Ottoman Empire Archives - Not Even Past

Review of Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347-1600 (2017) by Nükhet Varlik

Banner image for Review of Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347-1600 (2017) by Nükhet Varlık

The historiography of the Black Death has tended to cast the Ottoman Empire as the “sick man of Europe.” Nükhet Varlık does admirable work in breaking down this Eurocentric view by tracing the Black Death’s history during the rise of the Ottoman Empire, a history she considers as a long process of recurrent outbreaks rather than an isolated event. Varlık frames her work within the historiography of diseases, creatively intertwining environmental history, the history of science, and imperial political history. Moreover, she models how historians can work with up-to-date scientific research, including recent studies in epidemiology, genomics, ecology, and bioarchaeology.

Varlık argues for a correlation between the plague’s epidemiological patterns and the empire’s consolidation, which is visible through the interaction among ecological zones as human and nonhuman mobility increased. These mobile nonhuman agents included fleas, lice, rodents, and the pathogenic bacteria Yersinia pestis, and they determined the plague’s expansion and waves of recurrence. While ‘global’ histories of disease tend to flatten social differences and take connections for granted, Varlık builds upon the idea of a ‘network’—a dynamic set of relationships that assemble the asymmetrical flow of ideas, humans, goods, animals, as well as pathogens.

Plague and empire focuses on what conventionally has been called the “second plague pandemic” (the Black Death) —the first being the Justinian plague and the third the East Asian plague. Nevertheless, the second pandemic was not a single discreet event that took place in 1348. It consisted of several waves of epidemics over 250 years. It is no coincidence, Varlık argues, that this period coincided with the transformation of the Ottoman semi-nomadic regime into an extensive empire in the eastern Mediterranean. Therefore, she situates the Ottoman epidemic cycles within the context of imperial expansion and the conquest of cities like Edirne and Istanbul as trade connections with Europe and Asia increased. Thus, she overcomes a variety of historiographic fallacies, including the “westward diffusion of the plague,” Turkish indifference to the Black Death (fatalism), and “epidemic boundaries” between the Christian and Muslim Mediterranean worlds.

*The Black Death: Map of the World with vignettes, watercolor by Monro S. Orr. Source: Wellcome Library*

Varlık synthesizes historical primary sources with current scientific research on the etiology of the plague, including new understandings about the interaction among hosts (such as rodents, humans, and other mammals), vectors (fleas and lice), and the pathogen (Yersinia Pestis). She also explains how the disease remained “inactive” in wild foci of animals––that is, groups of infected animals that became plague reservoirs. Moreover, she suggests that climate played a role in the migration of some of these hosting species.

The book employs a wide range of documents such as medical treatises, travel accounts, and official reports, not only from Turkish sources but also from Arabic, Byzantine, Italian, and Iberian sources. Although there is an apparent absence of the plague in early Ottoman sources, she explains that it does not mean a real absence of the disease. Instead, she argues that the plague gradually became significant enough to register in Ottoman culture as the empire urbanized and its officials moved between territories. Thus, environmental factors became entangled with perceptions and knowledge about the plague and governmental measures for controlling outbreaks.

Despite its broad regional scope, Plague and Empire centers on Istanbul. Methodologically, this choice makes sense, particularly after its conquest by the Ottomans in 1453, because this new capital became the primary node where imperial and epidemic networks converged. Varlık’s focus on connections helps us understand how Istanbul was not isolated, but the core of governmental processes and the catalyst of epidemic waves in the Western Mediterranean.

Varlık’s model of intertwining imperial history and the flow of disease could productively be applied and tested in other contexts, including different epidemics. For instance, thinking about smallpox epidemics in the Conquest of America––simultaneous in time with this long Black Death––could be a fruitful comparison. Another case to think about is our current context of dealing with COVID-19. Considering its zoonotic origins, environmental drivers, post-modern circulation networks, and the state’s crucial role and supranational institutions to control its spread, we have much to learn from Varlık’s approach.

Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World constitutes a bold and reliable approach to the history of diseases in imperial and globally-connected perspectives. It incorporates current scientific research in ways that make it relevant across disciplines. Varlık carefully links social, political, and environmental analysis. As a result, the book offers not only a crucial addition to the new historiography of diseases but also makes a contribution that is relevant to our present pandemic experience.

Check out Dr. Varlik’s talk at the IHS Climate in Context conference.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Review of The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World (2017), by Cyrus Schayegh

Cyrus Schayegh addresses the spatial formation of the modern world in The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World. He uses the history of Bilad al-Sham from 1830 to 1945 as his case study. Bilad al-Sham, also known as the Levant or Greater Syria, is roughly bordered by the Mediterranean to the west, Anatolia to the north, the Euphrates to the east, and the Arabian Peninsula to the south. It is comprised of the modern states of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine. Schayegh describes Bilad al-Sham as a “meso-region,” a relatively uniform area that is larger than a single nation but smaller than a continent. Although the meso-region of Bilad al-Sham is not homogenous, with ill-defined and fluctuating borders, it is comprised of interlinked cities and rural areas with a shared history.

Schayegh sees the meso-region of Bilad al-Sham as an ideal candidate for his central concept, “transpatialization,” which he defines as the “socio-spatial intertwinements” of cities, nation-states, regions, and global networks. He prescribes transpatialization as a remedy to histories that overemphasize a single scale of history, whether global, regional, national, or municipal. Transpatialization is a way to consider multiple scales of history simultaneously, providing a more complete picture of modern developments. Schayegh implements it to study the individuals, cities, and nation-states of Bilad al-Sham and connect the entire region to global trends. He argues that applying this concept to meso-regions, like Bilad al-Sham, is the most effective means of understanding developments in modern history.

Map of Bilad al-Sham (via Wikimedia Commons)

Applying transpatialization to the making of the modern Bilad al-Sham, Schayegh argues that there were two stages in its modern history. During the first stage, from the 1830s to 1910s, there were three primary socio-spatial intertwinements: Bilad al-Sham and the Eurocentric world economy, Shami cities and their inter-urban ties, and interregional transformation. Schayegh’s first stage is conceptually cogent, effectively explaining the economic and cultural development of the region. Although Schayegh notes the role of individuals living in Bilad al-Sham, cities are the primary characters and Beirut is arguably the most important character. Schyageh’s application of transpatialization is most apparent with Beirut. The city came to prominence during the nineteenth century for its role as a port city, connecting the interior cities of Damascus and Aleppo to the Eurocentric maritime economy. Likewise, the city benefited from its interregional relationship with Anatolia and the Ottoman capital of Istanbul, leading to its assignment as the capital of its own providence in 1888. Schayegh also notes individuals living in Beirut during this period such as Butrus al-Bustani (1819-1883) who was instrumental in the Arab Nahda, a cultural and linguistic renewal founded in the publication houses of Beirut. Bustani, like the city he inhabited, developed his ideas at the confluence of different scales of history. Schayegh points to the city of Beirut, its residents, its inter-urban ties, and its economic development to describe the first stage of modern Shami history as one of rapid transformation.

The second stage of modern Shami history is the primary focus of the book, where Schayegh applies transpatialization to the transitional period of the Ottoman Empire during the 1920s and the development of nation-states during the 1930s and 1940s. He argues for the development of a “national umbrella” out of what was previously described as a “patchwork region.” Instead of attributing the rise of nation-states to globalization, the decisions of powerful individuals, or any other singular narrative, Schayegh ties together all relevant factors—the Great Depression, Jewish migration, European geopolitical strategy, Arab nationalism, and more. During the second stage, Schayegh records the accentuated build-up of nation-states in the region, which were influenced by innumerable factors. One particularly influential factor was the development of economic competition between the port cities of Haifa and Beirut. Schayegh notes the individuals, communities, cities, and nations that influenced this competition. He argues that this contest, primarily between Syrian and Yishuv communities, played a significant role in the development of competing national identities in the region. Schayegh’s concept of transpatialization convincingly entwines global, regional, national, and municipal histories to provide a nuanced account of nation-state development in Bilad al-Sham.

View of Beirut, 1934 (via Library of Congress)

Schayegh’s concept of transpatialization weaves together Bilad al-Sham like a tapestry. The intertwinement of local, urban, regional, and global fields presents views of the modern Middle East that are otherwise unapparent. For example, transpatialization brings new meaning to consequential topics like the development of Arab nationalism. It captures the fluctuating values of qawmiyya (pan-Arab nationalism) and Wataniyya (individual state nationalism) as individuals, cities, nation-states, and regions appropriated them. This leads to novel formulations like Syrian president Shukri al-Quwatli’s: “I am a son of Damascus including all its neighborhoods, its different quarters and houses, I am a son of Syria, and I am a son of the Arabs.”

Schayegh uses transpatialization to effectively trace some historical developments like Arab nationalism, but his attempt to offer a definitive history of Bilad al-Sham’s spatial formation is incomplete. For instance, he misses opportunities to address global networks. He mentions diasporic communities and individuals, like the Homsis in Sao Paolo and Khalil Sakakini in New York, yet fails to significantly develop these global connections into his argument. Most of his analysis remains within the bounds of Bilad al-Sham despite his global ambitions.

Schayegh pulls together a magisterial account of the modern formation of Bilad al-Sham and sets a precedent for the use of transpatialization in global history. While the argument of the book is often specific to Bilad al-Sham, it is a useful work for a broad audience seeking conceptual tools to make sense of the modern world. The concept of transpatialization is viable and should be employed in future studies of Bilad al-Sham, the modern Middle East, and the modern world.

Carter Barnett studies the history of medical institutions in the 19^th/20^th-century Middle East. He received his BA in History and Arabic from Baylor University and an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. His MA thesis examined the ambivalent interaction between missionary medicine and Palestinian society, politics and law. In 2022, he joined Johns Hopkins History of Medicine doctoral program. His present research takes interest in the history of (post)colonial medical institutions in the Middle East, focusing on the intersections between religion, international health organizations and changing medical practices.

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Yugoslavia in the Shadow of War: Veterans and the Limits of State Building, 1903-1945 by John Paul Newman (2015)

By Charalampos Minasidis

The end of the First World War in Europe signified the dissolution of the old empires, the creation of new states, and the triumph of liberal democracy and the parliamentary system. However, this triumph lasted only around a decade. By the end of 1920s and early 1930s, authoritarianism and dictatorship had replaced both liberalism and parliamentarism.

John Paul Newman uses the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes as a case study to discuss the failed liberal experiments in the successor states of interwar Eastern Europe. The Kingdom was found in 1918 under King Peter, and after 1921 under his son Alexander, of the Serbian Karadjordjević dynasty. Although the new state was a result of the panslavist dream of unifying all the South Slavs of the Western Balkans, its name proved to be a very unfortunate idea, as it did not signal the replacement of local nationalisms with a new national identity.

Newman constructs his study around the various veteran associations, their mobilizations and their remembrance and commemorations. Through documents, newspapers, and memoirs, Newman analyzes the political use of remembrance and Serbian, Croatian, and Slovene veterans’ remobilization after the war. For Newman, the veterans’ reluctance to leave the war experience behind led to the defeat of liberalism by authoritarianism. Belgrade’s official policy of “liberation and unification” viewed the period between 1912 and 1918 as a whole and praised the Serbian veterans and their allies that fought during the First Balkan War (1912-1913) against the Ottoman Empire, the Second Balkan War (1913) against their former ally, Bulgaria, and the First World War (1914-1918) against Austria-Hungary, Germany and Bulgaria. The Balkan Wars led Serbia to annex parts of the ex-Ottoman territories of Kosovo and Macedonia, while the Great War allowed Serbia to be unified with Montenegro and the ex-Austro-Hungarian territories of Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia, Dalmatia, Slovenia and Vojvodina. According to the official policy, it was the acts of Serbia and its army alone that liberated the South Slavs of the Western Balkans. The “liberation and unification” policy excluded the rest of the South Slavs from its remembrance and commemorations. They were viewed as just passively waiting for their Serbian liberators.

Alexander I of Yugoslavia and Maria of Yugoslavia in 1933 (via Wikimedia)

This Serbian “culture of victory” alienated all those South Slavs who as subjects of Austria-Hungary had fought under its army and had instead cultivated a “culture of defeat.” Such contradictions were even stronger for those who participated in the Austro-Hungarian campaigns against Serbia or those Slovenes, who fought against Italy, an Entente and Serbian ally, and its expansive designs into the Slovenian territories of Austria-Hungary. Both opposing cultures negated and undermined the idea behind a unified South Slav state in the Western Balkans.

Newman analyzes successfully how these conflicting cultures undermined the new state and nation building. The officers who served in the Austro-Hungarian Army were reluctant to join the new armed forces, where the official policy excluded them from the system of promotions. On the other hand, Serbian officers neither wanted their defeated ex-enemies to join them nor the official remembrance of the war to be abandoned, as it offered them pride and promotions. Similarly, new Kingdom’s welfare programs and land reform did not satisfy the veterans and ex-members of the Austro-Hungarian Army faced constant discrimination.

The Serbian Army enters Zagreb, 1918 (via Wikipedia)

As Newman demonstrates, the inability to improve their economic well-being quickly disillusioned Serbian, and other, veterans with the new state as well. Even more, Serbian veterans blamed parliamentarianism for the government’s failure to provide for them and viewed it as slow, corrupted, and ready to betray their legacy. Many Serbian and Croatian veterans also started gravitating towards fascism and right-wing revisionism. Nevertheless, cases of cooperation between ex-enemies were not rare. People like Captain Lujo Lovrić, a panslavist Croat volunteer in the Serbian army, who became blind during the war, were used by the regime to propagandize South Slav union and its social policies to the disabled veterans, but those policies were not enough.

Newman overall succeeds in explaining a failed nation-building project through a group of people who were mobilized and politicized during the Great War and could not accept the new state of affairs. Newman’s thorough analysis clarifies the catastrophic impact of divisive cultural and social policies in a divided society. As the crisis deepened King Alexander presented to the Serbian veterans the institution of monarchy as the Kingdom’s unifying symbol. In this way he secured their support, which proved crucial for the establishment of his dictatorship in 1929 and constituted his effort towards a new nation and state building project, Yugoslavia.

Also by Charalampos Minasidis on Not Even Past:

Review of The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. Paxton

Searching for Armenian Children in Turkey: Work Series on Migration, Exile, and Displacement

By Christopher Rose

Editor’s Note: To accompany this year’s Institute for Historical Studies theme and the theme of our film series Faces of Migration, Not Even Past will be showcasing a series of posts featuring graduate students working on topics related to migration, exile or displacement.

Nearly every historian can attest to the fact that working in the archives can lead you down unexpected paths that provide tantalizing, and often frustratingly abbreviated, glimpses into areas outside of their usual research. I had such an experience with a file that had the innocuous name “Near East Refugee Aid” one afternoon at the United Nations Archive in Geneva.

Near East Refugee Aid (NERA) was the name of a tiny League of Nations program that operated in the early- to mid-1920s. It consisted of only three agents—a director and secretary in Constantinople, and a female case worker based in Aleppo (now in Syria)—and operated on a tiny budget (none of its employees were paid). As I read through the documents in the file, I realized that NERA’s mission was far more specific than its name suggested: to seek out child survivors of the Armenian genocide.

The genocide began with the purge of prominent Armenian intellectuals and political activists by the Ottoman government in the spring of 1915. In the months that followed, the majority of Armenians residing in Asia Minor were rounded up and sent on forced marches toward the city of Deir ez-Zor, located in the Syrian desert along the Euphrates River. The vast majority of deportees never arrived, having been shot or hanged, or starved or frozen to death. Those few who managed to survive the trek found that almost no arrangements had been made to provide housing or other supplies for them once they arrived in Syria.

Armenians are marched to a nearby prison in Mezireh by Ottoman soldiers, 1915 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Estimates of the number of victims vary wildly. The Armenians claim over 1.5 million dead. While most historians—including a number of Turkish academics—recognize the events of 1915 as genocidal, the Turkish government does not and offers a revised death toll of around 700,000 (not coincidentally equal in number to the estimated Turkish civilian casualties during the war).

The documents in the NERA file complicated the usual polarized narrative of Turkish barbarism and Armenian suffering, and made the already tragic story even more heartbreaking.

NERA’s agents were looking for the children of Armenians who had been taken in by Turkish families. In some cases, Armenian parents left infants and toddlers with Turkish neighbors, coworkers, and friends who offered to take them in as deportation orders were issued. Other children were given away en route—sometimes, tragically, even sold—as their starving parents foresaw their own fates and desperately sought any chance for their children to live.

NERA’s mission was to find these children and, in the language of the Christian missionaries who staffed the organization, “to rescue them from Islam.” NERA’s reports laid out a narrative of victimhood: the children had been stripped of their identities, given new names, raised as Turkish speaking Muslims, forced to suppress their Armenian identities.

Armenian child refugees in cramped classrooms in Aleppo, 1915 (via Wikimedia Commons)

When NERA agents arrived in a town or village, some of the Turkish families came forward in hopes that their foster children might be reunited with their families, but others were quite reluctant to do so. It was unclear from the file what other methods NERA’s agents used to identify children suspected of being Armenian (neighborhood gossip appeared to be one source of information). Children would be summoned for an interview with a caseworker and an Armenian speaking volunteer. Since many of the children had been infants at the time and did not remember the Armenian language, more elaborate methods might be used. Children who could recognize traditional Armenian lullabies, for example, were assumed to be of Armenian origin. Once “recovered,” the children would be taken to a group home in Constantinople or Aleppo, until arrangements could be made to send them to relatives in Greece, France, or the United States.

While in some cases—usually those of children who were abandoned during the death marches—they had been treated as servants and never really considered part of the family, the opposite seemed to be true for those taken in by friends and coworkers in the child’s home town. However, NERA’s agents appeared to completely reject the idea the children might have formed a bond with the only family they had ever known. Some did not know they were not the natural born children of their Turkish parents. Tears and protestations of the Turkish parents at having the children taken away were usually dismissed as parlor tricks. In several cases police intervention was necessary to remove the children from their homes.

Armenian children in an orphanage in Merzifon, Turkey, 1918 (via Wikimedia Commons)

It was clear from the documents that the situation, which was represented by NERA as morally black and white, of rescuing Armenian children from “duplicitous” Turks, was far more complex in many cases. The traumatic effects on these children were clear from the file, although unrecognized at the time by the case workers on site. Some became violent and had to be restrained or sedated. A handful fled from the group homes and were eventually declared “lost.”

Frustratingly, the children’s stories contained in these files ended once they left Turkey. The file contained no information about what happened once they were reunited with relatives. Whether they fared well; if they kept in contact with their Turkish foster parents; or if any had eventually come back to Turkey to visit or live remains a mystery.

NERA’s work was short-lived, and came to an end toward the end of the 1920s, having successfully reclaimed just over one hundred children with relatives and, biases aside, provide a fascinating glimpse into the aftermath of the genocide. Several scholars (see note below) have begun working on the issue of Islamized Armenians living in Turkey after the genocide, and are contributing to a more nuanced analysis of what has become one of the most polarizing historical debates of the 20^th century.

The Ottoman Age of Exploration by Giancarlo Casale (2010)

by Christopher Rose

In The Ottoman Age of Exploration, Giancarlo Casale contests the prevailing narrative that characterizes the Ottoman Empire as a passive bystander in the sixteenth-century struggle for dominance of global trade. Using documents from archives in Istanbul and Portugal, Casale shifts our attention east and demonstrates that the Ottomans were actively engaged as rivals to the Portuguese for control of the lucrative spice trade and sea lanes of the Indian Ocean.

Casale’s study is a reaction against two historiographical trends: the first is a Eurocentric version of history in which the so-called Age of Exploration is posited as a purely European phenomenon, conditioned by the intellectual tradition of the European Renaissance and focused on New World colonization. This perspective focuses on the opening of direct trade between Europe and Asia as the catapult that launched Europe forward and started the Ottoman Empire’s slow road toward decline and eventual demise as the “sick man of Europe.” The second is the new trend toward a non-Eurocentric view of world history, that seeks to write the history of the global community that is independent of Europe. The Ottoman Empire tends to get short shrift in the early modern period in both of these narratives because it did not focus on Atlantic exploration or colonization. Indeed, a cursory review of nearly every map published in world history textbooks that depicts trade routes in the 16th and 17th centuries will show a swirl of arrows around, but never through, Ottoman and Safavid lands in the eastern Mediterranean.

Casale proposes instead that Ottoman participation in the Age of Exploration focused on maintaining, expanding, and defending Indian Ocean trade against the Portuguese expansion there. For the Ottomans, the Indian Ocean seemed likely to be far more lucrative than the colonization of a new continent whose economic viability was anything but assured. The income was substantial and the Ottoman and Portuguese navies were well-matched, challenging the Eurocentric narrative that suggests that European exploration was boosted by superior technology and weaponry.

While the phenomenon of Indian Ocean trade in the pre-colonial era has been well documented by Janet Abu-Lughod, Andre Frank and others, Casale provides the Ottoman perspective for the first time through new discoveries in the Ottoman archives. We are introduced to previously unknown heroes and villains, giving familiar events new interpretations. The Ottomans were introduced to this new milieu in 1517 following their conquest of Egypt, a province that had grown rich from its geographic position at the head of the Nile, the head of the Red Sea, and from the their monopoly on trade between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean world. The Portuguese sought to challenge Egyptian dominance of Indian Ocean trade by circumnavigating Africa and establishing their own trading ports in South Asia. The Ottomans, Casale proposes, were motivated in part by Egypt’s riches, which they needed to support, among other things, their never-ending military rivalry with Safavid Iran. Once in Egypt, however, the Ottomans discovered that the Portuguese had established a blockade of the Red Sea to disrupt Egyptian trade with India and a military outpost at Hormuz to control access to the Persian Gulf. In order to restore trade and income, the Ottomans had to deal with the Portuguese menace and increase the flow of goods and their resulting tax revenue. Over the course of the sixteenth century, this led to the annexation of Yemen and Eritrea in order to enforce a Muslims-only shipping policy in the Red Sea and to prevent the Portuguese from striking at the symbolic heart of the empire, Mecca and Medina, or the imperial shipyards at Suez. Similarly, Basra at the head of the Persian Gulf was incorporated into the empire outright, and Casale documents several negotiated attempts at alliances or outright annexation of territories across the Indian Ocean basin as the Ottoman sphere of influenced waxed and waned over the course of the century.

The Ottomans employed a combination of military might, intelligence and espionage, diplomacy, propaganda, science, technology, and cartography in order to counter the Portuguese as they made a serious bid to expand what Casale refers to as a “soft” empire, where trade, rather than political and military power, connected disparate territories across the Indian Ocean, stretching from Yemen and Hormuz to Gujarat, Calicut, and as far as the sultanate of Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra. Casale suggests that by 1580, the name of the Ottoman Sultan was read out during Friday khutbas from Central Africa to China, their reward for a propaganda campaign against the Portuguese. In telling this story, Casale’s brings us not only the voices of players in Istanbul, Cairo, and Lisbon but also the voices of the Indian and African rulers for the first time as they played these two powers—Ottoman and Portuguese—off of one another in an attempt to secure their dominions.

Casale might exaggerate the originality of his findings and the vision of some of his historical figures but he makes an interesting, readable, and meticulously detailed case for the Ottoman Empire as an active participant in the first century of the Age of Exploration, along with a well-justified explanation for its decision not to pursue expansion at the century’s end. European and World historians alike will find compelling evidence for a new narrative outlining a perilous balance of power in the Indian Ocean during this era in which Europe’s eventual ascendency was not a foregone conclusion. His readers will gain a new appreciation for all of the players involved—not just European and Ottoman, but also the Indian and African rulers who are finally given voice through Casale’s archival work.

Photo Credits:

Fragment of a 1513 Ottoman map depicting the coasts of Western Europe, Northern Africa and Brazil (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

A 1606 map of the Ottoman Empire (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

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