Download PDF | The View from Istanbul, Ottoman Lebanon and the Druze Emirate in the Ottoman Chancery Documents 1546-1711, I.B. Tauris Publishers (2004).
224 Pages
Acknowledgements
I wish to express my deep gratitude to the director and staff of the Basbakanlik Arsivi for their courteous assistance over the course of many summers while I was conducting the research for this book. I am also indebted to Professor Dr Ekmeleddine Ihsanoglu, director general of IRCICA, for his personal and professional help. Thanks are also due to Mr Nadim Shehadi, director of the Centre for Lebanese Studies, Oxford, for his and the Centre’s courteous hospitality and unfailing research assistance during the initial phases of work on this book.
I also thankfully acknowledge the advice and other support offered me by Professor Dr Halil Sahilioglu in and out of the Basbakanlik Arsivi.
I would further like to acknowledge with gratitude the research grants that I received from the University Research Board of the American University of Beirut, which partially financed my research trips to Istanbul.
Further thanks are due to Ms Debra Callaghan and Mr Suleiman Mourad for their respective help in editing the manuscript and preparing it for publication and to Mr Jason Cohen and Oxford Publishing Services for seeing the book through to press.
Note on Translation and Transliteration
Below are full translations of Miihimme documents on Lebanon. The only omissions made in the documents pertain to Turkish and Arabic compliments such as diistur-u miikerrem, miisir-i miifahham, nazim el-alem, qudwat al-amathil wa-al-aqran, qudwat al-umara’ al-kiram, zida qadruhu and dama majduhu, which are used to refer to high ranking officials of the state. I have also translated the Turkish oglu into the more familiar Arabic ibn, when it pertains to Arab personalities.
As this book represents Ottoman Turkish documents relating to the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, the text includes the names of Ottoman officials and Ottoman Turkish administrative terms as well as the names of local, that is, Arab, places and personalities: in both cases the transliteration system used is the one found in the International Journal of Middle East Studies. One exception in the case of Turkish names was made with respect to those that in a d, which was not changed into a t; thus Ahmed rather than Ahmet. Place and personal names and titles that have an accepted English form have been used accordingly. In all cases, diacritical marks, other than those used in the modern Turkish alphabet and the Arabic ‘ayn (‘) and hamza (’), were not used. Where the identity of a particular person could not be definitely established as often occurred, especially where people were only identified by their first names, I have hazarded to make a guess based on the context in which the names occurs.
Introduction
This book contains translations into English of the documents of the Ottoman Umur-i Miihimme Defteri, or Register of Public Affairs, which bear on the history of Lebanon - or, rather, the parts of Ottoman Syria that ultimately came to form Lebanon — in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is the period in the Ottoman history of the country that has hitherto received the least scholarly attention because local documentation for it is, at best, scarce and uneven and, for the most part, lacking. This is not the case for the history of Lebanon in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when local documentation becomes more plentiful. Consequently, scholars of Lebanese history during the Ottoman period have tended to focus their attention on these two latter centuries and barely touch on the two preceding ones.!
The disparity in the local documentation on Lebanese history between the first two centuries of Ottoman rule, on the one hand, and the latter two centuries, on the other, is probably due to the fact that Mount Lebanon did not begin to take form as an historical entity distinct from its Ottoman Syrian surroundings before the eighteenth century. It was only then that the central and southern regions of the Lebanon mountain range (the Maronite region of Kisrawan and the adjacent Druze country) came to have distinctive political institutions recognized both locally and by the central Ottoman administration.
One has to bear in mind here that, from the time of the Ottoman conquest (1516) until the government of the Lebanese mountains became relatively regularized by way of i/tizam, or tax concession, under the Shihab emirs (1711), the territory today known as Lebanon did not constitute an historical unit on its own, but was divided between the different provinces of Ottoman Syria, among them Damascus. It was only natural in the circumstances that the inhabitants of the territory in question should have conceived of their affairs as part and parcel of those of the larger Syrian territorial-administrative units to which their homelands then belonged. Consequently, the history of the Lebanese regions in the historical literature of these two centuries, apart from some fragmentary local records, tends to be subsumed in the broader history of Ottoman Syria, from which it is barely distinguishable, even in retrospect. Thus, for the modern scholar studying the Lebanon for this period, it is extremely difficult to separate the parochial affairs of the territory of present-day Lebanon from those of the Syrian provinces of which they formed, at least politically and administratively, integral parts. It is for this reason and also because of the dearth of information available from local sources that modern scholarship has tended to ignore the first two centuries of the Ottoman regime in Lebanon to concentrate instead on the period that followed.
In the absence, or near absence, of local literature on these two obscure centuries of Lebanese history and due to the spottiness of the information yielded by this literature, to the limited extent that it is available, the relevant Ottoman documentation on the subject acquires exceptional significance. This documentation furnishes official statements and instructions that speak about, or allude to, contemporary events and problems in particular areas. These statements and instructions, addressed by the central Ottoman government in Istanbul to local governors and civil or military officials, are often enigmatic and do not, by themselves, tell complete stories. Being intended for purely administrative use, as will subsequently be explained, they are more often than not laconic and fragmentary, speaking of particulars and ignoring the broader historical context. Yet, taken together, these documents do form a substantial body of source material from which the broad lines of the story of Lebanon in earlier Ottoman times may be reconstructed, at least in part.
The bulk of the Umur-i Miihimme Defteri, consisting of 263 registers covering the period 1553—-1905,? is preserved in the Basbakanlik Arsivi (Archives of the Prime Ministry) in Istanbul. Some other registers are to be found in other categories of these archives, in other libraries of the old Ottoman capital, or abroad. As registers, they are classified only chronologically, without regard to region, subject, or any other consideration.?
Each register contains copies of hundreds and sometimes thousands of orders issued by the central government to provincial governors, kadis, administrative functionaries of various kinds, or private individuals. In many cases, if not most, these orders were issued in response to petitions (singular arzuhal), complaints (singular sikayet), or reports sent from the provinces and concerning public or private matters — orders dealing with complaints of a purely personal nature against state officials or other private individuals only came to be preserved in a special Sikayat Defteri, or Register of Complaints, starting from 1649.
A typical order would begin by explaining the nature of the petition, complaint, or report received. This introductory part of the order is especially important as historical source material because it gives detailed information about local situations, developments, events or irregularities in the province (eyalet or beylerbeylik), administrative region (sancak), or administrative district (nahiye) from which the petition, complaint, or report originated.
What follows is the official reaction to the information the central government, as personified by the Sultan, received, written in the first person to express approval, disapproval or condemnation of what has been reported. In the former case, the central government applauds the local administrative action taken; in the latter, it instructs the responsible local official or officials to take the necessary corrective or punitive measures, or commands further enquiry where the rights and wrongs of a given case remain questionable or unclear. In this section of the order, the rationale behind the reaction is normally elaborated, often with reference to Islamic law (sar‘), statute (kanun), established custom (adet), or Ottoman state interests.
Next follows the specific order, starting with the expression buyurdum ki (I have commanded), which sums up the case once more, reiterating the official reaction to it and the rationale behind this reaction, and gives instructions regarding the measures to be taken. Except in cases where a subsequent order indicates that these instructions were indeed carried out, one can never be certain whether or not they were satisfactorily obeyed.
While most documents preserved in the Umur-i Miihimme Defteri follow this norm, others do not, and it is possible that such documents did not originally belong to the Miihimme category, but were so classified ad hoc, for lack of a better alternative. Such are the documents taken from volume 50 of the register and presented in this book. Most of these are not strictly orders, but certificates (singular berat) assigning particular offices or grants — timars or zeamets — to particular civil or military officials, or other individuals, in return for services rendered.
Due to their nature, the significance of both types of documents as important historical material is obvious. For the purposes of this book, they serve as a primary source for the history of Lebanon in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and up until the early eighteenth century. On the one hand, they provide historical information, much of which is usually lacking or, at best, mentioned only in passing, in contemporary local sources — to the extent that these sources exist. This information sheds light on a wide variety of local administrative, fiscal, financial, military and judicial matters, as well as on problems faced by local functionaries, private individuals, or groups, or by the general run of the local civilian population (normally referred to as the reaya, or subjects). Thus, in many instances, the Miihimme documents can be invaluably helpful in explaining events or developments that are left unexplained in the local sources — one would suspect deliberately and for understandable reasons, not least of which was the local political motive, more often than not a strong variance with central government policy.* The documents also help to establish historical facts that these same local sources obscure, or on which they maintain a suspicious silence. What they further provide is basic information on Ottoman policy regarding the provinces — provincial and regional regulations, official appointments and changes of personnel, and a variety of other matters — which the contemporary local literature ignores, or of which it makes no more than cursory mention.
Considering all this, the significance of the Miihimme documents as historical source material can hardly be exaggerated. They remain, however, insufficient in themselves for the reconstruction of a coherent history for any region or province. Being official orders issuing from the Ottoman state, as represented by the central government in Istanbul, they are primarily concerned with attending to immediate problems and, where they touch on the broader historical background of a particular problem, it is only for the purpose of providing summary explanation. The documents were copied into registers and preserved for administrative reference, rather than with an eye for their possible future use as source material for the writing of history. Otherwise, their historical content would have been more elaborate, leaving no matter historically unexplained.
The information yielded by these documents, as they stand, is eminently useful for filling certain gaps in the historical knowledge of Ottoman affairs, providing answers to a number of specific and unanswered questions as well as broader questions unanswerable from other sources. But the documents do not, in any way, provide the general picture, whose broad lines are only traceable from the writings of contemporary or near-contemporary historians, Ottoman or local. And where the works of such contemporaries are not sufficient for the purpose, the historian, using the Miihimme documents alone, can do little more than attempt an educated guess as to what the historical reality was in relation to what these documents have to say.
One of many apparent exceptions to this observation, where the history of Ottoman Lebanon is concerned, is the detailed and almost continuous chronicling that the Miihimme documents provide of Druze insubordination from as early as the 1540s to the closing years of the seventeenth century. This, in fact, is in keeping with the tendency of the Miihimme documents to highlight the immediate and the problematic, for the Druze rebellion created a long-lasting emergency situation that was naturally reflected in them. The detailed chronicling in this particular case stands in sharp contrast to the almost complete silence that local sources maintain on the subject, the single exception being the references to Fakhr al-Din Ma‘n’s rebellion in the local literature of the Lebanon and, more so, in the literature of Damascus.
In this context, Ottoman actions and their causes become more readily understandable than they would otherwise be if one relied solely on the explanations offered by local sources for the same actions.> But the documents in question have to be used with caution.
What the Umur-i Miihimme Defteri preserve are not the originals of these documents, but copies made by scribes, not all of whom were particularly careful, conscientious or knowledgeable regarding the regions to which the documents referred. At times, such scribes tended to be confused when citing place names and personal names. Failing to read a name properly, they often spelt it incorrectly, or omitted it entirely, leaving a blank space. By contrast, in some of the documents relating to Lebanon, it is the authors of the original documents and not the scribes who confused the religious and sectarian affiliations of individuals or groups to whom reference is made. For example, figures well known to have been Sunnite Muslims are sometimes referred to as Druzes and deprecated for so being. This may be attributed to the notoriety that the Druzes acquired as a particularly rebellious community, so that all rebellious individuals or groups were referred to as Druzes, possibly as a pejorative term without regard to their true religious affiliation. Furthermore, it is apparently the original documents, rather than the copies, which sometimes refer to individuals only by their first names, or only by their surnames, leaving the reader uncertain about the historical identity of such individuals. In other instances, the names of several individuals are mentioned only once, in the opening statement of the order, after which they are all referred pronominally as ‘he’, or as the mezbur, meaning the ‘aforesaid’, or ‘aforementioned’, leaving the reader to guess from the context who the mezbur was in each case.
In the final analysis, these are minor shortcomings which do not detract from the value of the Miihimme documents as primary sources of the first importance for the study, not only of the history of Lebanon, but of Ottoman Syria in general, not to mention the other present-day states which were once included in the Ottoman Empire. This fact was recognized by scholars long before the Ottoman archives became accessible; since then, a considerable number of studies and monographs have been published based on material derived from the different registers that these archives preserve, including the Umur-i Miihimme Defteri.
One such publication, and an early one, was Uriel Heyd’s Ottoman Documents on Palestine, 1552-1615: A Study of the Firman According to the Miihimme Defteri (Oxford, 1960). In this work, Professor Heyd, of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, presented English summary translations of a selection of Miihimme documents relating to the history of the territory of mandatory Palestine during the first century (or rather, the second half of the first century) of the Ottoman period. As there was then no clear and distinct line of separation between territories that would today be classified as Palestinian or Lebanese, some of the documents presented in Heyd’s work bear on the history of early Ottoman Lebanon. When Professor Heyd’s work was published, the Miihimme Defters were still little known and used, so Heyd had to devote a full section of his work to explain what they were, describing their contents in considerable detail. What he said on the subject, now common knowledge among specialists, need not be duplicated or elaborated upon here, beyond what has already been noted. What this book will do, rather, in the manner of Heyd, is present full English renderings of the Miihimme documents bearing on the history of Lebanon, going beyond Heyd’s time limit of 1615 to end in 1711, the year in which the Shihab regime in Lebanon was firmly consolidated — a development that finds no echo in the Miihimme documents.
The documents presented in this book are grouped into seven sections, to make them more readily understandable in the Lebanese, Syrian and Ottoman historical contexts. In five of the sections, the grouping is geographical, according to region — the sancak of Sidon-Beirut (the eyelet of Sidon as of 1660); the sancak/eyalet of Tripoli; the nahiyes of Baalbek, the Bigqa* and Wadi al-Taym; and the sancak of Safad. In the remaining two sections, it is topical: the first treating Ottoman imperial campaigns (sefer-i hiimayun) on the European and Persian fronts and their repercussions on the Syrian scene, especially with respect to Lebanon; the second concentrating on the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca and the financial and military obligations that this annual pilgrimage imposed on Lebanon. In each section the material is grouped into sections suggested by the contents of the documents; within each of these sections, the material is arranged chronologically. Naturally, the documents themselves, in most cases, touch on the affairs of more than one administrative or territorial unit, or on more than one issue. Also, copies of some documents were addressed to more than one person in different regions. I have here classified such documents on the basis of the principal relevance of the information that they yield in the context of the categories mentioned above.
The picture that the Miihimme documents present of Lebanon between the mid-sixteenth century and the early eighteenth is at considerable variance with what has traditionally been imagined or written about the subject in standard histories of the country. To begin with, these documents nowhere recognize a geographic unit of any kind called Lebanon, let alone a political or administrative unit by this name. What they do recognize are different eyalets, sancaks, or nahiyes of different sancaks in the territory that is today Lebanon, some answering to Damascus, others to Tripoli or Sidon. Also, central personalities and themes of Lebanese history, as traditionally conceived and related, are either depicted differently in the documents in question, or are totally absent from their contents. The figure of the Druze emir, Fakhr al-Din Ma‘n (d. 1635), is one example. Glorified in traditional Lebanese histories and in history textbooks as the heroic Lebanese prince and patriot upon whom the Ottomans officially conferred the title of sultan al-barr, or Sultan of the Open Country, in recognition of his pre-eminent standing, the same Fakhr al-Din emerges from the Miihimme documents as a Syrian provincial governor whose relations with the Ottomans, like those of many of his contemporaries, had their ups and downs, and who was at no time accorded an Ottoman rank above that of sancakbeyi of Sidon-Beirut and Safad. While it is known from local sources, as from Ottoman chronicles, that Fakhr al-Din embarked on a career of expansion between 1618 and 1633, which gained him unofficial control of a Syrian territory far larger than the sancaks of which he was officially the governor, no Miihimme document anywhere refers to him as sultan al-barr, or hints that any title other than sancakbeyi was ever conferred upon him, or claimed by him.
Another case in point is the Qaysi-Yemeni factionalism among the Lebanese Druzes, of which historians have hitherto made much issue and on the basis of which so much of the history of Lebanon during the first two centuries of the Ottoman period has traditionally been explained. The Miihimme documents do allude to this Qaysi-Yemeni factionalism in reference to different parts of Syria, but make no such allusions in reference to the Druze country in Mount Lebanon.
In many instances, the same documents provide important information that is unavailable from traditional sources. Here, the career of Ahmad Ma‘n (died 1697), the grandnephew of Fakhr al-Din and the last member of the dynasty, provides an excellent example. This Druze emir was the miiltezim of the mountain nahiyes of the sancak of Sidon-Beirut for 30 years and a contemporary and personal friend of the Maronite patriarch and historian, Istifan al-Duwayhi. Duwayhi’s chronicle, Tarikh al-azmina, is the primary source for the period of Ahmad Ma‘n’s active political career. Yet, the figure of the emir on the pages of this chronicle — as in all other available local sources — is a shadowy one: that of a mountain governor who inherited his position for lack of another candidate and whose career was almost totally uneventful.
A completely different picture of the man emerges from the pages of the Umur-i Miihimme Defteri. Here, the documents depict him as an ambitious, crafty and elusive scoundrel whom the Ottomans repeatedly tried but failed to capture and bring to justice. The man, it appears, took advantage of the military embarrassments of the Ottomans on the Hungarian front (1683-99) to stage a rebellion against Ottoman authority in his own Druze country and to instigate similar rebellions in other areas nearby. Unlike his great-uncle and predecessor, Fakhr al-Din, who was finally captured by the Ottomans, taken to Istanbul and put to death, Ahmad Ma‘n somehow managed to elude capture and one learns from Duwayhi’s chronicle that he died in bed.
Following the death of Ahmad Ma‘n, the Shihabs took control of the government of Mount Lebanon. According to traditional accounts, the Sunnite Shihabs, who came to be related to the Druze Ma‘ns through intermarriage, were formally appointed governing emirs of the Druze country and Kisrawan by the Ottomans, after being formally elected to the position by local notables meeting in a conclave. The Miihimme documents mention no such election. But an awareness of the immediate background of Ahmad Ma‘n’s rebellion and the even longer and almost continuous rebellion, spanning much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the Druze mountains makes this succession more comprehensible. The reference to the descendants of Ahmad Ma‘n in documents relating to the early Shihabs — such descendants including the ‘Alam al-Dins — also indicate that the Ottoman authorities in Istanbul came to recognize some kind of hereditary succession in the Druze mountain and Kisrawan in a particular line; this even though the early Shihabs are depicted as ordinary miiltezims of the mountain nahiyes of the sancak of Sidon-Beirut, much as Ahmad Ma‘n had been before them, their tenure of the i/tizam of these nahiyes being subject to an annual renewal which was not regularly forthcoming.
There are instances, on the other hand, where the information provided by the Miihimme documents confirms and clarifies what is known of Lebanese history of the period from local sources. The question of the origins of the Shiite clan of the Himadahs provides a good example. In the Duwayhi chronicle, these Himadahs are spoken of as a Persian clan, originally from the Tabriz region, who were brought in to settle the northern reaches of Mount Lebanon, in the vicinity of the Maronite country, by Stileyman the Magnificent, following the first conquest of Baghdad in 1524. In the Miihimme documents, these same Himadahs are unequivocally referred to as Kizilbas: the name of the heterodox Muslim sect of eastern Anatolia and Azerbaijan whose leaders became the founders of the Persian Safavid Empire.
A final word needs to be said about the dating of the documents. In the successive catalogues of the Basbakanlik Arsivi, a date is given to each of the Miihimme volumes, these dates being generally correct. In some volumes, however, the dates of individual orders are occasionally far removed from the date listed in the catalogue (MD 26). Furthermore, while a large number of orders are individually dated, those without dates have traditionally been assigned the date of the order that precedes them. But there are cases where this dating method proves inaccurate (MD 5). In the present work, the exact date is provided for individual orders where it is available; otherwise, the general date assigned to the Miihimme volume from which the order is taken is indicated in parentheses.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق