Browsing by Subject "Ottoman history"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6

Open Access
Cash loans to Ottoman timariots during military campaigns (sixteenth-seventeenth centuries) : a vulnerable fiscal system?
(Brill Academic Publishers, 2016) Tekgül, Nil
Scholarship has argued that the Ottoman timar system was an efficient way to provide military forces in a non-monetized economy. As the state granted its sources of revenue to timariots in return for military service, it was financially relieved of the need to pay the expenses of the cavalry. Several documents so far neglected by scholars and evidencing the practice of cash loans to timariots during military campaigns prove otherwise. This paper analyzes the process of the generation of timariots' disposable income in the framework of actor-network theory. It is argued that the granting of loans demonstrated an attempt to regulate the cash flow of the timariot's income during campaigns, which was necessitated by problems of transforming tax revenues into disposable form. In the light of documents evidencing cash loans, it is further argued that cash loans reflect the vulnerability of the Ottoman timar system.
Open Access
Discourse, identity, and tribal banditry: a case study on Ottoman Ayntâb
(University of Wisconsin, 2011) Soyudan, M.
[No abstract available]
Open Access
Early modern Ottoman politics of emotion: what has love got to do with it?
(Brill Academic Publishers, 2020) Tekgül, Nil
Despite a growing interest worldwide in the history of emotions, the topic has attracted the attention of scholars of Ottoman history only recently. In an attempt to understand the motivations underlying political undertakings, this article explores emotions, with a specific focus on mahabbet (love) and merhamet (compassion). It examines the social meaning attached to and the cultural importance of love and compassion in early modern Ottoman political language. I claim that as a socially constructed and political emotion, compassion was historically and culturally significant, serving as a tool to formulate political relations of domination and subordination.
Open Access
A gate to the emotional world of pre-modern Ottoman society: an attempt to write Ottoman history from “the inside out”
(2016-05) Tekgül, Nil
Beginning in the 1980’s, the research produced on various fields of knowledge including history, neuroscience, sociology, psychology and anthropology asserted that emotions are not only a product of biochemical but also cognitive processes. It is now commonly accepted that emotions do have a history, they are socially constructed changing across time and space. This thesis is an attempt to revisit the relations established within the pre-modern Ottoman society, by taking emotions into consideration. The relations are analyzed within three dimensions; the state and the subjects, intra-communal relations and familial ties. It is argued that the Ottoman state, each taife/cemaat within the society and families were not only social but also emotional communities. The collectively constructed emotional norms and codes of each emotional community and their reflections in political relations, negotiations and daily practices are elaborated via linguistic and discourse analysis of the primary sources. This thesis offers a new perspective and direction in Ottoman social history and thus stands as a first such attempt. The main emotion code, as reflected in the primary sources, was “telif-i kulûb” and “mahabbet” between the ruler and the ruled; “rıza ve şükran” for the community members; and “hüsn-i zindegani ve musafat” for husbands and wives. It is emphasized in this thesis that not only the material but also the emotional dimension of the political and social relations was important in shaping relations and that they should not be avoided in Ottoman social history studies.
Open Access
A matter of belonging: place attachment of ordinary people in the 18th century Ottoman society
(2022-12) Karakaş Demir, Handan
This dissertation is a quest to discover the bonds established between ordinary Ottoman people and places by engaging with the concept of place attachment, an instrument of environmental psychology. It seeks to answer how place attachment affected relevant phenomenons such as identity formation, collective actions, and the idea of vatan by questioning how the Ottoman people’s daily practices and use of space shaped the place attachment under the 18th century atmosphere of transformations. In order to provide a holistic framework, all main elements of the place attachment are presented, including socio-economic factors, communal ties, residential conditions, occupations, life experiences, symbolic and ancestral connections, emotional tendencies, and the role of “unattached” ones. In this context, the embedded meanings of Ottoman space and the forms of place attachments developed by ordinary people in different spatial planes ranging from houses to Ottoman mahalles and cities, are examined through textual and linguistic analysis of primary sources. This study has revealed that ordinary Ottoman people, similar to their professional or religious communities, formed “spatial communities” at different scales, transcending their other affiliations and ties. Place attachment developed at various scales, such as among those who share the same cul-de-sac (tarîk-i hâss), among those registered to the same avârızhanes, among the guests of inns (hans), or among those who settled in the tehnâ corners of a city, paved the way for the formation of spatial communities. Sometimes everyday responsibilities, economic interests, symbolic ties, or sometimes efforts to protect the environment have been influential in shaping these ties between people and space. Within this framework, this study points to the decisive importance of “spatial communities” formed based on place attachment rather than the policy of tolerance, which was commonly used to explain the possibility of coexistence in Ottoman society. This thesis also discusses that place attachments were not strong enough to transform the practice of coexistence in Ottoman society into a higher identity after the 18th century. Therefore, the traditional forms of place attachments may have transformed into other forms of affiliations influenced by modernity, as Ottoman people’s place identity changed during the nation-based disintegration process of the Ottoman State.
Open Access
The patriarch and the sultan : the struggle for authority and the quest for order in the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire
(2011) Bayraktar Tellan, Elif
In the eighteenth century, the Rum Orthodox Patriarchate of Istanbul underwent a series of changes that were the result of eighteenth-century economic and social developments in Ottoman society. This study investigates the changing fortunes of the Patriarchate in the eighteenth century through a contextualization of these events in their Ottoman background. Despite the conclusions of previous historiography, the patriarch appears as more than a mere mültezim or a milletbaşı / ethnarch, functioning instead more as a religious leader of the Ottoman Orthodox community who acted according to the Ottoman principles of nizam [order] and the safety of the mal-ı miri. These two principles were an important part of the discourse of negotiations between the Patriarchate and the Porte in the eighteenth century, and were used efficiently by both sides. Many internal and external actors were involved in the events, including archons, Catholics, Protestants, the esnaf, and merchants both Muslim and non-Muslim. A case study of the mid-eighteenth-century Patriarch Kyrillos V Karakallos demonstrates how one patriarch effectively struggled to consolidate his authority vis-à-vis his opponents. Following the patriarchal term of Karakallos, the system of gerondismos was established, as a result of which the Patriarchate had come, by 1763, to be represented before the Porte as a collective identity. Overall, far from being a static entity, the Patriarchate appears to have been an active subject in the urban setting of the imperial city, engaged in a relationship with the financial and social networks of Ottoman society.