The Other Faces Of The Empire: Ordinary Lives Against Social Order and Hierarchy

165 Pages·2022·3.463 MB·English

by  Fırat Yaşa

THE OTHER FACES OF THE EMPIRE
ORDINARY LIVES AGAINST SOCIAL ORDER AND HIERARCHY
Koç University Press: 275 HISTORY I OTTOMAN STUDIES
The Other Faces of the Empire: Ordinary Lives Against Social Order and Hierarchy The Other Faces Of The Empire
Editor: Fırat Yaşa
Translator: Esra Taşdelen Ordinary Lives Against Social Order and Hierarchy
Copyeditor: Aron Aji
Proofreader: Anthony Howson
Book design: Eylem Zor, Hatice Çavdar
Cover design: Emre Çıkınoğlu
Cover image: The horse body made up of people (Murakk. Behz.d, TSMK, Hazine 20, No:2165,vr.36)
İmparatorluğun Öteki Yüzleri: Toplumsal Hiyerarşi ve Düzen Karşısında Sıradan Hayatlar
Originally published in Turkish by Koç University Press, 2020.
EDITOR: FIRAT YAŞA
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1st Edition: İstanbul, April 2022
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Koç University Suna Kıraç Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data 
The other faces of the Empire : ordinary lives against social order and hierarchy = İmparatorluğun öteki yüzleri :
toplumsal hiyerarşi ve düzen karşısında sıradan hayatlar /|ceditor Fırat Yaşa. İstanbul : Koç Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2022.
328 pages ; 16,5 x 24 cm. -- Koç Üniversitesi Yayınları ; 275. Tarih
ISBN 978-605-7685-68-1
1. Turkey—History--Ottoman Empire, 1288-1918. 2. Turkey--History--Ottoman Empire, 1288-1918--Social conditions. 3.
Turkey--Social life and customs. 4. Turkey--Social conditions. I. Yaşa, Fırat. II. Title.
DR432.I47313 2022
If everyone looks like each other in a place, this means there is no one there.
—Michel Foucault
Foreword 9
INTRODUCTION 13
Ordinary Subjects of the Sultan, Confronted with the Social and Political Elites
Suraiya Faroqhi
SECTION ONE 53
Accessing People Through Their Crimes
CHAPTER ONE 55
Sitting in a Stable while Singing Palace Songs
Nurcan Abacı
CHAPTER T WO 71
An Ill-Behaved, Illegitimate Son and a Tattling, Restless Soul
Zeynep Dörtok Abacı
CHAPTER THREE 95
From the Marshes to the Qadi’s Court
Fırat Yaşa
CHAPTER FOUR 109
The Guiles of Men Outsmart Mâryem
Cemal Çetin
CHAPTER FIVE 129
Partnership in Mischief in the 16th century
Saadet Maydaer
CHAPTER SIX 155
The Case of Gülpaşa of the Gurbet Taifesi at Bor in the 16th Century
Emine Dingeç
CHAPTER SEVEN 167
Have Some Mercy, Sir!
Zübeyde Güneş Yağcı
SECTION TWO 183
The Operations of Ottoman Bureaucracy: Helpful or not?
CHAPTER EIGHT 185
Alaeddin from Üsküp (Skopje)
Yasemin Beyazıt
CHAPTER NINE 205 Foreword
The Demogerontia Elections
Filiz Yaşar
CHAPTER TEN 227
Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
Özlem Başarır
CHAPTER ELEVEN 249
Are we not Ottomans?
Faruk Yaslıçimen
CHAPTER TWELVE 275
Why did Süreyya, Vasfi, Mehmed and İdris become Runaways?
İsmail Yaşayanlar
This book project departs from the historiographical approach that we are relatively
SECTION THREE 295
familiar with in Ottoman historiography. It strives instead to understand the
Out of Category: The Adventures of a Dubious Broker
various dimensions of the lives of individuals mostly drawn from various archival
CHAPTER THIRTEEN 297
Nicolò Algarotti: A Life Shaped on the Border of Conversion documents, mainly court registers. It therefore inclines towards a micro-history. To
understand a marginal story and give it meaning, it is necessary to consider several
Buket Kalaycı
factors such as the wars, the victories, the economic circumstances, natural disasters,
Contributors 313
technological advances and epidemics that occurred during the historical period under
Index 317
study. Failing to do so will make it difficult to contextualize the stories of individuals.
The primary objective of this book is to touch on the “ordinary” lives of “com-
mon” people who produce, pay taxes, and make up the majority of the population.
As will be seen throughout the text, some of the unexpectedly extraordinary profiles
are even at times marginal as well. Naturally it is much more difficult to expose
the small worlds (microcosmos), the everyday lives, fears, individual deeds, crimes,
expectations, and mindsets of ordinary people in Ottoman society when compared
with European societies which transitioned to written culture much earlier. The
Ottoman society had low literacy rates and largely preserved an oral culture; the
sources (such as memoirs, journals, travelogues and correspondence) that we can
use to learn about the lives of common people are limited in number and mostly
generated by the state. Therefore, it is extremely difficult to follow information
and data on groups or individuals in a sustained manner. It becomes necessary to
adopt a multidisciplinary approach that involves collaboration with disciplines other
than history such as law, psychology, sociology, anthropology and ethnology, and
research of sources from these disciplines.
Our study is not free from limitations and challenges either. For this reason, we
recognize that our book, aiming to understand the world of ordinary people, may
receive criticism for over-relying on fiction and imagination at times, for overusing
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10 | THE OTHER FACES OF THE EMPIRE FOREWORD | 11
storytelling, or for being too literary. Nevertheless, we hope to have made a contri- composed a superb introduction to our volume. I am grateful to her for believing
bution to the efforts of understanding the small worlds of small people—who in in me and devoting her valuable time to this work, thereby enriching both this
reality comprise the base and majority of the social pyramid—by observing them book and my life.
at their level. The drive towards perfection and flawlessness that all researchers feel in pre-
The book in your hands may seem a departure from current historical studies in paring such a work might have confused me, and from time to time I might have
terms of not just its method and content, but also its preferred style. For example, gotten a bit lost in the complicated mazes of knowledge. Nevertheless, when readers
the fictionalizing approach to describe the events surrounding a person tracked provide feedback in the form of critique as well as interest and appreciation, I will
down from records has only recently gained currency in Ottoman historiography. have achieved the goals I set out for myself as an editor.
The majority of the essays in this volume emerged while weaving on our proverbial Fırat Yaşa
loom the stories of common people that fell in the “exceptionally normal” category,
Bursa 
people we came across in court registers and archives of the various cities of Anatolia.
Almost in all the essays, we preferred using “Thick Description” as our method;
instead of making general observations by piling together numerous documents.
We sought to understand historical facts by approaching them from multiplicity of
angles and, at times, by constructing diverse narratives about them. In other words,
by positioning individuals in the center of their relationships and tracking the events
that affected them directly or indirectly, we were able to emphasize their networks
of relations, identities, their frameworks of meaning, and their individual outlook.
Each author who started off with this conviction and contributed in meaning-
ful ways to this book has aimed to widen a bit further the gateway to the lives of
ordinary people who have been left “off stage” in Ottoman historical literature.
Every book carries traces of the mind that produced it and hints at stories. This
book too has its story. Anyone interested in court registers will, intentionally or not,
witness interesting stories about the lives of common people. The desire to transmit
what we discover is inevitable for most historians. I too had come across dramatic
stories of common people while researching court registers and had shared these
stories with Zeynep Dörtok Abacı whom I periodically visited in , in her office
at Bursa Uludağ University. In the course of these meetings, I became aware of the
existence of other historians who, like me, wished to understand and interpret the
lives of common people--a subject that, by then, had obtained great importance
for me. After that, the rings of the proverbial chain gradually multiplied, and we
arrived at the current group of authors. I especially thank Cemal Çetin and Özlem
Başarır who did not spare any help throughout the project and, at its completion,
were as excited as I was.
Finally, I am indebted to Suraiya Faroqhi who encouraged me, guided me
with her advice, and after reading all the contributions carefully and meticulously,
INTRODUCTION
Ordinary Subjects of the Sultan, Confronted with the Social and
Political Elites: Can We Extricate Their Stories?
Suraiya Faroqhi
In the Ottoman context, writing about ordinary people is a recent innovation,
and we hope this book will encourage historians to further proceed along this
path. Given the sources at hand, the authors focus on situations in which towns-
people and villagers confronted the bureaucratic apparatus put in place by sultans
and viziers. There must have been decisive events in people’s lives in which qadis,
military commanders and scribes took no part, but we know very little about them.
In terms of topics covered, we can divide the fourteen articles making up this
volume into two groups, with a perhaps unclassifiable case attached at the end. The
first section deals with people whose activities have entered the record because rightly
or wrongly, their neighbors and fellow townspeople/or villagers had accused them
of crimes. We encounter the theft of a horse, murder and mayhem in Anatolian
villages, prostitution and once again murder, but this time in a medium-sized city,
criminal families operating in Bursa, a Roma woman accused of immoral behavior,
and a nineteenth-century slave dealer who badly mistreated his slaves.
A second group consists of cases in which the functioning or malfunctioning of
Ottoman officialdom is crucial. Thus, sixteenth-century bureaucratic rules concern-
ing appointments determined the fate of a young scholar, who after imprisonment in
the ’lands of the unbelievers’ tried to resume his interrupted career as an Ottoman
scholar-bureaucrat. With the consent of the local qadi, Chios villagers elected repre-
sentatives, who were to collect their taxes and negotiate with the authorities on their
behalf. As for a local notable of early nineteenth-century Diyarbekir, he apparently
did not realize that if he went on a collision course with the representatives of the
central power, he was unlikely to win. In the Hamidian period, ordinary subjects
of the sultan had trouble making their voices heard as well. In legal terms, they
might well be in the right, but the reluctance of the bureaucracy to enforce the
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14 | SURAIYA FAROQHI ORDINARY SUBJECTS OF THE SULTAN, CONFRONTED WITH THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ELITES | 15
existing rules unless influential people complained, and the tendency of officials are by Mustafa Akdağ. In his book on the Celali uprisings originally published in
in Istanbul to not question the actions of their representatives on site, made it very , he has linked the rebellions of former peasants turned mercenaries or madrasa
difficult for even well-placed complainants to obtain redress. students to the population increases of the sixteenth century and the difficulty of
Whatever criteria we use, somebody or something will always defy categoriza- establishing new farmsteads in presumably overcrowded villages.
tion. Thus, we will end this book with the story of Nicolò Algarotti, a Venetian As for women, in  Ronald Jennings first demonstrated that the qadi regis-
subject of the early s. By the criteria applied when putting together the present ters of certain Anatolian towns, including Kayseri, contained significant stores of
volume, the Algarotti case is unique: for only in this chapter do we deal with a information on female property-holding and the attempts of women to end un-
dispute involving two polities, namely the Ottoman Empire and Venice. Algarotti’s wanted marriages. At a later stage, the work of Madeline Zilfi on female-initiated
adventures and probable misdeeds thus remind us that Istanbul, Egypt and Western divorces in eighteenth-century Istanbul and that of Leslie Peirce on women ap-
Anatolia certainly were part of the Ottoman Empire, but they belonged to a wider, pearing before the mid-sixteenth century qadi’s court of Ayntab, today’s Gaziantep,
Mediterranean world as well. showed how by means of judicial decisions, women tried to solve their problems.
The present Introduction begins with a discussion of the primary sources covering The latter included constant marital conflicts, but being unmarried and pregnant
the lives of the sultans’ ordinary, unprivileged subjects: firstly we survey the texts was an issue as well. In addition, Peirce demonstrated that despite the limited ac-
in Ottoman Turkish, and as a second step, source materials written in Armenian, cess of females to the written word, there were women attempting to teach other
Greek and Arabic. While non-elite women appear whenever they become visible women, a risky enterprise when the teacher aroused suspicions that she might not
in these sources, the recent surge of studies related to slavery makes it appropriate be a mainstream Sunni.
to devote a special section to this topic. A brief summary of recent methodological Admittedly, most of the available sources concern townspeople; apart from the
discussions concerning the use of the qadi registers, and especially the gaps that last fifty years of the empire’s duration, our knowledge of peasants and nomads, the
characterize these records, leads the reader to the summaries of the papers proper. vast majority of the Ottoman population, is very limited indeed. As for town dwell-
As noted, a discussion of people confronted with the workings of the Ottoman ers, even if illiterate, these men and women had friends and neighbors to turn to for
bureaucracy follows a first and sizeable selection of crime stories. Denizens of the help in composing a petition, so that they might express their wishes and complaints
empire are the main focus, but occasionally outsiders appear as well. in a form acceptable to the Ottoman authorities. Or else, townspeople with basic
literacy might find experts to help them in the composition of simple texts, intended
‘Ordinary People’ in Ottoman Historiography:
for readers of varying educational levels, perhaps fellow townsmen. In families where
Source Texts in Ottoman Turkish
boys trained as future religious scholars, women might receive some education too;
In all patriarchal societies including the Ottoman variety, information on women is and Cemal Kafadar has authored a memorable study on the letters written by a female
scarce because the sources relegate people who are not adult males to the background mystic resident in the town of Üsküp/Skopje, who wrote to her sheikh because as a
of the historical scene — if they appear at all. On the other hand, in modern-
3 Mustafa Akdağ, Celâlî İsyanları 1550-1603 (Ankara: A.Ü. Dil ve Tarih-Coğrafya Fakül-
style Ottoman historiography, female members of the urban subject population
tesi, 1963); idem, “Medreseli İsyanları,” İstanbul Üniversitesi İktisat Fakültesi Mecmuası,
and ordinary people ‘in general’ have emerged as academically credible subjects
11, 1-4 (1949-50), 361-87.
at about the same time. With respect to young males, the path-breaking studies
4 Ronald Jennings, “Women in early 17th century Ottoman Judicial Records: The sharia
court of Anatolian Kayseri,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient (from
1 For the attempts of Ottoman subjects to solve their problems on a political level, see now on: JESHO), XVIII, 1 (1975), 53-114.
Antonios Anastasopoulos (ed.), Political Initiatives ‘From the Bottom Up’ in the Ottoman 5 Madeline Zilfi, “We Don’t Get Along,” in Women in the Ottoman Empire: Middle Eastern
Empire: Halcyon Days in Crete VII, A Symposium Held in Rethymno 9-11 January 2009 Women in the Early Modern Era, edited by Madeline Zilfi (Leiden: Brill, 1997), pp. 264-
(Rethymno/Greece: University of Crete Publications, 2012). 96; Leslie Peirce, Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab (Los
2 Doubtless due to my linguistic limits, I have not been able to find ego-documents written Angeles, Berkeley, and London: The University of California Press, 2003).
by Jews living in the early modern Ottoman Empire. 6 Peirce, Morality Tales, pp. 251-75.
16 | SURAIYA FAROQHI ORDINARY SUBJECTS OF THE SULTAN, CONFRONTED WITH THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ELITES | 17
woman, she could not easily visit him in person. As for urban males, Kafadar has discussions with Shiite gentlemen in Tabriz, who he visited when traveling in Iran.
written a pioneering study as well, which concerns the seventeenth-century diary of Thus, Evliya’s work allows us to at least furtively glimpse the manner in which
an anonymous dervish, who Kafadar has shown to be Seyyid Hasan, in later life, educated inhabitants of the Ottoman and Safavid realms communicated with one
sheikh of a Celvetiyye lodge in Istanbul. This diary is especially memorable because another, politely ‘agreeing to disagree’ whenever necessary.
the author wrote about matters that in this period, most people did not consider In the eighteenth century, diaries and narratives written for a limited, domestic
worth recording, such as eating good-quality fruit and fine cheese, drinking coffee audience became more frequent. Admittedly, we do not understand the reason very
with relatives, visiting with friends and attending funerals — including the interment well, but probably the increasing number of schools established by local dignitaries,
of one of the author’s wives, probably a victim of the plague. even in a medium-sized Anatolian town such as Sivas, made it easier for people to
Even so, the most remarkable ‘ego document’ of the Ottoman seventeenth cen- gain some literacy and knowledge of literary models. Whatever the background
tury is the travelogue of Evliya Çelebi (-sometime after ), who has included may have been, the diaries and memoirs that have surfaced to date were often — but
a significant quantity of biographical information in his multi-volume work. For not always — the works of religious scholars. Selim Karahasanoğlu has studied the
a twenty-first century reader, it may come as a surprise that he does not name his text written by a qadi, who lived in the early to mid-eighteenth century and — as
mother, but perhaps he wished to observe the socially approved reticence with re- was customary — periodically returned to Istanbul when his provincial appoint-
spect to female relations — on the other hand, he did tell many tales about Princess ments had come to an end; for he needed to solicit the army judges (kadıaskers)
Kaya Sultan, apparently a relative by marriage. Nor does Evliya record whether he for new positions. Karahasanoğlu’s ‘hero’ was thus familiar with the Ottoman
ever married or had children. As his work did not attract much attention before capital, where he went sightseeing when the fountain of Ahmed III, inaugurated
the mid-nineteenth century, Evliya Çelebi’s name does not appear in biographical in , was a novelty. From the very early s, we possess the diary of Hafız
dictionaries of the s and s, and as no gravestone has survived, we do not Mehmed Efendi, who was the imam of Istanbul’s Soğan Ağa mosque and recorded
know for sure when and where he died. family events including the religious education of his sons, as well as the political
When it comes to documenting ordinary people, Evliya’s work is so valuable vicissitudes that marked the troubled reign of Sultan Selim III (r. -).
because, despite being a somewhat eccentric member of the elite, he was willing A text from the eighteenth-century Balkans, written in Ottoman Turkish but by a
to flout the conventions of Ottoman prose, discussing matters to which most au- native speaker of the Bosnian language follows a similar format; for the author combines
thors of the time paid little attention. As the spectrum of his acquaintances was an account of his life with the narration of local events, as in a chronicle. However,
far wider than the circle of friends and relatives gravitating around Seyyid Hasan, Molla Mustafa Bašeskija of Sarajevo (about -), an imam like Hafız Mehmed
Evliya offered a broad panorama of human interactions, recording for instance his Efendi and in addition, a public scribe who wrote letters for the families of soldiers
7 Cemal Kafadar, “Mütereddit bir Mutasavvıf: Üsküp’lü Asiye Hatun’un Rüya Defteri 10 For recent biographies compare: Robert Dankoff, An Ottoman Mentality: The World of
1641-43,” Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi, Yıllık V (1992), 168-222. Evliya Celebi (Leiden: Brill, 2006); Bekir Karlığa et al., Evliya Çelebi Atlası (Istanbul:
MEDAM, 2012); Nuran Tezcan, Semih Tezcan and Robert Dankoff eds., Evliya Çelebi
8 Cemal Kafadar, “Self and Others: The Diary of a Dervish in Seventeenth Century Is-
— Studies and Essays Commemorating the 400th Anniversary of his Birth (Ankara: Republic
tanbul and First-person Ottoman Literature,” Studia Islamica, 69 (1989), 121–50. At
of Turkey, Ministry of Culture, 2012).
Sabancı University, Istanbul, Tunahan Durmaz has recently defended an MA thesis,
which carries Kafadar’s study several steps further: Tunahan Durmaz, “Family, Com- 11 Ömer Demirel, Osmanlı Vakıf Şehir İlişkisine Bir Örnek: Sivas Şehir Hayatında Vakıfların
panions, and Death: Seyyid Hasan Nûrî Efendi’s Microcosm (1661-1665)” accessed Rolü (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2000). I have excluded the memoirs of Feyzullah
through https://www.academia.edu/38297349/_Family_Companions_and_Death_ Efendi (b. 1703) because he was a member of the highest ranks of the Ottoman elite and
Seyyid_Hasan_N%C3%BBr%C3%AE_Efendis_Microcosm_1661-1665_M.A._The- in no way an ordinary person.
sis_Sabanc%C4%B1_University_04.01.2019_ (accessed on 10 July 2019). 12 Selim Karahasanoğlu, Kadı ve Günlüğü : Sadreddinzade Telhisî Mustafa Efendi Günlüğü
9 Compare the index of Evliya Çelebi, Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi, Topkapı Sarayı Bağdat (1711-1735) üstüne bir İnceleme (Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2013).
304 Yazmasının Transkripsyonu –Dizini, vol. 1, edited by Robert Dankoff, Seyit Ali 13 Kemal Beydilli, Osmanlı Döneminde İmamlar ve bir İmamın Günlüğü (Istanbul: Tarih ve
Kahraman and Yücel Dağlı (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2006). Tabiat Vakfı, 2001).
18 | SURAIYA FAROQHI ORDINARY SUBJECTS OF THE SULTAN, CONFRONTED WITH THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ELITES | 19
fighting against the Russians and/or the Austrians, has produced a much longer work. times; but regrettably we cannot introduce them all, and Aşçı Dede will have to
He seems to have hoped that it would circulate among a broad public in his hometown. serve as the sole representative of an entire genre.
Bašeskija’s chronicle has interested historians of the twentieth and twenty-first centu- Furthermore, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, literacy and ‘first
ries as well, who have made ample use of his descriptions of plague epidemics, guild person narratives’ were no longer a privilege of people with a religious education. Jan
festivals, victory celebrations and very prominently, the miseries of war. In addition, Schmidt and at a later stage Tolga U. Esmer dwelt on the stories of an ‘Ottoman ir-
Molla Mustafa’s text allows the reader to evaluate the intellectual life of an important regular’ known as Deli Mustafa, who wrote or perhaps dictated a chronicle covering the
Ottoman provincial town: What books did people study, and what skills did a person period from - to -, in which his own adventures featured prominently. In
need to possess if he wanted his fellow citizens to consider him a learned man? this sense, he followed the format used by Molla Mustafa and Hafız Mehmed Efendi.
Concerning a slightly later period, Gülçin Tunalı Koç has studied the diary of a mid- By origin, Deli Mustafa was a villager from the region of Tokat in North Central
nineteenth century Ankara astrologer and occasional substitute judge (naib) named Anatolia, who became a mercenary because his father, also a professional soldier, had
Sadullah Efendi (d. ), who tried to derive humanly comprehensible messages from inducted him into the military. Because the author presented himself not as a simple
the configurations of the stars, in his attempt to make sense, of among other issues, soldier but as a man who knew all the tricks of his trade, Esmer has chosen to focus
the catastrophic Ankara drought of . While Sadullah Efendi does not seem to on the public to which this discourse might appeal. Put differently, in Esmer’s per-
have gone hungry, he certainly suffered and was well aware of the consequences for spective, the public that Deli Mustafa hoped to reach is at least as important as the
people less well placed than he was; this ‘bourgeois’ perspective contrasts with the author himself. A man who had spent most of his life on campaigns and battlefields,
abject misery of small peasants and agricultural laborers during those same years. Deli Mustafa had few qualms about telling stories of blood and gore. We can only
Later in the nineteenth century, the Mevlevi candidate member (muhibb) Aşçı hope that at least some of them were the product of his imagination. Whatever the
Dede İbrahim Efendi, in the diaries that he kept from  to the beginning truth of the matter may have been, his blood-curdling stories probably did not offend
twentieth century, wrote about both mystical experience and bureaucratic socia- his listeners. Thus, there must have been an emotional and cognitive bond between
bility. In the study of Carter Findley, Aşçı Dede appears as the representative of narrator and audience, and for this connection, the term ‘interpretive community’
a significant section of the nineteenth-century Ottoman administration, namely (yorumlayıcı çevre) has recently become popular. It is Esmer’s main concern to make
of people without any interest in the novelties of the Tanzimat, who nonetheless this connection between narrator and audience visible and intelligible.
enjoyed successful bureaucratic careers. Visibly, the relationships which Aşçı Dede
‘Ordinary People’ in Ottoman Historiography:
built with his fellow mystics helped him find suitable employments, while at the
Sources in Greek, Armenian, Bulgarian, and Arabic
same time his sincere religious commitment consoled him during the vicissitudes
of life. Many more Ottoman subjects, both Muslims and non-Muslims, wrote Not all Ottoman subjects who highlighted their own persons and experiences in
diaries and memoirs in the nineteenth century than had been the case in earlier their writings necessarily wrote in Ottoman Turkish. To readers unfamiliar with
Armenian, Greek or Arabic translations and secondary studies, they permit at
14 Kerima Filan, “Life in Sarajevo in the 18th Century (According to Molla Mustafa’s least a general impression. After all, the period, in which most historians comfort-
mecmua)” in Living in the Ottoman Ecumenical Community: Essays in Honour of Suraiya
Faroqhi, edited by Vera Constantini and Markus Koller (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2008), pp.
317-45.
18 For research on this topic, compare the project of the Orient Institut der Deutschen Forsc-
15 Gülçin Tunalı Koç, “An Ottoman Astrologer at Work: Sadullah el-Ankarâvi and the Ev- hungsgemeinschaft (DFG) Cihangir/Istanbul on late Ottoman ego-documents, coordi-
eryday Practice of İlm-i Nücûm,” in Les ottomans et le temps, edited by François Georgeon nated by Richard Wittmann, beginning in 2010: https://www.oiist.org/selbstzeugnisse-
and Frédéric Hitzel (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 39-60. als-quellen-zur-geschichte-des-spaten-osmanischen-reichs/ (accessed on 27 July 2019).
16 Aşçı Dede, Aşçı Dedenin Hatıraları, 4 vols., edited by Mustafa Koç and Eyyüp Tanrıverdi 19 Tolga U. Esmer, “The Confessions of an Ottoman Irregular: Self-Representation and
(Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2017). Ottoman Interpretive Communities in the Nineteenth Century,” Osmanlı Araştırmaları/
17 Carter Findley, Ottoman Civil Officialdom: A Social History (Princeton: Princeton Univer- The Journal of Ottoman Studies 44, Living Empire: Ottoman Identities in Transition 1700-
sity Press, 1989), pp. 174-382. 1850 (2014), 313-40.