The Ottoman Empire in the Long Sixteenth Century

Author(s): KAYA ŞAHİN

Source: Renaissance Quarterly , 2017, Vol. 70, No. 1 (2017), pp. 220-234
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Renaissance Society of
America

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26560197

REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26560197?seq=1&cid=pdf-
reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Cambridge University Press and Renaissance Society of America are collaborating with JSTOR
to digitize, preserve and extend access to Renaissance Quarterly

This content downloaded from

102.90.47.174 on Sat, 13 May 2023 23:53:20 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 REVIEW ESSAY

The Ottoman Empire in the Long Sixteenth Century

K A Y A Ş A HİN , I n d i a n a U n i v e r s i t y

GIVEN THE LONG lifespan, wide expanse, and rich linguistic and religious
demographics of the Ottoman Empire, it is possible to study Ottoman history
and cultures across a variety of geographies, periods, and issues, and through
a dazzling spectrum of primary sources in several languages. This richness
remains one of the foremost challenges as well as opportunities for the study of
the Ottoman enterprise. Every Ottomanist has to don the garbs of the
philologist, the historian, and the literary critic, not to mention the archival
sleuth and the manuscript hunter. Modern scholarly traditions that focus on the
Ottoman Empire exist in modern Turkish, English, French, German, Italian,
Hungarian, several Slavic languages, and, to a lesser extent, Arabic and Persian.1
Here I will discuss a considerable yet narrow section of Ottomanist scholarship
that pertains to what I would like to call the long sixteenth century. This
period extends from the emergence of new political and cultural notions and
administrative capabilities in the mid-fifteenth century, through the empire
established by S€ uleyman I (r. 1520–66), to the critical economic, ecological,
and indeed systemic transformations after the second half of the sixteenth
century. I will preface this with a brief discussion of the late medieval era in the
Balkans and the Middle East, up to the capture of Constantinople in 1453,
in order to set some context. I will refer mostly to publications in English to
make the discussion more accessible to Renaissance Quarterly readers, though
Ottoman scholarship appears in several languages, with the largest output being

I am grateful to Nikolay Antov, H. Erdem Çıpa, Burak Onaran, A. Tunç Şen, and Nicholas
Terpstra for their helpful suggestions. Of course, the responsibility for the errors of judgment
and infelicities of expression is mine. This review was completed in February 2016, and it does
not discuss works published later than fall 2015. I was the recipient of a National Endowment
for the Humanities Fellowship in 2015–16, which allowed me to devote my time to research
and writing. I would also like to acknowledge the support of Indiana University’s Office of the
Vice Provost for Research.
1
A 2010 special issue of the journal TALİD brings together several articles on the state of
Turkish historical scholarship across the world, and some articles can be accessed in English and
French: http://bisav.academia.edu/talid/15-Dunyada-Turk-Tarihciligi.

Renaissance Quarterly 70 (2017): 220–34 Ó 2017 Renaissance Society of America.

This content downloaded from

102.90.47.174 on Sat, 13 May 2023 23:53:20 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 T H E O T T OM A N E MP I RE 221

in modern Turkish. Finally, I will mention works that were published in the
past decade and a half in order to try and locate the recent directions and future
prospects in Ottoman scholarship. Ottomanists feel the need to take the pulse
of the field fairly regularly, and reviews were conducted recently by Leslie Peirce,
Alan Mikhail and Christine Philliou, and Virginia Aksan. These longer surveys
cover a larger time span than the present discussion.
Despite the inward pull created—indeed required—by the specificities of its
research languages and the wealth of its archival and narrative materials,
Ottoman scholarship has been open to outside influences since its emergence
as a modern scholarly field in the first decades of the twentieth century. Several
Ottomanists enthusiastically followed Fernand Braudel’s invitation to expand
the scope of Mediterranean studies. Braudel’s influence, coupled with increased
access to the Ottoman archives, led to a boom in the use of economic data. Later,
Immanuel Wallerstein found many followers to his world-systems theory among
Ottomanists, and his influence continued until the end of the 1990s,
culminating in Faruk Tabak’s masterful Waning of the Mediterranean in 2008.
Debates on development and underdevelopment, the Third World, and various
Marxian approaches were distinctly felt throughout the 1970s and well into the
early 1990s. The critiques of Orientalism and Eurocentrism, the postmodernist
attack against grand narratives, and the cultural turn directly or indirectly
inspired several Ottomanists. As a result, the lives of commoners (peasants,
artisans, and merchants), women, and religious minorities (non-Muslims
as well as non-Sunnis) became more integral parts of Ottoman scholarship.
Concomitantly, the nationalist and positivist certainties of earlier generations
came to be seen increasingly as historiographical problems to tackle, rather than
foundations to build on.
More recently, political pressures related to 9/11 and the subsequent “war on
terror,” the rise of political Islam in its myriad variants, and the Arab Spring and
its aftermath have had their impact on the ways in which the Ottoman
experience is understood. From a more strictly academic perspective, the revived
interest in empires, the emphasis on global and world history, and the rise of the
notion of early modernity led to a wave of works that place the Ottoman
experience within the larger structures of regional and global histories. More
inclusive understandings of the European Renaissance, and a revived interest
among Europeanists in the image and role of the “Turk” in Renaissance / early
modern literatures and identities, helped establish a ground for scholarly
exchange between Ottomanists and Europeanists. The growing visibility of
the Ottoman Empire in the works of Europeanists has been paralleled by the
growing visibility of Ottomanists in history and art history departments, and not
simply in Near / Middle Eastern studies centers and departments as before.
Working as colleagues with other historians and art historians has motivated

This content downloaded from

102.90.47.174 on Sat, 13 May 2023 23:53:20 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
222 R EN AI S S A N C E QU A RT E R L Y VOLUME LXX, NO. 1

many Ottomanists to make their teaching and research more accessible to those
outside the field. The tensions brought on by these developments should also be
acknowledged. Making our research on things Ottoman accessible to others
involves a process that is akin to a form of translation. The search for parallels,
similarities, and commensurabilities requires the adaptation of concepts,
contexts, and issues drawn from Ottoman history to other platforms. This at
times creates the risk of erasing the specificity of Ottoman history, and making
the Ottoman Empire look like yet another dynastic kingdom, land-based
empire, Mediterranean actor, or Islamic polity. On the opposite end, the
Ottoman Empire risks being painted as an utterly unique construct, either
within a glorifying narrative that emphasizes achievements, or an Orientalist one
that emphasizes stagnation. These two extremes are what they are, i.e., extremes,
and the overwhelming majority of Ottomanist scholarship falls somewhere in
between the two. The need to establish balance between the two extremities of
Ottoman scholarship helps give shape to a field that adopts different theoretical
and methodological approaches while using a wide array of primary sources in
several languages.
The beginnings of Ottoman history are rooted in developments in the
Balkans and the Middle East in the late medieval era, such as the decline of the
Abbasid caliphate after the mid-tenth century, the arrival of the Turkic nomads
into Anatolia in the mid-eleventh century, the first four Crusades, the
expansions and contractions of the Byzantine Empire in the Balkans and the
Anatolian peninsula, the rise of the Italian city-states and their activities in
the Mediterranean, the Mongol invasions from the 1220s onward, and the
emergence of the Mongol successor states. These developments established
the demographic, economic, and political-cultural foundations for the rise of
rival polities controlled by militarized elites keen on commerce, based on
military aggression, yet open to pragmatic negotiation. One of the venues where
we encounter such a holistic view of the early Ottoman enterprise is Cambridge
History of Turkey’s volume 1, edited by Kate Fleet, which covers the period from
the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, when a Byzantine force commanded by
the emperor was defeated by a Seljuq force, to the Ottoman capture of
Constantinople in 1453. Despite the emphasis on Turkey in the title, this
work renders the importance of the regional dynamics that transcend the
frontiers of the Turkish nation-state. The Ottoman enterprise, initially a small
venture supported by militarized nomads and their allies (soldiers of fortune
from Muslim and Christian backgrounds, overtaxed sedentary populations,
mystics and other latitudinarian figures), emerged in northwestern Anatolia not
as the manifestation of a nationalist teleology, but as a matter of historical
contingency. The development of a viable military apparatus (especially through
the temporary granting of land in exchange for military service, and the
formation of the janissary standing army), the creation of a dynastic ideology

This content downloaded from

102.90.47.174 on Sat, 13 May 2023 23:53:20 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 T H E O T T OM A N E MP I RE 223

favoring the leadership of a single ruler, the keenness on fostering commerce, and
the willingness to enter into pragmatic agreements with rival dynasties, local
notables, scholars, and merchants helped the Ottomans survive and eventually
thrive.
More specialized works further illustrate the richness of early Ottoman
history and its defiance of simplistic explanations. Early Ottoman history was
inescapably tied to Byzantine history, as Nevra Necipoglu, a Byzantinist, shows
in her Byzantium between the Ottomans and the Latins. This point is also made
explicit in Anthony Kaldellis’s recent analysis of the Byzantine historian
Chalkokondyles (ca. 1430–ca. 1470). The Ottoman-Byzantine encounter is
one of the potential directions for future inquiries. It has been argued, for
instance, that there were several links between Ottoman and Byzantine
apocalyptic narratives.2 Future works on Byzantino-Ottoman cultural history
would most likely reveal more convergences. Another critical encounter put the
Ottomans in touch with other Muslim polities to the East. These rivals displayed
a similar Turko-Mongol political culture and, more importantly, a more
developed literate culture in Arabic and especially Persian. As an Ottoman
palace library inventory from 1502–03 reveals, a new Ottoman cultural idiom in
the fifteenth and early sixteenth century was created by reading and adapting this
literate culture. A detailed article by Sara Nur Yıldız investigates the Ottoman
use of Persian as a historiographical idiom, and a recent dissertation by
Christopher Markiewicz further expands the contours of this cultural
exchange through an analysis of historiography, administrative knowhow, and
scholarly mobility. This is another direction in which knowledge of the myriad
influences on early Ottoman history can be advanced.
Compared to the Ottoman-Byzantine and Ottoman-Eastern encounters, the
Ottoman presence in the Balkans is much better studied. The early Ottoman
expansion in the area is described through its many vicissitudes by Machiel Kiel,
the dean of the subject, in an article in the volume edited by Kate Fleet,
mentioned above. Grigor Boykov’s work on urban development is a testimony
to the hybridity of the urban and cultural forms that emerged in the area.
Nikolay Antov’s recent dissertation is a meticulous study that brings together
debates on Ottoman settlement, Ottoman religious identities, and the
development of governance through a deep focus on a northern Bulgarian
region across two centuries. A common feature of these works is their empirical
thoroughness, as well as their departure from earlier nationalist models (i.e., both
Turkish and various Balkan nationalisms) in their search for the dynamics that
built an Ottoman presence in the Balkans.
Mentioning the nationalist historiographies that have haunted Ottoman
studies evokes two recent works where the beginnings of modern Ottoman

2
Lellouch and Yerasimos; Şahin, 2010.

This content downloaded from

102.90.47.174 on Sat, 13 May 2023 23:53:20 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
224 R EN AI S S A N C E QU A RT E R L Y VOLUME LXX, NO. 1

scholarship are questioned, and where two foundational figures of the field and
their arguments are placed within the larger intellectual history of the early
twentieth century. In a culmination of his long-term dedication to one of the
patriarchs of Ottoman history, Colin Heywood gathered, for the first time, all
the writings of Paul Wittek (1894–1978) on the foundation of the Ottoman
Empire in English (some in the English original, others translations from
German and French). In his critical introduction, Heywood demonstrates how
modern Ottoman scholarship emerged through the intellectual currents of
a period defined by imperial collapse, nationalist romanticism, hero worship,
social conflict, and war. Markus Dressler devoted the second half of a work on
Alevi Islam to a discussion of Mehmed Fuad K€opr€ ul€u’s (1890–1966) writings
on religion and history. A prominent intellectual of the late Ottoman and
republican periods, K€opr€ ul€
u helped create hegemonic definitions of crucial
concepts such as Turkish literature and Anatolian folk Islam. Here lies another
path that has not been explored enough: a reevaluation of the field’s founders,
and a thorough revisiting of the intellectual and political contexts within which
modern Ottoman scholarship emerged, both within the territories of the
Ottoman Empire, and across Europe, particularly in the lands of the Austro-
Hungarian Empire.
Very much like the European Renaissance, the long sixteenth century of the
Ottoman Empire refuses to relinquish its importance. Its eventual loss of status
in Ottoman studies has been predicted many times, but the period from 1453 to
the last decades of the sixteenth century continues to attract scholarly attention.
There are several reasons for this continued relevance. One of these is related to
the rich body of sources about the Ottoman experience: from the last decades of
the fifteenth century onward, and especially after the first decades of the
sixteenth century, the central administration produced a large number and
variety of documents about the empire’s political and fiscal management and its
diplomatic relations; court registers, providing veritable glimpses into the
everyday lives of the subjects, became more widespread; and narrative sources,
including poetry, religious treatises, biographical dictionaries, and historical
works, composed by authors from different walks of life, formed a veritable
Ottoman literature. This impressive group of sources was further supplanted by
European diplomatic reports, travelogues, and other writings on the Ottomans.3
It is notable that contemporary Ottomans, like many literati and commoners at
the time of the Renaissance, felt that they lived in a distinct era. The reigns of
Selim I (1512–20) and S€ uleyman I (1520–66), in particular, fostered ideas
about a new age. For some, this new age immediately preceded the end of time;
others described it as a time of tremendous changes in cultural and religious
identity, the sultan’s position within the imperial system, the nature of the

3
Suraiya Faroqhi offers an introduction to these sources in her Approaching Ottoman History.

This content downloaded from

102.90.47.174 on Sat, 13 May 2023 23:53:20 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 T H E O T T OM A N E MP I RE 225

central administration, etc. The empire became truly global, competing with the
Habsburgs in Central Europe and the Mediterranean, and the Safavids in the
Middle East. The economic zones unified by the Ottoman expansion were
further connected to global markets; as a result, the level of monetization
increased, while the Ottoman economy became more susceptible to the impact
of global flows of bullion and commodities. The economic aspects of empire
building and expansion have not received of late the attention shown by scholars
of previous generations; at the same time, several recent dissertations and
monographs have revisited the other developments of the sixteenth century.
Erdem Çıpa’s forthcoming book on the violent accession of Selim to power,
and the subsequent representations of his life and reign, sheds light on an oft-
misunderstood chapter of Ottoman history while asking critical questions about
cultural memory and textual traditions.4 Sooyong Kim’s dissertation on an
Ottoman poet in the first half of the sixteenth century offers a dynamic vision of
Ottoman poetry that was not only influenced by palace patronage, but by
individual artistic visions as well. Kaya Şahin’s monograph on the life and career
of the chancellor Celalzade Mustafa (ca. 1490–1567) places the imperial rivalries
with the Habsburgs and the Safavids at the center of Ottoman history, and
discusses the emergence of new bureaucratic mentalities and historiographical
modes as a result of the period’s tensions. Zahit Atçıl’s dissertation on the career
administrator and grand vizier R€ ustem Pasha (ca. 1501–61) similarly portrays
a self-consciously imperial ruling elite who helped transform the more ad hoc
administrative measures of the previous periods into more regular practices,
while responding to the challenges of truly global dynamics. The considerable
legal scholarship and the vibrant legal culture of the sixteenth century form the
subject of a dissertation by Snjezana Buzov, and monographs by Reem Meshal
and Guy Burak. The liveliness of Ottoman political thought, long seen as
derivative of earlier traditions, is decisively demonstrated in a dissertation by
H€useyin Yılmaz. One of the common threads encountered in these works is
what might be called Ottoman governance. What was the nature of the sultan’s
authority? How was it defined and supported in political and historical writings?
Beyond sultanic authority, how was the empire managed and legitimized
through the use of bureaucratic structures and the administration of the
law? How “Ottoman” were these measures? The current research attributes
a significant level of creativity to the Ottoman elite, without necessarily
repeating the old cliche that the reign of S€ uleyman represented the pinnacle
of Ottoman history. A possible next step may be to look into the limits
of Ottoman—indeed, of any other early modern—governance, and seek for
instances of protest and failure, as well as nonelite participation in everyday
governance.

4
I thank Erdem Çıpa for allowing me to read parts of his forthcoming monograph.

This content downloaded from

102.90.47.174 on Sat, 13 May 2023 23:53:20 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
226 R EN AI S S A N C E QU A RT E R L Y VOLUME LXX, NO. 1

In the study of the long sixteenth century, another cluster of interest is

religion. The Ottoman Empire was managed by a Sunni Muslim elite that ruled
over communities exhibiting a rich religious diversity. Ottoman subjects
followed several different interpretations of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism,
and the attempts at managing this diversity were inescapably colored by several
pragmatic measures, as Karen Barkey has argued in her Empire of Difference.
(Any references to Ottoman pragmatism now have to take into account the
incisive critique recently supplied by Murat Daglı in “The Limits of Ottoman
Pragmatism.”) Sufism preserved its popularity as a subject of study, as seen in
recent contributions by John Curry, Side Emre, Hasan Karataş, and Bet€ ul
Yavuz. These works have problematized the simplistic views of Sufism as a form
of popular/mystic Islam, and helped create a more historically informed study of
Sufism, latitudinarianism, and the relationship between political authorities and
diverse Islamic discourses. Other scholars have continued the investigation into
the relationship between politics and religion by focusing on the ramifications of
the Ottoman-Safavid political and cultural rivalry. The aggressive Ottoman
attitude toward the Safavids of Iran resonated in attempts at defining a Sunni
Muslim orthodoxy, and investigating the subjects’ religious compliance. While
the Safavid religious rhetoric transformed itself from a latitudinarian/millenarian
position into a conservative Twelver Shiism throughout the sixteenth century, it
similarly developed a more cautious attitude toward the beliefs and pieties that
did not follow suit.
Stefan Winter’s investigation into the relationship between the Ottomans
and the Shiites of Lebanon shows an atmosphere filled with deep suspicions,
which did not prevent the existence of several political arrangements. Derin
Terzioglu’s studies offer fresh insights into the religious anxieties of the period by
inquiring about the links between the political center’s attempts at control and
the transformation of lay Sunni Muslim piety. Together with Tijana Krstic,
Terzioglu has worked to apply the concept of confessionalization, initially
formulated to describe religious sensibilities in early modern Europe, to the
Ottoman case. Abdurrahman Atçıl’s dissertation, on the formation of the
Ottoman scholarly class between 1300 and 1600, is a crucial contribution to
the study of Ottoman religions in the early modern period through its
exploration of the textual and intellectual production of the Sunni Muslim
scholars and the changing relationship between the political center and the
scholarly class. The conversation on religion has been enriched by Ayfer
Karakaya-Stumpf and Rıza Yıldırım, who made the history and beliefs of the
Alevi/Bektashi/Shiite communities integral parts of the discussion on Ottoman
religion. They also helped demonstrate the religious and cultural exchanges
between the Ottoman and Safavid geographies. At times when the debate on
confessionalization risks remaining anchored in Europeanist methodologies and
concerns, and when Ottomanists mostly focus on the historically hegemonic

This content downloaded from

102.90.47.174 on Sat, 13 May 2023 23:53:20 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 T H E O T T OM A N E MP I RE 227

Sunni Islam and its manifestations, the case of the Alevi/Bektashi/Shiite

communities provides a much-needed dimension. The non-Muslim subjects
of the empire are somehow left out in these debates and walk into the limelight if
and only when they convert to Sunni Islam. What was the impact of the new
Sunni pieties on the Orthodox Christians and the Armenians of the empire? The
Greek Orthodox and Armenian patriarchates exhibit a higher level of control
over their flocks from the mid-sixteenth century onward, but the subject requires
further study by scholars armed with the necessary linguistic qualifications.
Yet another cluster is seen around the themes of encounters and exchange,
and, by extension, comparative analyses. These are related to the study of the
Ottoman Empire as part of larger regional and global developments in the
Mediterranean, and across what has been called “early modern Eurasia,” a shared
political, economic, and cultural space extending from England to the Indian
subcontinent, between 1400 and 1800. I will not discuss the rich and growing
field of Mediterranean studies here; insightful review articles have been written
recently by Francesca Trivellato and Eric Dursteler. Dursteler’s Venetians in
Constantinople and Natalie Rothman’s Brokering Empire offer innovative studies
by historians of Venice that discuss the Mediterranean beyond essentialist
approaches to culture, religion, and identity. A recent special issue of the Journal
of Early Modern History enters the fold through articles on diplomatic exchanges
in the early modern Mediterranean, where Mediterranean diplomacy appears
as a multi-actor conversation that took place simultaneously in several parts
of Mare Nostrum. Emrah Safa G€ urkan’s doctoral dissertation illustrates the
prospects created by a deeper integration of European and Ottoman narrative
and archival sources through its elevation of an elusive subject like espionage
into a prism for the early modern Mediterranean; it further contributes to the
ongoing debate about Ottoman governance, thanks to its discussion of
decision-making mechanisms and the struggles among elite factions. The
Mediterranean also becomes a conduit through which the Ottomans are
connected to the so-called early modernity, as illustrated by Daniel Goffman
and Linda Darling. The Early Modern Ottomans, a volume coedited by Goffman
and Virginia Aksan, brings together several articles that look at Ottoman
political literature, historiography, and Ottoman-European relations from
1453 to 1600 and beyond.
The label “early modern” is now regularly used by many Ottomanists, but it is
not always well defined, as Pal Fodor most recently argued. Its indiscriminate use
creates the risk of erasing the nuances of Ottoman history while trying to make it
more legible to Europeanists. The result is a reaffirmation of the Eurocentric
paradigm, either under the title of early modernity or Mediterranean studies.
Like the notion of confessionalization, early modernity was created, in the first
place, as a conceptual tool for European history. On the other hand, it is
refreshing to see that the term has been adopted by other scholars of Islamic

This content downloaded from

102.90.47.174 on Sat, 13 May 2023 23:53:20 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
228 R EN AI S S A N C E QU A RT E R L Y VOLUME LXX, NO. 1

societies and, through the efforts of Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Muzaffar Alam, and
others, it has been retooled for the usage of non-Europeanists. The Ottoman
case shares several meaningful dynamics with European and Asian societies
after 1450, and these include empire building, vernacularization, a type of
confessionalization, new forms of writing and authorship, etc. At the same time,
as argued by Fodor and by Mikhail and Philliou, what is needed is a balancing act
that ties the local with the global, instead of painting the local as the global and
vice versa. Another important challenge for those Ottomanists who believe in
the use of wider approaches is to bring other Islamic societies and polities into
the discussion, instead of referring to Europe or the Mediterranean as the loci of
an Ottoman early modernity. The Ottomans and the Safavids, for instance,
shared a common universe of literary and historical references, even though their
readings were colored by the requirements of each dynasty’s political and
cultural agendas. This kind of deep cultural affinity did not connect the
Ottomans to the Europeans, despite the fact that several political ideals, such as
universal monarchy or the primacy of the law, were equally widespread in
Europe and the Ottoman lands.
The linkages between the Ottomans and other Muslim communities and
societies have lately received somehow more attention than before. If graduate-
school applications are indicative of a trend, the Ottoman-Safavid interface will
be one of the growth areas in Ottomanist scholarship in the next decades. Sinem
Arcak Casale’s dissertation on Ottoman-Safavid exchanges of gifts is a perfect
illustration of the benefits of studying the Ottomans and the Safavids jointly.
Cihan Y€ uksel Muslu’s work on Ottoman-Mamluk relations offers the prelude to
a complicated history, namely, that of the Ottoman capture of Arab-speaking
lands in the Middle East. Benjamin Lellouch’s analysis of works by Ottoman
and Arab historians on the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517 and its
aftermath, a collection of articles on the Ottoman conquest of 1517 coedited by
Lellouch and Nicholas Michel, Helen Pfeifer’s work on the cultural encounters
between elite Ottomans and Arabs, Timothy Fitzgerald’s dissertation on the
Ottomans’ long and arduous incorporation of Aleppo, and Reem Meshal’s
abovementioned study of legal culture in Ottoman Cairo, complicate the
relationship between Ottoman conquerors and local Arabs. At a time when there
is a plethora of works on the encounters between Muslims and Christians, works
such as these help break up the catchall category of “Muslim” into several
geographical, linguistic, and indeed cultural components, while also shedding
light on the challenges of Ottoman governance in the Arab lands. In Giancarlo
Casale’s Ottoman Age of Exploration, the Ottomans make their irruption in the
Indian Ocean; in A. C. S. Peacock and Annabel Teh Gallop’s edited volume on
the links between Ottoman Anatolia and Southeast Asia, several articles look at
the economic and cultural connections between the Ottomans and a geography
that has been mostly seen as distant and unrelated. Finally, Suraiya Faroqhi’s The

This content downloaded from

102.90.47.174 on Sat, 13 May 2023 23:53:20 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 T H E O T T OM A N E MP I RE 229

Ottoman Empire and the World around It is the first brushstroke of what could be
a vibrant picture of individuals and communities conversing across wide
geographical distances.
It is difficult to do justice to the entire Ottomanist scholarship in the scope of
a single review essay. Recent monographs by G€ ulru Necipoglu and Emine
Fetvacı expanded our understanding of sixteenth-century Ottoman architecture
and literate culture; Necipoglu’s corpus has proved itself to be a beacon to
Ottomanists, through explorations of Ottoman-European cultural exchanges as
well as the affinities between the Ottomans and other Islamic cultures. Çigdem
Kafesçioglu’s monograph on the Ottomanization of Constantinople after
1453 revealed how even seemingly well-known subjects could benefit from
a careful inquiry. N€ ukhet Varlık’s monograph on the spread of the plague in
the early modern Mediterranean achieved a few goals in one fell swoop by
connecting Ottoman history to regional dynamics through environmental and
epidemiological processes, and also by establishing crucial links between
environmental challenges and early modern empire building. Walter Andrews
and Mehmet Kalpaklı have shown in a coauthored book the pervasiveness of
notions of love and eroticism in Ottoman and European societies. Elyse
Semerdjian and Leslie Peirce restored the agencies of the women of Aleppo
and Aintab, respectively, who struggled to carve themselves a place in the
midst of a patriarchal society. Rhoads Murphey and Gabor Agoston’s works
on military history integrated economic issues, environmental factors, and
technological capabilities and constraints to produce rich arguments; their
studies established military history and the history of technology as yet another
fruitful locus of Ottoman and comparative history. Even though it starts where
this review ends, around 1580, Baki Tezcan’s Second Empire offered a powerful
refutation of earlier ideas about the decline of the Ottoman Empire, and helped
integrate Ottoman history with early modern debates beyond the sixteenth
century. All of these works are representative of a field that is not very large when
compared to Renaissance Europe, but one that advances by responding to several
methodological and historiographical debates both within and without. Recent
edited volumes, such as The Frontiers of the Ottoman World, edited by Peacock,
and The Ottoman World, edited by Woodhead, reflect well the depth and
breadth of Ottomanist scholarship through and beyond the long sixteenth
century.
There are now very few scholars who would continue to argue that the
Ottoman Empire declined some time after the mid-sixteenth century, or that the
reign of S€uleyman was a sort of golden age. Gender and religion are questioned
more than ever before: a male-dominated, Sunni-centric empire does not look as
normal as it used to. The history of the ruling elite and/or the history of the
Sunni Muslim communities is not synonymous with the history of the empire
anymore, even though this observation does not apply to many studies

This content downloaded from

102.90.47.174 on Sat, 13 May 2023 23:53:20 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
230 R EN AI S S A N C E QU A RT E R L Y VOLUME LXX, NO. 1

conducted within Turkish academia. The increased use of narrative sources

allows the recognition of multiple voices and perspectives, but narrative sources
written in languages other than Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and Persian, such as
Greek, Armenian, Slavic languages, and Ladino, are still somehow missing from
the debates on Ottoman culture. Old-fashioned, data-driven economic history
is in retreat, and a part of its function has been taken over, albeit inadequately,
by environmental history. Digital history is poised to make a much-needed
intervention, as indicated by a few recent gatherings and essays, and its benefits
could potentially extend from the creation of indexed manuscripts to the
mapping of Ottoman space, not to mention the creation of a more accessible
form of textual and visual knowledge on all things Ottoman. Finally, it has to be
admitted that, despite the Ottomanists’ attempts at reaching out, the rate of
reciprocation among Europeanists remains low, with the exception of scholars of
Renaissance Italy. This is partly due to the fact that Europeanists do not have the
linguistic training needed to study the Ottomans. It also stems from the general,
and seemingly indelible, notion that the Ottomans are somehow irrelevant to
the European societies, hence the scarcity of references to the Ottomanist
secondary literature, even in works that touch upon the theme of the “Turk.”
Still, the prospects of an Ottoman history that wants to be truly global depend
on yet another weaving together of East and West, to repeat a cliche. Such an
Ottoman history would, if it wanted, truly connect early modern Eurasian spaces
and societies, without losing its endemic nuances.

This content downloaded from

102.90.47.174 on Sat, 13 May 2023 23:53:20 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 T H E O T T OM A N E MP I RE 231

BIBLIOGRAPHY


Agoston, Gabor. Guns for the Sultan: Military Power and the Weapons Industry in the Ottoman
Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Aksan, Virginia. “Theoretical Ottomans.” History and Theory 47 (2008): 1–14.
Aksan, Virginia, and Daniel Goffman. The Early Modern Ottomans: Remapping the Empire.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Andrews, Walter, and Mehmet Kalpaklı. The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-
Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.
Antov, Nikolay. “Imperial Expansion, Colonization, and Conversion to Islam in the Islamic
World’s ‘Wild West’: The Formation of the Muslim Community in Ottoman Deliorman
(N.E. Balkans), 15th–16th CC.” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2011.
Arcak Casale, Sinem. “Gifts in Motion: Ottoman-Safavid Gift Exchange, 1501–1618.” PhD
diss., Harvard University, 2012.
Atçıl, Abdurrahman. “The Formation of the Ottoman Learned Class and Legal Scholarship
(1300–1600).” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2010.
Atçıl, Zahit. “State and Government in the Mid-Sixteenth Century Ottoman Empire: The
Grand Vizierates of R€ ustem Pasha (1544–1561).” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2015.
Barkey, Karen. Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Boykov, Grigor. “Balkan City or Ottoman City? A Study on the Models of Urban
Development in Ottoman Upper Thrace, from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth
Century.” In Proceedings of the Third International Congress on the Islamic Civilisation in
the Balkans, 69–86. Istanbul: IRCICA, 2010.
Burak, Guy. The Second Formation of Islamic Law: The Hanafi School in the Early Modern
Ottoman Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Buzov, Snjezana. “The Lawgiver and His Lawmakers: The Role of Legal Discourse in the
Change of Ottoman Imperial Culture.” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2005.
Casale, Giancarlo. The Ottoman Age of Exploration. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Curry, John J. The Transformation of Muslim Mystical Thought in the Ottoman Empire: The Rise
of the Halveti Order, 1350 –1650. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010.
Daglı, Murat. “The Limits of Ottoman Pragmatism.” History and Theory 52 (2013): 194–213.
Darling, Linda. “Political Change and Political Discourse in the Early Modern Mediterranean
World.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 38.4 (2008): 505–31.
Dressler, Markus. Writing Religion: The Making of Turkish Alevi Islam. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2013.
Dursteler, Eric. Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity and Coexistence in the Early
Modern Mediterranean. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.
———. “On Bazaars and Battlefields: Recent Scholarship on Mediterranean Cultural
Contacts.” Journal of Early Modern History 15.5 (2011): 413–34.
Emre, Side. “İbrahim-i G€ ulşeni (ca. 1441–1534): Itinerant Saint and Cairene Ruler.” PhD
diss., University of Chicago, 2009.
Faroqhi, Suraiya. Approaching Ottoman History: An Introduction to the Sources. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000.
———. The Ottoman Empire and the World around It. London: I. B. Tauris, 2004.

This content downloaded from

102.90.47.174 on Sat, 13 May 2023 23:53:20 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
232 R EN AI S S A N C E QU A RT E R L Y VOLUME LXX, NO. 1

Fetvacı, Emine. Picturing History at the Ottoman Court. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2013.
Fitzgerald, Timothy J. “Ottoman Methods of Conquest: Legal Imperialism and the City of
Aleppo 1480–1570.” PhD diss., Harvard University, 2009.
Fleet, Kate, ed. The Cambridge History of Turkey. Vol. 1, Byzantium to Turkey 1071 –1453.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Fodor, Pal. The Unbearable Weight of Empire: The Ottomans in Central Europe—a Failed Attempt
at Universal Monarchy (1390 –1566). Budapest: Research Center for the Humanities,
Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 2015.
Goffman, Daniel. The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002.
G€urkan, Emrah Safa. “Espionage in the 16th Century Mediterranean: Secret Diplomacy,
Mediterranean Go-betweens and the Ottoman-Habsburg Rivalry.” PhD diss., Georgetown
University, 2012.
Journal of Early Modern History 19.2–3 (2015). Special issue, “Cross-Confessional Diplomacy
and Diplomatic Intermediaries in the Early Modern Mediterranean.” Ed. Maartje van
Gelder and Tijana Krstic.
Kafesçioglu, Çigdem. Constantinopolis / Istanbul: Cultural Encounter, Imperial Vision, and the
Construction of the Ottoman Capital. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009.
Kaldellis, Anthony. A New Herodotos: Laonikos Chalkokondyles on the Ottoman Empire, the Fall
of Byzantium, and the Emergence of the West. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research
Library and Collection, 2014.
Karakaya-Stumpf, Ayfer. “Subjects of the Sultan, Disciples of the Shah: Formation and
Transformation of the Kizilbash/Alevi Communities in Ottoman Anatolia.” PhD diss.,
Harvard University, 2008.
Karataş, Hasan. “The City as a Historical Actor: The Urbanization and Ottomanization of the
Halvetiye Sufi Order by the City of Amasya in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries.” PhD
diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2011.
Kim, Sooyong. “Minding the Shop: Zati and the Making of Ottoman Poetry in the First Half
of the Sixteenth Century.” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2005.
Krstic, Tijana. Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern
Ottoman Empire. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011.
Lellouch, Benjamin. Les Ottomans en Egypte: Historiens et conqu e rants au XVIe si
e cle. Paris:
Peeters, 2006.
Lellouch, Benjamin, and Nicholas Michel, eds. Conqu^ete ottomane de l’Egypte  (1517): Arri e re-
plan, impact, echos. Leiden: Brill, 2013.
Lellouch, Benjamin, and Stephane Yerasimos, eds. Les traditions apocalyptiques au tournant de la
chute de Constantinople. Istanbul: L’Harmattan, 2000.
Markiewicz, Christopher. “The Crisis of Rule in Late Medieval Islam: A Study of Idrīs Bidlīsī
(861–926/1457–1520) and Kingship at the Turn of the Sixteenth Century.” PhD diss.,
University of Chicago, 2015.
Meshal, Reem A. Sharia and the Making of the Modern Egyptian: Islamic Law and Custom in the
Courts of Ottoman Cairo. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2014.
Mikhail, Alan, and Christine M. Philliou. “The Ottoman Empire and the Imperial Turn.”
Comparative Studies in Society and History 54.4 (2012): 721–45.

This content downloaded from

102.90.47.174 on Sat, 13 May 2023 23:53:20 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 T H E O T T OM A N E MP I RE 233

Murphey, Rhoads. Ottoman Warfare, 1500 –1700. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
1999.
Necipoglu, G€ ulru. The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire. London:
Reaktion Books, 2005.
Necipoglu, Nevra. Byzantium between the Ottomans and the Latins: Politics and Society in the
Late Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Peacock, A. C. S., ed. The Frontiers of the Ottoman World. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009.
Peacock, A. C. S., and Annabel Teh Gallop, eds. From Anatolia to Aceh: Ottomans, Turks, and
Southeast Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Peirce, Leslie. Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003.
———. “Changing Perceptions of the Ottoman Empire: The Early Centuries.” Mediterranean
Historical Review 19.1 (2004): 6–28.
Pfeifer, Helen. “Encounter after the Conquest: Scholarly Gatherings in 16th-Century Ottoman
Damascus.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 47.2 (2015): 219–39.
Rothman, E. Natalie. Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012.
Şahin, Kaya. “Constantinople and the End of Time: The Ottoman Conquest as a Portent of the
Last Hour.” Journal of Early Modern History 14 (2010): 317–54.
———. Empire and Power in the Reign of Suleyman:€ Narrating the Sixteenth-Century Ottoman
World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Semerdjian, Elyse. “Off the Straight Path”: Illicit Sex, Law, and Community in Ottoman Aleppo.
Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008.
Tabak, Faruk. The Waning of the Mediterranean, 1550 –1870: A Geohistorical Approach.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
€
TALİD (Turkiye € Dergisi) 8.15 (2010).
Araştırmaları Literatur
Terzioglu, Derin. “How to Conceptualize Ottoman Sunnitization: A Historiographical Discussion.”
Turcica 44 (2012–13): 301–38.
———. “Where ‘İlm-i Hāl Meets Catechism: Islamic Manuals of Religious Instruction in
the Ottoman Empire in the Age of Confessionalization.” Past and Present 220 (2013):
79–114.
Tezcan, Baki. The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the Early
Modern Ottoman World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Trivellato, Francesca. “Renaissance Italy and the Muslim Mediterranean in Recent Historical
Work.” Journal of Modern History 82.1 (2010): 127–55.
Varlık, N€ ukhet. Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman
Experience, 1347 –1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Winter, Stefan. The Shiites of Lebanon under Ottoman Rule, 1516 –1788. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010.
Wittek, Paul. The Rise of the Ottoman Empire: Studies in the History of Turkey, Thirteenth –Fifteenth
Centuries. Ed. Colin Heywood. New York: Routledge, 2013.
Woodhead, Christine, ed. The Ottoman World. New York: Routledge, 2012.
Yavuz, Bet€ ul F. “The Making of a Sufi Order between Heresy and Legitimacy: Bayrami-
Malamis in the Ottoman Empire.” PhD diss., Rice University, 2013.

This content downloaded from

102.90.47.174 on Sat, 13 May 2023 23:53:20 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
234 R EN AI S S A N C E QU A RT E R L Y VOLUME LXX, NO. 1

Yıldırım, Rıza. “Turkomans between Two Empires: The Origins of the Qizilbash Identity in
Anatolia (1447–1514).” PhD diss., Bilkent University, 2008.
———. “In the Name of Hosayn’s Blood: The Memory of Karbala as Ideological Stimulus to
the Safavid Revolution.” Journal of Persianate Studies 8 (2015): 127–54.
Yıldız, Sara Nur. “Ottoman Historical Writing in Persian, 1400–1600.” In A History of Persian
Literature. Vol. 10, Persian Historiography, ed. Charles Melville, 436–502. London: I. B.
Tauris, 2012.
Yılmaz, H€useyin. “The Sultan and the Sultanate: Envisioning Rulership in the Age of S€
uleymān
the Lawgiver (1520–1566).” PhD diss., Harvard University, 2005.
uksel Muslu, Cihan. The Ottomans and the Mamluks: Imperial Diplomacy and Warfare in the
Y€
Islamic World. London: I. B. Tauris, 2014.

This content downloaded from

102.90.47.174 on Sat, 13 May 2023 23:53:20 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms