Interpreters of the Court in the Ottoman Empire as seen from the Sharia Court Records of Cyprus

2002 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kemal Çiçek
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Court Records ◽  
Ottoman History ◽  
Administration Of Justice ◽  
Popular Subject

AbstractAlthough the question of interpreters (tercüman) in the Ottoman empire has been a popular subject in recent writing on Ottoman history, the interpreters of the courts of the qadi (mahkeme tercümanlarι) have remained a mystery. Pioneering researchers of the sijills have mentioned their presence in court, but have been unable to establish their existence or explain the silence of the records about their position. In this essay, I analyse documents found in the sijills of the province of Nicosia, Cyprus, in order to explore the work of the translators who were charged with helping people on trial who did not know Ottoman Turkish. The court interpreters assisted the qadi and played an important role in the administration of justice, especially with regard to non-Muslims. The presence of interpreters in the qadi court of Nicosia helped the qadi to administer justice among dhimmis and gain their confidence, which may explain the frequency of references to them. Based on some berats (documents issued by the diwans) recorded in the sijills, I examine the identity, appointment, and the legal status of court interpreters.

The Great Armenian Flight: Migration and Cultural Change in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Empire

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-89
Author(s):  
Henry R. Shapiro
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Demographic History ◽  
Western Anatolia ◽  
Court Records ◽  
Ottoman History ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Time

Abstract The seventeenth century was a turning-point in the cultural and demographic history of the Ottoman Empire. Beginning in the late sixteenth century, Ottoman-Armenian subjects began to flee en masse from the Celali Revolts, war with Persia, and famine in Eastern Anatolia to more secure territories in Western Anatolia, Istanbul, and Thrace. This article documents the arrival of Armenian refugees in Thrace using Ottoman Turkish court records from the coastal town of Rodosto (Tekirdağ). After describing the micro-history of an Armenian refugee crisis, this article suggests that these migrations played a catalyzing role in the rise of a distinct “Western Armenian” culture and society, which developed for the first time in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire. The rise of this new society was an event of great importance in Ottoman history, as the Armenians would become a critical part of Ottoman economic and cultural life in the empire’s coastal trade cities.

scholarly journals An Analysis on the Operations and Functions of a Sharīʿah Court: the Case of Ottoman Üsküdar (1547-1551)

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-219
Author(s):  
Faika Çelik
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Dispute Resolution ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Administrative Services ◽  
Court Records ◽  
Administration Of Justice ◽  
Court Record

Through a close reading of a single register found in the sixteenth-century court record series of Üsküdar, this article introduces the reader to the operations of the Sharīʿah court of Üsküdar and its records from 1547 to 1551. By approaching the court records as both “text” and “document,” it explores the functions of the court, identifies the court officials, defines their roles, and delineates the role played by the qāḍī, his court and the local community in the administration of justice. This article can be read as a contribution to the newly emerging literature on variations in the Sharīʿah courts in the Ottoman Empire in terms of their operations. As the recent literature including this present study demonstrates, the duties of the local Sharīʿah court in the Ottoman Empire are neither singular nor monolithic. While some of the courts provided notarial and administrative services primarily, others acted as significant sites for dispute resolution. Hence their operations were primarily judicial. What emerges from this study is that the court of Üsküdar in the very middle of the sixteenth century primarily functioned as a “public registry.”

The Neo-Ottomanism of the Nakşibendis and the Welfare Party

2020 ◽  
pp. 126-143
Author(s):  
M. Hakan Yavuz
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Municipal Government ◽  
Elected Officials ◽  
Politics Of Identity ◽  
Local Election ◽  
Ottoman History ◽  
Election Victory ◽  
Legal Constraints ◽  
Islamic Parties

The chapter examines the Nakşibendi Sufi orders, Necmettin Erbakan, and their roles in reconstructing Islamic political identity and memories of the Ottoman Empire. The debate about the politics of identity is analyzed, as based on the experience of the Islamic parties of the National Outlook Movement (Welfare Party and the Virtue Party) between 1994 and 2001. The Welfare Party’s local election victory in 1994 resulted in its controlling nearly every municipal government in Turkey. Thus, the elected officials used the resources of the municipalities to criticize the Kemalist project by promoting Ottoman history, culture, and practices as an alternative. Rather than directly promoting Islamism due to legal constraints, they preferred to frame Ottomanism as a surrogate identity and ideology to criticize Kemalism.

Introduction

Black Samson ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Nyasha Junior ◽  
Jeremy Schipper
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African Descent ◽  
American Art ◽  
Biblical Story ◽  
Court Records ◽  
White American ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Popular Subject

Samson is a popular subject in biblical scholarship on the use of the Bible in art, literature, and popular culture, although this scholarship tends to focus on Samson in White European and White American art and literature. The introduction explains how Samson becomes identified with people of African descent in American literature. It discusses the biblical story of Samson and the lack of physical descriptions of Samson in the Bible. It provides examples of the racialized uses of Samson in poetry, sermons, speeches, narratives by enslaved persons, court records, and newspapers. It offers some possible reasons why the biblical story of Samson may have become associated with African Americans.

The Conscription of Greek Ottomans into the Sultan's Army, 1908–1912

2020 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 433-448
Author(s):  
Uğur Z. Peçe
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Diverse Population ◽  
Greek Language ◽  
Muslim Population ◽  
Military Conscription ◽  
Ottoman History ◽  
New Challenges ◽  
The Military ◽  
First Time

AbstractWith the reinstatement of the parliament in 1908, the Ottoman state faced new challenges connected to citizenship. As a policy to finally make citizens equal in rights as well as duties, military conscription figured prominently in this new context. For the first time in Ottoman history, the empire's non-Muslims began to be drafted en masse. This article explores meanings of imperial citizenship and equality through the lens of debates over the conscription of Greek Ottomans, the largest non-Muslim population of the Ottoman Empire. In contrast to the widespread suggestion of the Turkish nationalist historiography on these matters, Greek Ottomans and other non-Muslim populations enthusiastically supported the military service in principle. But amidst this general agreement was a tremendous array of views on what conscription ought to look like in practice. The issue came to center on whether Greek Ottomans should have separate battalions in the army. All units would eventually come to be religiously integrated, but the conscription debates in the Ottoman parliament as well as in the Turkish and Greek language press reveal some of the crucial fissures of an empire as various actors were attempting to navigate between a unified citizenship and a diverse population.

Serfs, slaves, or wage earners? The legal status of labour in Russia from a comparative perspective, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century

2008 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandro Stanziani
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Extreme Case ◽  
The West ◽  
The Caucasus ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
Forced Labour ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Wage Earners

AbstractComparative analyses of labour in Russia and the West often assume a dividing line between free and forced labour that is universally applicable. The first aim of this article is to show that, in Russia, the historical and institutional definition of serfdom poses a problem. I will therefore explore Russian legislation, and how it was applied, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Contrary to generally accepted arguments, serfdom as such was never clearly introduced institutionally in Russia. I will also discuss the presence of slaves in Russia, and the association between certain forms of servitude (especially for debt) and slavery. The presence of chattel slaves in the empire was related to territorial expansion, and to commercial relations with the Caucasus and the Ottoman Empire. Russian forms of bondage are compared to those in other situations, such as indentured service in the West, debt servitude in India, and Islamic slavery. My conclusion is that, not only in Russia but also around the globe, the prevailing forms of labour were not those familiar to us today, which were not introduced until the early twentieth century. Russia constituted an extreme case in a world in which severe constraints were imposed everywhere on labour and its movement, and the legal status of the wage earner and the peasant was lower than that of the master.

Capsali as a Source for Ottoman History, 1450–1523

1978 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 339-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aryeh Shmuelevitz
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Ottoman History ◽  
History Of

The chronicle of Rabbi Elijah Capsali (ca. 1483–1555), which concerns itself with the history of the Ottoman Empire, turns up as a subject for discussion from time to time. Capsali, rabbi of the Candia community in Crete, wrote the chronicle entitled Seder Eliyahu Zuta during the plague of the spring and summer of 1523. It is divided into four parts and 166 chapters and includes an introduction in which he explains the reasons for writing it and mentions his sources. As yet, however, the importance of this chronicle has not been sufficiently emphasized. The interpretation presented by Uriel Heyd at the Sixth Turkish History Congress held in Ankara in 1961. dealt with a number of aspects such as the sources of Capsali and Jewish references in the text, but only in their most general form. In this paper I examine the importance and limitations of the chronicle more thoroughly.

LEGAL STATUS NON-MUSLIM COMMUNITIES IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE IN THE XVI-XIX CENTURIES

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 102-110
Author(s):  
Александр Сквозников ◽  
Aleksandr Skvoznikov
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Religious Affiliation ◽  
The State ◽  
Legal Doctrine ◽  
Muslim Communities ◽  
The Right ◽  
Judicial Protection

The aim of the article is to investigate the legal status of non-Muslim communities in the Ottoman Empire. The author concluded that the sources of Islamic law, including the Koran and Islamic legal doctrine, formed the basis of the legal system of the Ottoman Empire, recognized the equality of people regardless of their racial, ethnic or religious affiliation. Non-Muslim subjects of the Ottoman Empire guaranteed the right to life, security of person and property, freedom of religion, freedom of economic activity, the right to judicial protection and protection against external enemies. However, the scope of rights and duties of citizens depend on their religious affiliation. The Ottoman Empire was essentially theocratic state, where Islam is the state religion and regularly held a dominant position among the other denominations. Served non-Muslim were somewhat limited in their rights: they could not come to the state, including military service, which does not allow us to talk about full equality of all subjects of the Ottoman Empire, regardless of religion.

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