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This book provides a novel approach to the history of medieval Anatolia by analysing political, religious and cultural developments in the region of Kastamonu during the reign of the Chobanid dynasty (c. 1211–1309).During the 13th century, the Chobanids consolidated a local dynasty in western Anatolia – a borderland between Islam and Christianity – becoming cultural actors patronising the production of religious, scientific and administrative works in the Persian language. These works, though surviving today in manuscript form, have received little attention in modern historiography. The book therefore attends to this gap in the research, incorporating a detailed study of texts by little-known authors from the time. The book explores the relationship between Islam and the Chobanid dynasty in the context of the wider process of Islamisation in medieval Anatolia, hypothesising that Turkmen dynasties played a fundamental role in this process of Islamisation and acculturation. The Chobanids of Kastamonu, then, offers an in-depth study of a Turkmen local dynasty that achieved political autonomy, financial independence and cultural patronage in medieval Anatolia vis-à-vis the main political powers of the time.Attentive to religious diversity, state formation and processes of transculturation in medieval Anatolia, the book is key reading for scholars of Middle Eastern history and Islamic studies.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license.

How did the premodern Ottomans understand public office corruption? To answer this question, Defining Corruption in the Ottoman Empire explores how Ottoman jurists, statesmen, political commentators, and others characterized this notion and what specific transgressions they associated with it before the nineteenth century. The book is based on extensive research and a wide variety of sources, including jurisprudential texts, imperial orders and communications, chronicles, and travel and diplomatic accounts. It identifies articulations of self-interested abuses of power by official and communal actors in these sources and illustrates how they resonate in some ways with modern perspectives. These premodern formulations, however, are shown to have collectively constituted a conceptual space that was contentious and temporally unstable, and no single overarching term was able to encapsulate all the specific misdeeds frequently linked to modern depictions of corruption. The book's genre-specific discursive survey is complemented by discussions that highlight, in the Ottoman context, the shifty boundaries that separated legitimate and illegitimate forms of revenue extraction; that examine the state's efforts to monitor and punish abuses by government officials; and that explore the context-dependent and often contested moralities of many acts, such as gift giving as bribery, office selling, and favoritism. It also considers the ways in which'corrupt'state actors might have rationalized their offenses. Defining Corruption is a conceptually driven work that is both comparative and interdisciplinary, engaging seriously with non-Ottoman historiographies, including broader Middle Eastern, European, and Chinese, and multiple disciplines besides history, in particular anthropology and economics, to provide a comprehensive analysis of premodern Ottoman perceptions of administrative abuse.

In the history of the Ottoman Empire, the seventeenth century has often been considered an anomaly, characterized by political dissent and social conflict. In this book, Aslıhan Gürbüzel shows how the early modern period was, in fact, crucial to the formation of new kinds of political agency that challenged, negotiated with, and ultimately reshaped the Ottoman social order. By uncovering the histories of these new political voices and documenting the emergence of a robust public sphere, Gürbüzel challenges two common assumptions: first, that the ideal of public political participation originated in the West; and second, that civic culture was introduced only with Westernization efforts in the nineteenth century. Contrary to these assumptions, which measure the Ottoman world against an idealized European prototype, Taming the Messiah offers a new method of studying public political life by focusing on the variety of religious visions and lifeworlds native to Ottoman society and the ways in which they were appropriated and repurposed in the pursuit of new forms of civic engagement.

This volume fluctuates between conceptualizations of movement; either movements that buildings in the medieval Mediterranean facilitated, or the movements of the users and audiences of architecture.From medieval Anatolia to Southern France and the Genoese colony of Pera across Constantinople, The Fluctuating Sea investigates how the relationship between movement and the experiences of a multiplicity of users with different social backgrounds can provide a new perspective on architectural history. The book acknowledges the shared characteristics of medieval Mediterranean architecture, but it also argues that for the majority of people inhabiting the fragmented microecologies of the Mediterranean, architecture was a highly localized phenomenon. It is the connectivity of such localized experiences that The Fluctuating Sea uncovers.The Fluctuating Sea is a valuable source for students and scholars of the medieval Mediterranean and architectural history.

This first comprehensive socio-political history of the Kizilbash/Alevi communities uses a recently surfaced corpus of sources generated within their milieu. It offers fresh answers to many questions concerning their origins and evolution from a revolutionary movement to an inward-looking religious order.

From a Christian, Greek- and Armenian-speaking land to a predominantly Muslim and Turkish speaking one, the Islamisation of medieval Anatolia would lay the groundwork for the emergence of the Ottoman Empire as a world power and ultimately the modern Republic of Turkey. Bringing together previously unpublished sources in Arabic, Persian and Turkish, Peacock offers a new understanding of the crucial but neglected period in Anatolian history, that of Mongol domination, between c. 1240 and 1380. This represents a decisive phase in the process of Islamisation, with the popularisation of Sufism and the development of new forms of literature to spread Islam. This book integrates the study of Anatolia with that of the broader Islamic world, shedding new light on this crucial turning point in the history of the Middle East.

For many years, Ottomanist historians have been accustomed to study the Ottoman Empire and/or its constituent regions as entities insulated from the outside world, except when it came to'campaigns and conquests'on the one hand, and'incorporation into the European-dominated world economy'on the other. However, now many scholars have come to accept that the Ottoman Empire was one of the - not very numerous - long-lived'world empires'that have emerged in history. This comparative social history compares the Ottoman to another of the great world empires, that of the Mughals in the Indian subcontinent, exploring source criticism, diversities in the linguistic and religious fields as political problems, and the fates of ordinary subjects including merchants, artisans, women and slaves.

Earthly Delights brings together a number of substantial and original scholarly studies by international scholars currently working on the history of food in the Ottoman Empire and East-Central Europe. It offers new empirical research, as well as surveys of the state of scholarship in this discipline, with special emphasis on influences, continuities and discontinuities in the culinary cultures of the Ottoman Porte, the Balkans and East-Central Europe between the 17th and 19th centuries. Some contributions address economic aspects of food provision, the development and trans-national circulation of individual dishes, and the role of merchants, diplomats and travellers in the transmission of culinary trends. Others examine the role of food in the construction of national and regional identities in contact zones where local traditions merged or clashed with imperial (Ottoman, Habsburg) and West-European influences.

Far from simply being a centre of military and economic activity, the Ottoman Empire represented a vivid and flourishing cultural realm. The artefacts and objects that remain from all corners of this vast empire illustrate the real and everyday concerns of its subjects and elites and, with this in mind, Suraiya Faroqhi, one of the most distinguished Ottomanists of her generation, has selected 40 of the most revealing, surprising and striking.Each image - reproduced in full colour - is deftly linked to the latest historiography, and the social, political and economic implications of her selections are never forgotten. In Faroqhi's hands, the objects become ways to learn more about trade, gender and socio-political status and open an enticing window onto the variety and colour of everyday life, from the Sultan's court, to the peasantry and slavery. Amongst its faiences and etchings and its sofras and carpets, A Cultural History of the Ottomans is essential reading for all those interested in the Ottoman Empire and its material culture. Faroqhi here provides the definitive insight into the luxuriant and varied artefacts of Ottoman world.

The newly awakened interest in the lives of craftspeople in Turkey is highlighted in this collection, which uses archival documents to follow Ottoman artisans from the late 15th century to the beginning of the 20th. The authors examine historical changes in the lives of artisans, focusing on the craft organizations (or guilds) that underwent substantial changes over the centuries. The guilds transformed and eventually dissolved as they were increasingly co-opted by modernization and state-building projects, and by the movement of manufacturing to the countryside. In consequence by the 20th century, many artisans had to confront the forces of capitalism and world trade without significant protection, just as the Ottoman Empire was itself in the process of dissolution.

With studies of China, India, West Africa, South America and Europe, this book provides a global perspective on food consumption in the modern world. Combing ethnographic, historical and comparative analyses, the volume celebrates the contributions of Jack Goody to the anthropology of food.

Byzantine rule over Anatolia ended in the eleventh century, leaving the population and its Turkish rulers to build social and economic institutions throughout the region. The emerging Anatolian society comprised a highly heterogeneous population of Christians and Muslims whose literati produced legal documents in Arabic, literary texts in Persian, and some of the earliest written works in the Turkish language. Yet the cultural landscape that emerged as a result has received very little attention—until now. Investigating daily life in Anatolia during the fourteenth century, Foodways and Daily Life in Medieval Anatolia draws on a creative array of sources, including hagiographies, archaeological evidence, Sufi poetry, and endowment deeds, to present an accessible portrait of a severely under-documented period. Grounded in the many ways food enters the human experience, Nicolas Trépanier's comprehensive study delves into the Anatolian preparation of meals and the social interactions that mealtime entails—from a villager's family supper to an elaborately arranged banquet—as well as the production activities of peasants and gardeners; the marketplace exchanges of food between commoners, merchants, and political rulers; and the religious landscape that unfolded around food-related beliefs and practices. Brimming with enlightening details on such diverse topics as agriculture, nomadism, pastoralism, medicine, hospitality, and festival rituals, Foodways and Daily Life in Medieval Anatolia presents a new understanding of communities that lived at a key juncture of world history.