The Ottoman Empire: a Historical Encyclopedia [2 Volumes]

by Kia, Mehrdad;

  Hale, William. Turkish Foreign Policy, 1774–2000. London: Frank Cass, 2000.

  Inalcik, Halil. The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age 1300–1600. Translated by Norman Itzkowitz and Colin Imber. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973.

  Jelavich, Barbara. History of the Balkans: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Vol 1. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

  Jelavich, Charles, and Barbara Jelavich. The Establishment of the Balkan National States, 1804–1920. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977.

  Kaplan, Robert D. Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History. New York: Picador, 2005.

  Lovrenović, Ivan. Bosnia: A Cultural History. New York: New York University Press, 2001.

  Quataert, Donald. The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

  Shaw, Stanford J. History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. 2 vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

  Somel, Selçuk Akșin. Historical Dictionary of the Ottoman Empire. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003.

  Sugar, Peter. Southeastern Europe under Ottoman Rule, 1354–1805. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977.

  Tursun Beg. The History of Mehmed the Conqueror. Translated by Halil Inalcik and Murphey Rhoads. Minneapolis, MN: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1978.

  Zürcher, Erik-Jan. Turkey: A Modern History. London: I. B. Tauris, 2004.

  Bulgarians and the Bulgarian Orthodox Church

  One of the oldest kingdoms on the European continent, the Bulgarian state was founded in the seventh century in the eastern part of the Balkan Peninsula. From its inception the Bulgarian Orthodox Church played a central role in preserving the Slavonic liturgy and Bulgarian language and history. The Bulgarian state adopted Christianity in 870 during the reign of Khan Boris-Michael I (r. 867–889). The first Bulgarian empire elevated the Bulgarian church into a patriarchate in 927 (Gradeva: 103). Although their country came under Byzantine rule in 1018, the Bulgarians managed to regain their independence in 1185 and established the second Bulgarian Empire, which restored the Bulgarian Orthodox Patriarchate in 1235. The power of the Bulgarian state waned soon afterward, and by the late 14th century its territory was partitioned among rival nobles who were conquered by Ottoman Turks. Murad I (r. 1362–1389) captured Plovdiv (Philippopolis) in present-day southern Bulgaria in 1363, and Sofia, located at the foot of Vitosha Mountain in western Bulgaria, in 1385. The conquest of Turnovo in northern Bulgaria in 1393, and of Vidin on the southern bank of the Danube in present-day northwestern Bulgaria in 1398, by Bayezid I (r. 1389–1402) brought any hope of Bulgarian independence to an end. Bulgarian territory was divided into several districts overseen by a governor. Each district was in turn subdivided into sancāks (sanjāks) or administrative units, governed by a sancāk bey (sanjāk bey). Though the Ottomans did not force the Christian population to renounce and abandon their religion, a large number of Bulgarians, particularly in the Rhodopes, converted to Islam. These Muslim Bulgarians are called Pomaks.

  In 1454 the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II (r. 1444–1446, 1451–1481), appointed the Greek bishop Gennadios Scholarios as the head of the Orthodox Christian religious community (millet). Not all Orthodox Christians were, however, Greeks. Bulgarians, like the Serbs, possessed their own native church hierarchies and organizations, which were taken over by the Greek appointees of Istanbul’s patriarchate. As a sense of Greek superiority emerged within the church hierarchy, its Slavic faithful grew increasingly resentful. Their ethnic self-awareness grew correspondingly, and a deep-seated animosity toward Greek domination began to make itself felt within the Orthodox millet. Bulgarian religious leaders and monks from remote monasteries and spiritual enclaves called for throwing off the supremacy of the Greek clergy and Greek language. If the Bulgarians wished to establish Bulgarian schools and liturgy, they needed an independent ecclesiastical system.

  In 1557, when Süleyman I (r. 1520–1566) reconstituted the Serbian Patriarchate of Peć, the Ottomans placed the Bulgarian eparchies under its authority. The Peć Patriarchate was, however, abolished by the Ottoman government in 1766. In the 19th century, as the authority of the Ottoman central government waned, the Bulgarians demanded “church services in Bulgarian, Bulgarian-speaking high clergy, the establishment of a national church, and a form of political autonomy” (Gradeva: 104). Finally, “in 1870, the sultan issued a decree authorizing the establishment of a Bulgarian exarchate” (Gradeva: 104).

  Beginning in the 18th and throughout the 19th centuries, Russian influence in the Balkans increased. Russia justified its intervention in the name of the unity of the Slavic peoples. The Pan-Slavic foreign policy of Russia allowed the Russian government to support the nationalist movements in Serbia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria. In 1876 a nationalist uprising erupted in Bulgaria. The Ottomans crushed this uprising, with heavy casualties. The massacre of the civilian population allowed Russia to demand that the Ottoman Empire introduce reforms and grant autonomy to the Bulgarian people. Recognizing the threat of Russian intervention in the eastern Balkans, the British intervened and called for the convening of an international conference in Istanbul. The principal objective of the conference was to prevent another war between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. However, on the first day of the conference, December 23, 1876, the Ottoman delegation shocked the European participants by announcing that a constitution had been promulgated and that any attempts by European powers to pressure the Ottoman state to introduce reforms in its European provinces were unnecessary because under the new constitution, all Ottoman subjects were to be treated as equals with their rights protected and guaranteed by the new government.

  The Ottoman constitution did not, however, prevent another military confrontation with Russia. Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire on April 24, 1877. The Ottoman forces delayed the Russians for several months at Plevna in Bulgaria. By December the Russian army had arrived outside Istanbul. On March 3, 1878, the Ottomans were forced to sign the Treaty of San Stefano with Russia. Among other clauses, the treaty called for the establishment of an autonomous Bulgarian state, stretching from the Black Sea to the Aegean, which Russia would occupy for two years. The Russian aggression in the Balkans was opposed by the European powers, who intervened and agreed to meet in Berlin at a new congress designed to partition the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire in such a way as to prevent the emergence of Russia as the dominant power in the region.

  According to the agreements reached at the Congress of Berlin (June 13–July 13, 1878), the large Bulgarian state that had been created at the Treaty of San Stefano was divided into three separate entities. The region north of the Balkan Mountains and the area around Sofia were combined into a new autonomous Bulgarian principality that would recognize the suzerainty of the sultan but for all practical purposes served as a Russian satellite. The region lying between the Rhodope and Balkan Mountains was designated as a semiautonomous region under its own Christian governor, who was to be appointed by the sultan and supervised by the European powers (Shaw: 2:191). The third area of Thrace and Macedonia remained under direct Ottoman rule (Jelavich: 360).

  In July 1908 a revolution erupted in Macedonia against the autocratic rule of Sultan Abddülhamid II (r. 1876–1909). A group of army officers affiliated with the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) rebelled and demanded the restoration of the Ottoman constitution of 1876. After a feeble effort to suppress the rebellion, Abdülhamid restored the constitution on July 23 and ordered parliamentary elections. The Turkish officers who had revolted against their sultan believed that the restoration of the parliamentary regime would preserve the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire. They were wrong. Bulgaria unified with Eastern Rumelia, which had remained an autonomous province under the nominal rule of the Ottoman sultan. On October 5, 1908, the independence of Bulgaria was declared at Tornova.

  See also: Battles and Treaties: Congress of Berlin; Rebels: Young Turks; Sultans: Abdülhamid II

  Further Reading<
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  Crampton, R. J. Bulgaria. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

  Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

  Glenny, Misha. The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers 1804–2011. London: Penguin Books, 2012.

  Gradeva, Rossitsa. “Bulgarian Orthodox Church.” In Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire, edited by Gábor Ágoston and Bruce Masters, 103–105. New York: Facts On File, 2009.

  Jelavich, Barbara. History of the Balkans: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Vol 1. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

  Kaplan, Robert D. Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History. New York: Picador, 2005.

  Macdermott, Mercia. History of Bulgaria 1393–1885. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962.

  Shaw, Stanford J. History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. 2 vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

  Jews

  Numerous Jewish communities lived scattered throughout the Ottoman Empire. Although “the Jews were recognized as a separate religious community by both Muslim legal scholars and Ottoman officials,” they “did not seek formal status as a millet until 1835, when the Ottoman government, in its attempt to standardize the way it dealt with each of the minority religious communities, pushed the Jewish community leaders to name a chief rabbi (hahambaşi) for the empire” (Masters: 384). The Jews of the Ottoman Empire governed their own affairs, just as the Orthodox Christians and Armenians did, under their local rabbis, who were elected by their congregation and confirmed in office by the sultan.

  The Jewish population of the empire did not constitute a monolith. It contained original communities in various parts of the Middle East and the Balkans, as well as the Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews who arrived in the Ottoman Empire in the 15th and 16th centuries. The original Jewish communities were divided into Rabbanites, or those who revered the Talmud (Commentaries), and the Karaites, or those who accepted the Bible as the only source of authority, did not recognize Hanukkah as a holiday, and permitted first cousins to marry (Masters: 308).

  Linguistically, the Jews of the Ottoman Empire were divided into four main groups: Romiotes, Sephardic Jews, Ashkenazi Jews, and Arabic-speaking Jews (Masters: 300). Some smaller Jewish communities in the Kurdish-populated regions spoke either Kurdish or Aramaic, while others in North Africa spoke Berber (Tamazight). Romiotes or Greek-speaking descendants of the Jews, who had settled in the former Byzantine Empire, formed the core Jewish population encountered by the Ottomans in the early centuries of building their empire. The Sephardic Jews, who were refugees from Spain and Portugal, “spoke a dialect of Castilian Spanish” called “Ladino or Judezmo,” while the Ashkenazi Jews, who were originally from central and eastern Europe, “spoke either German or the Jewish dialect of medieval German known as Yiddish” (Masters: 300; Sugar: 269). Arabic-speaking Jews resided in all the major cities of the Middle East and North Africa, but the largest communities were to be found in Cairo, Aleppo, Damascus, and Baghdad. Baghdad served “as a major center of learning for Arabic-speaking Jews,” and rabbis trained in the city “were in demand” both in Egypt and Syria (Masters: 300). All educated Ottoman Jews knew Hebrew, which served as the language of worship and prayer, of intellectual life, and in some cases of trade and commerce.

  The arrival of the Sephardic Jews who were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492, and the influx of the Ashkenazi Jews from central Europe, only intensified the diversity and the internal divisions within the Jewish community. These divisions were the result of significant differences in language, rituals, and even prayer books. Thus, far from being a unified religious group, the Jewish community was a mosaic of subgroups, each identified by its own unique linguistic and cultural characteristics. The Ottoman millet system recognized neither the fundamental differences between the Ashkenazi and the Sephardic communities nor the unique characteristics of the subgroups that existed within each group. However, it would be impossible to deny that for centuries the Jews of the Ottoman Empire lived under far more tolerant political and cultural conditions than the Jews of Christian Europe. The protection and tolerance offered by the Ottoman state allowed both Ashkenazi and Sephardic communities to preserve their languages, rituals, customs, and traditions (Sugar: 267).

  The Ashkenazi Jews were descended from the medieval Jewish communities of the Rhineland in Germany and had moved east, settling in Poland, Russia, Hungary, and other countries of Eastern Europe. Seeking a refuge from anti-Jewish attacks and persecution, many migrated to the Ottoman Empire in the 15th and 16th centuries. There they sought, and received, the protection of Ottoman sultans, who “encouraged the immigration of Jews from Europe, as an element bringing trade and wealth” (Inalcik: 141). The “welcome that the Ottoman sultans gave these Jewish immigrants is evident in the permissions granted to build new synagogues in the cities in which they settled” (Masters: 302). By the second half of the 16th century there were vibrant Ashkenazi communities in Istanbul, Edirne, Sofia, Pleven, Vidin, Trikala, Arta, and Salonika, who had arrived in the Ottoman domains during the reigns of the conqueror of Constantinople, Mehmed II (r. 1444–1446, 1451–1481), and his successor, Bayezid II (r. 1481–1512) (Sugar: 267). By 1477, the Jews “formed the third largest section of Istanbul’s population after Muslims and Greeks” (Inalcik: 141). Many sent letters home describing how much their lives had improved under Ottoman rule, and they encouraged family and friends to join them (Sugar: 267). The news that Jews were welcome in the Ottoman Empire traveled quickly, and immigrants began to arrive not only from the countries of central and western Europe, but also from Hungary, Moldavia, the Crimea, and even parts of Asia (Gibb and Bowen: 1:219). Many of these new immigrants set out for Palestine despite the opposition from the Franciscans of Jerusalem, who “talked the Pope into forbidding the Venetians to carry Jewish passengers to the Holy Land” (Gibb and Bowen: 1:225).

  In contrast to the Ashkenazi Jews, the Sephardic Jews lived originally in Spain and Portugal and fled to North Africa and the Middle East during the Spanish Inquisition, seeking economic security and religious freedom under the protection of Muslim rule (Ben-Zvi: 602). The new immigrants from the Iberian Peninsula included the so-called Maraños (Muranos), Jews who had expediently converted to Catholicism to escape persecution but upon arriving in Ottoman territory abandoned their disguise and merged back into the Sephardic congregation. Many settled in Istanbul and Edirne, as well as other cities of the empire, in the 15th and 16th centuries. There were Sephardic communities in the urban centers of the Balkans such as Sarajevo, Travnik, Mostar, Banja Luka, and Salonika, where the largest Jewish community, of nearly 30,000, resided. Salonika alone had some 30 different congregations, including Aragonese, Castilian, Portuguese, and Apulian communities (Roth: 246-247). Many “Jewish males were employed in Salonika’s woolen industry,” where they used “the techniques brought from Spain and Italy” to supply the imperial palace in Istanbul and the Ottoman army with most of the cloth they consumed (Masters: 302). The urban centers of Anatolia, such as Izmir, Bursa, Amasya, and Tokat, also witnessed a significant influx of Sephardic Jews. In each urban center the Jewish community was divided into separate congregations, which formed around the unique traditions and customs the immigrants had brought with them from various regions of Spain and Portugal. As with the Ashkenazi Jews, many Sephardic immigrants also headed to the shores of Palestine and settled in Jerusalem, Gaza, and Safad in Galilee, which served as “a center for the study of the Jewish mystical tradition of the Kabbalah” (Masters: 301). Smaller groups chose Syria, particularly Damascus, and Egypt, where they settled mostly in Alexandria and Cairo.

  In 1517, when the Ottomans defeated the ruling Mamluk dynasty and conquered Egypt, Selim I decreed new laws for the Jews. At that time the Egyptian Jews were led by their Nagid, or Reis, a rabbi and prince-judge, whose authority was similar to that conferred on the chief rabbi (hahambaşi) in Istanbul. Selim abolished the office of Nagid “to prevent h
is becoming a rival to the chief rabbi in Istanbul,” and Selim’s son, Süleyman I, reasserted the authority of the hahambaşi as the representative of all Jews in the empire (Gibb and Bowen: 1: 141). Süleyman also appointed an officer (kahya), a Jew himself, who enjoyed direct access to the sultan, the grand vizier, and his cabinet, and “to whose notice he could bring cases of injustice” suffered by the members of the Jewish community “at the hands of either provincial governors or of fanatical Christians” (Gibb and Bowen: 1: 141).

  The Sephardic Jewish population played an important role in the everyday life of the Ottoman state as merchants, artisans, and physicians. Determined to preserve their traditions, they organized their social activities around synagogues and community centers, where Hebrew was taught and the Torah and Talmud studied. Ottoman tolerance allowed them to emerge as one of the most educated and literate population groups in the empire (Lovrenović: 145). Rabbinical schools such as the one founded in Sarajevo in 1786 by Rabbi David Pardo played an important role in preserving Jewish religious and cultural traditions and customs (Lovrenović: 145). In these schools, the students learned classical Hebrew, though in their day-to-day life they continued to use Ladino, the Jewish-Spanish language they had brought with them from Spain.

  The massive migration of Spanish Jewry to the Ottoman Empire included many Jewish merchants who were active in transatlantic trade and introduced new world plants and fruits such as chili peppers. Thus, the Turkish name for the hot peppers, biber aci (aji), derives from the Caribbean ají (Krondl: 174). The Ottoman sultans welcomed the arrival of the new immigrants, particularly the artisans, merchants, and scholars, as men of enterprise and energy who knew precisely those arts and crafts that were in highest demand in the empire, such as “medical knowledge, woolen industry, metalworking, glassmaking, the secrets of the manufacture of arms, the import and export trade, retail trade and distribution, and so on” (Lovrenović: 245; Ben-Zvi: 603). Each Jewish immigrant community was known for excellence in a unique profession, trade, or craft. The Maraños (Muranos) were respected as manufacturers of weapons of war, while those of the medical school of Salamanca were much in demand as doctors (Gibb and Bowen: 1:220). Many also were recruited as translators and interpreters because of their international connections and knowledge of Europe (Gibb and Bowen: 1:220).