On Judicial Hierarchy in the Ottoman Empire: The Case of Sofia from the Seventeenth to the Beginning of the Eighteenth Century

2006 ◽  
pp. 271-298 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Judicial Hierarchy

Slavery and Ransom

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Smiley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Individual Characteristics ◽  
The State ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Law

This chapter explores captives’ fates after their capture, all along the Ottoman land and maritime frontiers, arguing that this was largely determined by individuals’ value for ransom or sale. First this was a matter of localized customary law; then it became a matter of inter-imperial rules, the “Law of Ransom.” The chapter discusses the nature of slavery in the Ottoman Empire, emphasizing the role of elite households, and the varying prices for captives based on their individual characteristics. It shows that the Ottoman state participated in ransoming, buying, exploiting, and sometimes selling both female and male captives. The state particularly needed young men to row on its galleys, but this changed in the late eighteenth century as the fleet moved from oars to sails. The chapter then turns to ransom, showing that a captive’s ability to be ransomed, and value, depended on a variety of individualized factors.

Imports to Smyrna between 1794 and 1802: New Statistics from the Ottoman Sources

2008 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 487-512 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mesud Küçükkalay
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Foreign Trade ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Terms Of Trade ◽  
Transport Maritime ◽  
Economic Trends ◽  
La Modification ◽  
New Statistics ◽  
Trade Partners

AbstractThis study is based on the foreign customs registers of the port of Smyrna in the Ottoman Archives of Istanbul. In this paper 115 ports, 112 ships, 2859 pieces of goods, and 1273 merchants have been investigated for the period 1794-1802. This information indicates that the transformation of the Ottoman Foreign trade at the turn of the eighteenth century was linked to the following economic trends of the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries: the emergence of the European supremacy in naval transportation, a change in the terms of trade that was disadvantageous for the Ottomans, and a shift in the trade partners of the Ottoman Empire. Cette contribution exploite les données des registres de la douane ottomane du port de Smyrne, consignant les importations étrangères, conservés aux archives d'Istanbul. L'étude porte sur les cargaisons de 112 navires en provenance de 115 ports, 2859 pièces de marchandises et 1273 marchands dans les années 1794-1802. Les données témoignent que la transformation du commerce ottoman étranger en fin du XVIIIème siècle est liée aux tendances économiques de la seconde moitié du XVIIIème et de la première moitié du XIXème siècles. Elles reflètent la domination européenne dans le domaine du transport maritime, la modification des conditions commerciales au détriment des Ottomans et un changement des partenaires commerciaux de l'Empire.

L’inventario della spezieria di Giovanni Zavanti al Cairo (1732)

2021 ◽  
Vol 101 (1) ◽  
pp. 421-495
Author(s):  
Alessandra Quaranta
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Professional Activity ◽  
Cultural Integration ◽  
Cultural Relations ◽  
Historical Source ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Second Generation Immigrants ◽  
Pharmaceutical Activity

Abstract The inventory of the apothecary Giovanni Zavanti, a Venetian pharmacist who worked in Cairo in the 1730s, was drawn up by the Egyptian city’s British Consulate in 1732. Since this institution ensured formal juridical protection to the English shopkeepers of the Levant Company, but devoted little attention to their need for health care, this historical source can be considered a rare testimony of European medical-pharmaceutical activity in the Levant. The inventory’s importance is also connected with the specific political and socio-cultural context of Egypt, the most economically important province of the Ottoman Empire. Substantial groups of English, French and Dutch merchants lived in the Muslim society of Cairo and were officially represented by their respective nations in the eighteenth century. The Venetian, also active in Cairo, could not count on the protection of their State institutions during the Turco-Venetian conflicts (1645–1718). In this complex context, Zavanti tried to take advantage of his professional activity and built up different socio-cultural relations to defend his properties and commercial interests. He was in contact with fellow countrymen, Arabic Christians of Egypt, Jews, Turkish officials and the Franciscan confraternity Custodia Terrae Santae. As second-generation immigrants from Venice, the Zavantis experienced a difficult process of cultural integration in Egypt.

scholarly journals Bulgaria in old Serbian accounts of pilgrimage

Balcanica ◽  
2004 ◽  
pp. 159-169
Author(s):  
Tomislav Jovanovic
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
The Road ◽  
The People

A rather small portion of old Slavonic literatures is thematically linked with the journey to the Holy Land. Of many Serbian pilgrims over the centuries only three left more detailed descriptions of Bulgarian places and parts: patriarch Arsenije III, Jerotej of Raca and Silvestar Popovic. They described, each in his own way, some of the places and areas along the road to Istanbul or Salonika. Their vivid depiction of encounters with people and observations about the places they saw on their way reveal only a fragment of life in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ottoman empire. In a seemingly ordinary way, they incorporate into their own epoch the legends heard from the people they met. The descriptions of Bulgarian parts in the Serbian accounts of pilgrimage have all the appeal that generally characterizes travel literature. Although their literary value is modest they belong among the works characterized by the simplicity and immediacy of experience. Rather than being the result of a strong literary ambition, they are witness to the need to speak about the great journey, quite an adventurous enterprise at the time.

The Evolution of Grain Policy: The Ottoman Experience

2013 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 571-598 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seven Ağir
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Price System ◽  
Economic Policies ◽  
Fixed Price ◽  
Grain Trade ◽  
The Creation

Ottoman reformers' re-organization of the grain trade during the second half of the eighteenth century had two components—the creation of a centralized institution to supervise transactions and the replacement of the fixed price system with a more flexible one. These changes were not only a response to strains on the old system of provisioning, driven by new geopolitical conditions, but also a consequence of an increased willingness among the Ottoman elite to emulate the economic policies of successful rival states. Thus, the centralized bureaucracy and political economy of the Ottoman Empire at the time had remarkable parallels with those in such European states as France and Spain.

Harvest of Briars

2019 ◽  
pp. 121-158
Author(s):  
A. Wess Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
Balkan Peninsula ◽  
The Black Sea ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Habsburg Monarchy ◽  
The West ◽  
The North ◽  
Third Phase

This chapter examines the competition with the Ottoman Empire and Russia, from the reconquest of Hungary to Joseph II’s final Turkish war. On its southern and eastern frontiers, the Habsburg Monarchy contended with two large land empires: a decaying Ottoman Empire, and a rising Russia determined to extend its influence on the Black Sea littorals and Balkan Peninsula. In balancing these forces, Austria faced two interrelated dangers: the possibility of Russia filling Ottoman power vacuums that Austria itself could not fill, and the potential for crises here, if improperly managed, to fetter Austria’s options for handling graver threats in the west. In dealing with these challenges, Austria deployed a range of tools over the course of the eighteenth century. In the first phase (1690s–1730s), it deployed mobile field armies to alleviate Turkish pressure on the Habsburg heartland before the arrival of significant Russian influence. In the second phase (1740s–70s), Austria used appeasement and militarized borders to ensure quiet in the south while focusing on the life-or-death struggles with Frederick the Great. In the third phase (1770s–90s), it used alliances of restraint to check and keep pace with Russian expansion, and recruit its help in comanaging problems to the north. Together, these techniques provided for a slow but largely effective recessional, in which the House of Austria used cost-effective methods to manage Turkish decline and avoid collisions that would have complicated its more important western struggles.

Frontier Anxieties: Toward a Social History of Muslim-Christian Relations on the Ottoman-Habsburg Border

2020 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 25-38
Author(s):  
Edin Hajdarpasic
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Social History ◽  
History Of

AbstractThis article reframes the formation of the Ottoman-Habsburg frontier after 1699 in social historical terms. By going beyond diplomatic and military factors, it identifies how the contraction of Ottoman borders affected taxation, landholding, and Muslim-Christian relations in Bosnia. The article argues that peasants in Ottoman Bosnia experienced the mounting pressures of increasing taxation, manipulation over landownership, and religiously inflected hostility, often driven by those Muslim noblemen who tried to capitalize on the destabilizing wake of several wars that the Ottoman Empire fought with the Habsburg, Venetian, and Russian states in the eighteenth century. Through these processes, by the end of the century the meaning of the reaya or raya—an Ottoman term for taxpaying “subjects” that theoretically applied to all denominations, including Muslims—had become synonymous with “Christians,” acquiring a new political significance.

scholarly journals The Parthenon, Pericles and King Solomon: a case study of Ottoman archaeological imagination in Greece

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-274
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Key Fowden
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
The City

What made Athens different from other multi-layered cities absorbed into the Ottoman Empire was the strength of its ancient reputation for learning that echoed across the Arabic and Ottoman worlds. But not only sages were remembered and Islamized in Athens; sometimes political figures were too. In the early eighteenth century a mufti of Athens, Mahmud Efendi, wrote a rarely studiedHistory of the City of Sages (Tarih-i Medinetü’l-Hukema)in which he transformed Pericles into a wise leader on a par with the Qur'anic King Solomon and linked the Parthenon mosque to Solomon's temple in Jerusalem.

The Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century

Itinerario ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 24 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 104-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Şevket Pamuk
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Technological Change ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Extended Period ◽  
Satisfactory Explanation ◽  
Internal Structures ◽  
Economic Forces ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
External Intervention

Something exceptional happened first in England and later in Northwestern Europe beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century. Institutions, state and the ability to achieve technological breakthroughs all need to be taken into account in any satisfactory explanation as to why and where the Industrial Revolution took place. This essay attempts to situate the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century. Until the 1780s, this century was a period of economic expansion for the Ottoman Empire but the empire was surely not in a position to achieve an Industrial Revolution of its own or even an extended period of technological change and productivity increases. The essay also argues that the explanation for this state of affairs should be searched not in any external intervention or impact but n i internal structures and dynamics. In short, social and economic forces for change remained weak while the Ottoman state was strong enough to defend a traditional order.

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