Haim Gerber Oppression and Salvation STUDIEN ZUR SPRACHE, GESCHICHTE UND KULTUR DER TÜRKVÖLKER Begründet von György Hazai Herausgegeben von Pál Fodor, Barbara Kellner-Heinkele, Simone-Christiane Raschmann STUDIEN ZUR SPRACHE, GESCHICHTE UND KULTUR DER TÜRKVÖLKER Band 27 Haim Gerber Oppression and Salvation Annotated Legal Documents from the Ottoman Book of Complaints of 1675 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de www.klaus-schwarz-verlag.com All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. © 2018 by Klaus Schwarz Verlag GmbH First edition Layout & Production: J2P Berlin Printed in Hungary ISBN 978-3-87997-472-6 Table of Contents Introduction...................................................................................................................7 Part I: Background Studies Chapter 1—Law and Order......................................................................................24 Chapter 2—The Rise of Ottoman Scholars (ulema)............................................49 Chapter 3—State, Bureaucrats and Scholars: The Evidence of the Book of Complaints.............................................................62 Part II: Documents Chapter 4—Oppression and Brigandage..............................................................83 Chapter 5—The Kadi and the Common People................................................109 Chapter 6—(In)justice by State Officials............................................................124 Chapter 7—Complaints against Kadis and Naibs (Assistant Judges)..........136 Chapter 8—The Shar’i Legal Process—Final?....................................................143 Chapter 9—The Agent (mübaşir)...........................................................................152 Chapter 10—The Role of the Divan in the Legal Process................................157 Chapter 11—Miscellaneous....................................................................................167 Glossary......................................................................................................................179 Bibliography...............................................................................................................182 Acknowledgement I thank Gerd Winkelhane, Klaus Schwarz Verlag’s Managing Director and an Ottomanist, for supporting and encouraging this project, as well as for helping with the editing. A note on transliteration This study is heavily based on Turkish and Arabic terms, so that total consis- tency was impossible. I have opted to give “special status” to the term Shari’a (the Muslim sacred law). All other terms are transcribed according to the cur- rent rules in Modern Turkish. Introduction T his book sets out to translate and edit a selection of Ottoman historical doc- uments from the original old Ottoman language into English. The reference is to the documents of the Vienna Book of Complaints (Şikayet Defteri), a large volume of documents published by the Austrian Academy in 1984 in a facsimile 1 form. The volume contains some 2,800 summaries of documents that are for the most part orders about complaints from citizens (and citizen groups) about wrongs done to them by various state officials during the previous year, as well as the orders from the center (formally the Sultan, but in reality the Divan, which included the Grand Vizier and the chief dignitaries of the state, in effect the Ottoman government) relating to the means of addressing the problems raised. The story of how this volume found its way into the Austrian archive is, of course, fascinating in itself. Briefly (since the full story has been told by Pro- 2 fessor Hans Georg Majer, the editor of the original German volume), this vol- ume accompanied the Ottoman Grand Vizier while on campaign in the Austrian front in 1675. As the campaign did not go well for the Ottomans, they eventually abandoned camp and withdrew, leaving behind many items, including this volume. There is evidence that there was an intention to issue a translation of the volume (like calling it “volume 1”). It is understandable why this never material- 3 ized: the different handwritings in it are exceedingly difficult to decipher. This is unfortunate, as it has caused the volume to be extremely under-researched, even though this is no doubt one of the most fascinating sources for information on Ottoman life and politics in the seventeenth century. That this volume deserves a full-length monograph to analyze its varied contents goes without saying. This study tries to partially fill this need by publishing a selection of 145 complaints, which are intended to be more or less a representative sample of the contents of the book. It must be emphasized that since the book has already been “pub- lished”, my part here can only be the translation of chosen documents, rather than an editing in the full sense. In addition to providing a strong taste of the central issues covered in the book, brigandage and tax and related forms of op- pression, I concentrate on some important aspects of the Ottoman legal system that inadvertently came to light in this volume. 1 Hans G. Majer, ed., Das Osmanische Registerbuch der Beschwerden (Şikayet Defteri), vom Jahre 1675, Verlag der Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna, 1984. 2 Majer, Şikayet Defteri, Introduction. 3 Majer was aided in his work by a group of well-known Ottomanists, who together made a major contribution to the value of the book by deciphering all of the place names and indexing them. This in itself is a job of herculean proportions, which greatly facilitated my own work. 7 Introduction The phenomenon of complaints was a central tenet in the ideology of the Ottoman Empire, an obsession it inherited from former Middle Eastern empires, Islamic and pre-Islamic. Attention was directed in particular to the tendency of state officials to overstep the bounds of their authority, exploiting vast areas of the countryside and the extremely poor communication to enrich themselves at the expense of the poor citizens and, in the process, to undermine the legitimacy of the ruler himself. Halil Inalcık pointed out many years ago the centrality of 4 the concept of justice (adalet) to the Ottoman state, and recently, Linda Darling published a massive book showing that much of this ideology was succinctly summarized by the concept of “Circle of Justice”, pointing out that the poor peasants were producing the wealth of the state, but if they were fleeced too much, everybody would be impoverished, the elite included; the ruler weaken- ed; and in due course his legitimacy was undermined and his length of rule con- 5 siderably shortened. The practical problem was that those who taxed the people were officials, and the ability of the ruler to control them was problematic in the extreme. This is no doubt the key issue in this collection of documents, and in my view, it was also the key issue in Ottoman political life at the time. I need to say a few things on the process of selection of the documents before proceeding. It is naïve to think that one can simply pick up any chance docu- ment and translate it. Although, with experience, many Ottomanists could un- derstand the contents of most of the documents in the Book, scientific transla- tion means deciphering every word of the document—no mean task at all. This, however, was the task to be performed if this book was to be published. It is important for me to emphasize that strictly speaking the complaints themselves are not the focus of my interest, but rather the general idea that the complaints convey about the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century—its life problems, the relations between the small citizens and the government, and the like. To achieve this, I read the entire volume, minus the perhaps twenty percent that proved impossible to decipher. The sample that I chose to translate is meant to convey the unique flavor of the documents, many of the documents having a unique flavor in the form of one or two first person narrative sentences (so rare in the Ottoman archives) that seem authentic and are often sharp and edgy. As I have said in the last paragraph, as I was reading the Book of Complaints (a very long process in any case), in time I became interested in something big- ger than the complaints alone. It is true that it is difficult to think of something bigger than the contents of the complaints. One can read in the volume of ter- rible tax extortions committed by state officials against peasants that forced the 4 Halil Inalcık, The Ottoman Empire, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973, pp. 65 ff. 5 Linda Darling, A History of Social Justice and Political Power in the Middle East: The Circle of Justice from Mesopotamia to Globalization, New York: Routledge, 2013. 8 Introduction victims to cry out that their ability to carry on is at an end and that they are fa- cing dispersal and sure death in the near future again and again. It has been pointed out, and I entirely agree, that these cries may have been somewhat ex- aggerated, but my strong feeling is that they are not invented, but rather convey harsh realities. Abusers in the Book of Complaints never put it on record that their “good name” was being smeared by the peasants. On the other hand, so many complaints of harsh abuses might give the im- pression that the Ottoman Empire in its entirety should have collapsed as a con- sequence. That this did not happen, should give us reason to ask, “Why not?” In fact, in the book of complaints itself, there is evidence of processes and people that worked against that abuse and deprivation of rights. Maybe the right image here is the Dutch boy who put his finger in a crack in the dam and saved the city. In our case, the elements that may have saved the day for the Ottoman Em- pire were the top bureaucrats, the officials of the Divan and their aids, and the top ulema, mainly Kadis (the Muslim judge). For these two elements, it was per- sonal—the survival of the state was their chief social and political interest, and they did what it took to achieve its survival. The record shows that the Kadis were the chief tool the system used to stem the tide of deteriorating standards of government—ninety-nine percent of the complaints were sent back to the Kadi with an order to take care of the situation. Some critical scholars, particularly under the influence of American Realism, take other scholars to task for not providing a good explanation of the personal agendas of Kadis while practicing Ottoman-Islamic law. These scholars probably do not realize that supplying fair justice was a personal, material interest of the Kadi as much as of the Sultan, in 6 as much as popular legitimacy was necessary for the survival of the state. In ad- dition, a large number of complaints were created in the Shari’a court because of a complaint to the kadi, and a large section of different complaints demanding that the kadi be the one to take care of things. The outcome of all this is that the Book of Complaints cannot really be understood without delving deeply into the role of the Kadis in it, and without recognizing that this is in fact a document that is above all a legal document. Rather than shunning legal issues as has been done by most scholars, I decided to make the extra effort and adopt this point of view, which in any case really means looking at politics of law rather than the law proper. In the first place, the Şikayet Defteri is a legal document because many of the complaints stem from the point of departure that a certain Shari’a law has been broken, violating the natural rights of certain groups of citizens. More important 6 See Kristen Stilt, “Price Setting and Hoarding in Mamluk Egypt: The Lessons of Legal Realism for Islamic Legal Studies”, in Peri Bearman et al., eds., The Law Applied, London: Tauris, 2008, pp. 57-77. 9 Introduction than this, however, the Şikayet is a legal document from an additional, methodo- logical perspective: the document provides a perspective on the Kadi, his court, and his position in the state, which are unlikely to be obtained from any other source. Particularly, such information cannot be had from the Kadi record (sicill) itself, as this source only looks at itself from the inside, solving day-to-day prob- lems. We do not know what the common people really thought of the kadi court and of the Kadi himself. We also do not know much about how the central gov- ernment perceived the role of the Kadi. Inadvertently, the Şikayet supplies plen- ty of insights on these issues. It was for these reasons that I decided to look at the complaints with a broader view than that confined to the narrative of abuses. In addition to shining a light on the kadi court, the Book of Complaints also supplies us with several insights on important issues in Ottoman-Islamic law, in- sights that neither the Divan secretaries nor the complainants intended, but that are nevertheless there. It would be a shame not to elucidate them. Ironically, the research of all these seemingly side issues does not create a distance from our main concern, which is how the Ottoman system dealt with the problem of ab- uses and corruption, but rather attacks the same problem from different angels to finally converge on the main point, which is the position of the Kadi in the Ottoman legal and political world. Former Studies of the Complaints Literature Suraiya Faroqhi is the main scholar who has grappled with a source similar to 7 the complaints literature to date. In her important article, Faroqhi points out that presenting the ruler with complaints about wrongs done to them was one of the most basic rights of citizens. This idea stood in opposition to a basic idea in Ottoman society: that society was naturally divided into two parts, each occu- pied by a different class—at the apex stood the askers, or members of the admin- istrative-military elite, and at the bottom stood the citizens, or reaya, who were actually devoid of any rights. The askers filled all the administrative posts and collected all the taxes that were to be collected, and in all probability, most of them thought that they were allowed to do anything. As far as they were con- cerned, the simple citizens had no rights at all, and a peasant not respecting their position and striving to climb the social ladder to become an asker was the worst type of social mayhem possible. The common people knew that this was actually far from being the case, however. The common people had a set of rights vouchsafed by the Shari’a, Islamic law that no one, not even the Sultan, had the right to violate without specific legal justification. A man (and a woman) 7 Suraiya Faroqhi, “Political Activity among Ottoman Taxpayers and the Problem of Sultanic Legitimation, (1570–1650)”, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 35 (1992), pp. 1-39. 10