Intercommunal Life in Istanbul During the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Historians of the Middle East and the Balkans have paid little attention to intercommunal relations in Ottoman cities prior to the onset of nationalism and the spread of communal violence in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Each national and religious community has, therefore, focused on writing and imagining its own history with very little attention to the larger social milieu, economic and social conditions, and interactions outside confessional boundaries in the pre-modern period. The history of the Jewish community has received more attention from scholars, while that of the Greek and Armenian communities has been largely ignored. The literature on Islamic cities also tends to emphasize the homogenous composition of residential neighborhoods in contrast to the diversity of the market place. I will show that in Istanbul, residential quarters remained mixed in their social and religious make-up until Muslim migration from the Balkans during the nineteenth century enhanced the ratio of Muslims. Moreover, the debate among Ottomanists has focused on the existence or absence of themilletsystem (autonomous communal organizations) prior to the nineteenth century. Scholars have argued that themilletsystem was a nineteenth century development and that there was great fluidity and interaction among the minority communities and the Muslim majority in Ottoman cities. In the nineteenth century, Tanzimat reforms also centralized the administration of confessional communities and set legal boundaries between them that used to be more porous. Elsewhere, I have discussed the plural legal system in eighteenth century Istanbul.