Faroqhi S.N. The Cambridge History of Turkey: Volume 3, The Later Ottoman Empire, 1603-1839

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more expensive and uncertain. By this time mulberry groves, which counted

as private property, belonged to the patrimonies of many townspeople. Old

trees were often replaced, an investment justiﬁed by proﬁtably selling off the

leaves to the growers of silkworms.

Orchardsand groves wereoften preferred

to arable farming. As both water and a certain amount of investment capital

were available in the relatively prosperous Bursa region, the construction

of large watermills was also common, some of them including dams and

perhaps short canals. However, there is no evidence of mills for other industrial

uses.

In the vicinity of Istanbul the growth of the Anatolian suburb of

Usk

udar

promoted the transformation of ﬁelds and meadows into gardens and vine-

yards. On the Bosporus during the eighteenth century, vineyards were culti-

vated by Muslims and non-Muslims alike, with the former sometimes selling

grape juice to the latter for the production of wine. This activity seems to

have prospered during the second half of the century.

Beyond the land walls

there were numerous farms producing milk, eggs and yoghurt (mandıra). By

the 1700s, moreover, specialised gardeners had emerged, cultivating plants

that were sold to wealthy urbanites for their gardens; these rich people also

generated enough demand to support an active ﬂower market.

Eighteenth-century Damascus, along with the nearbyport of Sayda, proﬁted

from the relative decline of its age-old rival Aleppo, but also from a surround-

ing oasis producing fruits and vegetables in signiﬁcant quantities.

Mount

Lebanon (Cebel L

ubnan) with its incipient urban development also formed

part of the Damascene hinterland, and this area was known by the early 1600s

for its mulberry groves and the raising of silkworms.

Even the inhabitants

of the port town of Sayda drew their livelihoods more from cotton, oranges,

lemons and raw silk than from commerce. In the hinterland the situation was at

times critical: thus the Baalbek region, previously prosperous, was devastated

42 Haim Gerber, Economy and Society in an Ottoman City: Bursa, 1600–1700 ( Jerusalem, 1988),

pp. 81–3.

43 Ibid., pp. 76–8.

44 Domenico Sestini, ‘Beschreibung des Kanals von Konstantinopel, aus dem Itali

anischen’,

trans. C. J. Jagemann, in Neue Sammlung von Reisebeschreibungen, Achter Teil (Hamburg,

1786), pp. 48–94.

45 Ahmet Hezarfenn, ‘18.y

uzyılda Ey

up’te lale yetis¸tirenler’, TarihveToplum137 (May 1995),

300–2; Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Supplying Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Istanbul with

Fresh Produce’, in Nourrir les cit

es de la M

editerran

ee, antiquit

e–temps modernes, ed. Brigitte

Marin and Catherine Virlouvet (Paris, 2003), pp. 273–301.

46 Abdel Nour, Introduction,pp.341–60.

47 Wolffgang Aigen, Sieben Jahre in Aleppo (1656–1663): Ein Abschnitt aus den ‘Reiß-

Beschreibungen’ des Wolffgang Aigen, ed. Andreas Tietze (Vienna, 1980), pp. 15, 19.

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Rural life

by local conﬂicts in the eighteenth century and thus lost much of its former

importance.

Agricultural products for export

Export-oriented agriculture was often concentrated in areas close to the

seashore; this was especially true of the cottons cultivated (and sometimes

spun) in the vicinity of Izmir and Manisa, and also in the Sayda region; many

of these exports were destined for Marseilles. Macedonia’s cotton production

more than tripled between 1740 and 1790, largely because of demand from

the Habsburg Empire.

The Ottoman authorities had prohibited the export

of cotton in the sixteenth century, but around 1600 these prohibitions were

relaxed. This was done in an ad hoc fashion, so that cotton might be available

one year and contraband the next. Cotton cultivation apparently increased as

a result of the demand generated by exporters and, as a result, by the 1700s

exports were regular.

Seventeenth-century Tunisia exported large quantities of grain to Mar-

seilles, Leghorn and Genoa; evidently the prohibitions enforced in the

Ottoman central provinces did not apply here.

Much of the olive oil used in

the soap manufactures of Marseilles was produced in Crete, where after the

Ottoman conquest (1645–69) olives had replaced grapes as the major commer-

cial crop. In the Tunisian coastlands olive groves also became numerous; here

local governors sold export licences and themselves traded in oil.

In other parts of the eighteenth-century empire, agricultural products were

sold by local magnates, who had acquired them as part of the peasant taxes

they had farmed from the central treasury. In addition, these personages also

acted as brokers for the crops sold by the peasants themselves. While a fee

was probably paid for this latter service, cultivators must have obtained better

prices as a result.

Both magnates and more modest notables in coastal regions

acquired landholdings in order to beneﬁt from the rising European demand

for cotton, tobacco and wheat. The latter commodity was in special demand

during the wars following the French Revolution and Napoleon’s seizure of

power (1792–1815). As armies and navies were mobilised, grain prices reached

48 Katsiardi Hering, Associations.

49 Molly Greene, A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean

(Princeton, 2000), pp. 130–40; Boubaker Sadok, La R

egence de Tunis au XVIIe si

ecle: ses rela-

tions commerciales avec les ports de l’Europe m

editerran

eenne, Marseille et Livourne (Zaghouan,

1987), pp. 109–29.

50 Gilles Veinstein, ‘Ay

an de la r

egion d’Izmir et commerce du Levant (deuxi

eme moiti

edu

XVIIIe si

ecle)’, Revue de l’Occident musulman et la M

editerran

ee 20 (1975), 131–46.

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suraiya n. faroqhi

an all-time high, and Anatolian, Macedonian and North African wheat was

consumed by Napoleon’s subjects. Even grains from isolated regions that up

to this time had not been involved in foreign trade came to be highly sought

after.

Although the demand for Ottoman grain receded again after 1815, this

was indeed a prime example of full-scale integration of a large Ottoman region

into the European world economy.

51 Traian Stoianovich, ‘The Conquering Balkan Orthodox Merchant’, Journal of Economic

History 20 (1960), 234–313.

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part vi

Culture and the Arts

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

The Ottoman musical tradition

cem behar

The earliest period to which we can trace back the inception of a speciﬁ-

cally Ottoman/Turkish musical tradition is the second half of the sixteenth

century. In and shortly after the 1550s we observe an extremely important

threshold in the musical life of Ottoman cities. Unfortunately, due to the lack

of sources – and particularly of any musical notation – we do not really know

what the ‘antecedent’ musical traditions of royal courts and city-dwellers may

have sounded like. It may well be, as has sometimes been advanced, that this

existential caesura was precipitated by the musicians that Selim I (r. 1512–20)

brought to the Ottoman capital from the lands he had recently conquered – in

other words, from Tabriz, Syria and Egypt.

Other musicians, though probably

much fewer in number, were brought in by S

uleyman the Magniﬁcent from

Baghdad after the Ottoman conquest of 1534. These musicians, whose practices

were grafted onto the pre-existing musical traditions of Istanbul, probably con-

tributed to the elaboration of a new and original imperial musical synthesis.

A few of the compositions these musicians brought with them survived into

later periods and were attributed to ‘the Persians’ (Acemler, Acemiyan) or ‘the

Indians’ (Hinduyan).

Whatever the particulars of the case, the mid-sixteenth century did indeed

witness the birth and establishment of an original musical tradition. This

involved the establishment of new cultural centres, musicians/composers and

makams (modes), in addition to the invention of original musical forms, styles

and genres. Above all, there was a new language – namely Turkish – that from

then on was widely used in the vocal repertoire in place of Arabic and Persian.

An independent repertoire of Ottoman art-music thus seems to have emerged

only after the mid-sixteenth century.

Ismail Hakkı Uzunc¸ars¸ılı, ‘Osmanlılar zamanında saraylarda musiki hayatı’, Belleten 41

(1977), 79–114.

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cem behar

This mainly urban musical tradition extended over a cultural area centred

on the capital city of the Ottoman Empire, also striking root in major cities

such as Edirne, Bursa, Izmir and Salonika and extending eastwards into south-

eastern Anatolian cities such as Urfa and Diyarbekir. This tradition, which we

now name Ottoman/Turkish classical music, was kept alive, without any major

discontinuity, well into the twentiethcentury. Thechanges observablebetween

the seventeenth and twentieth centuries are minor compared to those that

occurred between the 1500s and 1600s, and we thus possess extensive evidence

of a continuity within a well-established musical tradition. Put differently, the

beginnings of Ottoman music as we know it today go back to the years around

1600.

The chronological and sociological details of this fundamental shift in urban

and courtly musical traditions cannot as yet be satisfactorily accounted for.

Clearly enough, however, it is totally incorrect to posit a strictly mechanical

parallelism between the political–military rise and fall of the Ottoman empire

and the fortunes of its culture and music. An original and synthetic Ottoman

musical tradition took shape only after the Empire had achieved its – almost –

maximum extent and reached the zenith of its political power.

Teaching and transmission

In stark contrast to the overwhelming importance of the written word in

other areas of Ottoman culture and in the polity at large, Ottoman/Turkish

traditional music was always taught and transmitted orally. Many European

travellers, scholars and writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,

including Antoine Galland, Carsten Niebuhr, Giovanni Battista Donado, Jean-

Benjamin de Laborde, Gianbattista Toderini, Charles Fonton and Ignace

Mouradgea d’Ohsson were struck by the absence of written notation. Some

of these writers expressed their admiration for the feats of memory that this

situation implied, but others mistook the absence of written notation for a

lack of musical theory.

Until quite recently in the Ottoman/Turkish tradition, the systematic use of

written notation within the musical training process was really frowned upon.

The ﬁrst examples of musical notation were printed and published only in the

late 1870s, about a century and a half after the ﬁrst Ottoman printing-press

2 Owen Wright, Words without Songs: A Musicological Study of an Early Ottoman Anthology

and its Precursors (London, 1992), p. 284.

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The Ottoman musical tradition

had been established by

Ibr

ım M

uteferrika.

The most important form of

Ottoman musical literature had always been the manuscript song-text collec-

tion, the g

ufte/s¸arkı/ilahi/ayin mecmuaları, of which hundreds have survived to

this day.

Mes¸k was the name given to this oral teaching and transmission process.

Its existence and operation can be documented as early as the latter part of

the sixteenth century. The musical education of the pages (ic¸o

glanı) attached

to the Topkapı Palace was around 1630 centralised in a single mes¸khane.

Wojciech Bobowski (also known as Albertus Bobovius and Ali Ufk

ı Efendi),

who wrote in the 1640s and 1650s, gave a detailed and vivid account of musical

teaching and practice, and also of daily life, in this palace music school.

Mes¸k did not only involve the teaching of musical theory, of various tech-

niques of performance, or of a particular musical instrument. It was simultane-

ouslya means of transmitting the wholemusical repertoire itself – instrumental

or vocal, religious or secular. It was based on the memorisation and repro-

duction of the repertoire with, necessarily, a face-to-face relationship between

master and pupil(s).

Mes¸k became, with the passing of time, much more than a simple peda-

gogical method. Musical mastery, for instance, was – and, to a certain extent,

still is – contingent upon the commitment to memory of as large a number of

compositions as possible. A new composition could be taught, disseminated

and performed only through oral transmission. The process fostered a web of

chains of transmission connecting generations of composers and performers;

in the process it gave rise to a particular esprit de corps, to real or imagined

solidarities.

Teaching and transmission by mes¸k also moulded particular performance

styles, and eventually created a social/ethical and musical code of conduct,

some of whose basic tenets are still followed today.

Oral transmission and the

degree of freedom it gave to each particular performer also made possible, or

even inevitable, the production and dissemination of different versions or vari-

ants of the same work, while the ‘original’ forms of quite a few compositions

3 Cem Behar, ‘Transmission musicale et m

emoire textuelle dans la musique classique

Ottomane/Turque’, Revue du Monde Musulman et de la M

editerrann

ee 75/76 (1996), 91–102.

4 Cem Behar, Zaman, mek

an, m

uzik: klasik T

urk musikisinde egitim (mes¸k), icra ve aktarım

(Istanbul, 1993); Cem Behar, As¸k olmayınca mes¸k olmaz, (Istanbul, 2003 [1998]); Behar,

‘Transmission’.

5 Uzunc¸ars¸ılı, ‘Osmanlılar’. 6 Cem Behar, Ali Ufk

ıvemezmurlar(Istanbul, 1990).

7 Behar, Zaman.

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cem behar

are now perhaps irretrievably lost.

Selection through random attrition was

also certainly unavoidable, although its overall inﬂuence on the size of the

repertoire is nowadays often exaggerated.

Music and society

Musical training and performance went on in private homes, mosques, dervish

lodges (tekkes) and even coffee-houses. The social basis of the Ottoman musical

tradition was far from being limited to the palace or its immediate entourage.

Music therefore could and did survive independently from the impetus and

patronage provided by the ruling group.

In contrast to the antecedent musical traditions, Ottoman/Turkish music

of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was no longer the preserve of

an urban professional elite. Nor, as we have seen, was the court the only

centre of music-making.

The following occurrence may serve as a contrario

evidence: when two successive sultans, Osman III (r. 1754–7) and Mustafa III

(r. 1757–74), both strongly disliked music and chose to disband the Topkapı

Palace mes¸khane, thus ending all musical activity in the royal palace,

this rash

decision had no disruptive effect on the practice of music in the city. Twenty

years later, Selim III (r. 1789–1807), himself a patron of the arts and a great

composer, had no difﬁculty whatsoever in quickly reconstituting in the palace

a retinue of masterly musicians and composers. In other words, the tradition

was already sufﬁciently diffused and ingrained in the urban social tissue and

resilient enough to survive the effects of any random change in the musical

tastes, whims and preferences of the ruler.

This view is conﬁrmed by the information given by S¸eyh

ulislam Esad Efendi

(d. 1753) in his important biographical collection Atrab

ul-

ar ﬁ tezkire-ti uref

a’

il edv

ar, covering seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century composers and

musicians. The social diffusion indicated by the names and titles of the approx-

imately 100 musicians cited in this text, probably written in the late 1720s, cer-

tainly suggests that a very wide cross-section of the urban population took part

in musical activities. Certainly some dignitaries including religious ofﬁcials of

various ranks were present, as apparent from their titles (pas¸a, efendi, bey), as

well as members (s¸eyhs and dervishes) of various suﬁ orders. But many more

musicians were of much humbler origins, as is apparent from names such as

8 Owen Wright, ‘Aspects of Historical Change in the Turkish Classical Repertoire’, Musica

Asiatica 5 (1988), 1–109.

9 Wright, Words without Songs,p.204. 10 Uzunc¸ars¸ılı, ‘Osmanlılar’.

11 Behar, Zaman,pp.28–9.

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The Ottoman musical tradition

Tavukc¸uzade (son of the chicken-seller), Tas¸c¸ızade (son of the stone-cutter),

utc¸

uzade (son of the milkman) or Suyolcuzade (son of the builder of water

conduits). And many other musicians who made their livings as silk-weavers,

street vendors, tanners or stonemasons were accorded honourable mention

in Esad Efendi’s biographical dictionary.

For a later period we have the patent example of

Ismail Dede Efendi (1778–

1846), perhaps the most remarkable of all Turkish composers. A Mevlevi

dervish,

Ismail was born in Istanbul as the son of the owner of a public bath.

During his lifetime he was therefore usually called ‘Hamamcıo

glu

Ismail’ or

‘Dervis¸

Ismail’. It is only later idealisations and nostalgic yearnings for an aris-

tocratic musical past in republican Turkey that have transmogriﬁed his name

to ‘Hammam

ız

ade

Ismail Dede Efendi’. Wide participation from all classes of

society, and not class- or wealth-based exclusivity, seems to have been the rule

in the musical world of Ottoman Istanbul. It is also certain that the suﬁ lodges,

and especially those of the Mevlevis from the very early seventeenth century

onwards, functioned as important centres of musical training and transmis-

sion, making wide selections of the religious and secular repertoire accessible

to all classes of people.

Religious/ethnic minorities such as Greeks, Jews and Armenians were also

amply represented, especially in the latter part of our period. For the sev-

enteenth and eighteenth centuries, the most famous non-Muslim composers

were certainly the Greek Orthodox Zaharya (d. 1740?), most probably a church

cantor, and the Jewish musician

Isak Fresko Romano (1745?–1814), composer

and tanbur (fretted long-necked lute) teacher to Sultan Selim III. Yet another

one was a rabbi, Moshe Faro (d. 1760), also known as Musi. The share of non-

Muslims probably increased after the mid-nineteenth century reorganisation

known as the Tanzimat. Throughout the period in question, the liturgical

music of churches and synagogues was in many ways affected by the main-

stream Ottoman/Turkish urban musical tradition.

Notated music and written sources

The two collections of written notation that have survived from the seven-

teenth century were not coincidentally both written by ‘foreigners’ – that is,

by musicians with a Western cultural and musical background. One of these

collections is by Ali Ufki Efendi (1610?–1675), who was captured during one of

12 Wright, Words without Songs,pp.204–5; Behar, Zaman,pp.36–7.

13 Sadeddin N

uzhet Ergun, T

urk musikisi antolojisi, din

ıeserler(Istanbul, 1943/4), vols. I and

II.

397