As Night Falls: Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Cities after Dark 9781108832144, 1108832148

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As Night Falls

In a world that is constantly awake, illuminated and exposed, there is much to gain from looking into the darkness of times past. This fascinating and vivid picture of nocturnal life in Middle Eastern cities shows that the night in the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire created unique conditions for economic, criminal, political, devotional and leisurely pursuits that were hardly possible during the day. Offering the possibility of livelihood and brotherhood, pleasure and refuge; the darkness allowed confiding, hiding and conspiring – activities which had far-reaching consequences on Ottoman state and society in the Early Modern period. Instead of dismissing the night as merely a dark corridor between days, As Night Falls demonstrates how fundamental these nocturnal hours have been in shaping the major social, cultural and political processes in the Early Modern Middle East. avner wishnitzer is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University where he specializes in the social and cultural history of the Ottoman Empire. He is the author of Reading Clocks, Alla Turca: Time and Society in the Late Ottoman Empire (2015) and a co-editor of A Global Middle East: Mobility, Materiality and Culture in the Modern Age, 1880–1940 (2016).

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As Night Falls Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Cities after Dark

avner wishnitzer Tel Aviv University

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University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108832144 DOI: 10.1017/9781108933131 © Avner Wishnitzer 2021 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2021 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wishnitzer, Avner, 1976– author. Title: As night falls : eighteenth-century Ottoman cities after dark / Avner Wishnitzer, Tel Aviv University. Description: New York : Cambridge University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021004266 (print) | LCCN 2021004267 (ebook) | ISBN 9781108832144 (hardback) | ISBN 9781108927772 (paperback) | ISBN 9781108933131 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Nightlife–Turkey–Istanbul–History–18th century. | Istanbul (Turkey)–Social life and customs–18th century. | Istanbul (Turkey)–Social conditions–18th century. | Istanbul (Turkey)–Economic conditions–18th century. | Istanbul (Turkey)–Politics and government–18th century. | Turkey–History–Ottoman Empire, 1288–1918. | Jerusalem–Social life and customs–18th century. Classification: LCC DR726 .W57 2021 (print) | LCC DR726 (ebook) | DDC 956/.015091732–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021004266 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021004267 ISBN 978-1-108-83214-4 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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In memory of Walter G. Andrews (1939–2020) “For in the dark of that night she saw that Alexander clearly” Latifi (d. 1582)

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Contents

List of Figures

page viii

Acknowledgments

ix

Note on Terms, Names, and Transliterations

xii

List of Abbreviations

xiii

Introduction Part I

Nocturnal Realities

1 15

1

Disquieting

17

2

Order Invisible

46

3

The Urban Subconscious

81

4

Ambivalence and Ambiguity

110

5

Manufacturing Light

144

Part II

171

Dark Politics

6

Shining Power

173

7

Night Battles

207

Conclusion: Dawn of a New Night?

240

Appendix: On the Use of Court Records in This Book

249

Notes

253

Bibliography

335

Index

371

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Figures

2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2 5.1 5.2 5.3 6.1

A man and a young boy caught in bed A neighborhood raid A glimpse of tavern life A map of Istanbul’s drinking hubs An iftar meal at the grand vizier’s palace Armenians playing cards in candlelight A coffeehouse in Istanbul A firework display

page 55 67 84 85 163 164 166 189

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Acknowledgments

This project took off following a somewhat unexpected meeting during my postdoc at the University of Washington, a little over a decade ago. Soon after I arrived in Seattle, people told me I should meet Walter Andrews, whom at the time, I only knew by name. I was completely ignortant of the world of Ottoman poetry, nor was I particularly interested in learning about it. When we finally met, Walter listened carefully as I shared with him some raw ideas I had about Ottoman nights, and then gently suggested that Ottoman poets probably would not have agreed with many of my observations. I have to admit it had never occured to me to ask Ottoman poets what they thought. But something about the way Walter spoke about poetry lured me in and, before I knew it, I was participating in his poetry-reading group. It was as if Walter showed us a secret pathway into the collective mind of a bygone society and guided us along its long and winding corridors. With his immense knowledge he initiated us into a world of nuance and ambivalence and patiently corrected our often-embarrassing mistranslations. An almost incidental encounter turned into a fascinating intellectual journey. Over the years, I turned to Walter for advice whenever I was struggling with a couplet, or uncertain about a metaphor, and these consultations often turned into long conversations about poetry and politics, past and present, about words spoken and written and muted, or exchanged or suspended between people and peoples, words like darkness and inspiration, beauty and love. As I was putting the final touches to the manuscript, which has to do with all of these words, Walter told me about his illness. I was hoping to share the final work with him but, by the time I sent him the manuscript, it was too late. He died two days later. I will always be grateful for the opportunity I had to learn from such a great scholar and teacher, who was, above all, an exceptionally kind, warm, and wise person. This book is dedicated to his memory. ix Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 04 Aug 2021 at 06:37:28, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108933131

x

Acknowledgments

Many friends and colleagues contributed to this project in various ways, but I am particularly indebted to my research assistants, Zeynep Üzümçeker, Ramiz Üzümçeker, and Omar Halabi. This project benefitted immensely not only from their endless commitment, prudence, and intelligence but also from their particular disciplinary training and language skills. Zeynep, Ramiz, and Omar came to form a research dream team whom I could trust to locate sources and prepare them for analysis in the most efficient way. Moreover, in some crucial points, they suggested important insights and leads and encouraged me to follow them. I also thank Yoav Schwarz and Sahar Mor Bostock for their hard work during the early phases of this project. Without all of these people, this work would have been much more difficult, and certainly not as pleasant. The other dream team that accompanied this project is made of my friends and partners in the Social History Workshop: On Barak and Liat Kozma. On and Liat read the manuscript from beginning to end and some parts of it, more than once. They helped me think through some of the problems of the project in countless conversations and their ideas and comments greatly improved this work. My friend Selim Kuru, another master of Ottoman poetry, was always there for me when I needed guidance, and for this I am greatly indebted. I am also grateful to Eyal Ginio, whose sensible and sensitive comments on some of the chapters I adopted without hesitation. I would like to extend my gratitude also to Iris Agmon, for helping to make sense of the sicil, and to my friend Hillel Cohen, for helping me sharpen my thinking about some of the issues discussed in the book. This research was supported by the ISRAEL SCIENCE FOUNDATION (grant no. 423/16), and I am thankful for this support. I was also fortunate to receive the Visiting Israeli Fellowship which allowed me to spend a wonderful year at St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford. I thank Aron Shai and Ronit Ackerman for their continuous support, sensitivity, and understanding in difficult times. I further thank the people of the Middle East Centre at St. Antony’s, and especially its head, Eugene Rogan, for making my stay so stimulating and pleasant, and for some very important suggestions. Still at Oxford, I thank Aslı Niyazioglu ˘ for several wonderful conversations, and for providing insightful comments on parts of the manuscript. I also thank John-Paul Ghobrial and the participants of his seminar for some important feedback.

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Acknowledgments

xi

At Cambridge University Press, I thank Maria Marsh, Daniel Brown, Atifa Jiwa, and Thomas Haynes, who made working on this book a real pleasure. I am also indebted to Franklin Mathews Jebaraj and especially Benjamin Johnson, for the editing. I thank Raquel Ukeles, curator of the National Library of Israel’s Islam and Middle East Collection, for facilitating the work on the Jerusalem Court Records, and Roger Ekirch, for a particularly important conversation. I owe thanks also to Ehud Toledano, Dror Ze’evi, and Avi Rubin for their ideas and support, and to Jens Hanssen, Amnon Cohen, Nurçin İleri, Adel Manna, Serife ¸ Eroglu ˘ Memiş, Mahmoud Yazbak, Ayse Hilal Ugurlu, ˘ Yasemin Avcı, Deborah Shechter, Hay Eytan Cohen Yanarocak, Omri Eilat, Teddy Fasberg, and Idan Barir for very helpful suggestions and references. Special thanks to Peter Mackridge and Feras Krimsti, who kindly shared with me their unpublished work, and to Yener Koç, who helped to produce the drinking-hubs map. The cover was illustrated by Itamar Liebergall and I am grateful for his efforts. Finally, I thank Hagit, who has to put up with me, nights and days.

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Note on Terms, Names, and Transliteration

Ottoman Turkish words have been transliterated according to modern Turkish standards. In cases where the Ottoman words are no longer used in modern Turkish, they were transliterated according to the Redhouse Turkish/Ottoman-English Dictionary (1968). Arabic and Hebrew words were transliterated based on the style adopted by the International Journal of Middle East Studies. Arabic and Turkish terms usually appear in the singular form and are italicized and explained on the first appearance. Whenever the plural form of such terms is required, a romanized “s” is added to them. Extracts from poetry and chronicles that had been transliterated by other scholars and incorporated into the current study follow the original transliteration. All translations are mine, if not otherwise indicated. Names of places commonly known to readers of English have been written in their usual forms (therefore, Istanbul, not İstanbul; Jerusalem, not Yerushalayim or al-Quds). For names of authors who wrote in ¯ Ottoman-Turkish, Turkish transliteration was applied (hence Hasan Hamid and not Ḥasan Ḥam¯ıd). In cases where there are several common transliterations in modern Turkish, I chose the one closest to the Ottoman source (hence Ahmed Midhat and not Ahmet Mithat). However, in titles of Ottoman publications that have been reprinted in modern Turkish, the names of authors appear as transliterated by the publisher. Inconsistency between text and references in some places is therefore unavoidable. Names of authors who wrote in Arabic or Hebrew were transliterated following IJMES conventions.

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Abbreviations

BOA – EI – IJMES – JS – TDVİA – ÜS –

Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi Encyclopaedia of Islam International Journal of Middle East Studies Jerusalem Sicili Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi Üsküdar Sicili

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Introduction

In a world that is constantly awake, illuminated, and exposed there is much to gain from looking into the darkness of times past. Paradoxically, the most significant thing that studying Ottoman nights allows us to see, is the benefits and costs of invisibility. This book shows that the night in the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire created unique conditions for economic, criminal, political, devotional, and leisurely pursuits that were hardly possible during the day. It offered livelihood and brotherhood, pleasure and refuge; it allowed confiding, hiding, and conspiring. It was the ability to keep out of sight that created all these opportunities. To be “in the dark” surely involved the insecurity of not knowing, but also the promise of not being known, and the benefits of pretending not to know. This hide-ability, as I argue in this book, had far-reaching consequences on Ottoman state and society in the Early Modern period. Counterintuitively, it was not only the socially or religiously marginal who sought to be hidden from sight. While certainly conducive to alterity and even subversion, the night also served hegemony. Darkness allowed easing economic, political, social, religious, and sexual pressures out of sight, without openly challenging the established order. In fact, the state benefitted directly from taxes levied on alcohol consumption and prostitution. As long as what happened in the dark remained in the dark, sellers, patrons, and state officials could all pretend it had never happened. In other words, the night was dark enough to hide everybody. It was a collective subconscious of sorts, a part of the self that is, nevertheless, not in focal awareness. Yet, this productive neglect did not turn the night into some idyllic land of opportunity, equally open to all. For the feebler and more physically vulnerable, the impairment of vision and its negative effect on public security usually meant confinement, and sometimes fear and violence. Those who went out at night were either those who had no other choice, or those who could depend on their own stealth and 1 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 04 Aug 2021 at 06:37:27, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108933131.002

2

Introduction

physical strength, or on the protection of others. The janissaries, the once-celebrated soldiers of the Ottomans, best fit these criteria. They were armed and trained in the use of arms and cultivated strong group solidarity. Officially the arm of order, the unruly, religiously antinomian corps turned into a major source of disorder, especially at night. By the end of the eighteenth century, against the background of military defeats and internal instability, reform-oriented circles began to push for a more centralist, orthodox order. They were growing less tolerant of janissary unruliness, urban violence, and antinomian Sufi currents, and by extension, of the night that allowed all of the above to flourish almost undisturbed. Starting in the 1780s, an undeclared war was waged under the cover of darkness between the palace and the janissaries, culminating in the crushing of the corps by Sultan Mahmud II in June 1826, and the subsequent oppression of the Bektaşi Sufi order. Mahmud’s victory eliminated the forces that had pushed back against the incursion of sultanic authority into the night and kept it as an interval of dissent and freedom, but also of much violence and insecurity. A new nocturnal reality soon began to take shape under the sultan’s direct authority. Rather than dismissing the night as a dark corridor between days, when “real” history supposedly happened, the night is here shown to be more like dark matter, invisible and yet fundamental in shaping major social, cultural, and political processes in the Early Modern Middle East.

Reconsidering Darkness, Rethinking Sleep My sensitivity to the productivity of darkness is informed by an already massive, and still rapidly growing, literature about the transformation of the night in recent decades, and artificial lighting in particular. Several factors have contributed to this trend, most notably, enhanced awareness of the economic costs of outdoor illumination, the immense amounts of carbon emission it involves, and its negative impact on humans and nonhumans alike. Scientists working in various academic fields are investigating the effect of “light pollution” on public health, on the well-being of city dwellers, on local ecosystems, and on stellar visibility. Governmental and nongovernmental organizations are working to educate the public and promote stricter regulation of outdoor illumination.1 Darkness, which for generations has been

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Introduction

3

associated with danger and evil, and therefore as a sphere to be conquered and subdued, reemerges as an important interval that needs to be preserved.2 It now appears that a brighter future for humanity may, in fact, be a darker one.3 Critical approaches to over-lighting contribute to a renewed interest in the history, sociology, geography, and anthropology of the night. Research conducted thus far has enhanced our understanding of the emergence of the modern night from the seventeenth century onward, and yet most of it is almost exclusively limited to various parts of Europe and North America.4 Far less is known about the realities, perceptions, and experiences of night in other parts of the world. Within the field of Middle East studies, there is almost no research on night-related issues and the little that has been published focuses almost exclusively on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.5 Consequently, a whole range of human activity remains unknown. The poverty of research on the nocturnal in the Middle East also leaves the European and North American experience as an archetype, a model against which other areas are measured. Ottoman nights share some of the traits of medieval and Early Modern European nights and yet, their particularities are equally important. While the history of the night in major European cities is often narrated along an axis of expanding street lighting, the streets of Ottoman cities remained bleak throughout the eighteenth century.6 The Ottoman case thus offers an interesting laboratory in which to test how darkness featured in, and interacted with, processes typical of early modernity, from urbanization to the expansion of the governmental apparatus. Placed against the background of these processes, the study seeks to reconstruct particular experiences of the night, unique traditions of nightlife, and culture-dependent arrangements and representations of darkness and light. Such an examination may contribute to current discussions about the hyper-illuminated night and its costs by allowing access to a very different nocturnal reality and enabling us to imagine alternatives. A second discussion, to which I hope to contribute, is the study of sleep in past and present societies, which is again closely related to the rapid changes in contemporary nocturnal realities. New technologies including, most notably, portable computers and the internet, allowed carrying work home, thus blurring boundaries between the “workday,” and the dark hours that had been mostly reserved for repose,

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Introduction

family, devotion, and leisure. New modes of online entertainment and consumption further exacerbated pressures on sleeping time in many post-industrialized societies. This is only the most recent link in a much longer process of extending both work and leisure at the expense of sleep, a process greatly intensified by the industrialization of lighting, followed by around-the-clock businesses, and radio and television broadcasts.7 In his 2013 book about the “24/7 society,” Jonathan Crary warned that sleep is the last barrier protecting us from being fully absorbed into a new configuration of non-stop capitalism that threatens to reduce us into full-time producers and consumers.8 As if to prove Crary right, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings stated a few years later that his company’s competition was not HBO nor Amazon: “We are competing with sleep, on the margin. And so, it’s a very large pool of time.”9 The rapid changes in sleep patterns are prompting a flurry of new research into the world of slumber in the field of Humanities and Social Sciences. Most relevant for the current discussion, a growing literature shows how sleep patterns vary over time, across geographies and between social groups, affected by social class, gender, seasonality, technology, modes of nocturnal entertainment, and many additional variables.10 While the need for sleep is biological, everything about it, from sleeping time to sleeping spaces and arrangements, is historically specific and socially constructed. Historicizing sleep in the Middle East may contribute not only to our understanding of this crucial aspect of life in the region but also to wider contemporary discussions. While our bedrooms are indeed being invaded, we should be careful not to contrast dystopic accounts of a sleepless future with naive portrayals of the supposedly peaceful slumber of times past. Any conversation about the future of repose must consider its history, fraught as it was with inequalities. In this regard, this book follows in the footsteps of Roger Ekirch who has shown that in Early Modern England and its American colonies, various sleep disturbances deprived people – and commoners, in particular – of much-needed repose, possibly leading to widespread exhaustion and related health risks.11 While joining Ekirch on this point, I found little evidence in Ottoman sources of Ekirch’s other major contribution, namely, the slumber pattern he dubbed “segmented sleep.” According to Ekrich’s hugely influential studies, in preindustrial

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Introduction

5

Europe, sleep was broken into two intervals that were known in most European languages as “first sleep” and “second sleep.” Preindustrial families typically went to bed around 9 or 10 p.m., and then woke up around midnight and spent the next hour or two in a kind of quiet wakefulness, performing choirs, reading, praying, conversing, having sex, or meditating. They then went back to sleep for another few hours, until daybreak. This discovery has far-reaching consequences on our understanding of “normal” or “natural” sleep. Ekirch, and later Sasha Handley, both pointed out that while biphasic sleep was common, sleeping times varied considerably depending on multiple personal, seasonal, material, and religious factors.12 This book further complicates the picture. In the Ottoman Empire, so it seems based on the evidence at hand, biphasic sleep was not common. Monophasic, consolidated sleep which, in the European context, has been associated with the industrial revolution and the growing availability of artificial light, seems to have been common in the Middle East for centuries. My final wider intervention concerns discussions of “ocularcentrism,” that is, the perceptual and conceptual privileging of vision over the other senses which is said to be typical of western cultures. For more than a century, scholars in various fields worked to demonstrate that the seemingly biological hierarchy of the senses is largely a cultural construct that is supposedly typical of “the West.”13 The general impairment of vision of the pre-modern night allows testing these claims. Under these conditions, it is shown, confidence, security, and trust are significantly undermined. The analysis offered here certainly does not doubt that the human sensorium is heavily mediated by culture; it does provide further proof, however, that the hierarchy of the senses is not entirely constructed by culture and is not only typical of the postEnlightenment West.14 In the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire – a “pre-modern,” “non-western” society – people wanted to know with their eyes. When it came to establishing order and truth in the dark, they relied – first and foremost – on light and sight.

Dark Ecologies To reconstruct a thoroughly dark cityscape is to place urban society in its nonhuman environment. In the last few years, the environmental history of the Middle East seems to be finally taking off, significantly

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Introduction

changing our understanding of processes we thought we had understood.15 Yet, while some attention was paid to seasonal variation and its impact on humans and nonhumans, the daily cycle of light and darkness has attracted very little attention. Things are not significantly different in the scholarship in other areas. Extant histories of the modern night have demonstrated amply that the night is not merely a “darker version of the day,” to quote Joakim Schlör.16 Nighttime activity does not merely continue uninterrupted into the dark hours. Rather, the night changes this interaction in fundamental ways. This literature, therefore, laid great emphasis on the particularities of after-dark life, from crime and law enforcement, through sociability, sexual adventures, intoxication, and on to political subversion. Yet, this scholarship generally assumes that, while nocturnal life is culture-dependent, the night itself is a constant. In other words, outside the realm of socially constructed nocturnal reality, there lies a natural phenomenon that looks and feels pretty much the same around the year and all over the world.17 This is, at least partly, the result of the process that concerns many of these very histories, namely the development and spread of industrial lighting (and heating) that made such conceptual separation between human society and “nature” appear real. Illuminated and heated, the modern night is seemingly detached from the fluctuations of “nature.” The second reason why this assumption held for a long time is that almost all extant histories of the night focus on Europe and North America, where street lighting began to spread relatively early, and where the most comprehensive lighting projects were put in place in the nineteenth century. To this day, these are the most illuminated areas of the Earth.18 As already noted, the history of the night in eighteenth-century Ottoman cities is not a history of gradual illumination, but rather, one in which darkness still reigns supreme. Ironically, this dark cityscape lays bare the material and environmental entanglements that are specific to the night. But since, unsurprisingly, entanglements are hard to untangle, it may be useful to distinguish between different “types” or layers that are usually subsumed undifferentiated under “night.” The prominent geographer and intellectual Katip Çelebi (1609–1657) does exactly that. He differentiates between the “natural night” (leyl tabı¯ʿı¯) stretching from sunset to sunrise, and the Sharʿi night, which _ begins at the same time but ends already at dawn.19

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Introduction

7

In much the same way, I will make a distinction between “astronomical night,” “biological night,” and “social night.” The three categories are interrelated but not overlapping. The astronomical night is the period between astronomical dusk and astronomical dawn. Its length varies with the seasons, affecting a range of physical phenomena including temperature, humidity, stellar visibility, tides, wind regime, and more. The biological night is defined as the time when the circadian clock promotes sleep, which, among humans, roughly corresponds to the astronomical night.20 Yet, there is considerable variation between individuals in what regards the relation between darkness-light cycles and sleep-wakefulness cycles, depending on factors such as genes, age, and sex.21 The relation between the astronomical and the biological night is further complicated by what we may call the social night, here defined as the aggregate of technologies, practices, and norms that organize human life during the dark hours in any given society. We may say that the social night is affected by both the astronomical and biological night and, in turn, affects the latter. Cheap artificial lighting, for example, allowed extending the social day at the expense of the social night. Throughout the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth century, it was considered one more front in civilization’s struggle to conquer nature. However, we now know that this apparent severing of the social night from the biological night has taken its toll. It is wellestablished that mistimed sleep, as result of night work, jet lag, extended leisure activity, and exposure to artificial light, disrupts circadian rhythms and increase the risk of disease. It has recently been suggested that desynchrony of sleep/wake times upsets key regulators of gene expression and may be responsible for a wider range of health problems than hitherto considered.22 This study is focused squarely on the social night. My aim here is not to offer an environmental, or posthumanist history of the night, but rather to place a still anthropocentric history within a wider nocturnal ecology.23 This ecology varies between seasons and locations and is affected by climate, currents, tides, flora, and fauna. For example, currents and water temperature affect reproduction and movement patterns of fish and humans moving through, or depending upon, these waters for livelihood. As night fell, Early Modern Istanbul’s fishermen would take to the sea, seeking particular fish depending on the seasons, aligning themselves with the tides and currents (see Chapter 1).

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Introduction

Rodents too, were waking up, leaving their nests, and moving closer to humans. Mosquitoes and fleas now became more active, upsetting the sleep of their human hosts, and sometimes infecting them with disease, just when they were laying immobile, unable to defend themselves (see Chapter 1). In short, humans shared their beds, or rather matrasses, with nonhumans. If they needed to use light, that too was grounded in particular geographies, flora, and fauna. For example, in northern Europe and North America it was mostly tallow and especially whale oil that served those who could afford to use light at night (especially from the seventeenth century onward). In the Mediterranean, too hot for whales and too far from whalers’ ports, it was mostly vegetable oils, tallow, and beeswax that served as lighting materials (see Chapter 5). The concurrent examination through social, material, and – to some extent – environmental prisms helps us think beyond “conceptual” light and darkness, which are usually perceived as two universal, absolute entities that are mutually exclusive and diametrically opposed. That is exactly what makes “light and darkness” one of the most effective metaphors for contradiction and conflict, a metaphor that was also commonly used by the historical subjects of this study. Yet, as a lived experience, light and darkness are relative, contextdependent, and interrelated or “mixed” to various degrees. Any light source at night is limited and surrounded by darkness and, moreover, creates its own shadows. Any darkness is relative and affected by whatever light sources are available, whether the moon and stars or various forms of artificial light.24 That is why we should not think of night as synonymous with some primordial absolute darkness, nor think of artificial light in separation from the surrounding darkness. This has very real historical consequences. When I say that monarchs used great amounts of light (that is, fire) to “turn night into day,” we must not forget that this whole endeavor was only possible, and indeed meaningful, against the foil of darkness. When I say that the janissaries used darkness in different ways, what I mean is that they used a degree of darkness that allowed them more leeway, without completely hindering their orientation. They too, needed some form of light. In short, we must not be held prisoners by our tendency – and that of our historical subjects – to think of light and darkness only in theoretical terms, as opposing and mutually exclusive entities. Most often, what humans experience, and

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indeed seek, is not maximum light or complete darkness but, rather, a controllable level of visibility and hide-ability, one that would suit their needs.

Framing and Chapter Outline This study is predominantly focused on the imperial capital and yet, wherever the sources allow, I refer also to the nocturnal realities of the religiously central, but otherwise marginal, town of Jerusalem. The former represents a predominantly Turkish-speaking metropolis that served as a major port city, whereas the other was a small district capital in the interior of one of the Arab provinces. Jerusalem, in other words, is substantially different from Istanbul in terms of size, population makeup, dominant language[s], proximity to the sea (and hence interaction with the outside), and being completely (rather than partly) walled. The two cities, therefore, mark two extremities of a wide spectrum of nocturnal realities that coexisted in the late Ottoman Empire and examining them together allows a wider understanding of the topic than a focus on any one location would permit. While both cities are discussed, Jerusalem remains peripheral to the study, a reflection of its place in the imperial order but, even more importantly, of the much smaller body of relevant sources it produced. Therefore, while in some chapters (mostly Chapters 1, 4, and 5) a look from Jerusalem provides important insight, in other chapters, references to Jerusalemite realities are almost entirely absent. In terms of period, the study covers a “long eighteenth century” beginning with the return of the imperial court from Edirne to Istanbul, following the rebellion known as the “Edirne Event” in 1703, and the efforts of the ruling elite to reassert its power in the city through monumental construction, processions, and festivals.25 In this context, the nights became a means to demonstrate power, especially through extravagant displays of light. The same rebellion reverberated in Jerusalem, as local actors seized the opportunity to rise against their imperial lord in what came to be known as the Naq¯ıb al-Ashraf ¯ Mutiny (1703–1705). The period that followed the crushing of the revolt was marked by a new balance of power between local and imperial forces, between competing elite families in Jerusalem, and between the Muslim population and the religious minorities.26 Such power dynamics, in which central power was kept at check by other

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Introduction

actors from within the imperial and local elites, characterized the entire long eighteenth century. The study ends when this dynamic changed rather dramatically in the 1820s, following, in order, the outbreak of the Greek revolt, the crushing of the janissaries in Istanbul, and the occupation of Jerusalem by Mehmed Ali Paşa, the ambitious governor of Egypt. These events fundamentally disrupted power relations and ushered in significant economic, administrative, and political changes in both cities.27 In both cities, these transformations gradually altered nocturnal realities. This book is divided into two main parts: the first, comprising Chapters 1–5, explores various aspects of everynight life in a somewhat “sociological” manner. The discussion is concerned with the systems, norms, hierarchies, and relations that organized the urban night and less with processes of change these structures underwent during the period under discussion. In many of these aspects, little change was observable between the early eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century. For example, the economy, ecology, and technology of lighting did not exhibit dramatic breaks. The political use of light, by contrast, witnessed significant changes, as did other aspects of the urban night. Part II is devoted to some of these changes, in particular to the political processes that affected nocturnal realities and the role the night played in these same processes. It narrates the intensifying use of the night for various purposes by both the palace and dissenting elements, most notably the janissaries and janissary auxiliaries. Chapter 1, “Disquieting,” seeks to capture the experience of the night through a much-altered sensorium, one which relied on hearing to compensate for impaired eyesight. My main argument is that the deep darkness that reigned through the city undermined people’s sense of control, thus aggravating fears of very real nocturnal dangers. The second part of the chapter focuses on the domicile – the fundamental function of which is to counter this insecurity – to offer shelter in which one can close one’s eyes. The discussion accompanies people as they were readying themselves to sleep and shows that even at home, fears and real dangers could shake people’s security and disturb their sleep. But, while nocturnal threats, fears, and nuisances seem universal, their effect was highly differential since it depended on the means one could use to cope with them. My second argument is, therefore, that the night did not emancipate people from the social hierarchies and material conditions of their days. They remained unequal even in their sleep.

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Chapter 2, “Order Invisible,” takes the discussion outside. It explores the infrastructures of actual and conceptual order after dark and the means employed to maintain it despite the impairment of vision. Seeking to limit potentially invisible, incontrollable activity, official decrees, neighborhood communities, guilds, and moralists together created a powerful discourse that stigmatized the night, and a set of regulations aimed to impose visibility on those who nevertheless ventured out after dark. Especially in times of turmoil, the authorities complemented communal mechanisms and stigmatization by means of harsh punitive measures that were designed to deter people from using the night as cover for illegal activities. By projecting fear, sultans sought to compensate somewhat for their actually rather precarious control over the dark city. Chapter 3, “The Urban Subconscious,” ventures deeper into the dark, beyond formal mechanisms and concepts of order. The chapter sketches the scope and makeup of a huge and yet semi-clandestine nightlife scene, then explains its resilience, despite the various mechanisms put in place to limit it. Put briefly, the night attracted, first and foremost, economically underprivileged and socially marginal groups whose numbers were growing rapidly during the period under discussion. It offered them livelihood and leisure options that were hardly available during the day. Yet, it was not only the “mischievous,” marginalized populations who took cover in the dark. For “respectable” residents, and the authorities too, the night had its advantages. Darkness, indeed, had a blinding effect, but it also allowed turning a blind eye. Whereas infringements in broad daylight were a direct challenge to the established order, it was often comfortable for all parties to pretend that alcohol, gambling, and prostitution simply did not exist. Throughout the long eighteenth century – and with few exceptions – Istanbul’s huge nightlife scene was allowed to flourish as long as it remained out of sight and did not openly conflict with diurnal order. Chapter 4, “Ambivalence and Ambiguity,” continues the journey away from the official, the orthodox, and the respectable. If, in the previous chapters, I discuss Ottoman nocturnal life mainly from the perspective of the established order, which sought to limit it and keep it out of sight, in this chapter I propose to understand some of the traditions of nocturnal devotion and leisure in the terms of those who partook in them. Approached in this way, the night no longer

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Introduction

appears as a mere dark closet in which to hide while drinking, but rather as the ideal setting for cultivating intimacy and love, carnal, platonic, and divine. In fact, hiding in the night and celebrating were intimately connected. “Enlightened” in their own eyes, those engaged in nocturnal devotion and leisure distinguished themselves from the slumbering masses, which helped to create a sense of spiritual elitism or, at the very least, to consolidate a sense of group solidarity. While darkness was a fundamental experience that was shared, to some extent, by all, Chapter 5, “Manufacturing Light,” demonstrates that darkness too was differentially diffused. The chapter sketches the contours of a centrally regulated network that procured lighting materials from the provinces, channeled them to Istanbul and other crucial points in the imperial power grid, and set lighting priorities. This system served the needs of both the ruling elite and the general population, as lighting was considered a basic commodity. Yet, the power differentials and political considerations that shaped this “Ottoman lighting system” made access to light extremely unequal. Chapter 6, “Shining Power,” shows how Ottoman sultans, and especially Sultan Ahmed III (1703–1730), drew on this inequality to assert themselves. The chapter shows that darkness was not only a challenge to the ruling elite but also an opportunity to showcase power, hierarchy, and intimacy which, in itself, was a proxy of hierarchy in palace circles. By associating themselves with real and metaphoric light at night, Ottoman rulers in the long eighteenth century sought to project their power and legitimate it in the eyes of their subjects and rivals. If Chapter 6 shows how Ahmed III used light at night to project imperial power, the final chapter, “Night Battles,” shows how the janissaries used darkness to undermine it. Starting with the Patrona Halil uprising in 1730, the chapter underlines the importance of nighttime for the enactment of the janissaries’ “protocols of rebellion.” Once activated, the janissaries’ networks would organize quickly under the cover of darkness and march out of the shadows to confront the sultan in broad daylight. Ottoman sultans, on their part, occasionally tried to dislodge these networks, significantly in this context, by eradicating the nightlife scene. Throughout this period, the struggle was waged not only in the streets but also on the discursive level. Starting already following the 1730 rebellion, elite writers began associating the janissaries, the religiously antinomian, and the urban

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underclass with darkness. This rhetoric would gradually gain traction in court circles, as the tension between the palace and the janissaries increased toward the end of the century. The destruction of the janissaries and the oppression of the related Bektaşi order would be described as a triumph of sultanic light, upholding and supported by Sunni Islam, over the heretic forces of darkness and chaos.

Sources This work relies on a wide range of sources, including governmental correspondence, palace-produced celebration albums (sing. surname), logs of daily affairs (sing. rüzname) and other manuscripts, chronicles of various kinds, poetry collections, popular jokes and anecdotes, medical texts, prophetic traditions, and travel accounts written by both foreigners and Ottoman subjects, Muslims, Christians and Jews. It is only by relying on such a wide and diversified corpus that one is able to access a topic that is only rarely addressed intentionally and explicitly in any of the texts in the corpus. Yet, there is a price to pay. Each of the sources presents its own complexities, its own challenges, and those cannot all be equally and sufficiently addressed. I did try, of course, to contextualize and explain my use of the more important evidence in the relevant places throughout the text. One of the most significant sources for this study was court records (sicil) from the quarter of Üsküdar in Istanbul and from Jerusalem. I used four volumes from the Jerusalem court (from the 1740s and 1750s), and eight volumes from the Üsküdar court (ranging from the 1740s to the 1760s).28 This period was selected since, in both cities, these decades represented a relatively calm interlude between the upheavals of the 1730s and the gradual deterioration of public order (in Istanbul) following the disastrous war against Russia (1768–1774). All cases from both Üsküdar and Jerusalem were analyzed qualitatively, and the Üsküdar cohort was also analyzed quantitively. The cases gleaned from the Jerusalem court records, 38 in total, formed too small a sample for such an analysis.29 While the approach I adopted in the qualitative analysis is explained in the first chapters of the book, I chose to leave the explanation of the quantitative analysis to the appendix, assuming that many readers would deem it irrelevant and/or tedious. In a nutshell, the sample used for the quantitative analysis includes 146 cases of nocturnal crimes and conflicts gleaned

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from those eight sicil volumes, which forms 3.9 percent of the total number of cases in these volumes (3,663). When compared to published quantitative analyses of Ottoman court registers, this dataset is admittedly small, yet it does not stand alone. Rather, it is used to test some of the insights generated by the analysis of the other sources in a more systematic fashion. Taken together, this body of sources allows reconstructing nocturnal realities that were radically different than ours.

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part i

Nocturnal Realities

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1

Disquieting

Around midnight, a scream pierced the silence that hung over the neighborhood of the Jews in Jerusalem. At least one neighbor heard it, but nobody saw anything. The next morning, a woman named Sarah was found dead in the street, lying face down in the entrance to the house she rented. The judge-administrator (kadı) appointed several officials to investigate, among them two of the leaders of the Jewish community and the city’s head surgeon (jarrah başı). Upon examining the body, the surgeon found that Sarah had been stabbed in the head and in the elbow. The neighbor who testified she had heard the scream claimed she did not know “who did it.” She told the court that the house door was open, although it is not clear from the record if she had noticed it at the time of the incident or only after the fact. The court register provides no further information.1 Sarah’s death is, quite literally, shrouded in darkness. The only sure sign that signaled in real time that something out of the ordinary was happening, was the screaming that – given the late hour – probably woke up the neighbor. We can only imagine her, lying on her mattress, trying hard to listen to the voices in the dark, her heart pounding. She may have even gotten up to the window, peeking carefully outside, but could see nothing but darkness. Hearing without seeing, or without seeing well, was one of the defining experiences of the preindustrial night. This chapter seeks to capture something of this experience. It follows darkness as it fell, from sunset to bedtime, beginning with an attempt to “listen around,” or to reconstruct the aural texture of the night. While hearing was much more important than during the day for information and orientation, it could not compensate for the loss of vision. The main argument in these first sections is that the deep darkness of the Early Modern city undermined people’s sense of control, aggravating fears of very real nocturnal dangers. The second part of the chapter focuses on the domicile, the fundamental function of which is to counter this 17 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 04 Aug 2021 at 06:37:27, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108933131.004

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Nocturnal Realities

insecurity, to offer shelter in which one can close one’s eyes. Discussion accompanies people as they were readying themselves to sleep and shows that even at home, fears and real dangers could shake people’s security and disturb their peace. But while nocturnal threats, fears, and nuisances seem universal, their effect was highly differential, since it depended on the means one could use to cope with them. My second argument is therefore that sleep did not necessarily emancipate people from diurnal social hierarchies and material conditions. They remained unequal even in their beds.

Twilight Many of us today have only a vague idea about the time of sunset. Born into constantly illuminated environments, we often cross this once-important threshold without even noticing it. In the Ottoman world, such trespassing would have been impossible. The end of the day was visible, audible, and clearly felt in all aspects of life. The time of sunset coincided with the call for the evening prayer, which marked the opening of a new calendric day, a new round of prayers, and a new cycle of clock hours, commonly reckoned from sunset to sunset.2 These formulas for marking and keeping time corresponded to lived routines and the daily cycle of social life. Walled cities throughout the empire closed their gates at sunset, segregating urban communities from their rural hinterland. The gates of roofed bazaars, quarters, neighborhood courtyards, religious colleges, and bachelor inns were also closed at the same time, breaking the urban fabric into a series of almost isolated cells.3 The city was further segregated along gender and age lines. While men would often remain in coffeehouses and taverns, women and children had to be home by now.4 Whether this interval belonged to the social day or night was not always clear. At times, people called it “evening” (akşam), as distinct from both the day (ruz; nehar; gün) and the night (gece, şeb, leyl); in other times, people could say things like “at night, following the evening prayer.”5 Jurists too recognized the liminal nature of this time and distinguished it from both day and night, because although it was increasingly dark, there were still people in the streets.6 Sunset also effected an important sensorial shift, rendering eyes increasingly less effective as darkness deepened. The other senses, and hearing in particular, now became much more sensitive.7 This

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sensorial shift was accompanied by a significant change in the city’s aural texture. The soundscape of preindustrial cities was mostly made up of sounds produced by humans and animals, and tools operated with their muscles (or in some places, using water and wind power). The rapid urbanization of the Early Modern period amplified and multiplied this soundscape, but the range of possible sounds remained virtually the same.8 Based on contemporary accounts, we can easily imagine the calls of peddlers announcing their merchandise, the howling of porters, the pounding of blacksmiths’ hammers, the soft thrashing of hoofs on unpaved roads, the bleat of sheep lead to the slaughterhouses, and the humming of bubbling water pipes and random conversations rising from countless coffeehouses.9 The call for the evening prayer, cried more or less simultaneously from dozens of minarets, would hover over and above this soundscape, anticipating the end of the social day.10 In the absence of cheap illumination and without fossil fuels–based technologies to keep it going, urban life slowly calmed down.11 One could actually hear twilight. Markets were already closed and traffic receded. Animals gradually dozed off. In residential areas, mothers could now be heard singing their little children to sleep.12 The adults would remain awake for a little longer. The call for the night prayer (Tur. yatsı, Ara. ʿishaʾ) ¯ was the ending chord of the day, marking the boundary of this liminal phase. The call for prayer would be sounded between an hour a half and two hours after sunset, which translates into about 7:15 p.m. in Istanbul at the height of winter, and 10:40 p.m. on the longest day of the year. This meant that not only darkness but the various arrangements put in place to deal with it varied with the season. Lights in most mosques would now be extinguished13 and the pious would make their way home. Guards would go on their beats in the desolate streets, knocking their clubs against the ground as they went. In cities throughout the empire, anybody with business outside now had to carry a lantern.14 The night has begun. Very few people remained outside after this time.15 Narrative sources are here supported by records from the Üsküdar court. Out of 146 nighttime cases examined, 59 cases provide information about the time of night the incident occurred (the others simply state “at night”). Out of these, 49 incidents (83 percent) took place at what would today be considered evening, that is, between the evening prayer and the night prayer, or soon thereafter. Only 10 cases (16.9 percent)

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use terms such as “midnight,” or specify an hour that falls later than two hours after sunset. At least in residential areas such as Üsküdar, then, people and their disputes turned in early by modern standards. Even the crimes and conflicts that did occur after sunset, which are by their very nature an upsetting of nocturnal routines, mostly took place indoors. Out of 142 cases for which such information is provided, 96 (67.6 percent) took place in or just outside private domiciles. Only 46 cases (32.4 percent) occurred in the street or in public spaces such as coffeehouses, squares, or markets. By way of comparison, out of 64 violent cases from the same court in roughly the same period examined by Işık Tamdogan-Abel, ˘ 33 (51.5 percent) took place outside, and an additional 15 incidents (23.4 percent) occurred in public or commercial spaces. Only 13 incidents (20.3 percent) took place in private homes.16 The data concerning the incidents’ location is yet another indication that there was little going on in the streets in residential areas after sunset, and especially after the night prayer.

The Soundscape of Darkness It is hard for us, who live in the age of hyper-illumination, to imagine the degree of darkness in Early Modern Ottoman cities. A case brought to the Jerusalem court may give an idea. On November 10, 1719, a Jewish woman identified in the record as ʾEst¯ır (Heb. ʾEster) accused a certain Sheikh Muhammad of entering her room before dawn as she _ was sleeping and snatching her scarf along with the silver band (zinaq ¯ al-t aqiya) that fastened it to her head. Ester woke up and managed to ¯ _ wrestle back the jewel, but the accused ran away with her scarf. She now wanted her scarf back. The defendant denied involvement and the judge asked the plaintiff for proof. Ester replied that because it was dark, her room’s lamp (siraj ¯ baytiha) ¯ was extinguished, and since nobody else was present, she did not have proof. The defendant was therefore acquitted.17 Although Ester’s robber was within arm’s reach, darkness was so deep she could not positively identify him. At least one more case brought before the court in Jerusalem includes a testimony of a woman who claimed she could not identify individuals with whom she had talked one night because of darkness.18 In other cases of unnatural deaths at night, relatives of the victims explained their inability to see what had happened simply by saying that “it happened

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at night,” or that they were asleep and only heard a noise without actually seeing anything.19 The difficulties involved in using Ottoman court records as a source are discussed in Chapter 2. At this point, it is enough to note that even if we accept that in none of these cases can we know for sure what had actually happened, it is significant that darkness was considered a reasonable explanation for one’s inability to see, even at a very close range. Darkness was, therefore, enough to explain one’s partial knowledge even about events he or she claimed to have experienced firsthand. Seeing outside one’s window was next to impossible especially given that while interiors could be illuminated, however dimly, the streets were completely bleak, at least on moonless nights and when clouds obstructed starlight.20 This darkness, and the silence that accompanied it, drew the attention of contemporary European travelers. Since the late seventeenth century, more and more European cities were being illuminated, which helped to stretch social and economic life into the physical night. An English travel handbook published in 1840 prepared its readers for the distinctly different night of the Ottoman capital: “Constantinople and an [sic.] European city is still more strongly marked at night. By ten o’clock every human voice is hushed.”21 The Irish aristocrat James Caulfield (1728–1799), who visited Istanbul in the late 1740s, describes the “pitchy darkness of the night, here unallayed even by the twinkling of a single lamp, and the dead silence which now reigned through this populous and lately busy town.”22 Other European travelers provided similar accounts of both Istanbul and Jerusalem.23 While reading such descriptions, we must keep in mind that there remains a gap between the immediate sensorial experience of our historical subjects and their narration of their experience. The narration is always done after the fact, based on memory, and therefore susceptible to its trickeries. Moreover, texts are always shaped by ideological convictions, literary conventions, and intended audiences, among other things. Sensorial experience as described in those texts is therefore heavily mediated, not only in real time but also in retrospect. But it is true the other way around as well. Sensorial experience is always mediated by texts and other cultural scripts.24 It is in fact doubtful whether a distinction between the physical and the cultural is even possible. As David Howes writes, sensing involves both

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“sensation and signification.”25 There is no such thing as sensing outside a particular historical context. When reading such narrations of sensorial experiences, then, we need to bear in mind the “cultural scripts” that guided our narrators, and most importantly, their proclivity to contrast light and darkness as yet another manifestation of the supposedly essential difference between “Christiandom” and “Islamdom,” or West and East. There was certainly a difference between European and Ottoman cities, but the contrast may have been exaggerated. While some European travelers saw nothing but darkness and heard nothing but silence, others were more perceptible. The din of the city definitely faded as night fell, but it did not die out. In his description of a night out on the Princess Islands in the Marmara Sea, just outside Istanbul, the English writer John B. Harwood (1828–1899) noticed the roaring of the wind and the muttering conversations of fishermen sitting by the fire on the seashore, the “swirling and murmuring of the water,” and a dog howling.26 Back in the city, it was not just one dog. According to one listener, the infamous street dogs of Istanbul produced “uninterrupted noise at night.”27 Quieter, but still easily heard, were the footsteps of the guards and the beating of their clubs on the ground.28 In short, while certainly much quieter than the day, darkness had its own sounds. The effect of nighttime on its soundscape is somewhat similar to the effect of darkness on the landscape: Since the nocturnal aural environment was significantly less complex than that of the day, the few sounds that were heard could be detected and isolated much more easily.29 Harwood made exactly that point: “In the stillness of the night,” he noted, “every noise, however slight, could be distinctly heard.”30 It is this distinguishability of sounds at a time when most people were sleeping or trying to sleep that turned them into a potential disturbance, despite the fact that sound levels were now much lower than during the day.

Stop that Noise! Among the sounds noted by Harwood, was “the merry song and the music of the tinkling guitar which told that some band of cheerful mariners passed at the moment in their tiny shallop.”31 This sound too was not unusual, but rather a part of the nocturnal soundscape during spring and summer. Istanbul boasted an elaborate culture of moonlit

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pleasure cruises that interacted in particular ways with the darkness and quiet all around.32 Yet, what was for one the pleasant sound of “merry song and music” could ruin the sleep of another. On the night of September 8, 1790, another group of mariners, European in this case, went for a similar joyride on the Bosporus. The only problem that night was that the sailors were too loud and too close to the imperial palace, where Sultan Selim III (1789–1807) was trying to sleep. The next day, the irritated monarch issued an order to one of his highest-ranking officials, saying that Last night, toward the morning, Frenk sailors went with a boat back and forth several times in front of the palace while singing songs [türkü çagırarak]. ˘ Order the Chief Scribe to warn all ambassadors and Europeans never to perform this shameless act [again]. I will mercilessly kill who ever does it [bila aman katlederim] . . . Let him [the Chief Scribe] issue a stern warning.33

We can quite easily imagine the sailors cruising down the Bosporus, probably drinking more than just a little and singing their heads off. We can just as easily imagine the sultan raging in his bedchamber. He was not used to noise. Since Mehmed II (r. 1451–1481), the inner courts of the Topkapı Palace were enveloped in solemn silence, which was strictly enforced by the palace guards. As Nina Ergin notes, this near-complete silence was not merely a demonstration of the power of the ruler, as manifested in his ability to mute the great number of servants, officials, and guards present at the inner courts; it served as “background foil,” which helped to distinguish the ruler from the mundane, much like an open space around an important monument.34 Until the end of the sixteenth century, the palace even employed mutes, dozens of them, to maintain the quiet around the person of the sultan. The use of sign language in the presence of the sultan remained the norm long after the mutes had been ousted from the palace.35 In short, court protocols secluded the sultan within a silent bubble. The sailors’ singing pierced that bubble, and at night too, when the sultan could do nothing about it. What turns sound into noise, several studies have suggested, is tightly bound with social hierarchies and social control.36 In the cases cited above, the differences between the sources of sound (or noise) seem to have been less important than the difference between the listeners. For one, Harwood was sitting quietly and musing about the

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sounds he was hearing. The sultan was most probably trying to sleep. Even more important was the gap in their power and claim to control. Aimée Boutin notes that sounds are experienced as noise, that is, as a disturbance, when they lack harmony or order and when they are uncontrollable. She cites in this context Jacque Atali who contrasted music, which with its harmony represents social order, with noise, which by virtue of its disturbing of order connotes violence.37 But here we have music as noise. It is noise because it disturbs the sultan, and because – and this is the most important point – he cannot control it. Indeed, this is probably the final difference between Harwood and Sultan Selim: The former is but a tourist in the city; the latter, its ruler. Yet, the sultan simply cannot make it go away. For him, the singing coming through the window is a most irritating reminder of the limits of his control. Indeed, the sultan’s helplessness is probably the most striking element in his directive. Although it was formulated to impress its addressees with the wrath of an omnipotent monarch who can kill when he so desires, it was dispatched only after the event was over and the sultan’s sleep ruined. More than the warning testifies to the power of the sultan, then, it exposes the limitations the night posed to his power. In the heavy darkness that hung over the Bosporus, even the sultan could not locate those loud sailors and stop their singing. After all, he too relied on the senses of his men, and even the sultan’s men, who had easier access to artificial lighting, were not free from the universal constraints posed by darkness.38 Although the sensorium is heavily mediated by culture, human dependency on vision does have a biological basis. As Martin Jay has pointed out in this context, the optic nerve has 18 times more nerve ends than the cochlear nerve and is able to transmit tremendous amounts of information with an assimilation rate that far suppresses all other senses. The range of human vision too is much greater than the senses of hearing or smell.39 Depriving humans of vision denies them much of their sense of control. Control, notes Steven Connor, is premised on the ability to gain a picture of space that is “manipulable, permanent and homogeneous,” and to be able to position within it different bodies. This facilitates anticipation, planning, and decision-making. Unlike the seen physical space, sound happens. It breaks in and fades. A world in which hearing predominates, continues Connor, “is much more dynamic,

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intermittent, complex and impermanent.”40 Without sight, space is only implicated, orientation difficult, prediction and planning almost impossible. Without a continuous, constant picture of space, and bodies moving through it, people are reduced to a reactive mode of operation. They listen carefully, waiting for a cue that would ease orientation. Silence therefore can be a source of anxiety, as can sounds whose sources cannot be verified. We ask “who is there?” or “where did it come from?” Our ears alert us, but we then try to identify the source of the sound – the source of the possible danger – with our eyes.41 Clearly, even thick darkness is not identical with blindness. Darkness is always “situated, partial and relational.”42 Moreover, perceiving involves not only sensorial input but also memory and imagination, which allows the brain to predict the outcome of our actions based on previous experience.43 There should be no doubt that people accustomed to dark environments in the past navigated them much more easily than we do.44 Yet, the deep darkness of the preindustrial night could not but undermine one’s sense of control, and therefore, one’s security.45 As night fell, then, people retreated into the safety of their homes, shutting themselves off from the world.

Locked In Unlike security in the streets, which was by and large the responsibility of communities and the authorities, securing the domicile was in the hands of individuals who used a variety of measures to keep burglars out. These measures turned the interfaces between the domicile and the outside world into supposedly sealed borders. The distinction between the street and the home was thus accentuated: Outside it was exceedingly dark and insecure; inside, it was safe enough to let your guard down and go to sleep. But then again, there is no such thing as absolute security. Writing about eighteenth-century London, Amanda Vickrey describes “a frenzy of fortification” between sunset and candle lighting, a time known as “shutting in.” Integral locks, padlocks, internal bolts, iron bars, and chains were used to secure openings. Watchdogs, alarm bells, and even servants sleeping across the corridor were all supposed to keep danger out and rouse the household should somebody try to break in.46

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As already noted, a somewhat similar “shutting in” took place in Ottoman cities around sunset, but information about Ottoman “domestic fortifications” is harder to come by. Some details can nevertheless be gleaned from the sources. On June 29, 1748, a Jerusalemite Jew by the name of Ḥaydar was found dead in his bed, face down, with blood coming out both his ears. A surgeon (jarrah) was called to _ examine the body but found no signs of violence.47 In the victim’s room, there were a basket, a pot, and a chest whose locks had been broken and contents removed. A servant testified that the deceased retired to his room following dinner, as usual, and locked the door. She went to sleep and noticed nothing unusual. In the morning, she found the door still locked and when she knocked, there was no answer. She asked a small child to enter through the west-facing window and open the door from the inside. The servant entered and found the northfacing window open. Under that window, she found the dead body. The other residents of the house were asked whether they had left the house door open at night and they replied that they had locked it in the evening and found it still locked in the morning.48 It appears that, because there were no signs of violence or forced entry, no further investigation was conducted. If locks can be taken as an index of insecurity,49 then the victim probably felt rather vulnerable, as he kept his valuables behind three locks (the house, room, and chest locks). By London standards, these measures may seem modest. Yet, Jerusalem was a poor town and people could not afford expensive security measures. Inhabitants locked their doors and kept their few valuables in wooden chests,50 which were often fashioned with locks. Rabbi Moshe Ben Yisraʾel Naftal¯ı from Prague, who moved to Jerusalem in 1621, advised future migrants to bring with them “iron locks to hang on the rooms’ doors and closets.”51 The security measures in Ḥaydar’s room, then, appear to have been typical. The servant who found Ḥaydar’s body noted in her testimony that the window that was left open, had no iron bar, implying that barred windows were not uncommon.52 However, bars too were sometimes not enough to keep unwanted visitors out. In mid-March 1749, the house of Rabbi Abraham ¯ was broken into in the middle of the night and money and valuables were reported stolen. An investigation was then conducted, and it was revealed that the bars on the window opposite the door had been broken by the burglars. The rabbi noted

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that house’s door (possibly the gate of the courtyard) and rooms were locked and that the thieves moved in from the roof and stole the money and valuables that were stored in wooden chests. The investigation was continued and a few days later, the thieves were caught and confessed in court. They said that they broke into the rabbi’s house, broke the window bar, and thus entered his room. They also directed the kadı‘s men to the place where they hid the stolen valuables.53 This description indicates that the rabbi’s barred window did not even face the street. The burglars first entered the house (probably the courtyard) and only then broke the window bars. All these cases explicitly mentioned the barriers that were supposed to secure the house. Ester, whose scarf was snatched from her head, similarly did not fail to mention that the door was closed.54 Cases of burglary from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries also describe domestic security measures, including bars and locks.55 These measures no doubt reflect security concerns but their mention in all records may have been related to definitions of theft in Islamic jurisprudence. Theft was defined as secretly taking goods or money, the minimum value of which was sanction by law, from a “secure” or “protected” (Tur. mahfuz) place, when the taker does not own the goods or money or claims to have a share in them. It was therefore important to prove that the house was “secured.”56 Cases from the Üsküdar court in Istanbul drive this point home. For example, in early April 1747, a certain Amine bint İbrahim of the Durbalı neighborhood in Üsküdar appeared in court and accused her neighbor that in the previous night, he “secretly” (hafiyyeten) climbed the wall between his house and hers around the time of the night prayer, in order to steal from her secured (mahfuzan) property. He then ran away to the Kassam Bustani neighborhood and stashed the stolen goods there. Security officials (bahçıvanlar) got word of this and caught him the next day.57 In short, gates, doors, bars, and locks were important but were not always enough to guarantee security and peace of mind. In fact, even walls could not be trusted entirely. Whereas in Jerusalem, houses were built of stone, houses in Istanbul – and in many other parts of the empire – were built of wood. Sultanic law specifically referred not only to the possibility of gaining access through breaking locks, but also by drilling holes in the wall or roof.58 This was indeed a rather common way of breaking into houses throughout the period under discussion

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and beyond.59 One’s home could hardly be considered a fortress or a shelter from nighttime threats. Women were particularly vulnerable, even when in their homes. Court records from both Jerusalem and Istanbul include quite a few cases of verbal and physical assaults against women, and accusations of forced entries for the purpose of sexual assault.60 For example, on January 27, 1749, a Jerusalemite Christian woman named Jawhariyya brought charges against a fellow Christian, Salman ¯ bin Shali ¯ h. The two _ lived in different apartments in the same house. One night, five months prior to the complaint, the man entered her home “in the middle of the night” as she was sleeping and forced “illicit sexual intercourse” (zana¯ biha) ¯ on her, which resulted in her becoming pregnant. The man denied the allegation and the plaintiff failed to provide evidence. The kadı ordered the imprisonment of the man until the neighbors could be questioned, but when they all testified that he was an upright person that had never been involved in any such acts, the kadı ordered his release from custody and notified the woman that, since she failed to provide legal evidence, she would be punished (for filing a false complaint) after she gave birth.61 Less than a week later, Jawhariyya was found dead in her apartment. The body was examined by three Christian midwives (day ¯ at) ¯ who found no signs of violence. They established that the woman had died of bleeding, the reason for which remains unclear.62 Was it the result of a failed abortion? We will never know. All we do know for certain is that Jawhariyya lived alone, that she was pregnant, and that she accused Salman ¯ of illicit sex, implying it was forced upon her. Just like in the case of Ester, whose scarf has been snatched from her while she was asleep, the night setting in Jawhariyya’s narrative explained how the accused could approach her without her resisting it, and presented her as a victim, rather than as an active party. Like Ester, she was attacked while asleep, that is, at the time she was most vulnerable. Exactly because darkness crippled community and state surveillance, it threatened those who depended most on these mechanisms for personal security. Sleeping alone could be dangerous. For some women, the greatest threat lay inside. At least according to contemporary studies, much domestic violence takes place at night.63 This is hardly surprising given that women at this time are effectively locked in with their partners. A few cases may suffice to suggest that things were not much different in the past. For example, on September

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1, 1767, a Christian woman from the Yenimahalle neighborhood appeared in court to press charges against her husband. She claimed that five days earlier, after sunset (or the evening prayer), he hit her with a big stick bruising her underneath her left eye and elsewhere on her body. The husband confessed and the kadı ruled he was to be imprisoned, pending approval by the Imperial Council.64 For the wife of Hasan, too, the night was a time of fear. Hasan was a soldier in the guard of the Imperial Council, and according to a complaint filed by neighbors in the summer of 1790, he would “always” (daiman) return home drunk and hit his wife, accusing her of seeing other men.65 This horrific routine was embedded in the nocturnal: first, heavy drinking most often took place at night;66 second, as noted above, at night women were limited to the domicile. In other words, although the poor woman knew how the evening would end, she simply could not escape it. She was trapped at home with her abuser. The night for her was not a time of relief and repose but quite the opposite. It was the time when her vulnerability was felt most acutely. In this case, at least, the abuse was stopped. Following the neighbors’ complaint, Hasan was brought to court and exiled to Bursa, leaving his wife physically safer, but economically weaker, a woman without a breadwinner.67

FIRE! Violence, within or without, was not the only danger, however. The most horrendous sound one could possibly wake up to in Istanbul at night was the cry “fire!” (yangın var!). While burglaries were ultimately localized events, conflagrations could potentially ruin the entire city. It appears that fires were much less of a problem in the major urban centers of the Arab provinces, probably because they were built predominantly of stone and clay. In Jerusalem, open fires used for lighting, heating, and cooking surely caused conflagrations from time to time but the damage caused by them seems to have been limited.68 Istanbul, by contrast, suffered from conflagrations often, and with devastating results. Contemporaries and modern historians blame the frequent conflagrations on the timber of which almost all buildings in the city were built, and the strong winds (poyraz), especially during the summer, that fanned the flames and spread them quickly throughout the city. The dense urban landscape and the lack of efficient firefighting

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forces facilitated the spread of fire.69 Some fires nearly wiped out the entire city. The Great Fire of 1660, for example, destroyed about twothirds of the houses, causing the death of up to 40,000 people. Over the course of the eighteenth century, there were at least seven major fires, each lasting between one to three days, together destroying hundreds of thousands of houses. The Sublime Porte, the residence of the grand vizier and center of government, burned down entirely six times from the mid-eighteenth century to the early twentieth century.70 Nobody, powerful or poor, well-connected or marginal, was spared the danger of fire.71 Several nineteenth-century travelers noted that there were fires “every night.”72 They were probably exaggerating, but fires were indeed more likely to happen at night. In his encyclopedic work on Istanbul, Osman Nuri Ergin (1883–1991) listed 109 conflagrations that occurred in the city between 1633 and 1834, based on Ottoman chroniclers. Out of the 88 fires for which the time of the day was recorded, I counted 60 (68.1 percent) that started at night, and only 28 (31.9 percent) that started during daytime.73 Osman Nuri notes that many more fires went unrecorded, but at least based on the substantial list he provides, conflagrations were more than twice as likely to happen at night as during the day. Nocturnal conflagrations represented such clear and present danger that according to the Ottoman intellectual and statesman Mehmed Tahir Münif Paşa (1830–1910), some people slept with their clothes on, ready to run outside at any moment.74 Many fires were started by arsonists, often affiliated with the janissaries.75 But there were more prosaic reasons for the prevalence of fires at night, which were similar to the ones discussed throughout this chapter: darkness and the lapse of attention due to sleep. In order to see in the dark, people relied on artificial illumination, which before electricity was produced solely by combustion. Light was inextricable from fire76 and the latter’s blessings were therefore inseparable from its curse. With the household and neighbors sound asleep, a candle that had not been properly extinguished, or a blanket that accidentally fell into the heath could gain momentum before anybody noticed it. Sleep, again, could be dangerous. When the cry “fire” was heard, then, no one could stay in bed. The Prussian diplomat Friedrich Tietz (1803–1879), who stayed in Istanbul in 1833 described these terrifying moments: “I had sunk into slumber,

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when these gentry [the guards] aroused me with the most terrific cry (Iangin war! [sic.]) Fire, fire!” He rushed to the window and saw scores of people moving through the streets. A fire had broken out in Fener, on the other side of the Golden Horn.77 The eighteenth-century chronicler Küçük Çelebizade recorded in his work numerous conflagrations that broke out at night in the 1720s, sometimes noting the terrifying experience of waking up to imminent danger: “the horrifying sound and the terrifying cry of the guards disoriented the people of the city whose heads were rested on the pillow of security and peace.” In another place, he notes that “the horrifying cry of the guards sent shivers through the body.”78 The abovementioned Münif Paşa also described the terror that gripped all inhabitants of the city when the guards cry “fire, fire! (yangın var)” at night. “Close and far, awake and asleep” the fear deprived everybody of slumber and repose.79 It should be noted that the palace tried to counter the risk of nocturnal conflagrations by improving oversight and firefighting in the capital, and yet conflagrations remained a major problem in Istanbul to the end of the Ottoman Empire.80 The common folk could do little against this threat other than put out their candles, pray, and sleep in their clothes.

When the Devils Spread Burglaries and conflagrations were not the only dangers that threatened people in their homes. It was commonly believed that a whole world of supernatural beings came to life at nighttime and dispersed with the cock’s crow or the morning call for prayer.81 For example, some local traditions warned about a supposedly female spirit called albast (or alkarısı) that would appear at night to harass women who had recently given birth, risking both the mother and the newborn child. It would also take horses from stables, ride them all night long and return them, all sweaty, just before dawn.82 Greek folk traditions tell about spirits or goblins known as kara koncoloz (from the Greek καλικάντζαρος), who would appear in the 12 nights between Christmas and Epiphany to haunt humans.83 In the Black Sea region, these same beings were believed to appear at night at the height of winter. Imitating the voice of a close friend or relative, the spirit would lead people in their sleep out into the cold, causing their death. These beliefs obviously mark the night as a dangerous time, but they are more specific than that. They reflect something of the insecurity generated by

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the inability to see what was going on outside, the fear of voices whose origin cannot be verified, and the utter vulnerability of sleep. Just as people protected themselves against corporeal dangers, relying on gates, doors, locks, and bars, so did they cope with more elusive threats applying a wide range of tools and measures, from special prayers to protecting objects. These measures could amount to complex ensembles, “bedtime rituals” of sorts.84 Sasha Handley elaborates on what she calls “sleep-piety” by which she means a variety of practices shaped by Christian religious beliefs that were intended to ready the minds, bodies, and souls of the believers to receive God’s protection and favor while asleep.85 Very similar concerns shaped bedtime routines in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire. Several traditions provided pious Muslims with protocols for a safe night’s sleep. In one prophetic tradition (had¯ıth), for example, the _ Prophet is cited as saying that [W]hen night falls, keep your children close to you, since the devils spread at that time; an hour after the night prayer, you may let go of them; and lock your door, and mention the name of Allah thereupon, and put out your light, and mention the name of Allah, and cover the water skin, and mention the name of Allah, and cover your food containers, and mention the name of Allah, lest they remain exposed to something.86

Another tradition prescribed a different sequence: When one of you goes to bed, let him clean his bed with the inside of his robe and call the name of Allah, since he does not know what he had left behind him [in bed]. When he wants to lie down, let him lie on his right side and say: Oh God, thou of many praises, my Lord, in thine hands I entrust my body, and to thou [is the power to] raise it, and if thou hold my soul, forgive it, and if thou let it go, guard [it] as you guard your pious servants.87

The prayer clearly conveys the fear aroused by the lapse of the senses. Unconscious and vulnerable, one can only turn to God to watch over until one returns to his or her senses. Jews recited a somewhat similar prayer known as the “blessing of He who brings sleep” (birkat ha-map¯ıl). One of its Early Modern, Sephardic variations reads: Praised are You our God, king of the world, who brings sleep to my eyes, slumber to my eyelids and light to [my] pupil, daughter of the eye. And may it be your wish, my God, that you shall put me to sleep in peace and

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raise me to life and peace and may I be governed by good inclination and not by bad inclination, and save me from blights and ailments, and may I not be startled by bad dreams, and bad thoughts, and may my bed be safe in front of you, and light up my eyes, lest I sleep [to] death.88

Prayers were important, but not enough. Muslims, Christians, and Jews all took additional precautions to safeguard their houses against supernatural dangers. In his studies about the Balkans in the Early Modern period, the Serbian Ethnologist Tamotir P. Vukanovic describes a whole range of such practices.89 For example, among Serbian populations on the southern Croatian frontier of the Habsburg Empire, it was believed that witches entered houses to hurt children at night after the lights had been put out. In order to protect the children, mothers would rub them with garlic and stick knives in their cradles. Some Serbs in Kosovo, under Ottoman rule, believed that witches and evil spirits lurked in the dark on particular nights, waiting to attack newborns and their mothers. On these nights, mothers and babies would not be left alone and a light would be kept burning. During the first 40 days after delivery, the new mother was forbidden from going outside after dark. In Herzegovina, in order to keep witches away, locals would engage in a complex ritual before going to bed, which included eating garlic, feeding the fire with thorny branches, and bolting the door, at which time the oldest women in the household would chant a special charm three times. Similar beliefs were common in Anatolia and among the Jews of Istanbul, but the measures used to safeguard the mothers and babies were different.90 In the eastern Black Sea regions, beetroot was used to secure the house from the kara koncoloz spirits.91 Thus, as sleeping time drew near, people outsourced the security work done by the senses, assigning it to a variety of measures, from locks to garlic. Yet, while insecurity at night was more or less universal, the ability to cope with it was differential. Not everybody could retreat back behind walls; not everyone could relax even in his or her own home; not everybody could afford to keep a light on. These conditions could have an effect on the length, nature, and even the quality of sleep.

Bedtime In a society that was based, at least officially, on strict hierarchies of religion, gender, age, and social class, sleep may appear at first sight to

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be the only common denominator, the one natural constant in a world of socially determined variables. But it was not. The only “natural” thing about sleep was the biological need for it. Everything else, from sleeping time to sleeping place, from sleeping arrangements to the quality of sleep was dependent upon one’s social position and material circumstances. As several studies have shown, even dreams (and certainly their interpretation) are to a large extent socially constructed.92 We should note that some people in Ottoman cities worked nights and went partying.93 But as already noted above, the vast majority of people retreated indoors following the night prayer, if not earlier. Since candles were expensive, took much maintenance, and gave little light (see Chapter 5), most houses would have been very dark. Given that not much can be done without light, and that darkness induces sleep,94 it is very likely that most people turned in after the night prayer. This rhythm was believed to have been enjoined by the Prophet himself. According to one tradition, that has many versions, the Prophet disliked sleeping before the night prayer and staying up after it.95 In other words, “early to bed,” was not only borne out of material limitation; it was a socioreligious ideal. Sultans and their immediate social circle did not necessarily adhere to this ideal and often turned in long after the night prayer. Ahmed III (1703–1730) reportedly left the evening parties organized for him by some of his high officials between three to five hours after sunset.96 By contrast, Sultan Mustafa III was not much of a night reveler. Out of more than 2,200 days recorded in a special log that followed his schedule (ruzname), only a handful of entries mention nighttime leisure activities. Daytime leisure activities, by contrast, are much more frequently recorded. When he did stay around for after-dark entertainment, he retired three-and-a-half to four hours after sunset.97 Sultan Abdülhamid I (1774–1789) enjoyed evening entertainment until around three to four hours after sunset.98 In the daily journal kept by the secretary of Sultan Selim III (r. 1789–1807), which covers most of the 1790s, the sultan’s evening entertainments are meticulously recorded. In 33 entries, the hour the sultan turned in is noted. Most typically, the sultan got tired between three to four hours after sunset (25 entries). The longest he stayed was five hours after sunset (four entries).99 Staying up late, and certainly nocturnal entertainment, depended first and foremost on access to light. Recent studies have shown that

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light is among the most effective deterrents of sleep. Sleep scientist Charles Czeisler has even described light as a “drug” that affects our sleep.100 The palace elite suffered no shortage of light and could therefore prolong their merrymaking for as long as they wished.101 Just as important, they did not have to open a workshop before dawn, and nobody would scold them for missing the morning prayer in the neighborhood mosque. In other words, the palace elite lived by a different rhythm from the commoners. A similar gap between elite and commoners’ sleeping time was demonstrated for Europe.102 However, in Europe, according to Craig Koslofsky, court societies led a process he calls “nocturnalization,” that is, an “increase in scope and legitimacy of everyday nocturnal activity.”103 This thrust into the dark hours is much less significant in the Ottoman Empire during the period covered in this study. As shown above, Sultan Selim III in the late eighteenth century would still go to bed no later than five hours after sunset, and usually earlier, just like his grandfather, Sultan Ahmed III, did some 70 years earlier. Translated into mean time hours, Ottoman sultans retired around 1 a.m., at the latest. References to elite drinking parties that went on until dawn crop up, especially in poetry, but are rarely corroborated by other sources.104 In contemporary England, by comparison, genteel nighttime entertainment could often last until 4 or 5 a.m.105 Nocturnal leisure was widespread in Istanbul (but not in Jerusalem), and yet it was semi-covert and considered dubious, certainly not legitimate.106 As a whole, cities in the Ottoman Empire maintained their morning- to night-prayer rhythm deep into the nineteenth century. Writing in the mid-1840s, Charles White describes the “daily mode of life of the respectable inhabitants of Stambol” and noted that they woke up at dawn for the morning prayer, and typically retired at around 9 a.m. By 10 a.m., everybody is already asleep. Locals recorded similar patterns down to the early twentieth century.107 Many walled cities continued to shut their gates at sunset until the mid-nineteenth century, and beyond. Nocturnal realities began to change more dramatically only with the introduction of street lighting in the second half of the nineteenth century.108 While European elites stretched their activity deeper and deeper into the physical night, common families in Europe went to sleep more or less at the same time as their Ottoman counterparts. Yet, there was a significant difference. According to historian Roger Ekrich’s hugely

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influential studies, in preindustrial Europe, sleep was broken into two intervals that were known in most European languages as “first sleep” and “second sleep.” In preindustrial Europe, people typically woke up around midnight and spent the next hour or two in a kind of quiet wakefulness, performing chores, reading, praying, conversing, having sex, or meditating. They then went back to sleep for another few hours, until dawn.109 However, Ekirch, and later Sasha Handley, note that sleeping patterns were affected by various additional factors and changed over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.110 Unlike Europe, the sources examined for this work do not refer to segmented sleep. Narrative sources, court records, palace documents, and medical manuscripts which occasionally touch upon slumber, never once mention a “first” and “second” sleep. Medical treatises, for example, sometimes refer to the desired length of sleep but fail to mention a “segmented” pattern. In keeping with the emphasis on balance in the humoral tradition, one author recommended moderate sleep, which he defines as eight to ten hours.111 This advice matches recommendations about sleeping lengths in Early Modern political and moralistic treatises. Such texts typically advise sultans and grand viziers to divide their day into three intervals of eight hours each: one for state affairs, one for leisure, and one for sleep.112 The Chief Imperial Treasurer, Sarı Mehmed Paşa (d. 1717), included in his advice book similar recommendations, tying them to personal health and the good of the state, and supported his argument with a prophetic tradition.113 Like their European colleagues,114 Ottoman physicians cautioned against sleeping more or less than the recommended length. They warned that oversleeping makes the body too moist and weakens the mental capacity. Sleeping less than prescribed amounts damages digestion, upsets the temper, and may very well lead to mental complications. If one cannot sleep enough at night, one should complete the recommended duration during the day.115 This advice merely gave medical legitimation for the ancient tradition of afternoon slumber, which seems to have been common, in the palace and among the people.116 The more popular “Prophetic medicine” (tibb-i nebevi), which relied on health-related traditions ascribed to Muhammad, similarly enjoined 117 the afternoon nap (Ar. qaylula). Ottoman society can certainly be ¯ counted among the “siesta cultures.”118 Yet, the main interval of sleep

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was to remain at night. The author of The Science of Medicine (İlm-i Tıbb) warns that sleeping too much during the day might corrupt one’s color and damage the spleen, weaken her or his mental strength, and “stupefy the mind.”119 Again, no mention is made of segmented sleep. The fact that an afternoon slumber was common in parts of the Ottoman Empire can hardly explain the absence of segmented sleep. According to Ekirch, biphasic snooze was common also in “siesta countries” such as Italy and Spain.120 It appears that night sleep in the Ottoman world was only interrupted for devotional purposes, as in the case of the Jewish tiqun ¯ hatsot and other nocturnal rituals.121 Yet, _ it is not at all clear how prevalent these practices were. Moreover, some of these rituals were associated with particular holidays or times of the year. In short, sleeping timings changed over the years, between communities, religious confessions, and around the year. As noted above, such diversity was typical of contemporary Europe as well. Still, the difference between the monophasic pattern that seems to have been common in the Ottoman Empire and the biphasic patter that was prevalent in Europe remains unexplained, at least until further evidence comes to light.

Who Slept Where and by Whom? If one’s bedtime is dependent upon social norms and status, so do his or her bed place and bedfellows. Sociologists and anthropologists have shown that determining “who sleeps by whom” in a family household, but also in places where co-sleeping is not based on a familial structure, is a symbolic action that reflects and reaffirms proximity as well as hierarchies. Anthropological and historical research has shown that co-sleeping and bed-sharing was very common (and still is in some societies) and that the idea of private sleeping is relatively new.122 Sleeping together is strongly associated with security, intimacy, warmth, and trust and should therefore be counted among the measures taken to cope with the dangers and fears of darkness. Those who are forced to sleep alone, or with strangers, are considered – and often consider themselves – outsiders.123 Enjoying a secure, peaceful sleep begins with having a place to sleep. Sleeping outside leaves one exposed to nuisances and dangers discussed above, from physical attacks to noise, and most notably, to the weather. Sleeping outdoors in winter could quite simply end in death.

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Therefore, in Istanbul people with no home sought the heat and shelter of furnace rooms in the many public baths scattered throughout the city. They were known, cynically, as “gentlemen of the furnace” (sing. külhanbeyi).124 The French diplomat, scientist, and writer François Pouqueville (1770–1838), who traveled extensively in the Ottoman Empire, wrote that the public baths in winter were “the refuge of those unfortunate wretches who have no home,” including “rogues, drunkards or beggars.”125 According to the early twentieth-century Ottoman folklorist Abdülaziz bey (1850–1918), the külhanbeyis were either orphans or children who ran away or were driven away from their homes. Bathhouse operators would let these children pass the winters in the furnace room and they, in return, worked in the bathhouse. Some made a living by taking all kinds of petty menial jobs and sometimes stealing and pickpocketing.126 Many also worked in the bathhouse during the day and prostituted themselves as ‘bedfellows’ (sing. döşek yoldaşı) to janissaries during the nights. They were expected to make themselves available for up to three sexual acts. Poor, floating, and defenseless, these boys could hope to get in return both pay and protection.127 The külhanbeyis were among the most marginal populations of the city but even among them there was a clear “sleeping hierarchy”: the longer one stayed in the bathhouse, the closer he would be to the furnace, enjoying the most of its warmth. However, when one of the boys became sick it was common to let him move closer to the furnace until he got well. Somewhat similar arrangements were observed in societies where co-sleeping is common still today.128 When the weather got warmer, the külhanbeyis would leave the furnace rooms and find places to sleep outside, usually in neighborhoods along the seashore.129 Outdoors, it would be the group that provided at least the minimal level of security needed for one to close his eyes and doze off.130 Adults with no permanent residence sometimes slept in rudimentary sheds built in gardens, or in shops and coffeehouses.131 Others rented rooms in khans and inns known as “bachelors‘ rooms” (bekar odaları). These itinerants, whose numbers rose constantly over the period covered here, were often associated with nocturnal disturbances. Students of religious colleges (Tur. sing. medrese) co-slept in rooms allocated to them in the medrese, sometimes sharing beds as well.132 In short, while not sleeping outside, bachelors, medrese students, and apprentices enjoyed less than ideal sleeping conditions.

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Then there were those who slept in houses other than their own, like domestic slaves and servants, which effectively deprived them of the relief of “after work” hours, when they could be free from the authority of owners or employers. The constant subjugation, day and night, must have been hard at times. The anonymous author of Risale-i Garibe, probably written in the early eighteen century, criticizes those who maltreated their slaves, and the “little wives (kadıncıklar)” who made their slaves “work all day and all night,” and when they fell asleep poked them with a needle.133 Even if we do not take this critique at face value, it certainly does underline the fact that for domestic servants the night did not necessarily bring repose. It may have been  these kinds of pressures that got to a servant named ʿAʾishe who resided and worked in the house of her masters in Jerusalem. On the  night of May 10, 1750, ʿAʾishe had a fight with her mistress, and was consequently threatened she would be punished in the morning. The servant was so afraid she threw herself out of the window. If this was a suicide attempt, it failed. The poor slave only injured her leg badly.134 A Jamaican proverb known to the plantation slaves of the eighteenth century said that “sleep has no master.”135 Whether or not this was true on the plantation is not for me to decide. In the Ottoman Empire, however, the sleep of slaves and domestic servants certainly had a master. They could not escape servitude even in their beds. In the houses of the great, and certainly, in the imperial palace, they were expected to sleep in proximity to their masters, so as to be available to them should the need arise.136 They were close alright, but always separated. Charles White described in his oft-cited book, elite houses in which slaves and servants shared rooms below the upper stories, which were occupied by the masters. He noted that “the staircase is frequently divided by a door, which keeps the upper stories warm, and separates menials from masters at night.”137 It is important to note here both the proximity and the separation, particularly at night. It is at night that the door closed, that the border between the upstairs and the downstairs was sealed. Upstairs there was solitary sleep and warmth. Downstairs it was co-sleeping in the cold. The proximity and availability of Ottoman underlings to their master even at night was culturally constructed as a noble duty, a test of their devotion to their patron. Court poetry (divan şiiri) was of paramount importance here. Poetry was considered the highest form of literary expression deep into the nineteenth century and was central

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in the socialization and social life of the office-holding elite.138 Dependent as it was on patronage, Ottoman elite poetry was never far from the world of power. Like all other members of the Ottoman serving elite, poets competed with each other over the protection and support of powerful patrons and served them by signing their praise and defaming their rivals. Being thus embedded in patrimonial power structures, Ottoman court poetry reflected the hierarchal sleeping patterns that developed in this social context. Moreover, the poetry imbued these practices with additional layers of meaning and thus served to reaffirm them, at least in the eyes of the masters. It has been demonstrated that in the court poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, servitude and dominance were conceptualized in terms of love and affection. Courting patterns and amorous relationships, in turn, were modeled after patronage relations.139 In classical Ottoman poetry, the poet, always assuming the role of a servant or slave, strives tirelessly and hopelessly to win the heart of God, patron, and beloved who are all presented as powerful masters. Indefinitely waiting for one’s master and patiently waiting on one’s master conveyed the servitude of the underling/lover, but also his devotion to his master/beloved.140 Sleeping on the doorstep of the beloved/lord can be seen as a variation on the theme of devotion. If sleeping by or with somebody is often considered to be the ultimate expression of affection through physical contact (or what some anthropologists call “skinship”), well, the lover never achieves it. The lover/servant is always a door away. Intimacy is desired, never achieved. He remains on the outside, barred from reaching his beloved/patron. The distance that remains between lover and beloved is also conveyed through the conditions and quality of sleep on either side of the door. To sleep in the dirt on the beloved’s doorstep is an act of self-humiliation that at the same time demonstrates utter loyalty. The late sixteenth-century poet Emani ended a poem he devoted to a beloved named Kaya (lit. rock), with the following couplet: “His head spinning, your stone threshold is enough for Emani/As mattress and pillow in the dust at your door, my dear little Kaya.”141 Around a century later Çelebizade Abdullah Mahir (1643–1709), uses almost the same words: “For me, the beloved’s doorstep is enough for mattress and pillow.” 142 These poetic scripts were at times acted out in real life, or at least recounted to have been so. In his biographical dictionary,

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Mirza-zade Mehmed Emin Salim (d. 1743) tells of the late seventeenthcentury poet Dervish Fasih who fell madly in love with a young wine server (saki) in one of the taverns in Galata. The poet is described waiting and waiting in the tavern for his beloved to return until he cannot take the wait any longer. In the middle of the night, he goes to the beloved’s house and sleeps on his doorstep. “And he accepted to rest his head on the stone threshold, rubbing his face in dirt, imagining he was his [lover’s] guest that night, until morning comes.”143 After an unpleasant encounter with two tougher fans of the boy, which nearly cost Fasih his life, he was put on a boat and sent back across the Golden Horn.144 In short, the practice of sleeping in close proximity to one’s master, but always separated from him, was supported and perpetuated through cultural scripts. We can assume that for the servants themselves, however, sleeping on their masters’ doorstep and being awoken to serve was much less romantic than in the literature. We have seen that sleep did not lie outside the matrix of power relations in eighteenth-century Ottoman society. Sleeping time and length, its location and quality were all affected by one’s social position. This was true even within one and the same household, which, at least among elites, often included free and enslaved individuals. Even among free members of the family, sleeping conditions were not equal. Gender and age-based hierarchies, it turns out, never really sleep. Considered subservient to men, women were at the very least expected to “support” their men at night, as during the day. Rabbi Eliʿezer Pappo (1786–1827), the head of the Jewish community in Silistre, then ¯ in the Ottoman Empire, emphasized in his influential Pele Yoʿets (Wondrous Counselor) that “in Judaism,” a woman should do everything she can to assist her husband. “She should get up early in the night, make the fire and prepare coffee, and then wake up her husband so that he may say tiqun ¯ hatsot [a nocturnal sermon].”145 Women _ were supposed to ensure the sleep of their husbands, put the children to sleep and then back to sleep if they woke up crying.146 The situation was much worse for abused women. Contemporary studies have shown that women in abusive relationships report sleep deprivation and sleep disorders at much higher rates than other women. Many devise strategies that would allow them to sleep in relative security. For example, they might try to sleep only when the partner is absent.147 While we cannot reconstruct such strategies based on the sources at hand, it seems plausible that abused women in the

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eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire might have also suffered from similar problems, and used similar methods to cope with them.

The Materials of a Good Night’s Sleep Sleep inequalities were not only affected by social hierarchies. They were also embedded in materiality (which was often just another manifestation of social and economic power). Ekirch has already questioned common ideas about the supposedly peaceful and worry-free sleep in preindustrial societies, showing that Europeans in the Early Modern period suffered from a wide range of sleep disturbances, including fleas, lice, cold, noise, stench, and uncomfortable sleeping surfaces (not to mention worries that often kept them from sleeping). While laborers might have looked forward to sleep more than those up the social ladder, they often suffered from much poorer sleeping conditions.148 Handley has shown that Early Modern English households invested significant sums in “sleeping environments,” and increasingly, in specialized bedchambers equipped with bedsteads and a wide range of other objects supposed to ensure healthy and comfortable sleep.149 In the Ottoman Empire, by comparison, sleep remained materially simpler, and yet there was significant variability in the quality of sleeping environments. Generally, Muslim houses in both Istanbul and Jerusalem did not have beds. In fact, they had very little furniture. Writing about domestic spaces in seventeenth-century Jerusalem, Dror Ze’evi notes that in order to maintain the strict norms of gender segregation, Muslim houses generally sought to maintain a separation between an entertaining space and a private space (Tur. selamlık and haremlik, respectively). Most houses were simply too small to accommodate two separate sections, and therefore, the same spaces were used for multiple purposes (eating, entertaining, and sleeping). “Hard” metal or wood furniture would hinder this flexibility, and therefore, most houses included only “light” and movable furniture.150 After dinner, then, mattresses, that were stocked all day long in a special niche known as yuk, would be spread on the floor, turning the room from an eating into a sleeping space.151 “Bachelor rooms” too were empty of furniture and at night, the occupants would place mattresses on the floor. The pages of the imperial palace too slept on mattresses on the floor.152

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It was common to sleep on two mattresses (minder, döşek), the lower one being a course sack filled with straw and the upper one filled with cotton, wool, or hair. A sheet was sewed to the upper mattress and removed only for cleaning. The head was commonly supported by a pillow. According to Charles White, in the early 1840s, a local housewife could buy a complete “bed” of “excellent” quality (including mattresses, blankets, and pillows) for less than a hundred piasters.153 Indeed, probate inventories from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries show that these items were found in most houses. Around 90 percent of the inventories included blankets; between 73 percent and 91 percent included mattresses and sheets, the higher percentages generally being from the nineteenthcentury inventories.154 While most people could afford beddings, the quality and cost of these items varied hugely. On the upper end, one could find beddings of superb fabrics interwoven with silk, or stripes of gold and silver, and even pearls. During summer, nets were suspended over the beds to keep mosquitos away.155 While satin pillows and mother-of-pearl inlays did not necessarily improve sleep,156 the quiet of solitary spaces, the better-quality bedding, and the mosquito nets probably did. On the lower end of the social spectrum, the author of the Risale-i Garibe describes “laying” under the canopy of a mosque, exposed to the “evil” of snakes, centipedes, scorpions, lice, fleas, insects, and mosquitos.157 Charles Frankland, who traveled through the Ottoman Empire in the late 1820s, recounts that fleas, mosquitos, locusts, and other insects cost him many nights’ sleep. Locals too lost sleep (and blood) to such pests. At least in Greater Syria, households would gather in front of the oven before turning in and try to shake fleas off their sleeping clothes into the fire.158 The Damascene Sufi-traveler, ʿAbd al-Ghan¯ı bin ʾIsmaʾʿ¯ıl al-Nablus¯ ı ¯ (1641–1731), who journeyed around Greater Syria in the late seventeenth century, even dedicated poems to fleas that attacked him and his companions “like wolves.” He describes a night in one of the villages in northern Palestine and cites an earlier poet who wrote: “What we ate from the food we were served/ their fleas ate [back] from us.” That “freezing night of fleas” was like “poetry barren of passion.” In his narration of “a long night” in Majdal ʿAsqelan ¯ (on the southern coastal plain of Palestine), he included his own poem, dedicated to a flea that caused him and his friends to lose “much of our usual weight.”159

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Nablus¯ ı’s descriptions also bring up the effect of temperature on the ¯ quality of sleep, which has already come up above, in different contexts. Here again, seemingly universal conditions had a very differential effect on people’s sleep, depending on their social class, gender, and other variables. For example, around Jerusalem, it was common to sleep on rooftops to escape the heat that had accumulated inside the house during the day.160 However, it is doubtful if common notions of women’s chastity allowed women too to enjoy the relative coolness of the roof. In the winter, heating involved considerable expense and many simply could not afford this amenity.161 A good night’s sleep, then, depended also on geographical and ecological conditions, or one’s ability to seclude one’s self from disturbances that could arise from these conditions.

Conclusion As darkness descended on the Early Modern city and vision was gradually impaired, people retreated into the security of their homes. Now, it was mostly sound that brought the outside world in. The nearinvisibility of this world increased the likelihood of multiple dangers, ranging from burglaries to fires. But beyond such concrete threats, darkness deprived people of their vision, their most important means of orientation, and therefore, of their sense of control. Getting some rest under these conditions depended to a large extent on seclusion; seclusion from cold, disturbances, supernatural dangers, and physical harm that lurked in the dark. Yet, seclusion was a privilege not everybody enjoyed, certainly not to the same degree. Social status further affected the duration, location, and quality of sleep. Even within one and the same household, it was shown that some people’s sleep was more important than others’. It has been suggested that many of the fears people experienced before turning in were related to the defenselessness of sleep.162 That is no doubt true, and yet, it should be noted that afternoon sleep, common throughout the Ottoman world, did not arouse similar fears, nor generate a need for similar bedtime rituals. In other words, the fear was not wholly connected to the receded consciousness and the defenselessness of sleep (which was similar in afternoon sleep anyway), but rather its combination with the fears of darkness.

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Discussion in this chapter focused on individuals and households, but the same physical and biological conditions that were typical of the night (mainly darkness and human propensity to sleep in the dark), also challenged urban mechanisms of public order, and at the same time made them even more important than during the day.

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2

Order Invisible

This chapter leaves the relative safety of the home and takes the discussion outside. One contemporary observer noted the measures applied to secure the dark streets, but also their limitations. “In every street . . ., and every market, and every mosque gate and every tavern door you see a policing post (quluk, Tur. kolluk) of between ten and ¯ twenty men.” And yet, the streets were full of “roaches” and “adders” and there was no choice but to kill dozens of them every night. Most of them were rounded up and sent to one of the garrisons, where they would be put to work “day and night.” But, no matter how strictly order was imposed, Istanbul was a city that was simply “impossible to 1 police (Istanbul ˙ qabil).” ¯ ¯ zabtha¯ gayr _ The writer is Ḥanna¯ al-Tab¯ıb (c. 1702–1775), a Maronite physician _ from Aleppo who arrived at Istanbul in the mid-1760s. He was apparently the protégé of the statesman and commander Köprülü Abdullah Paşa (1684–1735) and accompanied him to the battlefields of the east. According to his travelogue, Ḥanna¯ al-Tab¯ıb came to Istanbul by order _ of the grand vizier, to treat the chief mufti (şeyhülislam).2 While a visitor in the capital, he was certainly no stranger to the corridors of power and the perceptions of order that prevailed in them. The numbers of guards and dead bodies cited by the physician seem inflated but his justification for the use of force echoes views typical of the elite at the time. The threat to public order, which intensified at night, warranted drastic means. The main argument I make in this chapter is that neighborhood communities, guilds, and religious and state authorities together created a powerful discourse that stigmatized the night, which worked to limit potentially invisible, incontrollable activity. This discourse was complemented by various practices that were intended to impose visibility on those who, nevertheless, went out. Yet, despite all these measures, the night remained a challenge to urban order and just like Ḥanna¯ al-Tab¯ıb explained, rulers sometimes felt they had “no choice” _ 46 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 04 Aug 2021 at 06:37:27, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108933131.005

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but to apply harsh punitive measures in order to project fear. These demonstrations of formal violence were meant to somewhat compensate for the authorities’ actually rather precarious control over the dark city. Ottoman public order and morality drew much scholarly attention in the past decades.3 While most discussions are very sensitive to the geography of public order and its disturbances, their treatment of temporal dimensions is cruder. By and large, the scholarship is still night-blind. Some scholars do refer to nightly occurrences and even measures of nocturnal order but these are often lumped together with those of the day.4 There is still no systematic discussion of the radically different conditions and challenges the night posed to Ottoman order and authority in the Early Modern period. That is exactly the focus of this chapter: rather than summarizing an already robust scholarship about public order and social control, it demonstrates how the night mattered in these respects. I begin by illustrating how darkness undermined the “diurnal,” vision-based operation of the guild and the neighborhood – two crucial links in the network of urban order predicated on “eyes on the streets modality.” The discussion then proceeds to the means used by the palace to augment security and police Istanbul at night, when these eyes were far less effective. Finally, I show that, whether at the level of the neighborhood or that of official policing, enforcing the law and public morality at night ultimately relied on vision, which in turn relied on artificial illumination. In the absence of systematic lighting, the night was bound to remain on the very edge of state control, the temporal frontier of its power.5 Discussion relies, first and foremost, on sources that may be regarded “hegemonic,” from court records, through sultanic decrees, and on to court chronicles. While these texts provide a wealth of information about guild and neighborhood surveillance, patrols, and other measures of nocturnal order, they cannot be regarded as mere “windows” opening onto these measures; rather, they were themselves measures of order – actual and conceptual – at a time when it seemed most vulnerable.

Ocularcentrism in the Dark This chapter continues the examination of the relation between the night and the senses, but the focus now moves from the level of

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individuals and households to that of guilds, neighborhoods, and urban society as a whole. In addition to the more historically specific discussion, I hope to contribute to a much wider conversation around “ocularcentrism,” that is, the perceptual and conceptual privileging of vision over the other senses. For more than a century, scholars in various fields worked to demonstrate that the seemingly biological hierarchy of the senses is largely a construct which is supposedly typical of the West.6 Over the last decades, researchers have shown that the clear-cut distinction between the senses, as if they were walled off from one another, is in itself flawed. Following neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists, historians of the senses speak of an integrated sensorium in which the different senses play shifting roles, and that is heavily mediated by culture. It is this “cultural” component that makes the sensorium an object of historical analysis.7 Concurrently, nonvisual sensorial input has been shown to be crucial. For example, work in the now-established field of sound studies has done much to claim the lost honor of hearing and sensitize us to the auditory dimension of present and past societies.8 The night attracted very little attention, despite its obvious relevance to these discussions.9 The relation between darkness, light, and sight has been examined extensively in philosophy, art, and political discourse, much less so in historical works.10 This is probably not incidental. The critiques of the alleged ocularcentrism of modern western societies were penned in the age of industrialized lighting, that has driven darkness to the point of near extinction in urban settings.11 The thick darkness of premodern urban environments is unknown to us, but it is exactly this darkness that offers a good laboratory for testing claims about the supposedly constructed “bias” toward vision in western societies. The night was an interval of impaired visibility experienced on both the individual and societal level. The protocols devised to cope with this partial blindness indeed allocated greater importance to the aural. Yet, even when impaired, vision never lost its primacy. Just like in what regards personal security, when it got to establishing order and truth, people in the Early Modern night relied on light and sight.

Black Markets In eighteenth-century Ottoman cities, all aspects of the urban economy, from provisioning, through production and pricing, and on to

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retail commerce were regulated by guild-like associations known in Turkish as lonca, esnaf, hirfet, or taife. Commodities arriving from outside the city were brought to central markets and then allocated to producers and retailers based on fixed quotas under supervision. In the process, the government collected a number of taxes and customs. Finally, the government also set ceilings for profit rates according to the commodity in question. The system was supposed to achieve several goals. First, it allowed cost-effective tax collection and therefore served the state’s interest directly. Second, it streamlined the supply of products, supervised their quality, protected consumers against overcharging, and limited competition among guild members, which was thought to protect the interests of the “less efficient majority.”12 Like the neighborhood surveillance discussed below, I argue, guild surveillance was that of the day. The night offered the best opportunity to circumvent the system. Engaging in trade at night allowed not only selling to unauthorized parties for prices above (and sometimes below) the fixed price (narh), but also to avoid various local taxes that were collected at the central markets or at the city’s gates.13 Thus, as cities throughout the empire fell asleep, the black market would wake to life.14 Markets were closed every day between the afternoon and the evening prayers.15 City gates too closed around sunset, helping not only to keep out threats to public order but also to prevent illegal trade. In towns fully enclosed within walls such as Jerusalem, such closure was no doubt more effective. But in a city like Istanbul, only part of which was walled, and which was built along waterways almost impossible to police at night, smuggling was much easier. In late August 1726, some 50 individuals from the guild of market vendors (pazarcı) came to court and accused el-Hac Mustafa b. Ahmed of the guild of dry fruit of violating market laws.16 Their complaint reveals the connection between daylight, the collective gaze, and order, and the disordering potential of the night. In trying to extract these elements, however, we must take into consideration the argumentation strategies of plaintiffs and the recording protocols of the court. As several scholars have shown, the final entries in the court records were processed after the fact from more informal records, which involved some “narrative reconstruction” which flattened complex social realities and forced them into narrow legal definitions. It is in essence a work of translating what

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was a “legal performance” (in court) to begin with, into a highly formulaic language, leaving out many of the particulars of each case in the process.17 Moreover, can we really trust that the accusations were real? As Bogaç ˘ Ergene has demonstrated, collective appeals to court against “undesirable” individuals, required little in the way of evidence and were very likely to succeed in punishing or removing the defendants. Not only that, the brevity of the entries, their highly formulaic nature, and their silence about the context or circumstances that produced them cast doubt on the extent to which these records can teach us about historical reality.18 Yet, the fact that we cannot fully reconstruct the “reality” behind those records, does not mean we should treat them as complete literary constructs, entirely dissociated from the world outside the courtroom. The people coming to court were real; their complaints were at the very least deemed reasonable, even if they were ill-intentioned or entirely fabricated. In other words, the writing conventions, the formulas, and the discursive order to which all these cases were subjected reflected fundamental assumptions about the night, and its relation to the socio-political order. It was the court’s role to reaffirm this order, first in writing, then through enforcing these assumptions outside the court. “Order” (nizam) as it is reflected in such court records consists of several elements: it rests on groups and serves groups; it draws its legitimacy from the past, as it is claimed to have existed, and all facets of this old order are preset; all facets are supposedly open to peer and state supervision. This order is sanctioned by sultanic authority, which in turn rests on the religious authority represented in the kadı. Most important for this discussion, economic order as it is reflected and reaffirmed in the “legal performance” enacted and recorded in court is diurnal. First, regarding the collective nature of order. Cases of infringement were typically brought to court by a group that speaks on record in one voice. This particular record, like so many others, opens with a long list of names who came to court, “each one of them saying that” (her biri şöyle takrir-i kelam eylediler ki). This is followed by the complaint they made, brought in direct speech. In fact, the court scribe summarized, rather than quoted, imposing order on words that must have been much less organized as they were uttered in the courtroom.19 The group is thus given a clear, well-orchestrated voice in the record.

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If the opening of the record is about who “we” are, next comes what is legally “ours.” The plaintiffs describe the order of things, things as they once were (at least supposedly), which is also how they should remain. Disruption is temporary and to be rectified by state intervention. According to “our old order,” they say, grapes coming from different places outside the city are loaded in barrels onto boats and go “straight” in front of the vegetable retail market (sebzehane). In other words, the boats don’t make detours to sell grapes out-of-sight. In front of the retail market, the merchandize is divided “publicly” (alenen) among guild members, based on the fixed price, by the pazarbaş, (an official charged with buying goods for the palace), a representative of the janissaries, and senior members of the guild. The former two are presumably present in order to ensure that the palace and the corps get their share. The collective gaze of the guild, under the supervising eye of state officials, is supposed to make sure the allocation is done fairly, that all transactions are subject to the narh, and ultimately, that both the state and the people get their grapes at fair prices. Finally, the record notes that the plaintiffs hold an imperial decree approving this arrangement.20 In other words, not only is it a time-honored arrangement. It is backed by the sultan’s authority which serves to legitimize this “order” and turn it into a binding system. This order is by necessity of broad daylight. Peer and state supervision could not work otherwise. El-Hac Mustafa undermined each and every aspect of this order. Without the knowledge of the group, he procured grapes from Gemlik and at night, secretly (hafiyyeten) brought them to his shop and storehouse and sold them above narh prices to peddlers. Many contemporary sources connect the night with acting “secretly” (gizlice, hafi, hafiyyen, hafiyyeten).21 El-Hac Mustafa’s record clearly contrasts the secrecy with which he acted, with the publicity (alenen) of the legal guild procedure, a procedure that relied on the collective gaze of the guild. Legality and order, it may be argued, relied on light and sight. The vendors accused that by secretly selling grapes, Mustafa caused disorder (ihtilal) among them, harmed the people, and acted in violation of the imperial decree that sanctioned the “old order.” The record notes that the accused confessed and was warned to abide by the established order, which is described again, and not to act in violation of the decree.22 It is important to note the textual sequence here. Order is established; it is then undermined “secretly” at night, but the accused

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is exposed, brought to court, and upon his confession, order is restored and reaffirmed. The same can be said about other similar cases. For example, in midJune 1726, a large group of fresh fruit sellers (yaş yemiş tüccarı) appeared in court and complained that fruit is being smuggled into the city under the cover of night. Like in the case of the market vendors, the record begins with a description of the established order, brought in direct speech. The rationale of the procedure is very similar to the one described in the previous case: cherries, pears, grapes, and other fresh fruit were regularly bought from producers in villages according to the fixed price, loaded onto boats and brought to the city, where they were divided under the supervision of senior guild members and palace officials, which secures narh prices. Then follows a description of the violation of order. “Peddlers and swindlers,” with no relation to the guild, arrive at the villages with small boats and buy directly from producers above narh prices. They bring the fruit to the city during the night, stash it in “hidden places” and then sell them above the fixed price. The disruption of “our old order,” complained the guild members, violates the narh and causes great harm to the people. The traders requested a decree that would sanction the enforcement of the old order.23 Under the cover of darkness, and while community and guild surveillance capacities were at their lowest, it was simply much more difficult to eliminate illegal trade. But there is another possibility: that the government actually tolerated such trade, not least because it formed an additional network of supply at a time when the guild system failed to provision the constantly growing population.24 In Chapter 3, I suggest that the night allowed illegal activities to take place not necessarily because darkness hid them completely, but also because it made them easier to ignore. In other words, whereas infringements in broad daylight were a direct challenge to the established order, it was often comfortable for all parties to pretend nighttime violations never happened.25 It is possible that a similar approach guided the authorities in turning a blind eye to economic activity at night until they were compelled to act by appeals to court. If economic order came under threat at night, what about public order more generally? How did darkness affect the mechanisms that were supposed to ensure the security, tranquility, and morality of the people?

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A Collective Sensorium In Early Modern Ottoman cities, residents were held collectively responsible for upholding public order and morality in their neighborhoods. This collective responsibility encouraged people to keep their eyes on the street at all times. Outsiders would immediately draw attention, and often suspicion.26 Darkness impaired this collective oversight and exposed the resident to outside threats. Thankfully, the neighborhood sensorium was not comprised only of humans and did not rely on vision alone. The famous street dogs of Istanbul played a crucial role in community policing, especially at night. Compared to humans, dogs have immensely superior smelling and hearing abilities, as well as better night vision. Unlike most people, the dogs of Istanbul spent their nights outside, and were thus not only better equipped but also better placed to detect movements in the street. Writing about dogs in eighteenth-century Cairo, historian Alan Mikhail notes that they tended to bark at strangers that infringed on territories they considered their own.27 In Istanbul too, street dogs functioned as watchdogs, “aiding the sentries to keep watch.”28 Any unusual movement could raise a terrible cacophony of barking that would alert residents all around. One visitor to the city describes how he was awakened by “the yelping, howling, barking, growling, and snarling merged into one uniform and continuous even sound” that lasted for hours. He finally managed to fall asleep but was awakened again by the noise.29 Dogs may have been good as security guards; less so as morality guardians. Neighborhood communities, it should be noted, were charged not only with maintaining peace but also with upholding chastity among their members. The pressure applied on the individual to conform to the group’s norms was similarly predicated on the constant gaze of the community, which one prominent scholar termed “eye pressure” or “eye oppression” (göz baskısı).30 Any breach of the norms could be easily noted and swiftly reported around. The “neighborhood talk” could be destructive for one’s reputation. A trashed reputation, in turn, could have an impact on one’s marriage opportunities, business transactions, and even legal status. Constant surveillance, which is so often associated with the modern era, is in fact much older. Darkness obstructed this communal eye, which was a constant source of concern for moralists. Eliʿezer Papo (1785–1828), the chief ¯

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rabbi of Silistra (nowadays in Bulgaria), expresses this concern explicitly. In his extremely influential morality book Peleʿ Yoʿets (1824), Papo ¯ laments the moral condition of Jewish communities in the empire during his time, including the proliferation of prostitution, same-sex relations, and masturbation (prohibited by the Halacha): Therefore, in every city they must appoint guardians over the young boys, and the rabbi must watch over his pupils and the father over his sons shall be very vigilant, especially in the middle of night and dark, lest they commit evil, because this is a sore evil and great impurity, causing evil to himself and to the entire community.31

Papo’s words lucidly convey both the threat the night posed and the ¯ remedy: increased communal surveillance. This approach translated into community rules (taqanot) drafted by rabbis in different Ottoman cities. For example, regulations published in Jerusalem in 1749, prohibited unmarried young men (bahur ¯ ¯ım) from going outside after dark _ unaccompanied by an adult family member, even for such noble purposes as studying Torah. Very similar regulations were published in Izmir and Salonica (Thessaloniki).32 Such concerns were not limited to Jewish communities, of course. In the Hamse (Quintet) by the poet Ataʾ¯ ¯ ı (1582–1634), we read about a “boy-lover” (gulampare) who _ seduces a boy and brings him over to spend the night with him. Yet, there are guests staying over and the two pretend to be asleep and wait for everybody else to doze off. But, when the boy-lover joins the boy in his bed, the guests, who have also been pretending to sleep, rise, light a candle, and catch the boy-lover “in the act.” Figure 2.1, taken from an illustrated manuscript completed in 1721, depicts the scene. In this case, the sin is prevented because the guests stay awake, alert, and when the time comes, expose the offender and shame him in front of those present, and in front of the reader. Much more is said about this practice below, but at this point, it is important to note the anxiety that the story betrays: Darkness and sleep threatened to undermine collective control. Hearing could compensate for impaired vision to some extent. While, according to the Sharia, ear-witnessing was not admissible proof in court (see below), hearing was crucial for detecting irregularities at night, probably more so than vision. While the darkness of the night impaired eyesight, its silence actually improved listening. The neighborhood could now hear what it could not see.33 In one case

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Figure 2.1 A man and a young boy caught in bed. From Ḫamse-i ͑At aʾ¯ ¯ ı. _ Courtesy of the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, W.666, 56a

brought to the Jerusalem court in the summer of 1702, the sheikh of one of the neighborhoods in Jerusalem heard a conflict developing outside one of the houses in the neighborhood and hurried to intervene.34 One night in July 1743, residents in one of the neighborhoods in Üsküdar heard shouts from one of the houses. Neighbors rushed there and managed to stop a person who had tried to rape a woman and then attacked her husband.35 In July 1790, residents in another neighborhood complained against a certain Hasan, who would return home drunk every night and hit his wife. It was the sound of his shouts that informed them of what was going on.36 In all of these cases, it was sound that alerted neighbors’ and facilitated their intervention, either directly, or by appealing to the authorities, or both. Indeed, if walls have ears (al-hit an as the Arabic prov¯ laha¯ adh ¯ an), ¯ _ _ erb has it, well, at night they listen more carefully. The fact that hearing was more important at night could, at times, save residents when they

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were attacked, but it could also be used against them. A rather common way of getting even with a neighbor was to shout insults at him or her at night, when everything was quiet and there was no one around to see. Some people accompanied the throwing of insults with the throwing of stones. This was an established practice of harassing and it remained common, at least in some places, until the end of the nineteenth century.37 But, even without stones, a night attack on one’s honor was considered a serious thing, not unlike shaming on social media today. On July 17, 1747, two women, Emine and Ümmehanı, brought charges against their next-door neighbor, a “bachelor” (bekar) by the name of İbrahim Beşe, a title that may imply janissary affiliation. They asserted that the night before, just before the night prayer, the said İbrahim, being drunk, banged on Amine’s door and shouted insults at her daughter and herself. He allegedly called Ümmehanı a whore, and her husband, a pimp. As in other similar cases, the insults thrown were aimed at the moral reputation, and more specifically, the sexual conduct of the addressees. Nobody would come by the house of an enemy at night only to shout out she (or he) is an idiot.38 Indeed, the slandered women argued that İbrahim violated their “honor” (ırzımızı hetk eylemişdir diye). The accused denied the allegations but witnesses corroborated the women’s story. The plaintiffs requested he should be removed from the neighborhood.39 Preserving women’s honor or chastity (ırz, namus) at night was a source of much anxiety. If it was the moralizing gaze of the community that was supposed to prevent moral irregularities, how could women’s morality be “protected” when that gaze was impaired? Even during the daytime, women’s access to urban space was (and still is) far from universal or taken for granted.40 At night, urban space was much more heavily gendered. If prevailing norms regarded the time between sunset and the night prayer as moral twilight – a frontier between the socially respectable and the immoral – for women, sunset comprised a borderline that was better not crossed.41 Judging by the cases brought to the Üsküdar court, the only women found outside after the evening prayer were prostitutes or women accused of prostitution.42 Even the interval between the evening and the night prayer, in short, was a male-only time. To protect the respectability of women from being soiled with suspicion, their movements and actions were closely monitored by

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male and other female household members, and by the community.43 In the case of Emine and Ümmehanı, however, we see that even in their homes, women’s reputation was not guaranteed. We know from the record that one of them was married but it appears that the husband was not at home at the time of the incident, neither did he accompany his wife to court. It may be, then, that the two women were living on their own, which made them particularly vulnerable to allegations of immoral conduct. It is very likely that İbrahim himself addressed his words not to the women locked behind doors but to the neighbors’ ears. In other words, he probably knew very well how to play the “politics of honor.”44 The women clearly did not take the matter lightly. They thought the insults seriously jeopardized their reputation, so much so that they rushed to court the next day. But in real time there was little they could do. Indeed, the nocturnal setting of the incident made things worse. As the streets sank into darkness, and the good people of the neighborhood retreated to the [relative] safety of their homes, the day’s din gradually receded. In the dark quiet that reigned through the neighborhood, the bangs and shouts no doubt echoed louder. As in the case of Hasan’s beaten wife, the neighbors who supported the women’s story in retrospect did not go out of their homes to stop İbrahim in real time. We can only imagine the women’s plight under such circumstances: they knew that the neighborhood was listening but could do nothing to stop the insults from spreading around in the stillness of the night. All they could do was to try to protect their reputation after the fact, by bringing their attacker to court. Nocturnal attacks on one’s reputation, or sumʿa (from the Arabic root that denotes hearing) had to be refuted during daytime, by actively voicing an objection. There is another option, of course, and that is that the plaintiffs made up the story to eject an undesirable individual from the neighborhood. İbrahim Beşe is reportedly a “bachelor” with no relatives in the neighborhood, and as such, was very possibly considered a threat to public morality. Similar cases of expulsion have been discussed in the scholarship and the possibility of using such tactics is further discussed below. It is still significant that the women here, as in other similar cases,45 chose to narrate the incident as a nocturnal one. Building on the stigma and fear associated with the night was probably an effective way to accentuate the sense of threat the accused

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represented, not only to the plaintiffs themselves but to public order and morality more generally. Every such case heard in court echoed and reaffirmed the stigmatization of the night. We have already seen that this stigmatization had economic and moral aspects. Next, I show that the night was also associated with religious deviance.

When the Candle Is Snuffed Out In Early Modern Europe, the night was widely associated with the occult, and particularly with witchcraft.46 In the Ottoman Empire, by contrast, witchcraft was not demonized and witch hunts were rare.47 However, there were others who served as “fifth columnists,” personalizing the fear of the authorities and communities from the undermining of social and political order. Here it was sometimes antinomian groups that were targeted as the “enemies within,” functioning somewhat like witches in the European and North American contexts.48 These heretics, like the alleged witches, were often accused of deviant sexual practices assumed to take place in the dark.49 Bogaç ˘ Ergene cites a 1698 case of three villagers from eastern Anatolia who were brought to court in the town of Çankırı, in north-central Anatolia. Their neighbors testified that they had seen them congregating at night in the house of one of them, drinking wine and having sex with each other’s wives. Ergene doubts the neighbors’ claims, as did the judge, and speculates that if they saw anything at all, it was probably the alevi ceremony known as cem. The cem does not involve any sexual activity but, since it is performed by men and women together, it violates Muslim-orthodox norms of gender segregation and was therefore for centuries the object of Sunni criticism. From here it was only a short step to stories, which abound in orthodox sources, about ritualized orgies that supposedly took place following the cem. According to this extremely widespread and persistent myth, after the candles of the ceremony are put out, those present have sex with each other in the dark. These alleged orgies are known in Turkish as “snuffing the candle” (mum söndürme).50 The roots of this slanderous myth reach deep into the ancient world. Similar stories of ritualistic orgies in the dark are ascribed in Roman sources to secretive religious groups like the Bacchantes and the early Christians. With the rise of kızılbaş opposition to the Ottomans in Anatolia in the early sixteenth century, this myth was used to slander

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antinomian Muslim groups such as the Kalendaris, the Bektaşıs, and others.51 The earliest Ottoman records that make such accusations, go back to the late sixteenth century, when heterodox tribes in southeast Anatolia sympathized with the Safavids, the Ottomans’ rivals to the east. For example, a sultanic decree referred to kadıs in the townships of Küre and Taşköprü in 1571, stated that several people had been overheard when convened in a certain house during the night to perform the cem. They played music, enjoyed themselves together, and then they snuffed the candle and had sex with each other’s wives. Other decrees from the same period repeated the accusation, sometimes stressing that the practice took place at night “in secret.”52 That the libel was common later on is beyond doubt. Paul Rycaut, who served as a secretary to the English ambassador in Istanbul in the 1660s (and later as a consul in Izmir), described the Bektaşis as “a sect among the janizaries [sic].” They are “called by some ‘Zerati’,” which he explains as “those who have Copulation with their own Kindred [capitalization in the original], and by the vulgar mum sonduren [sic], or extinguishers of the candle.” He then explains that “these people” copulate with their sons and daughters “against the instinct of nature.”53 Very similar allegations were made still in the twentieth century, not only by orthodox Muslims against Muslim heterodox groups, but also by orthodox Jews against Sabbateans, a sect of Jews that had converted to Islam, but kept some of their Jewish traditions. The stories were strikingly similar. Married Sabbatian couples allegedly gathered together for a ritualistic dinner on the night of the 22nd of Adar (around mid-March), known as the Lamb or Spring Festival. During dinner, the candles are snuffed and an orgy ensues in the dark. Like in the case of Muslim heterodox groups, the stories about Sabbateans have a long history going back almost to the beginning of the sect in the mid-seventeenth century. It should be noted that several scholars, including, most recently, Cengiz Sişman, ¸ believe the stories about candle extinguishing have a “factual basis.”54 Yet, the very fact that the same story was blamed on such radically different groups as the early Christians and the Sabbateans should cast serious doubts on its authenticity. Indeed, a careful reading of the evidence exposes the stories about Sabetean candle snuffing as baseless.55

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What all versions of the candle snuffing libel share is its nocturnal setting. The rituals of various antinomian groups (including the Sabeteans and Bektaşis) indeed took place at night and some of these groups certainly cultivated a culture that associated the night with love, carnal, platonic, and divine.56 But we should not confuse such general notions with alleged ritualistic orgies in the dark. The nocturnal setting of the libel contributes greatly to its power. It is darkness that renders the story both threatening and appealing, outwardly offensive to orthodox sensibilities, and at the same time mysterious, intriguing, and licentiously attractive. The famous Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi (1611–1682) discussed “candle snuffing” in his Book of Travels and noted that “people say that in Persia, there are still those who do it.” However, Evliya Çelebi completely discredits these allegations, at least with regards to that area. He emphasizes time and again that he has never observed anything like it although he traveled extensively in the region.57 He does bring a story, however, in an attempt to explain the origins of the practice. According to Evliya, it was Sheikh Safi al-Din, the founder of the Safavid Sufi order, who originated the practice. He led a mystical session known as tevhid (union) and invited both his male and female disciples to attend. At the end of the session, he extinguished the candle and said: “Let everyone, dark as it is, embrace the ones next to him and go home.” By virtue of his saintly blessing, it turned out that every man embraced his own wife and daughters. “It is truly a miracle that in that dark of night, and in that mingling and whirling crowd of people (ol karanlık gecede ol beni adem izdihamında karış katış dönerken), everyone should have found his very own wife.”58 The sheikh conducted such ceremonies a few more times, and every time the miracle repeated itself. Yet, when some of the sheikh’s deputies tried to pull the same trick, it did not work so well. The sheikh therefore prohibited not only the “snuffing of candles,” but forbade mixed tevhid sessions altogether. The story about Sheikh Safi al-Din strengthens Evliya’s claim that snuffing the candle is but a myth. He has not observed the practice, he seems to be saying, since the very saint who had initiated it later disallowed it. What is more important for this discussion is the imagination of darkness and its significance. As long as there was light in the ceremony, nothing particularly out of the ordinary happened. But in the darkness, there was much “crowding,” “mingling,” and

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“whirling.” Concealed from the authoritative gaze of the sheikh, and that of the community, people could peel off their morality as quickly as they could take off their clothes. In this case, it was the blessing of the sheikh that prevented scandal. Morality was miraculously saved, order was restored. But, in the absence of such saintly personhood, orthodoxy must be maintained. The lesson is, therefore, that men and women should not be allowed to mix. Slopes are more slippery in the dark. Evliya Çelebi could try to ease the concerns of his readers (while allowing them a sneak peek into dark rooms at the same time) and restore order merely by his power as narrator. When the authorities acted on an accusation of “snuffing the candle” it was not just words that were used. People branded heretics were, at times, severely punished for such allegations.59 Reports about “candle snuffers” surface occasionally over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For example, in 1789, a certain Ali Dere of “the heretic band of candle snuffers” (mum söndüren tabir olunur taife-i zale) was accused of “fomenting mischief” in a village by the name of Emre in the district of Karahisar-ı Sahib (today’s Afyonkarahisar), a few hundred kilometers southeast of Istanbul.60 In a report presented to Sultan Abülhamid II in the late nineteenth century, some of the same libels were repeated. Interestingly, the report noted that when performing their ritual, participants make a great effort not to be seen or heard.61 Not only is it dark, then; the deviants are actively trying to conceal themselves. That is one of the basic traits of all successful conspiracy theories. The fact you cannot see it does not mean it is not there, lurking in the dark. The libels of “candle snuffing,” then, not only stigmatized the night as a time of religious and sexual deviance; they also served to defame antinomian groups. If the alevis and later the Sabbateans were “a scapegoat for all seasons,”62 then associating them with the night, and the night with their praxis, added to their dubious reputation. Darkness is here shown to be not only threatening to hegemony, but also useful. Stigmatizing the night as an interval of economic, moral, sexual, and religious deviance, and community and guild surveillance that served to impose these norms, joined the physical compartmentalization of the urban fabric with doors and gates in discouraging the “respectable” from going out to the streets at night. Those who went out nevertheless had to make themselves visible and if they failed to do so, they risked being forcefully exposed and shamed.

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Bringing to Light Even if darkness did not completely undermine the collective sensorium of the neighborhood, it certainly made it harder to intervene in real time. Furthermore, at night, people were mostly indoors and a collective action against violators was harder to execute. Action required locating the source of disturbance, and then exposing the perpetrators, that is, depriving them of the darkness in which they sought cover. Hearing was simply not good enough for these purposes. Mechanisms of active intervention at night therefore relied on light and vision. First among these mechanisms was the compulsory carrying of personal lanterns.63 It is not clear when and how the practice developed. As discussed below, Sultan Murad IV (1623–1640) ruthlessly enforced it in Istanbul, which obviously means it was already in place during his time, or at least at the time the Ottoman chronicler Mustafa Naima (1665–1716) was reporting it. Orders sent to kadıs in Istanbul occasionally show that the measure was perhaps not applied comprehensively, and that officials had to be reminded at times of the need to enforce it. For example, the kadı of intramural Istanbul was ordered in 1695–1696 to make sure that nobody went out after the night prayer without a lantern.64 About a century later, the kadı of Üsküdar, on the Asian side of the Bosporus, was instructed to enforce the measure since “some vile individuals roam the streets at night and dare engage themselves in mischief, and since it has long been the rule that no one should go out at night without a lantern.” From now on, the decree read, anyone found in the streets without a lantern three hours after sunset, shall be arrested.65 These documents suggest that enforcement of the measure was not as strict throughout the period under discussion, and yet, whenever nocturnal disturbances occurred, stricter enforcement of individual illumination was the default. Starting in the 1840s, against the background of growing nocturnal traffic and soaring crime, the authorities enforced measures against individuals without lanterns much more systematically than ever before.66 In Istanbul, this remained the rule deep into the second half of the nineteenth century, long after street lighting had been first introduced. In Jerusalem, inhabitants were absolved of the need to carry a lantern only in 1905.67 When thinking about nineteenth-

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century developments, then, we should not assume a linear shift from the neighborhood gaze to the panoptic surveillance of a centralized state, and from self-exposure by light to a centrally operated system of street lighting. Rather, we need to consider how modern technologies and visual regimes interacted with older modalities of seeing and lighting in shaping nocturnal realities.68 But before the street lighting of the late nineteenth century, portable lanterns were the only lights to be seen in the streets at night. Powerful individuals, who could afford servants to light their way, used relatively big lanterns, but most people had to do with much less. The common lantern was made of a pasteboard bottom, on which a small candle was placed, and a paper cover about 14 inches high to protect the flame. The cover could fold much like an accordion and fit in the pocket. Finer lanterns were made of gauze stretched over a tin or copper frame.69 The Spaniard Domingo Francisco Jorge Badía y Leblich (1766–1818), who traveled through the Middle East under the assumed name Ali Bey al-Abbasi, passed through Istanbul in 1807 and left us a rather dark description of its nights and the portable lanterns used by its inhabitants: The profound darkness which reigns in all the streets, added to the mud with which they are covered, upon a bad pavement, more or less on the descent, renders the progress of passengers very tiresome, unless they have lanterns before them. The inhabitants use small ones made of linen, but they give so feeble a light, that it is difficult to distinguish the persons who carry them; so that the number of pale lights which may be seen moving about during the night, as if suspended in the lower regions of air, resemble a dance of phantoms.70

This mode of moving through the city is worthy of a few words. The walker is forced to walk slowly, his lantern lowered, with eyes scanning the ground to avoid puddles, pitfalls, and dogs who often slept in the streets.71 These were territorial animals, and you did not want to accidentally step on a tail. Even with a lantern, avoiding all these dangers was not guaranteed. Common candles gave very little light, which in the case of portable lanterns was further diminished by the paper or cloth cover.72 This feeble light source could not cast away darkness. In some ways, it actually deepened it. Darkness simplifies the perceived environment by hiding all but the most conspicuous features. Rather than focus on specific objects, eyes

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roam between them. Patches of light, on the other hand, draw the gaze and serve to focus it much more acutely than during the day, when a multitude of competing objects are visible.73 All these together contribute to the instinctive alignment of light and sight. But the very focus on the lantern serves to blind the traveler to her or his surrounding. The very exposure to light in the dark enhances this effect as it favors the cones over the rods, thereby impairing night vision. In short, a portable lantern was of limited usefulness for seeing. It was crucial, however, for being seen. The lantern signified that a person was willingly exposing himself to the gaze of the patrolling guards and that he was a decent member of the community with nothing to hide.74 Early republican historian Osman Nuri Ergin wrote that people who were caught walking the streets of Ottoman Istanbul without a lantern were apprehended even if they committed no felony, simply because they “invited suspicion.” They were often locked up overnight in one of the public baths around the city and made to work until the morning under the supervision of the stoker. Handing over individuals caught without a lantern and whose identity was unknown (fenersiz gezen hüvviyyeti mechul) to the stoker of the nearest bathhouse saved the trouble of escorting them all the way to the guarding station. But there was another benefit: the hard work in the public bath’s furnace was regarded as a deterring punishment. The detainees were forced to perform such jobs as carrying firewood and cleaning the furnace, and by the time they were set free in the morning, they were extremely dirty. When they made their way home all covered with soot and ashes, all who saw them understood that they had been arrested somewhere during the night, walking without a lantern.75 We can think of this forced blackening as an inversion of the self-identification by light. The French diplomat and academic François Pouqueville (1770–1838) recorded in his travel book a very similar practice and interpreted it in very similar terms. According to his account, Muslims who had been caught drunk more than three times were deemed beyond correction and were sent to sleep “upon the ashes” of public baths. Pouqueville understood this practice as a “manner of stigmatizing” and then explained the way neighborhoods often acted against such stigmatized individuals.76 By inscribing their dubious nocturnal deeds on their face and clothes, those violating the order and morality were publicly shamed. They were forcefully removed from the darkness in which they took

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cover, deprived of the anonymity in which they wished to wrap themselves, and then sent, stamped with disgrace back to their neighborhood. Here, in broad daylight, they were once again seen, recognized, shamed, and tamed. The night guards, it is readily understood, were crucial for the system. While authorized to punish offenders on the spot, guards also served to impose visibility, or put differently, with returning runaways back under the watchful eye of the community. James Caulfield (1728–1799), a Dublin-born aristocrat of English descent provides us with a first-hand account of what it was like to be caught without a lantern in the streets of Istanbul. Caulfield visited Istanbul in the late 1740s and decided to go with some of his acquaintances on a nightly excursion. They made their way through the streets “when all at once, the pitchy darkness gave place to the gleam of a multitude of lanterns by which we were surrounded and which glared upon us from every quarter, and the dead silence was broken by the clamour of a large party of men, who encompassed us on every side, armed with monstrous clubs which they violently struck against the ground.”77 Caulfield recounts his utter surprise as he and his friends did not hear even the “smallest previous noise.” The “blaze of light, which shone in our eyes and dazzled us like a nightly flash of lighning [sic], the number, noise, arms” of the guards, combined with the foreigners’ preconceptions of “Turkish barbarity” all contributed to the sense of terror that gripped the party.78 While poor in today’s terms, in Caulfield’s narrative the light of several lanterns, when shining suddenly in his eyes was enough to dazzle. The guards, according to Caulfield, went around in complete silence, with their lanterns covered, so as to surprise those “walking at undue hours.” When such individuals were spotted, they would quietly encircle them and then uncover their lanterns and take them by surprise. Caulfield and his friends, in any case, suffered no harm. After they explained who they were, the guards simply bid them good night, covered their lanterns, and set out again in complete silence.79 Caulfield had nothing but praise for this mode of operation, and wished it was adopted by the guards in his own country, who always made terrible noise that warned evildoers in advance and allowed them to perpetrate their “mischiefs” uninterrupted. In short, the patrolling guards not only imposed self-lighting but also used light themselves to expose and arrest people at night, whose failure to light and expose themselves automatically made them suspect.

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Finally, light was used by local residents when engaging in what is sometimes referred to as “neighborhood raids” (sing. mahalle baskını). The late Ottoman author, Abdülaziz Bey, provides us with a detailed description of such raids. When illegal activity, especially prostitution, was suspected to be taking place and threatened to soil the neighborhood’s reputation, a raiding party comprised of male residents and local night guards would assemble. They would encircle the suspected house with their lanterns while making a great deal of noise, shouting that they would not allow a stain on the honor of the neighborhood and its respectable residents. With the permission of the local imam or the kadı, they would sometimes break into the house, dragging the culprits out into the light and publicly shame them in front of the community.80 Culprits were often handed over to the authorities but the exposure to both eyes and ears of the community was no doubt critical not only for upholding public morality, but for advertising the neighborhood community’s firm stance on such issues. Figure 2.2 depicts such a neighborhood raid on a brothel. It is taken from an illustrated copy of Zenan-Name (The Book of Women) by Fazil Enderuni (1757–1810) and shows that the practice was wellestablished already in the eighteenth century. Contemporary court records further show that such raids were an integral part of everynight life. For example, in the summer of 1742 two men and two women were brought to court by the bailiff (subaşı) of the Yeni Mahalle neighborhood in Üsküdar. According to the court record, on the previous night, the group “engaged in mischief until the morning” (sabaha degin ˘ fısk u fesad eylediklerini) in an apartment in the Reis neighborhood. Unfortunately for them, they were spotted by neighbors who called in the bailiff. The official, together with the “neighborhood people” raided the place, took the partiers out, and arrested them. They were questioned in court and confessed.81 A record from midNovember 1764 tells of a woman named Emine b. Mehmed who was caught red-handed in the company of an “unrelated” man. The latter, however, managed to get away. He left behind a bottle of rakı and a mattress, which the record defined as “means of party” (alat-ı bezm).82 There is no shortage of similar cases.83 The court records are notoriously skimpy in details but, relying on the visual and textual descriptions brought above, we can easily imagine the terror and embarrassment that must have gripped the culprits as they were

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Figure 2.2 A neighborhood raid; from Zenannâme, by Enderuni Fazil (1755–1810). Courtesy of İstanbul Üniversitesi Nadir Eserler Kütüphanesi (TY 5502/148a)

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dragged out by the bailiff and/or the raiding party, to be exposed in the light of lanterns. The close link between light, the neighborhood’s gaze, and collective action is personified in the figure of the mahalleli (lit. a neighborhood resident) in the Ottoman shadow theatre (Hayal or Karagöz). This figure is actually made of three or four individuals congregating under one umbrella. Significantly, one of these individuals carries a lantern, signifying that the neighborhood can see even at night. This group– figure never speaks; it appears in specific moments to indicate that a certain happening was seen by the neighborhood and that it is now known to all.84 Not only policing and arrest were guided by light and sight; so was prosecution. Islamic law favored eyewitness over earwitness testimony. In fact, according to some prominent jurists, earwitness testimony was not acceptable except in very specific cases. One of the most important Hanafi works, Al-Hidaya (1196–1197) stipulates that “it is not per¯ missible for a witness to testify about something unless he saw it,” and elsewhere “if he heard [something] behind a screen (hijab), it is not ¯ _ permissible for him to testify [regarding it].”85 In many of the cases cited above, the judge was therefore unable to convict based on the Sharia and had to turn to sultanic law (kanun), which sets a lower evidentiary bar. The validity of evidence in Islamic law is well beyond the scope of this chapter, and this author’s expertise, but for the purpose of this discussion, it is significant that legally too, only vision was trusted to tell the truth. Thus far, I demonstrated the stigmatization of the night by neighborhoods, guilds, courts, and moralists and the way it worked to deter people from engaging in illicit activities at night. The Ottoman authorities augmented these mechanisms by circulating the dark streets and enforcing the law directly.

The Patrol With the partial lapse of community and guild surveillance, and in the absence of cheap street lighting, policing cities was a real challenge. In Jerusalem, the challenge was easier to meet. With less than 10,000 residents and fully enclosed within its high walls, the city could simply be shut away from the outside world. Indeed, throughout most of the Ottoman period, Jerusalem’s gates were closed every evening at sunset

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and kept locked and guarded until daybreak.86 Within the city too, gates of courtyards and roofed markets would also be shut at sunset making movement much harder.87 Traffic after the night prayer was extremely low.88 Home to hundreds of thousands of people, sprawling far beyond the old Byzantine walls and penetrated by waterways, Istanbul presented a much bigger challenge of nocturnal order. Considering it was the seat of government, however, meeting the challenge was crucial. The palace therefore deployed imperial forces to police the city, under the authority of the most senior officials in the empire, the grand vizier, and his deputy (kaymakam). Below them were the chief of the janissaries and his deputy (sekbanbaşı), and a number of high military officials, each responsible for a different area of the capital. The chief of the janissaries was in charge of policing intramural Istanbul, excluding the palace and its environs, which was the responsibility of the captain of the armorers attached to the janissaries (cebecibaşı). The chief of the janissaries also oversaw the “police posts” (sing. kolluk) in the areas under his responsibility. Among the duties of the men stationed in those locations were daytime and nighttime patrols and the arrest of suspects.89 Policing in the neighborhoods outside the walls was divided between three high officials. The grand admiral (kapudan paşa) was in charge of the harbor areas in Galata and Kasımpaşa. The master general of the artillery (topçubaşı) was responsible for the areas of Beyoglu ˘ and Tophane. Finally, the chief of the imperial guard (bostancıbaşı), oversaw policing in Üsküdar, Eyüp, the shores of the Bosporus, the coast of the Sea of Marmara and the Princess Islands, and all open areas including gardens, meadows, and forests.90 These officers and their men were assisted by two additional officials, whose mission was more strictly defined as maintenance of public order and crime prevention. These were the city superintendent (subaşı), responsible for daytime policing, and the captain of the guards (asesbaşı) whose kingdom was the night. The asesbaşı commanded a division of janissaries numbering as many as 500 men.91 What all representatives of power and authority shared as they patrolled the dark streets was that they too, much like the offenders they sought to apprehend, were partly blinded by darkness.92 Light and noise at night often signaled that something out of the ordinary was taking place. These signals could direct law enforcers and facilitate

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their intervention. The English journalist Frederic Shoberl (1775–1853) describes, in the illustrated volume he published in 1821, the modus operandi of the bostancıbaşı: If this officer hears a noise in any house, or sees a light in it at unseasonable hours, he orders stones to be thrown at the windows; on the slightest suspicion, he breaks open the door, searches it all over, and frequently punishes the master with a fine and the bastinado.93

As court records reveal, often it was neighbors that informed officials in real time.94 What the records merely mention in a few words, chronicler Cabi Ömer (d. ~1814) describes in more detail. According to one of the anecdotes he cites, one night, the chief of the janissaries was tipped off about gambling activity that was taking place in a house in the vicinity of Laleli. He arrived there one night in disguise and, conveniently, found a camel tied outside that belonged to a coal merchant. He had one of his men mount the camel and peek through the window. Once it was corroborated that illegal activity was indeed taking place, the chief and his men burst in and arrested the gamblers. It was later rumored that the chief of janissaries “even watches over private homes at night with a camel.”95 The camel was an unexpected bonus, but the chief was most certainly pleased that such rumors circulated. Let the people know that the night offers no refuge from the authorities. But, in fact, the city was far too big and much too dark to be controlled effectively. What law enforcers lacked in terms of effective power, they sometimes tried to make up for by projecting fear. This was not unique to the Ottomans. According to historian Roger Ekirch, even in Paris, the best-illuminated city in eighteenth-century Europe, the night remained largely beyond the effective control of the authorities. Sanctioned penalties for nocturnal transgressions were meant to deter, but enforcement was often impossible.96 While sharing much with other rulers, the Ottomans had their own ways of instilling nighttime fear of the law, and of those enforcing it. The bostancıbaşı and his men, as captured in several contemporary accounts by foreign and Ottoman observers, may help demonstrate this. One such account was left by Baron François de Tott (1733–1793), a French military officer of Hungarian origins. Baron de Tott served as military advisor to Sultan Mustafa III (r. 1757–1774).97 The Baron and his wife were invited to pass a few

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days in the waterfront house of the Greek Dragoman of the Porte. De Tott describes a dinner party attended by “Greek gentlemen” and “ladies” and takes great pleasure in ridiculing them for trying, rather unsuccessfully, to “imitate” the French ways. After dinner, the party moved outside to the villa’s quay. “The Moon began to appear, and a dead Calm invited us to go upon the Water” [capitalization in the source]. At that point, the company heard noise in the distance, which turned out to be the cries of people being hit by the men of the bostancıbaşı. “Mice are not more in haste to run away, at the approach of a cat, than all the women now were to hide themselves.”98 The bostancıbaşı soon appeared in a boat manned by 24 rowers. The officer, according to de Tott, went on one of his patrols in order to “chastise the irregularities of some drunken persons, and lay hold of certain females, a little too gay, who had fallen under his notice.” The bostancıbaşı passed by the quay, saluting the party, but soon after stories about his abusive behavior in nearby waterfront houses began to arrive. The officer, it was said, was arresting people and would only release them in return for a bribe. “This was sufficient . . . to render the Panic general.” However, as soon as the bostancbaşı’s boat was seen making its way back to Istanbul, “the Sea was covered by a prodigious number of Boats in which Ladies enjoyed the beauties of the scene, serenaded by musical instruments.”99 Tott witnessed a well-developed tradition of nightly cruises on the Bosporus.100 What is significant at this point is to note the seemingly conflicting impressions of widespread leisure and widespread fear. On the one hand, the account emphasizes time and again the terror that accompanied the bostancıbaşı wherever he went. On the other hand, the fear was obviously not enough to deter men and women from going on leisurely cruises. Wherever the dreaded officer went, boats moved out of harm’s way, taking cover in the dark, only to reappear immediately after danger has passed. People, so it seems, knew very well how to play this nocturnal hide and seek. Considering that officers were entitled to pocket some of the money imposed as fines at night, what Tott described as completely arbitrary extortion was, in fact, the abuse of an institutionalized mechanism. That is significant since people probably knew that even if they were caught, they could get away with a fine and possibly a few lashes. That was not pleasant, but certainly far better than the image of unrestrained violence as portrayed by the Syrian Ḥanna al-Tab¯ıb at the beginning of this chapter. _

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It can be, of course, that the level of enforcement varied not only between different areas and officers but between periods. At times of turmoil, enforcement was no doubt stricter. The Ottoman chronicler Cabi, tells of a conversation, which supposedly took place in early July 1808, between the new grand vizier Alemdar Mustafa Paşa (1755–1808) and some of his top officials. The conversation should be read against the background of the great instability following the janissary rebellion of 1807. The chronicler Cabi, then, reports that the recently appointed grand vizier told his top officials that in the provinces, people used to talk so much about the full-moon delights of Istanbul. Yet, he said, “I have traveled in disguise so much along the Bosporus and haven’t seen even one individual going about. I wonder, gentlemen, did we drive away everybody’s fun? (acaba bizler cümlenin saffalarını kaçırdık mı efendiler?)” One of the officials replied that the people may be afraid that leisure trips and wedding feasts might anger “our master,” and so they do not go out. Or maybe the chief of the bostancılar warned his men not to let people out. To this, the grand vizier replied: “What does this mean? As long as the people cannot enjoy, who can? Everybody should enjoy as they please, nobody should be prevented from it.” The chief of the bostancılar was then notified that it was the wish of the grand vizier that the people would be allowed to go for pleasure cruises on the Bosporus. One day, when the bostancıbaşı was sitting in the Kule garden, a few revelers (birkaç ehl-i keyf kimesneler), singing in the back of their boat, did not for a second hesitate and passed in front of him. This really angered him, but as Cabi says, what could he do about it? According to Cabi, it became clear that it was indeed the limitations imposed by the bostancıbaşı that drove people away from the Bosporus.101 Like Tott’s account, Cabi’s anecdote too exposes not only the heavy hand of the bostancıbaşı, but something of the life that went on in the dark despite it. Further away from the officer’s boat, before and after times of particularly intensive enforcement efforts, the night was swarming with activity, which was certainly not limited to the tavern hubs of the city.102 The most important point, however, is that the same darkness that allowed thieves, smugglers, and drinkers to engage in their illicit activities, also allowed those charged with catching them more leeway to avoid the supervision of their superiors. This dynamic is further discussed in Chapter 3, but at this point, it is important to

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note that monitoring the conduct of officials at night was one of the main reasons high officials and even sultans went out on undercover patrols at night, or at least, were believed to have done so.

To Meet the Sultan in a Dark Alley According to court chronicler Naima (1655–1716), “it is told” (menkuldur) that Sultan Murad IV used to roam the streets of Istanbul at night in disguise to enforce his ban on the consumption of alcohol, coffee, and tobacco.103 I shall return to Naima’s account shortly, but first, should we even take it seriously? Was it not a fable taken directly from the Arabian Nights, a kind of bedtime story whispered in the dark to deter those seeking nocturnal entertainments outside? Sure, that too. Yet, it is highly probable that some Ottoman sultans indeed went on such nightly excursions. In fact, I argue that the reality of the practice and its legend cannot be understood separately. In order to see that, we need, first, to call the practice out of the shadows of legend and mystery and look at it as yet another instrument in the Ottoman ruling toolkit. At the same time, we need to keep in mind that it was exactly those shadows that were supposed to make the practice effective. The most common term used to denote these undercover patrols was tebdil gezmek or tebdil çıkmak. Tebdil (lit. change) here is a shorthand for tebdil-i kıyafet or tebdil-i came, literally, change of clothes. According to contemporary sources, sultans very often adopted this mode of travel, usually for banal purposes such as taking a cruise down the Bosporus or going to pray in a particular mosque. Despite its prevalence, this mode of undercover travel has attracted far less scholarly attention than its pompous, extravagant cousin, the public sultanic procession.104 We do know, however, that Ottoman sultans went on such undercover excursions at least since the sixteenth century, and the practice became even more common in the following centuries. Fikret Sarıcaoglu ˘ assesses that Sultan Abdülhamid I (r. 1774–1789) went on tebdil six or seven times a month on average.105 Mehmet İpşirli speculates that it had to do with the growing isolation of the crown princes from the outer world ever since the late sixteenth century. These young men, he suggests, wanted to see the world outside the “cage” (kafes) of their childhood and therefore changed their clothes, assumed fake identities, and took to the streets.106 This claim should in fact be

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expanded: the seclusion of the princes was only one aspect of a much wider process: the growing distance between the palace and the city. The tebdil allowed traversing this distance incognito, giving the ruler a first-hand impression of what he would otherwise have to imagine, relying on other people’s reports. Therefore, Ottoman sultans and high officials at times dressed up as merchants, dervishes, or military officers and went about the city.107 The rationale, according to the chronicler Semdanı-Zade ¸ Fındıkıllı Süleyman Efendi (~1740–1779) was rather simple: to reward those who deserved it, and to punish, possibly even execute, the “impudent.”108 Sultan Selim III, for example, quite often went on tebdils, which at times resulted in measures against officials he held responsible for flaws in the administration of the city.109 Such excursions could happen during the day and the night but the two, I argue, were different in significant ways. If daytime undercover tebdils allowed inspection of the markets and other diurnal institutions, nighttime tebdils were excursions into the edges of state control, and therefore, a claim to rule over the night as well as the day. Ottoman sultans were following a very long tradition here. Several sources mention that the second Caliph ʿOmar bin al-Khattab ¯ __ (r. 634–644) used to walk the streets of Medina at night, asking the inhabitants whether or not they were content with the government. The practice seems to have been adopted by several Abbasid caliphs.110 The ruler most closely identified with incognito night patrols is the caliph Har ¯ un ¯ al-Rash¯ıd (r. 786–809), whose nightly outings with his vizier Jaʿfar were immortalized in the Arabian Nights. In the story of the porter and the three ladies, it is said that the caliph “was accustomed to walk abroad in disguise very often by night, that he might see with his own eyes, if everything was quiet in the city, and no disorders were committed in it.”111 Tales and motives from the collection made their way into Turkish oral tradition and were widely used by storytellers. The first partial translation into Turkish dates back to 1429, consisting of the stories of 55 nights.112 Interestingly, a comprehensive translation into Turkish was commissioned by Murad IV,113 whose nightly excursions were mentioned above. For one copy of this work, we know that it moved from hand to hand in Istanbul for 30 years, before finally making its way to Paris.114 The Bursa manuscript, which apparently dates back to the fifteenth century, includes descriptions of the Caliph’s nightly

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patrols.115 In short, stories of sultans roaming the streets in disguise have been around for centuries and were certainly known both in the palace and in the city. It matters not if Sultan Murad IV drew direct inspiration from the manuscript he commissioned or even if he actually went on tebdils at night; the important thing, rather, is that in the period under discussion here, he was widely believed to have done so, and that the stories about such patrols could be grounded in a longer tradition that gave them meaning. In any case, according to Mustafa Naima, the people who were caught violating Murad IV’s ban on alcohol, coffee, and tobacco, and the law that sanctioned the carrying of portable lanterns when walking the streets after the night prayer were “mercilessly executed.” The ban was so strictly enforced that people not only abstained from smoking publicly but also from going out even at the time of the night prayer, apparently to be on the safe side. And no wonder. Naima relates that one night, when the sultan was patrolling in disguise (tebdil gezerken) in the Hoca Paşa neighborhood, he chanced upon the son of the neighborhood’s imam. The young lad lingered in the mosque a little while longer and since his home was near, he did not carry a lantern. The sultan did not pause for details. He asked: “Did you not hear of my warning?” We can only imagine the stifling fear that must have gripped the poor young man. According to Naima, he stuttered, and the sultan, furious, had him executed on the spot.116 Despite first appearance, it is not arbitrariness that is the theme of this tale but rather the literal enforcement of the law. The sultan indeed decreed that those found outside after the night prayer without a lantern would be executed. Literally taken, the young man did just that, and literally again, had nothing to say in his defense. It is this literal enforcement of the decree that is unsettling as it violates basic notions of justice. It’s just not fair. The victim was not a wine drinker; he did not even consume coffee or tobacco. He was a pious young man, the son of the local imam on the way back from the mosque. It is the disagreement between the innocent infringement and the severity of the punishment that seems misplaced. In this way, Naima tries to give his readers a taste of the terror supposedly experienced by the people of Istanbul at that time. Every morning, he adds as if to make things explicit, people found one or two corpses lying in the streets, which caused great fear. This reminds us of Ḥanna¯ al-Tab¯ıb’s account, with _ which the chapter opened.

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It appears that the story was offensive to contemporary sensibilities as well, as Naima felt a need to explain the sultan’s ruthless behavior. It is clear, he stated, that Murad did not act so harshly merely for the sake of vain domineering. Rather, he used [the ban] as a pretext in the interest of punishing the vile ones and deterring the common people. People of virtue, he added, will see that under this oppression (kahr u zecrin tahtında) there lies perfect kindness and public interest (lütf-i tam ve nef’-i am). They would realize that in order to direct those who strayed from the road of docility and acted in violation of the imperial wish, it is of the greatest importance to scare the common people “with a shiny sword.” Furthermore, Naima explained that the ban on tobacco and coffee was not against the substances as such, but because of the social nature of their consumption. These substances, he explained, encouraged people to congregate together in coffeehouses, barbershops, and in houses of certain people, whence they engage in discussions of matters of the state, criticizing the rulers, “and so many were the lies they made up.” It was exactly for this problem, he continued, that the sultan patrolled the city, in person, “day and night.” During the day, he arrested and executed the riffraff and bandits and those who congregate to smoke when he encountered them, and at night he made the heedless night travelers (şeb-revlik eden bi-pervalar) drink the “beverage of death.”117 Naima’s text seems to suggest a distinction between daytime gatherings that revolved around coffee and tobacco, and those of the night which were fueled by alcohol (implied in “the beverage of death”).118 But if disorderly and potentially subversive activity was not limited to daytime, neither was sultanic surveillance. Fariba Zarinebaf has already noted that Naima’s praise of Murad IV should be read in context: he was writing in the aftermath of the 1703 rebellion, which seriously undermined political authority. Naima therefore stressed the need for a strong and direct rule of the sultan, relying on a powerful army and covert state control.119 Murad’s version of the “caliph nightly patrols” theme is therefore very different than that of Har ¯ un ¯ al-Rash¯ıd. While the latter sought to protect his subjects by monitoring his own officers and officials, Murad wanted to instill terror in the hearts of his subjects. The rationale of the patrolling technique was similar, however. Under normal circumstances, the monarch was allpowerful and at the same time inaccessible, concealed behind many

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walls and guarded by countless soldiers. This distance shielded not only the sultan from his subjects, but also worked the other way around. The thought that in the gloom of night, the supreme power was roaming the streets; that you might suddenly bump into him in a dark alley must have been terrifying. No wonder the poor imam’s son stuttered. Stories about the sultan’s acts of cruelty during his undercover night patrols were widespread in early eighteenth-century Istanbul, as attested by Dimitrie Cantemir (1673–1723) in his grand history of the Ottoman Empire.120 Such frightful stories were not the only accounts of the sultan’s nightly patrols. Among the people, stories expressing a completely diametric perspective circulated widely. In these stories and jokes, drinkers constantly outwitted and outmaneuvered the sultan and his men, undermining the enforcement efforts and the public morals they were meant to impose.121 Frightful or funny, what if these were stories and nothing more? Naima, after all, writes about Murad’s patrols more than 60 years after the fact and he might have been recording an urban legend, one that served both Murad and Naima’s purposes. One can rightly say that the very existence of such tales is revealing, even in the absence of any supporting evidence. In this case, however, we have additional indications that show that at least some sultans continued to go on nighttime patrols in the eighteenth century. The Istanbul-born Romanian Alexander Gika alias Elias Hebesci (~1743–1811), who served as secretary to the grand vizier under Sultan Musafa III (r. 1757–1773) tells in his book about the Ottoman Empire that his former master too used to stroll about the city at night in disguise.122 Habesci was surely an informed observer. Another Christian who mentions such nightly undercover trips is Konstantinos Mavrikios (1731–91), who was nominated Patriarch of Constantinople (under the name Kallinikos III) in January 1757. Mavrikios was ejected from office and banished from Istanbul only a few months later by order of the sultan who acted on the advice of some of Mavrikios’s rivals within the Patriarchy. Mavrikios too, then, was no stranger to the corridors of Ottoman power. In his memoirs, the former patriarch included a long and fascinating account of the festival held to celebrate the birth of the crown prince Selim (later Sultan Selim III) in 1761. Right in the beginning of the account, the former patriarch cites in full detail the stern warning issued by the sultan ahead of the celebrations “that no woman should appear in the

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streets, or in a caique, neither a Turk [Muslim] nor a reaya [non-Muslim subject], neither in her own attire (kılık) nor in disguise, on pain of death – a dire punishment/penalty.”123 This no doubt suggests that sultans were not the only ones who were getting dressed. Yet, while sultans could put on attires or shed them when they so pleased, those at the bottom of the social ladder took refuge in their disguise. Shedding it was dangerous. In one of the nights of the festival, Mavrikios narrates, the sultan went out in disguise to Tophane. He chanced upon two women in disguise, approaching the shore in a boat. Their attire did not save them. The sultan ordered the two poor women thrown into the sea immediately for violating his explicit orders.124 Interestingly, Mavrikios himself also used to go about the city in disguise. Since he had returned to Istanbul in violation of the sultan’s decree, he could not allow himself to be recognized. This is most probably how he witnessed the celebrations. To make things even weirder, according to his account, the celebrations included many shows that featured men dressed as animals and demons or hiding inside special constructions of women’s figures. While he definitely did see the festivities with his own eyes, the same cannot be said about the alleged execution of the women. Here he may have been relating something he heard from others. Eyewitness or not, the account creates a sense of horrid absurdity: a former patriarch in disguise who only a few pages earlier described many of the performers dressed up, describes a sultan in disguise who catches disguised women, and has them executed. One wonders how many others on the streets that night appeared as someone they were not. Suggesting that the temptation of the festival was too strong, the former Patriarch writes these women “became victims of the illuminations because of their thoughtlessness and carelessness.” He expressed his hope that this would serve as a warning to other women not to disobey the ruler again “as they live in slavery in this kingdom.”125 The anecdote reminds us of sultan Murad IV‘s lethal response to the violation of his own decree or at least, the story told about it. In both cases, we find the sovereign moving through the city disguised by both darkness and costume. In both cases, the rulers apprehend individuals who directly violated their orders. Facing the law cannot possibly be more direct, more personal, more surprising, and more horrible. The sultans’ response to the violation of their orders is designed not only to punish, but more importantly, to impress with fear. Both Naima and Mavrikios seem to pity the unfortunate individuals who were unlucky

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enough to come face to face with an angered sultan. But both accept the “shock and awe” logic that guided the sultan’s response. In this, their response recalls that of Ḥanna al-Tab¯ıb, cited above. Decrees _ must be obeyed, order – preserved, even if it is one based on what the patriarch defines as “slavery.” In fact, one of the things that struck Mavrikios most during the nights of the festival was the lack of fear, which, we understand was highly unusual: People who would have shrunk from passing in front of constables (zabit) at other times went fearlessly (με αφοβίαν, aphobia) to their palaces, where they leaped and danced and laughed in front of them . . . Even though the herb of madness was absent, freedom from fear (αφοβία) appeared to produce the same effect, even though fearlessness (αφοβία) is not as potent as wine-guzzling. Some people seem to get drunk on fearlessness, and they forget their position and their property.126

For Mavrikios, then, the absence of fear was both a source of joy and a source of anxiety. Without fear, he feared, the social order itself was in danger. We may conclude that it was certainly in the interest of those in power to project fear and that the logic was not alien to other people. Yet, we should not be blinded by such projections. Just like light was not distributed equally and systematically throughout the city and around the year,127 power was not applied systematically and equally over urban space and time; rather, it was concentrated around the sultan and traveled with him as he made his way around the city. Out of the sultan’s sight (and the sight of his men), power worked much more sporadically. The processions, the light displays (discussed in Chapter 6), and the undercover night patrols served to bridge this gap between pretense and reality by projecting an image of omnipresent power, day and night. However, to make such a claim credible, sultanic power had to appear absolute, awe-inspiring. At times this translated into fantastic light displays, in others, it was bodies returning home covered in soot or worse, lying dead in the streets at dawn.

Conclusion What does it all tell us about the more general discussion of “ocularcentrism” with which I opened? Placing whole cities in the

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dark laboratory of the Early Modern night shows that the dominance of vision is not a mere social construct. Even when partly blinded by darkness, hearing augmented sight, never replaced it. At least in the Ottoman Empire, a “non-Western,” agrarian society, vision was privileged over hearing, regardless of Plato, the Cartesian tradition, or the Enlightenment. This does not mean, of course, that vision can be dissociated from the other senses, or that the primacy of the eye is entirely biological. It means, rather, that within the integrated, and culturally mediated sensorium of humans, there is hierarchy after all. Ultimately, it was only light and sight that were trusted for establishing truth and order. Darkness, it was shown, undermined not only individuals’ sense of security but posed a serious challenge to urban order, that was ultimately predicated on [over]sight. Hearing was important to detect disturbances and direct law enforcers but ultimately, light was needed to expose and identify the people involved. The authorities, from the sultan down, sought to project fear, to compensate for their inability to police the entire city systematically. It was shown, however, that such projections did not necessarily deter people from breaking the law under the cover of darkness. Chapter 3 focuses more closely on these people.

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3

The Urban Subconscious

In his annals of the hicri year 1177 (1763–1764), the chronicler Semdanizade ¸ Fındıkıllı Süleyman Efendi (~1740–1779) recounts a story that apparently happened at least three years earlier. Semdanizade ¸ tells about a master jeweler by the name of Tahir Çelebi (or Aga) ˘ who was nominated the head jeweler of the court (kuyumcubaşı). Taking advantage of his proximity to the sultan, Tahir Çelebi was leased a tract of land in the area of Beykoz, north of the city on the Asian side of the Bosporus, and built a palace there. Since Tahir Aga ˘ was close with the sultan, ambitious elites who hoped to gain access to more power could simply not allow themselves to stay away. They built lavish beach houses, some 40 or 50 of them, around that area. Tahir then deemed it necessary to build a market, a mosque, and a public bath, as well as many shops. In order to create demand and increase the value of the shops, he kept the shops open “night and day” and ornamented them with candles and lanterns. The emerging scene attracted musicians, “coquet beloveds,” shadow theatre operators, jugglers, acrobats, and dancers (köçeks), “sweet tongued, slender waisted, calamity of the soul, sedition of the world.” Word of the action spread, and people from the city began arriving in boats (kayık) at night. According to the chronicler, up to 2,000 boats arrived every night bringing people, “some drunk, some sober,” and turning the area into an “abode of debauchery.” When the sultan heard that “multiple major sins” (kebair) were openly advertised, and that the mischief (fısk u fücur) had been going on for 40 days, he had a few “corrupting shops” demolished and dispersed the crowds. In so doing, the sultan was “forbidding wrong,” the chronicler wrote, alluding to one of the fundamental duties of a Muslim ruler which goes back to the Quran.1 Tahir Çelebi literally shed light on what had normally flourished in the dark, and it was this publicity, this “advertisement of multiple major sins” that prompted the decisive interference of the sultan. In 81 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 04 Aug 2021 at 06:37:27, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108933131.006

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what follows I show that as long as such “sins” were kept in the dark, they were largely overlooked. The night, I argue, was more tolerant than the day. It allowed everything that was repressed by diurnal order to surface under the half-closed eyes of the authorities.2 Darkness offered economically underprivileged and socially marginal groups livelihood and leisure opportunities that were hardly available during the day. These populations therefore figured prominently in the city’s nocturnal life. But the night offered cover also to the “respectable” residents of the city and to its rulers. As shown in the previous chapters, darkness indeed had a blinding effect, but it also made it easier to turn a blind eye. Whereas infringements in broad daylight were a direct challenge to the established order, it was often comfortable for all parties to pretend nighttime violations never happened. Muslim drinkers could enjoy a few nightcaps and pretend they were not, janissaries could continue to frequent the same “dens of mischief” they were supposed to police, and the tax revenue from these same dens could continue to flow to the treasury, even when their Muslim clientele was on the rise. Both order and its alleged enemies could more easily transgress their bounds at night, assuming that what happened in the dark remained in the dark. Throughout most of the eighteenth century, a huge nightlife scene was allowed to exist, as long as it remained out of sight and did not openly undermine diurnal order. In the next chapter, I show that this ambivalence, in fact, ran much deeper, into the heart of Ottoman culture, but at this stage, I limit the discussion to the more practical level of interests, and considerations of public order, morality, and stability. Excepting occasional references, this scene, or at least its scope and longevity, remains largely unknown even today. Some authors assumed there was simply nothing going on after dark. A few late Ottoman writers viewed nightlife as an innovation brought about by Europeans or by European wannabes. For example, Balıkhane Nazırı Ali Rıza (1842–1928) wrote that before the late nineteenth century “there had been no nightlife in Istanbul.” Elsewhere he wrote that the nightclubs and casinos of Pera seduced the men of Istanbul into spending their nights and their money on “merrymaking,” probably unaware that a century earlier, chronicler Ahmed Cavid (d. 1803) had argued the same about the taverns of the city.3 Writing in the early 1920s, in Allied-occupied Istanbul whose nightlife was boosted by thousands of European soldiers, the author Ahmed Haşim

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(1884–1933) lamented the good old days when Muslims went to bed early and woke up early for the morning prayer.4 Such claims were part of a wider discourse that identified Galata and Pera as the “foreign within,” and associated its nightlife with every possible vice.5 In short, nighttime debauchery was presented – and is still presented by some – as foreign. In the absence of systematic research into the nocturnal realities of the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, modern scholarship tended to reaffirm such impressions. Relying on scant evidence, it was assumed that before the arrival of gaslighting and related forms of nightlife, the dark hours in Ottoman Istanbul were nearly barren of social interaction.6 The majority of people indeed went to sleep around the night prayer, and yet, for many thousands of people, the night was still young. Some were forced to work nights, but most went out seeking illicit pleasures in what amounted to a huge, and yet semi-clandestine nightlife scene, fueled by substantial amounts of alcohol. This chapter seeks to sketch the contours of this scene, the profile of the people who populated it, and the interests that kept it going for so long, and on such a large scale.

Mapping the Nightlife Scene Consuming alcohol was forbidden for Muslims under Islamic and sultanic law (kanun) and was punishable by 24 lashes, or more commonly, a fine (according to the kanun). Just as important was the stigma attached to drinking, or at least, to heavy drinking.7 Like commercial sex and gambling, the other main options this scene offered, alcohol was not entirely limited to the night. Non-Muslims could drink in broad daylight without fearing punishment or risking their reputation. According to the Ottoman-Armenian writer Mourdagea D’Ohsson (1740–1807), people of the “lower classes” such as sailors, soldiers, and “dervishes” similarly did not limit their drinking to the dark hours (see Figure 3.1).8 Taverns in Galata, and possibly in some other places, were opened already during the day and attracted either non-Muslims or Muslims that were not particularly concerned about reputation.9 Yet, it was the night that turned the area into a domain of leisure, a “red light district” of sorts.10 It is worth noting that there was no concept of “nightlife” in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire. Going out after the night prayer was

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Figure 3.1 A glimpse of tavern life. The poet ͑Ataʾ¯ ¯ ı, himself not a drinker, is _ shown conversing with a dervish on the left. From Ḫamse-i At aʾ ¯ ¯ı. _ Courtesy of the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, W.666, 44a

suspect, dubious, and at specific times and places, strictly forbidden. But the fact that nocturnal leisure was not recognized does not mean it did not exist. To a large extent, it could exist because it was unrecognized. The occasional traveler could hardly access it or appreciate its scope. Glimpses of it appear in official documents, poems, and anecdotes but these too hardly reveal the pervasiveness of the scene. They are more like the tip of a huge iceberg submerged in a sea of darkness. Two reports filed by senior security officials in the early 1790s reveal just how big this iceberg was.11 The reports were produced as part of an effort to eradicate the scene in its entirety.12 For now, the reports will serve to map the drinking scene, which was more or less the map of nightlife in the city (see Figure 3.2). According to the first report, filed by the sekbanbaşı, there were 101 taverns and bars in his jurisdiction

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Figure 3.2 Istanbul drinking hubs, circa. 1790. The size of each circle represents the number of taverns in that area. Source: F. Kauffer, Carte de Constantinople Levée par F. Kauffer et J.B. Lechevalier, 1786. Courtesy of the Eran Laor Cartographic Collection, National Library of Israel

(which covered most of the walled city), 62 of which were defined as koltuk, i.e. unauthorized bars. Balat, on the eastern shore of the Golden Horn lead the list with 43 bars, followed by Samatya (12), Tekfursaray (10), and Kumkapı (9).13 By way of comparison, a register from the same time, listed 144 coffeehouses around the same neighborhoods.14 In other words, even in the relatively more conservative walled city, tavern numbers were not negligible when compared to coffeehouses, without doubt the most common leisure establishment in Ottoman cities. As shown below, after dark, at least some coffeehouses also served alcoholic beverages, so the gap between leisure establishments that did not sell alcohol and those that did was even smaller. The list submitted by the bostancıbaşı had even more taverns than that of the sekbanbaşı. Responsible for the neighborhoods and villages along the Bosporus and the northeastern side of the Golden Horn, the Bostancıbaşı listed 322 drinking houses of various kinds (meykede, meyhane, şerbethane) that had been shut down or converted to other uses. Here it is Arnavutköy, on the European side of the Bosporus, that

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sticks out with 53 bars, followed by Hasköy, a predominantly Jewish neighborhood on the Golden Horn with 46 bars, and Yeniköy with 29. Üsküdar and Yeni Mahalle, the predominantly Muslim district that forms a focal point in this study, had 27 alcohol-selling premises according to the same document.15 Put together, the two officials reported the closing down of 423 drinking houses. It should be noted that the lists do not include Galata, for centuries the most famous (or infamous) hub of drinking and prostitution in Istanbul. This was probably due to the fact that Galata was under the authority of another official, the voyvoda. According to Evliya Çelebi, writing in the midseventeenth century, there were 200 bars in Galata during his time. Evliya Çelebi’s tendency to exaggerate is well-known and yet, considering the numbers cited above, and given that Galata was known as the alcohol hub of the city, his figure does not seem implausible. Furthermore, an official record from 1829 lists 158 bars in Galata and Beyo˘glu (uphill from the port area).16 If, based on these earlier and later numbers, we round the number of taverns and bars in Galata to 150, it turns out that there were more than 570 drinking houses in greater Istanbul. A different document, from 1827, cites the number of 500 drinking establishments throughout the city (see below), which further demonstrates that the figures from the early 1790s were not at all inflated. These numbers do not include wandering booze vendors, known as “legged taverns” (sing. ayaklı meyhane), who supplied spirits to poor people who could not afford to drink in taverns. These vendors too operated only after dark.17 In the seventeenth century, Evliya Çelebi estimated their number at 800, although as already noted, his numbers should be taken cautiously.18 In addition, alcohol was also sold under the cover of darkness in khans, coffeehouses, and grocery shops (see below). In short, wherever one lived, an evening drink was just around the corner. Who frequented these drinking hubs? Who were the creatures of the night in eighteenth-century Istanbul? Judging by official documents and elite accounts, the Istanbul night was mostly populated by the urban underclass, and in particular, by itinerants and janissaries who dominated the dark streets. This was true to a large extent but not on account of these populations’ ingrained depravity, as many hegemonic sources would have us believe. Rather, an intricate web of push and pull factors drew these groups into the dark hours and determined the geography of nightlife.19

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Demographics of Nocturnal “Mischief” Throughout the eighteenth century, Istanbul attracted a great number of migrants, driven by war, natural disasters, banditry, abuse of power in some provincial areas, and the promise of security, charity, and better economic opportunities in the capital.20 Migrants played a crucial role in the urban economy.21 According to one estimate, in two of the city’s main districts, they made up about half of the workforce.22 It should be noted, however, that estimations of the city’s population during the eighteenth century vary considerably, ranging between 300–600,000 people.23 It is therefore hard to estimate the weight of migrants in the general population. What is beyond doubt is that the rampant migration changed the city’s social makeup, increased crime, and heightened social tensions.24 This, at the very least, was the view held by the authorities and many of the older residents, who looked at the migrants with much suspicion.25 Single men were considered particularly threatening. These people were variously called serseri, başıboş, and a host of other names, but in the eighteenth century they were most frequently referred to as “bekars,” literally “bachelors.”26 This category in fact covered seasonal workers, recently arrived migrants, vagrants, beggars, peddlers, demobilized soldiers, Roma, and others from among the urban underclass. Diversified as they were in terms of background, the “bachelors” did share certain characteristics that set them apart from other denizens: they were men without families in the city (many had families in their places of origins); they had no permanent address and no fixed occupation. They were transitory, floating, unstable, and therefore dangerous in the eyes of the authorities and the wider population.27 Other suspect groups included workers in particular professions such as porters, boaters, gardeners, and bath attendants, many of whom were itinerants or were in close interaction with itinerants.28 All of these groups sought to affiliate themselves with the janissaries, which made them even more suspect in the eyes of the elite, especially as the tensions between the palace and the corps intensified toward the end of the century.29 Religiously, socially, and morally suspect, these cohorts were the most likely to be associated with fesad, variously translated as “disorder,” “corruption,” “evil,” or “mischief.”30 In classical Islamic jurisprudence,

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sai bi’l-fesad, literally “a fomenter of evil,” referred mostly to highway robbers. The Ottomans have broadened the use of the term fesad to encompass different types of public offenses. Sai bi’l-fesad became equivalent with habitual criminal, a constant threat to public order.31 Başak Tug˘ has shown that individuals labeled “fomenters of evil” or “bandits” (eşkiya) could be tried based on the kanun, which set a much lower evidential bar than the Sharia. For example, according to the kanun, it was possible to prosecute based on “bad intentions” (su-ı kasd). Thus, forcing people considered a threat into the category of “fomenters of evil” made it easier to convict them and, in some cases, to inflict more severe penalties on them.32 While the term clearly connotes a disruption of order and criminal activity, it carries a strong moral tone which is not conveyed by such words as “disorder” or “crime.” I therefore chose to translate it as “mischief.” Beyond its legal consequences, fesad was widely interpreted as the opposite of public good and order. In eighteenth-century Istanbul, fesad was most closely associated with the “bachelors” and neighborhood communities therefore sought to keep outsiders away. “Strangers” (ecnebi) or people of “unknown status” (mechulü-l ahval), that is, individuals who could not be identified and vouched for by any respectable member of the community, were commonly considered a threat to public order and morality.33 In official eyes, and in the eyes of many permanent residents, the spaces inhabited by bachelors were fundamentally different from the mahalle, with its family values, and the mischievous lot (ehl-i fesad, ehl-i fisk ü fesad) were inherently different from the respectable people (ehl-i ırz) of the residential neighborhoods.34 “Crime and immorality,” argues Shirine Hamadeh, were not personalized, but spatialized, “and therefore moral order was to be maintained by enforcing spatial order.”35 Among other measures, the authorities tried to control the movement of transients and to limit their residence to specific areas. In reality, however, these “zoning” policies proved ineffective, and bachelors found ways to circumvent such measures.36 Transients, nevertheless, tended to concentrate on particular urban institutions and open spaces. Many of them resided in more than 12,000 “bachelor rooms” that were scattered around the city.37 These were located in large numbers in the port area, in khans and markets, and around jetties along the waterways, where many of the men found work. With transient population moving through

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constantly and lacking in terms of policing, these areas tended to be more violent.38 Medreses also lodged large numbers of young students and were similarly considered suspect in the eyes of the authorities, as were dervish lodges, soup kitchens, public baths, barbershops, and coffeehouses. These were exactly the sites and populations that rallied around janissary leaders in times of rebellion.39 The night was similar in this way: it pulled populations and activities that were pushed away by the various facets of diurnal order, described in Chapter 2. Contemporary court records documenting nocturnal crimes and conflicts clearly demonstrate, at the very least, that established residents and the authorities associated nighttime disturbances with the urban underclass, and itinerants in particular. A total of 146 cases gleaned from 8 volumes kept by the Üsküdar court provide the details of 236 individuals brought to court for various nocturnal transgressions, from verbal assaults, through thefts, brawls, and on to rapes. In order to get some idea about the social background of the defendants, I recorded separately the details of the plaintiffs and accused for each case, to the extent they were available. In what concerns this discussion, I noted gender, adjectives that may indicate social marginality (e.g. bachelor, “gypsy”), occupation (where applicable), religious affiliation (Muslim versus non-Muslim), and military status. Out of 236 defendants, 195 defendants (82.6 percent) were men and only 41 (17.3 percent) were women. We do not have diurnal data, so comparisons are impossible, but this figure does seem to indicate that the night turned the city into an almost all-male space, or at least, that women were almost never accused of nocturnal crime or conflicts, except for prostitution. It is obviously impossible to tell the truth in most of these cases, but it does lay bare the common association of the night with illicit sex. In terms of religious affiliation, the findings are inconclusive since we do not have reliable statistical data about the confessional makeup of Üsküdar in the eighteenth century. Under such conditions, only overwhelming figures can be trusted to indicate something meaningful. This is not the case here. Out of 236 defendants, 29 (12.2 percent) were non-Muslims (defined as either “zimmi” or “nasrani”). Considering that only 11 out of the 70 quarters in the district of Üsküdar were populated by Christians, and only one by Jews, the low representation of these groups in the sample is hardly surprising.

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In order to learn something about the socioeconomic profile of the defendants, I grouped together all defendants for whom I could establish with reasonable confidence that they belonged to the itinerant population or, more generally, to the lower social orders. These included defendants explicitly referred to as “bachelors,” but also individuals who appear in the record merely as “son of this-and-this,” without a title, place of residence, or occupation. To these, I added prostitutes, simple soldiers, boaters, porters, and other poorly paid menial laborers who were very often migrants and can be confidently regarded as part of the urban underclass.40 This group was then compared to the entire cohort. Thus, out of 236 defendants, 135 (57.2 percent) can be classified as belonging to the urban underclass with reasonable certainty. As may be expected, marginal individuals are much less prominently represented among the plaintiffs in the same sample (only 27 plaintiffs out of 113, that is, 20.3 percent). We do not have reliable demographic data for the eighteenth century and, therefore, any attempt to draw conclusions here is highly tentative, especially considering the small sample. It does appear, however, that lower-class individuals were more likely to be involved in after dark conflicts and crimes, or at least, were accused of being involved. Indeed, given the hostility toward itinerants and marginals, it is hard to tell if the cohort as a whole represents the “mischievous” population of nocturnal Istanbul, or rather the prejudices of the established residents toward the itinerants, and the superior socio-economic position of the formers, that allowed them to take legal action more easily. Considering the findings of other sicil-based studies, it is clear that itinerants and other marginal populations were legally more vulnerable and it is possible that their high occurrence in nocturnal cases is simply a reflection of this bias.41 A more careful way of characterizing the “mischievous” of nocturnal Istanbul is to use only cases where defendants were caught at night (rather than brought in during the daytime, after the fact) or cases where the defendants themselves confirmed their involvement in nighttime incidents either explicitly or implicitly (e.g. by reaching an agreement with the plaintiff ). Screening the cases in this way bypasses the possibility of false accusations and allows us to place people at night with more certainty. Out of 52 individuals in this subset, 34 (65.3 percent) can be associated with the urban underclass. It is true that we do not know the proportions of this group’s

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involvement in diurnal conflicts and crime, so a comparative analysis is once again impossible. Moreover, as in other times and places, it is likely that enforcement was selective, and that itinerants and homeless people were much more likely to be arrested in the first place. We cannot read around such biases. It is still significant that in comparison to other sectors of society, the urban poor figures very prominently in the general sample and the subset made of those who confessed or caught at night. Regarding the nature of the incidents that reached court, almost half of them (48.6 percent) were violent, including brawls, assaults, rapes, and more. By way of comparison, according to Fariba Zarinebaf, violent assault and injury made up around 10 percent of the convictions in Istanbul in the 1720s.42 Even taking these data with all the necessary caution, the gap is too big to be incidental. This does not change significantly even if we group assaults with rape (as in my dataset) since in both samples, cases of rape were of much smaller numbers. Furthermore, Zarinebaf’s sample includes both day and night cases, which makes the gap between diurnal and nocturnal violence even more pronounced. Regarding the rest of the cases, 49 cases (32.2 percent) were break-ins, and 34 cases (22.3 percent) can be classified as “mischief,” including prostitution, gambling, and drinking. There were 12 cases of slander (7.8 percent), three of which also involved stoning the assaulted person’s house, and a few cases that do not fall under any of these categories. In short, the nocturnal city was dominated by underprivileged males and was far more dangerous than during the day.

Geography of Nocturnal Mischief As shown above, the “nightlife scene” of Istanbul was spread between several locations, but all were in predominantly non-Muslim neighborhoods along the waterways. It was mostly when the scene spilled inward and attracted outsiders into residential areas when it raised local opposition. It was only then that the authorities intervened, and those interventions were localized and brief.43 Here is one example of this dynamic. In early July 1811, a big group of residents of Üsküdar, on the Asian side of the Bosporus, complained in a petition they submitted that the bachelor rooms on the shoreline were home to “outlaws and mischievous people” (eşkiya ve ehl-i fesad) who “openly

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engage in all kinds of mischief with prostitutes, without fear, night and day.” The petitioners complained that the authorities were unable to quell criminal activity in the area and therefore requested that the said bachelor rooms be demolished.44 The phrase, “night and day” (leyl ü nehar, or in many places gece ve gündüz, şeb ü rüz), is worthy of attention, as it repeats itself in many texts pertaining to nighttime “mischief.” The phrase is often translated simply as “ceaselessly,” yet the wording is important. Even today, in the supposedly 24/7 society, day and night still have their particular rhythms. The differences between diurnal and nocturnal rhythms were much more pronounced before the age of fossil fuels. Nothing could work “around the clock.” To be active during the day was normal, but to be doing something “night and day” was to be doing it in excess. For example, a heavy drinker was known as şaribü’l leyl ve’n-nehar, literally “night and day drinker,” as opposed to the more moderate “evening drinker” (akşamcı).45 In some contexts, the term could be used positively, for example, to express utter devotion (to one’s master or duty, to one’s lover or friend, to God),46 but in this case too, the expression captures a deviation from the norm. In most cases, however, and certainly in court records, the phrase signified dubious activity that extended into the dark hours. The term was also used by contemporary chronicles to criticize indulgence in leisurely pursuits, especially at night.47 In the abovementioned petition too, the use of the expression was not merely idiomatic. It indeed signified that criminal and immoral activity continued into the dark hours, which negatively affected life in the area. The chronicler Cabi, a resident of Üsküdar himself, reports about the disorder around the docks and notes that while prostitution was widespread throughout the area, it was at night that the prostitutes walked the streets in groups of three to five “as if on patrol.”48 The petitioners too specifically noted that as the evening was nearing, the men and women of the neighborhood refrained from passing through bachelors‘ territory. In other words, as long as it was day, these areas were safe enough for passage. It was darkness that rendered them offlimits for “respectable people.” The picture that arises from this petition is one of a socio-spatial ebb and flow that corresponds, roughly to the alternation of day and night: as darkness falls, illicit activity spreads from the interior out into the streets, threatening to turn them into a realm of insecurity and immorality. It was then that neighborhood communities turned to court.49

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In Üsküdar and elsewhere in the city, drinking hubs were also centers of prostitution. Zarinebaf refers to these areas as “red-light districts.” However, she notes that the swelling of the urban underclass in the eighteenth century has led to a dramatic increase in the number of Muslim prostitutes, usually single women who had no means to support themselves. It was against this background that prostitution spread beyond those limited districts.50 Prostitution in residential areas was even more dependent on darkness as both prostitutes and clients sought to evade community surveillance. For example, in 1741 people from the Solak Sinan neighborhood in Üsküdar complained in the local court that a number of brothel keepers (kerhaneci) operated in the neighborhood, each employing between three to five prostitutes every night. These places attracted bandits [eşkiya] and were sites of all “kinds of sins.” As in other similar cases, the plaintiffs requested the said people be ejected from the neighborhood.51 Another case brought to the court of Üsküdar in March 1748 similarly demonstrates the benefits of darkness for those who sought hide-ability, but also its limitations as a hideout. According to the register, because “bandits and thieves,” were going about Üsküdar, a force of bostancıs led by a senior officer was sent to patrol the streets at night and provide security and peace to the people. The residents informed the bostancıs that the “bandit” responsible for all mischief in the area was el-Hacc Ahmed of Antakya. He was brought to court and the people of the neighborhood testified that he had recently arrived in their neighborhood, having been ejected from another one. “He walks around disguised as a respectable man” (ehl-i ırz kıyafetinde gezip) but in truth he “engages in mischief” with prostitutes, undermining the neighborhood security. The next day el-Hacc Ahmed ran away and the people of the neighborhood requested that his house be sold and that he would not be allowed to return.52 This appears to be a rather standard case of group action against an outsider, but what is noteworthy is that the residents claimed that the accused makes an effort to appear respectable. While it was not explicitly said that he brought the prostitutes at night, the fact that the patrol had been sent to the neighborhood at night in order to secure the people implies that it was after dark when the el-hacc Ahmed allowed himself to drop the disguise and engage in pimping. In short, fesad and the populations most closely associated with it were both spatially and temporally marginalized. They were pushed

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away from the residential areas onto the margins (and kept coming back), and from daytime into the night. But the prominence of the urban underclass within the nocturnal population should also be understood in terms of the pulling effect of the night: it offered not only leisure but also livelihood opportunities that were hardly available during the day, to people who had very few options.

Working Nights When most of the people were lying in their beds, some were out making a living. In a city as big as Istanbul their numbers probably reached thousands and even in a small town such as Jerusalem, there may have been dozens of such people.53 As shown by research on other areas and times, it is typically the urban poor or socially marginal populations who are pushed to perform night work, for lack of better job opportunities.54 Research since the 1980s has demonstrated that night work also increases morbidity, mostly due to exposure to artificial illumination.55 In Ottoman Istanbul and Jerusalem too it was mostly the underprivileged who were forced into working nights. In Istanbul, one of the biggest groups of night workers were fishermen. Most of the fishermen in the city were non-Muslims that resided in the villages along the Bosporus. The majority were poor.56 They differed significantly among themselves in means, methods of catch, areas of fishing, and the species they specialized in. The night offered fishing opportunities that the day could not. Taking advantage of these opportunities required knowledge of the daily cycles of tides, currents, and winds, but also of the waking and sleep cycles of particular fish populations. For example, there is a strong current running from the Black Sea down to the Sea of Marmara, and a weaker undercurrent going in the opposite way. But as mariners passing through these waters knew all too well, there were more local, strong counter currents and eddies.57 The intensity of some of these local currents would change over the day. For example, a local counter-current running between Galata and Defterdar Burnu is at its height in the afternoon but calms down in the late hours of the evening.58 Winds too could pose a significant challenge to the inexperienced. The southwesterly wind known as Lodos, which blows episodically from October to April, is so strong it may even reverse the surface current in the straight

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if it blows long enough, seriously jeopardizing mariners. The Lodos typically calms down at night, allowing mariners to set to the sea. Night fishermen had to adjust their biological clock to these physical and biological cycles. For example, one method of night fishing that required dark nights, little wind, and calm water was to quietly approach fish sleeping in shallow water and to harpoon them.59 A more complex – and expensive – method of nocturnal fishing was to attract fish with light (usually a torch or a lantern suspended from the prow of the boat) and then harpoon them. Observers noted that this was a particularly profitable mode of fishing, and as one writer put it in the late 1830s, “at night, the waters are covered with many lights, which float in various mazes.”60 Night angling was also practiced both from the shore and in deeper water, with leads rubbed in quicksilver to attract fish in the dark.61 Fishing in general, and night fishing in particular, followed not only currents but also seasons, and the migration patterns of various fish populations. For example, in the late summer and autumn, different species of fish including Mackerel (modern Tur. Uskumru), Turbot (Kalkan), Bonito (Palamut), Bluefish (Lüfer), and more, migrated through the Bosporus from the colder Black Sea to the warmer Sea of Marmara.62 Not only did some of the city’s fish supply depend on night work; so did the meat supply. Meat would be transferred from the slaughterhouses of Istanbul to the butcher shops where it then underwent a process known as “porging” to cleanse it from certain fats and tendons that were forbidden to eat according to both Islamic and Jewish orthodoxy. This was a poorly paid job performed at night by professional “porgers” (sing. Tur. kanadar), who also weighed the meat.63 Bakeries too began working already during the night, to have bread ready by morning. Stokers in public baths, another low-paying job, would also work at night to get the hamams hot for bathers early in the morning.64 Another group of people who had to work at night, or at least evenings, were domestic servants and slaves. After dark, they handled candles and lanterns, which took great care, performed menial tasks, and ran errands.65 At least in Jerusalem, millers too toiled after dark.66 Then there was the “security sector” which also employed people at night. Both janissaries and local guards hired by neighborhood communities could not expect to earn much. For example, the guards hired

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to patrol the area of the Imperial Armory were allocated 100 guruş a month in 1792, which was less than 60 percent of the average pay for unskilled workers in Istanbul, that same year.67 According to a decree from 1695 to 1696, neighborhood guards were often retired, elderly people, another indication of the poor pay.68 At least in the late nineteenth century, migrants from eastern Anatolia predominated.69 It is not unreasonable to assume that, given the poor compensation, it would have been migrants who took the job in the eighteenth century as well. Finally, there was the “nightlife” sector with hundreds of businesses, many of which employed cooks and servers. Some even offered music and dance performances. Prostitutes worked in taverns‘ back rooms and around them, as well as in public spaces such as markets and khans, and in private houses.70 As shown below, the scene was even wider as it also included many legitimate businesses, from coffeehouses to grocery shops, which were turned after dark into improvised taverns, and houses of gambling and prostitution. This huge leisure sector therefore supported many thousands of people, most of whom were of humble means. Some had both a day and a night job. For example, bath attendants (sing. dellak), many of whom were poor young migrants, prostituted themselves at night. A manuscript from 1686 cites the number of 2,321 such boys in 408 public bathhouses throughout Istanbul. Some of these boys charged 70–100 akçe for a single act, and more than 300 akçe when hired as “bedfellows” (sing. döşek yoldaşı) for the whole night.71 This was around 15 times more than the daily wages of an unskilled worker when the treatise was written.72 Even if we assume that the author sought to present his bedfellows as particularly attractive, there should be no doubt that prostitution offered many poor boys income that was otherwise unavailable to them. In short, one can say that migration into the city partly overlapped with “migration into the night,” or in other words, that migrants to the city were more likely to be out at night, because of job opportunities that the more established populations would not take. In fact, working nights and seeking pleasures in the dark were related on several levels. First, most drinking hubs were located on the waterways, where many of the itinerants found work. Second, the pleasure of some was the work of others, and third, the two were not mutually exclusive. People who had to work nights could also engage in illicit leisure activities. For example, it is not hard to

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imagine nighttime fishermen having a drink before or after work, or janissaries visiting a brothel after (or during) their patrol or drinking on duty. After all, who could stop them?

Apex Predators of the Nocturnal City The military in general, and the janissaries in particular, were central to the reality of Early Modern Ottoman nights, not only, as may be expected, as the arm charged with imposing order, but also since its members were so often involved in subverting it. Over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the ranks of the janissaries swelled substantially due to military needs, economic dynamics, and intra-elite rivalries. Estimates for the eighteenth century cite the number of 20,000 janissaries in Istanbul, only a few thousands of whom resided in their main barracks.73 The soldiery, which had previously been recruited through the devşirme system, was increasingly replaced with Muslims. Since acquiring a janissary status entailed various privileges, group protection and solidarity, and considerable prestige, many urbanites and migrants sought to affiliate themselves with the corps. The janissaries became a major route for the “infiltration” of commoners into the military class, and as such, challenged the very distinction posited between the ruling elite and the subjects.74 Moreover, by loaning money from regiments᾽ treasuries to artisans, selling of janissary payroll tickets (esame) to commoners, and extending protection, the janissaries effectively tied many non-janissaries to the corps.75 At the same time, due to the constant swelling of their ranks and the devaluation of the coinage, the real wages of the janissaries shrank, and more janissaries than ever before were forced to engage in artisanal work, commerce, and entrepreneurship. Furthermore, janissaries, who had been barred from marriage in earlier periods, began marrying locals, thereby further integrating into the urban population.76 These trends impacted the entire corps, yet it should be noted that the janissaries were hardly a monolithic group. While a few senior officers managed to make a fortune, more could be counted among the middle-class. In the eighteenth century, however, janissaries’ salaries could not even support a meager living and many janissaries and pseudo-janissaries (i.e. those who inherited or purchased janissary status but never went on campaign) were forced to engage in the

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lowest-paying menial jobs. They can, in fact, be counted among the urban poor.77 Beyond such mechanical socioeconomic definitions, artisans and janissaries shared in a sociocultural world that brought these originally distinct groups closer together. In fact, the corps were organized much like the guilds.78 The lower echelons were much closer to the world of the urban underclass and shared living and working spaces, values, and norms.79 In short, the janissaries turned from an exclusive fighting force into an inclusive status group, or a cross between a “political pressure group” and a union, which clung to its distinct identity, espritde-corps, and privileges. All these processes amounted to what one scholar defined as the “proletarization of the janissaries and the militarization of the urban poor or the middle classes.”80 These populations were not only socially and politically volatile. They were also suspect on religious grounds, especially given that the elite and parts of the wider population grew more orthodox over the century. The janissaries were officially affiliated with the antinomian Bektaşi order, which was also very popular among the lower strata of society.81 The night, it should be remembered, was used in hegemonic discourse to discredit antinomian groups and blame them not only with heretical religiosity but also with deviant sexuality. Regardless of hegemonic discourse, however, the janissaries were indeed comfortable in the dark. They were numerous, organized, and could count on group solidarity to protect them from the many dangers of the Early Modern night. Last but not least, they were armed and skilled in the use of arms and did not hesitate to use force. These tendencies were not limited to the night,82 but seem to have peaked after dark, when official oversight was at its lowest. The janissaries took advantage of this laxer surveillance to conspire against the palace and subvert its policies. In other words, the night also served them politically.83 Here, I focus rather on the way the darkness allowed the janissaries to revel, and engage in sporadic violence while at it. According to the chronicler Esad Efendi, on payment nights, the janissaries would roam the streets from the afternoon until morning, harassing the “respectable people” with their drunk shouts. They would gather in their barracks to get their money and engaged in all kinds of “amusements and forbidden acts” (enva-i melahi vü menahi).84 This is corroborated also by Cabi.85 Another enemy of the corps, the statesman and chronicler Ahmed Vasif (d. 1806), lumped

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together the unruliness of the janissaries, their moral depravity, their humble social background, and their heterodox inclinations. He noted that they assembled in such dubious places as coffeehouses, taverns, and brothels and went on to charge: “This perverse race are outwardly Mussulmans, yet have they not the least idea of religious purity, and are indeed a collection of baccals [grocers], boatmen, fishermen, porters, coffee-house keepers, and such like persons.”86 When Sıvazi Mustafa aga ˘ was appointed chief of the janissaries in late November 1808, he assembled the men and issued a stern warning, which says much about janissary behavior: anyone who shouted, drew a dagger, broke a door, or hit someone in a tavern would be fined 4.5 guruş. He further warned the commanders that anyone who does not control his men will be removed from office. The new chief did not content himself with warnings but monitored the “defective conduct of the officers night and day.”87 Yet, nocturnal insubordination, disturbances, and clashes between military units continued, repeatedly causing casualties.88 Often it was conflicts over prostitutes that sparked violence.89 Such events are recorded not only by hostile chroniclers but in official correspondence and other real time sources as well.90 What all these incidents reveal is that the nocturnal urban ecology was much more predatory than the diurnal one. Anybody venturing into the night had to be strong enough to defend one’s self or rely on others for survival. The night, in other words, was not some idyllic asylum, equally open to all.91 It was largely populated by those who had fewer opportunities during daytime and dominated by those who could use force most effectively. But it would be a gross mistake to think that darkness only served the urban underclass and the janissaries, so thoroughly assimilated within this population. It was just as important for “upright” members of the community who wanted to make some extra cash by turning their legitimate businesses into occasional bars and brothels, and to others who sought to enjoy a little bit of mischief and return in time for the morning prayer, and their diurnal respectability.92

Under Cover Charles White, a British officer who spent three years in Istanbul around the mid-nineteenth century, noted how darkness served those

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who wanted to engage in the illicit without losing face. He describes parties held along the banks of the Bosporus and notes that so long as it is light, participants “content themselves with smoking, conversing, fingering their beads, eating melons, and drinking coffee or water. But when night throws its veil around them, and intrusive eyes can no longer watch their actions, then comes the flow of wine, if not the feast of soul.”93 This logic applied even more strongly to drinking within the city. While along the banks of the Bosporus one could hope to escape prying eyes even during the day, in the city itself this was impossible. Only darkness offered such cover. According to historian Reşad Koçu, licensed taverns, that were supposed to cater only for the nonMuslim population of the city, would open already in the late afternoon but even in those establishments, business started in earnest only in the evening. The unauthorized bars known as koltuks (which as shown above were much greater in numbers) operated only after dark. These places attracted not only the urban poor, but also “respectable” people who did not want to drink at home or be seen drinking outside. Over there, “hidden from everybody’s eyes, they would drink their two or three cups of rakı, one or two glasses of wine, wipe their mouths and then head home.”94 Hiding in the night for “respectable” persons was not a nineteenthcentury innovation, of course. The prominent Ottoman scholar Katip Çelebi (1609–1657) is explicit about the way darkness could be used as cover: The rival’s eyes cannot see [now]. Deceive the night with your desires. For the cultured person (ad¯ıb), night is day. There are many you would think are devout who [in fact] greet the night with shocking things (yastaqbil al-layl bi-amr ʿaj¯ıb). Once the night has covered and veiled him, he would pass it with much amusement and feasting. The fool [does it] openly [allowing] a watchful enemy to spread word [of these amusements].95

The author finds no fault in hiding one’s desires in the night, but quite the contrary. That is what a cultured person (ad¯ıb) should do. Moreover, that is what seemingly pious people do, “once the night has covered and veiled” them and rivals’ eyes can no longer see and harm them. Just as “respectable” people could hide their “mischievous” preferences at night, so did respectable businesses hide their mischievous

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income. Two decrees issued in 1812 and 1815 reported the proliferation of alcohol production and sale in the back rooms of sweet makers’ shops (şekerlemeci). However improvised, these places offered a variety of drinks including punch, rum, and ʿaraq. Not only do these shops sell alcohol, it was noted, they remain open night and day (leylen ü neharen, gece ve gündüz), in violation of their regulations, and attract crowds with various games, gambling, and prostitution, thereby encouraging mischief (icra-i fesad). Both documents are clearly concerned that these places attract Muslim customers as well. The earlier document (from 1812) records the location of 15 such shops in Galata alone and three years later it is reported that these shops are common (vafir) also in Beşiktaş, Büyük Dere, and Tarabya.96 The earlier document stipulated that the selling of alcoholic beverages must stop and that the shops must close at sunset, just like all other businesses.97 Darkness, then, sheltered both those seeking to buy booze and those seeking to sell it. The same was true for the other “mischievous” activities. Writing in the early nineteenth century, the French diplomat and scholar François Pouqville tells of certain shops that were transformed at night to serve as gambling houses.98 Coffeehouses often transformed in a similar manner. While extremely popular, coffeehouses were suspicious in the eyes of the authorities even during daytime. Many coffeehouses were owned by janissaries, drew migrant populations, and were key nods in the networks binding the two groups.99 The fact that coffeehouses remained open into the dark hours throughout the Ottoman Empire increased their potential threat in the eyes of both authorities and communities.100 As darkness fell, some coffeehouses metamorphosed into improvised taverns, that offered not only alcohol and gambling but also commercial sex.101 In early July 1767, the people of Solak Sinan neighborhood in Üsküdar brought to court one İbrahim Bin Salih, whom they accused of “engaging in mischief.” The said İbrahim, they claimed, turned a former grocery shop situated right next to the local mosque, into a coffeehouse. At night, people socialized there with young boys (gecelerde şabb kimesneler ile enis ü celis oldugundan), which undermined the residents’ security. They requested the coffeehouse be removed by an imperial decree.102

The Mischievous Foundations of Order The night, then, facilitated transformations and transgressions that were hardly possible during the day. It allowed coffeehouses, public

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baths, and sweetshops to turn into taverns and brothels;103 it allowed men seeking drink, gambling, and illicit sex to cross into the mischievous and come back again, their respectability intact. But it also allowed the state to maintain an appearance of order and morality while benefiting from what it defined as disorder and immorality. First, taverns, which were considered hubs of mischief, were the source of taxes that directly supported units and guards, whose job was to uphold urban order.104 Second, the janissaries and auxiliaries charged with enforcing order at night were among the most enthusiastic participants in the nightlife scene and were very often a source of disorder. In this terrain of blurred boundaries, selective enforcement and evasion were paramount, which goes a long way to explain the scope and resilience of the nightlife scene. Not only was there a growing population that was willing to pay to drink away their trouble; as noted by Cengiz Kırlı, the people up top had a vested interest in keeping the alcohol flowing.105 The “restriction” (zecriye) tax was introduced in the eighteenth century and imposed on all alcohol sold in the market. Additional levies were incumbent on the shipping of wines and spirits. According to Stanford Shaw, the restriction tax was farmed out to non-Muslims to prevent Muslims from benefitting from alcohol consumption.106 Yet, it appears that some of the money went to Muslim officials as well. The taxes levied on alcohol, explains the chronicler Ahmed Cavid, were borne out of necessity. Writing about Selim III’s move against the taverns in 1790–1791, the chronicler provides a detailed account of previous clampdowns on the city’s drinking and prostitution scene. He documents four such actions between 1595 and 1730 but notes that each time, the taverns were allowed to reopen. This was not merely the result of neglect. The heavy financial burden of the largely failed campaigns of the 1680s drained the treasury and pushed the leaders of the empire to lift the ban on alcohol retail, so as to fill the coffers with tax money. Since it was impossible to stop the sale of alcohol entirely anyway, they reasoned, it should at least be taxed. “It is necessary to turn a blind eye” (igmaz), ˘ they said, and silenced those who objected by the Sharʿi principle “necessity justifies that which may be unlawful” (in Turkish, from the original Arabic, ez-zarurat tubihü’l- mahzurat). The alcohol tax was hence reinstated, only to be abolished and then reinstated a few years later.107

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Cavid here exposes the fundamental dilemma facing the leaders, namely, whether to stick by the law and Sunni religious ideal and try to keep Istanbul dry or to be more pragmatic about the sale of alcohol. For the most part, they opted for the second option. The night eased the dilemma as it made it much easier to “turn a blind eye.” Cavid further explains that the tax revenues profited particular officials (the superintendent of alcohol and the governor of Galata), which made their posts much coveted.108 This system created an intricate web of conflicting interests and at times, thwarted actions against the taverns. When Sultan Selim III (1789–1807) tried to close down all taverns in Istanbul, his top officials tried to stall and push their master toward a more pragmatic policy.109 I suggest that this may have to do with the revenues the nightlife industry brought those high officials. This speculation is supported by several later documents from Sultan Mahmud II’s reign (1808–1839) that make the connection explicitly. Just like his uncle Selim, Mahmud considered the tavern scene a kingdom of fesad ruled by the janissaries. In 1821, against the background of the Greek rebellion, the kaymakam, the official in charge of Istanbul in the absence of the grand vizier, noted in a missive to the sultan that preparations for the campaign are advancing and that most of the soldiers are already under arms. It was in this context that an order to close down all taverns was issued “to prevent mischief.” The kaymakam drew the sultan’s attention to the fact that the chief of the janissaries derived most of his income from taxes levied on taverns, and if they were closed, he would lose revenue. The kaymakam suggested that the chief of the janissaries would be secretly (mahfiyen) compensated and given an additional sum as an imperial gift (ʿatiye-i seniyye-i şahane) to “encourage his efforts and attention” (ikdam ve dikkatına medar olmak için). The sultan approved the “gift” but ranted about the “endless shooting, day and night,” saying that the fact the janissaries are under arms does not justify that level of disorder. He expected that, following the pay, order would be restored.110 This exchange shows that the “forces of order” were directly supported by taverns that were so often referred to as the dens of disorder. The chief of the janissaries appears here almost as a gangster that holds the city hostage until he is paid protection money. The payment is done secretly in order to maintain at least an appearance of order.

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The second time Sultan Mahmud ordered a clampdown on the drinking establishments of the city, was part of his move against the janissaries in 1826. Documents issued around that time reveal just how much revenue was generated by the city’s taverns, and that it was not only the chief of the janissaries who benefitted from them. The governor of Galata (voyvoda) collected monthly payments of 1,500 guruş made by an unknown number of taverns, in addition to 15,000 guruş paid once a year by another group of taverns. The bostancıbaşı too was entitled to some of the revenue gleaned from some other taverns, although the exact amount was not specified in the documents.111 About a year later, the tavern owners whose businesses had been closed down appealed to the authorities and pledged to pay 5,235 guruş each month, on top of a yearly sum of 41,000 guruş, should they be allowed to reopen their establishments. Given the significant income, the superintendent of the zecriye tax recommended granting the request, and the sultan approved.112 Clearly, the tavern owners, who numbered more than 500 just before the above-mentioned clampdown, thought that they could pay more than 100,000 guruş a year in tax and still make a profit. Otherwise, they would not have approached the authorities. This shows not only the tremendous amount of money the drinking scene was making, but also the interest the state had in keeping the alcohol flowing, despite it being the “mother of sins” (ümm ül-habaʾis) as the grand vizier put in one of the above-mentioned memos.113 It was not only highest officials who benefitted from the nightlife scene. One of these documents said that originally, the taverns that had been allowed to operate in the city were supposed to cater only for the needs of non-Muslims. However, since janissary officials (referred to as the “abolished corps”) drew revenue from the taverns, they “did not care much for the religious aspect” (avaid ve zevaid almaları takribiyle diyanet tarafını gözetmeyip) and gave permissions to open new taverns time and again. The “exalted state” too did not consider the matter crucial and therefore the number of taverns rose every day, reaching over 500. The document further notes that Sharʿi limitations had not been enforced and as a result, alcohol consumption “spread throughout Istanbul” (dar al-saltanet al-seniyyelerinin her tarafında istiʿmal-ı müskirat şuyuʿ bulmak).114 Even low-ranking officers and simple soldiers had a direct interest in the preservation of the tavern scene, as the taxes generated by the

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taverns paid their salaries. For example, after the city’s taverns had been shut down by order of Selim III, two janissary officers whose job was to patrol the area of the Imperial Armory “night and day” with their soldiers, petitioned the authorities saying that following the closing of the taverns, “around the Armory and in other places,” they were allocated an allowance from the treasury. However, this allowance was discontinued, and the petitioners asked that it would be resumed and that they would be reimbursed retroactively for the period they were not paid.115 Kırlı notes that even some large religious endowments (sing. vakıf) received significant funds from taxes levied on taverns, which gave members of the religious establishment a vested interest in the alcohol business.116 From the top officers to the rank and file, then, the apparatus of nocturnal order was dependent on the “mischievous” alcohol scene. Moreover, law enforcers actually had an interest that the law would be violated. For example, the chief of the night guard was entitled to onetenth of the fines imposed at night for offenses such as drunkenness.117 And then there were bribes, which, given the laxer surveillance, were easier to take.118 In his book about bars in Istanbul, early republican author Reşet Ekrem Koçu notes that koltuk owners actively tried to evade government oversight by hiding activity behind curtains or by bribing janissaries on patrol to allow them to keep their businesses running even after the official closing time has passed. Significantly, this bribe was known as “don’t see us fee” (“görme bizi” ücreti).119 Darkness, it is shown again, served everybody involved. This may be the reason that a general curfew was not imposed in Istanbul, or stated more cautiously, I found no evidence of such a measure before the mid-nineteenth century. In fact, I did not even come across mentions of the enforcement of closing time on taverns except for Koçu’s statement, brought above. Exceptions were made in times of turmoil. The British ambassador, for example, reported in January 1742 that orders have been issued to the effect that “nobody should be abroad after such a time at night.”120 In Jerusalem, by contrast, a general curfew was the rule, at least in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and probably later too. According to Rabbi Moshe Ben Yisraʾel Naftal¯ı, a Jew from Prague who migrated to Jerusalem in 1621, two hours after sunset a drum sound announced curfew, which lasted until the drumming was heard again, two hours before dawn. The subaşı rode through the streets and was authorized to arrest

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anybody who violated the curfew. He could also impose a fine on people who failed to secure their doors.121 Very similar arrangements are described in court records from the sixteenth century.122 Much smaller than Istanbul and shut off from the world behind its walls at night, Jerusalem could more easily be “closed down.” More importantly, the economy was much smaller and the benefit nightlife could yield to the state was much humbler. Sources from the late Ottoman period do mention drinking houses (sing. khamara) in Jerusalem and ¯ it is very likely that such establishments were not new.123 Yet, I found no evidence whatsoever of a significant leisure scene, neither in the Jerusalem court records, nor in many dozens of travel accounts I searched, dating from the early eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century.

Mischief Visible It was shown above that the Ottoman authorities did not try to pull the plug on Istanbul’s nightlife. Rather, they were content with containing it geographically and temporally, subject only to loose regulation. When nocturnal “mischief” became visible, however, the authorities had no choice but to intervene. At this point, I would like to return to the story of the chief jeweler Tahir Çelebi, the king of the short-lived nightlife scene in Beykoz, whose exploits opened this chapter. I could not find traces of the events in any other source and therefore, the account must be read carefully, and in particular, given that it carries a pronounced moral message. Even without supporting evidence, however, we can still assume that the author sought to make the story believable and so, it can be read as a story that could have happened. As such, it is interesting for several reasons. First, the numbers of revelers cited by the author are striking. When brought at the beginning of the chapter, the reader might have dismissed them as a gross exaggeration, but with the scope of the nightlife scene now fully exposed, it is safe to assume that contemporary readers would deem these numbers perfectly plausible. Second, the chronicler ascribes to Tahir Aga ˘ intentionality. In today’s terms, we would probably say that he “identified a need.” The chronicler writes explicitly that in order to increase the value of the shops Tahir opened (dükkanlar kiymetli olmaya revac vermek için) he kept them open “night and day.”124 He was obviously in sync with people’s wishes and again in today’s

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terms, thousands of customers cannot be wrong. Tahir’s leisure scene attracted scores of people every night, despite, or maybe because of its remote location. Indeed, it was probably the remoteness of the scene that allowed it to thrive in the first place. One Leventine, a longtime resident of the city, explicitly wrote that people went to the northern areas of the Bosporus – Tarabya and Büyükdere in particular – because the palace guards (the bostancıs, in charge of patrolling the strait’s shores) did not reach those areas. In the past, this neglect has attracted seamen and “lyre-players” to these areas, and later on, European residents who sought more “freedom.”125 Indeed, word of the action reached the sultan only 40 days after the party had begun. We should doubt whether this was the exact number of days. It is more likely that the author chose this number to make a point. Some of the festivities arranged by Ottoman sultans lasted 40 nights and 40 days, a clear demonstration of their wealth and power. For example, Sultan Süleyman (whose name is mentioned in that same account) organized 40 days of celebrations in 1530, on the occasion of the circumcision of his three young sons. Moreover, all the elements in Semdanizade’s ¸ description would have been known from Ottoman nighttime festivities: the shops that remain open after dark, the music, dancers, and acrobats performing in the streets and, finally, the festive illumination.126 Tahir Aga’s ˘ candles and lanterns did not simply light the shops but rather “adorned” (tezyin) them. This was the term typically used by Ottoman writers to describe festive illumination.127 The chronicler seems to imply that by creating a nightlife scene that rivaled the most extravagant celebrations organized by sultans, Tahir aga ˘ stepped out of bound. The sultan’s reactions should therefore be read also as a much-needed retaliation against this infringement on the hierarchies of spending and wealth demonstration.128 The chronicler is clearly concerned not merely with the very occurrence of “mischief” but rather with its being committed openly. He notes that Tahir aga ˘ “did not fear preparing and running and advertising all kinds of pleasures (her cins zevkiyâtı ihzâr ve icra ve ilândan tahâşî etmez). Similarly, what got the sultan to act was not only that “mischief” was going on for a long time, but also that the revelers advertised their “multiple sins” (kebâir-i maʿdûdeyi ilân ettikleri).129 It was mischief revealed that necessitated action. Writing about nocturnal mischief was in itself an act of revealing. What can exist in the dark, even on a very large scale, must be

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denounced once it is described in text, in broad daylight. It is then that the wrong can no longer be ignored; it must be forbidden. Here both the sultan and the author rush into the action. The sultan effectively ruins the party and the chronicler frames the action in Sunni terms. The author’s final move of forbidding the wrong in his narrative is describing the punishment suffered by the offenders of the moral order. He relates that Tahir aga, ˘ who was not at all pleased to see his creation destroyed by the sultan, willy-nilly left his waterfront house and moved back to his house near the Ayasofya mosque. But his problems were only beginning. Because of the wrong he did to the vakıf, and the damage he caused the people, “the sparks of the sighs of the oppressed” set fire to his konak. He managed to move his family and furnishings to the palace of Yeşilli Oglu ˘ but the sparks of sighs reached there too, and his furnishings were reduced to ashes. The chronicler seems to suggest that Tahir aga’s ˘ house and its contents were torched by commoners who had suffered from his hand. Such acts of arson were rather common.130 Semdanizade ¸ here legitimizes the arson as an act of popular justice. The area that had been the site of mischief was abandoned. The account ends with a kind of postscript, according to which the waterfront houses built in the area developed by Tahir aga ˘ lost almost all their value. A house that had been worth 60 kise was sold for 4 kise three years later. “Those fools (humeka) who wanted to become close [to power] ended up far, knowing that they wasted their fortunes with their own hands.”131 Playing on words, the chronicler writes that the waterfront houses at Paşa Bahçe were cleansed (tahir) and Tahir’s nature was revealed (lit. became bright or manifest, bahir oldu). Semdanizade’s ¸ account is strikingly similar in structure and logic to the court records discussed in Chapter 2. Established moral order is disrupted at night; the disruption is then revealed, and the offenders are punished. Furthermore, the author functions much like some of the exposure mechanisms discussed in that same chapter: he brings to light the dark deeds and character of Tahir aga ˘ and his accomplices, shames and punishes them. Moral order, which had been openly disrupted in the nights of Beykoz, is thus restored.

Conclusion As shown throughout the discussion, the Early Modern night offered cover for different actors. It allowed those who made their livelihood

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from fesad to carry on with their business, mostly uninterrupted; it allowed patrons to frequent those businesses, mostly uninterrupted; and it allowed the authorities to benefit from the scene without losing face. At times, neighborhood communities or the authorities acted to limit “mischief” or drive it away, but systematic attempts to uproot it were rare. This ambivalence toward nocturnal reveling was demonstrated in this chapter mostly relying on texts that were meant to serve order. Chapter 4 is an attempt to go beyond these normative perspectives, and reconstruct the night as perceived by those who saw it as an opportunity, rather than a threat.

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4

Ambivalence and Ambiguity

At night, the moth came lip-to-lip with the candle, in the gathering Burning with wondrous longing, they conversed in the gathering. When the daughter of the vine was squeezed, her body flowed with sweat The cupbearer extracted and colored it for the beloved friends, in the gathering. Together the flute and wine rent the veil of chastity The collar proffered kisses to the skirts, in the gathering. O cupbearer, don’t swear you’ve given up drunkenness, I don’t trust it If I don’t see it, I won’t believe it and will keep on drinking in the gathering. Musellem, it is not the colorful ideas, it is the wine unblended That makes your pen give joy to the eloquent friends in the gathering. (Müsellem (Seyh ¸ Ebu’l-Vefa Edirnevi, d. 1754).1

“Gatherings” (meclis) or parties of the kind evoked here were held in Ottoman elite circles for centuries, loosely following “poetic scripts” laid out in countless similar gazels.2 Müsellem’s poem is rather conventional in this regard. Wine, music, and conversation flow freely, allowing participants to shed their “chastity” (namus) and immerse themselves in the intensely emotional and highly erotic atmosphere. Yet the candles, the moths, the cupbearer, and the garden itself, are not merely of this world. Rather, in this cultural universe, they reflect something of the divine, true reality (hakikat/hak) that lies beyond the illusion of this world. The gathering, the wine, the music, and the love they are meant to intensify are like passages leading from the here to the hereafter, a stairway to heaven. This stairway, and similar unorthodox ways of reaching God, belonged in the dark. In Chapter 3, I demonstrated the scope of the drinking scene in eighteenth-century Istanbul and discussed it mainly from the perspective of the established order, which sought to keep it out of sight. 110 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 04 Aug 2021 at 06:37:27, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108933131.007

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Darkness on this basic level was merely cover, an unofficially designated reserve for the unorthodox. In this chapter, I seek to understand traditions of nocturnal conviviality, particularly those that involved the consumption of alcohol, “from within,” that is, in the terms of those who partook in them. In order to do that, I begin with exploring the language and imagery of night and nocturnal devotion in contemporary poetry, which, as shown later in the chapter, also framed nocturnal sociability and invested it with meaning. Approached through this discourse, the night no longer appears as a mere dark closet in which to hide while drinking, but rather as the ideal setting for cultivating intimacy and love: carnal, platonic, and divine. In fact, hiding in the night and investing it with spiritual significance were mutually dependent. By enveloping these traditions in darkness, the night allowed a space of “ambivalence and ambiguity” that would not directly challenge the unequivocal dictates of orthodoxy and authority. Social drinking, in short, and the wider cultural streams that legitimized it, found in the nocturnal not only cover, but fertile soil in which to flourish, much like in a walled night garden. Previous chapters moved from the domicile out to the streets, paying attention to class and gender differences. This chapter, by contrast, emphasizes communalities between social classes and is harder to ground spatially. Nocturnal partygoers in Istanbul were mostly male, but they came from all walks of life. Some of the most devout drinkers were at the apex of power, and yet they shared at least some of the practices and meanings of social drinking with dervishes at the very bottom of the social ladder. The analysis, therefore, goes anywhere tightly knit groups of friends formed private circles, be it in secluded gardens, open meadows, or taverns. Class differences did matter, of course, and will be noted in due course. Finally, while the discussion of vigils in this chapter refers to both Istanbul and Jerusalem, the analysis of sociability patterns focuses almost exclusively on Istanbul. That is more than anything else a matter of sources. While for Istanbul these abound, for Jerusalem it is the sicil that serves as the main source and at least the volumes combed for this work, remain completely silent about nocturnal leisure. Does that mean there was none? Probably not. But it does stand to reason that in such a small town, that was completely shut away from the world at night, and hence less dynamic and better

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controlled, options of nocturnal leisure would have been more limited. Moreover, it may certainly be the case that antinomian Sufi practices and discourses had lesser influence in Jerusalem and the surrounding area. This question, however, remains open for future research.

Beyond the Prosaic In the court records, official decrees, and chronicles discussed in previous chapters, both the authorities and neighborhood communities seem to be speaking in one voice, for one set of morals that largely corresponds to the teaching of Orthodox Islam. Drinking and drinkers are associated with fesad. They are tolerated, at most, certainly not welcomed. We have to remember, however, that our access to the historical reality of the Ottoman city is heavily mediated through texts that depend on, and seek to enforce, legal discourse. These texts and the institutions that produced them flattened a whole sociocultural reality and squeezed it to fit narrow legal definitions. In fact, this work probably began with the litigants themselves. A precondition for winning a case in court was to narrate it in accordance with legal definitions that were by nature dichotomous, delineating the permissible from the prohibited. The court record, which is often our “window” into the neighborhood, is therefore far from transparent, not only because of the various hidden agendas of plaintiffs, the biases of jurists and kadıs, and the limited, often decontextualized information they contain;3 their very framing of reality is only one out of many that are possible. People do not usually live their life as they present it in court. The problems embedded in state-produced sources are further compounded by the biases of modern historians. As argued by Shahab Ahmed, scholars of Islam and Islamic societies have for too long favored legal discourse over all other discourses and acts of speech, considering it the “true essence” of Islam and the Islamic.4 Ahmed argues that, rather than viewing Islam through theologians’ eyes, we should approach it as “a matter of human fact in history,” as a “historical and human phenomenon” in which contradiction and paradox are paramount.5 Alongside the narrower legalist discourse (which is in itself fraught with contradictions), there has always existed other ways of engaging with Islam, other modes of being Muslim. Of particular relevance here

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is what some Muslim “Sufi-philosophers” called the “legal school of love” (Persian madhhab-i ʿishq; Tur. aşk mezhebi), or the “religion of love” (Tur. aşk dini). This huge stream of thought, practice, and ritual pervaded all Sufi orders, at least to some extent, and produced countless songs, poems, and treatises, effectively touching the lives of millions of Muslims over the course of many centuries. While obviously not one of the recognized schools of Islamic law, Ahmed argues that the Sufi-philosophical-aesthetical madhhab-i ʿishq laid its own normative claims that were often in tension, if not in outright contradiction, with that of legalist Islam. Ahmed insists that this was not a counterculture, nor can it be considered antinomian, as it was often espoused by the most powerful people in society.6 On the other hand, and contrary to what some scholars have suggested, this was not an eliteonly world. The ideals and norms of the madhhab-i ʿishq percolated through various oral, textual, organizational, and ritual means through all levels of society.7 If legal discourse and orthodoxy is characterized by seeking clarity and unequivocalness, the discourse of the School of Love is one of “ambiguity and ambivalence,” a notion developed by Daryush Shayegan with respect to the poetry of one of the foremost spokesmen of this stream, the Persian poet Ḥafe ¯ z (or Hafez in Turkish, _ 8 1320–1390). In Ahmed’s use, ambiguity means “ability to understand in more than one way,” and ambivalence is “the co-existence . . . of contradictory emotions or attitudes toward the same object or situation.”9 That Hafez chose to express such complexities through poetry was anything but incidental. Whereas political and legal authorities spoke through the prose of decrees, treatises, legal opinions (Tur. sing. fetva), and court records, the “people of love” or the “people of the heart” (Tur. ehl-i dil) spoke, first and foremost, through poetry, and the genre of the gazel in particular. Poetry was considered the medium of “inspired speech,” a medium that allowed saying what prose did not.10 Gazels typically weaved together several layers, or voices that speak simultaneously, each echoing the others. Love, which is at the epicenter of the genre, is at once carnal, platonic, and divine. The poet, always in the role of a lover, is desperately courting the beloved, who is an object of fleshly desire and a reflection of divine beauty, or even God Himself, all at the same time. Wine, the garden, its tulips, narcissuses, cypress trees, and everything about the social interaction taking place in it, are

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at the same time parts of the seen world and reflections of, and gateways to, the unseen (gayb) world of the divine. Within this poetic and aesthetic universe, not only the garden, love, and wine are bridges between the seen and the unseen; metaphor (Tur. mecaz) itself is considered such a bridge. Hence the importance of poetry; hence also the ambiguity and ambivalence that defines and sustains this universe.11 It should be noted that all the major teachers of the School of Love, including Suhrawardi (d. 1191), Attar (d. 1221), Ibn Arabi (d. 1240), Rumi (d. 1273), and Hafez (d. 1390), were hugely influential in Ottoman society and culture for centuries.12 Admittedly, grouping all these figures, and the great variety of Sufi orders and approaches that grew out of their teachings in one “school” gives a false sense of homogeneity. But they all shared in a belief that God can be reached by means other than God’s word as revealed in the Quran and the life of the Prophet. Moreover, the boundaries between this stream and more Sharia-minded discourses were porous and furthermore, changed over time. On the most general terms, while radical dervish groups heavily influenced by the School of Love were very common in the early days of the Ottoman principality, they were either tamed, absorbed in more controllable structures, or marginalized as the Ottoman order became more centralized. The space left for radical dervish groups certainly shrank as the empire was undergoing a process of “Sunnization” starting in the sixteenth century, and heterodox practices and ideas were increasingly threatened from the seventeenth century onward. But, in parallel to this process of containment, the School of Love permeated practically every aspect of Ottoman life, from ritual to political thought, from love and sexuality to modes of sociability.13 This influence persisted until the nineteenth century. Like in other Islamic societies, then, Ottoman poetry can be approached as an alternative archive, one that faithfully holds everything that had no place in prosaic texts, texts that were meant to draw boundaries, to tell right from wrong, to prescribe action. I do not wish to argue, of course, that legalist Islam was merely the business of jurists, or that it was entirely at odds with the SufiPhilosophical amalgam. Furthermore, I do not argue that the Sharia was limited to the day, or that the School of Love was entirely nocturnal. Such dichotomies are far too crude. Rather, the Sharia and Sufi Islam should be understood on a spectrum that ultimately presented

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Muslims, on both the individual and societal levels, with different ways of ordering the world and making sense of it as Muslims.14 Having said that, I do claim that the Sharia, along with political authority, were more diurnal, as they relied on light and sight, whereas dissent was more comfortable in the dark. In what follows I show that the School of Love informed both nocturnal spirituality and conviviality. In fact, in the dark of night, the two were not so easily distinguishable. One cannot make sense of the latter without first understanding the world of nocturnal devotion. Individual and group vigils were often described in terms taken from the world of nocturnal parties and drinking gatherings were conceptualized as spiritual undertakings.

Just You and Me, God In a pioneering study, Walter Andrews has argued that the Ottoman “ecology of emotions” can be conceptualized as an axis between two poles: union on the one side and separation on the other. Light, commonly associated with the former, was identified with happiness, and darkness was linked to the despair, grief, and madness of separation.15 I wish to argue that the night in Ottoman court poetry, and therefore, in the collective mind of elite society, was in fact more complex.16 It was indeed the time of the greatest suffering, but also the best opportunity for union with God.17 In fact, the suffering of sleeplessness, and the anxious waiting for the beloved/God to appear, was a measure of purifying the heart from the fallacies of the seen world, in preparation for the revelation (keşf) of the unseen (gayb). In other words, it is at night, when the seen world is covered in darkness, that one can gaze right through mundane reality, which is in fact an illusion, and get a glimpse of God-as-truth (hak).18 There is no denying that in Ottoman literature, the night often offers the setting for scenes of desperate love that cannot be realized.19 In many poems and anecdotes, the afflicted lover is depicted walking the dark and silent streets of his beloved’s neighborhood or trying to catch some sleep on his/her doorstep (see Chapter 1). When everybody else is enjoying a good night’s sleep, the lover tosses and turns, sighs deeply, and sheds tears of blood. The lover/poet’s inability to sleep is one more expression of her or, more commonly, his hopelessness.20 The lover suffers from a disease without cure, and as everyone who has been ill

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knows well, symptoms tend to worsen at night, becoming much more painful and alarming.21 Doctors ask “Does it keep you from sleeping at night?” Any Ottoman poet would invariably reply: “Are you kidding me?” Here is one example from a poem by the Mevlevi poet Esrar Dede (1749–1797): Pour pour oh my eyes many tears, tonight My rival embraced to his chest that shining moon, tonight. A cruel moon of dark complexion and dark clothes Bound (my) wretched mind to his lovelock, tonight. With a sigh-spark the crazed heart Again set fire to the whole house of woe, tonight [. . .]22

The image in the first couplet is one of darkness covering the moon, which is a common trope for the beauty of the beloved.23 Since the redif (a word that repeats itself at the end of every couplet) of the poem, tonight (bu şeb), can also be read as “this night,” the first couplet can also mean that the rival that embraces the beloved is “this night.” Embraced by darkness (and therefore clothed in black), the cruel moon does not reveal himself, unmoved by his lover‘s suffering and utter devotion, which is expressed through his being bound to the beloved’s lovelock (another common trope for the beauty of the beloved).24 Darkness appears here to be completely negative: it is the poet’s rival, not only a time of pain, but one of its sources. The Mevlevi Seyh ¸ Galib (1757–1797), similarly describes a night that is prolonged by agony, or rather, a night that actively prolongs agony: The pillar of my sigh went out to the roof of the heavens’ dawn At length I endured the teeth of the cogwheel of fate, the enemy, tonight. The dark night, the head of lovelocks, and the sorrow of love, Galib I was often reminded of the condition of Mecnun, whose days were black, tonight.25

These couplets again conjure an image of night as sorrow, an interval protracted by pain. Throughout the night, “at length,” the poet had to endure “the teeth of the cogwheel (çarh) of destiny.” The word çarh denotes a wheel or a cogwheel, the spheres that turn like a wheel, and fate, which is decided by the circular movements of the heavenly bodies, placed as they are (according to the Ptolemaic model) in the

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revolving spheres. The teeth of this cosmic machine then, threaten to squash the poet and when dawn comes at long last, his sigh is so deeply painful that it reaches these same spheres, or heavens (felek), like a pillar supporting a dome. The weight of the heavens is, therefore, on the poet’s shoulders. In order to add an additional tragic dimension, the poet evokes Mecnun, the sobriquet of Qays b. al-Mulawwah, an imaginary character known throughout the Islamic world for his tragic love for Leyla. When Leyla is given away in marriage to another man, Mecnun loses his mind, hence his sobriquet Mecnun Leyla (Arabic Majnun ¯ literally, the madman of Leyla. Barred from being with ¯ Layla), his beloved, Mecnun would secretly visit her at night and recite his love poetry to her.26 It should be noted that Layla¯ (or Leyla) is homophonic with “night” in Arabic and in Turkish, respectively. Mecnun Leyla sounds much like “night madman.” For a poet to evoke Mecnun, in short, was a sure way to bound together night, hopeless love, and maddening pain on multiple levels.27 If pain and hardship are measures of purification, then sleepless nights are pathways to union with God. Since the early days of Islam, Sufi lore often reversed the relations between day and night, between sleep and wakefulness. To be awake and engage only in thisworldly pursuits without attending to one’s spiritual duties is in fact to be heedlessly sleeping (hab-ı gaflet). In the words of Ibn Arabi, the Sufis were “the people of the night.” These notions translated into techniques of self-administered sleep-deprivation. Already in the first centuries of Islam, devout Sufis would deny themselves sleep as a measure of training the soul and reaching union with God, and the practice remained alive throughout the Middle Ages and into Ottoman times.28 Writing about ascetic techniques in the ancient world, Violet MacDermot has argued that they resemble what scientists refer to as “sensory deprivation.” Seclusion and the removal of external sensorial stimuli combined with food and sleep deprivation create conditions conducive for visions or “hallucinations,” as modern science would call them.29 Medievalist Aviad Kleinberg warns, however, that such “scientific” claims about our ancestors’ sense of reality stem from overconfidence in our own understanding of reality: In the past, no one doubted that visible reality was only the tip of the iceberg. In modern terms, saints and mystics “had hallucinations”; in the terms of their time, “they saw clearly through the screen of deception we call reality.”30

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While Sufis certainly did not perceive their visions as hallucinations, they clearly realized that the night provided an environment of dramatically decreased “external sensorial stimuli,” although they obviously did not use such terms. Here is how the Sufi poet İbrahim Hakkı Erzurumi (1703–1780) described it: The eye of the people of love is awake at the time of dawn. The soul of the people of the heart is filled with secrets at the time of dawn. The town of the heart is quiet at night, without the common crowds. The gathering of the soul [bezm-i can] takes place without the distress of strangers at the time of dawn.31

İbrahim Hakkı Erzurumi’s couplets clearly tie the outer experience of the city at night, with its mostly desolate and quiet streets, to the inner state of the contemplating poet. He turns the common trope of the drinking party (bezm) – which, as shown below, was typically a nightly tradition – into an image of soul searching in solitude. In the quiet, the spiritually devout can expect the secrets of the divine to be revealed. The presence of anybody other than the poet’s soul and God is a nuisance, even a threat, to that moment of intimacy between the mystic and God. İbrahim Hakkı Erzurumi, it should be noted, sought this intimacy all his life. Since the age of nine – when he was first allowed to meet the sheikh of his father – until his death, he devoted himself to the Sufi path.32 Many of his poems describe his vigils and some give a sense of the challenge involved. In one of them, he uses the telling metaphor of a guardian over his own ill heart: You slept so many nights for the pleasure of the soul What will you lose if for one or two nights, for the sake of the cavecompanion, you sleep not. [. . .] Is sleep permissible to a patient’s companion? Have mercy on this wounded heart, sleep not.33

In those two couplets, the poet uses images of duty, love, and care to call upon himself not to fall asleep. In the first one, he refers to the first Caliph Abu Bakr (r. 632–634), known as the Prophet’s “companion,” who hid with him overnight in a cave following their flight from Mecca. God then sent down “his calm” (sak¯ınathu) (Quran, 9:40). In

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other words, if only the poet guarded himself as Abu Bakr protected the Prophet, God would send His calm to him too. In the second couplet, he conjures an image of a dedicated caregiver who remains awake by the bed of a sick loved one. In another poem, even more explicitly, he calls upon himself to “eat little, sleep little, drink little,”34 and in yet another one, he urges his soul not to give in to tiredness: Beware, you the lover who hosts a guest, sleep not The beloved will come to the house of the heart, sleep not. Drive away the sleep of heedlessness and watch the heart at night How many secrets are revealed at night, sleep not. If you wish for God’s mercy Whatever you do, do not lie down, sit, sleep not. At night, lovers find auspicious luck Observe, find sight within yourself, sleep not. If people sleep, they waste their time Don’t you waste your time, for that awaken One, sleep not. If the sorrow of love breaks the heart That Powerful One comes to his throne, sleep not. Even if the pain of love is your guest, don’t leave him alone Hakkı! Give him whatever there is, sleep not.35

The poem is a window not only onto the challenge of self-prescribed sleep deprivation but also to the expected “outcome.” Watching the heart at night will reveal “many secrets.” It is then that one can see into the unseen, it is in the dark that one can “find sight.”36 To be sleeping heedlessly is to give away the time when God is most accessible, when He sits on His throne and can cure the ruined heart. But, it is only in solitude that one can meet with Him, it is only by keeping awake that one can be admitted into His presence. As the same poet ends another one of his vigil poems: A thousand times I said “Hakkı” come to God at night So that you know you do not exist, only Him, sleep not.37

Here the poet plays on his pen-name, Hakkı, which is derived from one of the titles of God, hak, or truth. The poet describes the tremendous effort, the countless tries to reach God-as-Truth, that is, to realize that

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everything in this world is Him, including, of course, the poet himself. Separation is but an illusion. It is at night, of all times, that the openhearted can see right through this illusion, if only he devotes himself entirely. Enderunlu Osman Vasıf Bey (~1771–1824) conveys a similar idea: “I made the beloved’s face reflect in the mirror of the heart/I looked at the moon through a polished mirror.”38 By polishing the mirror of his heart, that is, by purifying himself from carnal lust, the poet is able to see God reflected in his own spirit. The night is often presented as the perfect setting for this revelation and it is therefore far from being simply a dungeon of torture. In fact, it can also be a source of divine bliss. “That whose heart is pure drinks the wine of love at night/Wake up, understand the joy in the heart after midnight.”39 Some poems fuse together the terrible pain and the sublime bliss of the vigil. Here is Enderunlu Osman Vasıf one last time: Raise your dark lock like the month’s fourteenth night That shiny moon revealed his beauty, tonight. My face with a thousand veils, I teased and kissed his mouth He embarrassed me terribly, that shy rose, tonight. Be them one thousand and one, be them one thousand, my king, I am a captive of your lovelock Come my master, make me too your slave, tonight. The chest sighed, the heart cried out like a violin It played music and sang inside, tonight. May I not see the goblet of the beloved lips in a dream, beware! Oh Vasif, what is all this joy inside of me, tonight.40

In order to convey something of the awe, torment, and joy involved in losing one’s self in God, the poem plays with seeming contradictions and upsets conventional tropes. The poet calls upon the beloved to fully reveal himself by removing his lock from his face, like the full moon reveals his face in the middle (“fourteenth night”) of the lunar month. Yet, the poet cannot quite reach his object of desire. He can only kiss God through the thousand veils of reality. He is at once very close and painfully far from union. He seeks ultimate freedom by ultimate domination; he seeks to release himself from everything mundane by voluntary self-enslavement to God; he wishes union with Him

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but dreads it at the same time. Inside of him, a play on words on his penname Enderuni (lit. that of the inside), there is both the cry of his tormented heart and then tremendous joy.

Just You and Us, God The night was not only the setting for solitary introspection. God could also be sought in a group, and that too typically took place after sunset. This began, of course, with the canonical evening and night prayers, but could end much later. Many devout, Sharia-minded Sunnis would spend entire nights praying. In other words, there was nothing necessarily dervish about nightly devotions. Yet, it was in esoteric circles that the veneration of the night was most common. For example, in the widespread Halveti order, the important rites of the sema and devran were held on Thursday evenings.41 Another group for whom the night was a time of spirituality and was highly influential within this world of nocturnal rituals was the Bektaşi order. Founded in the fifteenth century and named after Hacı Bektaş Veli (1209–1271), the order absorbed a wide range of antinomian beliefs. The concept of love as a means to overcome the illusion of humans’ separateness from God was central to the Bektaşis, as it was in other antinomian sects and orders. In fact, the simple disciples were referred to as aşıks, literally, “lovers.”42 The Bektaşi order was both accessible and appealing to many different groups. Ritual was open to members of both sexes and included wine consumption, in violation of the Sharia. The libertine nature of the order and its openness to believers of other faiths made it popular among non-Muslims or recently converted Muslims who were still attached to their previous faith. But the appeal of the order far exceeded these groups. According to Halil İnalcık, around the early nineteenth century, there were 14 Bektaşi tekkes in Istanbul, and about one-fifth of the population was associated with the order.43 Moreover, the influence of Bektaşi doctrines was not limited to its lodges. The borders between orders were far from sealed and many affiliated themselves with several orders, including, at times, orthodox and antinomian orders.44 The order had a particularly large following among the lower strata of society and had a pronounced popular tint to it.45 In discussing the influence of the Bektaşis, it is important to consider not merely the number of their followers but their identity. The Bektaşi

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order has been for centuries the order of the janissaries, who were sometimes called “the sons of Hacı Bektaş.” While other antinomian groups were either tamed or maginalized under the Ottomans, the Bektaşis not only clung to their heretic traditions, but did so at the heart of the Ottoman, Sunni power structure, thanks to the custody of the janissaries.46 The Bektaşis, it should be noted, did not perform the canonical daily prayers, and instead held a ceremony called “ayn-i cem” in their tekkes. The ceremony begins around sunset and is performed in candlelight. The first ritual within this ceremony, and one of the three most important, is the “lighting of the candles” (çerag˘ uyandırma, lit. awakening of the candles). Drinking wine, which was commonly understood to be a vehicle of union with God, was integral to the ceremony. The rituals were followed by a social gathering, around food and drink that often lasted deep into the night.47 The symbolism invested with darkness and light among the Bektaşis is far too complex to be treated here seriously. The important points for this discussion are, first, that the Bektaşis regularly performed their rituals after dark, and deep into the night, which perforce meant that at least at nights of ceremony, they were active long after most people were already tucked in their beds. This no doubt fueled suspicions and libels on the part of Sharia-minded actors (see Chapter 2), and probably contributed to the sense of “spiritual elitism” that was typical of antinomian groups. As the city was sinking into darkness and sleep, the aşıks were awake to true, Divine reality (hak). As recited in the ayn-i cem: “Departing from the way of darkness I have put foot on the straight path; I have awakened from the sleep of indifference (gaflet), I have opened the eye of my soul.” The “awakening of the candle,” symbolizes this awakening of the soul. The light with which they are illuminated is the “light of Muhammad” that emanates, ultimately, from God.48 The mystic experience is again not only located in the night; it feeds off it. Which leads to the final point regarding the ayn-ı cem: the ritualistic is intricately connected with the social. In fact, given that the presence of other aşıks is integral to the experience, and forging bonds with them is practicing the love of God, it is questionable whether such a differentiation is even meaningful. This confluence of social gathering and spiritual meaning is crucial for understanding the ethics and aesthetics of nocturnal social life in the Ottoman Empire. It was the spiritual that justified the social, despite all its ambiguity or even outright

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antinomian nature (in the case of wine drinking, for example). It was this spiritual layer that gave meaning to such practices “in terms of Islam.”49 Some nocturnal rites began on the margins of society but found their way to the mainstream. The most prominent example is the mahyaʾ, ¯ an _ all-night long vigil devoted to the love of the Prophet that emerged lateMamluk Cairo.50 Night-long rituals, both individual and collective, were by then well-established in various Islamic traditions, but the mahyaʾ ¯ reached unprecedented conspicuousness. It was started by a _ peasant-sheikh who moved to Cairo in the late fifteenth century, and soon became an object of controversy. Fans praised it for nourishing love for the Prophet in the devotee’s heart, and for inspiring dreamvisions. Antagonists denounced it as a blameworthy innovation (bidʿa) and charged that burning candles and lanterns all night fell under the category of “forbidden expenditure.”51 The practice, however, gained the recognition and approval of some of the foremost religious authorities in early sixteenth-century Cairo and moved from a small obscure mosque to be performed in al-Azhar, the most important religious institution in Cairo, and perhaps in the entire Sunni Islamic world. The ritual later traveled to Aleppo and Damascus, where, again, it attracted, at least initially, people of the lower socioeconomic orders. Jonathan Allen, who traces the development of the ritual in great detail, argues that the humble background of the initiators and participants was one of the reasons for the opposition it raised, as were more general anxieties about nocturnal activity. While in Aleppo it quickly faded away, in Damascus the ritual was again adopted and defended by leading religious authorities and came to be practiced in the great Umayyad mosque, the central mosque of the city. The rite lasted at least until the nineteenth century.52 As Allen notes, the most significant aspect of this vigil was its visibility. In fact, when compared to the solitary, dark vigils discussed above, the mahyaʾ ¯ _ rituals appear to be almost ostentatious, a form of “conspicuous devotion.”53 Performed in the spotlight of candles on the most important religious stages in the biggest urban centers, featuring some of the most prominent religious “stars” of the period, the mahyaʾ ¯ were _ designed to draw attention. The night was the foil against which this performance shone. It was during the very same period, and in the very same context, that coffee made its debut in the Arab world. Most early sources on

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coffee agree that the drink was introduced by Sufis, who used it to stay awake during their nocturnal devotions.54 Coffee and the growing popularity of nocturnal vigils among Muslims in the Arab provinces may have encouraged a similar current among Jews. The leader of the trend among Jewish communities in the region was Rabbi Isaac Luria (1534–1572), known as the Ari. Born in Jerusalem, he moved to Cairo as a child, where he was raised by his uncle, a rich tax-farmer. Luria received superb education and was well-versed in rabbinical literature, but he was attracted mainly to asceticism and mysticism and eventually moved to Safed, in northern Palestine, an established center of Kabbalah. He gathered around him a circle of disciples and began teaching his Kabbalistic system, which included many distinctive features. One of the practices spread by the Ari and his disciples was a nocturnal sermon known as tiqun ¯ hatsot (lit. midnight correction), _ during which Jews mourned the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and prayed for its rebuilding. Until the mid-sixteenth century, it was considered a voluntary prayer to be performed individually. Only under the Ari did it become a collective ritual. The Ari’s disciples maintained a grueling schedule of prayer and Torah studying throughout the night. The Kabbalists believed, as one rabbi put it in 1586, that at midnight, God “amused himself with the righteous in the garden of Eden.”55 Elliot Horowitz has argued that the Kabbalists used coffee to drive away sleep, and as the drink spread, so did the tiqun ¯ hatsot. By the eighteenth century, it was popular well _ beyond the Ottoman Empire, spreading into northern Italy and even further north.56 Such vigils were performed also around Jerusalem in the eighteenth century. Gedaliah of Siemiatycze, an Ashkenazi Jew who arrived in Jerusalem in 1700 as part of a messianic group lead by rabbi Yehudah ¯ Ḥas¯ıd (1660–1700) witnessed such a vigil at the tomb the prophet Samuel, about 10 kilometers northwest of the city’s walls. Gedaliah describes the vigil of the 28th of the Hebrew month ʾIyyar at some length. After the evening prayer, he recounts, those present studied the book of Samuel and the book of Zohar (lit. “radiance” or “bright light”) until midnight: At midnight they extinguished all candles in the cave and sat in the dark and did tiqun ¯ hatsot in a tearful voice. And after they finished the _ tiqun ¯ hatsot they studied some Zohar. Then they brought the drink _

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that is called cafe, hot, and gave to each. They also ate biscuits that the Sephardim are used to eat every morning . . . Later they sing hymns and songs that belong to this night when Samuel died . . . and [they] sing in a very pleasant voice and make merriment until morning.57

Not only was this particular vigil held in a group; it took place in a site of significance, a site that can be perceived as yet another door opening into the unseen, particularly at night. Spending the night at a saint’s tomb was not unique to Jews. Around Jerusalem, Christians, Muslims, and Jews used to frequent a cave on the Mount of Olives, east of the city walls, that was identified as the burial place of different female saints (each community associated the site with a different figure). It was believed that circling the tomb seven times and lighting candles on it brought blessing.58 In short, the night itself, and even sleeplessness was not necessarily conceived negatively. The darkness and quiet of the night encouraged introspection. But there was more to it. Keeping awake at night presented a huge challenge, and it was exactly this difficulty that made the effort worthwhile. The difficulty involved was rewarding psychologically and socially, first, because it demonstrated one’s religious devotion both to him/herself and to peers, and second, because it tied the devotee to like-minded people, whether they spent the night together or in solitude. They were all part of a community, whether concrete (as in Kabbalist rituals) or a more elusive one, that of the “people of the night”, lovers of God. As İbrahim Hakkı Erzurumi reminds his soul, “lovers cannot sleep at night.”59 Just before we move from Sufi lodges and holy tombs to gardens and taverns, a word is in order about the relation between the actual partying and the highly stylized poetry which will serve as the main source. Surely, we do not imagine that every drunk in the gardens of Kagıthane ˘ or in the taverns of Kumkapı reflected about the unseen as he was downing a glass of wine. As a window into past reality, then, poetry is neither more nor less opaque or distortive than any other source. Just as legal texts and official decrees served to reflect – and also create – reality in line with the order sought by authority, the parallel discourse of poetry not only reflected, but also scripted, behaviors in the parallel universe of nocturnal sociability. Thus, we should not be fooled into taking the highly stylized setting of poetry for reality, but we should not dismiss it either. Sometimes only paying lip-service

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to this project, sometimes deeply invested in it, the School of Love was always present and accessible for partying Muslims.

Drinking Wine, Making Love The most common type of gathering identified with the night was known as meclis. The word meclis is derived from the Arabic root jalasa, which means to sit, and, therefore, different types of gatherings could be referred to as meclis.60 I will focus more specifically on the drinking-meclis, also known as bezm or alem. This was a convivial gathering of companions commonly held in private gardens, houses, courtyards, and taverns. Shahab Ahmed referred to such circles as public (-private) or private (-public) spaces and noted that they allowed “explorative discourses” entertaining “a wide range . . . of norms and contradictions” that the law, being prescriptive and unambiguous by nature, simply could not sustain.61 Such gatherings were held by groups across the Ottoman social spectrum and served to consolidate solidarity among group members.62 It was in elite circles, however, that the meclis reached its most elaborate form. As scripted in Ottoman court poetry, an ideal gathering would take place within the walls of a secluded garden on a spring evening, in the company of close friends. Food and wine would be served, poetry recited, and music played. Such gatherings could stretch late into the night.63 The elite meclis was usually conceptualized in mystical terms, and revelers assumed the roles of poets and dervishes, intoxicated with love, both mundane and divine. These garden parties were a way of reconciling the potentially unruly teachings of the School of Love with legalist Islam and the interdependent sociopolitical order. By assigning these doctrines specific spaces and ritualizing them along well-established cultural scripts, Ottoman hegemony curbed their disruptive potential.64 These “rituals,” I would add, were not only spatially delineated but also temporally, thus not interrupting daily routines and dominant norms. But the night figured in these parties not merely as a safe haven from hegemonic socioreligious norms; rather, it served to cultivate intimacy and cement personal bonds among participants. Recent studies suggest that in the dark, the self is rendered more open to others, provided that one feels secure. If one has a measure of control over the conditions of interaction this openness may become conducive to conviviality or

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intimacy; where control is absent, this openness is more likely to be experienced as vulnerability. It has been argued that candlelight, in particular, facilitates a relaxed, intimate, and cozy atmosphere that eases social interaction.65 It is reasonable to assume that the familiarity of the participants and the protocols of the drinking-meclis created a secure environment conducive to conviviality. The nocturnal gathering served to consolidate personal bonds further by differentiating the participants from their others. Deniz Çalış-Kural notes that participants of the classical meclis followed the Orthodox ritual practices in everyday life. During the garden party, however, they broke momentarily away from ascetic principles and engaged in sensual pursuits and drinking. This was part of a kind of ritual of inversion, in which they pretended to be mystics engaged in the quest for God.66 A significant part of this “ritual of inversion,” I argue, was the reversing of relations between night and day. This reversal was closely related to the sense of exclusivity shared by the participants. The classical elite meclis was confined both spatially (to the garden) and temporally (to the night), but it was exclusive on a more substantial level: the meclis was defined by its very difference from the outer world, and from the crowds that populated it. In their own eyes, the participants were the erbab-ı batın, those of the internal, mystical understanding. Their spiritual insight elevated them above “those of the outside” (erbab-ı zahir), the ignorant crowds and dogmatic moralists who renounced beauty and pleasure without truly understanding their internal, divine qualities. In Ottoman poetry, these outsiders always lurk outside the confines of the gathering, threatening it, but also serving to consolidate the bonds between those who partake in it. In keeping with this function, the classical gathering was visualized and often physically arranged in a circle, with participants facing inward. The wine cup would circle around between the participants. This practice was known as devr, a word that was also used to refer to the revolution of spheres and planets.67 Indeed, like everything else in the meclis, the circling of the cup carried a symbolic meaning. It tied participants not only to one another but also to celestial rhythms as punctuated by the revolution of heavenly bodies. It is worth remembering that in the dark of the Early Modern night, the stars would have been much more noticeable than they are in the light-polluted nights of the twenty-first century and were often a source of inspiration. Indeed, similes of luminary bodies abound in Ottoman poetry in general, and

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in representations of gatherings in particular.68 The recurrent circular images, of planets and spheres revolving around the earth (according to the geocentric model) or moths encircling a candle, were typically constructed around a pole, a source of power and beauty, which was often represented by light. As is already evident, within this universe, wine was not considered negatively, but quite the contrary. It was one other means to peek beyond the many veils of the illusion we call reality and reach divine truth. Some scholars have claimed that wine in this poetry was only a metaphor, but a wealth of textual and visual evidence testify that much wine was indeed consumed in such collective settings. All languages of the Islamic world refer to these wine drinking gatherings unembarrassedly.69 Reciting poetry about the meclis was at the heart of the meclis and served to frame it as a spiritual activity, and to sensitize the participants to the sensual experience. The night was central to this experience. Here are, for example, a few couplets from the extremely influential poet, Nedim (1681–1730): While you have no idea, we are in the corner with your image Every night we drink until it is morning. We don’t intend to hunt that Venus We make his lovelock into the string for the lute of the party. The ascetic dies for want of the pool of Heaven We drive away sorrow with a goblet of wine. We melt the arrowhead with the fire of the heart We are night dew on the rosebud bed of the wounded heart.70

These couplets all present the night meclis as remedy for the pain of longing for the beloved, knowing that union cannot be reached in this world. As common in gazels, these couplets work on two levels: one conjures up images from the actual meclis; and the other invests these images with spiritual meaning, bringing together the seen and the unseen. The first couplet depicts a despaired lover sitting on the margins of the party, contemplating his beloved and drinking just to pull himself through the night. The agony of separation from God, discussed above, is here alluded to by using the imagery of the meclis. The second couplet makes mention of the music played at the actual party, which again stands for more than just sounds. If union with the

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beloved is impossible, at the very least, the participants turn the pain of longing, represented again by the beloved’s lovelock, into music to soothe the heart. The third couplet makes a conventional reference to the ascetic, orthodox-minded type, who is the ultimate “other” of the School of Love and its poetry. He is here used to accentuate the difference between the spiritually enlightened, and those who are unable to access the Divine. While the orthodox-minded dies in thirst, deprived of heavenly water, the participants of the meclis can at least “drive away sorrow” with wine, if not quench their thirst for the beloved. On the level of the actual party, the fifth couplet refers to fire (possibly the candles illuminating the party) and water by conjuring up an image of a blacksmith workshop. The “burning of the heart,” is likened to a furnace where the arrowheads of pain can be melted, before the heart itself can be cooled off with the night’s dew. Just like the stars, the night dew was a common trope in court poetry and can thus be seen as mere literary convention. Yet, just like the stars, actual dew was part of the experience of the night outside and this is exactly what turned it into a potent image. It was easy to imagine how its cool touch could ease an aching heart. Presenting the meclis as a remedy for heartache is common. The following couplets are taken from a gazel by Sünbülzade Vehbi (1718?–1809) that uses “wine bottle” (mina) as the redif, thereby placing wine at the heart of the poem and the party it conjures up: The ornamented crown of Cemşid on the head of the wine bottle The coronet of the sky is a goblet full of the wine of your lips. The wine-server’s chest is the light of this dark night of sorrow, the full moon and the shining candle of the gathering, the flame of the star of the wine bottle. [. . .] As long as there is wine, the heart of light is not empty of the pleasure of love, Vehbi That is what it insinuates, the ornamented wine bottle.71

The poet likens here the upper part of the wine vessel to the crown of the mythological Persian King Cemşid (or Jamshid), who is credited with the invention of wine. He then immediately ties the actual to the spiritual by alluding to the dome of the sky, to a goblet of wine full of

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divine essence. From the actual wine bottle to the heavenly goblet, drinking allows traveling into the unseen. Similarly, the wine-server who pours the wine for the participants, in fact, illuminates them with his beauty (referenced by his exposed chest), which is ultimately divine. The last couplet ties drinking and esoteric light even more closely: it is wine that allows the heart to be open to, and be filled with, heavenly light. As evidenced even in the few couplets brought thus far, eroticism, and often homoeroticism, was as integral to the night as wine, and this too had a very long history in Islamic societies. Homoerotic interpretations of the Quran (56:16–18), emphasized that Muslims who reach paradise in their afterlives enjoy not only the company of heavenly virgins (hur), ¯ but also the flow of wine poured by boys of eternal youth _ (wildan Replications of heaven on earth in later gener¯ mukhalladun). ¯ ations were bound to echo these associations. In antinomian Sufi discourse, beautiful young boys (amrad) were considered to embody divine beauty, and therefore, some rituals included gazing at such boys. Sufis believed that this practice could induce powerful spiritual experiences.72 In reality, the boundaries between platonic and carnal love were harder to maintain than in prescriptive texts, and dervishes were often blamed not only for consuming wine and enjoying music but also for engaging in sodomy.73 In Islamic law, it would be remembered, sodomy was strictly prohibited under pain of death. Yet, despite clearcut legal definitions, even jurists often refrained from condemning same-sex relations outright. As Elyse Semerdjian noted, Ottoman rulings on such matters could be “ambiguous.”74 Further away from legalist discourse, things were even vaguer and here, again, the night assumed special significance. The prominent geographer and intellectual Katip Çelebi (1609–1657) put it succinctly: “The night is the cover of beloveds,” when rivals’ eyes cannot see.75 Darkness allowed platonic and erotic attraction to converge more comfortably, buffering lovers from prying eyes and clear-cut legal definitions. This erotic ambivalence and ambiguity were certainly not limited to the night, but as with alcohol consumption, the night offered unique opportunities, like a hidden playground, free from parental supervision. In short, if the meclis can be seen as a semi-ritualized gathering cultivating idealized love, well the night was essential to that ritual. Looking from the “outside in,” that is, from the perspective of diurnal,

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orthodox order, the night served to envelop and contain the subversive out of sight. Looking from inside out, that is, from the perspective of the meclis participants, the night was central to their experience and endowed it with meaning. By inverting temporal routines, the meclis celebrated and cemented the bonds between participants, always described as enlightened with divine light, implicitly or explicitly placing them in contradistinction to the darkness all around and the crowds, sleeping in it, spiritually unaware. The night served to accentuate the sense of spiritual superiority of the in-group.

A Silver Cypress Another tradition that can be seen as a derivative of the meclis was known as mehtab seyri, literally translated as moonlight watching or moonlight cruises. The term referred more specifically to nighttime boat trips on Istanbul’s waterways. This tradition, too, had its elite and popular varieties, which survived down to the end of the Ottoman period. In fact, some of the most elaborate descriptions and literary representations are from that later period.76 These tell us that during the last month of spring and the months of summer, when the moon was full and the weather appropriate, people would take to the water in boats cruising in close formations and enjoy food, drinks, music, and poetry. People would usually go out after the night prayer.77 The declared focus of these gatherings was the moon and the light it cast on the water, which was often likened to a “silver cypress” (serv-i simin). Both the full moon and the cypress were common symbols of perfect beauty and purity in Ottoman culture and were often associated with the grace of the archetypical beloved in poetry. Just like other types of gathering, the more affluent full-moon cruises included refreshments, music, songs, and poetry recitation, all of which served to sensitize the participants to the audible and visual aspects of the experience.78 Here is one example by Naşid (d. 1791): My young boy, let us be satiated with the glass of pure wine Let us drink so much so that we let loose our temper Come on, don’t incline to sleep this early, my lord Oh [you] moon on the summit of grace, let us go out to the full moon light.

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One or two lutes we need and a few good singers They should sing night tunes and play teasing music at times, Let us alight at the open meadows of Küçüksu for a while Oh [you] moon on the summit of grace, let us go out to the full moon light.79

The poetic protocols of the mehtab seyri tie it firmly to the elite-meclis. The late Ottoman writer, Nabizade Nazim (1862–1893), indeed referred to one such event as a “floating party” (bezm-i cari).80 Like in the garden party, in the mehtab seyri too the night is a time for wine drinking and heightened aesthetic and erotic sensibilities. These sensibilities were not limited to elite genres. For example, in one of the Tıfli stories, a series of popular anecdotes dating back to the eighteenth century (see below), Tıfli, the character who gave his name to the stories, drinks with his friends in a tavern in Galata. Around sunset, the band disperses and Tıfli boards a boat, wishing to go to Çatladıkapı on the southern edge of the walled city. However, “on the way, being drunk he began singing and because the rower too was senselessly drunk (mest-i laʿakil derecede sarhoş oldugundan), ˘ they seized the opportunity offered by the beautiful weather and full moon (mehtab), and headed to the [Princes, A. W.] Islands” instead.81 An anecdote brought by the chronicler Mütercim Ahmed Asım Efendi (1755–1819) may help us to think about the mehtab seyri beyond literary conventions, elite and popular, and place it in a more concrete urban context. The chronicler tells of Dimitraşko, brother of the governor (voyvoda) of Moldavia, who along with others from the Christian elite, lived the good life in seaside houses in Tarabya and Kuru Çeşme, north of the city. Dimitraşko would often go on mehtab cruises with his friends, whence they would get thoroughly drunk. The chronicler is highly critical of the group’s behavior and the anecdote he recounts should, therefore, be read as a moral lesson. As he puts it himself: “This party cannot go on like this. The drunks will get drowsy eventually (Bu meclis böyle kalmaz, mestler mahmur olur bir gün).”82 One night, the group went for one of these cruises in three boats, attached to one another, and “full of coquettish beloveds.” They set out, enjoyıng music, singing, and drinking. Interestingly, the chronicler used the Sufi expression “this is the moment” (dem bu demdir) to describe the revelers’ approach. As they were living the moment,

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they were attacked by more than 20 armed men who arrived in boats from the Asian side. The author contrasts the “quiet and peaceful night” and the gentleness of the partiers who went out to enjoy it on the one hand, with the “terror-filled noise” of the attack, and the vulgar and evil nature of the attackers, on the other. The attackers dragged the boats to a secret compound they had prepared in advance and had their own “mock party” (bezm-i mezak), in which they liberally enjoyed the wine they took from their captives and forced them to dance to the amusement of the captors. The party continued until dawn, when the captives were finally released.83 It is as if representatives of the urban underclass from Chapter 3 invaded the seemingly idyllic world of elite nocturnal leisure, reminding us that the urban night was not really arranged in chapters and that it could be far less poetic than literary renditions of it. But the most important aspect for this discussion is again hiding and revealing, which is also the focus of the chronicler. According to his account, the events were “hidden under the skirt of that disastrous night and nobody saw or heard what has happened.” Yet, Dimitraşko was determined to use his connections to catch those who had humiliated him and his companions. The bandits were never found but that “nocturnal story” (destanı şebane), quickly spread around town and earned Dimitraşko the “reproach of the refined” and the scorn of the commoners.84 As in the anecdote brought from the chronicler Semdanizade ¸ Fındıkıllı Süleyman Efendi in Chapter 3, the chronicler joins the reproach. In fact, he plays an active role in “exposing” and shaming moral offenders who had taken cover in darkness, bringing them to light, so to speak. Other contemporary accounts testify that the mehtab seyri was a well-established, and popular tradition that had different varieties.85 One version of the mehtab seyri involved watching night fishermen at work. Gasparo Ludovico Momarts (1696–1761), a Levantine born and raised in the Ottoman Empire, writes that “in the bluefish season, when the moon is shining and the sea is asleep, caiques gather around, large and small, with noble men and women in them, as if they are sitting in an audience chamber.”86 It is worth noting that such bluefish season “fish parties” (balık alemleri) were still held in the early twentieth century, following elaborate protocols.87 These sources show not only the popularity of mehtab cruises, but also that unlike the coffeehouse or the tavern, this tradition allowed

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room for women, at least among Christians. Among Muslims, if we can learn something from late nineteenth century accounts, women may have joined, separately from men. Yet, as important as garden and floating parties may have been, for most people in the city it was the tavern that served as the locus of nocturnal drinking.

Drink with the Common People Given earlier scholarly understandings of the cultural world of the upper classes as sealed off from that of the commoners, one might suspect that the influence of the School of Love was limited to the elite and confined in its high-brow poetry. However, more recent scholarship has shown that neither patterns nor spaces of sociability were entirely bifurcated along class or estate lines. It should come as no surprise that the wide variety of notions loosely grouped here under “the School of Love” were common in the tavern scene, given that it was so often frequented by dervishes, including of course Bektaşis, and considering that many leading poets were no strangers to the popular drinking scene. Some taverns actually posted their poems on the walls.88 That the protocols of the meclis and notions of the School of Love were accessible across the social spectrum does not mean they were accessible to all in the same way. Gender and class did matter. As already noted in previous chapters, “honorable” women were, by and large, barred from the nocturnal meclis setting. Economic means too were crucial. While the rich would usually host parties at home and often have their guests sleep over,89 non-elites’ domiciles were typically smaller and shouldering expenditures, for illumination, in particular, posed a serious challenge. Commoners would, therefore, meet outside and share the costs between them.90 Drinking was usually done away from the Muslim quarters, for example, in open areas along the Bosporus, or more typically, in any of the hundreds of taverns scattered along the waterways.91 But, whatever the differences that separated them from the elite, commoners too cultivated extra-legal discourses that “normatized” drinking, again, by associating it with the night and thereby delineating its boundaries and keeping it out-ofsight. Here, the alternative ethics and aesthetics of the School of Love could be left to exist. A glimpse of eighteenth-century tavern nightlife is offered in the biographical dictionary of Mirza-zade Mehmed Emin Salim (d. 1743)

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in the entry on the late seventeenth-century poet Dervish Fasih. One day, Fasih took a boat from Fener to Galata and joined some of his friends in one of the many taverns of the area. It seems that it was late in the afternoon and other groups had already formed their own “circles” (halka) of drinking, probably with a candle or another source of light in the center.92 As Ekrem Koçu writes in his work on Istanbul taverns, albeit without specifying the period, owners of taverns would greet their patrons, seat them, and place a lantern in their midst. Their assistants, known as “fire boys” (ateş oglanları) ˘ would light it, saying “welcome, gentlemen.”93 The light cast by the lantern would create a kind of “private space” within the larger space of the tavern, differentiating those in the light-circle from those outside of it. Reflected in the faces of those around the table, the light would serve to bring them closer together while separating them from the others in the tavern.94 Just as in the elite meclis, the symbolism and the physical sitting arrangement were hard to distinguish. Here too, at the center of the circle was the saki, or wine-server, whose beauty was supposed to set the fire of love in the hearts of the drinkers. These literary conventions actually scripted expectations and behaviors. We know, for example, that tavern owners indeed sought to employ good-looking boys as wine-servers, in order to attract customers.95 This was the case in the obscure tavern in Galata frequented by Fasih and his friends: In the midst of the company, a beautiful, heart-burning candle is lighting up the piping-hot meclis of pleasure, shining [so] bright that all the participants of the meclis . . . were moths to that bedroomcandle of the harem of beauty, and all those present were amazed, drunk and crazed by his bewildering beauty.96

With every round of the cup the saki made the ring of companions forget the distress of the world and, in every cup, he “pillaged” their mind and reason. Fasih fell instantly in love and began courting the boy with clever talk and poetry, but – just when he thought he was making progress – the boy said he had to leave as night was falling. Fasih spent the rest of the night drinking and agonizing, wondering if the saki would return the next day, as he had promised. Day came, and then evening again and Fasih was still waiting. Unable to withstand the wait any longer, he finally went to the home of that saki and spent the rest of the night on his doorstep. He did not enjoy a peaceful sleep, however. Two other fans of the boy, much rougher than the poet, were

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displeased to find competition on their beloved’s doorstep and sent him back to where he came from. Every single detail in this anecdote follows well-established traditions of writing and yet, this does not diminish its value as a historical source. As Andrews and Kalpaklı have amply demonstrated, poetic traditions reflected but also scripted behaviors and modes of sociability in Early Modern Ottoman society.97 The anecdote demonstrates that despite some obvious differences, the drinking in a tavern could be conceptualized using much the same imagery that was used to describe more exclusive elite gatherings. Like the candles of the elite garden party, the candles on tavern tables were ultimately islands in an ocean of darkness. Humble rather than extravagant, light was nevertheless identified with a shared experience of unrestrained joy and affection that only shone brighter in the surrounding darkness. Like moths around a candle, revelers of all kinds turned their back to darkness and their faces inside, forming a circle around a source of real and metaphoric light and gravitating toward it. One might object that while the setting of this anecdote is a popular one, the genre Salim was writing in was elitist. Yet, other sources suggest that the notions of the School of Love shaped, at least to some extent, popular gatherings as well. For example, the Sufi diarist Seyyid Hasan Nuri, records in the first volume of his diary, which covers approximately one year (1661–1662), 125 gatherings he defines as işret. The term and the synonymous use of bezm imply consumption of alcoholic beverages but there is no direct evidence that this was indeed the case. With or without alcohol, all but two gatherings took place after dark. Diurnal social gatherings are designated by other terms. Just to clear any doubt of the diarist being familiar with the “teachings” of the School of Love, he notes in his diary that he was reading the Divan of Hafez from time to time.98 Popular literary genres conveyed this association between the night and social gathering and drinking, as well as the intimacy and eroticism that is associated with the meclis. The Tıfli stories, as they are usually called, are a series of stories produced in Istanbul from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century. The oldest Tıfli story we know of was read aloud already in 1756–1757, and yet the manuscript has been lost. According to David Selim Sayers, who studied these stories, they were intended as “lowbrow entertainment” for wide

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audiences. He characterizes these stories as descriptive, rather than prescriptive or subversive, and asserts that although printed in the second half of the nineteenth century, they engage with pre-tanzimat norms, practices, and roles.99 Both their “realism” and their ability to mirror earlier realities make them suitable for interrogation for the purposes of this discussion. All of these stories are placed in the period of Murad IV, the great crusader against substances, including alcohol, whom we have already met in previous chapters. Tıfli Efendi, who gave his name to the whole series, in fact plays a minor role in them. He is presented as a close confident (musahib), consultant, and boon companion (nedim) to the sultan. The earliest printed Tıfli story that we know of is The Strange Story of the Lady with the Dagger (Hançerli Hanım Hikaye-i Garibesi) first serialized in the newspaper Ceride-i Havasis in 1851–1852. The story tells of a young handsome man by the name of Süleyman, the son of a prosperous trader, who upon the death of his father is pulled into a life of debauchery by a band of vagrants who claim to have been his late father’s dependents. Süleyman drinks and gambles away his inherited fortune and hits rock bottom. He is then rescued by a close friend of his father, who teaches him the secrets of commerce. One day, he comes face to face with a rich lady, known as Hançerli Hürmüz (lit. Jupiter with a dagger), and she falls madly in love with him. Unfortunately for her, Süleyman falls madly in love with her slave girl, Kamer (lit. moon). The names already imply the nocturnal setting of love. The lady invites Süleyman over and together they spend many nights, while he hopes to find an opportunity to be with Kamer. At last, when the two find the opportunity, they are spotted by the lady, who then launches a vicious vendetta campaign which culminates in assassination attempts made on both Kamer and Süleyman. By the end of the story (spoiler alert), owing to the intervention of Tıfli and then the sultan himself, the wicked lady stands trial and peace, order, and love flourish again.100 Not only is the story full of scenes of nocturnal drinking gatherings that follow the protocols and norms of the School of Love; these gatherings are conceptualized using that school’s vocabulary. For example, when the father is on his deathbed, he warns his son Süleyman about the dangers a young beautiful boy might face. Indeed, reality was not always as romantic as poetry would have us believe.

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A group of men drinking, hidden from communal and state mechanisms of surveillance, could be predatory. In his 1686 treatise, Derviş İsmail, the superintendent of the public bathhouses in Istanbul, tells of a 15-year-old boy by the name of Yemenici Bali who was raped by several janissaries at a nightly drinking party (meclis-i işret) they held.101 Süleyman’s sick father in the story Hançerli Hürmüz was clearly aware of such dangers: You are a candle full of warmth, hey light of the eyes Don’t show your face at every party (bezm). When the mirth of the gathering (meclis) is full of chastity Don’t play your chin in other, licentious gatherings. If they say: “Your pure ruby lips is a remedy” Say: “There is treatment by thorns for a man.” May you be safe with God May you find dignity in the two worlds.102

Many facets of the typical meclis are present here: the night (insinuated in the candle), the mirth, and the erotic context. Only for the father, fearing for his young, defenseless son, all these are a source of concern, a concern that turns out to be well-founded. The period following his father’s death is one of disorientation whence Süleyman is lured into a life of debauchery in the taverns of Istanbul. The people who lead him into this world are described as “vagrants,” “wretched” and “evil.” Much of their reveling takes place at night but is not limited to it. Sometimes they gather to drink in the early evening, and sometimes even during the day. They are “drinkers of night and day” (şaribü’l leyl ve’n-nehar) and this is one of the ways by which their marginality and threat is expressed.103 These drinking gatherings again include the basic facets of the drinking meclis: music, merrymaking, love poetry, mezzes, and lots of alcohol. Things are different with Hançerli Hürmüz: while she spends nights and days with Süleyman on several occasions, their drinking is limited to the night.104 Moreover, these drinking bouts are more elaborately described and are made meaningful through the language of the School of Love. For example, one night, when Süleyman visits the lady’s house, her slave girl (and his beloved), Kamer prepares a

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“drinking table” (işret masası) complete with a music band. Then “The three together, drinking slowly, started to listen to the delicate music of the lute.” Süleyman, “seeking to arouse the love of the lady and to strengthen the base of his own love [for Kamer],” started reciting the following poem: How lovely, the unequaled garden How lovely, the garden, the night-chamber (şebistan) of imagination If the heaven’s houris see the houris of this place they would fall down, jealous, into the fire. Don’t think it is dew on the red rose Sweat breaks out on the fresh face.

This poem, like more standard gazels, moves back and forth between the actual and the mystical, between the seen and the unseen worlds. The night is something like a mabeyn between the two.105 The first couplets turn the actual garden into a space of spiritual contemplation by likening it to a şebistan (literally a night-place), a word that designates both a bedchamber and a cell for nighttime solitary meditation of the kind discussed above. On the level of the actual party, the fire in the second couplet is that of the candles, but as a metaphor it stands for the love aroused in, and by, the party. The houris, those divine creatures of the heavens mentioned in the Quran, are here described as attracted to and jealous of the party. The unseen is not only present but actively seeking to participate in the actual party. The houris here are much like moths drawn to the fire, another standard metaphor for intense love that would have been known to all listeners. Much like moths, again, the houris are burned by their uncontrollable attraction and “fall into the fire.” The couplet further recalls a rather well-known illustration in Ottoman manuscripts of the divan of the Persian master-poet Hafez that depict houris celebrating in the invisible domain, looking down at the humans who hold their own meclis. The illustration adorns the couplet “The angle of mercy raised the cup of the pleasures of intimate company:/From the draught: upon the cheek of the houri and fairy: a rose hue!”106 Indeed, in our story, the actual rose of the actual garden appears in the following couplet, representing, as always in Persian and Ottoman poetry, the beloved. The beloved, in turn, represents God and serves as a corridor to Him.

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Here the rose is described covered in, and freshened by, night dew. That dew, however, is actually the sweat breaking out on the beloved’s face, aroused and excited as she is by the intensive experience of love. The poet, in the standard role of the lover, courts the beloved, consciously and explicitly using his poetry to enhance this experience. The night again emerges as the time of love and intoxication, of intoxication by love. The poem continues by mentioning all the typical components of the poetic garden, and the drinking gathering (here referred to as bezm-i işret): the cypress trees, the narcissus, the rose, and the tulip, and ends with a typical Hafezian call: Let us drink, sip by sip, from the goblet of pleasure Let us forget the day of sorrow.107

The day is here presented as a time of sorrow, and the meclis as an escapade, a time of pleasure and bliss. Much more can be said about this story, but for the sake of brevity, it is enough to note that in this low-brow literature too, nocturnal drinking exists in its own aesthetic and ethical universe, which is not at all limited to the elite. It matters not who penned this story. What matters is that the author assumed that all of these nocturnal practices and poetics would be readily accessible and intelligible to the readers and listeners (as it was common practice to read stories aloud). Furthermore, the story does carry moral lessons but these are far less pronounced than later Ottoman novels, some of which drew heavily on such printed renditions of earlier orally transmitted stories, including Hançerli Hürmüz.108 While Hançerli Hürmüz and the “vagrants” in the beginning of the story are undoubtedly evil figures, Kamer and Süleyman, who also engage in bouts of nocturnal drinking, are positive and sympathetic figures. Such stories, then, both reflect the relative normativity of nighttime drinking and serve to further normatize it. This lenient approach to nocturnal revelry is also evident in popular humorous stories about famous drinkers, most notably the renowned Bekri (lit. drunkard) Mustafa whose exploits are described in books and humorous collections in late Ottoman times. Many Bekri Mustafa stories, like the Tıfli Stories, are placed in the period of Murad IV, and quite a few of them refer directly to the latter’s ban on alcohol, coffee, and tobacco.109

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The association of Bekri Mustafa with alcohol consumption and Murad IV goes back at least to the early eighteenth century. Dimitrie Cantemir (1673–1723), prince of Moldavia under the Ottomans, mentions Bekri Mustafa in his grand history of the Ottoman Empire as a close boon companion of the sultan. Cantemir relates that the people supposed it was Bekri Mustafa who made the sultan so fond of alcohol. According to his version, because of the sultan’s love of wine, he only banned tobacco and coffee and enforced the ban harshly.110 Cantemir’s account provides direct evidence that Bekri Mustafa stories were circulating widely already in the period under discussion here, if not earlier, and that already then, his figure was closely associated with that of Murad IV, and with his ban on substances. Some scholars devoted considerable attention to the real identity of Bekri Mustafa.111 For my purposes here what matters is rather what his character represents in the city’s folklore, and what it tells us about popular approaches to alcohol consumption.112 Bekri Mustafa is usually presented as a habitual drinker with no permanent occupation, but in some stories, he works in casual jobs just to finance his booze. He is a rough, but ultimately good man. In strict orthodox terms, however, he is hardly a good Muslim. Although, according to some stories, he received medrese education and sometimes even served as a muezzin or an imam, leading the prayer, he is anything but observant. It is only during Ramadan that he gives up drinking and frequents the mosque. This again demonstrates the ambivalence and even outright contradiction with regards to alcohol in Ottoman society. Bekri Mustafa is the şaribü’l leyl ve’n-nehar type, and therefore, his drinking is hardly limited to the night, and yet as his world is that of the tavern, he is to a large extent a creature of the night.113 Here is one typical story, brought by Mehmet Tevfik in a text originally published in the early 1880s. One night, the famous Bekri Mustafa stayed in his regular tavern until one-and-a-half hours after sunset. The owners wanted to close the place in compliance with regulations, but Bekri Mustafa would not leave. At that time, the officer (subaşı) Tuzsuz (lit. unsalted, but also boring, flat) Ahmed, accompanied by a few of his men, went on patrol and passed by the tavern. Seeing that it was still open, he entered the place, raging. The tavern owners panicked and explained that the only reason they had

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not closed for the night was that they could not throw Bekri Mustafa out. Tuzsuz approached Bekri Mustafa, who was sitting by the sardine barrel that was commonly placed in the midst of many taverns: T: Hey you, prick, how much longer are you going to sit here? B: What’s the rush? T: Don’t you know who I am? B: Who the hell are you? [kim oluyorsun?] T: They call me the famous Tuzsuz Ahmed [. . .] B: Well, they call me the famous Bekri Mustafa. Go on, I already told you to piss off. T: In that case, I will have to teach you how unamusing [tuzsuz] I am. B: Then I will show you how much of a drunkard [bekri] I am.

He grabbed the officer and soaked him in the sardine barrel and then threw him out the door. He did the same to one of the officer’s men, who came charging at him. Passersby who saw them, all covered with fish water, asked what was going on. Tuzsuz and his man replied: “It appears a salter came in there, he salts people. If you fancy that, you too go inside.”114 It may very well be that the story was shaped by the new efforts made by the Hamidian regime (1876–1908) – when Mehmed Tevfik was writing – to limit the opening times of unlicensed taverns to one and a half hours after sunset.115 Yet, for my purposes here, the details are less important than the general features of Bekri Mustafa stories. Here we have a kind of ruffian who likes his booze and would have nobody disturb him. He clearly shares in a macho behavior with his antagonist, one that fits neatly in the kabadayı culture of which both figures are part.116 More importantly, as in many other stories, Bekri Mustafa and his rowdy drinking belong in the night and, in fact, he is successfully challenging the very efforts made by the government to regulate the night. As I showed elsewhere, such confrontations over drinking hours were not limited to the realm of fiction.117 A very similar approach to drinking, which is typically set at night is also evident in jokes which feature the Bektaşi type. Many such jokes were circulating and some of them appear in late nineteenth-century collections. Rather than an identifiable individual, the Bektaşi is a typecast that, like some of the popular figures mentioned above, mocks strict ascetics and hypocritical moralists and personifies a more lenient, tolerant approach.118 Much like in Bekri Mustafa anecdotes, Bektaşis’

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jokes sometimes depict their heroes drinking after dark. In some cases, people of authority, sometimes the sultan himself, invade their nights and threaten to take their booze or tobacco, and drive away their fun.119 As already noted, these anecdotes probably reflect late nineteenthcentury realities, and yet, when read as part of the collage brought above, of literary representations that stretch back into the late seventeenth century, it becomes apparent that these later renditions were definitely not an innovation of the Hamidian period. Rather, they were adopted and most probably adapted from a long tradition of popular representations of the largely nocturnal world of popular social drinking.

Conclusion David Saetre, a minister and professor of religion, describes his problem “with Christianity and most structured religions” as “the attempt to say too much . . . to destroy essential ambiguity.” He calls this “an obsession with a kind of false clarity” and critiques the “idea that everything can be brought into some kind of light.” Part of his role as minister, he says, “is to maintain the dimension of ambiguity.” The night, according to Saetre, is crucial for this dimension, as it is for our ability to connect with parts of our inner selves that are masked during the daytime. “Our daylight selves are not our full selves.”120 The foregoing discussion demonstrated the importance of the night in rather similar terms. The night, it was shown, was much more than a hideout for revelers. It offered a perfect setting for the “rituals” of the School of Love and this, on several levels. Using the contemporaries’ own terms, it is possible to say that as the seen world faded into the dark, the unseen became more accessible. In more material terms we can say that the lessened capacity of vision and the heightened sensitivity of the other senses facilitated an altered state of consciousness that was much sought by both devotees and meclis participants. In social terms, the night helped to cement bonds among participants, who congregated in small islands of light in a vast ocean of darkness. Whereas the common crowds were sleeping their sleep of unawareness in the dark of their spiritual ignorance, the participants were awake, practically and spiritually, enlightened by divine light. The night, in short, was the domain of the School of Love.

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5

Manufacturing Light

We go into a room and hit the switch. Then there is light. The fact is that even if we turn the light off, the glare spilling over from the windows would probably be enough to see anyway. In most urban areas around the world, hyper-illumination has driven darkness to the point of near-extinction, so much so that it now has to be preserved.1 We have become practically night-blind, entirely dependent on artificial light, oblivious of the highly complex systems that produce and bring it to us, and of the environmental cost of these systems. In fact, artificial lighting was instrumental in accentuating the very distinction between humans and “the environment.” With human society regularly illuminated with a steady flow of standardized light, it appeared to be detached from dark and erratic “nature.” Somewhere out there in the dark lie the sources of our light. The power plants are out of sight, the cables concealed in the walls. The power relations that organize these systems remain similarly invisible, “blackboxed,” and safely depoliticized.2 As observed by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, with industrial illumination, the use of light was gradually removed from its production, and light itself was standardized and homogenized, attaining with electricity a certain “abstract quality.”3 This “abstract” light flows out of our sockets, cheap and abundant, flooding entire spaces with light that is so continuous and homogenous as to become unremarkable. Sophie Reculin notes that it is only the power outlets and the sense of dependency they cause that remind us that electric light is a human creation.4 Although entirely artificial, light has become natural to us, transparent and yet essential, almost like the air we breathe. Millions of people are deprived of reliable artificial illumination still today, but for those of us who are connected to a power grid, industrialized light is the only light we know. When we think about people in times past, we assume they had less of the same. Most histories of the night and artificial lighting focused mostly on industrialized light and 144 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 04 Aug 2021 at 06:37:27, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108933131.008

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therefore did little to change this assumption.5 Little attention was paid to preindustrial lighting materials and hardware, even less so to the experience of light produced by them.6 Disregard to the ecology and materiality of preindustrial lighting may also have to do with the fact that almost all extant histories of the night focus on Europe and North America, where street lighting was introduced already in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, developing over the nineteenth century into comprehensive systems of industrialized light. With light remaining rare and precious until the second half of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire offers an interesting case by which to resensitize us to the infinite shades of preindustrial illumination. If we are to reconstruct something of this multiplicity, we must de-standardize light and return it to the particular sites and conditions in which it was produced and used. This chapter visits the pastures of the Danube principalities where tallow was sourced, the slaughterhouses of Eyüp and Yedikule where it was turned into candles, the grocery shops where they were sold, and the palaces and humbler houses where they were consumed. It sketches the contours of an “Ottoman lighting system,” that is, a centrally regulated network that procured lighting materials from the provinces and channeled them to Istanbul and other crucial points in the imperial power grid and set lighting priorities in line with its political needs. The main argument is that lighting was considered a basic commodity and its regular supply, therefore, concerned the state. Yet, access to light was extremely unequal, which, as shown in Chapter 6, made light a shiny index of power.

Illuminating Istanbul: Lighting Materials and Hardware Light in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire was produced either from animal fats, mostly processed into solid candles, or vegetable oils, which were burned in their liquid form in a variety of lanterns. Discussion here focuses primarily on the imperial system of lighting, the center of which was the capital where candles were the most common burning technology. Vegetable oils, and especially olive oil, will be treated more briefly in due course. Candles were commonly divided into three categories. The cheapest one was made out of tallow (don yagı), ˘ which gave little light and much foul odor. The best candles were made out of pure beeswax

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(balmumu, şem-i asel), which burned much brighter and emitted little smell. White (bleached) beeswax was considered the most valuable. Often, a hint of camphor was added to improve the smell. In between these categories were mixes of tallow with much smaller amounts of beeswax.7 Beeswax is produced by worker bees to make the cell walls of the honeycomb. It is extracted after the honey had been removed by melting the honeycomb in water. The wax is purified and then poured into molds to solidify.8 Tallow was produced from raw animal fat (iç yagı) ˘ from around the kidneys and loins of sheep, goats, and cattle. When first obtained, it produces a terrible stench, and it therefore has to be processed before it could be used for candlemaking. The fat is simmered, pressed, and as it cools down it solidifies and loses much of its bad odor.9 Lighting energy is thus extracted from the time and place in which it was produced and solidified into easily storable and transportable chunks. As long as it is kept in sealed containers (to prevent it from oxidizing), tallow can be kept for long periods. While in eighteenth-century France, for example, candles were commonly made of a mixture of cattle and mutton tallow, in Istanbul mutton and lamb were far more available than cattle and therefore candlemaking had to rely mostly on mutton tallow.10 Other than for candles, tallow was also used for making soap, greasing machinery, and in processing leather. Not only did lighting materials differ from one another, each could vary significantly, depending on a variety of factors. Tallow quality was contingent on the species, age, and sex of the animals from which it was extracted, and the parts of the body used. The solidity of the material could even vary with the animals’ diet.11 Wicks (sing. fitil) were another variable. Wicks were made of linen, or more commonly in candles, spun cotton fibers.12 Matching the size of the wick to the candle to optimize performance required considerable skill. Poor matches resulted in much smoke and waste of burning matter.13 While, as shown below, the manufacturing of lighting products was regulated by guilds, the light emitted by burning these materials could not possibly be fully standardized. Variation was integral to preindustrial light. When thinking about access to light we must consider not only how much light one could afford, but also what kind of light. But before answering this, the procuring of raw materials and their processing into lighting products must be considered.

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Fueling Istanbul: Provisioning and Stock Management Thomas Hughes, who authored one of the most influential historical studies of early electrification has tried to approximate a definition of a “system.” According to him, a system is a centrally controlled network that connects related components. Central control is applied in order to optimize the system’s performance and to ensure the achievement of its goals. The limits of central control are usually what defines the limits of the system.14 Lighting in eighteenth-century Istanbul was predicated on a “system” in those very terms. It was, however, significantly different from systems of industrialized light, whether gas, electricity, or even kerosene.15 The candlemaking industry in Istanbul relied on animal fat accrued in the slaughterhouses of the city, and on shipments of tallow and beeswax from the provinces. The supply of candles therefore depended on seasonal and geographical factors, on the rhythms of animal husbanding, and on the imperial provisioning apparatus.16 Antony Greenwood, who authored the most detailed study of this system, estimates that the annual consumption of sheep, goats, and lambs in Istanbul between the sixteenth and eighteenth century varied between 600,000 (at times of scarcity) and 1,800,000.17 The mechanism put in place to ensure the provisioning of the city with such huge numbers of stock, funneled to Istanbul animals “on hoof” mostly from the Balkans and particularly the Danube area. Only at times of shortage would state agents turn to Anatolia for sheep. In the second half of the eighteenth century, Anatolia’s contribution increased significantly.18 The timing of sheep transports followed biological rhythms. April was the time of lambing and therefore, herds could not be put on the road for the long march to Istanbul before the end of that month or the beginning of the following one. Most sheep arrived at Istanbul between late June and the end of November. Fattened in the pastures around the city, herds were then timed to the slaughterhouses in the city. The period stretching from December to April was typically a time of shortage since the summer’s supply had already been consumed and the city could now only rely on sheep pastured in its immediate environs.19 This system supplied Istanbul not only with meat but also with fat, much of which was rendered into tallow by candlemakers. This locally produced tallow was augmented by tallow sent from the provinces.

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The supply of tallow from the provinces too was seasonally bound. Shipments from Bulgaria, for example, were expected to arrive in the early autumn.20 Wallachia and Moldavia were crucial for the supply, as they were for meat provisioning.21 But as in the case of meat, with time, Anatolia too had to give its share. A list from around the middle of the nineteenth century, for example, mentioned Ankara, Konya, and Erzurum, among other Anatolian cities that supplied tallow to Istanbul. Tallow-supplying cities in the Balkans included Plovdiv (Filiba) and Pazardzhik, in present-day Bulgaria, and Selanik (Thessaloniki, in today’s Greece). The latter, to give an idea of the quantities, had 20,000 okkas (25,640 kg) ready for shipment according to the same document.22 The beeswax candles industry had its own ecology and its own rhythms. Before the introduction of the Langstroth movable beehives into the region in the late nineteenth century, the production of honey, and its by-product, beeswax, was pegged to seasonal cycles. In temperate areas, the blooming of plants in the spring signaled the beginning of production of honey, but until around the mid-summer, most of the nectar was not converted into honey but rather fed to the young, nonforaging bees in the hive, or consumed by the entire colony when weather conditions did not allow foraging. After mid-summer, when the number of young bees decreased, more nectar could be converted into honey and stored as reserves to be used by the colony during the following winter. Production rates and times further depended (and still do) on the variety of plants and their period of blooming in particular geographical areas.23 Like the honey it stores, then, the beeswax is harvested in the autumn, when the reserves of honey are at their peak, before they would be depleted during the winter. In Palestine, for example, honey harvesting would usually take place in September.24 Considering that Beeswax was sent to Istanbul from places as far as Trebizond (Trabzon, on the Black Sea), Wallachia, Moldavia, and different parts of Greece, beeswax was expected to arrive at Istanbul even later than tallow, at the very end of autumn.25 As with other commodities flowing through the conduits of the Ottoman provisioning system, variations of supply rates were not only seasonal. The supply of animals for slaughter varied following longterm climatic changes and was affected by a wide range of natural disasters, from droughts to epizootics.26 Furthermore, as the system relied on the pooling of resources from a vast geography, territorial

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losses had a direct negative effect on the amount of available materials. The Treaty of Passarowitz (1718), for example, signaled the growing isolation of the Ottomans from European economies and the loss of direct control over some provinces north of the Danube. This treaty, and later the Küçük-Kaynarca treaty (1774), placed new political limitations on the reach of the provisioning system, just at a time when the population of Istanbul was rising dramatically, and with it the demand for commodities.27 Just as the supply rhythm varied as a result of a wide range of factors, so did demand. The longer nights of the winter would have most definitely increased the need for light. But demand also fluctuated in correlation with the Hijri calendar, which was not seasonally bound. As shown below, a variety of public festivals and, most notably, the holy month of Ramadan, increased the demand for lighting materials and could create shortages. Abundance could create its own problems. In the Sacrifice Holiday (ʿid-i azha and later kurban bayramı) production of fat exceeded demand for candles, as great numbers of sheep and lambs were slaughtered in butcher shops around Istanbul. This underregulated abundance at times prompted disputes between candlemakers over access to the large amounts of fat accrued in the process.28 The fluctuations in supply and demand, the variation in extraction times and locations of the different lighting materials, and the difficulties involved in transporting them over vast distances all called for careful management. Electricity systems too need to balance production and demand, but the nature of electricity makes it much easier. Electricity can be used for many purposes other than lighting, and peaks and valleys in demand for light can be balanced by selling more or less electricity for other uses, thereby averaging demand and adapting it to production capacity.29 Working with substantially different lighting materials, each entangled in its own economy and ecology, the Ottoman central government tried to match supply and demand in a much more mechanistic way, by engaging in what we would now call stock management. At times of scarcity, procurement of material from the provinces had to be speeded up, and allocation, slowed down. For example, in the winter of 1807, Istanbul experienced a shortage of candles and the governor of Silistre was ordered to speed up the delivery of candles from his province. In his reply to the palace, the governor reported that the traders of his province were given the order to send candles to

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Istanbul, yet his province too experienced scarcity. Upon investigating, the local candle traders argued that raw fat needed for the making of the candles has not arrived from Wallachia and Moldavia and the price of an okka (standardized at 1.282 kg) in the area has risen to 50–55 para. Adding transport and other expenses, the cost was bound to exceed 55 para, which was well above the price fixed in Istanbul at 45 para an okka. The traders further stressed that they had already sent whatever candles they had. The governor, on his side, tried to reassure the palace that orders were sent to the districts and that soon, more candles would be sent to Istanbul.30 This exchange exposes something of the typical dynamics of the Ottoman lighting system. Shortage in Istanbul translated into pressure applied on provincial officials, who in turn transmitted it to the suppliers. But the sultan’s hand here reached the bottom of the barrel. Istanbul’s hunger for light would have to be satisfied with materials coming from elsewhere. At times like this, the allocation of raw materials had to be strictly controlled. For example, in late August 1789, the kadı of Istanbul reported that the stocks in the central tallow magazine (kapan) were running low, with only 50 yedek (7793 kg) of tallow and 112 yedek (17,456 kg) of animal fat remaining.31 The scarcity was probably related to the ongoing wars against Russia and the Habsburg Empire (1787–1792). The kadı noted that it was the magazine’s rule to keep every year, 100 yedek (15,586 kg) of fat as spare until the arrival of new fat, but since new fat was not expected to arrive in the coming two months, candle shortages were to be expected. Although 50 yedeks of tallow had already been allocated to candlemakers, the kadı anticipated that this would not be enough. He therefore requested permission to either allocate the remaining 50 yedek of tallow or to stop allocation altogether until the arrival of new fat, in keeping with the magazine’s regulations.32 Sultans actively interfered in order to draw the attention of officials to candle shortages. Sultan Abdülhamid I (1774–1789), used to go out in disguise (tebdil gezmek) to inspect the markets and to get an idea of “the word on the street.” In an undated decree, he expressed his concern that there were not enough candles to last until the arrival of new raw materials. He suggested several measures to be taken and rushed his grand vizier to “immediately concern himself with the good of the people.”33 His grand vizier calmed him, saying that new fat is expected to arrive within 30–40 days and that the magazines in intramural Istanbul and in Galata have enough tallow to last even beyond

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that time. He went on to explain how tallow stocks are managed. Every year, the quantities that arrived at Istanbul until a month before the beginning of winter were considered the yearly stock, and with additional shipments that arrived occasionally, this stock was sufficient. He expressed his hope that all due tallow would be delivered, but nevertheless noted that a decree would be sent to Varna to forward tallow to Istanbul.34 Abdülhamid I was not the only sultan to intervene in candle supply. In early December 1815, sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808–1839) alerted the grand vizier to the scarcity of candles and soap and demanded that they be addressed immediately, because “people began talking,” which the sultan thought might breed trouble. In his response, the grand vizier explained the reasons for the shortage and listed the measures taken to alleviate the situation. He pointed out that the slaughtering of animals for tallow in Silistra and in some other places in the region begins only in late August and it then takes about a month for the tallow to arrive at the capital. That year, Ramadan began a few weeks before that time, and therefore, candles were in short supply. The vizier probably found no need to explain the increased demand for candles during Ramadan. Clearly trying to defend himself, the vizier claimed that measures had been taken in advance to ensure the timely provisioning of tallow and the allocation of candles. Among those measures, during that month of Ramadan, each grocer was allocated 8 okka (10.25 kg) of candles per week, and after the holiday ended, 5 okka (6.41 kg) per week.35 Candles scarcity could indeed breed trouble. The Chronicler Sanizade ¸ (~1770–1826) offers a glimpse of how such candle shortages would be experienced on the consumers’ end. According to his account, a religious college (medrese) student went to buy candles from a local grocer but was told that due to candle deficiency, no one was allowed to buy more than one candle. Dissatisfied, the student hit the grocer, and soon officers (kolluk neferatı) appeared on the scene to restore order. One or two other “fanatic” (yobaz) students, apparently friends of the attacker, got into a conflict with the officers, which led to their being severely beaten, arrested, and later executed. When the news reached the medreses, the students convened and decided to go the next morning to the chief mufti and demand justice. They spent the night in preparation and early in the morning set to the mosques, interrupted the studies there, and then marched to the house of the

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chief mufti, to get some answers.36 In short, there was a good reason sultans and grand viziers took interest in candle supply. But while for candle consumers, scarcities were uncomfortable, for candlemakers they were a matter of livelihood.

The Ottoman Light Industry The production and sale of lighting products in the Ottoman Empire was regulated by the guild system.37 Unlike in modern, integrated systems of energy where the producer sells standardized “energy” directly to the clients, the Ottoman lighting industry was fragmented between producers and sellers, and producers were in turn organized separately based on the product they produced, and the location of their workshop. This industry consisted of makers of tallow and beeswax candles, weak weavers, olive oil sellers, makers of lanterns and candleholders, and related accessories.38 This variety created separate webs of dependencies for different lighting products, which subjugated their production to completely different conditions. Within the light industry of Istanbul, candle production was by far the biggest and the most important sector. Tallow candlemakers (mumcular/mumcuyan) were organized in a separate guild from that of the beeswax candlemakers (balmumcular). By the eighteenth century, if not earlier, retail trade in candles was mostly conducted by grocers.39 Guilds were differentiated also along confessional lines. While sellers of beeswax candles were all Muslims,40 the guild of tallow candlemakers was mixed, with Christians consisting the majority. In the 38 workshops connected to the Yedikule slaughterhouse complex in 1728, almost 70 percent percent of the masters and employees were Christian. Christians formed the majority among candlemakers working in other parts of town as well.41 Beeswax candle production was largely concentrated under state ownership. According to Evliya Çelebi, a state-owned workshop employing one hundred workers provided beeswax candles to all imperial mosques and palaces, and to the palaces of viziers and other high officials.42 After the imperial workshop received its share of the beeswax that arrived at the customs in Galata, the remaining material was parceled out between privately owned workshops of beeswax candlemakers. These were concentrated in the area of Çemberlitaş in the heart of intramural Istanbul.43 Since wax candles were much more

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expensive than tallow candles, the former were sold with the individual seals of producers, testifying that the candles were pure beeswax and not mixed with inferior substances.44 Tallow candle production was much wider and more diversified. Because tallow candle production depended on animal fat, a secondary product of the slaughtering industry, the guild of candlemakers was subject (yamak) to the guild of butchers.45 Production was centered around slaughterhouses with the biggest concentration of candlemaking workshops located in Yedikule, the largest slaughterhouses’ complex in the city. Yedikule, on the southwestern extremity of the city, was also a center of other animal-based industries such as tanning and soapmaking.46 Edirnekapı was another major center of slaughterhouses and dependent industries, including candlemaking.47 Other centers, albeit much smaller, were located in Eyüp, Tophane, and Üksüdar. Additional workshops were scattered along the Bosporus all the way down to Ortaköy.48 Based on intra-guild agreements, each center and workshop was allocated a fixed share (hisse) of the tallow arriving at the retail market from the provinces, and fat from the slaughterhouses around the city.49 These intra-guild arrangements were recorded in court and were occasionally updated as a result of conflicts over raw material, or in order to allocate newly opened workshops their share.50 In some slaughterhouses, these arrangements were rather complicated. In the state-owned slaughterhouse in Yedikule, the fat accrued in the first five days of each month went to the candlemakers of the janissaries. From the 6th to the 20th day, the fat went to the masters who operated private candlemaking workshops outside Yedikule. The fat produced in the remaining 10 days was divided between two groups. The candlemakers working near the horse market in Üsküdar received their share from the animals slaughtered in the mornings, and the masters of Yedıkule received their fat from the animals slaughtered in the afternoons.51 A court ruling issued a few years later affirmed that the fat from Azebkapısı and Tophane was reserved for the candlemakers of Galata; the fat of Beşiktaş, Ortaköy, Kuruçeşme, Aranavutköy, Kuzguncuk, İstavros, and Çengelköy was the reserve of the candlemakers of Ortaköy and Hümayun-abad, and so on.52 While originally, all centers of production seem to have been subject to the main guild in Istanbul, by the early seventeenth century,

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producers in each center of production had already developed into a kind of sub-guild with their own leadership. Thus, for example, the “candlemakers of Eyüp” or those of Üsküdar occasionally appeared in court to protect the interests of their men in disputes over raw materials and taxes.53 This seems to suggest that the industry grew over the period under discussion. To give an idea of the scope of production and the relative importance of the different centers, in 1728, Yedikule was home to 31 workshops, each employing between 1 and 9 workers, the average being 2.9.54 These workshops were owned by individuals who were not guild members. Some were in fact prominent officials who probably won the property as tax farm from the Ayasofya vakıf (endowment). They, in turn, leased the shops to guild members who operated them with the help of additional hired workers.55 In addition, there were almost 50 privately owned workshops around the same time. These were allocated almost 64 hisses, whereas those in all other parts of the city combined were allocated only 19.5 hisses. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the candlemakers of Yedikule (probably vakıf-owned and privately owned together) were entitled to 118 hisses and the candlemakers of Üsküdar to only 9.5. Individual candlemakers working in those different locations would then each get his share.56 As for outputs, we do not have systematic data but rather glimpses gleaned from occasional documents. For example, other than providing the needs of the population, the guild was expected to provide the janissaries 700 okka (890.4 kg) of tallow candles every month, at reduced prices, as a kind of tax that was shared between guild members working in different parts of the city.57 The relations between butchers and candlemakers in each area, and in particular the supply of raw materials, were laid down in the charters (sing. vakfiye) of the endowment that owned the premises in which the slaughterhouses were located.58 Arrangements between producers in different locations were recorded in court and often rectified by imperial decrees. For example, an imperial decree from 1716 reaffirmed an arrangement according to which the fat from animals slaughtered in five slaughterhouses belonging to the Eyüp vakıf was to be allocated to the candlemakers of that area. The same arrangement was in effect some 50 years later.59 A detailed arrangement of that type was recorded by guild members in the Istanbul court in October 1728. The record opens with a list of 66 workshops located in Yedikule, Eyüp, and Galata, the name of the

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owner and “operator,” and the share of raw material allocated to each (between 0.5 and 3.5 hisse). The record ends with a few basic terms that are supposed to guide the work of the guild and its interaction with related guilds. It is stated that guild members shall not use fat of inferior quality; that the head of the butcher guild and master butchers are to guarantee that all animal fat accrued in the slaughterhouses of Istanbul is sold to the candlemakers and to none other; that they commit to produce high-quality candles in sufficient quantities and sell them to the people of Istanbul in the fixed price; and that no one from amongst their midst shall act against these terms.60 As in all other sectors, the government, in dialogue with the guild leaders, fixed the prices of the final products based on the assessment of production cost, which consisted of the cost of raw materials bought at fix prices, and additional expenses. For example, in 1704–1705, total production expenses of candles were set at 6 akçe an okka, and the sum was later modified to 4 akçe. Based on this assessment, the market price of candles was set at 42 akçe an okka. In 1749, almost 60 master candlemakers appealed to the Imperial Council saying that the cost of yarn for wicks more than doubled over time, and rents and salaries to assistants had also increased dramatically. They therefore requested that the cost assessment would be put back at 6 akçes which would allow them to sell to the public an okka of candle for a lower price (36 akçes an okka instead of 42). Their request was granted and the arrangement was renewed some seven years later.61 It appears that candle production in the eighteenth century offered potential profit as it drew investors from among the state elite.62 The abovementioned list of workshops in Yedikule, dating from 1728, mentions among workshop owners some prominent men, including Hadim (a euphemism for a palace eunuch) Ahmed Aga, ˘ and Kisedar (purse bearer) İbrahim. The latter’s workshop was operated by the chief candlemaker of the palace (mumcubaşı). With nine employees, it was the biggest workshop in Yedikule, and hence in the entire city.63 The potential of investment in the candle industry is also reflected in the opening of new workshops, both legal and illegal. For example, in the early 1760s, three such workshops were opened with state approval, and several others were torn down.64 Such a moderate increase in the number of workshops could hardly meet the demands of a rapidly growing population and indeed, the price of candles was

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on the rise (see below), which increased the incentive to sell both raw materials and processed candles in the black market.

Light Leaks The Ottoman lighting system can be likened to a centralized network of conduits sucking lighting material to Istanbul and then prioritizing the distribution of these materials according to a set of political considerations. Yet the pipelines were leaking light all the way from the peripheries to the center. Put differently, there was a wide, even international, black market of lighting materials and products. The existence of illegal trade circumventing the narh (fixed price) system should not surprise us.65 Yet, the scope of this trade, and the state’s reaction (or lack thereof ), show that the highly centralized system described above in fact existed within a state of chronic violation of its principles. The demand for light, in other words, was regularly quenched by both legal and illegal trade. Light leaks began on the provincial level. For example, in January 1743, the chief custom’s official reported that honey, beeswax, fat, tallow, and other commodities produced in Wallachia and Moldavia and due to Istanbul, were sold by traders, “infidels and Jews” in other countries. This created shortages of tallow and other commodities in Istanbul, raised prices, and undercut customs revenues. He requested, and not for the first time, that an imperial order would be issued to prevent these practices.66 In May 1758, Istanbul intervened in candle production in the provincial town of Kayseri, in central Anatolia. What prompted this intervention was a complaint made by members of the candlemakers’ guild in the local court, in the presence of a large audience supposedly representing all classes and groups of the local population (ulema ve suleha ve ayan ve eşraf ve fukara ve zuefa). The candlemakers told the kadı that according to an old arrangement, local butchers sold all the tallow accrued from the sheep and goats they slaughtered, to the guild of the candlemakers for the fixed price that had been in place for the last 10 years. They, in turn, produced the candles and sold them to the people at the fixed price. However, some of the butchers, being “greedy,” sought to get a higher price and therefore illegally sold tallow to members of the guild of herbalists (kökçü). Some other butchers transported tallow to other countries (diyar-ı ahare), and sold

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it there, in violation of the established custom of the town. This resulted in severe scarcities of tallow, which deprived the people of Kayseri of candles. The candlemakers, according to their own testimony, were eventually forced to abandon the business leaving the city folk with no candles at all. The audience at the court corroborated the candlemakers’ complaint and the kadı ruled that all infringements must be stopped, and the old terms of sale and production should be reinstated. Under these conditions, a few of the candlemakers agreed to reopen their workshop and resume candlemaking. The “entire city,” as represented by the diversified audience at the court, therefore requested that an imperial decree stating these terms be issued.67 While the interference of the Imperial Council to facilitate candlemaking in the provinces was not unique, the Kayseri case is particularly revealing.68 First, it shows again the rationale of the Ottoman lighting system and the ethic that was supposed to sustain it. Every guild member was entitled to his share of raw material for a fixed price, and to seek higher prices was not good business but rather greed, as it deprived others of their modest income, and the people of the city, of much needed products. Which leads to the second point: in the provinces too, candles were considered a basic commodity that even poor people expected to have access to. We do not know, of course, who organized the crowd at court and what happened behind the scenes. It is possible, for example, that poor clients were mobilized by their patrons. That, however, is of little relevance here. What matters is that their presence at court was deemed important and was duly noted. They too, joined the appeal. They too, wanted candles. Third, in spite of all the legal and moral constraints, artisans could still evade the system and sell lighting materials on the local black market or smuggle it to other places. Finally, the case shows that the candlemakers, much like modern operators of lighting infrastructures, could literally turn off the light. Such premeditated “blackouts” directly hurt the population, prompting a collective appeal to the authorities. The government, on its side, similarly viewed candles as a basic commodity and intervened to ensure its supply to the city folk. It is possible to surmise based on all of the above that the government tried to limit illegal trade only when it created shortages and brought about complaints. Otherwise, it was left to be. Even when lighting materials did arrive at the capital, this did not mean they arrived at the places they were intended for. References to

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illegal production and trade in both tallow and beeswax candles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are scattered here and there in the extant scholarship, suggesting that the phenomenon was anything but new.69 Butchers were at times accused of withholding the fat from candlemakers in order to produce candles for sale by themselves, as did common people who illegally slaughtered livestock at home.70 Several court entries from the 1720s and 1730s show that beeswax too was traded on the black market, to the detriment of guild members.71 All the cases cited above may be considered isolated incidents. However, a set of petitions from 1764 to 1765 reveals the scope and persistence of the lighting black market. In the late summer of that year the directors of the endowment (vakıf) in Eyüp, along with tanners and candlemakers who rented their workshops from that endowment, appealed to the Imperial Council accusing the butchers and sandal makers of that same endowment of illegal trade in fat and skins.72 This, it should be noted, was not the first conflict between artisans working at Eyüp and those of Yedikule, nor was it the last.73 This petition and the ones that followed as a result of this conflict, help us ground light in concrete sites of production and particular sets of power relations, and to visualize the individuals involved as real people with pressing concerns. We can imagine the angered gazes and words exchanged between the representatives of the conflicting groups as they waited to be heard by the Imperial Council. Sweating in the hamam-like weather conditions of Istanbul in August and concerned about their future, emotions must have run high. While for the viziers who would decide their matter, candles were part of a whole world of aesthetics and poetics, for those poor artisans they were livelihood. Toiling in their stinky workshops, forced to eke out a living out of grease, candles were what they sold, not what they mused about. And so, when their raw material was taken from them, they had no other choice but to appeal for sultanic protection. According to the documents that record this dispute, there were four sheep slaughterhouses and one cattle slaughterhouse that belonged to and generated income for the endowment of Eyüp, all located along the Golden Horn. The meat was sold in 47 shops in intramural Istanbul, that were hired from the same endowment. The skins and fat of the slaughtered animals were to be sold to the tanners and candlemakers who hired their shops from the Eyüp endowment.74 This arrangement was by that time very old. It is described in almost

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the same terms in a decree from 1716, and according to that decree, even then it was already “old.”75 The Eyüp artisans who appealed to the court in 1764, accused the butchers and sandal makers (çarıkçı) of violating this old arrangement by illegally slaughtering animals in their shops and selling the skins and fat to the tanners and candlemakers of Yedikule, and to “unknown individuals.” This practice, the petitioners complained, entailed great losses to the endowment and to the tanners and candlemakers of Eyüp. The petitioners argued that the butchers and sandal makers had managed to get a formal decree which authorized their scheme. This authorization, claimed the Eyüp artisans, should be annulled as it contradicts earlier imperial decrees. The Imperial Council examined the records and questioned the representatives of the butchers and sandal makers’ guilds and finally ruled in favor of the Eyüp artisans. A note was sent not only to the kadı of Istanbul, the obvious authority in such matters, but also the chief of the janissaries. This was not the only case where orders pertaining to the candlemakers’ guild were also addressed to the chief of the janissaries.76 This was possibly connected to the fact that the janissaries were not only key players in the meat market but also major consumers of state-funded candles.77 But there seems to have been more to it. The Eyüp artisans explicitly argued that at the time of the previous sultans, the agas, ˘ apparently referring to former chiefs of the janissaries, were directly involved in the illegal trade. Gülay Yılmaz Diko has already shown that in the seventeenth century, janissary-butchers dominated the meat market (et meydanı), where the main janissary barracks was located, and engaged in illegal trade with candlemakers.78 Furthermore, the candle workshops in Yediküle were strongly affiliated with the janissaries. In 1728, 8 of the operators of the workshops (out of 38) bore the title, beşe, which signified janissary affiliation. Twenty-one of the workers in the workshops bore the title (out of 90 in total).79 Considering all the documents cited here, it appears that the janissaries maintained their position in the illegal trade of candle fat for generations. This case strengthens the impression that illegal trade did not take place without the knowledge of the palace, but rather, with its silent approval. The power of the janissaries served to deter the palace from interfering in the market and the privileges enjoyed by the janissary craftsmen.80 It was only when this trade severely injured the rights of

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other actors in the system, including, most notably, the interest of a major imperial endowment, that the authorities intervened to impose “the old order.”81 But such interventions were not guaranteed to produce a result, as the tanners and candlemakers of Eyüp soon found out. About five months after they had received the imperial decree they had petitioned for, they appealed once again to the Imperial Council complaining that nothing has changed. The butchers and sandal makers continued to sell their skins and fat to Yedikule.82 In other words, it is not that the palace did not know about the illegal trade, but rather that it lacked either the will or the ability to stop it.

The Home Economics of Light The fluctuations in the availability of lighting materials naturally translated into oscillations in price levels, not only between years but within the same year. The widespread illegal trade in lighting materials and products further complicates any attempt to assess the cost of lighting for consumers. Taking these complexities into account, the following cannot be considered more than a glimpse of a much more compound picture. In 1708, the fixed price of an okka of tallow candles was 20 akçe maximum. The cost of an okka of the best flour in the same year was 80 akçe maximum.83 Around the middle of the century, the fixed prices varied between 36 and 42 akçe.84 In 1807, the fixed price of an okka of tallow candle in Istanbul was 45 para (=135 akçe). According to an official price list from 1831, the price of one okka varied between 3 guruş and 38 para (=398 akçe) and 4 guruş and 15 para (495 akçe), according to the type and quality of the candles. In the same list, an okka of good flour was 1 guruş (120 akçe).85 Due to the strong inflation of the first third of the nineteenth century, the daily wages of an unskilled construction worker in Istanbul climbed from 116.8 akçe in 1807 century, to 533.6 akçe in 1831.86 As noted above, narh prices rarely represented real market prices but, when read comparatively, they give some indication of the value of candles vis-a-vis other essential commodities. Considering that flour was the most essential commodity, we can take it as the basis for comparison between the two periods. When compared to the fixed price of flour then, the fixed price of candles in 1831 was much higher than they were in 1708. For an unskilled construction worker in

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1831 to purchase an okka of even the worst type of candle would mean spending almost a day’s earning. Beeswax was out of the question. In 1807, the fixed price for an okka of beeswax was 630 akçe, and 1552 akçe in 1831.87 Relying on these prices, we can establish that beeswax was more than 4.5 times more expensive than tallow in 1807, and almost 3 times more expensive in 1831. But how much tallow-light would that same worker be able to buy for almost a day of labor? The efficiency of illuminents is measured today in candelas, which is an adaptation of an earlier measure called “candle power.” The measure itself represents the effort to standardize light, the same process I am trying undo here, exactly because it flattens the multiple qualities of light. For the purpose of quantification of light, however, it is surely useful. Candle power was originally defined in 1860, by the Metropolitan Gas Act in England. It was defined as the amount of light emitted by a candle of pure spermaceti weighing 1/6 pound (76 g) and burning at an average rate of 120 grains (7.777587 g) per hour. To give an idea of the difference between tallow and beeswax, in order to produce 28 candle powers, one would need 23 wax candles (sold in packs of six to the pound, that is about 75 g a candle). It would take 40 tallow candles of the same size to produce the same amount of light.88 As for burning time, a tallow candle of about 75 g that is well trimmed and attended to, would burn for almost four hours.89 It should be noted that all these calculations are approximations, at most. As already noted, tallow differed considerably depending on the animals it was made from, their diet, the parts of the body it was made from, and so on. Another complication is that we do not know the size of the “standard” common candles in eighteenth-century Istanbul. Evliya Çelebi refers to such a candle (adi) but does not give us its measures. According to the regulations of the janissaries, issued in the early seventeenth century, the regiments were allocated 15,000 candles a week, each weighing 16 dirhem (51.312 g). In addition, every year, 70,000 candles of a different type (referred to as zahire mumu), each weighing 20 dirhem (64.14 g).90 In the lack of more direct evidence, the measures of the smaller candles (produced in much bigger numbers) can be referred to as those of “common” candles in Early Modern Istanbul. Translated into these units then, an okka of tallow would mean 25 candles, each providing about 2 hours and 40 minutes of light. This

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light, however, was very dim. According to one estimate, even 70 such candles put together would still give less light than a single 60-watt bulb.91 In fact, the effectiveness of a light source is not measured only by its luminous intensity (measured by candela). As Sophie Reculin notes in her assessment of the effectiveness of eighteenth-century candle lanterns, what really matters is the intensity per unit area (measured by lux), and luminance, a measure of luminous intensity per unit area of light traveling in a given direction. Luminance measures the amount of light that passes through, is emitted or reflected from a particular area, and falls within a given solid angle (represented as Candela/M2). Ultimately, the effectiveness of a light source depends also on the sensitivity of the eye, which of course changes between day and night, and between people. However, eighteenth-century people were no doubt more accustomed to operating with meager amounts of light, at least by our standards.92 Still, even for them, one standard tallow candle would hardly be enough for more than basic orientation and the performance of basic tasks. Reading or sewing would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible. In other words, access to light, or lack thereof, determined the range of possible after-dark activities. It is therefore important to note the various levels of inequality in the availability of light.

Light Inequalities Wealthy households enjoyed much better lighting (see Figures 5.1 and 5.2) than the common people. We can get an idea of the quantities of candles consumed in these households from the records of the supplies provided by the imperial kitchen to senior officials traveling with their households to the battlefront during campaigns. Around the turn of the seventeenth century, the household of the powerful chief mufti Feyzullah (1639–1703), was allocated 2.56 kg of tallow daily, the monthly cost being 2160 akçe. In addition, he received a daily allotment of 0.64 kg of beeswax.93 It was enough to produce more than 50 tallow candles and 12.5 wax candles a day.94 Even keeping in mind that the chief mufti’s household consisted of several hundred people,95 the daily consumption of candles is still considerable, especially when measured against the meager amount of light unskilled workers could afford. Probate inventories seem to corroborate the picture of differential access to light. A study that examined 792 such inventories from

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Figure 5.1 An Iftar meal at the grand vizier’s palace, late eighteenth century. Huge candles illuminate the hall, and additional candles are placed on the tables. From Ignatius Mouradgea D’Ohsson, Tableau Général de l’Empire Othoman, divisé en deux parties, dont l’une comprend la Législation Mahométane, vol. II (Paris: De l’imprimerie de Monsieur, 1790)

Istanbul between 1785 and 1875, has shown that while possession of candleholders among commoners reached 44 percent (for the entire period), among members of the state-serving elite (askeri), 69 percent possessed candleholders. Data for roughly the first half of this period shows that while commoners typically had two candleholders on average, elite members owned almost three.96 Unequal access to light was not only a matter of prices but also of power. While commoners often suffered candle scarcities, privileged individuals and households could manipulate the imperial “lighting system” in order to secure their needs. In early 1788, a purchasing agent (bazarbaşı) for the old palace and the imperial palace in Galata reported that due to candle scarcity, it was hard to provision the two palaces with the customary number of candles. According to the report, monthly consumption of candles in these palaces reached eighty-five okka (~109 kg), in addition to a few large candles of the type known as “tube candles” (sing. fuçi mum). Yet, unlike common

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Figure 5.2 Armenians playing cards in candlelight, Istanbul, 1730s. Work by the Flemish artist Jean Baptiste Vanmour. Courtesy of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

subjects, the palace elite did not suffer the inconvenience of darkness. The pazarbaşı secured a decree that sanctioned the allocation of the needed amounts of tallow straight from the candlemakers’ guild in Yedikule.97 The gap in access to light was in fact even wider since eighteenthcentury candles were not only expensive and unequally distributed but also labor-intensive. Tallow candles burned unevenly, losing their brilliance over time. They tended to gutter, which wasted much burning material and made the flame flicker, giving off much smoke and unpleasant smell. An unattended candle would lose almost two-thirds of its original brilliance in eleven minutes. It could burn away in less than half an hour, using only 5 percent of its tallow and wasting all the rest.98 Tallow candles in particular also consumed significant amounts of oxygen and, together with the smoke and stench they emitted, had – quite literally – a negative effect on the atmosphere.99 In order to keep a candle alive and prevent it from guttering and smoking, the burnt

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wick had to be snuffed frequently and rekindled at least once every half hour.100 A special type of clipper, known as mum mikrazı, was used for that purpose.101 It is readily understood that we cannot imagine light as a constant even for one and the same candle, as its burning rate and the amount of light could change depending on a variety of factors, from oxygen levels to maintenance levels. Keeping many candles burning at the same time took constant care. In Ottoman palaces, the job was entrusted in the hands of servants known as şamdanılar or şamdancılar headed by a şamdancı başı.102 At least in the more “important” parts of these palaces, it was no doubt beeswax candles that were used since these were not only brighter and did not emit a bad odor; they also burned much more evenly and needed little maintenance, another good reason for their very high price.103 Baron François de Tott described one such candle, two inches thick and three feet high, that was placed by his bed when he was a guest in the house of the chief dragoman of the Porte. The wick, he wrote, was almost as thick as a finger.104 Most people could only dream of such amenities as they were sitting in their dark homes. Coffeehouses offered an affordable solution. Historian Cemal Kafadar has pointed out that seventeenth-century Istanbul witnessed an intensification of nightlife, which he tied to the proliferation of coffeehouses in the city and the new modes of entertainment they offered. Kafadar emphasizes the stimulant nature of coffee which allowed people to stay up longer.105 It may be that coffeehouses indeed contributed to the expansion of nightlife but not so much owing to the substance itself. After all, when people go out at night they often consume “downers,” and alcohol in particular. The discussion of the huge alcohol scene in eighteenth-century Istanbul, offered in Chapter 3, suggests that many contemporaries did the same. As recent studies have shown, light is among the most effective deterrents of sleep. Sleep scientist Charles Czeisler has even described the light as a “drug” that affects our sleep.106 Coffeehouses provided light, which was, as shown above, hard to come by in Early Modern Istanbul (see Figure 5.3). It is likely that people went to the coffeehouse for the free light it provided much like people today go to coffeehouses for their free Wi-Fi. A famous Turkish proverb says that the “heart wishes neither coffee nor coffeehouse; the heart wishes conversation, the coffee is just the excuse” (gönül ne kahve ister ne kahvehane.

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Figure 5.3 Free light is included: A coffeehouse in Istanbul. From Julia Pardoe, The Beauties of the Bosphorus (George Virtue: London, 1838), 146

Gönül sohbet ister kahve bahane”). It may be that at night the heart actually wished light; the coffee was just the excuse.

Lighting in Jerusalem While in Istanbul, candles were most commonly used, in Jerusalem olive and sesame oil were the main lighting materials.107 This probably had to do not only with the availability of the crops in the region but also with the low melting temperature of tallow, which caused candles to soften, making them unusable during times or in areas of excessive heat.108 Candles do crop up in sources from Jerusalem but their use seems to have been limited to ritual, and even here, oil was usually preferred.109 It appears, that the greatest numbers of candles were sold to the many pilgrims who visited the city every year.110 Unlike in Istanbul, where candlemakers were supplied with fat from local slaughterhouses and tallow sent from the provinces, Jerusalemite candlemakers (sing. shamaʿ) ¯ had to make do only with fat produced in local slaughterhouses. Here too, local butchers found ways to circumvent the guild system.111

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Unlike in the case of tallow, which was used for illumination first and foremost, the use of olive oil for illumination, with all its importance, was secondary to its culinary use, and to the production of soap.112 Due to its triple use, olive oil became much like a currency throughout the mountain areas of Palestine. Taxes were assessed and collected in kind were not calculated based on the volume or price of olives but in terms of their most important product, olive oil. The beginning of the olive harvest in Palestine ranged from the middle of August to the end of September.113 Amnon Cohen estimates that tens of tons of olive oil were brought to Jerusalem during the season, and much of this quantity was stored for later use.114 Olive oil could be kept for a long period of time without losing its nutritious (or illuminating) value.115 The oil was most commonly pressed in the villages and unlike other commodities, it was not brought to the city and then sold there but rather purchased well in advance by merchants who went to the villages. This was a clear indication of the importance of this product for the local economy.116 The best kind of olive oil was extracted in the first press. Afterward, water was added to the pulp, and a second and third press followed. These presses produced oil of inferior quality that was often used for lighting.117 Olive oil was to be brought to the central olive oil market (khan ¯ al-zayt), where it was weighed, taxed, and sold for fixed prices. As in the case of candles, sellers often found ways to circumvent the system and sell oil illegally.118 For lighting purposes, sesame oil was superior to the oil extracted from olives. According to Rabbi Moshe Ben-Yisraʾel Naftal¯ı, who arrived in Jerusalem in 1621, olive oil was cheaper than sesame oil (which he calls s¯ırj, probably from the Arabic siraj, ¯ lamp) and not as good as the former for illumination purposes. That is why, he explained, sesame oil is favored for lighting.119 Experiments conducted in the nineteenth century confirm that sesame oil was indeed a better illuminating fuel than olive oil. While it took 2,014 grains (130 g) to produce a given amount of light (equivalent to 13 sperm candles burning at a rate of 120 grains per hour), 1,716 grains (115 g) of sesame oil were enough to produce the same amount of light. According to the same experiment, tallow was more effective than both. It took only 1,300 grains (84 g) of that material to produce the same amount of light when placed in the same lamp with an identical wick.120

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A price list provided by a traveler who visited the city in 1824, shows that sesame oil was indeed more expensive than olive oil. While the former could be bought for 1.75 guruş per ratl (standardized at _ 337.55 g in the Arab provinces), the former was only 1.5 guruş.121 There is no doubt, however, that prices varied according to annual crop yields. For example, olive harvests alternate on a two-year cycle. One year they would bear full fruit and the next little or no fruit at all.122 Quality too mattered. As noted above, olive oil used for illumination was of inferior quality and was definitely cheaper than the price cited in the list. Without further data, then, it is impossible to compare the cost of lighting between Jerusalem and Istanbul. In any case, the price difference probably made olive oil more popular among people of lesser means. Indeed, travelers who visited the city between the midseventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries noted mostly the use of olive oil for illumination purposes and explained it by its availability and cheap price.123 Whatever oil one could afford would be put in clay lanterns, in which a single wick was dipped. These lamps provided very little light. Other than their dim light, oil lamps suffered from additional problems, most notably smoky flames and the need to prise and trim the wick, which required constant attention.124 More privileged households had glass oil lamps hanging from the ceiling, but these too provided only a meager amount of light. According to Titus Tobler, who visited the city in the 1840s, the light was “enough for drinking coffee comfortably, smoking, lying around on the diwan and chatting, but not for performing proper work. This would require different lamps or lights and [different] people, not lazybones.”125 Tobler clearly associates the inability to do “proper work” at night with the laziness he ascribes to the Jerusalemites, but that comment obviously reflects on him and his world as much as it does on his subjects. For him, the night too was made for work and those who did not work were simply lazy. Tobler’s comment, however, does make explicit the connection between the materiality of lighting and the activities it allowed or disallowed. Reading, for example, would necessitate an additional lamp, which meant additional costs. Among Jews, Torah studies justified the additional costs. But even in Jewish colleges (sing. yesh¯ıvah), where the lighting expenses were often covered from donations, several

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people would congregate around each oil lamp, which made reading very difficult. We can speculate that the poor lighting conditions had a negative effect on the eyesight of the readers. Houses of worship were illuminated by similar glass lamps, but here several wicks were placed in each lamp. The bigger mosques, churches, and synagogues boasted big chandeliers, each holding dozens of such glass lamps.126 While basic data is still lacking, it is reasonable to speculate based on the evidence at hand, that Jerusalem was significantly darker than Istanbul. This was the result of the quality of lighting materials available in the region. The more affordable lighting materials, olive and sesame oil, produced less light than animal fats, and therefore, even when lights were on, interiors would have been relatively dark. Moreover, elite spending on the illumination of public and sacred spaces in Jerusalem was much smaller than in Istanbul, despite the religious significance of the former.127 In other small towns that lacked such significance, there was probably even less “public” light. In other words, beyond the ecological factors (which made vegetable oils more available than fat), Jerusalem’s relative darkness was also a result of economic and political factors, a clear index of its peripheriality. This darkness must have further discouraged nocturnal leisure, which as shown in previous chapters, was extremely limited in Jerusalem anyway.

Conclusion Unlike modern, fully integrated energy networks that provide easily accessible and cheap standardized light, in the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire light was not only costly and arduous but highly diversified. It was made of different materials sourced from far-flung geographies, extracted through diverse technologies, and processed by different groups of artisans. Availability and quality of lighting products too fluctuated dramatically between places and times. The light emitted by these products reflected all this divergence. Socioeconomic class and power differentials therefore translated not only into gaps in the quantity of light, but also its quality. The rich and powerful could afford brighter, odorless, and more efficient light. The poor had to do with a few tallow candles, emitting little light and much stench. Even at night, then, social hierarchies were not only seen but

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also smelled. More relevant to this discussion, since the underprivileged simply could not afford much light, they were most definitely more accustomed to dark environments and better adapted to navigate them. Here is one more reason, then, for the prevalence of the destitute in the Early Modern night.

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part ii

Dark Politics

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6

Shining Power

With a candle the tulip invited mirth and pleasure To be guests in the party of sultan Ahmed, tonight.

This couplet, by the prominent Ottoman poet Seyyid Vehbi (d. 1736), economically packs together the material, emotional, and political value of light. This bundle is the focus of this chapter. The poet plays on a common phrase, “to invite with a candle” (mumla okumak) which means to invite sincerely, out of a strong wish to see the invitee. The phrase originated in a practice common in Ottoman times, to invite guests to nighttime celebrations (either elite parties or weddings) by sending them each a candle.1 Before the time of industrialized illumination, individuals going out after the night prayer were required by law to carry a lantern. These were most commonly candle-lamps.2 In material terms, then, the host shouldered the illumination expenses of the guests. Symbolically, the host extended hospitality all the way to the guests’ doorstep, thereby demonstrating a genuine desire to see the receiver. In Seyyid Vehbi’s use, it was the tulip, probably the single most famous visual motif of the reign of Sultan Ahmed III (1703–1730), that sent the candle to invite “mirth and pleasure” to one of the “lamp parties” (çıragan) ˘ that were favored by the sultan, and were typically held in different palace gardens in April, when tulips were in full bloom. Light, in other words, was not only a means to an end. Rare and precious, it could be used to signal a wish for proximity, even intimacy, but also to project awe-inspiring, inaccessible power. The previous chapters have shown that darkness posed a serious challenge to the authorities, and yet, as shown next, the night was also an opportunity to showcase power, hierarchy, and proximity to the ruler, which was in itself a proxy of hierarchy in palace circles. By illuminating mosques, Sufi lodges and palaces; in public and private light spectacles, and through court-produced texts, Ottoman rulers in

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the eighteenth century sought to associate themselves with light and through this association, to project their power and legitimate it in the eyes of their subjects and rivals. The two mediums – words and light – it will be shown, were intentionally and intricately connected to serve this purpose. While Ottoman use of actual and figurative light to project royal power and legitimacy had a long history, the palace elite of the early eighteenth century, and in particular the ruling clique of the so-called Tulip Era (narrowly defined 1718–1730), took it to a whole new level. This chapter begins with the way light was used to project power and religiously based authority in the city, during routine and on festive occasions. It then moves into the palaces of the court elite and focuses more specifically on the Tulip Era. This chapter offers two different – but interconnected – interventions. The first one concerns the distinctiveness of the “Tulip Era” (lale devri), a period commonly associated with the grand vizierate of Nevşehirli Damad İbrahim Paşa (1718–1730). The notion that this was a distinct period that marked a break with the past and signaled the beginning of progressive “westernization” was first expressed by the poet Yahya Kemal (1884–1958). It was later developed and popularized by the historian Ahmed Refik (1881–1937).3 According to Refik, Damad İbrahim’s vizierate was characterized by a new policy that sought peace on the European front, by the increasing circulation of European tastes and ideas, and through the indulgence of the elite in a culture of pleasure and extravagance, symbolized by the craze for tulips.4 Later historians have doubted the notion of a distinct tulip era and downplayed its uniqueness. Recent studies tend to stress long-term processes that began before İbrahim’s rise to power and continued long after his downfall. Among these processes, scholars point to more or less continuous economic growth in the first two-thirds of the century, which allowed not only the elite’s extravagant leisure culture but also the participation of commoners in a new culture of urban leisure. Ideologically, the regime was forced to retreat from its earlier valorization of conquest to a more defensive position with increased emphasis on maintaining social order. This emphasis stemmed, first and foremost, from rapid urbanization which threatened to undermine social hierarchies.5 While accepting that all these were long-term processes, looking at the early eighteenth century at night, the Tulip Era does shine in

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brighter light than the periods preceding and following it. This is not merely a metaphor. At least in what concerns the use of the night for both leisure and politics (and as shown below, the two were not at all separate), Damad İbrahim paşa’s term in office was unique. While here too, trends began before his grand vizierate and did not die with him, the “Tulip Era” witnessed a significant intensification in nocturnal sociability at court and the staging of light spectacles of different kinds. If this argument is diachronic in nature, my second intervention is synchronic, in the sense that it examines Ottoman uses of light alongside and against their European contemporaries. Craig Koslofsky has shown that Early Modern Europe underwent a process he dubbed “nocturnalization,” that is, the “expansion of the legitimate social and symbolic uses of the night.”6 This was paralleled by the growing use of artificial light and in particular, its deployment for political needs. Following the Peace of Westphalia 1648, European rulers sought new means to express legitimacy, means that would transcend the now heavily contested Christian sources of authority. By making intensive use of actual and figurative light, long associated with the divine, monarchs cast themselves as “sun rulers” capable of turning night into day. Furthermore, through extravagant light spectacles and the promotion of urban street lighting, they associated themselves with the widening discourse of Enlightenment that turned light into a metaphor for human reason. Light in the night, then, became one of the most prominent idioms of “enlightened” royal power during the Baroque.7 This chapter shows that the Ottomans too participated in this scene, and quite consciously so. They too sought to supplant the ethos of war, a sphere that posed growing challenges, with a more complex system of legitimacy that relied, among other things, on the projection of royal power through extravagance. Light was ideal for that purpose. It was even more “transcultural” than tulips, and indeed, in its demonstrative form, light became part of an expanding scene of elite conspicuous consumption shared between European and Muslim elites.8 Yet, this similarity was ultimately rather superficial. While clearly speaking also to their European peers and rivals, the Ottomans continued to interpret light within long-standing traditions that if anything, turned eastward and not westward for inspiration. If light was to some extent a universal political language, it also had very local dialects. In fact, it was this

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ability to speak simultaneously to different audiences on different levels that made artificial light such a versatile political tool.

Highlighting Sites of Significance As shown in Chapter 5, the Ottoman government channeled raw materials to the major cities and oversaw the manufacture of lighting products. The final facet of the “Ottoman lighting system” was the allocation of lighting products, first to the state apparatus and then to the general public. In that respect, lighting materials were not much different from other products that were funneled to Istanbul, from wheat to mutton, from coffee to soap.9 Like these items, light was considered a basic commodity. Like these items, the quality and quantity of light was dependent on capital, and closely connected to socioeconomic and political power. More than any other basic commodity, however, it could be conspicuously consumed and served to bring to the public’s eye to other manifestations of power, from architecture to celebration. Moreover, light was bound with the sacred on multiple levels. Official concern with the provisioning of light therefore had its own particularities. Imperial palaces and mosque complexes, barracks and fortresses, urban patrols, and navy vessels all had to be provided with light. This called for constant management and required significant funds. This tremendous effort is, in part, very obvious. For the power infrastructure to remain effective in the dark, light was imperative. For example, the navy needed lighthouses onshore, and lights onboard its ships for nightly operation and signaling.10 The Bosporus fortresses, the janissaries’ barracks, and later, the nizam-ı cedid barracks were also regularly provisioned with lighting materials.11 In addition to these very practical needs, the government burned a lot of lighting and administrative energy to ensure the regular illumination of important mosques and other religious sites, such as tombs and sufi lodges.12 The relative importance of religious sites and mosques in particular was demonstrated through light, with mosques connected to the royal family better illuminated than other, smaller mosques and sultanic mosques (cevamiʿ-i selatin), most brightly illuminated. This was a language anybody could read. The seventeenthcentury Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi includes in his descriptions of mosques in Istanbul the number and type of candles that illuminated

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the bigger mosques. In his description of the huge Süleymaniye Mosque, for example, he relates that on either side of the prayer niche (mihrab) there stood giant beeswax candles scented with camphor, each weighing more than a ton (20 kantar). One has to climb a 15stair ladder in order to light them every night, and “the inside of the mosque becomes light within light.”13 The Ayasofya mosque, considered the most important mosque in the Ottoman hierarchy, was illuminated every night with “12,000 lamps of various kinds, and beeswax candles with camphor on candlesticks and there is light upon light.”14 The numbers provided by Evliya Çelebi are no doubt inflated but the mosques he describes, along with other imperial mosques, were indeed magnificently illuminated. These mosques got most of their light from candle or oil lamps attached to metal frames (asma kandillik) suspended from the ceiling above the mosques’ main spaces.15 Such frames could hold hundreds of lamps. Maintaining such an amount of light required much labor.16 Around the time Evliya Çelebi was writing, the endowment of the Süleymaniye mosque employed 13 men (siraci) for that purpose. By 1703 the number of employees has decreased to 11. This may indicate that the scope of work, and therefore the amount of light, has remained more or less the same.17 Writing in the late 1830s, Julia Pardoe described the “thousands” of lamps that illuminated the mosque, and the huge candles at the Ayasofya, each being 18 inches in circumference.18 For the Ayasofya mosque, we have a more direct indication of the number of lamps, albeit, from a later period. During the renovations initiated in 1847, 2,399 oil lamps were added to the 3,602 lamps already installed in the mosque, bringing the total number to 6,001.19 These numbers did not include beeswax candles, the cost of which could reach almost a thousand guruş a year.20 The preference for beeswax and olive oil (rather than the cheaper tallow candles) was not incidental. In Greek Orthodox churches too, only olive oil and beeswax candles were used.21 Being odorless and shining more brightly, these materials were more suitable for the maintenance of a solemn atmosphere. In other words, it was not only the quantity of light that mattered. Its quality was just as important. In the surrounding darkness, such a huge number of lamps would have had a dazzling effect. Most people would experience such concentration of artificial light only in the mosque, which even in

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disenchanted terms would mark the site as different and special. But for the Ottomans light was hardly an “empty” physical entity. Thisworldly light at the mosque was but a reflection of the divine. To Evliya Çelebi this was “light upon light,” a reference to the oft-cited Light Verse from the Quran (24:35): God is the Light of the heavens and earth. His Light is like this: there is a niche, and in it a lamp, the lamp inside a glass, a glass like a glittering star, fueled from a blessed olive tree from neither east nor west, whose oil almost gives light even when no fire touches it – light upon light – God guides whoever He will to his Light; God draws such comparisons for people; God has full knowledge of everything – shining out in houses of worship.22

The notion that God is light is an old one and is shared by many religions. This probably has to do with the very nature of light: it can be seen and felt but not held; it is at once tangible and elusive, much present and at the same time perishable, constant but flickering, continually changing and yet always identifiable. Burning between the material and the abstract, between the physical and the metaphysical, and manifest in a huge variety of forms, intensities, and colors, light lends itself easily to metaphoric use. Such general characteristics granted, light is, ultimately, historically created. As shown in the previous chapter, it was (and still is) produced using specific materials, sourced from different geographies, using particular techniques, involving a variety of human and non-human actors. Moreover, the use of light, practically and conceptually (if the two can even be distinguished) is culture dependent. It is therefore significant to note the particular ways through which light is invested with meaning and “put to work” in the service of specific ideas, and ultimately, the actors who promote these ideas.23 Before continuing with the actual uses of light by the Ottomans, then, a few words are needed about the imageries available to them in extant discourses.

Light Diversion: Imageries of Illumination It was shown in previous chapters that alongside more orthodox concepts of the night, antinomian Sufi interpretations had a profound impact on modes of nocturnal devotion, literature, and sociability. The teachings of the School of Love or the Religion of love (aşk mezhebi,

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aşk dini), as this stream was sometimes called by its affiliates, often stood in tension, or outright contradiction, with relation to Sunni Islam. While a comprehensive history of light-related imagery in Islamic traditions is well beyond the scope of this study, I would cautiously suggest that orthodox and Sufi Islam developed two distinct concepts of light, despite some significant overlaps. Both streams identified light with the divine, but while for the Orthodox-minded, light was a metaphor for God’s guidance, mediated through jurists and rulers, for the Sufis, God Himself was light that one could reach individually. The path to divine illumination was internal, personal, and supposedly unmediated by text (while in fact it was mediated by Sufi discourse). Obviously, for many, probably most people in the Ottoman Empire, these were not mutually exclusive imageries. The abovementioned Light Verse can be seen as the shared source of both these traditions. God’s light in these sentences is not imagined as daylight but rather as the glow of a glass oil lamp that guides or attracts the chosen ones to Him. The implicit image here is one of people walking in the dark with only God to guide their way. Already in the Quran, then, light is a metaphor for divine, absolute knowledge that can be transmitted to “chosen” individuals. But it is not only a metaphor. These same verses refer to the light of the “houses of worship” which is corporeal and yet reflective of divine light.24 Early interpretations of the Light Verse seem to have clang to a more metaphoric understanding, with light standing for divine knowledge, faith, and good guidance, or to the vehicles of divine light, the Prophet and the Quran.25 But very early on, more mystical interpretations emerged, arguing that God is light, a supreme form of light.26 Shiites and antinomian Sufis, including the Bektaşis, perceived divine light to have been transmitted from Adam and Eve, through Muhammad and then through ʿAli, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet.27 With the neo-Platonists, the metaphysics of light saw further elaboration. To the neo-Platonists, the contrast is not between light and darkness, but between the world of ideas and the physical world. While in the upper world there is pure light (“light upon light”), in the corporeal world light is mixed with darkness.28 The Persian philosopher Shahab ¯ al-D¯ın Suhraward¯ı (1154–1191), who made illumination (ishraq) ¯ the fundamental notion of his entire philosophy, retained Ibn Sina’s hierarchal scheme of being, but replaced the notion of “being” with a concept of light, flowing from the “light of lights” (nur ¯ and animating ¯ al-anwar)

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the entire creation. The status of all beings within this scheme depends on their proximity to divine light, that is, the degree to which they are themselves illuminated. Seeking God is an internal struggle between the soul (nafs), which is associated with darkness, and the divine, which is found in all beings. The quest for illumination is a process of becoming aware of the divine in one’s self, thereby vanquishing darkness and climbing up the hierarchy of light, seeking, ultimately, to lose one’s self in the pure, supreme light of God.29 This notion is conveyed in the metaphor, found everywhere in the poetry of the School of Love, of the moth that is drawn to the candle and is eventually burned in it. The moth does not seek the light or heat but rather wishes to annihilate itself in the flame, to become one with it. This is the fate of the true lover of God.30 More orthodox writers often viewed the moth more critically, warning against the disdain of reason and norms that it represented.31 For them, light was more strictly associated with the Sharia and the learned (Tur. ulema), the only legitimate interpreters of God’s word, and just, pious rulers who upheld the Sharia in their realms, who could dispense it to the people. Lest there be doubt, all of these notions were very much present in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire. Numerous copies of Suhrawardi’s works were found in the libraries in Istanbul and informed contemporary writers, including, for example, the prominent scholar Katip Çelebi (1609–1657).32 Nor was this imagery limited to the elite. In his study of the Bektaşi order, John Birge cites a fascinating discharge paper issued to a janissary of the 45th company (bölük) in 1822: We are believers from of old . . . Since the time of the heroes (erler), we have been the intoxicated ones. We are the moths in the divine fire. We are a company of wandering dervishes (serseri divaneler) in this world . . . No one outside us knows our state.33

These words, taken from the most mundane document, demonstrate the pervasiveness of light-related images common in Sufi discourses. The reference to secret also hints at another element that distinguishes the two traditions: the public and universal versus the introverted and exclusive. As already noted in Chapter 4, notions of spiritual elitism were central to antinomian Sufi groups, and the night served this sense of exclusive group identity in different ways. Their understanding of divine light should be seen in this context. Shahab Ahmed notes that

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[T]he practitioners of philosophy and Sufism declaredly regard their pure truths as not fit for general human consumption – or rather, regard the generality of humans as not fit to consume those pure truths – whereas the practitioners of law regard their truths as being of universal application and actively prescribe them for general public consumption.34

These notions informed not only imageries of light but the use of actual light. While light in Sufi lodges and especially among antinomian groups, was limited to the interior, reserved for those initiated into the path, the light of din ü devlet (religion and [the Ottoman] dynasty) was projected out from mosques and palaces, reflecting the universal political and normative claims of the ruler and his order. This imperial order was a natural, immutable part of the nizam-i alem, the divinely sanctioned order of the universe.35 The light radiating out of imperial mosques was therefore reflective of, possibly even an emanation of divine light. As shown above, the ability to project light depended on material capabilities, but that is exactly what turned light into such a perfect metaphor for power and piety, and an effective means of legitimation. The concentration of light in the bigger mosques would activate this immense world of images, effectively tying it to the ruling dynasty. One did not even have to conjure up old memories from the mektep (Quran school). Many mosques boasted, alongside the simpler lamps, beautifully designed lamps ornamented with calligraphy of the abovementioned Light Verse, and sometimes light-related quotes from the had¯ıth _ literature or famous poets.36 Light literally shined through God’s words, bringing the this and other-worldly together, fusing orthodox alongside mystical interpretations.37 Even from an analytical point of view, the mosque lamps and the tradition of which they were part make the very attempt to distinguish the material from the discursive almost futile. Mosque lamps are meant to conjure up the verses and the verses materialize in the light of the mosque lamps. For the believer, the two are One. Evliya Çelebi’s citation, in short, was anything but incidental. Well-versed in the tradition, he was conditioned to use these verses upon seeing the many lights of the mosque. In fact, it was almost as if the tradition used him to reinforce itself. The lighting of sacred spaces was by no means limited to the capital. For example, the chronicler Mütercim Ahmed Asım Efendi notes in his eulogy of Mihrişah Sultan (1745–1805), mother of Sultan Selim III, that she provided the tomb of Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi in Konya

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with beeswax candles every night.38 Jerusalem too got its share of imperial light. As part of his endowment in Jerusalem, Sultan Süleyman stipulated 11 akçe daily for olive oil for illumination.39 Süleyman’s wife, Hürem Sultan (also known as Roxelana), endowed the biggest vakıf complex in Palestine, including a mosque, a public kitchen, a bakery, rooms for travelers, and many other functions. The complex served the population of Jerusalem for centuries.40 In the endowment deed, dated 1552, 2 akçe daily were set aside for “lights and lamps.” A superintendent was to oversee the lighting and extinguishing of the lights, among several other tasks.41 In all these cases, it would be noted, the light provided for from Istanbul served to advertise not merely the importance of the sites illuminated, but of the magnets who financed it, marking them as powerful, pious, and benevolent. Common Jerusalemites too would light candles or oil lamps in holy sites. For example, Christians, Muslims, and Jews used to frequent a cave on the Mount of Olives that various religious communities identified as the burial place of different female saints. It was customary to circle the tomb seven times and light candles on the tombstone. This was believed to bring blessing.42 Yet, even blessing had a material aspect. Tawf¯ıq Kanaʿan, ¯ a former Ottoman medical officer and folklorist, noted that it was common throughout Palestine to light lanterns and candles even in the simplest and most remote shrines. This would most typically happen on the night between Thursday and Friday. The worshiper would cite formulae of dedication that cited exactly the quantity, size, and quality of the burning material.43 This was an old practice. Mosheh Yerushalm¯ ı, an ¯ Ashkenazi Jew who arrived in Palestine in 1769, describes in his travel account the lighting of candles and lanterns in tombs sacred to both Jews and Muslims. “They pray their prayers, make vows and give alms for olive oil.”44 These formulae made explicit the significant sacrifice made in honor of the saint, which, it was hoped, would elicit his or her assistance. The explicit reference to the cost of light only makes power differentials more evident. While the offerings of simple folk had to be brought and kindled in person and burned out momentarily, the privileged could afford to illuminate sacred spaces on the other side of the empire continuously and on a much grander scale.

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Highlighting Times of Significance One can imagine Ottoman nights as exceedingly dark, with isolated, illuminated islands of power and authority. The closer one moved to the heart of the Empire, where such sites were concentrated, the more light one was likely to find. Such was the imperial lightscape.45 But it was not only specific sites that were highlighted, but particular times as well. First, light in mosques would be on until the night prayer, and then be lit again before the morning prayer, which falls before daybreak.46 Light was reserved for the prayers, and prayers only, leaving dark the interval between them. The night prayer, therefore, marked a boundary between the evening, when men could legitimately be outside, and the “deep night,” which was associated with danger, vice, and moral depravity. Light was differentially allocated not only along the duration of each night but between nights as well. For example, at least in some mosques, Friday nights would be better illuminated than weeknights, and the “five blessed nights” would be allocated even more light. The nights of the holy month of Ramadan were the best illuminated of them all. This all burned down to numbers. In the Ayasofya mosque around the mid-nineteenth century, every evening and dawn, 1167 lamps would be lit, and on Friday nights, and the five blessed nights, 1,000 additional lamps would be lit, a total of 2,167. During Ramadan the total number of lamps would reach 3,834. The cost of olive oil for all these additional lamps was 2,680 guruş, out of which 381 guruş were allocated to the five blessed nights and the rest for the nights of Ramadan.47 This does not include the cost of the mahya lamps that hanged between the minarets of Imperial mosques during Ramadan. The “five blessed nights” were nights of special religious significance. Marking these nights with additional lights dates back to preOttoman times.48 However, the Ottomans seem to have systematized the practice, making it a constant part of their overall lighting policy. It was apparently Selim II (1566–1574), who began the tradition of illuminating the minarets of the mosques during those nights.49 With time, these nights became so closely associated with light that they were (and still are) known as “lamp nights” or simply “lamp” (kandil geceleri; kandil).

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The lamps placed on minarets signaled to the population the holiness of these nights and their difference from other nights. It was the sultan himself, the caliph, the shadow of God on earth, who would “turn on the lights.” By the end of the eighteenth century, if not earlier, a standard procedure has developed according to which the kadı of Istanbul would send a memo, notifying the grand vizier that a certain kandil night was due on one of the coming nights. The grand vizier would then forward the information to the sultan, asking for a decree that would authorize the lighting of the mosque minarets around the city. The memos often referred to this illumination as adornment (tezyin) and was intended to reflect or even radiate joy (izhar-ı ibtihac ve surur için).50 For example, in early February 1796, the grand vizier informed Sultan Selim III that the night of the Mirac (Ara. Miʿraj) ¯ would fall on that coming Thursday and asked for a decree that would authorize the illumination of the minarets of all imperial mosques “as always,” in order to “light up the eyes of the Muslims (tenvir-i uyun-ı Müslimin).”51 It seems that the grand vizier could not resist a play on words that departed from the standard formulation of these decrees. He addressed the sultan as that “who shines royal light” (lamiʿ al-nur-ı mülükaneleri).52 This title, which in itself builds on a long tradition of associating light with political authority, shows again that light was framed within a particular set of images, operating at once in the “real world” and at several discursive levels that reinforced each other. The very real light that the sultan was to turn on, was his own projection. It was him who enlightened the eyes of his subjects with what was ultimately, divine light. Lamps in Ottoman mosques, then, were not only invested with religious significance but also with royal authority, and the two supported each other, highlighting, in short, din ü devlet. How much light are we talking about? I could not find comprehensive lists from the period under discussion but according to a slightly later document, from 1840, the number of candles prepared for the Berat night that year was 475, the overall cost being 343 guruş. The list specifies the number of candles according to price (3 candles of 6 guruş each, 50 candles of 30 akçe each, and so on) but does not reveal how the candles were divided between different mosques. It is clear, however, that by then not only the bigger, Friday mosques (cevamiʿ) were given their share, but also smaller mosques (mesacid).53

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Starting from the early eighteenth century, the minarets of major mosques, built by sultans and viziers were also illuminated on the first night of each holiday. According to a decree from September 1716, the practice originated in the Arab provinces. The decree stipulates that in order to “honor and enliven holiday nights” (tazim ve ihya), the “adorning” (tezyin) of mosque minarets with lamps after the night prayer, that has long been the practice in the Arab lands, was to be applied in all imperial and vieziral mosques in Greater Istanbul. However, the decree emphasized that these lamps shall be different from those of Ramadan and added specific instructions regarding the arrangements of the illumination, and even offered possible formulae for lamp inscriptions (mahya).54 Writing a few decades later, D’Ohsson observed differences in the arrangement of illumination of minarets between the nights of Ramadan on the one hand, and the Bayram, and the lesser kandil nights, on the other.55 The decree, in other words, seems to have been implemented. This decree is important for two reasons. First, it joins a wealth of evidence, brought below, that shows that under Ahmed III, the court actively sought more illumination, as a way of asserting its power and legitimacy. Second, it demonstrates the court’s full awareness of the differential use of light, in terms of both space and time: the decree orders the illumination of the mosques most closely associated with the dynasty, and designates hierarchies among the most important nights, with Ramadan nights prioritized above all other nights.

Turning Night into Day The holy month of Ramadan was characterized by the “slowing down” of everyday life as work in governmental bureaus, in shops, and in workshops was reduced to minimal levels, and religious colleges were closed altogether. The nights, on the other hand, served as intervals of leisurely diversion and were marked by great intensification of social interaction and relaxation of social boundaries. In sharp contrast to ordinary nights, gates and doorways were kept open, allowing undisturbed movement throughout the city; storytellers, acrobats, and shadow theatre (karagöz) performers amused crowds deep into the night. The evening thus became the climax of the social day, which amounted to a near reversal of urban routine.56

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One of the most important features of Ramadan nights was their special illuminations. The Spanish traveler Domingo Francisco Jorge Badía y Leblich (1766–1818), described the Ayasofya mosque: During the classical nights of the Ramadan, the mosques are illuminated. The illumination of the imperial mosques is magnificent. That of St. Sophia, in particular, produces a surprising effect . . . Thousands of small lamps placed along the cornices upon the mouldings and other projecting parts of the interior; innumerable lamps suspended from the roof upon frames of different forms; and an infinity of crystal and glass lamps of all sizes; serve to display the majesty of this temple better than the light of the sun. I confess I had not a complete idea of it until I saw it in a state of perfect illumination.57

The Spaniard was referring to a tradition is known as mahya (from mah, Persian for moon). During the month of Ramadan, lamps would be arranged on cords stretched between the minarets of imperial mosques, creating images and inscriptions.58 The illuminated inscriptions above the great mosques endowed by sultans emphasized the commitment of the Ottoman dynasty to Islam. In this sense, the mahya was one more way to radiate legitimacy. Illuminated nights were not only limited to religious occasions. Festive illumination and fireworks were central to all imperial celebrations. These celebrations were supposed to convey a complex set of messages. According to Stephan Yerasimos, the festivals were intended to stage an idealized order in which the Ottoman state is inseparable from a divinely sanctioned cosmic order.59 The power and hierarchies of that state were demonstrated through these festivals to both subjects, elites and non-elites, and to foreign envoys. This inter-imperial aspect was indeed crucial. Ariel Salzmann suggested viewing these events in terms of “dialogue” or even competition between court elites that shared much of their material culture.60 Among the festivals held throughout Ottoman history, the one held by sultan Ahmed III to celebrate the circumcision of his four sons, certainly stands out, especially in what concerns nighttime activity. The festival, lasting 22 days, included banquets, street performances, acrobats, guild parades, mock battles, and most relevant for this discussion, evening performances, festive illuminations, and great firework displays.61 Hakan Karateke notes that while the spectacular circumcision celebrations staged in Istanbul in 1582 included only a few nocturnal

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events, in the 1720 festival, almost half of the events took place after dark. Karateke ties this to the development of fireworks, but also, more broadly, to the expansion of public life into the night.62 Given the evidence brought thus far, this conclusion can be accepted, albeit with an important reservation: public life was officially allowed to extend into the night (beyond the night prayer), only on public celebrations. This does not mean that there was no nightlife on other nights but rather, that this nightlife was semi-covert, and could flourish only under the cover of darkness.63 The nocturnal events in Ottoman festivals were quintessential for the very functioning of the celebrations as a carnival, a “time out of time” in Bakhtinian terms. Central for the disorienting experience of the carnival was the seeming inversion of the relations between night and day. However, as I argue next, in hegemonic discourse, it was the sultan and his delegates who allow this inversion with his light. Hence also the importance of the nocturnal in these festivals: there is no better demonstration of sultanic power than the ability to turn night into day. Celebration books composed in court circles therefore allotted scope and attention to describing and illustrating festivals’ nights in great detail, explicitly tying the sultan to light again, and again, using typical hyperbole. The albums were obviously not just transparent representations of the festivals. They had a purpose, aligned with that of the celebrations themselves, but also quite distinct from them. Unlike architectural monuments, for example, a festival does not last. The huge sums put into arranging such events are therefore burnt away quickly, leaving only memories. The albums were the vehicles supposed to preserve the moment and carry it into posterity.64 That moment was not simply or innocently captured in the folios of these albums. Rather, composing these lavish works afforded an opportunity for a “second framing.” Ottoman festivals, it would be recalled, were staged to model the sociopolitical order, to begin with. The albums took these already staged events and interpreted them in line with the palace interests, and of the particular patrons who commissioned these works.65 Nowhere is this need for “second framing” more urgent than in the descriptions of fireworks displays. Fleeting and ephemeral, fireworks explode in the air and vanish back into darkness in seconds. They last even less than other nocturnal displays and are harder to give meaning in real time. That is why descriptions of fireworks displays in Ottoman

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celebration albums are so rich with detail, so replete with hyperbole. They seek to perpetuate on paper an experience that eludes perpetuation by its very nature. The imperial celebration album commissioned by the grand vizier following the festival illustrates this, quite literally. It was written by Seyyid Hüseyin Vehbi (1674–1736), one of the leading poets at court, whose couplets about the lamp parties were cited above. More than 25 copies of this work survived, a clear indication of the relative popularity of the text among the elites. The most important illustrated version of the text was done by Abdülcelil Levni (d. 1732), the most prominent painter of the period, and was probably completed around 1727–1730.66 It is hardly surprising that both Vehbi’s text, and Levni’s illustrations of it emphasize the role of the grand vizier, the commissioning patron of the work, in the celebrations.67 While the text and Levni’s illustrations do not match one another fully, both devote great attention to the details and effects of the illuminations and firework displays (see Figure 6.1). Here is an example from one of the festival’s nights: The solar-presence of the auspicious monarch Made his throne into the House of Aries and turned night into day. [. . .] That night, the sea of light washed over darkness Until it was gone. Even if the sun had not risen at dawn, the fireworks’ moonlight would suffice for day. The furnace of fire-water boiled Turning the “tent firework” into bubbles of fire. Sparks fell all around it Setting fire to the skirt of the heavens. The outburst of the firework was unique With a hundred colors, like the tail of a peacock.68

And so it goes on, for dozens and dozens of couplets. Every single firework is described in detail, using much the same imagery of the poems of the “lamp parties,” discussed below. Most importantly, it is the “solar presence” of the sultan that illuminates the entire scene. It is he who turns night into day. Unlike the exclusive lamp parties, however, his light is here openly dispensed to all. These images recall the

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Figure 6.1 A firework display, from Surname-i Vehbi. Courtesy of the Fine Arts Library, Harvard University (1990.15861)

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very conscious use of light-related metaphors by Louis XIV, the “Sun King.”69 Such close association of the physical light on display and the symbolic light supposedly emanating from the sultan is to be expected in a text commissioned by the grand vizier and designed to serve his own public image, along with the legitimacy concerns of his master. But how were the displays perceived by others? Did they make the same connections? Did they see light as emanating from the sultan? The answer is a reserved yes. While some of the observers used a much more sober, disenchanted language, they clearly understood the language of “light as power.” The very same celebrations were described in another festival book written by one Hafiz Mehmed Efendi, who served as a scribe under Elhac Halil Efendi, nominated chief of festival (sur emini), and hence in charge of the entire festival operation. It was the latter who asked Hafiz Mehmed to write down the details of the celebrations so that later, people will be able to feel merriment by reading the work, and maybe say a prayer for the producers of the work.70 Hafiz Mehmed describes the illuminations and fireworks of every single night in great detail, meticulously noting not only the names and numbers of dozens of different types of fireworks fired but also who prepared them, where they were fired, whether or not the sultan was present, when the displays ended, and sometimes what effect they had on the audience.71 While Vehbi’s is a court poet’s text, Hafiz Mehmed’s descriptions read like a storekeeper’s inventory, completely barren of poetics. He simply mentions what should be mentioned to convey the magnitude of the event, and to advertise his patron’s abilities as the organizer of this extraordinarily complex operation. Fireworks are certainly deemed worthy of such mention. Noting the ending time was possibly intended to serve the same purpose, that is, to show how unique the nights of the festival really were. The events, it turns out, ended between two hours after sunset, and midnight, at the latest. While certainly unusually late in Ottoman terms, these hours would have been considered early by contemporary Europeans. Even during festivals, the Ottomans turned in relatively early. What about people outside the palace? How did they respond? The former Patriarch of Constantinople, Konstantinos Mavrikios (Kallinikos III, 1731–1791), was amazed by the illuminations arranged to celebrate the birth of Prince Selim (later Selim III) in 1761. The first

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light spectacle was arranged in the palace already in the evening of that blessed day when the prince was born and included fireworks, and a lantern inscription of the sultan’s name hoisted on poles and “hung high in the air.” The former patriarch thought it was “truly a lovely spectacle.” But the best was yet to come: On the evening of the fifteenth, a Saturday, the illuminations began, and how could the oil suffice for the innumerable lanterns of all the City’s palaces and markets and shops? It’s certain that they surpassed the stars of the heavens and the sands of the sea, my friend, so don’t be incredulous. If the City’s shops and workshops cannot easily be counted, it was impossible to number the resplendent lanterns that adorned each one of them . . . The night resembled day because of the illuminations and their multiple reflections. The onlookers’ eyes were so dazzled by the flashing lights that they had to close them, while their ears could hear nothing but the roar of various musical instruments, the shouts of the crowd and the children, and the comic displays (maskaralık) put on by the trade guilds . . . Wherever you went, every street was filled with dancing and playing . . . Some people seem to get drunk on fearlessness, and they forget their position and their property.72

The former Patriarch goes on to describe the festivities, in truly carnivalesque, Bakhtinian terms. The nights of celebrations are defined by the inversion of urban routine: the darkness, quiet, desolateness, and fear of the everynight (discussed in detail in previous chapters), give way to great light, noise, commotion, and fearlessness. “The night resembled day because of the illuminations and their multiple reflections.”73 But if the festival seemed like a reversal of order, it was ultimately those in power, most notably the sultan, that illuminated the whole scene, therefore allowing it to take place in the first place. Shop owners and guilds spontaneously put lamps outside upon hearing of the celebrations but it was only the empire magnates and especially the palace, who could amass the lighting materials required for large-scale celebrations. The light of order therefore illuminated popular disorder, facilitating it and at the same time subjecting it to surveillance. It was the sultan who allowed this “time out of time” simultaneously framing it as his own. Baron François de Tott, military adviser to sultan Sultan Mustafa III (1757–1774) also recorded an Ottoman festival in his memoirs in great detail. According to Tott, on the occasion of the birth of a daughter to

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the reigning sultan, one of the high officials – who wished to please the population and to secure high office for himself – threw a public celebration. Tott also describes the festive illumination of avenues with “glass lamps” and “colored lanterns” hung from arches that were placed on posts lined along both sides of the street. “The Doors of private persons are, likewise, embellished [with lanterns] according to the importance or vanity of the Proprietor.” The palaces of the grand vizier, and that of the chief of the janissaries were most extravagantly decorated and illuminated, with the cipher of the sultan and quotes from the Quran once again burning side by side. This coupling of royal authority and holy verses repeated itself in other sites.74 While during the religious festivities of Ramadan, the monarch made himself visible by illuminating imperial mosques, in dynastic celebrations the symbol of profane authority was literally given a religious aura. Tott notes, cynical as usual, that these illuminations “amuse the multitude at a small expense.”75 Well, not so small. According to one account, Grand Vizier Koca Ragıp Paşa (d. 1763) bought 6.4 tons of olive oil to be used in the illuminations he arranged for one of these festivals.76 Tott, in any case, while keeping his distance from the message, clearly understood the medium. Light was a language even complete foreigners could read. He clearly sees the way the amount of light projected by magnates, for example, was an expression of their status within the system.77 If the night could be a stage for performing power, it was also used by the palace elite as a backstage room, a space for close, and supposedly informal interaction among the most powerful people of the empire. This space too, however, was a stage of sorts, on which both intimacy and hierarchy were performed following elaborate scripts.

Night, Leisure and the Politics of Intimacy In Chapter 4, I showed how the night served as an interval for cultivating personal bonds and intimacy among groups of peers across the social spectrum. Central here were the various forms of meclis, or gathering. Such gatherings were common in palace circles as well, only here they carried unmistakable political significance. Hierarchy was as important as intimacy.

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We tend to conflate leisure with pleasure but very often, leisure is not enjoyable at all but rather, another form of social obligation. Going out for a drink with colleagues, going golfing with business partners, or even going on family vacations may be fun, but that is not always the case. They may be dubbed “leisurely” activities, but many people certainly do not participate in them at their own leisure. Some feel obliged; for others, these activities may even be stress-inducing.78 That is because leisure is not necessarily “a break from life,” or its hierarchies and pressures, as it is sometimes presented. In some contexts, leisure is performance, with far-reaching consequences on one’s social relations and standing. Like the world of court politics, the world of court leisure revolved around the sultan. In fact, it has been suggested that the Ottomans, like their European contemporaries, may have not had a clear concept of “leisure” as distinct from work. This claim was subsequently doubted by historians of Europe, and it is questionable if it holds in the Ottoman context as well.79 The Ottomans did not have an equivalent for “leisure” but they certainly did conceive of non-work time dedicated to pleasures, even if recreation and labor were not always clearly distinct. Different Early Modern Ottoman writers, for example, advised men of state to divide their day between attending to state affairs, recreation, studying, and sleep.80 Thus, rather than arguing that there was no conceptual differentiation between politics and leisure, it is probably more accurate to say that contemporaries did differentiate conceptually between state business and leisure and yet, practically, the two categories were closely inter-related and at times hard to distinguish. That such a distinction did nevertheless exist is further evident in the “division of labor” between the role of the nedim and the post of the “royal favorite” (musahib, mukarreb, or makbul, lit. companion, close associate and favored). While the former was an informal but recognized “boon companion,” the latter was an official status accorded by the sultan to a high official, marking him as the closest advisor to the sultan.81 The favorite was typically a vizier who enjoyed unparalleled royal favor and had regular access to the sultan, above and beyond all other officials. Armed with the sultan’s favor, the musahib could bypass formal procedures, ignore official promotion patterns and deny other officials’ access to the sultan.82 Early Modern writers often stressed the need to maintain boundaries between the two

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functions,83 revealing again that conceptually business and pleasure were distinct but in reality, the boundaries between drinking and reciting poetry with the sultan, and talking politics with him, were often blurred. What both roles shared was royal favor, which often translated into a type of authority that did not derive from a particular office and was therefore not limited by the office’s constraints. It was an elusive type of influence that was effective exactly because it could work outside the official conduits of power. The changing patterns of court politics in the early seventeenth century made this type of authority more important than ever before. As argued by Günhan Börekçi, sultans were now forced to devise new strategies to retain their position, in the face of the growing power of other actors within the palace and state apparatus. In a reality of fierce factional competition involving top officials and ulema, the janissaries and sipahis, sultans increasingly relied on the post of the royal favorite to intervene in the political sphere and curb the power of other actors. Considering the growing inaccessibility of the sultan during that period, Börekçi notes, “anyone who . . . formed an intimate relationship with the sultan could solidify his power against all challengers and make them stay (literally) outside politics while, at the same time, legitimizing his own power. If a favorite became too strong, however, he risked polarizing the sultan’s court and alienating the Ottoman political elite.”84 It is as if these lines were written about Grand Vizier Nevşehirli İbrahim Paşa. Not only did he dominate the politics of the empire for 12 years; he was also married to the sultan’s daughter, which brought him into the royal family and gave him the much-esteemed title of damad (the sultan’s son-in-law). The tremendous power he accumulated indeed earned him the envy and animosity of many within the elite, and eighteenth-century writers often criticized him for intentionally keeping the sultan busy with pleasures, in order to divert his attention away from state affairs.85 However, contemporary missives penned by the sultan himself and addressed to his grand vizier show that the sultan was hardly a helpless victim manipulated against his will to spend his reign partying. At least when it came to his pleasure nights, the sultan was very active. For example, in one note he wrote: “My vizier, on Friday we arrive at Saʿdabad [palace] and will spend the night there. Prepare numerous fireworks and during the day, a banquet; let there be a play and a horse race to watch.”86

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Reading through these notes, one is struck by the closeness between the sultan and his grand vizier. In one message, apparently written when the vizier was ill, the sultan wrote to him that “tonight, I was upset and restless until dawn. I thought about you, worrying whether or not there is any improvement in your illness.” In another note, the sultan wrote that “tonight I had a cauldron of aşüre (a kind of pudding) prepared and had it sprinkled with pretty strong rose water and musk. It was too musky. I sent you a pot. Eat some.”87 The grand vizier was clearly on very close terms with the sultan, as close as one can possibly be with his absolute master, ruler of the world. Some of the sultan’s notes convey what appears almost as personal dependency on his vizier. He repeatedly implores İbrahim to join him for nights of diversion, using a very friendly language. Anxious as he was to be joined by his grand vizier, the sultan understood that the vizier had an empire to run, and therefore, was not always available for partying. In another message, the sultan wrote that The full moon over Saʿdabad is of such level [of beauty] that it cannot be described with a pen. It would be very agreeable if you come and stay tonight. I had a special tent placed. Will you take the grand admiral and come or leave him in Istanbul? Tonight is council night, [but] Wednesday night is fine. In short, you know, whenever you want, come . . . And say hello to my daughter. How great it is to have her in the world, with you.88

This message shows that the (however blurred) boundary between state business and leisure did not map neatly onto the division between day and night. Sultans and their companions often indulged in banquets, hunting parties, and whatnot in the middle of the day.89 Here we learn that at least some state business (i.e. the Imperial Council’s meeting) was conducted after dark. Yet, assuming some measure of correspondence between leisure and the night at the palace is not completely mistaken. Work after sunset was limited across Ottoman society and in the palace too. State affairs were officially carried out during the day. For example, meetings of the imperial council usually began early in the morning and continued until the late afternoon.90 Eighteenth-century palace logs (sing. ruzname) that recorded the daily schedules of sultans, also show that while leisure was not confined to the night, the night was mostly reserved for leisure, and for some sultans, devotion as well.91

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This was not incidental. Provided basic security, “controlled darkness” may be conducive for conviviality or intimacy.92 It appears that the sultan was actively seeking such intimacy. Read alongside the poetry, brought below, these notes reveal the importance of the dark hours for court sociability. It was the time that the grand vizier could finally be with his master, to relieve him of his boredom and possibly, from his loneliness. At times, the two exchanged couplets. For example, on one occasion the sultan wrote to İbrahim, expressing exactly the double role (nedim and musahib) he accorded to his grand vizier. Just as important, the latter is implied by an explicit nocturnal image: You are both my lamp and my witty vizier World-famous for fidelity, you have no equal.

The grand vizier countered with couplets that similarly played on the image of a lamp, inviting the sultan to yet another nighttime party, a halva gathering in this case: Since the beginning of all things you are my special lamp Because you enliven me with good fortune and bliss. My boundless gratitude is to you, my majestic sultan Show favor, come to the halva gathering with prosperity and majesty.93

I shall say a few words about halva gatherings below, but at this point, I am interested in the confluence of politics and leisure. In a rather sharp contrast to the notion of some contemporary critics, the grand vizier did not draw the sultan into the world of leisure and out of that of politics. Rather, leisure was the continuation of politics by other means. Indeed, it is hard to imagine the grand vizier survive that long in office without nourishing his relations with the sultan, and the other top officials in his circle. It is within this interface of leisure and politics that the palace elite’s halva gatherings and lamp parties of the 1720s should be interpreted.

Nocturnal Leisure at Court Sultans in the eighteenth century often went to sleep long after their subjects. They did not have to worry about lighting expenses; they did not have to open a shop or to start the fire in the furnace early in the

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morning. Their liberal use of time, and in particular nighttime, set them apart from the commoners. Like their European peers, they could party into the night, and they often did.94 As would be clear by now, these parties were never only about fun. Rather, they were complex performances of intimacy and hierarchy, marking not only who is part of the inner circle and who is out, but also the hierarchy within the ingroup. During the vizierate of Damad İbrahim, two forms of nocturnal parties became particularly popular among the palace elite: the halva parties, which were held during the winter nights, and the lamp parties held mostly in the spring. The halva party was a popular tradition. On the long winter nights, it was common for men to gather in a private house to chat, play games, sing, hear stories, and eat. Because of the season, fruits were hard to come by and it was typically halva that was served as the main dish, alongside other foods.95 The tradition was widespread during the period under discussion and was not limited to Istanbul. For example, the kadı Sadreddinzade Telhisî Mustafa Efendi, who kept a diary around 1711–1735, reports participating in 39 halva parties.96 Among the more humble residents, either the participants would take turns hosting (and covering the expenses), or they would split the cost of each gathering between them.97 It appears that this tradition was adopted at court during the vizierate of Damad İbrahim98 and in any case, was taken to a whole new level. The most celebrated halva parties were held in honor of the sultan by members of the faction that dominated Ottoman politics during this period. These included, most notably, Grand Vizier Damad İbrahim Paşa, his lieutenant (kethuda) Mehmed, and the grand admiral (kapudan) Kaymak Mustafa Paşa.99 The events organized by these men included exquisite food, drinks, music, and poetry recited by the best poets of the period. By throwing such lavish parties, the officials displayed their wealth and competed for glory and sultanic favor.100 In this, the halva gatherings shared much with the outdoor lamp parties that became so popular in the same circles during the same period. However, while the former merely took place at night, the latter depended on it in everything, from technics to poetics. It was a thoroughly nocturnal experience. Just like the halva party, the lamp party too cannot be understood outside the longtime meclis tradition. Full-moon, outdoor summer parties were favored in court circles long before the eighteenth century

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and there is evidence to suggest that even lamp parties (çıragan) ˘ were not entirely new.101 Yet, several eighteenth-century writers, both local and foreign, identify this tradition with Grand Vizier Damad İbrahim Paşa, whose name keeps cropping up throughout this chapter.102 It seems that as with the halva gatherings, the lamp cords installed in mosques, and nighttime festival amusements, the powerful grand vizier took an existing practice and developed it further. The çıragan ˘ tradition survived down to the early nineteenth century, but according to D’Ohsson, the splendor of İbrahim’s parties was never reached again.103 Court chronicler Raşid relates that the first çıragan ˘ party was held on April 26, 1720, at the new palace of the grand vizier in Beşiktaş, significantly named Çıragan. ˘ The sultan arrived with his harem and retinue and stayed for a week. Raşid writes that the sultan spent his days listening to music and his nights at çıragan ˘ parties.104 D’Ohsson adds that the sultan enjoyed himself so much at these parties that he ordered them to be repeated the next spring.105 A note written by the sultan corroborates, once again, that the grand vizier may have been the producer, but the sultan was the driving force. “My vizier,” the sultan wrote, “we are going down to the Beşiktaş palace. The women (harem) too will arrive there. The weather is pretty nice. Shall we organize a lamp party (çıragan) ˘ tonight or shall it be postponed? No rush. The lamp party will be whenever you are ready, and taking the weather into consideration.”106 The çıragan ˘ parties were most commonly held in the gardens of the new mansions built along the Bosporus and went well into the dark hours, although in modern terms the sultan apparently got tired quite early. According to various accounts, he usually left between three to five hours after sunset.107 The most important feature of these parties was the amount of light. Thousands of candles and lamps were arranged in the tulip beds, and vases of colored water and mirrors were placed, creating a dazzling multitude of lights and reflections. Sometimes, displays of fireworks were staged. Cages of nightingales were set among the lamps and tulips, adding an audio dimension to the setting.108 The real garden and the poetic garden invoked in the poetry produced in and about this setting became hard to distinguish.109 This poetry, written by the best-known poets of the period, enables us to reconstruct the meaning allocated to the çıragan ˘ parties by those who partook in them. The main poetic themes sensitized listeners to

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the night sky, to the setting of the garden, and to the sounds and colors of the interaction taking place in it. In this, the çıragan ˘ poems followed well-established conventions. Take, for example, the following lines from a song by Nedim (d. 1730): Flute and dulcimer, viol, harp, and tambour The bulbul’s song in harmony with the arbor. The world’s filled with mirth and joy of every color Good news to the garden for the time of lamps is come.110

Also in line with long-time conventions is the rather stark differentiation between the inner domain of the garden and the world outside. The garden is illuminated, alive, filled with joyful voices and pleasant sounds, and contrasted with the surrounding darkness and silence. İzzet Ali Paşa (d. 1734) describes one of the çıragan ˘ parties held by the grand vizier in the following words: Who views the lamps in the tulip garden Sees darkness become light in springtime. [. . .] Who attends to the gleam of mirrors in the meadow Supposes the shining sun has descended to earth. [. . .] Well done, nighttime diffusion of pleasure’s blessings, For now the dark heart of the people of vision finds Divine light.111

In line with convention, the poet endows the party with mystical significance and describes the participants as enlightened by divine light, which enables them to pure their heart of the dark spot of sin (süveyda) and see beyond the veil of reality. But the border between light and darkness, between the inside and the outside, is not drawn only on the mystical level. It is also a social boundary separating the select from the “commoners.” Here is İzzet Ali Paşa once again: It’s fitting if they come to observe this elite gathering [bezm-i has] The shining stars of all the layers of heaven.112

Like other modes of elite meclis, then, the çıragan ˘ contributed to the solidification of collective identity and personal relations within elite circles. Drawing the attention of all participants, fire represented the coming together of the souls. In this sense it was often explicitly associated with the archetypical beloved, a role that in elite meclis settings was often assigned to beautiful boys who served as cupbearers

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(sing. saki) or dancers. Within this world of conventional images and scripted behaviors, the beloved was frequently conceptualized as igniting the fire of love in the hearts of those present.113 The night emerges as the setting for more open expression of emotions and desires, with fire serving as a symbol of the shared experience. Here is Nedim: They watch the dance of the darling dears The wails of lutes rise to the spheres. A mouth-flame of voices set the soul on fire Good news to the garden for the time of the lamps is come.114

Projecting Power Thus far I have emphasized the supposedly intimate nature and the inner-oriented aspects of the çıragan ˘ parties. But there was clearly a dimension of ostentation: in the pitch-black night of eighteenthcentury Istanbul, the glow generated by thousands of candles, and the fireworks (with their additional audio dimension), were noted by the people in nearby neighborhoods, generating an image of imperial power that was near and yet inaccessible.115 Courtly texts echoed this effect, amplified and perpetuated it by explicitly connecting the light spectacle with power and authority. While as noted above, the association of light with royal and religious authority was not new, the scale was unprecedented. With typical hyperboles, court poets glorified the amount of light, the sophistication of its arrangement, and its dazzling impact. The Gift of Lamps (Tuhfe-i Çıragan) ˘ is a short work commissioned by Grand Vizier Damad İbrahim Paşa and presented to him by a poet writing under the pen-name Vahidi, probably around the mid-1720s. This little-known manuscript, preserved in the library of the Topkapı palace, focuses on the two most important features of the lamp party: the light and the flowers.116 Throughout, the author associates light with divinely delegated authority. For example, he describes the Prophet and the four “rightly guided” caliphs (rash¯ıdun) ¯ who guided the people with the “lamps (çıragan) ˘ of light of faith from the dark marshlands of the winter of calamity.”117 Such Sunni images of light are interwoven with metaphoric exegesis of Quranic verses that are typical of the poetics of the School of Love, discussed in detail in Chapter 4. For example, describing a çıragan ˘

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night, the author says that the elaborate illumination carefully arranged by architects (mühendisan) to illuminate every tulip, made it seem as though “the lowest heaven came together with this paradiselike garden.” The author then follows up with a verse from the Quran (67:5): “We have adorned the lowest heaven with lamps and made them [missiles] for stoning devils.”118 Building on the verse, Vahidi describes how, because of “the sparks and flames [of the lamp party], forty demons and devils fell and rose,” until finally “their wicked bodies were pierced and scattered.”119 The word used for flame here, şihab, also means a shooting star but the immediate meaning is again taken from Quranic verses (37:6–10) that are commonly associated with the verse brought above. These verses describe the stars of the lowest heavens as “a safeguard against every rebellious devil.” The şihab mentioned in these verses is understood as a “piercing flame” that is shot at devils who stealthily try to approach paradise (see also 15:16–18; 67:5). Vahidi may be implying that the static lamps placed in the garden are like the immovable stars that encircle Paradise and the fireworks recall the şihab. Conjuring up these images, the doubtless astonishing view of thousands of flickering flames and dancing shadows turn into a battle between divine light and the forces of evil. Once again, the seen hints at the unseen (gayb), and mundane lamps shine heavenly light, ultimately, on the figure and power of the monarch. Other court poets similarly tied hyper-illumination with royalty on the one hand, and with divinity on the other. Take, for example, the following lines by Mirza-Zade Ahmed Neyli (d. 1748): The kingly nature desires that lamps be plentiful So it’s no wonder that the ruler of the age wishes çıragan. ˘ Don’t think it a lamp party; the stars have gathered on earth To observe the flower garden of the world-tending king of kings.120

The amount of light is here directly connected to the nature of sovereignty. The kings of the world, the rulers of the empire, flock to the çıragan ˘ parties, or the Çıragan ˘ palace in Beşiktaş where many of these parties took place. Even the stars join them in marveling at the beauty of the garden of the king of kings, the sultan. The same association of the abundance of light with the power of the ruler is made in a gazel by İzzet Ali Paşa, written for another çıragan ˘ party:

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The tulip is become bringer of warmth to the lamps-gathering tonight It proffers its passionate burning to the ruler of the age tonight. It decorated the court of lamps with a cloth of many colors It ornamented this majestic kingly gathering tonight. [. . .] While every radiant candle is like a brilliant daytime Who looks at gleam of the shining moon’s face tonight.121

The ability to “turn night into day” sent a message of power to those left outside the garden, whether they were lesser officials or commoners. Far from being a transparent entity that allows social interaction to take place, light was the main theme of the party. This focus was apparent both in the physical arrangement of the garden, made to draw the attention of the participants to the lamps and their reflections, and in the poems, songs, and descriptions written about these parties. Light here is completely dissociated from the bloody floors of slaughterhouses where the candles were made, detached from the labor of bees and beekeepers, of sheep drovers and candlemakers, seemingly separated from the substance that brought it about. Thus, freed of its trivial, material entanglements, light could be turned into a metaphor, and one that worked on multiple levels. On the social level, light represented the affinity and collective experience of exhilaration; and on the mystical level, it was conceived as a divine gift given to those worthy of it. On the political level, light was identified with the patron and the çıragan ˘ parties therefore projected the power of the monarch, and possibly his highest representatives, in the eyes of the elite, the people, and other monarchs.

Ottoman En-lightenment? In projecting power through light, the Ottomans were following in the footsteps of earlier Muslim rulers, but in the eighteenth century, they were increasingly turning their attention west, where European rulers competed among themselves in staging similar spectacles.122 The Ottoman elite was aware of the European achievements in this field, and vice versa. Yirmi Sekiz Çelebi Mehmet Efendi, the Ottoman envoy dispatched to France in 1720, attended a light festival in Chateau de Chantilly, not far from Paris, and described it in detail in his report of the embassy. The relation of the spectacle to the power of the French

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monarch was not left ambiguous. The king’s personal symbol appeared out of the flames in the climax of a spectacular show of fire and fireworks. The whole spectacle, wrote the Ottoman envoy, lasted almost two hours and left him deeply impressed.123 When the French king bore a son in 1729, his ambassador in Istanbul held an illumination to celebrate the occasion.124 Clearly seeking to reciprocate and demonstrate their own power, the Ottomans often reserved front seats in their own light displays for European envoys, hoping they would share their impressions with their masters back home. To some extent, they succeeded: at least some European representatives expressed their admiration for Ottoman firework ability.125 If displays of light at night served as a shared field in which European princes and kings competed for splendor and demonstrated their majesty, as argued by Koslofsky, the Ottomans were clearly part of the competition. The similarities between Ottoman and European courts in the uses of the night for leisure and power projection begs the question of “Ottoman En-lightenment,” that is, the relations between actual illumination and ideas akin to the European intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment. Hans Blumenberg has argued that the Enlightenment movement significantly changed the metaphoric uses of light. Light, which had always stood for truth, was no longer seen as divinely bestowed on passive humans, but a vehicle they could actively use to illuminate the world, that is, subject it to reason and order.126 Darrin McMahon has shown that this conceptual shift was entangled with a transformation in the use of actual light. The Age of Enlightenment saw a great expansion of lighting schemes throughout most of Europe and the two aspects reinforced each other. Actual light was a metaphor and a measure of “progress.” Light was used to draw distinctions between the ancients and the moderns, and between Europe and the rest of the world.127 It was during this period, and against these trends, that European observers increasingly portrayed the Ottoman Empire as the diametric opposition of enlightened Europe, both literally and figuratively.128 The imagery used in typical Enlightenment narratives presented the Europeans as taking the “light of reason” or “science” from Islamic civilization and carrying it forward while leaving the realm of Islam in the dark.129 In fact, several scholars have argued that under Ahmed III, Istanbul too experienced Enlightenment-like trends including de-confessionalization

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and increased religious tolerance, de-militarization, a renewed emphasis on philosophy and rational interpretations of Islam, the rise of naturalism, cultural openness, and efforts to spread knowledge through the opening of public libraries and the first Ottoman printing press.130 Given the parallel increase in the use of artificial light, it is tempting to argue that like in Europe, the Enlightenment-like trends were coupled by shifts in the organization and interpretation of light. This temptation, however, should be resisted. Historians who have used “Enlightenment” for the Ottoman context, deployed it to bind together phenomena and trends that were not necessarily seen as related by contemporary Ottomans and were certainly not subsumed under the title Enlightenment.131 Moreover, as Khaled El-Rouayheb has cautioned, characterizing contemporary Islamic intellectual traditions using such imported concepts as “Enlightenment” necessitates stretching them to the extent they lose any coherence and meaning they originally held. Not every “individual illumination,” he stresses, is “Enlightenment.”132 His research suggests that some of the trends mentioned above, like the renewed emphasis on rational philosophy, may better be interpreted as the continuation of long-term trends in Islamic intellectual spheres, rather than as the eastern edge of the Enlightenment.133 This is not to say that the similarities should be ignored. Both Ottoman and European rulers played in the same arena and consciously competed with each other based on a basic set of implicitly acknowledged rules: the more light, and the more sophisticated its organization, the bigger the prestige. Yet, while the Ottomans may have acknowledged European expertise in staging light displays, including fireworks,134 their protocols of illumination and associated metaphors differed substantially. Just as light itself was produced from local burning materials by locally manufactured candles and lamps, the meanings that were assigned to light followed distinctly Ottoman cultural repertoires. Accounts and poems that refer to light spectacles never mention European sources of inspiration. In fact, the only contemporary source that touches on the history of the çıragan ˘ parties, the Gift of Lamps, shows that when it came to light, the Ottomans were looking more to the east than to the west.135 According to the text, one possible source was the Chinese court. Envoys sent by the Timurid ruler Sahruh ¸ (r. 1405–1447), son of the empire’s founder Timur (Tamerlane),

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witnessed the preparations for one such party.136 Keskiner and Araç suggest that this information may have come from the China Travel Book, a Persian work from 1422 that was translated into Turkish in 1728 by order of Grand Vizier Damad İbrahim Paşa. The work includes a detailed description of such lamp-nights.137 The author of the Gift of Lamps, however, notes that it was not only the Chinese that held such events. Independently of the Chinese tradition, the Roman (or Byzantine) Emperor (Sahınşah-ı ¸ Rum) had his own line of lamp parties during the tulip season. The “sultans of the lands of the east,” including the Abbasid caliphs, preferred organizing such “lamp nights” in the rose season, unlike the Ottomans (al-ı Osman) who favored the tulip season. Seasonal preferences aside, the Ottomans are shown to be the heirs of various distinguished dynasties. All of these dynasties, however, ruled “the lands of the east.” Moreover, the poet is clearly eager to demonstrate his mastery of the Persian poetic canon,138 which further strengthens the impression that outward resemblance between the Ottoman and European projection of light, keeps in the dark rather significant differences in the way this light was interpreted.

Conclusion This chapter demonstrated “nocturnalization” at the Ottoman court of the Tulip Era, and a parallel increase in the use of light in both public and closed, palace parties. In all festive events, both profane and religious, light was not merely an empty entity provided to allow social interaction to take place. Rather, it was designed to draw attention onto itself, serving to illuminate sites and times of significance. Taken together, these illumination efforts represented a push by the palace elite deeper into the night, an interval that had previously concerned the court to a much lesser extent. Whether on mosques or palaces, in Ramadan or following a successful military campaign, light at night was a declaration of patrimonial power that drew its significance from the darkness that reigned supreme in all other parts of town, and throughout the year. On one level, light seems to be a cross-cultural, even universal proxy and servant of power. At the same time, however, it was not only locally sourced and produced, but also locally interpreted. Since light and text were so intricately woven together, light could not be

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organized nor interpreted outside textual universes that were particular to the Ottomans. The eighteenth century was in this respect fundamentally different from the world of industrially produced light. Moreover, the Ottomans played the European game only to a certain extent. While competing in the realm of spectacle, the Ottoman court made no attempts to systematically illuminate streets, despite their growing fear of nocturnal disorder. Examined from this angle, the Ottoman Empire was actually becoming more different, rather than more similar to Europe.

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7

Night Battles

One morning in early 1809, dozens of residents in several neighborhoods of Istanbul woke up to find emblems of janissary regiments inscribed on their doors. In the following nights, more and more doors of private houses, but also of churches and synagogues, were marked in a similar manner. People interpreted this as a threatening message but nobody knew exactly what they meant or who was behind them. According to chronicler Cabi Ömer (d. ~1814), the clandestine action caused much anxiety among house owners as this was “not the work of one or two people.” One night, almost 100 doors were inscribed. People suspected it was the soldiers on patrol who were responsible, but nobody could figure out the reason.1 The matter reached the deputy to the grand vizier (kaymakam) who demanded answers from the chief of the janissaries, who, in turn, questioned the regiment commanders, but to no avail. Darkness was accompanied by silence. When the matter reached the sultan, he too was very concerned. The chief of the janissaries promised to apprehend the culprits but was shown completely helpless when, at dawn the next morning, a threatening message was posted on none other but the door of the chamber of the Imperial Council at the Sublime Porte. The message protested the appointment of Yusuf Ziya Paşa (d. 1817), a known supporter of the reform program known as “the New Order,” to grand vizier. “Blood drips from our sword,” the message read and went on to threaten the official’s assassination. The janissaries who had guarded the Porte at night claimed they did not know who posted the message and remembered they actually saw the kaymakam himself in front of the chamber’s door at dawn. “Ask him about the message,” they said, “maybe he did it so that he would be appointed grand vizier.”2 What was going on? The chronicler who recounts the story and us, his readers, cannot be sure. But the most striking point in this anecdote is that the sultan too was groping in the dark for an explanation. The 207 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 04 Aug 2021 at 06:37:27, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108933131.011

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janissaries here appear to have the upper hand. Relying on their solidarity and hide-ability, they initiate, strike, and disappear, leaving everybody else, including the sultan, helpless and anxious. Something was cooking in the dark, but nobody was sure what it was. In this chapter, I show how the loosely regulated night of the eighteenth century – that had accommodated orthodox and antinomian ritual, order, and its transgression – gradually turned into a battleground between the palace elite and the janissaries, the unofficial rulers of the night. When in conflict with the palace, the janissaries used the night not only for licentious pleasures and business but also for conspiracy and sabotage. Darkness was a crucial facet in their “protocols of rebellion.”3 Once activated, the janissaries’ networks would organize quickly under the cover of darkness and emerge out of the shadows to confront the sultan in broad daylight. Ottoman sultans, on their part, occasionally tried to dislodge these networks – significantly in this context – by eradicating the nightlife scene which they considered the breeding ground of janissary revolts. These efforts, however, were thwarted by the dependency of the authorities on, and the ambivalence toward, these very networks and activities.4 The drama is narrated below in three acts of major upheavals: the 1730 rebellion; the nizam-i cedid reforms and the 1807 uprising that undid them; and the destruction of the janissaries in 1826, which opened the way to significant changes in Ottoman nocturnal realities. Throughout, the struggle was waged not only in the streets but also on the discursive level. Starting already following the 1730 rebellion, elite writers began associating the janissaries and the urban underclass with darkness. This rhetoric would gradually gain traction in court circles, as the tension between the palace and the janissaries increase toward the end of the century. The destruction of the janissaries and the oppression of the related Bektaşi order would be described as a triumph of sultanic light, upholding and supported by Sunni Islam, over the heretic forces of darkness and chaos.

Lights Out In late September 1730, an Albanian peddler and part-time janissary known as Patrona Halil lead an uprising that brought about the downfall and execution of Grand Vizier Damad İbrahim Paşa and his associates, and the replacement of Sultan Ahmed III with Mahmud

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I (r. 1730–1754).5 As shown in Chapter 6, over the preceding decades the court made excessive use of light to project royal power and legitimacy. Yet, such demonstrations of power ultimately had an adverse effect. Against the background of severe hardship, the extravagance of the ruling faction created much popular resentment. One of the contemporary chroniclers to express such a view was Abdi, a high official under Damad İbrahim who nevertheless managed to survive the rebellion and secure himself even higher positions under the new regime.6 Abdi explicitly notes that the grand vizier and “the majority of those of high rank” were immersed in parties of pleasures and musical entertainment “day and night” while “the poor people were wretched by tyranny and oppression.”7 Even if we accept that Abdi and other chroniclers sought to retrospectively defame İbrahim and his faction in order to appease their new master, Sultan Mahmud I, and even if we agree that the rebellion was an intra-elite conspiracy rather than a popular revolt,8 it is still significant that contemporary writers chose to devote much of their critique to the extravagance and pomp of the former ruling faction. The authors were tapping onto a widely held sense of animosity, using the magnificent night parties of the elite as a shining, easy-to-hit target. Although the chroniclers were critical of Damad İbrahim and his circle, they were by no means sympathetic to the rebels. In fact, the rebels were consistently associated with the night, which was in turn presented as a time of disorder, insecurity, and treachery. This association was produced in two ways: the first was what we may call a “realist” representation of the nocturnal activity of rebels, in routine and during the rebellion itself. The second way was by figuratively “blackening” the rebels, building on both primordial and historically created fears of the night.9 In other words, the supposedly sinister nature of the night is attached to the rebels, thus presenting them as the direct opposite of sultanic light. First, regarding the reality of the rebellion and the rebels: it has already been shown that the palace’s authority relied on light and sight. Even in the capital, the night was frontier, an interval that could not be effectively governed. This reality allowed much more leeway to the extra-legal or semi-legal power structures dominated by the janissaries. Something of that dynamics came into play during the rebellion. The rebellion broke out on September 25, 1730, and the rebels initially assembled in front of the Bayezid mosque and marched

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through the covered market, rallying more people to their cause. The crowd headed toward the “meat square” (et meydanı), where the janissaries’ barracks were located. It seemed as if the mutiny was picking up steam. However, as the night set, the multitudes began to dissolve, leaving the leaders, hesitant and vulnerable, to their own devices. According to Abdi, they were concerned that the palace would learn that the crowds have dispersed and seize the opportunity to attack them at night. It was Patrona Halil who encouraged the group to stick together and persevere, thus earning the leadership of the group.10 It should be noted in passing that Patrona Halil was probably comfortable in the dark, familiar with the city’s nocturnal life described in previous chapters. According to John Montague, the Earl of Sandwich (1718–1792), who traveled through Istanbul a few years after the rebellion, Patrona Halil used to spend his nights at the taverns of Galata, where he drank away all of his days’ earnings.11 But if the descending night has left the leaders of the rebellion all by themselves, it also prevented the leaders of the empire from knowing about it. The top officials who convened in the illuminated halls of the palace to decide how to deal with the rebels had no idea what was going on outside. In Abdi’s words, they were “unaware” (bi-haber) of the situation and missed the opportunity to act.12 As a new day dawned upon the square and “the world was illuminated with light,” the rebels could see that the sultan, his men, and the people of Istanbul have all been taken by fear and locked themselves in.13 People now began to regroup around the leaders and the rebellion regained its momentum. The rebels were now emboldened and the next night they ventured out in bands, raiding houses of people of means. Two points are worthy of attention here. First, as long as it was night, even the rebel leaders could not assess the impact of their action. It was only daylight that revealed that they dominated the streets. While it was an everynight practice for the city to shut itself in, the fact that this self-imposed curfew continued into the day signaled to the rebels that they faced no opposition. Yet, and this is the second point, raiding awaited the return of darkness. We have already seen that janissary violence peaked at night, often leaving sultans completely helpless. The rebels’ actions on that second night were in a sense based on tradition. As the rebels became even more self-confident, their raids spilled over into daytime, but in general, even during the height of the rebellion,

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these actions were mostly limited to the night “when there were no other people around” (alem agyardan ˘ hali iken).14 In short, chronicles placed the rebels in the night partly because they were indeed more likely to operate in the night to begin with, and because during the rebellion itself they often made use of it. Yet, it would be absurd to assume that elite chroniclers merely reflected nocturnal realities “as they were.” Often, the nocturnality of the rebels was used against them. At times, the association of the rebels with the night was more implicit or indirect, and yet, it would not be lost on contemporaries. The chronicler Destari Salih, another confidant of the new Sultan Mahmud I, describes Patrona Halil and his associates as “a fearless group of dirty pimps from among the naked people of the bath of sin and fornication,” that “threw the sparks of the fire of the furnace of their brigandage among the different people . . . A group of guiltsoiled Albanians came together and lead the people with their satanic specters . . . causing a major riot.”15 The chronicler here builds on the dubious reputation of the bathhouse. The hamam, it may be said, was as central in Ottoman Istanbul as it was marginal. It was central since it was quintessential for the hygiene, ritual, social life, and well-being of city dwellers, and every quarter of the city had at least one. It was marginal, first, because it was mostly poor, unattached “bachelors” with limited opportunities who worked as bath attendants. Due to patterns of chain migration, Albanians came to dominate the profession.16 This network was activated during the revolt, hence Destari Salih’s reference to the “guiltsoiled Albanians.” But hamams were dubious in additional ways. Hamam stokers, another low-paying job, were among the city’s night workers. Moreover, the warmth of the bathhouse drew homeless people and they were often allowed to sleep near the furnace on the cold winter nights. Finally, at least some bathhouses were known as sites of commercial sex, especially at night, and bath attendants often turned to prostitution as a night job.17 Hence the reference to the “dirty pimps,” and “the bath of sin and fornication.” In short, the multilayered marginality of the bathhouse serves Destari Salih in his efforts to depreciate the rebels. The association of the rebels with the night becomes even more explicit a little further down the narrative. After introducing the leaders of the rebellion, the chronicler writes that two of them were

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“the bandits Çınar Ahmed and Uzun Mehmed who wielded the bloodspilling sword of sedition every night in the Meat Square in order to turn heedless sleep into rebellion, as if making unwholesome blood flow out of the artery of banditry.”18 The Meat Square is likened to an artery always flowing with subversive activity. The “bandits” opened that artery with their “knife of sedition” and let rebellion flow out like “unwholesome blood” (dem-i faside from Arabic al-damm al-fasid). ¯ The author is alluding to the porging of meat sanctioned by the Sharia, which was a low-paying night job.19 The whole trade was dominated by janissaries. The same term, dem-i faside, can also be read as “mischievous time,” which in this case refers to “every night.” Either way, the janissaries are here presented as the forces of darkness, and in some places (as cited above) are explicitly linked to Satan. Sultanic authority and order, on the other hand, are equated throughout the narrative with the sun, with the morning, and with light.20 Thus, the janissaries, once the mainstay of sultanic power, are presented as its ultimate opposite. Sun-ruler or not, the sultan eventually capitulated to the demands of the rebels and executed the grand vizier and his associates, before being forced to step down himself. According to Destari Salih, after the rebels received the bodies of the grand vizier, his lieutenant, and the grand admiral, they plucked out their eyes and stuck candles in their stead saying, “if there is going to be a lamp party (çıragan), ˘ let it be this way.”21 It is worth noting that lighting candles in such gory circumstances was not without its precedents. Until the end of the seventeenth century, candles were occasionally used for public torture and execution. The convict would be strapped to a cross-shaped contraption and deep cuts were made in his buttocks and below the shoulder blades, where wrist-thick candles were then inserted and lit. The bounded convict was then loaded onto a camel and paraded in the streets. Only when the convict was about to die would he be put out of his misery by hanging. This form of torture was applied, for example, on two spies of the rebel governor of Erzurum Abaza Mehmed Paşa in 1627.22 We do not know whether or not the rebels were copycatting or even that the event actually took place. The only thing we know for certain is that Destari Salih chose to narrate it in this way. By putting these words in the mouths of the rebels, the chronicler has them usurp the power invested in the imagery of the çıragan ˘ to celebrate their victory

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over the ruling elite in a little party of their own. If the lamp parties of the Tulip Era were supposed to accentuate social hierarchies and stabilize the elite’s rule, the rebels were neither impressed nor deterred. They quite easily leaped over the social walls that were supposed to keep them away from the elite. Not only were Patrona Halil and his men able to force the execution of the powerful grand vizier and, soon thereafter, the dethronement of the reigning sultan; they actually ruled the capital for almost a month, showing no signs of an inferiority complex.

Setting Aflame Toward the end of the eighteenth century, tension between the palace and the janissaries was again building. The period was one of crisis throughout the empire. Rampant banditry in the provinces, natural disasters, epidemics, food scarcity, seemingly uncontrollable urbanization, urban unrest, and especially, the excruciating military defeats that underlay or exacerbated these problems, deeply shook the selfconfidence of the Ottoman elite and prompted some of its members to seek new solutions to the Empire’s predicament. In reformist circles, the under-disciplined janissaries were blamed not only for the military debacles but also for offsetting any significant reform. The palace also took measures that harmed the janissaries, including, for example, stricter control of janissary payroll tickets (esame).23 The janissaries, on their side, blamed the new Sultan Abdülhamid I and his men for the problems on the front and at home and, over the course of the 1780s, increasingly engaged in sabotage and propaganda to voice their grievances, demonstrate their power, and undermine policies and appointments they opposed.24 Critical for this discussion, they often preferred to operate at night. Fire was one of their most effective weapons. Conflagrations were more likely to start and to spread more rapidly at night.25 Yet, several Ottoman writers insisted that many nighttime fires were not mere accidents. The kadı Sadreddinzade Telhisî Mustafa Efendi, for example, noted in his diary that most fires happened at night and argued they were mostly started by arsonists.26 He was not alone in arguing this point. The chronicler Taylesanizade Hafiz Abdullah (d. ~1794) tells that on the night of Friday, September 8, 1785, a fire broke out in Bayezid and quickly spread to different areas of the old city. The covered market was evacuated, and many shops

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were damaged. No sooner than the fire was put out, another one started in Kasımpaşa and then in a number of other places. On the night of December 19 that same year, fires started in several locations in the area of Aksaray, and on August 3, 1786, near Rüstem Paşa mosque.27 Taylesanizade Hafiz Abdullah claims these fires were all caused by arsonists. For the last case cited, he relates that the artisans whose workshops burned down, blamed the arson on one of the officers of the 40th company, subject to the chief of the night police (asesbaşı). The officer and two soldiers were apprehended and “chastised” by the chief of the janissaries.28 There is nothing surprising about the nocturnality of arson. Arson has often been the weapon of choice for the subaltern. It was cheap, accessible, required no skill, and still could wreak havoc on whole cities.29 Since arsonists sought to act without being caught, arson was almost always performed at night, not only in the Ottoman Empire but around the world.30 The reasons for starting a fire were often very personal. Ehud Toledano and Hakan Erdem have both shown that arson was used by slaves, mostly against their owners.31 In rural settings, as Ebru Aykut Türker has shown, arson was mostly used by peasants against one another to take vengeance or settle scores without recourse to the legal system. In many other cases, the arsonists were day laborers, shepherds, or farmhands who wanted to get even with their superiors, be they notables, landowners, village headmen, or officials. The rural arsonists too used the cover of night.32 What was unique about acts of arson in the capital was not only their much bigger destructive potential but the political ramifications they could have. Writing about janissary-related acts of subversion in the late eighteenth century, Fikret Sarıcaoglu ˘ notes that their use of arson increased in the 1780s and made Sultan Abdülhamid I anxious about his public image. He sometimes followed extinguishment efforts personally and spurred his men on to arrest the arsonists and extinguish the fires.33 Failure could cost them their office. The recurring conflagrations of 1782 lead to the dismissal of Grand Vizier İzzet Mehmed Paşa. Following yet another fire in September 1785, people slammed the deputy of the grand vizier saying “it is because of you that we burn and are reduced to ashes.” He too, was dismissed from office following the incident.34 The arsons were at times accompanied by anonymous notices left in different parts of the city, blaming different officials for various

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actions. The palace was certainly not indifferent to the word on the street and took different measures to calm the opposition and deal with the danger of fire.35 Subsequent sultans were just as conscious of the dangers arson posed to stability and the way even rumors of arson could be used to undermine their rule.36 We have already seen that high state officials used tremendous amounts of burning material to create awesome spectacles of light. Amassing and controlling so much fire was a clear demonstration of might and sophistication, which served to project the authority and legitimacy of the ruling dynasty and those serving it. Interestingly, the great nighttime fires of Istanbul were also described as “spectacles” by several European visitors.37 For example, James Dallaway, the physician of the British embassy in Istanbul in the late eighteenth century, wrote that fires in Istanbul were a “grand spectacle” that nothing can exceed, except maybe a volcanic eruption. He described the “vast column of flame, of the most laminous [sic.] glow, rising up from the centre, which lighting up the mosques and contiguous cypress groves, produces an effect of superior magnificence.”38 Describing a nocturnal conflagration some three decades later, the Prussian diplomat Friedrich Tietz (1803–1879) wrote that “the night was intensely dark, and the flames (reflected from the surface of the water) wrapt [sic.] the city in one immense blaze of light, thus forming an interesting though awful spectacle.”39 Owing to the power of the “spectacle,” nighttime conflagrations in Istanbul would become a common theme among nineteenth-century artists, foreign and local alike, including Mıgırdıç Civanyan (1848–1906), Halil Paşa (1857–1939), Garabet Yazmacıyan (1868–1929), and Auguste Etienne Francois Mayer (1805–1890). It is doubtful whether the common denizens of Istanbul would take the time to marvel at the “magnificence” of the flames as they were running away from their burning neighborhoods. Marvelous or not, the power of fire was undeniable. If concentrations of carefully orchestrated fire projected power, uncontrolled, raging fire directly undermined it. In the light of huge “columns” of flames, political authority seemed feeble and helpless. On the other side of the social spectrum, commoners – who could not dream of orchestrating lamp parties – could easily start one of those “awful spectacles” of fire to signal that after all, they too had power. In a horrific way, arson was an equalizer; fire was a leveler. The fact that janissaries and others often took

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advantage of the panic and disorder to plunder houses,40 no doubt aggravated the sense of chaos and collapse of authority. These are not mere academic observations made in retrospect. As discussed above, the politics of fire was obvious to contemporaries. The inability to control the city and secure the life and property of the people reflected negatively on the palace, as both the arsonists and the ruling elite knew very well. The relative freedom of action the night granted the janissaries was therefore crucial for their ability to fight for their privileges. By demonstrating their destructive potential, they hoped to influence appointments and policies. Yet, reform-minded officials were determined to end disorder, reassert sultanic authority, and bring the janissaries to heel.

Reestablishing Order Programs of reform along those lines have been circulating since the late 1770s. It was with the accession of Sultan Selim III (1789–1807) that these ideas finally matured into an ambitious reform project, known as the New Order. The New Order included both urban reforms in Istanbul and, more famously, the introduction of a new army built along European lines, based on imported European Knowledge, and a fiscal reform to support the project financially. The New Order was driven by a new reformist agenda that would significantly affect nocturnal realities in the capital. It is, therefore, crucial to say something about this agenda and the threat it posed to the nocturnal ecology of the capital. While earlier scholarship has interpreted the New Order mostly within the framework of Westernization and sometimes secularization, recent works explain the project as an attempt to constitute an Ottoman form of “enlightened absolutism” that was informed by both European ideas of military reform, and an agenda of orthodox revival lead and spread by the Nakşibendi-Müceddidi Sufi order.41 Scholars of the New Order have shown that the adoption of European military knowledge and awareness of the transformations underpinning European growing power were not an innovation of the late eighteenth century, nor that they necessarily reflected a “progressive” mindset. Rather, the reform agenda stretched back at least to the 1720s and was, to some extent, “traditionalist” in the sense that it sought new means to restore an old order, and thereby reconstitute a lost, “golden age.”42

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New military schools, first the Imperial School of Naval Engineering (established in 1776), then the Imperial School of Military Engineering (1793) institutionalized the dissemination of originally European (mostly French) knowledge. Here, European officers and military engineers met with Ottoman cadets and sometimes mathematicians and engineers, with the aim of producing what Ali Yaycıoglu ˘ dubbed “a Euro-Ottoman military Enlightenment.”43 Even disregarding the term “Enlightenment,”44 it is important to note the similarities between the ideas of this forming professional elite, and the agenda promoted by equivalent circles in contemporary Europe. As noted by Michel Foucault: Historians of ideas usually attribute the dream of a perfect society to the philosophers and jurists of the eighteenth century; but there was also a military dream of society. Its fundamental reference was not to the state of nature, but to the meticulously subordinated cogs of a machine, not to the primal social contract, but to permanent coercion, not to fundamental rights, but to indefinitely progressive forms of training, not to the general will but to automatic docility.45

This emphasis on order and docility as the basis of a comprehensive agenda of sociopolitical engineering is where the military strand of late eighteenth-century reformists overlapped with the NakşibendiMüceddidi Agenda. The Müceddidi branch of the Nakşibendi Sufi order that has originated in Mughal India, spread into the Ottoman domains in the seventeenth century and gradually grew in influence. The order called for the “revival and renewal” of Islamic societies by strict enforcement of the Sharia and “cleansing” unwarranted “innovations” (sing. bidʿa), which were, in fact, traditions that had taken root over time. The doctrine of the order was formulated both against the syncretistic religion founded by the Mughal Emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605) and the pantheist doctrines of Ibn Arabi, one of the foremost teachers of the School of Love (see Chapter 4).46 It was part of a much wider trend of revivalism that swept through the Islamic world, at least partly in response to growing European pressures.47 While the Nakşibendi-Müceddidi order was not the first to lead a Sunni-revivalist agenda in the Ottoman Empire, its influence among the upper rungs of society was unprecedented.48 Scholars generally agree that the growing influence of the order among the Ottoman elites should be viewed against the background of the late eighteenth-century

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crisis.49 The order’s emphasis on the role of political authority in reviving and revitalizing religion, its stress on renewal, and the hostile approach to antinomian Sufi groups who were perceived as a challenge to authority, were all appealing to elements within the elite that sought to centralize power based on a program of military and fiscal reforms.50 Thus, while the Bektaşi order was popular mainly among the urban underclass, and the janissaries, the Nakşibendiyye-Müceddidiyye was increasingly influential among the elite, and especially in palace circles. Sultan Selim III, who lead the reform project starting in 1791, was himself associated with the Mevlevi Sufi order but was surrounded by followers of the Nakşibendiyye-Müceddidiyye, many of whom lead the actual implementation of the reforms. By way of illustration, 9 out of 11 members in the council the sultan appointed to counsel him on the reforms were disciples of the order.51 The Nakşibendi-Müceddidi agenda indeed informed the New Order, complementing the imported principles and ideals of military order and discipline with Sunni indoctrination. The new barracks built for the soldiers as “spaces of order” set aside from the chaos of city life (and the janissaries, who were so closely integrated in it), also included mosques and Nakşibendi lodges. Imams were assigned to all regiments to oversee moral and spiritual training. It was mandatory for the recruits to perform the five daily prayers, again, in sharp contrast to the janissaries-Bektaşis who eschewed the prayers.52 The regulations issued for the new regiments stipulated that all soldiers were to be taught the catechism of Birgivi Mehmed (d. 1573), a scholar who had a profound impact on Ottoman puritan currents in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1803, 1,000 copies of this text were printed for use in the barracks, followed by a second edition two years later.53 In short, the conflict of interests between the reformers and the janissaries, which was also class-bound, was increasingly exacerbated by a widening religio-ideological rift, as the elite became more orthodox and less tolerant of the antinomian affinities of the janissaries and much of the urban underclass.54 It should be noted that the anti-Orderists did not openly stand for antinomian interpretations but rather used the same Sunni discourse to discredit their rivals. For the opposition, it was the court elite that had deviated from true faith, as manifested in their indulgence in luxury and interaction with infidels. Some even charged that the New

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Orderists sought to convert the empire. Rhetorically, then, both teams were playing the orthodox game. Yet, under this rhetoric there lay significant gaps, and tension between the two camps was building.

Cleansing Selim ascended to the throne on April 7, 1789, when he was 28 years old, in the midst of another disastrous war against Russia and the Habsburg Empire. Wartime scarcity led to riots, crime, and general resentment. As historian Betül Başaran has shown, the new sultan and his men responded to the wartime crisis by increased surveillance of marginal populations and harsh punitive measures, including exemplary punishments designed to instill fear and deter others from violating the law. According to Başaran, the innovation of Selim’s urban policies lay not in the actual measures taken (which were highly traditional), but in the spirit of activism and aggressiveness with which they were carried out. These had to do with Selim’s wish to reassert the personal authority of the sultan, an authority that has been eroded by his dependency on provincial governors for the war effort. 55 Central to Selim’s thrust was a clampdown on urban “mischief” (fesad).56 Eighteenth-century Istanbul was home to a widespread leisure scene, which was mostly nocturnal. More than 570 bars and taverns and countless sites of gambling and prostitution operated under the cover of darkness. The scene often bred violence but it was mostly tolerated by the authorities. Selim would tolerate it no more. Or so he thought. Early on in Selim’s reign, his grand vizier wrote to him that it was common practice to close down taverns at times “when the sailors and other soldiers are mobilized.”57 The grand vizier did not explain the measure, but it seems that with the majority of the armed forces on campaign, maintaining order would have been much harder. Pulling the plug on the drinking scene was, therefore, a reasonable move. The sultan approved and ordered to notify the relevant officials.58 It appears, however, that he soon grew in ambition. In a series of decrees issued in late December 1790 and early January 1791, he ordered the closing down of all drinking houses and the prohibition of prostitution throughout the city.59 According to the well-informed chronicler Ahmed Cavid (d. 1803), Selim acted under the influence of

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one Turhal Seyhi, ¸ probably the Nakşibendi-Müceddidi sheikh Turhallı Mustafa Efendi (d. 1794).60 The original imperial decree, issued on December 17, 1790, indeed carried a very Sunni tone, emphasizing that alcohol consumption and illicit sex (zina) were forbidden and enforcing the closing down of all taverns and a complete ban on prostitution. As in all other related decrees, the language was very strict. “However many bars and taverns there are, all must be closed down immediately and not a single drop of alcoholic beverages is to be bought and sold.” The decree threatened time and again that violators would be arrested and punished. The same went for prostitutes working in markets and brothels located in residential neighborhoods. Upon receiving these orders, the chronicler went on, the officials “left their sleep and peace” and worked “night and day” to seal the taverns, locate the brothels in the neighborhoods and arrest their owners.61 Both terms can be read as mere figures of speech, but as shown in previous chapters, these terms were most often used in nocturnal contexts.62 While the chronicler’s account emphasized the resolution and determination with which the sultan’s orders were carried out, contemporary official correspondence pertaining to the decree reveals a more complex picture. The sultan indeed pushed for an immediate and total ban on alcohol and prostitution at all times and throughout the city, but the policy proved harder to implement than he had anticipated. The sultan’s decrees not only specified the different areas of the city; they noted that the ban applies universally (külliyen) and should be enforced “day and night” or “continuously” (ʿala al-devam) with “utmost attention” (kemal-i itina ve nezaret).63 In August 1791, the sultan even ordered to impose the ban on alcohol in provincial towns as well.64 The term used in some of the relevant documents is “cleansing” or “purification” (tathir). This was not the first time the term, which also denoted garbage disposal, was used to refer to mischief.65 Yet, the term is significant as it discloses an approach very different from the tolerant policies that were in place throughout most of the long eighteenth century. Rather than assuming that “mischief” was endemic to the city and trying to limit its expansion, the new sultan sought its eradication. His highest officials, it appears from the correspondence, thought this was impossible and, in contrast to the picture that arises from Ahmed Cavid’s account, they were less than enthusiastic to carry out the orders.

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In a missive to the sultan, the grand vizier assured his master that following up on his decree, he immediately issued the required orders to seal up the taverns and summoned the officials who were responsible for security in different parts of the city. The grand vizier explained to them the implications of the sultanic decree, ordering them to keep the taverns closed, to search for brothels and punish their owners, to search for suspicious hamams and “cleanse” them of beardless youths, and to monitor the activity of prostitutes. However, right after noting the immediacy with which he acted upon the sultan’s order, the grand vizier chose to bring some of the reservations expressed in the meeting he had summoned. The sekbanbaşı, he reported, had noted that closing down the taverns would undermine the livelihood of their owners. In order to balance between this harm to the subjects and the wish to uphold security by closing the taverns, it was suggested that the owners would be allowed to sell the alcoholic beverages they had in stock for ten days, as long as they did not sell it to Muslims. After that time, the total ban on the sale of alcohol would be enforced.66 The suggestion was indeed adopted and the ban went into effect only on January 6, 1791.67 The most important aspect in the grand vizier’s response is that it reveals the comprehensiveness of his master’s ambition in terms of both sites and forms of leisure (taverns, brothels, public baths) and the geography. The officials summoned (the sekbanbaşı, cebecibaşı topcubaşı, and the voyvoda of Galata) covered between them the entire city, excluding the shores of the Bosporus. For some reason, the bostancıbaşı, responsible for security in that area is not mentioned in this memo, but he was issued orders separately.68 The second important point is that the sekbanbaşı appears very much minded to the interests of the tavern owners and very pragmatic in his approach to the prohibition policy. The grand vizier seems to be supportive of this pragmatic approach as he transmitted the words of the sekbanbaşı to the sultan.69 This was not the only attempt the officials made to restrain their ambitious master.70 In another missive sent by the grand vizier to the sultan, the former informed his master that he had discussed the closure of the taverns and their “emptying” (tahliye) from alcohol with the sekbanbaşı, the officer who was supposed to enforce the prohibition in most of intramural Istanbul. The sekbanbaşı said that if it was decided to go ahead with the measure, he would carry out the order.

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However, without taverns, bachelors who resided in hans would not be able to get food/livelihood (rızıklarına destres olamayıp) and would be forced to infringe on the homes of [other] subjects. In addition, the pay of soldiers (salmalar) and some security personnel and guards was covered by the monthly tax levied on these taverns. There was a need, he noted, to find an alternative source of revenue. He then suggested that “here and there” two or three taverns would remain open for the “non-Muslim bachelors” and a guard be put at the door to prevent Muslims from entering. In this way, the problem of the bachelors would be solved, and revenue for soldiers’ pay would not be lost. The grand vizier, it is quite clear, shared the sekbanbaşı reservations, and therefore added that during the reign of Sultan Ahmed (1603–1617), there were three taverns in Istanbul and Galata and that they multiplied later on. The matter, he concluded as always, was left for the sultan’s discretion.71 The mention of Sultan Ahmed was not incidental, of course. The sultan, known for his piety, enforced the most comprehensive ban on alcohol before Selim’s time.72 If he allowed a few taverns to exist, so can the reigning sultan. However, according to chronicler Ahmed Cavid, it was exactly this laxity that allowed alcohol to spread in the first place. He argued that following Ahmed’s ban, alcohol consumption again began to spread and those few taverns were gradually allowed to multiply. The last ban, according to him, was applied in 1730 but thereafter, again, their numbers rose, reaching the huge numbers of Selim’s time.73 It has already been shown that alcohol and security, order and its undermining were interlaced in somewhat unexpected ways. Taverns were considered dens of mischief, fomenting immorality and disorder, and yet it was their taxes that supported at least some of the security forces, many of whom were charged with policing the very same taverns. Shutting down all of them, the officials told their master, would decrease revenue and therefore, security. What is even more interesting is that the official that was charged with policing all of these taverns and their rowdy clients, actually thought that closing them down might upset public order, not improve it. The two officials (the grand vizier and the sekbanbaşı), in short, called for a slightly more selective enforcement, noting also that such a pragmatic solution had its precedents. The sultan, however, was not at all dissuaded. “It is my wish”, he wrote in response, “to prohibit alcohol from Muslims totally

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(külliyen)”. He therefore ordered the grand vizier to discuss the ways to implement a total (külli) ban on alcohol. If this was an attempt to project sultanic authority into the nocturnal realm of mischief, darkness still allowed much room for evasion, concealment, and hiding, not to mention official neglect and illegal profit. Such phenomena threatened to undermine the sultan’s efforts. A tavern owner by the name of Araboglu ˘ Yanaki was reported to have “secretly” (hafiyyeten) sold alcoholic beverages. For this, and for “spreading rumors,” he was exiled with his entire family to Samos.74 The Governor (voyvoda) of Galata aroused the anger of the sultan for secretly (gizlice, hafiyyeten) allowing some taverns in the [Princess] Islands and in Galata to remain in operation. Yet, the sultan warned that he has his spies in those areas and threatened to kill the official should he hear about any further transgressions.75 These cases demonstrate another dimension of hiding already noted before: of officials concealing their doings from their superiors. This again is not exclusive to the night but darkness certainly made it much easier. With the streets sunk in darkness, power holders and their men were freer to engage in the activities they were supposed to prohibit, to look the other way (often for a bribe), or to abuse their power. There was little those at the top could do to monitor their subalterns’ actions at night. Like his approach to alcohol, so with his attitude to prostitues, the young sultan seems to have been decisive, impatient, and extremely naïve about his abilities. The ban on prostitution too, it should be noted, was not without precedents.76 Like in the case of alcohol, earlier attempts to eradicate prostitution were short-lived. Like in the case of alcohol, the sultan did not seem to take this into consideration or thought that he could succeed where others had failed. The sultan apparently wanted all prostitutes deported and concentrated in one area, apparently in the neighborhood of Aga ˘ Kapı. The grand vizier wrote back saying that deliberations regarding the expulsion of prostitutes has been occupying him for a few days. He noted that there were many prostitutes and if they were all put in one place, they would practice their profession there. He later cited the sekbanbaşı who had said that if all prostitutes were kept in one place, they would have to be supplied with food and drink. He also expressed concern that such a concentration of prostitutes will surely “breed evil” among the janissary officers deployed there to police them.77

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The grand vizier therefore suggested that instead of general deportation, “two or three” well-known prostitutes would be executed, and the rest would be warned [or threatened – ihafe] that if they were caught again, they would face the same fate. They would be forced to repent and then released on the condition that they do not walk the streets again. The same would go for the brothel owners if they “secretly” try to reopen their establishments. Thus, little by little (refte refte), out of fear of execution (katl havfiyle), everybody would come to their senses and prostitution would be diminished. The difference in approaches comes out very clearly here. Instead of the unrealistic wish to cleanse the city of fesad in one stroke, the grand vizier suggests a measure that is likely to reduce prostitution gradually. The grand vizier’s suggestion seems to acknowledge the limitations of power. He knows that there are simply too many prostitutes and that deporting them involves practical problems. His “solution,” while horrifically violent, seems more cost-effective: his plan assumes that prostitutes and brothel owners would seek to return to the trade but suggests that fear would keep them at bay. It is very possible that he intended to satisfy the sultan with some measure of action hoping that, with time, the young sultan would grow to understand that some things are better left in the dark. In this case, the sultan adopted his vizier’s suggestions but probably thought “two or three prostitutes” were not enough. Instead, he wanted five to be executed, and even specified that three of them were to be hanged in Istanbul, one in Üsküdar on the Asian side of the Bosporus, and one in Kasımpaşa in the area of Beyoglu ˘ on the European side. The rest were to repent their sins and then be released, under pain of death. The grand vizier was to warn the relevant security officials that if they let even one prostitute slip away, they (the officials) shall be punished. The sultan went on to order that brothels were to be put to the torch and the owners executed. He concluded by warning the grand vizier himself: “implement this imperial order in its entirety without faults. You will be held accountable (sonra sen bilirsin).”78 Selim believed the reason for the failure of many of the measures he initiated was the ineffectiveness, carelessness, and corruption of his officials, and therefore often used such a threatening tone in order to spur them into action.79 Just as the grand vizier suspected the prostitutes and brothel owners might not abide by the new orders, so did the sultan suspect that his officials might not carry them out in full.

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He therefore emphasized, time and again, that he expected total enforcement. Fear, then, was to drive hunted and hunters alike. Operating under such circumstances, it was important for the grand vizier and his subordinates to demonstrate their efficiency to the impatient ruler.80 In a missive submitted to the sultan, the grand vizier reported that following the sultan’s orders, the sekbanbaşı was “immediately” (derhal) informed. The latter asked for permission not to go on patrol (tebdil) that day so that he can manage the operation. That night five prostitutes were executed and in the morning their bodies were hanged in Istanbul, Üsküdar and Kasımpaşa. The others were brought to the Aga ˘ Kapı in groups of three to five, made to vow that they would not do it again, and then released. “The imperial order,” wrote the grand vizier, “was implemented.”81 That was only partly true. The grand vizier in fact rephrased the original decree of the sultan and omitted reference to the torching of the brothels and the execution of the owners. He claimed that the sultan’s order was carried out but remained silent about these measures. More important for this discussion, it was at night when the prostitutes were arrested and executed. The sekbanbaşı’s men were supposedly imposing nizam on the realm of fesad. The bodies, however, were shown in broad daylight, for all to see: thus shall be done to those who break the law. Nobody could hide from the sultan’s eyes, even at night. This recalls the logic of “dead bodies at dawn” as discussed in Chapter 2. If the grand vizier hoped that the sultan would be satisfied with the measures taken, he was wrong. To sultan wrote to his vizier in response that if closing down two or three taverns and executing one or two women takes 20 days of deliberations, he would not be able to impose order.82 The gap between the sultan’s impatience and the grand vizier’s protracted and ambivalent implementation was here made explicit. In any case, the sultan’s wish with regards to the taverns of the city was eventually carried out and hundreds of drinking houses of various kinds were shut down by the authorities.83 Yet, the measures were soon abandoned, possibly because the war was over, and with it the state of emergency. It is even more likely that the sultan wanted to focus his attention on his ambitious plan to reform the army. Taxes on alcoholic beverages were among the important sources of revenue used to finance the project.84 Compromises with fesad had to be made.

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Rebellion, Again It is hardly worth repeating here that the sultan’s new army and the efforts to reorganize the old corps and subject them to a more demanding disciplinary regime were bitterly opposed in janissary circles and resentment finally erupted in a revolt in May 1807.85 In this context, it is important to show how like in the Patrona Halil rebellion some 80 years earlier, the janissaries made use of the night for their designs. The rebellion was started by janissary auxiliaries (yamaks) who were stationed in fortresses along the Bosporus. On the night of May 24, 1807, auxiliaries from various fortresses convened in secret. They were concerned by rumors circulating that they would soon be forced to wear European-style uniform, just like the soldiery of the nizam-ı cedid army. Underlying this tension was the yamaks’ fear that they would soon be replaced by nizam-ı cedid soldiers.86 The next morning, the yamaks convened in Umur Yeri by Hünkar İskelesi and informed two officers that were sent there to inquire about their intentions, that they refused to wear the new uniforms. The encounter deteriorated into a conflict during which the yamaks attacked the officers, killing one of them. The other one managed to escape but was later caught and killed. The yamaks then crossed to the other side and made contact with the janissaries, seeking their support. Just like in previous cases, the mutiny brewed overnight, and in the morning, the janissaries’ caldrons were taken out to the Meat Square, signaling open rebellion.87 The rebellion gathered momentum in the coming days, as more and more military units and civilians joined the rebels. The rebels, it should be noted, vowed to maintain a moral conduct, to abstain from alcohol, and perform the daily prayers. Their leaders imposed strict discipline and managed to prevent widespread disorder. Night raids are not described in the sources. According to historian Aysel Yıldız, this was all meant to bolster the rebels’ legitimacy.88 Given the dubious moral and religious reputation of the janissaries, it is not surprising that these efforts included a demonstration of Sunni piety, which matched the orthodox rhetoric they employed, as noted above. In an effort to distance the janissaries from the rebellion, the sultan declared his intention to abolish the nizam-ı cedid and acceded to the rebels’ demands to execute several high officials they identified with the

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reform project. The rebels, however, have lost trust in the sovereign. Despite all his efforts, Selim III was deposed by the rebels and taken into custody. His cousin Mustafa was crowned in his stead on May 29, 1807. Turmoil, however, did not end there. Alemdar Mustafa, the powerful governor of Rusçuk, marched on the capital in order to reinstate Selim and save the nizam-ı cedid project. The reigning sultan managed to murder Selim but was soon deposed by Alemdar Mustafa. Selim’s nephew, an ardent supporter of the reforms, was crowned as Mahmud II and immediately nominated Alemdar Mustafa grand vizier. Alemdar Mustafa now worked to recreate the nizam-i cedid units and to discipline the old corps, which did not improve his already terrible reputation in janissaries’ circles. In fact, they were determined to kill him. According to the chronicler Cabi, in one of the evenings of Ramadan in 1808 (hicri 1223), janissaries started a fire in a shop in Saraçhane, hoping that the grand vizier would rush there in order to oversee the extinguishing efforts. They placed gunmen in several shops around that area and waited. However, since it was a Ramadan night and the place was a central one, there were still people around and the fire was soon spotted. People sought help from the nearby security point, yet the officers, aware of the assassination plan, did not want to help putting out the fire. The people of the neighborhood then took matters into their hands and managed to extinguish the fire.89 The incident shows not merely that the janissaries favored the night for their operations; this, I believe has already been firmly established above. It shows, more specifically, how they used darkness, and a combination of overt (arson, shooting) and covert actions in their struggle against the palace. In this case, the grand vizier was saved without even knowing he was in danger. But his luck was about to run out. The next night, another fire started by arsonists was detected early and put out. But Istanbul’s sleep was uneasy. Tension was again building and violence erupted on the following night, November 15, 1808. This was the Night of Power (Tur. leyle-i kadır; Ara. laylat alqadr), one of the most important nights of the Islamic calendar. While the sultan was at the Ayasofya for the teravih prayer, a rumor started to circulate among the huge crowds in attendance that a fire had broken out in the janissaries’ headquarters, not far from the mosque, causing much panic. The chief of the janissaries hastened to the site of

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the alleged fire, only to find out that the rumors were baseless. The good news eased the officials, and the grand vizier, who had performed the prayers at the adjacent Sultan Ahmed mosque, allowed them to go back to their homes. All was quiet, or so it appeared. Yet, the janissaries had other plans for the night. The chronicler implies that the rumor at the mosque was of the janissaries’ making, possibly another attempt to execute the plan that had failed two nights earlier. He uses the same phrase, “false fire” (harika-i kazibe) to refer to both cases and adds, further, that janissaries at the mosque with concealed weapons were observed whispering to one another but their intentions remained unclear.90 Whether or not the rumor was premeditated, the janissaries were clearly up to something. That night at 7:30, Ottoman time (that is, about 1:15 a.m., mean time), the captains (ustas) of the janissaries held a consultation to plan their next moves. They then set out to raid the palaces of several top officials “collecting additional vile ones along the way.” It should be noted that this all happened in the dead of night, and the fact that they are able to enlist people during that time is in itself indicative of the night-mode capabilities of the corps. Interestingly, the conspirers decided that in order to recognize each other at night they would use the sentence “it’s morning” (sabahdır/bir sabahdır) as a password, to tell fellow janissaries from soldiers of the new units (sekban) formed by Grand Vizier Alemdar Mustafa. The choice of the password is not explained but perhaps the counterintuitive nature of the password explains its use. Only the conspirators would be apt to make such a statement at night. Alternatively, the password may have implied that while for the ordinary folks it was time to sleep, for the conspirers, it was morning, that is, time to act. In any case, those who did not know the password were forced to give away their weapons, and some were even stripped off their clothes. More than 15 of them were executed. Soon, members of the grand vizier’s household woke up to shooting sounds, as janissaries broke in. Intense fighting between the janissaries and the grand vizier’s guards then followed. When the janissaries realized they would not be able to overcome the opposition, they set fire to the house in several places. The grand vizier tried to escape and took refuge in a gunpowder depot but was encircled by janissaries who demanded his surrender. To their detriment, Alemdar Mustafa chose to go with a bang. Blowing up the magazine, the grand vizier took his own life, along with the lives of many of his enemies.91

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The chaos in the capital did not end with the death of Alemdar Mustafa. As fear of the rebels mounted, writes the chronicler Asım, people organized in armed groups and took turns patrolling the streets, and residents even placed lanterns on the four walls of their houses making that “disastrous night” (leyl-i pür veyli) look like daylight. People probably assumed that light would help keeping the janissaries away, which again demonstrates the association of the corps with darkness.92

“Vile and Contemptible People” The events of 1807–1808 revealed just how precarious the palace’s control of the city was, especially at night. Under the cover of darkness, the janissaries’ shadow army was again able to organize and mount an attack on the strongholds of official authority. Over the following years, Sultan Mahmud II gradually established himself on the throne and even managed to undermine janissary opposition.93 The night, however, proved harder to subdue. In one of the nights of early October 1819, a conflict over a prostitute in Galata ignited clashes between janissaries from the 25th and the 75th regiments (sing. ocak). Officers soon arrived at the scene and separated the two sides but there was an immediate danger that the hostilities would resume. The grand vizier therefore ordered the chief of the janissaries that if violence continues, the instigators shall be punished by their commanders.94 According to a contemporary diary, a similar conflict erupted three hours after sunset (around 9:20 p.m. in mean time terms) on February 19, 1820. This time it was men from the 26th regiment who fought the men of the 31st regiment “over a woman,” most probably a prostitute. The fight involved pistols, rifles, and knives and lasted to the following day, leaving dozens of casualties.95 In early October 1820, the Russian ambassador and his household members were alarmed by a group of drunk garrison guards (yamaks) who gathered in front of the house in Büyükdere two hours after sunset (around 8:45 p.m. mean time). They made “terrible and frightening noise, like madmen,” (meczuplar gibi sada-yı enker ve dehşet-engiz kopararak) as though they were readying for battle. A janissary guard that was stationed at the ambassador’s house rushed outside upon hearing the noise, as did the ambassador himself. He saw one of the

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irregulars shooting a pistol at the house and another slitting the throat of one of the janissaries, who was trying to defend the ambassador. The attackers managed to escape but one of them was captured by the janissaries and kept in the house. The ambassador then sent word to the commander of the nearest garrison, probably in the hope that he would rein in the men. However, before the latter could reach the ambassador’s house, the attackers returned with reinforcements, now numbering some 50 men. They demanded that their captured friend be released and when refused, broke into the house. It was then that the commander of the garrison arrived at the scene and the ambassador “was forced” to hand over the captive. It appears that the attackers then left and the household members went to sleep. The memo, from which we learn about the incident, was dictated to the embassy’s chief scribe at dawn and dispatched before sunrise to the Ottoman chief scribe, who was responsible for interaction with foreign delegates.96 We do not know anything about the background of this attack. We do not know why the ambassador’s house was targeted and what the yamaks’ objective was. Even so, several points are worthy of attention. First, the incident exposes again one of the most pressing problems of the Ottoman authorities in the early nineteenth century, and especially at night: security forces did not always enhance security. Under the cover of night, soldiers could promote their own agendas and their superiors were often very limited in what they could do to impose discipline in real time. Second, the incident reveals the advantages of militaries and paramilitaries in the Early Modern night. The yamaks here rely not only on their weapons and skill in using them, but also on the military structure and the solidarity among unit members that allows them to amass a great number of men at a time when most residents shut themselves in. Third, the commanding officer arrives only after the violence has already ended, and rather than discipline his men he basically follows them in demanding that the captured yamak would be released. Only when this happens do the men leave the premises, bringing the incident to an end. Violence seems to have worsened after the outbreak of the Greek revolt in February 1821. In 1823, Sultan Mahmud II was irritated by the deterioration of security in the neighborhoods of Tahtakale and Kapan-ı Dakik [in intramural Istanbul]. “Vile and contemptible people,” he wrote in a missive to the grand vizier, were going around these areas at night, shooting pistols and rifles, and robbing

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passersby.97 Unlike in the cases cited above, in this case, janissary involvement was not explicitly mentioned. But it was strongly implied. It is definite, stated the sultan, that most of the offenders were rowers, porters, and members of other guilds. The wharves in Istanbul, it should be noted, were controlled by different janissary regiments. The warden of each wharf was usually a janissary officer and was in charge of the porters working in that wharf. Most of the porters were janissaries’ affiliates, waiting to become full members.98 The sultan was surely aware of those affiliations. In any case, he was frustrated that the violence could not be stopped. With guards placed in “every corner” of the city, he continued, this should not be allowed to happen. The chief of the janissaries was to summon the heads of the relevant guilds and order them to have the offenders punished “according to the guilds’ ways” (bu makule edenhleri esnaf usulunca terbiye edip). Those who would refuse the guild’s sanctions were to be expelled from the guild.99 The palace gradually grew more determined to crush janissary opposition. Already, in the early 1810s, Mahmud II began taking actions to undermine the janissaries and their support base. He gradually eliminated the leaders of the 1807 revolt, razed down bachelor inns, spread anti-janissary propaganda, appointed loyalists to command the corps in an attempt to bring it to heel, and used a widespread network of informers to get a sense of the word on the street. In parallel, the sultan secured the support of the high ulema and continued to strengthen military units not affiliated with the janissaries, namely the artillery, the navy, and the bombardiers. Once he felt secure enough, he announced another military reform, knowing all too well that the janissaries would not sit still.100 This time, however, the palace was ready.

The Final Act Like in previous rebellions, the last janissary revolt gained traction at night, as per the unwritten protocol of the corps. According to Esad Efendi, the court chronicler who composed the “official” history of the “auspicious event,” as it came to be called, the janissaries started to group in the hippodrome (at meydanı) after sunset “like stray dogs.” They waited and invited more “pigs” and around midnight, sent people to summon higher officers. “Water sleeps but the enemy does

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not,” says the chronicler, conveying a feeling of threat that is constantly brewing in the dark. Indeed, like in accounts on earlier revolts, there is a very stark contrast between the nocturnal activity or hyperactivity of the janissaries in the streets and the retreat of the official leaders of the empire into the safety and comfort of their homes. According to Esad Efendi, the “frightening news” about the mutiny woke “all statesmen and notables from their peaceful sleep.” He cites in this context a couplet from the Basran poet Muhammad bin Ḥazim ¯ _ al-Bahil¯ ¯ ı (d. 810) who wrote: “Oh you who go to sleep at night, happy at its beginning/Events may come knocking on your door at dawn.”101 Again like earlier accounts, Esad Eefendi’s chronicle describes the actions taken by the janissaries under the cover of darkness, all of which would be known by now, and need not be repeated here.102 I would like to focus instead on the systematic effort of the chronicler to couple the sultan and the Sharia with light, on the one hand, and the janissaries and their heresy with darkness, on the other. As shown above, this framing of the struggle between the palace of the janissaries went back at least to the 1730s. Esad Efendi, however, made much more frequent use of such oppositions essentially turning his narrative into a triumph of light of darkness. The sultan and the Ottoman state/dynasty was repeatedly presented as a dispenser of light that was ultimately divine. The author referred, for instance, to “the sun of world, the light of the exalted state/dynasty of the Ottomans, may God make it eternal.”103 The light the Ottomans brought was God’s word as represented in the Sharia, in keeping with “orthodox” imageries of illumination.104 In the Base of Victory, it was not only the Ottoman dynasty in general, but the reigning sultan in person that dispenses and “shines” the light of Islam.105 This light binds together ruler and ruled. According to the narrative, when the sultan’s banner was taken out of the palace to signal that the ruler was going to face the rebels, heralds were sent everywhere calling “let the Muslims gather under the banner of felicity and shine with the lights of obedience to the leader of the Muslims.”106 The use of such metaphors of illumination to associate the monarch with Islam was standard in Ottoman court literature.107 Yet, the Base of Victory makes these metaphors shine brighter against the darknessrelated metaphors reserved for the janissaries. Throughout the narrative, the author depicts the janissaries as low-born “bandits” and “drunkards” who foment evil, “mischief” and heresy, thus presenting

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them as socially, morally, politically, and religiously subversive. For example, the author refers to “the leaders of the Bektaşi bandits (or the bandits of the Bektaşi order – eşkiya-ı bektaşiye) as the “source of the seditious acts.”108 Elsewhere the rebels are described marching with “those axe-at-hand-drunk-heretic rascals named Bektaşis (bektâşî nâmıyla teber-ber-dest mülhid-i bed-mest gidiler ile).”109 Further down the text, they are smeared for “openly” eating and drinking wine during Ramadan in “their tavern-like” tekkes, for not performing the obligatory prayers, and for Allowing all kinds of mischief and shameful acts (envâ’-ı fücûr u fezâhatı bi’l-istihlâl) . . . Even in their night of mourning in the 10th of Muharrem, which is one of their pervert ceremonies (âyîn-i dalâletkarînlerinden), at the end of the drinking parties of debauch they call ‘ayn-i cem (ʿayn-ı cemʿ taʿbîr etdikleri bezm-i fısk-cezmlerinde), they get drunk and recite gazels without meter or meaning.110

As shown throughout this book, even without the direct reference to the night, all activities described here, from banditry to drinking, including the evocation of the libel of ritual orgies (“snuffing the candle”) – implied here by “shameful acts” and “pervert ceremonies” – were all intimately connected with the night. But the association of the janissaries with darkness is more straight-forward than that. Referring to a janissary officer by name of Habib who was “a firewood spreading the sparks of the evil of the corps” the chronicler says that “the wind that blows incitement and foments sedition” might extinguish “the burning lantern of the sun.” In this case, however, it was light that overcame sedition.111 The separation of the different functions of fire is noteworthy. The janissaries are mentioned in relation to the destructive potential of fire, while the sultan and his high officials are repeatedly identified with its beneficial aspects, namely light and to a lesser extent, warmth. This metaphorical use of fire recalls the elite’s efforts to use massive amounts of carefully organized light to project order, and janissary use of fire to subvert that order. Often, the contrast between light and darkness is made explicitly, serving to bolster the ruler and delegitimize, even dehumanize his opposition: “The Ottoman dynasty, may it last with the help of God, giving light everywhere, and in every direction like the sun of light, drives away the darkness of idolatry and sins . . . they were the east of the light of Islam in the countries of east and west, over land and sea.”

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Yet, the author goes on, due to corruption of the janissaries over the years “the darkness of the invasion of the enemies stained some places.”112 If in the above quote the janissaries allow darkness in, in other places, they themselves are dark. In one point “the sun-faced sultan (zât-ı hümâyûn-ı âfitâb-dîdârları)” is described as he awaits news regarding the defeat of the “bandits of dark deeds and wicked fortune (eşkıyâ-i siyeh-kâr u tebeh-rûzgârın).”113 In another place, the author refers to the janissaries, by citing the Quran: “They try to extinguish God’s light with their mouth, but God insists on bringing His light to its fullness even if the disbelievers hate it” (Quran 9:32).114 He goes on to say that “they dreamt of extinguishing the sun-candle that illuminates the religion of revelation.”115 This may be yet another attempt to conjure up images of “candle extinguishing,” thereby pitching again dangerous, perverted heretic practices against the pious ruler and his divinely guided orthodox order. Throughout the narrative, then, Esad Efendi seeks to frame the conflict not only as a political struggle, but as a religious war between a rightly guided, Sunni sultan and a bunch of lowly, unruly heretics, who are ignorant of the Sharia or, worse still, actively trying to undermine it. Their actions are presented as attacks on Islam itself, which is exclusively identified with the Sharia.116 The tension between antinomian streams, most notably the Bektaşis, and orthodox Islam is turned into a zero-sum game, in sharp contrast to the relations between antinomian and more orthodox streams of Islam in earlier periods of Ottoman history. Metaphors of light and darkness lent themselves naturally to such dichotomist portrayal and indeed, the author exploits their potential to the full. In his use, light and darkness are not merely opposing entities that coexist and, together, make a whole. Rather, darkness actively tries to overcome light, against the will of God, and therefore, it cannot be allowed to stand. The forces of darkness must be overcome.

Cleansing, Again The eradication of the janissaries was accompanied by yet another attempt to cleanse the city of “mischief.” The nightlife scene was to receive another blow. A decree, sent by the grand vizier for the approval of the sultan in the summer of 1826, shows how the mode

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of thinking that guided the author of the Base of Victory, translated into policy, or at least helped to justif it. The decree wrapped together the janissaries, the Bektaşis, and alcohol, presenting them all as a threat to urban, moral, and religious order, a threat that had to be removed. The Grand Vizier Mehmed Selim Sırrı Paşa (in office 1824–1828) argued in the document that the sale of alcoholic beverages like wine and ʿaraq, that was supposed to be limited to the non-Muslims according to the Sharia, in fact, expanded well beyond that population. The document basically repeated the claim made in the 1790s decrees according to which alcohol consumption spread from the few taverns that had been allowed to remain open when all other taverns were closed in 1689, and again in 1730. Yet, unlike in Selim’s decree and in Ahmed Cavid’s account, in the new decree, the janissaries were blamed for the spread of alcohol consumption. The officers of the “abolished corps,” it was explained, did not care for the religious aspect (diyanet tarafını göz etmeyip), and since they received revenue from the taverns, they permitted more and more such establishments to be opened. According to the document, there were now more than 500 taverns throughout greater Istanbul. Alcohol was also sold secretly in khans and local grocery shops (bakkals).117 It has already been suggested that as long as drinking was done in the dark, out of sight, the authorities usually turned a blind eye. It was when alcohol consumption became too public and the violation of the law became flagrant, that the state intervened. This rationale is clearly evident here as well. The grand vizier reasoned that non-Muslims would go in and out the taverns, that were operating every day, “without fear or manners.” Muslims “without honor” too would enter the taverns, “daring to engage in forbidden acts openly” (alenen irtikab-ı menhiyat cesaret etmek). People would walk the streets completely drunk and permits to open taverns were sold illegally, and no penalties were inflicted.118 The document has an obvious Nakşıbandi-Mücedidi tone. Not only is the honor of the Sharia repeatedly evoked; the sultan is referred to as the “the imam of the Muslim and the renewer of the true religion,” a title that was much favored in Nakşıbandi-Mücedidi circles. Opposing the pious ruler and his divinely sanctioned order were the janissaries, who are the “cause . . . of all evils and mischief” and the heretic Bektaşis, presented as “the site of disobedience and illicit acts.” In crushing them, Mahmud was performing the sultan’s duty to “enjoin

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the good and forbid the evil.” Now that the enemies of the faith have been crushed, the sale of alcohol, “the mother of all sins,” shall not be left to continue as it has in the past. All alcohol selling establishments were to be shut down, leaving only one or two in each neighborhood where non-Muslims were concentrated. Non-Muslims were not to drink “inconsiderately” (bi-edibane) and Muslims were to be prevented from frequenting the taverns that would remain in operation. The illegal sale of permits would be discontinued, and violators shall be punished according to the Sharia. In this way, “the seat of the caliphate will be purified from these sins.” Here again we see that the clampdown on the taverns was not perceived as a mere act of law enforcement but as one of moral cleansing. The grand vizier obviously thought that considerations of moral and urban order should trump economic considerations. It would be remembered that tax revenues from taverns directly supported law enforcement officials and their men. The memo specified the way the collection of revenue was to change in order to prevent loss of revenue (and probably, resentment among those officials who relied on it). Yet, even in the face of a decrease in tax income, it was said, the honor of the Sharia should be upheld.119 The document therefore represents yet another attempt to do away with the pragmatism that has characterized Ottoman approach to alcohol consumption. Here, more than in any of the decrees issued by Selim III, the rhetoric is pious, yet, here too, it is considerations of public order and stability, rather than abstract religious principles, that guide the policymakers. The sultan’s response is telling in this regard. He accepted that the spread of taverns increased “various kinds of mischief” and approved the move against the taverns, yet he was clearly more interested in eradicating the tavern scene because it had been janissary kingdom. About a year after the closure of the taverns, tavern owners appealed to the government requesting permission to reopen their businesses and pledging to pay a much higher tax than they had paid in the past. The superintendent of the alcohol tax recommended the granting of their request and the serasker passed the recommendation to the sultan, probably deeming it desirable. The sultan approved, noting that the closure of the taverns “was only intended to prevent some conflicts” (mücerred bazı munazaanın zuhuruna bais olmaması için idi).120 Once the immediate threat of the janissaries had been removed, pragmatic, economic considerations

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again guided Ottoman policies. Strict moralists may have been disappointed but in the newly opened taverns, drinkers probably rejoiced, maybe even proposed a toast to the life of the sultan.121

Dead Janissaries Haunting Even after thousands of janissaries have been massacred and the corps was officially abolished, the government continued to fear popular disorder and continued its actions against janissaries who managed to escape and “suspect” populations of itinerants and especially porters and boaters, whose well-known affiliation with the corps was already noted above. In the provinces, the abolition of the corps generally went unchallenged but, in some places, significant resistance was registered, fanning government fears of further janissary-lead disorder. In Istanbul too, popular discontent with the sultan’s policies continued to threaten the palace.122 In short, the ghost of the janissaries as a counter-hegemonic, popular force, and powerful group identity continued to haunt the sultan and his men long after the bodies of the janissaries were collected from the streets of Istanbul. In October 1833, the Ottoman Official Gazette published a rather curious report, allegedly sent by the kadı of Tirnova in Bulgaria. According to the account, some supernatural beings attacked houses “after sunset,” mixing foodstuffs together and filling them with dirt, scattering objects, and throwing stones, pots, and jugs at people. A baby was reportedly pulled out from his mother’s bed and was found near the room’s door. These events scared the residents of two neighborhoods away from their homes and caused much fear throughout town. As the occurrences were unprecedented, the people agreed that they were caused by invisible witches known as cadı (cadı dedikleri ervah-ı khabiʾe).123 Some of the typical characteristics of nocturnal fears are present here: the invisibility of the threat and its association with disorder (manifested in the objects moving out of place and the foodstuffs mixing with one another), and the threat they posed to sleeping, defenseless people, and especially infants.124 The local residents sought the help of local authorities and with the permission of the governor, a local exorcist (cadıcı) by the name of Nicola was hired. He arrived at the local graveyard accompanied by a great multitude to identify the graves from which the witch-ghosts had arisen. The exorcist singled out the graves of two “bandit” (şekavet-pişe)

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janissaries – who, during their lifetime, had engaged in all kinds of mischief (fesad) from pillage to murder – as the source of trouble. When the graves were opened, the crowd saw that the bodies in them did not rot but rather increased in size. Their hair and nails grew longer, and their eyes were full of blood. This all showed that the evil spirits of the janissaries still inhabited their bodies. The exorcist tried sticking a stake in the dead bodies, a tested way of annihilating ghosts and witches,125 but this seems to have not produced the desired result. The evil spirits of the janissaries continued to harass the good people of Tirnova. The exorcist then ruled that the bodies had to be burned and, once the permission of the chief mufti had been obtained, the deed was done. The people of Tirnova were finally rid of the dead janissaries. This curious incident was in fact fake news. It seems that as part of the palace-lead war to eradicate even the remains of the corps, many janissaries’ tombstones were smashed, either on the sultan’s direct orders or by enthusiastic supporters. Although the matter is still debated by historians, it is possible to say, at the very least, that claims regarding the systematic smashing of tombstones appeared in foreign observers’ accounts as early as the 1830s. Historian Edhem Eldem notes that some of these observers explicitly argued that in order to justify the wide campaign against the tombstones, which must have raised reservations among the people, the sultan’s people spread stories about janissaries turning into vampires at night.126 For example, in his 1838 travel account, English architect and artist Thomas Allom (1804–1872) argued that the great damage evident in one of the graveyards in the capital, which he claimed was untypical of an Ottoman burying place, was the result not of negligence but of “design.” He goes on to say that When the janissaries were extirpated, the vengeance of the Sultan pursued them even to their tombs. Many of them were reported to be vampires, their graves were opened, and their bodies pinned to the earth by stakes, to prevent their rising to suck the blood of the faithful while all the emblems that appeared above ground, to designate them, were destroyed. The stones that marked their graves were distinguished by their turbans. Even these were decapitated, and the marble heads cast about the ground, where they now lie.127

Darkness, then, was not only a threat to the authorities. In this case (as in the case of the “snuffing the candle” libel), it served those in power

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to “blacken” real or potential opposition. When it came to janissaries, the palace now wanted to convince the people, you cannot be certain even when they are dead and buried. True to their treacherous nature, they return to haunt and attack innocent civilians, just as they had done when they were alive. If the janissaries and their evil spirits are the fomenters of nocturnal evil and chaos, the sultan and his order are of the day. At the end of the same account, the town’s inhabitants, whose “hatred of the janissaries has multiplied” following the events, are quoted thanking and praising the sultan for ridding them of the janissaries. They reportedly addressed the sultan as “the shadow of God, who shines everywhere, bright and clear like the sun.”128 The sultan’s light therefore triumphed over the forces of darkness one last time.

Conclusion As shown throughout this book, the nights of Istanbul were populated by the urban underclass and dominated by the janissaries, who used it for profit, pleasure, and political subversion. Darkness, in other words, was the janissaries’ best friend. Yet, it should be recognized that it also served the palace by saving its face. After all, the janissaries were supposed to be the subordinates and the sultan, and their insubordination did not reflect positively on the authority of the latter. Just as the janissaries, for the most part, sought to avoid direct conflict, so did the palace. Darkness not only served tactical purposes (by facilitating infiltration, surprise attacks, and so on); it also allowed both sides to engaged in a struggle on a limited scope, without escalating it to catastrophe the results of which neither side could predict. It was only when the janissaries and their allies (as in 1807), or the palace felt confident enough, that this semi-covert struggle turned into open warfare. The decisive victory of the palace in 1826, ended this undeclared war once and for all and opened the door to a series of changes that gradually reshaped the night in Istanbul, and later in other cities as well.

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Conclusion Dawn of a New Night?

It would seem that with the reopening of the taverns in 1827, everything was back to normal. The night in the capital assumed its old, familiar form, allowing what the day forbade. But, with the eradication of the janissaries and the final marginalization of the Bektaşis, the forces that had pushed back against the incursion of sultanic authority into the night and kept it as a space of ambivalence and ambiguity, but also of much violence and insecurity, were finally gone. The night would now be gradually colonized by an increasingly centralizing government promoting more orthodox Islam.1 Already in the years immediately following the massacre of the janissaries, the government began to tighten its grip over the night.2 In 1845, in the wake of a major crime wave, the government drafted new regulations that not only stipulated stricter enforcement of personal carrying of lanterns but also announced a general curfew, which was lifted soon thereafter.3 The first street lights, burning oil, were installed in Pera in 1847. Gas lighting was introduced in 1856 and the network gradually expanded, providing better security and allowing for new, public forms of nighttime entertainment.4 The Galata Bridge, connecting intramural Istanbul to the nightlife hub of Galata and Pera, would be closed for traffic at night. Over the next decades, regulations limiting drinking to the early hours of the evening were also introduced and enforced. At the same time, urban policing was being centralized and systematized.5 Similar measures, from street lighting to closing times, were introduced in provincial cities, including Jerusalem, in the last third of the nineteenth century.6 While nocturnal security remained a major challenge,7 the government no longer faced organized opposition such as the janissaries and could claim direct control over the city at night, with varying degrees of success. Economic globalization, and in particular, the 1838 Anglo-Ottoman treaties that increased European economic activity in the empire, contributed in various ways to the expansion of a Europeanized nightlife scene.8 240 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 04 Aug 2021 at 06:37:28, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108933131.012

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Yet, remnants of the nocturnal reality of the long eighteenth century lingered long after its major protagonists had been eliminated or simply died out, much like the dead janissaries’ ghosts that continued to haunt the people of Tirnova (see Chapter 7). In the illuminated hubs of Ottoman cities, new modes of public nighttime entertainment developed, but these did not take the place of the old, darkened nightlife scene. Rather, the two modes coexisted for many decades. Likewise, the new ways of seeing through the darkness that were devised by the state developed alongside (rather than instead of ) well-established patterns of communal gaze. Old anxieties about the dissolution of the moral order after dark also persisted, and probably intensified, as lighting not only contributed to the expansion of the nightlife scene but made it more visible.9 The culprits accused of nocturnal immorality did change, however. With Bektaşis and janissaries gone, and with European power and the threat of actual or symbolic colonization stronger than ever before, hegemonic moralistic discourse shifted the responsibility (or blame) for such nocturnal activities as drinking, gambling, and illicit sex from the “others within,” namely janissaries, antinomian Sufis, indigenous nonMuslim populations, and the urban underclass, to “others without,” that is, Europeans and Levantines. Thus, while nightlife was claimed by some Ottomans as integral to urban modernity, it was disowned by others as foreign to the Ottoman, Islamic, or Turkish way of life. As actual light and enlightenment discourse, along with orthodoxy and “progress” gradually took over city centers and intellectual life, conservative writers and leaders doubled their efforts to bury the ambivalence and ambiguity that had once resided in the dark, in the cemetery of collective memory.10 ** Although it is by now long gone, the night of the long eighteenth century offers valuable insights about Early Modern mechanisms of rule, urban life, center–periphery relations, and more. One significant point is the multifaceted relations between the body politic and human bodies. By this, I do not mean merely the relations between the real and symbolic body of the monarch, but rather the way very real bodies of common subjects worked together with the political system to uphold public order and morality. This is true even today (civilians still call the

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police to report crimes) but was much more straightforward prior to the mechanization, bureaucratization, and digitization of surveillance. Before identity cards and fingerprints; before police records and CCTV; before PRISM and face recognition, the state sensed through the senses of its subjects and often acted with their arms. Bound by mutual surety, residents of Ottoman cities were encouraged to keep an eye on the conduct of their neighbors and bar outsiders from entering their neighborhood. When they spotted irregularities, they either called security officials or organized a “neighborhood raid,” which was often followed by a lawsuit in the local court. The people and the state collaborated in sensing and eliminating threats to public order and morality, which were usually considered as one and the same thing. Christopher Otter argues that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the rise of “coercive and asymmetrical” visual regimes, which were nevertheless not panoptic.11 The current work shows that such visual regimes, which in the Ottoman Empire developed even earlier, were much less effective after dark. For many, this relative ineffectiveness was a mixed blessing. Darkness allowed evading or even violating economic, sociopolitical, and religious hierarchies and, at the same time, made these very same violations tolerable, as they did not challenge hegemony directly and, in some significant ways, even served it. Economically, the night created optimal conditions for illegal trade, hidden from the collective supervision of guilds. In Jerusalem, such trade was much harder to engage in since the city, fully encircled with high walls, was completely sealed off from the outside world at night. Istanbul was an entirely different story. Not only was it much bigger; large areas of the city were not surrounded by walls, and the waterways (the Bosporus and the Golden Horn), which would have been completely bleak on moonless nights and very hard to monitor, allowed reaching the very heart of the city rather easily. Moreover, the authorities may have facilitated this trade by turning a blind eye, as it helped to ease the pressures caused by frequent shortages of basic commodities. In terms of its social profile, the night belonged to the underprivileged. First, the night offered livelihood opportunities that more established populations would normally decline, because of the disruption of sleep they entailed, low compensation, and, in some cases, dubious reputation. Weaker populations, and especially migrants, had no

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choice but to take whatever job they could find, hence their gravitating toward the dark hours. Second, the lapse of surveillance mechanisms allowed such transient, automatically suspect populations more leeway to move through the city without attracting attention, and engage in activities that were both illegal and heavily stigmatized. No evidence of anything equivalent was found for Jerusalem and here again, it would seem that the relative ease with which the city could be shut down, combined with the much more limited revenue nightlife in such a small city could yield, worked to discourage the development of such a scene. Yet, it was not only the socially marginal who enjoyed a nightcap, and it was not the lack of knowledge about the nightlife scene that allowed it to flourish. Even more than in the case of illegal trade, the state and some of its highest officials, had a vested – and sometimes personal – interest in the nightlife scene. The forces charged with enforcing order drew their salaries, not to mention bribes, from the taverns and brothels they were supposed to police and, therefore, hardly wished them closed. The patrons, many of them Muslims for whom alcohol consumption was strictly forbidden, had their own interest in the perpetuation of the scene, and its remaining out of sight. The closest modern equivalent is probably the online porn industry, which allows millions around the world to consume “indecent” contents invisibly, without jeopardizing their respectability. It often involves abuse and is heavily stigmatized, but it generates huge amounts of money, which keeps the wheels of the industry going, despite frequent critiques. Everybody knows it is there; everybody knows it is huge; few would openly identify themselves as clients. It is an industry shrouded in metaphorical darkness. In the eighteenth century, darkness was real, but it served much the same purposes. After dark, the state and many of its subjects could benefit from what in broad daylight they would all denounce. Whether this was a manifestation of healthy flexibility, the Ottoman famous “pragmatism,” or simply institutionalized double-standard is probably in the eyes of the beholder. Or maybe this was exactly what the night allowed: a second standard, a set of norms that was different than that of the day. As shown in Chapter 4, the ambivalence and ambiguity that were characteristic of the night ran much deeper than economic interest or the need to hide. Darkness not only allowed but indeed encouraged activities, behaviors, and interpretations that stretched orthodox prescriptions beyond

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recognition or violated them completely. Such violations were not limited to antinomian groups, such as the Bektaşis, but were rather integral to drinking gatherings across the social spectrum. It would probably be exaggerated to speak of diurnal and nocturnal Islam, but it is clear that the night was conducive to the unorthodox. From a Bakhtinian perspective, however, the social night was crucial for upholding diurnal hierarchies, exactly because of their momentary relaxation. Again, it is questionable to what extent Jerusalem shared this nocturnal relaxation, ambivalence, and ambiguity. Toward the end of his book What is Islam? Shahab Ahmed raises the question of the importance of the “School of Love” in the premodern Arab world, as opposed to what he calls the Balkans-to-Bengal complex, where the influence of this “school” was immense. Although he argues that “the values of ambiguity, ambivalence and contradiction . . . are also abundantly present in the Arabic discourses of Muslims before the emergence of the Balkans-to-Bengal complex” and that they “remained present in these societies down to the advent of the modern,” he seems to acknowledge that these currents were less prevalent and influential here than in other parts of the Islamic world. Much more work is needed, but at this point we may speculate that it was not only the wall and the size of the population that circumscribed nocturnal life in Jerusalem; it is possible that local society and culture was less accommodating to the practices and interpretations fundamental to the School of Love. These conclusions bring up the relation between night time and space, as they materialized in city walls throughout the Ottoman Middle East and beyond. With their gates closed every evening at sunset, walls made the very same movements that animated the night of the capital, very difficult.12 The benefit of the wall was of course much higher levels of security and control over trade, public order, and morality. While it is commonly assumed that the farther from the center, the looser state control becomes, comparing nighttime in Istanbul and Jerusalem reveals an opposite picture: after-dark life in the remote town was much more strictly controlled than that in the capital. Examined from this perspective, it is no wonder that in many Ottoman cities, walls remained intact until the eighteenth and even nineteenth centuries. The expansion of cities beyond their walls was

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accompanied, and probably encouraged, by the expansion of city life into the night.13 The economic interest of private business owners and the imperial and municipal authorities’ hunger for tax revenues fueled this double expansion, which, in turn, drew more people out into the night. In Jerusalem, new neighborhoods began to be built outside the walls only around the mid-nineteenth century. The residents of the new neighborhoods still preferred to pass the night in the security of the walled city. Yet, within only two decades, the spatial expansion outside the walls entailed the expansion of city life into the night and by the early 1870s, the main gate of Jerusalem’s walls was left open throughout the night. In the late 1880s, street lighting was introduced, albeit in a gradual, piecemeal manner.14 Most narratives of the introduction of street lighting in Europe and North America, starting in the late seventeenth century, document an amalgam of political and economic factors that pushed the project forward, despite its high costs and in the face of occasional opposition to lighting taxes and the challenging of natural order. In the case of Ottoman Istanbul, economic interests probably worked to keep the city in the dark. It is otherwise difficult to explain why the Ottomans did not adapt systematic lighting before the mid-nineteenth century, although they have always been open to technological, organizational, and military innovations, from firearms to mechanical clocks, from maps to water pumps. The openness to European knowledge within the elite increased in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, effecting the introduction of many more innovations. Street lighting was not one of them, despite the seeming interest, on the side of the palace, to better control the city at night and although the elite was by then without doubt aware of the progress made in Europe in this regard. The city’s huge nightlife sector was a major source of revenue for the state and provided income to high- and low-ranking officials alike. Illuminating the scene would literally shed light on moral, economic, and political compromises that were more comfortable in the dark. It was only in the completely different settings of the tanzimat reforms, that street lighting was finally introduced. While economic, social, and political hierarchies were at least partly eclipsed at night, gender hierarchies were impregnable and were even more strictly enforced than during the day. The subalterns of the household, and especially women, could hope to elude community surveillance once outside, but slipping out and returning back home

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undetected was a different story. After sunset, then, the city turned into an almost all-male space, and all “respectable” women were confined to the domicile. Even the quality of sleep of women was likely to be negatively affected by gender hierarchies within the household as women were expected to take care of the needs of their spouses and children at night. Patriarchy, it transpires, never sleeps. Due to the impairment of surveillance mechanisms, women were more vulnerable even at home. Victims of domestic violence were in the worst situation; locked in with their aggressors, they were completely helpless. It was shown that there were great differences between nocturnal realities in Istanbul and Jerusalem on almost every level. What about the mass majority of the population, who lived outside cities? This work said almost nothing about night in the countryside and not because it is impossible to say something meaningful about it, but rather because of the limited scope. Various sources, from court records to travel accounts allow examining questions of nocturnal security and even leisure in Ottoman villages.15 Religious minorities were only crudely treated and they too deserve much more elaborate discussions, not least because of their involvement in alcohol retail, which fueled the nightlife scene, at least in Istanbul. These groups must await further research. Other than comparing Istanbul to Jerusalem, this book repeatedly juxtaposed Ottoman and European realities and demonstrated significant commonalities, which testify powerfully to the far-reaching impact of darkness in its own right. European and Ottomans shared nocturnal fears and dangers and often used similar measures to cope with them. They also made use of darkness in similar ways for spiritual purposes, illicit entertainment, sexual exploits, criminal activity, and political subversion. Rulers tried to counter such threats relying on similar methods, most notably by restricting free movement and forcing self-lighting and, at the same time, used real and metaphoric light to augment their legitimacy. Yet, these commonalities were gradually eroded during the period under discussion. Europe increasingly employed new material means to cope with some of those ancient nocturnal challenges. Whereas middle and upper class English people invested growing amounts of money in furnishing specialized bedchambers, sleeping technology in the Ottoman Empire remained relatively simple. While in Europe, sleep time was gradually delayed until later at night, at least among the elites, in the Ottoman Empire this

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Conclusion: Dawn of a New Night?

247

“nocturnalization” was more limited even in palace circles. Whereas European cities began deploying streetlights, Ottoman rulers clang to community-based mechanisms of order, under imperial oversight. Changes were introduced, for example, in the elaboration of mutualsurety networks, surveillance practices, and legal and administrative procedures, but the night remained beyond the effective control of the government as long as the janissaries were around. Differences were noted also on the ideological level. Whereas in Europe Enlightenment discourse began to change metaphoric uses of light, in the Ottoman Empire parallel changes were only beginning to appear in the early nineteenth century, and really gained momentum only with the tanzimat reforms from the late 1830s onward. ** Any discussion of the future of the night should be grounded in its past. The constantly connected, illuminated, and bustling world of the twenty-first century exerts tremendous pressures on humans, eroding their privacy, flattening relations, and undermining sleep. The Early Modern night presents a radically different reality, where the night was a time of seclusion, a time when people could be legitimately inaccessible to others. That is, if they had a home, and were not subject to the authority of others. Indeed, we should not romanticize this reality, nor idealize the quality of sleep it provided. While our bedrooms are certainly being invaded by online work, shopping, gaming, video streaming, and social media, we should not imagine that the past offered calm, stress-free nights. While hyper-illumination is indeed a problem, the solution cannot be simply to shut down the lights, as done in some cities in Europe and the United States in order to reduce public spending.16 As emphasized time and again throughout this book, a dark urban environment has had a negative effect on the more physically vulnerable elements of society, especially women. We must make sure that the darker and dark-sensitive nights of the future will not deny particular populations access to the night, nor put them at greater risk. In short, if the history of the night has anything to offer us, it is a range of past nocturnal experiences and the caution with which to examine their relevance for our future. There is a growing consensus that, because of the carbon emissions involved in the provision of public lighting, and the negative effects of

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light pollution on humans and other species, we need to dim down the lights (that is, of course, if they are not turned off altogether by a sweeping environmental catastrophe). We need to reacquaint ourselves with darkness, to become dark-sensitive. Just like after the designation of natural reserves outside the cities, there grew an awareness of the importance of “urban nature,” so do we need to make room for more urban darkness. This understanding has been developing over the last two decades, as attested to by legislation and regulation efforts in some countries, and the designations of dark-sky reserves.17 Promoting this agenda further calls for sustained legislation and regulation, not only in Europe, where these efforts are mostly concentrated, but in other illuminated areas around the world. Yet, legal action is not enough and, in many places, impossible, simply because there is no awareness of the costs of hyper-illumination. In order to raise such awareness, we need not only to explain the importance of darkness for human health and the environment, an effort that is well underway, but also its potential contribution to a richer human existence.18 Here, Early Modern aesthetics and sensibilities may become useful. Ottoman modes of nocturnal conviviality were not incidentally “placed” at night; rather, they built on the dark and quiet surrounding to create an atmosphere of intimacy and exhilaration. Poetry and music served to further sensitize the participants to the nocturnal setting and the play of lights and reflections (e.g. the candlelight on the beloved’s face), the starry sky, or the moonlight on the water. Attention was similarly drawn to the unique sounds against the foil of almost total silence, as for example, the swish of oars in the water (in the mehtab seyri), and the sound of a flute in the evening wind. Although some modes of nocturnal gatherings survived into the twentieth century, their aesthetics were completely erased by the glare of industrial lighting and the bustle of hyper-illuminated nightlife. Developing sensitivity not only to the material, medical and environmental benefits of darkness but also to its potential for repose and wellbeing is crucial for popularizing the notion of a darker future. A nightsensitive public would not want a “night turned into day” just like it would not want every last green piece of the city turned into concrete. Such a public would join the efforts to return a measure of darkness and quiet to our lives and reduce the carbon footprint we leave behind.

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Appendix: On the Use of Court Records in This Book

In this work, I used four court registers from Jerusalem and eight from the Üsküdar court in Istanbul, all from the 1740s to the 1760s. This period was selected since neither city experienced major upheavals during those years. In Jerusalem, I used the following registers: #230 (1741), #234 (1746–1747), #236 (1748–1749), and #239 (1755). Other registers from around the same period (including #248–253 and #261–270) were also searched, but did not yield a single nocturnal case. The reason is probably that litigations (sing. dava) were often registered separately from other legal and notary matters handled by the court. Only volumes of litigations include night cases. In addition to these registers, I used many nocturnal cases that were transliterated and published by Amnon Cohen, Elisheva Simon-Pikali, and Ovadia Salama.1 Since the overall number of cases from Jerusalem numbered in several dozens, I did not examine them quantitatively. In Istanbul, the effort focused on the court of Üsküdar. Knowing that I could not possibly cover the entire city, I chose Üsküdar for several reasons. First, I did not want to focus on places like Galata or Kumkapı, known for the exceptionally wide nightlife scene. Üsküdar, a predominantly Muslim district on the Asian side of the Bosporus, seemed more “average” and more typical of a largely residential area. Out of the many extant volumes that record all cases brought before the court during those years, I selected only volumes that included mostly recorded litigations. In order to enlarge the sample, I added to the cases I located in the unpublished sicil volumes, night cases gleaned from registers from the Üsküdar court that have been published. All in all, I used eight volumes of sicil from the Üsküdar court, four of which have been previously transliterated. These include #402 (1153–1154/ 1741), #407 (1155–1156/1743), #415 (1158–1159/1746), #420 (1159–1161/1748–1749), #433 (1164–1165/1751), #466 (1178–1179/1765), #470 (1179–1180/1766), and #474 (1180–1182/

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1767–1768). All together, these 8 volumes include a total of 3,663 cases, out of which 146 were “night cases” (3.9 percent). While for the qualitative analysis I also considered cases published in collections of sicil cases,2 for the quantitative analysis I limited myself only to registers that were published in full.3 The choice of registers is, therefore, not random, which complicates the problems that are integral to sicil studies and, especially, to the quantitative study of sicils. These problems have long occupied researchers.4 Most relevant to the modest analysis offered in this work is the question of the relation between the dataset and the “reality” it is supposed to reflect.5 To what extent Üsküdar is representative of Istanbul and to what extent the court records are representative of reality even with regard to the period and area covered in the volumes examined? These questions do not have easy answers, yet, as Ergene and Coşgel point out, they are not particular to the quantitative analysis of sicils, but rather complicate the use of many other types of sources and methodological approaches. The assessment of quantitative analysis, they argue, should be conducted with reference to specific findings, rather than in a sweeping manner.6 It is, therefore, important to address the specific problems of my dataset, and then to explain how it was processed to answer very specific, and relatively simple, questions. The most obvious among the problems of the dataset is its relatively small size, which means that findings should be treated very cautiously. Second, as already noted, it reflects only the realities of Üsküdar. It is very likely, for example, that janissary involvement in nocturnal activity was much higher closer to their barracks in Et Meydanı. For example, up to 95 percent of the residents in khans and bachelor inns in Galata and Kasım Paşa were associated with the military.7 Third, the sample reflects only the decades around the mid-century. Earlier, and later, realities may have been different. Fourth, even for that particular time and area, we do not know about nocturnal activity that did not reach the court simply because it went unregistered. We do not have, for example, police logs that record the arrest of people at night. Since, as noted in Chapter 2, officials had the right to punish individuals caught red-handed at night, drinking alcohol, for example, these individuals never reached court and remain invisible to us.

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Given all these problems, I limited myself to very specific and simple questions, for which straight-forward answers could be expected from the dataset. These questions were: (a) what populations were more likely to be outside after dark, or at least, brought to court for afterdark activities? (b) What time of the night were incidents and conflicts more likely to occur? (c) Where were incidents more likely to occur?8 Each of these questions bears consequences for our understanding of the Early Modern night, as explained in the relevant chapters. In order to answer these questions, the following details were recorded separately for each case: the identity of the plaintiff and accused including gender, titles that may indicate elite social status (hac, seyyid, aga), ˘ titles that may indicate social marginality (e.g. bachelor, “gypsy”), occupation (where applicable), religious affiliation (Muslim versus non-Muslim), and military affiliation. I grouped under “the urban poor” all defendants, for whom I could establish with reasonable confidence, that they belonged to the itinerant population or, more generally, to the lower social orders. These included defendants explicitly referred to as “bachelors,” but also boaters, soldiers, porters and other menial laborers, prostitutes, and individuals who appear in the record merely as “son of this-and-this,” without a title, residence, or occupation. This group was then compared to the entire cohort. In order to get an idea of who was likely to be outside after dark, I had to add to the defendants who were out or active after dark, the plaintiffs who, according to their own testimony, were also out. For example, if a resident charges three itinerants of breaking into his house at night, we have four people in court but only the three defendants should be counted as being “out at night.” But, if a person sues another one for stabbing him in the street after the night prayer, both of them were out at night and therefore should both be counted separately. The count of nocturnal cases, and the count of “people out at night” that is based on the very same cases therefore diverge significantly. Next, I looked at the sites in which nocturnal incidents took place (private home, shop, out in the street), and then grouped them under “indoor/outdoor.” Attacks on homes (throwing stones at homes, shouting insults) were included in the former category, even if the attacker remained outside since the object of the attack was inside, and in any case, the site was a domicile. The two categories were then compared.

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Finally, I recorded the times of nocturnal incidents (after the evening prayer, after sunset, at midnight) and then grouped them under evening/night with the evening defined as the period stretching from the evening to the night prayer, or immediately thereafter. These categories correspond to the way the Ottomans themselves divided the physical night, as discussed especially in Chapter 1.

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Notes

Introduction 1 For a good, recent summary of the rapid changes in nocturnal realities and the questions they pose, see Luc Gwiazdzinski, Marco Maggioli, and Will Straw, “Géographies de La Nuit/Geographies of the Night/Geografie Della Notte,” Bollettino Della Soci- Età Geografica Italiana, 1 (2018), 9–22. On the negative effects of nocturnal exposure to light on human health, see for example, Ron Chepesiuk, “Missing the Dark: Health Effects of Light Pollution,” Environmental Health Perspectives, 117(1) (January 2009), A20–A27; YongMin Cho et al., “Effects of Artificial Light at Night on Human Health: A Literature Review of Observational and Experimental Studies Applied to Exposure Assessment,” Chronobiology International, 32(9) (2015), 1294–1310; C. A. Wyse et al., “Circadian Desynchrony and Metabolic Dysfunction; Did Light Pollution Make Us Fat?” Medical Hypotheses, 77(6) (December 2011), 1139–44. For the impact of over-lighting on eco-systems and particular species, see for example, Kevin J. Gaston et al., “Review: Reducing the Ecological Consequences of Night-Time Light Pollution: Options and Developments,” Journal of Applied Ecology, 49(6) (December 1, 2012), 1256–1266; F. Hölker et al., “Light Pollution as a Biodiversity Threat,” Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 12 (2010), 681–682; Catherine Rich and Travis Longcore (eds.), Ecological Consequences of Artificial Night Lighting (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2006); Kevin J. Gaston et al., “The Ecological Impacts of Nighttime Light Pollution: A Mechanistic Appraisal,” Biological Reviews, 88(4) (November 2013), 912–927. Several national and international research initiatives have been formed over the last decade to promote interdisciplinary study of light pollution and its costs. These include the Loss of the Night Project, www .verlustdernacht.de/about-us.html (accessed June 17, 2019); the Consortium for Dark-Sky Studies, http://darkskystudies.org/ (accessed June 17, 2019); and Artificial Light at Night, www.artificiallightatnight .org (accessed June 17, 2019). Several international NGOs have been established in recent years to promote darker nights through education

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and advocacy. See for example, the homepage of the International DarkSky Association, www.darksky.org (accessed June 17, 2019). On the importance of darkness and current efforts to preserve darkness, see Paul Bogard, The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light (New York: Back Bay Books/Little, Brown & Co., 2014). On dark sky reserves, see Josiane Meier, “Designating Dark Sky Areas: Actors and Interests,” in Urban Lighting, Light Pollution and Society, Josiane Meier et al. (eds.) (New York: Routledge, 2014), 177–196. This perspective was deliberated in “The Bright Side of the Night” workshop, organized within the framework of the “Loss of the Night” Project in Erkner, Berlin (June 21–22, 2013). On the darker artificial lightscape of the future, see Kevin J. Gaston et al., “Review: Reducing the Ecological Consequences of Night-Time Light Pollution: Options and Developments,” Journal of Applied Ecology, 49(6) (2012), 1256–1266. On night in Early Modern Europe, see for example, A. Roger Ekirch, At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past (New York: Norton, 2005); Alain Cabantous, Histoire de la Nuit: XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2009); Craig Koslofsky, Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Sophie Reculin, “Le règne de la nuit désormais va finir: L’invention et la diffusion de l‘éclairage public dans le royaume de France (1697–1789)” (Charles de Gaulle University, 2017); Darrin M. McMahon, “Illuminating the Enlightenment: Public Lighting Practices in the Sicèle Des Lumières,” Past and Present, 240(1) (2018), 119–159; Mark J. Bouman, “Luxury and Control: The Urbanity of Street Lighting in Nineteenth Century Cities,” Journal of Urban History, 14(1) (1987), 7–37; Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of Califonia Press, 1995); Lettie S. Multhauf, “The Light of Street Lanterns: Street Lighting in 17thCentury Amsterdam,” Technology and Culture, 26(2) (1985), 236–252; Bryan Palmer, Cultures of Darkness: Night Travels in the Histories of Transgression (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000). See also Matthew Beaumont, Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London from Chaucer to Dickens (London: Verso, 2015). For systematic discussions of night-related issues, see Nurçin İleri, “A Nocturnal History of Fin de Siecle Istanbul,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Binghamton University (2015); Jens Hanssen, Fin de Siecle Beirut: The Making of an Ottoman Provincial Capital (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 193–202; Daniel-Joseph MacArthur-Seal, “Intoxication and Imperialism: Nightlife in Occupied Istanbul, 1918–1923,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 37(2) (2017), 299–313;

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G. Carole Woodall, “Decadent Nights: A Cocaine Filled Reading of 1920s Post-Ottoman Istanbul,” in Mediterranean Encounters in the City: Frameworks of Mediation between East and West, North and South, Michela Ardizzoni and Valerio Ferme (eds.) (Lanham: Lexington, 2015), 17–36; Avner Wishnitzer, “Eyes in the Dark: Nightlife and Visual Regimes in Late Ottoman Istanbul,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 37(2) (2017), 245–261; Avner Wishnitzer, “Kerosene Nights: Light and Enlightenment in Late Ottoman Jerusalem,” Past & Present (n.d.); Sibel Zandi-Sayek, Ottoman Izmir: The Rise of a Cosmopolitan Port, 1840–1880 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 26–29. For a survey of the development of gas-lighting in the empire, see Sertaç R. Kayserilioglu, ˘ Mehmet Mazak, and Kadır Kon, Osmanlı’dan Günümüze Havagazının Tarirçesi, 3 vols. (Istanbul: İGDAS, ¸ 1999). The only critical works on earlier periods are Cemal Kafadar, “How Dark Is the History of the Night, How Black the Story of Coffee, How Bitter the Tale of Love: The Changing Measure of Leisure and Pleasure in Early Modern Istanbul,” in Medieval and Early Modern Performance in the Eastern Mediterranean, Arzu Ozturkmen and Evelyn Birge Vitz (eds.) (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2014), 243–269; Jonathan P. Allen, “Up All Night Out of Love for the Prophet: Devotion, Sanctity, and Ritual Innovation in the Ottoman Arab Lands, 1500–1620,” Journal of Islamic Studies, 30(3) (2019), 303–337; Avner Wishnitzer, “Into the Dark: Power, Light and Nocturnal Life in 18th-Century Istanbul,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 46(3) (2014), 513–531. Occasional descriptions of nocturnal performances and modes of leisure are found in other works. See for example, Metin And, Kırk Gün Kırk Gece: Eski Donanma ve Senliklerde ¸ Seyirlik Oyunları (Istanbul: Taç Yayınları, 1959); Necdet and Nuri Akbayar, Binbir Gün Binbir Gece: Osmanlı’dan Sakaoglu ˘ Günümüze İstanbul’da Eglence ˘ Yaѕ̧amı (Istanbul: Deniz Bankasi, 1999); Abdülaziz Bey, Osmanlı Âdet, Merasim ve Tabirleri: Vol. 1 (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı, 1995), 287–291; Refik Ahmet Sevengil, İstanbul Nasıl Egleniyordu ˘ (1453’ten 1927’ye Kadar) (Istanbul: İletişim, 1993), 60–62, 92–95; Balıkhane Nazırı Ali Rıza, Eski Zamanlarda İstanbul Hayatı (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2001), 178–182; Öztekin, Divanlardan, 376–380, 251–271. 6 On the installation of street lighting in Europe from the late seventeenth century onward, see for example, Multhauf, “The Light of LampLanterns;” Wolfgang Schivelbusch, “The Policing of Street Lighting,” Yale French Studies, 73 (1987), 61–74; Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night; Joachim Schlör, Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London, 1840–1930 (London: Reaktion, 1998); Ekirch, At Day’s Close; Koslofsky, Evening’s Empire; Reculin, “Le Règne de la Nuit.”

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7 A. Roger Ekirch, “The Modernization of Western Sleep: Or, Does Insomnia Have a History?” Past and Present, 226(1) (2015), 149–192; A. Roger Ekirch, “Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-Industrial Slumber in the British Isles,” The American Historical Review, 106(2) (2001), 343–386. For the earlier phases of this process, see for example, Bouman, “Luxury and Control”; Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night; Baldwin, In the Watches of the Night, esp. 35–37. 8 Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London/ New York: Verso, 2013), 74. On the development of the “24/7 society,” see also Luc Gwiazdzinski, La Nuit, Dernière Frontière de la Ville (La Tour d’Aigues: Éd. de l’Aube, 2005), 101–140. 9 Alex Hern, “Netflix’s Biggest Competitor? Sleep,” The Guardian (April 18, 2017), www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/18/netflix-com petitor-sleep-uber-facebook (accessed June 17, 2019). 10 For historical analyses of changes in sleep patterns, see especially Ekirch, “The Modernization of Western Sleep”; Ekirch, “Sleep We Have Lost”; Sasha Handley, Sleep in Early Modern England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016). On the sociocultural embeddedness of sleep in various societies, see for example, Matthew Wolf-Meyer, The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine, and Modern American Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Peter Rensen, “Sleep without a Home: The Embedment of Sleep in the Lives of the Rough-Sleeping Homeless in Amsterdam,” in NightTime and Sleep in Asia and the West: Exploring the Dark Side of Life, Brigitte Steger and Brunt Lodewijk (eds.) (London: Routledge, 2003), 87–107; Yasmine Musharbash, “Embodied Meaning: Sleeping Arrangements in Central Australia,” in Sleep around the World: Anthropological Perspectives, Katie Glaskin and Richard Chenall (eds.) (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), 45–60; Roger Ivar Lohmann, “Sleeping among the Asabano: Surprises in Intimacy and Sociality at the Margins of Consciousness,” in Sleep around the World, 21–44; Eric L. Hsu, “The Sociology of Sleep and the Measure of Social Acceleration,” Time & Society, 23(2) (2014), 212–234. More works are discussed in Chapter 1. 11 Ekirch, “Sleep We Have Lost”; Ekirch, “The Modernization of Western Sleep.” 12 Ekirch, “Sleep We Have Lost”; Ekirch, At Day’s Close, 264–266, 300–302, 305–311. 13 This discussion is summarized in Chapter 2. 14 Martin Jay has already made the point, albeit briefly. See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French

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Notes to pages 5–9

15

16 17

18 19

20

21 22 23 24

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Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 5–6. See also Gwiazdzinski, La Nuit, 33–34. For some of the more prominent examples, see Nükhet Varlık, Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Sam White, The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Alan Mikhail, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Schlör, Nights in the Big City, 55. Historians of the Early Modern night seem to be more sensitive to various material and environmental aspects of the night. See for example, Reculin, “Le Règne de la Nuit”; Ekirch, At Day’s Close. F. Falchi et al., “The New World Atlas of Artificial Night Sky Brightness,” Science Advances, 2(6) (June 10, 2016). Kâtib Çelebi, Tuhfetü’l-Ahyâr Fi’l-Hikem ve’l-Emsâl ve’l-Eş’âr (Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, Esad Efendi, nr. 2539, n.d.), 474 (406). To be more precise, the Sharʿ¯ı night ends at the “second dawn,” that is horizontal light, as opposed to the “first dawn,” which is the zodiacal light (or al-fajr al-kadhib; false dawn). The latter has no significance in the Sharia. ¯ T. C. Erren, J. V. Groß, and L. Fritschi, “Focusing on the Biological Night: Toward an Epidemiological Measure of Circadian Disruption,” Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 74(3) (2017), 159–160; Simon N. Archer et al., “Mistimed Sleep Disrupts Circadian Regulation of the Human Transcriptome,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 111(6) (2014), E682–E691. Erren, Groß, and Fritschi, “Focusing on the Biological Night.” Archer et al., “Mistimed Sleep.” For a laypersons’ discussion of the “ecology of the night,” see Bogard, The End of Night, 124–157. On “controlled darkness,” see Robert Shaw, “Controlling Darkness: Self, Dark and the Domestic Night,” Cultural Geographies, 22(4) (2015), 585–600. On the relations between light as a social and material agent, and light as metaphor, see Mikkel Bille and Flohr Tim Sørensen, “An Anthropology of Luminosity: The Agency of Light,” Journal of Material Culture, 12(3) (2007), 263–284. Tülay Artan, “Architecture as a Theatre of Life: Profile of the Eighteenth Century Bosporus,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1989); Shirine Hamadeh, The City’s Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007); Rifaʻat Abou-El-Haj, The 1703 Rebellion and the Structure

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Notes to pages 9–13

of Ottoman Politics (Leiden: Netherlands Historical-Archaeological Institute in Istanbul, 1984). The term “the long eighteenth century” has been increasingly used by Ottomanists in recent years to refer to variously defined time periods. See for example, Michael Talbot, BritishOttoman Relations, 1661–1807: Commerce and Diplomatic Practice in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2017); Mikhail, Nature and Empire; Dana Sajdi, “The Barber of Damascus Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Levant” (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).
On the revolt, its causes and consequences, see Adil ʿMannaʿ, ¯ ı¯kh ¯ Tar filast ı¯n fı¯ awakhir al-ʿahd al-ʿuthm an ı , 1700–1918: qir aʾa jad ı da (Beirut: ¯ ¯ ¯ ¯ ¯ _ Muʼassasat al-diras ¯ at ¯ al-filast¯ın¯ıyyah, 1999); Dror Ze’evi, An Ottoman _ Century: The District of Jerusalem in the 1600s (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 63–85; Minna Rozen, “Mered ha-naq¯ıb alba-shan¯ım 1702–1706 u-matsavam shel bney haashraf ¯ bi-yerushalayim ¯ ¯ hasut ¯ ba-ʿ¯ır,” Cathedra: For the History of Eretz Israel and Its Yishuv, _ 22 (1982), 75–90. On the dramatic changes of the 1820s in the military, economy, government, state-subject relations, and more, see for example, Carter V. Findley, Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire: The Sublime Porte, 1789–1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 59, 133–147; Virginia H. Aksan, Ottoman Wars, 1700–1870: An Empire Besieged (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007), 288–342; Donald Quataert, “Clothing Laws, State, and Society in the Ottoman Empire, 1720–1829,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 29(3) (1997), 412–421; Marinos Sariyannis, Ottoman Political Thought Up to the Tanzimat: A Concise History (Rethymno: Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas – Institue for Mediterranean Studies, 2015), 171–174; Noémi Lévy, “Une Institution en Formation: La Police Ottomane à L’époque d’Abdülhamid II,” European Journal of Turkish Studies, 8 (2008). On changes brought about by İbrahim paşa’s rule in Jerusalem, see Yitzhak Hofman, “The Administration of Syria and Palestine under Egyptian Rule (1831–1840),” in Studies on Palestine during the Ottoman Period, Moshe Ma’oz (ed.) (Jerusalem: Magness Press, 1975), 311–330. For a full list of the volumes and the years they cover, see Appendix. Out of these 38 cases, 13 night-related cases were gleaned from the volumes of sicil documents published by Amnon Cohen and his colleagues, covering the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. See Amnon Cohen and Elisheva ı: hevrah, kalkalah, Simon-Pikali, Yehud¯ ¯ ¯ ım be-beyt hamishpat ha-muslem¯ _ _ ve ʾirgun ha-ʿuthm¯an¯ıt: ha-meʾah ha-shesh-ʿesreh, ¯ qeh¯ılat¯ı bi-yerushalayim ¯ 4 vols. (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben Zvi, 1993–2003).

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Notes to pages 17–18

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Chapter 1 1 “. . .baʿd nusf al-layl samaʿat siya¯ h fi-l-dar ¯ wa bab ¯ al-dar ¯ maftu¯ h wa lam _ _ _ _ taʿlam min faʿala dhalika.” Jerusalem Sicil [hereafter JS], vol. 236, p. 26, 26 B 1161 (July 22, 1748). The Hebrew name Sarah is spelled Sara ¯ in the Arabic-written court register. 2 On historically listening to the call for prayer, see Ziad Fahmy, “‘Coming to Our Senses: Historicizing Sound and Noise in the Middle East’,” History Compass, 11(4) (2013), 309–310. On the time of sunset and the setting of clocks, see Avner Wishnitzer, Reading Clocks, Alla Turca: Time and Society in the Late Ottoman Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 14, 32–33, 112, 124. Compare the ringing of church bells at sunset in rural French communities: Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside, trans. Martin Thom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 112–118. 3 On the “shutting down” of Ottoman cities at night, see for example, Ignatius Mouradgea D’Ohsson, Tableau général de l’Empire Othoman (Paris: Didot Pere et Fils, 1824), vol. 4, 241; James Caulfield Charlemont, The Travels of Lord Charlemont in Greece and Turkey 1749, W. B. Stanford and Finopoulos E. J. (eds.) (London: Trigraph for the A. G. Leventis Foundation, 1984), 210; Stephen Olin, Travels in Egypt, Arabia Petræa, and the Holy Land (New York: Harper & Bros, 1849), vol. 2, 78; Edmondo de Amicis, Constantinople, trans. Caroline Tilton (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1878), 130–131. For Jerusalem, see Avraham Moshe Luntz, Lua ¯ ı ve-sifruti ¯ li-shnat ¯ h ʾerets yisraʾel sh¯ımush¯ _ htrsʾ (Jerusalem: published by the author, 1903); Yehoshuʿa Ben-Arieh, ʿ
Ir _ bi-reʾ¯ı tequfah: yerushalayim ha-hadashah be-reʾsh¯ıtah (Jerusalem: Yad ¯ ¯ _ Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1979), vol. 2, 36; Harry Leech, Letters of a Sentimental Idler: From Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Nubia, and the Holy Land (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1869), 330–331. See also Abraham Marcus, The Middle East on the Eve of Modernity: Aleppo in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 16, 279, 284; Bruce McGowan, “The Age of Ayans, 1699–1812” in An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, Halil İnalcık and Donald Quataert (eds.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), vol. 2, 647; Mübahat Kötükoglu, ˘ “Life in the Medrese” in The Illuminated Table, the Prosperous House: Food and Shelter in Ottoman Material Culture, Suraiya Faroqhi and Christoph K. Neumann (eds.) (Wèurzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2003), 216. 4 On coffeehouses in the evenings, see for example, Thomas Milner, The Ottoman Empire: The Sultans, the Territory and the People (London: Religious Tract Society, 1859), 250. On the stigmatization of women outside after dark, see Raphaela Lewis, Everyday Life in Ottoman

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6 7

8

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Notes to pages 18–19

Turkey (London/New York: Batsford; G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971), 115; Zeyneb Hanım and Ellisson M. Grace, A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1913), 171–172. These norms are still very much in place in many contemporary Anatolian towns. See Binnaz Toprak et al., Türkiye’de Farklı Olmak: Din ve Muhafazakârlık Ekseninde Ötekileѕ̧tirilenler (Istanbul: Metis, 2009), 39–41, 89. Resul Attila, “Istanbul Galata Kadılıgı ˘ 353 Numaralı Serʿiyye ¸ Sicili, 3. R.1173–7.Ca.1173 (21 Aralık 1759–26 Ocak 1760),” unpublished MA thesis, Marmara University (1994), 38; Erdal Kılıç, “1158–1159 (1745–1746) Tarihli Üsküdar Sicili,” unpublished MA thesis, Marmara University (1997), 26–27. Nasuhi Bilmen, “Hukukĭ Islâmiyye ve Ĭstĭlahatĭ Fĭkhiyye” Kamusu (Istanbul: Bilmen yayĭnevi, 1967), vol. 3, 274. Historians, geographers, and anthropologists have recently grown aware of this shift, although studies that focus on it are still scant. For examples of such studies, see Tim Edensor, “Reconnecting with Darkness: Gloomy Landscapes, Lightless Places,” Social & Cultural Geography, 14(4) (2013), esp. 457–459; Nina J. Morris, “Night Walking: Darkness and Sensory Perception in a Night-Time Landscape Installation,” Cultural Geographies, 18(3) (2011), 315–342. For more passing references, see for example, Mark M. Smith, How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 33–34; Steven Feld, Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 180. Among historians of the night, Roger Ekirch, in particular, is an attentive listener. See Ekirch, At Day’s Close, 8–9; 132–133. Ekirch also emphasizes the importance of smell and touch. Emily Ann Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 116–117. Aimée Boutin argues that not only the city noise changed with modernity but also the way we listen to it. See Aimée Boutin, City of Noise: Sound and Nineteenth-Century Paris (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015). This passage is based on the following sources: Hayati Develi (ed.), XVIII: Yüzyıl İstanbul Hayatına Dair Risâle-i Garîbe (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 1998), 23; Albert Smith, A Month at Constantinople, 2nd ed. (London: Bogue, 1851); John Harwood, Stamboul, and the Sea of Gems (London: R. Bentley, 1852); The Abbé de St. Michon, Narrative of a Religious Journey in the East in 1850 and 1851 (London: Richard Bentley, 1853), 206–207; C. Addison, Damascus and Palmyra: A Journey to the East (Philadelphia: E. L. Carey & A. Hart, 1838).

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Notes to pages 19–20

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10 In this, the ezan was similar to church bells in rural communities. See Corbin, Village Bells, 97. 11 For a similar pattern in eighteenth-century Aleppo, see Marcus, The Middle East, 284. 12 That the voices of women singing lullabies echoed in the street was a source of concern for some Jewish moralists in eighteenth-century Jerusalem. See Alisa Meyuhas Ginio, “Ḥayey yom yom be-hug ¯ ha-mis_ hpahah ha-sefarad¯ıt lef¯ı peyrusho shel r’ yaʿaqov k uley le-sefer bereʾsh¯ıt ¯ ¯ _ ba-h¯ıbur me-ʿam loʿez,” in Nash¯ ı m, zeqen¯ ı m vetaf: qovets maʾamarim ¯ _ _ li-khevodah shel Shulam ı¯t Shahar, Miriam Eliav-Feldon and Yitzhak ¯ _ Hen (eds.) (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar le-toldot Yisraʾel, 2001), 161. The earliest collections of Turkish and Arabic folk lullabies are from the late nineteenth century, and therefore, I decided to leave them out of the analysis. On lullabies in Turkey and the late Ottoman Empire, see for example, Zeki Karakaya, “Göstergebilimsel İşlevler Açısından Ninniler,” Milli Folklor, 16(61) (2004), esp. 44–51; Nilgün Çıblak Coşkun, “Türk Ninnilerine İşlevsel Yaklaşım,” Turkish Studiesi, 8 (2013), 499–513; Songül Çek Cansız, “Ninnilere Baglam ˘ Merkezli Bir Yaklaşım,” Turkish Studies, 6 (2011), 61–75; Emine Kırcı Ugurlu, ˘ “Kültürel Bellek Aktarıcısı Olarak Ninni,” Milli Folklor, 26(102) (2014), 43–52; Belde Aka, “Ninnileri Psikanalitik Yaklaşımla Yeniden Okuma Denemesi,” Milli Folklor, 22(88) (2010), 38–43. On Arabic lullabies in Greater Syria, see Fruma Zachs, “Qolot redum¯ ¯ ım: sh¯ırey ʿeres ke-ʿaspaqlaryah le-havanat g¯ıshot mishtanot klapey yelad¯ım ve-yaldut ha¯ be-suryah ¯ gedolah,” Ha-mizrah ha-hadash, 58 (2019), 49–50. _ _ 13 On Lighting arrangements in mosques, see Chapter 5. In some mosques, all night long rituals took place, see Chapter 4. 14 On the extinguishing of mosques’ lights, see Chapter 6. On sleeping patterns, see below. On patrols and the carrying of lanterns, see Chapter 2. 15 Fuad Carım, trans., Pedro’nun Zorunlu İstanbul Seyahati: 16. Yüzyılda Türklere Esir Düşen Bir İspanyol’un Anıları (Istanbul: Güncel Yayıncılık, 1995), 156; D’Ohsson, Tableau général, 4:241; A Handbook for Travellers in the Ionian Islands, Greece, Turkey, Asia Minor and Constantinopl (London: John Murray, 1840), 152; Charles White, Three Years in Constantinople; or, Domestic Manners of theTurks in 1844. 2nd ed. (London: Henry Colburn, 1846), vol. 3, 77; Balıkhane Nazırı Ali Rıza, Eski Zamanlarda İstanbul Hayatı (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2001), 153. 16 Işık Tamdogan, ˘ “Atı Alan Üsküdar’a Geçti Ya Da 18. Yüzyılda Üsküdar’da Siddet ¸ ve Hareketlilik İişkisi,” in Osmanlı’da Asayiş, Suç ve Ceza, 18–20. Yüzyıllar, Noémi Lévy and Alexandre Toumarkine (eds.) (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı, 2010), 80–95.

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Notes to pages 20–21

17 The original record is brought in Cohen, Simon-Pikali, and Salama (eds.), Yehud ¯ ¯ım be-beyt ha-mishpat: ha-meʾah ha-shmoneh-ʿesreh, _ 296–297. Ester was in a difficult situation since, as mentioned in Chapter 2, Islamic jurisprudence favored eye witnessing and tended to dismiss ear-witness testimonies, not to mention that women’s testimony was considered inferior to that of men. 18 Cohen, Simon-Pikali, and Salama (eds.), Yehud¯ ¯ ım be-beyt ha-mishpat: _ ha-meʾah ha-shesh-ʿesreh, 87–88. 19 JS, vol. 234, p. 135, 3 R 1163 (March 11, 1750); vol. 234, p. 78, end of Ra 1165 (February 7–16, 1752). In another case, darkness hindered a victim from identifying her robber. See Cohen, Simon-Pikali, and Salama (eds.), Yehud ¯ ı¯m be-beyt ha-mishpat: ha-meʾah ha-shmoneh-ʿesreh, 296–297. For _ more about investigations conducted in cases of suspected unnatural deaths, see Cohen, Simon-Pikali, and Salama (eds.), Yehud¯ ¯ ım be-beyt ha-mishpat: _ ha-meʾah ha-shmoneh-ʿesreh, 306–307; Cohen, Simon-Pikali, and Ginio (eds.), Yehud¯ ¯ ım be-beyt ha-mishpat: ha-meʾah ha-teshaʿ-ʿesreh, 156–157. _ 20 On the critical role of moon and starlight for traveling at night, see Ekirch, At Day’s Close, 127–131; J. C. Baker, “Darkness, Travel and Landscape: India by Fire- and Starlight, c. 1820–c. 1860,” Environment and Planning A: Society and Space, 47 (August 6, 2015), 1–16. On the limitations of contemporary artificial lighting, see Chapter 5. 21 A Handbook for Travellers, 152. See also John Broughton, A Journey through Albania: And Other Provinces of Turkey in Europe and Asia, to Constantinople, during the Years 1809–1810, 2nd ed. (London: J. Cawthorn, 1813), vol. 2, 820; Charles Colville Frankland, Travels to and from Constantinople in the Years 1827 and 1828 (London: Henry Colburn, 1829), vol. 1, 84. Another common contrast drawn by European travelers was between the bright light of and bustle of Istanbul’s days, and the darkness and quiet of its nights. See for example, Charlemont, The Travels, 210; Broughton, A Journey through Albania, 2:820; Smith, A Month, 69; de Amicis, Constantinople, 130. 22 Charlemont, The Travels, 210. 23 See for example, Broughton, A Journey through Albania, 2:820; Smith, A Month, 69; Ali Bey (Domingo Francisco Jorge Badía y Leblich), Travels of Ali Bey in Morocco, Tripoli, Cyprus, Egypt, Arabia, Syria, and Turkey, Between the Years 1803 and 1807, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia, Pa: M. Carey, 1816), vol. 2, 400. On darkness and quiet in Jerusalem, see for example, Mary Elyza Rogers, Domestic Life in Palestine (Cincinnati, OH: Poe & Hitchcock, 1865), 307; Leech, Letters of a Sentimental Idler, 330–331. 24 On the gap between sounds and their often clichéd descriptions, and the way these descriptions often frame hearing, see Boutin, City of Noise, 5–6. On the cultural embeddedness of hearing, see Elizabeth Hellmuth

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Notes to pages 21–23

25

26 27 28

29 30 31 32

33 34

35

36

263

Margulis, “Music Is Not for Ears,” Aeon, November 2, 2017, https:// aeon.co/essays/music-is-in-your-brain-and-your-body-and-your-life (accessed July 10, 2019). David Howes, “Architecture of the Senses” in Sense of the City: An Alternate Approach to Urbanism, Mirko. Zardini and Wolfgang Schivelbusch (eds.) (Montréal: Centre Canadien d’Architecture, 2005), 329. Harwood, Stamboul, 181. White, Three Years, 3:290. Julia Pardoe, The City of the Sultan; and the Domestic Manners of the Turks, in 1836, 2nd ed. (London: Henry Colburn, 1838), vol. 1, 86–87, 163–164, 250–251; James D. Haas and Friedrich Tietz, St. Petersburgh, Constantinople, and Napoli Di Romania, in 1833 and 1834 (New York: Theodore Foster, 1836), 154; Smith, A Month, 69. Ekirch, At Day’s Close, 133. Harwood, Stamboul, 180–181. Ibid., 181. For a description of these cruises by the prominent scholar and statesman Ahmed Cevdet (d. 1895), see Ahmet Cevdet, Ma’rûzât, Yusuf Halaçoglu ˘ (ed.) (Istanbul: Çagrı ˘ Yayınları, 1980), vol. 2, 9. For eighteenth-century poems which refer to mehtab seyri, see Öztekin, Divanlardan, 376–380. For more on this, see Chapter 4. BOA, HAT 193/9461, 29 Z 1204 (9.9.1790). Ergin notes additional ways in which silence at the palace served to project awe and impress visitors. See Nina Ergin, “‘Praiseworthy in That Great Multitude Was the Silence’: Sound/Silence in the Topkapı Palace, Istanbul” in Resounding Images: Medieval Intersections of Art, Music, and Sound, Susan Boynton and Diane J. Reilly (eds.) (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2015), 109–133. See also Oleg Grabar, “An Exhibition of High Ottoman Art,” Muqarnas, 6 (1989), 5. Ayşe Ezgi Dikici, “Imperfect Bodies, Perfect Companions? Dwarfs and Mutes at the Ottoman Court in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” unpublished MA thesis, Sabancı University (2006), 63–65, 67; Ergin, “Praiseworthy in That Great Multitude,” 125. On silence, the use of sign language and mutes at the court, see also Gülru Necipoglu, ˘ Architecture, Ceremonial, and Power: The Topkapi Palace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (New York/Cambridge, MA: Architectural History Foundation/MIT Press, 1991), 26–29. Peter Payer, “The Age of Noise: Early Reactions in Vienna, 1870– 1914,” Journal of Urban History, 33 (2007), 773–93; Adam Mack, Sensing Chicago: Noisemakers, Strikebreakers, and Muckrakers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015); Boutin, City of Noise.

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Notes to pages 24–25

37 Boutin, City of Noise, 6. 38 For more on the limitations darkness posed to law enforcement and public order, see Chapter 2. 39 Jay, Downcast Eyes, 6. 40 Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 17–18. On sound and the experience of sighted people navigating thick darkness, see Edensor, “Reconnecting with Darkness,” esp. 457; Morris, “Night Walking,” 323–324. 41 Connor, Dumbstruck, 20–21. 42 Morris, “Night Walking.” 43 Daniel Yon, “Now You See It,” Aeon, July 4, 2019, https://aeon.co/ essays/how-our-brain-sculpts-experience-in-line-with-our-expectations (accessed October 7, 2019); Edensor, “Reconnecting with Darkness,” 461. 44 In fact, recent studies show that people tend to fear the night even in hyper-illuminated environments. See Bogard, The End of Night, esp. 64–92. 45 On limited visibility and insecurity, see for example, Brigitte Steger and Lodewijk Brunt, “Introduction: Into the Night and the World of Sleep” in Night-Time and Sleep in Asia, 6–7. Studies have suggested that the long-established connection between night and insecurity may not be only related to actual darkness, but also to circadian rhythms (that are in themselves connected to light and darkness), and to cognitivemediational factors. See for example, Yadan Li et al., “Night or Darkness, Which Intensifies the Feeling of Fear?,” International Journal of Psychophysiology, 97 (2015), 46–57; Jocelynne Gordon and Neville King, “Children’s Night-Time Fears: An Overview,” Counselling Psychology Quarterly, 15(2) (2002), 121–132. On nocturnal vulnerability, insecurity, and circadian rhythms, see also Gwiazdzinski, La Nuit, 25–37. On the relation between the ability to “control the experience of darkness” and relaxation at home, see Shaw, “Controlling Darkness,” 593. The inability to control darkness, by contrast, can be used to instill deep insecurity in inmates. See for example, the works of Lawrence Abu Hamdan (with Forensic Architecture and Amnesty International), about Saydnaya prison near Damascus, http://lawrenceabuhamdan.com/#/ sayadna/ (accessed November 2, 2018). 46 Amanda Vickrey, “His Castle? Thresholds, Boundaries and Privacies in the Eighteenth-Century London House,” Past and Present, 199 (2008), 156.

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Notes to pages 26–28

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47 The case is described in two separate entries in the Jerusalem court records: JS, vol. 234, p. 51, 3 B 1161 (June 29, 1748), and vol. 236, p. 25, 4 B 1161 (June 30, 1748). The latter adds a few more details to the former. 48 JS, vol. 234, p. 51, 3 B 1161 (June 29, 1748). 49 As briefly suggested in Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, 88. 50 Ze’evi, An Ottoman Century, 31. 51 Rabbi Mosheh Ben-Yisraʾel Naftal¯ı, “Masʿot R. Mosheh Poray¯ıt miprag” ¯ in Masʿot ʾerets yisraʾel, 276. 52 JS, vol. 234, p. 51, 3 B 1161 (June 29, 1748). 53 JS, vol. 236, p. 78, end of Ra 1162 (mid-March 1749). 54 Cohen, Simon-Pikali, and Salama (eds.), Yehud ¯ ı¯m be-beyt: ha-meʾah hashmoneh-ʿesreh, 296–297. 55 Cohen and Simon-Pikali, Yehud ¯ ı¯m be-beyt hamishpat: ha-meʾah ha_ shesh-ʿesreh, 54, 55, 57–58, 79, 87–88. 56 Bilmen, Hukukĭ Islâmiyye, 3:261, 263. See also Ömer Menekşe, “XVII ve XVIII. Yüzyılda Osmanlı Devletinde Hırsızlık Suçu ve Cezası” (Marmara University, 1998), 17–20. 57 Saadet Muzaffarova (ed.), “Üsküdar Kadılıgı ˘ 420 Numaralı Seriyye ¸ Sicili Defteri” (2012), 80. For another example, see Kılıç, “1158–1159 (1745–1746) Tarihli,” 36–37. 58 Ahmed Akgündüz (ed.), Osmanlı ve Hukukî Tahlilleri, IV. Kitap: Kanunî Sultan Süleyman Devri Kanunnâmeleriç I. Kısım (Istanbul: Fey Vakfi, 1992), 302, no. 1. 59 See Omri Paz, “Crime, Criminals and the Ottoman State: Anatolia between the Late 1830s and the Late 1860s,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Tel Aviv University (2010), 101–102, 273, 317, 327–329. 60 For examples, see Üsküdar Sicili (hereafter ÜS), vol. 407, p. 19, 4 M 1156 (February 28, 1743); ÜS, vol. 474, p. 11, 25 Z 1180 (May 24, 1767); ÜS, vol. 407, p. 40, 24 Ca 1156 (July 16, 1743); case dated 9 R 1159 (May 1, 1746) in Kılıç, “1158–1159 (1745–1746) Tarihli”; cases dated 25 S 1160 (March 8, 1747) and 5 B 1160 (July 13, 1747) in Muzaffarova, “Üsküdar Kadılıgı,” ˘ 68, 142 respectively; case dated 4 Z 1153 (February 20, 1741) in Ülkü Geçgil, “Uskudar at the Beginning of the Eighteenth Century,” unpublished MA thesis, Fatih University (2009), 63–64. 61 JS, vol. 236, p. 63, 8 S 1162 (January 27, 1749). 62 JS, vol. 236, p. 64, 14 S 1162 (February 2, 1749). The exact expression cited in the record as the cause of death is ʿara¯ d damaw¯ı, which is _ probably a corruption of aʿra¯ d damaw¯ı, lit. symptoms of blood. Given _ that there were no external signs of violence, and that midwives were sent

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66 67

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Notes to pages 28–30

to examine the body, the bleeding was probably vaginal, possibly from the womb. Shaw, “Controlling Darkness,” 595. ÜS, vol. 474, p. 23, 6 Ra 1181 (September 1, 1767). For another case of severe domestic violence at night, see ÜS, vol. 407, p. 12, 25 Sevval ¸ 1155 (December 23, 1742). BOA, C.ZB 16/786, 13 Za 1204 (July 25, 1790). The neighbors further accused Hasan of sexually assaulting neighborhood children. On the function of such accusations, see Baѕ̧ak Tug, ˘ Politics of Honor in Ottoman Anatolia: Sexual Violence and Socio-Legal Surveillance in the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 129–140. See Chapter 3. This dependency was only one out of multiple factors that deterred women from bringing charges against their aggressors. See Eyal Ginio, “Women, Domestic Violence and Breaking Silence: The Evidence of the Seriat ¸ Court of Eighteenth-Century Salonica” in Mélanges en l’honneur du Prof. Dr. Suraiya Faroqhi, Abdeljelil Temimi (ed.) (Tunis: Fondation Temimi pour la recherche scientifique et l’information, 2008), 153–167. Yaron Ayalon, Natural Disasters in the Ottoman Empire: Plague, Famine, and Other Misfortunes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 87–91. On fires in eighteenth-century Jerusalem, see Meyuhas Ginio, “Ḥayey yom yom,” 154–155. A writer in a late Ottoman Hebrew newspaper, published in Jerusalem, explained that fires were infrequent in the city because it was built of stone. See “Yerushalayim,” Ḥavatselet, December 27, 1889, 1. ¯ Derviş Efendi-Zade Derviş Mustafa Efendi, 1782 Yılı Yangınları, Hüsamettin Aksu (ed.) (Istanbul: İletiѕ̧im, 1994), 19–20; Barış Taşyakan, “The Volunteer Firefighters of Istanbul, 1826–1923,” unpublished MA thesis, Bo˘gaziçi University (2008), 75–81; White, The Climate of Rebellion, 264–265; Fariba Zarinebaf, Crime and Punishment in Istanbul, 1700–1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 31–33. On the 1660 fire, see Marc David Baer, “The Great Fire of 1660 and the Islamization of Christian and Jewish Space in Istanbul,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 36(2) (2014), 159–181. For the other data, see Taşyakan, “The Volunteer Firefighters,” 69–78. For a general discussion of fires in Ottoman Istanbul, see Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet, A Social History of Ottoman Istanbul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 77–89. The chronicler Sani-Zade ¸ makes this point when referring to the conflagrations of 1782. See Sânî-zâde ¸ MehmedʿAtâʾullah Efendi, Sânî-Zâde ¸ Târîhi (1223–1237/1808–1821), Ziya Yılmazer (ed.) (Istanbul: Çamlıca Basım, 1821), vol. 2, 852.

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Notes to pages 30–33

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72 Taşyakan, “The Volunteer Firefighters,” 72–73. 73 Osman Nuri [Ergin], “İstanbul Yangınları” in Mecelle-i Umûr-ı Belediyye (Istanbul: İstanbul Büyükѕ̧ehir Belediyesi Kültür İѕ̧leri Daire Baѕ̧kanlıgı, ˘ 1995), vol. 3, 1183–1227. 74 Münif Paşa, “Harîk-i İstanbul,” Mecmua-i Fünun, 28 (1281/1864), 153. 75 See Chapter 7. 76 On the unique nature of industrialized lighting with regard to earlier forms of lights, see Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, 3–78. 77 Haas and Tietz, St. Petersburgh, Constantinople, 154. See also François Tott, Memoires of the Baron de Tott: Containing the State of the Turkish Empire & the Crimea during the Late War with Russia (London: G. G. J. & J. Robinson, 1786), 20. 78 Küçük Çelebizade Asım Efendi, “Tarih-i İsmail Asım Efendi eş-şehir bi-Küçük Çelebizade” in Tarih-i Raşid (Istanbul: Matbaa-ı Amire, 1865), 492, 409; see also 68, 178, 416. For more accounts of nocturnal fires during those years, see 11, 77, 118–119, 224–225, 242, 491–492, 493. 79 Münif Paşa, “Harîk-i İstanbul,” 153. 80 On the firefighting measures, see Mehmet Zeki Pakalın, “Köşklü” in Osmanlı Tarih Deyimleri ve Terimleri Sözlügü ˘ (Ankara: Milli Egitim ˘ Basımevi, 1971), vol. 2, 304–305; Mehmet Zeki Pakalın, “Tulumbacı” in Osmanlı Tarih Deyimleri. On fires and firefighting in the nineteenth century, see, most recently, Taşyakan, “The Volunteer Firefighters.” 81 Pertev Naili Boratav, 100 Soruda Türk Folkloru (Istanbul: Gerçek Yayınevi, 1973), 92. 82 Ibid., 95. 83 Marinos Sariyannis, “Of Ottoman Ghosts, Vampires and Sorcerers: An Old Discussion Disinterred,” Archivum Ottomanicum, 30 (2013), 199–200. 84 On nighttime anxieties and bedtime rituals in the British Isles in the Early Modern period, see Ekirch, “Sleep We Have Lost,” 351–357. 85 Handley, Sleep in Early Modern England, 69–107. 86 Muhammad bin ʾIsmaʿ¯ ¯ ı, kitab ¯ ¯ ım al-Bukhar¯ ¯ ı, S ̣ah¯ıh al-Bukhar¯ ¯ ıl bin Ibrah¯ _ _ _ badʾal-khalq (Damascus: Dar ¯ Abu¯ Kath¯ır l-l-tibaʿa ¯ wa-l-nashr wa tawz¯ıʿ, _ 2002), vol. 1, 808, no. 3280. 87 Muslim Ibn al-Ḥajjaj ¯ al-Qushayr¯ı, S ̣ah¯ıh Muslim (Riyad: Bayt al-afkar ¯ _ _ al-duwaliyya li-l-nashr wa-l-tawz¯ıʿ, 1998), 1088, no. 64 (2714). For a similar formula, see p. 1086, no. 56 (2710). 88 Sidur ¯ tfilot ha-shana le-minhag qehilot romanya¯ (Venice: Dfus ¯ Daniʾel Bomb¯ırj, 1523), 22–23. 89 T. P. Vukanovic, “Witchcraft in the Central Balkans I: Characteristics of Witches,” Folklore, 100(1) (1989), 9–24; T. P. Vukanovic, “Witchcraft

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Notes to pages 33–35 in the Central Balkans II: Protection against Witches,” Folklore, 100(2) (January 1989), 221–236. Vukanovic, “Witchcraft in the Central Balkans II,” 222, 229–232; Boratav, 100 Soruda Türk Folkloru, 95. On “nocturnal women” (nash¯ım leyl¯ıyot) who lurk in the dark, seeking to strangle little babies, see Minna Rozen, A History of the Jewish Community in Istanbul: The Formative Years, 1453–1566 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 267. Boratav, 100 Soruda Türk Folkloru, 94. See for example, Aslı Niyazioglu, ˘ Dreams and Lives in Ottoman Istanbul: A Seventeenth-Century Biographer’s Perspective (London: Routledge, 2016); Amira Mittermaier, Dreams That Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). I chose to leave dreams out of this book as the topic is too wide and complex to be addressed here seriously. See Chapter 3. Ekirch, “The Modernization of Western Sleep,” 176–177. In some versions, it is said that the Prophet disliked “conversation” (had¯ıth) after the night prayer, and in others, that he did not “stay up” _ socializing (samara) after that prayer. See for example, S ̣ah¯ıh Bukhar ¯ ¯ı, _ _ vol. 1, book 10, no. 552. See for example, Asım Efendi Küçükçelebizade, Tarih-i İsmail Asım Efendi eş-şehir bi-Küçük Çelebizade (brought in Tarih-i Raşid, vol. 6), 366–377, 470–471; Raşid Efendi, Tarih-i Raşid, vol. 3, 319. In mean time terms, according to sunset hours in April for the latitude of Istanbul, these hours would translate to between 11:00 p.m. and 1:00 a.m. Yunus Irmak (ed.), “III. Mustafa Rûznâmes¯ı (H. 1171–1177/M. 1757–1763),” unpublished MA thesis, Marmara University (1991), 87, 98–99. Fikret Sarıcaoglu, ˘ Kendi Kaleminden Bir Padiѕ̧ahın Portresi Sultan I: Abdülhamid (1774–1789) (Istanbul: Tatav, Tarih ve Tabiat Vakfı, 2000), 45–46. Sema Arıkan, “III. Selim’in Sırkatibi Ahmed Efendi Tarfınan Tutulan Rüznamesi,” unpublished MA thesis, İstanbul Üniversitesi (1988). Cited in Ekirch, “The Modernization of Western Sleep,” 276. For a review of studies on the effect of light-darkness alterations on sleep patterns, see Jacques Galinier et al., “Anthropology of the Night,” Current Anthropology, 51(6) (2010), 824–825. See Chapter 6. Craig Koslofsky, “Princes of Darkness: The Night at Court, 1650–1750,” The Journal of Modern History, 79 (2007), 235–273;

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Notes to pages 35–36

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104

105 106 107

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Craig Koslofsky, “Court Culture and Street Lighting in SeventeenthCentury Europe,” Journal of Urban History, 28(6) (2002), 743–768; Sasha Handley, “Sociable Sleeping in Early Modern England, 1660–1760,” History, 98(329) (2013), 79–104. Koslofsky, “Princes of Darkness,” 236, 251–258. Koslofsky’s definition of the term “nocturnalization” applies also to the use of the night for political spectacles. In one case, brought before the court of Üsküdar, two commoners were charged for immoral conduct, having been caught partying with prostitutes, “until the morning.” This, however, may only be a figure of speech intended to highlight the defendants’ licentiousness. See ÜS, vol. 407, p. 3, 5 C 1155 (August 7, 1742). See also Mütercim Ahmed Âsım Efendi, Âsım Efendi Tarihi, Ziya Yılmazer (ed.) (Istanbul: Türkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu Başkanlıgı, ˘ 2015), vol. 1, 329. Handley, “Sociable Sleeping.” See Chapter 3. White, Three Years, 3:94–96. Balıkhane Nazırı Ali Rıza, Eski Zamanlarda, 153; Falih Rıfkı Atay, Batış Yılları (Istanbul: Hürriyet, 2012), 23. In late nineteenth-century fiction too, the neighborhood goes to sleep early. See for example, Sinasi, ¸ Sair ¸ Evlenmesi (Istanbul: Remzi Kitabevi, 1982), 43; Hüseyin Rahmi [Gürpınar], Sık ¸ (Istanbul: Atlas Kitabevi, 1968), 56–57. On the closing of the gates of Jerusalem at night, see Ben-Arieh, ʿ
Ir bireʾ¯ı tequfah, 1: 36; Ben-Arieh, ʿ
Ir bi-reʾi tequfah, 1979, 2:105, 167. On ¯ ¯ street lighting and the changing of Ottoman nocturnal realities, see Wishnitzer, “Eyes in the Dark”; İleri, “A Nocturnal History.” Ekirch, “Sleep We Have Lost”; Ekirch, At Day’s Close, 300–302, 305–311. Sasha Handley emphasizes that this basic pattern was differentially influenced by various factors and changed over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She does not question, however, that a biphasic sleep pattern was common. See Handley, Sleep in Early Modern England, 8–9, 151–163, 213. Handley, Sleep in Early Modern England, 8–9. Muhammed Bin Hasan, “İlm-i Tıbb (İnceleme-Metin-Dizin),” Hande Ünver Özdogan ˘ (ed.), unpublished MA thesis, Süleyman Demirel Üniversitesi (2015), 129. For similar recommendations, albeit without the specification of desired sleep length, see Gevrekzade Hafız Hasan, Aslü’l-usul tercüme-i faslü’l-fusul (1796), İstanbul Üniversitesi Kütüphanesi, TY, nr. 4289, p. 3. On Ottoman humoral medicine, see Miri Shefer Mossensohn, Ottoman Medicine: Healing and Medical Institutions, 1500–1700 (Albany: State University of New York,

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Notes to page 36 2009), 66–67. In Early Modern England too sleep was believed to be affected by a mixture of supernatural, spiritual, and bodily factors, with humoral medicine serving as the main framework for explaining its physiology. Starting in the second half of the seventeenth century, however, new neurological interpretations gained traction, and sleep was gradually removed from the spiritual realm and located firmly in the material body. See Handley, Sleep in Early Modern England, 18–38. Marinos Sariyannis, “Time, Work and Pleasure: A Preliminary Approach to Leisure in Ottoman Mentality” in New Trends in Ottoman Studies: Papers Presented at the 20th CIÉPo Symposium, Rethymno June 27–July 1, 2012, Marinos Sariyannis et al. (eds.) (Rethymno: University of Crete, 2012), 799–800. Defterdar Sarı Mehmed Paşa, Ottoman Statecraft: The Book of Counsel for Vezirs and Governors: Nasaihü’l-Vüzera, Walter Livingston Wright Jr. (ed. and trans.) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1935), 80. Ekirch, “Sleep We Have Lost,” 348–49. American physicians and moralists too warned against oversleeping. See Wolf-Meyer, The Slumbering Masses, 54–55. Bin Hasan, “İlm-i Tıbb,” 26a–27a (in the original text, brought in the appendix of the published work). Compare Handley, Sleep in Early Modern England, 22–29. For references to afternoon sleep across the Ottoman Empire, from the Early Modern period to the early twentieth century, see for example, Irmak, “III. Mustafa Rûznâmes¯ı,” 107; Thomas P Hughes, Travels in Greece and Albania, vol. 2 (London: H. Colburn and R. Bentley, 1830), 66–67; Georgina Mackenzie, The Turks, the Greeks, and the Slavons: Travels in the Slavonic Provinces of Turkeyin-Europe (London: Bell & Daldy, 1867), 13, 76, 265. See also Sariyannis, “Time, Work and Pleasure,” 807; Salim Tamari, “The Vagabond Café and Jerusalem‘s Prince of Idleness,” Jerusalem Quarterly File, 19 (2003), 33; Hanssen, Fin de Siecle, 197; Michelle Campos, Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 20. Muhhammad Na¯ sir al-D¯ın al-Alban¯ ¯ ¯ıth al-sah¯ıha wa¯ ı, Silsilat al-ahad _ _ _ _ _ _ shayʿan min fiqhiha¯ wa-fawaʾidh a¯ (Riyad: Maktabat al-maʿarif li-l¯ ¯ nashr wa-l-tawz¯ıʿ, 2000), vol. 4, 202. On “prophetic medicine,” its popularity and its competition with humoral medicine, see Mossensohn, Ottoman Medicine, 24.

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Notes to pages 36–38

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118 On “siesta cultures” see Steger and Brunt, “Introduction: Into the Night,” 17–19. In fact, afternoon slumber seems to have been common throughout Early Modern Europe, possibly owing to chronic sleep deprivation. See Ekirch, “Sleep We Have Lost,” 361. 119 Merin Güven, “Abdulvehhâb Bin Yusuf’un Müntahhab-ı Fi’t-Tıbb’ı (Dil İncelemesi-Metin-Dizin ),” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Pamukkale University (2005), 211. 120 Ekirch, “The Modernization of Western Sleep,” 158. 121 See Chapter 4. 122 On co-sleeping in contemporary societies, see for example, Musharbash, “Embodied Meaning”; Galinier et al., “Anthropology of the Night,” 822; Diana Adis Tahhan, “Sensuous Connections in Sleep: Feelings of Security and Interdependency in Japanese Sleep Rituals” in Sleep around the World, 61–78. On sociable sleeping in medieval and Early Modern Europe, see Handley, “Sociable Sleeping”; Ekirch, At Day’s Close; Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, Eric Dunning, Johan Goudsblom, and Stephen Mennel (eds.) (Malden: Blackwell, 1994), 137–42. 123 Richard A. Shweder, Lene Arnett Jensen, and William M. Goldstein, “Who Sleeps by Whom Revisited: A Method for Extracting the Moral Goods Implicit in Practice,” New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 67 (1995), 21–39; Musharbash, “Embodied Meaning”; Lohmann, “Sleeping among the Asabano”; Tahhan, “Sensuous Connections.” On “bed-companionship” in Early Modern Europe, see Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 153–156; Ekirch, At Day’s Close, 278–284. On those “left outside” see Rensen, “Sleep without a Home.” 124 Mehmet Zeki Pakalın, “Külhanbeyi,” Osmanlı Deyimleri, 339–340; Zarinebaf, Crime and Punishment, 46. The anonymous early eighteenthcentury writer Risale-i Garibe, criticizes those hamam owners who did not take poor people in. See Develi, Risâle-i Garîbe, 40. 125 François Pouqueville, Travels in Greece and Turkey: Comprehending a Particular Account of the Morea, Albania, Etc, 2nd ed. (London: Colburn, 1820), 291. 126 Abdülaziz Bey, Osmanlı Âdet, 1995, 1:324–325. 127 Serkan Delice, “The Janissaries and Their Bedfellows: Masculinity and Male Friendship in Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Istanbul” in Gender and Sexuality in Muslim Cultures, Gul Ozyegin (ed.) (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016), 115–136. 128 See for example, Musharbash, “Embodied Meaning,” 55. 129 Abdülaziz Bey, Osmanlı Âdet, 1995, 1:324–325. 130 Recent studies on the sleep of homeless people show that even the most seasoned outside sleepers fear falling asleep. See for example, Rensen,

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133 134 135

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137 138

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140 141

Notes to pages 38–40 “Sleep without a Home.” On group sleeping and security, see for example, Lohmann, “Sleeping among the Asabano,” 26; Musharbash, “Embodied Meaning.” Cengiz Kırlı, “A Profile of the Labor Force in Early Nineteenth-Century Istanbul,” International Labor and Working-Class History, 60 (2001), 135, 137; Cengiz Kırlı, “The Struggle over Space: Coffeehouses of Ottoman İstanbul, 1780–1845,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Binghamton University, 2000), 145. The “bachelors” are discussed in detail in Chapter 3. For a brief discussion of close relations among former medrese students, defined by sharing physical spaces, including beds, see Aslı Niyazioǧlu, “How to Read an Ottoman Poet’s Dream? Friends, Patrons and the Execution of Fig˙ an¯ ¯ ı (d. 938/1532),” Middle Eastern Literatures, 16(1) (2013), 8. Develi, Risâle-i Garîbe, 43. JS, vol. 234, p. 67, 3 C 1163 (May 10, 1750). Laura Hollsten, “Night Time and Entangled Spaces on Early Modern Caribbean Sugar Plantations,” Journal of Global Slavery, 1(2–3) (2016), 248–249. White, Three Years, 3:174; Frederic Shoberl, The World in Miniature: Turkey. Being a Description of the Manners, Customs, Dresses, and Other Peculiarities Characteristic of the Inhabitants of the Turkish Empire, trans. A. S. Catellan (London: R. Ackermann, 1821), vol. 8, 190. In Louis XIV’s bedchamber, a valet regularly slept at the foot of the bed. See Norbert Elias, The Court Society (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 83. White, Three Years, 3:178. Ahmed Evin, Origins and Development of the Turkish Novel (Minneapolis, Min: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1983), 26. On the functions of poetry in everyday life, see Walter Andrews and Mehmet Kalpaklı, The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 85–90. On the palace imagery and the portrayal of affectionate relations in terms of monarchial domination, see Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, XIX: Asır Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi, 2nd ed. (Istanbul: İbrahim Horoz Basımevi, 1956), 5–9; Walter G. Andrews and Mehmet Kalpaklı, The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 229–232; Walter G. Andrews, Poetry‘s Voice, Society’s Song: Ottoman Lyric Poetry (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1985), 89–108. Wishnitzer, Reading Clocks, 38–44. Brought in Walter G. Andrews, “Ottoman Love: Preface to a Theory of Emotional Ecology” in A History of Emotions, 1200–1800, Jonas Liliequist (ed.) (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), 37.

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Notes to pages 40–42

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142 The gazel is brought in full in Saadet Karaköse, “XVII: Yüzyılda Nedimâne Bir Üslup; Mâhir Divanı,” Türkiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi, 22 (2007), 162. For more examples, see Nazim Özerol, “Klasik Siirde ¸ Uyku,” Sosyal Bilimler Araştırmaları Dergisi, 1 (2013), esp. 88–89. 143 Mirzazade Mehmed Emin Salim, Tezkire-i Salim (Istanbul: İkdam Matbaası, 1897), 540. 144 Every single detail in this anecdote follows well-established traditions of writing and yet, this does not diminish its value as a historical source. As Andrews and Kalpaklı have amply demonstrated, poetic traditions reflected but also scripted behaviors and modes of sociability in Early Modern Ottoman society. See Andrews and Kalpaklı, The Age of Beloveds. 145 Cited in Matthias Lehmann, Ladino Rabbinic Literature and Ottoman Sephardic Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 127. On nocturnal religious rituals, see Chapter 4. 146 The expectation that mothers intervene as soon as their babies woke up crying was common in many traditional societies. See Monica Toselli, Angela Costabile, and M. Luisa Genta, “Infant Sleep and Waking: Mothers’ Ideas and Practices in Two Italian Cultural Contexts” in Sleep around the World: Anthropological Perspectives, Katie Glaskin and Richard Chenall (eds.) (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), 98. 147 Pam Lowe, Cathy Humphreys, and Simon J. Williams, “Night Terrors,” Violence Against Women, 13(6) (2007), 549–561. 148 Ekirch, “Sleep We Have Lost,” 351–363. 149 Handley, Sleep in Early Modern England, esp. 39–68, 108–148. On bedsteads see also Ekirch, “Sleep We Have Lost,” 352. 150 Ze’evi, An Ottoman Century, 31. On the introduction of heavy furniture and the related changes in domestic life in the nineteenth century, see Toufoul Abou-Hodeib, A Taste for Home: The Modern Middle Class in Ottoman Beirut (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), 95–97; Alan Duben and Cem Behar, Istanbul Households: Marriage, Family and Fertility, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 205–210. See also Ron Fuchs, “The Palestinian Arab House and the Islamic Primitive Hut,” Muqarnas, 15 (1998), 157–177. Charles White notes in the 1840s that in elite houses, European furniture, including beds, is already common but much less so in middle-class houses. See White, Three Years, 3:175, 178. 151 White, Three Years, 3:96. For similar sleeping arrangements in Early Modern Japan, see Brigitte Steger, “Negotiating Sleep Patterns in Japan” in Night-Time and Sleep in Asia and the West: Exploring the

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155 156

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Notes to pages 42–46 Dark Side of Life, Brigitte Steger and Lodewijk Brunt (eds.) (Vienna: Abteilung für Japanologie des Instituts für Ostasienwissenschaften der Universität Wien, 2006), 68–74. Florian Riedler, “Public People: Temporary Labor Migrants in Nineteenth-Century Istanbul” in Public Istanbul: Spaces and Spheres of the Urban, F. Ekradt and K. Wildner (eds.) (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2008), 241–242; Shoberl, The World in Miniature, 8:131. White, Three Years, 3:178–179. Fatih Bozkurt, “Tereke Defterleri ve Osmanlı Maddı Kültüründe Degişim ˘ (1785–1875),” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Sakarya University (2011), 312. White, Three Years, 3:178–179; Tott, Memoires, 95–96. The even-grumbling Baron de Tott found the pillows he was given in the house of the Chief Dragoman of the Sublime Porte to be extremely uncomfortable. See Tott, Memoires, 95–97. Develi, Risâle-i Garîbe, 19. For an Arabic lullaby referring to the protection of the sleeping child from snakes, see Zachs, “qolot redum¯ ¯ ım,” 62. Zachs, “qolot redum¯ ¯ ım,” 61. Frankland, Travels to and from Constantinople, 1:84, 132–133. 265; ʿAbd al-Ghan¯ı al-Nablus¯ ı, al-hadra al-ʾansiyya fi-l-rihla al-qudsiyya ¯ _ _ _ (Beirut: Al-masadir, 1990), 47–48, 356; ʿAbd al-Ghan¯ı bin ʾIsmaʿʾ¯ıl ¯ _ al-Nablus¯ ı, l-Ḥaq¯ıqa wa-l-majaz ¯ fi-l-rihla ʾila bilad ¯ al-sham ¯ wa misr ¯ _ _ wa-l-hijaz, ¯ Ahmad ʿAbd al-Maj¯ıd al-Har¯ıd¯ı (ed.) (Cairo: al-Hayʾa al_ _ misriyya al-ʿama li-l-kuttab, ¯ ¯ 1986), 150. _ For sleeping on rooftops, see for example, JS, vol. 234, p. 21, 25 Ra 1159 (April 17, 1746). For sleeping in the fields, see JS, vol. 234, p. 112, 17 N 1169 (June 14, 1756). In both cases, sleeping outside turned out to be terminal. See also Edward Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine, Mount Sinai, and Arabia Petrea: A Journal of Travels in the Year 1838 (London: John Murray, 1841), 32–33; Fuchs, “The Palestinian Arab House,” 167. On heating in Jerusalem, see for example, Titus Tobler, Denkblätter Aus Jerusalem (St. Gallen and Konstanz, 1853), 179. Handley, Sleep in Early Modern England, 6–7.

Chapter 2 1 Ḥanna¯ al-Tab¯ıb, Rihla, 1764, 54r, Gotha’s Research Library, Ms. Orient. _ _ A 1550. I used the transliterated version by Feras Krimisti. Translation is mine. I thank Feras for sharing with me this yet unpublished work and his

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Notes to pages 46–48

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thoughts on it. I use “policing forces” rather than police (as an institution in the modern sense), since the Ottomans, like most other Early Modern states, used soldiers to impose urban order, and had no concept of civilian law enforcement. On the physician and the travelogue manuscript, see Feras Krimsti, “The Lives and Afterlives of the Library of the Maronite Physician Ḥanna¯ al-T _ ab¯ıb (c. 1702–1775) from Aleppo,” Journal of Islamic Manuscripts, 9 (2–3) (2018), 190–217. For some of the more recent works, see Betül Başaran, Selim III, Social Control and Policing in Istanbul at the End of the Eighteenth Century Between Crisis and Order (Leiden: Brill, 2014); Zarinebaf, Crime and Punishment; Shirine Hamadeh, “Mean Streets: Space and Moral Order in Early Modern Istanbul,” Turcica, 44 (2013), 249–277; Shirine Hamadeh, The City’s Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007); Nina Ergin, “The Albanian Tellâk Connection: Labor Migration to the Hamams of EighteenthCentury Istanbul, Based on the 1752 İstanbul Hamâmları Defteri,” Turcica, 43 (2011), 231–256; Tamdogan, ˘ “Atı Alan Üsküdar‘a Geçti,” 85–90; Işık Tamdogan-Abel, ˘ “Les han, ou l’etranger dans la ville Ottomane,” in Vivre dans l’Empire Ottoman: sociabilitâes et relations intercommunautaires (XVIIIe–XXe siècles), François Georgeon and Paul Dumont (eds.) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997), 319–334; Elyse Semerdjian, “Off the Straight Path”: Illicit Sex, Law, and Community in Ottoman Aleppo (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008). See especially Zarinebaf, Crime and Punishment; Hamadeh, “Mean Streets”; Başaran, Selim III. For this concept, see Murray Melbin, Night as Frontier: Colonizing the World after Dark (New York: Free Press, 1987). On ocularcentrism and its critics in twentieth-century France and the U.S., see Jay, Downcast Eyes; Martin Jay, “Returning the Gaze: The American Response to the French Critique of Ocularcentrism,” in Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture, Gail Weiss and Honi Fern Haber (eds.) (New York/London: Routledge, 1999), 165–182. Martin Jay, “In the Realm of the Senses: An Introduction,” American Historical Review, 116(2) (2018), 307–315. See also Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), esp. 13–21. On the sensorium as an integrated system that is culture-dependent, see also Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, “Music Is Not for Ears,” Aeon, November 2, 2017, https://aeon.co/essays/music-is-in-your-brain-and-

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8

9

10

11 12

Notes to pages 48–49

your-body-and-your-life (accessed August 8, 2019); Daniel Yon, “Now You See It,” Aeon, July 4, 2019, https://aeon.co/essays/how-our-brainsculpts-experience-in-line-with-our-expectations (accessed August 8, 2019). For attempts to historicize vision in Europe, see for example, Jonathan Crary, Techinques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Christopher Otter, The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Theresa Levitt, The Shadow of Enlightenment: Optical and Political Transparency in France 1789–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). For good introductions into the rapidly growing field of sound studies, see for example, Jonathan Sterne (ed.), The Sound Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2012); Trevor Pinch and Bijsterveldm Karin (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). More specific studies are cited below. Historians and anthropologists of the senses have made occasional references to this shift. See for example, Smith, How Race Is Made, 33–34; Feld, Sound and Sentiment, 180. Among historians of the night, Roger Ekirch, in particular, is an attentive listener (and smeller). See Ekirch, At Day’s Close, 8–9, 132–133. For important exceptions, see Otter, The Victorian Eye; Reculin, “Le Règne de la Nuit.” For discussions of darkness, light, and vision in philosophy, art, and political thought, see for example, Hans Blumenberg, “Light as a Metaphor for Truth: At the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept Formation,” in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, David Michael Levin (ed.), trans. Joel Anderson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 30–62; Rolf Reichardt, “Light against Darkness: The Visual Representations of a Central Enlightenment Concept,” Representations 61 (1998), 95–148; Elisabeth Bronfen, Night Passages: Philosophy, Literature, and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); David Michael Levin (ed.), Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). See Chapter 5. Nurhan İsvan, “Illegal Local Trade in the Ottoman Empire and the Guilds of Istanbul, 1725–1726: Suggested New Hypotheses,” International Journal of Turkish Studies, 5(1–2) (1990), 5–6. For the eighteenth-century context, see Mehmet Genç, “Ottoman Industry in the

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Notes to pages 49–50

13 14

15 16

17

18

277

Eighteenth Century: General Framework, Characteristics, and Main Trends,” in Manufacturing in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, 1500–1950, Donald Quataert (ed.) (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 59–86. For general surveys of Ottoman guilds in the Early Modern period, see for example, Eunjeong Yi, Guild Dynamics in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul: Fluidity and Leverage (Ledien: Brill, 2004); Suraiya Faroqhi, Artisans of Empire: Crafts and Craftsmen under the Ottoman (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009). İsvan, “Illegal Local Trade,” 19. A comprehensive study of smuggling in the Ottoman Empire is yet to be written but occasional examples of nocturnal trade from different parts of the empire are scattered in various sources and in the scholarship. See for example, Câbî Ömer Efendi, Câbî Târihi: Târîh-i Sultân Selîm-i Sâlis ve Mahmûd-i Sânî: Tahlîl ve Tenkidli Metin, Mehmet Ali Beyhan (ed.) (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 2003), I, 179; Antony Warren Greenwood, “Istanbul’s Meat Provisioning: A Study of the Celepkeşan System” (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1988), 52; İsvan, “Illegal Local Trade,” 16; Alan Mikhail, The Animal in Ottoman Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 47–48; Marcus, The Middle East, 134; Eyal Ginio, “When Coffee Brought About Wealth and Prestige: The Impact of Egyptian Trade on Salonica,” Oriente Moderno, Nuova Serie, 25(86/1) (2006), 102. On the shutdown of Ottoman cities around sunset, see Chapter 1. On the advantages of appealing to the court en mass, see Bogaç ˘ A Ergene, Local Court, Provincial Society, and Justice in the Ottoman Empire: Legal Practice and Dispute Resolution in Çankırı and Kastamonu (1652–1744) (Leiden: Brill, 2003), esp. 72–73, 151–167. Ergene, Local Court, 127, 130; Metin Coѕ̧gel and Bo˘gaç A. Ergene, The Economics of Ottoman Justice: Settlement and Trial in the Sharia Courts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 132–133; Tu˘g, Politics of Honor, 157. On recording procedures in Ottoman courts, see also Işık Tamdogan-Abel, ˘ “L’écrit comme échec de l’oral? L’oralité des engagements et des règlements à travers les registres de cadis d’Adana au XVIIIe siècle,” Revue du monde musulman et de la Méditerranée, 75–76 (1995), 155–165. Ergene, Local Court, 151–167; Dror Ze’evi, “The Use of Ottoman Shar¯ıʿa Court Records as a Source for Middle Eastern Social History: A Reappraisal,” Islamic Law and Society, 5(1) (1998), 35–56; Bogaç ˘ A Ergene, “Social Identity and Patterns of Interaction in the Sharia Court of Kastamonu (1740–1744),” Islamic Law and Society, 15(1) (2008), 2–5; Ido Shahar and Iris Agmon, “Introduction to Theme Issue: Shifting

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19 20

21

22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29

30

Notes to pages 50–53

Perspectives in the Study of Shariʿa Courts,” Islamic Law and Society, 15(1) (2008), 1–19; Iris Agmon, Family & Court: Legal Culture and Modernity in Late Ottoman Palestine (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006), esp. 40–45. On direct speech brought in Ottoman court records and its functions, see Ergene, Local Court, 133–138. Entry dated 25 Z 1138 (August 24, 1726), in Fuat Recep et al. (eds.), İstanbul Kadı Sicilleri, İstanbul Mahkemesi, 24 Numaralı Sicil (H. 1138–1151/M. 1726–1738) (Istanbul: İSAM, 2010), 23–24. ÜS, vol. 407, p. 40, 24 Ca 1156 (July 16, 1743); ÜS, vol. 407, p. 14 7 Za 1155 (January 3, 1743); C.BLD 132/6569, 9 B 1194 (July 31, 1780); HAT 181/8259, 29 Z 1204 (September 9, 1790); Case dated 21 Ra 1160 (April 2, 1747), #109, Muzaffarova, “Üsküdar Kadılıgı.”Câbî ˘ Ömer Efendi, Câbî Târihi, 179, 802. More examples are provided below. Entry dated 25 Z 1138 (August 24, 1726), in Recep et al., İstanbul Kadı Sicillleri, 23–24. Entry dated 13 L 1138 (June 14, 1726), in Recep et al., İstanbul Kadı Sicillleri, 103–104. İsvan, “Illegal Local Trade,” 19. Ibid., 19–20. On collective responsibility with respect to nighttime theft and robbery, see Ömer Menekşe, “XVII ve XVIII. Yüzyılda Osmanlı Devletinde Hırsızlık Suçu ve Cezası” (Marmara University, 1998), 69–70. See also Fariba Zarinebaf, “Maitien de l’ordre et contrôle social à Istanbul au XVIII siècle,” in Metiérs de police: Etre policier en Europe, XVIII–XXe siècle, Jean-Marc Berlière (ed.) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008), 88, 90, 95. On neighborhood policing, see also Marcus, The Middle East, 322–328; Ehud R. Toldano, State and Society in MidNineteenth Century Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 200–203; Eyal Ginio, “Marginal People in the Ottoman City: The Case of Salonica during the 18th Century” (in Hebrew), unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1998), 81–85. Mikhail, The Animal, 91. White, Three Years, 3:291. Smith, A Month, 69–70. In French-occupied Cairo, dogs barked and chased the soldiers, constantly harassing them on their night patrols. This led to the French decision to poison as many dogs as possible on the night of November 30, 1798. See Mikhail, The Animal, 91. Serif ¸ Mardin, who coined the term “neighborhood (or community) pressure” directly connected it to the collective gaze of the neighborhood, or “eye pressure” (göz baskısı), as he put it. See Serif ¸ Mardin and Ruşen

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Notes to pages 54–56

31

32 33

34 35

36

37

38

279

Çakır, “Mahalle Baskısı: Ne Demek İstedim?,” rusencakir.com, 29 May 2013, www.rusencakir.com/Prof-Serif-Mardin-Mahalle-Baskisi-Ne-DemekIstedim/2028 (accessed October 7, 2019). Just like the original use of the term, the discussion that ensued around the “neighborhood pressure” was highly political. See Adnan Çetin, “Bir Kavramın Kısa Tarihi: ‘Mahalle Baskısı’,” Mukaddime, 3 (2010), 81–92. Brought in Yaron Ben-Naeh, “Moshko the Jew and His Gay Friends: Same-Sex Sexual Relations in Ottoman Jewish Society,” Journal of Early Modern History, 9(1–2) (2005), 103. Ben-Naeh, “Moshko the Jew.” In some ways, sound is superior to sight. In what concerns us here, it can go around corners and travel through walls. For a fuller discussion, see Jonathan Rée, I See a Voice: A Philosophical History of Language, Deafness and the Senses (London: Harper Collins, 1999), 34–40. Cohen, Simon-Pikali, and Salama, Yehud¯ ¯ ım be-beyt ha-mishpat: ha_ meʾah ha-shmoneh-ʿesreh, 279. ÜS, vol. 407, p. 40, 24 Ca 1156 (July 16, 1743). The defendant was accused of being a “habitual criminal.” Accusing one of being a “habitual criminal” and especially in sexual crimes, was a technique commonly used by plaintiffs to increase the chances of conviction. “Habitual criminality” turned an incident from a private suit into a case of public order, and therefore, transferred the defendant to the jurisdiction of sultanic law (kanun), which set a lower bar of evidence. See Tug, ˘ Politics of Honor, 129–140. See further below. BOA, C.ZB 16/786, 13 Za 1204 (July 25, 1790). The neighbors further accused Hasan of sexually assaulting neighborhood children. On such accusations, see previous note. For additional cases of people sensing undesirable activity within their neighbors’ homes, see for example, Marinos Sariyannis, “Prostitution in Ottoman Istanbul, Late Sixteenth– Early Eighteenth Century,” Turcica, 40 (2008), 38, 49–50. ÜS, vol. 407, p. 19, 4 M 1156 (February 28, 1743). For more cases of stoning houses at night, see case dated end of Z 1159 (January 4–12, 1747), in Ahmet Kal’a (ed.), İstanbul Ahkam Defterleri: İstanbul’da Sosyal Hayat, vol. 1 (Istanbul: İstanbul Araѕ̧tırmaları Merkezi, 1997), 255; case dated 26 Ra 1160 (April 7, 1747) in Muzaffarova, “Üsküdar Kadılıgı,” ˘ 86–87; cases dated 12 M 1159 (February 4, 1746); 41–42, 30 M 1159 (February 22, 1746) in Kılıç, “1158–1159 (1745–1746) Tarihli,” 31–32. On stoning houses at night in the nineteenth century, see Atay, Batış Yılları, 22. Similar insults could be thrown at men, although it is likely that men were better positioned to cope with such slanders, e.g. by appealing to court. See for example, ÜS, vol. 466, p. 10, 5 Ca 1178 (October 31, 1764).

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280

Notes to pages 56–58

39 Muzaffarova, “Üsküdar Kadılıgı,” ˘ 142. For similar cases of verbal attack after dark, see pp. 68, 114. Accusations of “violation of honor” were common in the eighteenth century. The term covered a wide range of offenses, from rape to verbal assaults. See Tu˘g, Politics of Honor, 149–151. 40 Maksudyan, “Introduction,” 3–4; Madeline C. Zilfi, Women and Slavery in the Late Ottoman Empire: The Design of Difference (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 74. 41 Lewis, Everyday Life, 115. Even in Ramadan, which generally marked the relaxation of gender limitations, women’s being outside could raise resentment. See Câbî Ömer Efendi, Câbî Târihi, II, 690. These norms are still rather common in many contemporary Anatolian towns. See Toprak et al., Türkiye’de Farklı Olmak, 39–41, 89. In early nineteenth-century Europe, too women “of good reputation” did not allow themselves to be seen after dark. See Schlör, Nights in the Big City, 192. 42 See Chapter 3. 43 Liat Kozma, “Wandering About as She Pleases: Prostitutes, Adolescent Girls, and Female Slaves in Cairo’s Public Space, 1850–1882,” Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World, 10(1) (2012), 18–36; Leslie P. Peirce, Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 166–179, 187, 193; Betül Başaran, “Remaking the Gate of Felicity: Policing, Social Control and Migration in Istanbul at the End of the Eighteenth Century, 1789–1793,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago (2006), 237 n. 77. Madeline Zilfi notes that women too were “watchdogs of their sisters’ morality” and served as the “eyes and ears of the neighborhood.” See Zilfi, Women and Slavery, 74. 44 I borrow the term from Başak Tug. ˘ Tug˘ shows that women sometimes turned to the state to thwart such assaults and protect their honor. See Tug, ˘ Politics of Honor, 140. 45 See for example, Kılıç, “1158–1159 (1745–1746) Tarihli,” 26–27, 77, 169–170. 46 Piero Camporesi, Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Polity in association with Basil Blackwell, 1989), 94–102; Ekirch, At Day’s Close, 15–23; Koslofsky, Evening’s Empire, esp. 28–45. 47 Sariyannis, “Of Ottoman Ghosts.” 48 See the online discussion in the H-Turk discussion group held between August 6–12, 2002, www.h-net.org/logsearch/ with keyword “Ottoman witchcraft” (accessed August 2, 2018). The scholars who took part in the discussion were Michael Meeker, Carter V. Findley, Diana Wright, Selim Kuru, Nurhan Davutyan, Colin Imber, Walter Andrews, Andras Riedlmayer, Anat Lapidot-Firilla, Bogaç ˘ Ergene, Matthew Elliot, Peter

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Notes to pages 58–61

49

50

51

52 53 54

55

56 57

58 59 60

281

M. Kreuter, and Leslie Peirce. See also Sariyannis, “Of Ottoman Ghosts,” 208–209 n. 50. For a case of alleged kızılbaş heresy analyzed in the context of sociopolitical anxieties in sixteenth-century Anatolia, see Peirce, Morality Tales, 251–275. Ayfer Karakaya-Stump, The Kızılbash/Alevis in Ottoman Anatolia: Sufism, Politics and Community (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 282, 292. Semerdjian, “Because He Is So,” 194. Ergene, Local Court, 165–166. On candle-snuffing see also Ayşe Baltacıoglu-Brammer, ˘ “‘Those Heretics Gathering Secretly . . .’: Qizilbash Rituals and Practices in the Ottoman Empire according to Early Modern Sources,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, 6(1) (2019), 39–60. Snuffing the candles when in company carried sexual connotations also in Europe and North America. See Ekirch, At Day’s Close, 192–193. M. Brett Wilson, “The Twilight of Ottoman Sufism: Antiquity, Immorality, and Nation in Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoglu’s ˘ Nur Baba,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 49(2) (2017), 237–238. Heterodox groups in Anatolia have been accused of engaging in orgies with family members already in the fourteenth century. See Mehmet Köprülü, Osmanlı Devleti’nin Kuruluѕ̧u, 4th ed. (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu basımevi, 1991), 100–101. Brought in Baki Öz, Alevilige ˘ Iftiralara Cevaplar, 2. basım. (Istanbul: Can Yayınları, 1996), 23–24. Paul Rycaut, The History of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire (London: Charles Brome, 1686), bk II, 248–249. Cengiz Şiѕ̧man, The Burden of Silence: Sabbatai Sevi and the Evolution of the Ottoman-Turkish Dönmes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 183–187. Marc David Baer, The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 167–169. On nocturnal religious rituals, see Chapter 4. Robert Dankoff, “An Unpublished Account of Mum Söndürmek in the Seya¯ hatname of Evliya Chelebi,” in Bektachiyya: études sur l’ordre ¯ _ mystique des bektachis et les groupes relevant de Hadji Bektach, Alexandre Popovic and Gilles Veinstein (eds.) (Istanbul: Isis, 1995), 69–73. All translations here are by Dankoff. Ibid., 72. Transliteration here follows not Dankoff’s translation but the simpler rules adopted in this work. Ali Yıldırım, Osmanlı Engizisyonu: Zulmün Tarihi (Kalkedon Yayınları, 2008), 176–177. BOA, AE.SABH.I 7665/1, 10 B 1203 (April 6, 1789).

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282

Notes to pages 61–64

61 Baki Öz, Alevilik İle İlgili Osmanlı Belgeleri (Istanbul: Can Yayınları, 1995), 145–146. 62 That is the title of Rifat Bali’s work on the demonization of Dönmes in contemporary Turkey. See Rıfat N. Bali, A Scapegoat for All Seasons: The Dönmes or Crypto-Jews of Turkey (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2010). 63 Compulsory carrying of personal lanterns was also the rule throughout late medieval Europe. See Schivelbusch, “The Policing of Street Lighting,” 61–62. 64 See decree cited in Osman Nuri Ergin, “Tenvirat,” in Mecelle-i Umur-ı Belediyye, vol. 1 (Istanbul: Matbaa-i Osmaniyye, 1922), 975. 65 Order dated 22 B 1193 (August 7, 1779), cited in Mehmet Mazak, “Istanbul’un Aydıntama Tarihçesine Giriş,” GazBir, 11 (2011), 118. The reference to clock hours, rather than to prayer time, reflected the growing reliance on mechanical clocks. See Wishnitzer, Reading Clocks, esp. 32–44. 66 For regulations sanctioning the carrying of lanterns in the nineteenth century, see Takvim-i Vekayi, 17 Za 1262 (December 1, 1846); BOA, A.MKT.NZD 309/41, 28 S¸ 1276 (March 22, 1860). There are many documents showing that the regulations were indeed enforced. See for example, BOA. A.MKT 5/49, 25 S¸ 1264 (July 26, 1848); BOA, C.ZB 3/101, 19 R 1289 (June 25, 1872). For background see Avner Wishnitzer, “Shedding New Light: Outdoor Illumination in Late Ottoman Istanbul,” in Meier et al. (eds.), Urban Lighting, 74–75; İleri, “A Nocturnal History,” 143–149. 67 For Istanbul, see for example, BOA, C.ZB 3/101, 19 R 1289 (June 25, 1872). See also İleri, “A Nocturnal History,” 168. On Jerusalem, see Yasemin Avcı, Degiѕ̧im Sürecinde Bir Osmanlı Kenti: Kudüs (1890–1914) (Ankara: Phoenix, 2004), 228–229. 68 Wishnitzer, “Eyes in the Dark.” 69 Balıkhane Nazırı Ali Rıza, Eski Zamanlarda, 67–68; Smith, A Month, 89; White, Three Years, 3:249–250. 70 Ali Bey, Travels of Ali Bey, 2:400. 71 See for example, John Madox, Excursions in the Holy Land, Egypt, Nubia, Syria, Etc. (London: Richard Bentley, 1834), 51. 72 On artificial lighting and its limitations, see Chapter 5. 73 Edensor, “Reconnecting with Darkness, 452. 74 See Osman Nuri’s description of “anonymous” individuals walking without a lantern (fenersiz gezen hüvviyyeti mechul) in Nuri, Mecelle, vol. 1 [2inci bölüm], 914, n. 70. See also Smith, A Month, 89. 75 According to Nuri, that is the source of the term külhanbeyi that is still used in modern Turkish to denote a roughneck, hoodlum, or a hooligan.

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Notes to pages 64–69 76 77 78 79 80

81 82

83

84 85

86 87

88 89

90 91

283

Pouqueville, Travels in Greece and Turkey, 291. Charlemont, The Travels, 210–211. Ibid. Charlemont, The Travels, 210. Abdülaziz Bey, Osmanlı Âdet, 1995, 1:339–341. Writing about the late sixteenth century, Fikret Yılmaz argues that breaking into a private house required a kadı’s permission. See Fikret Yılmaz, “The Line between Fornication and Prostitution: The Prostitute versus the Subaşi (Police Chief ),” Acta Orientalia, 69(3) (2016), 255. ÜS, vol. 407, p. 3, 5 C 1155 (August 7, 1742). ÜS, vol. 466, p. 6, 16 Ca 1178 (November 16, 1764). The defendant in this case was not Emine but rather a woman named Aişe, whom the neighborhood people blamed for operating a brothel. Emine was caught in the apartment Aişe was renting. In just two weeks in December 1767, three such cases were brought before the Üsküdar court. See ÜS, vol. 474, p. 40, 9 B 1181 (December 1, 1767); ÜS, vol. 474, p. 47, 21 B 1181 (December 13, 1767); ÜS, vol. 474, p. 47, 22 B 1181 (December 14, 1767). That is an unusual rate that may have to do with a particularly active bailiff, or a host of other reasons that remain invisible to us. However, similar cases were brought to court in other times and places. See for example, ÜS, vol. 466, p. 32, 11 Za 1178 (May 2, 1765). Işık Tamdogan-Abel, ˘ “Osmanlı Döneminden Günümüz Türkiye’sine ‘Bizim Mahalle,” İstanbul, 40 (2002), 69–70. Burhan sharh bidayat ¯ ¯ ¯ al-D¯ın ʿAl¯ı b. Ab¯ı Bakr al-Margh¯ınan¯ ¯ ı, al-Hidaya: _ al-mubtad¯ı, vol. 3 (Cairo: Dar ¯ al-salam ¯ li-l-tibaʿa ¯ wa-l-nashr wa-l-tawz¯ıʿ _ wa-l-tarjama, 2000), 1099, 1098. Ben-Arieh, ʿ
Ir bi-reʾ¯ı tequfah, i:36. ¯ Avraham Moshe Luntz, Lua ¯ h ʾerets yisraʾel sh¯ımush ¯ ¯ı ve-sifruti ¯ li-shnat _ htrʾ (Jerusalem: Published by the author, 1909), 11. Very similar practices were common in Medieval Europe, and in some areas they survived into the Early Modern era. See Schivelbusch, “The Policing of Street Lighting”; Ekirch, At Day’s Close, 61–65. Leech, Letters of a Sentimental Idler, 330–331. Details here are based on the good discussion provided in Başaran, Selim III, 44–56. For more on law enforcement in eighteenth-century Istanbul, see Zarinebaf, Crime and Punishment, 125–140. Başaran, Selim III, 48–52. On the bostancılar, see also Hamadeh, The City’s Pleasures, 127. Halim Alyot, Türkiye’de Zabıta (Tarihi Gelişim ve Bugünkü Durum) (Ankara: Kanaat Basımevi, 1947), 61–63. See also Glen W. Swanson,

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92 93 94

95 96 97

98

99 100 101 102 103 104

105 106 107

Notes to pages 69–74 “Ottoman Police,” Journal of Contemporary History, 7(1) (1972), 247–250. On the sensorial experience of the urban nights, see Chapter 1. Shoberl, The World in Miniature, 8:253. For examples, see ÜS, vol. 407, p. 3, 5 C 1155 (August 7, 1742); ÜS, vol. 466, p. 32, 11 Za 1178 (May 2, 1765); ÜS, vol. 474, p. 47, 22 B 1181 (December 14, 1767). Câbî Ömer Efendi, Câbî Târihi, i, 409–410. Ekirch, At Day’s Close, 88–89. Virginia Aksan, recommends using Tott’s memoirs cautiously, as they were heavily biased by the author’s preconceptions and poor familiarity with some of the topics he covered. See Virginia Aksan, “Breaking the Spell of the Baron de Tott: Reframing the Question of Military Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1760–1830,” The International History Review, 24(2) (2002), 253–277. François Tott, Memoires of the Baron de Tott: Containing the State of the Turkish Empire & the Crimea during the Late War with Russia (London: G. G. J. & J. Robinson, 1786), 100. Tott, Memoires, 100–103. On this tradition, see Chapter 4. Câbî Ömer Efendi, Câbî Târihi, 213–214. See Chapter 3. Mustafa Naima, Tarih-i Naima, Mehmet İpşirli (ed.) (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2007), 756. Modern research about the practice is limited to short entries in several encyclopedic works and passing references in some other works. See for example, Mehmet İpşirli, “Tebdil Gezmek (Osmanlılar’da),” Halis Ayhan and Ahmet Yılmaz (eds.), Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi (hereafter TDVİA) (Istanbul: Türk Diyanet Vakfı, 2011); Necdet Sakaoglu, ˘ “Tebdil Gezmek,” Dünden Bugüne İstanbul Ansiklopedisi (Istanbul: Kültür Bakanlıgı ˘ and Tarih Vakfı, 1993); İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarѕ̧ılı, Osmanli Devletinin Saray Teskilati (Ankara: Turk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1945), 60–62; Fikret Sarıcaoglu, ˘ Kendi Kaleminden Bir Padiѕ̧ahın Portresi Sultan I. Abdülhamid (1774–1789) (Istanbul: Tatav, Tarih ve Tabiat Vakfı, 2000), 47–51. Sarıcaoglu, ˘ Kendi Kaleminden, 48. İpşirli, “Tebdil Gezmek,” 212–213. Ibid.

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Notes to pages 74–77

285

108 Semʿdânî-Zâde ¸ Fındıkıllı Süleyman Efendi, Semʿdânî-Zâde ¸ Fındıkıllı Süleyman Efendi Târihi Mürʾiʾt-Tevârih, II.2, M. Münir Aktepe (ed.) (Istanbul: Edebiyat Fakültesi Matbaası, 1978), 35. 109 BOA, HAT 1384/54834, 29 Z 1203 (January 20, 1789). 110 İpşirli, “Tebdil Gezmek.” 111 Antoine Galland (trans.), The Arabian Nights Entertainments: Consisting of One Thousand and One Stories, vol. 1 (London: T. Longman, 1789), 98. 112 Husain Haddawy (trans.), The Arabian Nights: Based on the Text of the Fourteenth-Century Syrian Manuscript Edited by Musin Mahdi (London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1990), 78. 113 Sinasi ¸ Tekin, “Binbir Gece’nin İlk Türkçe Tercümeleri ve Bu Hikayelerdeki Gazeller Üzerine,” Türk Dilleri Araştırmaları, 3 (1993), 241; Hande A. Birkalan-Gedik, “The Thousand and One Nights in Turkish: Translations, Adaptations and Issues,” in The Arabian Nights in Transnational Perspective, Ulrich Marzolph (ed.) (Detroit: Mayne State University Press, 2007), 201–220. 114 Tekin, “Binbir Gece’nin,” 242–244, 254. 115 Sadettin Egri ˘ (ed.), Elfü Leyletin ve Leyle Hikayetleri/Binbir Gece Masalları, Bursa Nüshası (Bursa: Bursa Büyükѕ̧ehir Belediyesi Kitaplıgı: ˘ Bursa Araѕ̧tırmaları Merkezi: Bursa Kültür A.Ş, 2016), 258. For the dating of the manuscript, see pp. 37–38. On the different manuscripts and the relations between them, see Tekin, “Binbir Gece’nin.” 116 Tekin, “Binbir Gece’nin.” 117 Ibid. 118 On the association of the coffeehouse with the day, and the tavern with the night, see also Marinos Sariyannis, “‘Mob,’ ‘Scamps’ and Rebels in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul: Some Remarks on Ottoman Social Vocabulary,” International Journal of Turkish Studies, 11(1–2) (2005), 10. As noted above, however, some coffeehouses certainly operated into the dark hours. Furthermore, some coffeehouses were turned into provisional taverns after dark. See Chapter 3. 119 Naima, Tarih-i Naima, 756–757. On Murad and his nightly patrols, see also Zarinebaf, Crime and Punishment, 125. 120 Dimitrie Cantemir, The History of the Growth and Decay of the Othman Empire, Part 1, M. A. Tindal (trans.) (London: John James and Paul Knapton, 1734), 249–250. 121 On such stories, see Chapter 4.

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286

Notes to pages 77–83

122 Elias Habesci, The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (London: R. Baldwin, 1784), 226. Although Habesci’s work is widely cited in the scholarship, he is often miss-identified, mostly owing to the fact that very little has been written about him, despite his fascinating life story. For a good, brief biography, see Liviu Bordas, “An Early Ideologist of British Supremacy in South and South-East Asia: Elias Habesci (1793),” in Sharing a Future in Asia: The Fifth International Convention of Asia Scholars, Kuala Lumpur, August 2–5, 2007 (Bangi: Institute of Occidental Studies, 2007), 217–218. 123 Καλλίνικου Γ΄ Πατριάρχου Κωνσταντινουπόλεως, Τα Κατά Και Μετά Την Εξορίαν Συμβάντα, Agamemnon Tselikas (ed.) (Athens: MIET, 2004), 238. Turkish words appear in the original. As I do not read Greek, I used an unpublished translation by Peter Mackridge. I thank professor Mackridge for bringing this text to my attention and kindly sharing with me his translation. I was also guided by Peter Mackridge, “The Delights of Constantinople in Eighteenth-Century Greek Literature,” A talk presented to the Levantine Heritage Foundation at the Hellenic Centre, London, April 10, 2018. 124 Καλλίνικου Γ΄ Πατριάρχου Κωνσταντινουπόλεως, Τα Κατά Και Μετά, 256. 125 Ibid. 126 Καλλίνικου Γ΄ Πατριάρχου Κωνσταντινουπόλεως, 241. 127 See Chapters 5 and 6.

Chapter 3 1 Semʿdânî-Zâde, ¸ Mürʾiʾt-Tevârih, 61. 2 I am of course alluding to Freud’s conceptualization of mental material or “wishes” that had been “pressed down” to the extent that they cannot be accessed by the conscious mind, nor can they be erased. Rather, they continue to exist subconsciously, emerging and re-emerging in various forms. Freud developed these notions especially in The Interpretation of Dreams and Moses and Monotheism. 3 Balıkhane Nazırı Ali Rıza, Eski Zamanlarda, 153, 191. Ahmed Cavid, “Hadîka-i Vekayiʿ,” Adnan Baycar (ed.) (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu ¯ Basımevi, 1998), 217. 4 Ahmet Haşim, “Müslüman Saati,” Dergah, 1(3) (1921), 35; Balıkhane Nazırı Ali Rıza, Eski Zamanlarda, 153. On the intensification of nightlife during the foreign occupation of Istanbul, see Daniel-Joseph MacArthurSeal, “Intoxication and Imperialism: Nightlife in Occupied Istanbul, 1918–1923,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 37(2) (2017), 299–313.

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Notes to pages 83–84

287

5 Woodall, “Decadent Nights,” 17–36; Wishnitzer, “Eyes in the Dark,” 250–257; Nurçin İleri, “A Nocturnal History of Fin de Siecle Istanbul,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Binghamton University (2015), 202–270. 6 See for example, Arus Yumul, “‘A Prostitute Lodged in the Bosom of Turkishness’: Istanbul”s Pera and Its Representation,” Journal of Intercultural Studies, 30(1) (February 2009), 62; Fatma Müge Göçek, East Encounters West: France and the Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford Unıversıty Press, 1987), 54; Tülay Artan, “Architecture as a Theatre of Life: Profile of the Eighteenth Century Bosporus,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, MIT (1989), 44. There are some references in eighteenth-century sources to the lack of nocturnal activity in Istanbul. See for example, Charlemont, The Travels, 210; D’Ohsson, Tableau général 3:241. 7 Akgündüz, Osmanlı ve Hukukî Tahlilleri, IV. Kitap, I. Kısım, 301, 368. On the punishments stipulated by law to drinkers and the stigma attached to drinking, see also François Georgeon, “Ottoman and Drinkers: The Consumption of Alcohol in Istanbul in the Nineteenth Century,” in Outside In: On the Margins of the Middle East, Eugene Rogan (ed.) (London/New York: I. B. Tarius, 2002), 10. 8 D’Ohsson, Tableau général, vol. 4, 63. About night-time consumption of opium and alcohol among “dervishes,” see also Tott, Memoires, 141, 143–144. On nighttime gambling, see Câbî Ömer Efendi, Câbî Târihi, I, 421. 9 For taverns open during the day, see Mirzazade Salim, Tezkire-i Salim, 535–536; Yakup Çelik (ed.), Hançerli Hanım Hikaye-i Garibesi (Ankara: Akçag˘ Yayınları, 1999), 13; Broughton, A Journey through Albania, 2:279. 10 Fariba Zarinebaf, Mediterranean Encounters: Trade and Pluralism in Early Modern Galata (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 241. 11 BOA, HAT 212/11497, 29 Z 1204 (September 9, 1790); BOA, HAT 211/11470, 29 Z 1205 (August 29, 1791). The reports themselves do not carry dates and seem to have been arbitrarily dated by the archive to the last day of the Hicri year (29 Zilhicce), along with many of the other documents pertaining to the sultan’s clampdown on alcohol and prostitution. The chronicler Ahmed Cavid, who cites some of the related sultanic decrees, allows dating them to late December 1790 and early January 1791. See Ahmed Cavid, “Hadîka-i Vekayiʿ,” 194–195, 203, ¯ 215–221. See also Chapter 7. The dates of the documents are here provided only to ease their location in the archive. They do not reflect the dates the documents were actually issued. 12 On Selim III’s campaign against Istanbul’s taverns, see Chapter 7.

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288 13 14 15 16 17 18

19

20 21

22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Notes to pages 85–87

BOA, HAT 211/11470, 29 Z 1205 (August 29, 1791). Başaran, Selim III, 115. BOA, HAT 212/11497, 29 Z 1204 (September 9, 1790). Ahmet Hezafren, “H. 1245’te (1829) Başmuhasebeye Gedik Olarak Kayıtlı İstanbul Meyhaneleri,” Tarih ve Toplum, 129 (1994), 36–39. Reѕ̧at Koçu, Eski İstanbul’da Meyhaneler ve Meyhane Köçekleri, 2. baskı. (Istanbul: Dogan ˘ Kitapçılık, 2002), 16, 37–40, 61–65. Evliya Çelebi, Evliyâ Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi: Topkapi Sarayı Kütüphanesi Bagdat ˘ 304 Numaralı Yazmanın Transkripsiyonu -Dizini, Yücel Daglı, ˘ Seyit Ali Kahraman, and Robert Dankoff (eds.), vol. 7 (Istanbul: Kredi, Yapı, 2003), 349. Luc Gwiazdzinski provides a fascinating geography of early twenty-first century night with its ebbs and flows, and different types of “people of the night” moving in and out of particular spaces, engaging in different activities, and interacting with one another in different ways. See Gwiazdzinski, La Nuit, esp. 141–191. His “spacio-temporal” mode of analysis is further developed in his later work. Başaran, Selim III, 27–33, 62–66. Florian Riedler, “Public People: Temporary Labor Migrants in Nineteenth-Century Istanbul,” in Public Istanbul: Spaces and Spheres of the Urban, F. Ekradt and K. Wildner (eds.) (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2008), 235; Başaran, Selim III, 27; Zarinebaf, Crime and Punishment, 38. Kırlı, “A Profile,” 125, 134. See Kırlı, “A Profile,” 125; Kemal Karpat, Ottoman Population, 1830–1914: Demographic and Social Characteristics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 53, table 5.3; Başaran, Selim III, 60–61; Zarinebaf, Crime and Punishment, 38; Ali Yaycıogu, ˘ Partners of the Empire: The Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of Revolutions (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 19. Zarinebaf, Crime and Punishment, 38–39. Başaran, Selim III, 97, 106; Hamadeh, “Mean Streets,” 253. On the many other terms used by the elite to refer to the urban underclass, see Sariyannis, ““Mob,” 1–15. Hamadeh, “Mean Streets,” 252–253. Başaran, Selim III, 97, 106. Mehmet Mert Sunar, “Cauldron of Dissent: A Study of the Janissary Corps, 1807–1826” (Binghamton University, 2006), 33–95, 111. Başaran, Selim III, 103.

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Notes to pages 88–91

289

31 Haim Gerber, State, Society, and Law in Islam: Ottoman Law in Comparative Perspective (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 63, 72–73, 98–99. See also Peirce, Morality Tales, 327. 32 Tug, ˘ Politics of Honor, esp. 129–140, 157–163. 33 Ginio, “Marginal People,” 81–85; Başaran, “Remaking,” 62–71; Ehud R. Toledano, State and Society in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 200–203; Semerdjian, Off the Straight Path. 34 Hamadeh, “Invisible City,” 175; Riedler, “Public People,” 240. 35 Hamadeh, “Mean Streets,” 262. 36 Hamadeh, “Invisible City.” On measures taken against these population and their limited efficacy, see also Riedler, “Public People,” 236–237; Başaran, Selim III, 33–40; Zarinebaf, Crime and Punishment, 48–50; Kırlı, “A Profile,” 134–135; Sunar, “Cauldron of Dissent,” 115. 37 Hamadeh, “Invisible City.” 38 Işık Tamdogan ˘ demonstrates this with regards to the neighborhood of Üsküdar. See Tamdogan, ˘ “Atı Alan Üsküdar’a Geçti.” On khans, see also Tamdogan-Abel, ˘ “Les han.” 39 Sunar, “Cauldron of Dissent,” 113–115, 128–131. On these networks and sites, see Ergin, “The Albanian Tellâk Connection”; Başaran, Selim III, 133–161; Hamadeh, “Invisible City,” 180–181. See also Ali Çaksu, “Janissary Coffee-Houses in Late Eighteenth-Century Istanbul,” in Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee: Leisure and Lifestyle in the Eighteenth Century, Dana Sajdi (ed.) (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007), 117–132. The janissaries’ use of the night in times of rebellion is further discussed in Chapter 7. 40 On these groups and their place in the workforce in the long eighteenth century, and their relations with the janissaries, see Riedler, “Public People”; Kırlı, “A Profile”; Sunar, “Cauldron of Dissent,” 65–77, 113–116. 41 Bogaç ˘ Ergene and Metin Coşgel, for example, show that Ottoman courts in two provincial towns in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries served the powerful much more than they served the powerless. See Ergene, Local Court; Coѕ̧gel and Ergene, The Economics. 42 Zarinebaf, Crime and Punishment, 112. Even if we take the higher figure reported by Zarinebaf for the years 1719–1721 (armed robbery and banditry, at p. 73), the percentage of violent cases in my nocturnal sample is still significantly higher.

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290

Notes to pages 91–94

43 It was only around the end of the century that the palace adopted more comprehensive – and violent – policies to assert its control. See Chapter 7. See also Hamadeh, “Mean Streets,” 259–264. 44 BOA, C.ZB 34/1675, 12 C 1226 (July 4, 1811). For more about the petition and its context, see Hamadeh, 259–264. 45 Abdülaziz Bey, Osmanlı Âdet, 2:43, 1:307. For a similar, pejorative use of the term, see Marinos Sariyannis, ““Neglected Trades: Glimpses into the 17th-Century Istanbul Underworld,” Turcica, 38 (2006), 169. 46 Mirzazade Salim, Tezkire-i Salim, 300, 467. 47 For examples, see Kal’a (ed.), İstanbul Ahkam Defterleri, 1: 191, beginning of R 1158 (May 3–12, 1745); p. 247, middle of B 1159 (July 30– August 8, 1746; p. 253, no date, 1159 (1746); p. 291, middle of C 1161 (June 8–17, 1748); p. 345, end of B 1164 (June 14–24, 1751). For chronicles, see for example, Faik Reşit Unat (ed.), 1730 Patrona Ihtilâli Hakkında Bir Eser: Abdi Tarihi (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1943), 26; Semʿdânî-Zâde, ¸ Mürʾiʾt-Tevârih, 61. 48 Câbî Ömer Efendi, Câbî Târihi, 2: 761. 49 For another example of residents’ appeal to the court concerning drinking houses that operate “day and night,” see cases dated beginning of S 1165 (December 20–29, 1751) brought in Kal’a, İstanbul Ahkam Defterleri, ii, 26–27. More examples are brought below. 50 Zarinebaf, Crime and Punishment, 100–101. On prostitution in taverns at night see also Sariyannis, “Prostitution in Ottoman Istanbul,” 51, 55, 58. On prostitutes arrested in various public spaces around town, see Hamadeh, “Mean Streets,” 265–266. 51 Geçgil, “Uskudar at the Beginning of the 18th Century,” 235. For more examples, see Kal’a, İstanbul Ahkam Defterleri, 1: 191, beginning of R 1158 (May 3–12, 1745); p. 253, no date, 1159 (1746); p. 291, middle of C 1161 (June 8–17, 1748). Muzaffarova, “Üsküdar Kadılıgı,” ˘ 41, 57, 67. For more cases of prostitutes at night, see Zarinebaf, Crime and Punishment, 86–91, 108; Sariyannis, “Prostitution in Ottoman Istanbul,” 51. 52 Kılıç, “1158–1159 (1745–1746) Tarihli Üsküdar Sicili,” 51–52. 53 For night work in Early Modern European cities, see Ekirch, At Day’s Close, 155–184. 54 Melbin, Night as Frontier, 55; Ekirch, At Day’s Close, 158–160. On the colonization of the night in recent times, see also Gwiazdzinski, La Nuit. 55 For a review of the literature, see YongMin Cho et al., “Effects of Artificial Light,” 1294–1310. For a good discussion for laypersons, see Bogard, The End of Night, 93–124.

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Notes to pages 94–96

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56 Nejdet Ertug, ˘ Osmanlı Döneminde İstanbul Balıkçıları (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2015), 25; Minna Rozen, “Boatmen’s and Fishermen‘s Guilds in Nineteenth-century Istanbul,” Mediterranean Historical Review, 15 (1) (2000), 84. For a review of the huge marine sector in Istanbul, including the different types of fishermen, see Ertug, ˘ Osmanlı Döneminde, 18–81. 57 Alan R. Longhurst, Ecological Geography of the Sea (San Diego: Academic Press, 1998); James Tuckey, Maritime Geography and Statistics, or a Description of the Ocean and Its Coasts, Maritime Commerce, Navigation Etc., vol. 2 (London: Black, Parry and Co., 1815), 371. 58 Ertug, ˘ Osmanlı Döneminde, 86. 59 Suraiya Faroqhi, “Fish and Fishermen in Ottoman Istanbul,” in Water on Sand: Environmental Histories of the Middle East and North Africa, Alan Mikhail (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 94–95. 60 Thomas Allom and Robert Walsh, Constantinople and the Scenery of the Seven Churches of Asia Minor: Illustrated (London: Fisher, Son & Co., 1838), 40; R. Walsh, A Residence at Constantinople, during a Period including the Commencement, Progress, and Termination of the Greek and Turkish Revolutions, vol. 2 (London: F. Westley & A. H. Davis, 1836), 40; Stephen Olin, Greece and the Golden Horn (New York: J. C. Derby, 1854), 306; Faroqhi, “Fish and Fishermen,” 91–107. 61 Faroqhi, “Fish and Fishermen.” 62 Mackridge, “The Delights of Constantinople.” 63 Recep et al., İstanbul Kadı Sicillleri, 518. On “porging” and “porgers,” see Minna Rozen, “A Pound of Flesh: The Meat Trade and Social Struggle in Jewish Istanbul, 1700–1923,” in Crafts and Craftsmen of the Middle East: Fashioning the Individual in the Muslim Mediterranean, Suraiya Faroqhi and Randi Deguilhem (eds.) (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), 200. 64 On Bakeries, see Y. Barnay, Yehudey ʾerets-yisraʾel ba-meʾah ha-18. Behasut ¯ R. Eshel (ed.) (Jerusalem: Yad Yitshakq Ben¯ “peqidey Qush ¯ ta,” _ _ _ Tsev¯ı, 1982), 206. See also Peirce, Morality Tales, 171. On public baths in Istanbul, see Nuri, Mecelle, vol. 1 [2inci bölüm], 914, n. 70. 65 D’Ohsson, Tableau général, vol. 4, 241. On menial jobs, see Develi, Risâle-i Garîbe, 43. On taking care of lanterns and candles, see Chapter 5. 66 Cohen, Simon-Pikali, and Ginio, Yehud ¯ ¯ım be-beyt ha-mishpat: ha-meʾah _ ha-teshaʿ-ʿesreh, 237. 67 See BOA, C.DH 16/751, 27 L 1206 (June 18, 1792). 100 guruş equals 1,200 akçe, which, divided by the number of nights each month gives 40

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292

68 69

70

71

72

73 74

75

76

Notes to pages 96–97

akçe a night. An unskilled worker could make about 68 akçe for a day of work. See Sevket ¸ Pamuk, İstanbul ve Diger ˘ Kentlerde 500 Yıllık Fiyatlar ve Ücretler 1469–1998 (Ankara: Devlet İstatik Enstitüsü Matbaası, 2000), 72. On night guards in sixteenth-century Jerusalem, see Cohen and Simon-Pikali, Yehud ¯ ¯ım be-beyt ha-mishpat: ha-meʾah ha-shesh_ ʿesreh, 52–60. The decree is brought in full in Ergin, “Tenvırat,” 965. Noémi Lévy, “Yakından Korunan Düzen: Abdülhamid Devrinden II. Meşrutiyet Dönemine Bekçi Örnegi,” ˘ in Osmanlı’da Asayiş, Suç ve Ceza (18.-20. Yy.), 141–142. Zarinebaf, Crime and Punishment, 100–101. On prostitution in taverns at night see also Marinos Sariyannis, “Prostitution in Ottoman Istanbul,” 51, 55, 58. On prostitutes arrested in various public spaces around town, see Hamadeh, “Mean Streets,” 265–266. Derviş İsmail, Dellaknâme-i Dilküşâ, brought in transliteration in Murat Bardakçı, Osmanlı’da Seks: Sarayda Gece Dersleri (Istanbul: Gür Yayınları, 1992), 88–102. The figures cites are from the accounts of Yemenici Ali (89–90) and Kız Softa (92–93). For the average wages of unskilled workers in Istanbul that year, see Pamuk, İstanbul ve Diger ˘ Kentlerde, 70. For more on the Dellaknâme-i Dilküşâ and an analysis of the relationships between these boys and their janissaries patrons, see Delice, “The Janissaries and Their Bedfellows,” 126–127. On bath attendants, see also Ergin, “The Albanian Tellâk Connection.” For a brief discussion of these numbers, see Başaran, Selim III, 120–121. Baki Tezcan, The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 175–190, 199–212; Aysel Danacı Yıldız, Crisis and Rebellion in the Ottoman Empire: The Downfall of a Sultan in the Age of Revolution (London: I. B. Tauris, 2017), 57; Başaran, Selim III, 116–126. On janissaries’ group solidarity, see Kadır Ustun, “The New Order and Its Enemies: Opposition to Military Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1789–1807” (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia Univesity, 2013), 159–160. Tezcan, The Second Ottoman Empire, 204–212; Yıldız, Crisis and Rebellion, 57–59. On the janissaries’ interaction with other socioeconomic groups, see Ustun, “The New Order,” 173–184. On the intermingling of the janissaries and guilds, and the integration of janissaries into urban economy and society, see Cemal Kafadar, “Janissaries and Other Riffraff of Ottoman Istanbul: Rebels without a Cause?,” in Identity and Identity Formation in the Ottoman World:

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Notes to page 98

77 78 79 80

81

82 83 84 85

293

A Volume of Essays in Honor of Norman Itzkowitz, Baki Tezcan and Karl K. Barbir (eds.) (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 118–122; Cemal Kafadar, “On the Purity and Corruption of the Janissaries,” Turkish Studies Association Bulletin, 15(2) (1991), 273–280; Eunjeong Yi, Guild Dynamics in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul: Fluidity and Leverage (Ledien: Brill, 2004), esp. 132–143; Gülay Yılmaz Diko, “Blurred Boundaries between Soldiers and Civilians: Artisan Janissaries in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul,” in Bread from the Lion’s Mouth: Artisans Struggling for a Livelihood in Ottoman Cities, ed. Suraiya Faroqhi (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), 175–193; Ali Yaycioglu, “Guarding Traditions and Laws – Disciplining Bodies and Souls: Tradition, Science, and Religion in the Age of Ottoman Reform,” Modern Asian Studies, 52(5) (2018), 1550–1551; Tezcan, The Second Ottoman Empire, 202–204. Yıldız, Crisis and Rebellion, 179–180. Yaycioglu, “Guarding Traditions,” 1550. Shirine Hamadeh, “Invisible City: Istanbul’s Migrants and the Politics of Space,” Eighteenth Century Studies, 50(2) (2017), 180–181. On the privileges of the janissaries, and incentives for joining the corps, see Tezcan, The Second Ottoman Empire, 204–212. Yıldız, Crisis and Rebellion, 96–99. Quote at p. 97. For “political pressure group,” see Tezcan, The Second Ottoman Empire, 182–184. Halil İnalcik writes that in the early nineteenth century, about one-fifth of the capital’s population was associated with the Bektaşis. Halil İnalcık, The Ottoman Empire; the Classical Age, 1300–1600 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973), 199. On the popular nature and following of the order, see Butrus Abu-Manneh, “Between Heterodox and Sunni Orthodox Islam: The Bektaşi Order in the Nineteenth Century and Its Opponents,” Turkish Historical Review, 8(2) (2017), 210–212, 218; Yıldız, Crisis and Rebellion, 188–191. For a glimpse of janissary culture, including its non, or even counter-orthodox tendencies, see Elif Sezer Aydınlı, “Unusual Readers in Early Modern Istanbul: Manuscript Notes of Janissaries and Other Riff-Raff on Popular Heroic Narratives,” Journal of Islamic Manuscripts, 9(2–3) (2018), 109–131. On janissary and gang-related violence, see Zarinebaf, Crime and Punishment, 119–121. This aspect is discussed in detail in Chapter 7. Esʿad Efendi, Üss-i Zafer (Yeniçeriligin ˘ Kaldırılmasına Dair), ed. Mehmet Arslan (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2005), 115. Câbî Ömer Efendi, Câbî Târihi, I, 409–410.

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Notes to pages 99–101

86 William Wilkinson, An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia: With Various Political Observations Relating to Them (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1820), 219–221. Wilkinson includes in his book a translation of a treatise titled “The Final Word to Refute the Rabble” ascribed to one “Tshelebi Efendi.” Scholars debate the authorship of the work, but according to historian Ethan Menchinger, most recently, the work was written by Ahmed Vasif. See Ethan L. Menchinger, The First of the Modern Ottomans: The Intellectual History of Ahmed Vasıf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 268–276. 87 Câbî Ömer Efendi, Câbî Târihi, I, 338–339. 88 For examples, see Câbî Ömer Efendi, I, 369–371, 437–438, 469, 491, 570, 572; II, 761–762, 821, 829. 89 Two major night brawls among janissaries over prostitutes caused several deaths in January 1809. See Câbî Ömer Efendi, I, 380, 385. For more night brawls between members of different military units, see Câbî Ömer Efendi, 437–438, 469; II, 821, 829. 90 BOA, HAT 341/19504, 29 Z 1234 (October 19, 1819); BOA, HAT 1164/46058, 29 Z 1235 (October 7, 1820); BOA, HAT 525/25660, 29 Z 1238 (September 6, 1823); Selim Karahasanoglu, ˘ Kadı ve Günlügü: ˘ Sadreddinzade Telhisî Mustafa Efendi Günlügü ˘ (1711–1735) Üstüne Bir Inceleme (Istanbul: Türkiye Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2013), 191–192. More incidents of widespread violence are discussed in Chapter 7. 91 Peter Baldwin makes a similar argument with regards to nineteenthcentury American cities. See Baldwin, In the Watches, 6. 92 Rudi Matthee noted the “stealthy” mode of popular drinking among Muslims in Istanbul but missed the importance of the night in this respect. See Rudi Matthee, “Alcohol in the Islamic Middle East: Ambivalence and Ambiguity,” Past & Present, 222(9) (2014), 100–125. 93 White, Three Years, 3:101. 94 Koçu, Eski İstanbul’da Meyhaneler, 15–16, 33–34, 45, 48. 95 Kâtib Çelebi, Tuhfetü’l-Ahyâr, 475 (407). 96 BOA, C.ZB 24/1173, 9 R 1227 (May 12, 1812); BOA, C.ZB 78/386, 14 M 1231 (December 16, 1815). 97 BOA, C.ZB 24/1173, 9 R 1227 (May 12, 1812). The drinking scene around Galata and beyond was expanding during this time. See Zarinebaf, Mediterranean Encounters, 242.

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Notes to pages 101–102

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98 Pouqueville, Travels in Greece and Turkey, 267. On gambling in coffeehouses where drunk “infidels and people of unknown status” pass their nights, see ÜS, vol. 274, p. 54, 15 S¸ 1181 (January 7, 1768). 99 Kırlı, “The Struggle over Space,” 67–130. 100 For coffeehouses at night in Istanbul and elsewhere in the empire, see for example, ÜS, vol. 407, p. 4, 11 L 1155 (December 9, 1742); ÜS, vol. 407, p. 10 14 şevval 1155 (December 12, 1742); Kafadar, “How Dark Is the History,” 264–265; Abraham Marcus, The Middle East on the Eve of Modernity: Aleppo in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 227, 231; Alan Mikhail, “The Heart’s Desire: Gender, Urban Space and the Ottoman Coffee House,” in Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee: Leisure and Lifestyle in the Eighteenth Century, Dana Sajdi (ed.) (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007), 141–142; Hattox, Coffee and Coffeehouses, 128. Coffeehouses abounded in Jerusalem during the Naq¯ıb al-Ashraf ¯ mutiny (see Adel Manna, “Mered ha-naq¯ıb al-ashraf ¯ bi-yerushalayim ¯ (1703–1705),” Cathedra: For the History of Eretz Israel and Its Yishuv, 53 (1989), 62–63) and it is most likely they operated into the evening, considering that even in the small town of Safed, in the north of Palestine, coffeehouses remained open “late into the night.” See Elliott Horowitz, “Coffee, Coffee Houses, and the Nocturnal Rituals of Early Modern Jewry,” Association for Jewish Studies Review, 14(1) (1989), 25. On janissary ownership of coffeehouses, see Çaksu, “Janissary Coffee Houses.” On coffeehouses at night in Safavid Isfahan, see Farshid Emami, “Coffeehouses, Urban Spaces and the Formation of a Public Sphere in Safavid Isfahan,” Muqarnas, 33 (2016), 197. 101 For a complaint about transients drinking and gambling in a local coffeehouse after dark, see ÜS, vol. 274, p. 54, 15 S¸ 1181 (January 7, 1768). 102 ÜS, vol. 474, p. 18, 7 S 1181 (July 5, 1767). 103 For public baths as sites of prostitution in Istanbul and Aleppo, respectively, see BOA, HAT 195/9720, 29 Z 1204 (September 9, 1790); Delice, “The Janissaries and Their Bedfellows.” Elyse Semerdjian, “Naked Anxiety: Bathhouses, Nudity and the Dhimi Woman in 18th-Century Aleppo,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 45(4) (2013), 658. See also Khaled El-Rouayheb, Before Homosexuality in the ArabIslamic World, 1500–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 42–43. 104 Several scholars have already pointed out similar dynamics with regard to the vice trade: prostitution provided various benefits to a range of

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105 106

107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114

115 116 117 118

119 120

121 122

Notes to pages 102–106 groups, including government officials who benefitted from taxes levied upon it. For the taxation of prostitution in sixteenth-century Istanbul, see Sariyannis, “Prostitution in Ottoman Istanbul,” 55–57. On government officials and soldiers as patrons of prostitutes in eighteenthcentury Aleppo, see Semerdjian, Off the Straight Path, 94–137. See also Tug, ˘ Politics of Honor, 227–229. Kırlı, “The Struggle over Space,” 58–62. Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey: Volume 2, Reform, Revolution, and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey 1808–1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 110. Ahmed Cavid, “Hadîka-i Vekayiʿ,” 216. ¯ Ibid., 217. See Chapter 7. BOA, HAT 1315/51277, 29 Z 1236 (September 27, 1821). BOA, HAT 488/23958, 29 Z 1240 (August 14, 1825). The date given by the archive is incorrect (see no. 114). BOA, HAT 639/31486, 19 Z 1242 (July 24, 1827). BOA, HAT 488/23958, 29 Z 1240 (August 14, 1825). Ibid. The document is undated and the date given by the archive is definitely wrong, as the document refers to the “abolished corps” (ocag˘ ı mulga) ˘ BOA, C.DH 16/751, 27 L 1206 (June 18, 1792). Kırlı, “The Struggle over Space,” 61. Glen W Swanson, “Ottoman Police,” Journal of Contemporary History, 7(1) (1972), 240. BOA, HAT 191/9253, 29 Z 1203 (September 20, 1789); BOA, C.BLD 22/1067, 29 L 1205 (July 1, 1791). These cases are discussed in Chapter 7. For “don’t see us” fees, see Koçu, Eski İstanbul’da Meyhaneler, 16, 36. See Robert W. Olson, “Jews, Janissaries, Esnaf and the Revolt of 1740 in Istanbul: Social Upheaval and Political Realignment in the Ottoman Empire,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 20(2) (May 1977), 206. Rabbi Mosheh Ben-Yisraʾel Naftal¯ı, “Masʿot R. Mosheh Poray¯ıt miprag,” trans. Y. D. Wilhelm, in Masʿot ʾerets yisraʾel, 283. ¯ See for example, a case dated 6 N 982 (January 9, 1575), brought in Cohen and Simon-Pikali, Yehud¯ ¯ ım be-beyt hamishpat: ha-meʾah ha_ shesh-ʿesreh, 170–171. I have not come across a similar order in the court records of the eighteenth century.

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Notes to pages 106–112

297

123 Yaron Ben-Naeh notes that “taverns, even if they existed, apparently played no great role in Jerusalem.” See Yaron Ben-Naeh, “One Cup of Coffee: Ordinances Concerning Luxuries and Recreation,” Turcica, 37 (38) (2005), 179. For a mention of taverns in late Ottoman Jerusalem, see Khal¯ıl al-Sakak¯ ¯ khal¯ıl al- sakak ¯ ¯ın¯ı: yawm¯ıyyat, ¯ ¯ ın¯ı, Yawm¯ıyyat rasaʾil ¯ wa- taʾammulat, ¯ Akram Musallam (ed.), vol. 1 (Ramallah: markaz Khal¯ıl al-Sakak¯ ¯ ın¯ı al-thaqaf¯ ¯ ı, 2003), 114. 124 Semʿdânî-Zâde, ¸ Mürʾiʾt-Tevârih, 61. 125 Mackridge, “The Delights of Constantinople.” 126 On festive illumination, see Chapter 6. 127 For examples, see BOA, HAT 228/12678 (n.d.); BOA, AE.SABH.I 13/ 1170, 10 B 1203 (April 6, 1789). For another example, see the description of the festivities held for five days and five nights on the occasion of the birth of princess Mihrimah: Irmak, “III. Mustafa Rûznâmes¯ı,” 98–99. 128 On these hierarchies, see Artan, “Architecture as Theatre,” 67–69, 92–96; Necipoglu ˘ Gülru, “A Kanun for the State, a Canon for the Arts: Conceptualizing the Classical Synthesis of Ottoman Art and Architecture,” in Soliman Le Magnifique et Son Temps, Gilles Veinstein (ed.) (Paris: Documentation Français, 1992), 208–209. 129 Semʿdânî-Zâde, ¸ Mürʾiʾt-Tevârih, 61. 130 See Chapter 7. 131 Semʿdânî-Zâde, ¸ Mürʾiʾt-Tevârih, 60–61.

Chapter 4 1 Meryem Kurumehmet, “XVIII. yy. Sairlerinden ¸ Müsellem (Seyh ¸ Ebu’lVefa Edirnevi) Hayatı, Sanatı, Divanı’nın Tenkitli Metni,” unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Marmara (2006), 167. 2 The gazel is a genre of poetry most closely associated with the “gathering” (see below). On elite leisurely gatherings and the poetry produced in and about them, see for example, Andrews, Poetry‘s Voice; Andrews and Kalpaklı, The Age of Beloveds; B. Deniz Çalıѕ̧-Kural, Şehrengiz, Urban Rituals and Deviant Sufi Mysticism in Ottoman Istanbul (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014); Zeynep Tarım Ertug, ˘ “Onaltıncı Yüzyılda Osmanlı Sarayı’nda E˘glence ve Meclis,” Uluslararası İnsan Bilimleri Dergisi, 4(1) (2007), 1–9. 3 The difficulties involved in using Ottoman court records as historical sources are referred to in Chapter 2. 4 Shahab Ahmed, What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (New Jersey: Princeton Univesity Press, 2016), esp. 117–129.

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298 5 6 7 8

9 10

11

12

13

14 15

Notes to pages 112–115

Ibid., 5–6. Ibid., 40, 80, 97. Ibid., 85–97. Daryush Shayegan, “The Visionary Topography of Hafiz,” Peter Russel trans., Temenos, 6 (1985), 207–233; Ahmed, What Is Islam?, 36. Rudi Mathee has used the same term, “ambivalence and ambiguity,” referring to dominant approaches to alcohol consumption in the Middle East, but he did not develop the concept further. See Matthee, “Alcohol in the Islamic Middle East.” Ahmed, What Is Islam?, 36. Derin Terzioglu, ˘ “Sufi and Dissident in the Ottoman Empire: Niyazi-i Misri (1618–1694),” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University (1999), 269. On the different “voices” of Ottoman poetry, see Andrews, Poetry‘s Voice. On the gazel, ambivalence and ambiguity, and on the centrality of paradox and metaphor in the mezhep-i ışk, see Ahmed, What Is Islam?, 36, 386–397. İnalcık, The Ottoman Empire, 199–202. On the influence of some of these figures on Ottoman political thought in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, see Hüseyin Yılmaz, Caliphate Redefined: The Mystical Turn in Ottoman Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). For the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see for example, Terzioglu, ˘ “Sufi and Dissident,” esp. 364–374; Çalıѕ̧-Kural, Sehrengiz, ¸ 27–62. The following works are just a few out of many that tell this story of limiting the sphere of radical dervish groups on the one hand, and the huge influence of their ideas and practices, on the other: Ahmet T. Karamustafa, God’s Unruly Friends: Dervish Groups in the Islamic Later Middle Period, 1200–1550 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994); Madeline Zilfi, The Politics of Piety: The Ottoman Ulema in the Postclassical Age (1600–1800) (Minneapolis, MN: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1988); Terzioglu, ˘ “Sufi and Dissident”; Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, Osmanlı Toplumunda Zındıklar ve Mülhidler (15.–17. Yüzyıllar) (Istanbul: Ekonomic ve Toplumsal Tarih Vakfı, 1998); Niyazioglu, ˘ Dreams and Lives; Çalıѕ̧-Kural, Sehrengiz; ¸ Yılmaz, Caliphate Redefined; Andrews and Kalpaklı, The Age of Beloveds. Ahmed, What Is Islam?, 122. Walter Andres, “Ottoman Love: Preface to a Theory of Emotional Ecology,” in A History of Emotions, 1200–1800, Jonas Lileiquist (ed.) (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012), 27.

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Notes to pages 115–117

299

16 Serife ¸ Uzun has recently argued, along somewhat similar lines, that the night in Ottoman poetry is associated with both pain and hope. See Serife ¸ Uzun, “Klasik Türk Siirinde ¸ Seb-i ¸ Yeldâ,” Selçuk Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Dergisi, 34 (2015), 353–370. 17 Night as a time of divine meditation was also prized by Christians. See for example, Koslofsky, Evening’s Empire, esp. 46–87. 18 For a good discussion of these terms and their significance within a wider context, see Ahmed, What Is Islam?, 19–26. 19 Andrews and Kalpaklı, The Age of Beloveds, 56. 20 İskender Pala, “Fükrat,” “Gam,” “Hasret,” “Seb,” ¸ in İskender Pala, Ansiklopedik Divan Siiri ¸ Sözlügü ˘ (Istanbul: Kapı Yayınları, 2009), 169, 172–173, 207, 435–436. See also, Uzun, “Seb-i ¸ Yeldâ,” esp. 358–359. 21 Serife ¸ Uzun briefly refers to love-sick lovers at night in Ottoman poetry. See Uzun, “Seb-i ¸ Yeldâ,” 356–357. 22 Osman Horata (ed.), “Esrar Dede: Hayatı, Eserleri, Siir ¸ Dünyası,” in Esrar Dede: Hayatı, Eserleri, Siir ¸ Dünyası (Ankara: T. C. Kültür Bakanlıgı, ˘ 1998), 296. 23 Wheeler M. Thuckston, “Light in Persian Poetry,” in God Is the Light of the Heavens and the Earth: Light in Islamic Art and Culture, Jonathan Bloom and Shiela Bliar (eds.) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 185–187. 24 On the beloved as light, and his absence or reluctance as darkness in Persian poetry, see ibid., 179–180. 25 Seyh ¸ Galib, “Şeyh Gâlîb Dîvânı,” Muhsin Kalkışım (ed.) (Ankara: Akçag, ˘ 1994), 405. 26 It is noteworthy that in different Islamic literary traditions the madman (majnun) ¯ is often depicted as speaking the truth to power and challenging social norms. Night-time and madness are thus both associated with counter-order. On the love-madness of Majnun ¯ see for example, ¯ Layla, Michael W. Dols, Majnun: ¯ The Madman in Medieval Islamic Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 313–339. For an Ottoman interpretation of the story, see Walter G. Andrews and Mehmet Kalpaklı, “Layla Grows Up: Nizami’s Layla and Majnun ‘in The Turkish Manner’,” in The Poetry of Nizami Ganjavi: Knowledge, Love, and Rhetoric, Kamran Talattof and Jerome W. Clinton (eds.) (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 27–51. 27 For another example, see Seyh ¸ Gâlîb, Seyh ¸ Gâlîb Dîvânı, Muhsin ˘ 1994), 284. Kalkışım (ed.) (Ankara: Akçag, 28 Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam: 35th Anniversary Edition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 107,

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29

30

31

32 33 34 35 36

37 38

39 40 41 42

Notes to pages 117–121

114–115; William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 151, 157; Layla Shamash, “The People of the Night,” Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arbi Society, 14 (1993); Karamustafa, God’s Unruly Friends, 16; John Curry, The Transformation of Muslim Mystical Thought in the Ottoman Empire: The Rise of the Halveti Order, 1350–1650 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 8. Violet MacDermot, The Cult of the Seer in the Ancient Middle East: A Contribution to Current Research on Hallucinations Drawn from Coptic and Other Texts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 48. Aviad M. Kleinberg, Flesh Made Word: Saints’ Stories and the Western Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 149–150. Erzurumlu İbrâhim Hakkı, Tıpkı Basım Ve Yeni Harflerle Erzurumlu İbrahim Hakkı Divanı, Mustafa Güneş (ed.) (Istanbul: Sahhaflar Kitap Sarayı, 2008), 154–155. Compare the words of John of the Cross (1542–1591): “The tranquil night,/at the time of the rising of the dawn,/ the silent music and sounding solitude.” Brought in Koslofsky, Evening’s Empire, 59. Mustafa Çagrıcı, ˘ “İbrâhim Hakkı Erzurûmî,” TDVİA, 21 (2000), 305–311. Erzurumlu İbrâhim Hakkı, Erzurumlu İbrahim Hakkı Divanı, 320–321. Ibid., 453. Erzurumlu İbrâhim, Erzurumlu İbrahim Hakkı Divanı, 320–321. On seeing Truth in the dark of night, see also Uzun, “Seb-i ¸ Yeldâ,” 364–365. Such paradoxes abound in apophatic and mystical references to the night in Early Modern Europe. See Koslofsky, Evening’s Empire, 79–82. Erzurumlu İbrâhim, Erzurumlu İbrahim Hakkı Divanı, 320–321. Ederunlu Osman Vasıf, Enderunlu Osman Vâsıf Bey ve Divânı: Divân-ı Gülşen-i Efkâr-ı Vâsıf-ı Enderûni¸, Rahşan Gürel (ed.) (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 1999), 353. Erzurumlu İbrâhim, Erzurumlu İbrahim Hakkı Divanı, 252–253. Ederunlu Osman Vasıf, Enderunlu Osman Vâsıf Bey ve Divânı, 282–283. Curry, The Transformation, 8–9. John Kingsley Birge, The Bektashi Order of Dervishes (London: Luzac & Co., 1937), 109–111; Thierry Zarcone, “Bektaşiyye,” Kate Fleet et al.

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Notes to pages 121–126

43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59 60

61

301

(eds.), Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE; Ahmed Yaşar Ocak, “Bektaşîlık,” TDVİA, 5 (1992), 373–379. İnalcık, The Ottoman Empire, 199. George W. Gawrych, “Seyh ¸ Galib and Selim III: Mevlevism and the Nizam-ı Cedid,” International Journal of Turkish, 91(4) (1987), 95. Abu-Manneh, “Between Heterodox,” 210–212, 218; Yıldız, Crisis and Rebellion, 188–191. Karamustafa, God’s Unruly Friends, 83–84. For a detailed description of the ayn-i cem ceremony, the use of candles, and wine consumption, see Birge, The Bektashi Order, 175–201, 50–51, 110–111, 259. See also Fredrick de Jong, “The Iconography of Bektashism: A Survey of Themes and Symbolism in Clerical Costume, Liturgical Objects and Pictorial Art,” Manuscripts of the Middle East, 4 (1989), 8. Birge, The Bektashi Order, 259: quote at 193. I am here once again drawing on Ahmed, What Is Islam?, passim. The practice was most recently discussed in Jonathan Parkes Allen, “Up All Night Out of Love for the Prophet: Devotion, Sanctity, and Ritual Innovation in the Ottoman Arab Lands, 1500–1620,” Journal of Islamic Studies, 30(3) (2019), 303–337. Ibid., 319–321. Ibid. Ibid. Allen uses “conspicuous illumination.” Hattox, Coffee and Coffeehouses, 14, 74–76. See also Kafadar, “How Dark”; Allen, “Up All Night,” 332. Horowitz, “Coffee, Coffeehouses,” 32. Ibid. Yaari, Masʿot ʾeretz yisraʾel, 349–350. On the meaning given to performing the tiqun ¯ at night, see ibid., 365. Minna Rozen, Ha-qeh¯ılah ha-yehud¯ ba-meʾah ha-yz ¯ ıt be-yerushalayim ¯ (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University and misrad ha-bitachon, hotsaʾah la-or, 1985), 95, 261–264. See also Curry, The Transformation, 168. Erzurumlu İbrâhim, Erzurumlu İbrahim Hakkı Divanı, 453. On scholarly gatherings in the sixteenth century, see Helen Pfeifer, “Encounter after the Conquest: Scholarly Gatherings in SixteenthCentury Ottoman Damascus,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 47 (2015), 219–239. Ahmed, What Is Islam?, 454. For a discussion of public (-private) and public (-private) spaces, see ibid., 363–386.

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302

Notes to pages 126–131

62 Çalıѕ̧-Kural, Sehrengiz, ¸ 10; Hamadeh, The City’s Pleasures, 159–161. On popular gatherings, see more below. 63 Andrews, Poetry‘s Voice, esp. 146–157; Pala, “Bezm,” “Seb,” ¸ in İskender Pala, Ansiklopedik Divan Siiri ¸ Sözlügü, ˘ 81, 435–436. See also Hatice Aynur and Jan Schmidt, “A Debate between Opium, Berş, Hashish, Boza, Wine and Coffee: The Use and Perception of Pleasurable Substances among Ottomans,” Journal of Turkish Studies/ Türklük Bilgisi Araştırmaları, 31(1) (2007), 85–88. 64 Çalıѕ̧-Kural, Sehrengiz, ¸ 9. This argument recalls Ahmed Karamustafa’s thesis regarding the taming of heterodox dervish groups by the Ottomans. See Karamustafa, God’s Unruly Friends, esp. 85–90. 65 Shaw, “Controlling Darkness”; Bille and Sørensen, “An Anthropology of Luminosity,” 275. On darkness and candlelight promoting intimacy in Early Modern Europe and North America, see Ekirch, At Day’s Close, 192–192. 66 Çalıѕ̧-Kural, Sehrengiz, ¸ 10. 67 The word devr (or devir) and circles in general were loaded with layers of meaning taken from Sufi thought and practice. See Behar D. Çalış, “Ideal and Real Spaces of Ottoman Imagination: Continuity and Change in Ottoman Rituals of Poetry (Istanbul, 1453–1730),” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Middle East Technical University (2004), 100–101, 113, 117, 132–133, 268–274. 68 On planets revolving around the beloved, or the patron, in Ottoman gazels and kasides, see Atillâ Sentürk, ¸ “Osmanlı Edebiyatında Felekler, Seyyâre ve Sâbiteler (Burçlar),” Türk Dünyası Araştırmaları, 90 (1994), 136–137. 69 Ahmed, What Is Islam?, 57–62. 70 Nedim, Nedîm Divânı, Muhsin Macit (ed.) (Ankara: T. C. Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlıgı, ˘ 2012), 278–279. 71 Sünbül-Zâde Vehbî, Sünbül-Zâde Vehbî Dîvânı, Ahmet Yenıkale (ed.) (Ankara: T. C. Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlıgı, ˘ 2012), 350–351. 72 Dror Ze’evi, Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 83. See also El-Rouayheb, Before Homosexuality, 36–39. 73 El-Rouayheb, Before Homosexuality, 19, 36–39. 74 Semerdjian, “Because He Is So,” 185. 75 Kâtib Çelebi, Tuhfetü’l-Ahyâr, 475a (407). 76 Abdülhak Sinasi ¸ Hisar, Boǧaziçi Mehtapları (Ankara: Varrlık, 1978); Abdülaziz Bey, Osmanlı Âdet, 1:287–291; Nabizade Nazım, Zehra (Istanbul: Özgür, 2004), 26–29.

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Notes to pages 131–134

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77 Abdülaziz Bey, Osmanlı Âdet, 1995, 1:287–291; Hisar, Boǧaziçi Mehtapları, 75; Sakaoglu ˘ and Akbayar, Binbir Gün, 143–148. 78 Very similar practices and sensibilities are described by Abdülhak Hisar in his Boǧaziçi Mehtapları, 45–46, 72–77, 87–88. 79 Ömer Zülfe, “Nâşid [1749–1791]: Dîvân,” unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Marmara (1998), 95. Translation is author’s own. For more eighteenth-century poems which refer to mehtab seyri, see Öztekin, XVIII. Yüzyıl, 376–380. 80 Nabizade Nazım, Zehra, 26. 81 Çelik, Hançerli Hanım, 54–55. 82 Mütercim Ahmed Âsım Efendi, Âsım Efendi Tarihi, 2015, 1:327. 83 Ibid., 1:326–31. 84 Ibid., 1:329–31. 85 Tott, Memoires, 100–103. Câbî Ömer Efendi, Câbî Târihi, 213–214. These accounts are discussed in Chapter 2. 86 Mackridge, “The Delights of Constantinople.” On night fishing, see Chapter 3. 87 See Rıdvan Tezel, “Eski Balıkçılık Aleminden Portreler,” in Balık ve Balıkçılık (Istanbul: Et ve Balık Kurumu Umum Müdürlügü, ˘ 1955), 15–20. 88 On modes of leisure and sensibilities shared between different classes in eighteenth-century Istanbul, see Hamadeh, The City’s Pleasures. On poetry permeating everyday Ottoman life, see Hatice Aynur, “Ottoman Literature,” in The Cambridge History of Turkey. Vol 3: The Later Ottoman Empire, 1603–1839, Suraiya Faroqhi (ed.) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 499. On the blurred boundaries and commonalities between court and popular poetry, see for example, Cemal Kurnaz, Halk Siiri ¸ ve Divan Siirinin ¸ Müşterikleri (Ankara: Kurgan Edebiyat, 2011); Kim Sooyong, The Last of an Age: The Making and Unmaking of a Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Poet (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), esp. 7–11. On the protocols of meclis across the social spectrum, see Çalıѕ̧-Kural, Sehrengiz, ¸ 9–13. On notions of the mezhep-i aşk permeating popular discourses across the Islamic world for centuries, see Ahmed, What Is Islam?, 85–97. On poems on tavern walls, see Abdülaziz Bey, Osmanlı Âdet, 1995, 2:50. On poets in taverns in different periods, see also Koçu, Eski İstanbul’da Meyhaneler, 25–32. 89 See for example, Mirzazade Salim, Tezkire-i Salim, 155. For kubera hosting drinking gatherings in their homes, see also Abdülaziz Bey, Osmanlı Âdet, 1, 307. 90 Abdülaziz Bey, Osmanlı Âdet, 1995. Elites would also at times go to taverns. See Koçu, Eski İstanbul’da Meyhaneler, 48. On the inner

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91

92

93 94

95 96

97 98

99

Notes to pages 134–137 organization of houses and the scarcity of indoor illumination see Ugur ˘ Tanyeli, “Norms of Domestic Comfort and Luxury in Ottoman Metropolises, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries,” in The Illuminated Table, esp. 302–308, 314. For a map of these taverns in the late eighteenth century, see Chapter 3. For taverns in the nineteenth century, see Georgeon, “Ottomans and Drinkers,” 11; Sakaoglu ˘ and Akbayar, Binbir Gün, 136–142. This was still the arrangement in the late nineteenth century. See Balıkhane Nazırı Ali Rıza, Eski Zamanlarda, 180. The use of lightrelated metaphors in this anecdote suggests that the same arrangement was customary in the period here discussed. Koçu, Eski İstanbul’da Meyhaneler, 46. I am drawing here on an analysis of the use of such “confined” illuminated spaces for creating hygge (loosely translated as “coziness”) in Danish culture. See Bille and Sørensen, “An Anthropology of Luminosity,” 276. Abdülaziz Bey, Osmanlı âdet, 1, 309. Mırzazade Salim, Tezkire-i Salim, 536. On the candle as a metaphor for the beloved in Turkish and Persian poetry, see Sadık Armutlu, “Kelebegin ˘ Ateşe Yolculugu: ˘ Klasik Fars ve Türk Edebiyatında Semʿ ¸ Ü Pervâne Mesnevileri,” A. Ü. Türkiyat Araştırmaları Enstitüsü Dergisi, 39 (2009), 877–907; Thuckston, “Light in Persian Poetry,” 181–182; Celâl Metînî and Fatma Kopuz, “Pervane ve Mum,” Ekev Akademi Dergisi, 17(57) (2013), 525–540. Andrews and Kalpaklı, The Age of Beloveds. Aykut Can, “Seyyîd Hasan, Sohbetnâme, I. Cilt, (1071–1072/ 1660–1661), (Inceleme-Metin),” unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Marmara (2015). For a discussion of the diary, the diarist, and his social world, see Cemal Kafadar, “Self and Others: The Diary of a Dervish in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul and First-Person Narratives in Ottoman Literature,” Studia Islamica, 69 (1989), 121–150. On the question of alcohol consumption in Seyyid Hasan Nuri’s gatherings, see Tunahan Durmaz, “Family, Companions and Death: Seyyid Hasan Nuri Efendi’s Microcosm (1661–1665),” unpublished M.A. thesis, Sabancı University (2019), 34–35. David Selim Sayers, “Sociocultural Roles in Ottoman Pulp Fiction,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 49(2) (2017), 215–216, 218–221. On the “realism” of the stories and their connection to the story-telling tradition, see also David Selim Sayers, “Tıflî Hikâyelerinin Türsel Gelişimi,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Bilkent University (2005); David Selim Sayers, “Letâʾifnâme ve Çokseslilik,” in Mitten

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Notes to pages 137–141

100 101

102 103 104 105

106 107 108

109 110

111

112

113

305

Meddaha Türk Halk Anlatıları Uluslararası Sempozyum Bildirileri, M. Öcal Oguz ˘ (ed.) (Ankara: Gazi University, 2006), 90–99. Çelik, Hançerli Hanım. Derviş İsmail, Dellaknâme-i Dilküşâ, brought in transliteration in Bardakçı, Osmanlı’da Seks, 88–102. On wages, see Donald Quataert, “Janissaries, Artisans and the Question of Ottoman Decline, 1730–1826,” in Workers, Peasants and Economic Change in the Ottoman Empire 1730–1914 (Istanbul: Isis, 1993), 201. Çelik, Hançerli Hanım, 4. Ibid., 8–13. Ibid., 21–22, 23, 31, 34–35. In elite houses, the mabeyn, lit. “in-between,” was a room that connected (and separated), the part of the house reserved for hosting and the private sections. Ahmed, What Is Islam?, 417–418. Çelik, Hançerli Hanım, 21–22. On later novelists’ use of stories from the oral tradition, including Hançerli Hanım, see for example, Güzin Dino, Türk Romanın Do˘guşu (Istanbul: Agora Kitaplıgı, ˘ 2008), 33–39; Evin, Origins and Development, 35–36. Some adventure stories circulated in manuscript form, at least since the eighteenth century, and were often read in public. See Tülün Degirmenci, ˘ “Bir Kitabı Kaç Kişi Okur? Osmanlı’da Okurlar ve Okuma Biçimleri Üzerine Bazı Gözlemler,” Tarih ve Toplum, Yeni Yaklaşımlar, 13 (2011), 7–43. M. Guboglu, ˘ “Romen Edebiyatında Bekri Mustafa ve Bekricilik,” Türk Folkloru Belleten, (1986), 317–321. Dimitrie Cantemir, The History, 249–250. On Kantemir, and some problems involved in the English translation of his work, see Mihai Maxim, “Dimitrie Cantemir,” in Historians of the Ottoman Empire, an online project by the University of Chicago, Division of the Humanities, https://ottomanhistorians.uchicago.edu/en/historian/dimitrie-cantemir (accessed December 16, 2018). Rukiye Akçar, “Iki Osmanlı Nüktedanının (Bekri Mustafa-İncili Çavuş) Fıkraları Üzerine Karşılaştırmalı Bir Araştırma,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Selçuk University (2010), 123–128. Ibid., 130. See also Esma Simşek ¸ and Ömer Faruk Elaltuntaş, “Osmanlı Devleti’nde Uygulanan İçki Yasagının ˘ Fıkralara Yansıması,” Akra Kültür Sanat ve Edebiyat Dergisi, 6 (2018), 30. See for example, Reşad Faik, Külliyat-ı Letaif (Istanbul: Dersaadet Kitaphanesi, 1912), 526–527; Himmetzade, Bekri Mustafa, 2nd ed. (Istanbul: Kitaphane-i Sudi, 1927), 13, 51–52, 85–86.

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Notes to pages 142–145

114 Mehmet Tevfik, İstanbul’da Bir Sene (Istanbul: İletişim, 1991), 165–166. 115 Wishnitzer, “Eyes in the Dark,” 248–250. 116 On late Ottoman kabadayı culture, see for example, Roger Deal, Crimes of Honor, Drunken Brawls and Murder: Violence in Istanbul under Abdülhamid II (Istanbul: Libra Kitapçılık ve Yayıncılık, 2010), 73–144. 117 Wishnitzer, Reading Clocks, 124–126. 118 For a comprehensive collection and analysis, see Dursun Yıldırım, Türk Edebiyatında Bektaşı Tipine Baglı ˘ Fıkralar (Ankara: Akcag, 1976). 119 Ibid., 164, 170. For numerous anecdotes featuring Bektaşis drinking at night see also ibid., 91, 167–171, 193. 120 Quotes from Bogard, The End of Night, 173–174.

Chapter 5 1 On preserving darkness and light pollution, see for example, Bogard, The End of Night; Meier, “Designating Dark Sky Areas”; Chepesiuk, “Missing the Dark”; Bob Mizon, Light Pollution: Responses and Remedies, 2nd ed. (New York: Springer, 2012). 2 On the concept of blackboxing, see Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1999). See also On Barak, On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 21. On the politics of electrification, see for example, Ronen Shamir, Current Flow: The Electrification of Palestine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013); Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); David Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–1940 (New York: ACLS History E-Book Project, 2005). 3 Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, 25–30, 40–44, 178. 4 Reculin, “Le règne de la nuit,” 6–7. 5 See for example, Schlör, Nights in the Big City; Baldwin, In the Watches; Otter, The Victorian Eye; Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night; İleri, “A Nocturnal History.” 6 For an important exception that is highly sensitive to the experience of light, see Ekirch, At Day’s Close. Works focusing on artificial light (as opposed to the night more generally) did touch upon questions of materiality, but little was said about the experience of light. See for example, William O’Dea, The Social History of Lighting (London: Routledge &

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Notes to pages 146–148

7 8

9

10

11 12

13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20

21

307

Kegan Paul, 1958); Jane Brox, Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010); Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night. Anthropologists have recently begun to examine the “materiality and sociality” of light. See for example, Bille and Sørensen, “An Anthropology of Luminosity.” “Mumculuk: Osmanlı Dönemi,” Dünden Bugüne İstanbul Ansiklopedisi, vol. 5, 497–498. On beeswax and beeswax candles, see Eva Crane, The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting (New York: Routledge, 1999), 524–525. John Scoffern, “The Chemistry of Artificial Illumination,” in The Circle of the Sciences: A Series of Treatises on the Principles of the Sciences, with Their Application to Practical Pursuits, vol. 7 (London: Richard Griffin & Co., 1860), 450–451. On tallow in eighteenth-century France, see Reculin, “Le règne de la nuit,” 151–153. On the preference for mutton in Istanbul, see Greenwood, “Istanbul’s Meat Provisioning,” 8. O’Dea, Social History of Lighting, 213. Sources are mostly silent on the cost and source of wicks. An exception is D. 10433, 29 Z 1202 (September 30, 1788), which includes the cost of wicks in the calculation of lighting costs in specific mosques. O’Dea, Social History of Lighting, 219. For more on eighteenth-century wicks (in France), see Reculin, “Le règne de la nuit,” 153. Hughes, Networks of Power, 5. On Kerosene, see Wishnitzer, “Kerosene Nights.” On the interplay of these factors in the case of wheat provisioning, see Rhoads Murphey, “Provisioning Istanbul: The State and Subsistence in the Early Modern Middle East,” Food and Foodways, 2(1) (1987), 217–263. Greenwood, “Istanbul’s Meat Provisioning,” 19. See also White, The Climate of Rebellion, 35–37. Greenwood, “Istanbul’s Meat Provisioning,” 19–32. Ibid., 34. BOA, HAT 206/10861, 29 Z 1205 (August 29, 1791); BOA, HAT 295/ 17541 29 Z 1230 (December 2, 1815). See also Abdullah Uysal, Zanaatkarlar Kanunu: Kanun-Nâme-i Ehl-i Hıref (Ankara: KTB, 1982), 36–37, 39. BOA, C.MTZ 11/505, 8 Za 1155 (January 4, 1743); BOA, HAT 1366/ 54120, 29 C 1222 (January 3, 1807). Although by the early nineteenth century, Istanbul lessened its reliance on this area for sheep, a stocktakings from that period shows that the principalities still provided a

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22 23 24

25 26

27 28 29 30 31

32 33

34 35 36 37 38

39

Notes to pages 148–152

huge share of the sheep slaughtered in Istanbul. In 1818, for example, 42 percent of the sheep were brought from Wallachia and Moldavia, 63,000 in total. See Greenwood, “Istanbul’s Meat Provisioning,” 29; see also 31. BOA, MVL 265/67, 1 Ra 1270 (December 2, 1853). Crane, The World History. Tamar Novick, “Milk & Honey: Technologies of Plenty in the Making of a Holy Land, 1880–1960” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2014), 22, 31–32. On sources of beeswax candles, see BOA, C.MTZ 11/505, 8 Za 1155 (January 4, 1743); White, Three Years, 3:108–109. On such calamities and their effect on livestock and provisioning, see White, The Cilmate of Rebellion, 97–102, 155–162, 247–248; Mikhail, The Animal; Murphey, “Provisioning Istanbul.” Murphey, “Provisioning Istanbul,” 219–220. BOA, C.EV 278/14182, 4 Ra 1178 (September 1, 1764). More on these disputes below. Nye, Electrifying America. BOA, HAT 1366/54120, 29 C 1222 (January 3, 1807). Yedek is defined as a horse carrying reserves and is probably the equivalent of yük, or “horse load,” standardized as 155.86 kg. See Halil İnalcık and Donald Quataert, An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1914, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xliii. BOA, HAT 206/10861, 29 Z 1205 (August 29, 1791). BOA, AE.SABH.I 4/372, 10 B 1203 (1789). The document bears no date and the date here seems to have been given by the archive since it was the last day of Abdülhamid’s life. BOA, AE.SABH.I 18/1573, 10 B 1203 (April 6, 1789). For the dating of the document, see previous note. BOA, HAT 295/17541 29 Z 1230 (December 2, 1815). Târîhi, II:808–810. Sânî-zâde ¸ MehmedʿAtâʾullah Efendi, Sânî-Zâde ¸ See Chapter 2. Contemporary probate inventories include such items as mikraz (a clipper used to snuff the burned wick), mum damlalıgı ˘ (a plate-like piece placed under the candle). On these items, see Mehmet Zeki Pakalın, “Mum Makası” and “Mum Damlalıgı” ˘ in Osmanlı Tarih Deyimleri, 581. On their appearance in probate inventories, see Bozkurt, “Tereke Defterleri,” 318. On grocers selling candles in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, see for example, HAT 1384/54834, 29 Z 1203 (September 20, 1789);

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Notes to pages 152–153

40

41

42 43 44

45 46 47 48

49 50

309

HAT 295/17541, 29 Z 1230 (December 2, 1815). On grocers selling candles in the seventeenth century, see Selma Akyazıcı Özkoçak, “Two Urban Districts in Early Modern Istanbul: Edirnekapı and Yedikule,” Urban History, 30(1) (2003), 38; Yi, Guild Dynamics, 116. On differentiation between candlemakers’ guilds, see Evliya Çelebi, Evliyâ Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi, vol. 1, pt. 1, 274. Evliya Çelebi, Evliya Çelebi, 1, Pt. 1:274. Court records from the eighteenth century mention only Muslim names, in sharp contrast to records pertaining to tallow candlemakers. See records dated 21 C 1144 (December 21, 1731), in Recep et al., İstanbul Kadı Sicillleri, 395–396. See records dated 20 Ra 1139 (October 15, 1726) and 7 S¸ 1140 (March 19, 1728), in Recep et al., İstanbul Kadı Sicillleri, 320–321, 376–382, respectively. Evliya Çelebi, Evliya Çelebi, 1, Pt. 1:274. Recep et al., İstanbul Kadı Sicillleri, 272, 281–285; White, Three Years, 3:76–77. See records dated 21 C 1144 (December 21, 1731) in Recep et al., İstanbul Kadı Sicillleri, 395–396. On very similar problems and solutions in Early Modern England, see Crane, The World History. Evliya Çelebi, Evliya Çelebi, 1, Pt. 1:274. On yamak, see Yi, Guild Dynamics, 105–107. Özkoçak, “Two Urban Districts,” 28. See also ibid.; Yi, Guild Dynamics, 126(43). On the bigger centers, see for example, BOA, C.EV 278/14182, 4 Ra 1178 (September 1, 1764); BOA, C.BLD 35/1727, 25 Ra 1208 (October 31, 1793); records dated 20 Ra 1139 (October 15, 1726) and 7 S¸ 1140 (March 19, 1728), in Recep et al., İstanbul Kadı Sicillleri, 320–321, 376–382. On workshops along the Bosporus, see BOA, C.İKTS 21 1014, 11 S 1141 (September 16, 1728). See also S. E. Kucuk, “The Story and Conservation Problems of an Industrial Heritage Building in Istanbul: The Sütülce Slaughterhouse,” in Structural Studies, Repairs and Maintenance of Heritage Architecture XIV, C. A. Brebbia and S. Hernández (eds.) (Southampton/Boston: WIT Press, 2015), 237–238. On the distribution of slaughterhouses that provided these workshops with fat, see Greenwood, “Istanbul’s Meat Provisioning,” esp. 47–53. BOA, C.İKTS 36/1784, 11 B 1180 (December 13, 1766). For an example of hisse allocation, see record dated 20 Ra 1139 (October 15, 1726) in Recep et al., İstanbul Kadı Sicillleri, 320–322. For an example of reallocation following the opening of new authorized

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310

51

52

53

54 55 56

57 58 59

60

Notes to pages 153–155

and unauthorized workshops, see, BOA, C.İKTS 36/1784, 11 B 1180 (December 13, 1766). Case dated end of Z 1168 (September 27–October 6, 1755) brought in Kal’a et al., İstanbul Esnaf Tarihi, 1:118–119. The arrangement was later renewed and remained relevant for at least a few more decades. See Ahmet Tabakoglu ˘ et al. (eds.), İstanbul Ahkâm Defterleri: İstanbul Esnaf Tarihi (1764–1793) (Istanbul: İstanbul Araştırmaları Merkezi, 1998), 366–367. Ibid., 1:281–282, end of R 1174 (November 29–December 8, 1760). A very similar dispute reached court a few decades later, which suggests the same allocation arrangements were in place. Only the actors changed. See Tabakoglu ˘ et al., İstanbul Ahkâm Defterleri: İstanbul Esnaf Tarihi (1764–1793), 353–354. See for example, BOA, C.EV 278/14182, 4 Ra 1178 (September 1, 1764); BOA, C.BLD 35/1727, 25 Ra 1208 (October 31, 1793). On the branching of the guild in the early seventeenth century, see Yi, Guild Dynamics, 126(43). Record dated 7 S¸ 1140 (March 19, 1728), in Recep et al., İstanbul Kadı Sicillleri, 376–382. The owners may have been subletting vakıf property over which they had rights as tax farm, see Yi, Guild Dynamics, 54–55. BOA, C.BLD 35/1727, 25 Ra 1208 (October 31, 1793); BOA, HAT 625/ 30915, 23 Z 1248 (May 13, 1833). See also Özkoçak, “Two Urban Districts,” 38; Zeki Tekin, “İstanbul Debbaghaneleri,” ˘ Osmanlı Tarihi Araştırma ve Uygulama Merkezi Dergisi, 8 (2015), 349–364. C.BLD 35/1727, 25 Ra 1208 (October 31, 1793). On the sanctioning of relations between butchers and dependent guilds in vakfiyes, see Greenwood, “Istanbul’s Meat Provisioning,” 54. The earlier decree is dated 29 L 1128 (October 16, 1716), in Recep et al., İstanbul Kadı Sicillleri, 328–329. The same arrangement is described in detail in a series of petitions and decrees enclosed under BOA, C.EV 278/ 14182, 4 Ra 1178 (September 1, 1764). These are discussed in some detail below. On similar arrangements in other guilds, see Yi, Guild Dynamics. Record dated 20 Ra 1139 (October 15, 1726), in Recep et al., İstanbul Kadı Sicillleri, 320–322. Another record, dated 7 S¸ 1140 (March 19, 1728), lists 38 workshops, out of which 31 seem to be in Yedikule, 4 “outside Egrikapı,” ˘ and 3 in Eyüp. I cannot explain the differences between the numbers of workshops cited in those two documents, nor the discrepancies in the names of the owners and operators. That they are all from the same guild is evidenced by the fact that in both lists, the head

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Notes to pages 155–159

61 62 63

64 65 66 67

68 69

70 71 72 73

74 75 76 77 78 79

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of the guild (kethuda) is al-hac Mahmud. For the second document, see Recep et al., İstanbul Kadı Sicillleri, 376–382 Ibid., 1:61–62, end of Ca 1162 (May 9–18, 1749); 137–138, Beginning of M 1170 (September 26–October 5, 1756). Genç, “Ottoman Industry,” 63. On the workshop operated by the mumcubaşı in Yedikule, see record dated 7 S¸ 1140 (March 19, 1728) in Recep et al., İstanbul Kadı Sicillleri, 376–382. On the authority of the head of the state-owned workshop over all candlemakers, see Evliya Çelebi, Evliya Çelebi, 1, Pt. 1:274. BOA, C.İKTS 36/1784, 11 B 1180 (December 13, 1766). See for example, İsvan, “Illegal Local Trade.” BOA, C.MTZ 11/505, 8 Za 1155 (January 4, 1743). BOA, AE.SMST.III, 43/3085, 29 Z 1171 (September 3, 1758). On candlemaking in the provinces, see also Güler Yarcı, “Osmanlı’da Mum ve Beykoz İspermeçet Mumu Fabrikası,” in Mum Kitabi, Emine Gürsoy-Naskali (ed.) (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2015), 27–30. For a somewhat similar case in Kastamonu, see BOA, C.BLD 137/6804, 29 R 1179 (October 15, 1765). Ahmet Refik, On Altıncı Asırda Istanbul Hayatı (1553–1591) (Istanbul: Devlet Kitabevi, 1935), 112–113; Ahmet Refik, Hicrî on Birinci Asırda Istanbul Hayatı (1000–1100) (Istanbul: Devlet Matbaası, 1931), 28–29; Kate Fleet, “The Extremes of Visibility: Slave Women in Ottoman Public Space,” in Ottoman Women in Public Space, Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet (eds.) (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 134. BOA, C.İKTS 15/707, 3 Z 1107 (June 4, 1696). See also Özkoçak, “Two Urban Districts,” 38; Diko, “Blurred Boundaries,” 185. Recep et al., İstanbul Kadı Sicillleri, 272, 281–285. BOA, C.EV 278/14182, 4 Ra 1178 (September 1, 1764). Tekin, “İstanbul Debbaghaneleri,” ˘ 355, 360. We know of complaints about butchers withholding tallow from candlemakers already in the sixteenth century. See Refik, On Altıncı Asırda, 123. BOA, C.EV 278/14182, 4 Ra 1178 (September 1, 1764). A decree dated 29 L 1128 (October 16, 1716), in Recep et al., İstanbul Kadı Sicillleri, 328–329. Recep et al., İstanbul Kadı Sicillleri, 376. BOA, C.BLD 35/1727, 25 Ra 1208 (October 31, 1793). Diko, “Blurred Boundaries,” 185. On the involvement of janissaries in the economic sphere, see Sunar, “Cauldron of Dissent,” 32–95. Record dated 7 S¸ 1140 (March 19, 1728), in Recep et al., İstanbul Kadı Sicillleri, 376–382. On the title beşe, see Güçlü Tülüveli, “Honorific Titles in Ottoman Parlance: A Reevaluation,” International Journal of

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80 81 82 83 84

85

86 87

88 89

90 91

92 93

Notes to pages 159–162

Turkish Studies, 11(1–2) (2005), 21–22. The presence of janissaries in this guild conforms to Sunar’s findings, according to which janissaries were represented also among professions that required considerable skill. See Sunar, “Cauldron of Dissent,” 64. On janissary candlemakers and illegal trade, see ibid., 83–84, 252. Sunar, “Cauldron of Dissent,” 86. On the “traditionalist” rhetoric of guild politics and its reality, see Yi, Guild Dynamics, 113–165. BOA, C.EV 278/14182, 4 Ra 1178 (September 1, 1764). Arif Bilgin, “Narh Listeleri ve Üsküdar Mal Piyasası,” in Üsküdar Sempozyonu IV (Istanbul, 2007), 186–187. Cases dated end of Ca 1162 (May 9–18, 1749); 137–138, Beginning of M 1170 (September 26–October 5, 1756), in Kal’a, İstanbul Esnaf Tarihi, 1:61–62. Dogan ˘ Kuban, “Aydınlatma: Osmanlı Dönemi,” Dünden Bugüne İstanbul Ansiklopedisi, 475. On the narh and its renewed use as a comprehensive policy between 1789–1850, see Süleyman Özmucur and Sevket ¸ Pamuk, “Real Wages and Standards of Living in the Ottoman Empire, 1489–1914,” The Journal of Economic History, 62(2) (2002), 293–321. Pamuk, İstanbul ve Diger ˘ Kentlerde, 72. Tevfik Güran, Ekonomik ve Mali Yönleriyle Vakıflar: Süleymaniye ve Sehzade ¸ Paşa Vakıflar (Istanbul: Kitapevi, 2006), 150. In the midseventeenth century too, beeswax candles were more than trice the price of tallow candles. See Bilgin, “Narh Listeleri,” 186–187. Scoffern, “The Chemistry,” 444. R. B. Graves, Lighting the Shakespearean Stage, 1567–1642 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 184. For more data about different types of candles, see Andrew Ure, “Candles,” in A Dictionary of Chemistry on the Basis of Mr Nicholson’s, Andrew Ure (ed.) (Philadelphia: Robert Desilver, 1821), 295. Tayfun Toroser (ed.), Kavanin-i Yeniçeriyan: (Yeniçeri Kanunları) (Istanbul: Türkiye İѕ̧ Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2011), 96. This estimation is based on Graves, Lighting the Shakespearean Stage, 130. I converted the English standard to the Ottoman measure of 51.312 g per common tallow candle. Reculin, “Le règne de la nuit,” 156–159. Michael Nizri, Ottoman High Politics and the Ulema Household (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 162–163. As already mentioned, two imperial palaces toward the end of the eighteenth century were allocated almost 110 kg of tallow monthly, excluding beeswax candles. See Tabakoglu ˘ et al., İstanbul Ahkâm Defterleri: İstanbul Esnaf Tarihi (1764–1793), 363, beginning of Ca 1202 (February 8–17, 1788).

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Notes to pages 162–166

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94 In order to simplify things, I calculated beeswax candles as being of the same size as “common” tallow candles, although I have no indication that this was the case. 95 Nizri, Ottoman High Politics, 81. 96 Bozkurt, “Tereke Defterleri,” 315–321. For another study that demonstrates similar trends, see Pınar Ceylan, “Essays on Markets, Prices and Consumption in the Ottoman Empire (late-seventheenth to midnineteenth centuries),” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, London School of Economics (2016), 195–196. On inequality in access to light, see also Kafadar, “How Dark,” 257–258. 97 Tabakoglu ˘ et al., İstanbul Ahkâm Defterleri: İstanbul Esnaf Tarihi (1764–1793), 369, beginning of Ca 1202 (February 8–17, 1788). 98 Scoffern, “The Chemistry,” 452; Brox, Brilliant, 13–14; Graves, Lighting the Shakespearean Stage, 14–16. 99 On candles‘ consumption of oxygen, see O’Dea, Social History of Lighting, 19. 100 Scoffern, “The Chemistry,” 452; Graves, Lighting the Shakespearean Stage, 14. 101 Pakalın, “Mum Makası,” 581. 102 Mehmet Zeki Pakalın, “Samdancı ¸ Başı,” Osmanlı Tarih Deyimleri, 308. 103 O’Dea, Social History of Lighting, 6, 18–19. 104 Tott, Memoires, 96. 105 Kafadar, “How Dark,” 264–265. 106 Cited in Ekirch, “The Modernization of Western Sleep,” 276. For a review of studies on the effect of light-darkness alterations on sleep patterns, see Galinier et al., “Anthropology of the Night,” 824–825. 107 On the use of olive and sesame oil for illumination in nineteenthcentury Palestine, see Shmuel Avitsur, Ḥayey yom-yom be-ʾerets-yisraʾel ba-meʾah ha-teshaʿ-ʿesreh (Tel Aviv: ʿAm ha-sefer, 1972), 169–171. 108 Scoffern, “The Chemistry,” 460. See also O’Dea, Social History of Lighting, 19. 109 For example, BOA, HAT 1578/11, 28 L 1244 (May 3, 1829); JS, vol. 230, p. 131, 20 L 1153 (January 7, 1741); complaint dated middle of Ra 1117 (August 2–11, 1705), cited in Cohen, Simon-Pikali, and Salama (eds.), Yehud ¯ ¯ım be-beyt hamishpat ha-muslem ¯ ¯ı: ha-meʾah ha_ shmoneh-ʿesreh, 145. Among the Jews, oil lamps were often called nerot (usually translated as “candles”) and it was these lamps, rather than actual candles, that were used for the traditional “candle lighting” (hadlaqat nerot) service on the eve of Sabbath. See Avitsur, Ḥayey yomyom, 171.

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Notes to pages 166–169

110 Nathan Schur, Toldot yerushalayim, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Devir, ¯ 1987), 697. 111 This is, at least, the picture that arises from the work of Amnon Cohen on the sixteenth century. See Amnon Cohen, Economic Life in Ottoman Jerusalem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 14. 112 On olives, olive oil, and soap production Ottoman Palestinian, see ibid., 61–97; Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 131–232; Amy Singer, Palestinian Peasants and Ottoman Officials: Rural Administration around SixteenthCentury Jerusalem (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 78–79. 113 Cohen, Economic Life in Ottoman Jerusalem, 76. 114 Ibid., 81. 115 Ibid., 77. 116 Ibid., 75. 117 O’Dea, Social History of Lighting, 221–22. 118 Cohen, Economic Life in Ottoman Jerusalem, 77–78. 119 Rabbi Mosheh Ben-Yisraʾel Naftal¯ı, “Masʿot R. Mosheh Poray¯ıt miprag,” trans. Y. D. Wilhelm, in Masʿot ʾerets yisraʾel, 278. ¯ 120 George Gore, Marcus Sparling, and John Scoffern, Practical Chemistry: Including the Theory and Practice of Electro-Deposition, Photographic Art, the Chemistry of Food, with a Chapter on Its Adulterations, and the Chemistry of Artificial (London: Houlston and Stoneman, 1856), 470. 121 David de-beyt Hilel, “Masʿot David de-beyt Hilel be-ʾerets yisraʾel vebe-suryah,” in Yaʿar¯ı, Masʿot ʾerets yisraʾel, 504. The conversion of ratl ¯ _ is based on İnalcık and Quataert, An Economic, 2:xlii. 122 Singer, Palestinian Peasants, 78. 123 Gedalyah mi-s¯ım¯ıyat¯ ¯ ıts, “Masʿot R. Gedalyah mi-s¯ım¯ıyat¯ ¯ ıts ʿ¯ım shayeret Yehudah ha-Ḥas¯ıd,” in Yaʿar¯ı, Masʿot ʾerets yisraʾel, ¯ 323–368; David Millard, A Journal of Travels in Egypt, Arabia, Petrae, and the Holy Land during 1841–1842 (Rochester: Erastus Shepard, 1843), 258. 124 O’Dea, Social History of Lighting, 19, 27, 40. On oil lamps used in Jerusalem and their problems, see Avitsur, Ḥayey yom-yom, 69–72. 125 Tobler, Denkblätter Aus Jerusalem, 182. I thank Joana Bürger for her help in reading and translating the relevant parts of this book. 126 Shmuel Avitzur, “ha-Rovaʿ ha-yehud¯ ¯ ı ba-ʿ¯ır ha-ʿat¯ıqah,” in Praq¯ım betoldot ha-yeshuv ed. Yehuda Ben Porat, ¯ ha-yehud¯ ¯ ı bi-yerushalayim, ¯

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Notes to pages 169–176

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Ben Zion Yehoshua, and Aharon Kedar, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben Zvi, 1973), 39; Avitsur, Ḥayey yom-yom, 71. On oil lamps in churches, see Millard, Journal of Travels, 258. 127 See Chapter 6.

Chapter 6 1 Hasan Kaya, “Divan Siirinde ¸ Mum,” in Mum Kitabi, Emine Gürsöy Naskali (ed.) (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2015), 124. 2 White, Three Years, 3:249–250. On the carrying of lamps at night, see Chapter 2. 3 Can Erimtan, Ottomans Looking West?: The Origins of the Tulip Age and Its Development in Modern Turkey (New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2008). 4 Ahmet Refik, Lale Devri (Istanbul: Hilmi Kitaphanesi, 1932). 5 Artan, “Architecture as Theatre”; Hamadeh, The City’s Pleasures; Selim Karahasanoglu, ˘ “A Tulip Age Legend: Consumer Behavior and Material Culture in the Ottoman Empire (1718–1740)” (Ph.D. dissertation, Binghamton University, 2009); Zilfi, Women and Slavery, 6–7; Zarinebaf, Crime and Punishment, 11–50. 6 Koslofsky, Evening’s Empire, 1–2. 7 On light spectacles and politics in Early Modern Europe, see especially Koslofsky, 91–127. On the use of festive illumination in the Baroque, see also Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, 3–4, 137–43. On light and Enlightenment, see McMahon, “Illuminating the Enlightenment.” See also Gwiazdzinski, La Nuit, 23–28. 8 On this repertoire and the Tulip Age’s place in expanding it, see Ariel Salzmann, “The Age of Tulips: Confluence and Conflicts in Early Modern Consumer Culture (1550–1730),” in Consumption Studies and the History of the Ottoman Empire, 1550–1922: An Introduction, ed. Donald Quataert (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 83–106. 9 On the Ottoman provisioning system and its priorities, see Murphey, “Provisioning Istanbul”; Greenwood, “Istanbul’s Meat Provisioning”; White, The Climate of Rebellion, 276–297; Tülay Artan, “Aspects of the Ottoman Elite’s Food Consumption: Looking for ‘Staples,’ ‘Luxuries,’ and ‘Delicacies’ in a Changing Century,” in Quataert, Consumption Studies, 107–200. 10 BOA, İE.BH 14/01237, 25 L 1136 (July 17, 1724); BOA, HAT 695/3354 29 Z 1249 (May 9, 1834); C.BH 244/11301, 29 Z 1251 (March 16, 1836).

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Notes to pages 176–179

11 BOA, C.AS 1023/4484 28 Za 1201 (September 11, 1787); C.AS 136/ 6050, 3 R 1211 (October 11, 1796); C.AS 561/23544, 1 N 1210 (March 9, 1796). 12 Yarcı, “Osmanlı’da Mum,” 17. 13 Evliya Çelebi, Evliya Çelebi, 1, Pt. 1:69. Similar candles illuminated the mosques in the Ḥaram al-Shar¯ıf in Jerusalem. See Robert Hillenbrand, “The Uses of Light in Islamic Architecture,” in Bloom and Blair, God Is the Light, 105–106. 14 Evliya Çelebi, Evliya Çelebi, 1, Pt. 1:58. 15 On mosques’ illumination during the Ottoman era, see Kuban, “Aydınlatma”; Tanju Cantay, “Asma Kandillik,” TDVİA, vol. 3, 498–499. 16 On the labor needed to keep multiple light sources burning, see Chapter 5. 17 The numbers are gleaned from Güran, Ekonomic ve Mali Yönleriyle Vakıflar, 111–112. On the provisioning and maintenance of illumination devices in Mamluk mosque complexes, see Abdallah Kahil, “The Delight and Ambiguity of Light in Mamluk Architecture,” in Bloom and Blair, God Is the Light, 245–247. 18 Julia Pardoe, The Beauties of the Bosphorus (George Virtue: London, 1838), 81. 19 BOA, EV.d 14116, register begins in 15 L 1265 (September 3, 1849). 20 BOA, EV.d 11651, 1257 (1842). It should be noted that some artificial light was probably needed during the day too, as not all corners of these huge buildings were sufficiently illuminated. The document cited here, however, refers only to nighttime usage. 21 Scoffern, “The Chemistry,” 460. 22 M. A. Abdel Haleem (trans.), The Qurʾan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 23 Bille and Sørensen propose treating light as an agent in its own right and raise questions like “what does light do? How is light used? What does light mean?” See Bille and Sørensen, “An Anthropology of Luminosity,” 265. 24 Light is used in the Quran both concretely and figuratively. On light as metaphor for guidance, faith, and Islam in general, see William A. Graham, “Light in the Qurʾan and Early Islamic Exegesis,” in Bloom and Blair, God Is the Light, 50–52. 25 Ibid., 52–53. 26 De Boer, “Nur: ¯ Philosophical Aspects,” EI2; Graham, “Light in the Qurʾan,” 53–54.

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Notes to pages 179–182

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27 On this notion among Bektaşis, see Birge, The Bektashi Order, 114; de Jong, “The Iconography of Bektashism,” 13. 28 De Boer, “Nur: ¯ Philosophical Aspects.” 29 Mehdi Amin Razavi, Suhrawardi and the School of Illumination, 2nd ed. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 31–32. See also Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions, 4. 30 Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions, 70. 31 Armutlu, “Kelebegin ˘ Ateşe Yolculugu,” ˘ 882–883. 32 İlhan Kutluer, “Hikmetü’l İşrâk,” TDVİA, 17 (1998), 524. 33 Birge, The Bektashi Order, 75. As Birge notes in a footnote, erler in Sufi discourse refers more specifically to saints. 34 Ahmed, What Is Islam?, 365. 35 On the “order of the world,” see Gottfried Hagen, “Legitimacy and World Order,” in Legitimizing the Order: The Ottoman Rhetoric of State Power, Hakan T. Karateke and Maurus Reinkowski (eds.) (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 55–83. Hagen argues (at p. 81) that over the eighteenth century, the concept gradually lost its appeal. See also Menchinger, The First of the Modern Ottomans, esp. 84–85. 36 Cantay, “Asma Kandillik.” 37 According to Kahil, the light of glass lanterns inscribed with the Light Verse in Mamluk mosques, medreses, and Sufi lodges, stood for the faith of the donor, who financed their purchase, provisioning, and maintenance, rather than for divine light. Kahil, “The Delight,” 248–253. The two, however, are not mutually exclusive. 38 Mütercim Ahmed Âsım Efendi, Âsım Efendi Tarihi, 2015, 1:144–145. 39 Oded Peri, Christianity under Islam in Jerusalem: The Question of the Holy Sites in Early Ottoman Times (Ledien: Brill, 2001), 182–183. 40 On the complex, see especially Amy Singer, Constructing Ottoman Beneficence: An Imperial Soup Kitchen in Jerusalem (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002). 41 St. H. Stephan, “An Endowment Deed of Khasseki Sultan, Dated the 24th May 1552,” The Quarterly of the Department of Antiquities in Palestine, 10 (1944), 190–191. 42 See for example, Mosheh Ben El¯ıyahu¯ ha-Lev¯ı, “Masʿot Mosheh Ben El¯ıyahu¯ ha-Lev¯ı ha-qaraʾ¯ı,” in Yaari, Masʿot ʾerets yisraʾel, 317, 318, 321–322. See also Rozen, ha-qeh¯ılah ha-yehud 95, ¯ ¯ıt be-yerushalayim, ¯ 261–264. 43 T. Canaan, “Light and Darkness in Palestine Folklore,” The Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society, 11 (1931), 20. See also pp. 26, 36.

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Notes to pages 182–185

44 Mosheh Yerushalm¯ ı, “Masʿot R. Mosheh Yerushalm¯ ı,” Y. D. Wilhelm ¯ ¯ (trans.), in Yaʿar¯ı, Masʿot ʾerets yisraʾel, 431. See also ibid., 445–446, 449. 45 On “lightscapes” see Bille and Sørensen, “An Anthropology of Luminosity.” 46 See the calculation of olive oil cost for the thousands of lanterns in the Aya Sofya mosque: BOA, EV.d 14116, register’s beginning date 15 L 1266 (August 24, 1850). 47 BOA, EV.d 14116. The Defter begins at 15 L 1266 (August 24, 1850). 48 Nebi Bozkurt, “Kandil,” TDVİA, 24 (2001), 300–301. 49 İlhan Tekeli (ed.), “Kandiller,” Dünden Bugüne İstanbul Ansiklopedisi, vol. 4, 408. Tradition has it that the external illumination of mosques on holidays goes back to the second caliph, ʿUmar. Before the Ottomans, such illumination was practiced on a large scale by the Mamluks. See Kahil, “The Delight,” 241–243, 248–249. 50 BOA, HAT 228/12678 (n.d.). For very similar requests for decrees concerning the Mevlid nights of 1789 and 1791, and the Regaip night of 1792, see respectively BOA, HAT 1451/14 (around early December 1789); BOA, HAT 211/11361 (around mid-November 1791); BOA, HAT 205/10745 (Toward the end of March 1792). All documents do not indicate the dates they were written. Since the requests were written a few days prior to the kandil night in question, their date can only be estimated. 51 BOA, HAT 179/8050, 1210/1796 (no exact date given). 52 Ibid. 53 BOA, D 10404/1 (1840, no exact date found). 54 Record dated 24 N 1128 (September 11, 1716) brought in Recep et al., İstanbul Kadı Sicillleri, 38–39. 55 D’Ohsson, Tableau général, vol. 3, 37. 56 For a contemporary description of this reversal, see for example, D’Ohsson, Tableau général, vol. 3, 32–47; Elizabeth Craven, A Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1789), 277–278; James Capper, “Observations on the Passage to India” (London: W. Faden, 1785), 70. For scholarly analyses, see François Georgeon, “Les usages politique de Ramadan, de l’Empire Ottoman à la République de Turquie,” in Ramadan et Politique, Fariba Adelkhah and François Georgeon (eds.) (Paris: CNRS, 2000), 21–39; Avner Wishnitzer, “The Transformation of Ottoman Temporal Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Tel Aviv University (2010), 80–85; Adam Mestyan, “Upgrade? Power and Sound during Ramadan and `Id Al-Fitr in the

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Notes to pages 186–188

57 58 59

60 61

62

63 64 65

66

67

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Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Arab Provinces,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 37(2) (2017), 262–279. Ali Bey, Travels of Ali Bey, 2: 399–400. Nebi Bozkurt, “Mahya,” TDVİA, 27 (2003), 396–398. Stefanos Yerasimos, “The Imperial Procession: Recreating a World Order,” in Sûrnâme: An Illustrated Account of Sultan Ahmed III‘s Festival of 1720, Dogan ˘ Kuban, Stefanos Yerasimos, and Mertol Tulum (eds.) (Bern: Ertug˘ & Kocabıyık, 2000). Salzmann, “The Age of Tulips,” esp. 93. While some of the extant studies do refer to the nocturnal dimension of these celebrations, for the most part they do not engage analytically with their significance. See for example, Derin Terzioglu, ˘ “The Imperial Circumcision Festival of 1582: An Interpretation,” Muqarnas, 12(1) (1994), 85, 89; Mehmet Arslan, Osmanlı Saray Dügünleri ˘ ve Şenlikleri, vols. 4–5 (Istanbul: Sarayburnu Kitaplıgı, ˘ 2009), 324–327; Esin Atil, “The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Festival,” Muqarnas, 10 (1993), 82, 84–85; Sinem Erdogan ˘ İşkorkutan, “Between Representation and Reality: A Critical Evaluation of Narratives of the 1720 Festival and Unknown Archival Sources,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, 6(1) (2019), 121–140. On Ottoman fireworks see Suraiya Faroqhi, “Fireworks in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul,” in Medieval and Early Modern Performance in the Eastern Mediterranean, Arzu Öztürkmen and Evelyn Birge Vitz (eds.) (Turnhout, 2014), 181–194; Metin And, Osmanlı Senliklerinde ¸ Türk Sanatları (Ankara: Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlıgı ˘ Yayınları, 1982), 101–121. Hakan Karateke, “Illuminating Ottoman Ceremonial,” in Bloom and Blair, God Is the Light, 282–307. The imperial festival staged in Edirne in 1675 already included an elaborate evening program, including illuminations and firework displays. See Efdal Sevinçli, “Festivals and Their Documentation,” in Celebration, Entertainment and Theatre in the Ottoman World, Suraiya Faroqhi and Arzu Öztürkmen (eds.) (London: Seagull Books, 2015), 193–195. See Chapter 3. Yerasimos, “Sûrnâme,” 8. On the personal interests of the patrons, and their affect on the texts and illustrations of the 1720 surnames, see İşkorkutan, “Between Representation and Reality.” Atil, “The Story,” 181. Another illustrated version of the same text was painted by another court artist by the name of İbrahim: see İşkorkutan, “Between Representation and Reality.” İşkorkutan, “Between Representation and Reality.”

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Notes to pages 188–193

68 Ahmet Ertug˘ (ed.), Sûrnâme: Sultan Ahmed’in Dügün ˘ Kitabı (Bern: Ertugrul & Kocabıyık, 2000), 223. 69 Koslofsky, “Princes of Darkness,” 239–241. 70 Arslan, Osmanlı Saray Dügünleri, ˘ 4–5, 295. 71 The text is brought in full in Arslan, Osmanlı Saray Dügünleri. ˘ For descriptions of illuminations and fireworks, see for example, pp. 366, 369, 372, 375–378, 384–385, 388. 72 Καλλίνικου Γ΄ Πατριάρχου Κωνσταντινουπόλεως, Τα Κατά Και Μετά, 238–239. As I do not read Greek, I used an unpublished translation by Peter Mackridge. I thank professor Mackridge for bringing this text to my attention and kindly sharing with me his translation. 73 Καλλίνικου Γ΄ Πατριάρχου Κωνσταντινουπόλεως, 239. Translation by Mackridge. 74 Tott, Memoires, 169–173. 75 Ibid., 171. For a similar contemporary description, see Habesci, The Present State, 406–409. 76 Sevengil, İstanbul Nasıl Egleniyordu, ˘ 60. 77 Tott, Memoires, 169–170, 172. 78 According to a poll conducted by the British Institute for Leadership and Management, 73 percent of the interviewees (1,000 British workers and managers), reported that the prospect of an upcoming vacation increased their level of stress. See www.institutelm.com/resourceLibrary/summerholiday-stress.html (accessed March 19, 2019). 79 On the question of “leisure” as a clearly demarcated sphere in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, see Sariyannis, “Time, Work and Pleasure.” Hedda Reindl-Kiel has recently argued that by the seventeenth century, the Ottomans did have a clear concept of “leisure.” See Hedda ReindlKiel, Leisure, Pleasure and Duty. The Daily Life of Silahdar Mustafa, Éminence Grise in the Final Years of Murad IV (1635–1640), Stephan Conermann and Gül Sen ¸ (eds.) (Berlin: EB-Verlag, Dr. Brandt, 2017), 6. For the debate regarding contemporary Europe, see Peter Burke, “The Invention of Leisure in Early Modern Europe,” Past and Present, 146 (1995), 136–150; Joan-Lluis Marfany, “Debate: The Invention of Leisure in Early Modern Europe,” Past and Present, 156 (1997), 174–191. On the slippage between leisure and politics in the seventeenth-century Ottoman court see also, Reindl-Kiel, Leisure, Pleasure and Duty. 80 Sariyannis, “Time, Work and Pleasure,” 801–802. 81 Mehmet İpşirli, “Musâhib,” TDVİA, 31 (2006), 230–231. 82 Günhan Börekçi, “Factions and Favorites at the Courts of Sultan Ahmed I and His Immediate Predecessors,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University (2010), 151–152.

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Notes to pages 193–198

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83 See for example, Dikici, “Imperfect Bodies,” 101–102. 84 Börekçi, “Factions and Favorites,” 151–152. 85 See for example, Destari Salih, Destari Salih Tarihi: Patron Halil Ayaklanması Hakkında Bir Kaynak, Bekir Sıtkı Baykal (ed.) (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1962), 3. This opinion was also shared by at least some of the European diplomats. See Salzmann, “The Age of Tulips,” 92. 86 BOA, A.E.III. Ahmed 227/21888 (n.d.). 87 For the first quote, see BOA, E.SAMD III 223/ 21490; For the second, BOA, A.E.III. Ahmed 215/20805. 88 BOA, A.E.III. Ahmed 222/21416. 89 See for example, Mehmed Subhî, Sâmî, ve Hüseyin Sâkir, ¸ Subhî Tarihi: Sâmî ve Sâkir ¸ Tarihleri Ile Birlikte 1730–1744 (Inceleme ve Karşılaştırmalı Metin), Mesut Aydıner (ed.) (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2007), 223–226, 649–651, 728–729, 731–734. On leisure life in the midseventeenth century Ottoman court, see Reindl-Kiel, Leisure, Pleasure and Duty. 90 Wishnitzer, “The Transformation,” 101–103. 91 Irmak, “III. Mustafa Rûznâmes¯ı”; Arıkan, “III. Selimin Rüznamesi.” On Abdülhamid I, see Sarıcaoglu, ˘ Kendi Kaleminden, 45–46. 92 Shaw, “Controlling Darkness.” For a fuller discussion, see Chapter 4. 93 Cited in Sevengil, İstanbul Nasıl Egleniyordu, ˘ 94. Translation is mine. 94 On sleeping time at the court, see Chapter 1. On the “nocturnalization” of court life in contemporary Europe, see Koslofsky, Evening’s Empire, esp. 110–127. 95 The most detailed description of these popular gatherings dates back to the early 1880s. See Mehmet Tevfik, İstanbul’da Bir Sene, 46–48; Sakaoglu ˘ and Akbayar, Binbir Gün, 125. 96 Karahasanoglu, ˘ Kadı ve Günlügü, ˘ 56. On halva gatherings in Edirne, see Ratip. Kazancıgil, Edirne Helva Sohbetleri ve Kıѕ̧ Gecesi Eglenceleri ˘ (Edirne: Türk Kütüphaneciler Dernegi ˘ Edirne Şübesi, 1993). 97 Sakaoglu ˘ and Akbayar, Binbir Gün, 122; Kazancıgil, Edirne Helva Sohbetleri, 14, 16; Selim Nüzhet Gerçek, İstanbul’dan Ben de Geçtim, Ali Birinci and İsmail Kara (eds.) (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 1997), 109. 98 Sakaoglu ˘ and Akbayar, Binbir Gün, 120–125. 99 On this “troika” and their close relations, see Karahasanoglu, “A Tulıp Age Legend,” esp. 40–44. 100 Sevengil, İstanbul Nasıl Egleniyordu, ˘ 92–95; Sakaoglu ˘ and Akbayar, Binbir Gün, 120–122; Kazancıgil, Edirne Helva Sohbetleri, 5–8. 101 On the meclis in the sixteenth-century Ottoman court, see Ertug, ˘ “Onaltıncı Yüzyılda.” On full moon parties at court in the seventeenth

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103

104 105 106

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109 110 111

112 113

Notes to pages 198–200 century, see Reindl-Kiel, Leisure, Pleasure and Duty, 18–19, 23. See also Refik, Lale Devri, 35–36. For a reference to a çıragan ˘ party in a seventeenth-century poetry collection, see Öztekin, Divanlardan, 351. D’Ohsson, Tableau général, vol. 4, 249; Joseph De Hammer, Histoire de’l Empire Ottoman depuis son origine jusqu’a nos jours, Recherche (Paris: Bellizard, Barthes, Dufour et Lowell, 1839), vol. 14, 64–65; Mehmed Raşid Efendi, Tarih-i Raşid, vol. 3, 205–206. D’Ohsson, Tableau général, vol. 4, 249. For a çıragan ˘ party organized by Esma Sultan, daughter of Ahmed III, for the ladies of the harem, see Tott, Memoires, 78–80. On çıragan ˘ parties in the early nineteenth century, see Mehmet Ali Beyhan, “Amusements in the Ottoman Palace of the Early Nineteenth Century,” in Faroqhi and Öztürkmen, Celebration, Entertainment and Theatre, 233. Mehhmed Raşid Efendi, Tarih-i Raşid, vol. 5, 205–206; D’Ohsson, Tableau général, 249; Hammer, Histoire de’l Empire Ottoman, 64–65. D’Ohsson, Tableau général, vol. 4, 249. BOA, AE.SAMD.III 221/21374, 1730 (this is the date given by the archive, as this was the last year of Ahmed III‘s reign. The document itself is undated). See for example, Asım Efendi Küçükçelebizade, Tarih-i İsmail Asım Efendi, 366–377, 470–471; Raşid Efendi, Tarih-i Raşid, vol. 3, 319. In mean time terms, according to sunset hours in April for the latitude of Istanbul, these hours would translate to between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. For descriptions of çıragan ˘ parties, see Raşid Efendi, Tarih-i Raşid, vol. 5, 205–206, 292–295; Tarih-i İsmail Asım Efendi, 363–367, 456–458, 460–461; Vincent Mignot, Histoire de l’Empire Ottoman, depuis son origine jusqu’à la paix de Belgrade en 1740, vol. 4 (Paris: Le Clrec, 1773), 317–319; D’Ohsson, Tableau général, vol. 4, 248–249; Hammer, Histoire de’l Empire Ottoman, 64–65. For a description of such a party held during the reign of Mustafa III (1757–1774), see Tott, Memoires, vol. 1, 78–80. For discussions of Ottoman garden parties, see especially Andrews, Poetry‘s Voice, 143–174; Çalıѕ̧-Kural, Sehrengiz, ¸ 63–105. Ahmet Nedim, Nedim Divanı (Istanbul: İkdam Matbaası, 1338–1340 (1920–1922)), 196–197. İzzet Ali Paѕ̧a, Lâle Devri Şairi İzzet Ali Paѕ̧a: Hayatı, Eserleri, Edebî Kiѕ̧iligi ˘ Divan: Tenkitli Metin Nigâr-nâme: Tenkitli Metin, Ali İrfan Aypay (ed.) (İstanbul: [s.n.], 1998), 94–96. Aypay, Lâle Devri Sairi, ¸ 94–96. For more on the real and metaphorical use of light in nighttime parties, see Chapter 4.

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Notes to pages 200–203

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114 Nedim, Nedim Divanı, 196–197. 115 The parties were known and noted in real time by people who were not invited to take part in them. For example, the kadı (judge) Sadreddinzade Telhisi Mustafa Efendi (d. 1736), repeatedly reported the parties in his diary, and the Venetian representative (baili) in Istanbul, Giovanni Emo, described in his dispatches the çıragan ˘ festivities of 1722. See Karahasanoglu, ˘ Kadı Ve Günlügü, ˘ 106–109; Mary Shay, The Ottoman Empire from 1720 to 1734 as Revealed in Despatches of the Venetian Baili (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944), 20. 116 I could not find any information on the author in the standard biographical dictionaries of the period. As far as I am aware, the only scholarly work on this manuscript is Philippe Bora Keskiner and Ünal Araç, “Çeragan ˘ Eglenceleri ˘ ve Çiçekleri Tarihine Işık Tutan Bir Eser: Tuhfe-i Çeragan,” ˘ İstanbul Araştırmaları Yıllıgı, ˘ 3 (2014), 1–8. The manuscript was first located by Nurhan Atasoy. See Nurhan Atasoy, Hasbahçe: Osmanlı Kültüründe Bahçe ve Çiçek (Istanbul: Aygaz, 2002), 169. 117 Vahidi, Tuhfe-i Çıragan, ˘ Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Kütüphanesi, H. 1442, folios 1A–2. 118 English translation from Abdel Haleem, The Qurʾan. ˘ 10. 119 Vahidi, Tuhfe-i Çıragan, 120 Quoted in Öztekin, Divanlardan, 355. Translation is mine. 121 Aypay, Lâle Devri Sairi, ¸ 94–96. 122 On the Safavid ruler Shah Abbas I and the light spectacle he organized for foreign envoys in 1629, see Emami, “Coffeehouses,” 177. On light spectacles in contemporary European courts, see Koslofsky, Evening’s Empire, 91–127. On the competitive aspect of Ottoman and European light demonstrations see also, And, Osmanlı Senliklerinde ¸ Türk Sanatları, 101. 123 Mehmed Efendi Yirmisekiz Çelebi, Yirmisekiz Çelebi Mehmed Efendi’nin Fransa Sefaretnamesi, ed. Beynun Akyavaş (Ankara: Türk Kültürünü Araştırma Ensititüsü, 1993), 148. 124 And, Kırk Gün, 15. 125 Karateke, “Illuminating Ottoman Ceremonial,” 294. On European impressions of Ottoman firework ability, see Yerasimos, “Sûrnâme,” 9, 11; And, Osmanlı Senliklerinde ¸ Türk Sanatları, 101. Damad İbrahim was particularly keen to demonstrate Ottoman power and sophistication to European envoys. See And, Kırk Gün, 14. 126 Blumenberg, “Light as a Metaphor for Truth,” 52–54. 127 McMahon, “Illuminating the Enlightenment.”

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Notes to pages 203–204

128 Descriptions of dark Istanbul by contemporary Europeans are brought in Chapter 1. On the depiction of the Empire as the opposite of Enlightened Europe, see Vefa Erginbaş, “Enlightenment in the Ottoman Context: İbrahim Müteferrika and His Intellectual Landscape,” in Historical Aspects of Printing and Publishing in Languages of the Middle East: Papers from the Third Symposium on the History of Printing and Publishing in the Languages and Countries of the Middle East, University of Leipzig, September 2008, Geoffrey Roper (ed.) (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 56–57. On the rising interest in the lands of Islam among contemporary Europeans, see, most recently, Alexander Bevilacqua, The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018). 129 For a typical example of such construction, see “History,” Encyclopædia Britannica: Or, a Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, &c. On a Plan Entirely New (Edinburgh: Printed for J. Balfour and Co. W. Gordon, J. Bell, J. Dickson, C. Elliot, W. Creech, J. Mccliesh, A. Bell, J. Hutton, and C. Macfarquhar, 1778), 3678. Thomas Thornton notes that the “Turkish government” is blamed for “extinguishing the light of science.” He disagrees. See Thomas Thornton, The Present State of Turkey, vol. 2 (London: Joseph Mawman, 1809), 18. 130 Bekir Harun Küçük, “Early Enlightenment in Istanbul,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California San Diego (2012), 6–7; Erginbaş, “Enlightenment in the Ottoman Context: İbrahim Müteferrika and His Intellectual Landscape.” 131 Küçük, “Early Enlightenment in Istanbul.” 132 Khaled El-Rouayheb, Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century: Scholarly Currents in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 8. 133 Albeit from a very different angle, Nir Shafir’s study of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Ottoman “religiosity” too emphasizes “intra-imperial regime of circulation” over “more distant connections.” See Nir Shafir, “The Road from Damascus: Circulation and the Redefinition of Islam in the Ottoman Empire, 1620–1720,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California (2016), 2. 134 Karateke, “Illuminating Ottoman Ceremonial,” 294–296. See also Yirmisekiz Çelebi’s account, noted above. 135 I am here drawing on Erimtan, Ottomans Looking West? See also Can Erimtan, “The Perception of Saadabad: The ‘Tulip Age’ and the Ottoman-Safavid Rivalry,” in Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee:

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Notes to pages 205–210

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Leisure and Lifestyle in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Dana Sajdi (London/New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007), 41–62. 136 Vahidi, Tuhfe-i Çıragan, ˘ 3. 137 Keskiner and Araç, “Çeragan ˘ Eglenceleri,” ˘ 3–4. 138 Vahidi cites the prominent Persian poets Saʿd¯ı and Hafez, and his writing is extremely heavy with Persian vocabulary, references, and imagery. See also ibid., 8.

Chapter 7 1 Câbî Ömer Efendi, Câbî Târihi, 408–409. 2 Ibid., 409. These actions may have receded but did not cease entirely. On November 25 that same year (1809), two men were reportedly executed for writing on people’s doors at night, spreading “seditious ideas.” Cabi provides no further details about the identity of those men. See ibid., 579. 3 I take the concept of “protocols of Rebellion” from Sunar, “Cauldron of Dissent,” 127–129. He, in turn, adopted it from John Bohsted, Riots and Community Politics in England and Wales, 1790–1810 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983). For a much more elaborate discussion of the janissaries’ protocols of rebellion, see Yıldız, Crisis and Rebellion, 17–43. For a similar notion, see Yaycıoglu, “Guarding Traditions,” 1563. 4 On these dependencies, see Chapter 3. 5 For different, partly conflicting analyses of the rebellion and its social background, see Zarinebaf, Crime and Punishment, 54–69; Robert W. Olson, “The Esnaf and the Patrona Halil Rebellion of 1730: A Realignment in Ottoman Politics?,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 17(3) (1974), 329–344; M. Münir Aktepe, Patrona İsyanı (1730) (Istanbul: Edebiyat Fakültesi Basımevi, 1958); Karahasanoglu, ˘ “A Tulıp Age Legend.” 6 This is assuming that Faik Reşit Unat’s identification of the writer is correct. See Faik Reşit Unat (ed.), “Önsöz,” in 1730 Patrona Ihtilâli Hakkında Bir Eser: Abdi Tarihi (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1943) xi, no. 2. 7 Unat, Abdi Tarihi, 26. 8 As argued in Karahasanoglu, ˘ “A Tulıp Age Legend.” 9 See Chapter 1. 10 Unat, Abdi Tarihi, 30–32. 11 John Montague, A Voyage Performed by the Late Earl of Sandwich Round the Mediterranean in the Years 1738 and 1739 (London: T. Cadell Jr. & W. Davies, 1799), 233. 12 Unat, Abdi Tarihi, 30–32.

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326 13 14 15 16 17

18

19 20 21 22

23

24 25 26 27

28 29

Notes to pages 210–214

Ibid., 32. Ibid., 32, 35–36, 45. Quote at p. 36. Salih, Destari Salih Tarihi, 7. Ergin, “The Albanian Tellâk Connection.” On bachelors in the night, see Chapter 3. Derviş İsmail, Dellaknâme-i Dilküşâ, brought in transliteration in Bardakçı, Osmanlı’da Seks, 88–102. For a good analysis, see Delice, “The Janissaries and Their Bedfellows.” Salih, Destari Salih Tarihi, 7–8. The transliteration here reads “efsürde-i hâb-ı fesâd olmak için” but it should probably be “efsürde-hâb fesâd olmak için.” See Chapter 3. Salih, Destari Salih Tarihi, 8, 12, 15, 19, 20. Ibid., 19. Reşad Ekrem Koçu (ed.), “Balmumları ile Teşhir (Idam Mahkumları),” İstanbul Ansiklopedisi (Istanbul: İstanbul Ansiklopedisi ve Neşriyat Kollektif Șirketi, 1960), vol. 4, 2059–2060. On the crisis and calls for reform following the humiliating defeat in the 1768–1774 Russo-Ottoman war, see for example, Yıldız, Crisis and Rebellion, esp. 44–77; Başaran, Selim III, esp. 13–71; Virginia H. Aksan, “Ottoman Political Writing, 1768–1808,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 25(1) (1993), 53–69; Virginia H. Aksan, An Ottoman Statesman in War and Peace: Ahmed Resmi Efendi, 1700–1783 (Leiden: Brill, 1995); Sariyannis, Ottoman Political Thought, 153–167; Menchinger, The First of the Modern Ottomans; Yaycıogu, ˘ Partners of Empire, esp. 38–64. On blaming the janissaries, see Yaycıoglu, “Guarding Traditions,” 1567. On stricter control of the esame market, Yıldız, Crisis and Rebellion, 63–64. Fikret Sarıcaoglu, ˘ “Osmanlı Muhalefet Geleneginde ˘ Yeni Bir Dönem: İlk Siyasî Bildiriler,” Belleten, 64(241) (2001), 901–20. On the risk of nocturnal fires, see Chapter 1. Karahasanoglu, ˘ Kadı ve Günlügü, ˘ 159. Additional examples from other contemporary writers are brought below. Taylesanizade Hafız Abdullah Efendi, İstanbul’un Uzun Dört Yılı (1785–1789): Taylesanizâde Hafız Abdullah Efendi Tarihi, Feridun M. Emecen (ed.) (Istanbul: TATAV, 2003), 97–98, 118, 159. For more examples, see Câbî Ömer Efendi, Câbî Târihi, I, 270. See also ibid., II, 628. Taylesanizade Hafız Abdullah Efendi, İstanbul’un Uzun Dört Yılı, 159. Ebru Aykut Türker, “Alternative Claims on Justice and Law: Rural Arson and Poison Murder in the 19th Century Ottoman

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Notes to pages 214–217

30 31

32 33 34 35 36

37 38

39 40 41

42

43

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Empire,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Bogaziçi ˘ University (2011), 105–107. Ekirch, At Day’s Close, 54–56; Aykut Türker, “Alternative Claims,”, 115. Ehud R. Toledano, As If Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 177–181; Hakan Y. Erdem, “Magic, Theft, and Arson,” in Race and Slavery in the Middle East, Terence Walz and Kenneth M. Cuno (eds.) (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2011), 125–145. Aykut Türker, “Alternative Claims,” 109. For many examples, see ibid. esp. 136–196. Derviş Efendi-Zade Derviş Mustafa Efendi, 1782 Yılı Yangınları, 8. Sarıcaoglu, ˘ “Osmanlı Muhalefet,” 905–908. Ibid., 906–907. See for example, Sultan Mahmud II’s 1818 order to the chief of the janissaries as cited by his court chronicler, Sânî-zâde ¸ MehmedʿAtâʾullah Efendi, Sânî-Zâde ¸ Târîhi, II:855. Taşyakan, “The Volunteer Firefighters,” 73. James Dallaway, Constantinople Ancient and Modern, with Excursions to the Shores and Islands of the Archipelago and to the Troad (London: T. Cadell Jr. & W. Davies, 1797), 74. Haas and Tietz, St. Petersburgh, Constantinople, 154. Boyar and Fleet, A Social History, 87. For some of the important work of this new scholarship, see AbuManneh, “Between Heterodox”; Yıldız, Crisis and Rebellion; Kahraman Sakul, ¸ “Nizâm-ı Cedid Düşüncesinde Batılılaşma ve İslami Modernleşme,” DÎVÂN İlmî Araştırmalar, 19(2) (2005), 117–150; Yaycıoglu, “Guarding Traditions.” On the rather long tradition of advocating state and military reform based on European models, that informed the New Order, see for example, Enver Ziya Karal, “Tanzimattan Evvel Garplılaşma Hareketleri (1718–1839),” in Tanzimat I; Yüzüncü Yıldönümü Münasebetile (Istanbul: Maarif Matbaası, 1940), 13–30; Aksan, An Ottoman Statesman, esp. 184–205; Aksan, “Ottoman Political Writing”; Menchinger, The First of the Modern Ottomans, esp. 76–88; Darina Martykánová, Reconstructing Ottoman Engineers: Archaeology of a Profession (1789–1914) (Pisa: Pisa University Press, 2010), 3–7. On these institutions, see for example, Kemal Beydilli, Türk Bilim ve Matbaacılık Tarihinde Mühendishane, Mühendishane Matbaası ve Kütüphanesi (1776–1826) (Istanbul: Eren, 1995); Martykánová, Reconstructing Ottoman Engineers, 7–16.

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Notes to pages 217–219

44 For the difficulties involved in applying this concept to the eighteenthcentury Ottoman Empire, see Chapter 6. 45 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 169. 46 Butrus Abu-Manneh, “The Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya in the Ottoman Lands in the Early 19th Century,” Die Welt Des Islams, 22 (1/4) (1982), 12–13; Hamid Algar, “The Naqshbandi Order: A Preliminary Survey of Its History and Significance,” Studia Islamica, 44 (1976), 143–144. Algar notes (p. 144), that even among the Nakşibendis-Müceddidis, some still subscribed to Ibn Arabi‘s doctrines. On bidʿat as tradition, see Yaycıoglu, “Guarding Traditions,” 1582–1583. On the original Nakşibendi order in the Ottoman Empire, see especially Dina Le Gall, A Culture of Sufism: Naqshbandis in the Ottoman World, 1450–1700 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005). On the School of Love, see Chapter 4. 47 Yıldız, Crisis and Rebellion, 137–139. 48 Yaycıoglu, “Guarding Traditions,” 1585. On the most influential revivalist movement in the Ottoman world prior to the rise of the Nakşibendi-Müceddidis, see Zilfi, The Politics of Piety. 49 Yıldız, Crisis and Rebellion; Abu-Manneh, “Between Heterodox,” 208; Yaycıoglu, “Guarding Traditions,” 1566–1567. 50 Yaycıoglu, “Guarding Traditions,” 1588–1599. On the connection of the most prominent thinker among the reformists, Ahmed Vasıf (d. 1806), with the Nakşibendi-Müceddidis, see Menchinger, The First of the Modern Ottomans, 22–23. 51 Abu-Manneh, “Between Heterodox,” 210. For a more systematic discussion of the Nakşibendi-Müceddidi leanings of the leaders of the New Order, Yıldız, Crisis and Rebellion, 137–142, 204–209. On the Mevlevi attachment of Selim III, see Gawrych, “Seyh ¸ Galib.” 52 Yaycıoglu, “Guarding Traditions,” 1578–1579. 53 Abu-Manneh, “Between Heterodox,” 209–210. 54 This tension would later explode in the revolt of May 1807. See AbuManneh, 210–211. 55 Başaran, Selim III, 72–80. 56 For a brief discussion of Selim’s move against the taverns, see Kırlı, “The Struggle over Space, “ 58–62. 57 BOA, HAT 381/54515, 29 Z 1203 (September 20, 1789). This document, like many other documents pertaining to this issue, was dated by the archive to the last day of the Hicri year. 58 Ibid. See also Başaran, Selim III, 80–81. 59 Ahmed Cavid, “Hadîka-i Vekayiʿ,” 194–195, 203, 215–221. Most ¯ documents pertaining to the issue do not bear a date. Many of them

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Notes to pages 220–225

60

61 62 63

64 65 66 67 68 69

70

71 72 73

74 75 76 77 78 79 80

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seem to have been arbitrarily dated by the archive to the last day of the Hicri year 1204. It is Ahmed Cavid’s chronicle that allows dating them with confidence. See Chapter 3. Ibid., 219–220. On Turhallı Mustafa Efendi, see Sare Yıldız, “Turhallı Mustafa Efendi’nin Hayatı, Eserleri ve Tasavvuf Anlayışı,” unpublished M.A. thesis, Ankara University (2006), 26–29. Brought in full in Ahmed Cavid, “Hadîka-i Vekayiʿ,” 194–195. ¯ Cavid himself notes (p. 218) that the taverns were open “night and day.” On the use of the term in Ottoman texts, see Chapter 3. See for example, BOA, C.ZB 8/369, 20 Z 1205 (August 20, 1791); BOA, C.ZB 13/642, 29 N 1205 (June 1, 1791). Again, the dating of these documents by the archive should be ignored. BOA, C.ZB 8/369, 20 Z 1205 (August 20, 1791). See also Hamadeh, “Mean Streets,” 270. BOA, HAT 195/9720, 29 Z 1204 (September 9, 1790). Ahmed Cavid, “Hadîka-i Vekayiʿ,” 203, 205. ¯ Ibid., 194–195, 203. This approach is somewhat similar to that of Grand Vizier Koca Sinan Paşa (d. 1596), when he was assigned a similar task with regards to coffeehouses. See Kafadar, “How Dark,” 252. In the front too, high officials were trying to cool down the sultan’s unrealistic ambitions. See Menchinger, The First of the Modern Ottomans, 157–158. BOA, HAT 189/9020, 29 Z 1203 (September 20, 1789). Erdir Zat, Rakı: The Spirit of Turkey (Istanbul: Overteam Yayınları, 2012), 82. Ahmed Cavid, “Hadîka-i Vekayiʿ,” 203, 215–217. The chronicler ¯ explains that it was the need for the tax imposed on alcohol that drove the leaders of the empire to allow the re-opening of taverns. See also Chapter 3. BOA, C.BLD 22/1067, 29 L 1205 (July 1, 1791). BOA, HAT 191/9253, 29 Z 1203 (September 20, 1789). Hamadeh, “Mean Streets,” 267. BOA, Hat 208/11055, 29 Z 1204 (September 9, 1790). On the deliberations, see also BOA, HAT 195/9720, 29 Z 1204 (September 9, 1790). BOA, Hat 208/11055, 29 Z 1204 (September 9, 1790). Başaran, Selim III, 94. BOA, HAT 195/9720; HAT 209/11176; HAT 206/10845. Although according to their contents, these documents could not have been issued on the same day, they were all given the same date by the archive, 29 Z 1204 (September 9, 1790). Two other documents that pertain to the same issue, HAT 212/11497 and HAT 212/11497 were also given the

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81 82 83 84

85 86 87

88 89 90 91 92 93 94

95

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Notes to pages 225–230

same date. The true dating of the whole correspondence, according to Ahmed Cavid is between late December 1790 and early January 1791. BOA, HAT 206/10845, 29 Z 1204 (September 9, 1790). Ibid. Ibid.; BOA, HAT 211/11470, 29 Z 1205 (August 29, 1791). Yıldız, Crisis and Rebellion, 74–75; Menchinger, The First of the Modern Ottomans, 186. Kırlı notes that in addition to the economic interests, the sultan may have responded to petitions sent by the inhabitants of the Agean islands, who depended on the production of alcoholic beverages for livelihood. See Kırlı, “The Struggle over Space,” 61. On the janissary opposition to these efforts and its motives, see Ustun, “The New Order,” esp. 146–192. Yıldız, Crisis and Rebellion. Câbî Ömer Efendi, Câbî Târihi, 128. Various contemporary chroniclers holding different views regarding the rebellion all note the rebels’ use of the night for preparations, consultations, and intrigue. See for example, Mütercim Ahmed Âsım Efendi, Âsım Efendi Tarihi, Ziya Yılmazer (ed.), vol. 2 (Istanbul: Türkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu Başkanlıgı, ˘ 2015), 787, 800–803; Fahri Ç. Derin (ed.), “Yayla İmamı Risalesi,” İstanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Tarih Enstitüsü Dergisi, 3 (1972), 224, 229; Fahri Ç. Derin, “Tüfengçi-Başı Ârif Efendi Tarihçesi,” Belleten, 38 “Mustafa Necib (151) (1974), 385, 389, 397, 421; Bayram Dogan, ˘ Efendi Tarihi,” unpublished M.A. thesis, Ankara University (2001), 33. Yıldız, Crisis and Rebellion, 27–28. Câbî Ömer Efendi, Câbî Târihi, 269–270. Ibid., 270. Ibid., 270–273. On the death of Alemdar and the conflicts that ensued in the following nights, see also Derin, “Yayla İmamı Risalesi,” 254–56. Mütercim Ahmed Âsım Efendi, Âsım Efendi Tarihi, 2015, 2:1271. Sunar, “Cauldron of Dissent,” 158–199. BOA, HAT 341/19504, 29 Z 1234 (October 19, 1819). For more examples of janissary-related nocturnal violence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Chapter 3. Sadreddinzade Telhisi Mustfa Efendi’s diary was in the possession of a certain Sadık, who commented on some of its original entries. Sadık, about whom we know next to nothing, also used the empty space of that older diary to inscribe his own entries. For the cited entry, see Karahasanoglu, ˘ Kadı ve Günlügü, ˘ 191–192. On Sadık and his additions to Sadreddinzade’s diary, see pp. 183–201. BOA, HAT 1164/46058, 29 Z 1235 (October 7, 1820). The incident occurred on the night of September 27, 1820, assuming that Eylül in the document is the Ottoman Rumi Eylül (or the Julian September).

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Notes to pages 230–237

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97 BOA, HAT 525/25660, 29 Z 1238 (September 6, 1823). 98 Sunar, “Cauldron of Dissent,” 67–69. 99 BOA, HAT 525/25660, 29 Z 1238 (September 6, 1823). For another shooting incident, this time by sailors, see case dated 11 S 1160 (February 22, 1747), in Muzaffarova, “Üsküdar Kadılıgı,” ˘ 57. 100 Sunar, “Cauldron of Dissent,” 158–199. 101 Es’ad Efendi, Üss-i Zafer, 60. The chronicle was written soon after the events in 1826. 102 For examples, see ibid., 58–59, 93–94. 103 Ibid., 45. 104 See for example, ibid., 93. On such imageries, see Chapter 6. 105 For examples, see ibid., 188, 189, 190, 192, 195, 198. 106 Ibid., 65–66. The grand vizier is also associated with light in several places. See ibid., 74, 78. 107 See Chapter 6. 108 Es’ad Efendi, Üss-i Zafer, 78. 109 Ibid., 115. 110 Ibid., 168. 111 Ibid., 131. 112 Ibid., 49–50. 113 Ibid., 67. 114 English translation from Abdel Haleem, The Qurʾan. 115 Es’ad Efendi, Üss-i Zafer, 10. 116 This position is expressed throughout the narrative. For a succinct expression of it, see pp. 93–94. The Sharia and canonical duties are evoked repeatedly. See for example, pp. 17, 93, 94, 96, 100. For the janissaries’ ignorance of the Sharia, see pp. 120–121. 117 BOA, HAT 488/23958, 29 Z 1240 (July 14, 1825). The memo itself bears no date and it is not clear why it was given that date by the archive. The memo explicitly refers to “the abolished corps,” (ocag-ı ˘ mulga), ˘ suggesting it was penned after the abolition of the janissaries. Other documents pertaining to the same issue were similarly dated to the last day of the subsequent Hicri years (see below). According to another document pertaining to the same issue, the grand vizier’s order to demolish the taverns was issued in 23 M 1242 (August 27, 1826). See BOA, HAT 669/32648, 29 Z 1242 (July 24, 1827). 118 BOA, HAT 488/23958, 29 Z 1240 (July 14, 1825). 119 Ibid. 120 BOA, HAT 639/31486, 29 Z 1242 (July 24, 1827). 121 Pouqueville writes that the re-opening of a closed tavern is “a great event among the drinkers; and these form a pretty numerous class.” See Pouqueville, Travels in Greece and Turkey, 291.

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Notes to pages 237–240

122 Sunar, “Cauldron of Dissent,” 210–241. 123 “Tirnova naibi müderisin-i kiramdan Ahmed Sükrü ¸ Enfendinin der aliye’ye takdim eyledig, ˘ gayret alacak iʿlamıdır ki ʿayniyle tabʿ olunmuştur,” Takvîm-i Vekayi’ (October 6, 1833). The incident has ¯ been briefly discussed by several scholars. See for example, Reşad Ekrem Koçu, Yeniçeriler, 3rd ed. (Istanbul: Dogan ˘ Kitapçılık, 2004), 333–336; Sahmurat ¸ Arık, “Osmanli Döneminde Bir Cadı Avı ve Türk Romanında Cadı Kavramı,” Akademik Araştırmalar Dergisi, 29 (2006), 140–141; Zeynep Acibin, “Osmanlı Devleti’nde Cadılar Üzerine Bir Degerlendirme,” ˘ Ankara Üniversitesi Osmanlı Tarihi Araştırma ve Uygulama Merkezi Dergisi, 24 (2008), 59–60. For a more general discussion, see Sariyannis, “Of Ottoman Ghosts.” 124 On such fears, see Chapter 1. 125 See for example, Evliya Çelebi, Evliyâ Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi, vol. 7, vol. 280; Arık, “Osmanli Döneminde,” vols. 141–142. 126 Edhem Eldem, “Yeniçeri Taşları ve Tarih Üzerine,” Toplumsal Tarih, 188 (2009), 4–7. 127 Thomas Allom and Robert Walsh, Constantinople and the Scenery of the Seven Churches of Asia Minor, Illustrated. (London/Paris: Fisher Son & Co., 1838), 24–25. 128 “Tirnova naibi.”

Conclusion 1 My use of “the colonization of the night” relies on Melbin, Night as Frontier and Kraig Koslofsky’s emphasis that colonization of the night means “the exercise of power and authority, or both, over the people already there.” See Koslofsky, Evening’s Empire, 158. On the night as frontier and its “colonization” in more recent times see also Gwiazdzinski, La Nuit. 2 İleri, “A Nocturnal History,” 143–149. 3 For the curfew and lantern-carrying regulations, see BOA, I.MSM 5/77, 1 Za 1261 (November 1, 1845); Takvim-i Vekayi, 17 Za 1262 (December 1, 1846); BOA, A.MKT.NZD 309/41, 28 S¸ 1276 (March 22, 1860). There are many documents showing that the regulations were indeed enforced. See for example, BOA, HR.MKT 9/72, 1261 (1845); BOA, HR.MKT 9/ 72, 1261 (1845); A.MKT 5/49, 25 S¸ 1264 (July 26, 1848). For a more detailed analysis of these measures and their context, see Wishnitzer, Reading Clocks, 145–146; İleri, “A Nocturnal History,” 143–149; Wishnitzer, “Shedding New Light,” 74–75. 4 On early illumination efforts in Istanbul, see BOA, A.MKT 97/5, 23 L 1263 (October 3, 1847). See also BOA, A.MKT 98/65, 3 Za 1263 (October 12, 1847); BOA, A.MKT 152/55, 5 Za 1263 (October 14,

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Notes to pages 240–246

5

6

7 8

9 10

11 12 13 14 15

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1847). For the context, see Wishnitzer, “Eyes in the Dark,” 246–250. On gas lighting, see İleri, “A Nocturnal History,” 131–201. On drinking regulations, see Wishnitzer, “Eyes in the Dark,” 248–250. On policing the night, see İleri, “A Nocturnal History,” 271–328. See also Lévy, “Une institution.” Wishnitzer, “Kerosene Nights”; Hanssen, Fin de Siecle, 193–212; ZandiSayek, Ottoman Izmir, 26–29, 88, 100; Avcı, Degiѕ̧im Sürecinde, 227–229; Vincent Lemire, Jerusalem 1900: The Holy City in the Age of Possibilities, Catherine Tihanyi and Lys Ann Weiss (trans.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 107–109. İleri, “A Nocturnal History,” esp. 58–125; Deal, Crimes of Honor; Wishnitzer, “Kerosene Nights.” Steven T. Rosenthal, The Politics of Dependency: Urban Reform in Istanbul (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980), esp. 107–115; Malte Fuhrmann, “Down and Out on the Quays of İzmir: ‘European’ Musicians, Innkeepers, and Prostitutes in the Ottoman Port-Cities,” Mediterranean Historical Review, 24(2) (2009), 169–185; Malte Fuhrmann, “Beer, the Drink of A Changing World: Beer Consumption and Production on the Shores of the Aegean in the 19th Century,” Turcica, 45 (2014), 79–123; Boyar and Fleet, A Social History, 309–327; Wishnitzer, “Eyes in the Dark”; Yumul, “A Prostitute”; Edhem Eldem, “Ottoman Galata and Pera between Myth and Reality,” in From “Milieu de Mémoire” to “Lieu de Mémoire”: The Cultural Memory of Istanbul in the 20th Century, Ulrike Tischler (ed.) (München: Martin Meidenbauer, 2006), 19–36; Nur Akın, 19. Yüzyilin Ikinci Yarısında Galata ve Pera (Istanbul: Literatür, 1998). Wishnitzer, “Eyes in the Dark.” On this discourse and related trends see especially Wishnitzer, “Kerosene Nights”; Wishnitzer, “Eyes in the Dark”; Wishnitzer, “Shedding New Light.” See also İleri, “A Nocturnal History,” 202–270; Hülya Yıldız, “Limits of the Imaginable in the Early Turkish Novel: Non-Muslim Prostitutes and Their Ottoman Muslim Clients,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 54(4) (2012), 533–562; Yumul, “A Prostitute”; Woodall, “Decadent Nights.” Otter, The Victorian Eye, 3–5. Gates and walls did not always bring nocturnal traffic to a complete halt. See for example, Hanssen, Fin de Siecle, 198–199. On this dynamic in Beirut, see Hanssen, 199–200. Wishnitzer, “Kerosene Nights.” For an interesting treatment of leisure, including nocturnal leisure in a sixteenth-century Anatolian village, see Fikret Yılmaz, “Boş Vaktiniz Var Mı?,” Tarih ve Toplum (Yeni Yaklaşımlar), 1 (2005), 11–49.

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Notes to pages 245–251

16 See A. Roger Ekirch, “Artificial Lighting and Its Discontents,” a talk given at the 12th International Conference on Urban History (Lisbon, 2014). In many places the problem is the opposite: even efforts to dim the lights are thwarted by residents who demand ever more light, claiming they feel insecure, despite growing evidence that hyper-illumination does not diminish crime. See Bogard, The End of Night, 64–92. 17 On current efforts to reduce light pollution from a historical perspective, see, most notably, Bogard, The End of Night. See also the various studies collected in Meier, Urban Lighting. 18 Some people and organizations have been invested in this effort for some time now. For a beautiful introduction see Bogard, The End of Night.

Appendix 1 Cohen, Simon-Pikali, and Salama, Yehud¯ ¯ ım be-beyt: ha-meʾah ha-shmoneh-ʿesreh. 2 Most notably, Kal’a et al., İstanbul’da Sosyal Hayat, 1997; Kal’a et al., İstanbul’da Sosyal Hayat, 1998; Tabakoglu ˘ et al., “İstanbul Ahkâm Defterleri: İstanbul Esnaf Tarihi (1764–1793).” 3 Kılıç, “1158–1159 (1745–1746) Tarihli”; Geçgil, “Uskudar”; Muzaffarova, “Üsküdar Kadılı˘gı.” 4 For an insightful survey of the debate, see Coѕ̧gel and Ergene, The Economics, esp. 13–26. 5 Ze’evi, “The Use,” 44. 6 Coѕ̧gel and Ergene, The Economics, 18–19. 7 Cited in Zarinebaf, Crime and Punishment, 41. 8 Işık Tamdogan-Abel ˘ asks similar questions with regards to crime in “Atı Üsküdar, but she is not concerned with the night. See Tamdogan, ˘ Alan Üsküdar’a Geçti.”

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Archival Sources Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi (Ottoman Archives of the Office of the Prime Minister) Abbrevations for BOA collections cited in the text: AE.SABH.I – Ali Emiri/Abdülhamid I AE.SMST.III – Ali Emiri/Mustafa III A.MKT – Sadaret/Mektubî Kalemi C.AS – Cevdet/Askeriye C.BH – Cevdet/Bahriye C.BLD – Cevdet/Belediye C.DH – Cevdet/Dahiliye C.EV – Cevdet/Evkaf C.İKTS – Cevdet/İktisad C.MTZ – Cevdet/Eyalet-i Mümtaze C.ZB – Cevdet/Zabtiye D – Dahiliye EV.d – Evkaf Defterleri HAT – Hatt-i Hümayun tasnifi HR.MKT – Hariciye/ Mektubî Kalemi İE.BH – İbnülemin/Bahriye İ.MSM – İradeler/Mesâil-i Mühimme MVL – Meclis-i Vâlâ

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Index

Abdülaziz Bey, 66, 255, 271, 283, 290, 302–303, 336 Abdülhamid I, 34, 73, 150–151, 213–214, 321, 335 Abu Bakr, 118 Ahmed Asım Efendi, 132, 181 Ahmed III, 12, 34–35, 173, 185–186, 203, 319, 322, 369 alcohol, 1, 11, 73, 75–76, 83, 85–86, 101–105, 111, 130, 136–138, 140–141, 165, 220–223, 226, 235–236, 243, 246, 250, 287, 304, 329 Ali Bey al-Abbasi, 63 American colonies, 4 anecdotes, 13, 70, 84, 115, 132, 142, 306 antinomian, 2, 12, 58–61, 98, 112–113, 121–122, 130, 178–181, 208, 218, 234, 241, 244 Arabian Nights, 73–74, 285, 339, 347, 354 arson, 108, 214–215, 227 artificial light., 8 astronomical night, 7 Attar, 114 bachelors, 38, 87–88, 90, 92, 211, 222, 251, 272, 326 bars, 25–27, 32, 84, 99, 105, 219–220 baths, 38, 64, 89, 95, 102, 221, 291, 295 bedtime, 17, 32, 37, 44, 73, 267 beeswax, 8, 145, 147–148, 152, 156, 158, 161–162, 165, 177, 182, 308, 312 bekars, 87, See bachelors Bekri Mustafa, 140–142, 305, 340, 344, 353

Bektaşi, 2, 13, 98, 121, 142, 180, 208, 218, 233, 293, 344 bezm, 66, 118, 126, 132–133, 136, 138, 140, 199, 233, See gathering biological night, 7 bi-phasic sleep, 5, 37, 269, See segmented sleep, first and second sleep Bosporus, 23, 62, 69, 71–73, 81, 85, 91, 94–95, 100, 107, 134, 153, 176, 198, 221, 224, 226, 242, 249, 257, 287, 309, 345 bostancıbaşı, 69–72, 104, 221 Cabi Ömer, 70, 207 candles, 31, 34, 58–60, 63, 81, 95, 107, 110, 122–124, 129, 136, 139, 145–146, 148–152, 154–164, 166–167, 169, 176–177, 182, 184, 198, 200, 202, 204, 212, 281, 291, 301, 307–309, 312, 316, 343 snuffing, 31, 34, 58–60 carbon emission, 2 cebecibaşı, 69, 221 Celaleddin Rumi, 181 chief mufti, 46, 151, 162, 238 Christians, 13, 33, 58–59, 125, 134, 152, 182, 270, 299, 348 Çınar Ahmed, 212 çıragan, ˘ 173, 198–202, 204, 212, 322, See lamp parties circadian, 7, 264 circadian clock, 7 circadian rhythms, 7, 264 climate, 257, 368 coffeehouses, 18–20, 38, 76, 85–86, 89, 96, 99, 101, 165, 259, 285, 294, 329 court records, 13, 21, 36, 47, 49–50, 66, 70, 89, 92, 106, 108,

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372 112–113, 246, 250, 265, 278, 296–297 crime, 6, 62, 69, 87–89, 91, 219, 240, 334 Damascus, 123, 258, 260, 264, 267, 301, 324, 336, 341, 362–363, 365 danger, 3, 25, 29–31, 71, 79, 183, 215, 227, 229 dark/darkness, 1–3, 5–6, 11–12, 17–18, 20, 24–25, 30, 33–35, 44–46, 54, 57–61, 63–64, 68–72, 77, 80–83, 85–86, 90, 92–93, 95–96, 98, 100–101, 107–108, 110–111, 115–116, 119–120, 122–124, 126–127, 129, 136, 143–144, 162, 165, 169, 176, 179, 183, 187, 195–196, 198–200, 203, 205, 207, 210, 215, 224, 232, 234–235, 241–245, 247–248, 251, 254, 259, 268, 280, 285, 295, 300, 324 dawn, 6, 20, 31, 35–36, 79, 105, 116, 118, 133, 183, 188, 195, 207, 225, 230, 232, 257, 300 domicile, 10, 17, 25, 29, 111, 246, 251, See home dream, 120, 123, 165, 215, 217 drinking, 12, 23, 29, 35, 58, 83–86, 91, 93, 96, 100, 102, 104, 110, 115, 118, 123, 126–128, 130, 132, 134–138, 140–143, 168, 194, 219, 225, 233, 235, 240–241, 244, 250, 287, 290, 294, 303, 306, 333 Ecology, 272, 298, 345, 352, 355 Edirne Event, 9 Egypt, 10, 257, 259, 262, 277–278, 282, 289, 306, 314, 337, 340–341, 346, 358, 360, 367 Eliʿezer Papo, 53 ¯ Elliot Horowitz, 124 endowment, 154, 158–160, 177, 182 England, 4, 35, 161, 256, 267, 269, 273–274, 309, 325, 354, 362 Enlightenment, 80, 175, 203, 247, 254–255, 276, 315, 324, 347, 351, 357, 359, 362, 368 entertainment, 4, 34–35, 136, 165, 209, 240–241, 246

Index environment, 5, 22, 63, 118, 127, 144, 247–248 Europe/European, 3, 5, 21–23, 35–36, 58, 82, 85, 107, 149, 174–175, 193, 197, 202–205, 215–217, 224, 226, 240–241, 245–246, 258, 260, 262, 272, 276, 290, 321, 323–324, 327, 333, 345, 347, 349, 352, 358 evil, 3, 33, 43, 54, 65, 87, 133, 138, 140, 201, 223, 232–233, 236, 238–239 Evliya Çelebi, 60–61, 86, 152, 161, 176–178, 181, 309, 311, 316 family, 4, 37, 41, 54, 88, 108, 176, 193–194, 223, 281 Fazil Enderuni, 66 fear, 1, 11, 29, 31–32, 44, 47, 57, 70–71, 75, 78–80, 92, 107, 191, 206, 210, 219, 224, 226, 229, 235, 237, 264, 271 fesad, 66, 87–88, 91, 93, 101, 103, 109, 112, 219, 224–225, 238, See mischief Festival, 59, 190, 319, 345, 367, 369 fire, 8, 22, 29–30, 33, 41, 43, 108, 115, 128–129, 135, 139, 178, 180, 188, 196, 199, 203, 211, 213–216, 227–228, 233, 266 fireworks, 186–188, 190–191, 194, 198, 200–201, 203–204, 319 first sleep, 5, 36 fish, 291, 352 fishermen, 291, 352, 363 fleas, 8, 42–43 gathering, 110, 118, 122, 126–127, 129–131, 136, 138, 140, 192, 196–197, 199, 202, 297 Gedaliah of Siemiatycze, 124 gender, 4, 18, 33, 42, 44, 58, 89, 111, 245, 251, 280 guards, 22–23, 31, 46, 53, 64–66, 69, 95, 102, 107, 222, 228–229, 231, 292 guilds, 11, 46, 48, 68, 98, 146, 155, 159, 191, 231, 242, 277, 292, 309

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Index had¯ıth, 32, 181, 268 _ Hafez, 113–114, 136, 139, 325 hamam, see baths, bathhouses Hançerli Hürmüz, 137–138, 140 Ḥanna al-Tab¯ıb, 71, 79 _ 290, 348 health, 253, hearing, 10, 17–18, 24, 48, 53–55, 57, 80, 191, 229, 262 heretic, 13, 61, 122, 208, 233–235 hiding, 1, 12, 63, 78, 100, 105, 111, 133, 223 home, 3, 10, 18–19, 25, 27–29, 33, 38, 46, 55, 57, 60, 64, 75, 79, 91, 100, 134–135, 154, 158, 203, 213, 219, 245, 247, 251, 264, See domicile Ibn Arabi, 114, 217, 328 İbrahim Hakkı Erzurumi, 118–119, 125, 284, 300–301, 339, 348 illumination, 178, 282, 307, 317, 342, 362, 368 insecurity, 1–2, 10, 18, 26, 31, 33, 92, 209, 240, 264 intimacy, 12, 37, 111, 118, 126, 136, 173, 192, 196–197, 248, 302 intoxication, 6, 140 invisible/invisibility, 11, 46, 289, 293, 354 Islam, 13, 59, 112, 114, 117, 123, 126, 179, 186, 203, 208, 232–234, 240, 244, 289, 293, 297, 299, 301, 303, 305, 316, 324, 344, 347, 353, 362, 364–365, 369 James Caulfield, 21, 65, 259, 287, 338 janissaries, 2, 8, 10, 12, 30, 38, 51, 69–70, 82, 86–87, 95, 97–99, 101–103, 105, 122, 138, 153–154, 159, 161, 176, 194, 207–209, 212–213, 215, 218, 226–229, 231–236, 238–241, 247, 289, 292, 294, 311, 325–326, 331 Jerusalem, 9, 13, 17, 20–21, 26–27, 29, 35, 39, 42, 44, 49, 54–55, 62, 68, 94–95, 105, 111, 124–125, 166–167, 169, 182, 240, 242, 244–246, 249, 255, 258–259, 261, 265–266, 269, 274, 278, 282, 291–292, 295, 314, 317, 333, 335,

373 338, 340, 343, 346, 353–354, 357, 359, 362, 365–366, 368, 370 Jewish orthodoxy, 95 Jews, 13, 17, 32, 59, 89, 124–125, 156, 168, 182, 270, 282, 296, 313, 346, 348, 361 jokes, 13, 77, 142 Kabbalah, 124 kadı, 17, 27–29, 50, 62, 66, 150, 156, 159, 184, 213, 237, 283, 323 Katip Çelebi, 6, 100, 130, 180 kaymakam, 69, 103, 207 Konstantinos Mavrikios, 77, 190 lamp parties, 173, 188, 196–197, 205, 213, 215 lantern, 19, 62–65, 68, 75, 95, 135, 173, 191, 233, 282, 332 law enforcement, 6, 236, 264, 275, 283 leisure, 4, 7, 11, 34–36, 71–72, 82–83, 85, 94, 96, 106–107, 111, 133, 169, 175, 193, 195–196, 203, 219, 221, 246, 255, 303, 320, 333 light, 2–3, 5–10, 12, 22, 32–34, 42, 48, 51, 60, 62–65, 68–69, 79, 81, 83, 93, 95, 100, 107–108, 115, 122, 124, 127, 129, 131, 133, 135–136, 138, 143–146, 149, 152, 156–158, 161–162, 165, 167–169, 173, 175–188, 191–192, 198–205, 208–210, 212, 215, 229, 232–234, 239, 241, 243, 245–246, 248, 253, 257, 262, 264, 268, 276, 299, 304, 306, 313, 315–316, 322, 324, 331, 333 light pollution, 2, 248, 253, 306, 334 lighting, 145–147, 166, 253, 261, 269, 282, 285, 306–307, 312, 314, 334, 347, 350, 353, 357, 359–360, 363–364, 368 locked, 26–28, 57, 64, 69, 210, 246 long eighteenth century, 9, 11–12, 241, 258, 289 love, 12, 40–41, 60, 110–111, 113–116, 118–122, 126, 129–130, 135, 137–138, 140–141, 178, 200, 298–299

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374 lover, 113–114, 126, 129, 134, 136–138, 143, 178, 180, 200, 217, 244, 255, 272, 295, 298–299, 301, 328, 344–345, 349, 355 Mahmud II, 227, 231 mahya, 183, 185–186, See lamp inscriptions Majnun ¯ 117, 299 ¯ Layla, mattresses, 42–43 meclis, 110, 126–128, 130–132, 134–136, 138–139, 143, 192, 197, 199, 303, 321, See gathering medrese, 38, 141, 151, 272 Mehmed Ali Paşa, 10 mehtab seyri, 131–133, 248, 263, 303, See moonlight cruises meyhane, See tavern Mihrişah Sultan, 181 minorities, 9, 246 mischief, 61–62, 66, 81–82, 87, 91–93, 99, 101–103, 106–108, 219–220, 222–223, 232, 234–236, 238 modern, 1–7, 17, 19–20, 29, 32, 36, 42, 44, 47–48, 53, 58, 63, 80, 83, 95, 97–98, 108, 112, 117, 127, 136, 145, 152, 157, 161, 165, 169, 175, 180, 193, 198, 230, 241, 243–244, 247–248, 251, 254, 257, 267, 270–271, 273, 275, 277, 282, 290, 300, 302, 309, 315, 320, 336 moon, 8, 22, 72, 116, 120, 129, 131–133, 137, 186, 195, 197, 202, 262, 321 moonlight, 131, 188, 248 moonlight cruises, 131, See mehtab seyri Mosheh Yerushalm¯ ı, 182, 318, 343 ¯ mosquitoes, 8 mum söndürmek, 281, 349 Murad IV, 62, 73–74, 76, 78, 137, 140, 320, 362 Mustafa III, 34, 70, 191, 322, 335 Nabizade Nazim, 132 Nakşibendiyye-Müceddidiyye, 218 Naq¯ıb al-Ashraf, ¯ 9, 295 narh, 49, 51–52, 156, 160, 312 nature, 6–7, 18, 33, 50, 59, 76, 91, 108, 112, 121, 123, 126, 133, 144, 149,

Index 165, 175, 178, 188, 200–201, 209, 217, 228, 239, 248, 267, 293 neighborhoods, 38, 48, 53, 55, 68–69, 85, 88, 200, 207, 215, 220, 230, 245 nightlife, 3, 11–12, 82–84, 86, 91, 96, 102–104, 106–107, 134, 165, 208, 234, 240–241, 243, 245–246, 248–249, 286 nineteenth century, 6, 10, 35, 39, 43, 56, 61–62, 96, 99, 101, 105, 114, 121, 123, 134, 137, 145, 148, 160, 167, 183, 198, 230, 240, 242, 244, 247, 261, 267, 273, 279, 282, 293, 304, 307–308, 313, 322 nizam, 50, 176, 181, 208, 225–227, See order noise, 21–23, 37, 42, 53, 65, 69, 71, 133, 191, 229, 260 North America, 3, 8, 145, 245, 281, 302 ocularcentrism, 5, 48, 79, 275 oil, 8, 145, 152, 166–169, 177–179, 182–183, 191–192, 240, 313–314, 318 order, 1–2, 5, 9, 11, 13, 23–24, 27, 30, 33, 42, 45–52, 58, 60–61, 64, 69, 71, 73, 76–77, 79–82, 88–90, 93, 97–98, 102–103, 105–106, 108, 110, 114, 117, 120–121, 125–126, 131, 135, 137, 147, 149–151, 153, 156, 158, 160–161, 163–164, 174, 177, 180–181, 184, 186–187, 191, 194, 203, 205, 208, 212, 216–219, 221–222, 224–225, 227–228, 231, 233–236, 238–239, 241, 243–245, 247–249, 251, 264, 275, 279, 293, 296, 299, 313, 317, 327–328, 331 orthodox, 2, 11, 58–59, 98, 121, 129, 131, 141, 178, 180–181, 208, 216, 218, 226, 232, 234, 240, 243 palace, 2, 10, 12, 23, 31, 35–36, 39, 42, 47, 51–52, 69, 74–75, 81, 87, 98, 107–108, 149, 155, 159, 163, 173, 187, 190–192, 194–198, 200–201, 205, 208–210, 213, 215–216, 218, 227, 229, 231–232, 237–239, 245, 247, 263, 272, 290

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Index Patrona Halil, 12, 208, 210–211, 213, 226, 325, 361 poetry, 39, 113, 248, 272, 297, 299, 302, 304, 322, 345, 348, 367 police, 46–47, 49, 69, 80, 82, 214, 223, 242–243, 250, 258, 275, 278, 358 policing, 46–47, 53, 68–69, 89, 222, 240, 275, 278, 333 port, 9, 86, 88 pre-industrial night, 17, 25 prophetic, 36 prophetic traditions, 13 prostitution, 1, 11, 54, 56, 66, 86, 89, 91–92, 96, 102, 211, 219, 223–224, 287, 290, 292, 295 public baths. See baths Ramadan, 141, 149, 151, 183, 185–186, 192, 205, 227, 233, 280, 318, 353, 359 reading, 162, 168, 195, 255, 259, 272, 282, 306, 332, 368 rebellion, 9, 12, 76, 89, 103, 208–211, 226, 289, 325, 330, See revolt reform, 2, 207, 213, 216, 218, 225, 231, 326 religion/religious, 1, 5, 9, 18, 32, 33, 34, 37–38, 50, 58, 61, 98–99, 103–104, 113, 123, 125–126, 151, 169, 176, 181, 183–186, 192, 200, 204–205, 217, 226, 234–235, 236, 242, 251, 273, 281 revolt, 9, 209, 211, 226, 230–231, 258, 328 rüzname, 13 Sabeteans, 60 Sadreddinzade Telhisî Mustafa Efendi, 197, 213, 294, 322, 340 season/seasonal, 5–6, 19, 87, 133, 147–148, 167, 197, 205 second sleep, 5, 36 security, 1, 5, 10, 18, 25–28, 31, 33, 37–38, 41, 44, 46–48, 52–53, 80, 84, 87, 93, 95, 101, 196, 221–222, 224, 227, 230, 240, 242, 244–246, 272 segmented sleep, 4, 36–37 sense, 10, 12, 17, 24–25, 44, 57, 65, 78, 80, 114–115, 117–118, 122, 127,

375 131, 144, 159, 175, 180, 186, 199, 209–210, 216, 231, 275 sensorium, 5, 10, 24, 48, 53, 62, 80, 275 sex/sexual/sexuality, 5, 7, 28, 36, 54, 58–59, 83, 89, 101, 130, 146, 211, 220, 241 şeyhülislam, 46, 162 Seyyid Vehbi, 173 sicil, 13, 90, 111, 249–250, 258, 291 sight, 1, 11, 25, 33, 48, 51, 64, 68, 79, 82, 110, 115, 119, 131, 134, 144, 209, 235, 243, 279 siraj, ¯ 20, 167 sixteenth century, 23, 58, 73, 106, 114, 124, 283, 301, 311, 314 sleep, 3–4, 7, 10, 18–19, 22–26, 30–44, 64, 83, 94, 115, 117–119, 122, 124–125, 131, 134–135, 143, 165, 193, 196, 211–212, 220, 227–228, 230, 232, 242, 246–247, 256, 268, 271, 313 slumber, 256, 350 social night, 7, 244 solidarity, 2, 12, 97–98, 126, 208, 230, 292 sound, 19, 22, 24–25, 128, 199, 228, 248, 262 street lighting, 254–255 Sufi, 2, 12, 43, 60, 112–114, 117, 125, 130, 132, 136, 173, 178, 180–181, 216, 218, 297, 300, 302, 317, 348, 367 Sufism, 181, 281, 328, 357, 368 Suhrawardi, 114, 180, 317, 362 sunrise, 6, 230 sunset, 6, 17–19, 25, 29, 34–35, 49, 56, 62, 68, 101, 105, 121–122, 132, 142, 190, 195, 198, 231, 237, 244, 246, 252, 259, 268, 277, 322 tallow, 8, 145, 147–148, 150–154, 156, 158, 160–162, 164, 166–167, 169, 177, 307, 309, 311–312 tavern, 18, 41, 82, 84–85, 96, 99–101, 103–105, 111, 125, 134, 138, 142, 210, 219–223, 235–236, 240, 243, 285, 287, 290, 292, 303, 329, 331 tax, 49, 82, 102–104, 124, 154, 222, 236, 245, 310, 329 Taylesanizade Hafiz Abdullah, 213

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376 tebdil gezmek (undercover patrols), 73, 150 technology, 4, 10, 145, 246, 256 tiqun ¯ hatsot, 37, 41, 124 _ Üsküdar, 13, 19, 55–56, 62, 66, 69, 86, 89, 91–93, 101, 153–154, 224–225, 249–250, 260, 265, 269, 278–279, 283, 289–290, 312, 331, 335, 340, 347, 366 court, 13, 19, 27, 56, 89, 249, 283 Uzun Mehmed, 212 vakıf, 108, 154, 158, 182, 310 vigil, 119–120, 123–125 violence, 1, 24, 26, 28, 47, 71, 91, 98–99, 210, 219, 227, 229–231, 240, 246, 265, 294, 330 visibility, 2, 7, 9, 11, 46, 48, 65, 123, 264 vision, 1, 5, 11, 17, 24, 44, 47–48, 53–54, 62, 64, 68, 80, 143, 199, 276 wakefulness, 5, 7, 36, 117

Index walls, 27, 33, 49, 55, 68–69, 77, 106, 124, 126, 134, 144, 146, 213, 229, 242, 244, 279, 303, 333 west/western, 80, 124, 178, 202, 204, 233, 256, 268, 271, 300, 306, 313, 350, 355–356 whales, 8 wine, 41, 58, 75, 79, 100, 110, 114, 120–121, 125–129, 131–133, 135, 141, 233, 235, 301 work, 3, 7, 13, 30–31, 33, 36, 39, 46, 48–49, 51, 60, 64, 74, 83, 88, 92, 94–97, 111, 128, 133, 135, 155, 168, 177–178, 185, 188, 190, 193–194, 200, 205, 207, 242, 244, 246–247, 249–250, 270, 274, 281, 286, 288, 290, 292, 294, 305, 314, 323, 327 Yahya Kemal, 174 Yirmi Sekiz Çelebi Mehmet Efendi, 202 Yusuf Ziya Paşa, 207 zina, 220, See sex Zohar, 124

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