Coping with the State: Political Conflict and Crime in the Ottoman Empire, 1550-1720 9781463230067

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Coping with the State

Analecta Isisiana: Ottoman and Turkish Studies

17

A co-publication with The Isis Press, Istanbul, the series consists of collections of thematic essays focused on specific themes of Ottoman and Turkish studies. These scholarly volumes address important issues throughout Turkish history, offering in a single volume the accumulated insights of a single author over a career of research on the subject.

Coping with the State

Political Conflict and Crime in the Ottoman Empire, 1550-1720

Suraiya Faroqhi

The Isis Press, Istanbul

preSS 2010

Gorgias Press LLC, 954 River Road, Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA www.gorgiaspress.com Copyright © 2010 by The Isis Press, Istanbul Originally published in 1995 All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise without the prior written permission of The Isis Press, Istanbul. 2010

ISBN 978-1-61143-134-6

Reprinted from the 1995 Istanbul edition.

Printed in the United States of America

Born in 1941, Suraiya Faroqhi studied at the universities of Hamburg/Germany, Istanbul and Bloomington/Indiana. In 1971, she began to teach at Middle East Technical University, Ankara. She received the 'Üniversite Do^entligi' in 1980 and completed her 'Habilitation' at RuhrUniversität, Bochum/Germany in 1982. In 1986 she became a professor at Middle East Technical University, and in 1988, she accepted a professorship at Ludwig-Maximilians-l Iniversität, Munich/Germany. Her books incljde Der Bektaschi-Orden in Anatolien (Vienna, Oriental Studies Institute, 1981), Towns and Townsmen of Ottoman Anatolia (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984, publ. in Turkish as Osmanli'da Rentier ve Rentliler, Istanbul, Tarih Vakfi Yurt Yayinlari, 1993, tr. by Neyyir Kalaycioglu), Men of Modest Substance, House Owners and House Property in Seventeenth Century Ankara and Rayseri (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987), Pilgrims and Sultans, the Hajj under the Ottomans (London, fauris Press, 1994) and Rultur und Alltag im Osmanischen Reich (Munich, C. H. Beck, scheduled for Sept 1995). A selection of her articles came out as Peasants, Dervishes and Traders in the Ottoman Empire (London, Variorum, 1986) and apart from the present volume, a further selcciion of her articles is being prepared by the Isis Press under the title Making a Living in the Ottoman Lands, 1480 to 1820.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 1.

2.

3.

4.

7

"Political Initiatives 'from the Bottom up' in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Empire" in : Osmanische Studien zur Wirtschafts und Sozialgeschichte. In Memoriam Vanco ßoskov, ed. Hans Georg Majer (Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1986), pp. 24-33

25

"Political Activity among Ottoman Taxpayers and the Problem of Sultanic Legitimation (1570-1650)" Jl. of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, XXXIV (1992), 1-39

37

' Sainthood as a Means of Self-Defense in Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Anatolia" in : Manifestations of Sainthood in Islam, ed. Grace Smith and Carl Ernst (Istanbul, ISIS Press, 1993), pp. 193-208

67

"Town Officials, Timar-holders and Taxation : The Late Sixteenth-Century Crisis as seen from £orum", Turcica, XVIII (1986), 53-82

83

5.

"Political Tensions in the Anatolian Countryside Around 1600 An Attempt at Interpretation" in : Türkische Misz,eilen. Robert Anhegger Festschrift, Armagani, Melanges, ed. J. L. BacqueGrammont, Barbara Flemming, Macit Gökberk, liber Ortayh (Istanbul, 1987), p. 117-130, Turkish transl. by Nail Satligan : 11. Tez, 1 (1987)

6.

"Seeking Wisdom i i China : An Attempt to Make Sense of the Celali Rebellions" in : Festschrift Felix Tauer, ed. Rudolf Vesely (in preparation)

7.

8.

"Black Slaves ano: Freedmen Celebrating (Aydin, Turcica, XXI-XXII1 (1991), 205-215

125 1576)", '

149

"Counterfeiting in Ankara" in : The Turkish Studies Association Bulletin, 15, 2 (Sept. 1991), Issue in honour of Ronald Jennings, 281-292

159

6

COPING 9.

10.

11.

WITH

THE

STATE

"The Life and Death of Outlaws in (Jorum", in: Armagan, Festschrift fiir Andreas Tietze, ed. Ingeborg Baldauf, Suraiya Faroqhi and Rudolf Vesely (Prague : Enigma Corporation, 1994), pp. 59-77

171

"Räuber, Rebellen und Obrigkeit im osmanischen Anatolien", Periplus, 3 (1993", 31-46

189

"Robbery on the hajj road and political allegiance in the Ottoman Empire (1560-1680)" (unpubl, 1995)

205

INTRODUCTION

The articles reprinted in this volume are part of an ongoing discussion c o n c e r n i n g the relations between O t t o m a n society and the state which controlled it. 1 This discussion in a sense is as old as the study of Ottoman history in a 'modern', or where the Turkish context is concerned, 'republican' style. But it has taken a new turn in the last twenty-five years or so. From the late 1960s o n w a r d s , particularly e c o n o m i s t s and social scientists have attempted to figure out where the Ottoman case should be 'placed' in an overall discussion of social systems the world over. Given the fact that Ottomanists, if they knew anything a b o u t a non-Ottoman society, were familiar with European developments only, scholarly effort has been mainly expended on the comparison of Ottoman society with early modern Europe.

MODES

OF

PRODUCTION

In a first stage of historiography, discussion of the Ottoman place in world history involved the debate whether the Ottoman socio-political system should be regarded as a variant of feudalism. Sophisticated adherents of this latter view defined feudalism in a wide sense, namely as a society of peasants with independent access to their means of livelihood. Therefore these peasants could be persuaded to hand over part of their product only by extra-economic f o r c e . In addition, a society in w h i c h the feudal m o d e of production predominated might include significant 'pockets' of other modes : in the Mediterranean part of Europe, slavery continued to be important well into the Middle Ages. Thus describing a given society as 'feudal' did not mean that all human relations f o u n d within its c o m p a s s necessarily c o n f o r m e d to that pattern. Many misunderstandings were however caused by the fact that the term 'feudalism' is also used in i much narrower sense, namely for a society in which the lordly class is tied together by the institutions of subinfeudation and

' w h i l e the articles in this v o l u m e have been entirely reset, and certain mistakes and inconsistencies of spelling etc. ironed out in the process, it has not been possible to adjust the format in all cases. Thus in most articles the references are given in full the first time they occur in the notes, and later in abbreviated versions. In a fev texts however, the references can be found in a separate list, and an abridged f o r m is used in all the notes. Some articles give the names of the relevant publishers in their references, while others do not. I beg the reader to excuse these inconsistencies. T h e index w a s prepared with a great deal of help by Mrs Christl Catanzaro, for which I am g r a t e f u l

8

c o r

I NG

WITH

THE

STATE

homage, which obviously were absent f r o m Ottoman society. 1 M o r e o v e r many participants in the debate had a very old-fashioned view of the European Middle Ages, which was essentially derived f r o m studies published before Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre or Georges Duby completely changed our ideas of medieval and early modern society. 2 This difference of phase has made it easier for opponents of the idea that the category of feudalism might be of any use to Ottoman studies, to present their case in a convincing fashion. Scholars who did not regard the notion of feudalism as relevant to Ottoman history in the 19"'0s often adopted the concept of the 'Asiatic Mode of P r o d u c t i o n ' . T h i s c o n c e p t , introduced by M a r x at o n e point but subsequently discarded, w a s derived f r o m the — very limited and often mistaken — notions which m i d - n i n e t e e n t h - c e n t u r y E u r o p e a n scholars possessed of Indian society. These involved the idea of isolated, self-sufficient villages dominated by a slate apparatus which possessed few ties to society apart f r o m the extraction of taxes, except in areas which needed m a j o r hydraulic investments before they could be used for agriculture. Supposedly the despotic rule normally encountered in societies where the Asian Mode of P r o d u c t i o n ( A M P ) was d o m i n a n t , d i f f e r e d in kind f r o m the European absolutism of the early modern period. T h e absence of a rurally based aristocracy capable of restraining the Sultan's or emperor's despotic rule appeared as the crucial difference. 3 In addition this mode of production was considered to be incapable of evolution, so that it had to be broken down by outside intervention b e f o r e the society in question could d e v e l o p other initiatives. Dubious as this model may sound in the bald summary given here, it recommended itself to economists and social scientists of the 1970s by several properties. First of all it s e e m e d a viable alternative to the discredited assumption that all human societies must necessarily pass through the same sequence of stages. More mportantly, the exaltation of the state involved in this model, in the eyes of many social scientists seemed to nicely fit in with the results of O t t o m a n i s t historians, w h o w e r e u n e a r t h i n g m o r e and more material on the functioning of the kerim devlet,4 Needless to say, the

' F o r the discussion concerning feudalism, see the different studies of Halil Berktay, particularly "The Search for the Peasant in Western and Turkish History / H i s t o r i o g r a p h y " , in : New Approaches to State and Peasant in Ottoman History, ed. Halil Berktay, Suraiya Faroqhi (London: Frank Cass, 1992), pp. 109-184. The present text owes a great deal to discussions with Rifa'at A b o u - E l - H a j , Tulay Artan, Halil Berktay, Huri Islamoglu-inan, Ariel Salzmann and Isenbike Togan ; but they are of course in no way responsible for the results. 2 I n addition, many participants in the debate thought, or pretended to think f o r reasons of polemical convenience, that the arrangements analyzed by scholars such as Georges Duby for the tenth to twelfth centuries, applied to the late fifteenth or early sixteenth centuries as well. 3 Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1974), p. 464. ^ T h i s convergence may explain why the studies of O m e r Liitfi Barkan were highly esteemed and often quoted by Turkish defenders of A M P , even though Barkan, in his later years a conservative 'anticlerical', had little in c o m m o n politically with this particular group of his readers.

I NTRODUCTION

9

exaltation of the state also seemed appropriate to an interpretation of socialism which equated state (as o p p o s e d to social) control of the e c o n o m y with social progress; to use a R u s s i a n a n a l o g y , s o v c h o s e s w e r e regarded as s o m e t h i n g m o r e a d v a n c e d t h a n k o l c h o s e s . S c h o l a r s t r y i n g to e x p l a i n t h e lack of indigenous capitalist d e v e l o p m e n t in T u r k e y w e r e also attracted by the AMP c o n c e p t . A f t e r all, it a l l o w e d the s t a t e m e n t that the p r o d u c t i v e f o r c e s of O t t o m a n s o c i e t y h a d b e e n h e l d b a c k by t h e p r e v a i l i n g

socio-political

o r g a n i z a t i o n . O n l y a c o m p l e t e t u r n o v e r c o u l d catapult society o u t of its secular circle of centralization f o l l o w e d by decentralization and launch society o n the road t o c a p i t a l i s m and ultimately s o c i a l i s m . 1 H o w e v e r t h e e x t r e m e emphasis

on

the

state,

the

neglect

of

social

forces,

the

posited

incommensurability of AMP-dominated societies with c o n t e m p o r a r y European developments all have contributed toward the increasing discredit of this model in the 1980s and 1990s. H i s t o r i a n s specializing in the O t t o m a n realm in the 1970s w e r e still too m u c h involved with the e m e r g i n g riches of the Istanbul a r c h i v e s to pay m u c h a t t e n t i o n to this d e b a t e . M o r e o v e r m a n y of t h e m w e r e e x t r e m e l y conservative politically, and a debate informed by Marxian categories appeared m o r e than suspect. M o r e legitimately f r o m m y p r e s e n t p o i n t of v i e w , the immaturity of O t t o m a n historiography even in the 1970s p r o b a b l y m a d e it all b u t i m p o s s i b l e f o r a d e b a t e on c o m p a r a t i v e history to b e f r u i t f u l , to say nothing of a discussion a b o u t m o d e s of production. M o s t historians w o r k i n g in the archives s i m p l y w e r e n o t yet able to present i n f o r m a t i o n o n O t t o m a n state a n d society in s u c h a m a n n e r that c o m p a r a t i s t s could h a v e m a d e m u c h use of it; the c h a p t e r on O t t o m a n 'despotism' in Perry A n d e r s o n ' s s e m i n a l work is a good e x a m p l e of this c o m m u n i c a t i o n gap. 2

THE

IMPACT

OF

HISTORICAL

SOCIOLOGY

Recent d e v e l o p m e n t s have h o w e v e r been m o r e encouraging. On the one h a n d , at least c e r t a i n O t t o m a n h i s t o r i a n s h a v e d e v e l o p e d an interest in discussing mutual c o n c e r n s not only with E u r o p e a n historians, but also with m e m b e r s of the large and flourishing c o m m u n i t y of Indianists. 3 Indian history of the M o g h u l a n d p o s t - M o g h u l periods is on the whole m o r e developed and theoretically sophisticated than O t t o m a n history, but the gap is not s o great as to p r e v e n t a c o n s c i o u s n e s s of c o m m o n p r o b l e m s . In m y v i e w , o n e of the m o r e important lessons w e can learn f r o m Indianist historians is to take

' f a g l a r Keyder, Stale and Class ir, Turkey, a Study in Capitalist 1987). p. J 6-17, 26-28. ^Anderson, Lineages,pp. 361-396. 3

Development

(London- Verso

S e v e r a l c o n f e r e n c e s , organized principally by Tosun A r i c a n h , David Ludden and Ashraf Gham m Cambridge M A , California, Istanbul, Munich and Philadelphia have been devoted to these encounters.

10

C O P I N G

W I T H

T H E

S T A T E

cognizance of the model accounting f o r the importance of internal trade supplying the capital and political elites. 1 This phenomenon w a s especially significant in the Indian context, but it also has struck Ottomanist historians, particularly when dealing with Istanbul. Since the provinces were obliged to deliver large amounts of coin as taxes every year, and f e w regions had the chance to supply themselves with gold or silver f r o m abroad, provincials needed to earn back the m o n e y they spent on taxes by internal trade. Supplying the political elite and the population of the capital meant tapping the money supply accumulating at the centre every year, which, if it had not been drawn o f f , would have tended to merely drive up prices. T h u s the political structure partic ularly of very large states generated both a need and opportunities for internal trade. On the other hand new a p p r o a c h e s to history, which were first developed in the borderland between history and sociology and are associated particularly with Charles Tilly and his school, have provided inspiration to Ottomanist historians. Very refreshingly, Tilly has moved a w a y f r o m the glorification of rulers and state f o r m a t i o n so characteristic not only of Ottoman history, but of many branches of European history as well. 2 Tilly has steadfastly refused to accept the premise that once crimes are perpetrated on a sufficiently large scale, they are part of the realm of politics and thereby sacrosanct. French kings stand revealed as ordinary robbers and extractors of protection money, engaging in organized crime. Moreover the image that has impressed generations of their subjects, and latter-day historians as well, turns out to be the product of conscious manufacture, of a type which one might have believed impossible before the media age. 3 As a result, life has become easier for Ottomanist historians w i s h i n g to escape the m y s t i q u e of the Ottoman state, as this entity can now be studied without the attempts at glorification inherent in such endeavours down to the 1980s. More concretely, Tilly's work has inspired scholars concerned with the cohesion of the Ottoman state, specifically the problem why peasant rebellion failed to occur, even under the very trying circumstances of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Karen Barkey's recent work is based on Tilly's studies of early modern French rebellions. 4 Charles Tilly's emphasis on social

' C A Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, North Indian society in the age of British expansion, 1770-1870 (Cambiidge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 63ff. ^Charles Tilly, "War-Making and State-Making as Organized Crime", in: Bringing the Slate Back In, ed. Peter B. Evans. Dietrich Rueschemeyer & T h e d a Scocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), |>p 169-191; As Sociology Meets History ( L o n d o n . New Y o r k : Academic Press). 3

P e t e r Burke. The Fabricano i of Ijiuis XIV (New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 1992). ^ K a r e n Barkey. Bandits and Bureaucrats, The Ottoman Route to State Centralization (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994). On this issue see also Huri íslamoglu-tnan, State and Peasant in the Ottoman Empire, Agrarian Power Relations and Regional Economic Development in Ottoman Anal-ilia During the Sixteenth Century (Leiden: E.I Brill, 1994).

] INTRODUCTION

11

ties within groups of peasants or aristocrats, and on inter-class alliances as preconditions for rebellion, has become the starting point for Barkey's own work. It is her thesis that the low level of social organization in the Anatolian countryside inhibited peasant uprisings. Her point is well taken where the timar-holders are concerned. In the past, we have not sufficiently taken into account that rimar-holders were frequently rotated and thus unable to form close ties to 'their' peasants. 1 Moreover the fact that timar-holders were forced to compete against one another for scarce positions made it impossible for them to develop a group consciousness of their own, which might have enabled them to rebel against their late sixteenth-century demotion in favour of tax farmers. However as usually happens with a stimulating model, some problems emerge when one attempts to use it in practice. Bmphasizing the rotation of ft'mar-holders is a good thing. But this should not get us back to the old —and in my eyes at least— discredited notion that the Ottoman state of the sixteenth century possessed a bureaucratic apparatus comparable to the bureaucracies of modern states, complete with recruitment according to impersonal criteria, merit promotion, and penalties in case of corruption. 2 In principle there is of course no contradiction: we can perfectly well assume that Ottoman officials of the sixteenth century believed that on account of their ulema training, their descent from a former independent ruling family or from a father established ir the Sultan's service (that is, due to membership in the askeri), they were entitled to the benefits of high office. In the same vein, we can concede thai: sixteenth-century Ottoman officials expected promotion only partially due to their performance on the Job, and largely through the 'influence' of their patrons.-' By making these assumptions, Ottoman officials presupposed a set of criteria differing from those upon which modern bureaucratic careers are — supposedly — based. At the same time we may accept that, as Barkan and most recently Barkey have shown us, the frequent rotation of timar-holders and other provincial administrators, in addition to their mutual competition, prevented the organization as a class of this section of the Sultan's servitors. But due to human imperfection, there exists a kind of mental drift. This leads us to assume that if //mar-holders were frequently rotated, they thereby became a more impersonal, 'modern' phenomenon, and the Ottoman bureaucracy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a modern-style bureaucracy. In my view, it is important to resist that temptation. ' ô m e r Lutfi Barkan, "'Féodal' Dfczen ve Osmanli Timari" in: Tiirkiye iktisat Tarihi Semineri, Metinler/Tartqmalar .... ed. O s m a n Okyar, Unal Nalbantoglu (Ankara: Hacettcpe Univcrsitcsi 1975), pp. 1-32. 2 I t has been the great merit of R i f t ' a t Abou-El-Haj to point out this difference: Formation of the Modern State, The Ottoman Empire, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries (Albany NY: SÙNY Press, 1991). -i - Cornell Fleischer, "Secretaries' Dreams: Augury and Angst in Ottoman Scribal Service", in: Armagan, Festschrift fur Andreas Tietze, ed. Ingeborg Baldauf, Suraiya Faroqhi, Rudolf Vesely (Prague: Enigma Corporation, 1994), pp. 77-1 12, provides a graphic illustration of this point.

12

COPING

WITH

THE

STA TK

Another difficult} is involved in the concept of a peasantry deficient in social organization. On one level, this concept is valid for peasantries the world over; thus early Marxists saw peasants as people who, due to the nature of their work, developed few social ties to one another. There even existed a saying which compared the political structure of the peasantry to a sack of potatoes. Moreover competition between peasant families has been stressed by social historians dealing with early modern peasantries, particularly in Italy. 1 This competition was increased by the fact that in many parts of Italy peasants' tenure was short-term and insecure, a feature absent from most parts of Ottoman Anatolia. Yet Italy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries certainly had its share of uprisings in which rural dwellers played a part, to say nothing of widespread banditry with villager support. I would therefore emphasize the involvement of the Ottoman state in village affairs as a significant factor in inhibiting rural rebellion, which is a point that Karen Barkey repeatedly makes. 2 But I would place much less value on a supposedly deficient peasant organization. For to be honest, we know very little about the internal functioning of Anatolian villages. And in addition, it would be a pity if the Asiatic Mode of Production, with its attendant 'isolated villages' were to return by the back door after having been chased out — for good reasons, or so it seems — by the front. But in spite of these doubts, Barkcy's book is a major contribution to the state-society debate of recent years. Its great merit is to have integrated an empirical study of rural social structure with an cxiensivc discussion of historiographical problems. In so doing, it demonstrates the increasing maturity of Ottoman history as a field. Tilly's study of the social cohesion of ordinary people vis-à-vis a powerful state has inspired other Ottomanist historians as well. A problem almost equally troublesome as the absence of peasant uprisings is the question why the 'notables' of the eighteenth century, who for the most part had obtained their positions as tax collectors of one sort or another, so rarely attempted to set up separate states. For the most part they preferred to run the territories they had carvec out for themselves with a considerable degree of autonomy, while maintaining their allegiance to an often remote Sultan. And even those who, like the Kgyptian ruler Mehmed Ali, went to war with their legitimate sovereign, were still concerned about maintaining cultural ties to

' o n Italy compare Franco Saba. "Italien 1500 - 1650", in: Handbuch der europäischen Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichic, ed. Wolfram Fischer et alii (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1986), Vol. 3, pp. 692-693. Peasant competition in a northern setting (Piémont) has been analyzed by Giovanni Levi, Das immaterielle Erbe, Eine bäuerliche Welt an der Schwelle zur Moderne, tr. Karl F. Hauber and Ulrich Haussman (Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach, 1985), p. 146ff. ^Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucru s. pp. 108-140.

INTRODUCTION

Istanbul.' This applied even more to minor ayan for whom motifs from the capital, immortalized on the walls of their houses, constituted an element of prestige. Ariel Salzmann has tackled this question in the spirit of Tilly's inquiry, emphasizing the importance of economic and financial ties in holding the empire together. 2 Because ayan as tax farmers participated in the Ottoman enterprise, they had a material interest in its continued existence, and the Sened-i Ittifak of 1808 demonstrated their will to become shareholders politically and not just financially. By making this point, Salzmann has shown how including the Ottoman experience into comparative political studies can broaden our understanding. In the past, political historians have been led astray by their all but exclusive reliance on European cases. European experience has shown ever increasing centralization of coercive power from the late Middle Ages to the twentieth century. But other trajectories are equally feasible. By allowing political decentralization while yet binding local powerholders to the state, the Ottoman Empire achieved a resilience which allowed it to weather the storms of the period after 1770, when increasing European intervention combined with secular economic crisis to make the very survival of the Ottoman state appear doubtful. Thus the ability of the Ottoman elite to judiciously 'privatize' some state functions increased its capacity for action. For in this fashion it was possible to mobilize the resources of local powerholders. As inalctk, Mc Gowan and most recently Barkey have emphasized, these powerholders had originally been called into being by the very manner of the state's functioning. 3 Thus I see a certain convergence between the work of Barkey and Salzmann : both stress the central political elite's capacity to negotiate the inclusion of rivals emerging in the provinces, and thereby keep at bay the use of force against the Sultan's subjects. The relatively low level of violence against internal contenders in turn limited the need for an increasing centralization of power, and this relatively low level of military organization with its attendant flexibility may have allowed the empire to survive where other, more rigid organizations would have collapsed. 4

' Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, E-;ypt in the reign of Muhammad University Press, 1984), p. 32.

Mi (Cambridge: Cambridge

2

Ariel Salzmann, "An Ancien Regime Revisited: "Privatization" and Political Economy in the Eighteenth Century Ottoman Empire" Politics and Society, 2 1 , 4 (1993), 393-423. % a l i l Inalcik, "Military and Fiscal Transition in the Ottoman Empire 1600 - 1700" Archivum Ottoniamomi, Vf (1980), 283-337. Bruce M c G o w a n , Economic Life in Ottoman Europe, Taxation, Trade and the Struggle for Lam!, 1600-1800 (Cambridge and Paris: C a m b r i d g e University Press and Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 1981). ^Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrati,

p. 241 : Salzmann, "Ancien Régime", p. 409.

14

C O P I N G

W I T H

T H E

S I A T E

By emphasizing the similarities of the eighteenth-century Ottoman setup to the French Ancien Régime before 1789, Salzmann has moreover pointed to an aspect of Ottoman history which many specialists have tended to brush aside: while the relationship b e t w e e n O t t o m a n state and society certainly possessed features which differred strongly from what can be observed in Europe, this is not the whole story. In addition, as a pre-industrial, noncapitalist social system it also possessed a great many features in c o m m o n with many states and societies of continental Europe, of which tax-farming constitutes a good example. Only while in the Ottoman Empire, tax-farming served to integrate into the ruling group at the centre rural elites that had enriched themselves through state service, in France the rival elites integrated into the state structure through tax-farming had 'capitalistic' sources of wealth at their disposal as well as purely 'etatistic' ones.

S O M E

B A S I C

A S S U M P T I O N S

This difference between France and the Ottoman Empire is important, but so are the similarities. I would see the major merit of the feudalism debate in the fact that it has provided us with a f r a m e w o r k in which the similarities between pre-industrial E u r o p e and the O t t o m a n E m p i r e can be rendered theoretically relevant, i.nd thus do not need to be ignored any longer. On the other hand, approaches stressing the unique features of Ottoman state and society only allow us to make sense of the differences, an imbalance which should at last be remedied. Parallel features between Ottoman and Ancien Régime French societies have therefore become one of my concerns. Not that the divergencies should be d o w n p l a y e d , quite to the contrary. But the prevailing trend in the scholarly literature has been the q u e s t for the 'uniqueness of the West' on the European side, and the 'incommensurability of the Ottomans' where Ouomanist historians are concerned. Recent research n economic and social history has however shown that in many areas the major divergencies between the Ottoman and the European world begin quite late. Many historians now view the last quarter of the eighteenth century as t i e crucial period in which the ways parted.' W e will deal here with the time when, the technological level being as yet comparable, m a n y life experiences of O t t o m a n s and - particularly M e d i t e r r a n e a n Europeans were compaiable as well.

' M e h m e t G e n ç , "XVIII YCizyilda O s m a n l i ì m p a r a t o r l u g u ve S a v a j " Yapil, Toplumsal Arcqtirnialar Derisi (1984) 49, 4. 51-61; 50, 5, 86-93. Genç believes that the economic crisis of the 1760s constituted a turning point, while A n d r é R a y m o n d , Artisans et commerçants du Caire, 2vols (Damascus: Institut Français de Damas, 1973-74), p. lOOff. considers that the fin de siècle crisis in Cairo began in 1780.

15

I INTRODUCTION

Somewhere in these debates on Ottoman socio-political organization, the articles contained in this volume should be situated. They are based on the assumption that even though Ottoman state ideology ordained that legitimate political activity was the province of the Sultan and his servitors the Ottoman taxpaying sujects (reaya)

carved out a realm of de facto

askeri,

political

activity for themselves. By using the benevolence of the ruler as a metaphor for their own political aims, which were for the most part defensive, they were able to legitimize their behaviour. But even when a member of the subject class intended to m o v e aggressively against a fellow subject or against a m e m b e r of the local askeri,

rhetorical statements concerning the just and

protective ruler might prove serviceable.

T H E

P O L I T I C A L

A C T I V I T I E S

O F

O T T O M A N

T A X P A Y E R S

'Political initiatives "from the bottom up'", the first article in our series, contains a cursory overview over the evidence available in the Registers of Important A f f a i r s ( M i i h i m m e Defterleri) and Registers of C o m p l a i n t s (§ikayet Defterleri). T h e l a i t section of the title, namely 'some evidence for their existence' conveys the defensive tone of the article ; for it is concerned not with mercenary or ayan rebellions, nor with mere humble petitioning, but with the means used by Ottoman taxpayers to obtain responses f r o m the Sultan arid his administration, and to have these responses applied in practice. By official sixteenth-century standards, the subjects of the Ottoman ruler were to pay their taxes and avoid infringing on the 'political' domain, monopolized by the Sultan's privileged servitors. T h u s having the Sultan's decisions translated into practice usually was no easy undertaking, particularly since the governors and their mercenaries, against w h o m many of the complaints were directed, were more powerful than the complainants. Yet we find village aad small town taxpayers organizing themselves to set up and sign a petition, collecting money to send a petitioner to Istanbul, and taking recalcitrant governors to court. In the second article of this sequence, we will deal with the manner in which this business was managed. In order to obtain results, petitioners must have adopted a language which Ottoman administrators at the centre found acceptable, and this manner of speaking included references to the Sultan as protector of the reaya)

Thereby

the complaint process, quite apart f r o m the practical results which it might produce, engaged ruler and subjects in a dialogue which confirmed the Sultan's

On these problems compare Huri islamoglu-ìnan, "Introduction: 'Oriental despotism' in a world system perspective", in: The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy, ed. Huri ¡slamoglu-tnan (Cambridge and Paris: C a m b r i d g ; University Press and Maison des Sciences de l ' H o m m e 1987), pp. 1-26.

16

COPING

WITH

T HE

STAT H

legitimacy. This confirmation was achieved, quite apart f r o m the private thoughts individual pet tioners may have harboured about the weaknesses of this or that ruler. It has seemed worthwhile to analyze the metaphors and stereotyped expressions Ottoman subjects thought appropriate to use in this context, particularly since certain expressions were not what we, with our late twentieth-century standards of propriety, would expect. Thus it was common to complain about the misdeeds of a local administrator by saying that if his evildoing did not cease, the inhabitants of the district would flee the area. Peasant flight, though widespread, was illegal by the standards of Ottoman law. But obviously Ottoman etiquette under certain circumstances permitted real life situations to obtrude in official speech. This paper tries to establish an inventory of such occurrences, hoping that thereby the reader will be able to see combinations and permutations which remain hidden as long as one merely regards individual documents. If asserting the role of the Sultan as a protector of the 'poor reaya' was one way of shielding oneself against the exactions of the governors and their men, the mediation of saints could be another. Within O t t o m a n Anatolia, there existed quite a few dervish lodges inhabited by sheikhly families. Some of the latter had been prominent under the pre-Ottoman rulers of the Seljuk and post-Seljuk periods. These people, with more or less success, claimed to be "nobody's subject (raiyet)' and attempted to establish themselves as tax-free servitors of the Sultan, even though in many cases they were situated on the outer limits of the asken

class. In certain sixteenth and seventeenth-century

instances, vve find them pleading on behalf of fellow provincials. However a modern study of supposed sheikhly mediators in Lebanon may induce a degree of scepticism concerning the seriousness with which m a n y early modern sheiks played their roles as mediators. 1 While the first three articles deal with the Ottoman Anatolian scene as a whole, the fourth attempts to delineate political conflict in the more limited environment of a country town. T h e scene is late sixteenth-ccntury (^orum, whose local politics are covered by a single kadi register, albeit of exceptional richness. But these limitations turn out to be advantages. Here we are able to follow diverse events occurring at the same time as the m a j o r issue, namely an attempt on the part of the townsmen to obtain the restitution of taxes illegally collected by the local governor. Thus we can discern that 1595-97 were in fact crisis years, when a mediocre harvest caused certain suppliers of grain to Istanbul to forage as far as land-locked Quorum. In addition, deliveries of goods and services tc the I'alace and army started off major conflict among the townsmen. Because of these disasters the court case against the governor, along with the petitions which had preceded it, took on an urgency it would not have possessed in other, more peaceful years.

' M i c h a e l G i l s e n a n , " A g a i n s t Patron C l i e n t R e l a t i o n s " , in Patron.v and Clients in Societies, e d . E r n e s t Gcllner :ind J o h n W a t e r b u r y ( L o n d o n , 1977), pp. 1 6 7 - 1 8 2 .

Mediterranean

17

I N T R O D U C T I O N

Apart from the Ottoman-Austrian war going on at the time, f o r u m s problems, and those of many other Anatolian towns, stemmed f r o m the fact that these were the years of the Celali uprisings. Mercenaries of re ay a background attempted to obtain j o b security and a place in the regular Ottoman armies by being as disruptive as possible. 'Political tensions in the Anatolian countryside around 1600' and 'Seeking wisdom in China' review interpretations of these events which have appeared in the secondary literature. Unfortunately Karen Barkty's book could not be included, as it was published a f t e r these t w o articles had been c o m p l e t e d . 'Political tensions in the A n a t o l i a n countryside' i

OFFICIALS

T h e vast m a j o r i t y of petitions r e f l e c t i n g the relationship between t h e ruler a n d his s u b j e c t s are k n o w n to us o n l y b e c a u s e it w a s c u s t o m a r y to s u m m a r i z e the p e t i t i o n w i t h i n the rescript p r o m u l g a t e d as t h e S u l t a n ' s r e s p o n s e . W h i l e it is p r o b a b l e that c e r t a i n e x p r e s s i o n s f r o m t h e original petition w e r e taken o v e r into the rescript, n o c o m p a r a t i v e study of petitions and rescripts has ever been m a d e . T h e r e f o r e w e can only g u e s s at the slant given to petitions w h e n e v e r they were recycled by O t t o m a n o f f i c i a l s . W h e n interpreting the petition s u m m a r i e s , one has to be a w a r e of the bias inherent in t h e m , t h o u g h u s u a l l y it is not p o s s i b l e to c o m p e n s a t e f o r this bias b y using alternative s o u r c e s . E'ifficulties a r e especially o b v i o u s w h e n the text c o n t a i n s what p u r p o r t s to be a s t a t e m e n t q u o t e d v e r b a t i m ; t h e s e so-called q u o t a t i o n s a r e very g r a p h i c , and it is t e m p t i n g to r e g a r d

the often

conversational style as a m a r k of authenticity. B u t w h e t h e r t h e s e q u o t a t i o n s have been m o r e or less f a i t h f u l l y rendered, or w h e t h e r their contrast with the f o r m a l l a n g u a g e of t h e d o c u m e n t p r o p e r f u n c t i o n e d m a i n l y as a rhetorical device, remains u n k n o w n . W h e n all is said and d o n e , our k n o w l e d g e is limited to t h e s t a t e m e n t s m a d e b y O t t o m a n o f f i c i a l s , and t h e l a n g u a g e of the petitioners f o r the most part eludes us. At the s a m e time, a vast n u m b e r of original petitions survive, both in the Topkapi Palace archives and in the central archives proper. H o w e v e r , most d o c u m e n t s which h a v e c o m e to light deal with fairly routine matters. T h u s we p o s s e s s a vast n u m b e r of sixteenth and s e v e n t e e n t h - c e n t u r y petitions which introduce candidate tax f a r m e r s and s p e c i f y the a m o u n t s of m o n e y which they p r o p o s e d to pay to t h e O t t o m a n t r e a s u r y 1 . F o r later p e r i o d s , e v e n m o r e material survives; the a p p o i n t m e n t of f o u n d a t i o n administrators in m a n y cases necessitated a petition frorr the local kadi to the relevant b u r e a u s of the financial administration, and h u n d r e d s and p r o b a b l y thousands of these texts still survive. H o w e v e r , n o n e of these petitions are concerned with complaints. M o s t of the texts located to d;ite are so routine that very little trace remains of

*To be f o u n d in B a ç b a k a n h k Ar§ivi s e c t i o n s M a l i y e d e n m i i d e v v e r a n d K a m i l K e p c c i .

40

( O P I N G

W I T H

T H E

S T A T E

the petitioner's manner of expressing himself, so that at present, the summaries retained in the Miihimme and §ikayet (complaint) registers remain quite irreplaceable 1 . Additional summaries of complaints can be gained from local kadi registers, into which the scribes of the tribunal were expected to enter the sultanic rescripts arriving from Istanbul. But while these copies in the kadi registers often contain honorific formulas which cannot be found in the central government's records, the petition summaries themselves are the same in both types of registers.

P R E S E N T I N G R O L E

O F

T H E

P E T I T I O N E R ' S

A N C I E N T

C A S E :

T H E

U S A G E

In sixteenth and seventeenth-century Ottoman society, one of the most powerful means of legitimating any kind of practice was by saying that it conformed to precedent. In this respect Ottoman practice resembled that of medieval and early modern Europe, and of many other human societies as well 2 . As Muslims, both petitioners and officials placed a special religious value upon all practice rightly or wrongly believed to go back to the times of the Prophet Muhammad. After all, the movement of the Kadizadeliler during the seventeenth century had once again reminded contemporaries that all practices which were manifestly of more recent vintage could come under strident attack^. Thus it is not surprising that petitioners frequently dwelt upon the fact that their rights went back into the distant part. As an example, one might mention the villagers of Arguncuk, in the vicinity of Kayseri, w h o in 1056/1646-47 defended their users' rights over a stream against a medrese teacher and sheik who was actively building up his landholdings in the area 4 . This medrese t e a c h c , who at the same time claimed descent from the Prophet, had diverted ¡.o his own use a water course which the villagers 'from ancient times' (kadimiileyyam) had used to water their own fields and gardens. The argument appears to have convinced the officials of the Divan; for in the concluding pari, which contains the Sultan's resolution of the dispute, the diversion of water thai had belonged to the villagers 'from time immemorial' is explicitly condemned.

' T h e s e r i e s of § i k a y e t r e g i s t e r s , w h i c h c o n t a i n s r e s p o n s e s to c o m p l a i n t s , b e g i n s in t h e y e a r 1 6 4 9 . F o r a brief d e s c r i p t o n c o m p a r e A t i l l a £ e t i n , Ba^bakanlik

Argivi

Kilavuzu

(Istanbul,

1979), p. 5 9 . ^ C o n c e r n i n g the value early m o d e r n Knglishmen placed upon ancient p r e c e d e n t , K e i t h T h o m a s , Religion

and the Decline

of Magic

^ M a d e l i n e Z i l f i , " T h e K a d i z a d e l i s . D i s c o r d a n t R e v i v a l i s m in S e v e n t e e n t h - C e n t u r y Journal 4

of Near Eastern

Studies.

4 5 , 4 (1986), 251 -269.

M D 91, p. 8 . no. 25 ( 1 0 5 6 / 1 6 4 6 - 4 7 ) .

compare

( H a r m o n d s w o r t h , 1978), pp. 4 6 1 - 5 1 7 . Istanbul,"

POLITICAL ACTIVITY AMONG TAXPAYERS

41

However, the past was also used as a means of legitimation in rather m o r e surprising contexts. T h u s in 1018/1609-10 a n u m b e r of substantial townsmen of Kayseri defended the right of Haci Ferhad, a military man (sipahi oglani),

to build a c o f f e e h o u s e adjacent to the city walls, even though the:

fortress commander objected. In their defense of Haci Ferhad's initiative, the: townsmen claimed that for a long time a mosque, a school and shops had stood right next to the city wall. Since these old structures had not done any damage, presumably the coffeehouse would not cause any harm either 1 . T his example shows us that using the past as a standard did not necessarily result in a condemnation of every new initiative, even when a religiously debatable kind of innovation, namely a coffeehouse, was the object under discussion After all, the fortress commander, when he and his men moved against the coffeehouse, had condemned this building as a source of damage to the fortress walls, and not as a religiously illicit innovation. This is what one would expect, since he was a military man and not a member of the ulema\ nor was he an ordinary townsman or villager who needed to defend his rights mainly by reference to ancient usage.

PRESENTING RECOURSE

THE

TO

PETITIONER'S

WRITTEN

CASE:

DOCUMENTS

Even though the doctors of Hanefi §eriat law considered the testimony of witnesses more valuable than written documents, in practice whenever written evidence was available, people invoked it 2 . This seems to have been a practice of the Ottoman central administration, which petitioners adopted in their turn. In sixteenth-century registers of pious foundations, the contents of the foundation deed typically were summarized, and only if no foundation d o c u m e n t could be located, did the recording official have recourse to the testimony of witnesses 3 . Obviously foundations, even of the most modest kind, w e r e well placed when it c a m e to proving their rights by the presentation of documents. A person in charge of a village dervish lodge (zaviye) was more likely to read and write than the ordinary villager, and even if he did not possess this skill himself, he would find it easier to obtain access to those who did. It is quite remarkable how often the persons in charge of provincial zaviyes

presented official documentation. Zaviyes

exempted from taxes such as the avariz-i

divaniye,

were often

but their administrators

typically had a great deal of trouble ensuring that these exemptions were in

*MD 78, p. 185, no. 4 7 9 (1018/1609-10). ^Joseph Schacht, An Introduction to Islamic Law (Oxford, 1964), p. 18ff. •'Compare registration practice as apparent f r o m : Omer Liitfi Barkan, Ekrem Hakki Ayverdi (eds.) Istanbul Vakiflan Tahrir Defteri, 953 (1546) Tarihli (Istanbul, 1970). In most cases date and content of the foundation deed are specified. On p. 117 is an e x a m p l e of a foundation w h o s e deed could not be located and whose existence was justified by a lost document and 'ancient usage'.

42

C O P I N G

W I T H

T H E

S I

A T E

fact respected. Thus we find the descendants of a sheik residing in the north Anatolian town of §ebinkarahisar producing, in the reign of Sultan Ahmed I (1603-1617), an exemption document which had been issued to their ancestor by the father of the reigning Sultan's great-grandfather, namely Sultan Suleyman I (1520-1566)'. Moreover, the petitioners were aware of the fact that their ancestor's exemption had gained validity by being entered into the provincial tax register (vilayet defteri), and they pointed out this fact in order to strengthen their case. However, all this did not mean that the descendants of the Karahisari sheik, or the scribes that drafted their petition, had lost sight of the legitimizing role of 'the way things had always been'. Olagelmise mugayir ('against all precedent') was still a very effective phrase in weakening an opponent's position. Zaviye claims other than tax exemptions might also be based upon sultanic rescripts. Thus the male and female followers of the Celveti sheik Uftade Efendi (Uftade efendi fukarasi ve bacilari) had been granted the privilege that after their deaths, their estates were to pass under the control of their sheiks, who were to expend these resources in charitable works 2 . T h e rescript granting this privilege, whose original date remains unknown, was ultimately presented by Sheik Mehmed, halife of the influential dervish Sheik Mahmud Uskiidari. It was confirmed with the proviso that the people whose estates were .hus to pass under the control of the sheik should not be merchants or craftsmen. A frequently used tactic by which foundation administrators attempted to strengthen their claims was to invoke the will of the founder (¡art-i vakif mucebince). On the other hand, an arrangement of which these dignitaries disapproved, they often called 'contrary to the conditions laid down by the founder' (mugayir-i $art-i vakif)3. This language of approval and disapproval was shared by officials of the central administration and petitioners; the former, when forbidding abuses connected with sheiks and zaviyes, also liked to invoke the will of the founders as the reason for intervention. Thus both officials and petitioners took it for granted that it was incumbent on the Sultan to enforce the tvill of long-dead founders of mosques, theological schools and zaviyes. Interestingly enough, even in the absence of documents it was sometimes assumed t h a t the will of the founder was known. Thus most Bektashi zaviyes are notorious for not possessing any kind of foundation document, so that entries in the late fifteenth or sixteenth-century tax registers

' m D 7 9 , p. 6 7 , n o . 8 9 ( 1 0 1 9 / 1 6 1 0 11). 2

MD85,p.213

3

S e e f o r e x a m p l e B a § b a k a n l i < Ansivi M u h i m m e Z e y l i 10, f o l . 9 0 b ( 1 0 5 4 / 1 6 4 4 - 4 5 ) .

(1040/1630,W).

POLITICAL

ACTIVITY

AMONG

TAXPAYERS

43

often constitute our only evidence for their functioning during this period. But in a rather exceptional document, the sheik of the central zaviye in Hacibekta§ was granted a confirmation :>f his right to propose to the Sultan the names of the candidates applying f o r the position of sheik in a zaviye

of the Bektashi

order. T h e rescript granting this privilege, dated 1019/1610-11, claimed that the arrangement conformed to the conditions laid down by the founder 1 . Now it is probable that regulations of this type were devised in the intensively administered and bureaucratized O t t o m a n polity, and not in the m u c h less developed states of the pre-Ottoman period. Since the fifteenth-century legend of Haci Bekta§ does not mention any such privileges granted to the founder or his i m m e d i a t e heirs, it is unlikely that they existed at that time, let alone during the c o n f u s e d last years of the Seljuk sultanate, when Haci Bcktas supposedly flourished 2 . Therefore it would appear that Bektashi sheiks of the seventeenth century managed to persuade their official interlocutors that they knew w h a t the will of the f o u n d e r was, although we d o not k n o w what sources they claimed f o r their information. Strange though this case may seem, it was by no m e a n s unique: In the eighteenth a n d early nineteenth centuries, other Bektashi claims of d o u b t f u l historical validity were also widely accepted by Ottoman officials. H o w e v e r , zaviye

administrators were not the only people to invoke

written d o c u m e n t s in their f a v o u r . T h e s a m e p r o c e d u r e is s o m e t i m e s d o c u m e n t e d in the case of whole villages. D u r i n g the Cretan c a m p a i g n s (1654-1669) certain settlements in the area of Urgiip and Nigde were granted exemption f r o m the tekalif -i §akka taxes; in exchange f o r this exemption, they p r o v i d e d f i r e w o o d and earth c o n t a i n i n g saltpeter, essential in the manufacture of gunpowder. Subordinate commanders (suba$i) under the orders of the Nigde governor did not abide by this exemption and even refused to obey a sultanic rescript which protected the villagers 3 . T h e latter took their c o m p l a i n t not to the kadi or the central administration directly, as was c o m m o n procedure, but to the provincial governor of K a r a m a n , w h o was the hierarchical superior of the Nigde governor. Through the mediation of the provincial finance inspector, the complaint finally made its way to Istanbul, and the exemption rescript was confirmed accordingly. Unfortunately we do not know whether references to the exemption document had f o r m e d part of the original c o m p l a i n t (which is probable), or whether this was a tactic adopted only in the office of the Karaman finance director.

*MD 79, p. 345, no. 871 (1019/1610-11). ^Compare Abdiilbaki Golpinarli (t;d.) Manakib-i Haci Bekta$-i Veli "Vilayetname" (Istanbul, 1958) for the text of the Haci Bekta§ legend and the various stages of its composition. 3 M D 91, p. 48, no. 147 (1056/1646 47).

44

C O I ' I N G

W I T H

T H E

S T A T E

A special case is the employment of adaletnames in the complaint process. As Halil ¡nalcik has demonstrated, the practice of promulgating rescripts in order to rectify specific abuses goes back at least to the reign of Sultan Selim I 1 . But such rescripts multiplied during the troubled years of the Celali uprisings. One such text, promulgated in 1609 in the name of Sultan Ahmed I, became especially famous, possibly at least in part due to the rhetorical elaboration with which the text described the abuses of governors, kadis and other officials in immediate contact with the subject population 2 . It would appear that the rhetorical devices employed by the authors of late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century adaletnames had some influence upon the style of complaints composed by members of the subject population. This style should have appeared quite accessible to many petitioners, for the authors of the adaletnames abstained from the Arabic and Persian loanwords that were so characteristic of the formal language of the period. At the same time, these texts are extremely graphic and concrete, so that it should not have been too difficult for scribes drafting petitions to substitute the abuse at issue for the abuses mentioned in the adaletname. We may conclude that the multitude of complaints concerning abuses inspired the adaletnames, while at the same time the existence of adaletnames helped those who were oppressed by local administrators to find a legitimate form of expressing their grievances. However, apart from this indirect impact, we also encounter more direct uses of the adaletname. In 1019/1610-11, a certain Sheik Ali, active in the Denizli area and ranking as a halife of the Halveti sheik in charge of the famous lodge of Koca Mastafa Pa§a in Istanbul, found himself involved in a conflict with a tax collector 3 . This Halveti dervish presented himself as 'protecting, according k: the detailed adaletname sent out from my [the Sultan's] fortunate Palace, the reaya and free citizens of the Muslim state from oppression and the governor's men'. According to the single text which preserves a record of Sheik Ali's activities, the Halveti dervish then went on to state that he preached and gave good advice to Muslims. In this activity, he seems to have fallen foul of an official collecting taxes from lands assigned to a certain vizier. The latter attempted to remove his opponent by having him exiled to Cyprus. It appears that the adaletname was viewed as a text which authorized people such as Ali, whose social position on the margins between reaya and askeri permitted them a certain amount of manoevering space, to

' Halil I nalcik, "Adaletnamclcr," Beigeler, II, 3-4 (1965), 4 9 - 1 4 5 . C o m p a r e also the s a m e author's "The Ottoman Declinc ind its Effect upon the Reaya," in: Henrik Birnbaum and Speros Vryonis (eds.). Aspects of the Balkans. Continuitv and Change, Contributions to the International Balkan Conference held at UC / A. October 23-28 1969 (The Hague, 1972), pp. 338-354. 2 I n a l c i k , "Adaletnameler," no. X, p. I23ff ( M D 78, pp. 891-899). This text has also been made available by Mustafa Cezar, ihmanli Tarihinde Levendler (Istanbul, 1965), p. 385ff. A very similar text from the A n k a r a kadi registers has been published by M u s t a f a A k d a g , Celali isyanlan (1550-1603), (Ankara 1963), p. 265ff. 3 M D 79, p. 323, no. 815 (1019/¡610-11).

P O L I T I C A L

ACTIVITY

A M O N G

T A X P A Y H R S

45

resist the demands of locil administrators in the name of the Sultan: By mobilizing the influential sheik of Koca Mustafa Pa§a, Sheik Ali was able to secure a rescript which promised him immunity fom persecution in the future 1 . A more roundabout fashion of using the adaletname is documented in a rescript replying to the complaint of villagers from a settlement near Sivas. Documents in hand, they asserted that from the time of 'Sultan Alaeddir' onward, their village had formed part of the pious foundation of the Great Mosque in Sivas 2 . However certain taxes had been assigned to the son of a deceased vizier as a zeamel, or major tax grant, to remunerate the latter for his services in the Palace. Giv3n the importance of the zeamet, no other official had any rights to their dues. (In the case of smaller tax assignments or timar, one half of the penalties demanded from convicted criminals generally went to the governor of the provirce or sub-province). Now a military commander (suba§i) had been found murdered in his tent while on a tax-collecting trip. The murderer was not apprehended, and since the dead man was found in his tent not inside but outside the village, a fetva ultimately absolved the villagers from payment of blood money. In the meantime however, a cavu§ of Sivas arrested the villagers, and robbed them of 600 guru§ and some textiles. The villagers' manner of citing the adaletname in their defense is quite intriguing; for this crucial document is only mentioned in passing. Prominence is given to the exemption document, that forbade all officials, except the foundation administrators of the Great Mosque and the holder of the zeamet involved, to collect taxes from the villagers. One would have expected direct mention of the adaletname, for the abuse of which the villagers complained was explicitly denounced in the adaletname of Ahmed I. 'If on the lands of a given village, a man freezes to death, falls from a tree and is killed, drowns in a body of waier, or is found murdered, you [the provincial governors] come to the village, claiming: 'The penalties for bloodshed and the tithe of blood money are 3urs'. You remain in the village for many days, mistreat and imprison the villagers, beat them and take large sums of gold pieces and guru§ as your t the of the blood money'... 3 . It is hard to imagine that the authors of the petition were not aware of this passage which fitted their own case so well, and we can only assume that the adaletname'i; provisions were so well known that in referring to this text, it was quite unnecessary to be specific.

' o i l the context of this rescript compare Suraiya Faroqhi, "Sainthood as a M e a n s of Self Defense in Seventeenth Century Ottoman Anatolia," in Grace Smith and Carl Ernst (eds.), Manifestations of Sainthood in Islam (Istanbul, 1993), 193-208, reprinted in this volume. 2 M D 79, p. 492, no. 1262 (1019/1 i 10-11). ~Inalcik, "Adaletnameler." p. 126.

46

C (I P I N G

RECOGNIZED AND

THEIR

WITH

THE

LAWLESSNESS:

STATE

THE

GOVERNORS

M KN

It is w o r t h noting that in the rescript c o n c e r n i n g S h e i k Ali's dispute with the tax c o l l e c t o r

o p p r e s s i o n and t h e g o v e r n o r ' s m e n (ehl-i

drj)

are

p r e s e n t e d as t w o c l o s e l y allied t e r m s . T h i s w a s by n o m e a n s a p e r s o n a l opinion of Sheik Ali a n d / o r the scribe presenting his case, but a view that had received official sanction in A h m e d I's adaletname

and in other places 1 . W h i l e

c o m p l a i n t s a g a i n s t k a d i s a n d p a r t i c u l a r l y s t u d e n t s of t h e o l o g i c a l s c h o o l s (suhte)

w e r e by no m e a n s a b s e n t , lower-level g o v e r n o r s , their s u b o r d i n a t e

c o m m a n d e r s (subap)

and the a d m i n i s t r a t o r s of c r o w n lands a p p e a r as the

quintessential villains. A l m o s t by d e f i n i t i o n , t h e s e p e o p l e a r e a s s u m e d to o p p r e s s the reaya,

sultanic rescripts e n j o i n i n g t h e m to protect the ' p e o p l e

entrusted to t h e m by (rod' being normally ignored 2 . In this context, a rescript addressed to the governor-general of R u m and the kadi of Divrigi is particularly illuminating: This text, dated 1018/1609-10, d e s c r i b e s the activities of Yusuf bey, a f o r m e r g o v e r n o r of D i v r i g i 3 . A f t e r stating that the inhabitants of the province had been reduced to misery because of molestation by u n s p e c i f i e d 'robbers', t h e text continues: 'every m o n t h he [the provincial g o v e r n o r ) s e n t t h e m a military c o m m a n d e r (suba$i)

who

established himself [in the a r e a | a l o n g with thirty or forty m o u n t e d m e n and took a w a y their f o o d and f o d d e r w i t h o u t p a y m e n t . F r o m e v e r y village he d e m a n d e d forty to fifty guru$ in m o n e y , and in addition, m a n y times he m a d e t h e m deliver h o n e y , fat and barley' ... T h e text is r e m a r k a b l e not because of the events described, which were c o m m o n p l a c e , but b e c a u s e the m a n chiefly responsible f o r all these illegal exactions, though no longer h o l d i n g o f f i c e in Divrigi, w a s apparently still c o n s i d e r e d an official in good standing. In any case, the scribes of the Divan did not deny him the honorific c u s t o m a r y w h e r e m e n of his rank w e r e c o n c e r n e d , n a m e l y 'may his h o n o u r continue'. W e m a y regard this text as a graphic illustration of the observation stated previously, n a m e l y , that even in o f f i c i a l p a r l a n c e , o p p r e s s i o n and 'the g o v e r n o r ' s m e n ' constituted two closely linked p h e n o m e n a . G i v e n these c i r c u m s t a n c e s , it is not surprising that

Ottoman

reaya,

and probably even lower-level kadis, v i e w e d a n y o n e w h o m a i n t a i n e d c l o s e relations to the governor's e n t o u r a g e with s o m e suspicion. T h e very existence of such ties m i g h t f o r m the f o c u s of a c o m p l a i n t , f o r it w a s a s s u m e d t h a t w h o e v e r a p p r o a c h e d t h e g o v e r n o r ' s m e n , w o u l d d o so in o r d e r to a c c u s e his fellow provincials, s o as to e n s u r e that f u t u r e exactions fell m o r e heavily

' C o m p a r e inalcik, "Adaletnsmeler," p. 126. 2

Ìnalcik, "Adaletnameler." p 122.

3

MD7, p. 250, no. 624 ( I () i 8/1609-10).

POLITICAL

ACTIVITY

AMONG

TAXPAYERS

47

upon hapless taxpayers than upon the accuser 1 . Or else the aim might be to secure profitable tax farms; for even though the latter were in principle assigned to the highest bidder, it is likely that useful advance information could be obtained by people with the right contacts. Moreover, the negative view that provincial taxpayers held with respect to any contacts between their fellows and the governor's men was apparently shared by a considerable number of officials in the Ottoman central administration. Otherwise it would be hard to explain why complaining reaya continued to bring up this accusation, even though it presented high-level administrators in such a dubious light. In composing the Sultan's rescripts, Divan officials often incorporated accusations that a given provincial was overly friendly with the governor's men. If they had assumed these remarks irrelevant, they would scarcely have repeated them. That officials of the Ottoman central government ascribed very dubious motives to their colleagues in the provinces also becomes apparent when we examine the concluding sections of many rescripts in the Mtihimme Defterleri. Typically the Ottoman Divan, in the name of the Sultan, followed up its instructions to provincial officials with general admonitions of a more or less stereotyped character. To cite one typical example: '...You should studiously avoid protecting evil-doers out of a desire for illegitimate gain, or oppressing and harming people out of excessive zeal or personal hostility. You should not in any way deviate from the road of God and justice. If news that you have been protecting evil-doing bandits reaches my royal threshold and exalted throne, your answers and excuses will not find acceptance and you will definitely be held responsible and reproved accordingly'... 2 . That certain of these comminatory formulas can be traced back to the fifteenth century and even beyond is immaterial in this context 3 . Much more important is the observation that they were not regarded as meaningless routine. This is apparent from the fact that the Miihimme registers record them in detail, while the honorifics accompanying the addressees' names were left out. Moreover, even though these comminalory phrases consist of stereotyped formulas ('you will be held responsible and -eproved accordingly' etc.), they were put together in ever-varying fashions. In some cases, the sheltering of evil-doers by corrupt officials was stressed, while in other instances the motif that the Sultan's love of justice would not tolerate oppression of the reaya is given special prominence. Unfortunately, our information on most of these cases is limited to what can be learned from a single text or at most a few rescripts. Therefore we do not know whether .hese rhetorical variations had any conncction with the facts of the case as the Ottoman central administration judged it, or ' M D 78, p. 351, no. 911 ( 1 0 1 8 / 1 6 0 ' M 0 ) ; M D 78, p. 552, no. 1416 (1018/1609-10). 2 3

M D 85, p. 6, no. 7 (1040/1630-31).

P a u l Wittek, "Zu einigen friihosmanischen Urkunden (V)," Wiener Zeitschrift des Morgenlandes, 57 (1961), p. 104.

fur die

Kunde

48

C O l'I N G

WITH

THE

STATE

whether they were simply due to considerations of style. Be that as it may, it is still remarkable that in rescripts which for the most part were accessible to any Ottoman subject who could have them looked up in the records of a kadi's court, senior provincial officials should habitually have been described as inclined to all sorts of wrongdoing. It must be kept in mind that the scribes who drafted the Sultan's rescripts, and the administrators whom they denounced so persistently, were not locked in some perennial feud with the governors and their men. Certainly an official such as Mustafa Ali, a medrese graduate and litte'rateur of scribal background, made acerbic comments on the lawlessness of governors especially in the frontier provinces 1 . But it is not likely that a mere feud between two rival branches of the Ottoman administration would have been endorsed by a series of Sultans. And yet this assiduous description of the evil-doings mainly of governors and their men, but also of kadis, is a constant feature not only of replies to humdrum complaints, but also of (he most formal 'justice rescripts' 2 . We are confronted here with a variant of an age-old legitimizing device, found equally in Western Europe, namely the ruler whose good intentions are thwarted by the abuses of his advisors 3 . At least during the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the scribes of the Divan, with the full endorsement of their ruiers, presented the latter as constantly seeking to curb their servitors' inclination toward all kinds of oppressive acts. Thereby it was stated that the ruler was not a party to the depredations of his officials and his role as a protector of the reaya was reasserted. In a civil war situation of the kind which prevailed during the years around 1600, when in actual fact the government in Istanbul was quite unable to control the doings of its agents in the provinces, this device must have been used to salvage the ruler's prestige. T o what extent the reaya were willing to accept this excuse is of course a crucial question, but at present we are in no position to furnish an answer.

COMPLAINING

ABOUT

KADIS

Mustafa Akdag once observed that kadis were generally much closer to the taxpaying population than the governors and their men, and that as a result, kadis often supported the reaya in their struggles against members of the military-administruiive service 4 . This must have happened particularly in small towns and outlyir g districts. In the normal course of affairs, kadis of 'Fleischer, Bureaucrat ami Intellectual, p. 210. Inalcik. "Adaletnâmeler." p 72. -^Emmanuel Le Roy L a d u r i i . "I.es masses profondes: La paysannerie," in Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Michel M o r i i u a u (eds.) Histoire économique et sociale de la France, 4 vols. (Paris. 1977), vol, 1, 2, p. XV . ^Akdag, Celali isyanlari, p 17.

POLITICAL

ACTIVITY

AMONG

TAXPAYERS

49

places such as Sorgun in central Anatolia or Seferihisar on the Aegean coast had scant chance of ever reaching a high-level position in the ulema hierarchy. Moreover, these low-level kadis often lived out their official lives within a limited geographical area, so that they were familiar with their colleagues in neighbouring districts and probably with the prominent families of a whole region. However, since it was part of a kadi's official duties to j u d g e complaints and if necessary pass them on to Istanbul, the documents at hand tend to reflect a biased picture. Probably the composition of letters of complaint addressed to the central administration provided many kadis with opportunities to pose as protectors of the reaya, even though in real life, they were no less rapacious than the governor's men. The adaletname of 1609 has a good deal to say about the manner in which kadis might oppress the subject population 1 . Moreover numerous complaints documented in the Mühimme registers also make it clear that relations between kadis and the people whom they administered were often anything but idyllic. Under these circumstances, it is of interest to find out what low-level administrators and taxpayers thought it politic to say about kadis with whom they were dissatisfied. For the time being, we will disregard the almost unanswerable question whether the complaints of which we know give us a fair picture of the Ottoman judiciary, and if not, what kinds of biases were likely to appear. Even if the available material conveys a completely false impression, it is still worthwhile to know the categories in which complainants expressed thei- grievances. T o a considerable extent, these categories must have been shared by the central administration's officials to whom the complaints were addressed. A preliminary attempt at classification results in the following categories: (1) abuse of tax-collecting prerogatives for personal enrichment (2) association with governors and their mercenaries (3) association with robbers and rebels, a type of behaviour which in certain cases, may be regarded as a variant of category (2). Where kadis acted as t i x collectors, the misdeeds of which they were accused normally resembled those reported of the governors and their men. The abuses which kadis might commit were, however, limited by the fact that most of them did not possess an armed force of their own, and thus could but rarely quarter a large retinue upon hapless villagers. A rescript dated 1018/1609-10 accuses the former kadi of Ilgin (subprovince of Ak§ehir, province of Karaman), who demanded siirsat payments in money, when they should have been paid in kind. This constituted a major abuse in a countryside ravaged by war, and in which the normal channels of marketing had been disrupted 2 . Moreover, the kadi had supposedly profited from an increased 'inalcik, "Adaletnameler," p. 129. MD 78, p. 479, no. 1228 (1018/1609 10).

2

50

COPING

WITH

THE

STATE

d e m a n d f o r f o o d during these hungry years, by selling the grain he had collected to local merchants. This latter accusation was very appropriate if the authorities in Istanbul were to regard the offending j u d g e as an unregenerate malefactor, for thus he was depicted as sabotaging the Ottoman war effort 1 . Particularly w h e r e kadis w e r e i n v o l v e d , association with local governors and their retinues was regarded as a serious reason for complaint. Since kadis were apparently expected to check the abuses which provincial governors might c o m m i t , any assimilation of their style of living and behaviour to that of military men must have been regarded as a special threat to provincial taxpayers. This motif is graphically expressed in the picture that the kadi of Merzifon and 'people of the province' drew of a former judge. The accused had publicly drunk wine with mercenaries and the governor's men, and, moreover had cursed and beaten people 2 . This was only the introduction to a complaint concerning more specific abuses of office. Supposedly, this errant judge had demanded bribes before he would even consider a case, had allowed his private resentments to cloud his judgement, and in addition, had forged documents and with their aid, appropriated landed property. Moreover, he had pocketed surtaxes greatly in excess of what he was entitled to demand in compensation for his services as a tax collector. In other instances, the f o r m e r kadi of Merzifon had probably acted in concert with his mercenary boon-companions. Houses had been broken into and their contents plundered; since a seal had been affixed on the houses in question, the kadi had in all likelihood furnished in o f f i c i a l - s o u n d i n g pretext for the m e r c e n a r i e s ' depredations. In another rescript dating from the same year (1018/1609-10), w e hear of an 'ignorant and brutal' kadi who had found himself confederates of the same caliber, presumably mercenaries, and toured the countryside as a bandit-5. According to the complainants, he had, when visiting a village, behaved in a fashion that one had come to expect of the governors' men. In addition he had used his knowledge of the law to levy a host of accusations against hapless taxpayers, from whom he then proceeded to collect penalties. T h e s e cases show how greatly a personage not belonging to the governor's entourage could increase his capacity for illegal exactions if he was able to c o m m a n d the services of mercenaries Since on the other hand, contact to mercenary troops was most easily established in the e n t o u r a g e of a provincial

governor,

complainants who focussed on such contacts were behaving in a perfectly realistic manner.

' O n the r o l e of the kadi in ta i c o l l e c t i o n , c o m p a r e I n a l c i k , " A d a l e t n ä m e l e r , " p. 7 8 . 2

M D 7 8 , p. 154, no. 3 9 4 ( 1 0 1 8 / 1 6 0 9 - 1 0 ) .

3

M D 7 8 , p. 3 5 1 , no. 9 1 1 ( 1 0 1 8 / 1 6 0 9 - 1 0 ) .

P O L I T I C A L ACTIVITY AMONG

TAXPAYERS

51

In the general competition for revenue, certain kadis might find allies not among the officially appointed provincial administrators, but among the latters' unofficial competitors. Such a situation is documented in a rescript replying to the complaints of various officials from the Aksaray-Nigde area, namely the substitute kadi (kadi naibi) of Aksaray, the kadi of Eyiibeli, a local military commander (alaybeyi) and a zeamet-holder by the name of Bayezid £avu§.' The subject of the complaint was a former kadi of the rural district of Eyiibeli, who had elected to hold his court sessions in the house of a man whom the complainants described as a bandit and Celali. Here the complaint focussed not so much on illegal levies upon taxpayers, although these are also mentioned, but rather upon the competition among revenue takers. The kadi claimed thai certain villages had not paid their siirsat dues in full and demanded the shortfall from the zeamet-holder, whose carts loaded with tax grains were plundered. 2 Presumably the so-called Celali had his hand in the matter. But beyond these specific conflicts, we are again confronted with a case in which the dividing line between kadis and militaryadministrative personnel had become difficult to discern, and this infringement apparently constituted a major point in the accusations levied against the kadi of Eyyiibeli.

COMPLAINTS

AGAINST

LOWER-LEVEL

UI.F.MA

Among the complaints against locally-based ulema, a petition from the villagers of Arguncuk against a sheik and teacher (miiderris) in the Ko§k Medrese of Kayseri (1056/1(>46-47) is particularly illuminating. 3 The peasants accused the Kayseri scholar of damming the watercourse which irrigated their fields and gardens, and in this context, referred to their opponent as a mutegallibe or tyrant. This tsrm is worth retaining, because in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ii was commonly employed whenever regional powerholders (ayan) were mentioned in a derogatory sense. If the term mutegallibe did in fact originate in the peasants' petition, which seems probable, this must have been the expression familiar even to country people living in the middle of the seventeenth century. From the indications given by our text, a mutegallibe was a person who against all ancient custom, and against the prescriptions of the .¡eriat, proposed to take away what the villagers had always considered to be their right. For good measure this sheik,

' M D 78, p. 684, no. 1778 (1018/1609-10). 2 ' O n the siirsat and the fashion in which it was collected compare Liitfi Giiçer, XVI ve XVII Asirlarda Osmanh imparatorlugunda Hububat Meselesi ve Hububattan Al'inan Vergiler (Istanbul, 1964), pp. 93-114. For a document recording negotiations leading to a reduction in siirsat assessments compare M. Çegatay Uluçay, XVII. Asirda Saruhan'da Eskiyalik ve Halk Hareketleri (Istanbul, 1944), p. 196 3 M D 91, p. 8, no. 25 (1056/1646-47).

52

COPING

WITH

THE

S T ATE

teacher, mutegallibe and village tyrant deliberately distorted official statements to back up his spurious claims 1 . Alliances with 'bandits', most probably unemployed mercenaries, also became the focus of accusations against teachers in religious schools (muderris). An example from the later sixteenth century (1003/1594-95) involves a muderris and two senior students (dani^mend) from the busy market town of Nazi 11 i in the Anatolian province of Aydin 2 . These three men were accused of keeping a garden in which wine was consumed. In the text of the accusation, the official ranks of the accused are mentioned, as it were, in quotation marks (...naminda olan). In fact the latters 1 contacts certainly reached beyond the circle of religious scholars. For when the local kadi attempted to close down what he considered a wineshop, the accused were able to assemble a large number of armed 'bandits' whose relationship to the principal actors is not clarified, but simply alluded to by the expression 'those who followed their |the accused's] lead' (kendii havalarina tabi). This latter wording, in the documents of the time, was always used in a less than complimentary fashion. One may speculate that these 'bandits' were the customers of the garden cum wineshop, some of them possibly irregular soldiers. The encounter deteriorated into a fight, in which the kadi was insulted and wounded. Against the Nazilli wine-bibbers, the local kadi attempted to build a counter-coalition. We hear of the intervention of a kadi in charge of the neighbouring district of (,'ine, and of testimonies concerning the bad character of the accused, which had been issued by two muderris from outside Nazilli. A simple case of 'drunk and disorderly', when looked at more closely, seems to indicate a measure of factionalism among the Aydin ulema. Such an interpretation is made more likely by the context of the early 1600s, when the rebellions of medrese students analyzed by Akdag had died down but not completely disappeared 3 . In fact, certain complaints against local ulema call the accused a former suhte (rebellious student) w h o had by no means given up his rebellious ways and continued to protect bandits. Such accusations were for instance levied against an adjunct kadi (naib) from the district.of §ebinkarahisar in the Anatolian Northeast 4 . The latter supposedly continued to maintain contacts not only with the suhte but with bandits (e$kiya) as well, w h o m he supplied with food. Some of the naib's confederates were called ehl-i o r / a n d must therefore have been members of governmental services. Presumably, some of them were influential people, for a number of sultanic rescripts, previously issued against the substitute kadi, ' a study concerning the use of spurious or falsified documents during this period has not yet been undertaken, but might y eld worthwhile results. 2 M D 73, p. 171, no. 401 (1003/1594-95). ^Akdag, ( 'dab. Isvanlan, 4

pp. 107-8.

M D 78. p. 552. no. 1416 I ¡(¡18/1609-10).

POLITICAL

ACTIVITY

AMONG

TAXPAYERS

53

had not been sufficient to dislodge him. The naib is described as a man of violence, feared by the people of the locality, w h o s e a g g r e s s i o n s and depredations could barely be controlled even with support from Istanbul. This f o r m e r suhte

was by no means the only a d j u n c t kadi against

w h o m local people expressed dissatisfaction. Quite to the contrary, the Miihimme registers contain a sizeable number of complaints directed at these lowest-ranking members of the judicial hierarchy 1 . Adjunct kadis were often local men, who remained in office for long periods of time, while kadis only officiated for a year or two. Therefore despite official disapproval of long tenures, adjunct kadis were often able to build a local power base which they might use for personal gain and manipulate the officially appointed judge. From the frequency cf complaints against naibs., one may conclude that the Ottoman administration af the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had not yet developed an administrative structure that reached d o w n lower than the fairly extensive district (kaza) administered by a kadi. However, the building of an administrative structure reaching individual villages or tribes continued relentlessly f r o m the fifteenth into the twentieth century. T h e long-term tendency to increase the number of kazas, which can be traced through the various tax registers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, formed part of this effort to build a m o r e effective state structure. Attempts to limit the influence of locally-based substitute kadis should be regarded in the s a m e context, and thus the complaints against them must have been welcome to the Ottoman administration f r o m a political point of view. Unfortunately, we have no evidence which would allow us to decide whether complaints of this type were officially encouraged or even solicited. But possibilities for such an interplay certainly e x i s t e d , and s o m e ol the c o m p l a i n t s may be less 'spontaneous' than they appear at first glance.

COMPLAINTS PRESENTING

AGAINST THE

TAXPAYERS:

OPPONENT

In the civil war years which immediately preceded and followed the year 1600, complaints against public officials were more dramatic and of more immediate interest to the modern researcher than most complaints against taxpaying reaya.

S o m e of the latter, however, also present features which

shed light upon relations beiween the reaya and the Ottoman administration. A text dated 1003/1594-95 deals with a complaint by settled villagers against nomads, in response to a petition by the adjunct kadi of Malatya. 2 Complaints

• s e e for instance M D 78, p. 416, m . 1069 (1022/1613-14). 2

M D 73, p. 95, no. 218 (1003/1594-95); M D 73, p. 94, no. 217 (1003/1594-95).

54

C O P I N G

W I T H

T H E

S T A T E

of this kind were common enough. Members of the cemaat-i Selmanli w h o were known to the villagers by name and who therefore must have been frequent visitors to the area, had remained in the village for three days. 1 The tribesmen, who were armed with swords and arrows, had taken the peasants' grain and flour, and in addition killed two men. In response, the villagers did not rest content with the ordinary procedure of complaint in the kadi's court, but also arranged for the services of mediators, namely a family of descendants of the Prophet Muhammed (sadat). These sadat, who possessed tax collection rights (malikdne) in the village affected, and in neighbouring localities as well, may have been associated with the wealthy Malatya foundation, the Zaviye-i Kubra 2 . In their complaint, the sadat asserted that the nomads were not only habitual robbers, who molested villagers on their way back and forth from their summer pastures, but also hardened heretics who insulted the memory of the first caliphs and hated the Sunni community. We have no way of judging whether the accusation was true or not; Kizilba§ tribesmen were certainly common enough in central Anatolia to make it appear convincing 3 . But it is remarkable that the sadat introduced this matter into what would otherwise have been a routine conflict. Moreover, the descendants of the Prophet intervened in a dispute which concerned them only in an indirect fashion. Probably the villagers called in the sadat as their patrons, and since the memory of the brutal repression of Kizilba§ uprisings must still have been quite fresh, the sadat regarded this as an opportunity to present their opponents as appropriate targets for the wrath of a Sunni ruler. Other complaints against taxpaying subjects make us conscious of the difficulty, in a twentieth-century perspective, of distinguishing robbers from rebels. A rescript dated 1046/1636-37 shows that Divan officials of the time would not have understood this problem, since for them, by definition every taxpayer who refused to perform his obligations toward the Ottoman ruling establishment was by definition a robber 4 . In response to a complaint from a timar-holder, a villager named Ramazan f r o m the forested and inaccessible subprovince of Bolu is described by Divan officials as a §erir ve §aki (mischief maker and robber). It is probable that this was also the term applied to him by his sipahi. Ramazan, although he was a taxpaying subject as his father had been before him, had for ten years evaded the payment of the reaya taxes to which he was liable according to Ottoman sultanic law (kanun) and

' T h i s cemaal has not been located in the tax register ( l a h r i r ) of Malatya published by Refet Yinanv and Mesut Elibiiyuk (eds.), Kanuni Devri Malatya Tahrir Defterleri (1560) (Ankara, 1983). T h e village from which the complaint was issued, along with another settlement molested by the nomads, could be identified; in o n e instance the identification is certain, in the other at least probable (pp. 144, 147). The reading of the cemaal name remains problematic. ^Mentioned in Yinan9 and Klibiiyuk (eds.) Malatya, p. 37. 3

O n this issue compare Colir H. Imber, "The Persecution of the Ottoman Shi'ites According to the miihimme defterleri, 1565-1585." Der Islam, 56, 2 (1979), 245-273. 4 M D 87. p. 32, no. 88 (1046.' 636-37).

POLITICAL ACTIVITY AMONG

TAXPAYERS

55

the official entry in the tax register. Nor was he alone in his defiance, for the complaint mentions one other villager and, more surprisingly, a kadi as his accomplices. While the tirnar-holder was on campaign, these three raided the sipahi's house. We have no idea how the case appeared to Ramazan and his friends. The long period of ¡:ime during which these men were able to elude their sipahi makes it seem likely that they had sympathizers among the local peasantry; after all, the famous 'noble robber' Koroglu was reputed active in this area during the same period 1 . But whether Ramazan and his associates possessed any features of the social bandit, or were at least attributed these features by their fellow villagers, must remain undecided. Our text is also of ¡merest because it shows that the complainant had very limited authority in the village which he supposedly administered. This was a problem which he shared with other iwzar-holders of the time. Inflation and peasant flight during the Celali rebellions had reduced the sipahis' income, and constant compaigns in Iraq during the reign of Sultan Murad IV had made it difficult for them to retain control of 'their' villages. 2 A 'rescript for the rectification of abuses' is concerned with this problem (1058/1648). Addressed to the governor-general and the kadis of the province of Anadolu, this text states that the reaya had lost respect for the timar-holders, and no longer regarded them as their masters. 3 Not that the villagers referred to here necessarily stopped paying their tithes and other standard dues {a§ar-i §eriye ve rusum-i orfiye). But the} apparently were of the opinion that once these taxes had been paid, they could refuse to let the sipahis, remain in their villages even as guests. The text then went on to assert that this position was completely unjustified, and that the reaya owed the sipahi submission as their lawful lord and master. Not only were they to perform specific services for the sipahi, such as extending hospitality to him for three days (it remains unclear v/hether this applied to the village as a whole, or to every single f a m i l y ) . 4 But more menacing to the position of the reaya as independent peasants was the injunction that they should always be at the sipahi's beck and call, and could not attend to their own business without having first received permission from him. Moreover the right of the sipahi to have a piece of land worked by the reaya for his own benefit, which had been abolished in the sixteenth century, was formally reinstituted, and peasants who refused a service that had been demanded from them were threatened with punishment. If the injunctions of this rescript had all been conscientiously

' P e r t e v Naili Boratav, Koroglu Destarli, 2. ed. (Istanbul, 1983), pp. 96 9 7 mentions certain features of this epos which make a connection to the Celali milieu appear probable. 2 B r u c e McGowan, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe, Taxation, Trade and the Struggle for Land 1600-1800 (Cambridge E n g l , Paris, 1981), pp. 43-67 gives a comprehensive account of the difficulties besetting seventeenth-century /¡mar-holders. 3 l n a l c i k , "Adaletnameler", pp. 135-6. 4

Halil Inaici k, The Ottoman

Empire, The Classical

Age 1300-1600

(London, 1973), p. 110.

56

C O I '

I N G

W I T H

T H E

S T A T E

implemented, a Gutshernchaft on the Eastern European model might have been the result, and the course of Ottoman rural history would have been totally c h a n g e d . 1 As it is, the rescript of 1648, whose genesis remains unknown as does the story of its subsequent non-application, shows that in certain parts of Anatolia during the Celali rebellions and their immediate aftermath, there was considerable tension between villagers and fimar-holders.

B A R G A I N I N G

C O U N T E R S :

T H E

T H R E A T

O F

M I G R A T I O N

Given the conflicts inherent in early seventeenth-century Ottoman society, reaya who wished the central administration to take cognizance of their grievances needed to show that they possessed a certain degree of power. This power might be de facto, or they might be able to claim a legal basis for some of their moves. As an instance of petitioners showing their de facto strength, one might analyze the threat, fairly common in petitions of the time, to take flight if such and such an abuse was not rectified 2 . There was a practical basis for such a threat. With the beginning of the seventeenth century, secular stagnation and decline had taken the place of the population increase of the preceding century 3 . As a result, vacant land was once again abundant, while villagers settling in towns also might find ways of at least temporarily lightening thei • tax burdens. But even though peasant flight was a widespread phenomenon, to state the intention of leaving, in a petition submitted to the authorities, was problematic in a seventeenth-century Ottoman context. Sixteenth-century provincial regulations (kanunname) generally specified that villagers were not permitted to leave their fields without the permission of the timar-holder, administrator of crown lands or trustee of pious foundations under whose control their village happened to be. 4 Thus when reaya threatened to decamp, they were in a sense delving the authorities simply by putting their intention into writing. However even though we know of quite a few instances of such defiance, Ottoman authorities, at least in their written responses, preferred to not take up the challenge. Instead they addressed or at least pretended to address themselves to the grievana which the petitioners articulated.

' S e e M c G o w a n , Economic development.

IJ:< . p. 7 3 o n the role of the O t t o m a n s t a t e in p r e v e n t i n g s u c h a

2

S e e f o r e x a m p l e M D 7 8 , p. 6X5, no. 1780 ( 1 0 1 8 / 1 6 0 9 - 1 0 ) ; M D 8 4 , p. 10, n o . 18 ( 1 0 3 8 / 1 6 2 8 2 9 ) ; M D 7 8 , p. 2 8 5 no. 7 5 2 (1018M 6 0 9 - 1 0 ) . •^Compare M c G o w a n . Economu

',ife in Ottoman

Europe,

p. 8 6 .

^ T h e kanun of t h e K o c a c i k y i i r i k l e r i p u b l i s h e d by O m e r Liitfi B a r k a n , XV. ve XVI Asirlarda Osmanh imparatorlugunda Zirai Ekonominin Hukuki ve Mali Esaslan ( I s t a n b u l , 1 9 4 3 ) , p. 2 6 4 e x p r e s s e s t h i s p r i n c i p l e v e r y g r a p h i c a l l y , a l b e i t in a n e g a t i v e f a s h i o n . W h e n ytirtik l e a v e a p l a c e t h e y h a v e h i t h e r t o c u l t i v a u d , t h e timar-holder c a n n o t f o r c e t h e m to r e t u r n ; f o r a s yiiruk, t h e y a r e n o t tied t o a n y o n e p l a c e O b v i o u s l y the p o s i t i o n w a s d i f f e r e n t in t h e c a s e of p e a s a n t s .

POLITICAL

ACTIVITY

AMONG

TAXPAYERS

57

This state of affairs should not be taken to mean that the seventeenthcentury Ottoman administration was indifferent to widespread migration of reaya, quite to the contrary. Particularly during the reign of Murad IV (1623 1640), there was a broad drive to resettle peasants and townsmen in their province:) of origin, which they had been forced to abandon due to the chaotic conditions resulting from the Celali uprisings. 1 But this drive could not have scored even limited and partial successes, if it had not been accompanied by an amnesty for the moves which had preceded it. In fact, even the kanunnames of the sixteenth century, while allowing timar-holders and other local administrators long timespans during which they might reclaim absconding peasants, had not specified any major penalties for the fugitives. 2 The disruption of work and living patterns which resulted from forced resettlement must however have been one of the more serious penalties that could be inflicted on a family. 3 Given the de facto mobility of the reaya, the Ottoman administration may well have considered that the Sultan's legitimacy was best maintained if the challenge to his authority was ignored, and flight of the reaya was regarded as an indicator of distress and not as defiance. On the other hand, Anatolian reaya were not slow to use their bargaining advantage, particularly during the years which followed Kuyucu Murad Pa§a's repression of the major Celali leaders. In 1022/1613-14 and again in the reign of Murad IV, rescripts were promulgated that ordered the reaya who had fled their villages to return to their places of origin. Communities tried to negotiate the conditions of their return, which in certain cases they undertook most unwillingly. In some instances, traces of these negotiations survive in the rescripts of protection which the villagers were given. Thus peasants might claim that they were indebted and that their creditors, by threatening to seize the wherewithal of production, were making it all but impossible for them to resume a normal village life. 4 Settlers were accordingly granted a moratorium during which they might reestablish the bases of agricultural production. In another instance, Armenian peasants from a village near Divrigi complained of two of their fellow villagers and co-religionists, whose illegal oppression had already caused one hundred and twenty reaya to flee the area. 5 'Now that my |the Sultan's] rescript has been promulgated ordering all those who had previously fled to return to their former places of residence' a strategic moment had arrived, which permitted the villagers to press home their point. After all, the

'Suraiya Faroqhi, Towns and Townsmen of Ottoman Anatolia, in Urban Setting (Cambridge Engl., 1984), pp. 272-287. Inalcik, Tne Ottoman Empire, p i l l .

Trade, Crafts and Food

Production

% r a n d D. A n d r e a s y a n , "CelaliU rden Kaçan Halkin Gerì Gönderilmesi," in: Ismail Uzimçarçili'ya Armagan (Ankara, 1976), pp. 45-54. 4

M D 78, p. 254, no. 666 (1018/I6C9-I0).

5

M D 7 8 , p. 422, no. 1082 (1018/1(09-10).

Hakki

58

C O I' 1 N G W I T H

THE

STATE

disturbances caused by the two village strongmen prevented the peasants from stabilizing their villages. Again the background to the negotiations was the fact that the reaya were mobile, and that the official Ottoman policy of establishing stable agricultural settlements could only succeed if the peasants were offered inducements and guarantees. Whenever there were two opposing factions in the village, as seems to have been the case among the Armenians of Divrigi, the mobility of the peasants might constitute a strategic advantage to the stronger and more numerous of the two factions. For this latter faction decided whether a newly reestablished village would survive, or else be abandoned again within a brief timespan.

BARGAINING OUT

OF

COUNTERS:

KEEPING

OFFICIALS

VILLAGES

Another tactic to which aggrieved peasants might have recourse was to bar provincial governors and their men from entering their villages. In this instance, they could claim to have the law on their side, for between 1584 and 1590, Sultan Murad III had forbidden the devir, that is the descent of provincial officials and their retinues upon villagers to collect taxes or investigate alleged crimes. Village militias were authorized to prevent the entry of the governors' mercenaries, if need be by force. 1 This rescript was a product of desperation, even though attempts to limit the devir had already been undertaken in Kani ni's times. 2 Attempts to collect revenue by ad hoc methods were seen to lead to the dispersal of villages, and therefore to the long-term ruin of the tax base. On the other hand, to disallow provincial governors and their men entry into the villages made tax collection difficult if not impossible, quite apart from the fact that village militias might easily come to resemble their opponents the mercenary bands. 3 Thus the devir was soon reinstituted, with certain face-saving limitations which may or may not have been significant in practice. But villagers were inclined to remember the original abolition, and attempted to use it as the basis for negotiation. This tactic had certain chances of success since the Ottoman central administration, presumably in order to maintain intact the image of the Sultan as a protector of the reaya, was disinclined to admit that the prohibition of devir had been totally abrogated. Which types of devir were permissible and which ones were not, thus remained a subject for political bargaining.

*Akdag, Celali ¡syanlan, pp. 1501T.

^ìnalcik. "Adaletnàmeler," p. n !. ^Akdag, Celali ìsyanlari,

pp. 1 V)-2.

POLITICAL

A

rescript

ACTIVITY

dated

AMONG

1003/1594-5

TAXPAYHRS

describes

the

kind

59

of

village

administration c o m m o n at the time, and the alternative which Sultan Murad III and his advisers had hoped to institute. 1 From this text we learn that certain mercenaries had obtained positions as commanders (suba$i, suba^i

kethudasi)

with a succession of provincial governors, and had farmed local revenues, committing themselves to the payment of large sums of money. In order to recoup their outlays, they then instigated provincial governors to engage in all sorts of oppressive practices. T o end this abuse of authority, governors were now forbidden to send their men to the villages; when investigations became necessary, these were to be performed by substitute kadis, accompanied by three or four men only. A s to the reinstitution of the devir, we may refer to a text f r o m 1018/1609-1610, f r o m which we learn that a certain Ridvan ( S 'avus, active in the district of Dernirci (sub-province of Saruhan) had incited the reaya

to resist tours of inspection on the part of local tax collectors

(voyvodas).2

This m o v e m e n t was roundly condemned, even though Ridvan

f a v u § and the Dernirci villagers had previously been able to acquire a sultanic rescript supporting their cause; in all likelihood this rescript had been based upon Murad Ill's prohibition of devir.

Inspection tours once every three

months were explicitly authorized; it is probable that Kuyucu Murad Pa§a's victory over the Celali K a l e n d e r o g l u in 1608 had c o n v i n c e d

Ottoman

administrators that it was now safe to reinstitute previous patterns of rule. 3 H o w e v e r d i f f e r e n t arrangements by which devir might be avoided nonetheless are also recorded in the Miihimme registers. Thus in 1056/16464 7 villagers of Siravolos on i:he Aegean coast had agreed to a yearly payment of one hundred thousand akge to the sultan's kitchen, on condition that they would not be asked to provide irregular soldiers for the governor's service, and the devir remained f o r b i d d e n . 4 This exemption was disregarded by certain governors, whereupon the villagers had it confirmed; whether this second attempt at e n f o r c e m e n t was more succesful remains unknown. Much more problematic were negotiations which took place in the sub-povince of Bolu about 1046/1636-37. 5 Here villagers and tribesmen of the districts of Bolu, Dodurga, Samakov, Ova, U us and Bartin protested the tax-collecting tours which the governor's commanders undertook once every three months. Large groups of people participated in this protest; unfortunately, the rescript does not describe the way in which they were convoked and organized. T his activity the Ottoman administration declared illegitimate. A sultanic rescript was invoked,

to w h i c h

at

present

I have

not

been

able

to

find

any

further references, and which stated that throughout the empire, all manner of 1

M D 73, p. 193 no. 450 (1003/1594-95). M D 7 8 , p. 554, no. 1421 (1018/16(19-10). 3 William Giiswold, The Great Anat ilian Rebellion, 1591-1611 (Berlin, 1983), p. 187ff. 4 M D 91. p. 37, no. 112 (1056/1646-7). 2

5

M D 87, p. 36, no. 98 (1046/1636 7).

60

C O P ' NG

WITH

THE

STATE

assemblies (dernek ve cemiyet) were prohibited. On the other hand, the sultanic rescript invoked by the rebellious reaya, and which might be summarized in the phrase 'prohibition of devir' was not formally abrogated; quite to the contrary, the principle itself was even confirmed. However the revenue interests of governors were considered to take precedence, and thus the Ottoman administration took away with one hand what it had just granted with the other.

PRESENTING OFFICIALS

THE

S U E T AN T O

PETITIONERS

AND

The social historian dealing with Ottoman rescripts is mainly concerned with the beginning sections of these texts, in which Divan officials presented the facts of the case as they saw them. On the other hand, the second section (introduced by the famous phrase buyurdum ki T have ordered') seems much less interesting. Often provincial administrators were merely enjoined to make sure that the case, if it did not fall under the fifteen-year statute of limitations, was properly investigated in court. 1 In other instances, particularly when previous rescripts had already decided the matter, the Sultan's orders might consist of a simple injunction to respect his command. 2 However in quite a few cases, a more elaborate justification of the Sultan's position was attempted. Whether these phrases were principally directed at the complainants, or were intended to keep up the morale of Ottoman bureaucrats, is often difficult to determine. But in a study concerning the relations between rulers and ruled, both these aspects are worth investigating. We will analyze a rescript dealing with complaints against a former governor of the sub-province of Teke in south-western Anatolia, who had been involved in local intrigue and proven himself quite unable to cope with the problems of the area (981/1573-74. 3 ) According to the beginning section of the rescript, the kadi of Antalya, who should have conducted the investigation against the governor, also came in for his share of blame. 'Petitions were submitted to my Imperial Stirrup that complaints had been proferred against Hasan Bey, governor of I eke. An investigation was ordered and commenced according to my noble command. A large number of poor people (jukara) and other tax-paying subjects appeared to demand their rights in court. Taxpayers from my Imperial crown lands and other tax-collecting officials (iimera ve iimmal) also came forward; some of them demanded payment of back taxes,

' S e e for example M D 73, p. 150, no. 349 (1003/1594-95). 2

M D 80, p. 518, no. 1222 (1024/1615).

3

M D 23, p. 304, no. 694 (981; I S73-74).

P O L I T I C A L

ACTIVITY

A M O N G

T A X P A Y E R S

61

100,0000 \akge\ in some cases and even more in others. 1 (But] the kadi of Antalya took the aforementioned governor's money [i.e. allowed himself to be bribed] and permitted [the governor's] suba$is to escape. Later he had some of the complainants arrested and executed by night. Others he robbed of large sums of money and committed many grievous injustices. In this [current| year, more than 200 people were killed, but no retribution was exacted'. In this confused situation—the province of Teke was always difficult to govern, since it contained a sizeable nomad population with Shi'i-Kizilba§ sympathies—the Ottoman administration attempted to secure its revenues and at the same time maintain the image of the Sultan as the protector of his taxpaying subjects. The text does, not indicate that the author(s) were aware of a possible contradiction between these two aims. For this double purpose, the clauses following the 'buyurdum hi' proved a useful vehicle. The ordinary, standard command to the kadis, namely to hear the case if it did not fall under the statute of limitations and -eport the results to the central authorities, was expanded by clauses specific to the case at the hand. The rescript was addressed to the kadis of Antalya and Teke, which probably meant that the accused judge was no longer in office. The addressees were to try both Hasan Bey and the former kadi, and above all things, make sure that the latter paid their debts to the fisc. Only after the claims of the Sultan had been satisfied—and this clause probably included the demands of lowe'-level tax-officials as well—were the claims of private persons to be taken into consideration. This was standard procedure; but since there were many complainants against the accused, and the sums of money under dispute were sizeable by the standards of a poor and outlying province, the principle seemed worth a reminder. Once accounts had been settled, the ruler wished to learn in detail what crimes the two administrators had committed. The image of the Sultan repressing corruption while at the same time protecting the interests of the fisc formed part and parcel of Ottoman official ideology.

C O N C L U S I O N

The rebellious taxpayers of Bolu had tried to make their claims heard by assembling in large groups. But since research into the political behaviour of Ottoman taxpayers is still very much in its beginnings, we do not knowhow frequent actions of this type may have been. It is also much too early to establish a 'repertoire' of contentious acts performed by Anatolian villagers and ' T h e word jukara ('the poor') often means 'dervishes', but in the present context, it probably qualifies the following term 'reaya' m i a n i n g 'taxpayers'. 'Mal-i miri' has been translated as 'back taxes', because most 'state property 1 probably consisted of uncollected dues.

62

c o r

N G

W I T H

T H E

S T A T E

t o w n s m e n , of the kind that Charles Tilly and his c o l l a b o r a t o r s

have

established for France and early industrial England. 1 H o w e v e r such acts undoubtedly existed, and our understanding of them will increase as analysis progresses. At the present stage, it is important to maintain a critical distance f r o m our source materials, which were always written by Ottoman officials. The latter, however, cannot be regarded as impartial recorders. T o the contrary, they were the addressees of the taxpayers' petitions, and therefore parties with a stake in the game. Officials were themselves the causes of many collective protests. Certainly the o f f i c i a l s d r a f t i n g the rescripts c o n t a i n e d in the Mtihimme registers had interests which did not always coincide with those of the provincial administrators against whom most protests were directed. But even so, there were intercsls common to Ottoman officialdom as a whole, and caution is in order. Other aspects of the negotiation process and the underlying sociopolitical conflicts remind us of the phenomena investigated by Charles Tilly and before him, by scholar; such as Albert Soboul, George Rude and Richard C o b b in their studies of collective behaviour in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Europe

2

T o begin with, the assumption that the ruler was

willing to aid the poor tax paying subjects, and was not party to the exactions of his officials, is familial both from Ottoman and early modern European contexts. H o w e v e r while such assumptions were totally unrealistic where rulers such as Louis XIII and Louis X I V were c o n c e r n e d , Murad Ill's experiments in the conduct of local administration do make it comprehensible that Ottoman provincials ' h o u l d have believed that the Sultan was on their side. On the other hand, ihc petitions examined here demonstrate that there existed considerable tension between provincial governors, their mercenaries, certain kadis and /wwr-holders on the one hand, and taxpaying peasants on the other. In these disputes, the problem was excessive taxation. Certainly this should not be taken to mean that the Anatolian civil wars of the years around 1600 were peasant rebellions in the twentieth-century meaning of the word. Scholars working on this problem today, particularly Halil inalcik, assume that the Celali rebellions were uprisings of irregular soldiers trying to find

' C h a r l e s Tilly, "War and Peasan Rebellion in Seventeenth Century France," in: Charles Tilly, As Sociology Meets History (New York. 1972). ^Albert Soboul, The Sans Culottes: The Popular Movement and Revolutionary Government 1793-1794, tr. Remy I. Hall (New York, 1972); George Rude', The Crowd in the French Revolution (New York, 1959): G e o r g e Rudé, The Crowd in History, A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England 1730-1848 (London 1981): Richard Cobb, The Police and the People, French Popular Pro:est 1789-1820 (London, Oxford, 1970); Richard Cobb, Paris and its Provinces 1792-1809 (London. New York, Toronto, 1975).

POLITICAL

ACTIVITY

AMONG

TAXPAYERS

63

t h e m s e l v e s a p o s i t i o n in t h e O t t o m a n state a p p a r a t u s , a n d that p e a s a n t c o n c e r n s in the n a r r o w e r s e n s e of t h e w o r d w e r e of no i m p o r t a n c e in this c o n t e x t . 1 B u t it s e e m s that y o u n g peasants left the villages in large n u m b e r s b e c a u s e there w a s c o n f l i c t with the tax-collector, a n d w e s h o u l d not be t o o hasty in m a k i n g the O t t o m a n village into a utopia of social h a r m o n y . Orice again, a c o m p a r i s o n with early m o d e r n France m a y prove helpful. C h a r l e s Tilly has p o i n t e d o u t that s e v e n t e e n t h - c e n t u r y F r e n c h provincial rebellions were not p e a s a n t rebellions in the m o d e r n sense e i t h e r . 2 The m a j o r targets of these well-researched and much debated rebellions w e r e the agents of the centralizing state, not individual landlords. E v e n if the a m o u n t of class t e n s i o n b e t w e e n F r e n c h p e a s a n t s and local f e u d a l lords s h o u l d not be m i n i m i z e d , c o n f l i c t s between peasants and landlords, w h i c h alone constitute p e a s a n t u p r i s i n g s in the t w e n t i e t h - c e n t u r y s e n s e of the t e r m , w e r e by n o m e a n s d o m i n a n t . 3 B u t in the O t t o m a n E m p i r e as in F r a n c e , the a b s e n c e of anti-landlord uprisings does not m e a n that there w e r e no t e n s i o n s b e t w e e n revenue takers and taxpayers. T h e villagers regarded the agents of the central a d m i n i s t r a t i o n as the principal threat to their livelihoods. T h i s m a k e s good sense in the Anatolian context, where there w e r e f e w large l a n d h o l d e r s b e f o r e t h e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y . B u t c o n f l i c t s with r e p r e s e n t a t i v e s of t h e central administration w e r e f r e q u e n t , and if the adaletname

of 1648 is any guide in

the matter, there w a s e v e n a time w h e n the right of the peasant to operate his f a r m without day-to-day interference f r o m his íówar-holder w a s u n d e r official attack. T h e rebellions of scventeenth-century provincial F r a n c e are of interest in yet a n o t h e r context. T h e y w e r e directed against taxes levied by the central state, w h i c h w e r e m a i n l y intended to f i n a n c e war, or, to use C h a r l e s Tilly's e x p r e s s i o n , 'state m a k i n g ' . 4 In a d d i t i o n , t h e y s o m e t i m e s f o c u s s e d on the r e v e n u e f a r m e r s w h o w e r e t h e m a j o r r e p r e s e n t a t i v e s of ' c a p i t a l i s m ' in s e v e n t e e n t h - c e n t u r y F r a n c e . 5 In the O t t o m a n context, f i n a n c i n g wars a l s o played a key role in i n c r e a s i n g d e m a n d f o r taxes. So in this respect, the situation w a s quite c o m p a r a b l e to that prevailing in France. Less obvious is

Halil inalcik, 'Military and Fiscal Transformation in the Ottoman Empire 1600-1700' Archivum Ottomanicum, VI (1980), 283-337; Suraiya Faroqhi, 'Political Tensions in the Anatolian Countryside around 1600. An Attempt at Interpretation,' in Tiirkische Miszellen, Robert Anhegger Festschrift, Armagam, Mélanges (Istanbul, 1987), pp. 117-130, reprinted in this volume. 2

Tilly, "War and Peasant Rebellion " pp. 109- 111. ^However there has been much delate on this issue, particularly between Boris Porchnev, Les soulèvements populaires en Frarce au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1972) and Roland Mous'nier, Peasant Uprisings in Seventeenth-Century France, Russia and China, tr. Brian Pearce (London, 1971). For a summary of the debate, compare the contribution by Le Roy Ladurie cited in note 34. ^Tillv, "War and Peasant Rebellion." rp. 114. c 'Tilly, "War and Peasant Rebellion," p. 121.

64

C O P I N G

W I T H

T H E

S T A T E

the role of capitalism. Although Mustafa Akdag has attempted to make the impact of European capitalism responsible for the socio-economic crisis of the years around 1600, and thereby indirectly for the Celali uprisings, the connections he has tried to establish are not very c o n v i n c i n g . '

European

exports of grain and raw materials should have caused problems for town dwellers, particularly artisans. On the other hand, villagers selling produce to exporting merchants should, if they were lucky, have received slightly higher prices than they would have d o n e if they had sold in the m o r e strictly controlled domestic market. However most of the recruits to the rebel armies were of village and noL of artisan background. Thus it would seem that the villagers and townsmen whose actions we can perceive through the Muhimme documents were reacting against the load placed upon them by Ottoman state building. Certainly it must be admitted that the costs of state-building were enhanced by the 'price revolution 1 brought about in part due to the importation of European silver. But on the whole 'capitalism' was involved only in a secondary fashion, namely in so far as the revenue farmers w h o occupied such a prominent place in both France and the Ottoman Empire can be regarded as capitalists. T o summarize what is known about the participants in the Anatolian military rebellions, which reached their first peak between 1590 and 1608, but c o n t i n u e d spasmodically t h r o u g h o u t the seventeenth c e n t u r y , w e might suggest the following: in the past it had been assumed that young peasants unable to marry and establish themselves because of overpopulation, left their villages and sought s e n ice as mercenaries or attempted careers in the teaching and judicial services. 2 This explanation has now increasingly been cast into doubt, partly because it seems probable that 'overpopulation' occurred at most in a f e w limited districts of A n a t o l i a . 3 At the s a m e time pre-industrial populations are now k r o w n to adjust to demographic increase in a variety of w a y s . In many historical

situations, a g r o w i n g p o p u l a t i o n does

not

necessarily lead to the cultivation of ever more marginal lands, and the mechanical model of a population being pushed out of the village by its own increase has largely been abandoned. 4 As an alternative, it seems realistic to assume that increased taxation and the violence associated with tax collection

' C o m p a r e also Omer Liitl i Barkan. "The Price Revolution of the Sixteenth Century: A Turning Point in the Economic Histoiy of the Near East," International Journal of Middle East Studies, 6 (1975), 3-28. For the d i s c u s n o n of these issues, see Holm Sundhaussen, "Die "Preisrevolution" im Osmanischen Reich während der zweiten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts." Importierte "oder "intern verursachte Inflation". (Zu einer T h e s e Ö. L. Barkans)," Südost Forschungen, XEI1 ^1983), 169-181. "Akdag, Celali Isyanlari. p >>8ff. •^Michael Cook, Population 4

Pressure

in Rural Anatolia

1450 1600 (London,

1972).

H u r i Islamoglu-inan, "Oit osmanische Landwirtschaft im Anatolien des 16. Jahrhunderts: Stagnation o d e r regionale E n t w i c k l u n g , " Jahrbuch zur Geschichte und Gesellschaft des Vorderen und Mittleren Or ents (Jahrbuch für Vergleichende Sozialforschung) (1985-1986), 165-214.

POLITICAL

ACTIVITY

AMONG

TAXPAYERS

65

made village life unattractive to many peasants. The petitions of the period are quite conclusive in this respect. Petitioners complained a great deal about overtaxation and oppression by provincial administrators, and said nothing at all about land fragmentation, sinking agricultural wages and other symptoms of overpopulation. Thus it would seem that the late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century exodus from the villages was a political phenomenon, and not a consequence of demog -aphic growth. Confronted with this state of affairs, the ruler's position was ambiguous. Protection of the reaya constituted the basic obligation for the Sultan, as the reaya paid the taxes without which the state would have collapsed. 1 To discuss the matter on a more mundane level: once the devir had become the chief complaint of Anatolian reaya, and Murad III had toyed with the idea of its total abolition, it became very difficult for later rulers to rescind his orders, for that would have detracted from the Sultan's legitimacy as a protector of the reaya. On the other hand, the ruler, in spite of dire threats against officials who oppressed the taxpayers, ultimately depended upon Ottoman officialdom as a whole. This was clearly expressed in certain rescripts: governors and military commanders, who fought the rulers' wars, must be assured of receiving the revenues assigned to them. 2 Since these revenues could not be ensured without devir, devir must continue and be legalized. It is still to early to tell whether these manoeuverings contributed toward undermining the legitimacy of certain seventeenth-century Ottoman rulers.

P O S T S C R I P T

After this article had gone to press, I located two further relevant studies: Halil inalcik, "§ikayet Hakki: 'Arz-i Hal ve 'Arz-i Mahzar'lar," Osmanli Arafirmalari, 7-8 (1988), 33-54 and Linda Darling, "The Ottoman Finance Department and the Assessment and Collection of the Cizye and Avariz Taxes, 1560-1660", unpublished PhD dissertation, Chicago, 1990, p. 215 ff.

'For a discussion of the manner in which sixteenth-century Ottoman authors formulated this idea, compare Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual, p. 262. 2 M D 87, p. 36, no. 98 (1046/1636-i7).

SAINTHOOD AS A MEANS OF SELF-DEFENSE IN SEVENTEENTHCENTURY OTTOMAN ANATOLIA

In the closing decade of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, the steppe villages of central Anatolia lost many of their inhabitants. A substantial share of these settlements were abandoned for long periods of time or disappeared altogether. A d o c u m e n t f r o m the year 1 0 9 8 / 1 6 8 6 - 8 7 i n f o r m s us that the settled villages of the districts of Hacibekta§, Siileymanli-i kebir, and Siileymanh-i sagir (sancak of Kir§ehir) had been abandoned altogether, with the sole exception of a single village, presumably Hacibekta^. 1 In the same way, the district of H a y m a n a (to the west of Ankara), which in spite of limited rainfall had contained a fair number of villages according to the sixteenth-century tax registers, was almost exclusively nomad territory by the second half of the eighteenth century. 2 Wolf Hutteroth and his student Volker Hohfeld have emphasized how the flat and more easily accessible parts of central Anatolia remained largely void of permanent settlement until the middle of the nineteenth century. 3 Thus the years around 1600, at least where central Anatolia is concerned, thoroughly merited their name of "The Great Flight" (Biiyiik Ka^gun). 4 A s the persistence of Hacibekta§ as a settlement indicates, however, villages that contained the tttrbe and zaviye

of a saint had a much better

chance of survival than villages in which these elements of stability were lacking. In the present paper, I will explore the ways and means by which the existence of ttirbe and zaviye might help a settlement to survive in the face of often f o r m i d a b l e difficulties. W h e n interpreting the role of zaviyes zaviyedar

and

families, I will use anthropological studies concerning the role of

holy men in rural areas of the modern Middle East. Obviously, the attempt to bring together historical and anthropological data is beset with a number of difficulties. Since dervish orders in Turkey were officially closed down in 1925, the authors of recent anthropological studies of western and central Anatolia had very little opportunity to take the activities of holy men into

' o s m a n l i Ar§ivi Istanbul (until recently Ba^bakanlik Ar§ivi), section Kami] Kepeci 5271, p. 31. 2

T a p u Kadastro Ar§ivi Ankara, Kuyudu kadime section, No. 21, passim.

^Wolf Diether Hutteroth, Türkei, Wissenschaftliche Länderkunden, No. 21 (Darmstadt, 1982). p. 309. Volker Höhfeld, Anatolische Kleinstädte, Anlage, Verlegung und Wachstumsrichtung seit dem 19. Jahrhundert, Erlanger Geographische Arbeiten, Sonderband 6 (Erlangen, 1977). ^ M u s t a f a A k d a g , Celäli Isyanlart '1550-1603), Ankara Üniversitesi, Dil ve Tarih-Co«rafya Fakültesi Yayinlan, Sayi 144 (Ankara, 1963), p. 251.

68

( ' ( • P I N G

W I T H

T H E

S T A T E

account. The only available study is that by Martinus van Bruinessen, and that deals with eastern Anatolia, an area very indifferently covered by seventeenthcentury documentation. Therefore, twentieth-century data are largely derived from work on places like Lebanon, Egypt, or Morocco, 1 social settings which differ profoundly from Anatolia. Moreover, even if nineteenth- and twentiethcentury data had been available to a much greater extent than is actually the case, the problem would be only half solved. For zaviyes

and

zaviyedars

must have functioned somewhat differently when peasants produced merely for subsistence and taxes. In a countryside penetrated by roads and railways, and subject to the fluctuations of the world market social relations were inevitably transformed. In spite of all these objections, anthropological data can still provide valid indicators and help us interpret the available evidence. Given the scarcity of studies on the seventeenth century, it seems unreasonable to neglect them. In order to avoid possible m i s u n d e r s t a n d i n g s , it is necessary to introduce a caveat: if the present paper dwells on the political role of sheiks and dervishes, this is not to deny that these men (and sometimes, at least in the Anatolian context, women) 2 saw themselves — and were understood by their contemporaries — as playing a primarily spiritual role. 3 But the same is true of religious leaders the world over, which does not prevent them f r o m acting also in a political context; one need only cite the example of medieval European monks. Thus the present article simply deals with a single aspect of a many-faceted reality.

T H R E E

D I F F E R E N T

T Y P E S

O F

S A I N T S

Following the lead of social anthropologists, the f o l l o w i n g types of zaviyedars

are considered in the present study: (1) the saints w h o guarded

tribal frontiers, mediated in disputes, and as late as the 1950s intervened in the selection of tribal chiefs in the High Atlas; (2) the sheikly lineages of certain Sunni villages in Lebanon, w h o received visitors on a large scale, possessed religious prestige, and in certain situations stood up to the local landholders, while

at

the

same time depending heavily upon the latters 1 purse for

' M a r t i n u s v a n B r u i n e s s e n , Ay,ha. Shaikh and State in Kurdistan ( N . p . , n.d) (the G e r m a n v e r s i o n is m o r e e a s i l y a c c c s s i b l e : Aqha, Scheich und Staat in Kurdistan, ( B e r l i n , 1989). E r n e s t G e l l n e r , Saints of the Atlas, T h e N a t u r e of H u m a n S o c i e t y S e r i e s ( L o n d o n , 1 9 6 9 ) ; M i c h a e l G i l s e n a n , " A g a i n s t P a t r o n - C l i e n t R e l a t i o n s , " in Patrons and Clients in Mediterranean Societies, ed. Ernest G e l l n e r and J o h n W a t e r b u r y ( L o n d o n , 1 9 7 7 ) , pp. 1 6 7 - 1 8 2 ; I t h a n k M s . N ü k h e t S i r m a n f o r p o i n t i n g o u t this v o l u m e to m e . A m a i R a s s a m , " A l - t a b a ' i y y a : P o w e r , P a t r o n a g e a n d M a r g i n a l G r o u p s in N o r t h e r n Iraq," ibid., pp. 157-166. 2

Ö m e r Liitfi B a r k a n , " O s m a n l i i m p a r a t o r l u g u n d a bir i s k ä n v e k o l o n i z a s y o n m e t o d u o l a r a k v a k i f l a r v e t e m l i k l e r , " Vaktflar Derisi. 2 (1942), 279-386. ^ C o m p a r e in t h i s c o n t e x t V i n c e n t C o r n e l l , " T h e L o g i c of A n a l o g y a n d t h e R o l e of the S u f i S h a y k h in P o s t - M a r i n i d M o r o x o , " International Journal of Middle East Studies, 15 ( 1 9 8 3 ) , 69.

S A I N T H O O D AS A M E A N S O F S E L F- D E F E N S E

69

ceremonial expenses; (3) the sadat lineages of northern Iraq, who lived lives not very different f r o m other landholding families, except for the fact they were more concerned about ritual purity than their neighbours; 1 (4) and the Nak§bendi and Kadiri zaviyedars of eastern Anatolia, who gained a political role they had not previously possessed in the course of the fierce tribal conflicts that followed the Ottoman elimination of east Anatolian

beyliks

during the reign of Sultan Mahmud II (1808-1839). 2 At first glance, the "saints of the Atlas" appear scarcely relevant to the problem at hand, given the differences between Berber tribal society and seventeenth-century Anatolia. In the list of services performed by the Berber zaviyedars

to the society surrounding them, however, Gellner mentions items

familiar f r o m Anatolia as well, such as the protection of travelers, the facilitation of intertribal trade, and the sponsoring of religious festivals. Kven more importantly, by the miracles and supposedly Koranic decisions which the Moroccan zaviyedars

provided in local disputes, they strengthened the

villagers' identification with Islam, albeit a provincial and slightly heterodox variety of this religion. 3 In this context, Gellner attempts an historical reconstruction of how the saintly lineage of Zaviya Ahansal became established in local society. In Gellner's interpretation, the zaviyedars

may be descended f r o m a missionary

w h o adapted to local beliefs and customs, or else f r o m a locally established pre-Islamic Berber saintly lineage that became islamized and thereby continued to exercise influence. 4 For the Anatolian setting, the second alternative does not seem relevant, but the first suggestion fits in very nicely with Irène Mélikoff's hypothesis concerning the Bektashis. 5 According to Mélikoff, the Bektashis had attempted to induce Anatolian tribesmen to abandon the many shamanisl beliefs to which they were still attached, thereby bringing these heterodox nomads and semiromads into the fold of Sunni Islam. In order to be understood and accepted by their flock, however, the Bektashis were inclined to adapt and reinterpret many of the beliefs current among the tribesmen, so that an originally Sunni order was transformed into a heterodox one. Thus it would seem that parallels between Anatolian zaviyedars

and the saints of the Atlas

are not as rare as might appear at first glance. Moreover, it can be assumed that during the political and financial crisis of the early seventeenth century, the impact of the Ottoman administration upon the central Anatolian steppe was weakened, and tribesmen became more autonomous than they had been previously. If this is true, then there may have been further parallels between ' kassarn, "Power," p. 166. ^Van Bruinessen, Agha, Shaikh ana State, pp. 289-291. 3

Gellner, Saints, pp. 78, 300.

4

I b i d „ p. 299.

c

Irène Mélikoff, "Le problème kizi:ba§," Turcica 6 (1975), 49-67.

70

COPING

WITH

THE

STATE

the zaviyedars of Zawiya Ahansal and their counterparts from, for instance, Hacibekta§, than we can recapture today. The question cannot be decided without closer investigation. I will now consider the case of the sheikly lineages of the Akkar region that have been studied by Michael Gilsenan. Akkar is also a fairly remote area, but instead of being ruler-less like the Berber mountains, the area is dominated by families of large landowners. The latter, known as beys, control the labour of a poor peasantry. In certain locations, there are also families with religious prestige, often presumed to be descended from the Prophet Muhammad; these families may or may not be the dominant lineages of their locality. A significant part of their prestige is derived from the fact that the sheik can oppose his authority to the brute force wielded by the bey. When analyzing the situation more closely, Gilsenan found that in some villages, the sheiks replace rather than confront the beys, while in many other cases, the opposition sheik-bev, after an initial confrontation, turns into a de facto alliance. Many sheiks are supported by beys, either through direct gifts or through leases of land a: low rates. The beys' gifts rarely enable the sheiks to become rich in their own right, but simply allow them to sustain the hospitality demanded of them. It would seem, however, that certain sheikly families independently own the wealth needed to claim high status. Sheiks of this type are independent of the bey, but in their own villages they act like beys, with whom they combine to form the local ruling class. It goes without saying that their religious prestige is correspondingly diminished. Amal Rassam's account of Mosul notables and their clients in northern Iraq has certain features in common with Gilsenan's analysis of interclass relations in Akkar, while differing profoundly in other respects. Again we find notable families recogni /.ed as descendants of the Prophet, and like their Akkar counterparts these notables acted as patrons to their sharecroppers and former sharecroppers. Specifically, the notables provided hospitality to the peasants, housing them in the family compound whenever they visited Mosul and taking their widows and orphans into their homes as servants or retainers. The relationship was easily legitimized in religious terms, since the peasants, extremist Shi 'is, acknowledged the superior religious status of their notable "protectors." On the other hand, the sadat nobles of Mosul largely shared the beliefs of their peasants, and approached the relationship in a spirit of noblesse oblige. With respect 10 the stability of the patronage tie, Rassam's interpretation of the Mosul situation differs noticeably from that suggested by Gilsenan. From her account, it would seem that patronage ties break down principally in cases in which patrons and clients do not share a common value system. As long as these common values survive, however, horizontal

SAINTHOOD

AS

A MEANS

OF. S ELF - D E F EN S E

71

solidarities do not threaten the vertical relations characteristic of patronage. Ties between different types of notables and the latter's capacity for concerted action, that is, phenomena we might describe as class struggle from above, do not figure in Rassam's account, though they occupy a prominent place in Gilsenan's. In the Iraqi setting, each notable family seems to have confronted government and clients more or less on its own. Concerning the Naksbendi network that rapidly expanded in early nineteenth-century eastern Anatolia and northern Iraq, Van Bruinessen makes a number of remarks that may equally apply to western and central Anatolia during the seventeenth century. First of all, he notes that the first generation of Nak§bendi sheikhs, who followed the institution of the order in this region by Mevlana Halid, were not particularly politicized, but that the degree of their political involvement increased with the tribal feuds that followed the abolition of the semi-independent emirates. This is a reasonable assumption in the case of seventeenth-century western and central Anatolia as well: the Celali rebellions and the immigration of nomadic tribes from eastern Anatolia led to the breakdown of central control in many parts of Anatolia. It is likely that under such conditions even sheiks whose main concerns were otherworldly were pushed into political activity by the necessity of protecting themselves and their followers. Moreove r, the consolidation of the Bektashi order, which took place sometime between 1550 and 1650, may owe something to the atmosphere of rebellion and civil war that prevailed in Anatolia during those years. 1 Seen from a different perspective, the sheik and sadat families analyzed in the accounts of Gellner, Gilsenan, Rassam, and Van Bruinessen may be compared to Anatolian zaxiyedars of the time when ayan families were prominent in the countryside. 2 Even the heads of major Anatolian zaviyes, however, such as the dergah of Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi, were never in a position to compete with important ayan, even though in certain localities members of a given sheikly lineage might constitute the most prominent residents. It is probable that the more important zaviyedars acted as smallscale ayan on their own account, without necessarily maintaining close relations with the secular ayan. Thus I suspect that Anatolian zaviyedars resembled the sadat of Mosul more than the sheikly families of Akkar. Certain Anatolian zaviyes possessed affiliated peasants who claimed to be descended from the founding saint. These peasants may have constituted the power base for a particularly enterprising zaviyedar, who probably regarded them as his clients. 'compare Turcica, 6 (1975), in which various contributors have dealt with different aspects of this problem.

"Suraiya Faroqhi, "XVI-XVIII. Yuzyillarda Anadolu'da §eyh Aileleri," in Turkiye iktisat Tarihi Semineri, Metinler iarlqmalar, ed Osman Okyar and Unal Nalbantoelu (Ankara 1975) np 197-230.

72

C O P I N G

W I T H

T H E

S T A T K

It is well to keep in mind the large number of political conflicts in which the more ambitious sheiks, such as the zaviyedars example, were involved. A zaviyedar

of Hacibekta§, for

trying to cement his political position

was likely to arouse a great deal of hostility and quite literally took his life in his hands. This is consonant with Gilsenan's observations, for he records sheikly families engaged in blood feuds against peasants of the area in which they were established. 1 In spite of all this, both central Anatolian and Akkar sheiks were only marginally involved in physical confrontations. After all, the social scene Gilsenan describes included specialists of violence in the service of the beys, and the major Anatolian ayan also possessed their retinues of armed men. In contrast the sheikly families in Akkar and in central Anatolia were not known for the size of their private armies. But compared to the Atlas saints who abstained n o t ' o n l y from f e u d i n g but even f r o m litigation, the sheikly families of Anatolia were not exactly peaceful people.

T H E

S T A T U S

A N A T O L I A N

OF

Z A V I Y E D A R S

IN

T H E

C O U N T R Y S I D E

O t t o m a n dervishes had been closely involved with the Turkish settlement of Anatolia and Rumeli; this matter has been extensively treated by O m e r Liitfi Barkan and Cengiz Orhonlu and need not be taken up again here. 2 Once a zaviye was established and had become the nucleus of a settlement, the zaviyedars

might receive certain tax exemptions, mainly for themselves but

in certain cases for the village as a whole. T h e zaviyedars'

position was

strengthened if they could claim to be "no one's raiyet," which many of them were able to do. For such a claim, if accepted by the O t t o m a n central administration, mean! that the zaviyedar

might be considered as part of the

ruling group, even though often only as a marginal member. 3 From the point of view of the O t t o m a n administration, the crucial characteristic of the zaviyedars

was that the) kept open house for travelers and thereby contributed

to the safety of the roads. T h e y were probably assimilated, according to circumstances, either lo the muafve

miisellem

reaya who repaired bridges and

served as passguards. or to the minor timar

holders, w h o in the event of a

campaign were left behind to perform police duties. A small supply of arms

'Gilsenan, "Against Patron i lient Relations," p. 173. ^ B a r k a n , "Vakiflar," p. 28—304; C e n g i z O r h o n l u , Osmanli imparatorlugunda Derbend Tefkilatt, Istanbul Üniversiu a Hdebiyat Fakiiltesi Y a y i n l a n , No. 1209 (Istanbul, 1967), pp. 2131. •^Compare Suraiya Faroqhi. " The Peasants of Saideli in the Late Sixteenth Century," Archivum Ottomanicum, 8 (1983), 229. a n d C o r n e l l Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire, The Historian Musuh'a 'Áli (1541-1600), Princeton Studies on the Near East (Princeton, 1986). p. 20.

S A I N T H O O D AS M E A N S OF

SELF-DEFENSE

was probably kept at least in the more exposed zaviyes,

7.3

and the enemies of a

given sheik might even complain that he made common cause with robbers. 1 W h i l e Anatolian sheiks had made a niche for t h e m s e l v e s in the Ottoman administrative system, their saintly qualities, in the narrower sense of "saintly," were apparently much less emphasized in seventeenth-century Anatolia than in twentieth-century Morocco. Certainly the lineage of a major zaviyedar,

such as that of :he sheik of Hacibekta§, was a matter worth

recording even in the eyes of a sophisticated urban intellectual like Mustafa Ali. 2 But the importance of a zaviyedar

lineage, at least in the eyes of the

Ottoman officials w h o produced the sources w e all must use, lay in its function as a protector of travelers, and not in any intrinsic holiness.

ZAVIYEDARS

DEFENDING

THEIR

OWN

PRIVILEGES T h e sheiks of Anatolian zaviyes,

living in an environment where the

impact of the state made itself felt at every turn, had no particular qualms about defending their rights and privileges by litigation in the courts, or even by direct complaints to the Sultan's Divan. A s early as the sixteenth century, even members of the Bektashi order of dervishes, which during this period was o f t e n viewed with s o m e disapproval in official circles, m i g h t lodge a complaint if they had been set upon by robbers. 3 At the beginning of the eighteenth century, we again encounter a similar case, namely, when Sheik Elvan of Hacibekta§ accused an inhabitant of the village of robbery and d i s t u r b a n c e of the peace, thereby obtaining his banishment to C y p r u s . 4 Litigating sheiks constituted a permanent feature of Anatolian society. Under such circumstan:es one would expect dervish sheiks with good contacts in Istanbul to lobby with conspicuous success on behalf of their privileges, and that is in fact what did happen. T o name but one example: in the tiny town of Karahisar-i §irkf (§ebinkarahisar), the descendants of Sheik Haci Piri were in possession of an exemption document of the traditional type issued ever since the early centuries of the Ottoman Empire. 5 A c c o r d i n g to this document, the sheik's descendants were absolved from a wide variety of ' M u s t a f a Ali, Kunh ul-Ahbar, Istanbul Cniversitesi Kiituphanesi TY 5959, fol. 16b. I owe this reference to Prof. Abdiilbaki Golpinarli; adini rahmetle ve minnetle anariz. ^Osmanli Argivi, Miihimme Defterleri (hereafter MD) 78, p. 81, no. 22 (1018/1609-10). 3

M D 73, p. 467, no. 1031 (1003/1594-95).

4

MD 115, p. 4 1 4 (1119/1707-08). I thank Professor Halil Sahillioglu for pointing out this document to me. 5 I M D 79, p. 67, no. 89 (1019/1610-11). Compare the articles by Paul Wittek, "Zu einigen fruhosmanischen Urkunden (I-VII)," reprinted in La formation de l'empire Ottoman, ed. V. L Ménage (London, 1982).

74

('i) P I N G

WITH

THE

STATE

exactions, including aid to official couriers and to w o r k m e n employed ori fortress repair. Moreover, members of the sheikly lineage were exempt f r o m the irregular taxes k n o w n as avariz-i

divaniye

and tekalif-i

orfiye.,

particularly since one of Haci Piri's descendants had obtained a position as preacher in a local mosque. Tax exemptions, however, particularly of modest semirural sheiks such as Haci Piri and his grandsons, were not always easy to enforce, and by the beginning of the seventeenth century, the family was: confronted with demands for avariz, grain deliveries to troops marching to the' eastern frontier (niizuli, and tekalif-i orfiye. T h e family fought back. Pointing to the fact that their exemption had been entered into the tax register and was thereby legalized beyond any possible doubt, they complained to the Divan and received a confirmation of their privileges. Sheik Haci Piri's descendants, were simply d e f e n d i n g their own t a x - e x e m p t position. It is not k n o w n whether they controlled vakif lands, or whether the exemption granted thenaffected the position of local inhabitants w h o tried to make a living from the: poor and rocky soil of §ebinkarahisar. In other instances, however, it is obvious that by defending his own rights to the taxes of a given village, a zaviyedar

might also be defending peasants against arbitrary taxation.

A sultanic rescript solicited by the administrators of the M e v l a n a Celaleddin foundations and addressed to the kadi of Larende (Karaman), as well as to a palace gavwj resident in this town, shows the difficulty of keeping alive the settlement of Selerek. 1 T h e village had lost a n u m b e r of families: because of death and m i g r a t i o n . A p p a r e n t l y the a d m i n i s t r a t o r s of the foundations of Mevlana Celaleddin R u m i had attempted to resettle the village. The latter administrators were concerned with Selerek because Selerek supplied income to the foundat on of Mader-i Mevlana in Larende, controlled by the same family as the main tekke in Konya. But certain provincial administrators: had i m p o s e d taxes (largely illegal) upon the hapless p e a s a n t s , thereby endangering both the continued existence of the village and the income of the zaviyedar.

In response to a complaint, the central administration prohibited

the practice. At least for the time being, this should have safeguarded the continued existence of the village. Other seventeenth-century dervishes were equally willing to resume the: role once played by their fourteenth- and fiftecnth-century predecessors in settling abandoned wastelands throughout the empire. Thus in the middle of the seventeenth century, Sheik Kasim D e d e of Kayseri had undertaken a project of this type. 2 He had been granted the abandoned village of Incesu iri addition to another less important place against payment of a modest yearly ' o n S e l e r e k in O t t o m a n f o u n d a t i o n d o c u m e n t s , c o m p a r e I b r a h i m H a k k i K o n y a l i , Abide v