Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire

["photography 461 This photo, taken by Emile R\u00f6mler circa 1890, shows a typical Istanbul coffee house. (Courtesy of IRCICA) institutions, including the Ministry of War and the navy came to Istanbul with the troops of Helmuth Karl Bern- and army commands, also played a role in introducing hard Graf von Moltke (1800\u201391), the chief of staff of the and spreading photography throughout the land. Indeed, Prussian army. Rabach established the empire\u2019s first pro- military photography soon became its own specialty, and fessional photographic studio in 1856. Rabach\u2019s studio military academy graduates and engineers within the mili- was instrumental in coaching local photographers. The tary organization were at the forefront of the technology. Abdullah brothers (Abdullah biraderler, or fr\u00e8res Abdul- Captain H\u00fcsn\u00fc Bey (1844\u201396), Servili Ahmet Emin Bey lah), owners of one of the most renowned firms in the (1845\u201392), and \u00dcsk\u00fcdarl\u0131 Ali R\u0131za Pasha (d. 1907) are the history of photography, trained as apprentices in Rabach\u2019s first known Ottoman military photographers. The lat- studio and took it over when Rabach returned to Ger- ter served as the head of the Department of Photography many in 1858. These brothers, Wichen and Kevork (who in the Ottoman War Ministry. The Crimean War was the later converted to Islam and took the name Abdullah first war to be photographed, and all the action at the 1879 \u015e\u00fckri), were painters before taking up photography, a fact Turco-Greek War was recorded by photographers officially that played a considerable part in their success as pho- appointed by the state. tographers. They improved Rabach\u2019s studio and played a significant role in the general spread and acceptance of THE ABDULLAH BROTHERS AND photography. In addition to their work in the studio, they STUDIO PHOTOGRAPHY tried to capture the daily life and works of art in Istanbul, contributing ultimately to what would become the core In addition to giving rise to war photography, the Crimean of the Y\u0131ld\u0131z Collection. Their efforts were appreciated War holds a special place in the history of Ottoman pho- by Sultan Abd\u00fclaziz; in 1862 he appointed them as offi- tography because it motivated many Western photog- cial photographers or ressam-\u0131 hazret-i \u0218ehriyari (literally, raphers to travel to Istanbul and produce new albums of imperial painter), a title that was continued by the next Istanbul and Anatolia. Another important aspect of the sultan, Abd\u00fclhamid II. As a privilege, this title and the war was the arrival of a chemist named Rabach, who","462 pilgrimage the Arabic waba, \u201cto be contaminated,\u201d the lethal ill- ness known simply as \u201cplague\u201d usually refers to bubonic tu\u011fra or monogram of the sultan was stamped on back plague, also known in the West as the Black Plague or the of all their photographs. Black Death. Pandemic throughout the empire from the beginning of the 16th century to the middle of the 19th At the 1866 International Paris Exhibition, the century, plague was caused by the bacillus Yersinia pestis Abdullah brothers\u2019 pictures were appreciated for their and was usually transmitted by means of rodents infested technique and aesthetic. They were recognized by the with infected fleas, facts that have only come to light press and gained international fame. Among the other since the demise of the empire in the 1920s. Although notable people photographed by them were King Edward the disease was endemic, meaning that it was both geo- VI of England, King Frederick III of Germany, King graphically widespread and constantly present at some Victor Emmanuel of Italy, Emperor Franz Joseph of Aus- level in the population, periodic epidemic outbreaks of tria-Hungary, Nasruddin Shah of Iran, the Egyptian khe- great virulence frequently resulted in a 75 percent mor- dive, and the families of the Ottoman sultans. tality rate among those affected. For this reason, plague was greatly feared both by Ottoman subjects and by the Upon the invitation of the khedive in 1866, the foreign travelers and traders who frequented the empire. Abdullah brothers opened a branch of their studio, in Egypt. Febus Efendi, an apprentice of the Abdullah broth- In its most serious outbreaks, the plague disrupted ers, replaced them as the palace photographer. Another the Ottoman economy by interrupting harvests in the Abdullah brothers apprentice, A\u015fil Samsun Apollon, who countryside and commercial activities and handicrafts used photography to capture the constant bustle of every- in the cities. The plague therefore was a decisive factor day life in the empire, later became a palace photographer at the root of the difficulties and weaknesses of the Otto- himself and established his own studio. man Empire in the 18th century. Other famous photographers of the late 19th century Without any modern understanding of germ theory, include Kargapulo, who photographed life in Istanbul, Ottoman doctors, like those in the West, hypothesized and Niclaides, Michailidis, and Vafiadis, who photo- that plague was an airborne infection caused by mias- graphed and produced albums of existing buildings and mas (unpleasant or unhealthy air), carried by the wind. those under construction. Another early photographer, An alternative theory attributed the spread of plague to Rahmizade Bahattin Bey (Baha Ediz), began his photo- demons, or jinni. graphic career in Crete before moving on to Istanbul and opening studios in several other places. TRADITIONAL RESPONSES TO THE PLAGUE With the dawn of the 20th century, Ottoman pho- Plague was present even in the earliest centuries of Islam, tography developed its most ambitious project yet, the the Prophet Muhammad having apparently issued com- World Archives started by Albert Kehn. Before Kehn\u2019s mands indicating the proper behavior that must be bankruptcy brought the project to a standstill, the four adopted by Muslims during an epidemic; according to photographers involved had made 1,557 plates of Ana- certain hadith, or traditions reporting the words and tolia between 1912 and 1923. Stephanie Passet contrib- deeds of the Prophet, the faithful were instructed to uted 85 plates of Istanbul in 1912, Auguste Leon created remain where plague is raging, submitting themselves 143 plates of Istanbul and Bursa in 1913 and 23 plates to God\u2019s will, which punishes nonbelievers; at the same of Bursa in 1918, and Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Gadmer produced 1,306 time, they should not enter areas already affected by the plates between the years 1922 and 1923. plague. The behavior and convictions of Muslims with regard to plague epidemics were thus established very Hidayet Y. Nuho\u011flu early. These were affirmed by scholars of the medieval period, especially by Ibn Hajar al-Askalani in the 15th pilgrimage See hajj. century, who became an authority on the subject for the following centuries. pious foundations See charity; waqf. THE SPREAD OF PLAGUE AND MAJOR piracy See corsairs. EPIDEMICS plague (veba; waba) While not the only disaster that It is mostly likely that the original source of plague in the troubled the Ottoman Empire between the 16th and Ottoman Empire was Iranian Kurdistan, in the Libyan 20th centuries\u2014floods, earthquakes, smallpox, drought, Desert, and the territory of the Assyr Range between and famine all taking their toll\u2014plague was the most the Hejaz and Yemen. It was from these areas that the frequent and deadly of all. Called veba in Turkish, from illness spread over vast territories by means of fleas and their rodent hosts, emerging with the most lethal impact,","of course, in the more densely populated regions of the plague 463 empire. In the 17th and 18th centuries the plague had thus entrenched itself in Albania, Epirus, Moldavia, MODERN RESPONSES TO EPIDEMIC Wallachia, Istanbul, Anatolia, and Egypt. From these areas the plague continued to spread by land and by sea Things began to change at the beginning of the 19th through the entire empire, aided by structures of trade century with the outbreak in the Near East in 1820 of a and government that relied on travel: couriers, traders, new epidemic illness, cholera, which originated in Ben- pilgrims, sailors, nomads, the military, and fugitives. gal where it had already been pandemic for centuries. At this time, cholera spread out of its initial geographic While it is known that plague was firmly estab- area through two routes. The northern route went lished in Europe in the 14th century, documentation of through Iran, then reached Russia through the Cau- plague epidemics in the Ottoman Empire remain sketchy casus and spread from there toward northern Europe through the 16th century. There was a major Ottoman and ultimately to the United States. The second route pandemic from 1572 to 1589, during which time, with was over water, by the Red Sea and the Mediterranean few short interruptions, the plague was widespread from Sea. Brought to Mecca by pilgrims from India, cholera the Near East to Egypt, in Anatolia, and in the Balkans contaminated pilgrims who had come from other parts and North Africa. In the 17th century records are of the Muslim world and who subsequently brought the more reliable and it is well documented, for instance, disease back to their homelands. that Algiers suffered from major outbreaks of plague approximately every two years during the entire course Confronted by the combined forces of cholera and of the century. In Cairo seven major outbreaks of plague plague, especially in the 1830s, Muslim leaders began were recorded by chroniclers in the 17th century, cover- to approach epidemic outbreaks with an altered under- ing some 18 years in total, though smaller outbreaks may standing. Looking at the importance of demographics have gone unrecorded. in their military and the economy, these leaders adopted the methods of protection against the plague and chol- The plague was equally frequent in the empire dur- era that had already been implemented in Europe. The ing the 18th century. During this time Istanbul was traditional Muslim submission to the divine will was affected for 68 years, Aegean Anatolia for 57 years, replaced, at least by the head of state, by an effort to rec- Egypt for 44 years, Albania-Epirus for 42 years, Bos- oncile Islamic law, or sharia, modern knowledge, and the nia for 41 years, Syria for 33 years, Bulgaria for 18 welfare of the state. Since the 18th century, the Austrian years, the regency of Algiers for 45 years, and the Empire had been protecting itself from the frequent out- regency of Tunis for 19 years. The majority of these breaks of plague that contaminated its Ottoman neighbor outbreaks were comparatively mild. The deadliest epi- with a cordon sanitaire, or buffer zone, which functioned demics, responsible for killing between one-tenth and effectively as the border between the two empires. This one-third of the population, and typically occurring border region was patrolled by Austrian soldiers who in the larger cities\u2014Istanbul, Salonika, and Aleppo\u2014 forbade entry into their empire except where quaran- arose about once every 20 years. There were two major tines were possible. Beginning in the 1830s the Ottoman plague epidemics in the empire at the beginning of the Empire, including the North African regions of Egypt, 19th century, in 1812\u201319 and in 1835\u201338, which rav- Tunisia, and Morocco, adopted a similar approach, giv- aged almost the entirety of the empire. From 1840\u201344 ing way to the administration and regulation of sanitation the plague seems almost to have disappeared from the and initiating a plan for lazarets (quarantine stations) to Ottoman Empire with the exception of limited out- inspect travelers and protect the empire\u2019s borders, both breaks in Cyrenaica from 1856\u201359 and three episodes land and water. These innovations, a part of the greater in Iraq (1856\u201359, 1874\u201377, and 1891\u201392). The plague policies of the Tanzimat modernization era, were aided resurged again in 1894 and isolated incidents continued by Westerners, both diplomats and doctors, who sought to affect the former Ottoman territories in Africa and to expand their arena of influence. The speed of the posi- Asia for more than half a century. tive results was remarkable. This was a result not only of the efforts of local sanitation institutions but also of the It is difficult to evaluate with precision the demo- natural extinction of the breeding grounds for plague in graphic effects of the plague on the empire. Nonetheless, the previous centuries. By the closing years of the 19th the 16th century seems to have benefited from a seem- century, the occasional reappearances of the illness, often ingly long remission and is perhaps responsible for an brought from the outside, were both rare and vigorously upsurge in population growth in Anatolia and the Near combated. East. This period came to an end in the 1580s; from then until about 1840, episodes of plague became more fre- Daniel Panzac quent, which may be responsible for the stagnation of Further reading: Daniel Panzac, La peste dans l\u2019Empire Ottoman population growth. ottoman, 1700\u20131850 (Leuven: \u00c9ditions Peeters, 1985); Daniel Panzac, Quarantaines et lazarets: l\u2019Europe et la peste d\u2019Orient, XVIIe\u2013XXe si\u00e8cles (Aix-en-Provence: \u00c9disud, 1986).","464 Poland between Sigismund I (r. 1506\u201348) of Poland and Sultan S\u00fcleyman I (r. 1520\u201366) that protected Poland\u2019s south- Poland Military confrontations with the Ottomans ern provinces from invasion and was concluded for the played a prominent role in shaping the national and lifetime of both rulers. In the following years, both sides Christian identity of Poland. In 1444, a Polish king was tacitly cooperated against the Habsburgs and supported killed in the Battle of Varna. The 17th century brought the anti-Habsburg candidate to the Hungarian throne, two Ottoman-Polish wars of 1620\u201321 and 1672\u201378, John Z\u00e1polya, who was married to a Polish princess. and the spectacular relief of Habsburg Vienna (1683), Along with France, Poland played a key role in the Otto- besieged by the Ottoman army of Kara Mustafa Pasha, by man European policy, directed against the Habsburgs. the Polish troops led by King Jan Sobieski. Yet Ottoman- Friendly Polish-Ottoman relations continued during the Polish relations were also characterized by long periods reign of the last Jagiellonian king, Sigismund II Augustus of peace and political cooperation, directed first against (r. 1548\u201372). the Habsburgs and then against Russia. Oriental goods and fashion, imported through trade and war, deeply OTTOMAN-POLISH RELATIONS IN THE influenced the material culture of Polish nobility. In the 17TH CENTURY 19th century numerous Polish political refugees found safe haven in the Ottoman Empire and participated in its Following the extinction of the Jagiellonian dynasty, the modernization. Porte supported anti-Habsburg candidates to the Pol- ish throne. The subsequent elections of Henri de Valois EARLY CONTACTS WITH THE OTTOMANS (1573\u201374), Stephan B\u00e1thory (1576\u201386), and Sigismund III Vasa (1587\u20131632) were thus favorably received in Poland was first united under Duke Mieszko I from the Istanbul. However, the fierce Catholic policy of Sigis- Piast dynasty (r. ca. 960\u2013992), who subjugated the vari- mund III and his rapprochement with Vienna soon ous tribes of Western Slavs. Located on the eastern terri- strained mutual relations. The rising activity of Ukrai- tories of Western Christendom, north of the Carpathian nian Cossacks raiding the Ottoman shores of the Black Mountains and south of the Baltic Sea, between 1340 Sea, and the renewed Polish involvement in Moldavia, and 1387 Poland extended its borders toward the Black caused a further deterioration of relations between the Sea by annexing the Ruthenian principality of Haly\u010d and two powers. In 1620 the Polish grand hetman, Stanis\u0142aw forcing Moldavian rulers to acknowledge Polish suzer- \u017b\u00f3\u0142kiewski, led a preemptive campaign to Moldavia. ainty. The Polish-Lithuanian union (1385\u201386)\u2014which Besieged and defeated at \u0162u\u0163ora ( Cecora) by the Otto- was initially formed as an alliance against the Teutonic man-Tatar army of Iskender Pasha, the Polish troops Knights but lasted long after the Teutonic threat had were routed and the hetman was killed. The following subsided\u2014brought to the Polish throne the Jagiellonian year, Sultan Osman II (r. 1618\u201322) led a major expedi- dynasty, which held a long tradition of contact with the tion against Poland-Lithuania. Due to an unprecedented Muslim khans of the Golden Horde. mobilization of Polish-Lithuanian troops, supported by the Ukrainian Cossacks, the defenders were able to The first Polish embassy to the Ottoman court was withstand a major siege in the fortified camp near Kho- sent in 1414. In the 15th century Polish-Ottoman rela- tin (Chocim, present-day Xotyn, Ukraine). The truce of tions were mostly peaceful while Ottoman expansion Khotin (1621), confirmed with a formal ahdname (1623), was directed against Hungary. Even when Ladislaus restored the peace. III (r. 1434\u201344) of Poland and Hungary, encouraged by the pope, set out for his fateful Crusade of Varna (1444), The pro-Habsburg stance of the Polish court during Poland officially stood outside the conflict, although the European Thirty Years\u2019 War (1618\u20131648) resulted many Polish volunteers perished along with the young in another short-term military conflict when the Otto- king. In 1484 Bayezid II (r. 1481\u20131512) attacked the Pol- man commander Abaza Mehmed Pasha entered Podolia ish vassal Moldavia, capturing two Moldavian ports at (1633). The crisis of Poland-Lithuania, resulting from a the mouth of the Danube and Dniester rivers. Poland six-year uprising by the Cossacks that erupted in 1648 did not react initially, even concluding a peace treaty over the rights granted them by the Polish kings, and with the Sublime Porte in 1489 (see ahdname); however, subsequent wars against Russia (1654\u201367) and Sweden in 1497 the new king John I Albert (r. 1492\u20131501) led an (1655\u201360), caused the Porte to assist the Poles in order expedition to Moldavia, resulting in a crushing defeat for to maintain equilibrium in eastern Europe. The Crimean the Polish forces. khans (see Crimean Tatars) were encouraged to con- clude an alliance with Warsaw, and in 1657 the Ottoman The 16th century brought further Ottoman expan- governor of \u00d6z\u00ef was ordered to assist the Polish king. sion against Hungary and the final subjugation of Mol- davia. Although the last Jagiellonian king of Hungary, The new active northern policy led by the Ottoman Louis II, perished in the Battle of Moh\u00e1cs (1526), K\u00f6pr\u00fcl\u00fc viziers soon resulted in another crisis. The the reaction of the Polish Jagiellonians was rather weak. In fact, the year 1533 brought an unprecedented treaty","Ukrainian Cossacks, disillusioned with both Warsaw political satire 465 and Moscow after the signing of a Polish-Russian treaty (1667), asked for Ottoman protection. The Porte, fear- rale Christianitatis), Polish-Ottoman relations remained ing a Polish rapprochement with Moscow and Vienna, peaceful most of the time. Mutual trade flourished and acknowledged the Cossack leader Petro Doro\u0161enko as Ottoman fashion greatly influenced the Polish nobil- its vassal (1669) and declared war on Poland. In 1672 the ity, including men\u2019s clothing, tapestry, arms, armor, and Ottoman army, led by Sultan Mehmed IV (r. 1648\u201387) horse trappings. Numerous Turkish loanwords, associ- and Grand Vizier K\u00f6pr\u00fcl\u00fc Ahmed Pasha, captured the ated with horse riding and the imported habits of coffee key Polish fortress of Kamani\u00e7e (present-day Ukraine), drinking and pipe smoking, exist even today in the Pol- center of the province of Podolia. According to the Buc- ish vocabulary. zacz Treaty (1672), the Polish king agreed to pay a tribute, Podolia was ceded to the Porte, and Cossack Ukraine was Dariusz Ko\u0142odziejczyk mutually recognized as an Ottoman vassal. Although the See also Austria. Polish-Lithuanian Diet rejected the treaty and the grand Further reading: Zygmunt Abrahamowicz, \u201cLeh,\u201d in hetman Jan Sobieski won a brilliant victory against the Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., vol. 5 (Leiden: Brill, 1960\u2013), Ottomans at Khotin (1673), the subsequent war proved 719\u2013723; Norman Davies, God\u2019s Playground: A History of inconclusive and ended with the truce of \u017burawno (1676), Poland (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Dari- confirmed by the Polish embassy to Istanbul (1678). usz Ko\u0142odziejczyk, Ottoman-Polish Diplomatic Relations (15th\u201318th Century): An Annotated Edition of \u2018Ahdnames In 1683, the Ottomans once again clashed with the and Other Documents (Leiden: Brill, 2000); War and Peace: Poles as Poland-Lithuania joined the Habsburg-Ottoman Ottoman-Polish Relations in the 15th\u201319th Centuries (exhi- War and Jan Sobieski, now dignified as King John III, led bition catalogue) (Istanbul: Turkish Republic Ministry of a rescue expedition to help the Habsburgs defend Vienna. Culture, 1999). In 1684 Warsaw entered the anti-Ottoman Holy League along with Vienna and Venice, but only the Treaty of political satire The Ottoman Empire had a rich tra- Karlowitz (1699) restored Podolia to Poland. dition of humor and satire, embodied in poetry and in the sharp repartee of the shadow-puppet theater called During the 18th century, the Porte strove to pre- Karag\u00f6z. Satirists writing in the late Ottoman era (1876\u2013 serve Polish sovereignty against the rising pressure of 1920) drew from the multiple artistic and narrative tra- Russia. For instance, in 1711 Czar Peter I was forced to ditions of Istanbul, a cosmopolitan city whose culture remove his troops from Poland-Lithuania. In 1768 the mingled Turkish, Persian, Arabic, Greek, Italian, French, Porte, encouraged by Polish dissidents, declared war on and Armenian influences, among others. Satire appeared Russia, demanding its disengagement from Polish inter- in the many languages of the Ottoman capital and in nal affairs. The war, known in Turkish as Leh Seferi, or, various forms, from one-man plays, to tea-house story- the Polish War (see Russo-Ottoman War of 1768\u201374), tellers\u2019 tales, to broadsheets, to cartoons. In the mid-19th ended with the first partition of Poland in 1772 and the century the press became a primary venue for political, Treaty of K\u00fc\u00e7\u00fck Kaynarca (1774), disastrous for the social, and cultural expression, including the work of Ottomans. The Russian victory in the next Russo-Otto- satirists. Some Ottoman newspapers, or gazettes, were man War of 1787\u201392 hastened the second (1793) and entirely humorous or satirical. Others included elements third (1795) partitions of Poland. of satire within their pages in the form of jokes, essays, editorials, and cartoons. In both cases satiric precedents During the 19th century, numerous Polish refugees were apparent in the use of dialogue, rhyming captions arrived in the Ottoman Empire. After the failed Polish for cartoons, and Karag\u00f6z characters as mascots and uprising against Russian rule of 1830\u201331, a settlement spokespersons. for Polish refugees was founded on Ottoman soil in 1842. The settlement was named Adampol after its founder, As in many other countries at this time, censor- Prince Adam Czartoryski, although its popular Turkish ship was prevalent, and the writers and artists of the name became Polonezk\u00f6y (Polish village). Another wave Ottoman Empire were not free to publish anything they of Polish refugees, participants of the Hungarian upris- wanted. Autocratic rulers such as Sultan Abd\u00fclhamid II ing, arrived in 1849, including General J\u00f3zef Bem, who (r. 1876\u20131909) were sensitive about the public image of adopted Islam along with the new name of Murad Pasha. their regimes and carefully monitored criticism, direct or Among the other prominent Polish immigrants who par- implied, in the press. Publications could be edited or shut ticipated in the modernization of the empire were Micha\u0142 down if government censors found their content objec- Czajkowski (Sad\u0131k Pasha) and Konstanty Borz\u0119cki (Mus- tionable. Editors and satirists, however, were resource- tafa Celaleddin). ful and found various ways to circumvent the censors, including smuggling in banned materials and printing Although Poland identified itself internally and offending newspapers under new titles. Nonetheless, the externally as \u201cthe bulwark of Christianity\u201d (antemu-","466 political satire Satirist and cartoonist were preoccupied with the threat of European imperialism. In this image the cartoonist drew laws governing the content and tone of the press served Britain as a greedy giant, leaning on the pyramids of Egypt to limit severely what could be presented to the Ottoman whereas young Egyptians protest against the English occupa- reading public. Forbidden topics included any critique of tion of Egypt. (Personal collection of Palmira Brummett) the sultan and any mention of challenges to monarchies abroad. Thus few lawful targets remained for the satirist\u2019s new political and social regimes would eliminate the ills pen. That changed with the second constitutional revolu- of the past. tion of July 1908. Many characters populated the Ottoman cartoon The period 1908\u201309 is unique in the history of Otto- frame, some real and some fictional. The sultan and gov- man satire and the press. In the aftermath of the revolu- ernment officials were the most prominent objects of tion, government censorship was temporarily suspended cartoon scorn, as were individual viziers and government as the form the new regime would take was contested. In bureaucracy. Figures who were emblematic of their class, the year after the revolution, more than 240 new Otto- from wealthy socialites to maids and porters, were also man-language gazettes were published in Istanbul alone, commonly found on the cartoon pages. Extremely popu- among them an array of \u201cfunny papers\u201d that ran the lar in the satirical press were the characters of shadow- gamut from gentle humor to pointed and vehement sat- puppet theater, especially the irrepressible everyman ire. There was an explosion of satire in the newly liber- Karag\u00f6z (Black-Eye) and his sidekick Hacivat. Shadow- ated press that exuberantly scrutinized such themes as puppet theatre was a fast-paced, dialogue-rich, satiri- despotism, modernity, the transformation of gender cal theatrical form that translated very readily into the roles, new technologies, and European imperialism. satirical press of the late Ottoman Empire. It lampooned gender relations, class conflicts, ethnic differences, and That satire found its most dramatic form in a government authority in all its forms. Karag\u00f6z, like other great outpouring of cartoons. Satirical gazettes (mizah cartoon figures, served as the man on the street who had mecmualar\u0131), in the aftermath of the revolution little control over his own destiny but refused, nonethe- expressed the desires and anxieties of the literate classes less, to submit willingly to government regulations or and of the public as a whole. Suddenly the sultan was standard social conventions. He was a perfect spokesman the target of vehement criticism, accused of despotism, for the anxieties and ambiguities of the revolutionary era. greed, and abuse of his subjects. Cartoons depicted him A gazette entitled Karag\u00f6z, which included both picto- as a bloody tyrant, a buffoon, or a weakling. The new rial and narrative satire, was published from August 1908 parliamentary deputies were portrayed as lazy, ineffec- tual, and unlikely to save the empire from the enemies that surrounded it. Satirists were also preoccupied with the threat of European imperialism in its various forms (political, economic, and cultural). Cartoonists drew Britain as a greedy giant, leaning on the pyramids of Egypt or extort- ing riches from the Persian Gulf. France was a purveyor of immoral or frivolous fashions that tempted Ottoman elites to squander the resources of the empire. In the cartoon frame, the empire was envisioned as trapped between the old and the new, unable to attain the free- dom associated with the French Revolution but unwill- ing to return to the absolutism of sultanic rule, a form of government that many in the press thought unlikely to survive. Abd\u00fclhamid was depicted as one among a cara- van of monarchs (including the shah of Iran and the Rus- sian czar) who were destined for extinction. While politics was the primary area of concern in the satirical press, cartoonists also ranged widely over social and cultural topics. They targeted the demand for wom- en\u2019s rights, spirit mediums, and new-style entertainments such as ice-skating and cafes. They also lampooned \u201cold\u201d styles of dress, education, healing, and gender relations as obsolete, superstitious, or backward. Satirists viewed the Ottoman situation with a jaundiced eye; they were not persuaded that change was necessarily good or that","until 1928. The cartoon press of the empire thus survived population 467 the censorship that was reimposed after the abortive counterrevolution of 1909. Like that of the shadow-pup- including plague, warfare, and religiously motivated pet theater, its satire changed to suit the political and migrations, from the end of the Russo-Turkish War in social issues of the day, from the Balkan Wars (1912\u2013 1774 until the start of World War I in 1914. 13) to World War I (1914\u201318), and from Western-style fashions to female suffrage. A GREAT DIVERSITY Although historical analysis of Ottoman cartoons has The formation of the Ottoman Empire, which took place as yet been limited, there seem to have been at least two between the 14th and 17th centuries, consolidated many workshops of artists producing cartoons in Istanbul in different groups of people under the power of the sultan, the revolutionary period. Cartoons passed back and forth although the state never sought to restructure them all between gazettes in the capital and those in other cities, into one nation. As long as the sultan was revered, order such as Izmir in western Anatolia. As in other forms of was respected, taxes were paid, and the soldier levy (or art, cartoons were referential, sharing and copying motifs conscription) was met, individuals were free to practice not just from the Karag\u00f6z theatre but from Ottoman their religion, speak their language, and live in the pri- and foreign artists. The Ottoman press also reprinted vate sphere of their religious community or millet\u2014an cartoons from foreign gazettes such as the French Rire institution recognized by the state\u2014all while respecting (Laughter). Cartoonists, like printers, might work for the basic principles of Ottoman society. The Ottoman multiple publications at the same time, some innovat- Empire was therefore an enormous conglomerate of both ing, others crafting images to suit the editorial policies large and small communities of greater or less impor- of individual gazettes. Mehmed Fazl\u0131, editor of the peri- tance that coexisted without any real mixing. odical Lak lak (Stork), penned his own cartoons. While many cartoonists signed their work, numerous others left It is practical to first distinguish between the their work unsigned, thus heightening the sense that car- nomads and the sedentary population. If the latter were toons were public property. Among those who did sign greater in numbers, the former held a more important their work, the variety of styles and of ethnic names was place within the empire, if only by the fact that the a reflection of the cosmopolitan and multiethnic nature Turks, the original founders of the empire, were them- of Istanbul itself. selves a nomadic group that had come from Central Asia centuries earlier. In Ottoman culture, nomads\u2014 Palmira Brummett especially those of Turkoman ancestry\u2014held a certain Further reading: Metin And, Karag\u00f6z: Turkish Shadow prestige. Apart from the Roma (more commonly known Theatre (Istanbul: Dost Yay\u0131nlar\u0131, 1987); Palmira Brummett, by the pejorative term \u201cgypsy\u201d), who were spread Image and Imperialism in the Ottoman Revolutionary Press, throughout the empire, nomads were typically found 1908\u20131911 (Albany: State University of New York Press, in certain areas of the Balkans, such as Mount Rho- 2000); M\u00fcge Go\u00e7ek, ed., Political Cartoons in the Middle dope and Dobruja. They could also be found in cen- East: Cultural Representation in the Middle East (Princeton, tral and eastern Anatolia. In the Near East there were N.J.: Markus Wiener, 1998); \u015e\u00fckr\u00fc Hanio\u011flu, Preparation for the nomadic Bedouins of Syria, Iraq, the Arabian a Revolution: The Young Turks, 1902\u20131908 (Oxford: Oxford Peninsula, North Africa, Egypt, on the coastal plain University Press, 2001). (Sahel) of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania (in present-day Libya), in Tunisia, and in the regency of Algiers. With population In 1768, when the war against Russia the exception of the Roma, most of whom were Chris- began, the Ottoman Empire was an enormous political tians, the nomads were Muslims. Although they were structure that extended over 3,000 miles (5,000 km) from likely to have been comparatively few, it was never pos- the Atlas Mountains in the west to the Persian Gulf in the sible to establish an exact number. These few traveled east, and 1,800 miles (3,000 km) from the source of the great distances and opposed the value of agricultural Dniester River in the north to the rapids of the Assouan (fertile) lands set by the state, especially in Anatolia. in the south, stretching across three continents. In con- sidering the population of these vast territories, there are By comparison, with the exception of the Balkans, two main features to be considered: the great diversity the sedentary population occupied the Asian and Afri- of the people of the imperial territories, and the unusual can regions of the empire very sparsely (in very limited pattern of population growth and migration that shaped areas) and were primarily settled in coastal regions such the growing and changing empire. Thus both the com- as western Anatolia and the shores of the Black Sea, or in position of the population and the overall number of Syria, Tripolitania, and northern Africa. They also popu- imperial subjects were affected by successive disruptions lated the valleys of important rivers such as the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates. In regard to the sedentary population, the urban and rural populations must be distinguished. The great majority of the inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire lived","468 population in nine conflicts, totaling 35 years of war. Under such con- ditions, population growth was limited or nonexistent. in the countryside, but one of the characteristics of the population is the high number and significance of people According to the combined information from these in the cities, which created a dense and coherent urban surveys, scholars have been able to determine that the network where governors, administrations, and garri- Ottoman population at this time included approximately sons were stationed and where the important economic 25 million subjects. Despite the lack of precision, these activities took place. This urban setting was an essential statistics are important because they paint a picture of element in the cohesion of the vast empire. Other than the population of the empire at the onset of fundamen- Istanbul, whose population was estimated to be approxi- tal changes that greatly affected the following decades. mately half a million inhabitants at this time\u2014fewer Beginning in the 1830s, the Ottoman lands began to inhabitants than London, comparable to Paris, and more diminish. In 1830 the Empire covered more than a mil- populous than Vienna, Madrid, Berlin, or St. Peters- lion square miles (3 million square km) and included 25 burg\u2014many other large cities (50,000\u2013100,000 inhabit- million inhabitants, but that same year the empire lost ants) emerged within the empire by the end of the 18th control of Greece, Serbia, and the regency of Algiers. century. They included port cities such as Salonika, Beginning in the 1840s, the eradication of the plague Izmir, Tunis, and Algiers, and inland cities such as and the return to peaceful times allowed for a mod- Bursa, Aleppo, Sofia, Baghdad, Damascus, Sara- est, yet real, growth in the population of the empire. On jevo, and the second most important city of the empire, the other hand, in 1856 the empire lost Moldavia and Cairo, with 260,000 inhabitants.. Wallachia. Between 1878 and 1882 it lost Tunisia, Egypt, Cyprus, Kars and Ardahan, Bosnia, Thessaly, A third important distinction within the popula- and Bulgaria; between 1911 and 1913 it lost Alba- tion is between Muslims and non-Muslims. The former, nia, Macedonia, Western Thrace, Crete, the Dodeca- whether Turks or Arabs, held a higher position within nese, Tripolitania, and Cyrenaica. By 1914 the Ottoman Ottoman society; for example, only Muslims could par- Empire was reduced to about 500,000 square miles (1.3 ticipate in administrative or military functions. Chris- million square km) and 21 million inhabitants. It had tians of various denominations and Jews held a lower become essentially an Asian power. position but were protected by their status as dhimmis, or Peoples of the Book since it was considered that the Population growth played a role in the evolution of the Christian and Jewish bibles were precursors to the Quran Ottoman population in the years between 1830 and 1914, and that Moses and Jesus were prophets who preceded but another demographic phenomenon also had a great Muhammad. The Balkans were mostly Christian in the impact: migration. Emigration began in the 1860s and 18th century and Muslims dominated Anatolia, the Near affected 80 percent of Christians. Some left for economic East, and northern Africa, yet there were substantial reasons, but for many, it was also a means of escape from groups of different communities present in all the prov- the devastating Armenian Massacres that took place in inces of the empire, especially in the cities. the 1890s and again between 1908 and 1910. In the years between 1860 and 1914, it is estimated that 1,200,000 A DISORGANIZED DEVELOPMENT Ottoman subjects departed for the United States, Argen- tina, and Australia, notably from Syria and Lebanon. The empire conducted property surveys (tahrir defteri) in the 15th and 16th centuries. Based on these surveys, At the same time that other groups were leaving the the population of the empire in 1520 was estimated at empire, however, Muslims were relocating within the approximately 12 to 13 million. By the 17th century, this empire in ever greater numbers. Every time a province figure may have reached 22 to 25 million, but these sur- was lost, a part of its Muslim population relocated to the veys were not renewed, and it was not until the 19th cen- remaining parts of the empire. This was particularly true tury that the state began to investigate the real numbers for the Balkans, where the ancient inhabitants of Ser- of its population. bia and of Moldavia-Wallachia settled in Bulgaria in the 1850s. After 1880, a portion of the Bosnian and Bulgar- The first inquiry, which only covered one part of the ian Muslims sought refuge in Macedonia. After the Bal- empire, dates from 1831. It included part of the Balkans, kan Wars (1912\u201313), Istanbul welcomed nearly 200,000 the western half of Anatolia, and the Aegean Islands. To persons fleeing Macedonia and Thrace. Yet a majority complete the picture, however, there is the census of 1831 of these Muslim immigrants\u2014about four million out of ordered by Mehmed Ali in Egypt and Syria. This census the five to six million who came to reside in the Ottoman is particularly valuable because it was recorded at the end Empire between 1783 and 1913\u2014were from the Russian of an era characterized by high birth rates accompanied Empire. The first of these were the Crimean Tatars by high mortality rates. The latter were a result of natural who entered the empire between the end of the 18th cen- disasters, notably the plague, aggravated by man-made tury and the 1850s. It is estimated that they numbered disasters, such as foreign wars and internal revolts. In the 73 years from 1768 to 1841, the Ottoman Empire was involved","1,800,000 in 1922. The Circassians, two million or less, Prime Ministry\u2019s Ottoman Archives 469 comprise the second ethnic group that arrived beginning in the 1860s. Like the Tatars, the Circassians first settled the presidios menores (minor presidios) of Melilla, Pe\u00f1\u00f3n in the Balkans before relocating to Anatolia. The loss of de V\u00e9lez, and Alhucemas. During the 18th century the the Balkan provinces and the migration movements\u2014the Bourbon monarchs, who ruled Spain from 1700 through replacement of the Christian population by the arrival of 1808, ordered regular evaluations of the merit of main- Muslims\u2014reinforced the Muslim character of the Otto- taining the presidios menores and although several reports man Empire in the second half of the 19th century. In considered abandoning them, Spain retained sovereignty 1830, Muslims accounted for 75 percent of the popula- over them. The most important period of instability for tion; in 1914, they made up 81 percent. the North African presidios occurred during the siege of Ceuta, between 1694 and 1727. Daniel Panzac Further reading: Halil \u0130nalc\u0131k and Donald Quataert, Presidios such as Ceuta also served as penitentiaries eds., An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire and became an important source of labor for the Span- (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). ish Empire. Spanish authorities in the 16th and 17th centuries sentenced criminal offenders to hard labor in presidio Presidio is a Spanish term that originally the royal galleys or military presidios. Prisoners (presid- referred to the fortresses established by the Spanish iarios) performed maintenance tasks and contributed monarchs along the Mediterranean coastline and in the to the construction of fortifications and military facili- frontier areas of the Americas and the Philippines. Pre- ties. In Oran and Ceuta, prisoners whose crimes were sidios emerged as fortified military complexes out of the not considered heinous were allowed to be part of the need to exert control over and offer protection to areas garrison\u2019s military force, which offered them a chance located in otherwise unprotected or difficult geographic at redemption. While their degree of freedom inside the positions. In North Africa, the presidio satisfied a presidio varied, prisoners were still subject to all conven- defensive function (control of the coastline against cor- tional Spanish rules and regulations, being prosecuted, sair activities) while simultaneously offering important for instance, by the Spanish Inquisition well into the late strategic support for launching military operations and 18th century. During the 18th century, the African pre- protecting Spain\u2019s commercial interests in the Ottoman sidios, most significantly Ceuta, harbored prisoners sent Empire. from the Americas. The origins of the presidio go back to the establish- Vanesa Casanova-Fernandez ment of military frontier posts along the North Afri- Further reading: Ruth Pike, \u201cPenal Servitude in the can coastline during the reign of the Catholic monarchs Spanish Empire: Presidio Labor in the Eighteenth Century.\u201d in the late 15th century. This network of presidios was Hispanic American Historical Review 58 (1978): 21\u201340. designed to play an important part in the strategy of Spain, which wished to exert a limited control over the Prime Ministry\u2019s Ottoman Archives The Prime territory through a combination of military strength Ministry\u2019s Ottoman Archives or Ba\u015fbakanl\u0131k Osmanl\u0131 and a network of complex alliances with local Muslim Ar\u015fivi is the largest and richest source of Ottoman authorities. Spanish presidios in Italy and North Africa archival material in existence. Located in Istanbul, the played a key role in the development of new military archives belong to the Turkish Republic\u2019s Prime Minis- tactics as well as the formation of a new type of soldier. try and include documents of the central governmental Tactically, the presidio contributed to the inauguration bureaus of the Ottoman Empire. However, it also includes of a new understanding of warfare in the early mod- documents related to some 40 present-day countries ern period (late 15th and early 16th centuries) through reflecting its territorial expansion and multiethnic nature. combining land-based operations with maritime ones. The archives are thus an international record office, and The transformations brought about by the military rev- because of the extent and diversity of its collection, it is olution of this period, such as the use of portable firing one of the most significant archive offices in the world. weapons, modern artillery, and new warfare techniques, affected the evolution of presidios. In addition, the North HISTORY African presidios had to withstand the particular raid- ing and siege techniques employed by the Muslim groups Since its foundation, the Ottoman Empire attached great in this area as well as the difficulty in supplying military importance to keeping records. In the first capitals, Bursa equipment and water to the soldiers stationed there. The and Edirne, authorities carefully kept documents and most important presidios in North Africa were the pre- records related to the state. However, the records in Bursa sidios mayores (major presidios) of Ceuta and Oran and were substantially damaged and depleted in 1402 during the invasions of Timur, the founder of the Timurids in Transoxania (now Uzbekistan), who defeated the Otto- mans in 1402 and in subsequent wars. Therefore, very few","470 Prime Ministry\u2019s Ottoman Archives endangered and transported 208 chests of documents, foremost among them the imperial order documents, to documents related to the foundation period of the Otto- Konya. After one year, these documents were brought man state have survived. In Edirne, records of the state back to Istanbul via ferries and military trains. were preserved in the royal court of the Edirne Palace. In 1923, when the Republic of Turkey was declared, After the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the Department of Treasury of Documents was formed documents were kept in the Seven Towers or Yedikule. again as a unit bound to the Prime Ministry Private The archives, which had been transported to the Sulta- Office Department in order to protect and preserve Otto- nahmet district of Istanbul, were later placed in the Royal man documents and possessions. The organization was Treasury. Treasury documents were placed in the Old named Management of Storage of Documents; in 1927 it Tent Janissary Band Barracks at Sultanahmet. Because became Submanagement of Treasury of Documents as a of a change in the structure of Ottoman bureaucracy in part of the Undersecretariat of the Prime Ministry. the middle of the 18th century, a new governing struc- ture called the Sublime Porte (Bab-\u0131 \u00c2li) arose and in This organization underwent some institutional 1785 a building in the grand vizier\u2019s palace complex modifications between 1927 and 1943 and was renamed (today\u2019s governorship complex) was established to house Public Management of Archives, affiliated with the government and political records. In 1794 a record office Undersecretariat of the Prime Ministry. Finally, on June was established in the Engineer\u2019s Court for maps and 18, 1948, the government archives head office was plans for border castles. formed and the Ottoman Record Office, or Prime Minis- try\u2019s Ottoman Archives, was affiliated with it. The first steps for establishing a modern record office for the Ottoman Empire were taken in 1845 by Safveti CONTENTS OF THE ARCHIVE Pasha, who was the minister of the treasury at that time. Due to his efforts, millions of documents that had been The Prime Ministry\u2019s Ottoman Record Office is largely kept in the treasury of the Topkap\u0131 Palace were placed composed of official documents of the Ottoman Empire in storehouses with an established system for recording that were related to the empire\u2019s central administra- provenance. The most significant preservation attempt tion and provincial administration. Most docu- was made by Grand Vizier Mustafa Re\u015fid Pasha in ments are written using the Arabic alphabet in Ottoman 1846 when he ordered the building of a record office. This Turkish. There are 95 million documents and 360,000 building was completed in 1848 by architect Gaspare T. record books. Besides documents in Ottoman Turkish Fossati, who was born in the Italian part of Switzerland, there are documents in Arabic, Persian, Greek, Arme- and named the Treasury of Documents (Hazine-i Evrak). nian, and Russian. There are also some documents in At the same time, the office of Surveillance of Treasury of French, since this was the formal international language Documents was formed and Muhsin Efendi was appointed of diplomacy during the late Ottoman period. In addi- as its manager. For storage and sorting of documents, a tion to written documents there are visual materials such council composed of Bab-\u0131 \u00c2li governors was formed and as maps, photographs, and photo albums. an ordinance regarding this council was prepared in 1849. The Prime Ministry\u2019s Ottoman Record Office Due to this ordinance, the council sorted by subject does not include many documents before the period of the documents that had been kept prior to 1849. From Mehmed II (the Conqueror) (r. 1444\u201346; 1451\u201381), and 1850 onward, it adjusted which documents were to be there are also relatively few documents related to the preserved among the daily correspondence. A main period between the reigns of Mehmed II and S\u00fcleyman I storehouse and sub-storehouses were established, along (r. 1520\u201366), with only a few hundred record books from with a catalogue for the documents to be kept in the trea- that time remaining in the archives. However, a great sury of documents. In 1892, during the period of Grand number of documents are preserved from the period of Vizier Cevad Pasha, a filing system was established in the S\u00fcleyman the Magnificent until the end of the empire. Treasury of Documents and in other government offices. The first documents within this system were the ones The Prime Ministry\u2019s Ottoman Record Office has a related to Egypt and Bulgaria. rich variety of documents. There are documents related to cadastral surveys, population censuses, and tax registers; The declaration of the second constitutional monar- regulations concerning all provinces and subprovinces; chy in 1908 precipitated the organization of record offices records regarding the palace, military, navy, bureaucracy, in the empire. The head of the Ottoman History Com- civil servants, public works, charity, religious founda- mittee, Abdurrahman \u015eeref Bey, was appointed as the tions (waqfs), education, and public health. In addition director of the council responsible for sorting the archives there are contracts and agreements with foreign states in the storehouses in the Topkap\u0131 Palace and Sulta- records about the non-Muslim subjects of the empire. nahmet. However, the council left its work unfinished in 1914. After the beginning of World War I, Otto- Records of the Ottoman state\u2019s central organization man authorities noticed that the security of Istanbul was before the Tanzimat period (administrative reforms","after 1839) fall into two main groups. The first is the printing 471 records of the Imperial Council or Divan-i H\u00fcmayun, which issued political and legal rulings; the second is printing Despite widespread misconceptions that the the records of the Bab-\u0131 Defteri where official financial Ottoman Empire lacked printing until the establishment records were kept. The Imperial Council and court docu- of the first Arabic letter-printing house in 1727, new ments after the Tanzimat period are composed of the research indicates that the printing press has a rich his- records of the ministries of religion, foreign affairs, inter- tory in the empire and that printing played an important nal affairs, and justice. Documents may also be found in role from the late 15th century onward in the religious the Ottoman archives relating to the Ministries of Trea- and cultural life of the many denominations of this mul- sury, Education, Commerce, and Agriculture, as well as tireligious and multilingual empire, both in the provinces waqfs and the military. The Y\u0131ld\u0131z Archives, named after and in the capital of Istanbul. the Y\u0131ld\u0131z Palace where Abd\u00fclhamid II (r. 1876\u20131909) resided, which is composed of imperial documents issued EARLY OTTOMAN PRINTING: during the reign of Abd\u00fclhamid II (r. 1876-1909), are ISTANBUL AND THE PROVINCES also kept in the Prime Ministry\u2019s Ottoman Archives. The earliest uses of printing technology in the Ottoman Records from the various ministries were acquired Empire occurred in urban centers such as Istanbul and by the Record Office at different times. The records of Salonika. Printing in the Ottoman capital reflected the the Ministry of Treasury were acquired in 1934, those of myriad languages and alphabets used by the diverse pop- the Ministry of Religious Endowments (waqfs) in 1947, ulations under Ottoman rule. The first book printed in the Foreign Ministry Department of General Security the Ottoman Empire was published in 1493 in Istanbul in 1963, Security Forces in 1972, Commerce and Public by the brothers David and Samuel ibn Nahmias. It was a Works in 1972, Foreign Affairs in 1985, Communication four-volume edition of the code of Jewish law in Hebrew. and Education in the 1990s. Documents related to the The Nahmias brothers were part of a wave of Jewish ref- Ottoman Empire previously kept in the archives of Bul- ugees that had been welcomed into the Ottoman Empire garia, Hungary, Macedonia, Russia, Georgia, Alba- by Sultan Bayezid II (r. 1481\u20131512) after their expulsion nia, and northern Cyprus have also been added to the from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492. Other immigrants Prime Ministry\u2019s Ottoman Record Office in the form of followed suit and, in the first decade of the 16th cen- photo-reproductions or microfilms; these are available to tury, a copy of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the any individual with a research permit. Hebrew bible) was printed in Salonika by Don Yehuda Gedalya, a Jewish refugee from Portugal. Having already Some documents related to important historical and experimented with the use of print in the Iberian Penin- political figures of the more recent past\u2014for example, Ali sula, these refugee communities probably brought their Fuad T\u00fcrkgeldi (1867\u20131935), historian and chief secretary own presses and supplies with them, as well as the expe- of the Chancery under Sultan Mehmed V (Re\u015fad, r. 1909\u2013 rience of editors, proofreaders, and compositors. Other 1918)\u2014have also been placed in the Prime Ministry\u2019s Otto- residents of the capital also played an important role in man Archive. Another recent example is the collection of early printing. From 1567 to 1569, for example, Agbar documents of the zaviye (dervish convent or hospice) of Ali Tibir, an Armenian from Tokat (near the coastal town of Baba of Sivas. This collection is composed of 804 records Samsun in Anatolia) who had studied the art of printing related to the zaviye from the years 1572 to 1916. in Rome, set up a printing press in the Church of Saint Nigogos in Istanbul. In general, these first books printed Microfilms have been used in the archives since in Istanbul were religious in nature and were primar- 1998. Since 2002, 4 million documents have been trans- ily intended for devotional or instructional use by small ferred to a digital or microfilm format with four micro- local communities. film cameras and 10 digital cameras. Starting in 1976 and gaining momentum after 1987, the Prime Ministry\u2019s The 17th century witnessed the first use of print- Ottoman Archives also began a major effort to save and ing in the Arab provinces of the empire. In 1610, at the restore damaged documents. Maronite monastery of Saint Anthony in Quzhayya, now northern Lebanon, an edition of the Book of The archive also actively publishes works, both Psalms was produced under the guidance of the Italian sources and monographs, relating to its collections. printer Pasquale Eli. The psalter was printed in Karshuni, Between 1982 and 2006, 70 books were published, most the Arabic language using the Syriac alphabet. Despite about Armenian relations with Britain, France, Russia, these early ventures, the number of presses in operation, and the United States. the output of printed titles, and the actual use of printed documents by Ottoman subjects remained quite limited Mustafa Budak well into the 17th century. This did not mean, however, that Istanbul residents were necessarily unfamiliar with principalities See Moldavia; Wallachia. the art of printing. In 1588 Sultan Murad III (r. 1574\u2013","472 printing cosmographer Andre Thevet specifically mentions that two edicts were declared by the Ottoman sultans (in 1485 95) authorized two Italian merchants, Branton and Ora- and 1515) that threatened death for anyone caught print- zio Bandini, to sell books printed in Arabic, Persian, and ing. Although threats of similar punishments were pro- Turkish in Istanbul. These books were originally printed nounced at the same time in Europe, additional evidence in Rome, and the merchants had met with opposition is still needed to confirm that such edicts actually existed from local businessmen when they attempted to import in the Ottoman world. In 1551 another French traveler, and sell their books in the Istanbul bazaar. During Nicolas de Nicolay, wrote that Jewish communities liv- his appointment as French ambassador to the Ottoman ing in Istanbul had been permitted to print in Greek, Empire from 1591 to 1605, Savary de Br\u00e8ves claimed to Latin, Italian, Spanish, and Hebrew, but not in Arabic have successfully procured a font of Arabic type from a or Turkish. This may have been the result of a concern local engraver in Istanbul, suggesting that artisans in the on the part of certain sectors of the Istanbul elite about capital had sufficient skill to cast such a font. Printed the use of Arabic by non-Muslims, a concern dating to books also made their appearance in the capital in the the early centuries of Islam. Given the use of printing by form of gifts. In 1668, a Dutch mission presented Sultan various communities in different parts of the empire, it is Mehmed IV (r. 1648\u201387) with a printed copy of a famous likely that state policies concerning the use of print were atlas published by Joan Blaeu, a prominent Dutch cartog- formed in specific social, political, and geopolitical con- rapher and member of the Dutch East India Company texts and not, as some historians have suggested, as blan- (see cartography). ket policies. European social and political developments, such THE 18TH CENTURY: as the ongoing rivalry between Protestants and Catho- PRINT AND OTTOMAN ELITES lics, also contributed to the output of printed matter in Istanbul. European merchants, diplomats, and other The 18th century marked the beginning of state-spon- intermediaries could procure supplies, machine parts, sored printing in the capital and the growth of printing and fonts that were otherwise difficult for Istanbul resi- in the provinces. In the capital, \u0130brahim M\u00fcteferrika, dents to acquire. In the early 17th century, Ottoman a Hungarian convert to Islam, founded a printing press state officials were drawn into an incident sparked by with the help of state officials in 1727. This endeavor the distribution of printed books among the Christians marked the start of Ottoman state involvement in print- of Istanbul. The affair revolved around Cyril Lucaris, ing as well as the first effort to print in Ottoman Turkish officially ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople but in the empire. M\u00fcteferrika was permitted to print books known at the time for his inclinations toward Protestant, about sciences, warfare, and history, but was forbid- and specifically Calvinist, thought. In 1620, Protestants den to publish on matters of religion. The M\u00fcteferrika in Europe printed an Arabic Bible and delivered copies press published 17 titles including Turkish grammars, of it to Lucaris via the Dutch ambassador in Istanbul. court histories of the empire, and military treatises on Lucaris reportedly passed these Bibles out freely. In 1627 siege warfare. The operation of the press came to an end Lucaris, this time with the help of a Greek printer named with the death of M\u00fcteferrika in 1745 and was renewed Metaxas and Thomas Roe, the English ambassador in for a short time under M\u00fcteferrika\u2019s son. Istanbul, established the first Greek printing press in the Ottoman Empire near the English and French embassies In the Arab provinces, religious debate and polemic in the Pera neighborhood of Istanbul. Fearing the spread among Arab Christian communities contributed to a of Calvinist thought, Catholic partisans in Istanbul surge of printing. As with Lucaris in an earlier period, aimed to put an end to the spread of Lucaris\u2019s printed Christian, especially Catholic, missionaries maintained books. Intrigues and false accusations from the local close links with a number of Arab monastic communities, Jesuits ultimately incited the sultan\u2019s personal troops, providing them with supplies for the publication of reli- the Janissaries, to destroy the press, even though state gious texts. Such relationships resulted in the founding of officials later realized they had been duped. The affair a press in 1734 by Abdallah Zakhir, a Melkite Catholic illustrates the fact that Ottoman policies regarding print- priest, at the monastery of St John the Baptist at Shuwayr ing were usually a response to specific circumstances of in Lebanon. As well as scriptural and devotional texts, the moment, but it also reveals the presence of printed the Shuwayr press published a series of Arabic transla- books in the capital. tions of Catholic treatises first published in Italian and French during the Catholic Reformation in the early 17th Like many other states in the early modern period century. The Melkite Catholic patriarch, Athanasius Dab- (between the medieval age and the Industrial Revolu- bas, founded a press in Aleppo in 1704 with the financial tion), the Ottomans showed interest in the use of print and technical support of Constantine Brancoveanu, the by their subjects. Ottoman reactions to print during this voievod of Wallachia, an Ottoman vassal state (in pres- period remain a subject of disagreement among histori- ans. A 1584 travelogue written by the French traveler and","ent-day Romania). Additional presses were later estab- printing 473 lished in Beirut and other areas of the Levant. affairs, Vekayi-i Misriyye (Arab: Al-Waqai al-Misriyya, Monasteries were also an important site for printing The Egyptian bulletin), which mirrored the content of the in the Danubian principalities of Wallachia and Mol- publication produced by the central government in Istan- davia. Within the context of patronage for a revival of bul. By the start of the 20th century, printing in Egypt was Greek culture, local elites supported the establishment increasingly carried out by individuals outside the ruling of a number of printing presses. In the last decades elite. Because of a large missionary presence, a number of the 17th century Constantine Brancoveanu asked of foreigners were engaged in printing, frequently using Anthim Ivireanul, the metropolitan (bishop) of Bucha- presses that had been brought from Europe. rest, to assist with the operation of a new printing press at Bucharest. Soon after, Ivireanul published a version of Whereas early printing in the Ottoman world had the Gospels in Romanian. In 1710 Ivireanul also founded been practiced only by limited groups, the 19th century the first Georgian printing press at Tbilisi (the capital witnessed an ever-increasing number of printers, many of present-day Georgia), where a version of the Gospels of whom published new types of material. In Jerusa- was printed in Georgian for the first time in 1710. Thus lem, for example, the support and cooperation of vari- printing in the Ottoman provinces, much like in the cap- ous Christian missionary groups meant that books were ital, was aimed at satisfying the devotional needs of local being published in Arabic, Russian, Armenian, Greek, religious communities. But the 18th century marked and Turkish. One crucial contribution to the enter- the growing participation of elites in the sponsorship of prise of printing came from the body of self-proclaimed printing, a trend that paved the way for the adoption of nationalists in the empire. These individuals played an printing by Protestant and Catholic missionaries from important role in bringing local literature into print for Europe in their efforts to convert Eastern Orthodox the first time. In 1879 one such organization was founded Christians in the 19th century. in Istanbul, the Society for the Printing of Albanian Writ- ings, which was dedicated to reviving Albanian works in PRINT IN THE AGE OF REFORM AND a printed form. The printing press became an important NATIONALISM medium for political campaigns and for the spread of nationalism. At the same time, Muslim reformist think- In the 19th and 20th centuries, printing in the Ottoman ers also embraced the press as a means of engaging with world reflected the social and political developments larger theological debates about Islam, modernity, west- taking place across the empire. Shifts in printing cul- ernization, and the political organization of society. ture are distinguished by three important characteristics: increased output of printed material, growing diversity Even more important, perhaps, than this emerging among printers, and a change in the content of what was dialogue in print was the shift in the format of printed being printed. In Istanbul, new presses established by texts. Whereas earlier printing had been dominated by the state published dictionaries and other texts related to the production of multi-volume texts, increasingly the language, history, and medicine. The age of newspapers empire\u2019s printing presses were reserved for ephemeral began in 1831 with the printing of the first official gov- periodical literature, especially newspapers, as well as ernment newspaper of the empire, the Takvimi Vekayi pamphlets and placards. Easy to produce and distribute (Calendar of occurrences). Many presses remained in to a mass audience, such printed matter played a vital continual operation from this time until the so-called role in the political changes that rocked the Ottoman alphabet revolution of 1928, when the new republi- Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. can government of Turkey abandoned the use of Arabic script and adopted instead the Latin-based alphabet, ush- Historians have speculated about the reasons for ering in a new era in the history of printing. the ebbs and flows in the use of print in the Ottoman Empire\u2019s long history. The difficulty of reading printed During the early 19th century, the major urban center texts as opposed to manuscript ones, the existence of of Cairo also experienced an increase in printing. In the an organized and effective system for copying texts, and early 1820s, the establishment of a new printing press in even the high costs and technical challenges of printing the Cairo neighborhood of Bulaq was an important part in Arabic script were probably important factors. Still, of the strategies of military reform pursued by Governor specific incidents of the use of print are best understood Mehmed Ali of Egypt. Nicolas Masabiki, an Egyptian in light of the unique circumstances surrounding them. trained in typography in Italy, worked alongside Italian The experience of printing in other societies\u2014for exam- typographers to produce, first, an Italian dictionary, fol- ple, in early modern Europe or East Asia\u2014suggests that lowed by a flood of legal texts, calendars, and other books it is not surprising that scribal production, or the copy- in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. From 1828 onward the ing of texts by hand, continued to play an important Bulaq press produced an official gazette of government role in Ottoman society centuries after the discovery of Gutenberg\u2019s masterful invention. Similarly, the introduc- tion of the printing press in the Ottoman Empire need","474 prohibited goods WVA-Verlag Skulima, 2002); Klaus Kreiser, ed., The Beginnings of Printing in the Near and Middle East: Jews, not have ushered in a new era of the \u201cprint revolution.\u201d Christians and Muslims (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz in Rather, printing remained merely one medium for the Kommission, 2001). spread of information in a complex and dynamic com- munications network, a world in which print interacted prohibited goods See contraband. with other media such as manuscripts, visual signs, and, perhaps most importantly, the spoken word. provincial administration See administration, provincial. John-Paul Ghobrial See also censorship. Further reading: Eva Hanebutt-Benz, Dagmar Glass, and Geoffrey Roper, Middle Eastern Languages and the Print Revolution: A Cross-Cultural Encounter (Westhofen:","Q al-Qazdaghli household The al-Qazdaghli house- Mamluks, Ali, later to be called Bulutkapan (One Who hold, founded by Mustafa al-Qazdaghli at the end of Grasps the Clouds) by his admirers and detractors alike, the 17th century, was arguably one of the most success- seized the position of Shaykh al-Balad twice, in 1760\u20136 ful Mamluk households in Ottoman Egypt. The politi- and 1767\u201372. cal life of Cairo in that century was dominated by the bloody competition between two great Mamluk house- Ali Bey broke with the tradition, established by the holds, the Faqariyya and the Qasimiyya. Mustafa, who Qazdaghli household, of balancing the widening auton- was of obscure origins but may have been a freeboo- omy accruing to the Shaykh al-Balad by publicly offer- ter from Anatolia, achieved the rank of kahya (literally, ing fealty to Istanbul. In 1770 he replaced the Ottoman steward) of the Janissary forces stationed in the city and governor of Jeddah with an Egyptian Mamluk, threaten- allied himself with the Faqariyya. When Mustafa died ing the House of Osman\u2019s claim to be the guardian of the in 1704 the leadership of his household passed to Hasan holy places. In 1771, in an act of open rebellion against Kahya, who had been recruited by Mustafa as a mamluk the empire, he ordered his forces to invade Syria. But his and who also commanded the Janissaries. The house- commander of the invasion, Muhammad Abu al-Dha- hold continued to grow through steady recruitment of hab, returned to Egypt, having captured Damascus but mamluks and Muslim adventurers, but its members not wishing to press deeper into Ottoman territory. Abu were careful to cement their close relationships with the al-Dhahab then broke with his former master, drove him Janissary garrison stationed in Cairo. They also avoided into exile in Syria, and himself took the title of Shaykh engaging in the ongoing struggle among other Mamluk al-Balad. Ali Bey attempted a return to Egypt in 1773 but households for the beylicate, the unofficial administra- was defeated and captured; he reportedly died later of his tive office held by a Mamluk, which often competed for wounds in Cairo. control with the official Ottoman governor. Instead, the household concentrated on acquiring wealth through the Abu al-Dhahab abandoned Ali Bey\u2019s policy of control of tax farming and various customs revenues, confrontation with the Ottomans. In 1775, in a move as well as by extorting money from the city\u2019s merchants. designed to reduce the autonomy of Zahir Al-Umar, he invaded Syria a second time. He was initially victo- This low political profile changed in 1736 when Ibra- rious, but then died rather mysteriously outside Acre. him took control of both the Qazdaghli household and After Abu al-Dhahab\u2019s death the household broke into the beylicate. Ibrahim Bey, in turn, dominated Egypt\u2019s factions that battled for supremacy until a compro- political life from 1748 to 1754, taking for himself the mise established the joint leadership of two of Abu al- title of Shaykh al-Balad. This term harked back to the Dhahab\u2019s former Mamluks. The Ottomans attempted earlier Mamluk Empire and reflected Ibrahim\u2019s actual to wrest control of Egypt from the Qazdaghlis in 1786 control of Cairo, even while an Ottoman governor nom- but failed to unseat them. In the end, it was the French inally ruled in the city. After Ibrahim\u2019s death one of his occupation of Egypt in 1798 that overturned the house- hold\u2019s fortunes. 475","476 Qizilbash That led the others to conspire to overthrow him so as to achieve that prize for themselves. The Qazdaghli household demonstrates the strengths and weaknesses of the Mamluk household system in Bruce Masters Egypt. Its flexibility in recruitment allowed the house- Further reading: Jane Hathaway, The Politics of House- hold to continually replenish its ranks with new talent, holds in Ottoman Egypt: The Rise of the Qazda\u011fl\u0131s (Cam- but the bonds that held members together were based bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). solely on the self-interest of those individuals. As long as the household\u2019s main interests was the accumulation Qizilbash See K\u0131z\u0131lba\u015f. of wealth, individual members agreed to cooperate. But when the goal changed to the accumulation of political power, only one individual could ultimately triumph.","R Ragusa (Dubrovnik) The town of Ragusa (now particularly in time of war, when Ragusan neutrality was known as Dubrovnik) is situated at the southernmost advantageous. tip of the Republic of Croatia. The origins of the town, which eventually developed into a city-state, are said to After 1685 the hara\u00e7 ceased to be paid annually, and lie in the early seventh century, when refugees from the Ragusa instead paid tribute in the form of information, destroyed Roman town of Epidaurus (Cavtat) established informing the Ottomans about the plans of their ene- a settlement some 12 miles (20 km) to the northwest. mies and providing some information of a purely formal Politically, Ragusa belonged first to Byzantine Dalma- nature. Of greater significance to Ragusa than any trib- tia, then, after 1205, to Venice. In 1358 the already well- ute formally due to the Ottomans were the military and developed aristocratic republic accepted the suzerainty of economic pressures from the neighboring Ottoman offi- Louis the Great, the Anjou king of Hungary (r. 1342\u201382), cials in Bosnia, as well as from the everyday brigandage which effectively meant almost full independence. The of Ottoman subjects. basis of the republic\u2019s wealth was trade on land and sea, with a network of colonies all over the Balkans and con- The Ragusan fleet, highly active in trade, was among sulates around the Mediterranean. Some Ragusa mer- the largest in the Mediterranean, and the Ragusans were chants may have received privileges from one of the early among the first states in the region to adopt Western Ottoman rulers as early as the 14th century. The relation- innovations in banking and finance. ship between Ragusa and the Ottoman Empire is better documented, however, from the 15th century. Ragusa\u2019s fortunes declined steeply in the 17th cen- tury, particularly after a major earthquake in 1667. Both At this time, the Ottomans had conquered neigh- the population and the commercial activity of Ragusa boring territories in Serbia and Bosnia, and Ragusa were halved and the fundamentals of success, much became a vassal state, paying, first a \u201cgift,\u201d and then an expanded in the \u201cgolden age\u201d of Ottoman-Ragusan eco- annual tribute (hara\u00e7) continuously from 1458. Through nomic symbiosis, were shaken by the rise of Western this relationship, the republic had protection from merchants and the new traders from the Balkan hinter- Venetian aspirations and enjoyed a monopoly on trade land. In the 18th century Ragusa profited from political between the Ottoman Balkans and Italy. Customs duties and commercial changes in the Mediterranean, its fleet were set at the very low rate of 2 percent. In light of these becoming very busy once again. The allegiance to the many advantages, the tribute of 12,500 ducats paid to the Ottoman Empire had altered dramatically from its origi- Ottomans was moderate, but the Ragusans knew how nal terms, yet because it continued to provide protec- to minimize even this burden. Ragusa was integrated tion from Venice, North African pirates, and hayduks, into the Ottoman economic system. About 1580 it was or brigands from the Ottoman hinterland of Ragusa, the a great mercantile power, the yearly turnover of its com- formal relationship was maintained until the end of the mercial activities totaling more than a million ducats, republic on 26 May, 1806, when it was illegally occupied by Napoleonic troops who were taking over the Venetian possessions in Dalmatia from Austria. Ragusa\u2019s elite was 477","478 railroads that the railroads not only satisfy their financial expec- tations but also support the military, political, and terri- bitterly disappointed when Austria did not allow the torial ambitions of their home countries. Furthermore, reestablishment of the independent state after the Napo- foreign railroads and other industrial undertakings were leonic episode (1806\u201313). often intended to stake out the Ottoman territories with an eye to the potential future partitioning of the empire Nenad Moa\u010danin among the European powers. Russia\u2019s interest and Further reading: Robin Harris, Dubrovnik: A History involvement in Ottoman railroads in the northeastern (London: Saqi, 2003); Bari\u0161a Kreki\u0107, Dubrovnik: A Medi- part of what is now Turkey, for example, openly served terranean Urban Society, 1300\u20131600 (Aldershot, U.K.: Vari- its expansionist agenda and worked to keep other inter- orum, 1997); Zdenko Zlatar, Between the Double Eagle and lopers away. the Crescent: The Republic of Dubrovnik and the Origins of the Eastern Question (Boulder, Colo.: East European Mono- Railroads promised political and military benefits graphs, 1992). such as the centralization of power and the ability to transfer troops rapidly to and from the far interior. When railroads In the mid-1830s Britain began to expe- the sultans and their governments understood these rience a railroad boom, which soon gripped the rest capabilities, they became enthusiastic about railroads of Europe and the United States. Within the next two and offered generous incentives for their building. They decades, the railroad emerged as the ultimate symbol of also saw the railroad as a symbol and means of modern- Western industrial and economic power. Its tremendous ization. In 1867, in the first visit ever by an Ottoman sul- visual impact and the public image it generated for the tan to western Europe, Abd\u00fclaziz (r. 1861\u201376) traveled nations possessing it consolidated its strong association almost exclusively by railroad, with Paris and London as with modernity, progress, and growth. his main stops, and became a keen railroad promoter. His infatuation with the new mode of transport helped attract The birth of railroads in Britain depended on the railroad engineers and entrepreneurs to Istanbul in the growing need to transport, cheaply and swiftly, large 1870s. This railroad fervor did not mean, however, that quantities of raw materials such as coal to large markets the sultans and their officials were na\u00efve about the terri- and industrial centers that were not served by waterways. torial and political implications of foreign-built railroads. In the sparsely populated Ottoman Empire of the early In fact, most Ottomans remained ambivalent about the 19th century, where such large markets, industrial cen- foreign-financed railroads. Their suspicion grew as they ters, and factories scarcely existed, this need was mini- witnessed Europeans extending their domination. Fear- mal. Wheeled vehicles were limited to a few big cities ing that railroads might facilitate a sudden foreign inva- and paved roads were rare. Although relatively expensive, sion, Abd\u00fclhamid II (r. 1876\u20131909), for example, was camels and other pack animals were still convenient and wary of connecting railroads directly with strategic ports. widely employed, and for centuries a network of camel caravans had worked fairly well for the limited long- On the whole, however, the Ottomans hoped to distance transportation of goods across and beyond the benefit from the European rivalry over the railroads, empire. often by arranging a tactical balance among the con- testing countries to Ottoman advantage. Having several The initial incentive for railroads in the Ottoman major European powers build and operate lines across Empire came from the government and European entre- the empire ensured that none would be able to exercise preneurs. In the hope of becoming a railroad nation, too powerful an influence. It would also help to guaran- the Ottomans, who lacked sufficient financial resources tee that a serious threat by one would be thwarted by the and technical know-how, put themselves in the hands of others, and thus Ottoman territorial integrity would be European capitalists to design, finance, and manage their safeguarded. Railroad building in much of the late 19th railroads. Half a dozen European nations\u2014England, century Ottoman Empire accordingly became an enter- France, Austria, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and Rus- prise in which European ambitions were constantly mod- sia\u2014vied with each other to exploit the opportunities erated by the Ottoman effort to check the territorial and for railroad construction created in the Ottoman Empire political designs they embodied. The Ottoman Empire after the Crimean War. Their competition should have at times came close to becoming an informal European spurred an Ottoman railroad boom, but that did not hap- railroad empire, coming increasingly under European pen. Much of the contention, especially at the end of the financial control, especially with the formation in 1881 century, was rarely genuinely entrepreneurial. Railroads of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration (see debt) often became tools for a nation\u2019s political maneuvering to oversee the collection of revenues, but through shrewd in Ottoman affairs. At a time of robust colonial expan- political management, it was able to rebuff the European sion, railroads were not simply large industrial and busi- colonial domination. ness enterprises but also symbols of territorial influence, imperial grandeur, and power. Their investors intended","THE EUPHRATES VALLEY railroads 479 RAILWAY PROJECT Empire; out of the initial 60,000 shares, the Ottoman gov- In the late 1830s, British politicians and entrepre- ernment subscribed to 15,000 and Sultan Abd\u00fclmecid I neurs proposed a scheme to develop a shorter passage (r. 1839\u20131861) himself subscribed to 500 shares as a sign to India; this grand Victorian idea was to create a bet- of his personal support for the undertaking. The 10-mile ter passage for Britain by linking Europe to the Persian section from Izmir to Seydik\u00f6y opened in October 1858, Gulf via Turkey. After the Crimean War, a company becoming the second railroad in the empire after the Brit- was set up in London to realize this idea, with its pri- ish-built Cairo-to-Alexandria railroad in the autonomous mary aim being to connect by rail the Mediterranean province of Egypt in 1856. However, the project did not and the Persian Gulf by a route along the banks of the go as planned. The projected completion date of 1860 saw River Euphrates. Although suspicious of this huge only a short section of the line in operation; after further project, the Ottoman government generally approved delays and additional expenditures, the 81.6-mile line to the scheme but wanted it to pass through Istanbul, the Ayd\u0131n was completed in 1866. Ottoman capital\u2014in fact, they sanctioned a similar line via Istanbul under the name of the Imperial Mecidiye- Unlike the Izmir-Aydin line, the 58-mile line from Ottoman Railway. Izmir to Kasaba was constructed more efficiently. In 1863 the Ottoman government granted a concession to Although the Euphrates Valley Railway was never Edward Price, a prominent British investor, to build this built, for four decades it generated public debate both line, which was completed on time in 1866, and received inside and outside Britain. France was initially fiercely praise from the Ottomans. Price\u2019s company, which opposed to the scheme on the grounds that it would give operated under stricter Ottoman government control, Britain an unequal strategic position in the region. This received subsequent concessions to extend its line further opposition ebbed, however, when France became the inland, to Ala\u015fehir in 1875 and to Afyon in 1890, where sponsor of the Suez Canal, opened in 1869. Thereafter, it later joined the Anatolian Railroads. In 1893 the com- the Euphrates Valley Railway became the British rival to pany was taken over by a French-dominated syndicate. the largely French canal project. In 1871, the British Par- In 1912 its branch line from Manisa reached Band\u0131rma liament appointed a Select Committee to investigate the on the Sea of Marmara. whole matter, which reported in 1872 in favor of the rail- way. However, changing political circumstances altered With less generous concessions, meanwhile, the Britain\u2019s interests in the railway. In 1875 Britain gained Izmir-Ayd\u0131n Railway extended its line further inland, financial control of the Suez Canal, thereby effectively to Denizli in 1889 and E\u011fridir in 1912, but it was never securing a route to India, and in 1882 Britain occupied allowed to join the Anatolian Railroads. Both these rail- Egypt, with the result that the building of the proposed roads proved profitable, with considerable passenger railway lost its urgency and Britain finally gave up on the traffic and shipments of merchandise and agricultural idea. products to carry. THE FIRST RAILROADS IN TURKEY Other lines connecting port cities to their hinter- lands included the Mersin-Tarsus-Adana Railway (1886) Beginning in the mid-1850s, the Ottoman government on the Mediterranean, and the short line from Mudanya granted a large number of railroad concessions to Euro- to Bursa on the Sea of Marmara. The 25-mile (41\u2013km pean entrepreneurs. But the political rivalries and finan- line) was \u201ccompleted\u201d in 1874 by the Ottoman govern- cial difficulties among the potential builders caused most ment and its French contractors, but was not fully opera- to fail and delayed others. Buying and selling railroad tional until Belgian entrepreneur Georges Nagelmackers concessions became a business in itself. A large amount took it over in 1891 and opened it to traffic in 1892 after of money was squandered. Nevertheless, by the late laying it again as a narrow-gauge track) Several short 19th century, several short lines had been built, linking lines terminating at Black Sea coastal towns such as Sam- seaports with the regions of rich agricultural produc- sun, Eregli, Inebolu, and Trabzon were also projected tion and valuable raw materials in the interior. The most before World War I. prominent of these were the two lines, both built by Brit- ish entrepreneurs, linking the major commercial port city Most such railroads that were built did not form a of Izmir on the Aegean Sea to its agriculturally rich and network, and their engineering and machinery, which densely populated hinterland towns: the Izmir-Aydin and came from each builder\u2019s respective country, were some- the Izmir-Kasaba (Turgutlu) lines. times incompatible. Furthermore, these companies did not have any financial or political incentives to link and The concession for the Izmir-Aydin line was granted extend their lines throughout the empire. A few of the in 1856 to a group of British investors. The company lines (for example, those built by Russia) used different raised a substantial part of its capital in the Ottoman gauges and were later either abandoned or rebuilt. But on the whole, the Ottoman system adopted a standard gauge, and thus avoided a gauge war.","480 railroads In addition to its company\u2019s advertisements, travelers and writers popularized the Orient Express and gave it a RAILROADS IN THE OTTOMAN BALKANS romantic glamour. Best known of the works commemo- rating the line are Agatha Christie\u2019s widely read mystery With the exception of the two lines built by British entre- Murder on the Orient Express (1934), based on her trip preneurs on the Black Sea\u2014the K\u00fcstenci (Constanta) to in 1929, and Graham Greene\u2019s thriller Stamboul Train Bo\u011fazk\u00f6y (Cernavoda) line in Romania (1860), and the (1932), renamed Orient Express in its American edition. Varna to Rus\u00e7uk (Ruse) line in Bulgaria (1867)\u2014railroad The popular fascination with the Orient Express contin- building in the Ottoman Balkans followed a different pat- ues to generate considerable literature today. Latter-day tern from that which prevailed in Anatolia, largely thanks to versions have sprung up and still run in several coun- the financial schemes and managerial skills of Baron Mau- tries, including the American Orient Express, now called rice de Hirsch (1831\u201396), a German-born Austro-Hungar- Grand Luxe Rail. ian financier. In 1870, Hirsch obtained from the Ottoman government an exclusive concession, originally granted to ON THE EASTERN SHORES OF THE BOSPORUS a Belgian company, to build an extensive network of rail- roads across the Ottoman parts of eastern Europe, with a Unlike the situation in the Balkans, building railroads trunk line linking Istanbul to western Europe at Doberlin from Istanbul\u2019s Asian shores to the interior of Anatolia on the Austrian border via Edirne, Sofia, Sarajevo, and proved to be a slow affair. The government considered Banja Luka. The concession is well-known for its extremely this a particularly strategic part of the country and was generous kilometric guarantee\u20142,500 km in all\u2014that initially reluctant to allow foreign companies to oper- eventually made Hirsch immensely rich. ate there. Nevertheless, in 1871, backed by French inves- tors, construction was begun near the site of what was to Hirsch\u2019s success largely depended on his effective become Haydarpa\u015fa Station for a railroad eastward from methods of raising funds, mostly locally. By 1874, his that point, which was to be the western terminus of the Compagnie G\u00e9n\u00e9rale pour l\u2019Exploitation des Chemins de line from Anatolia and Arabia. The line reached Gebze, 30 Fer de la Turquie d\u2019Europe\u2014which later became known miles southeast of Istanbul, in 1872 and Izmit on the Sea as the Oriental Railways\u2014connected Istanbul with of Marmara the following year. But financial and politi- Edirne, Plovdiv, and Burgas (Bulgaria), and connected cal problems made it impossible to extend the line until the flourishing Ottoman city of Salonika with Skopje 1888, when it was taken over by the Anatolian Railroads, and Mitrovica (Kosovo), and its network continued to financed and operated by a German-led consortium. expand. Delayed considerably by uprisings and wars, the rail project finally linked Istanbul to Vienna in 1888, thus TOWARD A RAILROAD EMPIRE allowing rail travel to Istanbul from all Europe. At the turn of the century, in the latter part of Abd\u00fclhamid\u2019s The relatively densely populated Balkans made rail- 33-year reign, an empire-wide railroad network began to roads economically viable and generally profitable enter- materialize. The period was characterized by a German- prises. But in1890 Hirsch sold the company to a group of Ottoman alliance that culminated in close political, eco- German banks led by the Deutsche Bank in a transaction nomic, and military cooperation between the two powers. probably influenced by Germany strategic consideration The sultan put his trust in Germany, the rising industrial related to plans for a Berlin to Baghdad railway. and political power in Europe, to check the imperialist ambitions of Britain, France, and Russia. He and his offi- THE ORIENT EXPRESS cials also saw the financial, engineering, and entrepreneurial resources of Germany as essential for generating a substan- In 1872 the Belgian entrepreneur Georges Nagelmack- tial industrial and political drive that would keep the disin- ers, inspired by the Pullman sleeping cars in the United tegrating empire united. A network of railroads across the States, founded the Compagnie Internationale des Wag- empire would be essential to the effort. Starting in the late ons-Lits to provide a fast and luxurious train service 1880s, Germany began to win all major new Ottoman rail- with sleeping and dining cars for long-distance travel in road concessions and also began to take over the operation Europe. He also had a keen interest, economic and other- of several existing lines, while Britain\u2019s role in building and wise, in Ottoman railroads. operating railroads began to shrink drastically. In 1883 he started the famed Orient Express service, Two very large railroad projects dominated this late which at first ran from Paris to Giurgui in Romania via Ottoman era: the Baghdad Railroad (1903\u201318) and the Munich and Vienna. A complete journey to Istanbul 800-mile (1,300\u2013km) Hejaz Railroad (1900\u201308). The required further trips by train and ferry. In 1889, the Ori- Hejaz Railroad was a purely Ottoman undertaking con- ent Express finally began to run directly to Istanbul. Its necting Damascus and Medina. The sultan personally terminus there, Sirkeci Station, designed by the German promoted the project and led the campaign to finance architect and student of Ottoman architecture August Jachmund, opened in 1890 and is still in service. In 1892, the company built the now celebrated Pera Palace Hotel to serve its passengers arriving in Istanbul.","railroads 481 Railroads, ca. 1914 \u00a9 Infobase Publishing it. Although in practical terms the railroad would only de Fer Ottoman d\u2019Anatolie, or Anatolian Railroads, dom- serve pilgrims going to Mecca, it was also a grand impe- inated by the Deutsche Bank, not only obtained the oper- rial undertaking, its primary purpose being the sultan\u2019s ation rights of the strategically located Haydarpa\u015fa-Izmit political agenda. The sultan hoped that it would facilitate Railroad, but also won crucial concessions to extend it to Islamic unity and bring Arabia closer. The railroad also Ankara and Konya in central Anatolia. The line reached showed his Muslim subjects the sultan\u2019s determination to Ankara in 1892 and Konya two years later, prompting express his mastery over lands vital to the faith. discussions about planned branches to Iraq (Mesopota- mia) and central Arabia. The long-dreamed-of railroad THE BERLIN TO BAGHDAD RAILWAY to Baghdad was becoming practicable. A turning point in the history of railroads in the Otto- Wilhelm von Pressel (1821\u20131902), a German rail- man Empire came in 1888 when the Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 du Chemin road engineer in the Ottoman service since 1872 played","482 railroads The arrival of Kaiser Wilhelm II at the railway station in Hereke, October 20, 1898 (Historical Institute of Deutsche Bank) a considerable role in this project, as well in advancing Almost 700 miles (1,100 km) of the line was completed the whole Ottoman-German railroad drive. The Otto- by 1914, marking the halfway point between Konya and man government and the Anatolian Railroads intended Basra. Construction continued through World War I, to lay the track via Kayseri, Sivas, and Diyarbak\u0131r. How- but construction on the line was abandoned in 1918, still ever, because of Russian objections (the route would pass several hundred miles short of completion. too close to its southern border, which was then in Kars), they decided to run the line via Konya, a much costlier RAILROADS, MODERNIZATION, AND CHANGE alternative that required crossing the Taurus Mountains. Like the telegraph, the railroad became a symbol of the The scheme alarmed the European powers, Britain in social and industrial modernization of the empire. It also particular, which viewed this revival of its Euphrates Valley represented a new technological age, profoundly associ- Railway as a major threat to its interests in the region. The ated with Western Europe, which Ottomans aspired to first visit of the German emperor, Wilhelm II, to Istanbul join. The majestic images of trains in the mostly barren in 1898 gave the plan a final push. The following year, the landscapes of southern Anatolia and Arabia became a Ottoman government granted the Deutsche Bank a con- source of romance and wonder. The architecture of rail- cession for the 1,500-mile (2,400\u2013km) railroad from Konya road stations in particular conveyed a sense of modern- to Baghdad, plus 500 miles (800 km) of branch lines. ism. Often designed by European architects, the stations generally blended European styles with Ottoman archi- To reduce the financial burden of the project and tectural features. The railroad station and the passenger ease political tension, the Deutsche Bank made overtures railway car provided a form of new public space that to Britain and France to participate in the undertaking, encouraged interaction among the empire\u2019s diverse com- but failed to procure their full support. (Historians view munities. Railroad works themselves, a great source of the contest over this German-led project as a contribut- new employment, created an environment where Otto- ing factor to World War I.) man subjects mingled with non-Ottomans, creating an occasion for cultural exchange and learning. Construction of the line began in 1903 and subse- quently expanded to several sections simultaneously.","The mobility facilitated by railroads stimulated railroads 483 travel and tourism domestically and internationally. At the same time, they allowed exploitation and smug- cise control over distant provinces. In this way, railroads gling, particularly of antiquities. Railroad construction helped centralize political power. The railroad system also itself was often motivated by its archaeological prom- proved immensely helpful to the Ottoman war effort dur- ise for its builders. Railroad companies, particularly in ing World War I, enabling the Ottomans, for example, to Anatolia and Arabia, enjoyed the exclusive rights and stage an attack on the British-controlled Suez Canal in privileges over the lands along the routes, including that 1915. However, it is not easy to judge the extent to which of archaeological excavations. Ottomans themselves the railways served the imperial ambitions of the sultan used the new system intensively, with residents of the and his officials in their effort to reinforce political and ter- populous Balkan states taking a big lead, followed by ritorial unity. World War I ended the empire before the full those in Anatolia and Arabia. The railroads also stimu- import of its new network of railroads could be realized. lated economy and agriculture. They made it possible to transport grain to urban centers from the provinces After it became a republic in 1923, Turkey began and to export raw materials such as agricultural pro- to nationalize all the lines that remained within its new duce, widening the Ottoman market for manufactured borders, about 2,500 miles (4,000 km) of track out of an European goods. At the same time, railroads increased approximate total of the 6,000 miles (10,000 km) built in exploitation and smuggling, particularly of antiquities. Ottoman territories by 1918. But the skill and knowledge its engineers had gained made it possible for the new admin- Railroads introduced imperial grandeur and extended istration to launch a state railroad drive in the late 1920s, the political will of the sultan and his government. They resulting in 2,000 miles (3,200 km) of new track by 1939. enabled the rapid transfer of troops and material, which helped the central government suppress revolts and exer- Yakup Bekta\u015f Further reading: Yakup Bektas, \u201cThe Imperial Ottoman Izmir-to-Aydin Railway: The British Experimental Line in Asia Minor,\u201d in Science, Technology and Industry in the The Haydarpasha railroad station and its adjacent quay, located proximate to the Kad\u0131k\u00f6y suburb of Istanbul, was the originating point for rail lines to Anatolia and the Arab provinces (Historical Institute of Deutsche Bank)","484 Rashid Rida, Muhammad tion. Without modern technology and knowledge of sci- ence, Rida saw that the Muslim countries would remain Ottoman World, edited by Ekmeleddin \u0130hsano\u011flu, Ahmed weak, and that the West would continue to dominate Djebbar, and Feza G\u00fcnergun (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), them militarily and politically. Rashid Rida believed that 139\u2013152; Jonathan S. McMurray, Distant Ties: Germany, Muslim nations should ultimately unite under one gov- the Ottoman Empire, and the Construction of the Baghdad ernment. But in the absence of that union, Rida proposed Railway (Wesport, Conn.: Praeger, 2001); Peter Mentzel, that Muslim governments should work carefully with Transportation Technology and Imperialism in the Ottoman religious scholars so as not to enact any laws that were Empire, 1800\u20131823 (Washington, D.C.: Society for the His- contrary to Islam. tory of Technology and the American Historical Associa- tion, 2006). Abduh viewed the prospect of reform of Muslim society with optimism, but for Rashid Rida, programs for Rashid Rida, Muhammad (b. 1865\u2013d. 1935) Islamic reform were regarded with an uncertainty that bordered intellectual and reformer Muhammad Rashid Rida was on pessimism. Islamic societies had to adapt to survive, a student of Muhammad Abduh and a key figure in he wrote, but at the same time individual Muslims had to the Salafiyya movement to reform Islam at the end of constantly guard against the erosion of the moral order the 19th and the start of the 20th century. Rashid Rida imposed by Islamic law. Abduh saw Islamic law as flex- was born in a village outside the Lebanese city of Trip- ible and adaptable to change, but his student, Rashid oli in 1865. His education was in both the traditional Rida, believed that change and innovation were possible Quran schools and the new government schools where only if they were necessary for the Muslim community he studied science and learned French. Rashid Rida was to survive and even then only if they did not contradict unusual among the men of his generation in that he anything in the Quran. wrote a spiritual autobiography that detailed his intel- lectual passage through the various Islamic traditions. In Bruce Masters the course of the journey that led him away from Sufism, See also Abduh, Muhammad; Salafiyya. he discovered the writings of ibn Taymiyya, a 14th-cen- Further reading: Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the tury Muslim theologian who called for radical reform of Liberal Age, 1798\u20131939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University his society by a return to Islam as it was understood by Press, 1983). the first generation of Muslims in the seventh century. Rashid Rida felt that there was a parallel between Islam reform The idea and practice of reform existed among in his age and that in ibn Taymiyya\u2019s time. That sense of the members of the Ottoman elite from the 16th century. spiritual decline convinced him of the need for a pro- In fact, the Ottoman government underwent substan- gram of reform in the Ottoman Empire. After searching tial and deliberate political and economic changes from the writings of his contemporaries, Rashid Rida became that time until the late 18th century. From the late 18th convinced that the foundation for such a program lay in century onward, however, Ottoman reforms began to the writings of Abduh. be modeled primarily on European examples. Since the 1839 G\u00fclhane Imperial Edict, which marked the begin- Rashid Rida went to Cairo in 1897 to be closer to ning of the Tanzimat or Ottoman reform period (1839\u2013 Muhammad Abduh, and began publishing a periodi- 76), the scope and goals of Ottoman reform not only cal called al-Manar (The Lighthouse). The periodical became more comprehensive but also began to be self- became the major voice of the Salafiyya movement, consciously Eurocentric, relying on the notion of West- and Rashid Rida would continue to publish it until his ern superiority. death in 1935. Rida also wrote an important biography of Abduh. Rashid Rida always considered himself to be Between the 16th and 18th centuries, a number of the protector of Abduh\u2019s legacy and his chief interpreter. Ottoman bureaucrats and intellectuals, such as Mustafa But political events in Egypt led him to develop an even Ali and Ko\u00e7i Bey, argued for reform, urging for a return deeper mistrust of the West than is reflected in any of the to the so-called \u201cclassical age\u201d of Sultan S\u00fcleyman I (r. writings of his teacher. 1520\u201366), and writing about the perceived decline of the Ottoman classical system. Yet there is now an emerg- In the aftermath of World War I, Rashid Rida was ing consensus among scholars of Ottoman history that a strong opponent of the French occupation of Syria what several Ottoman bureaucrats considered a decline and an enthusiastic supporter of the new Saudi state in was rather a broader social and economic transforma- Arabia. Rather than seeing change as a benefit to Mus- tion of the empire due to external and internal pressures. lim societies and something that was in accordance with Changes that occurred in the Ottoman state during this Muslim principles, Rashid Rida saw it simply as a neces- time, which included a degree of decentralization paral- sity. Thus Rida was more reluctant than Abduh to accede leled by an increasing specialization of administrative to the modernization that frequently meant westerniza-","bureaucracy, was perceived as a decline, but this was reform 485 due to the perspective of certain members of the Otto- man elite who had been negatively affected by these influence or control Christian subjects within the Otto- transformations. man Empire and the Egyptian province\u2019s demands for autonomy. The reforms in the taxation system, military tech- nology, bureaucratic recruitment, and sultanic author- Although the G\u00fclhane Imperial Edict gave full legiti- ity, especially under the leadership of sultans Osman macy to the reformist bureaucrats and inspired further II (r. 1618\u201322) and Murad IV (r. 1623\u201340) or the acts of reform, its implementation involved a gradual K\u00f6pr\u00fcl\u00fc dynasty of grand viziers, helped maintain process during which the old institutions and customs the Ottoman state during its many periods of crisis. were allowed to end naturally rather than being eradi- With the enthronement of Sultan Selim III (r. 1789\u2013 cated. Traditional Islamic courts or educational insti- 1807), however, the period of modern, Western reform tutions were not abolished but were left to become the began. Selim initiated a more systematic and ambi- weaker part of a new two-pronged Ottoman legal and tious program of reform, openly inquiring into and social structure. For example, while new European-style adopting European models, and focusing especially on schools were established during the Tanzimat, the old technology, education, and the military. It was during madrasa schools continued to function, but with dra- this period that the opposition to some of the reforms matic decreases in their social prestige and economic by vested social and political interests, led by the Janis- base. Meanwhile, although legal equality of all subjects saries, led to the 1826 Auspicious Incident, in which was declared, different religious communities contin- the Janissary corps was destroyed in a bloody domes- ued to have separate religious laws and privileges. More tic conflict under the reformist rule of Sultan Mahmud importantly, interventions by the European powers to II (r. 1808\u201339). With the abolition of the Janissaries, protect the privileges of the Christian minorities pre- Sultan Mahmud II implemented an intense series of vented their assuming full political equality, since exist- reforms, centralizing the government, restructuring ing systems of privilege often gave them greater freedoms the military and administration, establishing new edu- and powers than the empire\u2019s Muslim subjects. Thus the cational institutions, and introducing European-style edict\u2019s implementation for the next three decades fell dress and head coverings. short of its intended goals. The G\u00fclhane Imperial Edict (G\u00fclhane Hatt-\u0131 H\u00fcma- By the end of the 19th century, reforms allowed yun) of 1839 became a turning point in the history of the Ottoman state to have greater control over its own Ottoman reforms in the sense that it declared European- provinces with greater administrative efficiency, tech- modeled reforms as the primary goal of the bureaucracy. nological capability, and international legitimacy, even The G\u00fclhane Edict initiated what is called the Tanzimat though many in Europe began to call the Ottoman state period, when a set of legal, administrative, and fiscal the \u201csick man of Europe.\u201d In fact, the Ottoman Empire reforms were implemented in order to strengthen the managed to survive the 19th century as the only Mus- Ottoman state and make it a member of the new Euro- lim empire to also be part of the European balance of pean diplomatic order. There is a strong line of conti- power system. The durability, diplomatic achievements, nuity of reform before and after the G\u00fclhane Imperial and centralized government of the Ottoman Empire Edict. The difference from the earlier reform efforts, were indicative of the successes of its reformist bureau- however, lies in the way the G\u00fclhane Edict was designed cracy. Despite these reform achievements, however, the to enhance the central government\u2019s control by empow- intensifying imperialist threat posed by the European ering the bureaucracy while changing and reshaping the powers, coupled with the inability of the Ottoman gov- relationship between the sultan and his subjects. The ernment to control its non-Muslim populations, led promised new legal system of the edict was intended to to a weakening of the Ottoman state in comparison to gradually reduce the arbitrary powers of the sultan and the European powers it sought to emulate. Ottoman ensure full rights and equality to non-Muslims under the reformists of the second half of the 19th century often reinterpreted rule of Islamic law, or sharia. Moreover, by complained that it was European interventions in the the G\u00fclhane Edict, Ottoman bureaucrats declared a long- domestic affairs of the empire that prevented the suc- term commitment to \u201cself-civilizing\u201d reforms in harmony cess of their comprehensive programs to make the with the standards of Europe as a basis for peaceful rela- empire economically richer and militarily more power- tions with the European powers. It was hoped that the ful. While disillusioned by European interventions and image of the Ottoman state as a reformed and civilized imperialism, the Ottoman elite continued to call for polity would enable the Ottomans to garner support from more radicalized European-style reforms and the new England and France in the face of numerous external generation of the elite, especially the Young Ottomans and internal pressures, among them Russia\u2019s attempts to and the Young Turks, called for a constitution and other political reforms to save the Ottoman state from extinction.","486 reis\u00fclk\u00fcttab the grand vizier if he had something to say and then returning to his place. In addition, until the end of the While the call for reform remained strong, an intra- 6th century, the reis\u00fclk\u00fcttab used to read petitions to Ottoman conflict over the nature, vision, and scope of the sultan and members of the Imperial Council. He these European-inspired reforms also began to mate- was present at the Divan before the viziers came and rialize. Symbolized by the disagreements between the left the meeting after them. The reis\u00fclk\u00fcttab was not Young Turks and the regime of Sultan Abd\u00fclhamid II (r. allowed to present a petition to the sultan; when pro- 1876\u20131909), the Ottoman reform conflict may be under- moted, he became either chancellor (ni\u015fanc\u0131) or chief stood in part by looking to the hotly debated questions of treasurer (defterdar). the reformers: Was the empire going to follow a British, French, or German model of reform? What were the real All the letters of appointment and award, admin- secrets of European progress and power? From the mid- istrative orders and codes written by clerks (katib) and 19th century until the end of the empire in the 1920s, these checked by other officials, were eventually approved by questions were intensely debated among Ottoman intel- the reis\u00fclk\u00fcttab with his special imprint. Following this lectuals, leading to the proliferation of competing reform procedure, the letters were finally prepared with the agendas, all advocating a more rapid program of change command (buyuruldu) of the grand vizier and were sent and sharper ideological justifications. Thus the ideological to the ni\u015fanc\u0131 if they needed the sultan\u2019s imperial seal or programs of change in the writings of Nam\u0131k Kemal and tu\u011fra. The reis\u00fclk\u00fcttab helped the ni\u015fanc\u0131 in preparing Ahmed Midhat Efendi led to more differentiated reform the imperial edicts (ferman); he wrote confidential let- ideologies such as the Westernism of Abdullah Cevdet ters by himself and kept records of the sultan\u2019s decrees and the Islamism of Mehmed Akif Ersoy. The Westernist and treaties. All correspondence, except for military and thread in the reformist tradition of the Ottoman Muslim financial affairs, was under his supervision. Moreover, it elite continued into the early years of the Turkish Republic, was part of his job to prepare the list of appointments which experimented with one of the most comprehensive (tevcihat). westernization programs of the 20th century. A well-organized bureaucracy was needed to man- Cemil Ayd\u0131n age all these affairs. The reis\u00fclk\u00fcttab thus supervised four Further reading: Roderick Davison, Reform in the offices (kalem): the beylik\u00e7i, tahvil (nishan), ruus, and Ottoman Empire, 1856\u20131876 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton amedci. The beylik\u00e7i served as the assistant to the reis\u00fcl- University Press 1963); Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel K. Shaw, k\u00fcttab and examined all writings prepared in various History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. 2 divan offices on his behalf. The tahvil arranged imperial (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Suraiya rescripts of viziers, judges, and holders of timar, ziamet, Faroqhi et al., An Economic and Social History of the Otto- and has prebends or fiefs. The ruus dispatched impe- man Empire, vol. 2: 1600\u20131914 (Cambridge: Cambridge rial commands with regard to religious institutions and University Press, 1994). foundations, clerks in state offices, and palace servants. And the amedci was a special scribe of the reis\u00fclk\u00fcttab reis\u00fclk\u00fcttab Also called reis efendi, the reis\u00fclk\u00fcttab , who participated in meetings with foreign state rep- (literally \u201cthe head of the scribes\u201d) was the head of the resentatives, took records of conversations, carried out chancery and record offices of the Imperial Divan or correspondence with foreign state representatives, and Council (Divan-\u0131 H\u00fcmayun). However, foreign affairs of collected monies for the reis\u00fclk\u00fcttab. the state were also placed under his responsibility after the diplomatic success of Reis\u00fclk\u00fcttab Rami Mehmed The reis\u00fclk\u00fcttabgained some importance after the Efendi during the peace negotiations with Austria at 18th century, becoming clerk to the grand vizier and no Karlowitz in 1699. The reis\u00fclk\u00fcttab probably existed longer working under the ni\u015fanc\u0131. This change occurred from a much earlier period even though the first histori- because state affairs were gradually transferred from the cal record regarding this position is found in the Kanun- Imperial Council to the grand vizier\u2019s office (bab\u0131ali). name or law book of Sultan Mehmed II (r. 1444\u201346, The clerks of the grand vizier naturally gained in impor- 1451\u201381), a compilation dating from the 1490s. Accord- tance and a special significance was attached to the ing to this source, the reis\u00fclk\u00fcttab was not a member of reis\u00fclk\u00fcttab, while the ni\u015fanc\u0131 lost importance. In addi- the Divan since he was considered a servant who worked tion, the dramatic increase in foreign relations in this under the command of the chancellor or ni\u015fanc\u0131. The lat- period made the reis\u00fclk\u00fcttab position more important ter was responsible for affixing the sultan\u2019s monogram or than in previous periods. At the same time, civil bureau- tu\u011fra to documents and as such represented the chan- cracy gained more gravity in state administration dur- cery in the Divan. ing the time of Selim III (r. 1789\u20131807). In 1836, during the reign of Mahmud II (r. 1808\u201339), an administrative However, the reis\u00fclk\u00fcttab was present during decree transformed the position of reis\u00fclk\u00fcttab into the Divan meetings, whispering quietly into the ear of position of minister of foreign affairs that fulfilled the","same bureaucratic duties but with a new emphasis on revolutionary press 487 foreign affairs. about the Ottoman lands were written by Venetian con- Ali Aky\u0131ld\u0131z suls in Egypt and Aleppo. The relazioni are still impor- Further reading: Carter V. Findley, \u201cOrigins of the tant for Ottomanists, even if many other sources are now Ottoman Foreign Ministry.\u201d IJMES 1, no. 1 (January 1970): available. They contain first-hand information about 335\u2013356; Carter. V. Findley, Bureaucratic Reform in the Otto- important events and gossip, which circulated but could man Empire: The Sublime Porte, 1789\u20131922 (Princeton, N.J.: not be written in Ottoman official documents. Princeton University Press, 1980). Maria Pia Pedani relazione The Italian word relazione means \u201creport,\u201d Further reading: Eric R. Dursteler, Venetians in Con- and refers in particular to a report delivered by a pub- stantinople: Nation, Identity, and Coexistence in the Early lic official of the Republic of Venice. The origins of the Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Venetian relazioni may be found in the 13th century University Press, 2006); Maria Pia Pedani, \u201cElenco degli when, in 1268, Venetian ambassadors sent to foreign inviati diplomatici veneziani presso i sovrani ottomani.\u201d courts were ordered to deliver a report of their mission to Electronic Journal for Oriental Studies, 5, no. 4 (2002): 1\u201354; Venice\u2019s head of state (doge) and his counselors. In 1425, Maria Pia Pedani, Reports of Venetian Consuls in Alexandria another decree established that every diplomatic envoy (Cairo: IFAO, in press); Lucette Valensi, The Birth of the had to deliver both a speech and a written text about his Despot: Venice and the Sublime Porte, trans. Arthur Denner mission. In 1524, it was ordered that every Venetian pub- (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987). lic official who had been sent either abroad or to subject lands had to compile a report. religion See Armenian Apostolic Church; Bulgar- ian Orthodox Church; Bekta\u015fi Order; conversion; The relazioni were eagerly sought by contempo- Copts; dar al-harb; dar al-Islam; Druzes; fatwa; raries interested in far-off countries. Thus they also Greek Orthodox Church; Gregorian Orthodox became a genre of Venetian literature. Some officials Church; Jacobites; Jews; Karaites; Maronites; Mel- even wrote two reports, one for the state about politi- kite Catholics; Mevlevi Order; millet; missionar- cal affairs, and another for a larger public about curiosi- ies; Naqshbandiyya Order; Nestorians; Rifaiyya ties, the life of high-ranking persons, and other matters Order; Serbian Orthodox Church; sharia; Shia of more general interest. The reports usually follow a Islam; Sufism; Sunni Islam; Uniates. precise scheme of composition. In the case of relazioni regarding the Ottoman Empire they start with intro- revolutionary press Although newspapers and maga- ductory remarks, followed by information concerning zines (both called \u201cgazettes\u201d) were published in the Otto- the sultan and his family, the grand vizier and other man empire in the 19th century, it was not until 1908 that viziers, the Ottoman bureaucracy, the army, the navy, a press that could truly be called \u201crevolutionary\u201d due to and the staff of the Venetian embassy. Manuscripts of its scope, critical vehemence, and political imagination, the relazioni can be found not only in the Venetian State appeared in the Ottoman capital, Istanbul. Archives but also in other libraries and archives; the bulk of them were written between the 16th and 18th The history of the revolutionary press in the Otto- centuries. The relazioni give information about lands man Empire is closely bound with the movement toward subject to the Venetian Republic (including Veneto, constitutional government which, as elsewhere, was nei- Friuli, Dalmatia, and the Greek islands) as well as about ther simple nor continuous. There were two constitu- foreign countries. tional revolutions in the empire, one in 1876 and one in 1908, marking the beginning and end of the long reign of At the beginning of the 19th century the relazioni Sultan Abd\u00fclhamid II (r. 1876\u20131909). Each revolution- became a relevant source for scholars interested in the ary movement was accompanied by activist writings in history of many European countries. The Austrian histo- the press, both within the empire and abroad. It was the rian and Orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, for second revolution, however, that established a constitu- instance, used them to write his seminal history of the tional regime that endured until the empire was dismem- Ottoman Empire, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches (His- bered in the aftermath of World War I. tory of the Ottoman Empire), complementing the relazioni with Ottoman chronicles and other Venetian papers. The revolutionary press emerged in the context of a relatively bloodless political revolution and in an envi- Most of the relazioni were edited and published dur- ronment of heightened foreign intervention in Ottoman ing the 19th century. The papers produced by Venetian lands and affairs. This revolution began in July 1908, officials sent to Istanbul were published at that time and when Sultan Abd\u00fclhamid II was forced, under mili- reprinted in 1996 with additional reports. Other reports tary pressure, to reinstate the constitution that had been","488 revolutionary press 1909 counterrevolution. Nonetheless, the revolutionary press of 1908\u201309 expressed an unprecedented range of promulgated in 1876 but that he had suspended shortly Ottoman voices; it illustrated the complexity of political, thereafter. In December of that same year Ahmed R\u0131za, social, and cultural thought in the empire; and it set the the editor of Me\u015fveret (Consultation), an expatriate tone for a new type of Ottoman press, one that was more newspaper of the Young Turks, was elected chairman of ambitious, more wide-ranging, and more critical. the newly constituted Chamber of Deputies. His election demonstrates the often intimate connection between the The press of this revolutionary era included a vari- press (which was still more politically than commercially ety of literary and artistic forms expressing a wide range oriented) and opposition politics. The new parliamentary of viewpoints. Press output ranged from broadsheets regime, which left considerable power in the hands of the through newspapers of four to 16 pages in length to sultan, was faced with addressing the dismal financial illustrated magazines and yearbooks that carried a hefty situation of the empire and the grave threats posed by price. Newspapers and magazines were sold to lists of European powers such as Austria (which had annexed subscribers, hawked in the streets, and delivered to com- Bosnia and Herzegovina outright), England (which mercial vendors such as bookshops. Reading rooms and had occupied Egypt since 1882), and Russia (a chronic coffeehouses also provided customers with newspa- aggressor on the empire\u2019s northern frontiers). Internal pers to peruse while on the premises. Some newspapers affairs were further complicated when, in April 1909, were organs of specific political parties such as the CUP. Abd\u00fclhamid was implicated in an attempted counter- Others represented the views of individuals, occupational revolution and was deposed. How the empire would sur- groups, or religious communities. On any given day in vive such threats constituted, not surprisingly, a primary the months after the 1908 revolution, consumers might theme in the revolutionary press, which highlighted read the daily paper Ikdam (Effort), which appeared from the menace of European imperialism and pondered the 1894 to 1928; the new satirical gazette Bo\u015fbo\u011faz (Indis- proper role of monarchy in a constitutional regime. creet); the short-lived women\u2019s gazette Demet (Bouquet); or the expensive illustrated journal Kalem (Pen), which The empire had a well-established press before the was published in Ottoman and French and included arti- 1908 revolution, including an Ottoman-language official cles on politics, culture, and society. There was no firm gazette, Takvim-i Vekayi, dating to 1831. In Istanbul line between politics and the press; thus many publishers, and elsewhere in the empire, multiple newspapers were editors, and writers were also government officials under also published in a variety of languages including Greek, the old or new regime, or both. The typical editor was Armenian, Arabic, and French. The government, how- politically active, more or less financially comfortable, ever, made vigorous efforts at control and censorship of and was often a member of the literati in his own right. the press, banning certain words and subjects, shutting Women participated in the writing, illustrating, and pro- down gazettes that became too outspoken, and confis- duction of some Ottoman gazettes (and thus in the pro- cating foreign publications. Under the Press Law, first duction of newspapers and magazines), but the Ottoman implemented in 1865, all publications required govern- press was overwhelmingly male. ment authorization. Despite such efforts at censorship, publishers were resilient, reintroducing newspapers that Some observers celebrated the newfound freedom had been shut down, cleverly circumventing the censors, of the press, but others were scandalized by what they and smuggling in forbidden foreign literature. Overall, considered license rather than freedom. The content however, the Ottoman press, like other presses of the and tone of certain articles or editorials could evoke time, was distinctly limited by government restrictions. strong feelings and even provoke violence as political What made the press of 1908\u201309 \u201crevolutionary\u201d was positions were advanced, grievances were aired, insults that these restrictions were temporarily suspended in the were traded, and moral conventions were challenged. open-ended political climate brought on by the consti- Fear of the power of the press led to the destruction of tutional revolution. The press thereby gained the poten- the offices of the pro-Unionist gazettes Tanin and \u015euray\u0131 tial to take an active role in defining a new political and \u00dcmmet during the abortive counterrevolution of April social order. There was an immediate boom in Ottoman 13, 1909. K\u0131br\u0131sl\u0131 Dervi\u015f Vahdeti, editor of the Islamic serial publication, with at least 240 new gazettes pub- daily Volkan (Volcano), an active critic of the new par- lished in Istanbul alone in the 12 months beginning July liamentary regime, was implicated in the counterrevolu- 1908. Political satire flourished. It seemed that writ- tion. His paper was shut down and he was imprisoned ers, editors, and cartoonists were rushing to print every- and executed. Hasan Fehmi, editor of Serbesti (Freedom) thing they had been afraid or unable to print before. This and an outspoken critic of the CUP, was assassinated by freedom of the press did not last long. Once the new an unknown assailant. regime, with the Committee for Union and Prog- ress (CUP) in charge, had established itself, censorship More commonly, the press engaged in an ongoing was reintroduced, particularly in the aftermath of the set of dialogues, hotly debating the social issues of the","moment and publicly airing political concerns without Russia 489 bringing their battles to the point of physical violence. Such issues included the nature of the new regime, the ships left Istanbul in May 1522, arriving in front of the condition of the Ottoman military, the obligations of citi- walls of Rhodes the following month. The city of Rhodes zens, imitation of the West, proper roles and dress for the boasted some of the strongest fortifications in the eastern modern female, and the adoption of new technologies. In Mediterranean and the siege dragged on for five months general, the revolutionary press gave a wider voice to the before the Grand Master of the Order of the Knights of literate Ottoman public. Readers expressed their views in St. John decided to surrender. letters columns, participated in contests sponsored by the various gazettes, and gained an increasing awareness of Ottoman chroniclers took great pride in the fact that their fellow readers through ads, coupons, and promo- the island was now an Ottoman possession. The long tions. The revolutionary era thus sparked the demand for and violent history of the Knights, as well as the strength a more wide-ranging, inclusive, and comprehensive cov- and even the beauty of the city\u2019s walls, had made Rhodes erage of Ottoman affairs, both domestic and foreign. famous far beyond its rather modest size. Little is known of the island\u2019s history under the Ottomans, particularly in Palmira Brummett the earlier centuries after 1552. We do know, however, that Further reading: Feroz Ahmad, The Making of Mod- it was a routine stop for ships sailing between Istanbul and ern Turkey (London: Routledge, 1993); Palmira Brum- Alexandria, thus playing a vital role in linking the north- mett, Image and Imperialism in the Ottoman Revolutionary ern and southern shores of the eastern Mediterranean. Press, 1908\u20131911 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000); Elizabeth Frierson, \u201cMirrors out, Mirrors in: Molly Greene Domestication and Rejection of the Foreign in Late-Otto- man Women\u2019s Magazines,\u201d in Women, Patronage, and Self- Rifaiyya Order The Rifaiyya Order of Sufism was one Representation in Islamic Societies, edited by D. Fairchild of the more unconventional Sufi orders. Western travel- Ruggles (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), ers to the Ottoman Empire dubbed the order the \u201chowl- 177\u2013201; \u015e\u00fckr\u00fc Hanio\u011flu, Preparation for a Revolution: The ing dervishes\u201d due to the loud and boisterous dhikr, or Young Turks, 1902\u20131908 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, prayer ceremony, they employed. Members of the Rifai- 2001); Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 3rd yya Order further drew attention with public displays ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). of eating glass, dancing with snakes, and passing skew- ers through their cheeks. The order claimed Ahmad al- Rhodes (Rodhos, Rhodos, Rhodus, Rodos) Rhodes Rafai, a mystic who lived in Iraq in the 12th century, is the easternmost of the major Aegean islands that as its founder. The order was very popular in Egypt in are a part of present-day Greece. As such, Rhodes has the Mamluk Empire period, and after the Ottoman always been a link between the Greek world and the conquest of Egypt in 1517, Rifaiyya disciples spread the Near East. The Ottoman capture of Rhodes in 1522 was order to Anatolia. In the modern period, the Rifaiyya a logical extension of Ottoman victories in Syria in 1516 Order\u2019s practices included the public act of dawsa, or and Egypt in 1517. By gaining control of the southern \u201ctrampling,\u201d wherein the sheikh of the order would ride shores of the Mediterranean, the empire went a long his horse over the prostrate bodies of his followers. Such way toward the re-creation of the old imperial unity of practices proved an embarrassment to modernizers in the eastern Mediterranean. As the 16th century began, Egypt. Muhammad Abduh declared the order\u2019s practices Ottoman conquests had significantly shifted the politi- un-Islamic and Khedive Tawfiq banned the order alto- cal geography of the region. For the first time since the gether. The Rifaiyya fared better in the Ottoman Empire, seventh century, Constantinople, now Istanbul, ruled as Abu al-Huda al-Sayyadi, the Syrian spiritual adviser over the Arab world, but this accomplishment brought to Sultan Abd\u00fclhamid II (r. 1876\u20131909), was a member with it the new challenge of guaranteeing the sea passage of the order and provided it with official patronage. between the capital and the new provinces, a challenge made increasingly difficult by the belligerent crusad- Bruce Masters ing order of the Knights of St. John, installed on the See also Sufism. island of Rhodes since the early 14th century. Standing in the way of Ottoman security in the Aegean, the Knights Russia Russians, one of three Eastern Slavic peoples, were also an embarrassment for Sultan S\u00fcleyman I (r. emerged as a distinct ethnic group with the rise of the 1520\u201366), given their militant anti-Islamic rhetoric, their principality of Muscovy in the early 14th century, which naval prowess, and their penchant for enslaving Muslims. subsequently evolved into the Russian Empire. By the Determined to seize the island, a fleet of 300 Ottoman 18th century, Russia had replaced Habsburg Austria as the main enemy of the Ottomans in central and south- eastern Europe. Russia\u2019s expansion posed a major threat to the Ottoman Empire during the last three centuries","490 Russia of Soudak and sent out a naval expedition that con- quered the city around the year 1223. In 1238 the Rus\u2019 of its existence and the 10 wars fought between the two were reported to have fled from the Mongols to Sinop empires had significant consequences for the history of (present-day Turkey), where a Seljuk ruler confiscated the emerging nations in southeastern Europe. their property (presumably slaves) recovered from one ship, which was sinking by the shore due to a storm. In EARLY ENCOUNTERS AND THE all probability these Rus\u2019 merchants represented Kiev, PROBLEM OF TERMINOLOGY because as late as the 16th century all imports coming to eastern Europe from the Balkans and Anatolia through Russian-Ottoman relations at their earliest stages are dif- the Crimean ports passed through Kiev. Like any other ficult to follow because the historical use of the name branch of Muscovy\u2019s foreign trade, commerce with the Rus\u2019, commonly associated with Russians, changed over Black Sea area was controlled by foreign merchants. time. The term Rus\u2019 came to the Ottoman language from They made up Moscow\u2019s richest merchant guild, called Arabic, where it initially referred both to the state of the Soudak merchants (surozhane). Rus,\u2019 with its capital city of Kiev, and to its Slavic popu- lation. This term remained in use to designate all the MUSCOVY AND THE OTTOMANS Eastern Slavs and their lands despite the partitioning of Kievan Rus\u2019 in the aftermath of the Mongol conquest of Up until the end of the 17th century the most important 1237\u201341. Closer interactions with Eastern Slavs, most of feature in the relations between the principality of Mus- whom were brought into the Ottoman realms as slaves covy and the Ottoman Empire, which did not share a or entered as merchants, made the Ottomans aware border, was long-distance trade. The exchange of prod- of various regional and political subdivisions among ucts was important for both sides and dictated political the Eastern Slavs and how they identified themselves. behavior toward one another. In the mid-15th century the Those Eastern Slavs (ancestors of today\u2019s Ukrainians and Ottomans grew to become the world\u2019s largest consumer Belarusians), who were incorporated into the Lithuanian, of traditional east European commodities such as furs, Polish, and Hungarian states and formed ethnic and reli- birds of prey, and walrus tusks. Their interest in securing gious minorities there, retained their old ethnic name of these commodities certainly motivated their conquest of Rus\u2019 The Eastern Slavs in the northern and eastern parts the northern coast of the Black Sea, which included the of Rus,\u2019 which became subject to the Mongol state of the port cities Caffa, Soudak, Azak (1475), Kilia, Akker- Golden Horde, strengthened their regional identities and man (1484), and \u00d6zi (1538). At the same time, access to came to identify themselves by the name of their capital Ottoman silk and cash, traded in return for furs, paid for cities, such as Moscow (Moskvich), Tver (Tverich), and Muscovy\u2019s spectacular expansion after 1460. Muscovite Novgorod (Novgorodets). Thus the term Moskov or Mos- princes gained control of this source of revenue by offer- kovlu, the Ottoman term for Moskvich, referred to the ing gifts and granting privileges to the international mer- subjects of the prince of Moscow, and was one name for chants, while prohibiting passage to neighboring states. Russians. Even in official correspondence, the Ottoman chancellery addressed the Russian czars as \u201dking\/czar of Diplomatic contacts, initiated in 1492 with the first Muscovy\u201d (Moskov k\u0131ral\u0131\/\u00e7ar\u0131), disregarding the latter\u2019s Muscovite embassy in Constantinople, also focused claims (since the end of the 15th century) to all the ter- on settling commercial disputes, in addition to carry- ritory of Rus.\u2019 Only when a separate name for Ukraine ing out the shopping orders of the two sovereigns and (Turkish: Ukrayna, sometimes Ukranya) found accep- conducting merchant caravans into each other\u2019s coun- tance at the end of the 17th century did it become pos- try. Although Muscovy was interested in a political alli- sible for the Ottomans to use the name Rus\u2019 for Muscovy ance with the Ottoman Empire, the Ottomans preferred without confusion. However it was only after the renun- to remain neutral in the area. They even left diplomatic ciation of their claims to Ukraine in 1741 that the Otto- relations with Muscovy, which included the exaction mans agreed to recognize Elizabeth I (r. 1741\u201361) by the of an annual tribute, in the hands of the khans of the title \u201cEmpress of All the Russias\u201d (tamamen Rusiya impa- Crimean Tatars, a Turkic-speaking Mongol group that ratori\u00e7a). Rus\u2019 became the term for Russian ethnicity later had founded a khanate in the Crimea in the first half of in the 18th century. the 15th century and that became Ottoman vassals in 1475. Muscovite ambassadors on their way to the Otto- In view of this ambiguity in terminology, there is no man capital Constantinople were obliged to call on the reliable evidence of direct commercial relations between capital of the Crimean Khanate. At the same time, the Russians and Ottomans prior to the end of the 15th cen- Ottomans refused to take responsibility for Crimean tury. While sources connect the Anatolian Seljuks with military expeditions against Muscovy, even though Otto- Rus\u2019 merchants selling furs and slaves in the Crimea, it man troops occasionally took part in them. Such aloof- is uncertain which people the term refers to. The Seljuk ness helped them avoid the political consequences of the sultan Kaykubad I (r. 1220\u201337) blamed the Rus\u2019 for the mistreatment of his merchants in the Crimean port","slave hunt, an invariable feature of Crimean warfare and Russia 491 a much-appreciated source of slaves for the Ottomans. Tatar raiders procured about 100,000 Muscovite captives PETER THE GREAT AND THE OTTOMANS during the first half of the 17th century. The successes of the Holy League (Austria, Venice, the Yet relegating relations with Muscovy to the Papacy, and Poland) forces against the Ottomans in Hun- Crimean khans proved risky in the long run. In 1551 gary in the war of 1684\u201399 enticed Muscovy to join its Khan Sahib Giray was deposed when he attempted to ranks in 1686. Initially, though, its army, accompanied by restore the rule of the Golden Horde, leading the Mus- Cossacks of Ukraine, unsuccessfully attempted to break covite czar, Ivan IV (r. 1533\u201384), to conquer the Kazan into the Crimea on two occasions (1687, 1689). The cam- Khanate (1552), an independent Tatar khanatewith its paigns of 1695 and 1696, this time led by Czar Peter I the capital in Kazan on the Volga River (in the present-day Great (r. 1682\u20131725, reigned jointly with his half-brother Tatarstan Republic) and a powerful ally of the Crimean through 1696 and alone thereafter) and Cossack Hetman Khanate at that time.He subsequently subjugated Astra- Ivan Mazepa, ended with the conquest of Azak and several khan (1556) and the Caucasus (1560). Ottoman sultan fortresses on the lower Dnieper. The peace agreement con- Selim II (r. 1566\u201374) attempted to conquer Astrakhan cluded in Constantinople in 1700 achieved all of the tra- in 1569, but failed. ditional strategic goals of Muscovy as it ended the tribute from Russia to the Crimean khans, established a Russian Muscovy at this stage proved more responsive ambassador in Constantinople, and obligated the Porte to to Ottoman customs and readily emulated court cer- restrain Crimean khans from raids into Russian territory. emonies, chancellery elements (including the Ottoman Yet the annexation of Azak steered a new course in Rus- sultans\u2019 monogram, the tu\u011fra), and system of govern- sian-Ottoman relations. Indeed, by the time of this peace, ment. At the same time, Orthodox clergy and artists Peter formulated his strategic goals against the Ottoman who frequented Muscovy from the Ottoman realms in Empire. Excited by his military success and imbued with expectation of generous alms or royal patronage spread mercantilist ideas, he wanted to curb both the Tatars and exaggerated stories about Christians\u2019 suffering at the Cossacks by surrounding them with fortresses, and he hands of the Ottomans. They inspired the czars who planned to force the Ottomans to open Constantinople believed that Muscovy\u2019s mission was to redeem Con- and the Straits for trade and free passage to the Mediter- stantinople from the Muslims. The reality, however, did ranean with the help of a powerful navy. This became the not favor the realization of such plans, and Czar Mikhail blueprint for Russian policy in the Black Sea from that Feodorovich (r. 1613\u20131645) wisely decided not to take time forward. Ottoman-Russian relations entered a new the Ottoman fortress Azak, offered by the Don Cos- phase whose main feature was Russian military expansion. sacks, who held it in 1637\u201342. The war of 1710\u201313 is memorable for the Pruth MUSCOVY, UKRAINE, AND THE OTTOMANS campaign (1711). It was the first Russian attack inspired by the illusory hopes of an Orthodox Christian rebellion The Cossack uprising in Ukraine against Poland that against the Ottomans. This time, however, Czar Peter did began in 1648 presented Muscovy with a chance to get a not have Ukrainian Cossacks on his side. He was sur- foothold on the Ottoman northern frontier, along with a rounded and outnumbered in Moldavia by Ottoman sizeable Cossack army experienced in steppe warfare. In and Crimean troops and he therefore agreed to evacuate 1654 Ukraine accepted a union with Muscovy in which Azak and Poland. However, this turned out to be the last the Cossacks would continue to exercise self-govern- Ottoman success before the Russian advance. ment. This move by Czar Alexis provoked a war with the Poles (1654\u201367) and the Crimean Tatars, as well as RUSSO-OTTOMAN WARS a civil war in Ukraine. The Ottomans were also dragged into this civil war by taking some Cossack factions under The Russo-Ottoman War of 1735\u201339, during which their protection, and they consequently occupied a part Russia allied with Austria, is usually ignored because of Ukraine in 1672. Such conditions led the two pow- of its lack of territorial exchanges, except for the recov- ers into their first direct conflict, which broke out in ery of Azak by the Russians. However, during this war 1676 over the possession of the Cossack capital, Chyhy- a modernized Russian army, together with their Cos- ryn. After the first aborted siege in 1677, the Ottomans sack allies, invaded the Crimea twice and proved to be took the city the following year, but soon evacuated. The effective against the Ottomans, both in taking fortresses peace talks of Bakhchisaray in 1681 resulted in an agree- and in the open field. Moreover, the Treaty of Belgrade, ment that called for the creation of a broad buffer zone concluded in 1739 between the Holy Roman Empire between Ottoman and Muscovite possessions in Ukraine and the Ottoman Empire, opened the Black Sea to Rus- through the depopulation of the territory on the right sian commercial activity. Russian trade with the Otto- bank of the Dnieper River. mans was primarily conducted through Greek merchants based either in Ottoman territory or in Ukraine. Extend- ing a privilege to Russia that had been granted to the","492 Russo-Ottoman War of 1768\u20131774 tion of the Straits after the victory of the Allied Powers (Britain, France, and Russia) in World War I. How- Ukrainian Cossacks in the previous century (1648), Rus- ever illogical this plan may have seemed, it remained on sian subjects were now allowed to trade in the Black Sea paper, even as both empires collapsed. using Ottoman ships. Oleksandr Halenko During the Russo-Ottoman war of 1768\u201374, Further reading: William McNeill, Europe\u2019s Steppe the Russians occupied the whole Crimean peninsula, Frontier, 1500\u20131800 ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, including the Ottoman province, or eyalet, of Caffa on 1964); Alan Fisher, The Russian Annexation of the Crimea, its southern shore in 1771, and won many decisive victo- 1772\u20131783 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); ries in Moldavia, Wallachia, and beyond the Danube Mubadele: An Ottoman-Russian Exchange of Ambassadors, River. The Russian navy, sent from the Baltic Sea to the annotated and translated by Norman Itzkowitz and Max Greek archipelago, burned the Ottoman navy at \u00c7e\u015fme Mote (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); Virginia (1770), although this spectacular operation failed to stir H. Aksan, An Ottoman Statesman in War and Peace: Ahmed a much anticipated Greek rebellion. With the Treaty of Resmi Efendi, 1700\u20131783 (Leiden: Brill, 1995). K\u00fc\u00e7\u00fck Kaynarca, Muscovy, known by now as the Rus- sian Empire, received several ports and fortresses on the Russo-Ottoman War of 1768\u20131774 Although there shores of the Black Sea along with the right of naviga- were several military encounters between the Ottoman tion in the Black Sea and free passage for merchant ships Empire and Muscovy, as Russia was known until the late through the straits of the Bosporus and Dardanelles. The 18th century, the war that was fought between 1768 and Crimean Khanate gained independence from the Porte. 1774 significantly changed the balance of power in the Middle East in favor of Russia and testified to the grow- This unprecedented success boosted Russian confi- ing Ottoman weakness in the international arena. The dence. Empress Catherine II (r. 1762\u201396) consequently Ottoman Empire was concerned with the growing Rus- disbanded the Cossack host in Ukraine (1775) and sian hegemony in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth ended Ukraine autonomy (1786); in 1783 she annexed (see Poland). When a Russian army detachment entered the Crimean Khanate and established a protectorate Ottoman territory in pursuit of retreating Polish forces, in Georgia. A Russian navy was built and Sevastopol in the Ottomans found the necessary pretext to declare war southwestern Crimea was chosen as its base. All of these on Russia without any military preparation (September actions provoked the wars of 1787\u201391 and 1806\u201312 (see 1768). Two decisive incidents in the course of the war Russo-Ottoman Wars), which only resulted in more were the naval disaster of \u00c7e\u015fme (Chesme), a natural Russian victories over the Ottomans. Russia annexed harbor south of Izmir, on July 6, 1770, and the Battle of Bessarabia (the eastern part of Moldavia) and the remain- Kartal (Kagul) on August 1, 1770. ing parts of the Pontic Steppe. In the summer of 1770, with the support of Eng- In the 19th century the Russian Empire reoriented its land, the Russian Baltic fleet, under the command of territorial expansion toward the Caucasus and continued Aleksi Orlov, appeared in the Aegean Sea. Despite the to support the nationalist movements of the Slavic and Ottoman victory in the first encounter between the Greek coreligionists in the Balkans. The Russo-Ottoman two navies early in July 1770, a confusing maneuver by wars of 1828\u201329 and 1877\u201378 were instrumental in creat- an Ottoman naval detachment resulted in the acciden- ing the independent states in the Balkans. However, Rus- tal retreat of the whole Ottoman navy into the harbor sian influence in this area alarmed Britain (see England) of \u00c7e\u015fme where, on the night of July 6, the Russians set and France, and caused their joint military interven- fire to the collected Ottoman fleet, killing 9,000 Ottoman tion in the Ottoman war against Russia in 1853\u201356 (the sailors and destroying 23 Ottoman ships. Crimean War). Britain and Austria-Hungary arranged the revision of the Treaty of San Stefano that had con- A few weeks later, the Ottoman army hastily crossed cluded the 1877\u201378 war and that had envisioned an inde- the Danube on barges, determined to retake the for- pendent Greater Bulgaria under the influence of Russia. tress of Hotin (Khotin). In the resulting pitched battle, The revised Treaty of Berlin, signed on August 24, 1878, the Russian army, under the command of Field Marshal reduced the size of the Bulgarian territory to a third. Rumiantsev, made excellent strategic use of light maneu- verable field cannons and the newly invented bayo- Due to intense military competition between the net attack, both of which had come into use during the 17th and 20th centuries, the Russian and the Ottoman recently concluded Seven Years War. Employing these empires are justly known as enemies. Only a few treaties new military developments, Rumiantsev easily defeated of alliance were concluded between Russia and the Otto- the Ottoman army, which was largely composed of irreg- mans (1799, 1805, 1833) and they were all prompted by ular and undisciplined troops who had been pressed dangerous circumstances for the Porte and were short- lived. The Russian efforts to bring the Straits under their control culminated in a secret agreement with Britain and France (1915) that envisioned the Russian annexa-","into military service. A total rout followed when, in the Russo-Ottoman War of 1768\u20131774 493 absence of a pontoon bridge, the retreating Ottoman field army was caught between the Russian forces and The Crimea was to be independent under the protection the Danube. One of the greatest military humiliations of Russia; Moldavia was to be granted full autonomy; in Ottoman history, this battle cost the Ottomans tens the Sublime Porte was to grant freedom of navigation of thousands of casualties. In fact, it was this defeat that and commercial privileges to Russia in the Black Sea spurred the Ottomans into making a series of Ottoman and the Mediterranean; Russia was to establish a per- military reforms on the Western model, leading to the manent embassy in Istanbul; and the Sublime Porte was abolition of the unmanageable Janissaries in the Auspi- to recognize the official title of Empress\/Emperor of all cious Incident of 1826. By the year 1772, Russia occu- the Russias. Aware of their military weakness, the Otto- pied the western banks of the Danube. man military headquarters accepted these demands, but Istanbul, pressured by the ulema, or religious establish- Because the Ottoman grand vizier and commander ment, insisted on resuming the war. After the armistice in chief Muhsinzade Mehmed Pasha and the Russian field ended in March 1773, the Ottomans achieved significant marshal Rumiantsev were inclined to make peace, the victories against the Russian army that besieged Silistra warring parties declared the armistice of Yerg\u00f6\u011f\u00fc (Giur- and Varna, while the Russian fleet continued to block gieu), which lasted through April and May of 1772. Peace maritime trade in the archipelago, to the detriment of talks broke down, however, in June 1772, when the Rus- Istanbul. sian navy bombarded Beirut, thus aiding Zahir \u00d6mer in Syria in his uprising against the Ottoman Empire. At The last phase of the war began after the Ottoman the same time, the Russians carried out secret negotia- rejection of the peace offer by Field Marshal Rumiantsev, tions with the rebellious Egyptian Mamluk Buludkapan who demanded that the Bucharest talks should constitute Ali Bey. By July, a truce had been declared between the the frame of reference for any peace treaty. Acceding to two naval forces in the Mediterranean and peace talks at the throne after the death of his brother on January 21, Fok\u015fani in August 1772 opened with the Russian refusal 1774, Abd\u00fclhamid I (r. 1774\u201389) was unwilling to con- of the mediation of the Habsburg ambassador Franz Thu- clude peace before rescuing H\u0131rsova, near Constanta, and gut and the Prussian ambassador Johann Christoph Zege- the Romanian principalities. Russia had suffered over- lin. The Russian delegates insisted on the independence of whelming losses from a war-related outbreak of plague the Crimea, which had been under virtual Russian occu- (which resulted in approximately 150,000 deaths), and pation since the beginning of the war, and demanded that these losses, combined with the exhaustion of the Russian the Ottomans cede the fortresses of Yenikale and Ker\u00e7 in Empire\u2019s financial resources, led to the Pugachev Revolt the Crimea to Russia. In addition to war indemnity, the in the Russian countryside in 1773, the single most Russians also demanded the granting of freedom of navi- important Cossack revolt in history. Under these press- gation and commercial privileges in the Black Sea and ing circumstances Rumiantsev was determined to launch the Mediterranean. a final offensive across the Danube to force peace on the Ottomans in the spring 1774. The defeat of the Ottoman The Sublime Porte was adamantly opposed to Rus- army at Kozluca (Kozludja) on June 25, 1774 turned into sian control of the Crimea and its fortresses. However, a general rout that spread to the Ottoman military head- with the intervention of Rumiantsev and Mehmed Pasha, quarters at \u015eumnu (Shumen\/Shumla) (July 1, 1774) as a the talks between the two powers continued in Novem- result of which Grand Vizier Muhsinzade Mehmed Pasha ber 1772. The two sides eventually agreed on 10 articles, had to sue for peace on Russian terms. the most important of which were the granting of a gen- eral amnesty in the Romanian principalities, the cancel- The final outcome was the Treaty of K\u00fc\u00e7\u00fck lation of the Russo-Ottoman Treaty of Belgrade (a peace Kaynarca, signed on July 21, 1774, with disastrous con- agreement signed in 1739 in which Austria, in alliance sequences for both the Ottomans and the Tatars. After with Russia, had given up control of northern Serbia 60 years of economic growth and reputable international and had given territory in Wallachia and Bosnia to the standing, the long war and difficult peace with Russia Ottomans), and the return of the Caucasus fortresses to now left the Ottoman Empire politically unstable, with the Ottomans. As for the Crimea, the Russian delegates an exhausted economy, an uncontrolled movement of complied with an Ottoman demand concerning the elec- decentralization in the provinces, and a devastating loss tion of the Crimean khan by the Tatars and mentioning of face in the international arena. the name of the Ottoman sultan in Friday ceremonies, but rejected both the return of the Crimean fortresses to Kahraman \u015eakul the Ottomans and dropping the matter of war indemnity. Further reading: Virginia Aksan, An Ottoman Statesman in War and Peace Ahmed Resmi Efendi, 1700\u20131783 (Leiden: This accord was not accepted by St. Petersburg, Brill, 1995), 102-168; Virginia Aksan, Ottoman Wars 1700- which instead put forward seven demands of its own: 1870: An Empire Besieged (Harlow, England: Longman\/ Pearson, 2007), 138-160; Caroline Finkel, Osman\u2019s Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire, 1300\u20131923 (London: John","494 Russo-Ottoman Wars For the Russians, renewed warfare with the Ottoman Empire provided an opportunity to realize long-standing Murray, 2005), 372\u2013412; Ekmeleddin Ihsano\u011flu, ed., History imperial goals in the Black Sea region. In an ideologi- of the Ottoman State, Society & Civilisation, vol. 1 (Istanbul: cally driven plan known as the \u201cGreek Project,\u201d Russian IRCICA, 2001), 63\u201366. Empress Catherine II (Catherine the Great) envisaged the reestablishment of a Byzantine state on Ottoman ter- Russo-Ottoman Wars (1787\u20131878) Over the course ritory with Constantinople (the ancient name of Istanbul) of a century the Russian and Ottoman empires fought as its capital. More concretely, the Russian Empire sought five wars (1787\u20131792, 1806\u20131812, 1828\u20131829, 1854\u2013 to improve its military and political position in the Black 1856, and 1877\u20131878) for control over the Black Sea Sea region and to fulfill its long-term geostrategic goal region. (For the 1854\u20131856 war, see Crimean War.) of gaining a commercial and naval outlet through the While ideological factors (such as nationalism and pan- straits of the Bosporus and Dardanelles. The triumphal Slavism) played a role in fomenting conflict between the and highly public procession in 1786 by Catherine II Ottoman and Russian empires in the 19th century, the (1762\u201396) to her new Crimean lands, coupled with the overarching geostrategic concern that drove Russo-Otto- pro-Orthodox Christian activities of Russian consular man conflict during this period was the Russian Empire\u2019s officials posted in the Danubian principalities of Wal- military and economic goal of securing an outlet to the lachia and Moldavia, vassals of the Ottoman Empire, Mediterranean Sea. For Russia, the achievement of this provoked this pro-war faction in Istanbul. These were goal required, first, possession of ports on the Black Sea the immediate causes of the Ottoman declaration of war coast and, second, navigational rights through the straits in the summer of 1787. of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. The principal focus of the first armed clashes between Starting in the 1770s with the acquisition of a small the two empires was control over the key Ottoman for- foothold on the northern Black Sea littoral, the Russian tress town of \u00d6zi, on the mouth of the Dniester River. Empire, by 1878, had occupied a large portion of the In the spring of 1788, a combined force of over 100,000 Black Sea coast from the delta of the Danube River in Russian soldiers attacked \u00d6zi. Following a long siege, the the west to the Georgian-Ottoman frontier in the east. Russians captured this fortress in December 1788, killing In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Ottoman 9,500 Ottoman soldiers and taking 4,000 prisoners. Empire was capable of mounting offensive military oper- ations against the Russian Empire. However, by 1878, the In 1789 the Ottoman army, under the command of Ottoman military generally found itself in a defensive Hasan Pasha, advanced north of the Danube River into posture and was reduced to countering Russian penetra- the Danubian principality of Wallachia. Under the highly tion into Ottoman territory. In the Balkans, Russian war effective leadership of Russian General Alexander Suvo- plans generally focused on bridging the Danube River rov, the Russian army beat the Ottoman army in two key and striking toward Istanbul through Ottoman Rume- battles in the open field at Foschani in July and on the lia. In eastern Anatolia, Russia\u2019s strategic goals centered Rimnik (Boza) River in September. Following these two on capturing key Ottoman cities in the region\u2014Kars, losses, the Ottoman army, hampered by confusion at the Erzurum, and Trabzon. command level and subject to heavy desertions, ceased to be an effective fighting force. The 1789 campaign season RUSSO-OTTOMAN WAR OF 1787\u201392 was one of the most disastrous in Ottoman history. On August 19, 1787, the Ottoman Empire declared war In 1790 Gazi Hasan Pasha replaced Hasan Pasha on the Russian Empire in an effort to regain territo- as commander of the Ottoman army in the Balkans. As rial and political control over its long-standing vassals, a result of losses incurred during the war, the Ottoman the Crimean Tatars. This war, following the Russo- army was now composed almost entirely of peasants and Ottoman War of 1768\u20131774, resulted in the Ottoman raw Anatolian recruits. The largest military encounter of Empire\u2019s ultimate loss of the Crimean Khanate and the the war occurred in December 1790 around the Ottoman permanent establishment of a Russian political and mili- fortress town of Ismail in the Danubian estuary. In one tary presence on the northern shore of the Black Sea. of the bloodiest battles of the 18th century, the Russian assault on Ismail resulted in the death of 26,000 Ottoman The declaration of war against the Russian Empire soldiers and civilians and the capture of 9,000 Ottoman was driven by a pro-war faction within the Ottoman soldiers. In that same year, the Russian Black Sea fleet government. Angered by the humiliating terms of the forced the Ottoman navy to retreat to its ports in the Treaty of K\u00fcc\u00fck Kaynarca (1774) and the lack of Bosporus. In so doing, the Ottoman Empire effectively Ottoman response to the Russian annexation of the ceded naval control of the Black Sea to the Russians. In Crimea in 1783, this pro-war group included the reli- August 1791, on the eastern shores of the Black Sea, the gious establishment (ulema), exiled Crimean Tatar Russian Empire gained control of Anapa, thereby defend- nobles, and Grand Vizier Hoca Yusuf Pasha.","ing its protectorate of Georgia and eliminating the Otto- Russo-Ottoman Wars 495 man Empire\u2019s last stronghold in this region. an Ottoman army of 30,000 commanded by Yusuf Ziya British and Prussian alarm at this demonstration Pasha at Arpa Su in eastern Anatolia of Russian military strength motivated these two Euro- pean powers to support the Ottoman Empire as a bul- In the spring of 1807, another Ottoman army of wark against Russian aggression in the Balkans. In 1791, 30,000 soldiers crossed the Danube River with the objec- British diplomatic pressure, coupled with Prussian war tive of recapturing Bucharest and preventing a link preparations against the Russian Empire, brought the between the Russian army and Serbian rebels. Succeeding Russians to the negotiating table. Following protracted in driving a wedge between the Russians and the Serbs, negotiations, the Ottoman and Russian empires signed the Ottoman army laid siege to Bucharest in June 1807. the Treaty of Jassy on January 9, 1792, ending the The Ottomans were also able to repel a Russian attempt Russo-Ottoman War of 1787\u201392. to cross the Danube at Giurgevo, located in present-day Romania across the Bulgarian port city of Ruse. RUSSO-OTTOMAN WAR OF 1806\u201312 The Ottoman spring offensive of 1807 showed prom- The conflict between the Russians and the Ottomans ise but was curtailed by two events, one external and one that began just 14 years later must be understood within internal, which had a profound effect on the course and the context of the rise of Napoleonic France. Impressed outcome of the war. On July 7, 1807, Napoleon and Czar with the military success of Napoleon, especially at Aus- Alexander I signed the Treaty of Tilsit. This treaty, which terlitz in December 1805, the Ottoman Empire moved to delineated Russian and French spheres of interest in the improve its relations with France. Alarmed by develop- Balkans, made clear to the Sublime Porte that French ing Ottoman-French relations, the Russian Empire raised material and diplomatic support for the Ottoman Empire, an army in southern Ukraine and resolved to occupy including assistance in reclaiming the Crimea, would not the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia be forthcoming. A series of internal political crises in as a preventive measure against French influence in the Istanbul from 1806\u201308 also severely hampered the Otto- Balkans. man Empire\u2019s military capabilities in the Balkans and the Danubian principalities. On May 29, 1807 a conservative The immediate cause of war between the Rus- alliance of Janissaries and ulema, threatened by a series sian and Ottoman empires in November 1806 was the of reform measures, including the creation of a Euro- Ottoman removal of two pro-Russian rulers or hospo- pean-style army corps (see Nizam-\u0131 Cedid), imprisoned dars in the Danubian principalities and their replace- Sultan Selim III (r. 1789\u20131807) and forced him to abdi- ment with hospodars friendly to France. This unilateral cate the Ottoman throne. The reign of the new Ottoman action on the part of the Ottomans contravened agree- sultan, Mustafa IV (r. 1807\u201308), was brief. In a struggle ments reached earlier between the Ottoman and Russian for power in the summer of 1808, Selim III\u2019s nephew empires. On November 24, 1806, two Russian armies ascended to the sultanate as Mahmud II (1808\u201339). (one under General I. I. Michelson and one under Gen- These dynastic struggles, which occupied the attention eral K. I. Meyendorff) moved across the Dneister River of the regular Ottoman army and the armies commanded and occupied the Danubian principalities. In response, by the provincial notables in the Balkans, forced the Otto- the Ottomans declared war on the Russian Empire. The man army to seek a defensive posture against the Russians only effective Ottoman resistance to this initial Russian and retreat behind its fortified Danubian line. incursion came from the Danubian notable (see ayan) Alemdar Mustafa Pasha, who, commanding an army The Russian Empire\u2019s occupation of the Danubian of 60,000, repulsed a Russian attack on the key fortress of principalities sapped the Russian army\u2019s war-making Ismail on the Danubian estuary. capabilities in the Balkans and, as a result, the Russians were unable to take advantage of these political crises While the Danubian principalities and the Balkans in the Ottoman capital. Russian military doctrine of the constituted the principal theater of conflict in the Russo- early 19th century compelled armed forces to rely on Ottoman War of 1806\u201312, Russian and Ottoman forces local inhabitants for supply and provisioning. The severe also engaged in hostilities at sea in the northern Aegean socioeconomic dislocation caused by the presence of a and on land in the southern Caucasus and eastern Ana- Russian army of 80,000 in the Danubian principalities tolia. Under the Ottoman-Russian defensive alliances of resulted in widespread looting in the countryside, out- 1799 and 1805, the Russian navy had been allowed to sail migration of peasants, and a severe drop-off in agricul- through the straits of the Bosporus and Dardanelles. In tural production. Regular outbreaks of the plague also July 1807 the Russian navy defeated the Ottoman navy contributed to a reduction in the overall fitness of the off the north Aegean island of Lemnos and blockaded Russian army in the Danubian principalities. Through- ships attempting to enter the trait of the Dardanelles. out the course of the war the Russian army lacked ade- Additionally, in the spring of 1808, the Russians defeated quate supplies which, coupled with resistance offered by an Ottoman army encamped in Shumla at the base of the","496 Russo-Ottoman Wars Burgas. The Ottoman army that took the field in 1828 under the command of Agha H\u00fcseyin Pasha was a ragtag Balkan mountain range, left it incapable of a sustained army composed primarily of Crimean Tatars and other military effort beyond the Danube River. The Russians irregular forces. did succeed, however, in capturing Ismail in September 1809, Ibrail (Braila) in January 1810, and Silistra, on the Meeting little Ottoman resistance, the lead column of Ottoman side of the Danube, in August 1810. the Russian army occupied Bucharest and Craiova, took Ibrail on June 16, and, following battles in Kustenje and Fearing a French invasion of the Russian Empire, Mangalia, occupied Dobruja. The second column of the Alexander I\u2019s advisers in Saint Petersburg urged the czar Russian army crossed the Danube in June and attacked to break the stalemate in the Balkans. In 1811 the Rus- the Ottoman fortress of Silistra on the southern side of sians, seeking a speedy end to their hostilities with the the Danube River, while the third column laid siege to a Ottoman Empire, increased their military and diplomatic series of Ottoman fortresses along the Danube. On Octo- pressure on the Sublime Porte. Under General M. I. ber 11, the Russians captured the important Danubian Kutuzov, the Russian army scored a series of military vic- port city of Vidin. Following the initial Russian onslaught tories along the Danube at Vidin, Slobodzia, and Rus\u00e7uk the Ottoman army, toward the end of the 1828 fight- (Ruse). Reducing their territorial demands from reten- ing season, fell back on the natural defensive line of the tion of the Danubian principalities to a slice of eastern Balkan mountain range, regrouped around \u015eumla under Moldavia (subsequently known as Bessarabia), the Rus- the command of the able Ottoman commander H\u00fcsrev sians signed a peace agreement with the Ottomans, the Pasha, and prepared to defend this key Balkan mountain Treaty of Bucharest, on May 28, 1812. By the time the pass against an expected Russian invasion in 1829. treaty was ratified, Napoleon\u2019s armies were already deep into Russian territory. In 1829 the Russians opened up a second front in the war in the eastern Black Sea region. By the spring of 1829 RUSSO-OTTOMAN WAR OF 1828\u201329 the Russians, under the command of General Paskievitch, had occupied the Georgian port of Poti and captured Arda- The roots of the Russo-Ottoman War of 1828\u201329 war lay han, Kars, and Bayazid in eastern Anatolia. In July 1829 the in the emerging national consciousness of the Ortho- Russian army occupied G\u00fcm\u00fc\u015fhane and the key eastern dox Christian populations in the Ottoman Balkans and Anatolian city of Erzurum. These gains were followed by the imperial ambitions of the new Russian czar, Nicholas the siege of the important Black Sea port of Trabzon. I, in the Black Sea region. Following the Greek War of Independence in 1822, Britain, France, and Russia signed At the start of the 1829 campaign season in the Bal- the Treaty of London in 1827 calling for the creation of an kans, the Russian army faced an Ottoman army com- autonomous Greek state. The Ottomans refused to agree posed of untrained irregulars. Additionally, the Ottoman to the formation of an independent Greek state and this, army suffered from food shortages due to a Russian naval coupled with Russian demands for the restoration of its blockade of the trait of the Dardanelles. When the Rus- privileges in the Danubian principalities of Wallachia and sian army moved on \u015eumla the Ottoman army disinte- Moldavia, resulted in a Russian declaration of war on the grated, abandoned its artillery on the field, and fled into Ottoman Empire in April 1828. In declaring war at this the Balkan Mountains. Rather than risk encountering the time, Nicholas I (1825\u201355) sought to engage the Otto- remnants of the Ottoman army in the \u015eumla Pass, the man army before the extensive military reforms initiated Russian commander, General Diebitsch, led his army on by Sultan Mahmud II in 1826 could take effect. The Rus- an arduous nine-day march through the Balkan Moun- sian declaration of war was welcomed in Istanbul by some tains and emerged south of the range in August. Encoun- members of the political elite who viewed the war as an tering little effective resistance, the Russian army moved opportunity to reclaim territory lost to the Russian Empire rapidly on Edirne, the capital of Ottoman Rumelia. Fol- in the Black Sea region during the preceding 60 years. lowing a three-day siege, the Russians occupied Edirne on August 22 and were now only a few days march from Upon the declaration of war, a Russian army of Istanbul. Despite the effective collapse of the Ottoman 100,000 mobilized rapidly, moving in three columns army, however, the Russian army was not in a position through the Danubian principalities toward Ottoman to move in strength on the Ottoman capital. The over- Rumelia south of the Danube River. In contrast, the Otto- extension of its supply lines and the spread of disease man military was ill-prepared. The Janissary component had taken a severe toll on the Russian troops. Mahmud of the army had been smashed by Mahmud II in the 1826 II and his advisers, however, were unaware of the dimin- Auspicious Incident and the Ottoman navy had been ished state of the Russian army, and after a Russian dem- virtually destroyed at the Battle of Navarino in October onstration in the direction of Istanbul, the Ottoman 1827. The Russian Empire enjoyed naval supremacy on government, following the advice of French and British the Black Sea and was able to avoid the supply problems diplomats in Istanbul, sued for peace. The Treaty of that hampered its previous campaigns in the Balkans by opening up a supply route through the Bulgarian port of","Edirne, signed on September 14, 1829, concluded the Russo-Ottoman Wars 497 Russian-Ottoman War of 1828\u201329. ism in the Ottoman Balkans, more mundane issues also CRIMEAN WAR 1854\u201356 animated the Ottoman Empire\u2019s Orthodox subjects in the Balkans. In the mid-1870s droughts, famine, and floods In general, the Crimean War followed the broad 19th- in Anatolia forced the Ottoman government to shift the century pattern of Ottoman-Russian geopolitical and ide- weight of the empire\u2019s tax burden onto the empire\u2019s Bal- ological conflict for control over the Black Sea region and kan subjects. Increasingly onerous taxes, coupled with influence over Orthodox Slavic populations in the Balkan measures employed to raise revenues, promoted instabil- peninsula. The first phase of the war (1853) unfolded in ity and provoked armed rebellion in the Balkans. a now familiar pattern: failed diplomatic negotiations between the Ottomans and the Russians; Russian mili- Events in Bulgaria in April 1876 internationalized tary offensives into the Danubian principalities and east- these domestic Ottoman disturbances. Taking advantage ern Anatolia; and Ottoman ability to slow the Russian of the rising discontent among the Bulgarian popula- advance coupled with a lack of military strength to seize tion of the Ottoman Empire the leaders of the Bulgarian the initiative. What distinguished the Crimean War from national movement called for a mass uprising against previous Ottoman-Russian conflicts, however, was the Ottoman rule. While the uprising itself did not garner rapid internationalization of the war. While the British widespread support, in the ensuing intercommunal strife, and French had exerted significant diplomatic pressure Bulgarian rebels killed 1,000 Muslim Ottomans, includ- in Saint Petersburg and Istanbul during previous peri- ing women and children. With most of their regular and ods of Ottoman-Russian hostilities, in the Crimean War professional forces involved in counter-insurgency oper- British and French troops were directly deployed in 1854 ations in Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Ottoman to protect the Ottoman Empire from Russian aggres- government relied on irregular troops (ba\u015f\u0131bozuks) and sion. In this second phase of the war, the combined land armed, ill-disciplined Circassian refugees to suppress the and naval forces of the British and French allowed for uprising in Bulgaria. The violent suppression of the April forward operations on Russian soil (the Crimean pen- uprising resulted in the death of an estimated 10,000\u2013 insula). Ottoman military contributions in the second 12,000 Bulgarians, including women and children, at a phase of the war were generally confined to support and time when political instability in Istanbul deflected cen- supply operations. In the treaty that ended the war (the tral government attention away from affairs in the Bal- Treaty of Paris, signed on March 29, 1856), British and kans. In May 1876 Sultan Abd\u00fclaziz (r. 1861\u201376) was French support resulted in relatively advantageous peace deposed; his successor, the mentally unstable Murad terms for the Ottoman Empire. V (r. 1876), was replaced by Sultan Abd\u00fclhamid II (r. 1876\u20131909) three months later, in August 1876. The Sub- RUSSO-OTTOMAN WAR OF 1877\u201378 lime Porte was thus unprepared to cope with the public reaction in Great Britain and Russia to the violent sup- The Treaty of Paris, which concluded the Crimean War pression of the April uprising in Bulgaria (reported in (1854\u201356), had severely reduced the Russian Empire\u2019s the foreign press as the \u201cBulgarian atrocities\u201d). Reports of influence, militarily and diplomatically, in the Black these atrocities in British newspapers shocked and hor- Sea region. After the introduction of sweeping domes- rified the British public and resulted in a shift in British tic reforms in the 1860s, the Russian Empire, in the public opinion against the Ottoman Empire. This shift early 1870s, once again turned its attention to affairs in in public opinion tempered Britain\u2019s traditionally pro- the Ottoman Balkans and the southern Caucasus. Influ- Ottoman foreign policy. In Russia, the Bulgarian atroci- enced by a pan-Slavic ideology that, in its diplomatic and ties, resonating widely among the educated segment of military worldview, envisioned Russian dominion over Russian society, provoked calls for war against the Otto- Orthodox populations in the Ottoman Balkans, the goals man Empire and the liberation of the Ottoman Empire\u2019s of Russian foreign policy in the early 1870s were focused Orthodox populations in the Balkans. on the reclamation of Russia\u2019s previously strong position in the Black Sea region. One of the prime architects of In an effort to defuse the growing crisis in the Bal- this pan-Slavic foreign policy was Count Nikolai Ignatiev, kans, European representatives assembled for diplomatic the Russian ambassador in Istanbul. talks in Istanbul in December 1876. Pre-empting dis- cussions focused on the socioeconomic condition of the Against this background, the events that sparked Ottoman Empire\u2019s Christian populations, Sultan Abd\u00fcl- another round of warfare between the Russian and Otto- hamid II, during the course of the conference, issued a man empires were uprisings in the mid-1870s in Bosnia constitution. The first of its kind in Ottoman history, and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria. the 1876 constitution called for the full equality of all While these uprisings are generally studied within the Ottoman subjects regardless of religion. From the Otto- context of the rise of 19th-century European national- man perspective, the 1876 constitution satisfied demands made to the Sublime Porte concerning its Orthodox","498 Russo-Ottoman Wars 70,000 Muslim refugees left Russian territory in the southern Caucasus and resettled in the Ottoman Empire. Christian subjects in the Balkans. Therefore, all further Conversely, 25,000 Ottoman Armenians sought refuge in demands made at the conference in reference to this pop- Russian territory. ulation were rejected by the Ottomans. In late November, 1877, Pleven fell to the Russians. In early 1878, the Russian Empire, believing that all Following up on this victory, the Russian army crossed avenues for a peaceful and diplomatic resolution to the the Balkan Mountains and took Sofia on January 4, 1878. Balkan crisis had been exhausted, initiated preparations Moving down the Maritsa River valley, the Russians cap- for another round of war against the Ottoman Empire. tured Plovdiv on January 17 and Edirne on January 20. These efforts included the negotiation of Austrian neu- The Russian army was now in a position to seriously trality and the extraction of a Romanian guarantee for threaten Istanbul and a forward move by the Russians the safe passage of Russian troops through Romanian from Edirne toward the Ottoman capital provoked a Brit- territory. Throughout the course of the ensuing Russo- ish response in the form of a strong naval demonstration Ottoman war, the French and Prussians would remain on the Sea of Marmara. Although exhausted, racked by neutral. While British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli disease, and as low on supplies as they had been in 1829, argued for British intervention on the side of the Otto- the Russian army, it was thought, might be in a position mans, anti-Ottoman sentiment prevailed in the British to challenge for Istanbul. The British presence around Parliament. It was only toward the end of the war, with the Ottoman capital convinced the Russians instead to Russian troops threatening Istanbul, that the British seek an armistice with the Ottomans. Conducted at the threw their support behind the Ottomans. Russian encampment in San Stefano (Ye\u015filk\u00f6y) and led by Count Ignatiev, the Russian-Ottoman armistice talks On April 24, 1877 the Russian army, operating out of resulted in a bilateral treaty. Signed on March 3, 1878, its recently established headquarters in Kishniev, Bessara- this treaty, known as the Treaty of San Stefano, officially bia, crossed the Pruth River into Romania and declared ended the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877\u201378. The provi- war on the Ottoman Empire. The military course of the sions of the treaty, however, were later amended during war was very much a reprise of the Russo-Ottoman War the Congress of Berlin in 1878. of 1828\u201329. Expecting an easy victory, Russian war plan- ning focused on sending the bulk of the Russian army The terms imposed on the Ottoman Empire in the across the central Balkan Mountains and, upon captur- Treaty of San Stefano were harsh. The treaty called for ing Sofia, moving down the well-supplied Maritsa River the creation of an autonomous Greater Bulgaria under valley to Edirne. In late June 1877 the Russian army the protection of the Russian Empire. As it was envi- bridged the Danube at Sistova. An advanced detachment, sioned, this Greater Bulgaria was to have stretched under the command of General Gurko, took Turnovo on east-west from the Vardar and Morava river valleys in July 7 and, despite heavy Ottoman resistance, secured Macedonia and southern Serbia to the Black Sea coast the strategic Shipka Pass over the Balkan Mountains on and north-south from the Danube to the Aegean coast July 19. The main Russian army, now joined by Bulgar- (except for Salonika). Bosnia-Herzegovina was granted ian and Romanian fighters, moved south from the Dan- autonomy. Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro were rec- ube toward the Shipka Pass. To remove a potential threat ognized as independent states and their borders were to Russian supply lines, the main Russian army attacked drawn to maximize Ottoman territorial losses. Bessarabia the Ottoman fortress town of Pleven, but here the Rus- was returned to Russia. In eastern Anatolia, the Russian sian advance bogged down. Multiple Russian attacks on Empire took direct possession of Kars, Ardahan, Batumi, the fortress were repulsed by Ottoman troops under the and Do\u011fubayazit. capable command of Osman Pasha. The resistance at Pleven forced the Russian high command to alter its mil- The terms of the Treaty of San Stefano elicited a swift itary plan and undertake a lengthy siege of the fortress. reaction from Great Britain and the Austro-Hungarian The siege of Pleven would last for five months and at its Empire. Pre-war negotiations with the Russians had led height involved 120,000 troops (84,000 Russian, 36,000 the Austrians to believe that they would receive Bosnia- Ottoman). Herzegovina in return for their neutrality. The British were worried that the creation of a Greater Bulgaria as a In April 1877 the Russian army moved across the Russian protectorate would result in the construction of Ottoman-Russian border in eastern Anatolia. In May the a Russian navy in the north Aegean (most likely at the Russians captured Ardahan and in June they took Baya- port of Kavalla). This could disrupt the balance of naval zid. In November 1877, following a five-month siege, power in the eastern Mediterranean. Couching their the key Ottoman city of Kars fell to the Russians, and in protests in diplomatic terms, the British and Austrians late January 1878 the Russians occupied Erzurum. The argued that diplomatic protocol, in so far as the Treaty of deterioration of Ottoman authority in eastern Anatolia San Stefano fundamentally altered the terms of the Treaty resulted in a significant outbreak of intercommunal vio- lence. As a result, during and after the fighting, 60,000\u2013","of Paris (1856), required further consultations with the r\u00fcs\u00b8 tiye mektepleri 499 European powers over the terms of the Russo-Ottoman armistice. In these demands, the British and Austrians In the Treaty of Berlin, the Russian Empire was were supported by the powerful and influential German given Southern Bessarabia and retained Batumi, Arda- Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Able to defeat the Otto- han, and Kars. Additionally, Russia was awarded a large mans militarily, but unable to challenge Britain, Austria, war indemnity. According to the Treaty of Berlin, the and Germany diplomatically, the Russians agreed to par- Ottomans were required to pay the Russians more than ticipate in these consultations. 800 million French francs ($340 million in current U.S. dollars) in war damages. Russian claims on Ottoman From June 13 to July 13, 1878, representatives of the revenue in the ensuing years hampered Ottoman invest- major European powers convened in Berlin to renegoti- ments and reduced Ottoman economic prosperity. For ate the Treaty of San Stefano. Despite working against the the Ottomans, the Treaty of Berlin resulted in the loss of interests of the Russian Empire, the revised treaty, known 8 percent of the empire\u2019s most productive territory and as the Treaty of Berlin, severely reduced the Ottoman the loss of 20 percent of the empire\u2019s total population Empire\u2019s territorial possessions in the Balkans. The prin- (or 4.5 million subjects). Additionally, the war and the cipal changes in the Treaty of Berlin concerned Bulgaria territorial alterations imposed at the Treaty of Berlin and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The idea of a Greater Bulgaria resulted in an in-migration of an estimated 500,000\u2013 was dismissed and in its place Bulgaria was partitioned 600,000 Muslim refugees from the Ottoman Empire\u2019s three ways. Northern Bulgaria\u2014from the Balkan Moun- former Balkan possessions. The loss of the Orthodox tains to the Danube River\u2014was declared an autonomous Christian populations in the Balkans, coupled with the principality. Central Bulgaria (Eastern Rumelia)\u2014from influx of Muslim refugees from the Balkans and the Rus- the Balkan Mountains to the Rhodope Mountains\u2014was sian Empire, significantly altered the demographics of given limited autonomy within the political framework the Ottoman Empire. By the early 1880s, Muslim sub- of the Ottoman Empire. The southern parts of Rumelia\u2014 jects accounted for roughly 75 percent of the Ottoman south of the Rhodope Mountains\u2014remained an integral Empire\u2019s population. part of the Ottoman Empire. The autonomous Bulgarian principality (called \u201cBerlin\u201d Bulgaria) represented only Andrew Robarts 37.5 percent of the territory of Greater Bulgaria (\u201cSan Further reading: Caroline Finkel, Osman\u2019s Dream: The Stefano\u201d Bulgaria). Bosnia-Herzegovina was placed under Story of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Basic Books, 2005); the protection of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Charles and Barbara Jelavich, The Establishment of the Bal- independence of Serbia, Romania, and Montenegro was kan National States, 1804\u20131920 (Seattle: University of Wash- recognized. Serbia was given possession of the Morava ington Press, 1986); Barbara Jelavich, History of the Balkans: River valley (around Pirot and Vranya) in what had been Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, vol. 1 (Cambridge: part of Greater Bulgaria. Dobruja, around the Danubian Cambridge University Press, 1983); George Jewsbury, The estuary, was attached to independent Romania. Russian Annexation of Bessarabia, 1774\u20131828 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976); John P. LeDonne, The The territorial and political realignment of the Bal- Russian Empire and the World, 1700\u20131917: The Geopolitics kans that resulted from the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877\u2013 of Expansion and Containment (Oxford: Oxford University 78 formed the basis for future irredentist claims on the Press, 1997); Paul Robert Magosci, Historical Atlas of East part of newly independent Balkan states. Few of the newly Central Europe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, constituted Balkan nation-states were wholly satisfied with 1993); Justin McCarthy, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleans- postwar territorial arrangements and maintained designs, ing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821\u20131922 (Princeton, N.J.: Dar- along ethnic-national lines, on territories outside their win, 1995); Stanford J. Shaw, Between Old and New: The internationally recognized borders. Conflicts resulting Ottoman Empire under Sultan Selim III, 1789\u20131807 (Cam- from this irredentism would destabilize the Balkan Penin- bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971). sula in the first and second decades of the 20th century. r\u00fc\u015ftiye mektepleri (middle schools) See education.","S Sabbatai Sevi See Shabbatai Zvi. binding on the believers. Beyond that, qualified schol- ars could apply their independent reasoning (ijtihad) Safavid dynasty See Iran. to those two sources to interpret what Muslims should properly do in cases where there was no clear guidance. Salafiyya In the 21st century, Salafiyya is the name of The principle behind the use of ijtihad is not unlike the an Islamic political ideology that seeks to impose a strict one that guides members of the U.S. Supreme Court, interpretation of Islamic law in Muslim societies and that who use the text of the U.S. Constitution as a guideline views Western cultures with suspicion. But in its origins to deal with problems that are not directly addressed by at the end of the 19th century, the movement sought to it. For American constitutional scholars the central ques- reform Islam so that Muslim societies could modernize tion is, \u201cWhat did the original framers of the constitution by adopting the knowledge and institutions of the West. mean?\u201d The question for Muslim legal scholars is, \u201dWhat The reformers who spearheaded this movement, which was intended by a particular passage of the Quran?\u201d included Muhammad Abduh and his students in Cairo among others, felt that, over time, Islamic scholars had The use of ijtihad allowed for flexibility in framing obscured the true spirit and meaning of the Quran and laws that would govern the vast community into which the Sunna, or traditions of the Prophet Muhammad, with Islam had grown in the centuries following the prophet\u2019s superstition and irrelevancies. The reformers believed death in 632 c.e. But by the 13th century, Sunni Muslim that Muslims needed to return to the sources of their legal scholars had become uneasy with what they felt religion and to understand them in the context of the were too liberal uses of independent reasoning by schol- society that had existed when the Prophet revealed God\u2019s ars and many called for the abandonment of the practice. message. The word in Arabic for \u201cancestors\u201d is salaf, and The community of scholars gradually agreed with the the intellectual reformist movement took its name from dissenters and in the following centuries, Sunnis aban- that term as it sought to return Muslims to the practice doned the use of ijtihad in making religious decisions. of Islam its proponents felt their ancestors had known in It remained an option, however, for Shii clergy with the the early centuries of Islam. rank of mujtahid, that is, a cleric recognized by his peers as having adequate training in sharia and its sources to For the reformers, the key to the rebirth of Islam lay allow him to exercise independent judicial reasoning in a in the revival of the legal practice known as ijtihad. Early specific case. Muslim legal scholars had argued that the foundations of Islamic law, or sharia, were the Quran and the Sunna. The reformers of the late 19th century were not Additionally, if the community as a whole agreed on a the first to call for the return of ijtihad. The writings of practice, known as ijma or consensus, then that too was Ahmad ibn Taymiyya, a Muslim religious scholar who died in prison in Damascus in 1328, were the inspiration for many. Ibn Taymiyya had castigated Sufism and the study of philosophy, both popular, as being un-Islamic. 500","He called upon the Muslim community to return to the salname 501 spiritual purity it had known in the days of the original Muslims (salaf). If Muslims understood Islam as well as Abduh had argued that Islam did not require polyg- did those original Muslims, he reasoned, there would be amy and that the Quran had provided women with no danger of error should their scholars use ijtihad. far-reaching rights and responsibilities. But he was not prepared to back his student Amin in the bold asser- Further inspiration for the Salafi reformers of the late tion that contemporary Muslim society was a back- 19th century was to be found in the writings of Muham- ward-looking patriarchate. Stunned by the rejection by mad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. Deriving inspiration from his teacher and by the Muslim intellectual class in gen- ibn Taymiyya, ibn Abd al-Wahhab wrote in the 18th cen- eral, Amin published a second book in 1901, The New tury that Islam had become a religion of superstition and Woman (al-Mara al-jadida), in which he again stated unbelief, by which he meant that Muslims were practic- that Muslim societies could never advance as long as ing an Islam that was clearly not sanctioned by the Quran. they did not emancipate women. But he abandoned the As a corrective, he advocated a return to the Quran as the Salafi approach of grounding his arguments in the Quran sole source for Islamic law. Although ibn Abd al-Wahhab and Sunna. Instead he relied on rationalist arguments was a literalist in that he held that the Quran\u2019s verses could advanced by secular Western European thinkers. not be interpreted by humans and must be accepted as they are, he did allow that the moral leaders of the com- From that point on, there was a division among Mus- munity could make pronouncements on the legality of lim reformers between those who believed a westernized issues not prohibited by the Quran. To the reformers, this modernity could be compatible with Islamic law and seemed to be sanctioning the return of ijtihad, and they values and those who felt that it could be achieved only eagerly studied the very works by ibn Abd al-Wahhab that through a secularization of Muslim societies. A third Ottoman legal authorities had labeled \u201cunlawful innova- option would later emerge; this group held that Muslim tion (bida) and heresy\u201d a century before. societies should not try to forge a compromise between modernity as defined by the West and Islamic law and Although the main center of the Salafiyya was in traditions; rather, they should accept change\u2014whether Cairo, Muslim scholars in Damascus and Baghdad had it was social, technological, or scientific\u2014only if those also rediscovered the writings of ibn Taymiyya and used developments were compatible with what they believed them to formulate responses to the issues raised by the constituted Islamic values and were permissible accord- waning power of the Ottoman state in the face of West- ing to Muslim law. ern imperialism. They also debated the role that Islam was to play in societies where political and social reform- The question of how Islam as a belief system that ers were increasingly adopting Western ideas and institu- encompasses spiritual, political, and social spheres should tions as models. As such, there was not one unified Salafi approach a rapidly changing world continued to be con- response. But in all cases, the Muslim scholars who were tested after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. For Abduh identified with the movement called for radical reform and his students, there was no question that Islam could in the ways in which Islam was to be understood, even adapt to change and that technologically progress would while they claimed that they were not introducing any- require Muslim societies to retain their faith in Islam as a thing that was fundamentally new to the religion. moral certainty to guide them. One of the issues on which most Salafi thinkers did Bruce Masters agree was condemnation of Sufism as an un-Islamic See also Rashid Rida, Muhammad. practice. In contrast, there was a wide divergence of Further reading: Aziz Al-Azmeh, Islams and Moderni- opinion on the compatibility of Islamic and Western ties (London: Verso, 1993); John Voll, Islam: Continuity and values, whether applied in the public or private sphere. Change in the Modern World (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, Muhammad Abduh was the scholar who probably felt 1982). most comfortable with Western models of government and education, but he also had limits beyond which he salname Salname is the name of the official govern- was not prepared to go. In 1899 one of Abduh\u2019s students, mental yearbooks or annual reports prepared by the Qasim Amin, created a social outcry when he published government from the mid-19th century on to document The Emancipation of Woman (Tahrir al-Mara). In his the events and developments that occurred in the coun- book, Amin wrote that the Muslim world\u2019s decline could try in a given year. The word itself is a combination of ascribed to the lowly status that Islamic law gave women, two Persian nouns: sal meaning \u201cyear\u201d and name mean- keeping them uneducated, veiled, and at home. He added ing \u201cletter\u201d or \u201cbook.\u201d Salnames are akin to modern data that the Quran condoned none of these practices; in fact, banks. There were three types of salnames. The first type, he argued, Islam as it was originally revealed represented known as devlet salnamesi (state annual yearbooks), were the liberation of women, hence the title of his book. prepared every year and covered the entire empire. The first state annual yearbook was published in 1847. The","502 Salonika as Slavic-speaking tribesmen moved into the hinterlands of the city in Macedonia and Thrace. The newcomers second type, vilayet salnamesi (provincial annual year- eventually converted to Orthodox Christianity but their books), included information on a single province. The arrival marked a period of instability in the region. Cru- first provincial annual yearbook in 1866. In addition to saders from western Europe sacked Salonika in 1185. these two, there were salnames prepared by governmen- After the crusaders conquered Constantinople in 1204 tal and nongovernmental institutions such as firms and they established the Latin Kingdom with Salonika as its banks at the lower level. capital. The Latin Kingdom lasted until 1224 when Byz- antine rule was restored in the city. The most common and important salnames were the provincial annual yearbooks. They included plans, maps, In the middle of the 14th century, Ottoman armies and photographs of cities, towns, and buildings. They began to raid in the hinterlands of Salonika. In 1387, gave detailed information about provinces, districts, as an Ottoman army approached Salonika, its people and villages including topographic, demographic, com- demanded that their governor, Manuel Palaiologos mercial, social, political, juridical, and cultural condi- (later to be Byzantine emperor), surrender without resis- tions and history. They provided statistical tables related tance. Unwilling to comply with their demands, he fled to mineral resources, agricultural production, industrial the city, and its inhabitants opened the city gates to the activities, population, roads, transportation, forests, reli- Ottomans. As the city had surrendered without a fight, gious foundations, schools, hospitals, libraries, mosques, the Ottomans left its many churches and monasteries in churches, synagogues, fountains, stores, bakeries, towers, the hands of the city\u2019s Orthodox Christians. Ottoman mills, and so on. They also contained information about rule proved to be short-lived, however, as during the civil the religious calendar and festivals of both Muslim and war that broke out among the sons of Bayezid I (r. 1389\u2013 non-Muslim groups living in a given province. 1402) following his defeat at the Battle of Ankara in 1402, Manuel Palaiologos, now emperor, was able to Thanks to these salnames, the Ottoman central gov- regain control of Salonika ernment could determine, in detail, the resources and conditions of its lands and population, from Yemen to Once Sultan Murad II (r. 1421\u201344, 1444\u201346) had the Caucasus, from the Arab Peninsula to the Balkans. consolidated his control over the sultanate, he sought to regain the city his grandfather Murad I (r. 1362\u20131389) Ahmet Zeki \u0130zg\u00f6er had taken. The Ottoman army began a siege of Salonika Further reading: Larsen Knud, National Bibliographic in 1422. The inhabitants of the city responded to the Services: Their Creation and Operation (Paris: UNESCO siege by accepting Venetian protection in the form of Publishing, 1955); Justin McCarty and D. Hyde, \u201cOttoman troops and ships to break the Ottoman blockade of the Imperial and Provincial S\u00e2ln\u00e2mes.\u201d Bulletin of the Middle harbor. But that aid only postponed the final assault on Eastern Studies Association 13, no. 2 (1979). the city, which came on March 29, 1430. The Ottoman army quickly overcame Salonika\u2019s defenses and the city Salonika (Salonica, Thessalonica; Gk.: Thessaloniki; was pillaged, its churches and other religious buildings Turk.: Selanik) The city of Salonika lies at the head destroyed or converted into mosques, and its population of the Gulf of Therma, an inlet of the Aegean Sea, and enslaved. Once the city was sacked, Sultan Murad sought is today the second largest city in Greece, after Athens, to revive it by ransoming some of its leading Orthodox in terms of population. But during the period in which Christian families from captivity and resettling them the Ottomans ruled the city, 1430\u20131912, it was the most in their former homes. He also brought in numbers of populous city in the territory that would become Greece Turkish-speaking Muslims to settle a city that had been and the largest city in the Ottoman Balkans. Salonika largely abandoned by its inhabitants during the long was important both as a port exporting the products of siege. Murad and other members of the Ottoman royal the Balkans to the rest of the empire and as a center of family, as well as prominent Ottoman officials, estab- manufacturing. Given its vital economic role in the Otto- lished endowments (waqfs) that built and supported man period, the city drew migrants from throughout the mosques, caravansaries, and Islamic schools, and the empire and beyond, giving it an ethnically diverse popu- construction of these institutions further aided in the lation in which no single religious or ethnic group con- city\u2019s reconstruction. stituted the majority. The biggest boost to Salonika\u2019s emergence as one of Salonika was founded in the fourth century b.c.e. the empire\u2019s major commercial centers came in the reign and was named after Thessaloniki, a half-sister of Alex- of Sultan Bayezid II (r. 1481\u20131512) when he invited ander the Great. The city flourished in the Roman period the Jews of Spain, who were expelled from that nation and after the empire\u2019s break-up in the fourth century c.e. in 1492, to settle in the Ottoman Empire. In 1478, the Salonika was one of the largest cities of the Byzantine year in which the earliest surviving Ottoman census was Empire. But the city\u2019s economic position in the empire, and its population, began to decline in the sixth century","made, no Jews lived in Salonika, but by 1519 the Otto- Salonika 503 man census showed 15,000 Jews living in a city whose population was estimated to have been between 30,000 had come when the sultanate would be overthrown and and 40,000 people. Thereafter Jews were never the abso- he would reign in its place. With that claim the Ottoman lute majority of Salonika\u2019s population but they were authorities took notice of the cult and Shabbatai Zvi was always the largest single religious community in the city. arrested and brought before Sultan Mehmed IV (r. 1648\u2013 Once Jews from Spain had settled there, the city also 87). He was given the choice of either converting to Islam attracted Jewish immigrants from central and eastern or being executed for treason. Shabbatai Zvi chose the Europe. The Jewish community in Salonika established former, and hundreds of his followers followed him into the earliest printing press in the Ottoman Empire in 1510 the new faith. to print books in both Hebrew and Ladino, a language based on the Spanish spoken by the original immigrants The descendants of those converts to Islam were from Spain but written in Hebrew letters and with many called d\u00f6nme, \u201cturncoats,\u201d by the Ottoman Turks as they borrowed words from Hebrew. The everyday language did not believe the Jews\u2019 conversion was sincere. The con- spoken by Salonika\u2019s Jews was known as Judezmo. It had verts called themselves the maminim, Hebrew for \u201cfaith- fewer Hebrew words and more loanwords from Greek ful,\u201d and professed to be true Muslims. But they married and Ottoman Turkish than did the literary language, only members of their own community and maintained Ladino. As the culture of Salonika\u2019s Jews became more their own mosques, separate from the rest of the Mus- secular in the 19th century, Judezmo was also used as a lim community. These practices gave rise to suspicions written language. After the city was attached to Greece in among both Muslims and Christians that the maminim 1912, Greek gradually replaced Judezmo to become the were still secretly practicing Jewish religious rites, dominant language spoken by Salonika\u2019s Jews. although historians have found no evidence that this was true. The maminim could be found in various parts of The Jewish immigrants from Spain brought with the Ottoman Empire; their largest community was, how- them from their old country the technology for the pro- ever, in Salonika where they numbered about 10,000 in duction of woolen broadcloth known in Ottoman Turk- 1912. After the city\u2019s occupation by Greece in that year, ish as \u00e7uka. They established dozens of workshops and the maminim, along with the remainder of the city\u2019s Mus- Salonika became the center for the production of that lim population, either departed the city as refugees for cloth in the 16th century. Salonika\u2019s merchants enjoyed what was left of the Ottoman Empire after the Balkan a monopoly of the supply of broadcloth to the imperial wars (1912\u201313) or were expelled during the population palace and the Janissaries and grew wealthy from the exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923\u201324. trade. Their wealth, in turn, was used to establish new synagogues in the city and to support Jewish education. In the 18th century, Salonika enjoyed a second eco- The cloth industry created an economic boom in the nomic boom that was fueled by the growth of the export city and its population climbed to an estimated 50,000 to of agricultural commodities such as wheat, cotton, and 60,000 people by the end of the 16th century as migrants tobacco from the Ottoman Balkans to western Europe. were drawn from the Balkans. These included Albanian As was the case with the wool trade of the 16th century, Muslims and Orthodox Christians who spoke Slavic dia- the majority of the merchants involved in this trade were lects. But Salonika\u2019s wool trade suffered from English and drawn from the city\u2019s Jewish population. That supremacy French woolen imports and the city\u2019s economy experi- was challenged by Greek merchants who were supported enced a downturn in the 17th century as Ottoman con- by Russian diplomatic efforts after the Treaty of K\u00fc\u00e7\u00fck sumers began to prefer cloth imported from Europe over Kaynarca in 1774. The Greek merchants suffered a the locally produced \u00e7uka. major setback in March 1821, however, when their compatriots rose in rebellion against Ottoman rule. In That economic downturn may have prompted many response, the Ottoman authorities arrested several hun- of Salonika\u2019s Jews to look for a spiritual answer to their dred prominent Greeks in Salonika; most of these were economic problems. They found it in the figure of Shab- executed in retaliation for the rebellion that was occur- batai Zvi (1626\u201376) who proclaimed himself in 1648 to ring to the south in the Peloponnese. This was followed be the long-awaited messiah of the Jews. Jews through- in May 1821 by a general riot, led by the Janissaries and out the Ottoman Empire heeded his call to hasten the re- Albanian military auxiliaries, in which over a thousand establishment of the Kingdom of Israel by selling all their Greeks were killed. In the aftermath of the riot, perhaps property to follow him. The cult following of Shabbatai several thousand of the city\u2019s Greek community fled the Zvi was especially strong in Salonika where thousands city, and Salonika entered into another period of eco- of Jews embraced him as the messiah. The cult enjoyed nomic decline. an increased fervor and optimism among its adherents when Shabbatai Zvi announced in 1666 that the time In the 1860s, the Ottoman authorities destroyed the city\u2019s sea wall and the land walls on the eastern side of the city. The former action allowed for the moderniza- tion of the city\u2019s docks and the construction of ware-","504 sancak tenegro all invaded what was left of the Ottoman Empire in Europe. In the face of a land grab by the independent houses to receive Balkan goods bound for export. The Balkan states, the Albanians declared their own coun- destruction of the land walls allowed the city\u2019s wealthy try\u2019s independence. The Albanians, Greeks, Bulgarians, elite to build large houses in the European style in new and Serbs all had ambitions for the city of Salonika and suburbs outside the former city. This reflected a grow- issued newly drawn maps that placed the city within ing population in the city that had recovered from their national boundaries. In the end, however, it was the trauma of the Greek War of Independence. In the Greek army that entered the city first on November 1800 the population was estimated by foreign visitors 8, 1912. Greece\u2019s possession of the city was confirmed by to be between 50,000 and 60,000 people. It fell to per- the Treaty of Bucharest in 1913 that ended the Sec- haps 40,000 inhabitants in 1830 and only recovered its ond Balkan War, which had in turn started after the vic- pre-war level by the mid-1840s. As the city once again torious Balkan states in the First Balkan War against the recovered its crucial role as chief port of the Balkans in Ottoman Empire went to war with each other over the the second half of the 19th century, the population rose. spoils. After World War I, the Greek government set- In 1880, the population of Salonika was estimated to be tled many of the Greek Orthodox Christians (see Greek 100,000 people, and 150,000 in 1909. In 1909 the popu- Orthodox Church) expelled from Turkey under the lation was roughly 30 percent Muslim, 30 percent Chris- terms of the Treaty of Lausanne in Salonika in the homes tian, and 40 percent Jewish. of Muslims who had either left or had been expelled. Some of the city\u2019s Jews left with the Muslims for Istanbul. The construction of railroads to Skopje in present- Most of those who did not died during the Holocaust in day Macedonia in 1888 and to Istanbul in 1896 encour- World War II. By 1945, Salonika, which had been a mul- aged investors in Salonika to construct factories for the tiethnic city under the Ottomans, was largely inhabited curing and processing of tobacco and the production by Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians. of cotton textiles. By 1900 Salonika was one of the most important centers of manufacturing and banking in the Bruce Masters Ottoman Empire. It also had the largest industrial work Further reading: Mark Mazower, Salonica: City of force in the empire. The presence of so many workers in Ghosts (Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430\u20131950) (New the city led to the formation in 1909 of the first socialist York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005); Eyal Ginio, \u201cMigrants and party in the Ottoman Empire. While Jewish workers were Unskilled Local Workers in an Ottoman Port-City: Ottoman drawn to radical politics that stressed class differences, Salonica in the Eighteenth-Century,\u201d in Outside In: On the Christian workers were increasingly drawn to nationalist Margins of the Modern Middle East, edited by Eugene Rogan movements. (London: Tauris, 2002), 126\u2013148; Basil Gounaris, \u201cSalonica.\u201d Review 16, no. 4 (1993): 499\u2013518. At the start of the 20th century, both Greece and Bul- garia coveted the port of Salonika. Greece saw it as the sancak See administration, provincial. natural capital of the remaining Ottoman territory that the Greek nationalists claimed belonged to Greece. Bul- al-Sanusi, Muhammad (b. 1787\u2013d. 1859) Muslim garian nationalists saw the city as Bulgaria\u2019s best chance scholar and reformer Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi was to have a port on the Aegean Sea, allowing them to avoid the founder of Sanusiyya, a reformist order of Sufism having to ship goods through Istanbul. The governments that is named after him. Al-Sanusi was born in Alge- of both Greece and Bulgaria clandestinely supported ria and studied with Ahmad al-Tijani in Fez, Morocco, nationalist political groups and schools established among where he established a reputation as a scholar and teacher Greek-speaking and Slavic-speaking workers. With a of core Islamic texts. Al-Sanusi embraced the idea that newly formed patriotism to these two contending nation Islam had become overly encrusted with tradition and states, workers representing the two Christian nation- that it needed radical reform to return to the purity of alities frequently clashed with one another. Meanwhile, its roots, a view that was being increasingly voiced in the Muslims in the city were alarmed about what their fate 18th century. He rejected many of the more extreme Sufi would be if Salonika were annexed by either Greece or beliefs and practices and came into conflict with many Bulgaria. Reflecting those fears, many of Salonika\u2019s Mus- established scholars as he advocated the return to the use lims supported the clandestine Committee of Union of ijtihad, a practice whereby qualified scholars use their and Progress that was seeking to restore the Ottoman independent reasoning, with the guidance of the Quran, constitution. Salonika became one of the centers of revo- to interpret what Muslims should do in cases where there lutionary activity and its native son Mustafa Kemal (later is no clear guidance. This practice would later be articu- Kemal Atat\u00fcrk) was one of the conspirators who helped engineer the revolution of 1908. Muslim hopes for keeping Salonika a part of the Ottoman Empire quickly vanished in October 1912 when the armies of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Mon-","lated by the scholars of the Salafiyya movement at the al-Sayyadi, Abu al-Huda 505 end of the 19th century. Further reading: Knut Vikor, Sufi and Scholar of the Like most Muslim scholars, Muhammad al-Sanusi Desert Edge: Muhammad b. Ali al-Sanusi and His Brother- eventually ended up in Mecca, where he studied with hood (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1995). Ahmad ibn Idris. Al-Sanusi left Mecca in 1841 and planned to return to Algeria. However, having reached al-Sayyadi, Abu al-Huda (d. 1909) Syrian courtier Tunisia, he decided he could not live under French rule. and adviser Abu al-Huda al-Sayyadi was a member of Instead he moved first to Tripoli and then to the Jabal the Rifaiyya Order of Sufism and an adviser to Sultan al-Akhdar region of Cyrenaica, in present-day Libya. Abd\u00fclhamid II (r. 1876\u20131909). Al-Sayyadi was born in There he established his first Sufi lodge (Ar: zawiyya) a village outside Aleppo, and many of the established in 1843. Between 1846 and 1853 al-Sanusi was again in families in that city considered him a peasant upstart. Mecca, where his order had already gained a following. In Aleppo, he attached himself to the Rifaiyya Order, Upon his return to Libya he moved deeper into the des- claiming that he was in fact a direct descendant of the ert, establishing another Sufi lodge at an oasis called Jag- order\u2019s founder, Ahmad al-Rifai. With that pedigree, he hbub, as he wanted to live outside Ottoman-controlled then added the honorific Sayyid to his name, although territories. From there, al-Sanusi\u2019s order branched out, that title is permitted only to members of the ashraf, or establishing other lodges along the trans-Sahara trade descendants of the Prophet. To many in Aleppo, his claim routes. He was considered by the Bedouins as a saint to the prophet\u2019s lineage was preposterous, and they con- (sidi or wali) and they looked to him to dispense justice sidered him an imposter and a fraud. Al-Sayyadi went to and to mediate in intertribal disputes. He also established Istanbul shortly before the enthronement of Abd\u00fcl- schools to educate their sons. When he died in 1857, hamid II, where he promoted his order and his belief that the leadership of the order and the mantle of sainthood the Ottoman sultan was the only person who could save passed to his son Sayyid al-Mahdi, who moved the head- the Arabs from European imperialism. His brand of Pan- quarters of the movement further into the Sahara, even- Islamism, with the sultan as champion, was appealing to tually settling in Qiru, in present-day Chad. Abd\u00fclhamid, who brought al-Sayyadi into the imperial entourage at court. Besides reform, Muhammad al-Sanusi believed very strongly that his order should engage in mission- In the palace, al-Sayyadi became the sultan\u2019s chief ary work and his followers converted many people in adviser for all things Arab, while remaining a constant central and western Africa to Islam. The ideology of the promoter of the members of the Ottoman royal house order was very literalist in its approach to the Quran. as the natural leaders of the Islamic world. Through his It was similar in approach to that which the Wahhabis self-promotion, and his attacks on Sufi orders other than were preaching in Arabia, except that the Sanusiyya was his own as well as on the intellectuals of the Salafiyya organized as a Sufi order. Both, for example, forbade movement, al-Sayyadi made many enemies, includ- music. Along with their faith, the Sanusiyya engaged in ing Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, who was perhaps one commercial ventures, allowing merchants to stay in of the most influential Muslim intellectuals of his time. their lodges and collecting tolls from them, creating a Al-Sayyadi was also an enemy of the Young Turks, who socioeconomic network that stretched across the Sahara demonized him as a \u201cfanatical Arab\u201d who sought to block Desert. the empire\u2019s path toward reform and progress. For his part, al-Sayyadi considered the Young Turks to be apos- As the Sanusiyya expanded into areas that the French tates. Given the level of polemic directed against him, it were claiming as part of their growing empire in Africa is often difficult to know how much influence al-Sayyadi in the late 19th century, the order developed a militancy had on the sultan, but he was clearly the most influential that was directed against European colonial expansion Arab at the sultan\u2019s court and a figure of controversy both into Africa and the Middle East. The bonds of member- then and now. With the Young Turk revolution of 1908, ship in the Sufi order allowed for the unification of tribes al-Sayyadi returned to Aleppo and the grand mansion that were historically antagonistic to one another, creat- he had built for his family there. He died the following ing a fighting force that the Sanusi sheikh could direct year, and the members of the Rifaiyya Order maintain his against the Europeans. When the Italians invaded Libya grave in Aleppo as a shrine. in 1911, the Sanusiyya joined forces with the Ottomans. After the Ottomans withdrew, the Sanusiyya remained Bruce Masters the core of anti-Italian resistance through the end of Further reading: Julia Gonnella, \u201cAs-Sayyid Abu\u2019l- World War II. When Libya gained its independence in Huda al-Sayyadi in Aleppo,\u201d in The Empire in the City: Arab 1951, Idris al-Sanusi, a direct descendant of Muhammad, Provincial Capitals in the Late Ottoman Empire, edited by became its first and only king. Jens Hanssen, Thomas Philipp, and Stefan Weber (Beirut: Orient-Institut, 2002), 297\u2013310. Bruce Masters","506 sciences taught in the colleges created by the Seljuks of Anato- lia. The Ottoman elites soon established contact with the sciences The Ottoman conceptualization and clas- eastern centers of the Islamic scientific tradition of the sification of sciences (ilm, ulum) were not very different Middle East and Central Asia. While Ottoman scholars from those prevailing in the classical age of Islam. Science set off for Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, Tabriz, Herat, was either learned by studying the Quran or acquired by and Samarkand for scientific study, men of erudition intellect. The knowledge transmitted from the Quran who flourished in those cities came to settle in the Otto- and the hadith (sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) man lands, and contributed their knowledge and exper- was defined as ulum-i nakliye, that is, religious sciences. tise to the Ottoman intellectual milieu in late 15th and Knowledge acquired by the intellect and perceived early 16th centuries. through the five senses was known as the ulum-i akliye, that is, the rational or experimental sciences. Ottoman While the Islamic scientific tradition was pursued in scholars adopted and elaborated this two-part classifica- the Ottoman colleges, new information, mostly techni- tion that was first established by al-Farabi (d. 950 or 951) cal, gradually filtered into the empire from the 15th cen- and later expanded by other Islamic scholars. tury on through its western frontiers. Ottoman military campaigns into central Europe and the naval expeditions Ta\u015fk\u00f6pr\u00fcl\u00fczade Ahmed Efendi (d. 1561) in his in the Mediterranean Sea provided for the influx of new Miftah\u00fc\u2019s-Saadet (Key to felicity) proposed a subdivi- knowledge, mainly from Europe. Europeans trading or sion based on the usefulness of sciences. The religious practicing various professions in Ottoman lands, as well sciences\u2014that is, the interpretation of the Quran, the as those recruited by the Ottoman government to work hadith, Muslim canonical jurisprudence (f\u0131qh), Islamic in military installations, were also influential in trans- theology (kelam), and Islamic mysticism (tasavvuf)\u2014were ferring information, techniques, and material (such as regarded as the beneficial sciences. Intellectual or rational books, atlases, and astronomical tables) to the Ottoman sciences such as medicine, mathematics, astronomy, and world. Books and other printed materials were translated agriculture were also worthy of study. He further grouped into Turkish by Ottoman bureaucrats, court officers, or sciences into seven categories, the first five being the army officers, either on the order of higher officials or rational sciences and the last two being the most signifi- through individual efforts. cant religious sciences, a classification emphasizing the relative importance of intellectual and religious knowl- Ottomans\u2019 contacts or alliances with western and edge. Ta\u015fk\u00f6pr\u00fcl\u00fczade\u2019s classification was influential on central European countries in the military, political, and Ottoman scholars and constituted the basis of the curric- commercial fields broadened in the early decades of the ulum of colleges (madrasas), the principal institutions of 18th century. Ottoman court members became interested learning in the Ottoman classical age from the mid-15th in European novelties, culture, and social life, especially century until the 18th century. after Yirmisekiz Mehmed \u00c7elebi\u2019s (d. 1732) visit to Paris as Ottoman ambassador in 1720. Following his visit, his The study of sciences was initiated by reading and son Mehmed Said Efendi (d. 1761) and Ibrahim M\u00fctefer- learning the Quran, followed by the study of Arabic rika (1674\u20131747), a Hungarian convert, founded the first grammar and syntax; logic; belles-lettres; theoretical Arabic script printing press in Istanbul in 1726, pro- philosophy, which included the study of philosophy and ducing books in Ottoman Turkish with Arabic charac- metaphysics; theology; Muslim canonical jurisprudence; ters (see printing). Histories and dictionaries, as well as the hadith and the interpretation of the Quran. Physics, books on linguistics, geography, magnetism, and military geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy were taught both reforms, were published. from theology books and from separate treatises devoted to these topics. In the early centuries of the Ottoman Empire the language for science was Arabic, which was the language Until the 19th century, when the Ottomans began of the Quran and the scientific language of the Islamic to primarily rely on Europe for the transfer of scientific world. Ottoman scholars, however, had to learn Persian and technical knowledge, Ottoman science was largely to complete their scientific studies. Since the Ottoman based on the scientific learning of classical Islam. Mus- rulers, their administrators, and the Anatolian population lim scholars, who had endeavored to transmit Greek spoke Turkish, scientific texts in Arabic and Persian were science\u2014and to a certain extent Indian and Chinese sci- gradually translated into Ottoman Turkish, a version of ence\u2014beginning in the eighth and ninth centuries under Turkish full of Arabic and Persian words and written in the Abbasid Caliphate (750\u20131258), had interpreted the Arabic script (see language and script). When the scientific knowledge they inherited, commented on it, Ottomans began translating European texts in the 17th and added valuable analyses of what it contained. They century, they were mostly rendered into Turkish. The made original contributions in many fields over the fol- textbooks for use in Ottoman modern schools during the lowing centuries. 19th century were also compiled in Turkish, while Arabic When the Ottoman state was founded at the turn of the 14th century, Islamic scientific knowledge was being","continued to be used in the madrasas. The compilations sciences 507 and translations of European textbooks proved essential in the reception and elaboration of modern sciences in between Istanbul, Damascus, and Cairo. The works of the 19th century. Besides Turkish translations, French al-Mardini (d. 1506), the timekeeper of the al-Azhar books were also available in the empire, because learning mosque in Cairo and a learned astronomer-mathema- French was popular among intellectuals and the language tician, became popular among Ottoman scholars. An was part of the curriculum of the modern schools. observatory was established in Istanbul to improve the astronomical tables of Ulugh Beg. Its founder, Takiy\u00fcd- The 19th-century translators of European books on din (1526\u201385), was a madrasa scholar trained in Damas- science often relied on Arabic to create a scientific termi- cus and Cairo. His calculations of solar parameters were nology. Turkish books on medical sciences, botany, and as accurate as those calculated by his Danish contempo- chemistry thus include a large number of scientific terms rary Tycho Brahe (1546\u20131601). Takiy\u00fcddin proposed the derived from Arabic, as well as European and Turkish creation of an observatory as soon as he was appointed terms. Thus the Ottoman scientific nomenclature of the chief astronomer (m\u00fcneccimba\u015f\u0131) in 1571. The construc- 19th century incorporated elements from the East and tion of the building and the instruments started around the West, making the Ottoman Empire the meeting place 1573 or 1574. Besides the classical astronomical instru- of different scientific traditions. ments such as astrolabes, quadrants, sundials, armillary spheres, and celestial globes, Takiy\u00fcddin used an instru- ASTRONOMY ment similar to the sextant and a device with a string to fix the position of the equinoxes. The demolition of the Ottoman astronomers relied heavily on the discoveries observatory in 1580 due to rumors aiming to depose and inventions of their Islamic predecessors. They wrote Takiy\u00fcddin\u2019s mentor, Hoca Saadeddin Efendi, prevented on theoretical astronomy, refined timekeeping and calen- Takiy\u00fcddin from completing his observations. He could dar computing methods, and manufactured astronomical only recalculate the tables for the Sun; his astronomical instruments more precise than those known up to that tables thus remained an incomplete version of the Ulugh time. Scholars affiliated with the Maraga and Samarkand Beg\u2019s tables. observatories in central Asia had a deep impact on Otto- man astronomy. One prominent astronomer of the era The Ottomans switched to European astronomi- was Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (1201\u201374), the founder of the cal tables in the late 18th century. Following the transla- Maragha observatory for the Ilkhanid khan Hulagu in tion of Tables Astronomiques (1740) by Jacques Cassini the second half of the 13th century. Al-Tusi\u2019s commen- (1677\u20131756) into Turkish, Sultan Selim III (r. 1789\u2013 tary on Ptolemy\u2019s Almagest, together with his treatises on 1807) ordered calendars to be calculated after Cassini\u2019s theoretical astronomy, calendar making, and astronomi- tables. In the early 19th century chief astronomer H\u00fcse- cal devices were much favored by Ottoman astronomers. yin H\u00fcsn\u00fc Efendi (d. 1840) translated the section on These works were introduced to Anatolia by al-Tusi\u2019s calendar-making of the Tables Astronomiques by Joseph- student Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi (1236\u20131311), who taught J\u00e9r\u00f4me de Lalande (1732\u201356) into Arabic and Turkish. astronomy in the Seljukid madrasa at Sivas (present-day From 1829 on, with the approval of Sultan Mahmud II Turkey), before the Ottoman state was founded. The (r. 1808\u201339), calendars were computed according to Lal- influence of the Maraga school of astronomy continued ande\u2019s tables. Copies of the astronomical tables of Ulugh well into the 18th century. Beg were, however, still being made until the 19th cen- tury. Astronomy courses were included in the curriculum Kad\u0131zade-i Rumi (d. after 1440) left Anatolia for of the 19th-century modern schools, and textbooks were Samarkand (present-day Uzbekistan) to study and work in compiled based on French astronomy textbooks. the observatory founded by the Timurid ruler and astron- omer Ulugh Beg (1394\u20131449), the grandson of Timur or MATHEMATICS Tamerlane. The commentary Kad\u0131zade-i Rumi wrote in 1412 on al-Chagmini\u2019s (fl. 13th century) compendium Knowledge of mathematics was considered a basic of astronomy became very popular among Ottoman stu- requirement for graduates of Ottoman colleges\u2014needed dents aspiring to learn astronomy. The astronomical to solve common problems such as calculating inheri- works of Ali Ku\u015f\u00e7u (d. 1474), a distinguished member of tance payments in court, setting calendars, and keeping the Samarkand school who taught in Istanbul upon Sul- the accounts of state departments\u2014and thus it was part tan Mehmed II\u2019s (r. 1444\u201346, 1451\u201381) invitation, were of the standard Ottoman curriculum. Medieval Islamic also much praised. The astronomical tables of Ulugh Beg, mathematical knowledge was at the core of Ottoman produced at Samarkand, were used by Ottoman astrono- mathematics. It incorporated Greek and Indian math- mers until the late 18th century for calendar making. ematics and was introduced to Anatolia in the 13th and14th centuries by scholars coming from Syria, The Ottoman conquest of Syria and Egypt in the Egypt, and Iran to teach at the Seljukid madrasas. In early 16th century intensified the exchange of scholarship the 15th century the tradition of the Samarkand school","508 sciences that Turkish translations of European mathematical text- books definitely replaced the works of medieval Islamic was carried on by the Ottomans. Kad\u0131zade-i Rumi\u2019s com- mathematicians. mentary on Shams al-Din al-Samarkandi\u2019s (d. ca. 1310) short work that discussed Euclid\u2019s propositions became PHYSICS the most popular and studied geometry book in Otto- man madrasas. The book on arithmetic and algebra (al- Physics taught in Ottoman madrasas was based on the Muhammediya fil-Hisab) by Ali Ku\u015f\u00e7u from Samarkand philosophical and theological literature of medieval was used in Ottoman madrasas until the 17th century. Islam. Texts discussing atoms, the void, space, form, From then on, Hulasatu\u2019l-hisab, composed by Bahaud- motion, and time were included in philosophy books din al-Amili (1546\u20131621), became the most widely used under chapters titled tabiiyyat (topics related to nature, mathematics book in Ottoman madrasas. Commentar- physics) together with chapters on logic, cosmology, ies on the works of Islamic mathematicians were also and metaphysics. A noteworthy example is the Kitab al- produced. Many mathematical treatises were written for Hidayah of Umar al-Abhari (d. 1265), a Persian philoso- practical purposes to meet the needs of tax collectors, pher and mathematician from Abhar (Iran), which was land surveyors, accountants, and judges. Others dealt the most studied of such books among the Ottomans. with more academic issues, such as the use of decimal Treatises on optics\/perspective and mechanics were also fractions in trigonometry and astronomy, trisecting an compiled. Those on mechanics dealt mostly with elevat- angle, resolving algebraic problems, or discussing the ing heavy goods, the construction of war machines, and properties of numbers. ballistics. In addition to his astronomical observations Takiy\u00fcddin is also known for his treatises that formed the Translation of European mathematical texts to Turk- basis for the construction of several mechanical devices ish started in the early decades of the 18th century. These including water pumps, gears, cranes, and mechanical were texts on applied mathematics and were used in cal- clocks. The military factories and the dockyards were culations related to geodesy, mechanics, and ballistics. the key places for applied physics, and mechanics was The opening of the Hendesehane (School of Geometry) learned there through training under a master. in the Imperial Shipyard in 1775 to teach mathemat- ics to officers from various military corps was a crucial The first printed book on physics, F\u00fcyuzat-i Mikna- step forward in the systematic teaching of mathematics. tisiye (Properties of magnetism), was published in 1732. In the 19th century, professors of the school of engineer- Translated from German, it described the properties of ing (M\u00fchendishane) translated and compiled a number the lodestone and the work undertaken in Europe for of mathematical textbooks from European languages for determining latitude and longitude. Courses on mechan- educational purposes. Gelenbevi Ismail (d. 1790) wrote ics were included in the curriculum of the Military Engi- on algebra and logarithms; H\u00fcseyin R\u0131fk\u0131 and Selim neering School in the early 19th century. Physics (\u0131lm-i Effendis translated the Elements of Geometry by the hikmet) courses were also given in the medical schools English mathematician John Bonnycastle (1750\u20131821); and the Military Academy. The first comprehensive Ibrahim Edhem Pasha rendered A. M. Legendre\u2019s (1752\u2013 physics textbook in Turkish was Mehmed Emin Dervi\u015f 1833) geometry book into Turkish; Ishak Efendi devoted Pasha\u2019s (1817\u201379) Usul-i Hikmet-i Tabiiyye (Elements of the first volume of his Mecmua-i Ulum-i Riyaziye (Com- physics), published in Istanbul in 1865. Turkish transla- pendium) to mathematics, in which he used Etienne tions of European textbooks, especially those of A. Gan- B\u00e9zout\u2019s (1730\u20131783) works extensively; Mehmed Ruhid- ot\u2019s (1804\u201387) book on experimental and applied physics, din translated parts of Charles Bossut\u2019s (1710\u20131814) Trait\u00e9 \u00c9l\u00e9mentaire de Physique Exp\u00e9rimentale et Appli- Cours Complet de Math\u00e9matiques (A Complete Course of qu\u00e9e, were largely used in the teaching of physics in the Mathematics); Seyyid Ali Pasha wrote on conic sections second half of the 19th century. using Apollonius\u2019 treatise together with contemporary French works; Emin Pasha, a graduate from Cambridge GEOGRAPHY University and the director of the Mekteb-i Harbiye (Mil- itary academy) in Istanbul, wrote on both mathematics Knowledge of geography was essential for Ottoman and engineering; Vidinli H\u00fcseyin Tevfik Pasha\u2019s Linear administrators to effectively plan excursions and mili- Algebra (1882) introduced three-dimensional linear alge- tary operations. Medieval Islamic geography books bra and its applications to elementary geometry; Mehmet were introduced to the Ottoman realm in the 15th cen- Nadir (1856\u20131927), obtained results of lasting value in tury when Sultan Mehmed II ordered them to be cop- number theory; and Salih Zeki (1864\u20131921), professor ied for his imperial library. Between the 16th and 18th of mathematics at the Dar\u00fclf\u00fcnun (Ottoman University), centuries almost all Ottoman works on geography were by compiling numerous textbooks, contributed to the written in Turkish. They were either based on the work dissemination of mathematical knowledge in both higher of Islamic geographers\u2014including al-Masudi (d. 957), and secondary education. Thus it was in the 19th century al-Idrisi (c. 1100\u20131165), al-Qazwini (d. 1283), and Abu","Parallactic instrument of Takiy\u00fcddin at Istanbul Observatory sciences 509 (16th century) (Courtesy of Istanbul University Library) printing of Cihann\u00fcma by \u0130brahim M\u00fcteferrika in 1729, al-Fida (d. 1331)\u2014or on renowned European geograph- almost a century after its compilation, also stimulated ical texts. Eastern and European sources might be used interest in European geography books. Books by Jacques comparatively. Although madrasa scholars compiled Robbe (1643\u20131721), the engineer and geographer of Louis geography books, geography courses were not included XIV; Dutch mathematician and geographer Bernhardus in the madrasa\u2019s curriculum. Varenius (1622\u201351); and others were translated at the request of Ottoman high officials. When geography was Ottoman seamen of the 16th century collected nau- included in the curriculum of modern military schools in tical and geographical information from far beyond the the 19th century, works by Adrien Balbi, Eug\u00e8ne Cortam- Mediterranean and Black Sea. Admiral Piri Reis (d. bert, Auguste Michelot, and Archibald Geikie were trans- 1553), the author of Kitab-\u0131 Bahriye (Book of seafaring, lated into Turkish, and many other geography books were 1521, 1526), used nearly 20 maps, among them an Alex- published for secondary and higher education. andrian map, eight Arab maps, four Portuguese maps, an Indochinese map, a Chinese map, as well as a map drawn CHEMISTRY by Christopher Columbus, to produce his Atlantic Ocean map (1513) depicting the shores of northwestern Africa, Before the introduction of modern chemistry in the mid- the Iberian Peninsula, and the eastern shores of Central 19th century, the aspects of chemistry that interested the and South America. His North Atlantic map (1528) pres- Ottomans were similar to those of the Middle Ages: the ents in detail the shores running from Greenland to Flor- use of mineral drugs in therapy for providing longevity ida. Seydi Ali Reis\u2019 (d. 1562 or 1623) Muhit (Ocean) was and to some extent for producing precious metals. Chem- a portolan chart for seafaring in the Persian Gulf and the ical knowledge was found in Ottoman materia medica Indian Ocean. giving detailed information on the properties and prepa- ration of mineral, vegetal, and animal drugs, as well as in The 17th-century campaigns to Crete stimulated texts based on Islamic alchemical and chemical treatises Katib \u00c7elebi, a prominent Ottoman bureaucrat, to com- accounting for the preparation of various chemical sub- pose the Cihann\u00fcma (Cosmorama, 1654). The book is stances, the philosopher\u2019s stone, and the elixir of longevity. considered the first Ottoman geography that referred to Jabir ibn Hayyan (d. ca. 777); al-Rhazi (ca. 865\u2013 ca. 925), both European works and Islamic geographies. A popu- known as Rhazes in medieval Europe; and Abul Qasim al- lar Latin version of Gerhard Mercator\u2019s Atlas Minor and Iraqi (fl. 12th c.) were the authors cited most often. Iznik\u00ee Abraham Ortelius\u2019s catalogue of geographers appended to Faz\u0131l Ali wrote extensively on alchemy\/chemistry in the Theatrum orbis terrarium were among Katib \u00c7elebi\u2019s west- 16th century. Translations made by Ottoman alchemists ern sources. Joan Blaeu\u2019s Atlas major seu cosmographia, the and physicians from iatrochemists such as Paracelsus most spectacular atlas in 17th-century Europe, was also (1493\u20131541), Adrien Mynsicht (1603\u201338), Jean Baptiste translated by Ebubekir b. Behram ed-Dima\u015fki (d. 1691) van Helmont (1577\u20131644), and Daniel Sennert (1572\u2013 at Grand Vizier K\u00f6pr\u00fcl\u00fc Faz\u0131l Ahmed Pasha\u2019s behest. The 1637) at the turn of the 18th century introduced both new therapies and new chemical substances. The teaching of modern chemistry started in the 19th century in the engineering and medical schools and in the Military Academy, which were equipped with chemical laboratories. The earliest Turkish textbook on chemistry, Usul-i Kimya (Elements of chemistry, Istanbul, 1848), was composed by Mehmed Emin Dervi\u015f Pasha, a graduate of the Military Engineering School in Istanbul, based on the chemistry books he used during his stud- ies in the \u00c9cole des Mines in Paris. His public lectures, which included chemical experiments, raised great inter- est in Istanbul. Laboratories were also set up in hospitals and state customhouses. The Y\u0131ld\u0131z Imperial Palace also had a private laboratory. C. Bonkowski Pasha (1841\u2013 1905) filled the position of sultan\u2019s chemist-in-chief. Ger- man chemists who taught at the Dar\u00fclf\u00fcnun (Ottoman University) during World War I organized the teaching of chemistry within the faculty of sciences together with their European-trained Turkish colleagues. A multilin- gual chemical nomenclature was developed by Ottoman","510 sciences and taught in the hospitals (dar\u00fc\u015f\u015fifas) and in the S\u00fcl- eymaniye medical college (S\u00fcleymaniye T\u0131p Medresesi) chemists over the course of the 19th century based on founded in the mid-16th century in Istanbul. Physicians classical Islamic and European chemical literature. and healers who came to settle in the Ottoman Empire as early as the 15th century contributed to the introduction NATURAL HISTORY of various practices either from the East (Iran, Egypt) or from the West (Spain, Italy, and other parts of Europe). Ottomans were very interested in plants, their medicinal The necessity of training qualified physicians to maintain properties, and therapeutic use. The materia medica of the healthcare services of the Ottoman army led to the physician, pharmacologist, and botanist Dioscorides (ca. opening of a military medical school in 1827 (fully reor- 40\u201390 c.e.) of Anazarba in Asia Minor and that of the ganized in 1839), followed by a civilian medical school in Arab physician and botanist Ibn al-Baitar (1190\u20131248) 1866. Both schools contributed extensively to the dissem- were among the most praised and popular books on ination of modern medical knowledge within the empire medicinal plants. from the mid-19th century onward. Research on the flora of the Ottoman Empire started TECHNOLOGY in the mid-16th century when western European natural- ists began to explore the eastern Mediterranean region. The Ottomans were mostly concerned with acquiring P. Belon (1517\u201364), L. Rauwolff (1535\u201396), and J. P. de and developing military technologies indispensable for Tournefort (1656\u20131708) were among the naturalists who expanding Ottoman territories. Soon after taking over collected plant specimens and wrote travel books. G. A. the western part of Asia Minor in the 14th century, they Olivier (1756\u20131814) was an entomologist who collected reached the Aegean coast, where they became involved in insects as well. constructing ships. When Ottoman territories expanded to the Balkans in the 15th century, they met local crafts- Regular teaching of modern botany, zoology, and men experienced in metalwork and collaborated with geology started in the Imperial School of Medicine in the them in casting guns and manufacturing rifles. The guns context of its new curriculum of 1839, although a few texts produced in the Balkans were used in the siege of Con- related to natural sciences were published earlier. The first stantinople. At first, cannons were cast on the battlefields, lecturer of botany was Dr. C. A. Bernard (1808\u201344), the as the Ottomans had no permanent foundry. Following Austrian medical director of the school. His El\u00e9mens de the conquest of Constantinople, a foundry (tophane) Botanique (Elements of botany, 1842) in French was the was built and together with the Istanbul dockyards (ter- first textbook on medical botany published in Turkey. He sane), it soon became one of the main industrial centers also established a herbarium and a botanical garden in the for acquiring and advancing technical knowledge. The grounds of the school. The teaching of botany was carried enderun, or inner circle, of the sultan\u2019s palace in Istanbul, on by Dr. Salih Efendi (1816\u201395), who also contributed served for centuries as a training center for high func- to the formation of Ottoman botanical nomenclature. In tionaries, as well as craftsmen, musicians, and architects. 1865 he translated into Turkish and published the zoology Work undertaken to reform and modernize the army in and botany sections of C. Arendts\u2019s (1815\u201381) El\u00e9ments the 18th and 19th centuries largely determined the trans- d\u2019Histoire Naturelle (natural history). Dr. Karl Eduard fer of scientific and technical knowledge from Europe to Hammerschmidt (also known as Abdullah Bey, 1801\u201374) the Ottoman Empire. The Military Engineering School was instrumental in the teaching of geology and mineral- (M\u00fchendishane) and the Military Academy (Mekteb- ogy as well as in the organization of the Natural History i Harbiye) were created to train the staff needed by the Museum at the Medical School. The museum\u2019s collection Ottoman army. Both European and Ottoman experts and included material he provided from Vienna and specimens professors collaborated in their creation, organization, from his private collection of minerals, fossils, insects, and and instruction. The graduates of these modern schools, plants. He published monographs on the geology and pale- some of whom were then sent to European universities ontology of the Ottoman Empire. to improve their knowledge, contributed to the introduc- tion of technical knowledge and to the teaching of mod- MEDICINE ern sciences and techniques. Galenic humoral pathology, in which illnesses were The Ottomans\u2019 adherence to Islamic culture, their believed to be caused by the imbalance of the four central Asian origin, the multiethnic, multireligious, humors, provided the conceptual framework of Otto- and multilingual character of their empire, and the man medical teaching and practice until the 19th cen- acquisition of new knowledge and practices from west- tury. Thus bleeding, cupping, leeching, cauterization, ern Europe characterized and shaped scholarly activi- phytotherapy (herbal medicine), and balneotherapy ties in the empire. Prior to the 19th century, science (water-based treatments) were the most common meth- ods of treating illnesses. The most authoritative medi- cal book was the el-Kanun fi\u2019t-Tibb (Canon) of Ibn Sina (Avicenna, 980\u20131037). Medicine was mainly practiced"]