Ottoman Court Research Articles

A Wedding Gone Wrong The Rather Worldly Woes of a Rather Wealthy Qādirī Sufi Shaykh. Two 18th Century Documents from the Ottoman Court Records of Ḥamā and Aleppo

A rather intricate legal case took place first in Ḥamā’s and then in Aleppo’s Ottoman Islamic courts around the middle of the 18th century. The setting, the social standing of the individuals involved, and the alleged circumstances of the case all contribute to make clear that this was not just another routine court case. Altogether, the two documents are a good example of the scope and quality of the information preserved in the archives of local courts and they both demonstrate the extent and modes of implementation of Islamic law in a specific Ottoman milieu. The long inventory of personal property in the Aleppo document gives us a good idea of the social status and affluence enjoyed by the plaintiff – a member of the Jīlānī/Qādirī family – and an interesting insight into material culture and what constituted wealth and affluence at the time.

A mechanical source of Turkish music from 18th-century London

A late 18th-century mechanical organ, built into a clock made by Henry Borrell of London, plays melodies that sound completely unlike those normally found on English domestic musical clocks. This article draws on the disciplines of historical musicology, ethnomusicology and horology to argue that these tunes derive from the repertory of the 18th-century Ottoman court. The melodies are analysed firstly in the context of the Ottoman repertory and then alongside contemporary European transcriptions of ‘exotic’ music, notably Edward Jones’s Lyric Airs (1804). The distortion of ‘Turkish’ melodies in European representations is set within the wider context of orientalism and musical transculturation; this evidence is then brought to bear on the interpretation of music that may also be subject to mechanical distortion. The article ends with a consideration of how these earliest known sounding examples of Ottoman music may have arrived in London, and what reception they found there.

The Topkapı Manuscript of the Jāmiʿ al-Tawārikh (Hazine 1654) from Rashidiya to the Ottoman Court: A Preliminary Analysis

The famous Persian version of the Jāmiʿ al-Tawārikh (Hazine 1654) has never been studied with the care it deserves. Since its transcription was completed a year before Rashid al-Din’s execution, it remained unfinished while approximately seven illustrations were inserted into it, and the locations of other illustrations were left blank. Careful examination of the manuscript reveals that almost all of the empty spaces left for narrative illustrations were painted during the last decades of the fourteenth century. Having decided to improve the quality of the manuscript, the kitābkhāna of Shāhrukh, in the fifteenth century, completed the missing passages of text and restored or overpainted some of its illustrations. The dedicatory inscription of Farhād Khān Qarāmānlu indicates that the manuscript was refurbished again in the Safavid period. The last artistic additions to the manuscript were overpainting an illustration and insertion of two illuminated friezes in the Ottoman Istanbul. This paper, which is a result of close examination of the original manuscript, explains the complicated life history of the book.

Guardian Assignment in the Ottoman Courts in the Last Cuarter of the 19th Century

İnceleyeceğimiz
 makale Osmanlı hukuk yapısı çerçevesinde şekillenmiş mahkeme kayıtları
 içerisindeki bir sicil defterinde yer alan vasî / hukuki temsilci davalarıdır. Bu
 davalardan; Vasîlik ile ilgili konuların 
 hangi nedenlerle ele alındığını, böyle bir durumun ortaya çıkmasında
 etkili olan durumları, vasîliğin ne demek olduğunu, hukuki temsilci olarak
 vasî’nin yükümlülükleri ve sınırları, vasî atanan kişilerin hak ve sorumluluklarının
 neler olduğu ya da olabileceği incelenmektedir. 
 
 Ayrıca Osmanlı
 hukuk yapısında gerçekleşen değişimlerin/ düzenlemelerin mahkeme kayıtlarına
 yansıma şekilleri ile Osmanlı toplum yapısında ortaya çıkan değişim ve
 gelişmeler üzerinde durulmuştur. 

Staging an Empire: An Ottoman Circumcision Ceremony as Cultural Performance

Abstract This article discusses an Ottoman circumcision ceremony for three princes held in the summer of 1530. The event stemmed from a new Ottoman court ceremonial, and its sundry activities, including gift exchanges, mock battles, processions, skills demonstrations, and feasts, were spread over a twenty-day period. These activities enabled individuals and groups within the Ottoman political-military elite, and within the city of Constantinople, to perform their identities and assert their place in the Ottoman social order. The ceremony allows us to discuss the origins and contents of Ottoman ceremonial culture, which borrowed themes and motifs from the Byzantines, the Venetians, and the myriad Turko-Muslim polities with whom the Ottomans maintained intense diplomatic and cultural relations. Next, it highlights the elevation of male circumcision, a fundamental ritual in all Islamic societies, to the status of a major dynastic event that addressed the entire Ottoman polity as well as its competitors in East and West. Finally, it shows how, in early modern societies, public ceremonies served as instruments of governance by creating highly visible, memorable, and relatively participatory events, and by constituting new spaces for political and cultural interactions.

Iconography of the Gift: Diplomacy and Imperial Self-Fashioning at the Ottoman Court

Over the course of the sixteenth century, countless gifts were exchanged between the sultans of the Ottoman Empire and the Safavid shahs of Iran, two of the most powerful Muslim dynasties of the ea...

People Before Print: Gens de Lettres, the Ottoman Printing Press, and the Search for Turkish Literature

ABSTRACT The advent of print at the Ottoman court in 1727 was greeted in France as the triumph of learning over Islamic ignorance. These initial reactions have shaped modern narratives about the Ottoman printing press, which center on the role of its founder, Müteferrika, a Hungarian convert to Islam. This article contextualizes these accounts by turning the focus to one of Müteferrika's French interlocutors, Peyssonnel. This latter's efforts to define Turkish literature demonstrate that the Republic of Letters subsumed the divisive question of print to that of the broader category of literature, which favored cultural continuities stemming from interpersonal relations.

Reading the Stars at the Ottoman Court: Bāyezīd ii (r. 886/1481-918/1512) and His Celestial Interests

Abstract This study seeks to determine the extent of the patronage of the science of the stars (ʿilm al-nuǧūm) at the court of the eighth Ottoman sultan Bāyezīd ii (r. 886/1481-918/1512). Throughout the medieval and early modern Islamicate world munaǧǧims (astronomer-astrologers) offered rulers their expertise in calculating heavenly configurations and interpreting them with a view to predicting future events; here the Ottoman polity is no exception. In the case of Bāyezīd ii, however, the sheer number of munaǧǧims employed and texts and instruments commissioned by or dedicated to the sultan unequivocally singles him out and makes it possible to further argue that his deliberate attempt to personally study and cultivate the science of the stars was inextricably related to the broader political, ideological, and cultural agendas at the time. The first part of the article provides statistical evidence on the exceptional nature of Bāyezīd’s patronization of the science of the stars based upon a number of archival documents, taqwīms (annual almanac-prognostications) and related texts presented to the sultan. Here a number of key munaǧǧims active at his court will also be introduced. The second part focuses upon Bāyezīd’s own learned interests and intellectual aspirations, and examine the celestial inquiries of the sultan in light of a few curious archival reports, textual evidence from surviving manuscripts, and testimonies of his contemporaries.

Physiognomy (ʿilm-i firāsat) and Ottoman Statecraft: Discerning Morality and Justice

Abstract In the tenth/sixteenth century six treatises on physiognomy (ʿilm-i firāsat)—a science widely considered able to predict inner moral dispositions (aḫlāq-i bāṭina) based on external appearances (aḥwāl-i ẓāhira)—were written for the Ottoman court. In a world in which statecraft and politics were ultimately based on questions of morality (aḫlāq), physiognomy was presented as a particularly useful skill for the Ottoman court due to its ability to evaluate inner moral character with scientific precision. Based on such knowledge, a partial conception of justice could be implemented with an instrumental coating of impartiality. Moreover, men with prized moral qualities could be selected for the ruling elite. The science also offered the sultan and his court a modus operandi for attaining self-knowledge and, if combined with moral self-disciplining (riyāḍat), a way to acquire divine characteristics.

The Influence of Majalla on the Middle Eastern Countries

Majalla is a civil code comprising mostly the principles pertaining to jurisdiction, law of obligations and property law.This code had been in force in all Ottoman courts except those in Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula from 1877 to the fall of the Ottoman State. On the contrary to Anatolia where Turkey founded after the Ottoman State, the code had yet been in force in the former Ottoman territories for a while. By means of examination of the codification process of the civil laws in Arab countries, Iraq in particular how much their laws have been influenced by Majalla will be clearly noticed. Iraqi jurists have deemed Majalla the main reference in order to develop a civil law and made use of it substantially. This study deals with the dimensions of the influence, particulary Iraq from Majalla through an examination of various codes. In the end of the paper, the positive and negative points of Majalla are spoken of.

Economic regulation by judiciary during the Ottoman Era: samples from Istanbul courts between 17th And 18th centuries

This paper which is based on court orders of Ottoman Judiciary (between 17th and 18th centuries), aims to discuss that regulation almost has 300 years past in Turkey's economic history. It is realised that Ottoman courts' verdicts and today's regulation authority orders have some similarities though they had not given under similar circumstances. These similarities are described from past to present by the point of purpose and qualification of regulations. In this setting, judicial conception of Ottoman courts to regulate is considered in terms of today's regulation mentality.

Powers of One: The Mathematicalization of the Occult Sciences in the High Persianate Tradition

Occultism remains the largest blind spot in the historiography of Islamicate philosophy-science, a casualty of persistent scholarly positivism, even whiggish triumphalism. Such occultophobia notwithstanding, the present article conducts a survey of the Islamicate encyclopedic tradition from the 4th–11th/10th–17th centuries, with emphasis on Persian classifications of the sciences, to demonstrate the ascent to philosophically mainstream status of various occult sciences (ʿulūm ġarība) throughout the post-Mongol Persianate world. Most significantly, in Persian encyclopedias, but not in Arabic, and beginning with Faḫr al-Dīn Rāzī, certain occult sciences (astrology, lettrism and geomancy) were gradually but definitively shifted from the natural to the mathematical sciences as a means of reasserting their scientific legitimacy in the face of four centuries of anti-occultist polemic, from Ibn Sīnā to Ibn Ḫaldūn; they were simultaneously reclassified as the sciences of walāya, moreover, which alone explains the massive increase in patronage of professional occultists at the Safavid, Mughal and Ottoman courts in the runup to the Islamic millennium (1592 CE). I argue that the mathematicalization, neopythagoreanization and sanctification of occultism in Ilkhanid-Timurid-Aqquyunlu Iran is the immediate intellectual and sociopolitical context for both the celebrated mathematization of astronomy by the members of the Samarkand Observatory in the 9th/15th century and the resurgence of neoplatonic-neopythagorean philosophy in Safavid Iran in the 10th/16th and 11th/17th, whereby Ibn Sīnā himself was transformed into a neopythagorean-occultist—processes which have heretofore been studied in atomistic isolation.

Two Hitherto Little-Studied Turkish Translations by Wojciech Bobowski alias Albertus Bobovius

In this contribution, I will discuss two Turkish translations made by the famous Ottoman court official, Wojciech Bobowski, alias Albertus Bobovius (d. ca. 1677 CE). One is his translation of the Anglican Catechism (1654), the other his version of the Ianua linguarum by Johannes Amos Comenius (Komenský, 1592–1670), the Czech philosopher, pedagogue and theologian (1658). Both texts have only survived as manuscripts and neither has been studied in any depth before. I will present the texts, as well as their historical backgrounds, and shed some new light on the life of the translator as well.

Mixing Musics: Turkish Jewry and the Urban Landscape of a Sacred Song

Mixing Musics: Turkish Jewry and the Urban Landscape of a Sacred Song

Enclothed cognition and hidden meanings in important Ottoman textiles

This paper illustrates how hidden details in garment design may reveal important clues about the motives of the wearer or designer that are of considerable cultural relevance. We suggest these hidden design features may reflect key psychological factors previously not considered. We illustrate this by doing a multilevel analysis of two important sixteenth century examples of Ottoman court clothing from the Topkapi Palace Museum. We show that these garments contain early examples of the use of “enclothed cognition” where the designs themselves are likely to have influenced the mind of the wearer. We suggest that the historical-social analysis of clothing may benefit from considering the concealed, as well as the explicit, psychologically relevant design features. We suggest that psychosocial interpretations of clothing may help further our understanding of textile and apparel design more generally, even within an historical context.

Divorce and Types of Divorce at the End of Seventeenth-century Bursa

According to Islamic law which is the basis of the Ottoman law of domestic relations, the right to get divorced, in principle, belonged to the man. It was sufficient for the man to verbally announce that he was divorcing his wife by his own declaration of intention. It was not necessary to have the court record the situation. However, the number of divorce documents that we encountered in court records shows that the divorce cases in the Ottoman society were recorded. This situation was crucial to protect the rights of the two parties after divorce. The termination of a marriage, which was recorded in the religious records by the kadi (Muslim judge) in the Ottoman courts, was possible in three different ways: talâk, a man’s unilateral declaration of will (bâin or ric’î); muhâlaa, generally realized by the woman renouncing her rights such as mehir (bridewealth) and iddet nafakası (the alimony given to women in the waiting period to remarry after divorce); and tefrik, which was realized through the verdict of the judge. Talâk was completely the man’s decision, whereas the woman’s request could be considered in muhâlaa and tefrik. This study examines all of the divorce documents from 1670 to 1698 in the Bursa Shari’a Court Records.

A Peace for a Prince: The Reception of a Safavid Child Hostage at the Ottoman Court

The twelve-year long Ottoman-Safavid War ended in 1590, when the newly enthroned Safavid king, Shah ʿAbbas sent his six year old nephew to the Ottoman court as a condition of peace. The arrival of this child prince, Haydar Mirza, his large retinue, and the gifts he brought for the sultan incited much enthusiasm and curiosity among contemporary observers. These were recorded in official histories, archival documents, manuscript paintings, and poems of Ottoman, Safavid, Venetian, and Habsburg origin. Through a cross-reading of authors with diverse political motivations, this essay demonstrates the multiplicity of ways in which the prince’s role as a social agent and mediator was interpreted during and after his transfer. A close comparative reading of these textual accounts and images suggests that the diplomatic encounter and its subtleties may never be described fully by the overarching goals of panegyric texts or selected episodes captured in narrative illustration.

Writing History at the Ottoman Court: Editing the Past, Fashioning the Future ed. by H. Erdem Çıpa, Emine Fetvacı

Writing History at the Ottoman Court: Editing the Past, Fashioning the Future ed. by H. Erdem Çıpa, Emine Fetvacı

Litigating Disputes over Ships and Cargo in Early Modern Ottoman Courts

This article explores how ownership disputes over ships and cargo were litigated and adjudicated in seventeenth-century Ottoman Islamic courts. Muslims, Christians, and Jews, Ottoman subjectse and foreigners, faced one another in Ottoman courts to recover or defend their rights to property lost or seized at sea. Drawing on the records of three courts - Galata, the military judge of Rumelia ( in Istanbul), and Candia on Crete - the article examines the legal strategies litigants employed, the evidence they supplied, and their reasons for going to court. This litigation was often inconclusive because the in-person witness testimony that was ussually necessary for plaintiffs to prevail was unobtainable, but the records of the courts, which also served a notarial function, suggest that disputants sometimes brought suit, regardless of whether they could win, in order to pressure the other party to settle out of court or agree to arbitration or mediation.

Enriching the Judgement: Fulke Greville and Didactic Drama

Fulke Greville (1554–1628) was profoundly interested in the association between drama and didacticism. His two extant plays set in the Ottoman court, Alaham and Mustapha, can be read as polyphonic articulations of moral instruction and political counsel, representing processes of ethical formation as experienced by young men. These plays turn Greville's tragic theories into practice. Greville's school and university education helped to form his ideas about how drama should instruct. The didactic impulse we see in the drama can be read against two other works: the Dedication to Sidney and his longer philosophical poem, 'A Treatie of Humane Learning'.