| Week | Topics | Study Materials | Materials |
| 1 |
(begins 22 February): Introduction: the Byzantine background
Topics to be treated: Ottoman Istanbul not built on a tabula rasa; Byzantium, the sea and the Balkan world; the Latin conquest of 1204 and its aftermath: commercial crises of the later middle ages: the rise of Galata and the relative decline of Constantinople; the Italian connection; the Ottoman conquest.
|
|
Readings:
Halil Inalcik, The Ottoman Empire, The Classical Age 1300-1600 (London, 1973), pp. 140-150. (Turkish translation available).
Caroline Finkel, Osman's Dream, The History of the Ottoman Empire (London, 2005), pp. 48-80 (Turkish translation available).
John Haldon, Bizans Tarihi Atlası, tr. by Ali Özdamar (Istanbul, 2007), pp. 233-262
Judith Herrin, Byzantium. The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire (London, 2007), pp. 3-11.
|
| 2 |
(begins 1 March): The reign of Mehmed the Conqueror (1451-81): a watershed?
Topics to be treated: The reconstruction of Istanbul as the capital of an Islamic world empire; architectural syncretism in the Topkapı Place; the Sultan at the center of courtly ritual; conquests both real and envisaged (from Iran to Italy); modalities of immigration.
Recent studies by archeologists; the ‘transition debate’: a site where Ottomanists and Byzantinists can meet.
|
|
Readings:
Halil Inalcık, “The Ottoman Survey of İstanbul, 1455,” 1453, İstanbul Kültür ve Sanat Dergisi, 3 (2008): 19-27.
Çiğdem Kafesçioğlu, “Osmanlı Şehirciliğinde Dönüşüm ve Devamlılık: Onbeşinci Yüzyıl İstanbul’unda Külliye ve Mahalleler,” in 550. yılında Fetih ve İstanbul (Ankara, 2007), pp. 177-188.
Gülru Necipoğlu, Architecture, Ceremonial and Power, The Topkapı Palace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Cambridge MA, 1991), pp. 3-30. (Turkish translation available).
Stéphane Yérasimos, “Dwellings in Sixteenth-Century Istanbul,” in The Illuminated Table, the Prosperous House, Food and Shelter in Ottoman Material Culture, ed. by Suraiya Faroqhi and Christoph Neumann (Istanbul and Würzburg/Germany: Orient-Institut and Ergon Verlag, 2003), pp. 275-300 (Turkish translation available).
|
| 3 |
(begins 8 March) The Age of Süleyman
Topics to be treated: The sultan as a symbol of victory and a source of charity: public buildings; securing materials and labor power; the ‘royal family’ as patrons: Hürrem, Mihrimah and Rüstem Paşa; Süleyman and Sinan; the myth of Süleyman in later ages; a post scriptum:
What about ordinary people?
|
Readings:
Gülru Necipoğlu-Kafadar, "The Süleymaniye Complex in Istanbul: an Interpretation," Muqarnas, III (1986): 92-117.
Gülru Necipoğlu, The Age of Sinan, Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire (London, 2005), pp. 27-46. (Turkish version available)
Stéphane Yérasimos, “Feeding the Hungry, Clothing the Naked: Food and Clothing Endowments in Sixteenth-Century Istanbul,” in Feeding People, Feeding Power, Imarets in the Ottoman Empire, ed. by Amy Singer, Christoph Neumann and Nina Ergin (Istanbul, 2007), pp. 241-249.
|
Kaya Şahin, “Imperialism, Bureaucratic Consciousness and the Historian’s Craft: A Reading of Celalzade Mustafa’s Tabakatu’l-memalik,” in Editing the Past, Fashioning the Future: Historiography of the Ottoman Empire, edited by H. Erdem Çıpa and Emine Fetvacı, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013), pp. 39-57 (Turkish version available).
|
| 4 |
(begins 15 March) Istanbul as the capital of a mature world empire (1566-1617)
Topics to be treated: Istanbul’s role in international trade: trading with East and West; local and foreign merchants in Istanbul and Galata; building projects after Süleyman; the Yeni Valide and Sultan Ahmed complexes as contested undertakings; the festival of 1582: an exercise in imperial self-presentation; how Istanbul was pictured by Ottoman and foreign artists.
|
|
Readings:
Halil Inalcik, “The Hub of the City: The Bedestan of Istanbul,” International Journal of Turkish Studies (Madison, Wisc.), I, 1 (1979-80), 1-17.
Derin Terzioğlu, "The Imperial Circumcision Festival of 1582: An Interpretation", Muqarnas, 12 (1995), 84-100.
[Ca'fer Efendi], Risale-i mi'mariyye, an early-seventeenth-century Ottoman treatise on architecture, edited and translated by Howard Crane (Leiden, 1987), pp. 1-15.
Suraiya Faroqhi, “Ottoman Attitudes towards Merchants from Latin Christendom before 1600,” Turcica, 35 (2002), 69-104.
Suraiya Faroqhi, “‘Made in Istanbul, Delhi or Agra’: Serving Imperial and Princely Courts in the Ottoman and Mughal Worlds” in Turkish History and Culture in India – Identity, Art and Transregional Connections, edited by Andrew Peacock and Richard McClary (Leiden: Brill, 2020), pp. 299-337.
|
| 5 |
(begins 22 March) Evliya Çelebi and his city I
Topics to be treated: Evliya Çelebi and life on the streets of Istanbul; the institutional framework within which he traveled and observed; Istanbul artisans between the state and the market: managing one’s neighbors -- and the government as well.
|
|
Readings:
Marinos Sariyannis, “’Neglected Trades’: Glimpses into the 17th Century Istanbul Underworld,” Turcica 38 (2006), 155-179.
Eunjeong Yi, Guild Dynamics in Seventeenth-century Istanbul, Fluidity and Leverage (Leiden, 2004), pp. 19-40.
Robert Dankoff, An Ottoman Mentality, The World of Evliya Çelebi (Leiden, 2004), pp. 153-184.
Cemal Kafadar, "Self and others: The diary of a dervish in seventeenth-century Istanbul and first-person narratives in Ottoman literature", Studia Islamica, LXIX (1989), 121-150
Halil Inalcik, “Memoirs and Travel Notes of a Boon Companion,” in Evliyâ Çelebi: Studies and Essays Commemorating the 400th Anniversary of his Birth, edited by Nuran Tezcan, Semih Tezcan, Robert Dankoff (Istanbul: Ministry of Culture and Tourism, 2012), pp. 226-31 (Turkish version available).
|
| 6 |
(begins 29 March) Evliya Çelebi and his city II
Islamization through architectural projects and the sultan’s charity; the Kadızadeliler; on the fringes of urban life: gardens and vineyards; the pleasures of life, in spite of everything: the growing importance of the coffeehouse as a center of male sociability.
|
|
Readings:
Marc David Baer, Honored by the Glory of Islam. Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe (Oxford, 2007), pp. 81-104.
Madeline Zilfi, "Discordant Revivalism in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul", The Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 45, 4 (1986), 251-269.
Ekrem Işın, “Coffeehouses as Places of Conversation” in The Illuminated Table, the Prosperous House. Food and shelter in Ottoman material culture, edited by Suraiya Faroqhi and Christoph Neumann, (Istanbul: Orient-Institut, 2003): 199-208. (Turkish version available)
Selma Akyazıcı Özkocak, “Coffeehouses. Rethinking the Public and the Private in Early Modern Istanbul,” Journal of Urban History, 33/6 (2007), 965-986.
Ali Çaksu, “Janissary Coffeehouses in Late Eighteenth-century Istanbul”, in Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee, edited by Dana Sajdi (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), pp. 117-132.
|
| 7 |
(begins 5 April) Court and city in the early 18th century
Topics to be treated: After half a century of abandonment, Istanbul once more dominated by the sultan’s court; an expanding city incorporating the Bosporus; palaces and villas of the elite; artistic renewal through the study of Iranian and (to a lesser extent) French and Italian models; the urban well-to-do establishing a multitude of small foundations.
|
|
Readings:
Tülay Artan, “Noble Women who Changed the Face of the Bosphorus and... The Palaces of the Sultanas,” Istanbul, Biannual, 1992 selections (1993), 87-97.
Tülay Artan, “Istanbul in the 18th Century: Days of Reconciliation and Consolidation,” in From Byzantion to Istanbul, 8000 Years of a Capital, edited by Nazan Ölçer and Koray Durak (Istanbul: Sakip Sabancı Museum, 2010), pp. 300-314.
Shirine Hamadeh, The City’s Pleasures. Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (Seattle, London, 2008), pp. 17-47.
Selim Karahasanoğlu, Kadı ve Günlüğü (Istanbul: İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2013) (Cursory reading)
|
| 8 |
(begins 12 April) The difficult lives of 18th century artisans
Topics to be treated: Artisan guilds in the process of organization and stabilization; the progressive integration of artisans and soldiers: janissaries turning into a militia; the contradiction inherent in the emerging system of slots/gediks: a means of limiting the action radius of artisans and (simultaneously) a means by which individual artisans could circumvent their guilds.
|
|
Readings
Engin Akarlı, “Gedik: A Bundle of Rights and Obligations for Istanbul Artisans and Traders, 1750-1840,” in Law, Anthropology and the Constitution of the Social, Making Persons and Things, ed. by Alain Pottage and Martha Mundy (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 166-200.
Robert Olson, “The Esnaf and the Patrona Halil Rebellion of 1730: A Realignment in Ottoman Politics?” in idem, Imperial Meanderings and Republican By-ways, Essays on Eighteenth Century Ottoman and Twentieth Century History of Turkey (Istanbul: The Isis Press, 1996), pp. 1-12.
Nina Ergin, “Mapping Istanbul Hamams of 1752 and their Employees,” in Bread from the Lion’s Mouth, Artisans Struggling for a Livelihood in Ottoman Cities, edited by Suraiya Faroqhi (New York: Berghahn, 2015), pp. 108-135.
|
| 9 |
(begins 19 April) A city in crisis: from 1768 to 1838
Topics to be treated: Food supplies in danger; intensified regulation as an answer to scarcity and social tensions; counting the city’s denizens as a means of controlling them; a few exceptional cases of ‘resistance from below’; the janissaries as a focus of urban organization; the crises of 1807 and 1826.
|
Readings (select at least 5 items):
Salih Aynural, İstanbul Değirmenleri ve Fırınları, Zahire Ticareti (Istanbul, 2001), pp. 5-16.
Cengiz Kırlı, “A Profile of the Labor Force in Early Nineteenth-Century Istanbul,” International Labor and Working Class History, 60 (2001), 125-40.
Fariba Zarinebaf-Shahr, “The Role of Women in the Urban Economy of Istanbul, 1700-1850,” International Labor and Working Class History, 60 (2001), 141-52.
Onur Yıldırım, “Ottoman Guilds as a Setting for Ethno-Religious Conflict: The Case of the Silk-thread Spinners’ Guild in Istanbul”, International Review of Social History 47/3 (Dec. (2002), 407-19.
|
Betül Başaran, Selim III, Social Control and Policing in Istanbul at the End of the Eighteenth Century: Between Crisis and Order (Leiden: Brill, 2014) (chapter 1).
Minna Rozen, “A Pound of Flesh: The Meat Trade and Social Struggle in Jewish Istanbul, 1700-1923,” in Crafts and Craftsmen of the Middle East, Fashioning the Individual in the Muslim Mediterranean, ed. by Suraiya Faroqhi and Randi Deguilhem (London, 2005), pp. 195-234.
Suraiya Faroqhi, “Fear, hatred, suspicion, and attempts to protect the legitimacy of the sultan: Istanbul fires as reflected in Şânî-zâde’s chronicle” in History from Below: A Tribute in Memory of Donald Quataert, edited by Selim Karahasanoğlu and D. Cenk Demir (Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi University Press, 2016), pp. 515-528.
|
| 10 |
(begins 26 April) Istanbul’s longest century: Tanzimat restructuring
Topics to be treated: The Istanbul elite – like other European elites – discovering the Paris model; fire-fighting, carts and carriages: how practical concerns as well as the desire to be ‘up-to-date’ impacted mid-19th century urbanism; the Altıncı Daire-i Belediye and its (limited) sources of finance; the capital’s water supplies: availability and profitability.
|
|
Readings:
Zeynep Çelik, The Remaking of Istanbul, Portrait of an Ottoman City in the Nineteenth Century (Seattle, London, 1986) (cursory reading; Turkish translation available).
Christoph K. Neumann, “Modernitelerin Çatışması: Altıncı Daire-i Belediye, 1857-1912,” in:
İstanbul: İmparatorluk Başkentinden Megakente, ed. Yavuz Köse. (Istanbul: Kitap Yayınevi 2011), pp. 426-55.
|
| 11 |
(begins 3 May) Modernizing projects and continuities of the Hamidian period
Topics to be treated: Tanzimat priorities continued: re-planning the city after major fires; schools, barracks and planned town quarters; a few ‘modern-style’ educated women; the persistence of ‘traditional mahalles’; changing Istanbul family life and a changing material culture in the home; the beginnings of a ‘consumer culture’ among the wealthier inhabitants of Istanbul.
|
|
Readings:
Alan Duben and Cem Behar, Istanbul Households, Marriage, family and fertility 1880-1940 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 23-47. (Turkish translation available)
Cem Behar, A Neighborhood in Ottoman Istanbul, Fruit Vendors and Civil Servants in the Kasap İlyas Mahalle (Albany NY, 2003), pp. 131-170.
İlber Ortaylı, Tanzimatdan Cumhuriyete Yerel Yönetim Geleneği (Istanbul, 1985), pp. 129-142.
Yavuz Köse, Dersaadet’te Tüketim (1855-1923) (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2016), pp. 36-119.
Eldem, Edhem, “Of Bricks and Tiles: The History of a Local Industry in the Area of Mürefte (Thrace),”
in Living the Good Life: Consumption in the Qing and Ottoman Empires of the Eighteenth Century, edited by Elif Akçetin and Suraiya Faroqhi (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 443-473.
|
| 12 |
(begins 17 May) Cultural life during the late 19th and early 20th centuries
Topics to be treated: ‘Modernity’ in communications and the arts: journalism, the theater, photography as a means of documentation and as a fine art; publishers and the printed book; imperial legitimization by ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ means: charity, fountains and clock towers.
|
|
Readings:
Nadir Özbek, “Imperial Gifts and Sultanic Legitimation during the Late Ottoman Empire, 1876-1909,“ in Poverty and Charity in Middle Eastern Contexts, edited by Michael Bonner, Mine Ener and Amy Singer (Albany NY, 2003), pp. 203-222.
Gilbert Beaugé and Engin Çizgen, Images d'empire, Aux origines de la photographie en Turquie, Türkiye'de fotoğrafın öncüleri (Istanbul, n.y. probably 1993) (cursory reading of the Turkish/French text).
Nalan Turna, “The Ottoman Stage: Politicization and Commercialization of Theatres, 1876-1922,” in Celebration, Entertainment and Theatre in the Ottoman World, edited by Suraiya Faroqhi and Arzu Öztürkmen (Calcutta, London, New York: Seagull Books, 2014), pp. 319-42.
|
| 13 |
(begins 24 May) Istanbul in war (1912-1923)
Topics to be treated: Refugees from the Balkans and the impoverishment of the ‘middling sort’; trying to make a living: the plight of soldiers’ wives; inter-communal tensions; Istanbul (temporarily) demoted: the capital moved to Ankara; Istanbul literati and ‘nostalgia for the Empire’.
|
|
Readings:
Nur Bilge Criss, Istanbul under Allied Occupation, 1918-1923 (Leiden, 1999), pp. 1-19.
Yavuz Selim Karakışla, Women, War and Work in the Ottoman Empire Society for the Employment of Ottoman Muslim Women 1916-1923 (Istanbul, 2005), pp. 81-100.
Zafer Toprak, İttihad-Terakki ve Cihan Harbi, Savaş Ekonomisi ve Türkiye’de Devletçilik 1914-1918 (İstanbul: Homer, 2003), pp. 99-126.
Elif Mahir Metinsoy, Ottoman Women during World War I: Everyday Experiences, Politics and Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) (cursory reading).
Yiğit Akın, “War, Women, and the State: The Politics of Sacrifice in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War”, Journal of Women’s History 26 (3) (2014), 12-35.
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/553959/pdf
|
| 14 |
(begins 31 June) General recapitulation and student presentations
Review your readings
|
|
|