In this chapter, Ekin Tuşalp-Atiyas describes the careers of two Ottoman chief scribes Şâmîzâde Mehmed (d.1663) and Râmi Mehmed (d.1708). Both men lived in the tumultuous socio-political milieu of the seventeenth century. Their lives and careers were shaped by the peculiar household (kapı) politics of the era and the patronage networks produced therein. The author studies the literature produced about their controversial legacies and tracks down the historical dynamics that first rendered them politically and culturally valuable and later totally dispensable.
How did seventeenth-century Istanbulites understand the past? And what did they want to write about the history of their city? My contribution addresses these questions by focusing on the case of a controversial beheading or more precisely, the revisionist discourse it generated a century later. In 1539, the Melami-Bayrami Sheikh İsmâil Maʾşûkî was executed for heresy and thrown into the sea. In the 1620s, defenders of the sheikh began to circulate written accounts of how his severed head and headless corpse moved upstream on the Bosphorus and reached Rumeli Hisarı to be buried together. Early modern martyrdom narratives, such as the case of İsmâil Maʾşûkî, I argue, are rich sources through which to observe power and dissent being displayed on the urban landscape. The story of a beheaded sheikh on the Bosphorus can show us the diverse ways in which early modern Ottomans reflected on their city's violent imperial past, turning what had been the sultan's assertion of power into a site of critical reflection on Ottoman history.
Over the course of four decades, Vücûdî Mehmed Efendi (d.1612) alternated between two supposedly distinct Ottoman career paths. Having begun as a müderris in the mid-1570s, he then transferred to a military role and spent several years on campaign. In 1598, he re-entered the scholarly profession as teacher and müfti in a medrese in his home region of Larende. In 1608, following a successful mahzar (round-robin petition) supported by senior judicial officials in Istanbul, he was also appointed kadı of Larende and elevated to mevleviyet status on an ad hominem basis. Vücûdî's varied career is a useful example of the professional and social flexibility possible for an Ottoman provincial scholar in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries. It demonstrates the value of carefully cultivated patronage links with members both of the ulema – in Vücûdî's case with the Kınalızade family in particular – but also of the ümera. The chapter concludes with a transcription and an English translation of the contribution by Azmizade Haleti (d.1631), a major literary stylist, to the mahzar of 1608.
It is possible to reconstruct the lives and careers of few middle-level office holders in Ottoman Hungary, but Osman Ağa, the hero of this study, is an exception. He first appears as a prebend-holder and tax farmer of the imperial domains in the sub-province of Fülek. From the late 1560s to mid-1590s, he was the contractor and then fiscal inspector of the Vác (O. Vaç) tax farm (mukataa), the Ottoman state treasury's most important source of revenue in Hungary, where he exhibited outstanding financial talent. Not only could he outbid his rivals, but he also managed to remit to the treasury what he had undertaken to pay. He was a gifted soldier, with his valiancy repeatedly rewarded with increases in his prebend. He was appointed district governor of Szécsény (O. Seçen) and later transferred to the sancaks of Esztergom (O. Estergon), Hatvan, Szécsény and, finally Szolnok (O. Solnok), the most prestigious district governorship in Hungary. He disappeared from sight during the first decade of the so-called 'Long War' (1593–1606). Osman Bey was among those local Ottoman notables who did much to establish and consolidate Ottoman rule in Hungary, both economically and culturally.
In this chapter, Iris Agmon focuses on the changes the Ottoman reformers introduced into the şeriat courts and highlights how they affected the overall Ottoman legal system. She argues that, from the outset, şeriat courts were an integral part of refashioning the judicial system. Attempts to introduce changes into the various legal forums, including the şeriat courts, continued until the end of the empire following the First World War. By examining three dimensions of the Ottoman judicial system – its structure; legislation and codification; and judiciary and legal education – she both shows how it changed during the long nineteenth century and traces the effects of those changes on the şeriat courts. Two complementary processes stand out from the discussion – the advancement of the legal system towards unification as a single modern state, and the redistribution of labour among its various judicial forums.
The focus of this chapter is on a firman text, dated March 1422, and copied from the library of the Droviani Monastery in southern Albania. Due to the rarity of pre-1453 Ottoman documents, this text provides a unique glimpse into a period following the Ottoman interregnum when Sultans Mehmed I and Murad II were still in the process of re-establishing central authority over the provinces. During this period, Mehmed I's brother Mustafa Çelebi, previously captured by the Turko-Mongol conqueror Timur in 1402 and deported to Samarkand, claimed the Ottoman sultanate for himself. This firman was issued by Mustafa Çelebi nicknamed "the Impostor" (Düzme), while he was in temporary control of the western Balkans and rebelling against his nephew Murad II. The author discusses the documentary importance of this firman, which was addressed to the kadı of Delvinë and concerned the territorial rights of the Droviani Monastery.
In this chapter, Cemil Koçak looks at the first Ottoman constitution (the Kanuni Esasi) of 1876. He examines how, by whom and for what purpose it was accomplished. He also looks at its specifications and the various changes that were made to it. Set against the backdrop of the constitutional monarchy of the 1860s, this period marked the beginning of a social engineering project that would turn Ottoman Turkey into a society with a constitution. Since then, the constitution has become both indispensable and necessary to the functioning of a modern Turkish state. This was the period that saw the rise of the Young Ottomans.
Can and should religio-legal norms change with the times? Can changes in religious practices ever be permissible, or should they be categorically rejected as bidʾat (blameworthy innovations)? This chapter comprises a discussion of how Muslim scholars grappled with these questions in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire, where adherents of the Sunni revivalist movement, known as the Kadızâdelis, waged a campaign against a wide variety of beliefs and practices they considered to be bidʾat. One of the condemned practices was the congregational performance of supererogatory prayers on the nights of Regaib, Berat and Kadir. These nocturnal services were very popular with Muslims in the core Ottoman lands, had the sanction of many of the leading Ottoman scholars of the past and had been actively sponsored by the imperial authorities. Yet, they were also clearly an 'nvented tradition', which went against the express pronouncements of the earliest Muslim authorities. The author, then, examines how two scholars in the early-seventeenth century, Mustafa bin Hamza bin İbrahim bin Veliyüddin, alias Nushî, and ʿAbdülkerim el-Sivasî, tried to find a way around this conundrum by evoking the juridical principle, 'sharʾi judgments change with the change of times.'
