Fırat Yaşa

In the early modern Ottoman Empire, social identity was closely tied to a hierarchical structure, with the sultanate occupying the highest tier and ordinary subjects positioned at the lower end. Empire's inhabitants were divided into groups based on the style and color of their clothes. By dressing in clothing from a different gender, socioeconomic class, or ethnoreligious group, one could disguise their true identity and social status. This article endeavors to unveil the motivations that compelled ordinary people to employ clothing as a means to conceal their involvement in criminal activities. Furthermore, it investigates the constraints associated with common identity-altering practices, particularly from the vantage points of religion, gender, and intersectionality. Drawing from an array of archival sources such as mühimme records, chronicles, manuscripts, and qadi court registers, the article scrutinizes the consequences of these practices.

This article, by focusing on Crimean slavery, aims to enhance our understanding of the social and economic nature of slavery that underwent a remarkable change between the conquest of Caffa (1475) and the Treaty of Karlowitz (1699), both of which marked a turning point in the history of slavery in Crimea. With the conquest of Caffa by the Ottoman Empire, the Crimean Peninsula turned into a ‘slaving hub’ in Pontic-Danube steppe land for nearly 200 years. In this period, slaves became a basic commodity employed by a wide range of people in Crimea from different backgrounds from urbanites to peasants and from those who were wealthy to those who were penniless. By contrast in the aftermath of Caffa, however, the Treaty of Karlowitz caused a rapid depletion of slaves and consequently a sharp decline in revenues that Crimean Tatars derived from slavery which was accompanied by high inflation in slave prices and therefore a huge labour shortage. Using a micro-global perspective, this article examines these two political occurrences, which are described as a ‘turning point’ and ‘beginning of the transformation’ in Crimean society and explores the nexus between the political contexts and the changes in economic and social life.

In the historiography of the early modern Ottoman history there are many studies on violence, crime, and criminals. These studies have generally dealt with various cases such as accusations of assault, homicide, prostitution, rape, as well as searches for criminals, delivery of suspects to court, and meting out of punishments. In this paper, I will focus on only one of the many homicide cases from records of the kadı court of Bursa for 1560. The possible innocence or guilt of suspects will be discussed as well as what they objected to as taking into consideration Gypsies in the process of investigation of their purported crimes.

Suicide, a new issue in Crimean social history research, has not been dealt with in terms of the status of free persons and slaves. It is difficult to find reliable and detailed primary source about slaves' private lives and their expectations apart from some cases which focus on slaves as merchandise to be bought and sold, and examples of their release and escape. However, the Crimean Shari'a court records, which recently became available, provide researchers with such information on slaves as well as some incidental information on many topics such as their living conditions, their hopes for release, and reasons for their suicide. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the impact of society on slave suicides by examining the Shari'a court records of the Crimean Khanate from 1650 to 1675.

Time is the only phenomenon that encompasses the past, present, and future, giving vitality to all living beings. Throughout history, people have tried to understand this phenomenon by determining its cycles and dividing them into segments. In pre-modern societies, the powerlessness of people against nature made them view time and space as closely connected (time-space continuum). In traditional Ottoman society, it was thus difficult to measure time. People made calculations using lunar movements. Court astrologers observed the moon and stars, advising sultans when to hold imperial accession ceremonies, celebrate princely births and weddings, or launch ships. In larger towns, at least the prayer times could be determined with assurance: However, villagers were mostly aware only of the day, month, season, and year. Hence, the understanding of time was quite different on the higher and lower rungs of the social ladder. In this paper, I attempt to answer the following questions: To what extent is it possible to measure time by studying the phases of the moon? What were the meanings that the Ottoman ruling class attached to the moon? For what reasons did ordinary people try to document in the qadi court at what time they saw the new moon, finding witnesses and having the court scribes record their testimonies? My sources are the qadi court records of Anatolian and Crimean cities, with additional information from travelogues and chronicles.

The article focuses on how the legal process works for slaves who are subject to property law. In this study, factors such as violence, accusations of violence, and the internalization and legitimization of violence in Crimean society between 1675 and 1700 have been examined through the study of the experience of slaves. It will be evaluated separately whether the raiding -one of the crucial sources of livelihoods for the Crimean Tatars- had an impact on violent events in the daily life of the society. In  particular, physical violence against the enslaved people will be discussed, and then the status of slaves exposed to violence in the Crimean qadi registers will be evaluated

In the historiography of the early modern history of the Crimean Khanate there are few microhistorical studies of individuals. This article presents such a case study based on a lawsuit brought before the Sharia court in the Khanate’s capital city of Bahçesaray. The lawsuit concerns a woman who had apparently converted to Islam of her own volition but later married a non-Muslim man and claimed to be Christian. Her motivations and the validity of her marriage are analyzed relying on the Crimean court records and the legal opinion of a contemporary Ottoman shaykh al-Islam.

This paper deals with the material of Italian archives related to the history of Crimea. It demonstrates that only a few scholars have dedicated their research to Crimean studies and published papers in Turkey or elsewhere in recent years. Turkish historians have tended mainly to focus on the Ottoman Empire. Although some publications about the Crimean Khanate have been produced in historical literature during the last twenty years, the sources they use are mostly limited to either Russian or Ottoman archives. Italian archives are usually disregarded despite being important sources for historians interested in the Crimea. My aim is to guide researchers who wish to study this subject using Italian archives. First, information about archive catalogues directly connected to relations between the Khanate and the Italian city-states, such as Bologna, Modena and Venice is given. Then some examples of the documents, including letters, dispacci, reports and missionary records, considered to be relevant to the Crimean Khanate, will be presented.

Neighbourhood and house typology have been the topic of many studies in Ottoman urban historiography. Although historians have produced plenty of studies, mostly articles, relating to neighborhood typology with the aim of providing a theoretical basis, few of them provide an adequate new approach. This study offers a new method of analyzing neighborhood structures and house typology, demonstrated on the basis of Bakhchisaray for the period 1650-1675. Using the Edraw-Max architectural software, we have been able to generate some visual estimates by processing data obtained from the Bakhchisaray qadi court registers (sicils). The first step of our method is to locate sicil-records of immovable property sales, most often for houses. Thereupon neighborhood images are created on the basis of information on buildings adjacent to buildings that are the subject of a sale. In this way, we are able to address questions such as who was the neighbour of whom, whether a house or other building was constructed in a regular or haphazard manner and what were the physical characteristics of the relevant structures. In addition, we can assess whether or not elite and ordinary people lived in the same neighbourhood.
Assessments have been made on two neighbourhoods of Bakhchisaray that frequently occur in the court registers—Cami-i Kebir and Koba Cami. Of particular interest is visualizing the Cami-i Kebir neighbourhood, since the palace where Crimean Khan lived was located in this neighbourhood. The other neighbourhood visualization is of interest because it had the largest bazaar of the city, as well as many shops, inns and a large caravanserai. While the former neighbourhood was mostly administrative, the latter was more commercial. The core of this study relates to the structural features of these neighbourhoods.
By analyzing archival data and on this basis reviewing recent studies, we indicate some differences and similarities between Ottoman and Crimean neighbourhoods. We also endeavor to help understand which factors determined houses prices—features such as the main material of these buildings, their sizes, additional parts (kitchen, bath, toilet, garden, courtyard, cellar, barn), whether single or two storey, water resources, proximity to smaller markets or larger bazaars. Thereby, it is possible to arrive at a house typology for Bakhchisaray.

Sosyal bir varlık olan insanı toplumsal ilişkilerin merkezine çeken güç, yakın ve uzak çevresiyle kurduğu iletişim ve alışverişe dayanmaktadır. Çalışmamız, bu gücün, kişinin sahip olduğu statü ve servetle nasıl bir ilişkisi olduğunu Kilercibaşı Mehmed Ağa örneği üzerinden anlamaya yöneliktir. Mehmed Ağa’nın hayatı, bağlantıları ve ilişkilerine dair mahkeme kayıtlarından edinilen veriler UCINET ve NETDRAW adlı programlara işlenerek görseller oluşturulmuştur. Böylelikle Mehmed Ağa’nın ölümünden sonra mahkemeye konu olan miras, borç, vasi, vekalet, alım-satım gibi davalar üzerinden hem ilişki ağları değerlendirilmiş hem de onun mesleki kimliği sorgulanmıştır.