Travel and Artisans in the Ottoman Empire

Suraiya Faroqhi is Professor of History at Istanbul Bilgi University and Emerita Professor of Ottoman Studies at the Ludwig Maximilians Universitat in Munich. 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).

• IntroductionPART I: TravelsAn Edirne scholar on Ottoman architecture and politics: The pilgrimage account of Abdurrahman HibriBringing back keepsakes from seventeenth-century Mecca Evliya Çelibi’s tales of Cairo’s guildsmenTravellers and sojourners in mid-sixteenth century ÜsküdarImmigrant tradesmen as guild members – or the adventures of Tunisian fez-sellers in eighteenth-century IstanbulRefugees and asylum seekers on Ottoman territory in the early modern periodThe image of Europe in the reports of the Ottoman ambassadors of the eighteenth centuryOttoman travellers to VenicePART II: Artisans9.Repairs to the Ottoman fortress of Hotin10.Ottoman artisans under Selim III11.Ottoman textiles in early modern Europe12.Seventeenth and eighteenth-century artisans negotiating guild agreements in Istanbul13.Christian and Jewish artisans in late eighteenth-century Istanbul14.Istanbul halva manufacturers in the mid-eighteenth century15.Keeping artisans in their places – or how to run a guild16.At the Ottoman Empire’s industrious core: The Story of BursaPurchasing guild and craft-based offices in the Ottoman central lands

A series of windows through which we catch glimpses of people on the move (for many different reasons) in the early-modern Ottoman Empire. Faroqhi brings to this subject both her wide-ranging interest - from slaves and artisans to ambassadors - and her almost unrivalled mastery of Ottoman primary sources, both published and unpublished. The result is not a quantitative or systematic study of mobility but a rich and varied panorama, with many telling anecdotes. Professor Erik Zurcher, Leiden University "Suraiya Faroqhi has produced a mesmerizing study of a bustling empire on the move: ambassadors, wandering scholars and dervishes, renegade mercenaries, nomads, pilgrims, merchants, refugees, asylum seekers - and the great travel seventeenth-century travel fanatic Evliya Celebi. She has found space to chronicle the Turkish experience of such exotic places as Venice and Vienna and to survey such arcane trades as those of the firework manufacturers, scorpion catchers, donkey barbers and fez sellers. Her work, which is based on an unusually wide range of primary sources is also an important contribution to the study of international relations, as well as a guide to recent and impressive researches by Turkish historians in a dynamic and evolving field of study." Robert Irwin, author of The Arabian Nights: A Companion