Invisible City: Istanbul’s Migrants and the Politics of Space

Shirine Hamadeh

Eighteenth-Century Studies, Volume 50, Number 2, Winter 2017, pp. 173-193

(Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2017.0002

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/646371

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 Hamadeh / Istanbul’s Migrants and the Politics of Space 173

INVISIBLE CITY: ISTANBUL’S MIGRANTS AND

THE POLITICS OF SPACE

Shirine Hamadeh

As elsewhere in the world, then and now, migrant workers in eighteenth-

century Istanbul personified problems of urban congestion, housing, unemploy-
ment, provisioning, delinquency, and crime. Intrinsically unstable by any social,
occupational, spatial, or temporal measure, they brought into urban focus the
sense of geographical and socioeconomic flux that had increasingly pervaded
the Ottoman Empire since the late sixteenth century. From then on, control of
population movements across imperial territories became a frequent motif of state
legislation, especially in times of economic and agrarian crises, food shortages, and
urban uprisings. But migration from Anatolia and the Balkans continued to swell,
soaring dramatically in the eighteenth century.1 Perpetual insecurity, tax farmers’
mounting abuses, and the instability wrought by the Celâli revolts in the Anato-
lian countryside in the second half of the seventeenth century created a snowball
effect, driving away hordes of men, in particular. Men went searching for work in
urban centers, mostly in the capital, where they joined the ranks of casual labor-
ers, odd-jobbers, panhandlers, and the unemployed. By the close of the century
they constituted nearly half the labor force of Istanbul and a fifth of the estimated
number of its inhabitants.2
This substantial population remains virtually absent from accounts of
the city’s history. In local and official parlance, they were the “bekâr” [figure 1].3
Literally meaning “bachelor” (or “the bachelors”), bekâr derived from the Persian
bî-kâr, for jobless, but in the Ottoman context it was associated specifically with
the figure of the male migrant who left his family and village in search of a better

Shirine Hamadeh is Associate Professor of Art History at Rice University and author of The
City’s Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (Seattle and London: University of Wash-
ington Press, 2008).

© 2017 by the ASECS Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 50, no. 2 (2017) Pp. 173–93.
174 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 50, No. 2

Figure 1. Detail, bekâr porters and peddlers at Tophane Square, by Antoine-Ignace Melling. From
Antoine-Ignace Melling, Voyage pittoresque de Constantinople et du Bosphore (Paris: P. Didot l’aîné,
1819; reprint, Istanbul, n.d.).

life in the big city.4 An assorted mix of young and older men, Istanbul’s bachelors
hailed from different regions of the empire (in the eighteenth century, the western
Black Sea region, central and eastern Anatolia, and the Aegean Islands), spoke dif-
ferent languages or dialects, and worked in a variety of mostly unskilled jobs. Some
returned home after a few years, others remained in the capital until death, and
others yet adapted to a life of seasonal migration. But regardless of their differences,
bachelors shared the same urban predicament that set them apart from the rest of
Istanbul’s denizens: They had no permanent address, no household attachment, and
no fixed occupation, and were bound by a set of intertwined occupational, social,
moral, and spatial restrictions. They fell into the cracks of the established economic
structure, for in theory, they could work only on the guilds’ margins. They were
 Hamadeh / Istanbul’s Migrants and the Politics of Space 175

excluded from the normative family space of residential neighborhoods (mahal-

leler), for bachelorhood (even if provisional, as for those married back home) was
an aberration to the Ottoman sociomoral order.5 And just like transient foreign-
ers, they were not considered bona fide residents of the city, a privilege conferred
exclusively to the “neighborhood residents” (mahalle ehalisi)—the “honorable
people” (ehl-i cırz. kulları) and “subjects of God” (cibadullah) of state and judicial
documents.6 In short, from the perspective of the state, they were the antithesis of
the permanent resident, fitting rather perfectly Zygmund Bauman’s notion of the
“permanent slimy.”7
It was mainly in this capacity, and as a thuggish, disruptive, and unruly
population, that the bekâr erupted in full strength into Istanbul’s historical records in
the eighteenth century. In this long century, which began to wane only in the 1840s
with the introduction of radical Tanzimat reforms in the spheres of governance,
policing, migration, and urbanism,8 control of the capital’s bachelor population
became a top priority for state authorities. Old mechanisms employed to control
or forbid their entry were reinforced. New strategies to monitor their conduct and
whereabouts within the city multiplied, increasingly so after the revolt of 1730
that was led by an Albanian migrant and Janissary, nicknamed Patrona Halil.9
Sultanic decrees sending bachelors back to their villages became routine, and in
1740, for the first time in history, throngs of men were expelled en masse following
an uprising that brought Sultan Mahmud I (r. 1730–54) dreadful memories of the
1730 revolt.10 Eighteenth-century state, judicial, and police archives reveal anxious
efforts to control bachelors’ exponentially rising numbers. Expressions of concern
about crime, insecurity, provisioning, or epidemics, and a hardened perception
of the bekâr as a delinquent and lawless people—one echoed in urban residents’
accusations of violence, petty crime, and unlawful employment—abound in these
records. Especially from 1740 onward, bachelors’ actions and stories surface and
resurface in the local chronicles as news items in their own right: expulsions, pun-
ishments, transgressions, conflicts with residents, involvement in the Janissaries’
revolts of 1807 and 1808, and even minor street brawls are followed and recorded.
In fact, for all their precariousness and peripheral urban condition, and
despite their regulated isolation from the normative spaces of domesticity and
economy, bachelors seemed implicated in virtually every urban matter that counted,
from provisioning to urban economy, welfare, housing, labor, security, public or-
der, and even political stability. A close reading of police and judicial case records,
sultanic and administrative orders, and ordinary people’s petitions reveals that they
were indeed constitutive elements of the eighteenth-century urban fabric.11 Their
agency in what I would call, broadly, the politics of urban space was pervasive
and persistent, and as I hope to show in this essay, it was galvanized by everyday
acts of resistance against their exclusion from normative space and society. These
acts ranged from aggressive, offensive, or spectacularly violent—as during the
Janissary-led revolts—to seemingly inconsequential and ever-so-slightly subver-
sive “discretenesses,” as Michel de Certeau would have called them, that helped
bachelors inscribe themselves into the city.12 They amounted to creative forms
of engagement with the urban spaces afforded to the bachelors: their collective
lodgings, the so-called “bachelor-rooms”; their own neighborhoods; and the city’s
public spaces—or more precisely, their peripatetic interaction with those spaces,
176 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 50, No. 2

which occupational transiency encouraged. Through these spatial opportunities

they cultivated relationships and alliances with residents from different walks of
life, and these networks, in turn, further facilitated their integration into Istanbul’s
normative fabric. If, therefore, I take as a central vantage point the figure of the
bachelor to address urban space, my goal is not simply to give voice to the subaltern
and tone down the panoramic gaze. It is mainly to foreground everyday spatial
agency in Istanbul’s urban history, particularly at a time when bachelors emerge
in the records as undeniable actors in the making of this history.

THE INSTITUTION OF BEKÂR ODALARI

Urban housing conditions could vary immensely from one bachelor to
the next. The lucky few who managed to enter a household as domestic servants
settled in their employers’ mansions. On the other end of the spectrum were
those essentially homeless who took shelter in the courtyards of mosques and Sufi
lodges, in abandoned buildings and gardens, and on docks and street corners. In
between were those, by far the majority, who lived in their workplace or in one of
the city’s bachelor-rooms, bekâr odaları. Called interchangeably bachelor houses
(bekârhaneler), singles’ rooms (mücerred odaları), bachelor inns (bekâr hanları),
and, up until the early sixteenth century, men’s rooms (hocerât-ı râcilîn), bachelor
rooms were an old urban institution whose history remains virtually unstudied.
Emerging in the years following the conquest of Constantinople, ostensibly as a
pragmatic answer to the needs of men who were brought in without their families
to repopulate and rebuild the new Ottoman capital, they became early on the
standard form of migrant housing. They accommodated continuous streams of
incoming single male migrants and, especially in the sixteenth century, men who
had been forcibly transferred to the capital to serve as temporary labor on large
construction projects sponsored by the imperial and ruling elites.13 Though absent
from architectural textbooks, bachelor rooms were, just like mosques, madrasas,
schools, public baths, hospitals, and soup kitchens, charitable foundations (awqaf
/ sing. waqf) with which patrons, high and low, had sought to endow the city ever
since the days of Mehmed II (r. 1453–81). The earliest records available to us (from
1488 and 1515–16) testify to the active role that ordinary men and women took in
their patronage.14 But most of the better-known establishments of the early sixteenth
to seventeenth centuries belonged to individuals of rank from the administrative,
military, or palace elites, and were usually founded as revenue-yielding endowments
for the maintenance of their mosques. Such was the bachelor inn of Defterdar Ebu’l
Fazl Mehmed Efendi, finance officer under Selim I (r. 1512–20) and Süleyman I (r.
1520–66). It was built between 1563 and 1574 in Küçük Karaman, in the quarter
of Fatih, in the walled peninsula, as an endowment for the patron’s mosque at To-
phane, on the European side of the Bosphorus.15 Likewise, the near-contemporary
Sultan’s Rooms Inn (Sultan Odaları Hanı), in Mahmupaşa, was endowed to the
mosque of Rüstem Pasha, Sultan Süleyman’s grand vizier (1544–53 and 1555–61),
located down the hill in Tahtakale [figure 2].16
In the early modern city, bachelor rooms counted among the few models
of collective tenements alongside “family rooms” (müte’ehhil odaları) and “Jewish
inns” (yahûdhâneler).17 By far the most ubiquitous, there were around twelve thou-
sand of them by the last quarter of the seventeenth century,18 ranging from modest
 Hamadeh / Istanbul’s Migrants and the Politics of Space 177

Figure 2. Street plan of Mahmudpaşa, in Eminönü, showing Sultan Odaları Hanı. From Jacques Per-
.
vititch, Jacques Pervititch Sigorta Haritalarında Istanbul / Istanbul in the Insurance Maps of Jacques
Pervititch (Ankara: Tarih Vakfı, 2000).

structures to huge enterprises that could house several hundred men. Mostly they
were built in and around commercial areas and port docks, where their tenants
were typically employed, as in Fatih and Mahmudpaşa, in the intramuros city, or
in Kasımpaşa, in Galata, across the Golden Horn [figure 3]. Small barren rooms to
be shared by four to five men each and collective toilet facilities formed the extent
of the typical bachelor inn. It was common for bachelors with kinship or regional
ties to share the same roof, as most of them would have found their way to the
city via relatives or fellow villagers.19 Building material, features, and amenities
varied. Most bachelor rooms were single-storied wood frame structures built at
street level or, as in the dense commercial areas of the intra muros city, lined up
above street shops and businesses. Better-endowed establishments, such as Büyük
Vefa Hanı, Hocapaşa Hanı, and Sultan Odaları Hanı, were solid masonry structures
178 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 50, No. 2

Figure 3. Based on François Kauffer’s map of Constantinople (1776), verified and expanded in 1786
by François Kauffer and Jean-Baptiste Le Chevalier (London: Cadell & Davies, 1815).
Map Legend
1 Yedikule. 2 Samatya. 3 Yeni Bahçe. 4 Edirnekapı. 5 Fatih. 6 Saraçhane. 7 Vefa. 8 Süleymaniye. 9
Mercan. 10 Beyazid. 11 Gedikpaşa. 12 Kumkapı. 13 Mahmudpaşa. 14 Bahçekapı. 15 Tahtakale. 16
Asmaaltı. 17 Unkapanı. 18 Balat. 19 Kasımpaşa. 20 Tophane. 21 Balaban. 22 Mumhane. 23 Toptaşı.
P Topkapı Palace. H Hippodrome. ☐ Old Barracks. ☐ ☐ New Barracks and Meat Square.

organized on two levels around a courtyard, and usually included a cooking area,
a water well, and even a coffeehouse, barbershop, or grocery shop. Substantially
larger than their wooden equivalents (Sultan Odaları Hanı, for example, comprised
sixty-one rooms that accommodated over three hundred men), they were more
akin to the city’s urban and commercial khans that offered temporary housing to
travelers and foreign merchants.20 To rent a room in any of these places, a bachelor
had to show proof that a credible male resident of Istanbul would stand surety for
him. This was the sine qua non of his existence, without which he was at risk of
expulsion. In return for a deposit he was sometimes handed a mattress, beyond
which everything was shared, including the guarantor (kefil) himself, for most men
turned to their inn owner (odabaşı) or headmaster (hancı), or to their employer,
if they had one, to fulfill this role—a first link to the settled world of urban soci-
ety.21 Inn owners and headmasters were entrusted with the strict control of their
inns, preventing overcrowding and the intrusion of strangers and undocumented
migrants. Architecturally, this meant that the inns were entered and exited from a
single gate, guarded by day and locked at night.22
Basic as they were, these considerations reflected a general vision of what
the life of a migrant-bachelor in the city should be: contained and controllable.
At the urban level, this meant isolating bachelors from urban residents. Exactly
 Hamadeh / Istanbul’s Migrants and the Politics of Space 179

when this vision crystallized in people’s minds and turned into a legal principle is
difficult to tell. But while in the early days most new comers sometimes preferred
to settle in the residential neighborhoods of the inner city or the boroughs of Eyüp
and Galata, building houses of their own or renting rooms from old-time residents,
their presence among urban residents was eventually no longer tolerated. Within a
year of his accession to the throne, Selim II (r. 1566–74) issued an order to all the
city’s neighborhoods’ leaders (imams) to expel from their neighborhoods anyone
who had entered the city within the previous five years and to ensure they would
never return.23 Another sultanic decree promulgated in 1579 reiterated the point:
bachelors did not belong in the mahalle.24 Whether this question continued to
preoccupy the authorities in subsequent decades is unclear. What is certain is that
it gained particular urgency in the eighteenth century.

SUBVERSIVE SPACES AND SOCIAL NETWORKS

The irony that stemmed from these efforts is hard to escape; for over the
centuries, bachelors came to constitute a massive presence in the very heart of the
imperial capital, its most populated area, and home to the broadest cross section
of population.25 Their urban geography was defined by a large perimeter within
the walled city, which stretched roughly from the gate of Bahçekapı to the east,
along the docks of Eminönü, Unkapanı, and Cibali on the Golden Horn, up the
hills and along the city’s western walls to the gates of Edirnekapı, Topkapı, and
Yenikapı, and south to Kumkapı on the Marmara Sea, comprising the quarters of
Gedikpaşa, Mercan, Beyazid, Mahmudpaşa, Tahtakale, Vefa, Süleymaniye, and
Fatih [figure 3].26 This was the capital’s most vibrant center economically and
commercially and the most prominent space of urban and imperial politics. Home
to the Old and New Janissary Barracks (Eski and Yeni Odalar) and the palace of
the Chief Janissary, it contained Istanbul’s most important religious and public
monuments. It was bordered to the west by the prestigious Aya Sofya district that
still housed the mansions of state, religious, and judicial elite households and the
grand vizier’s offices at the Sublime Porte, and it was bisected by the main impe-
rial ceremonial route, Divan Yolu, which began at the Topkapı Palace and ended
at the gate of Edirnekapı. It was also the site of the traditional spaces of political
resistance and uprising: the Janissaries’ Meat Square (Et Meydanı), the Flea Market
(Bit Pazarı), and the nearby Hippodrome [figure 3].27 Last but not least, it was,
along with Galata, the most sociable area of Istanbul, dotted as it was with eating
houses (başhaneler), boza houses (serving the fermented millet drink, boza), and
countless coffeehouses, the city’s prime centers of news dissemination and loci of
male sociability.28
The advantages of this geography (replicated on a lesser scale in Galata
and Kasımpaşa, across the Golden Horn, and in Üsküdar, on the Anatolian side,
where bachelors also constituted substantial populations) in facilitating bachelors’
social networking with the rest of urban population is obvious. At work, everyday
interaction with residents was inevitable. Bachelors were employed in a variety
of trades: on the docks as porters, caulkers, and boatmen; on construction sites
as bricklayers, stonemasons, carpenters, and sewer workers; in the food sector as
bakers, butchers, fishmongers, grocers, and boza makers; and as street peddlers,
porters, water carriers, public bath and coffeehouse attendants, tanners, firemen,
180 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 50, No. 2

stablemen, and vegetable gardeners.29 Whether on the docks, in the shops, or in

the backstreet taverns they frequented and the coffeehouses in which they idled
and looked for jobs, the opportunities to forge ties, nurture friendships, and form
solidarities were numerous, especially with guild artisans and shopkeepers, navy
men, and Janissaries.
Janissaries’ lives, in particular, overlapped a great deal with the lives of
bachelors. It is difficult to appreciate based on the available sources the extent of
this enmeshment; but that it was a major nuisance for the state is easy to glean. By
that time, the Janissaries had amassed tremendous power and influence. With every
revolt they had led since 1622, they turned into an ever more important political
force, capable of challenging the authorities, thrusting allies in official positions,
and deposing unfavorable monarchs. With the 1730 revolt, the first ever to be led
by someone from a lower echelon of the corps (the bath attendant Patrona Halil)
and to mobilize a social base, mainly among Albanian migrants, the threat of their
potential for leverage grew considerably.30 Their role in the urban economy was
no less significant. Their gradual urbanization since the late sixteenth century and
integration in the economy had become normalized features of the capital.31 Great
numbers of them worked in construction, transportation, and food production—sec-
tors that were staffed predominantly by bachelors. Many Janissaries had managed
to enter the guild (esnaf) economy, especially in the first half of the seventeenth
century. Different battalions controlled different employment venues (especially in
food production and construction), different docks along with the food distribution
activities they contained, and different coffeehouses around the city—operations
that expanded substantially in the second half of the eighteenth century.32
For the bachelors, particularly for newcomers, forging good relationships
with troops (whether at the individual or mess33 level) was undoubtedly the sensible
thing to do. For unlike in the previous century, when newcomers found ways to
gain guild membership—a phenomenon that impacted the guild order in nearly
the same way as the entry of Janissaries,34 access to employment security in the
eighteenth century was harder than ever. The guilds now reorganized and tightened
their grip, expelling migrants, instituting a strict policy of mutual guarantorship
among members, and redefining the old right of shop usufruct (gedik) as a license
to practice a trade—all of which made it very hard for bachelors both to infiltrate
and to survive as outside competitors.35 It is not surprising, then, that most bach-
elors worked in economic sectors in which various Janissary messes exercised
control: namely, construction, transportation, coffeehouses, and food production
and distribution. Additional factors must have helped solidify connections. One
was the facility with which one could obtain nominal Janissary status, and many
bachelors did, especially after 1739, when the back-alley practice of buying and
selling deceased members’ pay tickets became an open market activity.36 Shared
bonds of masculinity and bachelorhood cannot be dismissed.37 Nor can regional
and village connections, since by the eighteenth century countless men from earlier
generations of migrants had been recruited into the corps. As many troops were
employed in the urban police, including at migrants’ checkpoints at the city gates,
links may have been occasionally forged right at the bachelors’ entry points.38
It is not difficult to imagine the ease and ordinariness with which bekâr
and Janissaries related in this environment. Coffeehouses stood prominently at the
 Hamadeh / Istanbul’s Migrants and the Politics of Space 181

Figure 4. Coffeehouse on the port, by William H. Bartlett. From Julia Pardoe, The Beauties of the
Bosphorus (London: G. Virtue, 1838).

nexus of these connections, for they were the city’s prime spaces of sociability and
thousands of them were owned or managed by Janissaries or men with Janissary
titles [figure 4].39 Some served multiple functions. The infamous Elli Altı Kahve-
hane [Coffeehouse Fifty-Six] at the Çardak Docks in Unkapanı, on the Golden
Horn, fiercely controlled by the 56th mess, was a hub of policing, trading, and
food-distribution activities, and a place for Janissaries to gather as well as organize
revolts.40 They were places where relations between strangers were cultivated over
time, and bachelors who frequented them to relax, socialize, or look for employment
likely reaped the many benefits of mess protection. These could include new jobs,
pay raises, or access to foodstuff and pay tickets, all in return for the bachelors’
loyalty to the corps. For ultimately, this was a clientelist arrangement. Bachelors’
participation in the Janissary-led revolts of 1730 and the 1800s should be viewed
from this perspective, at least in part, as it was on such occasions that their loyalty
was most publicly expressed.41 In 1807 hundreds of porters, daily wage laborers,
and seasonal gardeners joined in the Kabakçı Mustafa rebellion that led to the
deposition of Sultan Selim III (r. 1789–1807). In July of the following year, as the
Janissaries rebelled against the repressive measures imposed by the grand vizier,
Alemdar Mustafa Pasha, they stood at the front lines of attacks, armed with axes
and butcher knives. And again in 1826, the bachelors of Tahtakale, Asmaaltı, and
Unkapanı flocked in masses to Et Meydanı to lend the Janissaries support, until
the latter’s final blow.42
But everyday opportunities for bachelors’ encounters with urban denizens,
soldiers, and civilians were not limited to the public space. Rife as they were at
work, at play, or on the street, they were often initiated and nurtured at home,
within the very confines of the bachelor room. As Allen Feldman has shown in
his powerful “genetic history” of political agency in Northern Ireland, even the
most coercively constricting spaces could be turned into instruments of agency.43
Of course, this is not to suggest an analogy between the prisons of Northern
Ireland Feldman examines and the bachelor inns of Istanbul. Yet nothing could
better describe the bachelor rooms or point to the paradoxes of segregation and
integration these spaces embodied. Among the huge number of migrant-bachelors
182 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 50, No. 2

who took shelter in their workplaces or in rooms above, many shared their spaces
with guild workers and even employers.44 Those who stayed in the large and
better-serviced khan-type inns, such as Sultan Odaları Hanı in Mahmud Pasha,
or in the nonspecialized khans that also operated as bachelor inns, like Yer Hanı
in Fatih, had the opportunity to mix on daily bases with all sorts of people, from
artisans and traveling merchants to military officials and judges.45 While bachelor
rooms were supposed to be guarded and locked at night, they functioned rather
like street extensions, liminal spaces neither private nor public, where brawls and
fights spilled out onto the street, where city officials barged in to count, survey, and
make arrests as they would in the market or a public bath, and where strangers
did not hesitate to enter and exit as they pleased. Male friends made themselves
inconspicuous until the gates were shut, at which point they were forced to stay
overnight. Prostitutes sneaked in, sometimes disguised as men, but many stayed
in for days on end. The so-called furnace boys (külhanbeyleri, a collective of or-
phans with their own rites and rituals) began drifting to bachelor rooms as the
boiler rooms of public baths, in which they traditionally slept, no longer contained
them. Sailors and soldiers made use of bachelor rooms adjacent to their own bar-
racks to bring in prostitutes.46 Many Janissaries left their barracks to live in the
city. While the upper ranks moved close to the posh Hippodrome area, the rank
and file settled in neighborhoods with high concentrations of bachelors, around
the Old Barracks, the Mosque of Mehmed II, Saraçhane, and Yenibahçe, or in the
bachelor rooms of the inner city and Üsküdar [figure 3].47 Population surveys and
records of arrests make clear that traffic between bachelor rooms and Janissaries’
barracks was routine.48 What is more seldom revealed is that it sometimes sparked
long-term relationships. This was the story of Galatalı Hüseyin Aǧa, member of
the 56th Janissary battalion, coffeehouse owner, and folk poet:

Gece gündüz olduk daim beraber /

Refikim Hamlacı Kurdoǧlu Cafer
Bekar uşakları içinde ejder
Baldırı çiplakdır şehlevend şehbaz . . .
Ayak uydurdu hamlacı itine
Bir dahi dönmedim baba evine
Bakmadım da yen yakamın bitine
Taallüm eyledim Kurdoǧlundan saz
Bana neler etti görün feleǧi
Bekar odasına serdim döşeǧi
Oldum yalın ayak bekar köçeǧi
Külhanlıkda geçdi bahar ile yaz

Day and night I was together with

My companion, the boatman Kurdoǧlu Cafer
A dragon among bachelors
Boisterous, fearless, magnificent thug . . .
I stayed with that dog of a boatman
Never returned to my father’s home
Ignored the fleas on my collar and sleeves
Learnt to play music with Kurdoǧlu
Look what fate did to me
I laid a mattress in the bachelor room
Became the barefoot bachelor’s dancer
And in this state of wandering, spring and summer went by49
 Hamadeh / Istanbul’s Migrants and the Politics of Space 183

CLAIMING SPACE
To reflect on all the possible factors that brought bachelors to associate
with Janissaries and to risk their lives in violent uprisings, even as measures against
the corps were getting increasingly repressive under Selim III and Mahmud II (r.
1808–39), is beyond the scope of this essay.50 Necessity, fear, opportunism, a pro-
clivity for thuggish behavior (to use the cliché), and common political or economic
interests can be neither discounted nor confirmed by the sources. What is certain is
that these associations—whatever shape or form they took—propelled bachelors
into the public and political spheres and offered them everyday “opportunities of
resistance” (to borrow from historian Robert Jütte) against their exclusion from
the normative urban fabric.51 Opportunities, that is, which sometimes implied ac-
cess to means and tools of violence, but always involved a sense of empowerment
and self-confidence that found a natural habitus in acts of defiance, aggression,
and disobedience.
These opportunities played out mainly in confrontations with the state, the
law, and the city’s denizens over matters of space that unfolded in and around the
.
bachelor rooms. The case of the Balaban Docks (Balaban Iskelesi), in the borough
of Üsküdar [see figure 3], began in 1787 and reverberated all over the city when it
was finally ruled on in 1811.52 Over the years, the residents of Üsküdar had come
together several times to petition the authorities against the bachelor rooms of
Balaban. These rooms, they explained, housed hundreds of delinquents and immoral
men, most of whom were employed on the docks, who loitered, provoked street
brawls, let prostitutes in, carried arms, raped, and killed. They roamed menacingly
on the streets and through the markets of Üsküdar, fired on police officials when
these were called upon to guard the area, set surrounding gardens on fire when
they pleased, and provoked so much fear among the residents that no one dared
walk around after dusk. It took nearly twenty-five years of repeated complaints
and accusations before the case was finally investigated, upon imperial order, by
the district judge and adjudicated by the sultan himself, Mahmud II. On July 24,
1811, over 130 bachelor rooms at the Balaban Docks were razed to the ground, as
the sultan watched through his binoculars from the top of the Yıldız hill, across the
Bosphorus. In the following two days, other bachelor rooms were taken down at
the docks of Mumhane, south of Balaban, in Üsküdar’s central market, and above
the market, in the neighborhood of Toptaşı [figure 3].53 Such a massive scale of
demolition was unprecedented in the history of Istanbul.
I have argued elsewhere that what lay at the core of this verdict was a
fundamental belief in the inherent ability of space to spread immorality, which
meant, literally, uprooting the bachelor rooms from the ground.54 But its dra-
conian nature, and the speed with which the case was swiftly resolved after two
decades of protracted problems and seemingly intractable lawlessness, suggest
that Mahmud II’s decision had far-reaching motives that were aimed ultimately
at the Janissaries. Memories of the revolts of 1807 and 1808 were still fresh. And
even though the case records do not even hint at the relevance of Janissaries to the
Balaban incident, passing statements by contemporary chroniclers reveal signifi-
cant connections between the bachelors of Balaban and members of the 59th mess,
stationed in Üsküdar.. We understand, for instance, that the superintendent of the
porters of Üsküdar, Ibrahim Kethüda, was himself a migrant and member of the
184 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 50, No. 2

mess. Another member, Kız Mustafa (Girlish Mustafa), owned the coffeehouse
.
adjacent to the bachelor rooms, Balaban Iskelesi Kahvehanesi, which probably
implied—as was the case elsewhere in the city—that his and the battalion’s sway
extended to the bachelor rooms.55 Anecdotes recorded in these chronicles leave
little doubt that behind the bachelors’ confidence in claiming ownership of their
territory, expanding their claims over the docks, streets, markets, and gardens of
Üsküdar, imposing their needs and practices on the district’s population, bullying
the police authorities—that behind their apparent infallibility all those years had
lain a whole apparatus of Janissary support.
If in the end the bachelors of Balaban were dealt a heavy blow that (one
would assume) disrupted their local network, those living in the walled city proved
more resilient. In 1812, about a year after the resolution of the Balaban case, the
outbreak of the plague in Istanbul gave Mahmud II a pretext to order down 577
wooden bachelor rooms and to seal shut all the masonry inns situated on the docks
of Kasımpaşa and elsewhere in Galata. The epidemic, he stated in the decree, had
already spread within these “mean places” (hebāsethāne) and threatened further
˘
propagation.56 As if in an afterthought, the sultan ˘
concluded his decree with the
order to demolish all the bachelor rooms located between the inner city neighbor-
hoods of Asmaaltı and Tahtakale and the city gate of Bahçekapı, as well as those
beyond the gate, in the inauspiciously named neighborhood of Melekgirmez (lit.
Angels Don’t Enter) [figure 3].57
As in the case of Balaban, this strike may have been politically motivated,
especially as nothing in the decree suggests that the plague had reached the inner-
city rooms.58 The inner-city bachelors’ involvement with Janissaries was common
knowledge, as were their theft and prostitution activities and capacity for fomenting
trouble. Some said the boatmen of Melekgirmez were associated with the 31st mess.
Others thought the bachelors of Tahtakale were members of or affiliated with the
26th mess. Others still speculated that the men’s loyalties were divided between the
26th and 27th battalions, for when street quarrels erupted, they were seen to side
with both camps. Most importantly, these were the men who had participated in
the revolts of 1807 and 1808.59 This could explain Mahmud II’s ultimatum to his
city officials demanding complete assurance that the rooms never be rebuilt. But in
a little over a year, eight rooms had reemerged above a butcher shop in Kasımpaşa.
And within the next few years, the bachelor rooms of Asmaaltı and Tahtakale were
all back up and running.60 It is hard to imagine such blatant acts of state defiance
and disregard for the law occurring without Janissary backing or sanction. Yet,
when in the months that followed the disbandment of the corps, in June 1826, the
bachelor rooms of Asmaaltı and Tahtakale were leveled once more by imperial
decree, they were all rebuilt again, this time ostensibly with no help, support, or
protection from the Janissaries.61
To emphasize the sense of power and invincibility bachelors must have
derived from associating with the troops is important, if only to redress the his-
toriography’s focus on the Janissaries in this equation. Yet I also wish to stress
that bachelors’ urban agency and opportunities for resistance did not begin and
end with their ties to the Janissaries. Their social network was broad and diverse,
encompassing a segment of civilian male society anchored in the city’s guild and
neighborhood structures and including small artisans as well as business employ-
 Hamadeh / Istanbul’s Migrants and the Politics of Space 185

ers. Although archival sources do not really allow us to unpack the mundane and
minuscule gestures through which bachelors connected with this population, they
nonetheless make it clear that the latter facilitated, willingly or unwittingly, bach-
elors’ integration into the city’s normative fabric. As with the Janissaries, shared
regional ties with earlier generations of migrants who had successfully settled in
the city may have encouraged such connections and eventually generated a process
of chain migration—a process with which we are more familiar in the context of
the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.62
In the larger political scheme of things, this civilian support network
was incomparably more innocuous than the power-wielding and unruly Janissar-
ies.63 But it was more nebulous and discreet and hence more difficult to disrupt.
Eventually, it made a significant dent in the urban order, destabilizing customary
zoning practices and well-entrenched modes of urban neighborhood life. In this
respect, what particularly irked the authorities was the rapid growth of an illegal
bachelor-housing sector. A seemingly endemic development, it was perpetuated by
ordinary people and ordinary greed and manifested itself in neighborhoods across
the intra muros city and the three boroughs. Many residents of Istanbul regarded
the ever-increasing flow of migrant-bachelors into their city as potentially profit-
able and hoped to turn the situation to their advantage. In the inner city, those
in the construction business engaged in real estate speculation as early as 1719,
buying large garden palaces and tearing them down to erect in their stead small
wooden rooms they then rented out.64 In the mills, sweets shops, and pastry shops
(börekciler and çörekciler), belvedere structures, basements, and half basements
were refurbished into makeshift bachelor rooms, usually without the necessary
authorization. Woodsheds sprang up without warning atop boathouses, especially
on the docks of Bahçekapı, on the Golden Horn, in Kasımpaşa, across the shore,
and in Üsküdar, along the Bosphorus. Unlicensed and precarious rooftop structures
mushroomed above all sorts of businesses in the walled city and beyond: coffee-
houses, bakeries, and butcher shops, all of which also doubled as sleeping places for
bachelors working on the premises, modest businesses like candy, nut, and pickle
shops, and, most astonishingly, private dwellings [figure 3].65
In fact, the bachelor rooms that turn up in eighteenth-century sources share
remarkably little with the planned and self-contained establishments that patrons
endowed in earlier times.66 They appear to have been built in piecemeal fashion,
one or a few at a time, as if when the need arose for a business owner to employ
and house new migrant workers, and they multiplied over time to produce rows
of tenements that could house up to a hundred men. One could argue that the
modest profile of this architecture, coupled with its organic mode of expansion,
may have helped its illegal proliferation go unnoticed, at least for a while. Official
documents point an accusing finger rather at the Chief Architect (mimarbaşı), who
may have turned a blind eye over such unauthorized construction in exchange for
bribes.67 What is unquestionable is that for the residents of Istanbul, the rising rates
of migration offered lucrative opportunities, and many were inclined to engage in
illicit construction and rental ventures. Some egregious cases surface in police and
legal documents. In 1760 the imam of the Selâmi Efendi Mosque, in the neighbor-
hood of Kısıklı, in Üsküdar, began to rent out the few rooms abutting the mosque’s
courtyard to “all sorts of Anatolian migrants,” when the mosque’s endowment deed
186 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 50, No. 2

unequivocally designated these rooms as free-of-charge shelters for local indigents.

In Kartal, another neighborhood in Üsküdar, one Yusuf quietly took advantage of
his position as the custodian of a recently abandoned khan to demolish the building,
take over the adjacent plot, and erect a larger khan for bachelors (bekâr hanı) on
the premises. On the other side of the capital, in Samatya, a small barley seller tore
down his shop to rebuild it as a bachelor inn. In Balat, a resident of the Mirahor
.
(Imrahor) neighborhood added rooms to his house and proceeded to rent them out
to undocumented boatmen [figure 3]. This became common practice; people did
not hesitate to put up bachelors in their own homes for a little profit even in strict
periods of surveillance, as during the reign of Selim III. When they were caught,
they usually gave the excuse of hosting a relative or friend.68 Most cunning were
those who took advantage of the fires that frequently erupted in different parts of
the city to either rekindle a bad business or start afresh. Hasan Aǧa, warden of the
boathouses at the small port of Çubukçu, in Galata, launched his business after a
fire nearly wiped out the harbor, in 1734, by restoring the boathouses and rent-
ing them out to bachelors working as caulkers on the docks. In 1761–62, when
a fire ravaged the neighborhood of Atpazarı, in Fatih, khan, bachelor-inn, and
coffeehouse owners rebuilt expanded versions of their former businesses, adding
rooms to maximize their rental profit from “troublemaking bachelors.” Burned-
down and abandoned houses, khans, public baths, and storehouses all around the
city were put to profitable use. In 1755 in Dülgerzâde, in Fatih, a house custodian
took control of the ruined khan next door and rented out its crumbling rooms
to willing bachelors without surety bond. Even bachelors ventured into the busi-
ness, as in the case of Manas and Abraham, two Armenian men who squatted in
a fire-stricken building in Derviş Ali, near the city gate of Edirnekapı, and rented
its rooms to their likes.69
For the state authorities and urban society, the most troublesome implica-
tion of these developments was the creeping of bachelors into residential neighbor-
hoods. Already in 1731, less than a year after the Albanian Janissary Patrona Halil’s
revolt, when measures against migrants (Albanian and undocumented, in particular)
intensified, Mahmud I issued a decree that categorically prohibited bachelors from
living in the residential neighborhoods of the intra muros city and the boroughs of
Eyüp and Galata. He also banned their presence in sham or makeshift inns (koltuk
hanları) and in rooms designated for migrant families (müte’ehhil odaları), whether
in residential or commercial areas.70 All this was to no avail. Throughout the
century, residents for whom bachelors had remained an invisible population until
then petitioned district judges or the Divan to have bachelors expelled from their
neighborhoods. The people of Samatya lodged a complaint against our enterpris-
ing barley seller not so much on account of his unlicensed business but because of
“the end of peace and security” it brought to their neighborhood.71 Abraham and
Manas were dragged to court by their neighbors on the grounds that the rooms
they rented out looked into “the windows of Muslim houses.”72 The Mirahor
resident who had taken to subletting parts of his own house to undocumented
boatmen was brought to justice by a woman neighbor.73 In the spring of 1810,
news circulated that several residential neighborhoods were struggling to get rid
of bachelor porters who had been living in their midst.74 Repeated transgressions
seem to have brought a new sense of urgency to the question of who belonged in
 Hamadeh / Istanbul’s Migrants and the Politics of Space 187

the neighborhood. In their petitions to the Divan or the district judge, residents
complained about bachelors’ physical proximity and visual access to their houses,
often regardless of the immediate issue at hand. Accusations were leveled against
bachelors because they encroached on the lives of “neighborhood residents” (ma-
halle ehalisi) and “honorable people” (ehl-i cırz) and disrupted their peace and
security. Explicitly or implicitly, judicial decisions identified the mahalle as the
space of Istanbul’s permanent residents that was to be protected from outsiders.
Sultanic edicts reiterated bachelor-housing regulations, dictated the precise terms
by which fire-damaged buildings could be renovated and repurposed, prohibited
the building of bachelor rooms in residential neighborhoods, and even banned their
construction altogether. And illegal and ill-situated rental rooms were routinely
pulled down and their property owners penalized.75
That none of these measures succeeded in keeping bachelors away from
the family mahalle is evident. Immigration continued to swell and the insinuation
of bachelors into the social and spatial fabrics of Istanbul continued to spiral out
of control, even when Selim III introduced more exacting measures of surveillance
to track down undocumented migrants. The canvassing operations he instituted
from the 1790s onward never ceased to cover residential neighborhoods, and
bachelors continued to live among residents until they were located and expelled.76

CONCLUSION
Things remained unchanged in the years that succeeded the so-called
“Auspicious Event” of June 1826. Yet for the bachelors, nothing was less auspi-
cious than the abolition of the Janissary army. In the months that followed, nearly
.
twenty thousand of them were huddled on boats to Izmit and Gelibolu and re-
turned to their hometowns in Anatolia and the Balkans.77 Meanwhile, a complete
overhaul of migrant regulations was underway. In a ten-page legal compendium
(nizâmnâme), intended essentially to reset market inspection and policing laws in
Istanbul, Mahmud II included stipulation upon stipulation pertaining to the ad-
ministration of bachelors.78 The question occupied more than half the document;
this was without precedent.79 Not only did the sultan establish new methods of
registration, classification, surveillance, and employment, but he also redefined, in
decree after decree, the conditions of bachelors’ employment, housing, and move-
ment in the city: six to seven new bachelor inns were to be built in “appropriate
quarters” and distributed among the inner city and the three boroughs of Galata,
Eyüp, and Üsküdar; construction of bachelor rooms in any part of Istanbul was
otherwise strictly prohibited; bachelors were banned from living in or above shops
and coffeehouses; and their movement in the city was to be limited to the path that
took them to work in the morning and brought them back home in the evening.
But in less than three years, the area around the Sublime Porte, one of Istanbul’s
most exclusive neighborhoods, was riddled with droves of unemployed young men
squatting in the ruins of houses and khans that had succumbed to a recent fire.80 A
few months later, Mahmud II was following in the footsteps of Selim III, dispatching
his officials to inspect the city’s shops and markets as well as its residential neigh-
borhoods in the hope of rounding up undocumented and troublesome bachelors.81
As scholars have noted, the nizâmnâme was nothing short of a necessary
undertaking following the abolition of the Janissaries. It reset the rules of market
188 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 50, No. 2

inspection and urban policing that the troops had mainly supplied until then, and
it rethought matters of bachelors, who had become a thorn in the flesh because
of the links they had forged with the corps.82 However, one could also argue that
the nizâmnâme represented a clear recognition of the extent to which bachelors
constituted an integral element of Istanbul. If Mahmud II needed reminding, the
near paralysis that hit the city’s transportation and porterage networks after the
order of mass expulsion earlier that year no doubt drove the point home.83 As a
document drafted and issued after the dismantlement of the Janissary troops, it
was, furthermore, a confirmation of the bachelors’ own leverage in urban mat-
ters. Mahmud II’s efforts in pushing the limits of bachelors’ spatial confinement
to unprecedented degrees was no less than an acknowledgment of their agency in
finding opportunities of integration in the city’s normative spaces of economy and
residence, with or without Janissary support. What Mahmud II may have failed
to recognize, however, was the Sisyphean nature of his efforts; for it was clear that
spatial confinement could not obliterate bachelors’ capacity to create further “dis-
cretenesses,” to continue to impose in Istanbul their own patterns of habitation,
circulation, and socialization, and to poke holes into prevailing understandings of
urban belonging.

NOTES
I would like to thank May Farhat for her constructive comments on an earlier draft and the anonymous
readers of Eighteenth-Century Studies for their thoughtful suggestions. I am also grateful to Çiǧdem
Kafescioǧlu for her many valuable insights on earlier versions of this article.

1. On eighteenth-century Ottoman migration see, for instance, Suraiya Faroqhi, “Migration into
Eighteenth-Century ‘Greater Istanbul’ as Reflected in the Kadı Registers of Eyüp,” Turcica 30 (1998):
163–83; Reşat Kasaba, “Migrant Labor in Western Anatolia, 1750–1850,” in Landholding and Com-
mercial Agriculture in the Middle East, ed. Çaǧlar Keyder and Faruk Tabak (Albany: SUNY Press,
1991), 113–21; Amy Singer, “Peasant Migration: Law and Practice in Early Ottoman Palestine,” New
Perspectives on Turkey 8 (1992): 49–65; Cem Behar, A Neighborhood in Ottoman Istanbul: Fruit
.
Vendors and Civil Servants in the Kasap Ilyas Mahalle (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), 1–63; Cengiz Şeker,
. .
“Istanbul Ahkâm ve Atik Şikâyet Defterlerine Göre 18. Yüzyılda Istanbul’a Yönelik Göçlerin Tasvir
ve Tahlili” (PhD diss., Marmara Univ., 2007); Betül Başaran, Selim III, Social Control and Policing in
Istanbul at the End of the Eighteenth Century: Between Crisis and Order (Leiden: Brill, 2014).

2. Cengiz Kırlı, “A Profile of the Labor Force in Early Nineteenth-Century Istanbul,” International
Labor and Working-Class History 60 (2001): 125, 134. These figures, based on a survey of small busi-
nesses along the Golden Horn and the western shore of the Bosphorus, might have been higher in the
inner city.

3. The bekâr were the subject of several wonderful essays by Reşat Ekrem Koçu in the late 1950s
and early 1960s before they disappeared from the scholarship, resurfacing only recently in studies of
migration, Janissaries, labor, khans, and public order. See, for example, Reşat Ekrem Koçu, “Bekâr
. .
– Bekâr Uşaǧı – Bekâr Uşaǧı Nizamı,” in Istanbul Ansiklopedisi (Istanbul: Istanbul Ansiklopedisi ve
.
Neşriyat, 1959), 1:2392–408; Başaran, Selim III; Şeker, “Istanbul Ahkâm”; Kırlı, “Labor Force,” 134–38;
. .
Kırlı, “Devlet ve Istatistik: Esnaf Kefalet Defterleri Işıǧında III. Selim Iktidarı,” in Nizâm-ı Kadîm’den
.
Nizâm-ı Cedid’e: III. Selim ve Dönemi, ed. Seyfi Kenan (Istanbul: Islam Araştırmaları Merkezi, 2010),
. .
183–212; Cengiz Orhonlu, “Osmanlı Türkleri Devrinde Istanbul’da Kayıkçılık ve Kayık Işletmeciliǧi,”
.
Istanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Tarih Dergisi 12 (1966): 109–34; Marinos Sariyannis, “Neglec-
ted Trades: Glimpses into the 17th-Century Istanbul Underworld,” Turcica 38 (2006): 155–79; Fariba
Zarinebaf, Crime and Punishment in Istanbul, 1700–1800 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2010),
35–50; Mehmet Mert Sunar, “Cauldron of Dissent: A Study of the Janissary Corps, 1807–1826” (PhD
diss., Binghamton Univ., SUNY, 2006); Selma Özkoçak, “The Urban Development of Ottoman Istan-
bul in the Sixteenth Century” (PhD diss., Univ. of London, 1997), especially part 2; Necdet Sakaoǧlu,
 Hamadeh / Istanbul’s Migrants and the Politics of Space 189
.
“Bekâr Odaları,” in Dünden Bugün Istanbul Ansiklopedisi (Ankara: Tarih Vakfı Yayınları, 1994),
2:123–24; Florian Riedler, “The Role of Labour Migration in the Urban Economy and Governance of
Nineteenth-Century Istanbul,” in Urban Governance Under the Ottomans: Between Cosmopolitanism
and Conflict, ed. Ulrike Freitag and Nora Lafi (London: Routledge, 2014), 145–58; Riedler, “Public
People: Temporary Labor Migrants in Nineteenth-Century Istanbul,” in Public Istanbul: Spaces and
Spheres of the Urban, ed. Frank Eckardt and Kathrin Wildner (Bielefeld: Verlag, 2008), 233–53. I am
very indebted to all these studies.

4. The term was quickly adopted in administrative, legal, and police documents to designate mi-
grant workers and, by the eighteenth century, thugs and hooligans of every sort. On the latter point,
see Başaran, Selim III, 33–36.

5. On the moral dimensions of celibacy, see Leslie Peirce, “Seniority, Sexuality, and Social Order:
The Vocabulary of Gender in Early Modern Ottoman Society,” in Women in the Ottoman Empire:
Middle Eastern Women in the Early Modern Era, ed. Madeline C. Zilfi (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 177–78.

6. Legally, city dwellers were divided into two groups, each treated and administered differently,
notably in matters of taxation: residents (sakinler or müstemkin edenler), who lived in residential
neighborhoods, the city’s smallest administrative units; and transients (misafir, lit. travelers, guests),
including travelers and merchants, who resided in urban and commercial khans. Işık Tamdoǧan-Abel,
“Les han, ou l’étranger dans la ville ottomane,” in Vivre dans l’empire ottoman: Sociabilités et rela-
tions intercommunautaires (XVIIIe – XXe siècles), ed. Francois Georgeon and Paul Dumont (Paris:
L’Harmattan, 1997), 319–44.

7. Zygmunt Bauman introduces this evocative image in the context of modernizing European cities
and in reference to the stranger who, as he writes, was “always threatening to wash out the boundaries
vital to native identity.” Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), 67.

8. For new institutions and forms of governance in post-Tanzimat Istanbul, see, for instance, Zeynep
Çelik, The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City in the Nineteenth Century (Seattle: Univ.
. .
of Washington Press, 1986); Nadir Özbek, Osmanlı Imparatorluǧunda Sosyal Devlet: Siyaset, Iktidar
.
ve Meşrutiyet, 1876–1914 (Istanbul: Iletişim Yayınları, 2002); Murat Gül, The Emergence of Modern
Istanbul: Transformation and Modernisation of a City (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009); Christoph Herzog,
“Migration and the State: On Ottoman Regulations Concerning Migration Since the Age of Mahmud
II,” in The City in the Ottoman Empire: Migration and the Making of Urban Modernity, ed. Ulrike
Freitag et al. (London: Routledge, 2011), 117–34; Ferdan Ergut, “Policing the Poor in the Late Ottoman
Empire,” Middle Eastern Studies 38 (2002): 149–64; Ergut, “State and Social Control: The Police in
the Late Ottoman Empire and the Early Republican Turkey, 1839–1939” (PhD diss., New School for
Social Research, 1999).

9. Başaran, Selim III, 33–40, 72–200.

10. Robert W. Olson, “Jews, Janissaries, Esnaf and the Revolt of 1740 in Istanbul: Social Upheaval
and Political Realignment in the Ottoman Empire,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the
Orient 20 (1977): 195–97.

11. Here I look mainly at cases relating to public order that were sent to the Imperial Divan.

12. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: Univ. of
California Press, 1988), 98–99.

13. Suraiya Faroqhi, “Controlling Borders and Workmen, All in One Fell Swoop: Repairs to the
Ottoman Fortress of Hotin (1716),” in Political Initiatives “From the Bottom Up” in the Ottoman
Empire: Halcyon Days in Crete VII, ed. Antonis Anastassopoulos (Rethymno: Crete Univ. Press, 2012),
327–43; Robert Mantran, Istanbul dans la seconde moitié du XVIIe siècle: Essai d’histoire institution-
nelle, économique et sociale (Paris: Adrien Maisonneuve, 1962), 44.

14. Early tax registers list, for instance, rooms built in 1488 for the waqf of the teacher Ahmed Harrat
.
and others built in 1515–16 by one Inci, daughter of Abdullah, all located in the district of Fatih. Ömer
.
Lutfi Barkan and Ekrem Hakkı Ayverdi, Istanbul Vakıfları Tahrir Defteri 953 (1546) Tarihli (Istanbul:
Fetih Cemiyeti Neşriyatı, 1958), 217, 221. I thank Çiǧdem Kafescioǧlu for bringing these references to
my attention.
190 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 50, No. 2

15. Stéphane Yerasimos, “Le waqf du defterdar Ebu’l Fazl Efendi et ses bénéficiaires,” Turcica 33
(2001): 10, 15.

16. Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi (henceforth BOA), Cevdet Belediye (CB) 5934.

17. Dozens of family rooms are mentioned in Hafiz Hüseyin al-Ayvansarayî’s late eighteenth-
century architectural encyclopedia. Howard Crane, ed., The Garden of the Mosques: Hafiz Hüseyin
al-Ayvansarayî’s Guide to the Muslim Monuments of Ottoman Istanbul (Leiden: Brill, 2000). On the
yahûdhâne, see Minna Rozen, “Public Space and Private Space among the Jews of Istanbul in the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Turcica 30 (1998): 331–46.
.
18. According to the historian Hüseyin Hezarfen, who wrote in 1672, noted in Halil Inalcık, “Is-
tanbul,” Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. E. van Donzel et al. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997), 4:236.

19. Kırlı, “Labor Force,” 125–40.

20. Özkoçak, “Urban Development,” 65, 66, 213; Mathilde Pinon-Demirçivi, “Le Grand Bazar
d’Istanbul et ses environs: formes, fonctions et transformations des han construits entre le début du
.
XVIIIè s. et le milieu du XIXè s.” (PhD diss. Université Paris–Sorbonne, 2009), 59, 169–73; Inalcık,
“Istanbul,” 236; Sakaoǧlu, “Bekâr Odaları,”123–24.
.
21. On the institution of kefil, see Kırlı, “Devlet veIstatistik,” 183–212; Kırlı, “Labor Force,” 125–40;
Başaran, Selim III, 37–40, 106–67.

22. Osman Nuri Ergin, Mecelle-i Umur-i Belediye, vol. 1 (Istanbul: Matbacası Osmaniye, h.1338/1922,
.
reprint, BLTM Books, n.d.), 1052; Sakaoǧlu, “Bekâr Odaları,” 123–24; Inalcık, “Istanbul,” 236.
.
23. Ahmed Refik, Onuncu Asr-ı Hicri’de Istanbul Hayatı, 1495–1591 (Istanbul: Enderun Kitabevi,
1988), 139–40. Selim II’s order could suggest that the maximum term of residency allowed was set at
five years. Eighteenth-century sources intimate that the term was extended to ten years. Olson, “Jews,
Janissaries, Esnaf,” 196. Exception to the law on neighborhood residence was made for water carriers
entrusted with tasks requiring interaction with residents, such as fetching water to private dwellings.
Charles White, Three Years in Constantinople, or, Domestic Manners of the Turks in 1844, 3 vols.
(London: Henry Colburn, 1845), 2:17–18.

24. Refik, Onuncu Asr-ı Hicri’de, 145–46.

25. Still in the seventeenth century, most of the urban population resided in this area, particularly in
Mahmudpaşa and Mercan. Özkoçak, “Urban Development,” 51–103; Gülay Yılmaz, “The Economic
and Social Roles of Janissaries in a 17th Century Ottoman City: The Case of Istanbul” (PhD diss., McGill
Univ., 2011), 91; Gülru Necipoǧlu, The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire
(London: Reaktion, 2005), 114–15.

26. Given the nature of the source material, a rigorous mapping of bachelor inns at any point in time
is virtually impossible. On the topography and demographics of the intra muros city in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, see Çiǧdem Kafescioǧlu, Constantinopolis / Istanbul: Cultural Encounter, Impe-
rial Vision, and the Construction of the Ottoman Capital (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ.
Press, 2009), especially 178–206; Stéphane Yerasimos, “Fatih: une région d’Istanbul aux XVe et XVIe
siècles,” in Studies in Ottoman History in Honour of Professor V.L. Ménage, ed. Colin Heywood and
.
Colin Imber (Istanbul: Isis Press, 1994), 369–81; Özkoçak, “Urban Development,” 20–164.

27. Yılmaz, “Economic and Social Roles,” 91; Olson, “Jews, Janissaries, Esnaf,” 193–94.

28. Selma Özkoçak, “Coffehouses: Rethinking the Public and Private in Early Modern Istanbul,”
Journal of Urban History 33 (2007): 967–69; Özkoçak, “Urban Development,” 83–85; Ahmet Yaşar,
“The Coffeehouse in Early Modern Istanbul: Public Space, Sociability and Surveillance” (MA thesis,
Boǧaziçi Univ., 2003), 28–65; Kırlı, “Labor Force,” 127.

29. Orhonlu, “Kayıkçılık,” 109–34; Kırlı, “Labor Force,” 134–38; Riedler, “Labour Migration,”
146–49.

30. Cemal Kafadar, “Yeniçeri–Esnaf Relations: Solidarity and Conflict” (MA thesis, McGill Univ.,
1981), 108–9. The revolt ended with the abdication of Ahmed III (1703–1730).

31. There is today a small but sophisticated body of revisionist scholarship about the reasons for
and history of this phenomenon, the various aspects of Janissaries’ integration in the social, economic,
 Hamadeh / Istanbul’s Migrants and the Politics of Space 191

and political life of Istanbul, and the revolts they led and in which they participated. See, for instance,
Kafadar, “Yeniçeri–Esnaf”; Kafadar, “On the Purity and Corruption of the Janissaries,” Turkish Studies
Association Bulletin 15, no. 2 (1991): 273–80; Kafadar, “Janissaries and Other Riffraff of Ottoman
Istanbul: Rebels without a Cause?,” in Identity and Identity Formation in the Ottoman World: A
Volume of Essays in Honor of Norman Itzkowitz, ed. Baki Tezcan and Karl Barbir (Madison: Univ.
of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 117–25; Eunjeong Yi, Guild Dynamics in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul:
Fluidity and Leverage (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 33–34; 133–58; Gülay Yılmaz Diko, “Blurred Boundaries
between Soldiers and Civilians: Artisan Janissaries in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul,” in Bread from
the Lion’s Mouth: Artisans Struggling for a Livelihood in Ottoman Cities, ed. Suraiya Faroqhi (New
York: Berghahn, 2015); Yılmaz, “Roles of Janissaries,” 189–243; Sunar, “Cauldron of Dissent.”

32. Yi, Guild Dynamics, 32–43; Kafadar, “Yeniçeri–Esnaf,” 113; Câbî Ömer Efendi, Câbî Târihi,
ed. Mehmet Ali Beyhan, 2 vols. (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2003), 2:749–51, 902.

33. The Ottoman term is orta, and can be translated as mess, battalion, or unit. Each mess was
composed of various regiments and divisions and headquartered in a separate station, called kolluk.

34. Yi, Guild Dynamics, 143–48. Esnaf is usually translated as “guilds,” but these were not as tightly
structured. Engin Akarlı, “Law and the Marketplace: Istanbul, 1730–1840,” in Dispensing Justice in
Islam: Qadis and Their Judgments, ed. Muhammad Khalil Masud et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 6.

35. Yi, Guild Dynamics, 131–32, 148–49, 197–99; Akarlı, “Law and the Marketplace,” 252; Suraiya
Faroqhi, Stories of Ottoman Men and Women: Establishing Status, Establishing Control (Istanbul:
Eren, 2002), 233–34.

36. Kafadar, “Yeniçeri–Esnaf,” 110. On the range of benefits bachelors could derive from their as-
sociations with Janissaries, see Sunar, “Cauldron of Dissent,” 55–80.

37. A few wonderful studies (including those by Walter Andrews, Mehmed Kalpaklı, Selim Kuru,
and Dror Ze’evi) have addressed questions of homosociability and homoeroticism in early modern
Ottoman urban gardens, taverns, and coffeehouses, but bachelors’ role in this context awaits further
research.

38. Ali Çaksu, “Janissary Coffee Houses in Late Eighteenth-Century Istanbul,” in Ottoman Tulips,
Ottoman Coffee: Leisure and Lifestyle in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Dana Sajdi (London: Tauris Aca-
demic Studies, 2007), 127; Cengiz Kırlı, “The Struggle over Space: Coffeehouses of Ottoman Istanbul,
1780–1845” (PhD diss., Binghamton Univ., SUNY, 2002), 124–27.

39. Each janissary coffeehouse was associated with and displayed the emblem of a particular mess.
Kafadar, “Janissaries and Other Riffraff,” 118; Kırlı, “Struggle over Space,” 119–22.

40. Çaksu, “Janissary Coffee Houses,” 117–32; Kırlı, “Struggle over Space,” 119–22; Sunar, “Caul-
dron of Dissent,” 128–31.

41. Whether, as some historians suggest, bachelors were motivated by shared interests or political
consciousness is impossible to confirm based on the available sources. See Sunar, “Cauldron of Dissent,”
144–49; Kırlı, “Struggle over Space,” 124–25.

42. See, Câbî, Câbî Târihi, 1:130, 285–86, 2:851. The involvement of migrants is well highlighted
in Sunar’s discussion of these revolts in “Cauldron of Dissent,” 110–17. For the Alemdar “Incident,”
see Aysel Yıldız, “A City under Fire: Urban Violence in Istanbul during the Alemdar Incident (1808),”
in Freitag and Lafi, Urban Governance, 37–57. For a nuanced exploration of Janissary revolts, see
Kafadar, “Janissaries and Other Riffraff,” 113–34.

43. Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in
Northern Ireland (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991), esp. ch. 5.

44. Kırlı, “Labor Force,” 133; Kırlı, “Struggle over Space,” 95–97.

45. See, for example, BOA, A.DVN 827, 831–36; Istanbul University Library, Rare Books Section,
.
T8830, T8865, T8866; Reşat Ekrem Koçu, “Bostancıbaşı Defterleri,” Istanbul Enstitüsü Dergisi 3–4
. .
(1957): 54–89; Cahit Kayra and Erol Üyepazarcı, Ikinci Mahmud’un Istanbul’u: Bostancıbaşı Sicilleri
.
(Istanbul: Istanbul Belediyesi, 1992), 117–54; Başaran, Selim III, 224–29; Özkoçak, “Urban Develop-
ment,” 65–66.
192 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 50, No. 2

46. See, for instance, BOA, Hatt-ı Hümâyûn (HAT) 19215, 10805, 911, 431, 433, Cevdet Zabtiye
(CZ) 4322. See also Reşat Ekrem Koçu, Eski Istanbul’da Meyhaneler ve Meyhane Köçekleri, 4th ed.
(Istanbul: Doǧan Kitap, 2015), 30; Mehmet Demirtaş, “XVIII. Yüzyılda Osmanlıda Bir Zümrenin Alt-
Kültür Grubuna Dönüşmesi: Külhanbeyleri,” Atatürk Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi 7
(2006): 120.

47. Yılmaz, “Economic and Social Roles,” 84, 122–34.

48. See, for example, BOA, HAT 9828, 19895. See also Faroqhi, “Controlling Borders,” 337–38.

49. Quoted in Koçu, “Bekâr,” 2400–1, my translation. Hüseyin Aǧa was the last owner of the Elli
Altı Coffeehouse. Reşat Ekrem Koçu, Patrona Halil (Istanbul: Doǧan Kitap, 2001), 157.

50. See, for instance, Sunar, “Cauldron of Dissent,” 128–208.

51. Robert Jütte, Poverty and Defiance in Early Modern Europe (1994; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1996), 185.

52. BOA, HAT 431, 433, 911, 1013, CZ 1675, 4322. I have discussed this case in some detail
in Hamadeh, “Mean Streets: Urban Order and Moral Space in Early Modern Istanbul,” Turcica 44
(2012–13): 259–64.

53. BOA, CZ 1675; Câbî, Câbî Târihi, 2:761–62.

54. Hamadeh, “Mean Streets,” 261–71.

. .
55. Câbî, Câbî Târihi, 2:749–51; Kemal Beydilli, Osmanlı Döneminde Imamlar ve Bir Imamın
Günlüǧü (Istanbul: Tarih ve Tabiat Vakfı, 2001), 120, 179. See also Çaksu, “Janissary Coffee Houses,”
123.

56. BOA, Cevdet Sıhhiye (CS) 290. See also Câbî, Câbî Târihi, 2:914; Şanizade Mehmed Ataullah
Efendi, Şanizade Tarihi, 4 vols. (Istanbul: Ceride-i Havadis Matbaası, h.1284/1867–h.1291/1874),
2:109–13, 151, 155–56.

57. BOA, CS 290.

58. This was also noted in Sunar, “Cauldron of Dissent,” 178–80, 193–96.
.
59. Şanizade, Şanizade Tarihi, 2:109–13, 151; Beydilli, Imamlar, 138; Câbî, Câbî Târihi, 2:914. See
also Sunar, “Cauldron of Dissent,” 112–15.

60. BOA, HAT 17226; Ahmed Cevdet, Tarih-i Cevdet, 12 vols. (Istanbul: Matbaa-ı Osmaniye,
h.1309/1892), 12:84.

61. Ahmed Lutfî Efendi, Târîh-i Lutfî, 8 vols. (Istanbul, h.1290/1874; reprint, Ankara: Türk Tarih
Kurumu, 1991), 1:158. See also Koçu, “Bekâr,” 2397.

62. See, especially, Behar, Neighborhood; Kırlı, “Labor Force,” 135–38.

63. The distinction I make here between civilians and military, by which I mean those who had no
ties to the Janissaries and those who did, is a tenuous one. As this article demonstrates, the lines between
the two were not always clear.

64. Stéphane Yerasimos, “La règlementation urbaine ottomane, XVIe–XIXe siècles,” in Proceedings
of the Second International Meeting on Modern Ottoman Studies and the Turkish Republic (Leiden:
. .
Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 1987), 6; Ahmet Refik, Hicrî On Ikinci Asırda Istanbul
Hayatı 1100–1200, 3 ed. (Istanbul: Enderun Kitabevi, 1988), 67–68.
rd

.
65. See, for example, BOA, CZ 428, HAT 17226, NFS–d 3, ff. 1–6; Refik, On Ikinci Asırda, 185–86;
Sakaoǧlu, “Bekar Odaları,” 123–24.

66. To my knowledge, the only exceptions were those endowed between 1708 and 1712 to the
Dülgeroǧlu Mosque, in the neighborhood of Mercan. Crane, Garden of the Mosques, 119; Özkoçak,
“Urban Development,” 121.
.
67. Refik, On Ikinci Asırda, 185–86; BOA, MAD–d 10173, f. 4.
 Hamadeh / Istanbul’s Migrants and the Politics of Space 193

68. See, for example, BOA, Cevdet Evkaf 16159, HAT 17226, 19215, 24051; Ergin, Mecelle,
. .
1:1052–54; Ahmet Kal‘a et al., eds., Istanbul Ahkâm Defterleri: Istanbul’da Sosyal Hayat, 2 vols. (Is-
. . .
tanbul: Istanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi, 1997–98), 1:125; Halil Inalcık et al., eds., Istanbul Mahkemesi
121 Numaralı Şer‘iyye Sicilli, h.1231–1232/1816–1817 (Istanbul: Sabancı Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2006),
146; Başaran, Selim III, 210.
.
69. BOA, CB 1806; Kal‘a, Ahkâm Defterleri, 1:157, 2:66–67, 390–93; Refik, On Ikinci Asırda,
185–86.
.
70. Ergin, Mecelle, 1:1052–54. This order is mentioned in Inalcık, “Istanbul,” 236, erroneously
dated 1634 (h.1044) instead of 1731 (h.1144).
. .
71. Inalcık, Istanbul Mahkemesi, 146.

72. Kal’a, Ahkâm Defterleri, 2:67.

73. Başaran, Selim III, 210.

.
74. Beydilli, Imamlar, 130–31.

75. See, for example, BOA, HAT 25726, CB 1806, CZ 428, MAD–d 10173, f. 4; Kal‘a, Ahkâm
. . .
Defterleri, 1:125, 2:66–67, 390–91; Inalcık, Istanbul Mahkemesi, 146; Refik, On Ikinci Asırda, 185–86.

76. BOA, CZ 428, HAT 8850. See also Başaran, Selim III, 106–67.

77. Koçu, “Bekâr,” 2393; Lutfî, Lutfî Târîhi, 1:158.

78. The document was titled “Kavânîn-i cörfiyye ve nizamât-i mülkiyye-i saltanât-i seniyye” [Cus-
tomary Laws and Imperial Regulations], BOA, HAT 24051.

79. Mantran, Istanbul, 301, 331–47, 366–70, 404–18; Mantran, “Règlements fiscaux ottomans:
La police des marchés de Stamboul au début du XVIe siècle,” Cahiers de Tunisie 14 (1956): 213–41.

80. BOA, CB 1806.

81. BOA, HAT 19215.

82. See, for example, Sunar, “Cauldron of Dissent,” 114–17, 179–80, 195–96.

83. Lutfî, Lutfî Târîhi, 1:158.