Synopses & Reviews
It has often been assumed that the subjects of the Ottoman sultans were unable to travel beyond their localities - since peasants needed the permission of their local administrators before they could legitimately leave their villages. According to this view, only soldiers and members of the governing elite would have been free to travel. However Suraiya Faroqhi's extensive archival research shows that this was not the case. Pious men from all walks of life went on pilgrimage to Mecca, slaves fled from their masters and craftspeople traveled in search of work. Faroqhi shows that even those craftsmen who did not travel extensively had some level of mobility and that the Ottoman sultans and viziers, who spent so much effort in attempting to control the movements of their subjects, could do so only within often very narrow limits. Challenging existing historiography and providing an important new perspective, this book will be essential reading for students and scholars of Ottoman history.
Review
To come
About the Author
Suraiya Faroqhi is Professor of History at Istanbul Bilgi University and Emerita Professor of Ottoman Studies at the Ludwig Maximilians Universität in Munich, Germany. She is a renowned authority on Ottoman history and her previous publications include: The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It; Artisans of Empire: Crafts and Craftspeople Under the Ottomans and Subjects of the Sultan: Culture and Daily Life in the Ottoman Empire (all I.B.Tauris).
Table of Contents
Introduction
Elite Travellers
1. What an Ottoman ambassador might find out in Vienna
2. Material culture in Latinate Europe: as reported by eighteenth-century Ottoman ambassadors
3. 'Seeking Refuge in the Sultan's Shadow': Asylum seekers on Ottoman territory
4. Evliya Çelebi's tales of Cairo's guildsmen
5. Ottoman travellers in Venice
ordinary people and their products on the move
6. Keepsakes and trade goods from seventeenth-century Mecca
7. Entering and leaving the Empire's industrious core: Bursa and its textiles
8. 'Just passing through': Travellers and sojourners in mid-sixteenth-century Üsküdar
9. Mostly fugitives: the trials and tribulations of slaves in sixteenth-century Üsküdar
10. Th e adventures of Tunisian fez-sellers in eighteenth-century Istanbul
11. Controlling borders and workmen, all in one fell swoop: From Istanbul to Hotin in 1716
staying put
12. Selling sweetmeats: Istanbul in the mid-eighteenth century
13. Where to make and sell cheap textiles in eighteenth-century Istanbul: A buyer's guide
14. In quest of their daily bread: Istanbul artisans under Selim III (r. 1789-1807)
Conclusion Movement into the Ottoman capital: some desiderata travel and artisans in the ottoman empire
Notes
Dramatis personae
Glossary
List of Maps
Bibliography
Index