4.2.1 Culture and Society

The Ottoman state originated in the fertile plains of Anatolia (also known as Asia Minor, roughly modern-day Turkey), which lies between the Aegean Sea to its west, the Black Sea to its north, the Mediterranean Sea to its south, and the Zagros Mountains to its east. The lands of Anatolia were attractive to the nomadic Turkic peoples who lived in the semifertile Eurasian steppe, a band of grassland that runs from east to west between western China and Hungary. As the Turkic peoples extended their control over northern Iran in the tenth and eleventh centuries, a group of Turkic warriors established their own state, ruled by the Seljuk dynasty.

Over the next century and a half, this Seljuk state grew to control much of central and southern Anatolia. The Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century transformed the political landscape in Anatolia, however, and a number of small Turkic principalities emerged in the region in the wake of these disruptive invasions. The Turkic principality in the northeastern corner of Anatolia rose to prominence around 1300, under the leadership of Osman I (Figure 4.12). Osman raised an army and began to take territory from the neighboring Byzantines.

Osman’s son Orhan continued the campaign upon his father’s death, expanding the territory under his control to encompass much of northwestern Anatolia. The state Orhan established became the Ottoman Empire, named for his father Osman. By the fourteenth century, the Ottoman Empire had expanded into southeastern Europe, effectively surrounding the Byzantine city of Constantinople. In 1453, Ottoman armies marched into the city and made it the capital of their expanding realm. Over the next century, successive rulers expanded the empire deeper into Europe, down through Syria and Palestine, and across North Africa.

At the height of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century, the Muslim-controlled state exerted dominance over a vast expanse of territory that included not only Muslims but also many dhimmis: Christians, Jewish people, and others. For example, the Ottoman-controlled areas of the Balkans in southeastern Europe were not only much more densely populated than Anatolia but were also overwhelmingly Christian. The Christian populations in southeastern Europe were some of the oldest in the Christian world and unlikely to convert to Islam in any large numbers. This reality led the Ottomans to implement a system under which dhimmis were able to govern their own affairs according to their own religious laws. This became known as the millet system, a term that comes from the Arabic word millah, meaning nation.

Millets were organized around religious identity: Orthodox Christians comprised one millet under the Orthodox patriarch in Istanbul, Armenian Christians were a second, and Jewish people a third. Other groups, such as the Syriac-speaking Christians and the Coptic Christians of Egypt, were later given their own millets. Millets had their own courts to settle their affairs; a dhimmi would appear in a sharia court only if dealing with a Muslim in a legal or business matter, or with the state itself. The millet system was intended to give non-Muslims a degree of autonomy and the ability to conduct their affairs according to their own customs and norms.

Among the most striking measures imposed on Christian communities in the Balkans and Caucasus was the devshirme (“gathering”), the enslavement of youth for state and military service. Conceived as a form of taxation on the Christian territories of Ottoman-controlled Europe, this system gathered boys between eight and ten years of age from specified villages, converted them to Islam, and gave them an education designed to create an elite military force in the service of the sultan. They were selected for both their physical attributes and their intelligence. The training was harsh and emphasized discipline, endurance, and loyalty to the sultan. Most became part of an elite corps of soldiers known as the Janissaries (from the Turkish words yeni cheri, meaning “new soldier”). Janissaries were expected to serve as bodyguards to the sultan, to whom they were fiercely loyal and who paid them directly.

A small number of young men who demonstrated exceptional intellect were sent to the palace school to receive language and other training in preparation for becoming the empire’s trusted administrative elite. The idea was to create a self-perpetuating system of administrators and military leaders who had been raised by the Ottoman state, and whose loyalty was not to their families, whom (in theory) they never saw again, but to the sultan and the system of which they were a part. In this way, political infighting within the government could be avoided because personal identity, ethnicity, and religion were suppressed and nepotism eliminated. The devshirme system lasted until the late 1600s.

The Ottomans brought knowledge of horses, military organization, and statecraft to their early empire. They followed their Seljuk predecessors in holding Persian culture and style in high esteem. While Arabic was considered the language of learning and religion, Persian was often the language of poetry and literature, even in the otherwise Arabic-speaking court of the Abbasid caliphs. The Ottoman Empire is often described as Persianate, meaning its culture, including visual art and architecture, was heavily influenced by that of Persia, but it was not Persian itself (Figure 4.13). Turkish was the language of administration and education; it was written in an adapted version of the Perso-Arabic script, and it incorporated numerous loan words from both Persian and Arabic. A parallel tradition of high poetry in Turkish called divan poetry also developed, which used the rhyme schemes and poetic meters of Persian poetry. In the seventeenth century, during the long conflict between the Ottomans and the Safavids in Iran, Turkish replaced Persian as a literary language, to emphasize the Turkish nature of the Ottoman state and distinguish its culture from that of its rival.

Most people in the Ottoman Empire could not read or write. As in most of the early modern world, primary education was considered the domain of religious institutions, not the state, although schools were often endowed by members of the sultan’s family. Basic schools called mekteps taught young Muslims to recite the Quran, and each millet was allowed to coordinate education for its own children. Schools tended to provide education in the preferred local language, since Turkish was required only of those who interacted directly with the state. This is one of the main reasons that Turkish did not eventually replace local languages like Arabic, Bulgarian, Greek, and Serbo-Croatian-Bosnian, although in some places people who were not ethnically Turkish did speak only Turkish. Local languages like Bosnian also incorporated many loan words from Ottoman Turkish. Multilingualism was valued for trade and commerce and let European traders communicate easily with local agents and business partners. It also allowed new immigrant groups to retain their languages. For example, after Jewish people were expelled from Spain in 1492, many resettled in the Ottoman Empire, particularly in Izmir, Salonica, and Istanbul, where they continued to speak Judeo-Spanish (often called Ladino).

Education past the basic primary level was generally accessible mainly to the wealthy. Some boys from average and poor families managed to attend local schools, but most people needed their children to help with agricultural work or assist in their father’s business. Boys from elite families went to private schools, and girls from similar families were educated at home by a private tutor. This was also the case among the millets. Millets provided schools for members of their community; a private school for Greek Christians opened in Istanbul in 1454, for example. The further education of exceptionally bright children from the lower classes might be sponsored by a wealthy local patron or landowner, often with the condition that the children go to work for the patron’s business after finishing school.

Following the construction of a lavish palace complex in Istanbul in the early 1460s, important changes took place in the royal court and the Ottoman style of government. Over the next century, successive Ottoman sultans ruled less frequently from constantly moving military encampments—as had been their practice—and took up longer periods of residence at the new palace, later given the name Topkapi. One result of this change to a more stable home was the reentry of women into the public and political life of the Ottoman court, which had once been more usual in the Seljuk state.

After Sultan Bayezid I’s wife had been captured and held hostage by the Mongol conqueror Timur in the 1400s, it became the practice for sultans not to marry but to simply take concubines, women who did not have the same legal status as an official wife and whose chief purpose was to bear children for the sultan. Suleiman I defied this tradition to marry Hurrem, a young woman from Ruthenia (now western Ukraine) who had been captured and enslaved by Crimean Tatars. While a captive, Hurrem was eventually taken to Istanbul and purchased by Suleiman’s mother as a gift for her son. As Hurrem Sultan, she became one of the most important and influential women in Ottoman history, setting a precedent for the powerful wives and chief concubines who followed her in what became known as the Sultanate of Women (Figure 4.14).

The wife or mother of the reigning sultan had unequaled power over the imperial family and frequently gained popularity by funding public monuments and buildings for use by the public, including soup kitchens, bath houses, fountains, and schools. Many of these were vaqfs, charitable endowments intended to help the poor or to serve religious purposes. Wealthy women (and men as well) often donated land or buildings along with funds to assist the public.

Outsiders who sought favor often wrote letters to or sent female relatives to plead their case with the sultan’s wife or mother. She in turn might transform her popular influence into political power by conspiring with palace administrators like the palace’s chief eunuch, becoming one of the most powerful people in the empire. The chief wife and the sultan’s mother were often rivals for political prominence; clashes could occur between them and also with the sultan’s chief (male) advisers at court. The Sultanate of Women lasted more than a century, ending in the late seventeenth century when a number of sultans died unexpectedly in a short period. The result was instability in the palace and a weakening of the interpersonal relationships between the imperial family and outside advisers upon whom the Sultanate of Women had relied.

Other than the sultan’s mother or wife, women in the Ottoman Empire played no role in politics. They were active in other areas of life, however. Unlike European women before the nineteenth century, married and unmarried Ottoman women could buy, inherit, and own property and bequeath their wealth to others upon their death. They could borrow and lend money and sue to protect their rights in court. Marriages were usually arranged by parents, but at least in theory, women had to consent to the match and could later obtain a divorce. Elite and middle-class women’s time was occupied in raising their children and supervising their households. If they lived in towns or cities, they socialized with other women, often meeting them at bathhouses. On their rare ventures out in public, they wore veils as a sign of their status.

Women from the working class might manufacture goods in their homes and peddle them in the streets. Although they could invest in businesses, they were largely excluded from the official guild system, which admitted only male artisans. There were a number of female-dominated trades, however, such as nursing and dancing, and women often made a living doing laundry. They also belonged to the various Sufi orders. Of course, the lives of both Muslim and non-Muslim women differed depending on where in the Ottoman Empire they lived. The lives of peasant women were different from those of city dwellers, and besides caring for the home and children, they might assist their male relatives with chores on the farm.

The synthesis of the Ottoman Empire’s diverse cultural base is perhaps most evident in its cuisine, which incorporated cooking styles and ingredients from places all over the world including Greece, Iran, the Balkans, the Arabian Peninsula, and central Asia. Following the discovery of the Americas, Ottoman cooks were among the first to incorporate ingredients from there, such as maize, peppers, tomatoes, and pumpkins, into their dishes. The Ottomans also likely introduced foods from elsewhere in Asia, like sesame, into the kitchens of the Middle East. Many dishes, such as rice pilafs from Egypt, Iran, and central Asia and Indian tandoori casseroles, were elegantly re-created for the imperial court in the kitchens of Topkapi Palace and then adopted in less extravagant versions by people throughout the empire. Food was an important symbol of power and generosity, and Topkapi could host up to four thousand people for a banquet. Each year, the sultan provided a lavish feast for the Janissary corps, the Ottoman Empire’s most elite troops. At one point in the eighteenth century, ten thousand troops were fed at once (Figure 4.15).

The birth of an heir, a royal wedding, and the funeral of the sultan (or his wife or mother) were all occasions upon which the palace was expected to hold public banquets. Soup kitchens fed thousands of people each day in major cities throughout the empire, as did the caravansaries. At the same time, public refusal to partake of the sultan’s food also conveyed a powerful message. When upset with imperial policies, the Janissaries symbolically turned their metal soup bowls upside down and beat them like drums. The sound reverberated around the capital, signaling their displeasure for all to hear.

Coffee drinking occupied a position in Ottoman life that was on par with—indeed, perhaps more important than—feasting, and the Ottomans first introduced it to Europe. The practice began in Arabia and spread to other places in the Islamic world. The first coffeehouses were established in the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, where they provided spaces for men to socialize, do business, and exchange news. Men of all social classes frequented coffeehouses, and men of little education could listen to literate men reading aloud from books, hear poets recite their newest works, and watch scholars engage in debates. Political discussions were common, and the Ottoman government often sent spies to listen for signs of dissent or potential rebellion. Talk of politics was especially frequent at coffeehouses favored by Janissaries. While many Muslim clerics had no objection to coffee because it was not forbidden by sharia, some clerics disapproved of it because of its stimulating qualities, and unsuccessful attempts to ban it were made in the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century, Sultan Murad IV, fearful that rebellion might be plotted in coffeehouses, banned them, and citizens who persisted in drinking coffee risked being sentenced to death.

Many Muslim clerics and scholars also objected to the smoking of tobacco, which had been introduced from the Americas in the sixteenth century and become popular in the Ottoman Empire by the seventeenth century. They saw tobacco as an intoxicant that affected people in the way wine or coffee did, and also as bad for health. Some denounced it as a foreign practice introduced by European Christians for the purpose of harming Muslims. Tobacco was also damned by its association with the coffeehouse, where much smoking took place, and when Murad IV closed the coffeehouses, he also outlawed tobacco smoking with the death penalty for violators.