Travel and Artisans in the Ottoman Empire

Employment and Mobility in the Early Modern Era

Suraiya Faroqhi

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781780764818
• eBook ISBN: 9780857738585
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

It has often been assumed that the subjects of the Ottoman sultans were unable to travel beyond their localities - since peasants needed the permission of their local administrators before they could legitimately leave their villages. However Suraiya Faroqhi's extensive archival research shows that this was not the case. Pious men from all walks of life went on pilgrimage to Mecca, slaves fled from their masters and craftspeople travelled in search of work. Faroqhi shows that even those craftsmen who did not travel extensively had some level of mobility. Challenging existing historiography and providing an important new perspective, this book will be essential reading for students and scholars of Ottoman history.

CHAPTER 1

What an Ottoman ambassador might find out in Vienna

In the present chapter, we will be dealing with the concerns of the Ottoman Empire and its Habsburg counterpart, as they confronted one another over a shifting border. In the seventeenth century, just before the period discussed here, Hungary had been a major venue for the power struggles of the two parties; until the war of 1683–99, which had begun with the second siege of Vienna in 1683, Hungarian territories had been largely an Ottoman province, while a small strip of land, which was, however, home to a sizeable population, was in the hands of the Habsburg emperors. As for Transylvania, which also had formed part of the medieval Hungarian kingdom, in the 1600s it was an autonomous principality that normally recognized the Ottoman sultan as its suzerain, although the local princes occasionally sided with the Habsburgs when imperial troops were in the vicinity. With the peace of Karlofça/Karlowitz (1699), both Ottoman Hungary and Transylvania passed into Habsburg hands. However, the dynasty’s commitment to Catholicism and even a latter-day version of the Counter-Reformation did nothing to endear it to its new subjects, particularly the Orthodox Serbs who had migrated from Ottoman to imperial territories during the war and settled as peasant-soldiers along the frontier.¹ Many Hungarian noblemen also were not too enthusiastic about Habsburg absolutism and as a result might show a degree of sympathy to the Ottoman ambassadors they encountered in Vienna, as we shall see.

A new kind of diplomatic history and its late arrival in the Habsburg–Ottoman borderlands

During the last few decades, the history of international relations has changed focus. For quite some time now there has been a concern to find out more about the persons and organizations that – by the standards of the relevant polity, legitimately or not – were involved in shaping foreign policy. More recently there has emerged a novel interest in not exclusively discussing the moves made by the government of a single polity, but incorporating the perspectives of two or more such entities into one and the same study. In the case to be treated here, such a proceeding involves alternating between discussions of the Ottoman and Habsburg points of view. Historians also try to gain a better understanding of borders and borderlands, both in the physical and the metaphorical sense of the term. In the instance to be discussed here the Ottoman province of Budin/Buda in Hungary, for example, or the principality of Transylvania are prime examples of borderlands in the physical sense, while a former Habsburg subject turned interpreter of the sultan may be regarded as living in a metaphorical borderland, at least during certain periods of his life. Whenever appropriate, the study of international relations in the new mode also includes the study of persons acting as mediators between the polities in question: thus the interpreter just introduced, if given a certain amount of latitude in negotiating a truce, may well have functioned as a mediator of this kind.

Even so, it is not easy to embark upon a ‘new-style’ investigation of the relationship between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs. For studies focusing on the ‘dual perspectives’ of the sultans and emperors, the extent and character of the physical and mental ‘borderlands’ between the two societies, as well as the activities of mediators, are as yet few and far between.² Most studies dealing with the relevant topics still are based exclusively on Habsburg and/or Hungarian sources. Even the two major English-language monographs on the 1683 siege of Vienna use Ottoman sources only insofar as they have been translated, or even avoid them altogether.³ Apart from the important contributions of a few Austrian and Hungarian Ottomanists, historians of early modern Europe, in other words the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, for a long time seem to have thought that they did not need to use Ottoman sources. Presumably this lack of interest was due to the example of the historians of the infamous ‘Oriental question’ of the nineteenth century, who also had worked on European sources exclusively; scholars focusing on the early modern period merely followed the path trodden by their predecessors.⁴

Certainly there are reasons for this lack of comprehension, which in spite of promising beginnings will take a lot of time and intellectual effort to eradicate. For it was only in the late seventeenth century that the sultans sent officials to Vienna or St Petersburg who quite officially had the brief to represent the Ottoman rulers and negotiate about war, truce, or peace treaties. In previous years, often sultans and grand viziers had sent office-holders of fairly modest rank, who only were to hand over a document issued by the sultan’s chancery. For at that time in Istanbul it was the dominant assumption that the Sultan commanded: he did not negotiate, and other rulers, especially ‘unbelievers’, would be wise to accept his commands without too many tergiversations.

Of course in practice negotiations were necessary, but they were reflected not so much in documents emitted in the name of the sultan but rather in letters issued by the grand vizier, which had a less official character. Upon certain occasions, Ottoman envoys might at least unofficially function as negotiators.⁵ But most of whatever debate did occur was the responsibility of the Habsburg ambassadors, who from the mid-1500s onward appeared in Istanbul with some regularity and resided in the so-called Elçi Hanı, a large structure opening onto an interior courtyard and located close to the Grand Bazaar.⁶ The best-known Habsburg ambassador to spend time in this building was doubtless Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq (1522–92), sent to the court of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent (r. 1520–66) by Ferdinand I (1503–64), brother and successor to Charles V (1500–58).⁷ Busbecq’s letters became popular in all of Europe due to their elegant Latin. Later ambassadors also often left both texts and images as testimonies to their stays in the Ottoman capital; but their reports usually were the work of secretaries or spiritual advisors.⁸ As the work of Busbecq and to a lesser extent that of Salomon Schweigger became quite well known, historians working on Habsburg diplomatic activity may have thought that they possessed sufficient information, and for a long time felt little motivation to hunt for the reports of Ottoman envoys.

However, preconceived notions also had a role to play. In the early 1980s the influential historian Bernard Lewis, on the basis of an Austrian source, had claimed that before the occupation of Egypt by Napoleon (1798–1801) Ottoman dignitaries had only shown an interest in European politics if the matter at issue concerned them directly. If this statement had been totally true, it would in fact have been meaningless to study Ottoman views on the Habsburg Empire. Recent research has shown though, that we need to allow for significant exceptions to this blanket statement.⁹ Fatih Yeşil’s work on the reports of Ebubekir Ratib Efendi, who visited Vienna in the earlier 1790s, well before Napoleon's attack, has made this point abundantly clear; especially in his as yet unpublished dispatches this diplomat relayed quite a bit of information on the political situation in Vienna. But even the older reports that will be the principal focus of the present study show that at least certain eighteenth-century Ottoman observers of the Habsburg lands were more interested in European politics than had been assumed to date.

In this chapter we will discuss a very specific problem, namely the transmission of political information concerning the overall situation in Europe from Vienna or else Hungary to Istanbul. We will also try to identify the impediments and limitations which quite often made it all but impossible for Ottoman envoys to acquire reliable information. For a historian approaching Ottomans and Habsburgs with the intention of writing a ‘new-style’ history of international relations, this political information would only be part of the question, as such a study would focus more broadly on the people, material goods and practices crossing the borders between the two empires. In a study adopting this broader perspective, the historian might discuss printing in Arabic characters, for in the early eighteenth century it was a refugee from Transylvania, recently occupied by the Habsburgs, the entrepreneur and scholar İbrahim Müteferrika, who first established this practice in Istanbul. As another aspect of cultural transfer, we might point to the Ottoman rugs and carpets that entered Transylvania from the sixteenth century onward and that during the 1700s often were donated to local churches.¹⁰ But these questions cannot be covered in a brief chapter and therefore we will limit our perspective to politics in the conventional sense of the term.

In addition we need to explain what is meant by the ‘long eighteenth century’. In the present author’s view it makes sense to begin this period with the Ottoman–Habsburg war of 1683–99, which opened with the almost-successful second siege of Vienna. Certainly after the battle of St Gotthard-an-der-Raab, Kara Mehmed Paşa had visited the Habsburg capital as an ambassador to confirm the peace of Vasvar (1665); and his report survives. But if we compare this text with the work of the Ottoman ambassadors appointed to Vienna after 1700, it turns out that Mehmed Paşa has little to say about European politics; by contrast it was his main aim to demonstrate that he had upheld the prestige of his sovereign under all circumstances, a concern that he shared with the authors of many early modern ambassadorial reports from all over the world.¹¹

However, Zülfikâr Paşa, who had the unenviable task of exploring possibilities for peace right in the middle of the war over Hungary (1683–99), by virtue of his brief needed to collect information on the political and military problems confronting the Habsburgs; and his report does contain some worthwhile information.¹² Once peace had been concluded in 1699, there began an era of ad hoc embassies, documented by written reports which contained as much political information as the relevant ambassador was able to collect. We will end the ‘long eighteenth century’ with the report of Ebubekir Ratib Efendi, who experienced the early phases of the French Revolution while in Vienna (1792); as this diplomat was very much interested in political information, his embassy will form a major focus of the present discussion.

After all, Ebubekir Ratib’s embassy was a latter-day example of the ad hoc missions that had characterized the 1700s, for it was Sultan Selim III (r. 1789–1807), the very ruler who had sent out this ambassador, who in his last years experimented with long-term embassies to Vienna and elsewhere; and under his nineteenth-century successors this practice became normal. However, one could also claim that the real end of the ‘long eighteenth century’ only occurred in the 1830s and 1840s, when the Ottomans began to send as ambassadors people specifically trained for their mission in the ‘Translation Chamber’ (tercüme odası) in Istanbul and/or as undersecretaries in the Ottoman embassy in Paris. But for our purposes, the ‘long eighteenth century’ will be long only because it encompasses people who reported on Vienna well before 1700 and will end, quite conventionally, around 1800.

During the last few years, Turkish colleagues have shown an increasing interest in the relations of the Ottoman world with Latinate Europe during the early modern period. Presumably this new focus has some connection to debates about Turkey’s possible entry into the European Community which have been taking place in the recent past. Until the 1990s, topics of Ottoman–Venetian or Ottoman–Habsburg interaction used to interest only European and American historians, but presently a number of Turkish colleagues also are conversant with the relevant languages and able to deal with primary sources written in Latin, Byzantine Greek, Spanish, German and other languages.¹³ Typically in these studies, political and military confrontations feature less prominently than cultural interactions, including perceptions of alterity and more specifically the Türkenfurcht or ‘fear of the Turks’ that was a significant feature of popular culture in Central Europe during the early modern period. For many Turkish colleagues this inheritance is a major reason for the widespread rejection of Turkey’s possible entry into the European Union, especially in Central Europe.¹⁴ Given the broader, cultural orientation of these studies, we can hope that in the near future it will become much easier to study Ottoman–Habsburg relations within the broader perspectives that have come to characterize work on international relations in the ‘new mode’.

Introducing the sources

Presumably because of this interest in cultural aspects, historians have but rarely asked how Ottoman diplomats viewed the foreign policies of the major European ministers and their cabinets.¹⁵ As exceptions we might mention the work of Fatih Yeşil and the admittedly rather short introduction by Ali İbrahim Savaş to his edition of the embassy report of Mustafa Hattî (1748). Furthermore, finding political information in eighteenth-century embassy reports is not always easy: Ottoman officials did not write systematic accounts of foreign courts that might have resembled for instance the Venetian relazioni. Rather, they tended to prefer the format of the travelogue, so that the relevant information is often found in unexpected places, namely when the author describes his encounter with this or that person transmitting information, be it true or false. Thus if no modern edition is available, historians have to search through manuscripts or older editions without indices, so that it is rather easy to miss relevant information.

Before the late 1600s the sultans’ envoys apparently were debriefed orally after their return, and written reports were not customary. But after 1700 the situation changed and several authors, either ambassadors or their servitors, have left brief or else lengthy notes about their experiences abroad. Given long borders and frequent wars, there were numerous occasions requiring the presence of Ottoman ambassadors and their suites in Vienna, or else on the shores of the Danube, which in many places functioned as the border. However, it was often not easy for an Ottoman envoy to collect valid political information. For often enough Habsburg diplomats did everything in their power to make sure that their foreign colleagues did not form an accurate picture of the Emperor’s situation. Disinformation was practised by Habsburg servitors, and the Ottoman envoys attempted to do the same whenever possible. However, the envoys of the sultans had to struggle with the lack of an established network through which information could be transmitted and verified. When all is said and done there were many denizens of Latinate Europe present in Istanbul, but very few Ottoman diplomats at European courts.

In addition there were ‘natural’ impediments, including the cold of the Little Ice Age (1300s to late 1800s) with its attendant ice, rain and mud. As a result, Ottoman diplomats might be reduced to basing their action – or inaction – upon rumours which might turn out to be true or false. Thus in the autumn of 1740 the Ottoman delegation determining the border that was to form part of the current peace agreement had heard that the emperor Charles VI (r. 1711–40) had died in the meantime. But the officials had no way of knowing whether these rumours were true or false. Only when the Habsburg negotiator appeared with black ribbons attached to his clothing was the Ottoman envoy willing to send a messenger to Istanbul so to relay this crucial piece of news.¹⁶

Matters became yet more difficult because Ottoman envoys were not specialized diplomats, a category that only came into being in the nineteenth century. People who had served in totally different fields before their embassies and who could count on having no further diplomatic employment once they had returned to Istanbul, did not have the experience needed to collect political information effectively; nor could they develop a motivation to specialize in this as yet little-known and low-prestige specialty. Often the ambassadors relied on their interpreters, who in the eighteenth century were virtually all Christians; only the Greek uprising in 1821 prompted the sultan to form the Translation Chamber to train young Muslims for this task. The interpreter accompanying an ambassador might well belong to the household of a powerful vizier or else maintain close relations with one or another European embassy. Thus there was no guarantee that the agenda of the interpreter would correspond to that of the ambassador. Yet even so, these men brought along from Istanbul were very helpful. For as the ambassador did not know any European languages, only his interpreters could inform him whether the translations made by their colleagues serving the Emperor were more or less accurate renditions of what had transpired. Quite often ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Maps
• Introduction
• ELITE TRAVELLERS
• 1. What an Ottoman ambassador might find out in Vienna
• 2. Material culture in Latinate Europe: as reported by eighteenth-century Ottoman ambassadors
• 3. ‘Seeking refuge in the Sultan’s shadow’: asylum seekers on Ottoman territory
• 4. Evliya Çelebi’s tales of Cairo’s guildsmen
• 5. Ottoman travellers in Venice
• ORDINARY PEOPLE AND THEIR PRODUCTS ON THE MOVE
• 6. Keepsakes and trade goods from seventeenth-century Mecca
• 7. Entering and leaving the Empire’s industrious core: Bursa and its textiles
• 8. ‘Just passing through’: travellers and sojourners in mid-sixteenth-century Üsküdar
• 9. Mostly fugitives: the trials and tribulations of slaves in sixteenth-century Üsküdar
• 10. The adventures of Tunisian fez-sellers in eighteenth-century Istanbul
• 11. Controlling borders and workmen, all in one fell swoop: from Istanbul to Hotin in 1716
• STAYING PUT
• 12. Selling sweetmeats: Istanbul in the mid-eighteenth century
• 13. Where to make and sell cheap textiles in eighteenth-century Istanbul: a buyer’s guide
• 14. In quest of their daily bread: artisans of Istanbul under Selim III (r. 1789–1807)
• Conclusion: Movement into the Ottoman capital: some desiderata
• Dramatis Personae
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Endnote