Zarinebaf - Crime and punishment in Istanbul: 1700-1800

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Crime and Punishment in Istanbul,
17001800

17001800

Fariba Zarinebaf

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University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

2010 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Zarinebaf, F. (Fariba), 1959.

Crime and punishment in Istanbul : 1700/1800 / Fariba Zarinebaf.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-26220-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-520-26221-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. CrimeTurkeyIstanbulHistory. 2. PunishmentTurkeyIstanbulHistory. I. Title.

HV7076.7.Z8Z37 2010

394.94961809033dc22 2010020820

Manufactured in the United States of America

19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is printed on Cascades Enviro 100, a 100% postconsumer waste, recycled, de-inked fiber. FSC recycled certified and processed chlorine free. It is acid free, Ecologo certified, and manufactured by BioGas energy.

To my mother and the memory of my father,
who fought for justice all his life

MAPS

FIGURES

This book is the result of a personal and intellectual journey that was inspired by many events and individuals. My long stays in Istanbul as a graduate student exposed me to a fascinating city, its people, and its history. I knew that one day I would be engaged in writing about some aspects of its amazing history. Without the training and support of many individuals and institutions, I would not have been able to carry out this ambitious project.

I would like to thank Professor Halil Inalcik and Professor John Woods for their training and mentorship. In the process of my writing of this manuscript, many colleagues and friends offered critical insights and support. Dror Zeevi, Ariel Salzmann, and Linda Darling read the manuscript and provided important suggestions and insights. I thank my friend Andrew Wachtel, who read several versions of the manuscript and shared his ideas for making the book more accessible to nonspecialists. I also would like to thank Janet Afary, Palmira Brummett, Richard Beal, Thomas Cogswell, Daniel Goffman, Shirine Hamadeh, Randolph Head, Hasan Kayal, Georg Michels, Marion Miller, Gabriel Piterberg, Nasrin Qader, Robert Patch, Joan Scurlock, Holly Shissler, Jennifer Tobin, and Madeline Zilfi for their support and friendship.

The feedback and support of my colleagues and friends in Turkey were crucial during my research in Istanbul. Among them, I thank Suraiya Faroqhi, Mehmet Gen, Anthony Greenwood, Caroline Finkel, Ali Akyldz, evket Pamuk, Edhem Eldem, Haldn Glalp, Glden Saryldz, and Victoria Holbrook. The warm friendship of Dilek Barlas and her family made my long stays in Istanbul a real joy. I also thank Glden Gneri and Semrin Korkamz of ARIT, as well as Muhittin Eren of Eren Bookstore, for their hospitality and friendship.

I thank Niels Hooper and Emily Park at the University of California Press for their patience and insights and for making the publication of this book possible. Victoria Casanas superb editorial skills greatly enhanced the final version of the manuscript. Jane Blanshard provided editorial assistance on the first draft with diligence. Paul Kaldjian prepared the maps of Istanbul at a very low budget. I thank Naomi Linzer for doing the index.

The generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Research Institute in Turkey made this dream possible. The University of California at Riverside provided a Regents Fellowship and additional funding for the editing of the manuscript. I would also like to thank Northwestern University and the University of Virginia as well as the Newberry Library at Chicago for providing summer research grants.

In addition, I would like to thank the staff at the Babakanlk Archives, the Islamic Research Institute (ISAM) and the Mftluk Archives in Istanbul for their patience and access to sources. I also thank the Rijks Museum in Amsterdam and the British Library for the copyright permissions for images by Vanmour and Fazil Beg Enderuni. The Northwestern University Library provided the images by Allom.

Finally, the long research and the writing of this book would not have been possible without the love and continued moral support of my family in Tehran and in Chicago, the young and the old to whom this book is dedicated. My parents absolute dedication to scholarship and their confidence in me during times of immense hardship gave me the real passion to write this book. My late father, who as a lawyer and a civil rights advocate was against torture and the death penalty, provided much inspiration for this book. Needless to say, while I was fortunate to have the intellectual, moral, and financial assistance of the individuals and institutions named above and others, all the errors in the interpretation of Istanbuls history are mine.

All the translations of Ottoman sources in the text are my own, and I have tried to remain close to the original text as much as possible. I have used Christian calendar dates when citing documents.

For terms other than common English forms (e.g., pasha), I have generally followed modern Turkish orthography. For specific Ottoman terms, I have followed Sir James Redhouses Turkish and English Lexicon, New Edition, Beirut, 1987, for the English transliteration of Ottoman words. For proper names (Turkish and Arabic), I have followed modern Turkish orthography (e.g., Aye, Mehmed).

Pronunciation of modern Turkish letters that are not transliterated in English:

The city drove men to crime!

BERNARD CHEVALIER, LES BONNES VILLES DE FRANCE AUX XIVE DU XVIE SICLE

European travelers, diplomats, and artists left a rich narrative and visual record of daily life and their encounters in the Ottoman capital for a curious and eager audience back home. For some, Constantinople was the embodiment of Ottoman decline, the violence of the Turk, the decadence of Islam, and the slow pace of European modernitys attempts to gain a firm foothold in Ottoman culture. The Ottoman modernization effort actually started in Istanbul in the late eighteenth century. For the romantic traveler, it was a picturesque Eastern city in the process of decline, with its rich Byzantine and Ottoman heritage and diverse religious, ethnic, and linguistic mosaic. As European women began traveling to the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century, a genre of travel narrative by women developed that was more ethnographic and less biased than previous accounts and that focused primarily on the lives of Ottoman women in the harem, whether imagined or real. It goes without saying that these narratives influenced modern Western perceptions of the Ottomans, their once great imperial capital, and their place in world history.