Forging Urban Solidarities: Ottoman Aleppo 1640-1700.
Forging Urban Solidarities: Ottoman Aleppo 1640-1700. By CHARLES L. WILKINS. The Ottoman Empire and Its Heritage, vol. 41. Leiden: BRILL, 2010. Pp. xvi + 323. $186.Work on the surviving court records (sijills or sicils) of the Ottoman empire has for several decades been one of the most vibrant and contested fields of Ottoman history. As we have learned, the kadi courts were ubiquitous--though not perhaps as numerous as one might suppose--and the most obvious presence of dynastic power across Ottoman territories over six centuries. Historians have used evidence from the court cases to explore the long hand of Ottoman/Islamic law in order to construct state local (or center periphery) arguments about peasants, minorities, gender, trade, wealth, inheritance, and more generally, "civil society." Yet, as we have also discovered, the records could be as idiosyncratic as the judge in charge of a particular court in a particular place at any given time. For all those caveats, exacerbated by chronological gaps in the record, the sijills have afforded several generations of historians the opportunity to dig deeply into Ottoman social relations.
My own, very brief excursion into sijills occurred in the collections in Sofia, Bulgaria, as part of a study on Ottoman warfare of the eighteenth century. It seemed to me that the overwhelming concern of the court records I was examining was provisioning, mobilization, and extraordinary taxes, second only to the working out of inheritance cases of deceased Janissary Corps members, but that impression may well have been the result of my gaze at that particular moment. I came away wondering why we are not studying the sijills for the impact of major wars and campaigns on the social order and well-being of the provinces.
Clearly I was not the only one to pose the question. The editors of the Ottoman Empire and Its Heritage series are to be congratulated for publishing much of the new work on these sijills of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly Amnon Cohen, The Guilds of Ottoman Jerusalem (2001); Eunjeong Yi, Guild Dynamics in Seventeenth Century Istanbul (2004); Nenad Moaeanin, Town and Country on the Middle Danube, 1526-1690 (2006); Hulya Canbakal, Society and Politics in an Ottoman Town: 'Aynt[a.bar]b in the Seventeenth Century (2007); and most recently Charles Wilkins, Forging Urban Societies. That list does not include the many other scholars associated with this pursuit whose earlier work set the agenda for further research: Suraiya Faroqhi, Abdul-Karim Rafeq, Herbert Badman, and Andre Raymond; others who continue to push the horizons would include Bogac Ergene, Leslie Peirce, and Rossitsa Gradeva to name just a few. Efforts to publish the court records from the early nineteenth century are ongoing under the umbrella of Cemal Kafadar and the Ottoman Court Records Project at Harvard University (http://cmes.hmdc.harvard.eduiresearch/ocrp). Given the opacity and often incompleteness of these records, all those who work on them must be admired for their tenacity and perseverance.
Charles Wilkins asks a large question: What can the sijills of Aleppo tell us about the "militarization of the civilian population" and/or its mirror "the civilianization of the military population" in an era of bureaucratic reform and mobilization for war at the end of the seventeenth century? (p. 9). In order to answer that question Wilkins first lays out the terrain and methodology of his project and is very thorough in crediting his predecessors with setting the boundaries of the field (pp. 3-8). He is interested in focusing on mahalles, or regions of the city of Aleppo in the mid-seventeenth century, how the urban terrain of the city was occupied and deployed in the commerce of the city, and the kind of contracts used by the 'asker class (non-taxpayers, soldiers, and stipendiary positions) and guildsmen to protect and maintain themselves. My focus here is on the Janissaries--a focus that entails neglecting Wilkins' equally interesting discussion about guild enterprises and collectives of the period.
Wilkins argues that the city of Aleppo contained a large number of rank-and-file soldiers (beses) engaged by the end of the seventeenth century in all kinds of market crafts and transactions, including small amounts of money-lending, tax collection, and market enforcement. I was particularly interested in the seventeenth-century ocaklik contracts of garrison members in Aleppo, which included one set up to pay the military unit stationed in the citadel of Kars and Ardahan some considerable distance away. Mostly citadel guards managed their assignments by subcontracting them as tax farms (iltizam) to Aleppine residents, including Janissaries and ulema, as a means of increasing their diminishing incomes. Wilkins concludes that they could be likened to merchants of modest to middling wealth, who show up in the court records as property owners and money-lenders. While these are conclusions we have long wanted to draw, the amount of evidence presented here is decisive.
The career of one All ibn Shabib (d. 1678) is instructive. He is first encountered in court records in 1640 as second-in-command of a local garrison in the Aleppo region, probably of Arab origin, already involved in operating (renting) a watermill, and responsible for collecting certain fees his regiment owed to officials in the city. By 1657 he is still recorded as the second-in-command of the garrison, is listed as tax collector with the high status rank of agha, but has also become a prominent member of the watermiller's guild of the city. As Wilkins notes, "The likelihood [is] that soldiers, as they took up trades and crafts, absorbed the cultural norms of their non-military colleagues, thereby displacing or weakening concepts of hierarchical command authority. This process was probably more important than the reverse, of merchants and artisans adopting military norms, since many of these made no pretense of pursuing military training and merely sent proxies when called to serve on campaigns" (p. 197).
Hulya Canbakal's evidence, utilized by Wilkins, points to a similarity between the Ottoman seven-teenth century and European state trends of the period where, she writes, "modern state-formation now appears to have involved successive stages of centralism and provincial accommodation that resulted in the rejuvenation of the ruling class and allowed the state to capitalize on wider economic and political resources" (op. cit., p. 62). She adds, "Increased taxation incited the demand for tax privileges, and social mobility, coupled with the centralization of status allocation incited the demand for honors ... In the Ottoman case, the acquisition of stipends, posts and tax farming contracts also made one an 'askeri, as did claiming descent from the Prophet Muhammad or entering a military corps" (ibid., p. 63).
Hulya Canbakal's 'askeris, defined according to a survey of 'Ayntab of 1697, are as interesting as the examples of Wilkins. The list includes all those on stipends (preachers, prayer-leaders, scribes, trustees of charitable organizations, tax collectors and overseers, dervish convents, Qur'an reciters, and the like); semi-professional auxiliary troops; descendants of the Prophet; special services such as falcon-raisers, mountain pass guards, bridge-keepers, messengers, share-croppers on state land, rice cultivators, sheep producers, sheep and cattle dealers, copper miners, deputy judges, and city wardens, and, finally, Janissaries and sipahis--that is, some 1,053 members or thirty-six percent of all the households, which Canbakal estimates at five times the size of the estimated 'askeri population (ibid., pp. 68-70).
We will likely continue to debate the integration of the 'askeri class into the provincial economy as a cause or result of the collapse of both sipahi and Janissary military effectiveness. What is clear is that the decline of the sipahi class and the simultaneous loss of control over the size and discipline of the Janissary forces diminished the Ottoman central capacity to organize warfare effectively. This required the introduction of other methods of raising manpower, which led gradually to the increased use of ethnically/regionally based autonomous militia. Their loyalties lay with their patrons, their households, and their ethnic brotherhoods, but the source of their wealth ultimately remained tied to the continuation of the dynasty, as demonstrated by Canbakal and Wilkins. Hence, many authors now refer to the post-1650 period as the Ottomanization of the provinces, or the creation of the Ottoman-local class, or, as well demonstrated by Wilkins, the "civilianization" of the Janissaries.
VIRGINIA H. AKSAN MCMASTER UNIVERSITY
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| Author: | Aksan, Virginia H. |
|---|---|
| Publication: | The Journal of the American Oriental Society |
| Article Type: | Book review |
| Date: | Oct 1, 2011 |
| Words: | 1364 |
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