had links to Hungarian settlements; to the south, the smaller and larger stockades of southern Transdanubia had connections to the so-­called ‘Serb towns’. This situation probably explains why in the Hamzsabég stockade about half the ceramic material is Ottoman and the rest Hungarian, with vessels made on a hand-­turned wheel being completely absent. By contrast, in the Bátaszék stockade further south the latter ceramic is dominant, with Hungarian ceramic types making up just one-­ third of the whole.42

Conclusion While a great deal remains to be done, even now the combined efforts of historians and archaeologists have produced some valuable results. Artisans will always require markets for their goods; and on the relevant interchanges, archaeological finds provide information that is unavailable in the written sources of the time, which are very scanty given the tax-­exemption of most locally produced and marketed potteries. While high Ottoman officials stationed in the former Royal Castle of Buda and elsewhere might occasionally have turned spendthrift and purchased quality Iznik ceramics, or more modestly bought the products of potters working in the Ottoman style, stockade garrisons appar-

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ently purchased at least some of their ceramics from the surrounding villagers. The information that ceramics provide on settlement and, to a lesser extent, on trade networks is the principal reason for studying the refuse pits of villages and fortifications. At the same time, the historian of crafts may focus on technologies; thus the replacement of hand-­ driven ­potter’s wheels by the foot-­driven variety had occurred among Ottoman and Hungarian potters by the early 1500s, while this heavier and more elaborate equipment was not as yet very popular among the Vlachs. In this context, it is interesting to note that while Ottoman styles of leatherwork (imported in huge quantities, as shown by the customs records) appear to have been adopted quite readily by Hungarian craftsmen, the potters of different ethnicities operating on Hungarian soil seemingly did not adopt techniques or decorative elements from their neighbours.43 Further studies may allow us at least to formulate hypotheses concerning this intriguing discrepancy. The archaeological material is especially instructive in relation to the pottery as a whole. In respect of fabric, glazes, and execution, the Ottoman ceramic types exhibit a uniformly high standard. Likewise uniform are the shapes: every piece can be assigned to a given, known type. This fact seems to prove that although we have no sources on the operation of Ottoman potters’ guilds on Hungarian territories under Ottoman sway, potters worked to uniform regulations and strict technical prescriptions, with the result that the ware they produced was invariably of the same quality. The uniformity discernible in the finds indicates a high level of organization with regard to the work, since the ware under study could obviously not all have been made in one workshop. The absence of change in the forms and techniques employed over a period of two centuries assumes a direct transfer of knowledge and traditions from one generation to the next, and/or the existence of a centrally controlled and enforced system of regulation. Unfinished and spoiled pieces, a large number of so-­called kiln tripods, and the remains of a Turkish potter’s kiln at Esztergom–Szenttamáshegy all appear in the archaeological record, thus proving that Ottoman potters plied their trade in the occupied parts of the country.44 It is still unclear, however, how much of the Ottoman pottery found in Ottoman-­occupied Hungary was made there and how much of it was imported into the country commercially. Finally, it is worth mentioning a special find, one which brings the person of the potter who made it closer to us. The piece is a glazed earthenware footed bowl unearthed in the Castle District in Buda. On its

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inner surface can be read a sgraffito quotation from the Qur’an and on its outer one the name ‘Abdu Cabbâr ʿâlim’, along with three Ottoman verse extracts seemingly unrelated to one another. According to the researcher who published it, on the basis of the mistakes in the text, ‘the devout tradesman [who made it] was not highly educated and relied on his hearing instead of the rules of orthography’.45 We may perhaps recognize in him the type of person Evliya Celebi had in mind when he wrote that Buda’s inhabitants are Bosniaks who know Hungarian well, but who speak Turkish a little oddly.

Notes   1. The chapter’s title was inspired by the article of Charles Tilly, ‘Sociology, Meet History’, in idem, As Sociology Meets History (New York: Academic Press, 1981).  2. Archaeozoology and paleoethnobotany can significantly assist reconstruction of some details of eating habits and animal husbandry: Andrea J. Tóth, László Daróczi-­Szabó, Zsófia E. Kovács, Erika Gál, and László Bartosiewicz, ‘In the Light of the Crescent Moon: Reconstructing Environment and Diet from an Ottoman-­Period Deposit in Sixteenth to Seventeenth Century Hungary’, in Integrating Zooarchaeology and Paleoethnobotany: A Consideration of Issues, Methods, and Cases, edited by Amber M. Van Derwarker and Tanya M. Peres (New York, Dordrecht, Heidelberg and London: Springer, 2010), 245–80.   3. Wilhelm Abel, Die Wüstungen des ausgehenden Mittelalters. Ein Beitrag zur Siedlungs-­und Agrargeschichte Deutschlands (Jena: Fischer Verlag, 1943); Maurice Beresford, The Lost Villages of England (London: Lutterworth Press, 1954); Jacques Le Goff, Witold Hensel, et al., Archéologie du village déserté, 2 vols. (Paris: Armand Colin, 1970).  4. Géza Dávid, 16. Yüzyılda Simontornya Sancağı: Osmanlı Macaristan’ında Toplum, Ekonomi ve Yönetim (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı, 1999), 73–83.   5. András Pálóczi Horváth, ‘The Survival of Szentkirály in the Ottoman Era’, in Archaeology of the Ottoman Period in Hungary, edited by Ibolya Gerelyes and Gyöngyi Kovács (Budapest: Hungarian National Museum, 2003), 201–6, see 201–2.   6. Ferenc Szakály, ‘Szerbek Magyarországon – szerbek a magyar történelemben. (Vázlat.)’, in A szerbek Magyarországon. Die Serben in Ungarn, edited by István Zombori (Szeged: Móra Ferenc Múzeum, 1991), 10–50. See Chapter 11 for other migrations. – Editor’s note.   7. Pál Fodor, Vállalkozásra kényszerítve. Az oszmán pénzügyigazgatás és hatalmi elit változásai a 16–17. század fordulóján (Budapest: MTA Történettudományi Intézete – Magyar–Török Baráti Társaság, 2006), 272–99.   8. The first Hungarian researcher to draw attention to this question was Géza Fehér, who pointed out the close connection between Ottoman-­era finds from southern Transdanubia and twentieth-­century ethnographical material from Bosnia-­Herzegovina. Cf. Géza Fehér, ifj., ‘A pécsi Janus Pannonius Múzeum hódoltságkori török emlékei’, in A Janus Pannonius Múzeum Évkönyve (1959), Pécs 1960, 104–49, pls. XXVIII–XXXVIII.  9. Géza Dávid and Ibolya Gerelyes, ‘Ottoman Social and Economic Life Unearthed: An Assessment of Ottoman Archaeological Finds in Hungary’, in Studies in Ottoman Social and Economic Life, edited by Raoul Motika, Christoph Herzog, and Michael Ursinus (Heidelberg: Heidelberger Orientverlag, 1999), 43–80; Géza Dávid, ‘The Connection between History and Archaeology in Researching Ottoman Rule in Hungary’, in Archaeology of the Ottoman Period, 11–22.

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10. See chapters 4, 5, and 6 for other ‘guild’ monographs (editor’s note). 11. Géza Dávid and Pál Fodor, ‘Hungarian Studies in Ottoman History’, in The Ottomans and the Balkans: A Discussion of Historiography, edited by Fikret Adanır and Suraiya Faroqhi (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2002), 305–50, see 330. 12. Ida B. Bobrovszky, A XVII. századi mezővárosok művészete (Kecskemét, Nagykőrös, Debrecen) (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1980), 58–91. 13. For an analysis of one such place, see Klára Hegyi, ‘Bács: A Balkan-­ Turkish Town in Hungary’, Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae LIV (2001), 471–83. 14. Gyula Káldy-­Nagy, ‘The Administration of the ṣanǰāq Registrations in Hungary’, Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae XXI (1968), 181–223. 15. For example, Ferenc Szakály, Mezőváros és reformáció. Tanulmányok a korai magyar polgárosodás kérdéséhez, edited by József Jankovics (Budapest: Balassi Kiadó, 1995), 37–38, 107–8, 238–39. 16. Lajos Fekete and Lajos Nagy, Budapest története a török korban (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1986), 41. 17. Zsigmond Pál Pach, ‘“Platea Chapo ucza vocata”. A hazai posztóipar 16. századi történetéből’, Századok 132/4 (1998), 793–824, see 801–4. 18. Péter Kulcsár, ‘Az 1522-­es szegedi tizedjegyzék mint történeti forrás’, in Tanulmányok Csongrád megye történetéből VIII (Szeged: Csongrád Megyei Levéltár, 1984), 5–27. 19. István Szabó, Ugocsa megye (Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, 1937), 13–14. 20. Fekete and Nagy, Budapest története. 21. Bruce W. McGowan, Sirem sancağı mufassal tahrir defteri (Ankara: TTK, 1983), 273. 22. Hegyi, ‘Bács’, 479. 23. Klára Hegyi, ‘Jászberény török levelei’, in Szolnok Megyei Levéltári Füzetek (Szolnok: Szolnok Megyei Levéltár, 1988), 7–176; see 129, no. 115. 24. Ömer Lûtfi Barkan, XV ve XVIıncı asırlarda Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda ziraî ekonominin hukukî ve malî esasları. I. Kanunlar (Istanbul: Bürhaneddin Matbaası, 1943), 301, 315, 318. 25. The scattered data in the probate inventories prove the premise that high-­ranking Ottoman officials may have owned significant amounts of faience and porcelain ware: Lajos Fekete, Das Heim eines türkischen Herrn in der Provinz im XVI. Jahrhundert, Studia Historica 29 (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1960). With regard to commercial distribution, the Buda customs records contain just one datum: on the clearance through customs of ‘9 denk çini’ on 18 October 1573. Lajos Fekete and Gyula Káldy-­Nagy, Rechnungsbücher türkischer Finanzstellen in Buda (Ofen) 1550–1580. Türkischer Text (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1962), 216. Concerning the archaeological finds, see Anikó Tóth, ‘An Ottoman-­ Era Cellar from the Foreground of Buda’s Royal Palace’, in Archaeology of the Ottoman Period, 273–80; Gyöngyi Kovács, ‘Iznik Pottery in Hungarian Archaeological Research’, in Turkish Flowers: Studies on Ottoman Art in Hungary, edited by Ibolya Gerelyes (Budapest: Hungarian National Museum, 2005), 69–86. This last study is especially interesting, since it illuminates the close connection between the output of the Iznik workshops and the ware appearing in the provinces; the author points out that the latest Iznik products always made their appearance in newly conquered territories. 26. Gyula Káldy-­Nagy, Szegedi török számadáskönyvek az 1585–1588-­as és az 1670-­es évekből (Szeged: Csongrád Megyei Levéltár, 2002), 21, 30, 32, 34, 39, 41. 27. Fekete and Káldy-­Nagy, Rechnungsbücher: Türkischer Text, index. 28. In relation to Ottoman ceramics found on Hungarian territory, many studies have come out in the past few decades. For the latest summary see Gyöngyi Kovács, ‘A magyarországi oszmán-­török régészet új eredményei: áttekintés a Dráva menti kutatások kapcsán’, in A középkor és a kora újkor régészete Magyarországon, edited by Elek Benkő and Gyöngyi Kovács (Budapest: MTA Régészeti Intézet, 2010), 757–79.

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29. Direct parallels with the finds in Hungary are known from Serbia and Bosnia: Ibolya Gerelyes, ‘Die Balkanverbindungen der türkischen Keramik von der Budaer Burg’, Acta Archaeologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 42 (1990), 269–85. 30. For an analysis of the contents of Ottoman and pre-­Ottoman refuse pits, see Imre Holl, Fundkomplexe des 15.–17. Jahrhunderts aus dem Burgpalast von Buda (Budapest: MTA Régészeti Intézet, 2005), 16–17, 28–29. 31. Find ensembles from two castles in northern Transdanubia that lay outside the borders of the Ottoman Empire may serve as examples: Károly Kozák, ‘A sümegi és a szigligeti vár XVII. század végi kerámiája’, in Veszprém Megyei Múzeumok Közleményei 5 (Veszprém: Veszprém Megyei Múzeum, 1966), 81–89. 32. An example from Transdanubia is the ceramic material from the market town of Ete: Zsuzsa Miklós and Márta Vizi, ‘Válogatás egy késő középkori fazekasműhely leletanyagából’, in Az agyagművesség évezredei a Kárpát-­medencében, edited by Szilvia Andrea Holló and János Szulovszky (Budapest – Veszprém: MTA VEAB, 2006), 91–99. Very similar is the material excavated at Ottoman-­occupied Hungarian villages in the vicinity of Kecskemét, between the Danube and Tisza rivers: Kálmán Szabó, Kulturgeschichtliche Denkmäler der Ungarischen Tiefebene (Budapest: Országos Magyar Történeti Múzeum, 1938). 33. In accordance with the traditions of research current in Hungary, the archaeologist joint author of the present study describes ceramics which meet the above-­mentioned criteria as ‘Hungarian’. This material is placed in a broader context by Vesna Bikić, who in her latest book has described vessels belonging to this type as ‘Central European’. Vesna Bikić, Gradska keramika Beograda (16–17. vek) – Belgrade Ceramics in the 16th-­17th century. Arheolośki Institut Posebna Izdanja 39 (Belgrade: Arheolośki Institut, 2013), 105–16. 34. Imre Holl, ‘Adatok a középkori magyar fazekasság munkamódszereihez’, Budapest Régiségei 7 (1956), 177–96, see 190–91; Győző Gerő, ‘Türkische Keramik in Ungarn. Einheimische und importierte Waren’, in Fifth International Congress of Turkish Art, ­ edited by Géza Fehér (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1978), 347–61, see 351, fig. 13. 35. A. Kalmeta, ‘O seljačkom lončarstvu u zapadnoj Bosni’, Glasnik Zemaljskog Muzeja u Sarajevu 9 (1954), 127–68, see 131; Cv. D. Popović, ‘Lončarstvo u Bosni i Hercegovini’, Glasnik Zemaljskog Muzeja u Sarajevu 11 (1956), 17–46; G. Marjanović-­Vujović, ‘Kuća iz druge polovine XVII veke otkopana u utvrđenom podgrađu Beogradskoj grada-­Donjem gradu’, Godišnjak Grada Beograda 20 (1973), 201–28. 36. Dávid and Gerelyes, ‘Ottoman Social and Economic Life Unearthed’, 51–52. 37. Kovács, ‘A magyarországi oszmán-­török régészet új eredményei’, 766. 38. Kálmán Magyar, ‘Szigetvár és a dél-­somogyi mezővárosok, várak kapcsolatai 1526–1664 között (Különös tekintettel Babócsára és Kálmáncsára)’, in Tanulmányok a török hódoltság és a felszabadító háborúk történetéből. A szigetvári történész konferencia előadásai a város és a vár felszabadításának 300. évfordulóján, edited by László Szita (Pécs: Baranya Megyei Levéltár – Magyar Történelmi Társulat Dél-­dunántúli Csoportja, 1993), 219–40, see 230. 39. Dávid and Gerelyes, ‘Ottoman Social and Economic Life Unearthed’, 49–50. 40. Tamás Pusztai, ‘The Pottery of the Turkish Palisade at Bátaszék’, in Archaeology of the Ottoman Period, 301–10, see 309; Gyöngyi Kovács, ‘Some Possible Directions for Research into Ottoman-­era Archaeological Finds in Hungary’, ibid., 257–68, see 261. 41. Gyula Káldy-­Nagy, A budai szandzsák 1559. évi összeírása (Budapest: Pest Megyei Levéltár, 1977), passim. 42. Ibolya Gerelyes, ‘Garrisons and the Local Population in Ottoman Hungary: The Testimony of the Archaeological Finds’, in The Frontiers of the Ottoman World, ed. A.C.S. Peacock (Oxford: Oxford University Press – British Academy, 2009), 385–402, see 399–401. 43. Lajos Fekete, Buda and Pest under Turkish Rule (Budapest: ELTE Török Tanszék, 1976), 50.

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44. Gyöngyi Kovács, Török kerámia Szolnokon (Szolnok: Damjanich Múzeum, 1984), pl. 27; Géza Fehér and Nándor Parádi, ‘Esztergom-­szenttamáshegyi 1956. évi törökkori kutatások’, in Esztergom évlapjai. Esztergomi Múzeumok évkönyve 1 (Esztergom: Balassi Bálint Társaság, 1960), 35–44. 45. Mihály Dobrovits, ‘A Szent György téri török talpastál feliratai és értelmezésük’, in Budapest Régiségei XXXVIII (Budapest: Budapesti Történeti Múzeum, 2004), 153–157, see 154.

Chapter 3

Damascene Artisans around 1700 Colette Establet

Damascus used to be known for its considerable wealth of Ottoman documentation: it remains to be seen how much of it has survived the current civil war. Compared to the northern metropolis of Aleppo, the city of Damascus was less involved in Iranian and/or European commerce; and the city always projected an image that was emphatically Islamic. But local trade within Syria was important for the inhabitants; and a number of caravansaries or khans were built in the Ottoman period. By the eighteenth century the courts of these buildings had often been roofed over, giving them the appearance of covered markets (bedestan). Most importantly, it was from Cairo and Damascus that the two major pilgrim caravans to Mecca departed every year. As the Ottoman sultans had taken responsibility for the protection of these routes, not only pilgrims but also soldiers – along with their mounts – congregated in the city during the weeks before the caravan’s departure, and after its return. As a result, many craftsmen and shopkeepers, in one way or another, produced and retailed items which members of the pilgrimage caravan might want to buy. The goods ranged from camel litters to a twice-­baked kind of bread that, similar to ship’s biscuit, would remain edible even after a march of some weeks through the desert. Certain people who had travelled with the pilgrimage caravan must have settled in the city, although our information on them is less complete than on those unfortunates who never made it home, because they

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died in Damascus.1 Some of the soldiers whose estates we will encounter were of local origin (yerliyya); but in order to maintain control over the city, the Ottoman government had in addition sent a military corps from outside the province to Damascus, the kapı kulları or servants of the [sultan’s] Porte.2 Although these people remained in the city for generations, they were still viewed as different from the yerliyya, with whose members they frequently clashed. Furthermore, as Damascus was a centre of the grain trade, many people from the surrounding countryside must have spent some time in the city because of their work; and once again, some of them must have become ‘regular’ inhabitants. Similarly to other Ottoman towns, Damascus attracted migrants. In the course of our work on the registers of Damascus inheritance (or estate) inventories for the period between 1680 and 1717, my colleague Jean-­Paul Pascual and I have several times had occasion to discuss local artisans. But the results of our analyses remain scattered over a number of articles and monographs. Now that we have nearly completed our exhaustive study of these registers, which in separate volumes encompass both ‘ordinary’ subjects (ra‘âyâ) and servitors of the central administration including soldiers (‘askar), the time has surely come to pull this information together and thus provide an overview of the situation of Damascene artisans around 1700; and this kind of synthesis is the aim of the present chapter.

What do we Need to Know about the Sources? As prepared in Damascus and all over the Ottoman Empire, estate inventories are part of an administrative routine serving the transmission of a given deceased’s goods and chattels to his/her heirs. While the qadis and their scribes employ a dry and repetitive language, their terminology fortunately is both precise and consistent. The registers No. 15 and 19 cover the subject population, while No. 10 records the inheritances of the sultan’s servitors, the ‘askar. In the preamble the scribes record the name and titles of the deceased and sometimes his job or office, place of work, or residence. In the second section we find a list of the goods to be transmitted together with their monetary values; movable and real property occur together with sums of money owed to the estate. In the third section the scribes list the debts to be discharged before the heirs can claim their shares: the cost of the funeral, supplementary expenses, and unpaid debts. The final section contains the net value of the estate and the shares accruing to the different heirs according to Islamic religious law. If the deceased did not leave anything of value, no inventory was ­necessary and thus the registers exclude the very poor. Moreover, some

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of the property of the deceased might have ‘disappeared’ between his/her death and the time at which the scribes compiled the inventory. But even though these omissions mean that the picture provided by the qadis’ records is biased, these documents are still of unique value, as they are numerous enough for historians to undertake serial studies charting changes over time. On the one hand, the inventories permit economic, social and demographic analyses of Ottoman societies – in our particular case the society of Damascus; on the other hand, with the aid of these sources we gain an idea of the still rather poorly known material culture of the townspeople, as the inventories, so to say, open up houses and shops for the historian’s inspection. Thus these records convey information not available elsewhere, even if the lacunae just referred to make it imperative to approach the data critically and avoid sweeping conclusions. And I cannot help but feel that these often long lists are very difficult to interpret, and demand long and tedious verifications. Our source base is broad: registers No. 15 and 19 provide 449 usable inventories covering male and female members of the subject population. In addition, from register No. 10, we gain 78 lists documenting the inheritances of the ‘askar, or servitors of the sultan, along with their female relatives. A total of over 500 inventories thus allow us to reconstruct an urban population at work with artisans taking centre stage. In the best of cases, the qadi has recorded not only the name (ism) and patronymic (nasab) but also the craft of the deceased, by adding a so-­ called nisba: thus we may find a record of Mustafa b. ‘Abdallah al-­farra’, the furrier, or al-­bawâbîjî (the manufacturer of a type of slippers, bâbûj). However we need to remain vigilant as the craft terms in our inventories may refer not to the occupation of the deceased, but to that of his progenitor or distant ancestor. In certain instances, the man whose inventory has survived had clearly exercised a trade different from that of his father or grandfather. Thus al-­hâjj Muhammad b. ‘Alî b. Shams al-­‘allâf was not a grain and fodder merchant as the nisba seemed to indicate, but his inventory evidenced that he dealt in wood and charcoal. At times the scribes did not record any occupation at all; then it is only the goods in the deceased’s shop which the historian needs to study closely; for they may indicate how the deceased made a living. Furthermore it is often difficult to distinguish artisans from traders/ shopkeepers. While in today’s world, production and sale are most of the time recognized as separate activities, in Ottoman Damascus the artisan typically sold the goods that he had produced. André Raymond has made the same point for Cairo, dwelling on the difficulty of deciding whether a given person was a craft worker or a trader. In seventeenth-­and

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eighteenth-­century Cairo, manufacture and sale were inseparable, as the typical artisan sold the goods that he had produced.3 Thus, for example, a butcher (lahhâm) sells meat but he also cuts up the carcasses of slaughtered animals. Is he a trader or an artisan? To make this distinction, admittedly somewhat anachronistically, we have used the dictionary of Damascene trades compiled by al-­Qâsimî at the end of the nineteenth century. Fortunately for today’s historian, this author has recorded whether a given person both manufactured and sold, or was only a producer, or was fully in the business of buying and selling. But we will place ‘mere artisans’ and ‘artisans cum traders’ in the same category, disregarding the fact that some people may have been more involved in commerce than in craft production. Several suppliers of essential goods and services fall into this ambiguous category: grocers and druggists (sammân and ‘attâr), butchers, people weighing goods (wazzân), brokers (dallâl), transport workers (‘akkâm), and muleteers (qatirjî), the latter providing an essential service in a city living on caravan traffic. Our sample thus includes a sizeable number of small shopkeepers working both as artisans and as traders. Their activities form a major part of the everyday life of Damascus. By contrast we have excluded the operators of public baths (hammâmî) who, if they served the customers in person, used implements that belonged to the bathhouse and thus were not their property. Therefore their workaday world does not appear in the registers. Neither will we deal with major textile merchants (tâjir). Certainly the latter may not have limited their activities to trade, also organizing production in some kind of a ‘putting-­out’ arrangement, under conditions that bore no resemblance to the work of a small tradesman. Such a rich merchant might own the implements of a weaver in addition to dye-­stuffs such as indigo and cochineal; for as the lists of their creditors indicate, businessmen of this type had connections to artisans in the textile sector, who probably worked for them. Thus we should not regard these men as artisans; they were entrepreneurs.

What do we Know about Women? None of the three registers studied here has anything to say about women working in crafts. We may assume that the wives and daughters of the ‘askar were wealthy enough to avoid manual labour. But let us for a moment look beyond the walls of Damascus. Certainly in his study of seventeenth-­century Kayseri, Ronald Jennings concluded that the local women had no share in crafts or commerce.4 But other historians have found records concerning women who did engage in handicrafts. Dealing

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with textiles, Suraiya Faroqhi has commented: ‘[I]n this sector [textile crafts] women so often played an active role: in the 1550s, they spun the yarn that Ankara manufacturers made into mohair cloth . . . In addition, slaves both female and male were employed in Bursa silk manufactures during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries’.5 In the same study this author cites the work of Donald Quataert, who has referred to the minimal wages that Anatolian and Balkan manufacturers of the 1800s paid to women and children.6 In his study of seventeenth-­century Bursa, Haim Gerber has also stressed that women working at home were of some significance as artisans.7 Furthermore, in spite of the silence of the qadis’ scribes, even in Damascus there were some female artisans.8 But in the near absence of documentation we have no way of knowing whether they wove or spun, or whether they worked for their families or else for artisan or merchant employers.

Did ‘askar ever Work as Craftsmen? These men served the sultan either as soldiers or else in a political capacity. A collection of laws presumed to date from the late 1400s list the different categories of people that could claim ‘askar status. Apart from military men both in service and retired, we find male and female slaves of the monarch, as well as people active in ‘the judiciary, teaching, religion, the administration of pious foundations (waqfs) and similar activities’.9 In theory these men should not have been involved in trade and crafts. However, among the seventy-­eight inventories of ‘askar that we have analysed, four janissaries and one son of a military man and a local woman (qul oglu) were directly involved with trade and crafts. Certainly the percentage of artisans and artisan-­traders among the ‘askar is small; but such people did exist. Moreover the jobs they did are reasonably well known: one of them was a farrier (baytâr), and one of his colleagues undertook or organized the manufacture of military horse-­gear. In addition a furrier and a shoemaker (qawwâf) of ‘askar status, were also on record. The one and only qul oglu worked as a rakabî, in other words he produced stirrups and thus also served the military. All five men had thus chosen occupations that kept them close to the world of the soldiery and moreover possessed links to the animal world: they were saddlers, worked with leather and fur, and provided various types of care to horses and camels. These observations fit into a particular historical context: in the late 1600s and early 1700s the piaster (or guruş) suffered constant devaluation, and as a result the soldiers’ pay also diminished. Therefore certain ‘askar seem to have searched for additional – but not officially s­ anctioned –

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sources of revenue. The period under study featured profound changes. While in the 1500s the organization of the Ottoman Empire had been based upon the strict separation of the sultan’s servitors (qul) from the subject population, in the late 1600s and early 1700s this division had become less categorical. On the one hand, certain ra‘âyâ aspired to become janissaries and often did manage to enter the Ottoman army; on the other, certain qul appropriated jobs that earlier on had been the province of the subject population. Thus in the early 1700s ‘askar and ‘ordinary’ townsmen were in closer contact than they had been previously, even in cases when the former did not actually practise a craft. Thus the accounts (muhâsaba) of a former muezzin in the Ummayad Mosque show that the properties left by this man, now deceased, were administered by his brother, a scholar and trustee (wasî) for the minor heirs of the muezzin; the latter, an ‘askar by virtue of his studies, filled this office in conjunction with several artisans. The widow had sent a furrier to represent her interests while a tailor provided the same service for an earlier spouse of the deceased. Renting out shops was another way for ‘askar to draw profits from the urban milieu. Thus we find an office-­holder renting out storage spaces, a butcher’s shop, and other shops whose use remains unknown. Two janissaries and a bulûkbâshî were on record for having received rent from such premises: the list included the shops of a tailor, a barber, a farrier, a trader in animal fodder, and a grocer; other premises listed were a baking oven, a workshop producing drums, and a saw-­works. Thus we find a few ‘askar, whose participation in the urban marketplace was significant but still limited in scope. Yet if we compare the situation in Damascus with that observed in Istanbul or Cairo, ‘askar involved in crafts or trade played a role that was more circumscribed and less central to the urban marketplace (compare Ch. 7). At present it is hard to explain this state of affairs, but future historians may be able to solve this riddle.

What was the Role of the ra‘âyâ? Obviously most of the artisans on record were part of the subject population (ra‘âyâ). Among 279 inventories belonging to males, 218 recorded the worldly possessions of people whom we can identify as artisans and shopkeepers. As the names and the goods in their shops showed, 78 of them were traders of different kinds, including some very rich merchants. In addition our sample contained 140 artisans. How did the remaining 61 men, whose type of work we cannot identify, make ends meet? Most

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of them being quite poor, they must have exercised some petty trade or other, presumably in the street. But since the records do not allow us to support this hypothesis, we will mostly ignore these unfortunates; only a few extrapolations from nineteenth-­century data have been attempted, but we must keep in mind that they are hypothetical. Thus one half of all surviving estates concerned shopkeepers and artisans who also sold the products of their work to the final consumer. At the end of the nineteenth century the Damascene author al-­Qâsimî, who as noted had collected his evidence in the commercial streets and shops of that time, came to a similar conclusion. He wrote that artisans, those that sold their products in shops and those who did not, made up 46 per cent of the urban population.10 As for Cairo, André Raymond estimated that half of the population were craftsmen and that one-­third made a living from trade.11 These different observers thus were in – at least ­approximate – agreement.

Diverse Occupations Damascus was home to a large and highly specialized artisan population. Out of 140 deceased artisans, 63 had exercised trades that formed part of a more encompassing craft complex, such as for instance the manufacture of shoes. Thus the inventories record iskâf, zarâbîlî, bawâbîjî qawwâf, and na’âl; for the modern historian it is often difficult to establish in what way for instance qawwâf differed from iskâf. Once again the popular expression current in Cairo and recorded by Raymond comes to mind: ‘the seller of the tassel does not sell the headgear’. Raymond considered that as artisans and shopkeepers so often inherited their specialties and came together in the same shop-­lined streets and craft guilds, their sense of solidarity was far more developed than their competitive drive. Moreover as artisans and shopkeepers possessed very little capital, they avoided a clear separation of production processes from sale: it would not have done to forego an opportunity for gain, however small. This lack of capital also induced manufacturers to specialize, so as to minimize investment in tools and inventory.12 This situation, discussed in detail with respect to Cairo, was no different in early eighteenth-­century Damascus. Most of the artisans whose inventories concern us here worked in the preparation of foodstuffs: the thirty-­nine men in this sector included people on the border between crafts and commerce such as grocers, and grocers cum druggists (twelve sammân and eleven ‘attâr).13 Our sample holds but a single baker (khabbâz) and one miller (tahhân) but quite a few manufacturers of sweets and pastries (hulwânî). Apricots (qamar ad dîn)

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being a Damascus specialty, there was an artisan who made a paste from this fruit which could be preserved and consumed throughout the year, and also an ordinary apricot vendor. Others produced dry biscuits (kaak) and flat cakes known as qatâ’if. An aqsamawwî made a living by selling ice sweetened with grape juice, similar to the gratta checca still popular in Nice and Italy. In the meat sector, the scribes recorded a butcher, two slaughterers (masâlikhî), and a man who sold roast meat (shâwî). As previously noted, our discussion of the textile sector, in which thirty-­ three people had been active during their lifetimes, does not include the merchants; especially the wealthiest traders will not concern us here. Three men wove and/or sold a cheap woollen textile known as ‘abâ (abawî), which was also popular in eighteenth-­century Istanbul; in addition there was a weaver or shopkeeper offering unspecified woollens for sale (sawafî). Two men practised a trade connected to cotton; in addition there was one man whose craft remained unrecorded but whose workshop was that of a weaver. A large number of auxiliary trades further underlined the importance of the clothing-­and-­textile sector: two furriers (farra’), six manufacturers of the braid ornamenting coats and caftans (‘aqqâd), two artisans who bleached textiles, one of them known as a qassâr, a fuller (da‘âs), two men who imparted a sheen to textiles presumably by pressing them (daqqâq), two twisters of silk yarn (fattâl), five tailors (khayyât), five dyers (sabbâgh), and a manufacturer of tapestries (tanâfisî). We have already had occasion to discuss the involvement of Damascus’ ‘askar in the leather sector. Among the ra‘âyâ, twenty-­four artisans worked in leather, including several shoemakers whose exact specialties as noted remain unclear: four bâwâbîjî, two zarâbilî, one iskâf, three na‘‘al, and five qawwâf. The specialty of one man remained unrecorded; four others were tanners (dabbâgh), while three saddlers (surûjî) and a man who manufactured the gear needed for riding and loading donkeys (galâlâtî) also used leather as their principal raw material.14 Our last group contains several sub-­sections. On the one hand there are the artisans using metal, especially iron and copper, the men working in wood, and those serving the construction sector. On the other hand the inventories record people doing a host of disparate jobs that will not fit into a single category. We will begin with the metalworkers: a blacksmith (haddâd), two coppersmiths (nahhâs), and a man decorating metal pots, plates and other items by engraving designs on them (naqqâsh). One artisan worked with wood but his specialty remained unclear (hattâb); four men definitely were carpenters (najjâr), while two others manufactured boxes and crates (‘ulabî). Assuming that a manufacturer of cases (sanâdâqî) also worked in wood, we will place him in this category; and the same thing applies to a manufacturer of pipes (galâ’înî). However,

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Ottoman pipes were often made of pottery, so this categorization is doubtful. As for the building sector, some of the artisans mentioned earlier, such as carpenters and blacksmiths, may well have worked on construction sites. In addition we hear of a construction worker whose exact job remains unclear but whose tools indicate his involvement with the building trade. Furthermore two men covered walls and floors (tayyân) with some coating or other. Four people offered a variety of doubtless minor goods and services (khurdajî); in the late 1800s al-­Qâsimî described their descendants as salesmen of worthless goods imported from elsewhere.15 Four men, described as veterinary surgeons or else as farriers took care of horses and other animals. Humans could count on the services of a Christian medical man (tabîb) and two barbers (hallâq). Other people providing everyday services, who even may have participated in the compilation of our inventories, included a man who worked at the public weighing scales (wazzân). Perhaps this person had established the weight of the copper pots and pans that some of our deceased artisans had left behind, while a broker (dallâl) figured out the prices that the owners could ask for any inherited goods which they wanted to sell. Finally the inventories recorded a few specialists: three armorers (bunduqjî), two Christian goldsmiths (sa’igh), and two money changers – the Jew being called a sarrâf and the Muslim a sayrafî. The fashion for European-­style clocks and watches, widespread in Istanbul during the 1700s, had spread to Damascus as well, as there survives the inventory of a manufacturer/seller of such items (sa‘atî). Muleteers and camel drivers served local trade and the annual Mecca pilgrimage (three ‘akkam, one makkarî, one qatirjî).

The Paucity of Possessions Travellers visiting Cairo and/or Damascus have often noted that an active commercial life contrasted with widespread artisan poverty. Certainly the markets and shop-­lined streets are more visible than artisan workshops. Fernand Braudel has expressed this situation in a nutshell: ‘circulation has the advantage of being immediately obvious’.16 After all, whatever town the traveller may choose to visit, the noise of the market is always unmistakable. As the inventories demonstrate, the profits of all this activity go to the traders: on an average, merchants leave estates worth more than seven times those of artisans and petty shopkeepers. As Table 3.2 indicates, in terms of their make-­up the estates of artisans and merchants are quite similar. But we do observe small differences and these are significant: artisans’ possessions consist of the workshop and its inventory, domestic consumer goods, and cash. As artisan estates

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Table 3.1 Comparing the estates of merchants and artisan-­shopkeepers (in piasters). (Based on registers No. 15 and 19 of the Damascus qisma ‘arabiyya) Debts and marriage gift owed to wife

Estate after debts

Average estate

140

Value of estate, before payment of debts 64,103

19,724

44,379

317

78

226,906

43,408

183,498

2,353

Category

Number

Artisan-­ shopkeepers All kinds of merchants

Table 3.2 The composition of artisan-­shopkeepers’ and merchants’ estates. (Based on registers No. 15 and 19 of the Damascus qisma ‘arabiyya) Category Real estate Money owed to deceased/estate Jewellery Shop inventory Domestic goods Cash Total Debts as a share of the estate (before payment of debts)

Artisans (per cent of estates) 21 26 1 26 12 14 100 23

Merchants (per cent of estates) 20 41 1 24 8 6 100 13

are so small in comparison to merchant fortunes, we find less money owed to the deceased or his estate and more significant debts: differently from the procedure followed in compiling Table 3.1, in Table 3.2 the debts do not include the still-­outstanding part of the marriage gifts owed to the widow, but only loans contracted and not yet repaid at the time of death. It is worth noting that the inventories of artisan shopkeepers contain a relatively large share of ready cash; this fact is linked to the relatively small amounts of money owed to these estates. Certainly even artisan-­shopkeepers had about one-­quarter of their estates tied up in unpaid loans; but fully fledged traders had much more money coming in. Artisans were rarely in a position to lend out money; if their estates had money owed to them it was probably because ­customers

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had bought on credit or merchants had purchased goods for resale for which they had not yet paid. Many everyday transactions involved small deals and payment in petty cash; if the money was not forthcoming the artisan-­shopkeeper would need to borrow, as is apparent from Table 3.2. When interpreting these figures we must keep in mind that we are dealing with percentages, for in absolute terms an artisan always left much less property than a merchant. If the craftsman possessed domestic goods worth 52 piasters, the merchant’s house contained textiles and kitchenware worth 229 piasters. In terms of real estate, the average artisan left 98 piasters’ worth, while a merchant would amass property valued at 580 piasters. That said, even among artisan-­shopkeepers fortunes were not equally distributed. In twenty cases, the value of the estate after subtraction of debts turned out to be negative. Although furriers were normally quite prosperous, our sample contains a reference to a representative of this craft whose estate, surprisingly, was short of 118 piasters which the creditors could not retrieve. There also was a dyer who at his death left 2,964 piasters of debts which his entire estate did not suffice to discharge. Even though there are some exceptions, the largest average estates had been left by artisan-­shopkeepers dealing in foodstuffs (548 piasters); next in line were artisans in the textiles sector that left 330 piasters, while leatherworkers left 191 piasters. The other crafts are too diverse for their individual averages to make much sense, but taken together the representatives of these trades left 178 piasters on average. Upon closer examination it emerges that if a given artisan not only produced but also sold, his estate gained in value, Table 3.3 Estates after debt repayment, outstanding loans (credits) and debts in relation to the values of the relevant estates, before payment of debts. (Based on registers No. 15 and 19 of the Damascus qisma ‘arabiyya) Credits and debts as shares of Damascene estates before debt repayment Average estate after debt repayment Money owed to estate as a share of estate before debt repayment Debts as a share of estate before debt repayment

Food-­processing

Textiles

Leather-­working

548 piasters

330 piasters

191 piasters

25%

24%

21%

9%

40% or 24%

23%

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as there were fewer debts and more money was owed to him. This observation applied, for the most part, both to the food-­processing and the textile sectors – it did not really pay a craftsman to use his hands a lot. Evidently, the two figures relating to debts in the textile sector are in need of explanation: a single tailor, for reasons that remain unknown, had left enormous debts – enough to significantly alter, for the entire group, the table entry ‘debts as a share of estate before debt repayment’. If, however, we disregard this anomalous case, the share of debts decreases to 24 per cent, which is well within the range of what is ‘normal’ for all the relevant artisan groups. A closer look at the estates of people outside those covered in Table 3.3 confirms our previous observations: only the poorest artisans engaged in manufacture to the exclusion of commercial activity. By contrast, once a man was involved in trade and his contact to the world of production became less intense, his estate gained in value. With the exception of two salesmen of miscellaneous goods that also died indigent, the poor were manufacturers, including the makers of pipes, boxes, cases, wooden implements, and arms, in addition to one coppersmith, one specialist who engraved metalwork, three farriers, but also the one and only medical man in our sample: they all left estates worth less than a hundred piasters. By contrast, estates worth 300 piasters and more typically belonged to people who had provided services to the commercial world such as the officials operating the public weighing scales and also the money changers. The only exceptions to the rule that manufacturing did not pay were the two goldsmiths, but then these men were trading in addition to making jewellery.

Tools In this case our data is neither homogenous nor exhaustive. Only in describing twenty-­ eight small shops selling everyday goods have the qadi’s helpers mentioned the monetary values of the items with which the owners had conducted their trades. As noted previously, the estates of artisans/shopkeepers differed widely in value, and the same observation applied to the select group whose tools were on record: in the latter case the poorest estate amounted to 17 piasters and the highest to over 6,800 before the payment of debts; afterwards the minimum was 2 and the maximum 2,964 piasters. Often it was the artisans/shopkeepers in financial trouble whose instruments or implements made it into the registers: six of the twenty-­eight men at issue had debts that equalled their possessions, thus there was no inheritance to distribute. After the executors had discharged most obligations, a tailor

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still left two piasters in unpaid debts; and one person had an estate worth only a single piaster. Normally the scribes did not take the trouble of recording the cheap and simple tools of Damascene artisans; presumably when they did so, it was because the executors hoped to sell these items and pay off a petty debt or two. Moreover the value of an artisan’s tools amounted to a mere 2.9 per cent of an average estate – a small proportion even where modest craftsmen were concerned.17 This observation confirms André Raymond’s remarks about the workshops of Cairo: ‘[U] sually the share of capital invested in materials used for manufacture was extremely limited’.18 The same author also noted that tools remained traditional and working methods determined by routine. Most of the time the scribes refer to tools by means of blanket formulas unhelpful to the historian, such as ‘the instruments of a veterinary surgeon’ (‘iddat baytâr), ‘the tools of a braid-­maker’ (‘iddat ‘aqqâd), or ‘the tools of a weaver’, the latter sometimes expressed by the terms ‘a complete loom’ or ‘a loom with a wooden frame’ (‘iddat nûl). However in a few exceptional cases the qadi’s scribes have produced lists in which they enumerate the tools one by one and we will follow their lead. A manufacturer of wooden recipients (‘ulabî) used planks (daff khashâb) and nails in the production of crates and boxes (mahâ’ir): these items were valued at sixty-­nine piasters, amounting to half of all his possessions. A veterinary surgeon and/or farrier possessed a larger set of instruments and tools, which the scribe enumerated with care.19 The farrier owned different types of hammers (matraqa and shâkûsh), probably mallets, hammers that were light enough to protect the hooves of the animals and other hammers presumably much heavier, with which the farrier could stamp a hole in the iron on which he was working. He also owned mahâwîr or irons for branding camels: a definition on record in Kazimirski’s dictionary.20 The veterinary surgeon cum farrier’s other tools included pincers (kammâsha), horseshoes (na‘l), old and new nails (mismâr), and anvils (sindân). Certain other tools in this shop are not found in conventional dictionaries, so the translation remains hypothetical. Thus the term maqâlim perhaps refers to a rogne pied or a boutoir as Dozy defines the term qullâma as ‘nail clippings’.21 The same workshop also contained manâqir, apparently a tool for producing holes like a chisel. Barthélémy considers this item as a carpenter’s tool, but there is a variant used by farriers.22 The workshop also held a tool known as kaffât or kafât, which according to Kazimirski serves to seize something, perhaps pliers. There are some other tools that I have not been able to identify. Together this set of instruments and implements was worth fifty-­three piasters and made up half of the estate before payment of debts.

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A certain Muhammad b. Muhammad al-­shâwî had sold roast meat. What were his ‘tools’ like? His customers ate from fifty plates (sahn) made of locally manufactured faience (qashânî). His stock in trade was mutton cut up very fine and grilled on small iron spits (sîkh kabba). Taken together all these items were worth six piasters, his estate before the payment of debts amounting to no more than forty-­five. A seller of apricot paste also possessed individual serving ‘dishes’, namely eighty planks on which he had exhibited his goods, with a total value of forty piasters, or half a piaster apiece. While these shops were one of a kind, the tailors’ (khayyât) workshops, of which five have been described in some detail, are somewhat better represented. These artisans all possessed wooden planks (daff khashâb), one of these implements being described as a daff khiyâta. On these items, worth between one and three piasters, the masters placed the textiles on which they planned to work. Other tools included scissors (miqass) worth between one-­third of a piaster and one piaster, irons (mikwâya) that were somewhat expensive due to the metal (hadîd) from which they were made and valued at two or three piasters apiece, as well as measuring rods. Some of the latter, known as dhirâ, were also of iron (about 66 cm). In addition tailors often possessed handâza, flexible wooden measuring rods in the Turkish style that were two fingers shorter than the dhirâ.23 These rods were typically valued at half a piaster. Other tools used by textile workers included a comb (masht), estimated value 1.5 piasters, and a skein winder needed for the twisting of silk yarn (dûlâb fatâla li sinâ‘at al-­harîr) – at 10 piasters this was one of the more costly tools. Throughout Damascus, artisans thus used cheap implements. To gain a sense of the proportions involved, it is worth remembering that a gold piece was worth between 2.5 and 3 piasters. Even so, some artisans did not own their tools; thus a barber had rented not only his shop but also his razors, napkins, copper pail and scissors.24 In addition many shops contained items that were not specific to any particular trade but rather were common to many, and which certain scribes recorded as ‘items for the shop’ (asbâb dukkân, ‘idda dukkân or farsh dukkân). The lists prepared for the court included a variety of receptacles such as chests (sundûq), small coffers (sebet) or cash-­boxes (ma‘add) that could be secured with locks (aqfâl hadîd); some shopkeepers moreover used small wooden counters (bâshtakhta) and inkpots (dawâya). Those who needed to weigh the goods they sold owned copper scales together with their weights (mîzân nuhâs wa awâq), while those who dealt with large sums of money might possess scales suitable for weighing gold, protected by a wooden receptacle (mîzân lil dahab bi bayt khashab).

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Places of Work: dukkân, hânût, makhzân, and perhaps Houses When enumerating and evaluating the shop inventory, the scribes also mention the workplace, if only in the standard expression ‘what has been found in the hânût or dukkân or makhzân (mâ wûjîda fî l-­hânût. . .) Scholars have long debated whether there was a difference between shops known as hânût and those recorded as dukkân; but Gaston Wiet and André Raymond agree that the two terms are synonyms.25 The inventories confirm this conclusion, for the same shop may appear once as a hânût and elsewhere as a dukkân. Accounts documenting the businesses of deceased persons that were being kept going in trust for minor heirs (muhâsaba) do not differentiate between the two terms either. As an example we only need to look at the accounts prepared by a supervisor (nâzir) in charge of administering the fortunes of two deceased brothers, both from the ruling or military group. Dated 1680 and 1682, there is a gap of eighteen months between the two estimates covering the same set of shops; a piece of real estate called the hânût of a barber in the first account appears as a dukkân of a barber in the second one, so once again the two terms are interchangeable. While the hânût and the dukkân mostly functioned as workplaces, the makhzân was used for storage. But as we will see, the distinction is not always clear. It would be of interest to learn more about the monetary value of shops occupied by their owners, the rents paid by artisans who were tenants, and the role of pious foundations as landlords. However, when it comes to these matters, the estate inventories are somewhat disappointing. While the qadi and his scribes regularly mention real estate, often at the end of the list, they do not usually assign these items any monetary value. Even so it is clear that shops did not cost very much. On an average, the ten hânût mentioned together with their sale prices were worth around 40 piasters apiece; but the most frequent values lay between 15 and 30 piasters. Houses by contrast were much more expensive: about sixty are documented whose average price amounted to 227 piasters. The rent appears in the inheritance inventories only if it was a debt to be paid by the estate, in other words if the deceased had died owing money to his landlord. As a result information on rents is only available in a limited number of cases. Even worse, most inventories do not say for how long the sum of money indicated therein had given the tenant a right to his rented shop. Only in a single case do we possess information on this matter: a very poor manufacturer, whose estate was worth no more than

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20 piasters, had rented a hânût where he produced firearms and for which he paid a three-­monthly rent of one piaster. Somewhat more information can be derived from the accounts documenting orphans’ properties (muhâsaba). These records cover longer periods and thus reflect the development of the patrimonies in question. Having acquired urban real estate, certain ‘askar supplemented their salaries through incomes derived from shop rents. In addition to the sums of money involved, the muhâsaba also indicate which people, institutions or communities made money as artisans’ landlords. In these accounts we find unambiguous information on rents: ten shops on record in the 1680 and 1682 accounts produced annual revenues of 11.9 piasters apiece; in other words the rent for a shop was one piaster per month. The highest rents were paid by a butcher and a baker renting an oven. A janissary had left four hânût in the shop-­lined street known as the souk al-­Qâdî, annual rental value amounting to 160.5 piasters or 3.3 piasters per shop per month, an unusually high figure. In the course of ten years an official of the sultan had received 117 piasters in rent for a storage space producing one piaster a month. In addition a butcher’s shop brought in 0.7 piasters per month, or about 80 for the entire ten-­year period, and another establishment located directly below the citadel paid 1.4 piasters per month or about 170 piasters for the entire ten-­year period. Who exactly received these rents? Unfortunately the inventories do not tell us. Some of the landlords must have been ‘private persons’. But the accounts also reflect the importance of pious foundations, which frequently controlled urban real estate and especially shops. This situation for instance is reflected in the two accounts of 1680 and 1682 which include waqf property; for the two brothers who had left the estates documented also held shops belonging to pious foundations. Moreover in connection with dukkân or hânût, there appeared the term khulû. An official designated as a bulûkbâshî had the right to collect 1,259 piasters as the khûlu of sixteen hânût situated somewhere in the city, the duration of the rental contract being unspecified. We also learn that a janissary held four-­fifths of the khulû of a dukkân situated in the shop-­lined street (suk) of Surûjiyya. This source of revenue produced 24.25 piasters; in addition the military man received 12 piasters for the khulû of half a shop (dukkân) in the same souk. The exact meaning of the term khulû is a matter for discussion, but quite clearly the fee is connected to the existence of pious foundations. Randi Deguilhem has proposed the following definition: contracts of kadak and khulû only concern buildings where commerce or a productive activity takes place. This contract combines two separate

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a­ rrangements, namely the kadak which gives the right to exercise a given trade or craft and the khulû which permits the occupation of a [given] space for residential or commercial purposes [compare Ch. 9]. In fact [these transactions] hide the purchase of properties belonging to waqfs.26

These few observations allow the following conclusions: the annual rents of hânût, dukkân or makhzân were quite moderate, somewhere around a piaster per month; certain members of the ruling group rented out shops; and pious foundations were involved in the same activity. It is not always easy to distinguish between spaces devoted to work and others dedicated to ‘private life’. Historians have established the distinction that shops are found in the souk, while the houses are the sites of private life. When work ends the souk empties and life withdraws from the street, meanwhile the house fills up. Once again André Raymond has put the matter in a nutshell: ‘[I]n Mediterranean societies family life is relatively segregated, a separation that Islam has reinforced’.27 But is the separation really so clear-­cut? In an article based on some thirty inventories that I wrote as a ‘trial balloon’ for later and more encompassing work, I located an exceptional person whose singularity emerged after the contents of Damascene homes had been subjected to a detailed factor analysis.28 In the house of this grocer (sammân), the qadi had found halved walnuts, raisins, wooden plates, scales, weights, crates, jars, coffers and boxes. However it was very rare to find food supplies in people’s homes as they had either disappeared between the death of the owner and the compilation of the inventory, or else for various practical reasons the household had never possessed them. The home of this particular grocer thus apparently served as his storehouse. Among the 140 cases investigated here, the qadi only recorded very few comparable instances: thus a seller of cakes (qata’ifî) had a storeroom in his home (makhzân bi dârihi), and another grocer and a tobacco dealer had made similar arrangements. A druggist (‘attâr) owned or rented a shop (hânût) in the souk called Bâb al-­Jabîya, where he kept groceries worth 139 piasters; but he kept another 7 piasters’ worth in his house. When the inventories specify the locations of the makhzâns, the latter for the most part are situated in the city’s various business structures (qâsâriyya or khan), the two terms being interchangeable according to Damascus usage, but some of these shopkeepers also seem to have used their homes as storage spaces. On the other hand the registers do not ever refer to a dukkân or hânût situated in a dwelling. But if the qadi’s inventories can be taken at face value, not all salesmen were fortunate enough to dispose of a hânût or dukkân. Certainly in some cases the scribe may have not recorded the existence of a rented

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shop because the rent had been paid beforehand and thus did not appear among the debts owed by the estate. But we can be almost certain that the poorest artisans and salesmen did not have access to any kind of shop. Among our corpus of 140 persons, the scribes recorded the presence of shops much more often if the deceased had been well off. The estates of 78 men who according to their inventories disposed of a shop, either their personal property or rented, were on average worth 520 piasters. By contrast those deceased artisans/salesmen without access to a shop left only 259 piasters before the payment of debts, and their inheritances were thus only worth half as much as those of their more fortunate colleagues. Some of these people had doubtless been unable to purchase or rent a workplace. In support of my hypothesis, here is a quote from the text by which the grandson of al-­Qasimî introduced the work of his grandfather on the crafts of Damascus at the end of the nineteenth century: his thirst [for knowledge] was not satisfied by the enumeration of crafts [or] by pacing up and down the souks. Quite a few trades were practised outside of the souks, in the countryside, in the open air, on the banks of the river or in the dwellings of the artisans. Certain jobs were seasonal which is why the men employed in them did not have workshops29 in the accepted sense of the term.

The purchase or renting of a shop was an investment, which may appear minor but still was not accessible to everybody. The street and probably even the family house could also serve as workspaces. Conversely, in addition to craft tools, the shops also contained certain objects evoking private life. Here too there might be cushions on which to recline (tarrâha and mikhâdda), copper pots (sakhkhâna nuhâs), a few basins and ewers (legen, ibrîq), a set of superimposed copper pots in which an artisan might bring his lunch from home (matbaqiyya nuhâs). In this context it is of interest to take a look at the inventory of a cloth trader, grandson of an agha, whose estate was recorded among those of the ra‘âyâ even though the deceased was of ‘askar origin. This man kept a full complement of domestic articles in his storehouse: kitchenware and a variety of dishes and plates made of copper or glass, trays, coverlets and candlesticks, as if the storehouse also served as a residence. This case remains enigmatic. In certain shops we also find objects that facilitate the fulfilment of religious duties: certain artisans possessed a Qur’an and perhaps a few mystical treatises (tasawwuf), a prayer rug (sajjâda), and a string of prayer beads (masbaha). Presumably artisans and traders spent long hours in their shops, so long that they also used these venues for ordinary life and prayer.

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Conclusion Recently Suraiya Faroqhi has commented that, ‘studies to date of social groups active within the empire normally concern men involved in the government, especially religious scholars, but also officials . . . Among Ottoman urbanites, merchants have been the most privileged in life as in scholarly research; and in the hierarchy of neglect, artisans rank just above peasants and nomads, the most numerous and least studied segments of the Ottoman population.’30 To some extent the inventories studied here permit us to fill this gap in the history of Ottoman working populations. Certainly the very poor remain inaccessible and unknown. But even so, the sizeable number of estates left by artisan shopkeepers indicates that these people, whose modest possessions reflect their poverty, must have been numerous. The precise and detailed descriptions produced by the qadi’s office also permit at least a sidelong glance at the material culture of Damascus artisans and shopkeepers, as the scribes have indicated the use and value of different tools, and sometimes also the general appearance of the shop, which was not only a workspace but also the site where petty artisans and shopkeepers lived out substantial portions of their daily lives.

Notes   1. Colette Establet and Jean Paul Pasqual, Ultime voyage pour la Mecque: Les inventaires après décès de pèlerins morts à Damas vers 1700 (Damascus: Institut français de Damas, 1998).   2. Colette Establet and Jean Paul Pasqual, La gent d’État dans Damas ottomane, les ‘askar vers 1700 (Damascus: Iremam/Ifpo, 2011).   3. André Raymond, Artisans et commerçants au Caire, au XVIIIe siècle, 2 vols (Damascus: Institut Français de Damas, 1973–74), vol. 1, 203–13.   4. Ronald C. Jennings, ‘Women in Early 17th Century Ottoman Judicial Records: The Sharia Court of Anatolian Kayseri’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, XVIII(1) (1975), 53–114.   5. Suraiya Faroqhi, Artisans of Empire: Crafts and Craftspeople under the Ottomans (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 15.  6. Faroqhi, Artisans of Empire, 21.   7. Haim Gerber, ‘Social and Economic Position of Women in an Ottoman City, Bursa, 1600– 1700’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 12 (1980), 231–44.   8. ‘Abd al-­Karîm Râfiq, ‘Mazâhir min al-­tanzîm al-­hirafî fî Bilâd al-­Shâm fî l-­‘ahd al-­‘utmânî’, Dirâsât târîkhiyya 4 (1981), 30–62.  9. For a translation into Arabic, compare Halil Sahillioğlu, ‘Qânûn nâmeh âl ‘Utmân’, Dirâsât, University of Jordan 13(4) (Sha’bân 1406/April 1986), 107–93, 162–64. 10. M. Qâsimî et al., Qâmûs al-­sinâ’ât al-­shâmiyya (La Haye-­Paris: Mouton, 1960). 11. Raymond, Artisans et commerçants, vol. 1, 206. 12. Ibid., 215–16. 13. Colette Establet and Jean-­Paul Pascual, Familles et fortunes à Damas, 450 foyers damascains en 1700 (Damascus: Institut Français de Damas, 1994). In this study we joined textile

Damascene Artisans around 1700 107

merchants and manufacturers in a single category. As a result the artisans of the food-­ producing sector were slightly less prominent. 14. Dealing with the 1830s, Jean-­Paul Pascual has established the same frequency distribution: food preparation, textiles, and leather: ‘Boutiques, ateliers et corps de métier à Damas d’après un dénombrement effectué en 1827–1828’, in Études sur les villes du Proche-­Orient, XVIe XIXe siècle, Hommage André Raymond, ed. Brigitte Marino (Damascus: PIFD, 2001), 177–99. 15. Al-­Qasîmî, Qâmûs, 123. 16. Fernand Braudel, Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, 3 vols (Paris: Armand Colin, 1979), vol. 2, 12. 17. In Establet and Pascual, Familles et fortunes, we had arrived at a slightly higher proportion, namely 5.4 per cent. The present chapter is based on a sample that is more complete and contains more details, so this figure should be preferred in the future. 18. Raymond, Artisans et commerçants, vol. 1, 218–21. 19. I have identified these items on the basis of the Wikipedia article ‘Le maréchal ferrant’, accessed in July 2012: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_mar%C3%A9chal_ferrant. 20. A. de Biberstein Kazimirski, Dictionnaire arabe-­français, 2 vols. offset reprint (Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1860), 511. 21. Reinhart P. Dozy, Supplément aux dictionnaires arabes, 2 vols. Reproduction of the original edition of 1881 (Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1968), 407. 22. Adrien Barthélémy, Dictionnaire Arabe-­Français, Dialectes de Syrie: Alep, Damas, Liban, Jérusalem, 2 vols. (Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1969), 843. 23. K.V. Zetterstéen, ‘Kleine Beiträge zur Lexikographie des Vulgärarabischen. II. Aus dem Nachlass Prof. Herman Almkvists’, Le Monde oriental, Archives pour l’histoire et l’ethnographie, les langues et littératures, religions et traditions de l’Europe orientale et de l’Asie, Uppsala, Leipzig, Paris and London, vol. 19 (1925), 1–186, 5–14. 24. Sassi Ben Moussa, Présentation et analyse des actes de qadi à Damas, 1102–1104/1690– 1692, Mémoire de maîtrise d’arabe, Université de Provence, 1992. 25. Raymond, Artisans et commerçants, vol. 1, 268. 26. Randi Deguilhem, ‘Approche méthodologique d’un fonds de waqf: deux registres de sharî’a du XIXème siècle à Damas’, in Randi Deguilhem (ed.), Le waqf dans l’espace islamique outil de pouvoir socio-­politique (Damascus, Institut français de Damas, 1995), 45–70, 67–68. 27. André Raymond, Grandes villes arabes à l’époque ottomane (Paris: Sindbad, 1985), 172 sq. 28. Colette Establet, ‘Les intérieurs damascains au début du 18ème siècle . . .. sous bénéfice d’inventaire’, in Daniel Panzac (ed.), Les villes dans l’Empire ottoman: activités et sociétés, 2 vols (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1994), vol. 2, 15–46. 29. al-Qasimy, Dictionnaire des métiers damascains, 2 vols. (Paris; Den Haag: Mouton & Compagnie, 1960), vol. 1, 13. 30. Faroqhi, Artisans of Empire, 13.

Chapter 4

Mapping Istanbul’s Hammams of 1752 and their Employees Nina Ergin

With contributions by Yasemin Özarslan

Introduction Following the Patrona Halil Revolt, which ended on 2 October 1730 with the deposition of Sultan Ahmed III, the Ottoman administration became especially concerned about the great number of Patrona Halil’s fellow countrymen – that is, Albanians – who crowded into Istanbul in search of employment. In the view of Istanbul bureaucrats these men constituted a dangerous ‘mob’.1 Of particular interest to officialdom were the many Albanian tellâks and nâtırs staffing Istanbul’s bathhouses, since Patrona Halil himself had been a bath attendant.2 Moreover the latter’s ability to mobilize a rebellious crowd was based not only on ethnic solidarity (or being hemcins).3 The nature of his profession was also important, as it brought him into close contact with the many bathers frequenting his workplace, the Bayezid Hamamı (no. 43 on Map 4.2 at the end of the chapter). It should therefore come as no surprise that the administration felt the need to police hammam employees more closely, a quest that began with the creation of a detailed record of all the existing bathhouses of Istanbul, including their male staff. Accordingly, an imperial decree of 1734/5 ordered that ‘whoever works in a hammam [. . . they] shall all be registered with their names and patronymics and it shall be written where they are from, their appearance and their features shall be described; next to the names of the Albanians, with a red pen shall be made a sign saying “Albanian”’.4

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An Eighteenth-­Century Recording of Workers in Istanbul Bathhouses It is against this background of social unrest and virtually uncontrollable labour migration into the capital that an inspection register, the İstanbul Hammâmları Defteri, was prepared between 13 July and 6 August 1752 (AH 1 and 25 Ramazan 1165).5 In a leather-­bound volume containing thirty folios, the unnamed scribe individually recorded the 177 bathhouses of Greater Istanbul by name and, if necessary for identification, by neighbourhood as well. For each bathhouse, he listed first the tellâks and then the nâtırs with their names and patronymics, their nickname if they had one, their zımmî (non-­Muslim) status if applicable, and their place of origin. Above each entry, a one-­or two-­word physical description was added to make identification of the relevant employee easier. Typical entries would have contained the following information: ‘çâr-­ebrû [youth with slight facial hair] Osman Mehmed[,] İstarova’, or ‘kumrâl sakâllı [brown-­bearded] ser-­nevbet [supervisor] Ali Hüseyin[,] Görice’.6 Following the last entry of each group, the scribe added the total number of employees. Over a period of twenty-­five days, all male hammam employees of Greater Istanbul – including Eyüp, Hasköy, Kasımpaşa, Galata, and the settlements along the Bosporus both on the European and Asian shores – were thus registered, amounting to a total of 2,400 persons. Of course, some employees may have hidden and thus escaped the attention of the scribe. Therefore, the İstanbul Hammâmları Defteri provides a snapshot of one particular segment of Istanbul’s labour force in the summer of 1752, permitting conclusions about the size of the staff operating the city’s bathhouses, as well as the age distribution and home provinces of the men involved.7 Elsewhere I have discussed this valuable primary source in terms of what it can tell us about labour migration patterns and dynamics, from the Ottoman Balkans (Rumeli, Rumelia) all the way to the capital.8 However, the data contained therein is so rich that the defter begs further examination from another angle – that of spatial analysis. The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to examine hammams together with their employees by means of a set of maps visualizing their distribution within urban space, by way of highlighting a number of select variables. In other words, while my previous work had introduced the ‘Albanian tellâk connection’ in a general way, the present study attempts to map it, this time in greater detail.

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Introducing Geographical Information Systems Geographical Information Systems (GIS) have become another most useful item in the Ottoman historian’s toolbox, and there has been a significant increase in the number of projects and publications relying on GIS for a variety of purposes – from documenting the architectural remains of Ottoman buildings, to locating abandoned villages recorded in archival documents.9 But most importantly GIS assists in the rendering of (often numerical) ‘raw’ data into maps that help to visualize patterns of spatial distribution and relations. For instance, with the help of GIS-­generated maps, Amy Singer has studied the way in which, throughout the seventeenth-­century Ottoman Empire, soup kitchens (imâret) formed a network for the provisioning of townsfolk as well as of travellers. To give an example of the conclusions that we can draw from such mapping projects, Singer has argued that ‘alongside a preference for older parts of the empire, the relative sparseness of imarets elsewhere might also reflect a declining quantity of the surplus resources required to establish large foundations’.10 In a different perspective, Yamashita Kimiyo has used GIS to study the water supply system of Ottoman Istanbul, analysing in particular the distribution and patronage patterns of public fountains, which ensured that in those areas with the highest population density the shortest distance between çeşmes was always 300 meters or less.11 In an ongoing GIS-­supported study, Cengiz Kırlı and Betül Başaran are examining the kefalet defterleri, in which imperial scribes detailed the names of guildsmen so as to ensure that everybody had a proper guarantor; they also listed vagrants and others to be deported from the capital (compare Ch. 11).12 While not a kefâlet defteri, the nature of the İstanbul Hammâmları Defteri does render the present undertaking complementary to the work of Başaran and Kırlı.13 The map-­making process can be broken down into several phases, which reflect the standard manner of inputting data into ArcGIS, the program we have used here: (1) identifying the locations of the 177 bathhouses listed in the register (see Table 4.1 at the end of the chapter) on the map of Greater Istanbul; (2) entering the data concerning the employees of each bathhouse into shape-­files linked to the respective location; and (3) determining the criteria and variables on which the individual maps should be based. As to the latter, we cannot claim to have exhausted all the possibilities, and thus this contribution is preliminary; but even so it shows the great potential of mapping for the study of Ottoman guilds. The first step of locating the hammams proved a particularly challenging and multi-­layered endeavour (see annotations to Table 4.1). Not sur-

Mapping Istanbul’s Hammams of 1752 and their Employees 111

prisingly, those baths that are still known by their original name (such as the Tahtakale Hamamı) and/or continue to function today were easiest to situate in the maps. However, not all of the establishments listed in the register have kept their names over the centuries, and we have greatly profited from Mehmet Nermi Haskan’s survey, in which he not only gives the (still identifiable) addresses of 237 bathhouses of Istanbul but also cross-­lists them under their various names, including several that have disappeared.14 Still, several dozen of Istanbul’s hammams existing in 1752 have not survived, nor found their way into Haskan’s survey. Fortunately, the scribe in the majority of entries recorded the name of the neighbourhood or a close-­by point of reference such as a mosque or fountain. Such indications were especially helpful for those hammams with names so common that they did not provide any clue as to location (Büyük/Great Hamam, Küçük/Small Hamam, Paşa Hamamı/Hamam of the Pasha) – unlike names such as Aksaray or Edirnekapı Hamamı, which indicate well-­known sections of eighteenth-­century and present-­day Istanbul. For identifying such points of reference, Hafız Hüseyin al-­Ayvansarayi’s The Garden of the Mosques, a guide of encyclopaedic scope to Istanbul’s Islamic monuments completed in 1780, has proved invaluable, for even when the hammam’s name and neighbourhood are given, sometimes no trace is discernible in today’s urban fabric.15 Yet, even The Garden of the Mosques does not include all the hammams that existed in 1752, and in a handful of cases the only way to determine a location is to trace the scribe’s physical movement from one identifiable establishment to the next, as reflected in the register, and to triangulate the missing bathhouse in reference to the identifiable ones in the same or adjacent neighbourhoods.16 This lack of precision is justified for the present purposes, since the conclusions to be drawn from the maps presented here do not depend on absolutely exact topographical coordinates within the eighteenth-­ century street fabric, which in any event can no longer be recovered with complete certainty. Rather, approximate locations within specific neighbourhoods suffice to visualize the distribution and networks of hammam workers within the city as a whole. Map 4.1 illustrates the general distribution of bathhouses in Istanbul as reflected in the register of 1752 and therefore presents a snapshot of the establishments open and providing services to the public at that moment in time. In addition, these buildings were workplaces, not only for tellâks and nâtırs (and the female hammam attendants that the administration did not find necessary to record), but they also served as markets for the workers and artisans participating in what we may even call a ‘bathing industry’ – makers and sellers of towels, soap, depilatory paste, clogs, hammam bowls, and the like.17 The overall distribution pattern of the

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177 bathhouses holds no surprises: the highest density can be found in those areas with the largest number of residents – that is, on the historical peninsula within the city walls, in the settlements around Eyüp, on the northern shore of the Golden Horn, and in the Galata area. Concomitant with its smaller population, Üsküdar offered nine hammams to its residents, and Kadıköy only one. The distribution visible on this map quite clearly reflects the way in which the Ottoman administration had organized and named the capital: on the one hand the ‘Abode of Felicity’ within the walls and on the other the three boroughs of Eyüp, Üsküdar and Galata (dersaadet ve bilâd-­ı selâse). But the map also includes thirteen villages along the northern reaches of the Bosphorus, which boasted but a single bath each; on the European shore Ortaköy, Kuruçeşme, Bebek, Rumelihisarı, Yeniköy and Sarıyer were in this position. On the Asian shore Anadolukavağı, Beykoz, Kanlıca, Anadoluhisarı, Kandilli, Çengelköy and Beylerbeyi also contained a single public bath each. The middle of the eighteenth century was a time when ‘suburban development’ along the Bosporus emerged in the form of palatial dwellings and gardens for the ruling elite.18 Thus one hammam per settlement may seem a rather small number, and furthermore most of these public baths had but few employees. The Ortaköy Hamamı with seventeen employees was the largest, but several other bathhouses had only a single tellâk. However, the mansions of the elite must have had their own private baths, and so the customers of these generally very small hammams would mainly have been local villagers too poor to hire an attendant to begin with. They therefore perhaps relied on relatives and friends to help with washing and scrubbing.

Reconstructing the Procedures of an Ottoman Inspector Map 4.2 provides a close-­up of a section of Map 1 that allows for the establishments to be identified, based on the numbers assigned to them in Table 4.1; these numbers in turn reflect the exact order in which the scribe recorded them. As for the latter’s working method, the maps provide a fortuitous opportunity to examine how an inspection was carried out within the rather complex urban space of Istanbul, divided by multiple bodies of water and extending over a large fragmented territory. Beginning with the Süleymaniye Hamamı, the inspector first examined hammams 1 to 7 in the area around the eponymous mosque complex, before back-­tracking to the Ayasofya Hamamı (8) and then beginning another round with the hammams of the districts (nahiye) of Ayasofya, Mahmudpaşa and İbrahimpaşa (9–22). Then the official zigzagged

Mapping Istanbul’s Hammams of 1752 and their Employees 113

his way through the neighbourhoods along the southern shore of the Golden Horn, up to the city’s land walls (23–41). Once again returning to a more central point close to the Divanyolu and starting with the Sırt Hamamı (42) next to the Covered Bazaar, the scribe now proceeded westwards along the Divanyolu (43–47) and into the peninsula’s central area, wedged between the southern and northern branches of the major traffic arteries following the old Byzantine mese. In order to cover the hammams in this large, wedge-­shaped area, the official worked his way roughly along two counterclockwise circles, the first from Aksaray northwards to Mesihpaşa and then southwards to Cerrahpaşa (48–68).19 The second round started from Cerrahpaşa (69), moving south-­westwards to Kocamustafapaşa (70–79) and then northwards to the Topkapı Gate (80–84). Afterwards, the scribe returned once more to the nahiye of Ayasofya to record two hammams in the Hocapaşa neighbourhood (85, 86) and then continued his inspections along the shore of the Marmara Sea, from Sultanahmed all the way to Yedikule (87–104), maybe backtracking once more; for he may have repaired an earlier omission by capturing the İmam Hamamı in Tatlıkuyu, between Beyazıd and Kumkapı (105). Having thus recorded the 105 bathhouses of intra muros Istanbul, the scribe left the city walls behind and inspected first the two hammams right outside the land walls in Yedikule (106, 107), before travelling northwards to Eyüp with its nine bathhouses (108–116). Sütlüce and Hasköy (117–121) were the next stops on his itinerary. The following group of nine public baths (122–130) were all located in Kasımpaşa, serving the area north of the imperial arsenal whose workers and officials also made up the majority of the local population.20 Afterwards, the scribe recorded the bathhouses in Galata, starting in Azapkapı and working his way towards Karaköy (131–137), Tophane (138–149), Beşiktaş, and Yahya Efendi (150–54), this time wandering between hammams in what seems to have been a much more haphazard manner – or maybe the official only jotted down his entries in a less organized way. From here on, the scribe entered what may be called Istanbul’s ‘suburban’ parts, as he now recorded the employees of the isolated hammams that served the villages along the Bosporus. He travelled northwards on the European shore, to Sarıyer (160), crossed the straits to the Anatolian side, and there recorded the public baths from Beykoz to Beylerbeyi (167). Finally, the inspection ended in Üsküdar (168–176) and Kadıköy (177). What emerges from this lengthy description of the scribe’s route is a very systematic and precise method of capturing all the workplaces of tellâks and nâtırs; this style of working is rather typical, given the Ottoman penchant for bureaucracy. Nevertheless, the efficiency and

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orderliness with which this particular official worked is remarkable, and tracing his footsteps from hammam to hammam may tell us something about how inspection registers in general came to be put together, and not only in this specific case. While Maps 4.1 and 4.2 demonstrate the easy access that the residents of greater Istanbul, even those living on the city’s outskirts, had to this important urban amenity, the distribution pattern apparent from the map of the historical peninsula is of particular interest. The highest number of bathhouses is in the band that runs from the southern shore of the Golden Horn to the Marmara shore, roughly between the Topkapı Palace and the Fatih Mosque Complex. This density of bathhouses is to be expected, for several reasons. The area had a high population density, and it also housed major mosque complexes of which the hammams were often dependencies; and especially north of the Divanyolu there existed many commercial structures such as the Covered Bazaar and the Uzunçarşı as well as the business-­related structures (hans) where merchants and travellers found temporary accommodations, and these sites supplied the hammams with many of their customers. The empty space at the tip of the peninsula indicates that the several hammams belonging to the Topkapı Palace were not part of the inspector’s responsibilities; if any Albanian attendants worked in them, as members of the imperial court they were considered to be beyond suspicion.21 Furthermore, the neighbourhoods close to the city walls, especially south of the Edirnekapı Gate, had fewer bathhouses and with greater distances between them. This fact can be attributed to the presence of gardens and other kinds of urban agriculture and the resulting lower settlement density. Even with the somewhat tentative placement of several hammams, the present map allows us to understand that, of the 105 bathhouses existing in intra muros Istanbul in 1752, none was located at a Euclidian distance of more than about 1.3 km from its nearest neighbour. As already indicated, the lowest densities were in the neighbourhoods along the city walls running from the Edirnekapı to Yedikule, where few monuments dotted the urban landscape and orchards and fields gave the area a rural appearance. There the İbrahim Paşa Hamamı (77) at the Silivrikapı Gate stood as Istanbul’s ‘loneliest’ bathhouse, being situated at a distance of about 1.3 km as the crow flies from its nearest competitor, the Koca Mustafa Paşa Hamamı (78). On the other hand, the shortest Euclidian distances between the Sultan Bayezid Veli Hamamı (43) and the Kapudan Paşa Hamamı (2) measured only about 200 m, a short walk even if we make allowance for the fact that the course of the streets providing access may have obliged the customers to make a few detours.

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Tophane also contained no less than six bathhouses within a radius of circa 400 m; here the cannon foundry dominated the hillside above the Kılıç Ali Paşa Mosque. The Kapı İçi Hamamı (137), the Kapudan Ağa Hamamı (138), the Paşa Hamamı (139), the Yalı Hamamı (140), the Sarraç Hamamı (147), and the Kılıç Ali Paşa Hamamı (152) were all situated in the area. These establishments would have found a large clientele amongst the foundry workers, as well as the sailors and soldiers coming ashore in search of a bath and recreation.

Bathhouses as Business Enterprises Were so many bathhouses really necessary, even in the heavily trafficked neighbourhoods of Mahmudpaşa, Eminönü, along the Divanyolu and around the Covered Bazaar? Or, to ask this question from the viewpoint of the tellâks and nâtırs and other hammam employees: in such a saturated market, would the bathhouses have found enough customers? Apparently so; the hammam managers did make enough of a profit that enterprising individuals attempted to construct privately owned and operated establishments beyond the number that the administration considered strictly necessary, as can be gathered from an imperial decree dated to the first third of Rebiülevvel 1182 (July 1768). Only sixteen years after our scribe had recorded the 177 hammams of Greater Istanbul, Sultan Mustafa III (r. 1757–74) prohibited the construction of any further ones, since they supposedly were superfluous and caused water and fuel shortages.22 Although the existing hammams built in Istanbul and Üsküdar and Galata and in the connected provinces and in Eyüp on the Golden Horn and in the villages on [the shores of the] Bosporus are sufficient for the people of the present neighbourhoods, for some time some people have built several single baths and several double baths, which are unnecessary, in the previously mentioned neighbourhoods in Istanbul and Üsküdar and Galata and the connected provinces, with the intention of generating income for themselves[.] And since the abundance of unnecessary hammam[s] causes a shortage of water in the hot season and, in addition, since it is obvious that this condition [of the existence of superfluous hammams] causes, together with the unnecessary destruction and waste of fuel brought to Istanbul, a scarcity [of fuel] for the servants of God [i.e. the inhabitants], henceforth no [Imperial A]rchitect or other person shall in any way give permission and license to the building of a double or single hammam, either in Istanbul and Üsküdar and Galata and the connected provinces or in the villages in Eyüp, the Golden Horn and the Bosporus . . . When my honoured imperial decree regarding the complete prohibition and removal [of these buildings] is issued [the following shall be

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enforced:] thus, when you, the above-­mentioned head of the Imperial Architects, are aware of the circumstances, permission and license to build either a single or double hammam in the above-­mentioned places shall henceforth be given by you under no circumstances[.] If, contrary to my imperial order, [somebody] sets out to build a hammam in Istanbul or the above-­mentioned places, an inquiry shall be made and continuously great care and attention shall be paid to immediately carrying out my imperial order to demolish [the bath] . . . In the first ten days of Rebiülevvel 1182.]

Considering this decree together with the inspection register and the maps based thereon gives a good sense of what the city’s administration regarded as a suitable number of hammams to ensure comfort and hygiene for the residents of Greater Istanbul, without however wasting precious resources. In this context, the distribution pattern of hammams should also be considered together with the water supply lines. Evidently the latter were an important determinant for the choice of location, regardless of whether the hammam was part of a mosque complex or endowment, or an individually conceived structure. However, relations between the distribution of hammams and the water supply system will be reserved for a future study. As the next step we will now turn to the bathhouses as places of business that employed (at a minimum) the recorded 2,400 tellâks and nâtırs, and provided commercial opportunities for many more people. On Map 4.3 the size of the dots marking the hammams in intra muros Istanbul, Eyüp and Galata represents the respective number of attendants and servants on record. The Tahtakale Hamamı (21) with fifty-­nine tellâks and nâtırs, the Çemberlitaş Hamamı (11) with fifty-­eight, the Gedik Paşa Hamamı (93) with fifty-­six, and the Mahmud Paşa Hamamı (20) with fifty-­one workmen were the four largest employers and remarkable for the size of their staff, as Ottoman businesses seldom employed more than fifty, even at the turn of the nineteenth century.23 These large bathhouses were clustered together in the commercial zone around the Covered Bazaar and extended along the shore of the Golden Horn. Establishments falling into the second-­and third-­largest categories, comprising forty-­one to fifty and thirty-­one to forty employees respectively, also operated within roughly the same area, but with an additional territory extending towards the Fatih Mosque Complex. Hammams in the zone between the city walls and an imaginary line from the Golden Horn through the Fatih Complex to the Marmara Sea employed no more than thirty – and mostly fewer than ten – male attendants and servants. This distribution reflects yet once more the bifurcation of Ottoman Istanbul’s urban landscape into a densely built-­ up area where major monuments were concentrated, and an area of almost rural aspect and

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fewer urban amenities. In addition to providing a public service to a large number of bathers and securing profits for their endowments, the monumentality of the hammams in the former area served to bolster the visibility of their patrons, namely the sultan himself, his family and the higher echelons of the ruling elite.24 In Greater Istanbul, half of all hammams (88 out of 177, or 49.7 per cent) had ten or fewer male attendants and servants, and Map 4.3 shows how innumerable minuscule baths were scattered throughout the city’s more peripheral areas such as Eyüp, Hasköy, Kasımpaşa and Beşiktaş. The same holds true for Üsküdar and the Bosporus villages, which have not been included in this map, because they predictably contain the smallest dots. More eye-­ catching is the fact that a small bathhouse was often located in very close proximity to a much larger one, as was true of the Kapudan Paşa Hamamı (no. 2, with 13 male attendants and servants) and the Sultan Bayezid Veli Hamamı (no. 43, with 47 attendants and servants); it is worth repeating that the latter had been the workplace of Patrona Halil, the man who brought down Ahmed III and Damad İbrahim Paşa. The Sultan Bayezid Veli Hamamı was one of the first baths built after the conquest, in order to secure income for the mosque of Bayezid II’s wife in Edirne.25 By contrast the much smaller Kapudan Paşa Hamamı was only erected in 1707 as part of the mosque complex of Kapudan İbrahim Paşa, at that time vizier and admiral of the Ottoman fleet.26 The decision to build a small-­scale bathhouse only about 200 m away from a much larger one begs a number of questions, which for the most part do not find answers here. Did Kapudan İbrahim Paşa have a say in the choice of location for his mosque complex, and by implication his bathhouse as well? Or had the land simply been assigned to him? It is also possible that a population increase in the neighbourhood had prompted the Chief Imperial Architect to allow the addition of a new hammam in the early eighteenth century. Furthermore, how did the bathers choose which establishment to visit – was it based on whether they felt like bathing in an intimate setting or in a more monumental one? Or, more probably, did they base their decisions on the social relations they had established in the hammam they customarily visited? Did the two public baths engage in a conscious competition for customers? And, were the hammam attendants and servants who had migrated from İstarova – seven in the Kapudan İbrahim Paşa Hamamı and six in the Sultan Bayezid Veli Hamamı – well acquainted with one another, or even members of the same family? The existence of networks connecting several bathhouses in the same neighbourhood will be discussed below, in relation to Map 4.5.

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Bathhouse Employees, both Youngsters and Adults Map 4.4 reflects the age of Istanbul’s tellâks and nâtırs, based on the references to facial hair by which the scribe identifies them. Although the distinctions could be drawn much finer – based on whether a young male tellâk was without any sign of a beard (sabi, taze) or had some light growth (çar-­ebrû), whether an older male tellâk was only greying (ak bıyıklı, ak sakallı) or showing more extensive signs of aging (ihtiyar) – for the sake of the map’s legibility, these details have been collapsed into two categories: mature (45 per cent) and adolescent (54 per cent).27 As apparent from the small pie charts displaying the percentages of these two categories for every bathhouse, most hammam managers employed a mix of old and young. However, as the map also shows, a few had hired exclusively either adults or else adolescents. The reasons behind the overwhelming presence of adolescents may vary; but they certainly did not result from the respective hammam manager’s desire to save money by hiring youngsters for less pay, since attendants and servants made their earnings from tips. In some cases, the exclusive presence of young workers may have been connected to specific employment and/or migration cycles within the history of the individual business concerned, which had just brought in a new crop of attendants and servants after the previous group had ‘retired’, maybe to return to their home province, or to move on to a different job. Such cycles would have been more pronounced in smaller businesses with fewer employees, where a wholesale replacement of staff occurred more easily and more frequently. In fact, here we experience the shortcomings of maps dealing with a single variable, as hammams employing no more than one or two attendants (and no servants) will distort the overall picture. Subject to the caution resulting from this situation, such employment cycles are perhaps reflected in Map 4.4, which shows five bathhouses (6, 60, 65, 74 and 103) on the historical peninsula with an exclusively adolescent staff. Map 4.4 also allows us to understand whether ‘young’ hammams may be linked to topographic variables. For instance, it is tempting to consider those ‘young’ hammams located in disreputable neighbourhoods as places of illicit homosexual encounter and male prostitution. After all, young tellâks were a ‘favourite object of the Ottoman homoerotic imagination’.28 This state of affairs is well attested in Ottoman erotic literature.29 It is inadvisable to rest claims concerning the business practices of a given hammam on the location and the staff’s young age alone. Nevertheless, in the case of bathhouses in rather disreputable neighbourhoods such as Tophane, thickening evidence of this kind will help histo-

Mapping Istanbul’s Hammams of 1752 and their Employees 119

rians to conduct a more targeted search for relevant information from other primary sources, such as the şeriyye sicilleri (judges’ registers) and the mühimme defterleri (registers of important affairs) that document the administration’s attempts to curb illicit activities. Map 4.5 shows the origins of the tellâks and nâtırs, the issue that had prompted the compilation of the İstanbul Hammâmları Defteri in the first place. The location of each bathhouse is indicated by means of a small pie chart that reflects the percentage of employees originating from Rumelia (71 per cent of the workforce), the Anatolian provinces (17 per cent), and Greater Istanbul (7 per cent).30 As the dominance of Rumelian hammam workers throughout the city is immediately recognizable, any bathhouses primarily or exclusively employing Anatolians are noteworthy, instantly prompting a closer look. Most of these establishments are very small, with less than five employees. Yet the Molla Gürani Hamamı in the Uzunçarşı neighbourhood (22) emerges as a particularly interesting case, because all of its nineteen tellâks and nâtırs were migrants from Sivas, a case to be discussed in more detail below. It has been speculated that migrants found work primarily in the townships on the margins of Istanbul, where the guilds had less control and the newcomers were farther away from the watchful eyes of the administration.31 But as the maps show very clearly, this pattern certainly did not apply to bathhouses. On the contrary, migrants from Rumelia overwhelmingly dominated intra muros Istanbul. Natives of the city were probably quite reluctant to do this type of menial work, aspiring to occupations with more potential for advancement, greater social status, and higher earnings.32 If natives of Greater Istanbul (called şehri, Üsküdar, Eyüp, Kasımpaşa, Galata, and so on) did work in a hammam, they were more likely to do so in the peripheral areas, probably in their own neighbourhoods. In other words, while the intra muros hammams in the more crowded areas of the historical peninsula and Galata were dominated by the network of Albanian (and to a much lesser extent Anatolian) tellâks, natives of Üsküdar, Kasımpaşa, and Eyüp appear to have more easily found jobs in their own urban wards. This is borne out by Map 4.6, which shows the distribution of hammam workers from Üsküdar throughout the city: they found work primarily in their place of residence. In all likelihood, this situation was due to the close socio-­professional relationships formed in outlying communities, more tightly knit than in the bustling and probably more anonymous commercial sections of the historical peninsula. However, in the case of the Çukur Hamamı in Fatih (30), an intra-­city migration network seems to have existed, albeit on a minuscule scale: for thirteen of its thirty-­six employees, the scribe noted Üsküdar as their place of origin; thus, labour migration did not need to involve long-­distance travel.

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Map 4.7 shows the distribution of hammam labour migrants from Avlonya (today: Vlorë in Albania) as expressed in absolute numbers. People from this little town were the most numerous among migrants from the Western Balkans (649 – or 38 per cent of all tellâks and nâtırs). Furthermore, Map 4.7 shows that, in addition to one bathhouse in Tophane, the Avlonya migrants favoured the section of the historical peninsula where the largest bathhouses operated; thus we find them in thirteen hammams, where between fourteen and twenty-­three men from Avlonya had found employment. However, in terms of percentages, the picture is slightly different, as viewed from this angle men from Avlonya dominated the bathhouses located somewhat further to the west of the city, close to the city walls. As for the hammams closer to the ‘tip’ of the Istanbul peninsula, in the central districts of the capital they were less dominant, having to share their workplaces with more attendants and servants from other provinces. By contrast, Map 4.8 shows that bathhouse workers from İstarova (411 in total, or 24 per cent of the entire workforce) had a stronger presence in the hammams closer to the ‘tip’ of the peninsula. As for Map 4.9, it indicates the locations of the much smaller migrant group from Çemişgezek in Eastern Anatolia (33 people, or 0.95 per cent of the total workforce) distributed across Greater Istanbul in nine different establishments (1, 18, 22, 66, 85, 86, 96, 127, 135), mostly as individuals working together with employees from elsewhere. However, in terms of percentages there existed a cluster of Çemişgezek tellâks and nâtırs in one single bathhouse – the Küçük Ağa Hamamı in Hocapaşa (85), with eighteen male attendants and servants. There are several such instances in which a migrant group appears to have ‘taken over’ a single hammam. Possibly the strategy was to use it as a first port of call and anchor site for new arrivals. Later on these men might have found employment in a different bathhouse, after having made use of connections with employees they had encountered in the ‘anchor’ hammam. A further migrant group deserves closer attention because it formed a rather conspicuous network. As Map 4.10 shows, migrants from Sivas, another resource-­ poor province, were widely distributed throughout Greater Istanbul, including the villages along the Bosporus, but they formed several clusters on the historical peninsula as well and slowly but surely made inroads into a specialty otherwise dominated by Rumelians. A substitution of Anatolian for Rumelian migrant workers was very much what the administration hoped to achieve through discriminatory measures – for instance, as mentioned in the ferman quoted above, prohibiting renewed employment of Albanians after they had returned home to remit their earnings. With the help of maps we can understand how this substitu-

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tion and hence the breaking-­up of Albanian migrant networks proceeded within the urban topography, gradually changing the demographics of the relevant neighbourhoods as well. Evidently, the relevant maps show only a single moment in time, and in order to draw solid conclusions, a sequence of maps based on additional registers of dates both earlier and later than 1752 is required. Further mapping endeavours based on the data contained in the İstanbul Hammamcı Esnafı ve Tellâklarının İsimlerini Havi Defter of AH 1147 (1735) and the registers currently under study by Cengiz Kırlı and Betül Başaran (see Ch. 11) should throw light on the precise characteristics of this transformation of the hammam labour force.33 At this point, it is only possible to set up the working hypothesis, based on the information compiled in the inspection register, that the city administration did more than just monitor the bathhouse workers. In selected hammams in key neighbourhoods such as the business districts of Mahmudpaşa and Tahtakale (compare Ch.11) officialdom strategically set out to convince managers operating bathhouses in strongly Rumelian-­dominated areas to draw their labour force from Eastern Anatolia instead.

Conclusion The series of GIS-­generated maps discussed here allow us to visualize the distribution of hammams as well as the location of the many workers attached to them within the urban fabric, and to draw conclusions about the spatial dimensions of the network formed, especially by the migrant workers. This chapter presents a first foray, and clearly many questions have been left unanswered. The limitations of space in an edited volume have obliged us to leave out several maps already prepared; and many more issues could have been addressed with the set of maps already in hand, to say nothing of the numerous additional maps that the current geospatial database would have allowed us to generate. On a general level, the maps serve as a most useful catalyst for questions and observations that would not have emerged, had the historical data merely been presented as tables: thus, for example, the distribution of native hammam workers in the peripheral areas of Greater Istanbul has only become clearly visible with the help of Maps 4.5 and 4.6. At the same time, the maps do have some significant shortcomings, and it has been necessary to return repeatedly to the data extracted from the register so as to avoid exaggerated or even totally false generalizations. Paradoxically the scale of this mapping endeavour may appear both too extensive and too limited at the same time. On the one hand, the

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temporal scale of a single month in a single year cannot convey more than a snapshot; the next step towards a fuller understanding of the composition and transformation of the hammam workforce should be to create a succession of maps from sources such as inspection registers, but also from encyclopaedic texts such as Ayvansarayi’s Garden of the Mosques. Although the latter work does not specify the numbers of tellâks and nâtırs, even the mere documentation about the existence or disappearance of bathhouses may raise new questions about distribution patterns, and the profitability of the hammam business. Admittedly, covering Greater Istanbul results in a very general picture. While a broadly based overview is doubtless necessary, it still blurs many details. A micro-­history of the baths of a smaller area or a single neighbourhood, comparable to Cem Behar’s study of the Kasap İlyas Mahallesi, would allow for an in-­depth investigation of its labour force and migrant networks, especially when brought together with any available demographic information and data about other business venues and employers, from coffeehouses to barber shops.34 At the same time, we need to take account of the limitations of our sources. The registers were meant to facilitate control of the bathhouse workers, so that the scribes did not collect information on the ­customers – not on the males, and certainly not the females. At first sight it may also be tempting to calculate the ratio of bathhouses and bathhouse attendants to the total population, but our data on the population of Istanbul between the years around 1500 and the early nineteenth century are no more than estimates, and contradictory to boot (see Ch. 7). Data on the inhabitants of individual sections of Istanbul and its suburbs are totally missing. As a result it is prudent to avoid mixing reasonably solid information with what, unfortunately, must remain pure speculation. Finally, a map ultimately remains wedded to a quantitative viewpoint. Maps can serve as a crucial stepping stone within a larger research project, but they say little about the qualitative effects that the presence of so many Rumelian hammam attendants and servants had on everyday life in Istanbul. But at least it is worth thinking of the languages other than Turkish that migrants brought to the city; the social relations that they formed among themselves, with their customers, and with neighbourhood residents; the competition for jobs that they exacerbated; and last but not least the tensions they introduced, as evidenced most dramatically in the Patrona Halil Revolt.

Mapping Istanbul’s Hammams of 1752 and their Employees 123

Table 4.1 List of hammams included in the İstanbul Hammâmları Defteri (Baş­ bakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Kamil Kepeci Müteferrik Defterleri 7437) together with neighbourhoods where the buildings were located. A neighbourhood name in brackets indicates that it is not mentioned in the defter, but could be identified on the basis of other sources. A superscript ’1’ indicates that its location is based on information included in The Garden of the Mosques. A superscript ’2’ shows that its location is approximate, based on internal evidence and the scribe’s physical movement as reconstructed. All other locations are based on Haskan’s survey.

  1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9  10  11  12  13  14  15  16  17  18  19  20  21  22  23  24  25  26  27  28  29  30  31

Name of Hammam Süleymaniye Hamamı Kapudan Paşa Hamamı Ayşe Hanım Hamamı Vefa Hamamı Pertev Paşa Hamamı Kovacılar Hamamı İbrahim Paşa Hamamı Ayasofya Hamamı İshak Paşa Hamamı Acı Hamamı Valide Sultan Hamamı

Neighbourhood Bab-­ı Ağa (Süleymaniye Mosque) Saray-­ı Atik (Süleymaniye Mosque) Süleymaniye Vefa Mosque Vefa Meydanı Mosque Sarraçhane Cebehane (Sultanahmed) (Sultanahmed) Atmeydanı (Çemberlitaş)

Sultaniye-­yi Cedid Hamamı2 İbrahim Paşa Hamamı Şengül Hamamı Hoca Paşa Hamamı Yıldız Hamamı Haseki Hamamı Sultan Hamamı Alaca Hamamı Mahmud Paşa Tahtü’l-­Kal’e Molla Gürani Hamamı Küçük Pazar Hamamı Hacı Kadın Hamamı Çinili Hamam Atpazarı Hamamı Azepler Hamamı Bostan Hamamı Haydar Paşa Hamamı Çukur Hamamı Ayvansaray Hamamı

Acımusluk (Sultanahmed) Bab-­ı Hazret Paşa (Sirkeci) Bağçe Kapusu Ketenciler Ketenciler Ketenciler (Mahmudpaşa) (Mahmudpaşa) Uzun Çarşı (Unkapanı) Küçük Pazar (Unkapanı) Zeyrek (Zeyrek) (Zeyrek) Cebe-­i Ali (Cibali) (Fatih) Fatih Mosque (Ayvansaray)

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Table 4.1  (continued)

 32  33  34  35  36  37  38  39  40  41  42  43  44  45  46  47  48  49  50  51  52  53  54  55  56  57  58  59  60  61  62  63  64  65  66  67  68

Name of Hammam Hançerli Hamam Arabacılar Hamamı Hamam-­ı Cedid Sultan Hamamı Tihtap Hamam Müfti Hamamı Sultan Selim Hamamı Mehmed Ağa Hamamı Zincirlikuyu Hamamı Edirne Kapusu Hamamı Sırt Hamamı Sultan Bayezid Veli Hamamı Vezneciler Hamamı Acemoğlan Hamamı Kadıasker Hamamı Kızlar Ağası Hamamı Kasavet Hamamı Aksaray Hamamı1 Horhor Hamamı Hamam-­ı Cedid Hanım Sofular Hamamı Kıztaşı Hamamı Büyük (?) Hamam1 Sarıgürz Hamamı Hokkabaz Hamamı2 Karaman Hamamı Ali Paşa Hamamı Keçeciler Hamamı Çaşnigir Hamamı1 Lütfi Paşa Hamamı Şah Huban Hamamı Kör Ali Ağa Hamamı Fareli Hamam Mehter Hamamı1 Safa Hamamı Tevekkül Hamamı Şifa Hamamı

Neighbourhood (Ayvansaray) (Ayvansaray) Salma Tomruk Salma Tomruk Kebir Kapan Kadıçeşme (Selimiye Mosque) Mehmed Ağa Mosque (Edirnekapı) (Bayezid) (Bayezid) (Bayezid) (Şehzadebaşı) Çukurçeşme Laleli Çeşme Aksaray (Aksaray) (Aksaray) Horhor (Aksaray) (Sofular Mosque) (Fatih) Sarıgürz (Fatih) (Fatih) Sultan Mosque (Fatih) (Fatih) Mesih Paşa

(Lütfi Paşa) Lütfi Paşa (Fatih) Mehterçeşmesi Molla Gürani Yusuf Paşa Çeşmesi Molla Gürani

Mapping Istanbul’s Hammams of 1752 and their Employees 125

Table 4.1  (continued)

 69  70  71  72  73  74  75  76  77  78  79  80  81  82  83  84  85  86  87  88  89  90  91  92  93  94  95  96  97  98  99 100 101 102 103 104 105

Name of Hammam Cerrahpaşa Hamamı Bostan Hamamı Çardaklı Hamam Yağlıkçı Hamamı Çavuş Hamamı Gece Hamamı Altunkaşık Hamamı Küçük Hamam İbrahim Paşa Koca Mustafa Paşa Hamamı (?) Hamamı Mimar Hamamı Macuncu Hamamı İnadiyye Hamamı Arpa Hamamı Topkapu Hamamı Küçük Ağa Hamamı Büyük Ağa Hamamı Akbıyık Hamamı Arasta Hamamı Şifa Hamamı Kuşluk Hamamı Çardaklı Hamam Alaca Hamamı Gedik Paşa Hamamı Nişancı Hamamı Zindan ? Hamamı Havuzlu Hamam Mirahor Hamamı Deniz Hamamı Ağa Hamamı Hisar Dibi Hamamı2 Hacı Evhad Hamamı Manoğlu Hamamı Arapkapu Hamamı1 Yedikule Hamamı İmam Hamamı

Neighbourhood (Cerrahpaşa) Haseki Avret Pazarı Davud Paşa Bekir Paşa Mosque Nur Ali Paşa Mosque Altımermer Altımermer Bab-­ı Silivri (Koca Mustafa Paşa) Koca Mustafa Paşa Yaylak (Çapa) (Topkapı) (Topkapı) (Topkapı) Hocapaşa Hocapaşa, Demir Kapu Sultan Ahmed Mosque Sultan Ahmed Mosque Naklibend Mehmed Paşa Yokuşu Küçük Ayasofya Kadırga Limanı (Gedikpaşa) Kumkapu Langa Nişancı Langa İskele-­yi Davud Paşa Samatya Ab-­ı Kum Yedikule Hacı Kadın (Yedikule) Yedikule (Yedikule) Tatlıkuyu

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Table 4.1  (continued) Name of Hammam 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140

Hariç-­i Yedikule Hamam2 Hariç-­i Yedikule Mevlevihane Hamamı2 Otakçılar Hamamı Hamam-­ı Muradiyye-­yi Cedid2 Kerpiç Hamamı1 Çömlekçiler Hamamı Türbe Hamamı Müfti Hamamı2 Yalı Hamamı Eskidere Hamamı2 Kırkık Hamamı Sütlüce Hamamı Piri Paşa Hamamı Osman Paşa Hamamı Çardaklı Hamam2 Küçük Hamam2 Kulaksız Hamam Büyük Piyale Paşa Hamamı ? Hamamı2 Paşa Hamamı2 Büyük Kasım Paşa Hamamı 2

Küçük Hamam

Tepebaşı Hamamı2 İplikçi Hamamı Dere Hamamı Yeşil Direkli Hamam Perşembe Hamamı Büyük Hamam1 Mahkeme Hamamı2 2

Narenci Hamamı Karaköy Hamamı Kapı İçi Hamamı

Kapudan Ağa Hamamı2 Paşa Hamamı2 Yalı Hamamı

Neighbourhood (Yedikule) (Yedikule) (Eyüp) (Eyüp) (Eyüp) (Eyüp) Eyüp Selhhane (Eyüp) Eyüp Eyüp Eyüp (Sütlüce) Hasköy Hasköy Hasköy Hasköy Kasımpaşa (Kasımpaşa) Kasımpaşa Kasımpaşa Kasımpaşa Tersane ardı (Kasımpaşa) Kasımpaşa Kasımpaşa Kasımpaşa Azepkapusu (Galata) Galata Alaca Mosque (Galata) Galata Kal’e Kapusu (Galata) (Karaköy) Galata Tophane Mosque (Tophane) (Tophane)

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Table 4.1  (continued)

141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177

Name of Hammam Ağa Hamamı Bahçeli Hamam Sormagir Hamamı Hendek Hamamı Ayaspaşa Hamamı Bostanbaşı Hamamı Sarraç Hamamı1 Çavuş Paşa Hamamı İbrahim Paşa Hamamı1 Fındıklı Hamam 2

Kemançı Hamamı Kılıç Ali Paşa Hamamı Köprübaşı Hamamı Cedid İbrahim Paşa Hamamı Ortaköy Hamamı Kuruçeşme Hamamı Bebek Hamamı Rumelihisarı Hamamı Yeniköy Hamamı Sarıyer Hamamı Kavak Hamamı Beykoz Hamamı Kanlıca Hamamı Anadoluhisarı Hamamı Kandilli Hamamı Çengelköy Hamamı İstavroz Hamamı Küçük Hamam Atik Valide Yeşil Direkli Hamam Eski Hamam Hacı Paşa Hamamı Ağa Hamamı Toptaşı Hamamı Çinili Hamam İnadiyye Hamamı Selamsız Hamam Kadıköy Hamamı

Neighbourhood Tophane (Tophane) Tophane Tophane Fındıklı (Tophane) Çavuş Paşa (Tophane) Tophane Arap İskelesi (Fındıklı) Beşiktaş Beşiktaş Beşiktaş Yahya Efendi (Ortaköy) (Kuruçeşme) (Bebek) (Rumelihisarı) (Yeniköy) (Sarıyer) (Anadolukavağı) (Beykoz) (Kanlıca) (Anadoluhisarı) (Kandilli) (Çengelköy) (Beylerbeyi) Kolluk, Üsküdar Üsküdar (Üsküdar) (Üsküdar) (Üsküdar) (Üsküdar) (Üsküdar) (Üsküdar) (Üsküdar) (Kadıköy)

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Map 4.1  Overall distribution of hammams in Greater Istanbul.

Map 4.2 Hammams on Istanbul’s historical peninsula (for legend, see Table 4.1)

Mapping Istanbul’s Hammams of 1752 and their Employees 129

Map 4.3  Historical peninsula, Eyüp and Galata, hammams by the number of employees

Map 4.4  Historical peninsula, Eyüp (partial) and Galata, hammams by employee age

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Map 4.5 Historical peninsula, Eyüp (partial) and Galata, hammams by employee origin (Hammam no. 143 has been omitted since the origin of its only employee is unknown)

Map 4.6  Number of employees originating from Üsküdar per hammam

Mapping Istanbul’s Hammams of 1752 and their Employees 131

Map 4.7  Number of employees originating from Avlonya per hammam

Map 4.8  Number of employees originating from İstarova per hammam

132

Map 4.9  Number of employees originating from Çemişgezek per hammam

Map 4.10  Number of employees originating from Sivas per hammam

Nina Ergin

Mapping Istanbul’s Hammams of 1752 and their Employees 133

Notes We would like to acknowledge Betül Gaye Dinç and Nilay Dursun, who assisted with preparatory work and data entry for making the maps.   1. Münir Aktepe, Patrona İsyanı (1730) (Istanbul: Edebiyat Fakültesi, 1958); Robert Olson, ‘The Esnaf and the Patrona Halil Rebellion in 1730: A Realignment in Ottoman Politics?’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 17 (1974), 329–44. For published primary sources, see Faik Reşit Unat (ed.), 1730 Patrona İhtilali Hakkında bir Eser: Abdi Tarihi (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1943); Bekir Sıtkı Baykal (transl. and ed.), Destari Salih Tarihi: Patrona Halil Ayaklanması Hakkında bir Kaynak (Ankara: Ankara Üniversitesi Dil ve Tarih-­Çoğrafya Fakültesi, 1962). Marinos Sariyannis, ‘Mob, Scamps and Rebels in Seventeenth-­Century Istanbul: Some Remarks on Ottoman Social Vocabulary’, International Journal of Turkish Studies 11 (2005), 1–15. On Ottoman attitudes toward Albanians as ‘the Other’, see Antonis Anastasopoulos, ‘Albanians in the Ottoman Balkans’, in The Ottoman Empire, the Balkans, the Greek Lands: Toward a Social and Economic History; Studies in Honor of John C. Alexander, eds Elias Kolovos, Phokion Kotzageorgis, Sophia Laiou and Marinos Sariyannis (Istanbul: The Isis Press, 2007), 37–47.   2. When generally referring to bathhouses of the 18th century, I have used the transcription hammam; by contrast when referring to specific buildings, I use modern spelling and write hamam. The term nâtır meant bathhouse servant in the 18th century and only later came to describe a female bathhouse attendant, as it does today. Tellâks would wash and scrub the bather, while the nâtır would help him undress and dress, hand him items, and perform similar services.   3. On ethnic solidarity among the Ottomans, see Metin Kunt, ‘Ethnic-­Regional (cins) Solidarity in the Seventeenth-­ Century Ottoman Establishment’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 5 (1974), 233–39.   4. For this decree in transcription, see ‘Dellak’, in İstanbul Ansiklopedisi, ed. Reşat Ekrem Koçu (Istanbul: İstanbul Ansiklopedisi ve Neşriyat Kollektif Şirketi, 1965), vol. 8, 4363; translation mine. I have not been able to locate the original document.  5. Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi [hereafter BOA], Kamil Kepeci Müteferrik Defterleri 7437. For studies based on similar inspection registers from the later 18th and early 19th century, see Cengiz Kırlı, ‘A Profile of the Labor Force in Early Nineteenth-­Century Istanbul’, International Labor and Working-­Class History 60 (2001), 125–40; Betül Başaran, ‘Remaking the Gate of Felicity: Policing, Social Control, and Migration to Istanbul at the End of the Eighteenth Century’ (Unpubl. Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2006); eadem, Between Crisis and Order: Selim III, Social Control and Policing in Istanbul at the End of the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2014); Cengiz Kırlı and Betül Başaran, ’18. Yüzyıl Sonlarında Osmanlı Esnafı’, in Osmanlı’dan Cumhuriyet’e Esnaf ve Ticaret, ed. Fatmagül Demirel (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2012), 7–20.   6. BOA, Kamil Kepeci Müteferrik Defterleri 7437, fol. 10–11. See Nina Ergin, ‘The Albanian Tellâk Connection: Labor Migration to the Hammams of Eighteenth-­Century Istanbul, Based on the 1752 İstanbul Hammâmları Defteri’, Turcica 43 ([2011] 2012), 229–54, 233 and 236–37.   7. See Tables II–V in Ergin, ‘Albanian Tellâk Connection’.   8. Ergin, ‘Albanian Tellâk Connection’.   9. See, for example, Caner Güney, Arzu Özsavaşçı, Lucienne Thys-­Şenocak and Rahmi Çelik, ‘The Utility of Geodetic Survey Techniques and Equipments in Architectural Heritage Documentation: An Assessment of Recent Approaches in Turkey: The Documentation Project of the Ottoman Fortresses of Seddülbahir and Kumkale’, in CIPA 2003 International Symposium Conference Proceedings, Antalya, Turkey, ed. Orhan Altan (Istanbul: Istanbul Technical University, ICOMOS, 2003). Available at http://cipa.icomos.org/

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10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

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fileadmin/template/doc/antalya/191.pdf. See also: Egawa Hikari, ‘The Use of GIS to Locate Abandoned Villages Listed in the Temettuat Registers of Balıkesir District, Anatolia’, in Islamic Area Studies with Geographical Information Systems, ed. Okabe Atsuyuki (London: Routledge, 2004), 122–38. Amy Singer, ‘Mapping Imarets’, in Feeding People, Feeding Power: Imarets in the Ottoman Empire, eds Nina Ergin, Christoph Neumann and Amy Singer (Istanbul: Eren, 2007), 43–55, 50. Singer has also been very active in promoting and encouraging the use of GIS by other Ottomanists; for example, she organized and chaired the following conference panels: ‘Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Ottoman Social and Economic History’, XI. International Congress of Social and Economic History of Turkey, Bilkent University, Ankara, 2008; ‘GIS (Geographical Information System) in Middle East Studies: Working Local and Going Global’, Annual MESA Meeting 2008 (Washington DC) and 2009 (Boston). Yamashita Kimiyo, ‘The Water Supplies and Public Fountains of Ottoman Istanbul’, in Islamic Area Studies with Geographical Information Systems, ed. Okabe Atsuyuki (London: Routledge, 2004), 162–83; idem, ‘GIS and the Study of Ottoman Water Supplies’, paper presented at the XI. International Congress of the Social and Economic History of Turkey, Bilkent University, Ankara, 2008. For a first, preliminary publication based on this project, see Kırlı and Başaran, ’18. Yüzyıl Sonlarında Osmanlı Esnafı’. Compare the contribution of these authors to the present volume. Mehmet Nermi Haskan, İstanbul Hamamları (Istanbul: TTOK, 1996). Furthermore, the following studies have helped to pinpoint locations not mentioned by Haskan: Bektaş Baran, ‘Galata Hamamları ve Kılıç Ali Paşa Hamamı Koruma Önerileri’ (unpubl. MA thesis, Yıldız Technical University, Istanbul, 2006); and a petition addressed to the Fatih Belediyesi İmar ve Şehircilik Müdürlüğüne, which lists, together with their locations, 211 small Ottoman mosques, medreses and other buildings that have not been included in the latest master plan for the protection of monuments, available at http://www.haberfatih. com/fatih-­halkina-­ve-­medeniyet-­sevdalilarina-­duyurudur/. Hafız Hüseyin al-­Ayvansarayî, The Garden of the Mosques: Hafiz Hüseyin Ayvansarayi’s Guide to the Muslim Monuments of Istanbul, translated and edited by Howard Crane (Leiden: Brill, 2000). Crane’s meticulous footnotes identify and locate not only the mosques, but whenever possible also all other buildings mentioned in the text. The bathhouses identified in the register as the Çaşnigir Hamamı in Alemdar (60) and the Kuşluk Hamamı on the Mehmedpaşa Yokuşu (90) were difficult to locate. Based on Haskan (248–50) as well as a reference in The Garden of the Mosques (312), the latter is identifiable as a bathhouse located in Eyüp, but that building appears completely out of sequence with the itinerary of the scribe along the Marmara shore. The former is also out of sequence, since, based on Crane’s annotations (91), it should have been in the vicinity of the no longer extant Çaşnigir Mosque in Alemdar in the Mahmudpaşa quarter. Nina Ergin, ‘Bathing Business in Istanbul: A Case Study of the Çemberlitaş Hamamı in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Bathing Culture of Anatolian Civilizations: Architecture, History and Imagination, ed. Nina Ergin (Louvain: Peeters, 2011), 142–67, 142. On the changing face of the Bosporus in the eighteenth century, see Tülay Artan, ‘Architecture as a Theater of Life: Profile of the Eighteenth-­Century Bosphorus’ (Unpubl. Ph.D. diss., Massachussetts Institute of Technology, 1988); Shirine Hamadeh, The City’s Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008). As stated above, the Çaşnigir Hamamı (60) falls outside this sequence. For a detailed study of Kasımpaşa in the light of historical maps and travel accounts, see Ayşe Pınar Gökpınar, ‘The Northern Shore of the Golden Horn in the Seventeenth Century:

Mapping Istanbul’s Hammams of 1752 and their Employees 135

The Development of the Urban Landscape and its Reflection in Social Life’ (unpubl. MA thesis, Koç University, Istanbul, 2009). 21. For a description of the attendants working in the hammams of the palace, see C.G. Fisher and A. Fisher, ‘Topkapı Sarayı in the Mid-­Seventeenth Century: Bobovi’s Description’, Archivum Ottomanicum 10 (1985), 34–35 and 51–52. 22. Ahmed Refik (Altınay), Onikinci Asr-­ı Hicride İstanbul Hayatı (1689–1785) (Istanbul: Enderun Kitabevi, 1988), 216; the translation is mine. I have not been able to locate the original; and Ahmed Refik’s work is out of copyright. 23. Kırlı, ‘Profile of the Labor Force’, 128. 24. The patron of the Tahtakale Hamamı was Mehmed II (r. 1444–46); Mahmud Paşa, grand vizier to the latter sultan from 1458 to 1468 and then again from 1472 to 1474 had founded the hammam named after him. Gedik Ahmed Paşa, grand vizier to Mehmed II from 1474 to 1477, had done the same thing; while the Çemberlitaş Hamamı was a charity of Nurbanu Sultan, wife of Selim II (r. 1566–74) and mother to Murad III (r. 1574–95). For a discussion of the historical and urban context to the fifteenth-­century baths, see Çiğdem Kafesçioğlu, Constantinopolis/Istanbul: Cultural Encounter, Imperial Vision, and the Construction of the Ottoman Capital (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009). 25. Haskan, İstanbul Hamamları, 56. 26. Ibid., 191–92. 27. The scribe’s decision to identify a number of tellâks and nâtırs by distinguishing marks other than facial hair renders 1 per cent unidentifiable in terms of age. 28. Marinos Sariyannis, ‘Prostitution in Ottoman Istanbul, Late Sixteenth–Early Eighteenth Century’, Turcica 40 (2008), 37–65, 61. 29. These include, for example, the Dâfi’ü’l-­Gumûm ve Râfi’ü’l-­Humûm of Deli Birader (d. 1535) [for a translation of this very popular pornographic text, see Selim Sırrı Kuru, ‘A Sixteenth-­Century Scholar: Deli Birader and his Dafi’ü’l-­gumûm ve rafi’ü’l-­humûm’ (Unpubl. Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2000)]; the Hammâmnâme-­i Dilsûz of Belîg˘ (d. 1758/9) [on hammâmnâmes, see Irvin Cemil Schick, ‘Representation of Gender and Sexuality in Ottoman and Turkish Erotic Literature’, The Turkish Studies Association Journal 28 (2004), 81–104, 90]; the Hubânnâme of Enderunlu Fâzıl Bey (d. 1810); and, maybe most notoriously, the Dellâknâme-­i Dilküşâ (1685) by Derviş İsmail; this text has been published in Murat Bardakçı, Osmanlı’da Seks: Sarayda Gece Dersleri (Istanbul: Gür Yayınları, 1992), 86–102, but the manuscript is in the personal collection of the author and not available for further study. 30. In 5 per cent of all cases, the place of origin was in the Arab provinces or even lay outside the Ottoman Empire altogether; or else it was not on record. See Ergin, ‘Albanian Tellâk Connection’, Table IV. 31. Başaran, ‘Remaking the Gate of Felicity’, 264–65. 32. Ergin, ‘Albanian Tellâk Connection’, 249–50. 33. İstanbul Belediye Kütüphanesi, Muallim Cevdet Tasnifi, İstanbul Hammamcı Esnafı ve Tellâklarının İsimlerini Havi Defter, AH 1147 / 1735 AD. I am indebted to Ahmet Yaşar for acquainting me with this source. 34. Cem Behar, A Neighborhood in Ottoman Istanbul: Fruit Vendors and Civil Servants in the Kasap İlyas Mahalle (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003).

Chapter 5

Surviving in Difficult Times

The Cotton and Silk Trades in Bursa around 1800

Suraiya Faroqhi

In this chapter we will mainly deal with the work of artisans who produced textiles with a significant share of cotton fibre, and with the business of merchants who made the relevant products available to a larger clientele. We will focus on Bursa in north-­ western Anatolia. Despite serious competition from Izmir, this city in the late 1700s was still an economic metropolis and in addition the ‘workshop’ of Istanbul.1 Raw cotton must have come from the Aegean seaboard, then as now a major producer. Moreover, since the 1600s, the countryside surrounding Bursa was a source of raw silk, a fact that rendered the city’s weavers more or less independent of the Iranian product, which had to travel a long way over more than uncertain roads. Raising silkworms and preparing silk for weaving was a laborious task, in which non-­guild labour, namely women and country people, had a significant role to play. Merchants sometimes ‘put out’ textile fibres for spinning and weaving but we have very little information on such activities.2 While depending on the work of ‘unorganized others’, where documentation is at issue, Bursa guildsmen definitely took centre stage. It is worth stressing that in this study we are concerned with the late 1700s and very early 1800s. Mehmet Genç has shown some twenty-­five years ago that the late eighteenth century was a difficult time for Ottoman handicraft producers; and as elsewhere time and conjuncture determined the life chances of artisans in Bursa. Civilian demand crumbled due to a

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disastrous war against Russia from 1768 to 1774, the confrontation with Russia over the annexation of the Crimea (1783), the war against the Habsburgs which only ended in 1790–91 with the peace of Ziştovi, the rebellion of the Mamluk duumvirs Ibrāhīm and Murād bey in Egypt during the 1780s and 1790s, and finally the occupation of this province by Napoleon (1798–1800). In order to finance the production of goods needed by the armies, the Ottoman government resorted to confiscations; while in the past only people involved with government business had been liable to this treatment, now any subject of the sultans whose wealth had attracted attention might lose his fortune, often under most distressing circumstances. In this situation capital formation, always a weak point in the Ottoman economy, must have become difficult if not impossible. After all the government set the prices (narh) and only allowed very low margins of profit: once dues, both official and unofficial, as well as shop rents had been paid, what was left over in many cases barely sufficed for subsistence. This statement remains true even though many artisans in the capital – and surely in Bursa as well – seem to have been quite adept at circumventing regulations.3 Even if most Ottomanist scholars are not willing to follow Timur Kuran’s claims that the Islamic law of inheritance was a central factor in preventing long-­living firms and capital accumulation, the documents from the Istanbul qadi registers recently published by Kuran and his collaborators do confirm that, in the 1600s, partnerships and capital pooling were indeed of minor importance.4 Following Mehmet Genç, most historians today would stress the role of the sultan’s administration in preventing capital accumulation. The bureaucratic apparatus displayed only a limited interest in promoting economic growth, which after all often was – and is – accompanied by some inflation. Apart from the benefits that sultans and viziers wished to secure from low prices, such as military campaigns at minimum cost, they were probably also suspicious of wealth in private hands that was governed by Islamic law and thus not directly controllable by sultanic fiat. Whatever the reasoning, in the war-­ridden late 1700s, the more prosperous producers in particular were so overwhelmed with demands that they frequently no longer retained the capital needed for the continuation of their enterprises. As a result branches of production that had previously been reasonably successful, such as the imitation of Indian printed cottons in the regions that today form northern Syria and south-­eastern Anatolia, lost most of their previous dynamism.5 Egyptian luxury crafts also declined, probably because there was no longer sufficient demand to sustain them. In addition, the rivalry between different magnates – and the struggles between partisans and opponents of the ‘New Order’ of Selim III – set the scene for vicious infighting and banditry, which made

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the roads insecure and further limited the already none too ample domestic market for Ottoman craft products.

Joseph von Hammer ‘Surveying’ Bursa As we will see, Bursa textiles seem to have been rather less affected than other manufactures. At least this is the impression we gain from an account by the Austrian scholar-­ diplomat Joseph von Hammer (or Hammer-­ Purgstall), who together with the Prussian chargé d’affaires Freiherr von Bielefeld and the British diplomat Mr Stratton visited Bursa in 1804.6 This trip, or at least the book that documented it, was intended for educational rather than commercial purposes; moreover the three diplomats wanted to escape from the constant worries generated by Napoleon’s domination, and they promised one another that for the duration of this two-­week excursion they would avoid even referring to current affairs. Thus apart from references to ancient, medieval and Ottoman history as well as classical mythology, Hammer devoted a great deal of space to the beauties of nature, including the springs and streams that watered Bursa, local mosques and dervish lodges and the palace of the sultans, about half a century before the latter was finally flattened by an earthquake. Economic matters apparently were not part of ‘politics’ and therefore not off limits; but these issues seemingly were not of major interest to Hammer, who did not even describe a walk through Bursa’s ancient and famous covered markets and business structures. However he commented that Bursa, which by his estimate contained fewer than a hundred thousand inhabitants produced 100,000 toffet of raw silk every year. Hammer claimed that this quantity was equivalent to almost 3,000 Austrian Centner while one toffet equalled 610 Drachma; presumably the latter unit corresponded to the dirhem.7 A toffet of raw silk was worth eighty-­eight to ninety guruş; so that the annual raw silk crop should have been worth 8.8 to 9 million Ottoman silver coins. Unfortunately the author did not say from whom he got this information; quite possibly it was a senior employee of the weighing scales for silk (mizan-­ı harir), where for centuries all silks had to be weighed and the relevant payments made before the goods could enter the market.8 As for the fabrics manufactured in Bursa, Hammer mentioned kutni, which was used for long vests and underclothes that he considered elegant (geschmackvoll). Customers had a choice between floral designs and the fine stripes that were so popular from the eighteenth century onwards. Remarkably, the author does not mention any addition of cotton to this fabric, although the name suggests its presence. According to French

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sources of the 1600s and 1700s, the cotonis was a kind of atlas whose outer side was silk and whose reverse was cotton; in this manner certain wealthy men were able to circumvent the prohibition for males to wear silk, which is enshrined in Islamic religious law.9 Kutni was a major export item, for according to the information Hammer relayed more than one hundred thousand pieces left the city every year. We can only regret that this author did not include information about the principal buyers as well. A thorough analysis of inheritance inventories covering fabrics current in Damascus around 1700 has very little to say about Bursa as a source of textiles, so presumably the Syrian metropolis was not a major market; we do not know whether Bursa producers had better luck in Aleppo.10 In addition, Hammer encountered a thin silk fabric, apparently not too expensive, known as Burundschik/bürümcük, that women used for shirts and vests; similarly to the bürümcük that was on the market as late as the 1970s, this fabric was semi-­transparent. The variety described by Hammer was decorated with alternating stripes of transparent and non-­transparent weave; and the author imagined that the harem beauties that he of course had never seen, would, when clothed in this material, appear as ‘zebras with gold and silver stripes’. As for the cushion covers that the city’s manufacturers also produced, Hammer stressed the resemblance to contemporary Turkish rugs.11 We may wonder whether the author really took a close look: for many cushion covers have no fully developed ‘frame’, as is normal for rugs and carpets, but only a row of lappets on the short edges of the oblong cushion cover. However we do find cushion covers that sport a complete frame surrounding the central field, situated between the latter and the border of lappets, so it is quite possible that Hammer had seen pieces that really looked like miniature rugs.12 According to this author, the ground of such compositions was always white, while we would probably call it cream-­ coloured or beige. The flowers and other elements making up the design featured ‘blue, green, red and yellow’; the normal arrangement was to have two colours, but multi-­coloured compositions were not unknown.13 Given the items surviving in today’s museums, most cushion covers were probably red-­and-­cream. A minor but not insignificant branch of industry was the manufacture of silk tassels that presumably ornamented curtains as well as articles of clothing (on braid manufacture in Damascus, see Ch. 3). Last but not least, Hammer noted the high quality of the waistcloths to be used in the public baths (peştemal) that for the most part were dyed blue or dark green. We may link their popularity to the many hot mineral baths (kaplıca) for which Bursa had been famous ever since the earliest Ottoman period.

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Remarkably the Austrian traveller did not say that textile production had recently suffered a major setback, as we would expect given the general conjuncture of the time: perhaps his sources did not bother to inform him, and he was not interested enough in economic issues to ask the right questions. Be that as it may, if there had been a great many jobless manufacturers sitting in the mosque courtyards and coffeehouses of the city, it does seem likely that Hammer would have recorded their presence. To check the observations in this account, we need to analyse Ottoman sources, preferably archival ones. For this purpose we will undertake a case study dealing with three men involved in the manufacture of, and trade in, cotton cloth and mixed silk–cotton fabrics, whose post-­ mortem inventories have fortunately come down to us. The earliest is dated to 1201/1786–87, and the two later ones to 1202/1787–88 and 1205/1790–91 respectively. They record the shop inventories of a beledici or weaver of what must have been cotton cloth, a bezzaz or trader in cotton cloth and a kutnici that specialized in the production of, and trade in, these silk–cotton fabrics.14 These three texts are of special interest since they reflect both moderate wealth and dire poverty; and an added attraction comes from the fact that the kutnici İstamat veled Kostanti was an Orthodox Christian, while the bezzaz el-­hac (Hacı) Salih b Ahmed and the beledici Halil b Halil were Muslims. We can thus document the input of Orthodox artisans, whose work in the silk sector has recently come in for some attention.15 Although three documents are not a sufficient basis for broad conclusions, the detailed investigation of individual stories – which is the only feasible option as the number of inventories is limited – will nevertheless give us some clues that will permit us to put Hammer’s claims into perspective. So many studies of Ottoman post-­mortem inventories now exist that we only need to recapitulate some of the salient features.16 Such documents, which in greater or lesser numbers survive in the registers put together by the scribes of the local qadis, were only obligatory if some of the heirs were minors and/or absent; presumably in case of a dispute, one side or the other would also have demanded an inventory. As the qadi and lower-­level officials involved in the process demanded fees, especially poor people must have turned to the court only if they could not avoid doing so; this situation explains why the poor – and women – are notoriously underrepresented. Yet the property of a woman gifted to her at her wedding or else inherited or even earned by work in the textile sector, might be indispensable for the family’s survival, as we will see. Moreover, as the register only records freehold property, the use of rented facilities by the deceased remains undocumented unless the rent

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was in arrears. This observation is important because many artisans and merchants rented real estate from local pious foundations. (To compare a similar situation in Damascus, see Ch. 3.) Partnerships also did not enter the inventories unless the surviving party had money owed to him/her, and the scribes explicitly stated that the claim derived from a former partnership. Even more inconveniently for us historians, the inventories normally say nothing about the deceased as a guild member; yet by the late 1700s a master craftsman not only needed to be part of the apposite professional organization, he also had to be the fortunate possessor of a formally conceded right to exercise his trade, usually in a specified place but sometimes at a site of his own choosing.17 This right, known as gedik, could be inherited (see Ch. 9); yet the scribes who compiled the inventories evidently did not view it as private property, and thus did not mention it.

In Dire Poverty When compiling the inventory of Halil b Halil, a life-­long resident of Hamza habbaz (Hamza the baker) town quarter, the scribe has only used the akçe, a much devalued coin which by this time was often merely a unit of accounting. However, so as to permit comparison with the inheritance of the moderately wealthy bezzaz el-­hac Salih b Ahmed, whose inventory we will analyse next, we will convert the value of the major items owned by Halil b Halil into guruş as well. As the rate of exchange, we will use one guruş=120 akçe, because this equation is documented in the inventory of el-­hac Salih b Ahmed, where 19,830 akçe are on record as being equivalent to 165.5 guruş.18 Halil b Halil, a weaver of beledi – a modest cloth usually made of cotton but occasionally including some silk – who left a wife, a mother and an adult daughter, was probably in his late thirties or early forties. He had been a poverty-­stricken artisan of the type that was probably common enough during the economic crisis of the late 1700s, and his entire estate was worth only 20,691 akçe (172.4 guruş). The court decided – as was common during this period – that it should be sold off in the public market (suk-­ı sultanî). Apparently the deceased had run his shop on capital borrowed from his wife Emine bint İbrahim, for the ‘delayed wedding gift’ (mihr-­i müeccel) that the deceased still owed to his widow amounted to 12,000 akçe (100 guruş). Thus even though a widow’s ‘regular’ share in an inheritance was minute, smaller even than that of a mother, this particular widow was entitled to more than half of the estate. Separating the textiles that Halil b Halil had manufactured for sale in his shop from the clothes that he wore is not an easy task; but we can

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make a supposition that a cloak of rough wool with leggings and a belt, that together sold for the modest sum of 150 akçe, were not intended for Halil’s customers; and the same applies to a pair of boots valued at 135 akçe. The weaver’s only personal possession of any value was a gun with silver inlay worth 2,855 akçe (23.7 guruş); we can only speculate how Halil b Halil might have acquired it and whether he had ever had any occasion to use it.19 In the shop, twenty-­five cushions or cushions cum covers were by far the most valuable item; they sold for 5,751 akçe, which means that a single piece cost 230 akçe or almost two guruş.20 These items were probably of moderate or perhaps even poor quality. Admittedly in the 1730s four beledi cushions owned by a well-­to-­do woman had cost 733 akçe, or 183 akçe apiece; but during the 1700s, devaluations were numerous, so that cushions of the type Halil b Halil stored in his shop would have been worth but a modest sum back in the reign of Mahmud I (r. 1730–54). Probably Halil, in his attempts to make ends meet, had been producing moderately priced items for which he hoped to find buyers in spite of the hard times of the later 1700s.21 There were also two sets of ready-­made shirts in his shop: one of these consignments cost a little less than 50 akçe per item, and the other set was even cheaper as a shirt in this pile went at less than 25 akçe. We do not know who had sewn up the fabric, perhaps the three women of Halil b Halil’s household. Unfortunately the inventory does not explicitly say what kind of raw material went into beledi manufacture, but as linen was not in ample supply in north-­western Anatolia we can assume that the iplik (yarn) recorded in the document was mostly cotton. The price of white yarn varied significantly, probably according to quality criteria about which our records tell us nothing: 5 kiyye/vukiyye and 20 dirhem (or 5.5 vukiyye) were worth 1,212 akçe (10.1 guruş), which means that a vukiyye (1.28 kg) cost 220.3 akçe (1.8 guruş). But at the same time another lot amounting to more than 42 vukiyye went for 1,125 akçe (9.3 guruş) or slightly under 26 akçe (0.2 guruş) per unit; thus there must have been a great difference in quality. For obvious reasons, Halil b Halil had mainly acquired the cheaper variety. Apparently for the design of beledi cushion covers the weaver needed some coloured yarn: half a vukiyye of red (kırmızı) yarn sold for 192 akçe, which meant that the price of a vukiyye should have been 384 akçe (3.2 guruş). Thus red yarn, presumably of the beautiful and durable variety that Austrian and French manufacturers of the time were anxious to imitate, was a high-­cost item, used sparingly by our manufacturer.22 Prosperous customers seem to have favoured waistcloths for the bath decorated with red (kırmızı) yarn; two such items sold for 4.5 guruş, a respectable sum given the poverty of

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Halil’s inventory.23 There was also a cheaper kind of coloured yarn available, which the inventory called boyalı (dyed); perhaps for the expensive variety manufacturers used an insect-­based dye, while only vegetable matter went into the manufacture of boyalı yarn. Unfortunately we have no way of knowing which colours made up the boyalı batch; but as red textiles were favourites with Ottoman customers, the yarn at issue may also have been red. Ottoman artisans – and pre-­industrial craftspeople in general – rarely had very costly implements in their shops, and Halil b Halil was no exception to this rule (to compare a similar situation in Damascus, see Ch. 3).24 Apparently this beledi manufacturer owned only a single loom in addition to two mechanical wheels (çıkrık), and we do not know whether the female members of the household used them for spinning or whether they served some other purpose. There were also several implements called tefe, which could have been reeds for use on a handloom, but also and less probably, hanks of spun silk or – as an even more remote ­possibility – a silk-­winding machine. The inventory also contained a rather valuable item whose name I have not been able to decipher along with a weaver’s reed. Perhaps the scribe had recorded a dialectal form of terazu or weighing scales. As the latter implement and its weights were of metal, they were probably not cheap; and since a weaver would often need to weigh the yarn that he purchased, it would have made sense for him to own such an item. We can assume that Halil b Halil rented his shop, perhaps from a pious foundation, as among his property there is no record of any kind of real estate. Nor is there any evidence of domestic goods including pots and pans, bedding or the cushions that this weaver produced for his customers and that formed an indispensable part of any domestic interior. As the space inhabited by this beledici features in the inventory as an oda (room), perhaps he was one of those poor people who lived and worked in the same place, as was common in late eighteenth-­century Istanbul.25 In that case the family perhaps lived in the house of one of his relatives, most likely the mother or wife who in this case also must have owned the wherewithal to make a home. The relatively high ‘delayed wedding gift’ may indicate that Emine bint İbrahim was of a status higher than her spouse and/or that she contributed significantly to the survival of the family. It may well have been due to her resources that Halil b Halil, in spite of his poverty at the time of his death, was not indebted to anyone except his wife. But admittedly there is no documentary evidence for these hypotheses.

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A Textile Merchant of Moderate Wealth Even though times were hard, some people still managed to prosper, and the inventory of el-­hac Salih b Ahmed, who had been a resident of Debbağlar (the tanners’) town quarter, contains some indications as to how an artisan might better himself. Before the payment of debts, the decedent’s total fortune was 745,156 akçe (6,209.6 guruş); and once again, the court intended to have his possessions sold off in the public market and distribute the money to the different claimants. However some items did not find any buyers, and ultimately the court scribes had to distribute both money and a significant number of goods, whose nature remains unspecified. Taken together, the widow and the two sons of the deceased received 539,760 akçe (4,498 guruş) and some small change. In the case of el-­hac Salih b Ahmed there was a clear division between personal property and the items belonging in the shop. The first section of the inventory concerned personal possessions, being a list of the deceased’s clothing and his mule – one of the more valuable items in the whole inventory at 6,150 akçe (51.2 guruş). The scribe took the trouble to record the sub-­total of this section as 19, 830 akçe (165.5 guruş); thus the merchant’s clothing was worth slightly over 100 guruş. There followed a list of the items found in the shop of the deceased: apart from 284 guruş in cash, the latter featured a kilim, a mattress on which the seller and his customers might sit, scissors, a measuring rod and a box where the shop-­owner probably kept his money. As the inventory did not mention any looms or other implements needed by a weaver, we can say that el-­hac Salih was a merchant pure and simple, without any connection to manufacturing. Once again, there was no evidence of real property or household goods and we can only guess what domestic arrangements might have caused this omission. Perhaps the deceased had transferred his real estate long before the sickness leading to his death, either directly or through a pious foundation benefiting his descendants. He may also have wanted to secure as much ready cash as possible, and therefore sold his real estate within the family, presumably to his wife. As Hacı Salih’s stock in trade, the estate inventory listed sixty-­nine pieces or rolls of cloth, worth 1,746 guruş; including the cash and the 10 guruş that was the value of the items used in the shop, this section of the deceased’s inventory was worth 2,040 guruş. As for the third section it only contained the 113 debtors of Hacı Salih; the outstanding sum amounted to 4,014 guruş and some small change, or more than half of the inheritance. Unfortunately the estate inventory does not tell us

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whether all these debtors finally paid up or whether the heirs, to their presumably great frustration, were saddled with a number of bad debts.

Sources of – albeit Modest – Wealth With a good deal of care the scribes then proceeded to record the debts owed by the deceased, which given the size of the inheritance, were manageable (1,721 guruş, including the various payments that fell due when the estate was recorded and distributed among the heirs). Apart from burial expenses and an unspecified loan from a certain Hanife Hatun, these debts were all clearly commercial in origin: Seyyid Halil Ağa had delivered goods from Aleppo, perhaps the Halep alacası (23.5 rolls, worth 176 guruş) that heads the list of fabrics found in the shop of the deceased; as the estate owed Seyyid Halil Ağa 600 guruş he was the most important creditor. This trader may also have delivered a few other items from his hometown, including belts and lengths of fabric to be used as aprons, waistcloths or bath towels. Ottoman merchants often only paid for deliveries after they had sold at least part of the goods received, and el-­hac Salih may well have conformed to this custom. Molla Ahmed, whose hometown is not recorded and who therefore may have been a local man, demanded payment for what was probably a significant quantity of lining fabric. In addition, el-­hac Salih had two Christian creditors, who also were probably from Bursa: Dimitri had delivered the popular cotton textile known as bogasi, also in use for lining caftans. As Dimitri proved his claim to almost 500 guruş, and as bogasi was fairly cheap, the amount of cloth delivered must once again have been substantial. Another man, named Şalvaroğlu, had supplied a textile called mücessem yemeni.26 If Bursa usage conformed to that on record for other places, this latter item should have been a cheap cotton cloth which however was, as the qualification mücessem would seem to indicate, rather more solid than other varieties of yemeni on the market at the time. The inventory of el-­hac Salih’s shop shows that the deceased had received fabrics from a variety of mostly Anatolian towns and regions; as yet English factory-­made cottons were quite unknown to Bursa consumers. The Denizli region had been a significant source of supply in the 1500s and 1600s, and this was true in the 1780s as well. For not only the city proper but also tiny towns in the vicinity delivered fabrics to el-­hac Salih’s shop; the inventory recorded Karacasu and Ağras/Ağrus/Atabay.27 There were fine cottons suitable for women’s face veils (yaşmak) and even bürümcük, which normally would have been of silk and not cotton: local masters had either produced small quantities of cheap silk, or else

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they had made a variety of cotton delicate enough to compete with silk fabrics. But Denizli also provided cheap and rough yemenis in addition to something described only as çeyrek top or ‘quarter roll’. This textile, on which I have not found any further information, came in large and small sizes. In addition, el-­hac Salih stocked yet a further type of cheap white cloth: broadly speaking, Denizli seems to have been a purveyor of cottons suitable for the customer with little money to spend. On the other hand the Aegean town of Manisa, which had a long-­standing reputation as a producer of cottons, in the inventory of our merchant appeared only as a source of alaca, a fabric that could have been either a mixture of fibres or else decorated with stripes.28 Apart from the Aegean region, el-­hac Salih maintained close contacts with the little town of Bor, in the Central Anatolian province of Niğde. The varieties on record did not differ very much from those which el-­hac Salih received from Denizli: one of the articles – to be read either as çıtari or cebin – was either a simple cotton cloth or else a mosquito net.29 This article was quite cheap, as eight rolls were worth only 5 guruş. Bor also produced lining fabric and the ubiquitous bogasi. For the somewhat wealthier customer, el-­ hac Salih once again stocked fabrics described as kırmızı: the price of a roll varied between 1.25 and 15 guruş: if the scribes had not made any mistakes and my reading is correct, this price difference was enormous, perhaps because of the different quantities of the expensive red yarn that had gone into the manufacture of the textiles in question. Hacı Salih also stocked some cushion covers from Bor that cost slightly more than a guruş per piece, and thus were in the same price range as the beledi items that Halil b Halil had manufactured locally. Throughout, the shop of el-­hac Salih seems to have contained mostly white – or perhaps we should say un-­dyed – cloth, in addition to a few red, blue and purple (maî, mor) items. Our information is even poorer when it comes to designs: certain fabrics are called ‘flowered’ (çiçekli) but since so many Ottoman textiles, if not plain, were ornamented with floral designs this description does not tell us very much. Being merely a ‘still’ taken shortly after Hacı Salih’s death, the inventory does not indicate how the deceased had conducted his business affairs – a frustrating experience for today’s historian. As both his surviving sons were still minors, they cannot have been of much help to their father when it came to dealing with traders from distant localities, or travelling to Denizli, Manisa, Bor and Aleppo. We have no way of knowing whether el-­hac Salih had ever visited these towns; on the nearby Aegean region, presumably enough information was available in Bursa to make personal oversight seem less necessary. Aleppo, on the other hand, was far away. In this context it is worth remembering that Hacı Salih had completed

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the pilgrimage to Mecca; and while Aleppo was not located on the route that pilgrims normally took, it was close enough to the places where the pilgrimage caravan usually stopped that we may surmise that the Bursa merchant had made a detour and stopover in Aleppo, probably on his way home.30 Even more puzzling is el-­hac Salih’s choice of Bor as a place to buy cotton cloth: the prices on record in the inventory are no different from those recorded for the Denizli region – and the way to Istanbul was long, with maritime transport not an option. We can only surmise that producers in Bor, where perhaps a good deal of weaving went on in private homes, offered attractive prices so that Hacı Salih made a bigger profit when he sold Bor cottons at the standard rates prevailing in the market of Bursa. Or maybe the merchant had personal ties to this town, which induced him to take a special interest in its textiles. Important though commerce was in the composition of el-­hac Salih’s fortune, most of his capital was tied up in moneylending. He had lent out his 4,014 guruş cum small change to 113 borrowers, most of them individuals. But in one case a village had borrowed as a collective, an arrangement that already by the early 1600s was common enough in the area covered by modern Greece.31 The borrowers were mainly Muslims, but the group included at least nine Christians or Jews; perhaps in reality there had been one or two more, because the inventory contains some vague references to ‘nameless’ people, for instance a ‘tailor from Istanbul’, ‘the daughter of the sick [man]’, or ‘the well-­digger of [the village of] Kestel’. Evidently the deceased as well as his friends and neighbours knew who these people were, even though we do not. When all is said and done, in spite of Hacı Salih’s role in interregional trade, his milieu was probably a face-­to-­face society in which the given name – or in certain instances the mention of a family name – by itself sufficed to identify a person. As a result the scribes sometimes might record a combination of personal and family names, but did not view this precision as indispensable. Although el-­hac Salih was solidly based in Bursa, quite a few of his debtors were villagers; and he tended to concentrate his loans in a few settlements close to the city, especially Kestel where fifteen men owed him money. Some of these villagers had borrowed rather large amounts, Karagözoğlu Hüseyin from Kestel holding the record with a debt of 804 guruş; furthermore some of Hüseyin’s neighbours owed between two and three hundred each. Possibly these men were of enough substance to be creditworthy and had undertaken to pay the taxes of their village en bloc, a loan which the ‘ordinary’ peasants would have needed to pay back in due course. As Kestel was probably not too populous, fifteen families with major debts to a single merchant must have made Hacı Salih a power in the land; and as we also find other moneylenders focusing on specific

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villages, people in this profession may well have pursued a conscious strategy of establishing rural bases of power and patronage.32 A few debtors lived in the villages of Kazıklı and Karaman; while in Anatolia there are many settlements bearing the latter name, in this instance the most likely candidate is a place in the immediate vicinity of Bursa, on record already in the tax register of 937/1530.33 Five cases concerned the village/small town of Kite, where the local imam had also borrowed from Hacı Salih. As the inventory does not contain any real estate, we cannot tell whether our merchant had ever foreclosed on houses and gardens belonging to debtors unable to pay on time.34 In addition many artisans, presumably for the most part resident in Bursa, were among the debtors of Hacı Salih (compare Ch. 8). These people all owed small sums, very often less than 10 guruş. Salamon was a Jewish tailor who needed to pay 8 guruş, while one of his Orthodox colleagues was in debt to the tune of 7 guruş and 2 pare. Yet another needed to hand over 11 guruş to the estate of our cotton trader. A fourth tailor was the unnamed inhabitant of Istanbul that we have already encountered, who owed 29 guruş – perhaps a commercial debt – while Agob the Armenian was to pay a mere 3 guruş. Apart from the man from Istanbul, whose religion remains unknown, the tailors were all non-­Muslims, an interesting result given the relative rarity of Christians and Jews among the inhabitants of Bursa in general and the debtors of the deceased in particular. Outside of the textile trades, we find six shoemakers also owing small sums; presumably tailors and shoemakers appeared with relative frequency because they were mostly rather poor. While it is probable that these modest artisans had needed credit to tide them over a difficult period, we also encounter at least one debtor – el-­hac Molla, personal name unknown – who was probably a merchant colleague of Hacı Salih, dealt in woollen cloth (çuhacı) and owed 53 guruş to the estate of the deceased. It is also possible that the silk mercer (kazzaz) Ali Ağa had incurred his debt of 17 guruş and 5 pare because he had received goods that he had not yet paid for when el-­hac Salih died. Women borrowed money but rarely; and if they did, they were not always clearly identifiable. At least we do know that these females were all Muslims: one of them, Zülfüsiyah Usta, was probably a former African slave. In addition there was a second woman with the title usta but with the prosaic given name of Zeyneb. We are left to guess whether these two had once served in an elite harem where the title of usta was in use, or alternatively whether they were mistresses of some craft.35 The artisans of Bursa seem to have borrowed petty sums that they needed to spend on immediate necessities, while a small number of presumably creditworthy individuals, mainly but not exclusively from Kestel,

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borrowed several hundreds of guruş that they may have hoped to invest. A specific variety of investment involved paying the taxes of fellow villagers and in addition to some sort of financial indemnity, acquiring the social capital that resulted from being a ‘benefactor of the community’. Some of these relatively rich men doubtless profited from the distribution of taxes, which the authorities assessed en bloc, among the inhabitants of a given village (tevzi). Others may have purchased crops before they had been harvested (selem) thus securing a supply of grain or even silk at a conveniently low price. Unfortunately our inventory has nothing to say about these transactions.

A Christian Artisan Cotton went not only into beledi and yemeni, but also into more valuable textiles. As we have seen, İstamat veled Kostanti had been a manufacturer of a cotton–silk mixture known as kutni, who had resided in the town quarter of Demirkapı (‘the iron gate’). Upon his death he left a widow Panayotça, an adult son Petro and three minor children. Differently from Halil b Halil and Hacı Salih, in this case the register does not indicate that the heirs or scribes made any attempt to sell off the estate. On the contrary, an official estimate was prepared, involving a small fee for the person(s) (muhammin) charged with this task. Presumably Panayotça and Petro then divided up the inheritance according to the prices recorded in the inventory. Albeit in a modest way, İstamat had been a man of substance; after subtraction of the dues payable to Bursa officialdom, the items in his house and shop were worth 133,620 akçe (1,113.5 guruş), the debts due to his estate amounting to 137,649 akçe (1,147 guruş), and his real property to 58,800 akçe (490 guruş). Interestingly the register did not mention any debts; at some point in his career the deceased must have purchased goods on credit, but presumably all creditors had been paid off before the family had the inheritance estimated. For once, we have detailed information about real estate values: İstamat had owned a house in Demirkapı town quarter – 39,600 akçe (330 guruş); a one-­third share in a second house located nearby – 12,000 akçe (100 guruş); a garden/vineyard – 4,800 akçe (40 guruş); and a piece of woodland – 2,400 akçe (20 guruş). However the scribes did not much bother their heads with the items in İstamat’s home, apart from his garments that they did list individually. Otherwise, all domestic items were lumped together under the heading of ‘copperware’ worth 20 guruş, and various domestic items (hırdavat-­ı menzil ve eşya) worth no more than 10 guruş. Perhaps the more valuable

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items such as bedding, curtains and the like belonged to İstamat’s widow Panayotça, and therefore did not enter the inventory. In his cash box, our kutnici kept a limited amount of money, but in addition to 1,680 akçe (14 guruş) in silver he did possess four Istanbul gold pieces and three others from Cairo – as a sign of the times, they all were underweight. The inventory of İstamat’s shop rather incongruously contained a prayer rug (seccade) in addition to a mattress where the owner of the shop could sit down with his customers. The same document recorded an interesting assortment of fibres that went into the production of the kutni that was İstamat’s specialty. Customers could choose between kutni with a design composed of ‘staves’ or perhaps stripes (çubuklu) and another with a rounded design that the scribes called ‘eyes’ (göz), to say nothing of the ubiquitous floral motifs. In addition our kutnici stocked an expensive fabric with a floral decoration (çiçekli) whose name unfortunately I have not been able to read (value: 8,800 akçe or 73 guruş per roll). İstamat kept silk of different qualities and also cotton yarn, but more remarkable was a stock of linen thread which was much more expensive than his cotton. Apparently the kutnici used only vegetable dyes; and there is no reference to any kırmızı textiles. If we are willing to speculate a bit, this inventory allows us to reconstruct some of the business practices of the deceased manufacturer. In all probability İstamat supervised people who wove the kutni he sold in his shop. As the latter contained no looms, it is not likely that any weavers worked in this locale. Perhaps the master kutnici, aided by four Christians named Dimitri, Kostanti, a second Kostanti, and Apostol, who all bore the title of kalfa, handed out raw materials and in time collected the finished product; but this is no more than a hypothesis, for the inventory only tells us that the four men held significant quantities of kutni, which in every single case were worth several thousands of akçe. If our assumption is at all realistic, İstamat had put out raw materials to be worked up; and some of these jobs had not been finished at the time of his death. Thus the dyer Hacı Mehmed still held four twists of silk worth 11,520 akçe (96 guruş). In addition the inventory recorded that a certain Bekâr Mehmed held firmly twisted Bursa silk (meşdud) belonging to the deceased, which seemingly had not as yet been attached to a loom. Perhaps this man and/or his wife had been engaged in the preliminary steps of reeling and twisting. All these people must have received payment for their work; but as they do not appear as creditors in the estate inventory, we may suppose that at the time of İstamat’s death they had not yet begun the jobs they probably had contracted for. But it is also possible that earlier on these men had received advances that now, after the death of İstamat, counted as payment for the work

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they had been expected to do. Admittedly it is difficult to imagine the exact proceedings by which, in this eventuality, the accounts would be finally closed. In the case of Bekâr Mehmed Ağa we possess a minor clue, because a man of this name appears among the debtors, owing the substantial sum of 60 guruş. Thus İstamat may have lent money to an impecunious silk worker, who then needed to pay off his debt through labour. But this explanation is predicated on the assumption that there was only one Bekâr Mehmed in İstamat’s social circle; and we cannot be sure that this was the case. In his lifetime, our kutnici had also lent out money although his investment of 1,147 guruş paled next to the 4,014 guruş (cum small change) on record in the inventory of Hacı Salih. Among İstamat’s thity-­nine debtors, the register does not mention any villagers, although possibly some of the people whose residence is not on record lived in the countryside near Bursa. This observation strengthens the hypothesis that Hacı Salih’s moneylending was in some way connected to taxation and the building of a local power base, as a Muslim probably had important advantages in this field. On the other hand eighteen borrowers on İstamat’s list were on record as living in Bursa. It is impossible to determine the others’ places of residence: there must have been a few out-­of-­towners, for the document refers to a man from Izmir, two from Kütahya and one from Karahisar, probably identical to today’s Afyon. Unfortunately we do not know whether these men were in fact new arrivals or if they had settled in Bursa many years previously, so it would be hazardous to claim that İstamat was involved even in regional, let alone interregional trade. Most of İstamat’s debtors owed relatively small sums, 20 guruş or less; however, there were exceptions. and one such case was İbrahim, a resident of Bursa who was in all likelihood a cleaner of cotton (hallac) and who had contracted a debt of 185 guruş. Even larger was the obligation of Kir Yani from Kütahya, and in this case the court saw a document (temessük) which proved the claim of İstamat’s estate. Artisans were quite prominently represented among the debtors: apart from the cotton cleaner already mentioned, the inventory listed fifteen craftsmen. Among others the document contained the names of two furriers (kürkcü) or makers/users of shovels (kürekci) – the two words are spelled alike – a quilt-­maker, a kutni manufacturer who thus borrowed from a fellow guildsman, two dyers, a shoemaker and a tailor. There were no women among the debtors. Nineteen of İstrati’s debtors were Muslims and one was a Jew, confirming other observations made of the Ottoman world that adherents of different religions may not have socialized very much, but they were quite ready to do business with one another.

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Conclusion Two swallows do not make a summer, yet I would suggest that in eighteenth-­ century Bursa, moneylending was the royal road even to modest wealth, to say nothing of ‘real’ riches. This state of affairs was due to the difficulties that private persons encountered if they tried to accumulate capital in the Ottoman central lands, especially in the calamitous late 1700s. When cash was at a premium, lending out money could not only make the lender rich but also might allow him to establish a position of at least informal power. In Bursa during the 1730s, Hacı Abdullah, the campaign architect or builder, and Mustafa Çelebi, the ex-­artisan, by extensive moneylending had managed to amass gardens, vineyards and cash.36 To date, the only exception to this preference for moneylending that I have come across concerns a rich Bursa tanner named Hacı İbrahim (died before January 1790). Hacı İbrahim’s estate by far surpassed the modest prosperity of Hacı Salih and İstamat, as it was worth 12,843 guruş and 54 akçe. Yet remarkably this man had only lent out 19–22 per cent of his fortune.37 Given the profits accessible to lenders, it is not surprising that both Hacı Salih and İstamat had substantial shares of their estates tied up in loans: before payment of the debts owed by the deceased, about two-­ thirds of Hacı Salih’s estate had been lent out; and once debts had been subtracted, evidently the value of the estate decreased and the percentage share of the cotton trader’s loans increased yet further. At least to our knowledge, İstamat did not leave any debts, but about 40 per cent of the inheritance accruing to his family was in the hands of a multitude of often small borrowers. As yet we cannot tell what social mechanisms ensured that this kind of investment was not an enormous risk. For only if the lender was reasonably sure that at worst only a few debtors would default, did it make sense to tie up scarce resources in this fashion. This concern would have been especially important in a large city such as Bursa, where quite a few people must have been temporary residents that could pack up and go in very short order. Moreover in the case of İstamat, we need to pay particular attention to the problem of recovering debts: for he had plenty of Muslim debtors, and being non-­Muslims his family could not testify in court against a Muslim that refused to pay. Yet İstamat seems to have regarded the risk as tolerable. Perhaps the guilds informally guaranteed that their members would pay up; or perhaps the decedent had made arrangements with some Muslim business partner or other that if necessary, this man would testify in court and thus protect the interests of the widow and her children. But whatever strategy İstamat and Hacı Salih

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adopted, these arrangements could not have worked unless there was a degree of trust in the Bursa business district, even between adherents of different religions. That said, it would seem that Hacı Salih preferred Muslim debtors and İstamat Christians, or else people in need of money were likely to seek help from a fellow believer. As this analysis has shown, we are still far from understanding how merchants and manufacturers in the Bursa cotton trades conducted their businesses. To some extent, they may have relied on networks provided by membership in a religious community or, in the case of Hacı Salih, on connections established when he travelled to Mecca. We do not know whether it was normal to lend money and then expect the borrowers to work off their debts. It is also intriguing to note that the four Christians who held İstamat’s fabrics were called kalfa, a title given to people in a variety of positions including journeymen. None of the many other people mentioned in the inventory bore this title. We may speculate that perhaps the two Kostantis, Dimitri and Apostol had been journeymen of the deceased; if so, we may wonder what happened to them after their master’s death, as the gedik – if any – surely went to Petro, İstamat’s eldest son. Presumably in the adverse conjuncture of the late eighteenth century, these men would have found it difficult to establish workshops of their own, and some of them might well have contracted debts with moneylenders – in other words, the Hacı Salihs and İstamats of the late 1790s and 1800s. How do these questions connect with the observations which, some fifteen to twenty years later, Joseph von Hammer was to record in his travelogue? Certain continuities strike the eye: in spite of long-­term economic depression, in 1804 the masters of Bursa were still turning out large quantities of cushion covers and kutni, flowered or striped according to the preferences of the customers. Raw silk and cotton were available, which means that trade in the Aegean area continued, even though the uncertainties of travel must have limited exchange. The city’s weavers were still producing aprons and loincloths of good quality cotton; and the products of Bursa found buyers outside of the city. Apparently no English cottons as yet competed with the local product, and while Bursa’s raw silk probably went to Ottoman manufacturing sites such as Chios, Hammer saw no evidence of raw silk being exported to Europe – in any case by 1804, wartime conditions would have largely prevented this type of trade. Perhaps the credit networks that form such a major part of the present study persisted; and in spite of the high interest undoubtedly involved, their existence allowed at least a significant proportion of Bursa textile manufacturers to survive. As a result, the incorporation of the city’s textile crafts into the European-­dominated world market took place quite late,

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and not before the 1830s.38 It was only in this latter period that Bursa silk producers finally became subservient to the factories of Lyon.

Notes  1. There is an ample bibliography on this city, of which I will cite only a few examples: Halil İnalcık, ‘Bursa and the Commerce of the Levant’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 3 (1960), 131–47; idem, ‘Capital Formation in the Ottoman Empire’, The Journal of Economic History XXIX(1) (1969), 97–140; Murat Çizakça, ‘Price History and the Bursa Silk Industry: A Study in Ottoman Industrial Decline, 1550–1650’, in The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy, ed. Huri Islamoğlu-­Inan (Cambridge and Paris: Cambridge University Press and Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, reprint, 1987), 247–61; Haim Gerber, Economy and Society in an Ottoman City: Bursa, 1600–1700 (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University, 1988); Hüseyin Özdeğer, 1463–1640 Yılları Bursa Şehri Tereke Defterleri (Istanbul: İstanbul Üniversitesi İktisat Fakültesi, 1988); Murat Çizakça, ‘Cash Waqfs of Bursa, 1555–1823’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 38(3) (1995), 313–54; Osman Çetin, Sicillere göre Bursa’da İhtida Hareketleri ve Sosyal Sonuçları (1472–1909) (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1999); Özer Ergenç, XVI. Yüzyılın Sonlarında Bursa (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2006); Arif Bilgin, Osmanlı Taşrasında bir Maliye Kurumu: Bursa Hassa Harç Eminliği (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2006); Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘At the Ottoman Empire’s Industrious Core: The Story of Bursa’, in The City in the Islamic World, eds Renata Holod, Salma Jayyusi, Attilio Petruccioli and André Raymond, 2 vols (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2008), vol. 1, 357–81.  2. İnalcık, ‘Capital Formation’, 118.  3. Eunjeong Yi, Guild Dynamics in Seventeenth-­Century Istanbul: Fluidity and Leverage (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2004).   4. Timur Kuran (ed.), Mahkeme Kayıtları Işığında 17. Yüzyıl İstanbul’unda Sosyo-­Ekonomik Yaşam [Social and Economic Life in Seventeenth-­Century Istanbul: In the Light of Court Records], 8 vols (Istanbul: İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2010–11); idem, The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East (Oxford, Princeton, 2011), 65, Table 4.1.   5. Katsumi Fukasawa, Toilerie et commerce du Levant, d’Alep à Marseille (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1987).  6. Joseph von Hammer, Umblick auf einer Reise von Constantinopel nach Brussa und dem Olympos und von da zurück über Nicäa und Nicomedien (Pest [today: Budapest]: Adolf Hartleben, 1818), VII–VIII, 69–70. Verbatim Umblick means ‘looking around’, and given the content of the book which in its appendix contains Ottoman literary sources in translation, ‘survey’ seems a reasonable equivalent.   7. An Austrian Centner in the early 1800s was equivalent to 56 kg (=100 local Pfund); this equivalency became official in 1811 (both in Austria and Bavaria). Hammer would thus have referred to almost 168 tons of silk. My profound gratitude goes to Maximilian Hartmuth of Vienna University, who has provided this information.   8. Fahri Dalsar, Türk Sanayi ve Ticaret Tarihinde Bursa’da İpekçilik (Istanbul: İstanbul Üniversitesi İktisat Fakültesi, 1960), 251–53.   9. Colette Establet and Jean-­Paul Pasqual, Des tissus et des hommes, Damas vers 1700 (Damascus, Syria: Institut Français d’Études Arabes de Damas, 2005), 342–43. 10. Establet and Pasqual, Des tissus et des hommes, 257, briefly refers to Bursa velvets used for home decoration. 11. These yastıks are the subject of the Oxford dissertation of Amanda Phillips: ‘Weaving as Livelihood, Style as Status: Ottoman Velvet in a Social and Economic Context, 1600–

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12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

28.

1750’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Oxford, 2011); my heartfelt thanks to the author for allowing me to read her valuable and innovative work. Hülya Tezcan and Sumiyo Okimura (eds), Textile Furnishings from the Topkapı Palace Museum (Istanbul: Vehbi Koç Vakfı and Republic of Turkey, Ministry of Culture and Tourism, 2007), items No. 26 and 28. Another cushion cover with a ‘mini-­carpet’ design is in Hülya Bilgi, Osmanlı İpekli Dokumaları: Çatma ve Kemha/Ottoman Silk Textiles (Istanbul: Sadberk Hanım Müzesi, 2007), No. 37. For an example from the 1800s, see Tezcan and Okimura, Textile Furnishings, item No. 32. Bursa Sicilleri B 232, fol. 6b (beledici); B 232, fol. 55b (bezzaz); B 243, fol. 10a–11a (kutnici). Linda Komaroff, Gifts of the Sultans: The Arts of Giving at the Islamic Courts (Los Angeles: Museum Associates – Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2011), 148, has reproduced an Ottoman silk textile adapted as a church vestment in the early 17th century. The classic study is still Ömer Lütfi Barkan, ‘Edirne Askeri Kassam’ına ait Tereke Defterleri (1545–1659)’, Belgeler III(5–6) (1966), 1–479. However the work of Hülya Canbakal, currently in process, may well result in a completely novel perspective. Engin Deniz Akarlı, ‘Gedik: A Bundle of Rights and Obligations for Istanbul Artisans and Traders, 1750–1840’, in Law, Anthropology and the Constitution of the Social, Making Persons and Things, eds Alain Pottage and Martha Mundy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 166–200. To be exact 19,830 akçe=165.5 guruş, so 119.8 akçe=1 guruş; but the discrepancy is probably due to rounding off and/or small material errors. As in the 1700s the guruş served for payments of any size, apparently the akçe was not devalued independently of the guruş so that the rate of exchange governing the two units remained constant over lengthy periods of time. On arms and horse-­gear with silver inlays as ‘male jewelry’, see Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Crime, Women and Wealth in the Eighteenth-­Century Anatolian Countryside’, in Women in the Ottoman Empire, Middle Eastern Women in the Early Modern Era, ed. Madeline Zilfi (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 6–27. While the figure denoting total value resembles ‘5751’, it is quite possible that the scribe’s pen slipped and he intended to write ‘5750’. B 162, fol. 25a, inventory of Fatma bint el-­hac Mehmed b Aşur. Olga Katsiardi Hering, ‘The Allure of Red Cotton Yarn, and How it Came to Vienna: The Associations of Greek Artisans and Merchants Operating between the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires’, in Merchants in the Ottoman Empire, eds Suraiya Faroqhi and Gilles Veinstein (Leuven: Peeters, 2008), 97–132. According to his inventory, el-­hac Salih b Ahmed stocked these items in his shop. For the under-­ capitalization of artisan workshops and reasons for this phenomenon, compare Fernand Braudel, Civilisation and Capitalism, 15th to 18th Century, 3 vols, tr. by Siân Reynolds (London: William Collins & Sons, 1983, 1984, 1985), vol. 2, The Wheels of Commerce, 298, 342. Cengiz Kırlı, ‘A Profile of the Labor Force in Early Nineteenth-­Century Istanbul’, International Labor and Working Class History 60 (2001), 125–40. Establet and Pasqual, Des tissus et des hommes, 353, describe yemeni/yamani as an un-­dyed textile used mainly for home decoration. Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Notes on the Production of Cotton Cloth in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-­ Century Anatolia’, The Journal of European Economic History (Rome) 8(2) (1979), 405–17. For the identity of modern Atabay with Ağrus/Ağras, see Tahir Sezen, Osmanlı Yer Adları (Alfabetik sırayla) (Ankara: T.C. Başbakanlık Devlet Arşivleri Genel Müdürlüğü, 2006), 9. My thanks to Sinan Çetin for his help with this matter. Feridun Emecen, XVI. Asırda Manisa Kazası (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1989), 78–79, discusses the sale and spinning of cotton. Already in the 1500s the manufacture of alaca was important as well.

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29. For çıtari see Lale Görünür, Osmanlı İmparatorluğunun son Döneminden Kadın Giysileri: Sadberk Hanım Müzesi Koleksyonu/Women’s Costume of the Late Ottoman Era from the Sadberk Hanım Museum Collection (Istanbul: Sadberk Hanım Müzesi, 2010), 292. According to Görünür this fabric is partly of cotton and partly of silk, with a design in red and yellow. A different colour scheme, namely white and brownish, occurs in the çıtari reproduced in Halil İnalcık, Türkiye Tekstil Tarihi üzerinde Araştırmalar (Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası, 2008), 109. This volume also features striped kutni from the Halil İnalcık collection (see 107 and 110). 30. Evliya Çelebi, who only followed the standard pilgrimage route from Damascus onwards, did take the opportunity to revisit Aleppo: Evliya Çelebi b Derviş Mehemmed Zılli, Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi, Topkapı Sarayı Kütüphanesi Bağdat 306, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi Pertev Paşa 462, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi Hacı Beşir Ağa 452 Numaralı Yazmaların Mukayeseli Transkripsyonu –Dizini, vol. 9, eds Yücel Dağlı, Seyit Ali Kahraman and Robert Dankoff (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2005), 184–92. Evliya did not mention any cottons or alaca among the ‘praiseworthy’ products of the city, but he did record the presence of kutni. Compare also brief notes in: Wolffgang Aigen, Sieben Jahre in Aleppo (1656–1663), Ein Abschnitt aus den ‘Reiß-­Beschreibungen’ des Wolffgang Aigen, ed. Andreas Tietze (Vienna: Verlag der wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaften Österreichs, 1980), 29 and elsewhere. 31. Eleni Gara, ‘In Search of Communities in Seventeenth-­Century Ottoman Sources: The Case of the Kara Ferye District’, Turcica 30 (1998), 135–62. For villages and even a town quarter of Bursa borrowing as groups: Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Indebtedness in the Bursa area, 1730–1740’, in Sociétés rurales ottomanes, Ottoman Rural Societies, eds Muhammed Afifi, Rashida Chih, Brigitte Marino, Nicolas Michel and Işık Tamdoğan (Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 2005), 197–213, see 209. 32. Faroqhi, ‘Indebtedness’, 210. 33. İsmet Binark et al. (eds), 166 Numaralı Muhâsebe-­i Vilâyet-­i Anadolu Defteri (937/1530: Hüdavendigâr, Biga, Karesi, Saruhân, Aydın, Menteşe, Teke ve Alâiye Livâları (Ankara: T.C. Başbakanlık Devlet Arşivleri Genel Müdürlüğü, 1995), 8, in the facsimile section of the text. However the place seems to have either disappeared or changed its name later on, as it does not appear on the detailed map of the province of Hüdavendigâr to be found on p. 185 of the transcribed section of this volume. 34. Other moneylenders of the 1700s may have foreclosed: Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘A Builder as Slave Owner and Rural Moneylender: Hacı Abdullah of Bursa, Campaign mimar’, in Mélanges Prof Machiel Kiel, ed. Abdeljelil Temimi, Arab Historical Review for Ottoman Studies 19–20 (Zaghouan: Fondation Temimi, 1999), 601–15. 35. For a sixteenth-­century woman teaching a textile trade to a young girl, see Dalsar, Türk Sanayi ve Ticaret Tarihinde Bursa, 320. 36. Faroqhi, ‘A Builder as Slave Owner and Rural Moneylender’ and ‘Indebtedness in the Bursa area, 1730–1740’. 37. There is a slight discrepancy between the figures computed by the scribes and those at which I have arrived: Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘How to Live and Die Rich in Eighteenth-­Century Bursa: The Fortune of Hacı Ibrahim, Tanner’, in Pauvreté et richesse dans le monde musulman et méditerranéen, ed. Jean-­Paul Pascual (Paris: Maisonneuve and Larose, 2003), 99–118, 105–6. 38. Leila Thayer Erder, ‘The Making of Industrial Bursa: Economic Activity and Population in a Turkish City 1835–1975’ (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1976).

Chapter 6

The Shoe Guilds of Istanbul in the Early Nineteenth Century A Case Study

Nalan Turna

The shoe guilds of early nineteenth-­century Istanbul provide a vivid illustration of the changing nature of urban economic activity during that crisis-­ridden period.1 Beginning with a brief profile of the guilds in question, this chapter turns to a consideration of how the posts of guild wardens/headmen changed hands, followed by an account of the dissolution of guild monopolies – the latter phenomenon demonstrating just how active and fluid the shoe market was. To evaluate the tendencies towards a less monopolistic economy, the chapter also discusses guild disputes, and concludes with a brief survey of the changing relationship between guilds and the Ottoman state in the post-­1826 era – in other words, the period directly following the abolition of the janissaries. Historians now regard it as old-­fashioned to view Ottoman guilds as state-­controlled entities.2 In fact, focusing on the long-­ignored aspect of guild autonomy, Haim Gerber has recently viewed the guilds as civil society organizations.3 However it is equally problematic to view guilds purely as grassroots organizations in permanent opposition to the state.4 For such a perspective suggests an unchanging and linear state–guild relationship, and ignores the complicated realities of artisans’ existence, which often required compromises and indeed compliance with state demands.

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The Wide Field of Istanbul Shoemaking Two types of guild dominated the shoe market in early nineteenth-­ century Istanbul: on the one hand craft guilds, and on the other trade or commercial guilds. The craft guilds comprised a variety of groups, such as the shoemakers (dikici, pâpûşçu, yemenici and kunduracı esnâfı), boot makers (çizmeci esnâfı) and slipper makers (d/terlikçi esnâfı), as well as the manufacturers of leather socks to be worn inside outdoor footwear, which for the sake of brevity we will call ‘interior boots’ (mestçi esnâfı) (on the Damascus shoe market, see Ch. 3). Among the commercial guilds we find the shoe salesmen (haffâf esnâfı), street vendors dealing in shoes (ayakta haffâf/haffâfan esnâfı), and also the sellers of second-­hand footwear (eskici esnâfı/eskici haffâfan esnâfı). At the present state of our information we cannot unfortunately give a total of all Istanbul artisans engaged in the shoemaking business. Of only a few guilds do we know the religious composition and/or the number of members, and much of our information concerns the marginal representatives of the trade, such as the street vendors retailing footwear.5 We can only hope that archival research will produce better results in the future. Moreover our information on the population of Istanbul in the early 1800s is an approximation, albeit a reasonably reliable one: the walled city should have held a population of about 171,200 and the suburbs 188,800. Thus the total should have amounted to something like 360,000.6 Given the uncertainty of information both on shoemakers and the general population, it is impossible to compute the ratio of shoemakers to the inhabitants of the Ottoman capital, and so we do not know whether the city contained more shoemakers than the population required. Whether Istanbul shoemakers produced for civilian customers outside the city is unknown but seems unlikely, given the shortages on the market of the capital that will form a major topic of this study. But as for the shoes worn by soldiers and sailors, they must have been largely the work of Istanbul artisans, for had matters been otherwise, the government after the abolition of the janissary corps in 1826 would not have chosen to site a state-­sponsored tannery in the Ottoman capital, which was to manufacture leather mainly for military use. Generally these shoemakers and vendors plied their trades in the commercial buildings of Istanbul, namely the Kürkçü Hanı, the Mercan Hanı, the Vefa Hanı, the Arasta-­yı Kebir and the Tuğcular Arastası.7 These commercial buildings brought the guildsmen together and enabled them to act collectively, the close contact making it easier for the shoe guilds to maintain their monopolistic status. However, because they occupied

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Table 6.1  Shoemaking guilds in Istanbul Name of guild Dikici Pâpûs¸çu Yemenici

Kunduracı

Çizmeci Mestçi Derlikçi/terlikçi Zenne derlikci Haffâf Ayakta haffâf Eskici

Product made or service rendered Manufacture of shoes, perhaps shoe repairs Manufacture of shoes, no specification Manufacture of what was in the late 1800s a shoe of red, yellow or black morocco leather, earlier on a light shoe Manufacture of what was in the late 1800s a shoe in the European fashion, shape in early 1800s unknown Boot maker Maker of ‘interior boots’ worn inside an outer shoe Maker of slippers Maker of women’s slippers Seller of shoes Street vendor retailing shoes Second-­hand vendors, here of shoes

Title of guild head if not kethüdâ Dikicibas¸ı

Kâhya

Kâhya

Çizmecibas¸ı

workplaces in separate buildings located in different parts of the city, the guildsmen did not seem to possess large, uniform, or unbroken monopolies. The shoemakers of the Vefa Hanı, for example, had a ‘small’ monopoly on the manufacture of red and black shoes.8 Thus the shoe market was not homogenous, but rather formed a mosaic of minor and fragmented monopolies. The guild wardens, like the trades they represented, were not uniform either. These dignitaries went by a variety of titles: most of the shoe guilds named their wardens kethüdâ; but Istanbul’s manufacturers of ‘light shoes’ (yemenici esnâfı), as well as the ‘regular’ shoemakers (kunduracı esnâfı) of Istanbul and Galata, called their headmen kâhya.9 By contrast, another group of shoemakers (dikici esnâfı) and also the boot makers named their wardens dikicibaşı and çizmecibaşı, respectively.10

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Hierarchies among Shoe-­Producing Guilds It appears that the religiously homogenous shoe guilds of the period were smaller in size than their heterogeneous counterparts. As a case in point we might once again refer to the guild comprising the street vendors of footwear, with its thirty non-­Muslim members.11 Shoemakers’ guilds differed from each other in terms of status and influence. Influential guilds were generally more or less equal in power: this was obvious, for instance, in the case of the shoemakers’ and shoe salesmen’s guilds. Compared to the second-­hand retailers and street vendors, the shop-­based shoe salesmen’s guild had acquired greater economic privileges, largely monopolizing the sale of shoes in the city. In conformity with usage established since the 1600s, it prohibited street vendors from selling in and around the commercial buildings that fell within its monopoly– the Arasta, the Valide Hanı and the Yeni Han.12 However dependent guilds like that of the street vendors devised a variety of methods to violate these rules – for example, by cooperating with the predominant guild of the locally active shoe market, using commonplace and generally accepted guild discourses, or resorting to legal mechanisms.13 The shoe guilds of Istanbul were not homogenous in terms of membership status either. On the contrary there were hierarchical differences between members, with those who had power, status and influence over the means of production controlling the guild’s decision-­making processes. The chief warden of Arasta-­yı Kebir, the warden of Tuğcular Arastası, and even the warden of the second-­hand shoe vendors were all highly active in guild politics.14 Archival sources make it clear that the wardens of shoemakers and shoe salesmen, as well as certain senior artisans, were the most influential figures in shoe manufacturing and the sale of footwear.15 Correlatively, there were also guild members of lower status, who might well have to work for other masters with all the loss of prestige that dependency entailed. Members of the shoe-­related guilds thus lost more than just material goods when unable to discharge their debts, as is evident from an 1826 court case.16 A certain Manol had failed to pay the merchants who had provided him with raw materials; in this precarious situation Manol’s guild took over and allowed him to work under a master shoemaker in order to pay off his debt to the merchants.17 Although Manol retained his membership, and his guild in fact stood behind him, this could not mitigate his loss of status, and he no longer possessed sufficient capital to work independently. In this connection, it is also striking how the merchants cooperated with the guilds of the relevant market so as to protect their investments.

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Conflicts Swirling around the Guild Wardens A survey of the manner in which guild wardens acquired and lost their positions shows that the relevant guilds were pragmatic in their everyday politics. For when wardens changed, the guildsmen needed to compromise with the state authorities often anxious to install a man of their choice, who might or might not be agreeable to the rank and file craftsmen.18 Halil İnalcık has explained the importance of authorization papers (berât) in guild wardens’ appointments: ‘The berât not only put the guild members under the authority of the guild offices with regards to specific duties, it also made it incumbent upon the state authorities, when asked, to come to the aid of the officer, and to reaffirm and restore his authority’. Even so the guildsmen were not without recourse: in 1808, the members of the shoemakers’ guild made effective use of legal mechanisms to replace the current warden, Kantarcıoğlu İbrahim, with Esseyyid Elhaç Osman Ağa.19 In 1818, it was the turn of the shoe vendors, who expelled and replaced their warden.20 Furthermore in 1821, the members of the shoemakers’ and shoe vendors’ guilds acted together to replace Esseyyid Ahmed Ağa with Süleyman Ağa.21 Personnel changes in the guild wardens’ offices continued in later years as well: for example, in 1823, the shoemakers chose a new headman.22 After only one year in office, this man wished to leave his post for reasons that remain unknown. Changes in the office of headman accelerated in the late 1820s, with guilds such as the Muslim ‘interior boot’ producers, the ‘light shoe’ manufacturers, the ‘ordinary’ shoemakers, the second-­ hand shoe vendors, the ‘regular’ shoe salesmen, and the street vendors selling ‘light shoes’ all changing their wardens at one time or another.23 To the qadis’ courts that needed to approve these requests, the guildsmen gave a variety of reasons: the guild warden was allegedly unable to fulfil his role, had annoyed guild members (rencide etmek), ignored customary rules (örf ve âdet), or acted improperly (hilâf-­ı rızâ hareket). Presumably the court knew what concrete discontents lay behind these standardized expressions, as they had been used for a century or more, for serious reasons were necessary before the guildsmen were allowed to proceed. After all, according to Halil İnalcık, by this period certain guild offices had come to figure as personal property. Already in the eighteenth century guild offices had sometimes changed hands through simple bilateral agreements between two private individuals.24 None of the complainants, however, indicated whether economic hardship – due to the wars, uprisings, or the growing international competition characteristic of the time – had contributed to their discontent. It is also unclear whether the wardens had failed to maintain the expected quality and prices of

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the shoes marketed, both of which the guilds needed to maintain if they hoped to preserve their privileges.

Shoemakers’ Guilds out to Enlarge their Markets It was mostly the shoemakers’ wardens (dikicibaşı) who pushed the boundaries of their guild, thus causing turmoil in the market. Guild wardens’ offices were economically profitable and thus the object of strenuous competition on the part of would-­be holders, since these offices allowed access to both guild and non-­guild markets.25 Conflict arose, for instance, when the shoemakers’ warden sought to extract a new additional fee from a lower-­ranking guild. In 1806, he demanded this extra payment, supposedly for authorization papers (tezkere harcı) issued to the guild of the street vendors selling shoes (ayakta haffâfan esnâfı). For this purpose, the warden cooperated with the guild of shoe salesmen working from shops, another important actor in the shoe market and often a rival of the itinerant sellers. Together, these two guilds seized the shoes, which the street vendors desperately needed if they were to continue in business.26 To solve the problem, the street vendors then applied to the local court, where they refused to pay the shoemakers’ warden, stating that they were only responsible to the shoe salesmen’s guild and not to the shoemakers’ warden. They insisted that they had had the right to sell on the streets ‘since ancient times’ (kadîmden beru) – which was guild parlance that craftsmen commonly used to defend their rights and privileges.27 Eventually, the court decided to uphold the guild’s customary right and found the shoemakers’ warden guilty, warning both him and the shoe salesmen’s guild not to interfere (mümânaat ve müdâhale etmemek) with the street vendors who sold shoes in the market places and bazaars of Istanbul.28 The conflict between the two parties flared up again in 1814, for similar reasons; perhaps it had simmered on during the intervening years without ever reaching the qadi’s court. Differently from their tactics in the confrontation of 1806, the street vendors now cooperated with the shoe salesmen’s guild and stood together against the shoemakers’ warden.29 Ten of the shoe vendors alleged that they were earning their livelihoods, and thus sustaining their families, through street vending, emphasizing their poverty and misery and claiming that they were unable to open their own shops for lack of capital (bilâ sermâye).30 Evidently when it came to the possession of funds there was a significant gap between the main shoemakers’ guild and the organizations of the dependent artisans/salesmen. It appears that the shoemakers exerted pressure on the street vendors in order to expand their own market shares;

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however the tactic failed on this occasion since the shoe salesmen had withdrawn their support. Conflicts like this one demonstrate that the shoemakers increasingly pushed the boundaries of the shoe market towards a less restrictive and less monopolistic economy. However they were not able to expand their field of activity, because the other guilds actively resisted and the qadis came to the aid of the less powerful organizations. Three further examples set out below will allow us to observe other conflicts over guild monopolies. In the first case, dating to 1806, the mirror makers complained about intrusion into their craft.31 They claimed that İsmail, a shoe salesman, had made mirrors without their permission, suing him and alleging in court that they enjoyed customary self-­governing (müstakil) status and thus exclusive rights over mirror making. The court found İsmail guilty and took some action against his intrusion; however, he was able to continue making mirrors thanks to the support of his guild. Help came notably from other upper-­status guild members – such as the shoe salesmen’s warden, the headman of the commercial street known as Tuğcular Arastası, and also the shoemakers’ warden in addition to some senior masters, who all stood behind İsmail.32 Such support suggests that there was increasing competition among the shoe-­manufacturing guilds. Of course, İsmail’s case was connected to the interests of his seniors in the guild and thus the organization as a whole was willing to intervene: working together, these guildsmen exerted pressure directed at the opening up of new market spaces. It is also important to discuss how İsmail and other mirror-­producing shoe salesmen defended their, at first glance, rather surprising activity. They said that customers preferred to buy a coherent set of engagement gifts (nişân takımı) including fancy shoes (incilu, tellu, and sırmalu pâpûşlar), mirrors, boxes and chests, which they liked to purchase from a single set of guild shops. In view of this fashion, and also due to an allegedly declining demand for shoes, the shoe salesmen had embarked on mirror making as a side line. In this case too, the shoe salesmen’s intrusions helped to break up the pre-­existing guild monopolies.33 Certainly the moves of wealthier artisans to enlarge their fields of action had been common enough even in the 1600s, but it was a novelty of the early nineteenth century that such men could gain the support of their guild. The second example concerns a similar dispute. In 1807, the women’s slipper makers’ guild (zenne derlikci esnâf) confronted one Tosun Mehmed Beşe, a manufacturer of ‘light shoes’ (yemenici esnâf) who supposedly was violating their rules. In court, the guildsmen complained that Tosun Mehmed was not a member of their guild and had not served under a master slipper maker; thus, to the complainants, he was unskilled and produced ‘sub-­standard’ (kalb) products.34

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A third dispute took place around 1808. This time battle was joined between the women’s slipper makers and the Istanbul manufacturers of ‘interior boots’ (mestci esnâfı). As in the earlier dispute, the slipper makers endeavoured to dismiss a master manufacturer, one Memiş, appealing to an imperial decree (emr-­i âlî) that had given them exclusionary privileges in their craft. The slipper makers emphasized that Memiş, being ‘untrained’, had manufactured ‘sub-­standard’ products. As they saw it, the accused had violated their customs. Although the slipper makers’ guild won the case, the dispute did not come to an end. Once again, the Istanbul shoe market was highly competitive: intrusions on the part of the larger and more successful guilds militated for a less restrictive economy, which was also to be less effectively controlled by rank and file producers. Apparently the guilds of the shoe market were not able to fully dominate production and sales, although their monopolies did not disappear at just that time. Clearly, the early 1800s were a period of fluidity in the urban economy. Competition over monopolies became fiercer after 1808. With the Istanbul populace bitterly complaining about the high price of shoes, Ottoman officials took action. The shoe salesmen were spurred to defend themselves, arguing that it took raw leather (sahtiyân) almost three weeks to arrive in Istanbul from Kayseri. To solve the problem, the sultan intervened and ordered that both the raw leather and eighty thousand ready-­ made ‘interior boots’ be procured from Kayseri within five to ten days.35 The shoe vendors resisted this intrusion, closing their shops in protest, but the Grand Vizier instructed the Istanbul judge and the guild wardens to ensure that the shoe salesmen sold the incoming products.36 Two years later, in 1810, the shoe salesmen once again refused to buy around ninety thousand ‘interior boots’ ordered from outside the city: ‘We cannot buy them. We are told that we would regret it if we buy any of these interior boots’. According to the contemporary historian Cabi, the guildsmen claimed to have been threatened by the janissaries.37 In the first of the cases discussed above, it is unclear whether the janissaries really had exerted any pressure on the shoe salesmen; however, with respect to the second case, that of 1810, it is clear that the janissaries occupied a dominant role in the distribution of goods and thus could have taken action (compare Ch. 7). It should also be noted that in 1814, those shoe salesmen who did not limit their market to Istanbul and complained about the shoes ordered from outside the city at the same time endeavoured to increase their sales in the provinces (taşra memleketler). It seems that the dissolution of guild monopolies promoted emerging regional economies, as exemplified by Kayseri and also Istanbul.38 While all this was happening, some guilds struggled to keep their monopolistic status. In this context, the shoemakers complained about

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sixty of their colleagues operating in the Vefa Hanı who in 1818–19 desired to resume the recently nullified monopolies over the manufacture of red and black shoes. The shoemakers of the Vefa Hanı stated that they would obey the shoemakers’ warden and respect the rules of the shoemakers’ guild, but only if the demand for red ‘interior boots’ increased; they seemed to be quite sure that this would in fact occur.39 Apparently, unlike the shoemakers at the Vefa Hanı, the main shoemakers’ guild promoted a more competitive and non-­monopolized economy. In this case they succeeded in reaching a favourable verdict, reconfirming the abolition of monopolies over coloured shoes. As a result of these conflicts, all shoemakers were henceforth able to produce shoes of any colour, from yellow to red and black.40 In the 1820s, competition in the market for coloured footwear grew more intense. In 1824, for example, the shoemakers of the Tekfursarayı compound argued that they were legitimately entitled to a monopoly on blue shoes (mâî mest ve pâpûş), which were destined for Jewish buyers. In order to preserve this privilege, like some other guilds of the time, they relied on support from a pious foundation (vakf-­ı celîle) in addition to an imperial edict (fermân-­ı âlî). But still they failed to retain their monopoly. Influential members, such as the shoemaker’s warden, his assistant (yiğitbaşı), the leading administrators of the pious foundation involved, and the property owners also concerned in the matter, all agreed that the monopolies should be abolished (inhisâr-­ı bey’ ü şirânın men edilmesi). Thus in a political and economic context that was rapidly changing, the earlier imperial edict meant nothing. Opportunities for those who sought to produce coloured shoes therefore arose. Further analysis is surely necessary, but perhaps the abolition of monopolies on coloured shoes designed for the empire’s different religious communities is a reflection of the de facto tendency towards increased social homogeneity. At least where footwear was concerned established distinctions between religious groups apparently were on the decline.41 As mentioned above, most of the archival sources show that the major guilds increasingly favoured a more competitive economy. To achieve this, they employed and diffused a language targeting the monopolies.42 In brief, in the early 1800s we observe the demise of an established pattern of multiple yet small monopolies, as more guilds chose to pursue a non-­ monopolistic economy. Fierce competition among and within guilds, and the activity of non-­guild members, were the principal reasons why monopolies ended or came to be under threat. Some shoemakers managed to break up the pre-­existing monopolies by the effective use of legal means; others, however, complained that without ­monopolistic

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­ rotection the value of their products would diminish. Meanwhile, certain p guilds continued to protect their members even when they intruded into other guilds’ business, while other craft organizations managed to enshrine in law their argument that they were being threatened by a decline in shoe prices. All this activity, often at cross purposes, demonstrates that in the early 1800s the shoe market was highly volatile.

The Shoe Market minus the Janissaries Some guild privileges ended in 1826 when the janissaries were abolished. With their political and military power a thing of the past, this militia also ceased to function as the defender of guild privileges. The abolition of the janissaries also facilitated the liberalization of the Ottoman market.43 As for the shoe manufacturers and salesmen, they had to confront state officials more frequently than earlier on, for in line with a general drive to increase urban-­based revenues, during the post-­1826 era the central bureaucracy became more and more involved in direct tax collection. According to new regulations, shoes had to be stamped at the source of production; the state levied a stamp tax (resm-­i damga) on shoemakers not only in the capital but also often in remote parts of the empire, including Diyarbakır, Kos (İstanköy), the Mediterranean islands in general (Cezâir-­i Bahr-­i Sefîd), Jerusalem (Kudüs), Viranşehir, Ankara and Mosul.44 To control the taxation process the central government appointed special officials, and to legitimize these ‘novelties’ deployed symbolically coercive language, denigrating those who did not sell to or trade with the state – they were called ‘profiteers’, a term now common in the marketplace.45 Problems arose when the state began taxing shoes twice over: once for the leather used as raw material (meşin, gön and sahtiyân), and again for the finished products. Internal customs also created severe difficulties for the shoemakers. For the government obliged them to pay two taxes simultaneously, one as internal customs and the other as a due for the shoes marketed. As the shoemakers had already paid a tax on the leather they had purchased even before beginning production, they thus needed to cope with three separate payments. At least for a while, the stamp tax did not entirely replace pre-­existing customs duties, though later on, during the Tanzimat era, the administration did abolish internal customs dues.46 The shoemakers complained that these policies were unfair. As the volume of complaints increased, the state decided that those s­ hoemakers in provinces/districts where, throughout, no internal customs duties

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were being demanded, would be excused these duties on their particular trades.47 Local shoemakers thus would not be disadvantaged vis-­à-­vis their fellow artisans in other specialties. However, this measure probably did little to help producers in the long-­established centres, where the financial administration had been levying internal customs duties for many years. There were other shoemakers who resisted the newly implemented taxation policies. Those of Urfa Province, for example, stated that their production levels were so low that they were entirely unable to shoulder an additional financial burden. However, officials did not respond to their pleas, insisting that all shoemakers of the empire would need to pay.48 The Urfa case, then, shows us the state-­as-­tax-­collector asserting increasing power over artisanal production. New establishments called state tanneries (mîrî debbâğhâneler) further served the assertion of state power, providing equipment and financing for the new army that replaced the Janissary Corps. For these tanneries, the state appointed officials such as the senior scribes (hâcegân) Mehmed Ragıb and Azmi Efendi, who managed the enterprise and also supervised trade in raw leather.49 In addition the tanneries needed an organized and experienced labour force, and officials provided jobs for tanners, saddlers, shoemakers, shoe vendors and merchants (debbâğ, sarrâc, dikici, haffâf esnâfı and tâcir).50 In consequence at least some artisans shifted from a self-­governed guild-­based economy to a context that may be called, at least in part, factory-­based. In addition, the demands of the new army were easier to satisfy in an economy with fewer guild monopolies, and so new players were able to enter the shoe market. By 1831, a typical shoemakers’ guild possessed seventy-­ one registered shoe makers’ licences (gediks), which should, ideally, have served to limit shop and workshop numbers and so allow the established artisans to monopolize the manufacture of and trade in footwear.51 But even with this privilege, the guild failed to provide enough shoes for the market, and as a result the number of shoemakers’ gediks rose from seventy-­one to a hundred. Non-­guildsmen opened twenty or thirty workshops, for example in Galata. In this way, it became legal – de facto, if not entirely de jure – to open shops without guild permission.52 This development seemingly had the effect of heightening competition in the urban economy of Istanbul, and thus the dynamics of the war economy rapidly changed practice. Archival sources show that in the 1820s many of the shoe market monopolies were dissolved. Later, in 1839, the broader reform movement known as the Tanzimat enshrined the abolition of the monopolies in law. Henceforth any shoemaker, whether Muslim or not, could produce shoes

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of whatever colour he wished, although it took some time for the Muslim artisans in Plovdiv (Filibe) and Pazarcık to give up their monopolies, and for a while these provincial artisans continued to prevent their non-­Muslim colleagues from producing any colour of shoe other than black. In Istanbul, however, difficulties arising from the new regulations were temporary, and by 1853 there were no more outstanding problems between Muslim and non-­Muslim shoemakers and vendors.53 In other words, the Istanbul shoe market of the mid-­nineteenth century was more liberalized than it had been in the 1700s, the heyday of guild power.

Conclusion In summary, the shoe market of early nineteenth-­century Istanbul was highly competitive, and in this context certain guilds struggled to retain their monopolies. Some relied on pre-­existing customary rules or imperial decrees, others argued that the value of their products would diminish without monopolies, and yet others insisted that they had practiced the craft and trade ‘since ancient times’ and dismissed non-­guild members as ‘untrained’. Last but not least some guildsmen assumed that the Ottoman administration would be responsive to their complaint that, if deprived of their privileges, these artisans would have to lead ‘poor’ and ‘miserable lives’. In the mid-­1820s, guild monopolies, and even the status of a self-­ governed guild itself, came increasingly under threat. More flexible and open to change than assumed by historians of a previous generation, the guilds of the time did not function in isolation; under pressure, small guild markets tended to fuse, although the larger guilds did not usually follow this trend. When the demand for shoes increased, especially in the 1820s and beyond, guilds were less likely to retain monopolistic control, although not all monopolies ceased to exist in this period. Later, however, the Tanzimat finally confirmed their abolition. Following the demise of the janissaries, and later on during the Tanzimat, the Ottoman administration became more and more dismissive of those who did not trade or cooperate with it. In this period the government took over those urban spaces which had earlier been claimed by the janissaries. While urban actors now paid taxes directly to the treasury, opportunities for artisans and merchants emerged within the newly formed state establishments. As a result, a new relationship between the state and Istanbul artisans evolved after 1826. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, however, the shoe market was profoundly transformed. This period witnessed the opening of new

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factories, the application of new technologies, the beginning of training outside the guild system, and the emergence of foreign and local entrepreneurship as well as of new fashions in shoes. The increasing level of imports from Europe, the ecological issues arising due to the newly opened factories, and the extraction of new taxes, are all issues which call for further research.

Notes  1. For background on the major patterns of Ottoman manufacturing, see Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 134–40. For further analysis of this sector, see also his Ottoman Manufacturing in the Age of the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). As an important overview concerning Ottoman artisans, see Suraiya Faroqhi, Artisans of Empire: Crafts and Craftspeople under the Ottomans (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011).  2. Gabriel Baer, ‘The Administrative, Economic and Social Functions of Turkish Guilds’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 1(1) (1970): 28–50; idem, ‘Monopolies and Restrictive Practices of Turkish Guilds’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 3 (1970), 145–65; Ahmet Kal’a, ‘Gediklerin Doğuşu ve Gedikli Esnâf’, Türk Araştırmaları Dergisi 67 (1990), 181–87. However Baer changed his mind after reading the work of his former student Haim Gerber. Gabriel Baer, ‘Ottoman Guilds: A Reassessment’, in Social and Economic History of Turkey (1071–1920), eds Osman Okyar and Halil İnalcık (Ankara: Hacettepe University, 1980), 95–102.   3. Haim Gerber, ‘Ottoman Civil Society and Modern Turkish Democracy’, in Ottoman Past and Today’s Turkey, ed. Kemal Karpat (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 133–49.   4. See an early work by Bernard Lewis, ‘The Islamic Guilds’, The Economic History Review 8(1) (1937), 20–37.   5. This guild had 30 members, all of them non-­Muslims.  6. Betül Başaran, ‘The 1829 Census and Istanbul’s Population during the Late 18th and Early 19th Centuries’, in Studies on Istanbul and Beyond: The Freely Papers, vol. 1, ed. Robert Ousterhout (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2007), 53–72, 60.   7. One particular state register sets out the Greek shoemakers, boot makers, and shoe vendors doing business in various commercial buildings in Istanbul: Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives/Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi (hereafter BOA), Tevziat, Zehar, Esnâf ve İhtisab Defterleri (hereafter A.DVNS.TZEİ.d.), 29 (1236/1821), 21–21.   8. BOA, Hatt-­ı Hümayun (hereafter HAT), 548/27062 (1247/1831–32). See also BOA, HAT, 628/31033 (1236/1821).   9. Istanbul Local Court Records/Istanbul Mahkemesi (hereafter IM), 151 (1244/1829), 56; IM, 151 (1245/1830), 94. 10. BOA, Cevdet Belediye, (hereafter C.BLD), 35/1723 (1218/1803). 11. BOA, C.BLD, 65/3248 (1217/1806); BOA, HAT, 627/30985 (1235/1820). Mixed guilds commonly had Muslim wardens: IM, 137 (1236/1821), 9; IM, 141 (1239/1823), 4–5; IM, 143 (1240/1824), 39. 12. BOA, C.BLD, 65/3248 (1217/1806). 13. For a case from the eighteenth century, see BOA, C.BLD, 138/6871 (1189/1775). 14. BOA, C.BLD, 35/1723 (1218/1803). 15. Balat Mahkemesi (Istanbul), 120 (1222/1808), 16.

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16. This phenomenon was even more evident among the Istanbul barbers, who mostly lost their means of production and thus looked for reliable investors. See Nalan Turna, ‘Ondokuzuncu Yüzyılın İlk Yarısında İstanbul’da Berber Olmak, Berber Kalmak’, İstanbul Üniversitesi Atatürk İlkeleri ve İnkılap Tarih Enstitüsü Yakın Dönem Tarih Araştırmaları Dergisi 9 (5) (2006), 171–88. 17. BOA, HAT, 623/30804 (1241/1826). 18. Halil İnalcık, ‘The Appointment Procedure of a Guild Warden (Kethuda)’, in Festschrift Andreas Tietze zum 70. Geburtstag gewidmet von seinen Freunden und Schülern, Wiener Zeitschrift fur die Kunde des Morgenlandes 76 (1986), 135–42, 139. 19. IM, 94 (1223/1808), 54. 20. BOA, C.BLD, 80/3985 (1230/1815). 21. IM, 137 (1236/1821), 9. 22. IM, 141 (1239/1823), 4–5; IM, 143 (1240/1824), 39. 23. These and other guild warden replacements were recorded in IM, 151and 153. 24. İnalcık, ‘Appointment Procedure’, 137. 25. Guild wardens also financed themselves by extracting money for licence (gedik) registrations. See my ‘The Everyday Life of Istanbul and Its Artisans, 1808–1839’ (Ph.D. diss., Binghamton University), chap. 4. 26. BOA, C.BLD, 65/3248 (1217/1806). 27. BOA, HAT, 627/30985 (1235/1820); BOA, C.BLD, 65/3248 (1217/1806). 28. BOA, C.BLD, 65/3248 (1217/1806). 29. BOA, C.BLD, 35/1723 (1218/1803). 30. BOA, C.BLD, 80/3961 (1229/1814). 31. IM, 135 (1229/1814), 10–11. 32. IM, 135 (1229/1814), 10–11. 33. IM, 135 (1229/1814), 10–11. 34. BOA, Istanbul Ahkam Defterleri (A.DVNS.AHK.İS.d.), 16/391 (1221/1807). 35. Cabi Ömer Efendi, Cabi Tarihi: Tarih-­i Sultan Selim-­i Salis ve Mahmud-­ı Sani, trans. Mehmet Ali Beyhan (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2003), 268–69. 36. Cabi, Cabi Tarihi, 417. 37. Ibid. 38. IM, 135 (1229/1814), 14. 39. BOA, HAT, 628/31033 (1234/1818–19). 40. BOA, HAT, 628/31033 (1234/1818–19). An undated archival document indicates that the Vefa Hanı shoemakers made similar efforts: BOA, Cevdet İktisat (hereafter C.İKTS, 11/510 (1255/1840). 41. BOA, HAT, 627/30972 (1239/1824). 42. BOA, HAT, 627/30972 (1239/1824). 43. Donald Quataert, ‘Main Problems of the Economy during the Tanzimat Period’, in idem, Workers, Peasants, and Economic Change in the Ottoman Empire, 1730–1914 (Istanbul: The Isis Press, 1993), 175–83. On the importance of the abolition of the janissaries, see also Donald Quataert and Çağlar Keyder, ‘Introduction,’ New Perspectives on Turkey 7 (1992), 1–6. 44. BOA, Sadaret/Umum Vilayet Evrakı (hereafter A.}MKT.UM 6/22), (1266/1852). BOA, A.}MKT.UM, 7/93, (1266/1853). BOA, A.}MKT.UM, 7/40, (1266/1853). BOA, A.} MKT.UM., 6/52, (1266/1852), BOA, A.}MKT.UM, 7/33, (66/1853). BOA, A.}MKT. UM, 3/100, (1266/1852). BOA, A.}MKT.UM, 5/60, (1266/1852). BOA, A.}MKT. UM, 4/58, (1266/1852). 45. IM, 154 (1243/1827), 54. 46. BOA, HAT, 311/18361.A (1242/1826–27). 47. Mehmet Genç, ‘Osmanlı Devleti’nde İç Gümrük Rejimi’, in Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda Devlet ve Ekonomi (Istanbul: Ötüken Neşriyat, 2002), 196–202.

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48. BOA, Sadaret/Mühimme Kalemi Evrakı (hereafter A.}MKT.MHM), 38/91 (1268/1852). 49. An archival document reveals Mehmed Ragıb’s gratitude for his new job: BOA, C.İKTS, 17/833 (1243/1828); IM, 154 (1243/1827–28), 54; BOA, C.İKTS, 24/1200 (1244/1829). 50. BOA, C.İKTS, 17/833 (1243/1828). 51. BOA, HAT, 548/27062 (1247/1831–32). For more detail on gedik, see for example Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Understanding Ottoman Guilds’, in Crafts and Craftsmen of the Middle East: Fashioning the Individual in the Muslim Mediterranean, eds Suraiya Faroqhi and Randi Deguilhem (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 3–40; Engin Deniz Akarlı, ‘Gedik: A Bundle of Rights and Obligations for Istanbul Artisans and Traders, 1750–1840’, in Law, Anthropology, and the Constitution of the Social: Making Persons and Things, eds Alain Pottage and Martha Mundy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 166–201. 52. BOA, HAT, 774/36313 (1247/1831). 53. BOA, Sadaret/Divan Kalemi Evrakı (A.}DVN), 92/23 (1269/1853).

PART II

INTRA-­GUILD PROBLEMS

Chapter 7

Blurred Boundaries between Soldiers and Civilians

Artisan Janissaries in Seventeenth-­Century Istanbul

Gülay Yılmaz Diko

From the Ottoman chronicler Naima (1655–1716) we learn that when, in 1651, Istanbul artisans mass-­petitioned the palace against the tyranny and the high taxes exacted by the janissary commanders (aghas), the guards of the latter threatened to kill the complainants. In the events which followed, the aghas rebelled. Yet they could not obtain the support of the heads of the hierarchy of judges cum religious scholars (müftü, kadıasker, and the chief judge of Istanbul), and nor did the city folk support them. On the contrary, people poured into the palace court and the open spaces around Haghia Sophia and the Sultan Ahmed Mosque to protest against the domineering aghas. Naima recounts that the janissaries, especially those stationed in the so-­called Old Barracks, sided with the civilians in this rebellion, joining the masses in the city squares.1 This open support for civilians by the janissaries against their own commanders should be read as a reflection of profound changes in Istanbul’s urban culture. What then was the socio-­economic basis of this alliance between janissaries and civilians that became manifest in this urban protest? The answer to this question lies in a two-­way movement between seventeenth-­century janissaries and artisans and the concomitant blurring of the social boundaries between soldiers and civilians. In this chapter I will discuss the janissary–artisan relationship in ­seventeenth-­century Istanbul by presenting the relevant data from the nine oldest s­ urviving

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registers (sicils) of the qadi’s court of Istanbul, covering the periods 1612 to 1620, and 1660 to 1662. Unfortunately the registers of the intermediate period have gone missing. The gaps in the sicils can be filled to some extent by another set of documents, namely the estate records (terekes) of the janissaries residing in Istanbul between 1595 and 1668, preserved in the six oldest ‘askeri kassam registers of­ Istanbul.2 In my study of court cases I have used the titles of beşe and racil (infantry soldiers) as indications that the deceased indeed had been janissaries. By contrast I have included men bearing the titles of beg, agha, çavuş, or çelebi in the janissary population only if the scribes identified the plaintiff or defendant in a given case as such, typically through the expression dergâh-­ı ali yeniçerilerinden (belonging to the janissaries of the Sublime Palace).3 Through this procedure I have detected 415 cases relating to janissaries, the relevant texts providing information on the daily lives of these men, including property sales, credit records, manumissions, issues related to pious foundations (vakıfs), and personal disputes. Some aspects of family life also appear, in particular inheritance cases, marriages and divorces. We do not have specific information as to how many of the janissaries were married and settled outside the barracks of Istanbul. However, among the 173 estate records of janissaries living in Istanbul during the early seventeenth century that I have located in the kismet-­i ‘askeriyye registers, 85 out of the 173 were married. Thus about half of the total janissary estate records belonged to men who had been fathers of families. If we are to accept these figures as a reflection – albeit very approximate – of the general frequency of marriage among janissaries, we may assume that about 18,000 of the 35,000–40,000 janissaries stationed in Istanbul during the early seventeenth century were married and had separate households. In this chapter I plan to delineate the trades and branches of commerce in which janissaries were active during the early and mid-­seventeenth century, examine their degree of involvement in the urban economy, and interpret the meaning of these developments for Istanbul’s social life. This purpose involves a focus on artisan activity by janissaries and other issues related to Istanbul guilds. But given the limitations of our sources, an analysis of the estate inventories of the 173 janissaries on record is indispensable if we wish to gain a reasonably complete picture of artisanal activities undertaken by the Ottoman military.

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A Brief Glance at the Historiography on City-­based Janissaries There are many deep-­ rooted misconceptions in twentieth-­ century Ottomanist historiography that continue the tradition of the Ottoman chroniclers in interpreting the 1600s and 1700s as a phase of decline. One of the main misconceptions is to see the janissary army as a degenerate institution composed only of vagabonds, and to argue that these men were nothing but criminals, hated by all civilians.4 However, for the last two decades, scholars have questioned and criticized this paradigm of decline, and their research has changed the image of the janissaries.5 As a result these men no longer appear as an anarchic force of troublemakers, but rather as a socio-­economic institution that established organic links within Ottoman cities (compare Ch. 11).6 Studies concerned with the transformation of the military class to date have concentrated on major provincial cities in the Arab world. Thus André Raymond’s pioneering works on seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century Cairo prove that the local janissaries were absorbed into civic society and show the growing importance of these military men in urban economic life.7 For late seventeenth-­century Aleppo, Charles Wilkins’s recent study demonstrates the janissaries’ integration into various aspects of urban life, including neighbourhoods, guilds or patrimonial households.8 As for Colette Establet and Jean-­Paul Pascual, they have focused on military–civilian relations in Damascus, investigating credit relations and comparing the levels of wealth accumulation typical of these two groups (compare also Ch. 3).9 Another important study is Jane Hathaway’s investigation of the Qazdagli family that had originated in the janissary milieu of Cairo.10 Outside the Arab provinces however there are very few studies. On the borders of the Arab world lies ‘Ayntab (today: Gaziantep), and Hülya Canbakal has studied wealth accumulation among the military elements stationed in this city; while Molly Greene in her monograph on late seventeenth-­century Crete closely investigates the increasing domination of janissaries over the city of Candia after the Ottoman conquest.11 As for the janissaries in Istanbul the only investigation to date is Cemal Kafadar’s MA thesis completed in 1981, which remains widely read and influential. Kafadar has underlined the process of ‘esnafization’ of the janissaries during the seventeenth century – in other words their transformation into artisans and shopkeepers – concluding however that the involvement of janissaries in the city market was rather limited, as they were only active in street peddling and petty trades.12 In an article published in 1991 however, he has revised this opinion and argued that the janissaries

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were also active within the guild structure.13 Eunjeong Yi’s examination of Istanbul guilds during the first half of the seventeenth century also supports this latter argument and proves enhanced janissary involvement in various trade guilds in Istanbul.14 Building on this literature, I will investigate the organic links that the janissaries established within the Istanbul market during the early and mid-­seventeenth century. The court cases recorded in Istanbul sicils and the estate registers of janissaries based in the Ottoman capital reveal that these men were present in the markets as merchants, tradesmen and craftsmen; they ran a varied range of businesses, both large and small. The documents mention military men trading in textiles, mutton, wheat and grain, small wares, fruit, vegetables and other comestibles; they also practised crafts such as candle-­making, tanning, cooking, brewing a millet-­based drink, and many others.

Janissary Merchants and Artisans: The Problem of Capital Formation Istanbul was a mega-­conurbation. With a population of around three hundred thousand, it was more of a consumer city than a centre of production.15 The Ottoman capital was always in need of importing products for its industries, the palaces, the army and the arsenals; local manufactures mostly processed and distributed these imported products. Many commercial businesses and artisan activities aimed at meeting the daily needs of Istanbulites. A major task was the provisioning of the city with basic consumer goods such as meat, wheat and other grains, other foodstuffs including rice, oil, fish and honey, as well as the all-­important textiles. Presumably the janissaries took a role in the transportation of these commodities since they were relatively more mobile than the rest of the population.16 Court records and janissary estate registers do in fact show that these military men acted as transporters and suppliers of various commodities. We find a janissary involved in a complex network of mercantile activities: the soldier Yusuf b. Kurd acted as a transporter for Ali Çavuş b. el-­Hac Mustafa residing in the town of Süleymaniye in Bosnia; the two men were brothers-­in-­law. When Ali Çavuş wanted to send woollen fabric (çuka) and silk cloth (kemha) to his son living in Istanbul, he may have decided on Yusuf as a transporter not only because of family ties, but also on account of the latter’s mobility. However during the journey Yusuf passed away in Edirne and Ali Çavuş claimed in court that the fabrics belonged to him. Thus the records reflect a family business where the

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supplier/manufacturer, the transporter, and the receiver, who may have been a shopkeeper or an artisan, were all related to one another. The document does not indicate how the three men were to share the profit; but it is likely that the janissary Yusuf b. Kurd was to receive a share. Many goods were imported by sea. Wealthy merchants of Istanbul dominated this trade, either as the shipmasters, transporting goods in their own ships, or else as ship owners, staying in the city and equipping their vessels for overseas trade.17 Among these Istanbul traders there were some janissaries: Şaban Beşe b. Mehmed and Bali Beşe b. Abdullah, for example, were joint owners of a ship (sefine). The two janissaries recorded a transaction in the Istanbul court, the former selling to the latter half of his share in their common ship for 32,100 akçes.18 Unfortunately the document does not indicate what kind of mercantile activity the partners were involved in: they may have been working as transporters for third parties, or else been merchants on their own account. Another record reveals that Osman Beşe b. Bayram was a janissary merchant who supplied grapes from Izmir to Istanbul. In the qadi’s court he complained about a captain Manol (?) v. Todori who was responsible for transporting 1,200 kantars of grapes belonging to Osman Beşe from Izmir to Istanbul.19 This was a very large quantity; but something must have happened on the voyage, for upon arrival, Osman Beşe found that delivery was eighty-­nine kantars short.20 Long-­distance trade was not unknown to janissaries either, for a captain named Ali sued Pehlivan Hasan Beşe b. Hüseyin who was acting as an intermediary between an Iraqi merchant named Ibrahim and Hasan Çavuş based in Istanbul. Captain Ali claimed that he had shipped eighteen kantars of clarified butter (sadeyağ); however, Pehlivan Hasan Beşe b. Hüseyin did not complete the transaction although he had received the goods.21 Records prepared in the Istanbul court also make it seem likely that there were janissaries residing in Istanbul who were major merchants, connected to traders delivering goods to the capital from different parts of the empire. A market supervisor (pazarcıbaşı) named el-­Hac Emineddin b. Yusuf of Aleppo, who was also a grocer, sued Süleyman Efendi and Mehmed Agha to get back the 120 guruş that he had handed over to them.22 Süleyman Efendi was a scribe in charge of expenditures (masraf katibi) to the Pasha of Aleppo, Mehmed Paşa, and Mehmed Agha a baş çavuş in the janissary corps. The latter seems to have been the party based in Istanbul active in a trade network supplying groceries from Aleppo to Istanbul – however, in such an arrangement the money should have gone from Istanbul to Aleppo and not the other way around, so it is hard to say what kind of agreement the parties had concluded. Another possible trade network is hinted at in a court case that the janissary scribe (yeniçeri

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katibi) Nesimi Efendi b. Sipah filed against Hasan Çelebi b. Mustafa Cündi.23 Hasan Çelebi owed four yük (i.e. 400,000 akçes) for the products he had bought from Nesimi Efendi. The record refers to the goods as ‘miscellaneous’ (emtia-­yı mütenevvia); the value of the transaction being rather high, Nesimi Efendi was probably a wealthy merchant.24 Among the provisions supplied to the capital, mutton had a significant place. Anthony Greenwood has estimated the state-­dependent mutton consumption of Istanbul, which included the palaces and the janissary corps, as being 40,000–50,000 sheep in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, 90,000–100,000 sheep in the third quarter, and some 140,000– 170,000 at the beginning of the seventeenth century.25 On the Balkan or Rumelian side of the empire it was mostly Greeks who dominated the market, while Turks and Armenians controlled the trade on the Asian side.26 Grain was brought to Istanbul from Wallachia and Rumelia, especially from the Edirne region. At times when grain was not available in these areas, Istanbul was provisioned from Caffa, Egypt, and Tripoli in Lybia; at times the grain merchants also called upon the northern Anatolian provinces of Sivas, Tokat and Amasya. Janissary involvement in the supply trades was reflected in two cases of conflict over the transportation of livestock that ended up before the Istanbul court: both Mehmed Beşe b. Ahmed and İbrahim Beşe b. Hasan had sold animals and applied to the qadi to claim the outstanding sums still owed to them.27 Other janissaries appeared as grain wholesalers cum shippers (navluncu), a business which included the purchase, transport, and storage of large amounts of wheat and barley either in their own names or in those of the wealthy Istanbul merchants they were representing.28 As court records reveal, Mehmed Beşe b. Mustafa, who was a member of the navluncu ta’ifesi, bought 542 kile of wheat from Mehmed Çelebi, the administrator (kethüda) of Hüseyin Efendi b. Mehmed’s farm in Çubuk village in the Ergene district of Rumeli.29 In this context the term ta’ife denoted guilds, thus Mehmed was a janissary who was also a member of the grain wholesalers’ guild, however we do not know if he was a janissary in origin or by assimilation (i.e. an artisan-­turned-­ janissary). Another grain wholesaler, Halil Beşe b. Ibrahim, sold 200 kile of wheat to el-­Hac Ali b. Selam, valued at 59 akçes per kile: Halil Beşe sold it all for 101,800 akçes.30 As these cases show, supplying the needs of Istanbul through overseas trade was a business in which the geographical mobility of the janissaries played a role. The trade networks they had established during their stay away from Istanbul, especially during campaigns, helped them to coordinate provisioning once they had returned to the capital. According to the 1664 salary register of the janissaries, for example, the number

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registered in Istanbul amounted to 39,571. Only 44 per cent of these men, however, were physically present in the city. Most of the remainder had been sent on different campaigns, mostly in Persia and Crete, and 6 per cent were unaccounted for.31 Some people managed to make a profit while on campaign, thus the estate inventories of certain deceased janissaries included money transferred from Crete and recorded as earnings.32 Janissary merchants also were well established on the Istanbul market. Thirty-­seven of the relevant registers contained commercial goods, and twenty-­six janissaries rented shops; in three cases, moreover, these premises were the property of a janissary.33 Thus 78 per cent of the men possessing commercial goods did their business in shops, usually selling various textiles34 including linings (bogasi), muslins (tülbent), linens (ketan) and fustian (aba), and also clothing and underwear (came, don), bath towels and shirts (hamam havlusu ve gömleği), as well as embroidered fabrics (münakkaş makremes).35 Some janissaries were also in the market for comestibles: one such seller, Mustafa Beşe, sold watermelons and melons in his shop, rented for 735 akçes.36 A rich merchant named Ahmed Çorbacı with an estate worth 223,473 akçes was on record as a rice trader (pirinçi) and owned a warehouse (mahzen) worth 116,000 akçes.37 Another janissary, sekban Ali Beg b. Mustafa, bought a grocery, a butcher’s shop, and a store for şira (grape juice) from Sini Hatun bt. Mehmed for 80,000 akçes.38 Disputes over sales of comestibles provide yet further evidence of the janissary presence in the food markets of Istanbul.39 Further information on this issue comes from a unique register compiled by the Istanbul market inspectorate (ihtisab) and dated to 1092/1682, which lists 3,200 shops dealing with food in intramural Istanbul. This is a forty-­one-­page survey limited to the trade in comestibles and compiled to facilitate the collection of a tax called yevmiye-­i dekakin (‘daily [tax] on shops’). The registrar had divided intramural Istanbul into fifteen sectors (kol) and listed the types of shops involved, the owners of the relevant properties, the trades carried on in them, and the rate of daily tax. However the document did not identify the people who actually ran the businesses: accordingly, among the 3,200 shop-­owners, 189 beşes, comprising 6 per cent of the total, owned shops that they either ran themselves or rented out to others;40 427 shop owners (13 per cent) were aghas and 47 (1.5 per cent) were begs; however it is impossible to detect how many of them were affiliated with the janissary army.41 On the basis of the data provided so far, it is apparent that by the seventeenth century, janissaries were active as textile merchants, fruit and vegetable sellers, grain wholesalers, butchers, and other major or minor traders provisioning Istanbul. Janissary mobility was possibly a significant

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factor that allowed the men in question to establish contacts with provincial sellers and to gain experience in running trade networks. Other janissaries were ensconced in Istanbul markets as artisans or property owners renting out business premises. However as capital formation is often only possible by the spoliation of those who are less powerful, we may presume that janissaries often used violence against primary producers and civilian artisans; if we reject the assumption that all janissaries were vagabonds and bullies, this does not mean that the group as a whole had gained its prominence in trade exclusively by peaceful means.

Janissary Integration into Istanbul Guilds In the 1600s, Istanbul guilds were subject to transformation partly due to the economic involvement of janissaries in the market. By mid-­century, there was a significant increase in the frequency of janissary appearances in court as members of various guilds. We have already observed artisan janissaries in the textiles and food sectors. Other janissaries made a living as candle-­makers, tanners, cooks and metal workers, as we will see in this section. When mobility between soldiers and civilians was at issue, the enhanced involvement of janissaries in the business sector was only one side of the coin. The entry of artisans into the ranks of janissary regiments was not uncommon, either. The janissary population of Istanbul skyrocketed from thirteen thousand to fifty thousand in the first half of the seventeenth century.42 This was part of a general increase in the military population, with Ottoman grandees, who competed for appointments, often recruiting armed men that might serve them when and if they came to hold high office.43 In addition, the European military revolution of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries changed the nature of warfare, as European armies became mainly composed of musketeers, and armies thus expanded by the recruitment of commoners who could use firearms. The Ottoman state adapted itself to these changes quite successfully by expanding the janissary army. The classical janissary army that had been based on recruits collected as tribute from the Christian peasantry (devşirme) began to accept commoners as sekban and sarıcas – in other words, peasants recruited as temporary mercenaries, kuloğlus or the sons of janissaries, ağa çırağıs or recruits in the personal service of the janissary commander, and ferzend-­i sipahis, who were the sons of senior cavalry men. There also were people who infiltrated the janissary corps through illegal ways, such as the trick known as becayeş (lit. place switching): this was a practice whereby a corrupt official permitted a new recruit to

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serve in a janissary company under a false name, using the pay-­ticket of a deceased soldier. Seventeenth-­century Ottoman intellectuals were disturbed by these sudden changes and complained about outsiders (ecnebis), peasants and criminals who were accepted or bribed their way into the corps. As noted earlier, these complaints have led to the misconception that the janissary army decayed because of vagabonds infiltrating the institution.44 However it is worth remembering that the material benefits and privileges accruing to the janissaries became more appealing to city folk who tried to protect themselves from the economic crisis of the time by obtaining military titles. Artisans of Istanbul were not immune from these tendencies. Army affiliation became a desirable status that offered a certain protection against deteriorating economic conditions and rising taxes. In either case, the two-­way movement between the janissaries and civilians had an effect upon Istanbul guilds. As a comparison of the documents from the 1610s and the 1660s reveals, this two-­way movement was an on-­going phenomenon. Within half a century, the number of individual cases in which a janissary who was engaged in artisan activities came up either as plaintiff or defendant increased from seven to twenty. Moreover, Yi’s examination of guild petitions and appeals by groups of guild members, including their wardens, reveals that in the 1610s there were only four cases involving military elements, whereas in the 1660s, among thirty-­seven guilds that appealed, eighteen, or almost half, contained military elements.45 Members with the relevant titles were concentrated in certain guilds: thus beşes made up four out of ten members of the guild comprising the cooks of sheep’s trotters, three out of six members of the cooks/kebab-­sellers’ guild, and five out of eight members of the organization of manufacturers of the fermented millet drink known as boza.46 However, we do not have lists of the full membership of guilds like tanners and candle-­makers, where janissaries apparently were numerous, and nor do we possess information on the internal functioning of these organizations or the relationships of the relevant artisans with their customers. As a result it is impossible to say whether candle-­making, tanning and other crafts favoured by janissaries were significantly different from other crafts with limited or no military connections. This data proves that seventeenth-­century janissaries were already a part of Istanbul artisan life, being active in a broad range of trades and crafts, and that they were becoming more and more active in the guilds, even taking on a role in court cases. Some janissaries might become guild wardens (kethüdas and yiğitbaşıs). Moreover, janissaries controlled the eight butcher shops and animal pens (tomruks) near Et Meydanı/Meat

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Square next to the New Barracks (Yeni Odalar), two of their adjuncts being non-­Muslims.47 The latter along with their four helpers were exempt from the head-­tax payable by Christians and Jews (cizye), and from other dues. In one instance, three butcher partners, Ali Beşe b. Abdullah, and the two sons of İskarlat, namely Kosta and İstadola, were on record as owning a half-­share in eight tomruks at Et Meydanı. Normally meat for the janissaries arrived at the butcher shops near the barracks from the slaughterhouses in Yedikule and near Edirne Kapısı. In this case, however, the butchers were tenants at the slaughterhouse of Aya Kapısı, so they probably brought in meat from this venue. Thus at least occasionally the slaughterhouses of Aya Kapısı also provisioned the janissary barracks.48 The other half of the eight tomruks belonged to Mustafa Agha who lent his half-­share to the three partners for one yük akçes per year, the surviving document recording the outstanding debt which the partners owed to Mustafa Agha. According to an earlier document dated to 1028/1619, Mustafa Beşe b. Abdullah had lent 100,000 akçes to four butchers at Et Meydanı; with interest, the sum to be repaid amounted to 116,400 akçes.49 When Mustafa Beşe went to court demanding his money, it emerged that the debtors had cash-­flow problems since they had not yet sold their merchandise. One of them had paid his share of the debt nonetheless, and it was agreed that a certain İbrahim Agha from the janissary army would become the guarantor of the other three butchers, who promised to pay as soon as they had sold their meat.50 These cases reveal that the janissaries were powerful as owners of shares in the tomruks and that non-­Muslims established relations with janissary creditors and military men who would act as their guarantors. Documentary evidence also suggests that certain janissaries were practising butchers not only in the shops near the barracks, but elsewhere as well. Thus the estate register of Hüseyin Beşe b. Hasan, for example, contained a butcher’s hook (kasab çengeli) and a knife for meat-­mincing (kıyma bıçağı). Some of these men were active in the butchers’ guild as well.51

Connections between Janissaries and Candle-­makers An interesting case worth a more detailed look involved the candle-­makers guild and its relationship with the janissaries. In seventeenth-­century Istanbul, candle-­ makers were predominantly non-­ Muslims (mumcu zımmis).52 In addition, however, there were janissaries such as Mehmed Beşe and Ali Beşe who also were involved in the trade.53 I could continue the enumeration of candle-­maker janissaries almost ad infinitum,

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however, it is more important to stress that there were no court cases indicating that the candle-­makers rejected new candidates for membership, including those with military backgrounds. Certainly some members of the candle-­makers’ guild protested against the illicit behaviour of outsiders.54 They complained about people who slaughtered sheep and cattle in their houses and made candles for sale at home, and also about individuals who bought animal fat from the slaughterhouses to make candles, although these enterprises should only have sold their fat to the candle-­makers’ guild. This proceeding indicates that the guild did not resist the incorporation of new elements per se, but protested against their disregard for guild custom. As this case shows, administrators of the candle-­makers’ guild had to deal with the fact that several members illegally bought fat from the butchers of Et Meydanı where, as noted previously, the principal janissary barracks were located.55 To cope with the problem, the guild officials made the delinquent members swear that they would not buy fat from the janissary butchers again, thus indicating on-­going business relations between the soldiers and candle-­makers. However, the extent of their connections remains unknown, and we have no evidence to prove whether such circumventing of guild regulations was more common when janissaries were involved. Thus relations between the janissary butchers controlling the ‘Meat Square’ and members of the candle-­makers’ guild leave us with some unanswered questions. Who were the initiators of the illicit traffic in animal fat; and were there any janissary candle-­makers that facilitated negotiations between the two parties? A loan transaction by Çorbacı Mustafa Agha b. İsmail of the tenth ağa bölüğü increases the likelihood of economic ties between the barracks and the candle-­makers’ guild. Mustafa Agha loaned 260,000 akçes to the villagers of Tırnova in Yenişehir (in present-­day Greece) so that they could pay their taxes. The candle-­makers Andon v. Dimitri and Tatoş v. Andon, as well as the yiğitbaşı of the candle-­makers’ guild, Hristo v. Manko, were on record as being the agents of Mustafa Agha, with responsibility for collecting the money in his name.56 The same candle-­makers were also the agents of Çorbacı Mustafa Agha b. İsmail in collecting the poll-­tax (cizye) of the Fenar district in Rumelia.57 Visibly economic liaisons between some janissaries and candle-­makers required the agency of the guild, as apparent from the intervention of a yiğitbaşı or adjunct warden. Thus relations between the two parties were more complex than appears at first glance, and not limited to the existence of janissaries who simultaneously followed the trade of candle-­making. In fact by the mid-­seventeenth century the kethüda of the Istanbul candle-­ makers’ guild was a janissary named Aslan Beşe b. Muharrem.58

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Janissaries as Guild Wardens Janissaries functioning as guild administrators were not unique to the candle-­makers’ guild; they also played a significant role in the trade association of the tanners (debbağ). In the 1660s, among the fifteen guild elders (ihtiyars) there was one janissary officer (çorbacı) named el-­Hac Mehmed b. Osman, and two beşes called Mustafa Beşe b. Bayram and Osman Beşe b. Zekeriya.59 Furthermore, a document from 1071/1660 recorded that the headman (kethüda) of the guild encompassing the cooks/sellers of sheep’s trotters (paçacı) was a janissary named İbrahim Beşe b. Hüseyin.60 In 1072/1662, the brass-­workers’ guild registered in the Istanbul court that the yiğitbaşı Hüseyin Çelebi b. Mehmed, a janissary, was to become their next kethüda. Among the eight guild elders who registered this appointment, three held the title of beşe.61 When the linen weavers (ketancıs) registered their new kethüda it emerged that one of their elders was also a janissary.62 What did it mean to have janissaries in the upper echelons of guild administration? According to Yi, the leaders of guilds in Istanbul came to office either by ‘internal selection’ or through ‘external appointment by the government’. Most of the men appointed were from the military corps, as firstly the Ottoman administration attempted to increase its control over the guilds, and secondly the aim was to provide salaries for military personnel in times of economic crisis.63 Although we cannot neglect the government’s role in the selection of guild leaders, we should not assume without closer investigation that the guilds which had janissaries as administrators were of necessity more accessible to government intervention, for the soldiers were not always the ‘loyal slaves of the Sultan’. After all, many military men had become so integrated with civilians and so much a part of the urban economy as artisans, property owners, tenants, investors, or merchants that their interests often lay with the market more than with the state. Interestingly, janissaries acceded to guild leadership in late seventeenth-­ century Aleppo as well as eighteenth-­century Cairo, with ordinary guild members regularly contributing to the selection of these wardens.64 According to Yi, some janissary kethüdas of Istanbul also enjoyed the support of their guilds, such as the linen-­weavers and tanners.65 Finally, although soldiers administered some guilds we do not know whether the wardens in question were janissaries by origin or else artisans-­turned-­ janissaries. None of the military men officiating as guild administrators appeared as ‘sons of Abdullah’, indicating that they were not converts to Islam. These guild wardens could have been ordinary civilian artisans who at some point had obtained janissary titles so as to gain a stronger posi-

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tion in society as well as at least partial exemption from taxation.66 One may suppose that the prestige an artisan derived from belonging to the janissary army facilitated his rise in the guild, or else guild members might select a janissary as their leader, hoping to thus obtain a stronger representation. People with a janissary affiliation may have enjoyed a competitive edge when it came to rising to the upper echelons of guild administration. Just as the names of janissaries reveal information on their backgrounds, the titles indicating janissary affiliation in the court records help us to detect elements of social differentiation. The manner in which court records identified the various categories of janissaries reflected a two-­way movement between artisans and military men. As the borders between soldiers and civilians became more blurred, the titles indicating janissary affiliation altered. In the first quarter of the century, janissaries appeared with the title of beşe, and the documents underlined their identities as infantry soldiers (racils). In some cases, the officials stated that a particular soldier was dergâh-­i ali yeniçerilerinden, in other words belonging to the janissaries stationed in the capital; however the qadis’ court but rarely noted the soldiers’ regiments. Around the mid-­seventeenth century customs changed, and there was an attempt to provide more specific information on the affiliation of the janissaries; the court began to use the term dergâh-­i ali yeniçerilerinden almost systematically, and in addition often recorded the regiment to which the janissary was affiliated. A typical record thus took the following shape: dergâh-­ı ali yeniçerilerinin 88. cema‘atine mahsus oda ahalisinden Mehmed Beşe b. Hasan (Mehmed Beşe the son of Hasan who belongs to the 88th regiment of the janissary army). The title beşe started to appear in a context which differed from that which had been customary in the early 1600s. Officials now found it unnecessary to record that a soldier was part of the infantry, and in some cases they even described a given beşe as a kimesne or quidam. Who were the people described as kimesne yet given the title of beşe? They may have been janissaries of civilian background, or janissary recruits who had entered the corps without passing through the devşirme process, or else janissaries whose main occupations were civilian. From my reading of court cases I have gained the impression that whenever a person’s principal affiliation was with a guild or a profession the scribes were more likely to identify him as beşe without further details. Perhaps this usage reflects the understanding of the court scribes that the boundaries between janissaries and civilians had become blurred, and they wished to distinguish the different social types that appeared before them. Amalgamation between soldiers and artisans had thus arrived at a point at which the court found it necessary to use different titles for different types of janissary.

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Clearly the qadis’ courts and the guilds of Istanbul were affected by the increased involvement of janissaries with the city market. Furthermore, as we have seen in the case of the butchers’ and candle-­makers’ guilds, janissaries, or people who acted as personal agents of janissaries, could become guild wardens, and of course ordinary guild membership on the part of soldiers was even more widespread. Moreover the court records also demonstrate the presence of janissaries as creditors or guarantors of debts; thus the entrance of these men into the guilds was sometimes accompanied by transactions in which they exercised a certain degree of economic power. Run-­of-­the-­mill janissaries becoming members of certain trade guilds thus form but a single aspect of a much more complex phenomenon. Unfortunately for this early period, our documents do not furnish much evidence on artisans migrating to Istanbul and managing to enter the local guilds, so we do not know whether perhaps migrants were more likely than residents to seek janissary membership in order to acquire a recognized urban identity. Nor do we know whether individuals from the provinces entering Istanbul as soldiers were more likely than military men long-­established in the capital to find a supplementary source of income in artisan work.

Conclusion The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries witnessed major changes in the military field. Rivalry among candidates for high office as well as the new weaponry and methods of warfare forced the army to increase its numbers by enlisting men who could learn to use firearms in a short period of training, while previously armies had consisted of a small number of professionals who had trained for many years. In consequence, as we reach the early 1600s, we encounter a rapid expansion of the janissary army. The new soldiers of provincial origin arrived in Istanbul with their own expectations and agendas. They integrated into society on different levels: some remained mere soldiers and existed on their pay alone; others became involved with production and trade and gained influence over urban guilds; yet others were property owners, tenants, or wealthy merchants provisioning Istanbul. Perhaps those who were most astute financially became investors or moneylenders. Military men were present in various fields but often clustered in a few key sectors of production and trade, such as textiles and food supplies, particularly the wholesale trade in grain and meat. We may assume, though we cannot prove, that the power due to membership in a military unit allowed some men to establish themselves in these key trades. In the

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meat sector, less ambitious or less fortunate soldiers worked as butchers, but were also involved in candle-­making, tanning, and cooking meat for immediate consumption by the customer. We can also surmise that janissaries had started to work in these fields before the mid-­seventeenth century, and had long been gaining strength in the market and in the guilds. Documents reflecting military involvement in trade confirm that some janissaries became quite powerful, for example as wealthy wholesalers dealing with huge amounts of produce, or, on a lower level, as active members representing their guilds in court, or even as guild wardens. We do not have the numbers of artisans joining janissary regiments; however, as guild members with a janissary affiliation stood a good chance of becoming wardens, holding a janissary title was a desirable thing in business circles. Evidently it made sense for an Istanbul merchant or artisan to establish close business relationships with military men. This blurring of boundaries is apparent from the popular protests of the mid-­1600s with which we began our discussion. According to Evliya Çelebi, his relative the grand vizier Melek Ahmed Paşa lost his position because of a conflict with the Istanbul tanners.67 The event he refers to is the 1651 rebellion which began with the protests of artisans, who had to sell their goods at the price set by the government and accept payment in the newly debased akçe. With the support of the janissaries, the protest became larger and finally led to the end of Melek Ahmed Paşa’s vizierate. If we are to believe Evliya, the tanners’ guild was the most politically potent among the guilds of Istanbul.68 His assumption gains credibility as the janissaries played a significant role in exactly this guild. Whether the tanners’ guild initiated the rebellion or not, the 1651 event began as a protest of the Istanbul artisans and found supporters among the janissaries. We may therefore define it as a combined soldier/civilian urban protest that was only possible because of the important economic ties between janissaries and Istanbul artisans, as demonstrated in this chapter.

Notes This chapter is based on Gülay Yılmaz, ‘The Economic and Social Roles of Janissaries in a Seventeenth-­Century Ottoman City: The Case of Istanbul’ (unpublished Ph.D. diss., McGill University, 2011).   1. Mustafa Naima. Tarih-­i Naima, ed. Mehmet İpşirli, vol. 3 (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları, 2007), 1337.   2. The ‘askeri kassam took charge of the estates of defunct servitors of the sultan, which in principle were confiscated although it was customary to return part of the inheritance

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to the heirs. The terekes in these registers have been studied by Said Öztürk; the author has provided statistical data from the inheritance records of one thousand people who belonged to the governing (‘askeri) class and passed away in Istanbul during this period. Among these men, I have detected 173 janissaries. Going back to the original documents used by Öztürk, I have extracted further information, mainly on the occupations of these janissaries, the shops they rented, and the commercial goods that they owned.  3. Eunjeong Yi, Guild Dynamics in Seventeenth-­Century Istanbul, Fluidity and Leverage (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004), 132–33, uses a broader definition of ‘janissary’ in her study of early seventeenth-­century Istanbul guilds. She takes titles such as agha and begs into consideration even when the documents do not specify whether the men in question were affiliated with the janissary army, noting that in her study ‘janissary’ is an ‘umbrella’ term. She has thus studied a larger group of people, however her method involves the risk of including people who were not affiliated with the janissaries at all.  4. Two examples will suffice to show this trend: Bedri Noyan, Bektaşilik, Alevilik Nedir? (Ankara: 1987), 26–27, refers to vagabonds that had penetrated the Ottoman army and ruined its discipline; Yılmaz Öztuna, II. Mahmud (Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı, 1989), 70, speaks of the hatred which ordinary inhabitants of Istanbul felt for the janissaries that had become a mere gang of criminals.   5. Haim Gerber, Economy and Society in an Ottoman City: Bursa, 1600–1700 (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University, 1998); Linda Darling, Revenue-­Raising and Legitimacy: Tax Collection and Finance Administration in the Ottoman Empire, 1560–1660 (Leiden: Brill, 1996); Rhoads Murphey, Ottoman Warfare, 1500–1700 (London: University College London Press, 1999); Leslie Pierce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).   6. Cemal Kafadar, ‘On the Purity and Corruption of the Janissaries’, Turkish Studies Association Bulletin 15(1991), 273–79; Baki Tezcan, The Second Ottoman Empire: The Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).  7. André Raymond, ‘Soldiers in Trade: The Case of Ottoman Cairo’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 18 (1991), 16–37; idem, Artisans et commerçants au Caire: au XVIIIe siècle, 2 vols (Damascus: Institut Français de Damas, 1973–74).   8. Charles L. Wilkins, Forging Urban Solidarities: Ottoman Aleppo, 1640–1700 (Leiden: Brill, 2010).   9. Colette Establet and Jean-­Paul Pascual, ‘Comportements économiques des agents civils et militaires à Damas, fin du XVIIième siècle’, in Mélanges en l’honneur d’André Raymond, eds Ghislaine Alleaume, Sylvie Denoix and Michel Tuchscherer (Cairo: IFAO, 2009); Colette Establet and Jean-­Paul Pascual, La gent d’État dans la société ottoman damascène: Les ‘askar à la fin du XVIIe siècle (Damas: Presses de l’Ifpo: 2011). 10. Jane Hathaway, The Politics of Households in Ottoman Egypt: The Rise of the Qazdaglis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 11. Hülya Canbakal, Society and Politics in an Ottoman Town: ‘Ayntab in the 17th Century (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2007); Molly Greene, A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 12. Cemal Kafadar, ‘Yeniçeri Esnaf Relations: Solidarity and Conflict’, unpublished MA Thesis, McGill University, 1981. 13. Kafadar, ‘Purity and Corruption of the Janissaries’, 273–79. 14. Yi, Guild Dynamics. 15. For the seventeenth century, Garzoni, a Venetian bailo of the time, has guessed that the population of Istanbul amounted to one million; and the famous Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi agrees with him. Robert Mantran has concluded that the population must have been around 600,000–700,000, basing this estimate on information given by travellers such as the Englishman Sandys, and the Venetian bailo, Pietro Civrano. By

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contrast Halil İnalcık argues that, considering the limits of the city’s infrastructure, the population of early modern Istanbul cannot have been more than 300,000: Costantino Garzoni, ‘Relazione Dell’Impero Ottomano’, in Relazioni Degli Ambasciatori Veneti al Senato, edited by Eugenio Albèri, 3 vols (Florence: Società editrice fiorentina, 1840) vol. 1, 389; Robert Mantran, Histoire d’Istanbul (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1996), 253; Halil İnalcık, ‘Istanbul’, in Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd edition (from now EI2), 12 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1986) vol. 4, 230–39. İnalcık’s estimate is probably the most realistic. 16. Istanbul Kadı Sicilleri (from now on IKS, copies studied at the İslam Araştırmaları Merkezi/ İSAM in Bağlarbaşı, Üsküdar) 5, 31b, no. 211 (1029/1620). 17. Halil İnalcık, ‘Capital Formation in the Ottoman Empire’, The Journal of Economic History 29(1) (1969), 97–140, 120. Suraiya Faroqhi, Towns and Townsmen of Ottoman Anatolia: Trade, Crafts and Food Production in an Urban Setting, 1520–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 152–55. 18. IKS 1, 18b, no. 112 (1012/1612). 19. 1 kantar = 56.449 kg. Halil İnalcık, Sources and Studies on the Ottoman Black Sea, vol. 1: The Customs Register of Caffa, 1487–1490 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1996), 177. 20. IKS 2, 45b, no. 380 (1025/1616). 21. IKS 8, 20b (1071/1660). 22. IKS 9, 88b (1071/1660). 23. Cündi is an honorific title given to sipahis, meaning warrior. 24. IKS 5, 13b, no. 104 (1029/1620). The case also reveals that Nesimi Efendi was involved in loan transactions. He lent large sums of money, amounting to 8 yük akçe, to another janissary named Malkoç Efendi, who was a scribe in Damascus and Tripoli. The high value of the loan makes it likely that Nesimi Efendi was acting as an investor or moneylender. This court record established that Hasan Çelebi assumed the debt of Malkoç Efendi and it was agreed that he should pay 12 yük akçes to Nesimi Efendi. The document does not say why Hasan Çelebi assumed the debt; but there could have been a commercial relationship between him and Malkoç Efendi. 25. Anthony Greenwood, ‘Istanbul’s Meat Provisioning: A Study of Celebkeşan System’, Ph.D. diss., The University of Chicago, 1988, 15–17. His calculations are based on the daily consumption as recorded by Kavanin-­i Osmaniye der rabıta-­yı asitane (quoted in Robert Mantran, Istanbul dans la seconde moité du XVIIe siècle: Essai d’histoire institutionnelle, économique et sociale (Paris: Librairie Adrien Maisonneuve, 1962, 196). In the mid-­seventeenth century, consumption amounted to 6,000 sheep a day, in times of scarcity reduced to 2,000 (2,190,000 sheep in a normal year, and 758,000 in times of scarcity). But it is not certain that this total included state-­dependent consumption. 26. Mantran, Istanbul, 39; Greenwood, ‘Istanbul’s Meat Provisioning’, 21–22. 27. IKS 7, 4a, no. 11 (1069/1658). In this case, Mehmed Beşe b. Ahmed sued Odnam v. Yahudi for an outstanding debt of 67,340 akçes from the sale of 1,140 water buffalo heifers (su sığırı düvesi). Mehmed Beşe claimed that he sold the animals for 140,640 akçes but received only 73,300 akçes. Odnam, on the other hand, argued that he had purchased 520 water buffalo heifers and 412 cattle heifers (inek düvesi) and then got an additional 30 water buffalo heifers. In the end he compromised, saying that he still owed 36,520 akçes to the janissary. Also relevant is IKS 7, 31b (1070/1659): Ibrahim Beşe b. Hasan had sold 35 sheep to Seyyid Mustafa Çelebi b. Seyyid İdris for 4,900 akçes and went to court over the 1,000 akçes that he had not received. 28. Mehmet Demirtaş, Osmanlı’da Fırıncılık: 17. Yüzyıl (Istanbul: Kitap Yayınevi, 2008), 84. 29. According to İnalcık, ‘Customs Register of Caffa’, 177, where wheat is concerned, 1 kile equals 25.656 kg. IKS 9, 104b (1071/1660): Demirtaş, Osmanlı’da Fırıncılık, 84.

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30. IKS 9, 85b (1071/1660). 31. Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi (BOA), Kamil Kepeci (KK) 6599 (1074–75/1663–64). 32. Kısmet-­i ‘Askeriyye (from now on KA, copies studied at the İslam Araştırmaları Merkezi/ İSAM in Bağlarbaşı, Üsküdar) 6, 44a (1078/1668); Greene, A Shared World, 147. 33. The document does not indicate if the rent was monthly or annual. 34. Some examples of rich merchants: KA 5, 134b (1077/1666): Mehmed Beşe b. Abdullah Bağdadi, who had a net estate of 239,610 akçes, had amassed commercial goods worth 533,269 akçes and before his death had been selling muslin in Istanbul markets. Mehmed Beşe had an Istanbul shop rented for 300 akçes. KA 6, 31a (1077/1666): El-­Hac Ibrahim Beşe b. Hasan had dealt in textiles for public baths and possessed commercial goods worth 287,645 akçes. He owned his own shop worth 60,000 akçes and left a fortune of 841,755 akçes. See also IKS 9, 67b (1071/1660), KA 5, 152a (1079/1669), KA 6, 80a (1078/1667), KA 6, 13a (1077/1666). 35. KA 2, 17a (1025/1616); KA 2, 24b (1026/1617); KA 3, 41b (1048/1638); KA 3, 113b (1055/1645); KA 5, 120b (1072/1661); KA 5, 134b (1077/1666); KA 6, 13a (1077/1666); KA 6, 31a (1077/1666); KA 6, 58a (1078/1667); KA 6, 80a (1078/1667); KA 5, 152a (1079/1668). Bogasi was a simple fabric used for lining garments and available in many colours. The regulations of the time indicate that it was also used commonly by Christians and Jews. Also, janissary undergarments were made of bogasi. Muslin (tülbent) was a fine cotton fabric used for headgear, while cheap woollens were known as aba: Faroqhi, Towns and Townsmen, 126–27, 137. 36. KA 6, 53a (1078/1667). 37. KA 4, 79a (1060/1650). 38. IKS 5, 81b, no. 577 (1029/1620). 39. IKS 3, 16a, no. 135 (1027/1618); IKS 2, 36a, no. 300 (1025/1616). 40. Mustafa Ismail Kaya, ‘Shops and Shopkeepers in the Istanbul Ihtisab Register of 1092/1681’, unpublished MA Thesis (Bilkent University, 2006), 63–79. 41. Kaya, ‘Shops and Shopkeepers’, appendix, 125–85. 42. Halil İnalcık, ‘Military and Fiscal Transformation in the Ottoman Empire (1600–1700)’, Archivum Ottomanicum 6 (1980), 288–97; Gábor Ágoston, Guns for the Sultan: Military Power and the Weapons Industry in the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 26; Halil İnalcık, ‘Ghureba’, EI2, vol. 2, 1097–98; Rhoads Murphey, ‘Kanun-­name-­i Sultani li Aziz Efendi’ (Aziz Efendi’s Book of Sultanic Laws and Regulations: An Agenda for Reform by a Seventeenth-­Century Ottoman Statesman), Sources of Oriental Languages and Literatures 9 (1985), 54; Koçi Bey, Koçi Bey Risaleleri, ed. Seda Çakmakçıoğlu (Istanbul: Kabalcı, 2007), 59; ‘Kavanin-­i Yeniçeriyan-­ı Dergâh-­ı Âlî’, in Osmanlı Kanunnameleri ve Hukuki Tahlilleri, I. Ahmet Devri Kanunnameleri, vol. 9, ed. Ahmet Akgündüz (Istanbul: Fey Vakfı Yayınları, 1990), 211. 43. Tezcan, The Second Ottoman Empire, 143–45. 44. Kitab-­ı Müstetab, ed. Yaşar Yücel (Ankara: Ankara Üniversitesi Basimevi, 1974), 4; Rhoads Murphey, ‘Kanun-­name-­i Sultani li Aziz Efendi’; Koçi Bey, Koçi Bey Risaleleri, 44, 59–60. 45. Yi, Guild Dynamics, 139. 46. Ibid. 47. İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Devleti Teşkilatında Kapıkulu Ocakları, 2 vols (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1943) vol. 1, 255. 48. IKS 9, 60a (1071/1660); Uzunçarşılı, Kapıkulu Ocakları, vol. 1, 255. 49. The butchers were Yani v. [illegible], Koca Yani v. Papa Dimitri, Aleks v. Kosta, and Iskerlat v. Parves: IKS 4, 19a, no. 127 (1028/1619). 50. IKS 4, 19a, no. 127 (1028/1619). 51. KA 6, 30a (1078/1668); IKS 8, 25b (1071/1660); IKS 9, 166a (1072/1662). Janissary butchers were not confined to Istanbul. In Aleppo they were present as well, and even the

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leadership of the guild was in the hands of janissaries: Wilkins, Forging Urban Solidarities, 239–40. 52. Ayşe Hür, ‘Mumculuk’, in Dünden Bugüne İstanbul Ansiklopedisi, 8 vols (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı, 1994), vol. 5, 497. 53. IKS 9, 191b (1072/1661). IKS 9, 197a (1072/1661). 54. Ahmet Refik Altınay, Hicri On Birinci Asırda İstanbul Hayatı (Istanbul: Enderun Kitabevi, 1988), 20–21, 28–29; Hacı Osman Yıldırım et al. (eds). 82 Numaralı Mühimme Defteri (Ankara: Başbakanlık Devlet Arşivleri Genel Müdürlüğü Osmanlı Arşivi Daire Başkanlığı, 2000), 45, no. 70 (1027/1618); Nezihi Aykut and Mertol Tulum (eds), Mühimme Defteri 90 (Istanbul: Türk Dünyası Araştırmaları Vakfı, 1993), 181, no. 214. 55. IKS 9, 170b (1072/1662). 56. IKS 9, 155a (1072/1662). On villagers borrowing money from Muslim notables to pay their taxes, compare Eleni Gara, ‘Lending and Borrowing Money in an Ottoman Province Town’, in Acta Viennensia Ottomanica, Akten des 13. CIEPO-­Symposiums, eds Markus Köhbach, Gisela Proházka-­Eisl and Claudia Roemer (Vienna: Institut für Orientalistik, 1999), 113–19. 57. IKS 9, 155a (1072/1662). 58. IKS 9, 23b (1071/1661). The yiğitbaşı was Hristo v. Manko, and the listed ihtiyars were Tonoş v. Andon, Nezir v. Andon, and Andon v. Vimor. The document recorded a permission given to a candle-­maker, Apostol, to sell candles in the grocery of the Armenian Varkan in the Sulumanastır neighbourhood, near Yedikule. 59. IKS 9, 145b (1072/1661). They argued that all the sheepskins arriving from Anatolia and the skins of cattle and goats slaughtered in Istanbul, which had not as yet been dried, were to be distributed to the members of the guild on an equal basis. At the same time the artisans claimed that a certain Salih had bought 448 salted goatskins from the Eminönü slaughterhouse and thus violated the guild rules by acquiring more than his proper share. 60. IKS 9, 70a (1071/1660). 61. IKS 9, 249a (1072/1662). 62. IKS 8, 27b (1071/1660). 63. Yi, Guild Dynamics, 74–75. 64. Charles Wilkins has found a document indicating that a partnership of butchers who had the right to the office of guild headman (kasapbaşı) chose a janissary as their partner; the latter was also to operate as a guild headman. Wilkins, Forging Urban Solidarities, 230; André Raymond, ‘Soldiers in Trade: The Case of Ottoman Cairo’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 18(1) (1991), 16–37, 28–29. 65. Yi, Guild Dynamics, 77. 66. The scribes recorded the patronymics of people who had converted to Islam as ‘Abdullah’, meaning ‘slave of God’. 67. Robert Dankoff, trans. and comm., The Intimate Life of an Ottoman Statesman, Melek Ahmed Pasha (1588–1662) as Portrayed in Evliya Çelebi’s Book of Travels, introduction by Rhoads Murphey (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1991), 12–14. 68. Suraiya Faroqhi records that in Evliya’s account, the saintly protector of the tanners’ guild was Ahi Evren, projecting a power that could even be used against the sultan. Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Urban Space as Disputed Grounds: Territorial Aspects to Artisan Conflict in Sixteenth to Eighteenth Century Istanbul’, in eadem, Stories of Ottoman Men and Women: Establishing Status, Establishing Control (Istanbul: Eren Yayıncılık, 2002), 225.

Chapter 8

Rich Artisans and Poor Merchants?

A Critical Look at the Supposed Egalitarianism in Ottoman Guilds

Eunjeong Yi It has been generally assumed that Ottoman guildsmen were immersed in sufi-­futuwwa mentality.1 Certainly there were many complaints about greedy and dishonest artisans who did not live up to the futuwwa ideal.2 But even so, futuwwa has been considered a vital principle for guildsmen at least on the basic, organizational level. Artisans were reportedly not only against pursuing profit for its own sake but also against competition between colleagues that would favour the strong at the expense of the weak.3 For artisans, religious morality was supposedly more important than worldly wealth. Our overall impression of Ottoman guilds, therefore, is one of groups consisting of small producers tightly bound to one another by communal bonds, and little differentiated in terms of wealth. By contrast, merchants are usually considered a totally separate category: they moved around freely trading in whatever commodities would produce a profit, while not subject to the ihtisab law codes that regulated crafts. In acting according to their own commercial interests, merchants were often infringing on the territories of rule-­bound, narrowly specialized guildsmen. Given such contrasting characteristics, it would seem no wonder if the latter harboured deep rancour against the former. Whether due to a sufi-­futuwwa mind-­set or the resentments generated by unequal business relations, such hostility on the part of guildsmen towards traders and wealthier colleagues has been assumed to be a normal phenomenon;

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whenever a guildsman became ‘too rich’, his fellows might, supposedly, expel him, stating that he had turned into a merchant.4 Even in empirical studies that do not necessarily presume a sufi-­futuwwa mind-­set among guildsmen, we may find the idea that poor artisans would unite to resist encroachment by the rich.5 Doubtless there was a certain egalitarian element within the guilds that at least promoted an equitable distribution of raw materials and discouraged the single-­minded pursuit of commercial interests. Numerous guilds tried to ensure that their members bought raw materials only through prearranged channels, so that no one would disrupt the existing order. Some guilds even claimed that they distributed raw materials equitably (ala’s-­seviye). Probably most guildsmen did not like to see rich members dominate their organization. However, the image of an equality-­oriented guild totally opposed to the profit motive does seem rather lopsided. While there was a streak of egalitarianism in the guilds, we need to ask ourselves whether we have not focused excessively on materials that fit such an impression and thus reinforce our prejudgment. Egalitarianism alone may not characterize all the artisans and service workers organized into guilds, and much less dominate their complex relationships with merchants. We do need to check the relevant sources against data that do not sit well with the existing images. There are huge questions involved in re-­examining the egalitarian view of Ottoman guilds. First of all, what was the effect of sufi-­futuwwa economic ethics and how strong was it? Secondly, whether due to futuwwa morality or not, were guildsmen in fact roughly homogeneous in terms of wealth, at least within each trade? Thirdly, how did the artisans regard merchants? The latter might have been adversaries but at the same time were closely connected to the craft world, as they brought in raw materials and often provided much-­needed credit. Put differently, were artisans so categorically separate from merchants? In this chapter, I will try to answer these questions through an observation of seventeenth-­century Istanbul guilds, if only in an incomplete and impressionistic manner, for source materials are not only sparse but also rather unevenly distributed. The surviving transactions either come from the regular court records (sicill defteri) or else they concern inheritance cases from the specialized registers documenting the servitors of the Ottoman sultan, called Kısmet-­i Askeriyye (KA), the official in charge of these records being known as the askeri kassam.6 Unfortunately, there is not a good series of artisans’ estate inventories (tereke) yielding a comprehensive set of data that neatly shows the relative wealth of artisans classified by trades, or the wealth distribution within each line of activity.7

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Nevertheless, looking at scattered cases from seventeenth-­ century Istanbul has some merit. The Ottoman capital may have been a special case, but if so it was an important one. After all, Istanbul was the largest city of the empire and the Mediterranean world, where, as Halil İnalcık has pointed out, some capitalist tendencies may have existed and even flourished.8 Although not much is known about Istanbul merchants, quite a few of them must have been living in or frequenting the Ottoman capital.9 The period in question, namely the seventeenth century, saw increasing institutionalization and standardization of the guilds, although compared with later periods these organizations as yet were quite flexible. It would be interesting to see if the gradually crystallizing guilds of this period were indeed reflecting egalitarianism as has been proclaimed.

The Question of Futuwwa-­minded Egalitarianism We tend to regard egalitarian elements in the guilds as a product of sufi-­futuwwa mentality, although some scholars think that guildsmen’s quasi-­ egalitarianism derives mainly from the practical considerations indispensable for the survival of poor artisans.10 There is no doubt that sufi-­futuwwa tradition was alive within the guilds. Evliya Çelebi’s description of the goldsmiths’ initiation ceremony is a very vivid example of community traditions, and guildsmen’s communal meals must have been important occasions. Some barbers even called themselves ‘all of us brothers’ (cümlemiz ihvan).11 But the religious characteristics of these organizations seem to have declined, at least where Istanbul was concerned, given that guild leaders with religious titles such as şeyh and ahi baba were but rarely found in this period.12 The existence of futuwwa rhetoric and rituals notwithstanding, the real question is how that tradition affected guildsmen’s economic minds and behaviours. Was it then possible that in the guilds, the continuation of futuwwa tradition directly translated into economic egalitarianism? Clearly the Ottoman guilds in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and thereafter were professional organizations a world apart from the Anatolian ahis that Ibn Baṭṭūṭa had described.13 After all, according to this author, every afternoon the members of these groups brought their daily earnings to their leaders, who redistributed them at least partly for communal uses. By contrast, each shop in an Istanbul guild was a separate business that had to secure working capital and make ends meet on its own, although the members of a guild often took collective action when securing raw materials and collecting taxes. Therefore, for guildsmen it would have

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been impractical to follow the idealistic injunctions of futuwwa-­literature to the letter. In addition, it may be hard to find coherent and concrete prescriptions in the futuwwa-­literature. Even a cursory look at the major published sources shows that their moral injunctions are often ambiguous, and varying interpretations remain possible. Most of the discussions are on the level of abstract morality, and they hardly state the duties of a futuwwa-­follower in concrete terms. Futuwwa literature does repeatedly emphasize the importance of charity, which may count as an element promoting egalitarianism; but that feature by and of itself cannot guarantee that guilds were generally egalitarian. Futuwwa-­treatises mostly encourage readers and listeners to renounce avarice and greed, and not turn away from a needy brother. Some fütüvvetnames, indeed, exhort the fityan to give endlessly whatever they may possess. For example, the thirteenth-­century Sunni-­ inclined fütüvvetname by Burgazi says that an ahi is supposed to give all he has earned to others (kazandığını ortaya dökecektir) and leave for his own use only eighteen dirhem of silver, to be expended on his funeral.14 A patron of the futuwwa is a person who lays all his possessions and also his soul open to the public.15 Just as significant are the statements of the Fütüvvetname-­i Kebir written in Bursa in 1524, in other words at a place and time relatively close to seventeenth-­century Istanbul; this text became a closely followed model for later fütüvvetnames. According to this work, the preacher known as the nakib ü’l-­nukaba is supposed to address the congregation as people who have no concern with the wealth of this world.16 But such total denial of personal wealth accumulation may not have been practicable in a guild made up of individual masters, many of them with debts to repay and families to support. Presumably many artisans tended to set such idealistic statements aside as having a purely ceremonial function, mostly irrelevant to their everyday activities. However the obligation to exercise charity towards one’s fellow guildsmen was a much more serious issue, really relevant to guild life. Furthermore, theoretically speaking, some of the moral exhortations in the futuwwa literature could work towards undermining egalitarianism as well. For instance, the idea of modesty and obedience that all fütüvvetnames invariably promoted in place of pride and vanity deserves another look. In addition, envy and anger figured among the emotions that this literature strongly discouraged.17 Thus the futuwwa morality could also have made most guildsmen accept the existing hierarchy in a given guild. When successfully repressing anger and envy, they also avoided questioning the legitimacy of those in authority, regardless of whether their superiors were ‘too rich’ or not. Artisans quite often acted

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as collectives when taking their guild leaders to court and having them officially dismissed; yet cases of an individual member raising questions with the guild authorities are rare (compare Chapter 10).18 Once a man had become a guild member, for most of the time he would have been obliged to follow the guild authorities (or powerful colleagues). These obligations remained even if the individual artisan did not approve of the economic activities of his richer colleagues, because he risked losing out against those more powerful than he was; furthermore the communal atmosphere of the futuwwa did not promote confrontation.19 In other words, quite possibly part of the sufi-­futuwwa ideas legitimized and camouflaged unequal power relations in a guild. In addition, there was a concept of legitimate earnings (helal kazanç), a term which remains rather vague. Some futuwwa circles may not always have denigrated profit-­making, even if they disapproved of compulsive profit-­seeking; and downright poverty may not always have been a source of public esteem.20 For one of the earlier fütüvvetnames related that the wise Lokman told his son to earn money by legitimate means and thus avoid poverty, since viewed in religious terms the latter always led to ‘three negative qualities’. Unfortunately one of these three negative qualities is missing from the text, but the other two are ‘confusion in a man’s reasoning’ and ‘the disappearance of mürüvvet, the virtue of a mature man’; admittedly disdaining the poor was an even greater mistake (gaflet).21 As a wise man encouraged his followers to gain a reasonable living by legitimate means, to be successful in business in and of itself cannot have been a bad thing. Since no hard-­and-­fast boundary separated those that were ‘too rich’ and those that were acceptably successful, a wealthy man could probably legitimize his wealth, even if large, as long as he gave abundant alms to brothers in need. Meanwhile, the Fütüvvetname-­i Kebir written in the commercial environment of sixteenth-­century Bursa does not exclude merchants from the futuwwa at all. Rather, futuwwa was a path open to both merchants and artisans, and anecdotes emphasizing the importance of honesty might feature merchants. Certainly traders storing food for speculative purposes (matrabaz) could not be part of the futuwwa movement, but merchants of confirmed honesty were perfectly acceptable.22 At least certain representatives of futuwwa did not reject merchants as an intrinsically negative social category. Thus futuwwa ideals may not always have inculcated absolute egalitarianism in their followers. Although this set of ideas could have promoted the quasi-­egalitarian and communal atmosphere dominant in the guilds, its application in daily economic life was probably rather haphazard. The main role of futuwwa writings and ceremonies may have been to provide

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an ‘ideological’ background and a degree of cohesion for craftsmen’s organizations, whose main purpose was to promote common interests, but at the same time the futuwwa moral code may also have left some room for relatively well-­to-­do guild members.

Egalitarian – or Probably Egalitarian – Features in the Guildsmen’s Behaviour When it came to raw material distribution, egalitarian principles seem most obvious. We have documents from various guilds stating that they had accepted the rule of distributing raw materials (tevzi‘ ve taksim) under the supervision of their legitimate headmen and in a previously specified place.23 Securing and distributing raw materials was one of the key activities of guilds, and to compete with outsiders in these matters was apparently as important as equitable internal distribution and the social harmony that this proceeding would hopefully entail.24 Some of the guilds did in fact strongly emphasize that distribution must be equitable. However, to a sceptical observer, this principle does not necessarily imply that egalitarianism alone determined raw material distribution – it only indicates that securing raw materials was of great concern among guildsmen. In fact rules regarding raw materials usually entered the record in the face of challenges, the cooks of sheep feet (paçacı) providing a case in point when, in 1071/1661, a paçacı complained that the guild authorities were not giving him his due share of sheep’s heads and feet.25 A year later, nine members of this guild, who did not bear any titles and thus must have been of modest backgrounds, came to court saying that they had elected a new headman (kethüda) and made an agreement that he should distribute raw materials among them, ‘without giving any more or less to any one member’ (kimesneye ziyade ve noksan virilmemek).26 This statement indicated that egalitarian principles could not be taken for granted, and that within the group opposing trends existed as well. Economic egalitarianism could not endure unless there were enough people determined to maintain it. Moreover, egalitarianism in a guild setting did not usually imply giving everybody the exact same share, but rather coexisted with hierarchy. In his recent book Amnon Cohen, for example, found ‘graduated equality’ among Jerusalem guilds in distributing both raw materials and tax burdens.27 We tend to assume that in every guild the relevant officials supervised the purchase of raw materials, and that such control was a necessary precondition for equitable distribution. However, in some cases supervision

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may have been quite loose, for without any hindrance some tradesmen individually managed to procure large amounts of raw materials worth tens of thousands of akçe. Thus there is reason to doubt that all guilds supervised every legitimate transaction in the raw materials sector. Guildsmen freely formed partnerships, which often involved the purchase of raw materials in large quantities. The Istanbul butchers were the most obvious example, forming partnerships and buying more than a hundred sheep at a time from remote places like Moldavia. In the seventeenth century when the officially ordained sheep-­delivery system was in disarray, butchers would have wanted to take matters into their own hands.28 There is also the case of a baker who bought forty-­six tons of flour at the price of 280,050 akçe, perhaps an extreme example of an artisan’s economic individualism.29 It is unclear whether these individual transactions were in violation of guild rules or not. At least apparently the kethüda of the cauldron-­makers’ guild did not have any problem with a member of his organization buying copper worth 20,000 akçe and reselling it for profit. For we find this headman bearing witness in a lawsuit over profit-­sharing between two cauldron-­makers who were partners, stating that indeed one of the men had bought copper at the specified price.30 On the other hand, at times people who bought raw materials in large quantities outside the arrangements agreed upon by their fellow craftsmen were taken to court, so as to answer a complaint from the guild authorities.31 Ultimately what was decisive was the set of internal agreements arrived at by each individual guild; yet given frequent records of such transactions in the sicils, buying large amounts of raw material may not always have been a violation of guild rules. Some organizations may have been more lenient than others towards individual members’ securing raw materials through partnerships or agents in the provinces. Given the gaps in our information, we do not know which artisans bought large quantities of raw materials because they wanted to increase production in their own workshops, and which of them engaged in sub-­contracting with colleagues who were poorer and/or less well connected, thus having to accept dependent status.32 In the end, it is not clear if most guilds even wanted to ensure rough equality among their members. Depending on the situation, some guilds seem to have permitted differences in raw material distribution and, upon occasion, even individual procurement of such materials from the provinces. What egalitarianism existed was not a primary factor determining the behaviour of the guildsmen. In other words, it was a rather flexible, adaptable type of egalitarianism that varied according to the internal arrangements peculiar to a given guild.

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Internal Differentiation of Wealth As shops owned by guild members remained separate businesses, there had to be economic differentiation, despite fixed prices and the collective purchase of raw materials. This fact of life is variously attested by the data in Istanbul court records. To examine how wealth was distributed among seventeenth-­century artisans is in itself a daunting task, as the source materials are not comprehensive but rather a product of chance factors we are often unable to reconstruct. Thus we are in no position to determine the relative wealth of different artisan groups in any complete or detailed manner, as for example Pascale Ghazaleh was able to do in her masterful study of Cairo artisans.33 My account here will inevitably be impressionistic, dealing with cases that have come down to us haphazardly but are still illuminating; nevertheless this approach does show the possibilities that were available to Istanbul artisans as well as the limits within which they needed to operate. As previously noted, scholars have assumed that artisans within the same trade did not normally differ much from one another in terms of wealth. Mehmet Genç has reported on eighteenth-­century artisans that ‘the difference between the poorest and the richest artisan in the same activity hardly exceeded 1:4 or 1:7’.34 On the other hand, with respect to Istanbul in the 1600s we have indicators pointing to a more uneven distribution of wealth. The numerous records in the sicils regarding shop transfers and rents may be a good starting point for our investigation. Certainly shops were usually small and not elaborately furnished, but the money spent in acquiring them does indicate the earning capacity that seller/landlord and purchaser/tenant attributed to these pieces of real estate. However sometimes data from the sicils are imprecise and do not give complete information regarding a particular transaction. For example, often the amount of down payment (icare-­yi mu‘accele) is not on record, but the scribe has simply noted that the concerned parties know the amount payable (beynimizde ma‘lum olan muaccele). Furthermore the rent of a shop may reflect the fact that tenant and landlord are bound by a special relationship. If the tenant is indebted to the landlord he may pay a higher than normal rent in order to extinguish his debt; or else the tenant may have consented to make major repairs, for which he receives compensation in the shape of a reduced rent. In some cases a single transaction has lumped together a shop and a room, or two shops, a proceeding that makes it difficult to figure out the monetary value of each unit. Given these problems, trying to establish the distribution of wealth among artisans with the aid of rent and sales data can be a risky business.

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Although few records refer to one and the same trade and thus permit comparison, documents concerning shop transfers and leases provide snapshots that indicate that businesses might greatly differ in terms of size. Even if the price and rent of a given shop may not exactly reflect the wealth of the artisan owner or tenant, they still indicate an order of magnitude. Among the early to mid-­seventeenth-­century court records, the lowest rent was that of a shoemaker (haffaf)’s shop which amounted to 15 akçe per month (or 180 akçe annually) plus an unknown amount of down payment.35 At the same time a baker paid the highest rent on record, namely 18,000 akçe per year, although we do need to make allowance for inflation.36 Take, for example, the leases of grocers’ shops in the 1610s. In one case, the rent was only 300 akçe down payment and 25 akçe in monthly rent, whereas in another instance the tenant was supposed to pay 7,000 akçe a year (that is, more than 580 akçe per month).37 Depending on the duration of the contract concerning the cheaper shop, which unfortunately is not on record, the latter tenant would pay between eleven and twenty-­ three times as much as the former. Moreover, there was a bakery whose inventory of wheat, flour, horses, firewood and equipment was valued at 69,930 akçe. As for another baker, whom we have already encountered, he bought 280,050 akçe worth of flour or forty-­six tons in a single transaction, though admittedly on credit.38 The price of this flour easily surpassed that of an average estate recorded in the askeri kassam registers, where fewer than 30 per cent of the listed estates were above 100,000 akçe.39

Differing Sums of Money Donated to the ­ Cauldron-­makers’ Guild Foundation In the previous sections I have discussed haphazardly collected cases of people in the same trade who may or may not have belonged to the same guild. For example, a trade like shoemaking was an agglomeration of many specialties, including the makers of boots, women’s shoes, sandals and other footwear, who had all formed separate organizations. Even if two people made shoes, we thus cannot be sure that they belonged to a single craft organization, as they may well have been members of subgroups that had decided to organize separately (compare Ch. 6). So the examples previously discussed do not provide firm evidence of substantial economic differentiation within one and the same guild, although it suggests that such a phenomenon was plausible. Fortunately, there is a document instituting a pious foundation (vakfiyye) that seems to more satisfactorily reflect the distribution of wealth within a single guild.

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The document at issue concerns the guild foundation of the cauldron-­ makers (kazgancılar), dating from the first ten days of Rebiü’l-­ Ahır 40 1053/1644 (see Table 8.1). Apparently the guild was a relatively small cohesive group whose members had come from Trebizond to Istanbul. There were eighteen donors who contributed money to form a fund supporting the pious foundation to be instituted. Interestingly, twelve of them had the patronymic of ‘ibn Abdullah’, which may indicate that they were recent converts. Table 8.1 Donations to the guild vakıf of the cauldron-­makers. (Based on IBK 122, 25b–26a) Name Hasan b. Abdullah El-­Hac Ali b. Abdullah Hüseyn b. Abdullah Mehmed b. Hüseyn El-­Hac Resul b. Murad Mehmed b. Abdullah El-­Hac Mehmed b. Abdullah Mehmed b. Murad Yahya b. Hüseyn İbrahim b. Abdullah Hasan b. Kurt Mustafa b. Osman (another) Mustafa b. Abdullah Abdurrahman b. Abdullah Mahmud b. Abdullah Mustafa b. Abdullah Kara Mehmed b. Abdullah (another) Hasan b. Abdullah

Donation amount (akçe) 11,200 7,200 4,800 4,800 4,800 3,200 3,200 3,200 2,000 2,000 2,000 1,200 1,200 1,200 1,200 1,200 1,200 1,200

As the guild was a relatively small one and probably made up of closely connected people, the distribution of wealth would probably be rather even. Assuming that the donors were equally generous, this document should thus reflect the guild’s wealth profile.41 Of course, one cannot be sure that all the donors were committed to the project to the same degree, and to complicate matters further, people’s wealth and their donations could be totally disproportionate, depending on their personalities and current obligations. People tend to give the amount they would like to give as opposed to the amount they can afford.42

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However, as many guildsmen gave certain round sums on which they seem to have previously agreed, presumably these donations were not purely a product of the donors’ free will. Seven people gave 1,200 akçe per person, three people 2,000, another three subscribed 3,200 akçe each, and yet another three donated 4,800 per person. Only two men went beyond this limit, one giving 7,200, and the other 11,200 akçe. Probably the group had agreed on varying amounts, reflecting the economic means and perhaps also the social standings of its members. The average donation was 3,156 akçe, but more than half of the guildsmen provided less than that amount, ten people donating 2,000 akçe or less. Thus the bottom strata seem rather ‘thick’ and homogenous. Presumably, while most members owned more or less standard amounts of wealth, a few of them apparently possessed several times as much. As Hasan b Abdullah gave 11,200 akçe, more than nine times the smallest amount, I would imagine that he was more than nine times as rich as his poorest colleagues, which is somewhat higher than the 1:4 or 1:7 ratio suggested by Mehmet Genç. I would imagine that the difference in wealth could have been even greater if the donors represented not the totality of the guildsmen but just a relatively well-­to-­do segment, who alone could afford to donate money.43 Some cauldron-­makers were rather poor. For among Istanbul estate records (tereke defterleri) we find a Christian (zımmi) cauldron-­maker who left behind a mere 1,713 akçe.44 This case was on record as the deceased did not have any documented heirs and his estate was taken over by the treasury (beytülmal). Most of this estate comprised the products of the cauldron-­maker’s trade, such as pots (tencere), metal grids (sac), and metal trays (sini). The deceased may or may not have been a member of the same group of cauldron-­makers that established the vakıf previously discussed, although we cannot tell whether his Muslim colleagues would have included a Christian in their group. Be that as it may, we can be sure that some cauldron-­makers were much poorer than their colleagues. If the deceased zımmi had been a member of the guild in question – although there is a good chance that he was not a full member but an apprentice or hired worker – he would probably not have been able to donate 1,200 akçe. In addition, this case opens up the question of whether, when dealing with artisan inequality, we should take wage-­earning workers and apprentices into consideration, for this would naturally broaden the gap between the rich and the poor. Thus this vakıf document indicates that artisans who were much wealthier than their colleagues could function as legitimate and honourable members of their guild, and if they contributed large amounts of money to the vakıf fund they may even have commanded special prestige. It is thus doubtful that

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an average guild would have expelled someone just because he became ‘too rich’. It is indeed hard to imagine a firm threshold of wealth beyond which a man became a ‘merchant’ and ‘too rich to remain a guildsman’. Being substantially wealthier than one’s colleagues in and of itself may not have been a negative point, as long as a wealthy artisan did not obviously break the rules of his guild.

Estates of Wealthy Artisans To establish the wealth that guildsmen possessed, the obvious source of data is the Istanbul inheritance registers (tereke defterleri). Said Öztürk’s study of early to mid-­seventeenth century estate records concerning the sultan’s servitors (askeri) provides some useful examples.45 As not many artisans of the early 1600s were of the askeri class, the number of relevant cases is limited to about thirty. Nevertheless, the corpus studied by Öztürk shows a variegated picture, ranging from a knife-­maker (bıçakçı) who left only 860 akçe to a cap-­maker (takıyeci) with an estate worth 1,366,060 silver coins (see Table 8.2). We would expect to find many poor people among Istanbul artisans.46 But those craftsmen leaving rather substantial wealth should draw our attention as well. Although the super-­rich cap-­maker, Abdülbaki Çelebi, may be set aside as exceptional, there are still a few other artisans whose estates ranged between 100,000 and 200,000 akçe.47 For example, we may list a brocade-­maker (kemhacı) (135,905 akçe), a palace baker (198,480 akçe), the kethüda of the tent-­makers (181,900 akçe), and a manufacturer of halva who left 204,174 akçe. In addition, a man whose title was bazarbaşı had assets worth 194,575 akçe, although the value of his estate was negative due to even larger debts. These rich artisans, as outstanding members of their guilds, belonged to the upper strata of the entire population recorded in the askeri estate records and examined by Said Öztürk.48 Of course it is questionable whether these wealthy artisans, especially the kethüda and bazarbaşı, really exercised their crafts, as some of them may have been officials and thus arrived at guild leadership from outside the artisan world. Whether externally appointed or internally selected, the headmen of any guild may well have been somewhat wealthier than their colleagues. After all even the internally selected guild headmen would often have come from among the well-­off elements in the guild.49 Unfortunately, these cases of relatively wealthy artisans are too few to allow generalizations. Now let us turn to the cap-­maker’s estate worth 1,366,066 akçe that we previously noted as being exceptional, and which deserves a closer look.50

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Table 8.2 Some of the most important items belonging to Abdülbaki Çelebi. (Based on KA 6, 164b) Raw materials and manufactured goods Ağır takıye kumaş ma’ parça

English translation Heavy fabric for skull-­caps, with pieces Hafif . . ..kumaş ma’ Light. . . fabric parça with pieces Parça kaba kumaş Pieces of coarse (. . ..) fabric Saka arakıye-­i Chestnut-­ kesdanevi coloured felt cap (of the kind worn by water-­ carriers?) Sarmalı arakıye Felt cap with fabric wound around it Hafif sarmalı arakıye Felt cap with light fabric wound around it Arakıyelık ağır Heavy fabric kumaş suitable for felt caps Sarı kılabdan Yellow (probably imitation) gold thread

Quantity (no. of Price of goods in units) × price (akçe) shop (in akçe) 1,600 × 56 89,600

1,100 × 37

40,700

800 × 10

8,000

10 × 30

300

300 × 19

5,700

200 × 13

2,600

350 × 7

2,450

2,000 × 7

14,000

Abdülbaki Çelebi’s estate surpasses many merchant estates in value, and the deceased features among the twenty wealthiest persons studied by Said Öztürk; the magnitude of his fortune becomes even more obvious if one keeps in mind that only 3.1 per cent of all estates listed in the Istanbul tereke defterleri of the sultan’s servitors were above a million akçe in value, although these comparisons take no account of the monetary fluctuations of the seventeenth century. It is also interesting to compare Abdülbaki Çelebi’s estate with that of another cap-­maker recorded in 1078/1667–68, who was neither rich nor poor as he left behind 51,238 akçe.51 The relationship between the two estates amounts to about 1:26. What is more, both cap-­makers bore the title of çelebi, which could designate office-­holders as well as prominent merchants and/or artisans.52

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Perhaps even the smaller estate, though rather modest, belonged to a well-­established representative of the cap-­making craft, and the trade could have included artisans that were much poorer. To sum it all up: the gap between the poorest and the richest artisan estates was perhaps much wider than the ratio 1:26 might suggest. How was the estate of Abdülbaki Çelebi put together? Surprisingly enough the cash box of this extremely rich artisan was full, containing 2,756 şerifi altun (gold coins) amounting to 620,100 akçe. In addition, there were 3,394 mürevvec riyal (riyal guruş [Spanish silver coins]) in circulation, equivalent to 339,400 akçe, and 3,307 esedi guruş (Dutch silver coins) worth 330,700 akçe – plus, this cap-­maker owned 497½ clipped guruş, which had not even been included in the sum total. As the deceased did not leave any debts owed to his estate, he probably had not been a moneylender but perhaps a money-­changer (sarraf). Yet whatever Abdülbaki Çelebi had done with his money, he was still an active manufacturer, as he owned raw materials for his cap-­making business as well as headgear in large quantity. For example, he had plenty of heavy and light textiles used for making caps (takıye), various types of soft felt caps (arakıye), and ornamental items such as – perhaps imitation – gold wire wound with silk (kılabdan), whose total value amounted to well over 160,000 akçe. The cap manufacturer also had felt caps (arakıyeler) to sell; thus he seems to have been encroaching on the felt-­cap makers’ turf, which had been recognized as a separate entity since at least the mid-­1500s. Given all this wealth, Abdülbaki Çelebi would have been the first to be considered a ‘merchant’ and kicked out of the cap-­makers’ guild, if the latter had been rigidly egalitarian and focused on the protection of weaker members. However, the deceased was probably not on bad terms with the cap-­makers’ guild, and may well have remained a member as his executors discharged a debt of 7,100 akçe owed to the guild vakıf of the cap-­makers. Although it is unclear why Abdülbaki Çelebi borrowed from the guild vakıf despite having so much cash, we may at least infer that he was still recognized as an insider. Otherwise, if the guild members had wanted to get rid of him, they would not have lent him any money. If indeed he was still in good odour with his colleagues, it seems that even a very wealthy person might be an acceptable guild member. Are there any indications in the inventory indicating Abdülbaki Çelebi’s strategies vis-­à-­vis the other cap-­makers? Where his life-­style is concerned, it is of interest that he did not own obvious luxury items such as might be expected of a very rich man. He had only one house, worth 15,000 akçe, while his cap-­maker colleague, the other çelebi whose estate was slightly over 50,000, left a house worth 35,000 akçe. Remarkably in a society in which people normally inhabited houses that they owned, Abdülbaki

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Çelebi must have rented his dwelling, as the modest house which he owned was not located in the Karabaş quarter where he resided but in the quarter known as ‘Çirağcı Çavuş’.53 In addition, the deceased rather generously donated money for charity. He left 50,000 akçe for provisions to be supplied to the poor, another 50,000 for prospective pilgrims to Mecca, and still another 50,000 akçe for religious services (va‘z and nasihat). Living a frugal but charitable life, he was not a likely target of his colleagues’ envy. Even in the light of the moral injunctions taught in futuwwa literature, the cap-­maker Abdülbaki Çelebi had few shortcomings, but we have no way of knowing whether the cap-­makers’ guild was only ready to accept such a rich member if he was also frugal and charitable. As this is an exceptional case in many ways, we cannot use it to draw general conclusions, but at least it does show the range of possibilities.

The Boundaries between Artisans and Merchants There were numerous pleas against ‘merchants’ on the part of artisans claiming that these people intruded into their fields of work, or that they hoarded raw materials which the craftsmen required for their own trades. In the records from seventeenth-­century Istanbul which I have examined, fruit-­sellers accused traders described as bazarcılar of opening shops that dealt in fruit illicitly, and four groups of artisans in metal-­related trades sued men who supposedly hoarded coal, in both cases the accused being called matrabazlar/madrabazlar.54 As this term meaning ‘profiteer’ has a decidedly negative connotation, the texts in question simply tell us that artisans disliked intruders and hoarders, and called them names. In consequence such cases do not indicate that there was a firm dividing line between merchants and artisans; they do not even mean that most artisans hated merchants as a social category. Very little is known about Ottoman merchants active in Istanbul, and their activities are mostly beyond the scope of this chapter. However, just as there were diverse groups of artisans with members of varying economic standings, the same thing may have applied to merchants too. We tend to assume that only the large-­scale, long-­distance traders were ‘real’ merchants that deserve to be studied, and that otherwise the production and sale of commodities were not separated; in other words, the trade not conducted by long-­distance merchants was in the hands of ordinary artisans. Of course most artisans did produce and sell their products, but this fact did not exclude small shopkeepers from the Istanbul trading world. Such people might well claim to be merchants (tüccar), and deemed to be so by others, thus we should not ignore them altogether.

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There were indeed merchants whose behaviour very much resembled that of ‘stereotypical artisans’.55 For example, we often see ‘merchants’ whose estates were worth less than 100,000 and occasionally as little as 10,000 to 20,000 akçe.56 Ironically I have not found an artisan group in Istanbul that actually expelled a colleague labelling him a ‘merchant’ – although expulsion was mentioned as a possibility in a case involving the tanners’ guild. However I did find a group of small merchants who did resort to this drastic measure, namely a group of shopkeepers based near the Grand Bazaar (Bezzazistan) that tried to guard their monopoly over the retailing of Morocco leather.57 These merchants called tacirler ta’ifesi possessed a kethüda, a yiğitbaşı, and ihtiyarlar – in other words, a full set of regular guild authorities. Using the cliché rhetorical device that artisans often used, the resident traders emphasized their long tradition, claiming that they had been settled in shops since the time of Mehmed the Conqueror (Feth-­ı hakaniden birü tacirlerden olup dükkanlarda oturan kimesneler). In their petition, the tacirler by means of their fixed shops distinguished themselves from the bazarganlar, who engaged in mobile trading. The complainants accused a bazargan and two people who originally had been tacirler of combining tacirlik and bazarganlık. Apparently the story went back some considerable time, as the traders already held orders of the sultan forbidding the combination, presumably because of earlier petitions. Curiously, the tacirler also stated that it was not their custom to go to the provinces where Morocco leathers were being produced to buy them in person or through partners; thus their trading horizons were narrower than those of many butchers who did not hesitate to do just that, as we have seen. In the end, the bazargan was ordered to sell the Morocco leather he had been storing for retail sale to the tacirler, and the two tacirler who had branched out into the business of the bazarganlık were warned to confine their activities to bazarganlık (i.e. they were kicked out by the tacirler). Presumably this meant that from then on these traders had to give up their shops and limit their activities to itinerant trading, which is to say that they were excluded from the association of tacirs. Here we find a small-­merchant version of ‘labelling their former colleagues as merchants’ (in this case bazarganlar) and expelling them from the trade. Still, the Morocco leather retailers seem to have considered the bazargans’ long-­distance trade a legitimate walk of life, although they wanted to secure their own sphere of business against these rivals. Guild-­related court cases show that agreements and disputes which shaped the often narrow definitions of craft specialties constituted a distinctive feature of the guilds. It may not be altogether surprising that there were merchants whose mode of existence and behaviour resembled that of artisans: for our

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present study such cases are of interest because they show that the boundary between artisans and merchants was often blurred. Local shopkeepers still called themselves a type of ‘merchants’ (tacirler), but they had narrow specializations and traditions that closely resembled those of artisans. Moreover, as Suraiya Faroqhi has recently pointed out, fixed prices (narh) applied not only to local products but also to certain imported goods traded by merchants.58 Perhaps a kind of order resembling that customary among the craft guilds, supported by tradition and inter-­guild agreements, prevailed in some merchant circles. Thus the category of ‘merchant’ concealed a division of labour. In the Morocco leather business there was a division at least between local retailers (tacirler) and long-­distance traders (bazargans), however it is unlikely that such terms were always applied consistently. A trader was not supposed to combine both specialties, but for people determined to do so it was not difficult to encroach upon the territories of their competitors, as retailers doubled as wholesale merchants and vice versa. As mentioned above, the local shopkeepers clearly did not consider the long-­distance merchants inherently evil. They seem to have thought that the bazarganlar were legitimate in a separate realm of long-­distance trade, as long as they did not encroach upon the specialties of local sedentary merchants. It is this intention to protect one’s own territory that provides a key to the attitudes of artisans as well as small merchants. Artisans could also have admitted that long-­distance merchants had their own legitimate realms.59 Although their attitude towards ‘hoarders/profiteers’ would have been coloured by moral overtones, artisans may not necessarily have objected to pursuing profit or have detested the rich for ideological reasons. More importantly, even if guildsmen harboured some hostility towards merchants, they could not avoid daily contacts with the trading world. Merchants were ready sources of credit to craftsmen, so much so that Engin Deniz Akarlı has argued that, in the eighteenth century, merchants petitioning to have indebted artisans established in particular places facilitated the development of fixed ‘slots’ for the exercise of a given trade (gedik).60 Debt relations between artisans and traders must have been common, although this assumption is difficult to demonstrate because Ottoman inheritance documents do not usually indicate merchants as such.61 Furthermore, some people in the market may not have been easy to classify as either merchants or craftsmen/shopkeepers. In 1682 a list of shops operating in the district of Tahtakale near the Golden Horn listed over fifty premises as bazargan-­bakkal (‘merchant-­grocer’), so perhaps the owners had managed to sell both wholesale and retail.62 The existence of some affluent artisans blurs the boundary between artisans and merchants even more. The cap-­maker Abdülbaki Çelebi and

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upscale bakers and grocers occupying high-­rent shops or making large-­ scale purchases demonstrate that at least some artisans were well off, and perhaps did make money from their trades. In a few cases, artisans were not inferior to merchants either economically or socially.63 Thus the rich cap-­maker Abdülbaki Çelebi could have easily counted as an important figure in the Istanbul market. He may well have straddled the divide between artisans and merchants, seeking profit and encroaching upon the territory of the felt-­cap makers’ (arakıyeci) guild. However, there is also a good chance that he was still affiliated with the cap-­makers’ (takıyeci) guild as he still had transactions with the latter’s vakıf. It is too simplistic to consider artisans and merchants as if they were totally separate categories. They came into conflict at times, but there were conflicts within and among the guilds and conflicts between large and small merchants as well. Thus the fault lines did not only exist between the categories of ‘artisans’ and ‘merchants’, but there were more complex divisions and differentiations within both groups. Even in a small, cohesive-­looking guild such as the cauldron-­makers, economic differentiation was greater than expected. Although a quasi-­egalitarian mentality was probably widespread among guildsmen, it did not always dictate their behaviour or the distribution of wealth among them. Such sentiments rather coexisted with hierarchy and economic differentiation.

Conclusion In one way or another, all the sources discussed here are relevant to the nature of Ottoman craft guilds. Some of these did have a quasi-­egalitarian streak, although we may not consider the latter a product simply of sufi-­ futuwwa ethics. As noted previously, some of the futuwwa literature explicitly accommodated both artisans and merchants, and the futuwwa mind-­set, given its flexibility and amorphousness, could often have tolerated the relatively rich, as long as they provided charity and showed sympathy towards their less fortunate colleagues. Likewise, we find craft-­ guilds less adamantly egalitarian than we might have thought. Businesses of widely differing scales could coexist in the same guild or trade, as is obvious from the records concerning shop sales/rents, estate inventories and also the single vakıf document studied in this chapter. In the light of seventeenth-­century Istanbul court records, most guilds seem to have been self-­organized and self-­defined professional associations, whose purpose was to promote common interests. Therefore, their internal arrangements could vary greatly depending on their situations and needs, and egalitarianism may or may not have featured prominently

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in such arrangements. It was the principal aim of guilds to uphold the advantages gained by their members in the course of time, as shaped by agreements and precedents. Guildsmen wanted to guard their interests and not necessarily curb the rich, as long as the latter did not disrupt the established order. It is doubtful that in the long run the initiative in a guild remained in the hands of jealous, poor artisans, although they could at times seize it. It is more likely that the leaders of most guilds were relatively well off, able to render some material service to other members and gain a good reputation in return.64 Wide disparities of wealth could occur within a single guild, and guildsmen may not necessarily have considered this situation problematic, as they could benefit from having some rich members in their group. In this line of thought, we may need to reconsider the boundary between artisans and merchants. The line between the two categories is blurred not only by rich artisans but also by poor local retailers whose behaviour, outlook, and even organization was similar to the arrangements typical of craft guilds. There were quite different levels of wealth both among artisans and merchants, so that those at the high and low extremes may not necessarily have felt that they had much in common or belonged together with their fellow artisans – or fellow merchants. Meanwhile, people belonging to these two groups were involved in close relationships, as the merchants brought in raw materials used by craftsmen and often provided credit. Business partnerships crossing the imaginary boundary between artisans on one side and merchants on the other must have been quite common. In addition, some vague terms that applied to both artisans and merchants, such as ehl-­i suk – and for the more prominent personages, ‘çelebi’ – seem to indicate that in the eyes of contemporaries the two classes could merge to some extent. Ottomanists have not as yet fully explored craftsmen’s diversity. Now that it is clear that some artisan groups could tolerate economic differentiation within their guilds and that some individuals could become and remain relatively wealthy while staying within the guild system, it behoves us to note significant exceptions to the stereotype of Ottoman artisans as poor, egalitarian small producers. Further examination of artisans’ economic statuses, and the whole gamut of their relations to diverse groups of merchants, will be crucial in reconstructing the fabric of Ottoman urban society and the dynamics that characterized it.

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Notes This work was supported by the Research Settlement Fund for the new faculty of Seoul National University, 2004. A Korean version of this article has been published in Hangook Joongdong Hakhoe Nonchong (Korean Journal of the Middle East Studies) vol. 27–2 (2007).  1. Sabri Ülgener, İktisadi Çözülmenin Ahlak ve Zihniyet Dünyası (İstanbul: Der Yayınları, 1981), 65–97; Ahmet Güner Sayar, Bir İktisatçının Entellektüel Portresi: Sabri F. Ülgener (İstanbul: Eren, 1998), 306–15.   2. Sabri Ülgener, ’14.üncü Asırdanberi Esnaf Ahlakı ve Şıkâyeti Mucip Bazı Halleri’, İstanbul Üniversitesi İktisat Fakültesi Mecmuası 11(1–4) (1949–50), 388–96.   3. Normally guildsmen were allowed 10–20% profit margins in addition to their production costs, as reiterated in many price registers. However, Mübahat Kütükoğlu (ed.), Osmanlılarda Narh Müessesesi ve 1640 Tarihli Narh Defteri (Istanbul: Enderun Kitabevi, 1983), 58, gives a list of masters with exquisite skills who may have commanded specially high prices. Furthermore, Ahmet Akgündüz (ed.), Osmanlı Kanunnameleri, vol. 9, 492, 529 and 550, has published a kanunname of the period of Ahmed I (r. 1603–17) for central Anatolia, whose ihtisab section seems to have been modelled on the Istanbul regulations. This text states that leathers of extremely good quality might be sold with a 40% profit margin.   4. Halil Inalcik, ‘Capital Formation in the Ottoman Empire’, Journal of Economic History 29(1) (1969), 97–140, 103–4. In the perspective of this author, artisans were hostile to the principle of unlimited profit, and this tendency became ever more pronounced as time went by.  5. Haim Gerber, Economy and Society in an Ottoman City: Bursa, 1600–1700 (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Press, 1988) 50–51, 58–59. For this author, guild rules served to protect the masses of poor craftsmen against the wealthier members, whose enrichment might disturb the social order.  6. The sicil defteris from which documents have been cited in this chapter, and the period they cover, are as follows: IK (Istanbul Kadılığı, copies to be consulted at İslam Araştırmaları Merkezi/İSAM, Bağlarbaşı, Istanbul) 1 (1021–22/1612–14), 2 (1024–25/1615–16), 3 (1027/1618), 4 (1028/1618–19), 5 (1028–29/1618–20), 6 (1028–29/1618–20), 7 (1069–70/1658–60), 8 (1071/1660–61), 9 (1071–72/1660–62), 10 (1072–73/1661– 63), 11 (1073/1662–63) IBK (Istanbul Bab Kadılğı, copies to be consulted at İslam Araştırmaları Merkezi/İSAM, Bağlarbaşı, Istanbul), 122 (1053/1643–44), KA (Kısmet–i Askeriye, copies to be consulted at İslam Araştırmaları Merkezi/İSAM, Bağlarbaşı, Istanbul), 1 (1000–1017/1591–1609), 2 (1021–29/1612–20), 3 (1045–55/1635–46), 4 (1058–61/1648–51), 5 (1066–79/1655–69), 6 (1077–78/1666–68).  7. For example, Pascale Ghazaleh has provided a detailed and balanced discussion of the wealth owned by Cairene artisans: Masters of the Trade: Crafts and Craftspeople in Cairo, 1750–1850 (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1999), published in Cairo Papers in Social Sciences 22(3).   8. Inalcik, ‘Capital Formation’, 106.   9. Istanbul was a commercial centre if not an ‘emporium’ (Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Esnaf Ağları ve Osmanlı Zanaat Üretimi’, in eadem, Osmanlı Dünyasında Pazarlamak, Yaşamak (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi, 2003), 15, and it was an important spot in the Egyptian merchants’ business network. See Nelly Hanna, Making Big Money in 1600: The Life and Times of Ismail Abu Taqiyya, Egyptian Merchant (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998), 35, 46, 78. 10. See footnote 5, and Timur Kuran, ‘Islamic Influence on the Ottoman Guilds’, in Kemal Çiçek et al. (eds.), The Great Ottoman Turkish Civilization (Ankara: Yeni Türkiye, 2000) vol. 2, 43–59. 11. IK 9, 8a. 12. Robert Mantran, Istanbul dans la seconde moitie du XVIIe siècle: Essai d’histoire institutionelle, économique et sociale (Istanbul and Paris: Institut Français d’Archéologie d’Istanbul

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13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

25. 26.

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and Adrien Maisonneuve, 1962), 363–64; Eunjeong Yi, Guild Dynamics in Seventeenth-­ Century Istanbul (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2004) Appendix F. Database: Guilds Found in Group Appeals, 271–89, also occasionally shows guild leaders bearing such titles. Ibn Battuta, The Travels of Ibn Battuta, A. D. 1325–1354, translated and ed. H.A.R. Gibb (London: Hakluyt Society, 1958) 3 vols, vol. 2, 418–20. Abdülbaki Gölpınarlı, ‘Burgâzî ve ‘Fütüvvetname’si’, İstanbul Üniversitesi İktisat Fakültesi Mecmuası 15 (1953–54), 76–153, 91. Abdülbaki Gölpınarlı, ‘İslam ve Türk İllerde Fütüvvet Teşkilâtı ve Kaynakları’, İstanbul Üniversitesi İktisat Fakültesi Mecmuası 11 (1949–50), 6–354, 242: this passage comes from the translation of the Fütüvvetname of Nacm-­ı Zar-­kûb. Deodaat Anne Breebaart, ‘The Development and Structure of the Turkish Futuwwa Guilds’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Princeton University, 1961, 177. The Fütüvvetname­i Kebir has the same overall moral tone. It was written by a Shiite-­leaning Shafiite qadi (Seyyid Muhammed ibn el-­Seyyid Ala ed-­Din el-­Hüseyni) in Bursa in 934/1524. The author claims that many trades in this city were organized according to futuwwa principles and hierarchy, and that futuwwa ceremonies could vary from trade to trade. This book, like many other earlier fütüvvetnames, is full of moral injunctions and prohibitions. It states that the fityan need to close seven doors (of avarice, violence, envy, worldly pleasure, reliance on man, vain speech and evil deeds) and open seven other doors (of generosity, kindness, contentment, ascetic discipline, trust in God, glorification of God with readings from the Qur’an, and pious deeds). In addition, the fütüvvetname exhorts them not to disobey, not to hate, to cover up the errors of others and to earn one’s living by carrying on a trade, not to strive for personal enrichment but for a modest life with support for the poor and needy (Deodaat Anne Breebaart, ‘Fütüvvetname-­i Kebir, a Manual on Turkish Guilds’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 15 (1972), 203–15, 207, and Ph.D. thesis, 166). Gölpınarlı, ‘İslam ve Türk İllerde Fütüvvet Teşkilâtı’, 324. Even when such cases occurred, the initiators were often marginal members of the guild who did not share the latter’s cohesive in-­group mentality. Adherents of futuwwa should forgive others while also focusing on their own faults: Gölpınarlı, ‘İslam ve Türk İllerde Fütüvvet Teşkilâtı’, 209, 216, 218, 285–87 (among others). There was, on the other hand, a Melami şeyh, a certain Sarı Abdullah (d. 1071/1660) who stated that he had two crafts: poverty and struggle. He also said whoever loved both would love him as well, while those who hated both also would hate him: Gölpınarlı, ‘İslam ve Türk İllerde Fütüvvet Teşkilâtı’, 72. Gölpınarlı, ‘İslam ve Türk İllerde Fütüvvet Teşkilâtı’, 218, in a passage of Tuhfat’ul Vasaya by Harput’lu Nakkaş İlyas oğlu Ahmed. Furthermore, those Melamis who required every follower of futuwwa to take up a trade did not disapprove of commerce; even some of the most prominent Melami leaders were merchants: Gölpınarlı, ‘İslam ve Türk İllerde Fütüvvet Teşkilâtı’, 72–73. Examples are found among fruit-­sellers (IK 3, 29b/252), perfumers (IK 4, 51b/362), gunlock-­makers (IK 5, 28b/190), tanners (IK 7, 5a–5b/31), candle-­makers (IK 9, 145b), straw-­mat sellers (IK 9, 262b), cooks of sheep feet (IK 10, 52a), and sherbet-­makers (IK 5, 40a/272, IK 10, 72a). See also Eunjeong Yi, Guild Dynamics, 81–83. When dealing with Bursa, Haim Gerber stated that it was much more important to curb the internal competition posed by enterprising members than to compete with other guilds for raw materials. But it is unclear if the same was true for Istanbul: Gerber, Bursa, 50. IK 9, 70a. IK 10, 52a. Even this document may have aimed at not giving anyone more or less than his rightful share of raw materials.

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27. Amnon Cohen, The Guilds of Ottoman Jerusalem (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2001), 165. 28. IK 1, 61a/419, IK 2, 25b/212, IK 3, 73b/612, IK 9, 5b/32, 15a, 230a, 235b, IK 10, 55b, 148a. 29. IK 9, 154b. 30. IK 9, 61b (1071/1661). It is unclear if the transaction was made at the site of collective purchase chosen by the guild. Although this guild apparently had janissary beşes and zımmis as members, it could have been connected to the cauldron-­makers from Trebizond who had founded a guild vakıf some twenty years before, which will concern us at a later stage (see note 41). 31. IK 9, 145b (tanners), IK 10, 74a (oil-­makers). 32. On early modern European guilds whose members sometimes used subcontractors, see Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, Worthy Efforts: Attitudes to Work and Workers in Pre-­ industrial Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 336–38. 33. Ghazaleh, Masters of the Trade, 134–41. 34. Mehmet Genç, ‘Ottoman Industry in the Eighteenth Century: General Framework, Characteristics and Main Trends’, in Manufacturing in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, 1500– 1900, ed. Donald Quataert (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 67. 35. IK 3, 42a/362 (1618). 36. IK 9, 256a (1662). By the mid-­century, the value of the akçe went down to almost half of what it used to be in the 1610s. See Şevket Pamuk, A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 136, table 8.2. While the exchange rate between silver akçe and gold sultani had been 150 akçe/sultani in1618, it was 270 akçe/sultani in 1669. 37. IK 3, 47a/397, 70b/588. From the 1660s onwards, when the value of the akçe went down substantially, the value of leases concerning grocers’ shops also diminished (IK 8, 39a, IK 11, 39a). 38. IK 10, 47b and IK 9, 154b. Both cases date to 1072/1661–62. 39. Said Öztürk, Askeri Kassama Ait Onyedinci Asır İstanbul Tereke Defterleri (Istanbul: Osmanlı Araştırmaları Vakfı, 1995), 138–39. 40. IBK 122, 25b–26a. Actually the vakıf founders tried to cancel the pious foundation afterwards, though unsuccessfully, after they had heard that some Hanefi jurists were against cash-­vakıfs. However it is also possible that the attempt to cancel was fictitious and only served to elicit a judgment confirming the legality of the foundation, as was often the practice in Anatolia as well. I have also analysed this document in Yi, Guild Dynamics, 61–62. 41. Although there once was a saddle-­maker who gave away 20,000 akçe, which amounted to one-­third of his entire fortune to make a vakıf for his guild, such disproportionate charity was probably not common practice. His son filed a lawsuit trying to prove the foundation invalid (IK 9, 89b). 42. I am grateful to the late Donald Quataert, who once informed me that the coalminers he had worked on donated amounts of money bearing no relation to their wealth. 43. We may even speculate that there were donors who had donated less than 1,200 akçe and were not listed, as the donations on record only add up to 56,800 akçe, whereas 76,000 was actually collected. 44. KA 2, 4b (1021/1612), see Öztürk, Tereke Defterleri, 442. 45. Öztürk, Tereke Defterleri, 438–93. His list of estates includes records of poor as well as rich artisans: a knife-­maker (860), a zımmi cauldron-­maker (1,713), and a palace water-­carrier (3,215), in contrast to a kethüda of the tent-­makers (181,900), a palace baker (198,480) and a cap-­maker (1,366,060). 46. Gerber, Bursa, 24. Gerber defines the ‘poor’ as those whose estates were worth less than 20,000 akçe. 47. Gerber, Bursa, 29.

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48. On the other hand, the values of these estates fall within the normal range of artisans’ estates from contemporary Bursa (Gerber, Bursa, 29). 49. In addition, the kethüda of the kazgancı in the early 1660s was the namesake of the cauldron-­maker, who donated 4,800 akce for the guild vakıf in 1664: IK 9, 61b. 50. KA 6, 164b. I sincerely thank my colleague Özlem Sert for her invaluable help in deciphering this tereke document. 51. KA 6, 115b. This amount approximates the average artisans’ estates in seventeenth-­century Bursa: Gerber, Bursa, 21. 52. Mehmet Zeki Pakalın, Osmanlı Deyimleri ve Terimleri Sözlüğü (Istanbul: MEB, 2004) vol. 1, article ‘çelebi’; Özer Ergenç, ‘Osmanlı Klasik Dönemindeki Eşraf ve A‘yan üzerine Bazı Bilgiler’ Osmanlı Araştırmaları 3 (1982), 105–18, especially 106, 113. Eşraf and ayan were the prominent people in a province or city, sometimes including both merchants and artisans. They sometimes used the title of çelebi. 53. It is unclear where and when this mahalle existed. The names and boundaries of Istanbul mahalles went through considerable changes. There are three mahalles with names starting with ‘Çirağcı/Çerakçı’ in a nineteenth-­century French map of Istanbul, Plan de Constantinople et de ses Fabourgs d’apres Kauffer, Lechevalier, Barbié du Bocage et Joseph de Hammer (Paris, 1836), but none of them features the exact same name. On the other hand, there is no mention of a mahalle name that starts with ‘Çerakçı’ in Ekrem Hakkı Ayverdi, Fatih Devri Sonlarında İstanbul Mahalleleri, Şehrin İskanı ve Nüfusu (Ankara: Doğuş Matbaası, 1958). 54. IK 6, 2b/10, 11a. 55. However, it is difficult to completely believe Sabri Ülgener’s contention that with economic retrenchment merchants turned away from long-­distance commerce and became ‘like artisans’. 56. Three people have been called merchants in the tereke defterleri studied by Said Öztürk: tüccar Behram b Abdullah who left 24,000 akçe (KA 3/38a, 1048/1638.), tüccar el-­Hac Ahmed b Hızır who left behind 11,000 (KA 5/98b, 1071/1661), and tüccar el-­Hac Yahya b. Şaban with an estate of 88,278 akçe (KA 6/157a, 1078/1668). 57. IK 9, 121a. 58. See the index of Kütükoğlu, Narh, as cited in Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Immigrant Tradesmen as Guild Members, or the Adventures of Tunisian Fez-­sellers in Eighteenth-­Century Istanbul’, in The Arab Lands in the Ottoman Era, ed. Jane Hathaway (Minneapolis: Center for Early Modern History, 2009), 187–207. 59. Craft guilds in Egypt and Syria seem to have tolerated merchant-­driven soap factories and sugar refineries: Hanna, Making Big Money, 90. 60. Engin Deniz Akarlı, ‘Gedik: A Bundle of Rights and Obligations for Istanbul Artisans and Traders, 1750–1840’, in Law, Anthropology and the Constitution of the Social: Making Persons and Thoughts, eds Alain Pottage and Martha Mundy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 166–200, 176–177. 61. In the Istanbul terekes, merchants, especially those with large amounts of commodities, were often not indicated as such: Öztürk, Tereke Defterleri, 438–93. 62. Atatürk Kitaplığı Muallim Cevdet B 2, 1b–2b (1092/1681–82). 63. Some artisans may appear among the notables of various towns together with large merchants and ulema: Suraiya Faroqhi, Men of Modest Substance: House Owners and House Property in Seventeenth-­Century Ankara and Kayseri (Cambridge: Cambridge Univesity Press, 1987), 49, mentions a list of notables in Kayseri that featured families named after a perfumer (attar), a shoemaker, a blacksmith, and a maker of headgear (kavukçu). Ergenç also reports that sixteenth-­century urban notables included old and prosperous artisans in ‘Eşraf ve A‘yan üzerine Bazı Bilgiler’, 106. 64. IK 3, 39/338. The water-­carriers without pack animals sued their yiğitbaşı for not holding a banquet after taking office, but the latter countered that he would do so only if the guild reimbursed the money he had used for communal spending.

Chapter 9

Gedik: What’s in a Name? Seven Ağır and Onur Yıldırım

The rules determining the ownership of capital assets are crucial to understanding the ways in which society distributes the returns to commercial activity. In this chapter, we will explore how these rules were defined and contested in late eighteenth-­and early nineteenth-­century Istanbul. With this aim in mind, we intend to closely examine an eighteenth-­ century institutional innovation, namely the gedik, a term whose dictionary meaning is ‘gap, slot, or opening’. Given the multitude of meanings and functions ascribed to this term, it is rather ambiguous and thus ‘a concept too many’.1 Various authors have explored the eighteenth century emergence and rise of gediks; but the implications of this process for investment and growth in urban economic activity have remained mostly uncharted territory. This chapter will suggest a preliminary framework for clarifying the ambiguities inherent in this notion. At a more general level, understanding how the gedik as an institution emerged and evolved will allow us to make sense of the overall transformation that the labouring populations of the capital city experienced during Sultan Selim III’s (r. 1789–1807) vigorous campaign of reform, during the 1790s and early 1800s. It is worth stressing that scholars who have worked on the Ottoman guilds of the eighteenth century have emphasized the emergence of the ‘gedik’ as a legal concept with a multitude of meanings: thus gedik referred to the right to own tangible capital goods necessary to practise a trade or craft, to the exclusive right to work as a fully fledged member of

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a closed community of artisans (esnaf or lonca), and to the entitlement to a specific work space (workshop or store) reserved for that particular craft and trade.2 Moreover there are two types of gedik. Here, we will focus on the fixed (müstakar) gedik which allowed the owner to practise his craft or trade in a specified location only; in other words, his property was immovable. When enjoying a havai (moveable) gedik, the owner could do business without attachment to a specific location, this type of gedik being generally issued to itinerant tradesmen. To use Engin Deniz Akarlı’s expression, the ‘bundle of rights’ attached to the gedik appeared as the product of the struggle of urban shopkeepers to protect their interests through claims to exclusive membership in a particular group (esnaf) authorized to practise a specific trade or craft. Certainly, the emergence and expansion of gediks was part of a process consolidating the monopolistic practices associated with Ottoman guilds.3 At the same time, however, the notion was linked to the struggles involving shopkeepers’ claims to real estate which these people conducted against property owners, for the most part religious endowments (vakıf). In addition, masters stated their claims to capital inputs, in this case opposing the journeymen that were not, or at least not yet, full members of the guild.4 In the secondary literature, these various functions of gediks have been conflated, with little discussion as to whether at any point in time the term had a clearly defined content. Neither has there been any systematic effort to test the validity of alternative explanations for the emergence and proliferation of gedik certificates. Although historians have on occasion underlined the interpretative problems surrounding the nebulous concept of gedik, we still lack a conceptual framework that would help us to solve these problems.5 Therefore, drawing upon a large collection of hitherto unused primary sources, we suggest a taxonomy that may help to clarify ambiguities inherent in the notion of gedik. Based on this taxonomy, we will explore when and why gediks implied ‘barriers to entry’ and what ‘barriers to entry’ meant for eighteenth-­century urban economic growth. In the last part of our chapter, we will make a few preliminary observations regarding certain characteristics of gediks poorly examined in the secondary literature. Our aim is to contribute to the emergence of a research agenda in which the implications of secondary gedik markets will be explored in terms of their effects on credit relations and partnership forms. We will also suggest some methods to evaluate to what extent gedik markets reinforced or undermined existing social barriers relevant to economic transactions. In this way, we aim to highlight potential implications of secondary gedik markets for the emergence of impersonal exchange in the Ottoman context.

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Ambiguities in the Secondary Literature: Origins and Meanings In the late eighteenth-­ century court registers, gedik is probably one of the most frequently recurring terms. It was bought, sold, inherited, mortgaged and owned by one person or else by several people at the same time, who all wanted to ensure they had proof of ownership in the form of a document issued by the court or guild, or later by the newly established Ministry of Pious Foundations. One century earlier, however, the relevant documents had contained very few references to gediks. The question, then, is where this institution originated and why it became popular. The answers to these questions will help us to understand the meaning of emergent gedik markets. In the literature, two explanations have been offered for the rise of gediks. One of these is related to the original meaning of the term that has emerged in Islamic jurisprudence. Ahmet Akgündüz, a legal historian, has claimed that until the term became associated with the guilds in the eighteenth century, it had merely referred to the usufruct rights granted to artisans and tradesmen by virtue of their residence in shops, in particular those rented out by religious endowments (vakıfs).6 In line with this meaning of gedik, Engin Akarlı, who has studied the development of property relations connected with gediks between 1750 and 1840, has explained the emergence of gediks as a by-­product of urban artisans’ and tradesmen’s attempts to preserve their real incomes during the later 1700s, a period noted for its economic difficulties. Financial stringencies, so Akarlı maintained, had led the Ottoman administration to search for ways to gain a share in the revenues of pious endowments, which by this time owned most urban commercial buildings. In response to these pressures, foundation administrators attempted to increase their revenues, particularly rents. By registering their shops as gediks, the shopkeepers hoped to preserve their permanent rights to tenancy and resist such increases. A second way of explaining the emergence of gediks involved the agency of guilds. As eighteenth-­century urban artisans and tradesmen came to hold various monopolistic privileges, the term acquired the meaning of a ‘licence’ required to practise particular crafts or trades. Hence, the term was associated with sector-­specific barriers to entry that limited the number of people able to enter a craft or trade. Although these studies offered anecdotal evidence indicating that both meanings of the term, namely usufruct rights related to permanent tenancy and licensure related to monopolistic privileges were valid

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in specific cases, there was no discussion as to whether these cases were ­generalizable to all sectors and periods.7 Neither was there an attempt to specify in which ways gedik implied a rupture from earlier forms of tenancy and licensure.8 By contrast we argue that gedik, in the urban context of the late 1700s and early 1800s, meant different things in different sectors, which unfortunately have been conflated in the literature. Subtle differences in content, not at first apparent in official documents, arise from the accompanying regulations (or the lack thereof) characterizing a particular sector. In order to clarify the ambiguities inherent in the notion, we suggest differentiating two kinds of gedik and focusing on how each one of these relates to the notion of ‘barriers to entry’: 1. Gediks as real-­estate deeds implying long-­term (or permanent) tenancy of a specific shop for a fixed rent, creating opportunities for speculative investment in real estate markets. 2. Gediks as occupational licences limited in number, implying potential (but not necessarily actually imposed) barriers to entry on a sectorial basis.

Even though these two meanings could overlap in certain cases, in analytical terms they should remain separate as only by following this procedure will it become clear which functions the registration of gediks, as well as later transactions, served in any particular sector. This taxonomy will enable us evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the existing hypotheses about the causes and implications of the widespread use of gediks. We will also be able to suggest an alternative explanation for the proliferation of gedik registrations in the early nineteenth century.

Gediks as Permanent Tenancy Rights How do gedik and permanent tenancy rights relate to one another? In line with Islamic jurisprudence, pious foundations (vakıfs) could be endowed with rent-­yielding property, including urban commercial buildings. Although vakıf property was unalienable, contemporary jurists on several grounds legitimized long-­term or permanent tenancy, although such contracts might imply a threat to the permanence of foundation holdings. A short-­term tenant had little incentive to keep the premises in good condition, and thus the value of the estate would go down due to natural wear and tear. More importantly, frequent fires and occasional earthquakes destroyed the buildings, depriving the vakıf of its revenues. In such cases, restoring a property might force the vakıf to incur large

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expenses, all the more burdensome as they could not be foreseen or planned for. Hence, some Muslim jurists maintained that, in order to ensure stable revenues, long-­term tenancy (icare-­i tawila) of vakıf property was permissible.9 In order to acquire this right to long-­term tenancy, tenants had to make an advance lump-­sum payment (muaccele) to the vakıf owning the piece of real estate in question. Theoretically this sum of money should have been sufficient to restore the building; in addition the tenants of course agreed to pay monthly or annual rents (müeccele). This arrangement, also known as icareteyn (double rent), was somewhat controversial among legal scholars as it created a loophole for the alienation of vakıf property. Yet, although some important figures of Ottoman jurisprudence such as Ebu Su’ud (d. 1574), the chief jurisconsult of Süleyman the Lawgiver, disputed that icareteyn or icare-­i tawila was a valid form of rental contract, most jurists adopted it; and it seems to have become a common practice by the seventeenth century.10 Furthermore, through various legal modifications made over time, the right of long-­term lease embedded in the notion of icareteyn paved the way for greater flexibility in the use and control of rented property.11 As a result, the ‘tenant’, who now was referred to as the proprietor (mutasarrıf) of the gedik, could sell, pawn, rent and bequeath his/her usufruct rights granted by icareteyn contract.12 As mentioned above, Akarlı and Akgündüz have suggested that the term ‘gedik’ emerged as a particular form of this long-­term tenancy contract. While icareteyn contracts granted stable and favourable tenancy rights, in return for the tenant’s commitment to make the repairs necessary to preserve the value of the estate, gedik referred to permanent usufruct rights granted in return for the tenant’s placement of the capital inputs required for a particular craft or trade. Thus in the late eighteenth-­and early nineteenth-­century court registers the term gedik literally referred to this tangible equipment, in other words to implements and inventory (alat-­ı lazıme-­i malume). As long as the tenant paid the initially set rent, the landlord could not evict him. Yet, the gedik holder and the proprietor were linked in such a way that the agreement always referred quite clearly to a specific real estate in which the tenant would place the equipment. In this sense, the gedik was a version of ‘icareteyn’ where permanent tenancy rights were granted in return for improvement of the premises through their designation as commercial spaces. Through gedik, shopkeepers acquired permanent tenancy rights; and for this reason Akarlı has viewed widespread appeals for gedik as an attempt to resist rent increases. Yet icareteyn contracts had been available ever since the seventeenth century. The question, then, is to what extent contracts involving gedik assignments were different from icareteyn

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c­ ontracts and what these differences imply in terms of tenancy rights. The most important difference originates from the fact that gedik owners had more flexibility in the control and use of their usufruct rights; for towards the late 1700s gedik owners were able to sell or rent their usufruct rights, albeit with serious restrictions in specific sectors, which will be discussed shortly. Put differently, there was an active secondary market in gediks. In the following pages we will provide evidence for these arguments through an analysis of both legal norms and actual practices. Under the law, in icareteyn contracts the tenant was able to sell his usufruct rights, but the payment exacted could not be higher than the lump-­sum amount originally paid to the vakıf.13 Judicial opinions and court registers indicate that initially experts in the field determined this amount, evaluating the cost of reconstructing a ruined building.14 In the seventeenth century, for instance, there are various cases of icareteyn contracts, in which tenants and vakıf administrators agreed that the former would reconstruct a ruined vakıf property with their own funds; and then the cost of reconstruction as estimated by experts would constitute the advance payment (icare-­i muaccele) required for the initiation of a double-­rent contract. Also in some cases, tenants made repairs and the amount they had spent was deducted from an advance payment payable in the future.15 This deduction probably concerned the payment that foundation administrators would once again charge at the renewal of the contract; this observation also confirms the non-­permanent nature of icareteyn contracts. In cases in which the vakıf used its own resources for the reconstruction of its property, administrators seem to have had the right to increase the annual/monthly rent (müeccele) above the amount specified in the icareteyn contract.16 There are, however, very few examples of such increases in the primary documents studied to date. Although a narrow focus on legal sources might indicate that the cost of repair or reconstruction determined advance payment, almost from the start icareteyn tenants’ ability to transfer usufruct rights, and the limited supply of available real estate, facilitated the emergence of a secondary market, in which supply and demand established the prices of transferred usufruct rights. Before explaining the logic of this argument, let us present the historical evidence. As early as 1742, the tenancy rights of vakıf properties were sold at auction, a procedure signifying that the muaccele was a source of revenue for the foundation’s budget (on conflicts between shop-­renting artisans and those plying their trades on the street, compare Ch. 1 and 3).17 Although the initial justification for long-­term or permanent tenancy was the vakıf’s need for stable revenues, presumably higher advance payments were being legitimized in a similar vein.

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By the seventeenth century, the tenants, who held the usufruct rights granted through icareteyn contracts were already able to sell their tenancy rights. For instance, in 1612, one of the two owners of the usufruct rights over a mill died and his daughter, as his sole heir, sold the rights at auction to pay her father’s debts. In this case, the co-­owner purchased these rights, but the document emphasized that an auction had been held, supervised by the trustee.18 In other words, the partner did not have any priority in acquiring the assets. The reasons for the emergence of a secondary market are quite obvious. Firstly, there was demand for tenancy rights of this kind because icareteyn contracts ensured that rent increases were highly improbable. Secondly, and maybe more importantly in this earlier period, the transfer of tenancy rights at free market prices enabled the tenants to pay their debts to various creditors including the vakıf administrators, to whom rent arrears could have been due. Although this was not the initial justification for icareteyn contracts, vakıfs in difficulty over uncollected rents considered the reallocation of usufruct rights at auction as a remedy for their financial troubles.19 Whether the vakıf could easily reclaim and resell usufruct rights if the tenant did not pay his rent is not clear from the documents. In other words, we do not know if the secondary market, from the perspective of the vakıf, served as a safety net against tenant defaults. Even in cases when the vakıf administrator was not able to evict the defaulting tenant, as long as he/she could reclaim the usufruct rights, the foundation could count on the help of the new tenant for evicting the previous one. Unfortunately, we do not have many examples as to how vakıfs dealt with defaulting tenants. Rents specified in icareteyn contracts being lower-­than-­market, administrators may have found replacements very quickly, so that no such disputes came up in court. If the tenant died without heirs – given epidemics and infant mortality, heirless property was not rare20 – the vakıfs could also expect to profit from higher market prices. The secondary literature maintains that when a tenant acquired gedik rights for a particular shop, he would make an advance lump-­sum payment and agree to defray a regular monthly or yearly rent, as was the rule in all icareteyn contracts.21 We argue that this assumption was correct only if the gedik rights had been acquired from the vakıf directly – in other words, if the gedik owner was also the tenant of the icareteyn contract. However this was not always the case, an issue overlooked in the secondary literature. Tenants of icareteyn contracts could profit from an increase in market rents not only by selling their usufruct rights but also by subletting the premises for higher rents. Some shopkeepers active in the urban market were therefore sub-­tenants who could be charged more than the

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rates specified by the icareteyn contract. Theoretically, and as various cases from the late eighteenth century indicate empirically as well, the tenant of an icareteyn agreement could thus be different from the owner of the gedik or equipment placed in the shop that had been rented out by this contract. When the gedik holder was a sub-­tenant, it is not clear if he had to make an advance payment to the vakıf or to the principal tenant; in some cases there must have existed an icareteyn contract within another icareteyn contract, as in ‘Russian dolls’. As the guilds could issue deeds of gedik, known as warden’s deeds or kethüda temessükü, perhaps gedik owners were not always expected to pay a lump sum to the vakıf or principal tenant. Even for the beginning 1800s for which we have the most extensive data, we do not yet know what percentage of gedik owners were primary tenants of icareteyn contracts and what percentage were sub-­tenants. Nor do we know what percentage of gedik deeds had been issued by vakıf administrators, and how large was the share of guild-­issued documents. We do, however, know that gedik, by definition, implied a protection against eviction and rent increases, very much like the icareteyn contract had originally done. So a gedik owner could resist a tenant’s attempts to increase rents.22 In this case, it would be the price of the gedik, rather than the payment for usufruct rights involving the premises, which would increase. If most gedik holders were sub-­tenants and dealt with principal tenants rather than with the vakıfs, this might explain why, in the gedik transactions registered at the court, there is almost no reference to the role of the vakıfs in determining the price of gediks. As long as the gedik holder, whether a tenant or a sub-­tenant, continued to pay rent regularly to the property owner, he or she was free to sell, pawn or rent the gedik to any potential creditor or sub-­tenant. Although in most court registers there is no explicit discussion of how gedik prices were determined, it is apparent that the owners of gediks were able to sell them at auction. In other words, such a person could sell his gedik for a price higher than the muaccele if he was the primary tenant or higher than the cost of his gedik – if he had incurred any costs in obtaining the gedik from his guild. In both cases, the value of the gedik would reflect the expected benefits accruing from permanent tenancy rights, such as paying below-­market rents. Archival evidence also demonstrates the existence of a secondary market in gediks. According to numerous documents surviving in court registers from the late 1700s and early 1800s, non-­artisans and non-­ traders assiduously bought and sold gediks as well as gedik shares. For instance, a money-­changer (sarraf) held the gedik relevant to a large bakery cum mill complex.23 Similarly a man described as a tobacco-­dealer (duhani) could legally own another combined bakery and mill.24 Various

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people with titles indicating legal-­religious positions (molla, kadı, müderris) also owned entire gediks or at least shares.25 In addition women held, sold and pawned gedik shares in a wide variety of sectors.26 Furthermore, especially in gediks pertaining to retail shops, numerous shares circulated, with prices fluctuating within short time spans. We may thus conclude that the value of the gedik was determined in a secondary market, regardless of the condition of the relevant real estate or commercial enterprise. It is not exactly clear in these cases if gedik owners considered themselves as partners to the shopkeepers and claimed any say in shop management. Most probably they profited by merely renting out the gediks to actual practitioners of a craft or trade. For instance, a certain Mehmed Şerif Efendi, a respected judge, was the tenant of an icareteyn contract of a grocer’s shop and also owned the gedik. He rented the latter to a certain Yani for 16.5 guruş per month, with other grocers standing surety for any potential debts, both to the gedik owner for rent arrears and to wholesale merchants for goods bought on credit.27 In other words, it was only the gedik holder, and not the gedik owner, who was responsible for complying with guild regulations. Guilds, however, could shape the issuance and distribution of gediks in other, more direct ways. Before exploring the manner in which guild regulations affected gedik markets, we will look at the most obvious way by which guilds became involved in the rules concerning gedik acquisition. After all it was these organizations that set the number of gediks available to potential artisans or shopkeepers in a given sector, and thereby made these ‘immaterial goods’ serve as occupational licenses.

Gediks as Sectorial Licences One of the earliest references to a gedik as an occupational licence is an official document authorizing the transfer of a deceased water carrier’s gedik to his brother ‘according to the traditional way of doing things’ (vech-­i meşruh üzre kadimden olıgeldiği üzre). There are two reasons why we should analyse gediks as occupational licences. Firstly, as previously noted, there was a type of gedik allowing the holder to operate a legitimate business without any reference to usufruct rights connected to real estate. These gediks, also known as movable (havai), were generally assigned to itinerant retailers or service providers, such as water carriers (sakas) and itinerant bagel sellers (simitçis).28 Ownership of a gedik, in this sense, implied access to a market hedged in with barriers to entry, and, therefore, a potential for oligopolistic profits or at least protection against competition. Gediks such as these were not rented or bought from the

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vakıf and their acquisition did not entail an obvious cost, c­ omparable to the advance payment in icareteyn contracts. Secondly, most gedik holders, whether they held usufruct rights to a particular piece of real estate or not, had some relationship to guilds. Hence, in various ways and degrees – again depending on the sector – guilds became involved in the issuance of gediks and their distribution. We have suggested that there was a secondary market in gediks, especially those assigned to retail shops. Yet in many cases, the use and control rights over gediks were restricted by the collective rights and obligations of the relevant artisans or tradesmen. For instance, in sectors where quality concerns were important, gedik owners or their heirs would not be able to sell the gedik to people deemed unqualified by the guild. Such regulations were most obvious with respect to gediks concerning the looms placed in authorized urban weavers’ workshops. Although gediks connected to looms changed hands frequently, it was mostly qualified journeymen and masters who took part in these transactions.29 Furthermore, unlike gediks assigned to bakeries or grocers’ shops, weavers’ gediks were not divided into shares, a custom implying that there was no separation between management and ownership. Where retail was at issue, the guild concerned itself with the ownership of gediks, but the underlying reason was solvency rather than professional skills. Guild members were collectively liable for debts arising from their transactions with the state or wholesale merchants, making the guild responsible for the resale of gediks to pay the debts of deceased or absconding gedik owners. Hence, it was not unusual for guild officials to take over the gedik of a shop owner indebted to his wholesalers or the state and sell it at auction to extinguish these debts. In one case, for instance, Mehmed Ağa, owner of six out of thirty-­two shares of a bakery-­cum-­mill gedik, sold his shares to Veliyüddin for 1,500 guruş, an important sum of money which served to pay his debts to the state and the merchants.30 In this case, the indebted seller, Mehmed Ağa, was not in fact present in the qadi’s court, but was represented by the warden of the bakers’ guild. This situation raises the possibility that given collective liability, the guild had forced this transaction upon the gedik owner.31 In another case, the guild warden likewise represented a certain Nuri Usta in court: the latter needed to sell a quarter share of his gedik to his brother İsmail Usta, and the money automatically served for the extinction of his debts.32 Collective liability does not seem to have precluded outsiders from taking part in gedik markets. On the contrary, the use of gediks as collateral against commercial debts, authorized by the guilds concerned, must have opened the way to the partitioning of gediks and the subsequent

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transfer of shares. As mentioned above, in the early 1700s gediks and gedik shares pertaining to bakeries, grocery stores, and other retail shops were easily transferable, with little reference to guild prerogatives. Due to their monopolistic claims, guilds also played a significant role in the creation and transferral of gediks. Theoretically, through registering their shops as gediks and acquiring a charter fixing the number of the latter, tradesmen or artisans could prevent new entries into their sector. Yet, even in the 1500s and 1600s before gediks were at all widespread, it had not been unusual for urban artisans and shopkeepers to claim exclusive rights in their particular sectors (compare Ch. 1). Law codes specifying the number and kind of people allowed to perform a given trade or craft had long introduced this restriction, known as inhisar-­ı bey ü şira (or just inhisar). Only qualified journeymen, upon approval of the guild administration, could acquire the status of a master (ustalık) and practise their craft, provided of course that a vacant shop was available. It has been suggested that the institution of gedik emerged out of this exclusive right.33 As mentioned above, however, the term seems to have its roots in the notion of permanent tenancy, and only after certain additional steps had been taken did gediks come to be affiliated with claims for exclusive rights. Contemporary administrative attempts to restrict the creation of gediks also attest to this interpretation. Contemporary jurists argued that, especially in sectors dealing with essential commodities such as bakeries, butcher shops and grocery stores, for the sake of the public good shopkeepers should be allowed permanent tenancy, and the sultan’s officials agreed.34 Although the decree at issue did not directly associate gedik with monopolistic privileges, these were also the sectors in which inhisar was justified on the grounds of serving the public good. Once these gedik rights were in place, shopkeepers from different sectors started to claim exclusive privileges to practise a certain craft or trade on the grounds of holding the appropriate gedik. On many occasions, one or another group of craftsmen applied to the court to officially register their gediks as the only ones valid for that particular craft or trade. We will provide examples below. Although during the late eighteenth century such charters were granted to a wide variety of sectors, they were not at all irreversible. In a decree from 1792, sellers of aba or coarse woollen cloth came to the qadi’s court with a charter granted by a previous sultan to prevent sellers of old and used garments from dealing in new aba (for regulations concerning the different branches of textile production in Bursa, see Ch. 1). According to this charter dated 1787, those not trained in the guild were not allowed to open a business, and even those who had already acquired training in the authorized guild shops could not open their own

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e­ stablishments without the permission of guild officials and senior guild masters. There were in total twenty-­five authorized gediks and when one of the gedik owners died, his gedik would be sold to his son or, if he had no sons, to a qualified member of the guild. Overseen by the warden and the senior guild members, these transactions had to take place at the current market price (semen-­i misil). Referring to the regulations specified in this charter, the aba sellers – including the warden, his assistant the yiğitbaşı, thirteen Muslim and ten Christian masters – came to court to complain about certain dealers in old and used fabrics who were buying and selling new woollen cloths (aba and s¸ayak). In this context, they specifically referred to thirteen Christian salesmen. Upon the complainants’ request, the administration issued a new decree to confirm the regulations concerning the marketing of garments and to prohibit cloth-­dealers from other branches of the trade from buying and selling new woollens. A few years later, however, in 1798, a certain Mehmed Arif, also a dealer in woollens, came to the court complaining about his colleagues who had prevented him from converting his shop, where he must have been selling a variety of textiles, into an enterprise specializing in woollens. Mehmed Arif appealed to a decree issued in 1788/89 abolishing barriers to entry (inhisar-­ı bey ü s¸ira) in non-­essential commodities. The sultan decided in his favour and asked the court to expunge the regulation setting barriers to entry in the above-­ mentioned charter, in line with the abolishment of inhisar.35 Although the 1788/89 decree invoked by Mehmed Arif is not available to us, an edict dated 1791 apparently reconfirmed the prohibition of barriers to entry where non-­essentials were concerned. By this decree, Sultan Selim III abolished inhisar in all sectors but those dealing with primary consumer goods, claiming that these limitations caused inflation and harmed the consumers.36 Certainly the ‘public good’ had always been part of the legal and political discourse concerning regulation in urban markets (compare Ch. 10). Yet Selim III’s administration was the first to openly criticize and prohibit inhisar as a general principle, and as a result, by the end of the century, shopkeepers may have been more concerned with proving that their monopolistic privileges were in line with common interests. In another case, a decree abolishing ‘barriers to entry’ among plasterers specified in detail various rules concerning in-­guild training and limitations applicable at the work site. This guild had required that a man had to be at least twenty-­five years old when he became a master, and also that Muslim and Christian plasterers must work in separate buildings. Although the decree prohibited inhisar in theory, with the regulations introduced, the authorities ensured that the established

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occupational and, seemingly, quality-­oriented limitations continued to prevail.37 In many cases, members of officially recognized groups of artisans and shopkeepers infringed upon the exclusive rights presumably granted to other groups. For instance, in 1798, the producers and sellers of sherbet who had previously been granted gedik rights came to the qadi’s court, complaining about the sellers of akide (a kind of sugar candy), who were now producing sherbet and thus violating the rights granted to the complainants by the earlier charter. As for the sellers of akide, they defended their actions on the grounds of the decree prohibiting barriers to entry. While this argument seems to have resonated with the court which underlined that sugar was not an essential commodity (erzak-­ı zaruri), sherbet sellers responded by referring to the earlier decree that fixed the number of gediks and also to the fact that they and the akide sellers had different wardens and different organizations with specific quality requirements, as was also the case in other sectors such as flour products. In other words, the complainants invoked the example of the separate guilds for bakers of bagels and breads. In the end, the sultan decided in favour of the sherbet producers on the grounds of both the limitation set upon gedik numbers by the earlier decree and the quality concerns raised by the sherbet sellers.38 All these examples indicate that in practice gediks did not automatically imply ‘barriers to entry’. Legally opening a new shop or increasing production/marketing capacity in an existing establishment did not depend on whether these shops already had gediks or not. After all, if a potential entrant in a sector or sub-­sector acquired an official permission he seemingly could find the building and equipment needed for his gedik.39 In other words, although gedik numbers – in the sense of licences to produce – were in general fixed, the same thing did not apply, ipso facto, to the supply of gediks in the sense of workplaces and implements.

Gediks and the Problem of Intra-­guild Mobility When a particular group of artisans and tradesmen specified their gediks as belonging to their specialty, and fixed the numbers involved, this action could serve two purposes. First, as Suraiya Faroqhi has underlined, established masters of the guild could use their gediks to prevent qualified journeymen from acquiring the same privileges. By preventing intra-­guild mobility, the masters could preserve both their access to raw materials and their market share. In both a growing and a stagnant economy, this situation would result in an increasing income gap among practitioners

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of one and the same craft. According to Faroqhi, a growing number of journeymen with claims to master status and thus the acquisition of their own shops was the reason why masters felt threatened and used the gedik to preserve their economic and social status.40 This story indicates that an increase in the number of journeymen per master, possibly driven by a growing market, caused the widespread use of gediks. Faroqhi supports her argument by pointing out that ‘gediks were developed first in collective workshops, such as dyers and tanners, where interaction between masters was much closer than in other places and fixed rules more necessary’.41 The argument that gediks were used by masters to preserve or even increase their market share is corroborated by archival evidence, which will be presented below. But this use of gediks is not necessarily the only or even the initial cause of an expanding gedik market. For instance, already in 1764 a large group of retailers selling the cloth known as alaca, imported into Istanbul from Aleppo and Damascus, asked the court not to allow the opening of new shops explicitly on the grounds of protecting the public good. According to the seventy-­one complaining shop-­owners, including both Muslims and non-­Muslims, these new shops, which by the way also held gediks, were unable to pay their debts to the wholesalers, they raised the prices of the commodity, and furthermore they sold their gediks to outsiders for prices above the actual values of their shops.42 This case of collective petitioning for a restriction of legitimate gediks by a group of tradesmen – and not a group of artisans labouring in collective workshops with relatively expensive capital – does not fit in well with Faroqhi’s theory. As retailers dealing with imported cloth, doing business in shops dispersed throughout the city, alaca sellers’ demand for a restriction of gedik numbers seems to originate from their concern with increasing competition from outsiders. Theoretically, the gediks could even serve the established journeymen as long as they prevented the entry of ‘complete’ outsiders into the sector. The assignment of gediks to a particular guild would prevent the participation of these outsiders in the auctions designed to sell the gedik of a deceased shopkeeper. Given limited entry, the auctions would not drive up the price very much, enabling existent guild masters or journeymen to acquire the gediks for affordable prices. Before further elaborating on the theoretical implications of guild organization for gedik markets, let us look at several cases in which gediks seem to have served as an impediment to intra-­guild mobility. One of these cases concerns a group of master craftsmen in the weaving business. In 1797–98 certain silk weavers (kemhacı) requested the abolition of gediks on the grounds that they allowed the wealthier guild members to prevent the poorer ones from using the looms (destgâh) and practising their craft; after all, every destgâh assigned to a gedik cost 400 gurus¸. Put

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differently, the petitioners maintained that the unequal access to capital goods originated from economic differences among guild members and the assignment of a fixed number of gediks to highly valued means of production. For the gedik owners, on the other hand, these claims were unjustified. In their response the latter, who were apparently all established masters, maintained that there were 432 looms with officially assigned gediks and that this number sufficed for the consumption of the city. They also argued that the petitioners requesting the abolition of gediks were the journeymen who had not yet completed their training but who had already dared to establish their own unauthorized looms and produced low-­quality fabrics.43 The court sided with the masters and decided to punish journeymen who acted against guild rules. According to a court register from 1816–17, the average price of looms as recorded in market transactions was now around 1,000 gurus¸, two and a half times what it had been fifteen years earlier. Even with allowance for inflation, the established masters seem to have ‘made a killing’. When complaining about the high price of entering their craft, the younger masters or journeymen thus surely had a point. Probably the high price of the gedik was not due only to the price of the looms that after all were available in a free market. The decree makes it clear that the journeymen, in spite of regulations, could start their business in unauthorized shops, which means that they were able to acquire looms although the latter might have been of lower quality. Rather, loom gediks were expensive because their numbers were fixed, and in this way the gediks served as official licences to practise the craft. By limiting the number of looms by means of gedik, the masters probably aimed not only at preventing competition driven by an increasing number of authorized master craftsmen, but also at preserving the value of the gediks in existence, assuming that there was an active gedik market in this period and craft. The master weavers of bürüncük, a white crepe-­like cloth made of raw silk, also seem to have controlled access to the relevant looms. In 1200/1785–86, their guild was able to obtain an imperial decree specifying the masters’ exclusive rights to practise this craft.44 Only ninety-­one shops, each with two looms, had obtained authorization, and neither the number of shops nor the number of looms could increase. When a shop-­ owner died, his gedik could only go to his son as long as the latter was qualified in the craft, or else it went to his journeymen. While in these cases, masters of the guild apparently controlled access to capital inputs and thereby benefited from the increasing value of their gediks, in other textile sectors there were some regulations favouring journeymen. For instance, the Ottoman government had fixed the price of the looms used by muslin weavers (dülbent and çine) and also of those

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used by silk weavers producing a relatively cheap kind of silk (sandal).45 Such price controls probably aimed at preventing an increase in the price of looms that would harm journeymen. At the same time such controls might have favoured the emergence of a black market, yet until now the present authors have not encountered any complaints to that effect. Also, in a guild more strictly controlled by the central administration such as the manufacturers of thread including (imitation) silver or gold wire (kılapdancı), masters were probably less able to use their gediks to prevent journeymen’s access to capital goods. Perhaps the emergence of standard ‘half-­share looms’ among kılabdancıs in the late eighteenth century enabled an increased number of journeymen to acquire the status of masters.46 These various cases offer some insights and help us to raise further questions as to the causes and consequences of gedik markets. Some masters could use their gediks to curb intra-­guild competition. As suggested by Faroqhi, in a sector such as the manufacture of thread, including silver or gold wire, which obviously required specific skills and relatively expensive capital goods, the guild was probably organized in a more formal way, implying a more hierarchical master–journeyman relationship and a more strictly defined promotion procedure. By restricting access to capital goods, guild masters probably did not only aim at protecting their pecuniary interests but also the established social structure. As a result in these sectors, we do not see any partitioning of gediks or sale of gedik shares to outsiders.

Ethno-­religious Restrictions There is another dimension to the gedik which is probably more intriguing and puzzling than any other, namely the ethno-­religious restrictions occasionally, if not always, observed at the issuance and transfer of gediks. A number of eighteenth-­century documents reveal that the transfer of gediks and gedik shares from one ethnic group to another was in principle strictly prohibited. Thus in 1194/1780, a sultanic edict ordered that the bakeries of Armenians, when they died or left their workplaces – often due to debts – should not be sold to members of other groups.47 As Selim III was much given to complaining about Albanians acquiring bakeries who were probably suspect because of their janissary connections, this particular decree probably targeted Albanians too. Another order stated more generally that the gediks of Armenian bakeries should only be transferred to other Armenians, while the bakeries’ gediks held by Muslims should only go to Muslims.48 Interestingly, there are also instances where the parties involved in the transaction ignored the prohibition of transferring gediks between ethno-­

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religious groups – and moreover the authorities were willing to overlook the irregularity.49 In this context the following example may be of interest. In the early 1800s, the urban ward of Firuzağa contained a bakery with a mill attached to it. Eight horses as well as two millstones belonged to El-­Hac Mustafa bin El-­Hac Ahmed, who wanted to transfer them to a mill to be established in the area of Koca Mustafa Paşa but did not have the necessary means. In consequence he sold his shares to two non-­ Muslims, who planned to transfer their new acquisition to a mill that they jointly owned in nearby Samatya. Even though the seller was a Muslim and the purchasers were not, the qadi’s court endorsed the transaction, requesting permission for re-­registration of the Samatya mill in the registers of the Baş Muhasebe (Accounting Office), given its now increased number of millstones. We are left with the unanswered question of how the two parties to the transaction secured the necessary official permissions. Were there perhaps officials that did not believe these restrictions to be necessary, or was there a bribe involved? The general question then is the following: in which sectors were non-­ economic factors such as ethno-­religious identity important in restricting access to capital assets, and how did the broad context of political economy shape these restrictions? A future systematic study of gedik markets will hopefully allow us to answer these questions.

Conclusion This chapter has argued that, depending on the sector and period involved, there were different reasons for individual shopkeepers, groups of m ­ asters or prominent traders to register their shops as gediks, the latter turning into widely transacted documents certifying a multitude of property rights. In this manner, the gediks served the claims of established artisans and shopkeepers, mostly organized in guilds. These people demanded exclusive rights to practise a certain craft or trade; in other words, the gediks fulfilled a monopoly-­sustaining function. But at the same time gediks could serve the claims of newcomers to equal rights to capital assets and market participation, and in this respect they were monopoly-­ eroding. Whether gediks sustained or eroded monopolies depended both on the sector at issue and on various conditions surrounding that sector at a particular point in time. If a group of artisans or traders was indeed successful in fixing the number of gediks, then gediks would serve their monopolistic privileges, which might or might not be used against journeymen of the same group. If in spite of the collective demands of guild members, gedik registration

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did not take place, the acquisition of this ‘immaterial capital good’ might facilitate the entry of newcomers into a sector as well as their permanent rights to work premises. Formal barriers to entry, however, did not imply that outsiders’ access to capital assets was totally impossible. Whenever secondary markets were available, the ownership of gediks and gedik shares might enable newcomers to access the rents which guildsmen had obtained from their monopolistic privileges. When access to secondary markets was restricted, as was often the case in the textiles sector, this fact could work in two ways. As long as the prices of gediks were controlled, the number of journeymen limited, and journeymen’s access to those openings that became available regulated according to some objective criteria, the journeymen would benefit from the restriction. If, by contrast, the prices of gediks were not controlled and the number of journeymen was allowed to increase, then masters could profit at the expense of journeymen. In brief, whether guild masters succeeded in preventing journeymen from sharing their privileges depended on the particular craft or trade in which they were engaged. Further research may help us to better understand how a given guild’s willingness and ability to set a fixed number of gediks related to the structure and division of power within this particular organization.

Notes The research for this chapter has been financed by TÜBİTAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey), project code 111K274.  1. For an earlier case study referring to this complex notion in similar terms, see Onur Yıldırım, ‘Gedik: A Concept Too Many’, presented at the panel ‘Crafts and Craftsmen in the later Ottoman Empire: From Craft to Industry in the Ottoman Empire and its Successor States’, at the 29th German Congress of Oriental Studies combined with the 11th Congress of the German Middle East Studies Association (DAVO), Halle/Saale, Germany, 20–24 September 2004.   2. Engin Deniz Akarlı, ‘Gedik: A Bundle of Rights and Obligations for Istanbul Artisans and Traders, 1750–1840’, in Law, Anthropology, and the Constitution of the Social, Making Persons and Things, edited by Alan Pottage and Martha Mundy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 166–200; Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Between Conflict and Accommodation: Guildsmen in Bursa and Istanbul during the Eighteenth Century’, in Guilds, Economy and Society, Proceedings of the Twelfth International Economic History Congress, B1, eds Stephen Epstein, Clara Eugenia Nuñez, et al. (Seville: Fundacion Fomento de la Historia Economica, 1998), 143–52; and W. Padel and Louis Steeg, De la législation foncière ottomane (Paris: A. Pedone, 1904), 267.   3. Gabriel Baer, ‘Monopolies and Restrictive Practices of Turkish Guilds’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 13 (1970), 145–65; Enver Ziya Karal, Osmanlı Tarihi, 6 vols (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları, 1976) vol. 6, 276.

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 4. Engin Deniz Akarlı, ‘Gedik: Implements, Mastership, Shop Usufruct, and Monopoly among Istanbul Artisans, 1750–1850’, Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin Jahrbuch (1985–86), 225–31; Akarlı ‘Gedik: A Bundle of Rights and Obligations’; Faroqhi, ‘Between Conflict and Accommodation’.  5. Onur Yıldırım, ‘Onsekizinci Yüzyılda Kurumsal bir Yenilik Olarak Gedik: Istanbul’daki Kılapdancı Esnafı Örnegi’, in Osmanlı’nın Peşinde Bir Yaşam: Suraiya Faroqhi’ye Armağan, ed. Onur Yıldırım (Ankara: İmge Kitabevi, 2008), 373–99.   6. Akgündüz links the early meaning of the term to several concepts referring to usufruct rights that tenants acquired by virtue of residence and/or improvements to the premises (hakk-­ı karar), accepted by various schools of Islamic law as early as the twelfth century. See Ahmet Akgündüz, İslam Hukukunda ve Osmanlı Tatbikatında Vakıf Müessesesi (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1988), 402–6, for the meanings of the terms sükna, girdar and hulüvv. For a brief definition of gedik and its origins, see Ahmet Akgündüz, ‘Gedik’, in Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi, eds Bekir Topaloğlu et al. (Istanbul: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, 1996), (13) 541–43.   7. Engin Deniz Akarlı, ‘Gedik: Implements, Mastership, Shop Usufruct, and Monopoly’. See also Salih Aynural, ’18. Yüzyılın Sonunda İstanbul Esnafının Alım ve Satım Tekeli ve Gedik Hakkı’, Türk Dünyası Aras¸tırmaları 130 (2001), 215–20.  8. Akarlı, ‘Gedik: Implements, Mastership, Shop Usufruct, and Monopoly’; Ahmet Kal’a, ‘Gediklerin Doğuşu ve Gedikli Esnaf’, Türk Dünyası Aras¸tırmaları 67 (1990), 181–87; Aynural, ’18. Yüzyılın Sonunda İstanbul Esnafının Alım ve Satım Tekeli’.  9. Akgündüz, Vakıf Müessesesi, 356, and Murat Çizakça, Islamic Capitalism and Finance: Origins, Evolution, and the Future (Cheltenham: Elgar, 2011), 81. 10. Akgündüz, Vakıf Müessesesi, 356–58 and 362–63; Klaus Kreiser, ‘Icareteyn: Zur “Doppelten Miete” im Osmanischen Stiftungswesen’, Journal of Turkish Studies 10 (1986), 219–26, also appeared as Raiyyet Rüsûmu, Essays presented to Halil Inalcik on his Seventieth Birthday by his Colleagues and Students. Kınalızade Ali Efendi (d. 1572), a prominent Ottoman jurist, maintained that as long as the arrangement benefited the vakıf it should be allowed. 11. Bahaeddin Yediyıldız, XVIII. Yüzyılda Türkiye’de Vakıf Müessesesi: Bir Sosyal Tarih İncelemesi (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2003); Robert J. Barnes, An Introduction to the Religious Foundations in the Ottoman Empire (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1986). 12. For instance, the chief juriconsult, Zekeriyazade Yahya Efendi (d. 1643) specified that as heirs to the proprietors, daughters also could inherit the usufruct rights associated with icareteyn. See Akgündüz, Vakıf Müessesesi, 363. 13. Akgündüz, Vakıf Müessesesi, 401–5. 14. Ibid., 366. 15. Galata court register 41, fol. 1a/2 (1616/1025). This has been transcribed in Timur Kuran (ed.). Mahkeme Kayıtları Is¸ığında 17. Yüzyıl İstanbul’unda Sosyo-­Ekonomik Yas¸am, 10 vols (Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası, 2010–13), vol. 2, 253–56. 16. Ahmet Kal’a, et al. (eds.), İstanbul Ahkâm Defterleri, İstanbul Vakıf Tarihi I (1742–1764) (Istanbul: İstanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi, 1998) (from now: İV I), 4/57/151 (1169/ 1756). 17. İV I, 1/37/166 (1155/1742). 18. İstanbul Court Register 1, fol. 51b/3 (1021/1612), cited in Kuran, Sosyo-­Ekonomik Yas¸am, vol. 2, 226–27. 19. İV I, 3/138/527 (1165/1752). 20. We thank Suraiya Faroqhi for bringing this point to our attention. 21. Akgündüz, Vakıf Müessesesi, 214. 22. ‘İstanbul Mahkemesi 43 Numaralı Şeriyye Sicili (1192 Şevval 22 – 1193 Safer 29)’, transcribed and edited by Mustafa Nuri Türkmen, Marmara Üniversitesi, unpublished MA thesis, Istanbul, 1995 (from now: İM1) 43(1) (1192/1778).

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23. ‘1205–1207 H. Tarihli İstanbul Mahkemesine Ait Olan 60 Numaralı Hüccet Sicilinin Transkripsiyonu’, transcribed and edited by Ekrem Yılmaz, Sakarya Üniversitesi, 1997 (from now: İM2) 60(70) (1206/1792). 24. İM2 60, No. 13, (1205/1790–91). 25. İM2 60, No. 1 (1205/1791); No. 8 (1205/1791); No. 107 (2 Ş 1206/1792), No. 159 (1207/1792); No. 178 (1207/1792–93). 26. İM2 60, No. 31 (1205/1791); No. 34 (1206/1791); No. 67 (1206/1791–92); No. 107 (1206/1792); No. 117 (1206/1702), No. 161 (1207/1792). 27. İM2 60, No. 159 (1207/1792). 28. Murat Şener, Salih Dutoğlu and Hacı Osman Yıldırım (eds), 85 Numaralı Mühimme defteri (1040/1630–1631) (Ankara: T.C. Başbakanlık Devlet Arşivleri Genel Müdürlüğü, 2001) No. 168. According to Eunjeong Yi, Guild Dynamics in Seventeenth-­ century Istanbul, Fluidity and Leverage (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2004), 157, other sectors in which gedik assignments had already occurred by the 1600s were porters, night guards, brokers, shoe-­tip makers, and glass manufacturers. 29. İstanbul Mahkemesi 120 Numaralı Şeriyye Sicili (found in the CD-­ROM accompanying Nejdet Ertuğ and Şevki Nezihi Aykut (eds), İstanbul Mahkemesi 121 Numaralı Şeriyye Sicili (Istanbul: Packard Humanities Institute and Sabancı University, 2006) (from now: İM3) 1-­250/54, 1-­250/54b-­3, 1-­120/12b, 1-­122/49b, 17-­129/68. 30. İM2 60, No. 37 (1206/1791). 31. As early as 1757, a decree had authorized takeover and sale of the gediks of meat-­dealers unable to repay their debts. See C. BLD. 61/3008 (1170/1757). 32. İM2 60, no. 38 (1206/1791). 33. Yediyıldız, XVIII. Yüzyılda Türkiye’de Vakıf Müessesesi, 115. 34. Akgündüz, Vakıf Müessesesi, 411. 35. ‘İstanbul Kadılığı 76 Numaralı Emir ve Ferman Defteri (1211–1217/1796–1803)’, transcribed and edited by Hasan Çağlar, Marmara Üniversitesi, unpublished MA thesis, Istanbul, 1993 (from now: İK) 76, No. 23 (1207/1792) and No. 29 (1212/1798). 36. Hatt-­ı Hümayun Collection, Prime Ministry’s Archives, Istanbul. (from now: HAT) 192/ 9342 (1205/1791). 37. İK 76, (1211–1217/1796–1803), No.24: ‘esnaf-­ ı mezkurenin yedlerinde olup sened ittihaz eyledikleri evamir-­i aliyyenin mahall-­i kaydları ref ü terkin ve bu şurut-­ı meriyye Başmuhasebe kalemine kayd . . .’ 38. İK 76, no. 30, (1213/1798). 39. The creation of new gediks continued in this period. For instance, in 1811, new gediks for snuff-­sellers were created, with 150 gurus¸ advance payment (muaccele): Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi Cevdet Belediye (from now: C. BLD.) 13/629 (1226/1811). Gediks for new commercial spaces such as Sultan Odaları, with use remaining unspecified, also appeared on the market: C.BLD. 106/1528 (1218/ 1803) and C. BLD. 28/1396 (1216/1801). 40. Faroqhi, ‘Between Conflict and Accommodation’. 41. Ibid., 143. 42. C.BLD. 1698. 43. HAT 1413/57568 (1212/1797–98). 44. Sıdkı, Gedikler, 16. Similar restrictions applied also to the weavers of other types of cloth. 45. Database based on İM3 120 and İM4 121. 46. C.BLD 15 (1808). 47. C. BLD. 21/1047 (1194/1780). 48. C. BLD. 739 (1209/1795). 49. C.BLD. 14/696 (1216/1801).

Chapter 10

Punishment, Repression and Violence in the Marketplace Istanbul, 1730–1840

Engin Deniz Akarlı

Introduction Maintaining a degree of harmony and predictability in the fluctuating labyrinth of human interactions, with minimal recourse to coercion and violence, has been a challenge for any given polity in human history. Some of the best minds in all ages and places have addressed the challenge and helped to develop means of dealing with it as effectively as possible. All responses have been obviously imperfect, and historically as well as spatially contingent. Yet, we can learn from the experience of different times and cultures to better understand the problems of maintaining relatively peaceful relations in a given society. If the longevity and the broad geographical reach of a regime are indicative of a reasonable response to this universal challenge and ideal, then the experiences of the people living under such regimes should deserve our attention. The Ottoman experience would rank in this category. The Ottoman state could not have survived over a wide geographical area for several centuries without some effective response to the challenge of balancing diverse, conflicting and fluid social and political forces, with due adjustments in time and space. The final dissolution of the Ottoman state in 1912–22, despite the hundred-­year-­long Ottoman attempts at reform, may well indicate the limits of the adaptability of its old traditions and methods of regime maintenance to the modern era. Simultaneously, one

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may find fault with the particular models of modern statecraft that the Ottomans and their successors in the region chose, or felt obliged to choose. At any rate, modern representations of Ottoman rule in general as an ‘Oriental despotism’ that rested on coercion and left violence as the only viable reaction to government policies seem to make little sense. As in all early modern (and, for that matter, modern) states and societies, the Ottoman ‘public’ arena had its share of punishments, coercion, violence and counter-­ violence. Yet, such practices did not necessarily become the norm to the point of exhausting a regime’s legitimacy. Violence may mark an aberration in the normal course of relations between executive authorities and the civilian population, or instances when the established means of conflict resolution and control fail. Nevertheless, the parties to the conflict may still resort to the same conceptual and institutional resources to overcome the crisis, with due adjustments. Focusing on violence alone in such situations would generate a distortedly chaotic picture, concealing from the eye a regime’s hegemonic influence and institutionalized practices that help to accommodate conflict. One needs to view violence and other uses of coercive force with due attention to the broad cultural and institutional context in which they occur, in order to understand the conditions that entail or inhibit violence.1 With these thoughts in mind, I focus on punishment, repression and violence in the four major business districts of Istanbul in the period 1730–1840. My aim is to understand the place of force in an Ottoman ‘public sphere’ just before the efforts to modernize the Ottoman state took off in earnest. In this period, the courts served as the main forum for conflict resolution and the negotiation of differences, not only for the various segments of the civilian population but also for issues between these people and the executive authorities. Both the courts and the executive organs of the state employed coercive power to repress conflicts. I call the former ‘judicial punishment’ and the latter ‘political punishment’ or ‘repression’. This chapter illustrates this distinction, and in addition refers to a few instances of protest and artisan-­backed coups directed against the executive authorities. Thus, I review different forms of coercion in the same setting over a relatively long period in an effort to develop a differentiated view of the use of physical force as it affected the artisans and traders of Istanbul. My research relies mainly on the judicial files of the imperial council (divan) concerning the artisans of Istanbul during the period under consideration. The two highest-­ranking Ottoman judges were members of the divan and constituted its judicial branch. They advised the divan on legal matters, heard appeals against the decisions of the regular courts, and examined the validity of objections to previous decisions of the divan.

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Other senior judges assisted the divan judges if need be.2 The affairs of the artisans and traders of Istanbul figure prominently in the judicial files of the divan.3 Reliance on official legal documents renders the picture I draw somewhat ‘sanitized’, for they frame the incidents they represent in a stylized discourse. All the same, these documents constitute the richest source of information available to us on conflicts of a public nature. They include references to the civilian population in general and the parties to these conflicts in particular, the different stages of the judicial process of conflict resolution, forms of punishment, and the problems that emerged when the legal system failed to mitigate or control conflicts. Besides, the fundamental legal concepts we encounter in these documents (at least in those related to the affairs of the artisans of Istanbul) provide the clues to a discourse that both government officials and the civilian population used to justify their claims and positions. In other words, the language of the law provided a hegemonic conceptual medium that facilitated negotiations between the government and the civilian population as well as within and between different segments of the population. Indeed, recent research makes it increasingly clear that the Ottoman judicial system operated as a bridge between the executive authorities and the civilian population, and facilitated – relatively speaking – the development of broadly shared concepts and expectations of right, justice and legitimate governance.4 This feature of the legal documents adds to their significance, as they guide us towards a refined understanding of the place of violence and other uses of force in the experience of artisans and traders.

Judicial Punishment The Ottoman legal tradition allowed a large degree of autonomy to various segments of the population in handling their internal affairs and differences according to their own custom. Thus, each group of artisans took upon itself to collectively preserve peaceful relations between its members as well as its contractual agreements with other parties, including the government offices with which it had relations. Each group’s custom provided guidelines for the resolution of internal conflicts. The ‘custom’ in this context represented the prevailing consensus of the group – ­notwithstanding the formulaic statement that custom was ‘ancient’. As conditions changed, each group defined and redefined itself as well as its ‘ancient custom’. When reaching a consensus proved difficult, the members of the group sought help from the regular courts. Likewise, a group applied to the courts for the registration of its custom for future reference, lest d ­ isagreements

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emerge over the group’s conventional practices. The courts also served as the main venue through which a particular group reached a working agreement with other groups or parties. Quite often, these customs and agreements indicated, implicitly or explicitly, the kinds of punishment awaiting those who would ‘dare to breach’ them.5 Price regulations (narh nizamları) constitute a version of such agreements. A price regulation was a periodically renegotiated agreement between the qadi, who represented the government, and the representatives of artisans. The market inspector had the authority to deal with those artisans and shopkeepers who breached the price regulations by inflicting set fines and punishments on them if he caught them red-­ handed. One of the duties of the district judge was to prevent the market inspectors from abusing their authority.6 If an artisan deviated from custom, a collective contract or the negotiated regulations to which he had agreed, his colleagues would take him to court, unless they brought him into line by their own means. The first time such a person appeared before the qadi, the latter would normally rebuke him and make him pledge his word of honour not to repeat his misdeed but to work in harmony with his colleagues. Repeat offenders, however, were regarded as obdurate people who heeded no advice and therefore deserved punishment. The leaders or the steward of the group at issue as well as the qadis had the authority to fine such recalcitrants. In addition, the qadis might sentence them to short terms of imprisonment in Istanbul and/or decide to expel them from the trade if their colleagues agreed on such a measure.7 In principle, only the sovereign had the right to mete out severe punishments, such as banishment from Istanbul.8 In these cases, normally, first one of the two judges of the divan, or another senior judge authorized by this assembly, had to undertake the necessary investigation and interrogations to ascertain the guilt of the accused. The judge reported his decision to the divan, which submitted it to the palace for approval. The following cases should illustrate the legal procedure at work in the punishment of the people who persistently broke conventions the group had agreed upon. Case 1: The flour sellers took their steward, Mustafa, to the district court for oppressing his colleagues. The qadi agreed to expel him from the trade. However, Mustafa managed to re-­join the group and adopted a spiteful attitude towards his colleagues. In 1733, they accused him in the divan, requesting his unconditional expulsion and banishment from Istanbul ‘for our well-­being and the orderly conduct of our affairs’. The divan judge summarized the complaints of the artisans and the previous court decision, and sub-

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mitted his statement, without additional comment, for the sultan’s approval. The sultan decided that Mustafa should be banished to Bozcaada.9 Case 2: In 1791, a group of greengrocers petitioned the sultan requesting the punishment of five colleagues accused of selling in the black market. Through the divan, the sultan ordered the qadi of Istanbul to summon to his court the petitioners, the steward and other elders of the greengrocers, as well as the accused, to inquire into the truth of the matter. One of the accused fled, but the others were brought to court. They acknowledged the accusations directed against them. In his decision (i‘lam) addressed to the sultan, the qadi summarized the results of his inquiries. He recommended that the five accused should be forbidden to work as greengrocers in Istanbul again, without possibility of reprieve. Their ears should be twisted and their punishment should serve as a deterrent to others. Once again, the sultan ordered their banishment to Bozcaada.10 Case 3: Ahmed and Mehmed Sadık Ustas were water-­wheel makers who had already been banished to Bozcaada briefly for ‘oppressing’ their colleagues. Upon their return, they continued to act in ways that ‘disturbed the harmony and order of the group’. Their colleagues took them to the divan, where the judge decided that according to the evidence ‘discord and mischief making were in the nature of these two individuals’. Their punishment and correction were, therefore, in order and important. The sultan approved their banishment to Bozcaada again, as a ‘deterrent to others’.11

If those convicted through the judicial process thought that the punishment inflicted on them was unjust, it is unlikely that they would have found many sympathetic ears. Punishment had occurred through a legal process in which their peers or people from their own social group actively participated and endowed the arbitrators with an authority to act decisively. In other words, the law and the legal process served as an interface that linked the ruling class and the ruled under the acknowledged leadership of the former, thereby enabling the government to maintain the legitimacy of its influence and hegemony.12 This interface, however, was not a given. It had to be renegotiated, maintained and continually readjusted over time. Recent research has tried to bring out which groups had good chances of obtaining a sympathetic hearing in court, and who was likely to lose out. Organization was the key factor: a guild or town quarter stood a much better chance of success than an individual, a situation which explains why, as we shall see, it was usually marginalized artisans that attempted to win a case ‘on their own’ (compare Chapter 8). Presumably, they proceeded in this way because they did not have any alternatives. Furthermore, it was probably helpful if a group of complaining artisans could invoke g ­ uarantors

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or patrons. On the most basic level, the members of a guild often vouched for one another’s good conduct, or else the artisans in question might invoke the protection of a notable figure, who in person or through a representative might take his place among the witnesses appending their names to the official record of the court case (s¸uhud ul-­hal). In consequence we might expect migrants to have a more difficult position than locals, and in fact Albanian bathhouse workers (compare Ch. 4) were less likely to complain against people with whom they were in conflict than have complaints against them being considered by the qadi’s court. But it seems that apart from people with ‘established reputations as troublemakers’ such as low-­class Albanians working in eighteenth-­century Istanbul, being a migrant was not so much of a problem as the lack of ‘respectable’ connections in the city. As for non-­Muslims, whether or not they were able to convince the courts of the merit of their case depended on circumstances. Thus the Jewish spice dealers, who in the mid-­1700s complained against their Muslim colleagues who apparently were trying to drive them out of business, did obtain a certain amount of support from the central authorities.13 However, non-­Muslims seemingly stood a better chance of success if they teamed up with Muslims: thus for instance the Jewish butchers of Istanbul found a Muslim to speak for their cause even when the dispute was an exclusively Jewish matter, namely securing a share of the incoming sheep to be butchered according to kosher rules/rites.14 In this connection as well, the problem was not so much being a non-­Muslim as being poorly connected in comparison to a rival litigant (compare the case discussed in the Appendix). As for artisan-­janissary connections, at present we do not really know whether, in the eighteenth century, they were an advantage or disadvantage to a group of complaining craftsmen. Once Mahmud II was on the throne and out to destroy the corps, it was best to hide whatever links might have existed. That is another story.

Political Intervention and Repression There were times and cases when the military and administrative authorities resorted to blunt coercive power, or threatened it, acting as they saw fit and not necessarily in effective consultation with judicial authorities or by negotiation with the affected civilian population. In these instances, the executive authorities acted in the name of maintaining peace and public order (maslahat-­ı amme ve nizam-­ı memleket), punishing those who caused discord (müfsid) or harmed the people (muzırr lil-­‘ibad). We

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can consider such instances as situations when the ruler’s discretionary authority turned repressive. The following cases should illustrate the point: Case 4: In 1794, Sultan Selim III (r. 1789–1807), by his own discretion, ordered the banishment of the steward of the butchers to Rhodes and that of two other butchers to Limnos. In his decree, the sultan spoke thus: ‘It is manifest to me that there exist among the butchers some avaricious and dishonest people who sow discord (müfsid), defy the ancient custom of their trade, and cause shortages of meat for the inhabitants of Istanbul. I have asked the head of my palace doorkeepers, who also oversees the provisioning of meat, to talk to the steward and elders of the butchers and to bring to their attention that it is incumbent upon them to conduct the affairs of their trade properly and to punish their colleagues who defy the custom and regulations of their trade . . . He duly warned them – above all, their steward Hacı Emin – and asked them to convey “my will to every single butcher”. However, my investigations indicate that, far from acting accordingly and making an effort to prevent the misdeeds [of his colleagues], this Hacı Emin is himself involved in misdeeds. So I have ordered his arrest and expulsion to Rhodes in order to punish him and to intimidate (terhiben) other butchers.’ In two accompanying decrees, the sultan ordered the banishment of two other butchers to Limnos for similar reasons and to put fear into other butchers’ hearts.15 Case 5: In 1809, the newly enthroned Sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808–39) issued orders for the arrest and banishment of Salih, an olive-­oil seller, because it was confirmed that instead of minding his own business like everybody else, Salih caused discord (ifsad) among olive-­oil sellers and instigated (tahrik) them to keep prices high. To intimidate and chastise (terhib ü te’dib) people like him, the monarch decided that this man ought to be punished. Sultan Mahmud ordered the banishment of Salih to Karahisar-­ı Sahib under strict supervision, forbidding him to take ‘even a single step’ to go to another place.16 Case 6: In 1814, Sultan Mahmud II issued an ‘imperial decree on a blank sheet’ (beyaz üzerine, i.e. a decree emanating directly from the palace, without being initiated by any court) that stipulated an administrative solution to a protracted legal dispute among three different groups of cloth dyers concerning the types of cloth they were supposed to dye. In 1812, the sultan had decided on a new arrangement of the affairs of cloth dyers following ‘long investigations and due consultation with some experts’, abolishing all differences between the subgroups and raising the rents they paid to a pious foundation established to finance military reforms. However, ten dyers refused to abide by this administrative decision, thus arousing the sultan’s fury. In his new decree, Mahmud II vituperated these dyers for claiming the validity of the legal documents affirming their old custom. He added, ‘What does it mean to act in defiance of my decree . . .? I did not

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write what is in it off the top of my head, without reflection. I made that arrangement after having examined all [aspects of the issue]. Destroy the documents in their hands and issue them new ones . . . If any of the dyers dares to resist, let me know! The new order will surely hold, once a few of them are hanged!’17

These cases differ from Cases 1–3 in two ways. First, they represent acts of administrative fiat, although they refer to certain legal concepts, suggesting some adherence to legality. Second, they involve decisions intended to intimidate a particular segment of the civilian population and to strike fear in people’s hearts or to coerce them to obey an arrangement in the drafting of which they had not been consulted, contrary to the custom of the marketplace. There were also unusual times when the executive authorities meted out summary punishments to artisans, and even hanged them as rebels. Case 7: A case in point appeared in a document in which the grand vizier explained to the sultan ‘the reasons behind the execution of [two] non-­ Muslims [the other day] (haklarında icra-­yı siyaset olunan zımmilerin sebeb-­i katilleri). This long document involved a dispute between the bakers and the executive authorities over the price, weight and quality of bread. Clearly, the government had demanded conditions that the bakers could not fulfil under the prevailing circumstances. Although the government made some concessions, the bakers remained dissatisfied. Muslims and non-­Muslims alike gathered to plead their case at the divan. When not allowed to do so, they went to the residences of the qadi of Istanbul and the s¸eyhülislam (chief jurist) to express their grievances. These two officials tried to mollify them, but in vain. Hundreds of bakers embarked on large boats to present a petition to the sultan in person when he took his regular walk at the imperial landing site, but they just missed him as he had come there a little earlier than usual that day. All along, the grand vizier thought that further concessions would encourage the bakers to further disobedience and cause harm to the people (‘ibadullahı ızrar). Furthermore, he held that these demonstrations resulted from the agitation (ifsad ve tahrik) of only a few instigators (ba‘is-­i fesad). Consequently, the grand vizier decided to arrest the instigators and to hang two of them summarily as a lesson to others. According to this official, ‘Ever since that day there has been neither a complaint nor idle talk. Praise be to God! Loaves of bread are now white like white roses and the people’s blessings for your imperial majesty rise like a mountain’. The sultan responded to this letter in the following manner: ‘My [dear] vizier, you are my trusted representative and the regulator of my state. I have entrusted to you the pursuit of the proper conduct of the affairs of the people in order to attract their perpetual prayers for me. And my prayers are with you; I accept [the explanation]’.18

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There is no date on this document, as if the incident it records occurred beyond history, beyond the normal flow of life when legal (shar‘i) principles remained the norm. In this incident, the grand vizier resorted to ‘sultanic custom’ (örf-­i sultani), which allowed harsh punishment in order to enforce discipline among soldiers and administrators. The jurists justified the practice primarily as a necessary measure to protect the people from the excesses and oppression (zulüm, mezalim) which those who wielded power over them were likely to commit. Thus in fighting armed criminals (harami) the jurists unequivocally allowed resort to forceful measures; and in fighting armed rebels (bughat) they also permitted the use of force, albeit with some reservations, because both instances disrupted public peace and caused harm to people. Otherwise, subjecting the civilian population to the sultans’ military custom would undermine the very purpose this custom was supposed to serve, namely the protection of the ‘servants of God’ (‘ibadullah, in other words the civilian subjects irrespective of their religion) from oppression at the hands of the servants of the state and the sultan.19 The vizier in Case 7 circumvented the established legal process and arbitrarily ordered the execution of two individuals to set an example to all protestors. His characterization of the petitioners as mischief-­makers causing harm to the public represents a testimony to the law’s intent. The vizier’s action, however, was political in nature. The bakers had gathered in large numbers but they were unarmed and were exercising, if emphatically, their legal right to air their grievances against a government decree that they deemed a threat to their very livelihood. It was religiously and legally incumbent upon the ruler to hear and respond to the complaints of the people, Muslim and non-­Muslim alike, so that he might win their blessings, as the sultan himself acknowledged that he should. Yet with the sultan’s consent, the vizier handled the protestors as if they were rebels, in an effort to impose the government’s will on them. His intervention verged on zulüm, conceived as cruel and unjustifiable oppression and the opposite of justice.20

Violent Reactions The same basic notions of legitimacy that generated a sense of governmental responsibility, however imperfect, also inspired peaceful public demonstrations (as illustrated in Case 7) as well as violent popular resistance and revolt. Artisans participated in several riots that led to the deposition and even killing of sultans, not to mention viziers and other top administrators, amid demands for justice. Whether the protestors’ claims

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were justifiable or not, these incidents show that people did not see the sovereign or his executive representatives to be ‘above the law’. Indeed, the period I cover begins with a popular uprising in 1730. The active participation of the artisans and traders of Istanbul in this uprising, which led to the abdication of the reigning sultan and the execution of several top officials, is well documented.21 The new executive heads of the government were careful to handle the affairs of the artisans and the marketplace through the judicial process. From the 1770s onwards, however, the growing financial difficulties of the government and the shortages of provisions and raw materials necessary for Istanbul’s large population led to tensions. Under Selim III (1789–1807), the government sided with proprietors in their rent disputes with artisans and resisted the artisans’ efforts to control the number of shops in their line of trade. Disgruntled artisans defied regulatory orders that they considered a threat to their basic livelihood and, therefore, to public ‘benefit’. Simultaneously, struggles over the distribution of increasingly scarce resources strained the capacity of the courts and the judges to accommodate differences effectively and enduringly through the judicial process.22 External wars and internal power struggles further complicated the problems and made peaceful resolution of conflicts difficult. Coups and counter coups followed each other. Selim III as well as his immediate successor Mustafa IV were deposed and killed along with several top executives in 1807–8. These were difficult times, comparable to 1730.23 We do not know yet the extent of artisans’ direct involvement in the violent events of 1807–8. The majority of the artisans and shopkeepers would not have been inclined towards violence unless as a desperate measure, for violence disrupted business and the normal flow of life. Clearly, they had serious complaints of Selim III’s policies, but the persistence of political instability and confusion under his immediate successor did not help the artisans either. They felt a need to better organize along trade lines, and undertook petition campaigns and demonstrations to air their grievances. Some of these groups probably supported, tacitly or explicitly, one of the rival political factions in the chaotic days of 1807–8. The artisans’ complaints and ability to tip the political balance in the capital at times of confusion did not escape the attention of the advisors of the newly enthroned young sultan, Mahmud II. Conspicuously, Mahmud II and his advisors thought it wise to adopt generally cautious and conciliatory policies toward artisans, although this relationship was not always a smooth one. Case 6 illustrated the sultan’s eagerness to ‘regulate’ the affairs of the Istanbul artisans, and not always in full consultation with them. Once Mahmud felt sufficiently secure on the throne, he intensified his efforts to bring the artisans under the

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control of his increasingly bureaucratic and efficient administration. His policy meant higher taxes and dues for artisans. They organized massive demonstrations to resist a new wave of tax hikes and bureaucratic measures in 1837–38. Mahmud felt obliged to reduce the tax rates but did not compromise the modern bureaucratic system that he was building.24

Conclusion We can safely presume that the majority of artisans had a stake in political stability and public order. Participation in violent acts was their last resort. Under less extreme circumstances they had other means of defending their interests and airing their grievances. Primarily, they worked through the courts and the legal process. Whenever feasible, they also managed to ignore those government decisions that they considered unfair. Petition campaigns that occasionally turned into public demonstrations helped artisans to impress their worries and concerns for survival upon judicial and executive authorities, as well as upon proprietors of urban real estate, creditors and individuals who wanted to practise their trade independently of the artisanal associations concerned. However, to defend their interests with the limited means available to them, artisans needed to act in sufficiently large numbers and as much as possible in an organized manner. Organized artisans and traders could and did tip the political balance in Istanbul, particularly at times of tension or political crisis. The executive authorities of the government often wielded brute force legitimately, for instance to execute court decisions, to maintain discipline among the ranks of the security forces, and to maintain public order in general; but they sometimes also abused their physical power to protect their own political or material interests. Their power was by no means absolute, however. Different factions balanced each other and the organized segments of the population, such as artisans and traders, set limits to executive abuses. Furthermore, the executive authorities, too, had a stake in a peaceful and stable public order. Finally, the Ottoman ruling class in general, and the people in responsible administrative positions in particular, acted within an institutionalized structure and abided by certain traditions of government, including a well-­established legal culture. Two features of the Ottoman legal culture deserve close attention in a discussion on the uses of force in a public sphere where the government and the civilian population interacted, as they did in the marketplaces of Istanbul. First, the legal institutions and practices included the people in the making of the regulations that applied to them. Recognition of the autonomy of organized groups and a legal process that

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facilitated ­negotiated resolution of disputes manifested the participatory and ‘accommodational’ nature of the Ottoman legal system. The legal process relied on contracts as a major device to assure settlements. Case by case, judges tried to verify, demarcate and balance the respective rights and obligations of each party to a dispute, if the parties had not already done this by their own means and come to the court merely to register their agreement. Even when a judge had to settle a case by resorting to his decisive legal authority, he would formulate the final sentence in the form of an agreement guaranteed by all the parties involved. As indicated above, the contractual arrangements effected through the legal system often also included the terms of punishment that would apply to any who transgressed the arrangement to which they previously had agreed. Second, the judicial process helped to disseminate certain legal concepts of right, legitimacy and good governance that were fundamental to the Ottoman-­Islamic legal tradition. These concepts provided some direction not only to government decisions but also to the objections of those who felt that a given decision violated their rights and thus was unjust. Even when the negotiated settlement of conflicts failed and the parties, including the executive authorities, resorted to forceful means to defend their interests or position, they appealed to the same fundamental concepts to justify their acts. Thus, the legal system helped to generate a sense of inclusion and a shared hegemonic culture, while mitigating potential and real disputes and acting as a mediator between the civilian population and the government. My point is not that these institutional and cultural arrangements ended violence or injustice. Rather, I want to make a conceptual distinction between hegemonic and coercive forms of rule. Power in itself cannot explain the longevity of a political regime. Certainly the Ottoman model of governance did not create an ideal world. Executive authorities abused established concepts and also their power to take innocent lives, as Case 7 illustrated. Judicial authorities accepted bribes to let an organized group have its way although these actions caused harm to others.25 Certain groups of artisans became closely affiliated with military factions and took part in struggles that had little to do with their legitimate interests.26 We can expand these examples of aberration and abuse, but my point remains the same. In so far as the Ottoman approach to public issues remained open to negotiation and consequent adjustment, and the civilian population and the overseers of public affairs moved within certain shared concepts of right and legitimacy, the regime maintained its vitality and influence. In this regard, the legal system played a crucial role. Intensification of struggles over the distribution of increasingly scarce resources in the last quarter of the eighteenth and the beginnings of

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the nineteenth century, however, appear to have critically strained the capacity of the courts and the judges to accommodate differences effectively and enduringly. This development, combined with the rise of new notions of government and law, gradually marginalized the interactive judicial processes that had helped to connect the formulations of public interest to the ‘public’ to which it applied. Administrative decisions began to define ‘public benefit’, which became increasingly hard to distinguish from raison d’état. This trend accelerated in the ‘reform era’ (1839–76), along with the efforts to build a modern hierarchic and bureaucratic government apparatus with uniform authority over the territories and people under its jurisdiction. A growing cadre of bureaucrats and technocrats trained in modern schools began to see law as a means to systematically enforce state authority, and the state as a means to move society on a linearly conceived path of progress towards set objectives. Bureaucratic institutions, including the new courts, developed into elaborate hierarchical structures but with little input from the population. Institutions intended to provide a sense of inclusion to the politically conscious elements of the population remained marginal and mostly ineffective. Ottoman subjects, Muslim and non-­Muslim alike, grew suspicious and fearful of the government as well as of each other. The growing violence in society urged the government to resort to harsher police measures. A vicious cycle was set into motion.27 These changes in state–society relations had implications reverberating to this day. The state is still the dominant force, and law its tool to manipulate and control society. Modern Islamists and their conspicuously statist reinventions of Islamic law are no exception to this rule. Legal reform in the modern Middle East may have produced seemingly strong and stable states, and in certain cases even the rule of law, but not regimes consistently accountable to the people over which they rule. Significantly, civic initiatives are repressed and civil institutions wanting. This is a legacy of the nineteenth century, rather than of the eighteenth; for in the 1700s law had different meanings and objectives that were responsive to society at large and provided a remarkable degree of civic autonomy and initiative. Learning about the experience of the people who used and influenced this legal system may inspire reassessments of the current relations between state, society and law in the Middle East. Such reassessments may even generate some ideas that will hopefully be able to curtail the often senseless violence and counter-­violence that prevail in virtually all parts of the region.

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APPENDIX: Dimo versus Angeli: A Show of ‘Force’ in a Property Dispute in Ottoman Silivri (October 1763) The Actors Yorgi, son of Laza, originally from the province of Janina, lived and worked in Silivri, a little town on the outskirts of Greater Istanbul and a subordinate to the district of Eyüp. Possessing an eatery in downtown Silivri, Yorgi had obtained a licence to make and sell sweet bread rolls and cakes (çörek) as well as flaky pastry (börek) in his place, apparently thanks to the contacts of his cousin, Dimo son of Manto, who also was a master baker of cakes, sweet rolls and flaky pastry. Yorgi’s health was failing. He worried about the future of his wife, Zehariya, daughter of Levesh, their little daughter Haydo, and his mother Istano. Dimo promised to take care of Yorgi’s affairs if, God forbid, something should happen to him. The two men went to the Silivri sub-­district court and Yorgi designated Dimo as his freely appointed agent to settle Table 10.1  Background conditions Year 1726

Conditions It was impossible to start a new bakery for ordinary bread but possible to start a new cake oven/shop. At this time a certain Salih Ağa built just such an establishment on land rented from a vakıf on a perpetual lease. 1734 Emphasizing their disadvantages vis-­à-­vis the ‘regular’ bakers, the bakers of cakes and sweet rolls finally won recognition as a group with the right to control their own affairs. 1734–56 Even so they continued to run into conflicts with bakers and artisans running sweet shops. 1756 The manufacturers of cakes and sweet rolls agreed to the appointment of a steward by the government, which meant accepting a fee increase in return for expanded rights, particularly vis-­à-­vis the sub-­lessees of vakıf property and other proprietors who wanted to increase rents. 1758 Gözlemecis, lokmacıs and some others offered competition to the bakers of cakes and sweet rolls. 1762 The manufacturers of cakes and sweet rolls forced their government-­ appointed steward to resign, streamlined their organization under a certain Osman, whom they elected as their steward. 1812 The bakers of cakes and sweet rolls absorbed the gözlemecis too, and acquired monopolistic rights.

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his estate and oversee his affairs in case of his death. The court registered his statement and issued a legal agency document to Dimo. Yorgi rented the shop where he ran his business for 55 kurus¸ [per month?]. His landlords had divided ownership into seven and a half shares, the grocer Angeli and his son Pietri owning one share each. Angeli lived in Silivri, but Pietri, a mature adult, apparently was away from the town for a long period. (Based on a register of 137 imperial decrees pertaining to Istanbul artisans and traders, in the possession of the author, and the Cevdet collection of imperial decrees in the Prime Ministry Archives in Istanbul; see note 3 for details.)

The Court Case: Phase One Yorgi died in the early autumn of 1763. In his capacity as Yorgi’s agent, Dimo took charge of the deceased’s affairs and his shop. He prepared an inventory of Yorgi’s possessions, including all the tools and equipment of his shop/eatery. He saw to it that the sub-­district court approved and registered the list. The resultant document indicated the value of Yorgi’s tools and equipment as a cake-­and-­pastry gedik (i.e. as the fixed capital assets of a licensed shop in this craft). Dimo then settled Yorgi’s outstanding debts and paid the rent of the shop to its owners, at the 55 kurus¸ rate that Yorgi had been paying. Dimo’s meticulous attention to legal detail indicates that either he intended to sell the place or, probably, to sublet it as it was, that is as a cake–pastry shop and eatery, in order to assure a regular income for Zehariya, Haydo and Istano, his cousin’s heirs. However a certain Angeli objected. As a co-­owner of the shop, he demanded a higher rent or else the vacation of the premises. Dimo took him to the court of the sub-­ district judge (naib).

The Naib’s Decision The naib tried in vain to reconcile Angeli and Dimo on the basis of a modest rent increase, as Angeli insisted on a rent of 85 kurus¸. Dimo argued that since the shop was a designated bread roll cum pastry shop with a fixed gedik attached to it, the owners could neither rent it for any other purpose nor request a rent higher than what was ‘customary’. Angeli disputed Dimo’s agency as well as the gedik status of the deceased Yorgi’s business. After examining the documents and hearing witnesses,

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the naib decided that Yorgi’s business was indeed a licensed bread roll cum pastry shop, and that Dimo’s acts as an agent were legally valid. He recommended that Angeli come to a peaceful agreement in keeping with the court’s decision.

The Court Case: Phase Two According to Dimo, Angeli paid little heed to the court’s decision, confident of his connections to some powerful people (mütegallibeden bazı kimesnelere istinaden). He kept pestering Dimo in order to force him into either raising the rent or vacating the shop. Dimo decided to take the matter to the judges of the divan, the imperial court, submitting a formal petition for an order that would put an end to Angeli’s illegal interventions and hostile attitude.

The Divan’s Decision The divan judge decided that this was an ordinary (sıradan) case, the handling of which called for knowledge of the local situation and custom (örf-­i belde). He recommended that the qadi of Eyüp, the Silivri naib’s superior, hear the case again and that one of the divan sergeants be dispatched to the area to duly summon to the court all the litigants, witnesses and evidence relating to the case. Orders were dispatched accordingly.

The Court Case: Phase Three With due help from the divan sergeant, the Eyüp judge summoned the litigants to court. Angeli’s son Pietri could not come in person, but he deputized Lapester to represent him. Angeli failed to produce evidence that the owners of the remaining five and a half shares were in accord with him and his son. On the other hand, Osman, the steward of the cake, patty and bagel makers of Greater Istanbul, his assistants (yiğitbas¸ıs) as well as the scribe and the elders of this group of artisans came to the court as expert witnesses. Speaking on behalf of his colleagues, Osman confirmed that Yorgi’s eatery held the licence and fixed tools (gedik) of a cake–pastry business and as such was subject to the ‘ancient custom’ of the trade. According to this custom, which the divan, too, officially recognized, only an appropriately trained person could run Yorgi’s shop (gedik). As long as its established (kadim) rent was duly paid, the owners

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of premises housing a cake–pastry gedik could neither remove the latter nor rent the shop to anyone but a qualified master of the trade. Since none of the owners of the shop rented by Yorgi had anything to do with the business at issue, they should have no right to interfere. Osman’s colleagues affirmed that his statement was in accord with the local custom (örf-­i belde) and the ancient custom of the trade. Since Yorgi had also run an eatery in the same shop, the judge had also summoned to his court the steward and elders of the owners of eateries to serve as expert witnesses. However, these men do not appear to have played a significant role in the court proceedings. Backed by his colleagues’ testimony, Dimo accused Angeli of illegal and vengefully hostile intrusion motivated by greed. From the judge he requested an injunction to prevent Angeli’s intervention in the transactions related to Yorgi’s estate and gedik; thus Dimo requested permission to act as he saw fit in his capacity as Yorgi’s legitimate agent. Apparently dumbfounded by the voices raised against him and his cause, Angeli remained silent, thus forgoing his procedural right to plead his case. As a result, the judge decided in favour of Dimo and duly informed the divan of this decision.

Some Pertinent Questions and Considerations On the one hand, we need to consider what was at stake for the bread roll, patty and bagel-­makers so that they came to Dimo’s aid with a show of force and solidarity. Apart from the moral concerns that they may have felt, as they probably knew the people at issue, there was the question of the gedik to be considered, as this latter form of immaterial property had been created at least in part to forestall exactly the kind of rent increase that Angeli had been pushing for. On the other hand this case with its emphasis on local custom shows how judges in the divan as well as in both Islamic courts were particularly responsive to community mores, as indicated by the fact that the divan turned the case over to Eyüp. Presumably the decisions of the naib and the qadi might have been more favourable to Angeli if he had not appeared as a bully, merely attempting to increase his rental income, although he already had a decent business of his own. After all, he was acting against the interests of a widow, an orphan girl, and an elderly mother. In pushing Angeli towards an out-­of-­court settlement, the naib who first heard this case acted in accordance with the principle, enshrined in Islamic law, that such settlements should be preferred whenever possible. But the remark of the divan judges that this was an ordinary case best decided locally may

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also have been based on the realization that neither the state apparatus nor individual members of the elite had any financial or political interest in its outcome.28

Notes   1. For a discussion of the Habermasian concept of ‘public sphere’ in conjunction with the Gramscian concept of ‘hegemony’, see Geoff Elley, ‘Nations, Publics, and Public Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century’, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 289–339. Other articles in this collection are also useful, although they are mostly on Western Europe in the modern era.   2. On the divan and its judicial functions, see Ahmet Mumcu, Hukuksal ve Siyasal Karar Organı Olarak Divan-­ı Hümayun, 2nd. edn (Ankara: Birey ve Toplum Yayınları, 1986). Mumcu’s work covers the period up to the early1600s. His descriptions largely apply to the 1700s as well, although Mumcu suggests that the divan became a corrupt institution from the early seventeenth century on. This impression echoes a cliché unsupported by a study of the relevant documents. On the divan and various Ottoman courts, also see İ.H. Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Devleti’nin ‘İlmiye Tes¸kilatı (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1965), 83–160; M. Akif Aydın, ‘Osmanlıda Hukuk’, in Osmanlı Devleti ve Medeniyeti Tarihi, ed. Ekmeleddin İhsanoglu, 2 vols (Istanbul: İRSİCA, 1994), vol. 1, 375–438, 391–404; and Engin Deniz Akarlı, ‘Law in the Marketplace: Istanbul, 1730–1840’, in Dispensing Justice in Islam: Qadis and their Judgments, edited by M. Khalid Masud, Rudolph Peters and David S. Powers (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006), 245–70.   3. The documents I use in this chapter come from two sources. The first is a register of 137 imperial decrees pertaining to Istanbul artisans and traders and abbreviated as EEA in the footnotes. EEA was prepared for Kara Kemal, the Minister of Provisions in the Ottoman war cabinet of 1915–1918, also responsible for the organization of artisans and traders during the war years. Selim İlkin acquired the register from Kara Kemal’s estate and has generously allowed me to use it. EEA is currently in my possession. The second source is the Cevdet collection of imperial decrees in the Prime Ministry Archives in Istanbul. Most of the documents I use come from the Cevdet-­Belediye section of this collection, abbreviated as CB in the notes. I also analyse a few files also from the Cevdet-­Iktisad section, abbreviated as CI. I indicate the months of the Islamic lunar calendar by the abbreviations used in Ottoman documents and archival catalogues.  4. Huricihan İslamoğlu-­İnan was the first to underline this feature of the Ottoman judicial system and to use the Gramscian concept of ‘hegemony’ to explain it in a comparative perspective. See her ‘Introduction’, in The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy, ed. Huri Islamoğlu-­İnan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). For other studies that cast light on the intermediary role of the courts, see, for instance, Haim Gerber, Islamic Law and Culture, 1600–1840 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1999); Eyal Ginio, ‘The Administration of Criminal Justice in Ottoman Selanik during the 18th Century’, Turcica 31 (1999), 185–209; Bogaç Ergene, Local Court, Provincial Society and Justice in the Ottoman Empire: Legal Practice and Dispute Resolution in Çankiri and Kastamonu (1652–1744) (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2003); Leslie Peirce, Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); and Engin Akarlı, ‘Gedik: A Bundle of Rights and Obligations for Istanbul Artisans and Traders, 1750–1840’, in Law, Anthropology and the Constitution of the Social: Making Persons and Things, eds Alan Pottage and Martha Mundy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 166–200. Although not directly relevant to the Ottoman legal system or the early modern period,

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  5.

  6.

  7.

 8.

  9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

Lawrence Rosen’s recent works provide important theoretical insights into judicial practices informed by the Islamic legal tradition; for this same tradition informed the Ottoman legal system as well, see: Lawrence Rosen, The Justice of Islam: Comparative Perspectives on Islamic Law and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). See, for instance, CB 7598, fi 1247/Jan. 1832, which includes twenty such agreements dating from 12 Ra 1191/20 May 1777–25 Ca 1236/28 Feb. 1821. For similar arrangements, see artisans working for the Imperial Mint (CB 350, 15 Ca 1176/1 Jan. 1763 and CB 285, 22 C 1183/23 Oct. 1769); the snuff sellers (CB 4771, 4 Ş 1196/15 July 1782); and owners of taverns and small wine shops CB 735 (12 C 1222/17 Aug. 1807). Mübahat Kütükoğlu, Osmanlılarda Narh Müessesesi ve 1640 Tarihli Narh Defteri (Istanbul: Enderun Kitabevi, 1983); Osman Nuri, Mecelle-­i Umur-­ı Belediye, vol. 1, 327–34 and 393–470; and Uriel Heyd, Studies in Old Ottoman Criminal Law, ed. Victor L. Ménage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 229–34. See Osman Nuri, Mecelle, vol. 1, 637–42; CB 787, 27 Ş 1201/14 June 1787, and EEA, pp. 145–50, N 1247 /Feb. 1831. Imperial court records that refer to the background of repeat offenders also highlight this point; according to the judges, these men ultimately deserved a severe punishment. For a list of the deterrence (ta‘zir) offenses that were subject to the sultan’s approval and discretion, see Halil Cin and Ahmet Akgündüz, Türk Hukuk Tarihi: Kamu Hukuku (Konya: Selçuk University Press, 1989), 276–82. CB 1017, 22 Za 1145 (6 May 1733). At this time, Istanbul was still recovering from the confusions of 1730. CB 675, 3 Za 1205 (4 July 1791). CB 1259, 15 Ra 1218 (5 May 1803). Leslie Peirce, ‘Localizing Legitimation: Bargaining through the Law in a Provincial Court’, New Perspectives on Turkey 24 (Spring 2001), 17–49. Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Did Cosmopolitanism Exist in Eighteenth-­Century Istanbul? Stories of Christian and Jewish Artisans’, in Urban Governance under the Ottomans: Between Cosmopolitanism and Conflict, ed. Ulrike Freitag and Nora Lafi (London: Routledge, 2014), 21–36. See EEA, 106–10 (25 M 1253 / 2 May 1837). Compare with EEA, 253–55 (1201 / Nov 1786 with references to documents dating from 1733, 1740 and 1760), and EEA, 101–4 (Ca 1255 / Aug. 1839). Jewish butchers obtained beef from slaughterhouses attached to the Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Vakıf (endowment). Mahmud II’s attempts to bring all major endowments under the administration of a ministry entailed the renegotiation of certain established rights and shares. Jewish butchers preferred to work with a Hafız Mehmed in these negotiations. Jewish butchers would assist him, and the rabbis too would do their job as always, according to the arrangement. The decree reproduced in EEA, 253–55, mentioned above, indicates that a group of mostly non-­Muslim candle-­makers lined up behind a bes¸e (Janissary) colleague in their dispute with the Jewish butcher David in 1760. These examples are not isolated cases. CB 2802 (1–10 C 1208 / 4–14 Jan. 1794). CI 1935 (1–10 S 1224/18–28 March 1809). For similar cases, which involved a tailor and three bakers, respectively, see CZ 3710 (1–10 Z 1207/10–20 July 1793), and CB 4370 (18 B 1252/9 Nov. 1835). EEA, 184–7 (Za 1229/Oct.–Nov. 1814). CB 2195, no date. The cataloguer of CB 2195 suggests that the case might be from Selim III’s reign. Mübahat Kütükoğlu, the leading expert on this period, holds that most likely it dates from the reign of Mustafa IV (1807–1808). Harami or ‘bandit’ was the common Ottoman term that applied to someone who committed the crime of ‘hiraba’ or ‘qat‘ al-­tariq’ (highway robbery). According to the Islamic legal tradition, both baghi and hiraba were among the crimes of the hadd category, i.e. a

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crime committed against the rights of God or –for practical purposes – against the public. For brief definitions of the parameters of these two public crimes according to the Hanafi madhab, the official school of law of the Ottoman state, see Mehmet Akif Aydın, Türk Hukuk Tarihi (Istanbul: Beta Basım Yayım Dağıtım, 2001), 191–93 and 198. For a more detailed discussion, see Khaled Abou El Fadl, Rebellion and Violence in Islamic Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Compare with Baber Johansen, ‘Vérité et torture: ius commune et droit musulman entre le xième et le xiiiième et siècle’, in Séminaire de Françoise Héritier, De la violence, I (Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 1996), 123–68. 20. See Heyd, Studies in Old Ottoman Criminal Law, 227, Ahmet Mumcu, Osmanlı Devleti’nde Siyaseten Katl (Ankara: Ankara Üniversitesi Hukuk Fakültesi, 1963), 70–71; idem, Osmanlı Hukukunda Zulüm Kavramı (Ankara: Birey ve Toplum Yayınları, 1985), and Aydın, Türk Hukuk Tarihi, 67–77. Cf. Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Political Activity among Ottoman Taxpayers and the Problem of Sultanic Legitimation (1570–1650)’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 35(1) (Feb. 1992), 1–39 (from now: JESHO). 21. Münir Aktepe, Patrona İsyanı (1730) (Istanbul: Istanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi, 1958); Robert Olson, ‘The Esnaf and the Patrona Halil Rebellion of 1730: A Realignment in Ottoman Politics?’, JESHO 17(3) (September 1974), 329–44; idem, ‘Jews, Janissaries, Esnaf and the Revolt of 1740 in Istanbul: Social Upheaval and Political Realignment in the Ottoman Empire’, JESHO 20(2) (May 1977), 185–207; and Ahmed Cevdet, Tarih-­i Cevdet, 2nd. edn, 12 vols (Istanbul: Matbaa-­i Osmaniye, 1309) vol. 8, 139–75. 22. See Akarlı, ‘Gedik’. 23. Aysel Yıldız, ‘The Anatomy of a Rebellious Group: The Yamaks of the Bosprous at the Margins of Ottoman Society’, in Political Initiative from the Bottom Up in the Ottoman Empire (Rethymno: Crete University Press, 2012), 263–91; Ubeydullah Kuşmânî and Ebubekir Efendi, Asiler ve Gaziler: Kabakçı Mustafa Risalesi, ed. Aysel Danacı Yıldız (İstanbul: Kitap Yayınevi, 2007). 24. Osman Nuri, Mecelle, vol. 1, 335–64, and 375–92. 25. See, for instance, Selim III’s imperial decree of 12 R 1220/10 August1805, reproduced in Osman Nuri, Mecelle, vol. 1, 654–56. 26. Osman Nuri, Mecelle, vol. 1, 595–97. 27. For a broad assessment of developments in the nineteenth century, see Engin Deniz Akarlı, ‘The Tangled Ends of an Empire and its Sultan’, in Modernity and Culture from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, eds Leila Fawaz and Christopher A. Bailey (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 261–84. This article summarizes my position, based on detailed research published earlier. For a critical assessment of my position see, Huri Islamoglu and Peter Perdue, ‘Introduction’, Peter Perdue, ‘Empire and Nation in Comparative Perspective’, and Huri Islamoglu, ‘Modernities Compared: State Transformation and Constitutions of Property’, all in Journal of Early Modern History (special issue on Contacts, Comparisons, Contrasts 5(4) (2001), 271–81, 282–304 and 353–86, respectively. For an important assessment of the secularist aspects of legal reforms, see Talal Asad, ‘Religious Law and Modern Ethics in Colonial Egypt’, in Formation of the Secular (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 205–56. 28. Istanbul Ahkam Defterleri # 6/307/885 and # 6/318/912 (Ra & R 1177/Oct. 1763), reproduced in İstanbul Esnaf Tarihi, vol. 1, ed. Ahmet Kal’a et al. (Istanbul: Istanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi, 1997), 359–62. For related documents, see IAD # /156/482, # /132/586, # 5/23/72, #5/116/367, # 4/119/367, and # 9/212/794, and IKS# 6/122/345 (L 1175/May 1762) and # 24/44B/2 22 M 1139/19 Sept. 1726), both quoted in Ahmet Kal’a, İstanbul Esnaf Birlikleri ve Nizamları, vol. 1 (Istanbul: İstanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi, 1998), 210–11.

PART III

ARTISANS CONFRONTING THE MODERNIZING STATE

Chapter 11

Some Observations on Istanbul’s Artisans during the Reign of Selim III (1789–1808) Betül Bas¸aran and Cengiz Kırlı

During the reign of Sultan Selim III (1789–1807) the Ottoman central administration began a periodic registration of certain segments of Istanbul’s inhabitants, partly out of the growing fear of an urban population that members of the state apparatus perceived to be potentially unruly. These inspection registers or survey records, which we have been the first to study, provide us with invaluable information about the composition of the city’s population and their occupations. In a recent study, Betül Başaran suggests that the estimated population for late eighteenth-­century Greater Istanbul was slightly above 400,000.1 Based on a census in 1829, contemporary historian Ahmed Lütfi Efendi has provided an estimate of 359,089 inhabitants for the walled city and the suburbs.2 Presumably the abolition of the janissaries in 1826, with its concomitant massacres and banishments, was at least partly responsible for the decline, in addition to the lack of bread in the city during the Russian–Ottoman War of 1828–29, when the tsar’s armies took Varna and Silistra, and Balkan grains no longer reached Istanbul. However these estimates are not solid enough to serve as a basis for further calculations. Among the people on record, artisans form a large section. With the exception of large state enterprises such as the imperial arsenal (Tophane) and the naval dockyard (Tersane), the Grand Bazaar, as well as certain marketplaces, the registers cover the entire labour force active in the Greater

260

Betül Bas¸aran and Cengiz Kırlı

Istanbul area, including the townships of Eyüp, Üsküdar and Galata. The registers do not mention taverns either, as they were closed and banned during the period at issue and were thus, at least officially, non-­existent. Unfortunately public baths have been but partially recorded, and various workshops in large business-­oriented buildings (hans), sometimes known as ‘inns’, are also missing. Even so, the registers give us detailed information regarding nearly forty-­five thousand people. They contain data on different types of commercial shops and fruit/vegetable gardens, labourers such as boatmen and porters at the docks, students and residents of religious seminaries (medreses), travellers and visitors at inns, and residents of bachelors’ quarters. In addition they provide the names and titles of employers, the number of employees in each workplace, information regarding migrant workers who constituted a majority of the labour force in certain areas and occupations, as well as – where applicable – the janissary affiliations of employers and some employees. Such a wealth of information makes it possible to come up with some observations regarding the ethno-­religious division of labour in the city, as well as the complex networks involving migration, ethnic/religious and provincial affiliations, and the esnaf–janissary connection. Furthermore, since most registers list workplaces in each location sequentially, as part of our ongoing project we hope to also recreate the topography of Istanbul’s artisans.3 The registers under study contain an unprecedented amount of detail, updated every six months for a brief period in the early 1790s. Previously, such registers were sporadic and for the most part only targeted selected groups that in the eyes of the ruling elite might cause public disorder, such as the men servicing public baths (compare Ch. 4).4 During the nineteenth century there was an increase in Ottoman population counts for various military and civilian purposes, the results of which survive in the registers serving artisan control (esnaf yoklaması), the control of properties on the Bosporus by the sultan’s chief gardener (bostancıbas¸ı), revenue collection (temettüat), information gathering through spy reports (havadis), and even public health (tahaffuz).5 These practices require us to think about the Ottoman Empire as a polity that was increasingly becoming a ‘statistical’ state or power, along with its contemporaries in Europe during the same period, and go beyond mechanistic models of borrowing that focus primarily on military reform and European embassies in our discussions of Ottoman ‘modernity’. The registers we are working on appear to have been one of the early examples of this tendency towards the ‘statistical’ state, which attempted to make certain segments of the population visible beyond the immediate concerns of taxation.

Some Observations on Istanbul’s Artisans during the Reign of Selim III (1789–1808) 261

Migration and Public Order In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there were both mass migration and chain migration movements towards Istanbul.6 The uncontainable flow of rural migrants in search of work and socio-­economic opportunities was one of the concerns that preoccupied the authorities and about which they never ceased to write. Merchants, craftsmen, medrese students, dervishes and beggars all entered the city in the course of the eighteenth century; some of them were single young men while others arrived as complete households. Following the 1730 and 1740 revolts in Istanbul, immigrants became ever more associated with public disorder and crime, and the authorities increasingly perceived them collectively as a disruptive element.7 Towards the end of the century, Sultan Selim III attempted to increase control over the populace of the capital, following the example of his father Mustafa III (r. 1757–74) and his uncle Abdülhamid I (r. 1774–89). However, his efforts to contain migration and to control the transient population were not merely a by-­product of the state’s worries about the supply of food and water and the possible decrease of provincial tax revenues due to the abandonment of farmsteads. We contend that such efforts also reflected a growing need to consolidate sultanic power, and constituted the basis of the struggle to centralize power in the hands of the sultan, a policy followed even more energetically by Selim’s successor Mahmud II (r. 1808–39). There is no question that continuous waves of migration changed the social and ethnic make-­up of Istanbul in this period. Newcomers most likely, and quickly, replaced those who had died as a result of epidemics, earthquakes and fires. Integration into the life of the city depended on complex occupational and regional networks such as janissary affiliation, membership in artisanal groups, contacts based on shared places of origin, and encounters in coffee houses. As Madeline Zilfi has recently pointed out, such dependencies were not a lifestyle choice but the foundations of survival in the capital.8 Under these circumstances it is no surprise that population control and questions of food supply became political. Selim’s years on the throne were all too often characterized by intense urban crisis as a result of frequent wars, territorial losses, wartime taxation, natural disasters and epidemics, as well as high inflation rates. Thus striking a balance between food supply and urban population was of necessity a cornerstone of sultanic policy. Similarly to their counterparts in Paris and Vienna, Ottoman authorities were quite aware of the political implications of providing the capital with basic foodstuffs, especially bread and grains.9 The anxiety connected to these matters is

262

Betül Bas¸aran and Cengiz Kırlı

very evident in contemporary sources, which give the reader the impression that the city was overcrowded, resources were insufficient, and that the immigrant population was the primary cause of ongoing social and economic tensions. However, we suggest here that these references are better understood in view of the government’s shrinking ability to meet the needs of the residents as a result of worsening economic and political conditions, rather than as evidence of a significant demographic expansion.10 Recent studies have established the significance of migrant labour in Istanbul during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As noted, chain migrations from a limited number of areas in Anatolia and Rumelia were especially common. Suraiya Faroqhi’s work on Eyüp, Cengiz Kırlı’s analysis of the labour force in Hasköy, Eyüp, and the Bosporus villages, as well as Cem Behar’s study of the Kasap İlyas neighbourhood, all indicate that migrants provided a sizeable share, in certain contexts even one half, of the entire labour force.11 We now also know that during the 1750s migrants were the majority among public bath attendants and gardeners.12 Once we have completed the analysis of the registers of the Selimian era, we will be able to make more concrete observations on migrant labour in Istanbul as a whole. At the current state of scholarship, the attempts to prevent migration into Istanbul appear to be largely political. They represent a dichotomy between, on the one hand, the Ottoman government’s quest for social stability and, on the other, the city’s actual dependency on a flow of newcomers to sustain its population. The following edict (ferman) written soon after the Patrona Halil rebellion which ended with the dethronement of Ahmed III (1730) reflects the political concern over immigrants in Istanbul: Various kinds of people from near and distant regions, and especially from Rumelia, have for some time been coming to Istanbul, the seat of the government of my well-­protected domains and the caliphate, and residing in inns and such places with the intention of permanently settling here. As their numbers have grown day by day, they have been casting covetous eyes on the property and purity of the people due to their malicious nature. Openly involved in vice and debauchery day and night by provoking each other, these scoundrels have manifested their treacherous and malicious behaviour [quite a] few times without any reason in my City of Felicity, by breaking into people’s houses and plundering their property. Each time they were dispersed, the destitute were punished, their ill-­intentions were eliminated, and those villains who had run off from their regions were captured and their blood was spilt. To prevent this bloodshed and debauchery, it is the order of this ferman that from now on those who want to come from the provinces to my seat of government with

Some Observations on Istanbul’s Artisans during the Reign of Selim III (1789–1808) 263

the pretext of taking care of important business are to be prevented [from doing so], and those who really need to come here to conduct their business are to find reliable persons to stand surety for them.13

During the 1790s there was a renewed emphasis on the difficulty of enforcing the regulations and the need for social control. Selim’s regulations regarding migration into the Greater Istanbul area focused primarily on unemployed bachelors and migrant workers, who were generally perceived by the authorities to be highly suspect and potentially criminal. These concerns gained momentum after an incident at the Ayasofya mosque in December 1791. During the Friday prayer on that day, an alleged madman ranted some words of complaint and threw a musket ball directly at the sultan. The author of a palace journal described Selim’s panic which was followed by a ‘cleansing’ (tathir) operation that involved the arrest and expulsion of groups of bachelors and Arabs from the city.14 In his history, the contemporary author Mehmed Edib discussed strict regulations that were ‘imposed in accordance with the New Order’ which produced the inspection registers we are working with.15

Inspections and Registers: Kefalet Defterleri Acquiring a guarantor that the authorities would accept (kefalet) was the key mechanism in the survival of a newcomer to the city. Scores of migrants were expelled as a result of sultanic inspections, in many, if not most, instances because they did not have a reliable person to stand surety for them. In fact, it appears that one of the principal objectives of the inspections was to enforce strict kefalet requirements on workplaces, mainly targeting single men, many of whom were migrants. The rule was to allow only those who had found jobs and reliable guarantors to stay in the city, and the purpose of the regulations was to ferret out those individuals who were not so well connected and to make sure that those who stayed in the city became identifiable as parts of a recognized collective identity. The practice of kefalet provided the link that transformed the unidentifiable persons (mechul) into a legally identifiable (ma‘lum) category.16 In other words, for a migrant, finding the right sponsor was the key to success.17 Certainly kefalet had been a well-­ established legal concept in the Ottoman Empire for many centuries.18 Yet, the inspection registers discussed here resulted from the application of this custom in a novel way which would make possible the implementation of a new administrative procedure. Manifestly, we can extract detailed information regarding

264

Betül Bas¸aran and Cengiz Kırlı

Istanbul artisans from court records and tax registers, including information on guarantors (kefils). However, in most of these cases it was the artisans themselves that demanded the provision of guarantors, as part of their negotiations with the government and as a way of protecting their interests.19 By contrast, the registers of the Selimian era are distinctive in that they were kept in order to collect and keep track of information that would make possible the efficient control and surveillance of particular segments of society by the Ottoman administration. It was for that reason that they provided an amount of detail not available in earlier documents.

Classifying Istanbul’s Population Table 11.1 shows the areas in which commercial shops, workshops, fruit and vegetable gardens, as well as porters, boatmen, fishermen, water carriers and itinerant vendors were registered together with their guarantors. It is worth repeating here that the registers included the entire work force involved in production and retail, and covered the Greater Istanbul area including the three townships of Eyüp, Galata and Üsküdar.20 In total, ten registers contained the records of 43,639 individuals as detailed below. When analysed together, the registers allow us to confirm certain trends for the Greater Istanbul area which we had previously established for only certain parts of the city.21 The data allow us to test the assumption that a so-­called ethnic/religious division of labour was typical for the Ottoman world. This outdated but nevertheless still widely accepted theory holds that ethnic and religious affiliations were the primary factors determining economic activity for Muslim and non-­Muslim subjects of the empire.22 While a cursory examination of the registers may suggest that certain ethnic and religious groups specialized in certain trades, we contend that the complex factors and networks involved cannot be reduced to ethnic/ religious affiliations alone. For example, where the period under examination is concerned, it would be misleading to overlook the prevalence of provincial/regional networks and janissary connections, as will be detaıled below.23 Most of the entries in the registers include the names and often titles of employers and employees, which allows us to largely but not fully determine religious affiliations. The registers do not provide information on religious affiliation specifically, except on a few occasions where certain groups are designated as Muslim, Christian (nasara) or Jewish.24 We therefore need to base our conclusions on given names; but while Muslim or Jewish names provide fairly reliable indicators, Armenian and Greek-­Orthodox names are often difficult to distinguish. Furthermore,

Some Observations on Istanbul’s Artisans during the Reign of Selim III (1789–1808) 265

Table 11.1 The geographical distribution of Istanbul Esnaf according to the registers specified*

Register No A.DVN 827 A.DVN 830 A.DVN 831 A.DVN 832

A.DVN 835 A.DVN 836 A.DVN 837 A.DVN 899 D.BŞM 42648 NFS 7 Total

Number of Labourers in Shops and Gardens

Number of Total Boatmen, Number of Workforce Porters, and Others**

1,640

25

1,665

1,373

812

2,185

7,015

3,129

10,144

3,392

828

4,220

1,324

3,926

42

3,968

1,036

2,293

25

2,318

1,155

3,590

219

3,809

2,739

7,019

2,523

9,542

943

2,269

589

2,858

879

2,517

413

2,930

13,489

35,034

8,605

43,639

Number of Shops and Fruit– Geographical Area Vegetable Gardens Covered Beyazıt–Topkapı– 858 Yedikule–Kumkapı Tophane–Fındıklı– 667 Galatasaray–Sirkeci Extra-­muros 2,588 Istanbul Galata 1,300 Intra-­muros Istanbul (The historic peninsula) from Çemberlitaş to Sirkeci Beyazıt– Odunkapısı– Süleymaniye Vezneciler– Edirnekapı– Eğrikapı–Unkapanı The Bosporus between Kadıköy and Dolmabahçe Eyüp–Sütlüce– Hasköy Kasımpaşa– Beyoğlu

* (BOA) A.DVN.: Bab-­ı Asafi Divan (Beylikçi) Kalemi (Records of the Imperial Council); (BOA) D.BŞM.: Başmuhasebe Kalemi (Records of the Office of Chief Accountant); (BOA) NFS: Nüfus Defterleri (Census Registers) ** ‘Others’ include itinerant and freelance labourers such as water carriers, horse-­cart drivers, woodcutters, fishermen, night watchmen, gravediggers, etc.

266

Betül Bas¸aran and Cengiz Kırlı

we cannot determine the ethnic backgrounds of the Orthodox population, which encompassed Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians, some Albanians, and others. However, we believe that the few instances in which we may have made mistakes in differentiating between Armenian and Orthodox names will not result in a dramatic distortion in the overall statistical data. These figures suggest that all religious groups (millets) in Istanbul participated in the economic life of the city more or less in proportion to their share of the population. This observation applies to commercial shops and gardens, of course excluding employees in those premises not yet investigated at the current stage of our study. Itinerant labourers show a somewhat different make-­up: among porters and boatmen Muslims are represented in higher numbers, presumably due to a steady Table 11.2 Religious distribution of masters/shopkeepers. (Based on the sources used for Table 11.1) RELIGION Muslims Orthodox Armenians Jews Zimmi (Undifferentiated Non-­ Muslim) Unidentified Vacant Shops TOTAL

TOTAL 8,111 2,604 1,661 516 18

% 60.13 19.30 12.31 3.83 0.13

496 83  13,489

3.68 0.62 100

flow of unskilled labourers from Anatolian towns and villages. We should also note here that the registers do not include any information on the merchants of Istanbul, whose religious affiliations we thus cannot include in our analysis. The second common trend applying to Istanbul as a whole involves the social composition of shops and workshops. It appears that in most of the commercial sites owners/tenants were involved in production and retail. The businesses on record were mostly small scale, with an average of roughly 2.5 employees, including the shopkeeper or master (usta). Nearly 70 per cent of all shops had only one employee or apprentice (çırak). Those workplaces boasting at least fifteen to twenty workmen were typically bakeries, mills, and to a lesser extent public baths, which as previously noted are not fully included in the registers. In addition to these small businesses, around Yenikapı and Üsküdar-­Ayazma there oper-

Some Observations on Istanbul’s Artisans during the Reign of Selim III (1789–1808) 267

Table 11.3 Religious distribution of boatmen, porters and peddlers. (Based on the sources used for Table 11.1) Religion Muslims Orthodox Armenians Jews Unidentified Total

Total 6,156 724 1,144 289 292 8,605

% 71.52 8.40 13.28 3.42 3.38 100

ated textile-­printing workshops (basmahane), with forty to sixty labourers each, that employed a total of some nine hundred people. As Figure 11.1 shows, out of nearly fourteen thousand commercial shops and some three hundred different types of professions on record in the registers, coffee houses and people operating these establishments made up the largest subgroup in the city and its environs, followed by barber shops. For Istanbul males, these were the two most important sites of sociability. Orchards and vegetable gardens combined constituted the third largest subgroup, followed by grocers, tobacco sellers and greengrocers. Unfortunately the registers are not uniform in terms of the data they record. In more than half, for example, we have no information on the home provinces of the labourers. This gap is more likely to occur in the registers covering the city intra-­muros. By contrast, in extra-­muros Greater Istanbul the surveyors may have been more attentive to such details, as this area contained various docks where porters and boatmen worked. Figure 11.2 shows the large numbers of these service workers throughout the city, many of whom were immigrants. However it is just as possible that the surveyors inspecting the workforce had different personal priorities when it came to recording the details of each individual. In other registers, however, surveyors meticulously indicated information about the home provinces of migrants, so that we can make some observations about the volume of migration into Greater Istanbul. For the masters of shops and gardens, data exist for 4,157 people of whom 2,307 were recent immigrants (55 per cent), while 1,850 men (45 per cent) indicated Istanbul and its environs as their province of origin. Of the latter, the overwhelming majority were locals (yerli), in other words people from the extra-­muros neighbourhood where their shops were located. To a lesser extent, workmen also lived in intra-­muros ­Istanbul

Figure 11.1  Shops and gardens by frequency (top 35 shown)

Figure 11.2  Occupations by employment (top 35 shown)

270

Betül Bas¸aran and Cengiz Kırlı

(s¸ehrî or Istanbullu). We are not sure how much time was required for an ‘immigrant’ to become a ‘local’; yet if we combine masters and their employees, more than half of the workforce in shops and gardens were immigrants. With respect to boatmen and porters, as well as itinerant and freelance labourers such as water carriers, horse-­cart drivers, woodcutters, fishermen, night watchmen, and gravediggers, we have information about 4,609 people. Of those, 3,459 were immigrants (77 per cent) and 1,060 were from Istanbul and its environs. Once again, most of these people lived close to their shops and gardens. In spite of the high level of migration to Istanbul and the extensive territories of the empire, it is worth noting that migrants came from just a limited number of towns located mainly in the central Balkans, the western Black Sea region and Central and Eastern Anatolia. The tendency to migrate from a relatively small number of localities was due to chain migration, linking those at the point of origin with others at the destination through a common hems¸ehri (fellow townsman or villager) identity. Being from the same town or region, as the registers indicated, seems to have been the most important factor determining a migrant’s choice of profession, craft specialization and workplace. It was very rare for a master and his employees to have different geographical roots, indicating the social arrangement in which the former provided employment and often accommodation in return for, perhaps, loyalty, overwork and low wages. Most of the thirteen hundred people working in nearly five hundred grocery stores, for example, were Greeks, but the overwhelming majority came from a few towns, namely İncesu in Central Anatolia, and Grevena and Agrafa in the Balkans (compare also Ch. 4). In particular, the migrants from Grevena only worked in vegetable and fruit gardens along the Bosporus, or in grocery stores. Similarly, although most of the workforce employed in the fruit and vegetable gardens were Orthodox, they had migrated mainly from (in this order) Permet, Ohrid, Grevena, Monastir, Vlorë and Yanina, all these provinces being located in the central and western Balkans. It is worth noting that all migrants from Ohrid, 90 per cent of those from Permet, and more than 50 per cent of the men from Monastir worked as gardeners. Again, 75 per cent of nearly one hundred bakeries and mills were run by Armenians and almost the entire workforce were migrants, mostly Armenians and the remainder mainly Muslims. Regardless of religion, however, the overwhelming majority of the workforce employed by bakers and millers came from a few localities in Central and Eastern Anatolia, namely Ağın, Karahisar, Kuruçay, Erzurum, Sivas and Divriği, indicating the primacy of geographical networks over religious identity. More examples may illustrate this

Some Observations on Istanbul’s Artisans during the Reign of Selim III (1789–1808) 271

Table 11.4  Esnaf and titles. (Based on the sources used for Table 11.1) Shops and % for Gardens Muslims (Masters Only) 2,485 30.6

Titles Military Titles Religious Titles*

Boatmen, % for Porters, and Muslims Others

Total

1,035

16.8

3,520

1,720

21.2

281

4.5

2,001

Hacı

550

6.8

53

0.86

603

Seyyid

601

7.4

147

2.4

748

Monla

350

4.3

68

1.1

418

İmam

20

0.25

3

0.05

23

Müezzin

28

0.35

1

0.01

29

Acı

20

–

–

–

20

Seyyid-­ Hacı Seyyid-­ Efendi Seyyid-­ Monla

55

0.68

2

0.03

57

25

0.31

1

0.01

26

17

0.21

1

0.01

18

332

4.1

330

5.36

662

102

1.25

3

0.05

105

Other Titles** Efendi

* Some people had more than one title. The total number refers to all religious titles, but only those most frequently mentioned are listed. Some military title-­holders also possessed religious titles, but they have not been shown here. ** Other titles include guild officials such as kethüda and yiğitbaşı as well as emir and ağa, whose social meanings are unclear.

point: nearly the entire workforce employed in the manufacture of coarse woollen garments (abacı) were from Kalofer, more than half the migrants from the island of Chios worked as lemon-­sellers, and a significant share of the migrants from Kayseri were in construction-­related professions, such as lumber-­sellers, nail-­sellers or stonemasons. Furthermore, hems¸ehri networks were important for porters, boatmen and other unskilled labourers working in the various Istanbul docks. Hems¸ehri identities also determined the choice of workplace at the local

272

Betül Bas¸aran and Cengiz Kırlı

level. Almost all the porters and boatmen in Ahırkapı Pier, for example, were from Kemah in Eastern Anatolia; the majority of porters and boatmen at Büyük and Vezir Piers in the Bahçekapı area had come from Ürgüp and Çankırı; and almost all of the seventy-­one porters at Eminönü Hasır Pier were migrants from Çankırı and Divriği (for a similar situation among bath attendants, see Ch. 4). More than half of all porters and all the wood-­cutters at Kumkapı Pier came from the Eastern Anatolian town of Harput, today’s Elazığ, and all of the porters employed at Eyüp Defterdar Pier from Sivas. The list can be extended to include all the piers throughout Istanbul, but the data all point to the same conclusion: the decision to migrate to the capital was not based on the individual choices of the migrants concerned, but on the established regional networks in which people participated so as to minimize the risks of travel, finding accommodation and locating a job. Inspectors were more attentive to the titles which some of the guildsmen might possess. We had previously established a significant janissary presence during the late 1700s and early 1800s in certain areas of Istanbul, with the coffee house business a favourite activity.25 The registers collectively confirm this observation as a widespread and general trend which was not limited to particular sites or a few professions (compare Ch. 7). Fully 30.6 per cent of all masters and shopkeepers in our database held military titles. Among boatmen, porters and other workers this ratio was 16.8 per cent. In addition to common titles such as bes¸e, bostanī, bölükbas¸ı and karakullukçu, some of the registers, especially those covering intra-­muros Istanbul, also included the numbers of the janissary regiments (cemaat or bölük) that employers and employees were associated with. Certainly not all military title-­holders were active janissaries; for as is frequently pointed out, many individuals entered the corps to obtain its privileges rather than to actively serve as soldiers. In one way or another, roughly 18 per cent of the Muslim work force in Istanbul was connected to the military establishment at the turn of the nineteenth century.26 Similar to hems¸ehri networks, janissary connections were also instrumental in determining employment patterns, and janissaries from the same regiment or division almost always worked side by side in the same workplace. An important qualification, however, is apposite: although the available evidence is not conclusive, apparently many janissary regiments had formed on the basis of hems¸ehri connections, in which case even the janissary networks were over-­determined by geographical ­identity.27

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The Business Districts of Istanbul Based on the registers, two areas in the city stand out as focal points for intense economic activity. The first one comprised the piers between Eminönü and Unkapanı along the Golden Horn, which provided a natural setting for commerce during Byzantine as well as Ottoman times.28 In addition to the boatmen, porters and drovers serving the piers, these areas were full of workmen employed in bakeries, mills, and various pastry and desert shops. In addition, the area provided customers for the vendors of miscellaneous foodstuffs, coffee and tobacco, as well barbers and launderers. In the surrounding areas there were also numerous inns and bachelors’ quarters where labourers, artisans and merchants might live. The second area of activity was the large hans, or inns, in the vicinity of Bayezid, Çemberlitaş and the Grand Bazaar. The registers list a total of 564 hans and bachelors’ quarters containing 8,889 rooms. The largest hans in our database are the Kürkçü Hanı with 366 rooms and the Valide Hanı with 320 rooms, both in the vicinity of Mahmutpaşa. The registers only tell us that the rooms were occupied by various merchants, brokers and artisans, without specifying numbers, ethnicities, or religious affiliations. In other cases, the inspectors recorded details about the inhabitants but not their occupations: in the Vezir Hanı there were eighty-­three rooms occupied by a total of 320 non-­Muslims as well as twenty-­two rooms inhabited by 60 Muslims. Thus these rooms provided shelter for tens of thousands of skilled and unskilled labourers, many of whom were presumably migrants, as well as the merchants and brokers mentioned above. Large inns served many Muslims and non-­Muslims who laboured in shops during the day, but they must have also accommodated other labourers and artisans who worked in the surrounding neighbourhoods. Workers and artisans living in inns included porters, boatmen, merchants, coffee sellers, painters, plasterers, construction workers, shoemakers, dyers, unskilled labourers, carriage drivers, and men who made a living by fluffing cotton and wool. Carpenters, sweepers, saddle-­makers, donkey-­ drivers, leather workers, tobacco crushers, wood choppers and water carriers were also much in evidence. However, even though in many cases the registers provide the numbers of Muslims and non-­Muslims domiciled in these rooms, or sometimes the nature of their work, the information is too fragmentary for reliable conclusions about the residents of these inns. In particular, we have no knowledge about families living in such accommodations. Residence in hans would normally have been limited to single men, but who can tell what happened in emergencies.29

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Conclusion At the present state of our analysis, we are able to confirm certain patterns among the Istanbul workforce at large. First of all, when studying the division of labour, we must clearly take numerous factors into consideration, including provincial/regional networks as well as janissary connections. Ethnic/religious affiliations were important but not the sole determinants. Our data suggest that all religious groups in Istanbul participated in the economic life of the city more or less in proportion to their share of the population. Secondly, we can also establish that more than half of the workforce in shops and gardens, masters and employees combined, were immigrants to the capital. Among boatmen, porters, as well as itinerant and freelance labourers, lines of work supported by continuous migration, this figure was as high as 77 per cent. Most of these people lived close to their shops and gardens, or even slept in the workplace. Finally, we have demonstrated that military titles were commonplace among Istanbul’s artisans. Over 30 per cent of all masters and shopkeepers in our database held military titles. Among boatmen, porters and other workers this ratio was 16.8 per cent, presumably related to the migration networks mentioned above. At the turn of the nineteenth century, roughly 18 per cent of the Muslim workforce in Istanbul, masters and men combined, was connected to the military establishment in one way or another. But the sources under investigation contain much more potential, and in the later stages of our project we will be able to elaborate further on the complex nature of the labour force in Istanbul, especially with regard to migration and janissary networks. Did migrants associate with janissary units because they thus gained access to guarantors that the administration would accept? In a different vein, the information contained in the registers will allow us to map and connect the regions that sent migrants to Istanbul, and to analyse the relationship between migration and profession in more detail. Through this kind of analysis we will also obtain a better sense of the everyday lives of the people of Istanbul, for instance by examining their residence patterns and how far they travelled to work – or else failed to move at all, for as we have shown in our earlier studies, there were quite a few craftsmen that spent their nights in their shops. Were such people perhaps regarded as candidates for deportation because the lack of a house indicated that they were not well integrated into the social fabric of the capital? Were perhaps these houseless artisans and shopkeepers especially anxious to join the janissaries? Once we have carried our analysis further, we will certainly be able to produce a more nuanced understanding of the demography, social life, and economic activities of Istanbul’s artisans and workers.

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Notes   1. Betül Başaran, ‘The 1829 Census and the Population of Istanbul during the Late 18th and Early 19th Centuries’, in Studies on Istanbul and Beyond: The Freely Papers, Vol. 1, ed. Robert G. Ousterhout, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum Publications, 2007), 53–71, 60.   2. Ahmed Lütfi Efendi (1999). Vak‘anüvīs Ahmed Lūtfī Efendi Tarihi, 2 vols. ed. and translated by Yücel Demirel and Tamer Erdoğan (Istanbul: YKY), vol. 2, 361–62. The relevant chapter of his chronicle is called ‘Zuhūr-­ı emāre-­i kaht der-­İstanbul’ [Appearance of signs of scarcity in Istanbul].   3. Selected registers of this period have been studied, but individually and partially. Currently, we are in the process of analysing them collectively for the first time. We have published some of our preliminary findings in Cengiz Kırlı and Betül Başaran, ’18. Yüzyıl Sonlarında Osmanlı Esnafı’, in Osmanlı’dan Cumhuriyet’e Esnaf ve Ticaret ed. Fatmagül Demirel (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2012), 7–20. See also Cengiz Kırlı, ‘A Profile of the Labor Force in Early Nineteenth-­Century Istanbul’, International Labor and Working-­Class History 60 (2001): 125–40; idem, ‘Devlet ve İstatistik: Esnaf Kefalet Defterleri Işığında III Selim İktidarı’, in Nizam-­ı Kadim’den Nizam-­ı Cedid’e III. Selim ve Dönemi (Selim III and his Era from Ancien Regime to New Order), ed. Seyfi Kenan (Istanbul: İSAM Yayınları, 2010), 183–212; Betül Başaran, ‘Remaking the Gate of Felicity: Policing, Social Control, and Migration in Istanbul at the End of the Eighteenth Century, 1789–1793,’ (unpublished Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2006); and eadem, Between Crisis and Order: Selim III, Social Control and Policing in Istanbul at the End of the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2014). Nejdet Ertuğ has also used some registers from this period: H. Nejdet Ertuğ, Osmanlı Döneminde İstanbul Hammalları (İstanbul: Timaş Yayınları, 2008); idem, Osmanlı Döneminde İstanbul Deniz Ulaşımı ve Kayıkçılar (İstanbul: Kültür Bakanlığı Yayınları, 2001); idem, ‘Osmanlı Kefalet Sistemi ve 1792 Tarihli Bir Kefalet Defterine Göre Boğaziçi’, MA Thesis, Sakarya Üniversitesi, 2000.   4. See for example, Nina Ergin, ‘The Albanian Tellâk Connection: Labor Migration to the Hamams of Eighteenth-­Century Istanbul Based on the 1752 İstanbul Hamamları Defteri’, Turcica 43 (2012), 231–56. Zarinebaf discusses some registers from early and mid-­ eighteenth century in Fariba Zarinebaf, Crime and Punishment in Istanbul, 1700–1800 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010).   5. For a discussion of various registers, and primarily the spy journals, see Cengiz Kırlı, Sultan ve Kamuoyu: Osmanlı Modernleşme Sürecinde ‘Havadis Jurnalleri’ (Istanbul: İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2009), 13–43.  6. For eighteenth-­century population movements, see Bruce McGowan, ‘The Age of the Ayans, 1699–1812’, in A Social and Economic History of the Ottoman Empire. Volume Two, 1600–1914, ed. Halil Inalcik with Doald Quataert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 646–50. For different estimates and a detailed account of external migrations in the nineteenth century, see Ahmet Akgündüz, ‘Osmanlı İmparatorluğu ve Dış Göçler, 1782–1922’, Toplum ve Bilim 80 (1999), 144–70; and McGowan ‘The Age of the Ayans’, 793–95. On the situation in the early Ottoman period see Ekrem Hakkı Ayverdi, Fatih Devri Sonlarında İstanbul Mahalleleri, Şehrin İskanı ve Nüfusu (Ankara: Doğuş Matbaası, 1958).  7. On these events, see Robert Olson, ‘The Esnaf and Patrona Halil Rebellion of 1730: A Realignment in Ottoman Politics’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient (hereafter JESHO) 17(3) (1974), 329–44; and idem, ‘Jews, Janissaries, Esnaf and the Revolt of 1740 in Istanbul: Social Upheaval and Political Realignment in the Ottoman Empire’, JESHO 20(2) (1977), 185–207. Karen Barkey compares the 1703 Edirne Incident and 1730 Patrona rebellion to the 1848 revolutions

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in Europe; see Karen Barkey, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 197–225. Zarinebaf’s recent work Crime and Punishment includes an overview of the so-­called Tulip Age in this context.   8. Madeline Zilfi, Women and Slavery in the Late Ottoman Empire: The Design of Difference (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 3.   9. Salih Aynural, İstanbul Değirmenleri ve Fırınları. Zahire Ticareti (İstanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2001); and idem, ‘The Millers and Bakers of Istanbul (1750–1840)’, in Crafts and Craftsmen of the Middle East: Fashioning the Individual in the Muslim Mediterranean, eds Suraiya Faroqhi and Randi Deguilhem (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 153–94; Lynne M Şaşmazer, ‘Policing Bread Price and Production in Ottoman Istanbul, 1793–1807’, Turkish Studies Association Bulletin 24(1) (2000), 21–40; Onur Yıldırım, ‘Bread and Empire: The Workings of Grain Provisioning in Istanbul during the Eighteenth Century’, in Nourrir les cités de Méditerranée. Antiquité-­Époque moderne, eds Brigitte Marin and Catherine Virlouvet (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2004), 251–72. On Paris, see Steven Kaplan, Provisioning Paris (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); and idem, The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question 1700–1775 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). For a comparison of supply problems in Vienna under Joseph II and in Istanbul under Selim III, see Fatih Yeşil, ‘İstanbul’un İaşesinde Nizam-­ı Cedid: Zahire Nezaretinin Kuruluşu ve İşleyişi’, Türklük Araştırmaları Dergisi 15 (Spring issue, 2004), 113–42. 10. At the current state of scholarship, there is no reliable data to support the claim that population expanded in this period: Başaran, ‘The 1829 Census’. 11. Cem Behar, A Neighborhood in Ottoman Istanbul: Fruit Vendors and Civil Servants in the Kasap İlyas Mahalle (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003); Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Migration into Eighteenth-­Century “Greater Istanbul” as Reflected in the Kadı Registers of Eyüp’, Turcica 30 (1998), 163–83; appeared in Turkish in ‘Eyüp Kadı Sicillerine Yansıdığı Şekliyle 18. Yüzyıl “Büyük İstanbul” una Göç’, in 18. Yüzyıl Kadı Sicilleri Işığında Eyüp’te Sosyal Yaşam, ed. Tülay Artan (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları); Kırlı, ‘A Profile of the Labor Force’ and ‘Devlet ve İstatistik’. 12. Ergin ‘The Albanian Tellâk Connection’. 13. Prime Minister’s Ottoman Archives (hereafter BOA) Cevdet-­Zaptiye, 2637 (R 1144 / September 1731). 14. İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, ‘III. Selim Zamanında Yazılmış Dış Ruznamesinden 1206/1791 ve 1207/1792 Senelerine Ait Vekayi’, Belleten 148 (1973), 607–62, 615–16. Compare the accounts in Tahsin Öz, ‘Selim III’ün Sırkatibi Tarafından Tutulan Ruzname’, Tarih Vesikaları 3(13) (1944), 26–35, 116–26 and 183–99, see 116; and V. Sema Arıkan, III. Selim’in Sırkatibi Ahmed Efendi Tarafından Tutulan Ruzname (Ankara: TTK, 1993), 54–55. 15. Edib Mehmet Emin (Efendi), Edib Tarihi (H. 1208), İstanbul Üniversitesi Türkçe Yazmalar 3220. See fol. 158–59. 16. For a detailed discussion of these legal categories, see Başaran, ‘Remaking the Gate of Felicity’ and Between Crisis and Order. 17. Zilfi, Women and Slavery, 3. 18. Abdullah Saydam, ‘Osmanlılarda Kefalet Usulü’, Tarih ve Toplum 164 (August 1997), 4–12; Ertuğ, ‘Osmanlı Kefalet Sistemi’; Nalan Turna, ‘Pandemonium and Order: Suretyship, Surveillance, and Taxation in Early Nineteenth-­Century Istanbul’, New Perspectives on Turkey 39 (2008), 167–89. 19. Engin Deniz Akarlı, ‘Gedik: A Bundle of Rights and Obligations for Istanbul Artisans and Traders, 1750–1840’, in Law, Anthropology and the Constitution of the Social: Making Persons and Things, eds Alan Pottage and Martha Mundy (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 177–78.

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20. In the absence of sufficient comparative data and scholarship on the subject, one can never be too sure when making such assertions. As is apparent from Table 11.1, the registers seem to completely and exhaustively cover the intra-­and extra-­muros Istanbul neighbourhoods. However, certain types of commercial establishments such as public baths, for which earlier surveys are available, seem to have been substantially under-­recorded in our registers. According to Ergin, who has worked on a survey of public baths in Greater Istanbul, there were 177 public baths in 1752, while our registers recorded only 84. Even the imperial decree of 1768 which prohibited the further construction of public baths (Ergin, ‘The Albanian Tellâk Connection’, 239, fn. 10) does not explain why the record in our register is incomplete. 21. See Kırlı, ‘A Profile of the Labor Force’ for the township of Eyüp and the Bosphorus villages. Also: Başaran, ‘Remaking the Gate of Felicity’. 22. This theory is now being challenged by a number of scholars. For an overview, see Kırlı, ‘A Profile of the Labor Force’. More recent examples include the work of M. Erdem Kabadayı in the 2nd volume of this collection. 23. Our current project involves a comprehensive analysis of these factors, and will allow more elaboration. 24. For example: A. DVN. 831. 25. Kırlı, ‘A Profile of the Labor Force’; Başaran, ‘Remaking the Gate of Felicity’. 26. On the janissaries, see for example, Cemal Kafadar, ‘Janissaries and Other Riffraff of Ottoman Istanbul: Rebels without a Cause?’, in Identity and Identity Formation in the Ottoman World: A Volume of Essays in Honor of Norman Itzkowitz, eds Baki Tezcan and Karl K. Barbir (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 113–34. More recently, Nalan Turna has analysed janissary–esnaf relations in the nineteenth century in eadem, ‘Yeniçeri-­Esnaf İlişkisi: Bir Analiz’, in Osmanlı’dan Cumhuriyet’e Esnaf ve Ticaret, ed. Fatmagül Demirel (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2012), 21–42. See also Mert Sunar, ‘“When Grocers, Porters and other Riff-­raff Become Soldiers”: Janissary Artisans and Laborers in the Nineteenth-­Century Istanbul and Edirne’, Kocaeli Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi 17(1) (2009), 175–94; and idem, ‘Cauldron of Dissent: A Study of the Janissary Corps, 1807–1826’ (Ph.D. diss., Binghamton University, 2006). 27. For example, in the early nineteenth century the members of the 25th regiment were mostly from Erzurum and Van, and the members of the 56th regiment from Gerede. Cabi Efendi, Cabi Tarihi: Tarih-­i Sultan Selim-­i Salis ve Mahmud-­ı Sani, ed. Mehmet Ali Beyhan (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1992), 440, 502. 28. See Wolfgang Müller-­Wiener, Bizans’tan Osmanlı’ya İstanbul Limanı, tr. by Erol Özbek (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 1998) (original title: Die Häfen von Byzantion, Konstantinupolis, Istanbul, Tübingen: Wasmuth, 1994). 29. On the inns of Istanbul, see Mathilde Pinon-­Demirçivi, ‘Le Grand Bazar d’Istanbul et ses environs: formes, fonctions et transformations des han construits entre le début du XVIIIe s. et le milieu du XIXe s’ (Ph. D. diss., L’Université Paris-­Sorbonne, 2009); and Işık Tamdoğan-­Abel, ‘Hanlar ya da Osmanlı Kentinde Yabancı’, in Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda Yaşamak, eds François Georgeon and Paul Dumont (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2000), 387–405 (original title of Tamdoğan’s work: ‘Les han, ou l’étranger dans la ville ottomane’, in Vivre dans l’Empire Ottoman, eds François Georgeon and Paul Dumont (Paris: l’Harmattan, 1997), 319–34.

Chapter 12

Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire Protest, the State, and the End of the Guilds in Egypt

John Chalcraft

Introduction The decline and disappearance of the Egyptian guilds in the period 1800–1914 is often still seen as a top-­down affair, in which decaying and passive traditional trades and guilds were, on the one hand, destroyed by imports and world economic integration, and on the other abolished by official decree linked to the reforming projects of modernizing elites.1 My research has attempted to revise this top-­down picture by recovering grassroots histories of guilds, crafts and service-­workers.2 Against the received wisdom, I contend that crafts and service-­workers were not passive bystanders in the demise of their guilds, but through adaptation and protest, played a significant role. This chapter sets out to clarify the role of weapons of the weak, petitions, protests and collective action in the end of the guilds and the emergence of new networks and forms of organization.3

The End of the Guilds The Ottoman guilds in Egypt were no unchanging mystical or fraternal brotherhood; nor were they a tool in the hand of the government, or a backward and restrictive monopoly.4 Instead they embodied an enduring,

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varied and flexible corporate order for the organization of urban occupational life. Although the picture is tantalizingly incomplete, one can say that the guild (ta’ifa, pl. tawa’if) was a group of all those practising a particular profession in a particular place. Although highly heterogeneous by time and place, guilds often enjoyed a monopoly guaranteed by customary rights and duties, and underpinned by a segmented market structure. Guilds often formed social communities for their members, as suggested by their corporate presence at major festivities, the existence of initiation ceremonies, ethnic, national or linguistic markers, trade customs, and distinctive clothes and locations. They also often solved economic and social problems for their members – regulating numbers in the trade and the flow of raw materials, and on occasion providing mutual assistance. Guilds were usually headed by a sheikh who exercised leadership and solved disputes on the basis of customary law, and linked guilds to the government, chiefly through maintaining order and collecting and distributing taxes. Guilds’ complex, semi-­autonomous relationship to the government was bolstered by their rich network of connections to other groups and individuals drawn from state, society, and in-­between: sufi orders, janissary corps, tax-­farmers, market inspectors, members of the Pasha’s household, mamluks, court judges, and men of religion (ulama).5 By 1914 this corporate order had largely disappeared. True, certain guild-­like groups were still to be found at public celebrations until the mid-­twentieth century. One or two observers reported the existence of mutual help in the trades in the early 1900s. Sheikhs or would-­be sheikhs continued to exercise unofficial authority in particular trades, or lived on as contractors or brokers into the first decades of the twentieth century. Some guild terminology carried over into new organizations such as unions. But monopolies guaranteed by customary rights and duties for particular trades had disappeared – indeed, the ‘freedom’ of the trades was decreed in 1890. Licences to trade were now granted by the state. The old segmented market structure and its ‘natural’ monopolies had been swept away by new communications infrastructure and the spread of competition and market relations. Whatever remaining social and economic functions were maintained by guild-­like groups were attenuated, rare, and/or unofficial. A realm of semi-­autonomous customary law was replaced on the one hand by codified, bureaucratic regulations, implemented by officials, and on the other by local, unofficial networks and rackets. What had been seen as legitimate customary autonomy was now stigmatized as backward and ‘traditional’, the latter word taking on an entirely new meaning connected to retarding progress and modernization. The official guild leaderships of yesteryear, who had collected taxes and imposed order on behalf of the government, lost their remaining

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functions in 1892. The old, complex relationship to the state was no more as the central bureaucracy emerged, as tax farmers, janissary corps and other power-­brokers disappeared, and as sufi orders and the religious establishment lost their older forms of autonomy. Intimate relationships to the qadi courts were severed with the emergence of new secular courts. No longer were all those practising a particular trade in a particular location seen as forming a distinctive ‘guild’ whether as a matter of nomenclature or of substance. The unions and syndicates which started to appear, especially after the protests of 1907, were distinctively new forms of social organization, linked to new social groups, with no state-­like functions, and premised more on the social interests of individuals and interest groups than on order, hierarchy, justice or community. These far-­reaching social, economic and political changes were not simply the result of the decline of a backward and passive crafts sector, or a deluge of European imports and investment, the latter development aided by the projects of modernizing state officials. Conventional accounts have tended to ignore the role of popular protest in driving forward the array of changes that comprised the end of the guilds in Egypt. Collective action, ‘weapons of the weak’, and petitioning by guild members prior to the 1890s simultaneously dragged in the state and foiled state-­based projects – processes which undermined the guilds from within and without. After the 1890s, new kinds of mobilization contributed to the establishment of new kinds of social organization. These processes took guild members ‘out of the frying pan’, which refers to the crises of the guilds co-­opted by dynasty-­building and unable to deliver solutions to new problems before 1890, and ‘into the fire’, which refers to the new crisis of the unprotected encounter with intensified economic problems and a colonial bureaucracy that was, by turns, unresponsive and ­heavy-handed.

The Workers of Large Egyptian Cities In the course of the nineteenth century, Egypt’s integration into the European-­dominated world economy proceeded apace, with cotton as the major cash crop. Mehmed Ali/Muhammad Ali Pasha and his successors promoted the formation of political elites deriving their incomes from large landholdings geared to commercial agriculture.6 During this period, the population approximately doubled, standing at close to ten million by the century’s end. After the ‘Urabi revolt against khedival rule and foreign intervention, followed by the British occupation of 1882, Egyptian cities expanded, as landless and land-­poor peasants sought work

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in urban centres. The population of Cairo, where Copts and Jews had lived for centuries along with the Muslim majority – plus other groups, designated in the census of 1868 as Hijazis, North Africans, and even Indians – grew from about a quarter of a million at the end of the eighteenth century to 570,000 a hundred years later, while Alexandria in the late 1800s was home to little more than three thousand.7 By the 1900s, sizeable numbers of Greek, Italian, Maltese, and other migrants from southern Europe came to be employed in Egypt; in 1907 there were over a hundred thousand such residents, living mostly in Cairo and Alexandria. Multinational groups of investors, who owned many of the larger workplaces, especially after 1882, might import foreigners for the most highly qualified tasks, such as happened in cigarette manufacture. The Ottoman tobacco monopoly, instituted after the state bankruptcy of 1875, and dominated by the Ottoman sultan’s European creditors, promoted modern-­style factories, whose owners and highest qualified workers were mostly Greeks. In these factories, Egyptian women also worked, as tobacco sorters; they were considered low-­skilled and were paid a mere pittance.8 These sections of the labour force grew up outside of the guild system. There was also much new employment outside of the guild system in the new, large-­scale transport and communications infrastructure.9 The khedives promoted railroads, which due to the relative flatness of the country were less expensive to construct than in Anatolia and the Balkans. By 1914 there were 1,700 miles (2,720 km) of railways in operation; and the twelve thousand men in the employ of the Egyptian State Railways worked for the largest industrial enterprise in the country. Yet several times larger was the network of canals dug in the nineteenth century, which were largely a product of village labour, and thus outside of guild purview; and the large number of postal employees and telegraph operators, the latter of necessity literate, did not become guild members either.

Restructuring not Disappearance In this context, the existing crafts and services trades were restructured rather than destroyed. In construction, furnishing, garment-­ making, weaving, dyeing, urban transport, metallurgy, ironwork, carpentry, tannery, milling, butchery, patisserie-­making, chemical industries such as oil, soap and candle-­making, as well as in artistic trades such as jewellery, fine-­carpentry and embossing, craftspeople continued to find work in significant numbers and deliver much-­needed cheap goods and services to large sections of the population. Where imported shoes remained

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expensive, for example, shoemakers diversified in their thousands to produce and repair shoes in European styles, customized to taste. Tailors, seamstresses, furniture-­makers, and construction workers in their tens of thousands thoroughly transformed their products in order to tap new demands for European styles. Masons, for example, started to dress stones in the Italian fashion, and tailors now sewed European-­style suits and shirts. Moreover by 1914, some of the commonest urban trades in Egypt, such as cab-­driving and carting were just as new as the large-­scale transport sector. These trades, ubiquitous in the newly paved streets of Egypt’s cities in 1914, had not existed at all during the first decades of the nineteenth century.10 Although artisans came under considerable pressure, and were relatively impoverished, the available statistics indicate that employment in crafts, trades and services increased significantly in absolute terms, and even advanced slightly as a proportion of Egypt’s fast growing population. According to the Egyptian census of 1897, for example, about 260,000 worked in manufacturing of all kinds – all but a tiny proportion of this total being employed in small, locally run workshops. By 1907, this figure had risen to around 380,000 and by 1917 to around 490,000. Such totals represented an advance on the proportion of the Egyptian population employed in industry – from 2.7 per cent to 3.9 per cent over the period. The statistics for Cairo tend to confirm this picture. In 1897 around 53,000 worked in manufacturing, and by 1917 around 84,000 – totals which advanced the proportion of the population working in industry from 9.3 per cent to 10.6 per cent. Again, the overwhelming majority – perhaps more than 97 per cent – of these workers were employed in largely unmechanized, small enterprises. As an indication of this, ‘employers’ and ‘self-­employed’ outnumbered ‘workers’ in the 1917 census. As the Commission on Commerce and Industry – convened to enquire into the state of Egyptian industry during the First World War, when local production suddenly became an issue for British rulers now interested in wartime provisioning – noted, ‘in reality, and despite its appellation, [small industry is] the most important because it occupies the greatest number of workers and extends its network in all towns and farmsteads of Egypt’.11 Only where crafts and services faced direct competition from large-­scale industry duplicating the exact product or service to meet strong demand amenable to standardization were they steadily destroyed. Where demand was weak, fluctuating or customized in one way or another, crafts and service workers could continue to make a living, and expand to fill new niches.12 The availability of such low-­profit areas in the economy was the only prerequisite for crafts’ survival in a new age. Increasingly competitive

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c­ onditions forced crafts and service workers to restructure their production. New trades appeared; older trades adapted, migrated, or were abandoned; larger workshops and putting out networks were built. Production costs were lowered by the use of cheaper premises and the widespread purchase of cheaper or more convenient raw materials, often factory produced. Productivity was improved to some degree in various cases by piecemeal mechanization. The main key to cheap production, however, was to find reductions in the cost of labour – both skilled and unskilled. In competition with large-­scale production and with each other, crafts and service workers owning some means of production engaged in self-­ exploitation, lowering their rates to the extent that their profits only sufficed for their own subsistence and the reproduction of their existing fixed and working capital. And where labour was cheap, abundant and largely unprotected, masters squeezed the semi-­skilled and unskilled workers under their control, lengthening hours, lowering wages, raising the intensity of work and allowing conditions to deteriorate.

‘Weapons of the Weak’ Thus, the economic basis of guild structures was not destroyed, nor did a modernizing state simply abolish the guilds. In fact, for much of the nineteenth century, officials did not seek to destroy the guilds but to co-­opt them in tax-­raising and regulation for dynasty-­building in the name of progress and order. Just as in the countryside, where village headmen and ‘umda-­s were increasingly important in channelling the demands of the state for conscripts, taxes and so on, in the towns the centralizing government sought to use guild sheikhs and leaderships to raise new and increased taxes, to conscript labour, and to impose new forms of order and regulation connected to town planning, hygiene, law and order. In part because their local guilds were the very instrument of new impositions, it was difficult for members of guilds to combine with their leaderships to resist openly. Furthermore, unlike during the last days of the mamluk lords in eighteenth-­century Egypt, or for the Istanbul guilds during the deposition of Selim III, they had few allies among the middling strata of the urban population as the janissary corps had been abolished, and the sufi orders, tax-­farmers and religious establishment brought to heel (compare Ch. 11). Amid dynasty-­building and self-­ strengthening, therefore, an important form of resistance involved guild members and their leaderships in unofficial and silent forms of coordinated resistance redolent of James C. Scott’s ‘weapons of the weak’. The principal forms of resistance involved cooperation between guild leaders

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and their allies among the rank and file to diminish their tax assessments. In particularly propitious cases, guild leaders managed to hide members from the tax-­levy completely. Such forms of resistance should not be underestimated. These practices may have been fairly widespread. Cases which have come to light in some detail have involved trades ranging from the grain warehouse assistants of Bulaq, the Nubian servants of Cairo, the boatmen and brokers of Alexandria, and the bakers of Cairo. In the latter case, in 1878, a substantial proportion of them – as many as 545 – went undetected by the taxman thanks to this kind of illicit combination. The bakers frustrated state officials, who responded by seeking to get ever closer to guild affairs. The local authorities in this case warned ‘all the masters in the district’ to tender statements as to their income and workers, warning that masters would be held responsible if those working for them were found to be evading the professional tax (wirku). Furthermore, partly as a result of such resistance, certain taxes started to cost more to levy than they yielded in revenue, a fact not lost on the British and Egyptians alike concerned with tax reform after 1879. This state of affairs contributed in turn to the actual abolition of many of these so-­called ‘vexatious’ taxes in the 1880s and 1890s.

Loyal Petitioning Much urban protest, however, was not directed against the central state, but against forms of local exploitation, which intensified as the corporate order broke down under political, economic and social pressures. Such forms of exploitation were partly the result of unofficial resistance against tax-­raising, which often came at the expense of the weaker members of a guild, or those who had no strong ties to guild sheikhs. Exploitation also intensified amid commodification, growing competition, new forms of contracting, self-­ exploitation, and labour-­ squeezing. The petitions of loyal subjects addressed to the mercy of the khedive sought not to avoid the state but to appeal to it, and its new regulations, especially new electoral procedures which had been promulgated for guild sheikhs and deputies in 1869. Such petitioning, which I have researched in detail among men employed in weighing, measurers, the Bulaq carters, Cairo construction workers, box-­makers, Alexandrian boatmen, porters, dyers, and coal-­heavers inter alia, played an important role in consolidating the impact of the central state upon guild affairs, undermining guild autonomy and order in the process. The case of the Bulaq measurers can serve as an illustration.

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The Bulaq Measurers In December 1876, some 134 grain measurers from Bulaq port sent a long petition (more than one thousand words) to the Interior Minister.13 They were complaining about being robbed of their measuring fees by a contracting scam organized by a disgraced former head of the guild and five deputies. It appears that the former guild head, one Hasan Abdullah, and a number of deputies had been sentenced by a court to dismissal from the headship. The deputies had gone to prison, whereas Hasan Abdullah had launched an appeal in the courts, during which time he does not seem to have been confined. Instead, he apparently brought in several allies and managed to get them instated by the police as temporary replacement deputies in the guild of measurers. Meanwhile legitimate elections were held, and the guild voted for three new deputies and a new sheikh. But this election does not seem to have been recognized by the authorities. The temporary, illegitimate deputies started monopolizing measuring contracts and renting out measurers in an exploitative way. Previously the measurers simply took the fee directly from the seller of grain, whereas now the deputies took the fee and distributed it later, taking their own unfair cut in the process.14 As elsewhere, the petition linked claimants to power-­ holders, and the Bulaq measurers were careful to reiterate the notions of just ruler and loyal subject that accompanied petitioning. Beyond the usual references to ‘Your Excellency’ (dawlatalu afandim) and to ‘Your servants’ (‘abidkum), the petitioners also mentioned in a more unconventional manner that the corruption of Hasan Abdullah was not hidden ‘from our wise leaders’ (la yakhfi dhalika ‘ala asyaduna dhuya al-­ma‘qul), invoking the putative omniscience as well as the benevolence of the powers-­ that-­be. Further, the petitioners articulated and identified their interests with the language of justice (haqq). As the petitioners roundly asserted: ‘It is not a mere fiction that if we have rights (huquq) to the [fees which have been withheld] on the account of the deputies then we are not slow to complain to the bureaux of the government, which for its part gives each possessing a right his right (i‘ta kulla dhi haqq haqqahu) and removes injustices’. Here was a strong statement as to popular expectations of the ideal functioning of the state. As the petitioners elaborated, ‘it is not permitted to dispossess the guild of about three hundred persons of work and of all the orders of the government’. In fact, Hasan Abdullah, it was asserted, ‘takes us as slaves, even though slavery and monopoly are forbidden; and yet his intention is to take us by a type of slavery just as when he was guild head’. Measurers were asserting a right to make a living without dispossession or slavery. Finally, the petitioners impugned

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the probity of Hasan Abdullah, underlining the fact that he did not enjoy the consent of the guild. There were repeated references to his trickery, treachery and falsification, and the complainants asserted several times that the guild desired not Hasan Abdullah but a different sheikh and three deputies, who, it was claimed, had in fact already been legitimately elected and were of upright character. Through petitioning and elaborating on the question of justice and the good practice of local leadership, petitioners engaged in an agreed-­on language which linked them to the state, without any hint of transgression on the part of the petitioners. In the process the latter conveyed some sense of the moral economy that stood behind the grievances of the ‘enslaved’ measurers, who were not receiving proper fees for measuring at the hands of corrupt deputies. In practice, whether or not the signatories were telling the whole truth, their petition appears to have been effective, at least as far as the archival record goes. The Interior Minister was quick to demand the truth of the matter from the Cairo governor, who replied a month later to say that the police would now – following a decision against Hasan Abdullah from the Appeals Court – ensure the dismissal of Hasan Abdullah from his position. As elsewhere, such protests had an only partially intended structural effect, which was to bring the codes and practices of bureaucracy, here in the shape of the police and the law courts, more closely to bear on guilds and trades.

The Impact of Contention on the Guilds Weapons of the weak and loyal petitioning worked in various ways to build sub-­and extra-­guild networks, to drag in state intervention, to displace custom as a basis for trade regulation, and to undermine the corporate solidarity of the guilds. Weapons of the weak were not based on guild solidarity. Instead they pitted a clique of leaders and allies against other members of the guild. Loyal petitioning was almost invariably based on a struggle against local exploitation, which pitted rank and file against local exploiters and leaders. Networks were built which did not coincide with guild organization. These kinds of resistance attracted state intervention in the name of order, regulation and progress. Avoidance of taxes led to intervention to regulate taxation. Loyal petitioning attracted the intervention of bureaucrats and police, and worked to internalize bureaucratic codes and regulations. Such interventions undermined the customary autonomy and independence of the guilds. Thus state regulation was not simply imposed on the guilds from without, but was also attracted from within.

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The abolition of the guilds in 1890 was therefore in part a consequence of contentious interaction with the state. The state was already rooted in craft affairs by the 1880s, so abolition was feasible. Second, it was clear to officials that guilds, because of resistance from below, were not doing the job the state believed they were supposed to be doing, as they were neither delivering order nor collecting taxes adequately. In other words, guild disaggregation had much to do with contention, and abolition had much to do with resistance. The guilds dissolved themselves in many ways – this explains why they were never suppressed, and why there were no protests when they were abolished in 1890. This could also explain why the artisans interviewed by the French craft historian Germain Martin in 1909 could only remember the abuse they had suffered at the hands of their sheikhs, and how the past was full of injustice and ‘black jokes’.15 Historians have tended to understand guilds’ quiescence in terms of passivity on the one hand and destruction of a whole traditional economy on the other. Amid widespread economic restructuring and various forms of political mobilization, neither proposition holds. Instead, crafts and service workers were quiet about decrees effectively removing guild monopolies and tax functions in 1890 and 1892 because guildsmen were no longer interested in saving their guilds, as ultimately these organizations had failed to solve new political, economic and social problems. But how do we evaluate Juan Cole’s argument that the guilds played a significant role during the ‘Urabi rebellion? Cole argued that craft organizations took part in popular demonstrations and protests, acting as a kind of ‘shop democracy’, protecting their members, mobilizing resources for demonstrations and lobbying the state.16 Cole’s research certainly showed that guild members participated in large numbers in urban demonstrations. My research also confirms his emphasis on the importance of new electoral practices within the guilds. I thus adduce no empirical reason to doubt Cole’s heuristic contention that guild members may have applied the same norms to the khedive as to local tyrants, and this attitude may have motivated protest when the political opportunity arose in 1882. But how were these protests organized? Cole could not trace empirically the networks and modes of resource mobilization on which urban demonstrations rested. His work in fact had to assume that the guilds formed the basis for protest – a highly problematic assumption. My own research suggests that popular protest was mobilized in sub-­and extra-­ guild networks more than in guilds acting as corporate units, because the evidence I have seen suggests that by the early 1880s guilds were deeply divided by restructuring and contentious politics. Meaningful monopolies were being broken up with growing competition and lack of government protection (compare Ch. 6). New forms of contracting, the squeezing of

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labour and its commodification, combined with state co-­optation of guild leaderships brought new forms of exploitation. Weapons of the weak and loyal petitioning were based on intra-­guild conflict, not on guild solidarity. They also dragged in state intervention and undermined guild customary autonomy. Newly established electoral norms may have raised the expectations of artisans, in the face of ongoing forms of corruption and exploitation. New norms vivified the failings of the guild leaderships by bringing new standards to bear against their conduct, while failing to solve intensifying problems. The very fact that there was no government discourse depicting guilds as a threat during 1881–82 points to the lack of meaningful guild organization – indeed, the government tried to use guild leaders to maintain order during the rebellion. We do not know how far the state was successful in this enterprise, but official perception clearly was not that the guilds were lost to the rebels, and such intervention may have worked to yet further increase intra-­guild tension and compromise the position of guild leaderships by linking them to European control and autocracy. In short, although more research on the details is required, it would appear that as far as the evidence goes, resources were probably not mobilized during 1881–82 on the basis of guild solidarity. Just because guild members were involved it does not follow that their guild organizations were responsible for organizing them. It seems very likely that such mobilization took place on the basis of sub-­and extra-­guild networks, forged already through other forms of protest in the preceding decades.

Into the Fire In spite of the failings of the guilds, their official abolition in 1890 did not mean any ‘golden age’ of work. Although the tax cuts which accompanied guild abrogation were celebrated by many, in a sense guild members had jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. As noted previously, the distant colonial bureaucracy that took over the state-­like functions of the intermediary guild leadership turned out to be unresponsive on the one hand, and heavy-­handed on the other. Furthermore, although some reform projects were discussed by intellectuals, no solution was forthcoming for the social and economic problems of the crafts, no social legislation was enacted for small-­scale industry. Especially when compared with new expectations, problems only intensified with expanded commodification, new forms of competition, contracting and exploitation, labour-­squeezing, and the like.

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Protest and Organization Successful protests, robust new forms of organizing and the growth of an alliance with nationalist middle classes contributed to the making of new organizations – syndicates and unions – which appeared in the years following the protests in the spring of 1907. There is no need to repeat here the detailed treatment in my Striking Cabbies of how a mass strike of the drivers of one-­and two-­horse cabs formed the background to the short-­lived organization of a syndicate in 1907–8.17 This organization was not a guild in any earlier sense of the term. It ceded all state-­like functions to the central state, and was not based not on custom, hierarchy and community but on the social interests of members, and was understood in terms of ‘the economy’ and political ideology. The sheikh of the cab-­ drivers who represented his guild members to the authorities in 1907 may have been the very same person as the elected sheikh of the 1870s, but his political role was new. He was now representing the interests of a group, not fulfilling the demands of the sultan’s justice known to all and only contravened by the ambitious, the corrupt or the tyrannical. The target of his representations was not personal tyranny, but the bureaucratic regulations affecting cab-­drivers, however much the language of tyranny remained to condemn such regulations. Likewise, the cabbies who organized in the autumn of 1907 were not complaining about personal tyranny when they sought to prevent the import of motorized cabs. Instead, they were complaining about an economic system and its management. This was new. Such protests were rare in Egypt before the 1900s. Syndicates and unions, furthermore, were not linked to a complex of semi-­autonomous entities – from janissary corps to ulama – but now forged organizational links to political parties formed in late 1907 and to the other activities of nationalists searching for popular constituencies to represent in the name of the Egyptian nation.18 These forms of organization and politics, which now included unions and syndicates involving tramway workers and construction workers, as well as tailors and shoemakers, heralded a distinctively modern form of socio-­political articulation and organization. Where protest and organization were unsuccessful or impossible, a much more common situation for most urban workers, the result was distinctively new kinds of informal networks: contractors, racketeers, strongmen and patron–client relations, which could no longer be described as guilds. Emerging networks, clientelist structures, and rackets – among fishermen in Matariyya, coal-­heavers in Port Said, egg-­traders in Alexandria and Lower Egypt, construction workers, and so on – had no state-­ sanctioned structure.19 Their autonomy was identified not as a legitimate

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sphere of custom, a powerful shared norm in the urban order, but rather in terms of backwardness.

Conclusion Against prevailing views, this chapter has sought to highlight the argument that over a number of decades, contentious interaction with power-­ holders broke up the guilds and built new networks and new kinds of organization. These processes should be put in the context of new forms of economic exploitation and adaptation: monopolies were undermined by the loss of customary rights and duties and the growth of competition related to the spread of market relations. The rapid expansion of certain trades made guild organization weak or problematic. As I have argued elsewhere, the ruralization of the textile industry, not its economic collapse, worked to break up the textile guilds, and the emergence of new forms of production (larger workshops, putting out systems, contracting networks) and intensified forms of exploitation made guild organization more difficult, or created conflicts which guilds could not contain.20 It was not that modernizing elites sought to abolish a congenitally backward and traditional guild and craft sector and eventually got their way. Instead, nineteenth-­century officialdom sought to use the guilds for new purposes, and guild resistance to such policies (not their passivity) played a major role in their official abrogation in 1890. The protests of guild members against local exploitation dragged the state and new regulations into guild affairs, undermining the autonomy of the guild from within. The corporate order was unable to solve the problems thrown up by new forms of adaptation and protest, which built new sub-­and extra-­guild networks for resource mobilization and protection. This was not a generalized and linear process of ‘social mobilization’ which broke up particularisms through communications infrastructure, literacy, urbanization and the like, but a process dependent on contentious politics and the shifting construction of social interests. The differential outcomes of subsequent contentious interaction with the heavy-­handed and unresponsive colonial bureaucracy in the context of intensified economic problems led to the ramification of informal and clientelist networks and, after 1907, the emergence of new organizations such as unions and syndicates. Hence it should be clear that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, the guild order was broken up from within as well as from without, and popular protest and adaptation was irreducibly part of the story. In a wider frame, such an argument illustrates how modern forms were not somehow parachuted into a backward and passive Egypt from above.

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It was not that modernizing elites attempted to drag a resistant, culturally authentic and monolithic ‘traditional society’ into the twentieth century. Instead, the Egyptian modern – legible in the changing form of the state, the transformed structure of the economy, the end of the guilds, and the emergence of new networks, organizations and political forms at the site of civil society – was the outcome of many-­sided adaptations and conflicts, struggles in which low-­status, poor and disenfranchised crafts and service workers played an important and often occluded role. To see these major transformations in this way is to refuse completely the identification, so often made, between the ‘popular masses’ on the one hand, and the traditional, the Islamic and the anti-­modern on the other.

Notes   1. Gabriel Baer, Egyptian Guilds in Modern Times (Jerusalem: Israel Oriental Society, 1964); Charles Issawi, ‘Middle East Economic Development, 1815–1914’, in The Modern Middle East: A Reader, eds Albert Hourani et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); ‘Abd al-­Salam ‘Abd al-­Halim ‘Amir, Al-­Tawa’if al-­Hiraf fi Misr, 1805–1914 [The Craft Guilds in Egypt, 1805–1914] (Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organization, 1993); André Raymond, ‘Les transformations des corporations de métiers au Caire du XVIIIe au XIXe siècle’, in Les institutions traditionelles dans le monde arabe, ed. Hervé Blanchot (Paris: Karthala, 1999), 29–40.   2. John Chalcraft, ‘The Cairo Cab Strike of 1907’, in Empire in the City: Arab Provincial Capitals in the Late Ottoman Empire, eds Thomas Philipp, Jens Hanssen and Stefan Weber (Beirut: Orient Institute, 2002), 173–200; idem, The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories: Crafts and Guilds in Egypt, 1863–1914 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004); idem, ‘The End of the Guilds in Egypt: Restructuring Textiles in the Long Nineteenth Century’, in Crafts and Craftspeople in the Middle East, eds Suraiya Faroqhi and Randi Deguilhem (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 338–69; idem, ‘Popular Protest, the Market and the State in Nineteenth-­and Early Twentieth-­Century Egypt’, in Subalterns and Social Protest: History from below in the Middle East and North Africa, ed. Stephanie Cronin (London: Routledge, 2007), 69–90; idem, ‘Counterhegemonic Effects: Weighing, Measuring, Petitions and Bureaucracy in Nineteenth-­Century Egypt’, in Counterhegemony in the Colony and Postcolony, eds John Chalcraft and Yaseen Noorani (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 179–203.   3. The term ‘weapons of the weak’ has been inspired by James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985).   4. These views have been held respectively by Louis Massignon, ‘La “Futuwwa” ou “Pacte d’honneur artisanal” entre les travailleurs musulmans au moyen age’, in Opera Minora, ed. Y. Moubarac (Beirut: Dar al-­Ma’arif, 1963); Baer, Egyptian Guilds; and André Raymond, Artisans et commerçants au Caire au XVIIIe siècle, 2 vols (Damascus: Institut Français de Damas, 1973).   5. Cf. Pascale Ghazaleh, Masters of the Trade: Crafts and Craftspeople in Cairo, 1750–1850 (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1999).   6. Roger Owen, Cotton and the Egyptian Economy, 1820–1914: A Study in Trade and Development (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969).

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  7. Daniel Panzac, ‘The Population of Egypt in the Nineteenth Century’, Asian and African Studies 21 (1987), 11–32.   8. Joel Beinin, Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 68.   9. Ehud Toledano, ‘Social and Economic Change in the “Long Nineteenth Century”’, in The Cambridge History of Egypt, vol. 2, Modern Egypt from 1517 to the End of the Twentieth Century, ed. M.W. Daly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 252–84, 261. 10. For details, see Chalcraft, Striking Cabbies, 105ff. 11. DWQ MW (Majlis al-­Wuzara’) NM (Nizarat al-­Maliyya) 19 Committee on Trade and Industry / Lajnat al-­Tijara wa al-­Sina‘a 1916, Part III ‘Le Development de L’Industrie en Egypte’, 12–16. 12. For details, see Chalcraft, Striking Cabbies, 105ff. 13. Dar al-­Watha’iq al-­Qawmiyya (DWQ) ND (Nizarat al-­Dakhiliyya) MA (Mukatibat ‘Arabi) M (Mahfaza) 20, 134 Bulaq measurers/ Interior Minister, Dhu al-­Qa‘ada 1293/ December 1876. 14. DWQ, Nizarat al-­Dakhiliyya (ND), Mukatibat ‘Arabi (MA), Mahfazat 20, 134 Bulaq Measurers/ Interior Minister, Dhu al-­Qa‘ada 1293/ December 1876. 15. Germain Martin, Les Bazars du Caire et les petits métiers arabes (Cairo: Université Egyptienne, 1910). 16. Juan R.I. Cole, Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 17. Chalcraft, Striking Cabbies, 158 ff. 18. Zachary Lockman, ‘Imagining the Working Class: Culture, Nationalism, and Class Formation in Egypt, 1899–1914’, in Poetics Today 15 (Summer 1994): 157–90. 19. Chalcraft, Striking Cabbies, 154 ff. 20. Chalcraft, ‘Restructuring Textiles’.

Glossary

Glossary

‘abâ, aba rough woollen fabric ‘abawî maker/seller of rough woollen fabric, in Turkish: abacı ‘akkâm in Arabic: transport worker ‘Asakir-­i mansure-­yi new-­style army founded by Mahmud II muhammadiye’ after the destruction of the janissaries (1826) ‘askar in Damascus: servitors of the central administration including soldiers (see also askeri) ‘atîk köle emancipated slave ‘attâr druggist ‘ibadullah ‘Servants of God’, people regardless of religion ‘ıtkname emancipation document given to a freed man/woman ‘ulama’, ulema in Turkish scholars trained in Islamic law and the religious sciences ‘umda in Egypt: locally important personage abacı maker/seller of rough woollen fabric ağa çırağı recruit in the personal service of the janissary commander agha, ağa term with multiple meanings, here: janissary commander ahi baba guild elder of high rank, especially among the tanners ahis members of mystical fraternities with a stress on male bonding, active mainly in medieval Anatolia, and also in Bosnia after the Ottoman conquest akçe small Ottoman silver coin al-­‘allâf in Arabic: the grain and fodder merchant

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Glossary

ala’s-­seviye equitably alaca a fabric made of mixed fibres, often ornamented with stripes, brought to Istanbul from Syrian cities alat-­ı lazıme-­i malume implements and inventory needed for the practice of a given trade al-­bawâbîjî in Arabic: the manufacturer of a type of slippers, bâbûj al-­farra’ in Arabic: the furrier amil subordinate administrator amphora two-­handled storage vessel ‘aqqâd manufacturers of the braid ornamenting coats and caftans arakıyeci maker of felt caps askeri servitors of the sultan, exempt from many, though not all, taxes; the sultan had the right to confiscate the inheritances of military and administrative cadres, though not those of religious scholars askeri (or: ‘askeri) kassam official, whose job it was to oversee the division of the inheritances of the sultan’s servitors; often after confiscation part of the inheritance was returned to the heirs (see also Kısmet-­i askeriye) Baş Muhasebe Central Accounting Office, particularly active during the 1700s basmahane textile printing workshop baytâr in Arabic ‘farrier’; in Turkish ‘veterinarian’ bazargan merchant; here: mobile, long-­distance trader becayes¸ literally: place-­switching: this practice involved an official permitting a new recruit to serve in a janissary company, using the pay-­ticket of a deceased soldier bedestan, bedesten covered market beg, beğ, bey lord, gentleman – meaning differs according to context beledici weaver of (what was probably) cotton cloth berat imperial licence bes¸e, racil infantry soldier

Glossary 295

beytülmal emini official in charge of collecting heirless property on behalf of the treasury; he often farmed his position beytülmal the sultan’s treasury bezzaz trader in cotton cloth Bezzazistan covered market bila sermaye lack of capital bogasi plain cotton cloth börek flaky pastry bostanī, bostancı palace gardeners who also acted as policemen (term also used for janissaries); their chief was the bostancıbas¸ı boza millet beer, more or less fermented bozâ’î brewer of millet beer bozahane workshop for the manufacture of millet beer bulûkbâshî, bölükbas¸ı military officer bürümcük light semi-­transparent silk, usually white/ cream-­coloured bürüncükçü manufacturer of light silk fabrics came clothing çanak bowl çavus¸ title given to a variety of often low-­level officers of the Porte cemaat, bölük janissary regiment çes¸me water fountain çırak here: apprentice çizmeciler boot makers cizye head-­tax, in principle graded by income, payable by Christians and Jews çömlek container made of pottery çömlekçi potter çorbacı here: janissary officer çörek sweet bread rolls and cakes cotonis a kind of atlas whose outer side was silk and whose reverse was cotton Covered Bazaar, Kapalıçarşı major Istanbul shopping centre çuhacı a manufacturer of, or trader in, woollen cloth dallâl, in Turkish: dellal broker debbağ tanner defter general term, denoting a register

296

Glossary

dergâh-­i ali yeniçerileri janissaries stationed in the Ottoman capital dersaadet ve bilâd-­ı selâse intra muros Istanbul plus the three boroughs of Eyüp, Üsküdar and Galata destgâh loom divan here: council, at the sultan’s court or in the office of the grand vizier Divanyolu main Istanbul street, in some sections following the former Byzantine mese dolabî (silk) winder don clothing or underwear duhani tobacco dealer dukkân shop dülbendci muslin maker ecnebi outsider(s) Eflak Vlach ehl-­i hibre experienced master artisans ehl-­i hıref men of skill, artisans and artists in the service of the Ottoman palace elkab, Arabic: alkāb titles, professional epithets emin salaried administrator of a resource owned by the sultan, usually in temporary employment erzak-­ı zaruri essential commodity, usually a foodstuff esedi gurus silver coin of Dutch origin, stamped with a lion esnaf term denoting a craft, such as tailoring or shoemaking, or else the organization of people practising one and the same specialty, or at least related crafts esnaf vakıfları pious foundations instituted by artisans esnaf yoklaması registers recording the names and businesses of artisans, for purposes of control es¸refî gold coins evkaf-­ı humayun Sultanic Pious Foundations Evkaf-­ı Hümayun Nezareti Ministry of Pious Foundations, a nineteenth-­century novelty fakih religious scholar fazekas Hungarian term for potter ferman, ferman-­ı ali imperial edict, sultanic command flori gold coin, ducat

Glossary 297

fütuvvet, Arabic: futuwwa rules of conduct inspired by Islamic ­mysticism and popular in certain artisan guilds gedik in general parlance: ‘opening’ or ‘slot’; in guild life the term denoted the permanent right to a workplace, usually rented from a pious foundation, and the right to practise a given craft there gön rough leather gözlemeci maker of a pancake-­style bread gülistânî kadifeci a maker/seller of a special kind of velvet gülistânî kemhâcı a maker/seller of a slightly less valuable brocade gümüs¸ arayıcıları officials in charge of coin standardization gurus silver coin, of Ottoman, Spanish or Dutch provenance haddâd blacksmith haffāf Arabic: shoemaker hakk-­ı karar usufruct rights that tenants acquire due to residence and/or improvements to the premises hallac cleaner of cotton hallâq barber hamam, hammam bathhouse, in the present context usually a public bath hamamcı in Turkish: operator of a public bath, bath attendant hammâmî in Arabic: operator of a public bath han buildings accommodating trade and crafts, often with residential facilities included hânût shop harami armed criminals, robbers hassa harc emini official in charge of procuring goods for palace consumption hattâb artisan working with wood havadis here: spy reports havai gedik right to practise a craft, not tied to any particular location hayyat tailor helal kazanç legitimate earnings hems¸ehri fellow townsman or villager hırdavat-­ı menzil ve es¸ya miscellaneous domestic items

298

Glossary

hırfet term denoting a craft, such as tailoring or shoemaking, or else the organization of people practising one and the same specialty, or at least related crafts hulwânî in Arabic: manufacturers of sweets and pastries ibris¸imci a maker/seller of silk thread icare-­i tawila long-­term rent contract, involving vakıf property icareteyn double-­rent contracts, which obliged the tenant of foundation-­held property to pay a large sum at the beginning of the contract; but once in place, he was to enjoy a low rent icare-­yi mu ‘accele down-­payment on the rent of a piece of real estate ihtisab kanunnameleri regulations concerning the quality and prices of goods sold in the market, to be enforced by the market inspector İhtisab nezareti Ministry of the Marketplace ihtisab, Arabic: hisba Ottoman market inspectorate ihtiyar here: guild elder imâret today: soup kitchen, previously also used for the buildings of pious foundations in general inhisar-­ı bey ü s¸ira barriers to entry into a given trade ipekçi/kazzâz silk manufacturer or trader iplik yarn iskâf shoemaker ism in Arabic: personal name kadayıf, qata’if wheaten cakes, served with sweet syrup kadayıfçılar hirfeti ustaları master artisans making the dessert known as kadayıf kadı judge, adjudicating cases according to Islamic law kadıasker ‘army judge’, the two heads of the Ottoman juridical-­cum-­religious hierarchy, under the s¸eyhülislam kadifeci a maker/seller of velvet kadifî manufacturer of velvet kadimden beru ‘since ancient times’ a term commonly used to defend rights and privileges

Glossary 299

kalânisî maker of the turban called kalansuva kalb goods of sub-­standard workmanship, ‘fake’ kalfa a title given to people in a variety of positions, including journeymen kanun-­ı kadim ancient laws or regulations kanunname here: Ottoman provincial tax regulations, mainly of the sixteenth century kaplıca hot mineral baths karakullukçu here: term used for janissaries kârhâne-­i âmire workshop serving the palace kasaba small town kazgancı cauldron maker kazzaz silk mercer kedek, Arabic: kadak Syrian term, originally derived from gedik, which gave the holder the right to exercise a given trade or craft; later the term came to denote a simple rent contract kefâlet defterleri registers in which imperial scribes recorded the names of guildsmen, to ensure that everybody had a proper guarantor kefalet, kefâlet sponsorship or guarantee that a given person would appear in court when needed, or else pay his/her debts kefil bi’l-­mal guarantor who ensured that a given person would pay his/her debts kefil bi’l-­nefs guarantor who ensured that a given person would appear in court when convoked kemhacı a maker/seller of gold or silver brocade and velvet ketan, keten linen ketancı linen weavers kethüda here: head of guild; but the meaning of this term varied greatly according to context kethüda temessükü ‘warden’s deed’ or document issued by a guild and conferring a gedik khabbâz in Arabic: baker khedive title given to Mehmed Ali/Muhammad Ali Pasha and his successors as autonomous governors of Egypt

300

Glossary

khulû in eighteenth century Damascus: revenue collected from buildings connected to pious foundations, permitting the occupation of a given space for residential or commercial purposes kılapdancı maker of thread including (imitation) gold and silver wire kiln tripods small tripods separating the individual bowls or plates to prevent them from sticking together; sometimes the feet of the tripods would leave traces in the glaze kırmızı red; in the case of yarn, dyed with kermes or cochineal Kısmet-­i Askeriyye office in charge of dividing the inheritances of servitors of the sultans koltukçu peddler kürkcü furrier kutnici manufacturer of, or trader in, the silk-­ cotton fabric known as kutni lahhâm in Arabic: butcher legen, ibrîq basin and ewer (Arabic spelling) lokmacý maker of baked goods dipped in syrup lonca in today’s parlance: a guild, but in the eighteenth century this term denoted the place where the members of certain guilds used to assemble ma‘lum known; here in the sense of ‘legally identifiable’ madhab, Turkish: mezhep one of the four schools of law officially recognized in Sunni Islam mahalle town quarter makhzân, Turkish: mahzen storage space, often situated in a business structure mamluk slave, typically freed after military training maslaha Islamic law term meaning ‘well-­being’ maslahat-­ı amme public peace and order matrabaz, madrabaz speculator, profiteer mechul unidentifiable person medrese college where students studied the religious sciences and particularly Islamic law, to become judges and scholars/teachers mes¸dud firmly twisted Bursa silk

Glossary 301

mes¸in leather mihr-­i müeccel ‘delayed wedding gift’, a payment due to a wife when her marriage ended through death or divorce millet religious group, often with some self-­ government under the responsibility of rabbis, bishops or patriarchs miri debbağhane state tannery, founded in 1827 mizan-­ı harir public weighing scales for silk, where all silks had to be weighed against payment of a fee molla non-­specific term denoting a religious scholar muaccele a lump-­sum, payable in advance, in a rent or tax-­farming contract müderris teacher in a religious college (medrese) müeccele monthly or annual rents müfsid a person sowing discord müftü, müftî religious and legal scholar who can advise people whether or not a certain action is permissible according to Islamic law; in the Ottoman world müftüs were often in public employment Mühimme Defterleri Registers of Important Affairs, an important category of Ottoman chancery registers musalaha peaceful settlement of disputes müstakar gedik  gedik which allows the owner to practise his craft or trade in a specified location only müstakil in the case of guilds: self-­governing by custom mutasarrıf possessor naggâr, najjar carpenter nahhâs coppersmith nahiye smallest administrative unit, in the countryside sometimes without an urban centre; in Istanbul: urban region consisting of several town quarters naib sub-­district judge nakkas¸hane atelier that produced designs for use by the ‘men of skill’ serving the palace

302

Glossary

naqqâsh engraver in metalwork narh nizamları price regulations narh fixed price, often determined by the qadi, or else by agreement among guild members nasab in Arabic: patronymic nâtır in the 1700s: male helper to the bathhouse attendant; today: female bathhouse attendant navluncu shipper-­cum-­wholesaler nâzır supervisor nis¸an takımı in the early 1800s: set of engagement gifts, including fancy shoes and a mirror nisba in Arabic: addition to the personal name, indicating the subject’s work or association with a given place nizam-­ı memleket public peace and order oppida Latin term, in Hungary used for small market towns orducu craftsman required to follow the army on campaign örf-­i belde here: local custom of a town örf-­i sultani sultanic custom pabuççular a variety of shoemaker paçacı cooks/sellers of sheep’s trotters pas¸makçılar a variety of shoemaker pazarbas¸ı trader in charge of supplying the palace pes¸temal here: waistcloths to be used in the public baths qadi Islamic judge, see also kadi qâsâriyya, khan business structure, the two terms being interchangeable according to Damascus usage qatirjî, in Turkish: katırcı muleteer qawwâf, kavvaf shoemaker qul oglu in the Arab provinces: son of a military man and a local woman qul, kul servitor of the sultan’s, separate from the subject population rakabî maker of stirrups reaya, in Arabic: ra‘âyâ taxpaying subject population resm-­i tamga stamp tax

Glossary 303

Rumeli, Rumelia the Ottoman Balkans sa‘atî manufacturer/seller of clocks and watches sabbağ dyer sac metal grid sahn in Damascus: plate sahtiyan leather sammân in Arabic: grocer sancak Ottoman sub-­province sandal here: cheap silk fabric saraç saddler sarıca a mercenary, a soldier not part of the sultan’s kul sarraf money-­changer sawafî weaver or shopkeeper offering unspecified woollens for sale seccade prayer rug s¸edd kus¸anma ‘girding’ of new masters, a ceremony indicating their acceptance into a guild s¸ehir kethüdası administrator concerned with urban affairs sekban a military man: a janissary or else a mercenary semen-­i misil the current market price seraserci a maker/seller of brocade s¸erifi altun Ottoman gold piece s¸eriyye sicilleri registers in which the qadi’s scribes recorded the business of the court s¸eyh here usually: senior guildsman, head of a guild, in other contexts: religious leader shar‘i, s¸er’i (in Turkish) legal according to Islamic law sicil, sicill register; here: registers kept by the scribes of a qadi, or şeriyye sicilleri simitçi (itinerant) bagel seller sini metal tray sipahi cavalry soldier either holding a timar or else serving in the palace cavalry sipahizade, ferzend-­i sipahi sons of sipahis who are candidates for military positions sufi member of a mystical brotherhood (compare tasavvuf) s¸uhûd’ül-­hal witnesses to a court case suk-­ı sultanî the public market

304

Glossary

surûgî in Arabic: saddlers tabîb medical man tâjir in Damascus: major textile merchant, see also: tüccar tahhân in Arabic: miller tahrir defterleri tax registers, on which the government based the assignment of timars taife, ta’ife term meaning ‘group’, sometimes used to denote artisan guilds takıyeci cap maker Tanzimat period of administrative reconstruction, conventionally dated from 1839 to 1876 tasawwuf Islamic mysticism tellâk male bathhouse attendant temettüat defterleri registers serving revenue collection tencere pot tereke defterleri estate or inheritance inventories, sometimes also known as probate inventories tereke records documenting the estate of a deceased person terhib ü te’dib to intimidate and chastise testi earthenware jug tevzi distribution of taxes, assessed en bloc, among the inhabitants of a given village or district tezkere here: authorization papers timar military tax assignments: the taxes, in money and in kind, being mostly but not exclusively paid by peasants toffet unit for measuring raw silk in Bursa, 1 toffet equalling 610 drachma; probably the latter was equivalent to the dirhem tomruk here: animal pen tüccar merchant (in Turkish); the form tacir is also in use tülbent muslin ‘ulabî manufacturer of boxes and crates Uskoks pirates active in the Adriatic in the late 1500s and early 1600s, loosely controlled by Habsburg border commanders usta title to a master artisan and also to a woman involved in running an elite harem

Glossary 305

Uzunçarşı shop-­lined street in downtown Istanbul vakfiyye document instituting a pious foundation vakıf, Arabic: waqf pious foundation Vilayet Ahkâm Defterleri ‘Registers of edicts sent to the provinces’; important chancery registers instituted in the mid-­eighteenth century vilayet Ottoman province vukiyye, okka unit of weight, equivalent to 1.28 kg wasî, Turkish: vasi trustee for heirs who are still minors wazzân in Arabic: a man weighing goods yamak auxiliary yemeni cheap cotton cloth, shoes yeniçeri katibi janissary scribe yerli local person yerliyya military corps in Damascus, recruited locally yevmiye-­i dekâkin daily tax on shops yiğitbas¸ı assistant to the head of a guild yük ‘load’: in the case of akçe often equivalent to 100,000 zarâbilî in Arabic: shoemaker zâviye, zaviye dervish lodge, hospice zımmî non-­Muslim subject of an Islamic polity zulüm the exercise of arbitrary power; often, governmental abuse of power

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Contributors

List

of

Contributors

Seven Ağır is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Middle East Technical University, Ankara. In 2009 she gained her Ph.D. at Princeton University. She has published several articles relating to the grain trade in the early modern world, using a comparative approach. She is currently involved in two major projects: ‘Evolution of Business Organizations in the European Periphery: Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic, 1850–1950’, a four-­year project sponsored by the European Commission’s Marie Curie programme; and ‘Ottoman Commodity Chains in Institutional Perspective: Bread, Meat and Leather Supply in Istanbul, 1774–1808’, a joint project with Onur Yıldırım (METU) and Arif Bilgin (Sakarya University), sponsored by the Turkish research fund TUBITAK. Engin Deniz Akarlı is Professor of History at Istanbul Şehir University and Joukowsky Family Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Modern Middle East History at Brown University, Rhode Island. He has taught at Princeton, Boğaziçi (Istanbul) and Yarmouk (Irbid, Jordan) universities, as well as Washington University in St Louis. He has received fellowships from Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, NEH, Institute for Advanced Study, Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard University, and Fulbright. His publications include The Long Peace: Ottoman Lebanon, 1861–1920 (1993), Belgelerle Tanzimat (1977), Political Participation in Turkey (1974), and articles on nineteenth-­century Ottoman history and Ottoman legal history. He serves on the Board of Advisors of Islamic Law and Society, the Journal of Turkish Legal History, and the Center for Turkish Studies of the Foundation for Science and the Arts. Betül Başaran, who received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2006, is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at St Mary’s College of Maryland, USA. She has written several articles on the demography and social history of Istanbul in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Together with Cengiz Kırlı she is engaged in a broadly based

336

Contributors

i­nvestigation of the sites occupied by Istanbul craftsmen and merchants. In the academic year 2011/12 she received a grant from the Institute of Turkish Studies for the completion of her book Between Crisis and Order: Selim III, Social Control, and Policing in Istanbul at the End of the 18th Century, published in 2014 by E.J. Brill, Leiden. John Chalcraft is a Reader in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He is the author of a number of articles on the problems of contemporary workers in the Middle East, especially migrants, focusing on Syrians working in Lebanon. He has also worked on the nineteenth century: The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories: Crafts and Guilds in Egypt, 1863–1914 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004). In 2009 he published a second book-­length work: The Invisible Cage: Syrian Workers in Lebanon (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press). Géza Dávid is the Professor of Ottoman Studies at Loránd Eötvös University in Budapest. He is the author of Osmanlı Macaristan’ında Toplum, Ekonomi ve Yönetim: 16. Yüzyılda Simontornya Sancağı (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı, 1999), Studies in Demographic and Administrative History of Ottoman Hungary (Istanbul: ISIS, 1997), ‘Affairs of State Are Supreme’: The Orders of the Ottoman Imperial Council Pertaining to Hungary (1544–1545, 1552) (Budapest: MTA TTI, 2005), and ‘This Affair is of Paramount Importance’: The Orders of the Ottoman Imperial Council Pertaining to Hungary (1559–1560, 1564–1565) (Budapest: MTA TTI, 2009), the latter two together with Pál Fodor. He has edited and co-­edited a large number of books on early modern Hungary. He has also written the chapter on Ottoman warfare for the Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. 2 (Cambridge: CUP, 2013). Nina Ergin is an Assistant Professor at Koç University, Istanbul. In 2005 she received her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, USA, ‘The Çemberlitaş Hamam in Istanbul: From Bath to Tourist Attraction’. She has written on Ottoman buildings promoting social relations such as baths and public soup kitchens, and is the editor of Bathing Culture of Anatolian Civilizations: Architecture, History, and Imagination (Leuven: Peeters, 2011). Together with Christoph Neumann and Amy Singer, she has co-­edited Feeding People Feeding Power: Imarets in the Ottoman Empire (Istanbul: Eren, 2007); and together with Scott Redford, Perceptions of the Past in the Turkish Republic: Classical and Byzantine Periods (Leuven: Peeters, 2010). Her most recent work concentrates on the sensory aspects of the Ottoman-­

Contributors 337

built environment, resulting in the recent article ‘The Fragrance of the Divine: Ottoman Incense Burners in their Context’, The Art Bulletin 96 (2014), 70–97. Colette Establet has taught at the University of Provence in Aix-­ Marseille. Together with Jean-­Paul Pasqual, she is the author of four monographs on Damascus around 1700: Familles et fortunes à Damas: 450 foyers damascains en 1700 (Damascus: IFEAD, 1994); Ultime voyage pour la Mecque: Les inventaires après décès de pélerins morts à Damas vers 1700 (Damascus: IFEAD, 1998); Des tissus et des hommes: Damas vers 1700 (Damascus: IREMAM/IFPO, 2005); La gent d’État dans Damas ottomane, les ‘askar vers 1700 (Damascus: IREMAM/IFPO, 2011). She currently studies French documents relevant to trade with Asia. Suraiya Faroqhi is a Professor of History at Istanbul Bilgi University, having previously taught at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis/St Paul, Middle East Technical University in Ankara, and Ludwig Maximilians-­Universität, Munich. She is the author of Artisans of Empire (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009); The Ottoman Empire and the World around It (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004); and Subjects of the Sultan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000). She is the editor of The Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. 3 (Cambridge: CUP, 2006), and co-­editor, with Kate Fleet, of vol. 2 in the same series (2013). Her most recent work is a collection of articles: Travel and Artisans: Economic Migration and Commerce in the Early Modern Period (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014). Ibolya Gerelyes is Head of the Archaeology Department at the Hungarian National Museum, Budapest. She has edited Süleyman the Magnificent and his Age (Budapest: Hungarian National Museum, 1994) and Turkish Flowers: Studies on Ottoman Art in Hungary (Budapest: Hungarian National Museum, 2005). Among the works she has co-­edited are Archaeology of the Ottoman Period in Hungary: Papers of the Conference held at the Hungarian National Museum, Budapest, 24–26 May 2000 (Budapest: Hungarian National Museum, 2003, together with Gyöngyi Kovács) and Thirteenth International Congress of Turkish Art, Proceedings (Budapest: Hungarian National Museum, 2009, together with Géza Dávid). Cengiz Kırlı is an Associate Professor at the Atatürk Institute for Modern Turkish History at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. He is the author of Sultan ve Kamuoyu: Osmanlı Modernles¸me sürecinde havadis jurnalleri (Istanbul: İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2009). He has also published numerous

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Contributors

articles on the social history of Istanbul, among others: ‘A Profile of the Labor Force in Early Nineteenth-­century Istanbul’, International Labor and Working Class History 60 (Fall 2001): 125–40; and ‘Surveillance and Constituting the Public in the Ottoman Empire’, in Publics, Politics and Participation: Locating the Public Sphere in the Middle East and North Africa, edited by Seteney Shami (New York: SSRC, 2009), pp. 282–305. Together with Betül Başaran, he is engaged in a broadly based investigation of the sites occupied by Istanbul craftsmen and merchants. I˙klil Selçuk completed her dissertation ‘State and Society in the Marketplace: A Study of Late Fifteenth-­century Bursa’ at Harvard University in 2009. She is the author of several articles on Bursa artisans and their relationship with officialdom, and also has an interest in the history of food and drink. She teaches at Özyeğin University, Istanbul. Nalan Turna received her Ph.D. from Binghamton University, NY, in 2005/6, her thesis concerning ‘The Everyday Life of Istanbul and its Artisans, 1808–1839’. She has published a number of articles on the social history of nineteenth-­century Istanbul, including plague epidemics and the relationship of janissaries to the artisan world; most recently she has explored the holdings of the Ottoman archives concerning the theatre. She is an Associate Professor at Yıldız Technical University, Istanbul. Eunjeong Yi is the author of Guild Dynamics in Seventeenth-­century Istanbul, Fluidity and Leverage (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2004). Apart from her publications in Korean she has continued her work on Ottoman social history with a study of an artisan rebellion of 1688 in Eleni Gara, M. Erdem Kabadayı and Christoph K. Neumannn (eds), Popular Protest and Political Participation in the Ottoman Empire (Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi University Press, 2011) pp. 105–26. She currently teaches at Seoul National University. Onur Yıldırım is a Professor in the Department of Economics at Middle East Technical University, Ankara. His Ph.D. is from Princeton University (2002). He is the author of Diplomacy and Displacement: Reconsidering the Turco-­Greek Exchange of Populations, 1922–1934 (New York: Routledge, 2006); and the editor of Osmanlının Peşinde bir Yaşam: Suraiya Faroqhi’ye Armağan (Ankara: İmge Yayınevi, 2008). He also has written extensively on the bread supply of early modern Istanbul, the Ottoman guilds, and the experiences of people caught up in the Greco-­Turkish population exchange of 1923.

Contributors 339

Gülay Yılmaz Diko received her doctorate from the Institute of Islamic Studies of McGill University, Montreal, in 2011. Her thesis ‘The Economic and Social Roles of Janissaries in a Seventeenth-­Century Ottoman City: The Case of Istanbul’ focuses on soldiers turned militiamen who made a living as artisans and traders, often in specialties requiring know-­ how and some capital. She teaches at Akdeniz University in Antalya and continues to study the social history of early modern Istanbul.

Index

Index

Names and terms occurring on almost every page, such as ‘Istanbul’, ‘artisan’, or ‘guild’ do not appear in the index. Some authors have used the Arabic and others the Turkish forms of common terms; this index groups both versions together. Except for the cicumflex denoting long vowels, and the ‘ denoting the ‘ayn, diacritical signs have been ommitted in the Arabic versions. aba, ‘abâ, 95, 227 abacı, aba sellers 228, 271 Abdülbaki Çelebi, rich cap-maker 205 Abdülhamid I 261 administrative fiat 244 Ágoston, Gábor 9 Ağır, Seven 37 ahi 25, 52, 53, 62, 63, 65, 66 ahi baba 63, 196 Ahi Evran, Ahi Evren 63–65, 193 ahi(s) 1, 32, 63, 196, 197 Ahmed III 4, 34, 117, 262 Ahmed Lütfi Efendi 259 Ahmed Ağa, Esseyid, guild warden 161 Akarlı, Engin Deniz 15, 19, 23–26, 38, 210, 218, 219, 221 Akgündüz, Ahmet 219 Aksaray 111 alaca 146, 230 Albania, Albanian(s) 10, 28, 34, 114, 119–121, 232, 242, 266 Aleppo 10, 25, 31, 88, 139, 145, 146, 177, 179, 186, 230 Alexandria 281, 284, 289 Ali Çavuş b. el-hac Mustafa, merchant 178 al-Qâsimî 91, 94, 96 Altıntaş, Abdulmennan Mehmet 25, 26 Amasya 180 Ambraseys, Nicholas N. 3 ‘amil, amil(s) 54, 60 amphora(e) 78 Anatolia, Anatolian 1, 3, 30, 32, 34, 52, 53, 64, 73, 76, 77, 92,

119–121, 136, 137, 142, 145, 148, 262, 270, 281 ancient custom 239, 252, 253 Angeli, co-owner of a shop 251–253 Ankara 12, 21, 64, 166 arakıyeci 211 Arasta-yı Kebir 160 archaeology, archaeologist(s), archaeological 70–72, 76–78, 80, 83 Armenian(s) 10, 148, 180, 232, 264, 266, 270 army affiliation 183 arsenal, naval 4, 9 artisan-janissary connections 242 Aščerić-Todd, Inez 13, 31 ‘askar 89–93, 105 askeri, ‘askeri 36, 190 205 ‘askeri kassam 195, 202 ‘askeri kassam registers 176 attâr, ‘attâr 91, 94, 104 auction(s) 224, 224, 230 Austrian 138, 140, 142 Avlonya (today: Vlorë) 120 ayakta haffâf(an) 158, 162 Ayasofya 113 Ayasofya Hamamı 112 ‘Ayntab (today: Gaziantep) 177 Aynural, Salih 9 Ayvansaray 122 Azmi Efendi 167 Baber, Johansen 24 baker(s) 5, 24, 54, 94, 200, 205, 211, 244, 245, 250, 284

Index 341

baker(s) of cakes and sweet rolls 251 bakery, bakeries 202, 224, 225, 227, 232, 233, 266, 270, 273 Bali Beşe b. Abdullah, janissary shipowner 179 Balkan(s) 28, 52, 76, 78, 80, 92, 109, 120, 270, 281 Ballian, Anna 6 barber(s) 18, 34, 93, 170, 273 barber shops 122, 267 Barkan, Ömer Lütfi 4, 59 barriers to entry 218, 220, 225, 228, 229, 234 Baş Muhasebe 233 Başaran, Betül 11, 16, 28, 38, 110, 121, 259 bath keepers 54 bath-house(s) 28, 34, 39 bath-house workers 242 baytâr 92 bazarbaşı 205 bazarcılar 208 bazargan-bakkal 210 bazargan(s) bazarganlar 209, 210 becayeş 182 bedestan 88 Behar, Cem 122, 262 Bekâr Mehmed 150, 151 beledi 141, 142, 146, 149 beledici 140 berât 161 Berkes, Niyazi 30 beşe(s) 176, 181, 183, 186, 187, 215, 255, 272 bezzaz 140, 141 bıçakçı 205 bilâ sermâye 162 Black Sea 270 blacksmith(s) 4, 54, 73, 95 blurred boundaries, between artisans and merchants 210, 212 blurring of the social boundaries, between soldiers and civilians 175 boatmen 260, 264, 266, 270–273, 284 bogasi 62, 145, 181, 192 bookseller(s) 18, 19 Bor 146, 147 Bosnia(n) 1, 13, 57, 60 Bosporus 5, 112, 115, 117 Bostan, İdris 9 bostancıbaşı 260

boyalı 143 boza 54, 63, 183 bozahane 63 bozâ’î 54 Bozcaada 241 broker(s) 54, 91, 279, 284 Buda 33, 74, 75, 77, 80, 82–84 Buda Vlachs (Eflaks) 79 builder(s) 54 Bulaq 284, 285 Bulgarians 180 Bulmuş, Birsen 4 bundle of rights 218 Burgazi 197 Bursa 1, 6, 8, 18, 25, 31, 32, 34, 53, 54, 57–63, 65, 66, 69, 92, 136–139, 145, 147–149, 151–153, 197, 198, 214 Bursa court records/ registers 57, 59, 62 Bursa İhtisab Kanunnamesi 58 butcher(s) 22, 35, 91, 93, 95, 181, 184, 185, 200, 209, 227, 243 butchers, Jewish 242 butchery 281 bürümcük 139, 145 bürüncükçü 61 Cabi 164 Caffa 180 Cairo 10, 25, 27, 31, 33, 88, 90, 93, 94, 96, 150, 177, 186, 201, 281, 284, 286 Canbakal, Hülya 177 candle-maker(s) 182–185, 193, 255 candle-making 35, 189, 281 cannon foundry 9 capital formation 182 cap-maker 206–208, 211 carpenter(s) 12 cauldron-maker(s) 200, 202, 203, 211, 215 centralization 29, 52, 65, 66 ceramic(s) 74–78, 80–83 chain migration 261, 270 Chalcraft, John 19, 39 charity 197, 208, 211, 215 Christian(s) 12, 147, 153, 192, 204, 228, 264 cigarette manufacture 281 circle of equity 26 cizye 184, 185

342

clientelist networks/ structures 289, 290 coercive rule 248 coffee 54, 273 coffee houses 18, 122, 140, 266, 272 coffee sellers 273 Cohen, Amnon 31, 199 Cole, Juan 287 competition 35, 225, 230–232, 279, 282–284, 287, 288, 290 competition from imported goods 20 construction workers 282 contractor(s) 279, 289 cook(s) 182, 183 coppersmith(s) 95, 99 Copt(s) 281 cotton(s) 34, 136, 138, 140, 145, 146, 149, 153, 156 court(s) 239, 246, 248, 249, 251, 252, 285 court(s), of qadis 238, 240 court ateliers 2 court records/ registers 187, 201, 211, 224, 231, 264 Covered Bazaar 113–115 credit 210, 212, 218, 225 Crete 177, 181 Crimea 137 cushion covers 142, 146 cushion covers, from Bursa 139 custom(s) 24, 73, 239, 240, 244, 245, 252, 263, 279, 286, 289, 290 customary law 279 customs registers 73 çanak 75 Çemizgezek 34 çes¸mes 110 çırak 266 Çizakça, Murat 21 çizmeci 158 çizmecibas¸ı 159 çömlek 75 çömlekçi 74 çuhacı 148 çuka 178 d/terlikçi esnâfı 158 dallâl 91 Damascus, Damascene 31, 33, 88–92, 94–96, 100, 104–106, 139, 141, 143, 158, 230 Damad İbrahim Paşa 117

Index

Darling, Linda T. 26 Dávid, Géza 32 De Moor, Tine 21, 22 debbağ(s) 63, 167, 186 defter(s) 54, 64, 74 Deguilhem, Randi 103 Demirtaş, Mehmet 9, 17, 25, 26 Denizli 145–147 deportation, from Istanbul 39 dergâh-ı ali yeniçerileri 176 destgâh 230 devşirme 182, 187 dikici 158, 159, 167 dikicibaşı 159, 162 Dimo son of Manto, baker 251 divan 238–241, 244, 252–254 Divanyolu 113–115 division of labour based on religion 10, 11 Diyarbakır, Diyarbekir 10, 166 duhani 224 dukkân 100, 102–104 Düzbakar, Ömer 25, 26 dyeing 281 dyer(s) 23, 54, 60, 243, 244, 273, 284 Ebu Su‘ud 221 ecnebis 183 economic differentiation 201 Edirne 18, 30, 178, 180 Edirne Kapısı/ Edirnekapı 111, 184 egalitarianism 195–197, 199, 200 Egypt, Egyptian(s) 39, 137, 180, 280, 281, 282, 283, 284, 289, 290, 291 ehl-i hibre 14, 57, 60, 61, 62, 65 ehl-i hiref 7, 59, 65 ehl-i suk 212 el-hac (Hacı) Salih b Ahmed 140, 141, 144, 145–147, 148, 149, 151–153 emin 54, 60 Emine bint İbrahim 141, 143 Emineddin b. Yusuf el-Hac, grocer 179 emîns 61 equality within guilds 36 equitable distribution of raw materials 195 Ergenç, Özer 63 Ergene, Boğaç 24 Ergin, Nina 33, 38, 277 Erünsal, İsmail 18, 19 eskici haffâfan 158

Index 343

esnaf 14, 32, 52–54, 58, 59, 61–63, 66, 218 esnaf vakıfları 59 esnaf yoklaması 260 esnaf-janissary connection 260 Establet, Colette 33, 177 estate(s) 99, 202, 205, 206, 207, 253 estate records/ inventories 89, 176, 204, 211 estate registers of janissaries 178 Et Meydanı 183, 185 ethnic/religious division of labour 260, 264 ethno-religious identity 37 ethno-religious restrictions 232 Evliya Çelebi 5, 10, 13, 23, 189, 190, 196 exploitation 39, 283, 286, 288, 290 Eyüp 6, 28, 109, 112, 113, 115–117, 119, 252, 253, 260, 262, 264, 272 Faroqhi, Suraiya 58, 92, 106, 210, 229, 230, 232, 262 farrier 92, 93 Fehér, Géza 84 Finkel, Caroline 3 fires 2 fishermen 264, 270, 289 flour sellers 240 foundation 202 French 142 futuwwa 53, 65, 194, 198, 199, 208, 211, 214 futuwwa-literature 197 futuwwa-treatises 197 fütüvvet 10, 13, 20, 27, 32, 36, 53, 62, 65, 69 fütüvvetname(s) 69, 197, 198, 214 Fütüvvetname-i Kebir 197, 198 Galata 9, 109,112, 113, 115, 116, 119, 159, 167, 260, 264 gardener(s) 28, 262, 270 gedik(s) 14, 15, 17–20, 22, 24, 34, 35, 37, 141, 153, 167, 210, 217–229, 231–233, 236, 251–253 gedik, müstekar 218 gedik as collateral against commercial debts 226 Genç, Mehmet 136, 137, 201, 204 Geographical Information Systems (GIS) 110, 121, 134

Gerber, Haim 63, 92, 157, 214 Gerelyes, Ibolya 32 Ghazaleh, Pascale 201 Gibb, H.A.R. 64 Golden Horn 5, 112–116, 210, 273 goldsmith(s) 33, 72, 74, 99, 196 Gölpınarlı, Abdülbaki 69 gön 166 grain measures 285 grain wholesaler(s) 180 Grand Bazaar 209, 259, 273 Greece 147 Greek(s) 180, 266, 270, 281 Greek-Orthodox 264 Greene, Molly 177 greengrocer(s) 241, 267 Greenwood, Anthony 180 Grehan, James 2 grocer(s) 211, 225, 226, 241, 267 grocers’ shops 226 grocery (stores) 227, 270 guarantor(s) 39, 241, 264, 263, 274 guild disputes 157 guild dissolution 20 guild elders 186 guild monopolies 167 guild petitions 183 guild privileges 166 guild wardens/ headmen 157, 159, 161, 164, 186, 188, 189 gun-founders 9 gunpowder 2, 9 Güçer, Lütfi 4 Hacı Abdullah, the campaign architect or builder 152 Hacı İbrahim 152 haffâf, haffaf 158, 16, 202 Hafız Hüseyin al-Ayvansarayi 111 Halep alacası 145 Halil Ağa, Seyyid 145 Halil b Halil 140–142, 149 hallac 151 hamam 133 hammam(s) 28, 109–116, 118–122, 133 Hanna, Nelly 31 han(s) 273 hânût 102–104 Hasan Abdullah, disgraced former guild head 285, 286 Haskan, Mehmet Nermi 111, 123

344

Hasköy 5, 109, 113, 117, 262 Hathaway, Jane 177 Hatice Turhan 5 Hatvan 33 havai gedik 16, 218, 225 hayyat 57 headman 186 hegemonic rule 248 hegemony 254 hemşehri 270–272 hirfet 14, 32, 52, 58, 62 hierarchic, hierarchy 36, 197, 199, 211, 249, 289 hisba 54 Hotin 28 Hungary, Hungarian 31, 33, 71–74, 77, 78, 80 Ibn Battuta 64 İbrahim Paşa 34 icare-yi mu‘accele, icare-i muaccele 210, 222 icareteyn 37, 221–226 İdrîs-i muhtefî 36 ihtisab 54, 181, 194 İhtisab nezareti 29 İhtiyarlar, ihtiyar(s) 186, 209 imâret 110 immigrants, see also migrants 274 İnalcık, Halil 5, 52, 161, 191, 196 India(n) 21, 137 inhisar 227, 228 interior boots 164 internal customs 166, 167 Iran(ian) 136 İslamoğlu-İnan, Huricihan 254 İsmail, shoe salesman 163 İstamat veled Kostanti 140, 149, 150, 152, 153 İstanbul Hammamcı Esnafı ve Tellâklarının İsimlerini Havi Defter 121 İstanbul Hammâmları Defteri 109, 119 İstarova 117, 120 itinerant labourers 266 ‘ıtkname 57 Izmir 1, 12, 136, 151, 179 Iznik 75, 82, 85 janissary, janissaries 3, 18, 25, 28–31, 35, 36, 64, 92, 93, 157, 158, 164, 166–168, 175–179, 182, 184–186,

Index

188, 189, 215, 232, 255, 259, 260, 272 janissary affiliation 187, 261 janissary barracks 184 janissary commanders 175 janissary connections 264, 272, 274 janissary corps 279, 280, 283, 289 janissary involvement in the supply trades 180 janissary merchants 178, 181 janissary presence in the food markets of Istanbul 181 Japan, Japanese 3, 21, 22 Jennings, Ronald 91 Jerusalem 10, 166, 199 Jews, Jewish 5, 10, 12, 147, 148, 151, 165, 192, 242, 264, 281 Jewish butchers 255 journeymen 230–234 judicial punishment 238, 239 justice 285, 286, 289 kadı 225 Kadı, İsmail Hakkı 12 kadıasker 175 Kadıköy 112, 113 kadim 17 Kafadar, Cemal 29, 35, 52, 177 kâhya 159 kalânisî 64 kalansuva, kalansuwa 54, 64 Kantarcıoğlu İbrahim, guild warden 161 kanun 26 kanunname, kanunnames 32, 59, 74, 75 Kanunname-i İhtisab-ı Bursa 59, 65 kapı kulları 89 Karababa, Eminegül 6 Karagözoğlu Hüseyin from Kestel 147 Karahisar-ı Sahib 243 kasapbaşı 193 Kasımpaşa 9, 109, 113, 117, 119 Kayseri 10, 91, 164, 271 kazgancılar 203, 216 kazzaz 148 kadak 16, 103 kefalet 11 kefalet defterleri 110, 263 kefil(s) 264 kemha 178 kemhacı 205, 230

Index 345

Kestel 148 ketancıs 186 kethüda(s) 14,19, 32, 52, 57–59, 61, 63, 159, 183, 186, 199, 200, 205, 209, 215, 216 kethüda temessükü 224 kethüda-ı habbazîn 59 Keyder, Çağlar 29 khan(s) 38, 88, 104 khulû 103, 104 Kınalızade Ali Efendi 235 Kırlı, Cengiz 11, 38, 110, 121, 262 kırmızı 142, 146 Kısmet-i Askeriyye 195 Kimiyo, Yamashita 110 kismet-i ‘askeriyye registers 176 koltukçu 62 Konya 63 kunduracı 158, 159 Kuran, Timur 21, 137 kutni 138, 139, 149–151, 153, 156 kutnici 140, 150, 151 Kütahya 64, 151 Kütükoğlu, Mübahat 255 labour-squeezing 284 leatherwork 83 legal culture 247 legitimacy 245, 248 legitimate governance 239 Lewis, Bernard 30 licence, to practice a trade 37 licensure related to monopolistic privileges 219, 220, 231 Limnos 243 linen thread 150 linen weaver(s) 186 Lis, Catharina 23 locksmith(s) 30 lonca 14, 218 long-distance commerce 216 long-distance traders 210 loom gediks 231 Lucassen, Jan 22 Luiten van Zanden, Jan 22 Mahmud I 142 Mahmud II 10, 30, 35, 242, 243, 246, 247, 255, 261 makhzân 104 Manisa 146 Manol, indebted shoemaker 160

Mantran, Robert 14, 190 market inspector(s) 240, 279 market welfare 26, 27 Martin, Germain 287 maslaha 24 maslahat-ı amme 242 mason(s) 282 mass migration 261 material culture 8, 30, 70, 79, 90 matrabazlar/madrabazlar 208 measure(s), measuring 284, 286 Mecca 88, 147, 153 Mehmed Ağa, selling gedik because of debts 226 Mehmed Ali/Muhammed Ali Pasha 280 Mehmed Rağıb Efendi 167 Mehmed II 59 Melek Ahmed Paşa 189 merchant(s) 180, 194–196, 198, 205–207, 209–212, 216, 261, 266, 273 merchant estates 206 mestçi 158, 164 meşin 166 mezalim 245 migrant(s) 242, 262, 263, 267, 272–274, 281 migrant labour 262 migrant workers 260, 263 migrant(s) into Istanbul 29, 39 migration 260, 267, 270, 274 migration into and out of Istanbul 3, 11, 27 mihr-i müeccel 141 Ministry of Pious Foundations 219 mîrî debbâğhâne(ler) 29, 167 mizan-ı harir 138 modernity and the ‘popular masses’, in Egypt 291 Moldavia 200 moneylending 147, 151, 157 monopolistic 157, 163, 227, 228, 234, 250 monopolizing 160, 285 monopoly, monopolies 17, 19, 20, 22, 157, 159, 164, 165, 168, 233, 278, 279, 285, 287, 290 Mosul 166 Mottahedeh, Roy 51, 52, 58 muaccele 221, 222, 224, 236 muhâsaba 93, 102,103 muhtesib 54

346

muleteer(s) 91 mumcu zımmi(s) 184 musalaha 58 Muslim(s) 9. 10, 11, 12, 13, 17, 57, 73, 74, 75, 76, 140, 147, 148, 151–153, 161, 167, 168, 204, 228, 230, 232, 242, 244, 245, 249, 264, 270, 272, 273, 274, 281 Mustafa Agha b. İsmail, janissary moneylender 185 Mustafa Âlî 7 Mustafa Beşe b. Abdullah, moneylender 184 Mustafa III 115, 261 mutton consumption 180 mücessem 145 müeccele 221, 222 müftü 175 mühimme defterleri 14, 119 Nagata, Mary Louise 22 naib 251, 252, 253 Naima 175 nakkaşhane 7, 8 Napoleon 137, 138 narh 137, 210 narh nizamları 240 nâtırs 109, 111, 113, 115, 116, 118–120, 122, 133 navluncu 180 negotiation(s) 248, 264 nizam 26 non-Muslim(s) 9, 11, 12, 13, 17, 24, 57, 152, 160, 168, 184, 230, 233, 242, 244, 245, 249, 255, 264, 273 Nurbanu Sultan 135 occupational licences 225 oppida 72 orducu(s) 58, 61 organization, of Ottoman potters in Hungary 83 Ortaköy Hamamı 112 Orthodox 6, 10, 140, 148, 266 Osman Ağa, Esseyid Elhaç, guild warden 161 Osman Beşe b. Bayram, merchant 179 Ottoman modernity 260 örf-i belde 253 örf-i sultani 245

Index

Özarslan, Yasemin 34 Öztürk, Said 205, 206, 216 paçacı 199 Pamuk, Şevket 21 pâpûşçu 158 partitioning of gediks 226 partner(s), partnership 200, 209, 212, 218, 223, 225 Pascual, Jean-Paul 33, 89, 177 patisserie-making 281 Patrona Halil 34, 117, 122, 262 patron-client relations 289 paying the taxes of fellow villagers 149 pazarcıbaşı 179 Pehlivan Hasan Beşe b. Hüseyin, janissary merchant 179 permanent tenancy 37, 220, 224, 227 peştemal 139 petition campaigns 38, 246, 247 petition(s) 278, 285 petitioner(s) 285, 286 petitioning 280, 284, 286, 288 pious endowments/ foundations 5, 15, 21, 33, 60, 92, 143, 144, 165, 176, 202, 203, 215, 219, 243 Pitarakis, Brigitte 6 plasterer(s) 228 Plovdiv (Filibe) 168 political punishment 238 porter(s) 54, 260, 264, 266, 270– 273, 284 potter(s) 32, 33, 72, 74, 75, 77, 82, 83 potter’s wheel 78, 83 pottery 80, 82 price regulations 240 profit 213 property, private 20 property, quasi-private 16, 18 protest(s) 278, 286–288, 290 provincial/ regional networks 264 public bath attendants 262 public baths see also hammam/hamam 260, 266, 277 public sphere 254 punishment(s) 238–241, 244, 245, 248 qadi(s) 63, 89, 90, 102, 140, 161–163, 179, 240, 241, 253 qadi’s court, see also court(s) 176, 179, 187, 188, 226, 227, 229, 233, 242, 280

Index 347

qadi of Istanbul 244 qadi registers/records 14, 32, 90, 137 qatirjî 91 qawwâf 92 Qazdagli 177 Quataert, Donald 19, 29, 92, 215 qul 93 qul oglu 92 ra’âyâ, reaya 36, 93, 105 racil(s) 176, 187 raison d’état 24 rakabî 92 raw materials 199–201, 212, 214, 229, 246, 279, 283 raw silk 138, 153 Raymond, André 31, 90, 94, 100, 104, 177 reductions in the cost of labour 283 rent(s) 15, 16, 93 resistance 283, 284, 286, 287, 290 resm-i damga 166 retail shops 227 retailers 210 Rhodes 243 Rumeli, Rumelia, Rumelian(s) 28, 109, 119–122, 262 Russia 136, 137 sabbağ, sabba ¯ğ 57, 61 saddle-maker(s), saddler(s) 167, 215 sahtiyân 164, 166 Samatya 233 sammân 91 Sarajevo 13 sarıcas 182 sarrâc 167 sarraf 207, 224 Scott, James C. 283 secondary market in gediks 37, 218, 222, 225 secondary market(s) 223, 234 securing raw materials 196 sekban 182 Selçuk, İklil 31, 32 self-exploitation 283, 284 Selim I 7, 65 Selim III 3, 10, 11, 24, 25, 30, 38, 137, 217, 228, 232, 243, 246, 255, 259, 261, 283 Serb(s) 180 Sert, Özlem 58, 216

Shechter, Relli 26 shaykh(s), sheikh(s) see also şeyh(s) 14, 36, 39, 51, 279, 283–287, 289 shoe guild(s) 157, 160 shoe salesman/vendor(s) 160, 162–164, 166, 167, 168 shoemaker(s) 22, 30, 35, 54, 148, 151, 158–160, 162, 163, 165–168, 202, 273, 282, 289 shoemaking 61, 202 shopkeeper(s) 97, 98, 99, 106, 208, 209, 218, 227, 229, 230, 233, 272 shop-owners 230 sicil/sicill defter(i) 54, 195 sicil(s) 57, 60, 73, 176, 178, 200, 201 Silivri 251 silk 34, 54, 136, 145, 150, 156 silk spinners 54 silk weavers 230 silversmiths 72 Simontornya 71, 79 Singer, Amy 4, 110, 134 Sivas 10, 34, 119, 120, 180, 270, 272 slaughterhouse 184 slave labour 53 slave(s) 57, 60, 64, 92 slavery 285 solidarity 94 Soly, Hugo 23 Southern Slav(s) 71, 78, 79 spice dealers 242 squeezing of labour 287 standardization 282 statistical state 28, 260 steward(s) 240, 241, 250, 252, 253 steward of the butchers 243 stonecutter(s) 12 stonemason(s) 271 street vendor(s) 160 sufı-futuwwa 194, 195, 198, 211, 279 sufi orders 280, 283 suk-ı sultanî 141 Sultan Bayezid Veli Hamamı 117 sultanic custom 245 Sunar, Mehmet Mert 29, 30, 31, 35 Süleyman Ağa, guild warden 161 Süleyman the Law-giver, the Magnificent 7, 221 Süleymaniye Hamamı 112 Sütlüce 113 Syria(n) 16, 17, 88, 137, 109 Szeged 74, 75

348

Şaban Beşe b. Mehmed, janissary shipowner 179 Şânî-zâde 6 şedd kuşanma 13 şehir kethüdası 57 Şenyurt, Oya 12, 16 şeriyye sicilleri 119 şeyh(s) 19, 61, 196 ta’ifa, pl. tawa’if 279 Tabriz 7 tâcir, tacirler, tâjir, tüccar 91, 167, 208–210 tahrir defterleri 71, 73, 80 ta’ife, taife 32, 52, 54, 180 tailor(s) 54, 93, 148, 282, 289 takıyeci 205 tanner(s) 22, 54, 63, 64, 66, 152, 167, 182, 183, 186, 209 tannery, tanneries 158, 167, 281 tanning 189 Tanzimat 166–168 tavern(s) 260 taxation 260, 261, 286 Tekirdağ 58 tellâks 109, 111, 113, 115, 116, 118–120, 122, 133 temettüat 260 tent-makers 205 tereke(s) 176, 190, 195, 216 tereke defterleri 73, 204, 205, 206 Tersane 259 testi 75 tevzi 149 Tezcan, Baki 3, 28, 29 The Garden of the Mosques 111, 122 tobacco monopoly 281 tobacco sellers 266 tobacco-dealer 224 Tokat 64, 180 tomruk(s) 183, 184 Tophane 115, 118, 120, 259 Topkapı Palace 114 Transdanubia 77, 79, 80, 82, 86 transmission of skills 31 Trebizond, Trabzon 203, 215 Tripoli 180 Tuğcular Arastası 160, 163 Tuncer, Yakup 59 Turna, Nalan 17, 18, 29, 31, 34, 35, 37 two-way movement between artisans and military men 183, 187

Index

unions and syndicates, in Egypt 289, 290 unskilled/untrained (of artisans) 163, 164, 168 Urfa 167 usufruct rights 222, 223, 226 usufruct rights related to permanent tenancy 219, 220 Uzunçarşı 114 Uzunçarşılı, İsmail Hakkı 30 Ülgener, Sabri 216 Üsküdar 28, 65, 112, 113, 115, 117, 119, 260, 264, 266 vakfıyye 202 vakıf(s), waqfs 57, 63, 64, 92, 103, 176, 204, 207, 211, 215, 216, 218–224, 226, 235, 250 Varlık, Nükhet 4 Vefa Hanı 165 Vilayet Ahkâm Defterleri 17 villages, abandoned/deserted 71, 72, 79 violence 238, 239, 248, 249 Vlach(s) 80 Von Hammer, Joseph 34, 138, 139, 140, 153 warden(s) 160, 165, 228, 229 warden of the bakers’ guild 226 water carrier(s) 264, 270, 273 water-wheel maker(s) 241 wazzân 91 weakening of the guilds 16 ‘weapons of the weak’ 278, 280, 283, 286, 288, 291 weaver(s) 95 weaving 281 wholesale merchant(s) 226, 230 Wiet, Gaston 102 Wilkins, Charles 31, 177 women 19, 30, 35, 91, 92, 136, 140, 148, 151, 225 women, Egyptian 281 women’s slipper makers 164 world economy, European-dominated 20, 39, 280 yarn 142 yaşmak 145 Yedikule 184 yemeni(s) 145, 146, 149 yemenici(s) 158, 159, 163

Index 349

yeniçeri 179 yerli 266 yerliyya 89 yevmiye-i dekakin 181 Yıldırım, Onur 11, 12, 15, 16, 17, 21, 35, 37 Yılmaz Diko, Gülay 35 Yılmaz, Fehmi 17, 37 Yi, Eunjeong 15, 27, 31, 36, 52, 178, 183, 186

yiğitbaşı(s) 14, 52, 57, 58, 60, 61, 165, 183, 185, 186, 209, 216, 228, 252 Yorgi son of Laza baker 251–253 Yusuf b. Kurd 178, 179 zenne derlikci 163 zımmi(s) zımmî 109, 204, 215, 244 Zilfi, Madeline 261 zulüm 24, 25, 245