The Heritage of Edirne in Ottoman and Turkish Times

Continuities, Disruptions and Reconnections

Birgit Krawietz, Florian Riedler

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783110634136
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110635157
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia moderna

Die Studien zur Geschichte und Kultur des Vorderen Orients erscheinen als Supplement der Zeitschrift Der Islam, gegründet 1910 von Carl Heinrich Becker, einem der Väter der modernen Islamwissenschaft. Ganz im Sinne Beckers ist das Ziel der Studien die Erforschung der vergangenen Gesellschaften des Vorderen Orients, ihrer Glaubenssysteme und der zugrundeliegenden sozialen und ökonomischen Verhältnisse, von der Iberischen Halbinsel bis nach Zentralasien, von den ukrainischen Steppen zum Hochland des Jemen.
Über die grundlegende philologische Arbeit an der literarischen Überlieferung hinaus nutzen die Studien die archivalischen, sowie materiellen und archäologischen Überlieferungen als Quelle für die gesamte Bandbreite der historisch arbeitenden Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften.
Beginnend mit Band 28 setzt SME die Reihe Studien zur Geschichte und Kultur des islamischen Orients / Studies in the History and Culture of the Islamic Orient (STIO) fort.

Part I: Forming Edirne

In Search of Early Ottoman Edirne

Amy Singer

Note: This research was supported by The Israel Science Foundation (grant No. 167/17) .

1 Locating Edirne

Edirne is recognized as the second Ottoman capital. It was one of the largest Ottoman cities (together with Salonica) in the European part of the empire for most of Ottoman history. By the end of the Ottoman era, Edirne preserved a symbolic significance that was largely out of sync with its actual importance as an urban entity or even as the urban center of Turkish Thrace. Rescued several times from foreign conquerors during the last Ottoman century, the city had lost much of its population, its human and cultural diversity, and its prior role as a commercial, transportation, and administrative hub. These functions had been among its defining characteristics in the late Byzantine era and continued in the Ottoman era through the mid-19th century.

A critical scholarly history of Ottoman Edirne remains to be written and, in the past, few scholars have taken an extended interest in the city. Scholars have mined various sources in Ottoman Turkish, Greek, Serbian, and other languages for evidence on the history of the city, but from these they have produced what is largely a chronological outline of the city’s history in Ottoman times.¹ Their studies have described only generally what happened, cataloguing at selected moments who lived in the city and the value of Edirne’s revenues and endowments, as well as the aesthetic or technical aspects of its major monuments, buildings like the Selimiye, the Muradiye, and the complex of Bayezid II. The imperial palace, today almost entirely invisible above ground, has only recently become the focus of systematic archaeological excavation and publication.²

Edirne has been strangely absent as the focus of investigation as opposed to simply being “on the way to” somewhere else, its importance defined by Constantinople/Istanbul, the imperial city to the east, which has largely overshadowed Adrianople/Edirne. Ottoman historians today are taking a more integrative and complex view of relations between the capital in Istanbul and the provincial nodes of power, revisiting the assumptions about center-periphery dynamics as a basic feature of Ottoman administration. Studies of the many Ottoman provinces have multiplied in number, so that they can now be considering more clearly as separate, but overlapping and interacting political, economic, and cultural spaces.³ Yet even here, Edirne, which was both a center and a province, has not attracted much attention. Was it too close to Istanbul to count as “periphery” or “province” or “margin”? Too central in spite of being overshadowed?⁴

For the most part, however, scholars have not inquired about the physical and human shape of Edirne as an integral aspect of the city’s society and culture in the premodern era. The present chapter is part of a larger study that aims to retrieve a denser history of Edirne during its first two Ottoman centuries. These begin sometime in the 1360s around the uncertain date of the city’s conquest;⁵ they end with the completion of the Selimiye mosque in 1575, the year after its patron, Selim II, died. The Selimiye, although famous from this time as the city’s most prominent monument, rebalanced its physical space both horizontally and vertically and probably affected patterns of movement and settlement within the city. The enormous mosque, whose minarets are clearly visible across the Thracian plain, signaled spatially what had long been the case de facto: that Edirne was, for numerous reasons, an enduring imperial Ottoman center.⁶ This study, then, sets out to discover early Ottoman Edirne and to re-locate the city, to re-place it into the micro and macro narratives of the empire as an actor and not as backdrop. The present chapter proposes generally that Edirne was more important to Ottoman history than the current bibliography of published work would indicate. It was something more than a chronological moment called “the second Ottoman capital,” a stopping point on a map, or a rallying site for the army. Rather, the city developed gradually into an Ottoman urban space, imbued with earlier patterns and traditions that were modulated by Ottoman forms and functions.

The project of rediscovering Edirne will eventually make possible, indeed oblige, a reconsideration of Bursa and Istanbul, which served as capitals prior to and following Edirne, but were also the nearest cities of comparable size and activity. Even after the conquest of Constantinople and the transfer of the imperial center to the renamed Istanbul a few years later, Edirne continued to function for several centuries as a seasonal residence of the sultan and his household and as the chief mustering point for the Ottoman army as it headed into the Balkans. Bursa, on the other hand, became a thriving manufacturing and commercial city and a pilgrimage site sanctified by the tombs of the first six sultans and numerous members of the Ottoman family.

The question framing the present long-term study of the city is: “Where is Edirne?” This query encapsulates a collection of questions, all of which hinge on the location of the city – in time, in space, and in imagination. The method is not to locate the city on maps, but to ask: Who went to Edirne and for what purposes? How did people get to Edirne, and when did they go there? How long and where did they stay? In seeking replies, the study here revisits Edirne through the eyes of Ottoman, Byzantine, and other chroniclers, paying attention to when and how the city appeared in their narratives and what the authors emphasized about Edirne’s people, its location, and its relationship to its own hinterland, to other Ottoman regions, and to people and places outside the empire. Taken together with a variety of structures and monuments that can be located specifically and chronologically with some certainty, these sources help to discover the more concrete aspects of the city’s structural and functional presence during Ottoman times, as well as how Edirne was seen, experienced, and imagined by the people who lived there or passed through. By beginning with movement to and from the city, I hope to avoid conceiving it as static in any way. Thus the question “where is Edirne?” is part of a strategy to inject and preserve motion into the telling of the city’s history.

Why answer the question in this way? Because until the later 15th century when the Ottoman chronicles begin, there are few Ottoman contemporary written sources available to modern historians of the empire. Buildings are more plentiful, and even if they have been largely destroyed or repaired beyond recognition, their location, name, and rough date of completion are valuable sources. This is particularly true in Edirne, which is only sometimes the focus in Ottoman narrative chronicles; these accounts tend to stick close to the sultan as he goes about his business. Foreign chroniclers, too, tend to follow the sultan and the center of action, but they do include observations of what their authors encountered along the way. My methodological hypothesis is that, in the absence of direct evidence of what is going on in the city and its surroundings, the people who claimed to or were described as moving into, out of, and through the city populated it with a range of activities and services that were necessarily present. Evidence of the topography, the distribution of contemporary structures, and the location of certain activities allows us to identify and follow these people. Put together with the rulers, officials, soldiers, and travelers, we can infer the kinds of professionals at work, their locations, and the list of supplies they would have required, along with the sounds and smells that characterized different quarters of the city.

2 Approaching Edirne

Following the Menakıb-ı Al-i Osman, the familiar narrative of Derviş Ahmed Âşıkî or Aşıkpaşazade (d. circa 908 AH/1502?), the article tries to appreciate Edirne through his eyes. Rather than skimming the text in search of Edirne at obvious chronological moments, I have read through it, waiting to see when Edirne appears, who comes to or leaves it, when it is absent or present, both predictably and unexpectedly.⁷ Added to this are the observations of two contemporary Europeans: the French traveler Bertrandon de la Broquière, who arrived in Edirne in 1433 in the company of the ambassador from the Duke of Milan to the Ottoman sultan and the Cordovan Pero Tafur, who claims to have traveled to Edirne in 1437 in the company of some Genoese merchants.⁸

Edirne, consistently written by Aşıkpaşazade as “Edrene,” does not “come on stage” for quite some time in his account. One would not necessarily expect it to be otherwise. The Ottomans had to cross the Dardanelles into Europe before Edirne came on their “horizon of expectations” or, less metaphorically, into their range of targets. Also, Aşıkpaşazade’s narrative generally stays close to the sultan, his sons, and his most prominent pashas (commanders) and to their military engagements. But does Aşıkpaşazade’s silence (or the silence of any account) mean that the Ottomans had no knowledge of Edirne? That they had no sense of the places that they would one day conquer? Edirne in the first half of the 14th century was not an unknown provincial town or a village waiting for an upgrade. It was a major Byzantine city and a capital during the civil wars of the mid-14th century. The Ottomans and the other Turkish beğs, the rulers of a variety of western Anatolian principalities, were probably expanding their knowledge of the politics and geography of eastern Thrace by the mid-14th century. Turkish fighters from Anatolian principalities had already served Byzanti...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword Personal Recollections of Field Research in Edirne in the 1970s
• Acknowledgements
• Approaching Edirne. Dis-/Connections and Attractions
• Part I: Forming Edirne
• Part II: Imperial Architecture
• Part III: Heritage Construction in the Turkish National State
• Part IV: Crossroads Edirne
• Part V: Disrupting and Re-framing
• Part VI: Re-connecting Edirne
• Index