In the 15th through late 18th centuries, the Ottomans represented for Christian Europe a major “Islamic threat,” prompting Europeans to study the history and religion of “the Turks,” as the Ottomans were then and have been since referred to in Europe. By the late 16th century, Europeans produced an impressive cor- pus of literature on the Ottoman Turks, known as Tur- cica-literature, that is, works dealing with the history, religion, and culture of the Turks. While these works contain valuable data and observations for the historian of the empire, they were written from a biased perspec- tive and contain misconceptions that have persisted in later European historiography on the Ottomans. The history and nature of Ottoman studies, along with the image of the empire in the various European countries is complex and differs from country to country, reflect- ing, among other things, the complex relationship that these countries have had with the Ottomans through the centuries. Until the 1920s or so, Turkish and Otto- man studies in Europe were dominated by the German and Austrian history-writing tradition. Most works were published in German, which by the 19th century had become the lingua franca of the field. From the early 16th through early 20th centuries, these countries had close contacts with the Ottoman Empire, and thus Turkish/Ottoman studies were very much a state activ- ity. Some of the early students of the empire in Austria and Hungary were government servants, such as the diplomat Josef Hammer von Purgstall, the author of the 10-volume History of the Ottoman Empire (Geschichte
des osmanischen Reiches, Pest, 1827–35). As govern-
ment servants, they had the opportunity either to col- lect considerable Ottoman manuscripts, like Hammer, or had access to Ottoman archival sources preserved in European archives.
Their access to primary sources, along with the general positivist mainstream of the late-19th-century German- Austrian-Hungarian historiography and the schooling of these early Ottomanists, explains their Quellenkundliche orientation, that is, their focus on source criticism and pub- lication. It is hardly surprising that it was these European Ottomanists who first studied Ottoman manuscripts and archival sources and who first introduced source criticism into the field of Ottoman studies.
In recent years, however, Ottoman studies have been integrated into general historical studies and members of the youngest generation try to keep pace with the major trends of the history profession as a whole. They are especially strong in economic and military history, and there have been successful attempts to incorporate Otto- man history into its European context by applying some of the latest approaches and theories of European histori- ography, such as those of the War and Society and Fron- tier Studies.
In France, the emphasis has been on social and eco- nomic history, and Ottomanists were influenced by the
Annales school of history writing, named after the famous
French history journal Annales d’histoire économique et
sociale (1929–to date in different names), which empha-
sized long-term social and economic trends as opposed to short-term political ones and used the methodology of a wide variety of social sciences. Besides traditional top- ics, such as French-Ottoman relations, French scholars also produced significant studies concerning the Arab provinces of the empire, and compiled an up-to-date concise history of the Ottoman Empire.
In the United Kingdom, the traditional centers for Ottoman studies have been the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), and the University of Oxford; however, several other universities have at least one Ottomanist historian. In recent years, through its fellow- ships, conferences and symposia The Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies (Newnham College, Cambridge), the only research center devoted purely to Ottoman studies, became a major center for scholars studying the history of the Ottomans in its wider European and Mediterra- nean context.
Ottoman studies have always been a strong disci- pline in the successor states of the empire in the Balkans and more recently there is an interest in the history of the Ottomans in the Arab successor states, too. Some of these countries house considerable collections of Otto- man documents. However, the fact that these countries were under Ottoman rule for centuries has proved to be a disadvantage, for Ottoman history was often subject to political and ideological (nationalist, Marxist, etc.) manipulations and distortions. The Ottoman Empire traditionally got bad press in these countries, starting in the era of nationalisms (see nationalism). Unlike Turk- ish historiography that tended to focus on the “classical” or “golden age” of the empire (circa 1300–1600), histori- ans in the Balkan and Arab successor states studied the 19th century, the era of “Ottoman decline” and “national liberation movements.” Whereas Turkish historiography has emphasized the “Pax Ottomanica,” that is, the pros- perity of the empire, the meritocracy and efficiency of its institutions, the relative religious tolerance of this multi- religious and multi-ethnic empire in an age when most
xxxvi Introduction
European monarchs tried to impose religious homogene- ity upon their subjects, historians in the successor states stressed the backwardness and oppressive nature of the late empire, and often projected their negative experi- ence onto earlier periods. These one-sided and distorted images have, however, changed in the past two decades, for Ottoman studies had become an international field of study, not least because of the development of the disci- pline in the United States.
The study of the Ottoman Empire in the United States has been influenced by many of the same trends that shaped Islamic and Middle Eastern studies in gen- eral. Most early students of the Ottomans were trained in departments and centers for Near/Middle Eastern stud- ies, often established in the United States by European scholars along European traditions. Ottoman history was thus studied mainly by Turkologists, that is, specialists in the languages and culture of the Turkic peoples who were usually not trained in history, or by historians who used mainly European sources and either did not know Otto- man Turkish or had no access to Ottoman sources for other reasons. Like students of other “Oriental” empires and civilizations, many of these scholars displayed Ori- entalist and/or Eurocentric bias. This has changed in the past couple of decades due to a new generation of Otto- manists who were trained jointly by history and Middle Eastern departments and thus acquired the skills of the historian along with the necessary languages.
Changes in attitudes toward empires have also played a role. Prior to the 1990s, the political and intel- lectual left equated “empire” with “imperialism” and “colonialization,” while the political and intellectual right also used it in negative terms, characterizing, in the words of President Ronald Reagan, the Soviet Union, the West’s main rival, as “evil empire.” By the 1990s, how- ever, empires and “imperial endings” had again become fashionable as an object of study, largely brought on by the dissolution of the Soviet empire and the emergence of the United States as the dominant power in interna-
tional politics. Since then, many have likened the United States’s (temporarily) unrivaled power to that of the Romans and of other past empires. Many study the his- tory of ancient empires in order to search for lessons as to how these empires ruled and dominated international politics in the past.
The Balkan wars of the 1990s as well as the religious and ethnic conflicts in the Middle East have dramatically increased interest in the history of the Ottoman Empire, which ruled these regions for centuries. Nevertheless, scholarship on the history of the Ottomans continues to lag behind that of other empires. Not counting popular histories, there are only half a dozen scholarly histories of the empire written in the past decade by Ottomanists, and most cover only parts of the empire’s 600-year his- tory. Historical dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other handbooks are also rare.
The present volume is the first and only English-lan- guage Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire. Its intended readership is high school and college students who are taking courses in Middle Eastern, Balkan/eastern Euro- pean, and/or world history. Keeping our readership in mind we tried to create larger headings in English, instead of having separate entries on a myriad of Otto- man Turkish terms. Thus, for instance, the reader will not find separate entries on vilayet/eyalet/beylerbeylik,
sancak, nahiye, kaza, that is, on terms used to denote
administrative units in the empire; instead there is a lon- ger article on Ottoman provincial administration (see administration, provincial). Similarly, instead of having entries on the various terms related to the Otto- man land tenure system, we chose to commission a lon- ger essay on agriculture. Readers interested in special Ottoman terms are referred to the detailed index that will direct them to entries where they are discussed. Given that this is the first encyclopedia of its kind we hope that graduate students and our colleagues will also find our encyclopedia a useful handbook.
A
Abbas I (Shah Abbas the Great) (b. 1571–d. 1629) (r.