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

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Ecology of the Ottoman lands

wolf-dieter h

utteroth

Area and period

This section deals with the centuries of long-term contraction and stagnation

of the Ottoman Empire, following the splendid period of S

uleyman the Law-

giver (1520–66). In the time-span treated here the Ottoman Empire lost several

provinces situated on its fringes, while stability and security within its bound-

aries also declined. These two-and-a-half centuries were a period of internal

stagnation, in which the empire’s connection with contemporary European

developments was lost. On the Ottoman side there was hardly anything to

compete with the modernisation and increasing power of Austria and later

of Russia. Down to the Tanzimat period, the Ottoman Empire more or less

remained a medieval state.

Nevertheless, in the 1600s the empire retained impressivepower, continental

extension and enormous diversity. From the northern Carpathians (southern

Slovakia), the south-western Ukraine and the Caucasus, the sultans’ domains

extended all the way to southern Arabia, upper Egypt and along the North

African coast to Tunis and Algiers. Cool, wet mountain forests on the shores

of the Black Sea and in the Balkans formed part of the realm, as did the steppes

of Anatolia and Syria. Mediterranean evergreen forests extended from Albania

to Greece, southern Anatolia and the Syrian coastlands. They were all part of

this empire, and the same applied to the empty deserts of Arabia and North

Africa.

We know the reasons for the empire’s decline in its later history. The dis-

connection of the Ottoman state from Europe and the latter’s modern devel-

opment has often been held responsible, and the relevant arguments need

not be repeated here. We will rather consider how the empire ﬁtted into the

physical landscape, and which political and social developments in the course

of time changed the appearance of the various lands under Ottoman rule. We

will discuss mutating patterns of settlement and rural production – and their

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Ecology of the Ottoman lands

effects on the landscape – and attempt to establish why they occurred. Which

changes in settlement location and distribution had physical reasons, perhaps

attributable to administrative or military acts of the ruling class, and which

ones were more indirect consequences of latter-day Ottoman government?

We also have to include natural events such as the plague, which, however,

had only indirect inﬂuence on the economic potential of the Ottoman state.

A ﬂuctuating population in a stable

climatic environment

We know that the degree of settlement density prevalent in early Ottoman

times could not be maintained everywhere during later centuries. Information

about the population numbers and density prevailing in the ﬁrst Ottoman

centuries is not absolutely reliable, but it is at least available, thanks to the

government’s custom of conducting periodic censuses of the tax-paying popu-

lation and agricultural production (mufassal defter). The ﬁrst of these registers

were produced soon after the Ottoman conquest, and they continued to be

compiled throughout the sixteenth century. Much credit also is due to the

efforts of generations of ofﬁcials who ensured the survival of these registers

down to the present time. Different parts of the empire showed vastly differ-

ing patterns. In the Danube regions, population apparently diminished due

to emigration, despite considerable new settlement by ethnic Turks.

On the

other hand, in the Arab provinces there seems to have been a rise in population

and a certain expansion of settlement due to better administration, compared

with that of the Circassian Mamluk sultans before the Ottoman conquest of

1516–17. For large parts of Anatolia, as well as for Syria, the sources show an

increase in population during the sixteenth century.

For present-day Greece

and Bulgaria demographic developments as yet remain unclear; however, we

may assume that, broadly speaking, the Ottoman lands were inhabited by

one-tenth to one-twentieth of the present-day population.

From the sixteenth-century Ottoman surveys, the astonishing fact emerges

that in most of the empire the proportion of nomads was not very high. Even in

the steppe sub-districts (nahiyes) of central Anatolia and Syria, nomads seldom

numbered more than about a quarter of the total population. Certainly not all

nomads could have been counted in these fringe areas of settled agriculture;

1 M. Tayyib G

okbilgin, Rumeli’de Y

ukler, Tatarlar ve Evl

ad-ı F

atihan, (Istanbul, 1957).

Omer L

utﬁ Barkan, ‘Research on the Ottoman Fiscal Surveys’, in Studies in the Economic

History of the Middle East from the Rise of Islam to the Present Day, ed. M. A. Cook (Oxford,

1970), pp. 163–71.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

0 300 km

Malatya

Aleppo

Antakya

Damascus

Beirut

Silifke

Hama

Jerusalem

Aqaba

Istanbul

Bolu

Antalya

Ankara

Kayseri

Rhodes

Athen

Thessaloniki

± 0° - + 5°C January mean temperature

Over + 5°C January mean temperature

300 mm or more annual rainfall

Alexandria

Cairo

Hamadan

Kuwait

Basra

Baghdad

Kerbela

Tabriz

Van

Baku

Derbent

Grosny

Tiflis

Erzurum

Trabzon

Batum

Sivas

Diyarbakr

Rakka

Mosul

Sinop

Bahceseray

Odessa

Yassy

Varna

Edirne

Sofya

Skoplje

Sarayevo

Belgrad

Dubrovnik

Tirana

Banyaluka

Temeshvar

Budapest

Bukarest

Kütahya

Bursa

Izmir

Map 2.1 Most important climatic zones

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Ecology of the Ottoman lands

but the information provided by sixteenth-century bureaucrats is conﬁrmed

by our calculations that according to the grazing potential of these marginal

lands, there could not have been many more. In the European part of the

empire there were even fewer nomads, despite the immigration of Turkish

uks and the persistence of the well-known Koutsovlach, Aroumani and

Sarakatsani transhumant populations.

Climatic reasons are frequently held responsible for the stagnation and

occasional decline in population after about 1600. Decreasing mean precipi-

tation or slightly declining temperature averages are accepted as reasons for

worsening agricultural conditions in the course of the sixteenth century. But

up to now arguments of this kind have not been convincingly proven. The

slight climatic deterioration during the ﬁrst half of the seventeenth century

showed itself in Europe mainly through glacier progression in the Alps and

other high mountains. Certainly, parallels in high Anatolian mountains do

exist, but a long-lasting inﬂuence on vegetation in lower altitudes has not been

demonstrated.

Even in central Europe this drop in temperature was a climatic oscillation,

which did not inﬂuence the conditions of agricultural production to any mea-

surable degree. Of course, ﬁelds high up in the mountains were an exception.

Probably during this time – long before the ﬁrst instrumental observations –

there were some minor variations in the averages for temperature and precip-

itation, of the kind which also happen in our own time. Historical information

about cooler summers and cold winters are frequent for the sixteenth cen-

tury as well, and the slight expansion of the Caspian Sea points in the same

direction.

Even the frequency of bad wine harvests increased during those

years.

But no general shift in agricultural zones occurred, and thus a gen-

eral and long-lasting climatic change cannot be deduced from the available

observations.

Nevertheless, theview, based mainlyon western European and NorthAmer-

ican examples, that a ‘Little Ice Age’ occurred in the sixteenth century is

widespread.

On the other hand, we must keep in mind that most agricul-

tural products of the plains, as well as those of Mediterranean coastlands

3 Sırrı Erinc¸, ‘Changes in the Physical Environment in Turkey since the End of the Last

Glacial’, in The Environmental History of the Near and Middle East since the Last Ice Age, ed.

W. C. Brice (London, 1978), pp. 87–110.

4 Hermann Flohn, ‘Klimaschwankungen in historischer Zeit’, in Die Schwankungen und

Pendelbewegungen des Klimas in Europa seit dem Beginn der regelm

aßigen Klimabeobachtungen

1670, ed. H. v. Rudloff (Braunschweig, 1967), pp. 81–90.

5 Ibid., p. 87. 6 Jean M. Grove, The Little Ice Age (London and New York, 1988).

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

wolf-dieter h

utteroth

or mountains, have a certain range of climatic tolerance. Contemporary

observers must have had difﬁculties in recognising long-term changes, given

the absence of recorded yearly precipitations and temperatures. Even today,

normal differences from year to year are overinterpreted by the average lay

observer.

Before 1942–3, Gustav Gassner and Fritz Christiansen-Weniger investigated

hundreds of central Anatolian tree-rings, and their work showed that no major

changes had occurred during the previous few centuries.

Catastrophic years,

either too dry or else too cold, were not absent, but the dendro-chronological

evidence showed no general changes of climate. From other parts of the

Ottoman Empire or neighbouring regions no contrary observations have

emerged either. All known oscillations of climate have been situated within

the range of the long-term averages for the last three millennia at least.

Certainly there were some exceptionally cold winters in the sixteenth cen-

tury, in which theBosporus supposedlyfroze over.

Yet even if reliablyreported,

these events are not evidence for a general change of climate. A southward

shift of the circulation belts by a few degrees was probably responsible for

lowering average temperatures in Europe and increasing cyclonal activity in

the Near East. A further possible explanation, alternative or additional, is the

atmospheric dust caused by strong volcanic activity around the earth during

this period.

Archaeologists working on the Near East have taken it for granted

that ‘no major changes of climate [have occurred] since Assyrian times’.

The

geographer Xavier de Planhol and the vegetation historians Willem van Zeist

and Sytze Bottema have concurred.

Further evidence against long-term climatic deterioration is phytological.

There are well-known climatic limits for several agriculturally relevant plants,

and their geographic spread does not seem to have changed noticeably. The

average line of precipitation of 300 mm per annum was the approximate limit

of rain-fed agriculture against the dry steppe, and so it remained until the

7 Gustav Gassner and Fritz Christiansen-Weniger, ‘Dendroklimatologische Untersuchun-

gen

uber die Jahresringentwicklung der Kiefern in Anatolien’, Nova Acta Leopoldina N. F.

12, 80 (1942/3).

8 Xavier de Planhol, Kulturgeographische Grundlagen der islamischen Geschichte, trans. Heinz

Halm (Zurich and Munich, 1975).

9 Flohn, ‘Klimaschwankungen’.

10 Peter J. Ergenzinger, Wolfgang Frey, Hartmut K

uhne and Harald K

urschner, ‘The Recon-

struction of Environment, Irrigation and Development of Settlement on the Habur in

North East Syria’, in Conceptual Issues in EnvironmentalArcheology, ed. John Bintliff, Donald

A. Davidson and Eric G. Grant (Edinburgh, 1988), pp. 108–28.

11 De Planhol, Kulturgeographische Grundlagen; Willem van Zeist and Sytze Bottema, ‘Late

Quaternary Vegetation of the Near East’, Beihefte zum T

ubinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients,

A-18 (Wiesbaden, 1991).

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Ecology of the Ottoman lands

present days of mechanised agriculture.

This is valid at least for those areas

where rains fall mostly in the winter, a characteristic of Mediterranean and

Near Eastern climates. In areas where most rain falls in the summer this value

must be raised to about 400 mm, because a larger proportion of the available

rainfall is lost by evaporation. As to the small share of the tropical summer

precipitation zone, which the Ottoman Empire held in Yemen, these posses-

sions were lost in the 1630s and not regained until after the end of ‘our’ period.

Rain-fed agriculture in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries was not

practised at an annual precipitation below 300 mm, while by the late 1900s,

grain agriculture had progressed almost to the 200 mm line in most parts of the

Near East. But the reasonforthis divergenceis verysimple. Present-day farmers

under these conditions accept that they will have good harvests in certain years,

and bad ones or even none in others. But this was not an alternative for the

peasant of pre-modern times, due to the lack of security and the impossibility

of storing grain for several years. Nor was it proﬁtable to transport grains over

a distance of more than a few days. Beyond the precipitation limit of about

300 mm agriculture has been precarious at all times, and peasants of the early

modern period selected their settlement sites accordingly.

Thermal conditions, especially the limits separating the Mediterranean cli-

mate from cooler zones, also do not seem to have changed during the last

centuries.Mediterranean agriculture

is limited by the+5

◦

C January tempera-

ture line.

This was and is found on the southern slopes of the Taurus, at the

foot of the northern Greek mountains and on the coast of Dalmatia. Inland

or north of this line the olive tree, this old characteristic of a Mediterranean

climate, does not occur. Only a few isolated and sheltered places on the Turkish

Pontic coast or in the southern Crimea do have some. Many other Mediter-

ranean plants follow these climatic limits, citrus fruit being slightly less tolerant

of winter cold and ﬁgs (Ficus carica) somewhat more so.

Human habits in the consumption of edible fats coincide with this distri-

bution of ecological possibilities. This is most evident in the coincidence of

the Mediterranean climatic zone with the popular custom of olive-oil con-

sumption. In the wet forests of the Black Sea the hazelnut has long been the

traditional provider of edible fats. Near the borders of the dry belt in northern

Arabia pistachio nuts fulﬁl the same function. The winter-cold areas of central

Anatolia and the Balkans, however, are the natural domain of animal fats,

where butter is clariﬁed because in this state it is better preserved during the

12 See map 2.1. 13 See map 2.2. 14 See Map 2.1.

15 Van Zeist and Bottema, ‘Quaternary Vegetation’.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

0 300 km

Malatya

Aleppo

Antakya

Damascus

Beirut

Silifke

Hama

Jerusalem

Aqaba

Istanbul

Bolu

Antalya

Ankara

Kayseri

Rhodes

Athen

Thessaloniki

Cultivation areas of vines (unirrigated)

Climatic limits of olives

Climatic limits of date palms

Alexandria

Cairo

Hamadan

Kuwait

Basra

Baghdad

Kerbela

Tabriz

Van

Baku

Derbent

Grosny

Tiflis

Erzurum

Trabzon

Batum

Sivas

Diyarbakr

Rakka

Mosul

Sinop

Bahceseray

Odessa

Yassy

Varna

Edirne

Sofya

Skoplje

Sarayevo

Belgrad

Dubrovnik

Tirana

Banyaluka

Temeshvar

Budapest

Bukarest

Kütahya

Bursa

Izmir

Map 2.2 Main cultivation areas of olives, date palms and vines

Ecology of the Ottoman lands

hot summers. This distribution has survived into the twentieth and perhaps

even into the twenty-ﬁrst century. Often traditions of food consumption are

more inﬂuential than modern production facilities, with the increasing pop-

ularity of olive oil in Europe during the last two centuries the exception that

proves the rule.

The Balkan zone to the north of the Mediterranean is often called ‘sub-

Mediterranean’ in climate, although, because of its cold winters, it is hardly

comparable with the traditional sub-Mediterranean areas of western Europe.

From Macedonia and Thrace to Slovakia and the Crimea, the summer months

at least are warm enough for the widespread cultivation of crops sensitive to

cold; after all, winter temperatures do not touch them. InOttoman times things

were no different. Given sufﬁcient water, rice could and can be cultivated in this

area and products of the vine, such as raisins, were an integral part of the food

economy even in Ottoman times.

The Ottoman Turks and Islamised Balkan

populations cultivated vines although they did not produce wine. Grapes were

consumed fresh, as raisins or concentrated into syrup (Turkish pekmez).

In later centuries maize (corn) had one of its European centres of cultiva-

tion in the Balkan peninsula and in Danube countries. The climate of these

regions corresponds to the thermic conditions of southern North America.

There are sufﬁcient summer rains in the Anatolian Black Sea region and the

western Caucasus as well. Here a typical European/Near Eastern maize zone

developed, whose limits remained stable down to the introduction of hybrid

corn species since the mid-twentieth century.

Remnants of ancient forests

Given the dependence of human beings on trees for fodder and fuel, the

distribution and especially the composition of locally available forests is very

important. Expanding into the Balkans and to the Danube, the Ottomans

by about 1400 had reached those areas in which oak trees (Quercus frainetto,

Q. macrolepis, Q. trojana) naturally predominate, from the plains up to the

mountains of medium height. This fact had consequences which cannot be

overestimated, as the most important use for oak forests since ancient times

has been the pasturing of pigs. Yet for Muslims it is forbidden to slaughter or

eat pigs, and even to touch them. Local villagers who converted to Islam were

therefore confronted with a dilemma: getting rid of the pigs, as demanded by

the Islamic faith, would have destroyed their way of living and their economic

16 Map 2.2.

wolf-dieter h

utteroth

existence.

In such situations, religious conversion necessitated a total change

in the prevalent way of life and economic system. To a certain extent the

survival of the Christian faith in the Balkans and the Danube countries must

have been due to this simple fact.

By contrast, pig-breeding was without any importance at all in other parts

of the Ottoman Empire. Anatolia, for example, where wooded areas are rare,

has mainly forests of different pine and juniper species (Pinus silvestris, P. brutia,

P. halepensis; Juniperus foetidissima, J. excelsa, J. phoenicea). The evergreen oaks of

the Mediterranean region (Quercus ilex, Q. coccifera) are not attractive for pig-

rearing. Furthermore, throughout the millennia they have been reduced by

the overgrazing of goats and largely replaced by pine forests.

While oaks are

not absent in the broadleaf forests of the Black Sea coast, it is beeches (Fagus

orientalis) that prevail in this region. In the southern parts of the Ottoman

Empire – Iraq, Egypt and North Africa – oaks and, for that matter, forests

of any kind are of no signiﬁcance. Certainly the mountains of Iraq, Iran and

Algeria do have oak forests, but here the Muslim faith has such ancient roots

that pigs can never have been bred in this area during Ottoman times.

Uncontrolled tree cutting in the forests was practised down to the late

Ottoman period. In areas with some forests or forest remnants, especially in

eastern Anatolia, the use of ﬁrewood was doubtless predominant among the

wealthier inhabitants. For the winter cold of these regions made ﬁrewood

a valuable and expensive product, far higher in price than the commonly

used tezek (dried dung of cows). Even the last forests of central Anatolia have

progressively been degraded during Ottoman times. In the surroundings of

Ankara, on the Elma Da

gı, the Mongol emperor Timur is said to have hidden

his war elephants in the pine forestsbeforethe battle against Bayezid I in 1402 ad.

Only a single, century-old pine supposedly remains of these forests today.

Nevertheless, we must view the preservation of great parts of the Anatolian

and Syrian forests in connection with the process of ‘nomadisation’ which

took place in the Middle Ages. Nomads use the mountain forests far less than

settled villagers; moreover, the population density of villagers is usually far

higher than that of nomads.

Furthermore, settled peasants need ﬁrewood

in winter when nomads will have moved to the warmer coastal plains. The

conservation of Mediterranean mountain forests then is to a certain extent a

17 De Planhol, Kulturgeographische Grundlagen,S.330.

18 Herbert Louis, Das nat

urliche Pﬂanzenkleid Anatoliens, geographisch gesehen (Stuttgart,

1939).

19 Xavier de Planhol, ‘Les nomades, la steppe et la for

et en Anatolie’, GeographischeZeitschrift

53, 1–2 (1965), 101–16.

Ecology of the Ottoman lands

result of medieval nomadisation. Another consequence of this process is the

low upper limit of permanent villages: in ‘nomadised’ areas we do not ﬁnd

permanent settlements at higher elevations, even in places where agriculture

was and is possible. The southern mountains of present-day Turkey are a

typical example; new villages were not founded at these heights in sizeable

numbers before the twentieth century. The forests of the Anatolian Black Sea

area likewise experienced a loss of settlement and population density, with a

relative increase of nomads, after late Byzantine times, and this gave them a

chance to regenerate.

Not only bushes, but a quasi-natural timber forest of

broadleaf type reappeared in these mountains.

In eastern Anatolia conditions are too dry for forests below 1,500–2,000

m and too cold above 2,500–3,000 m.

Due to the narrow band of potential

forests (mainly of the Juniperus species) there must have been extreme use and

over-use of wood at all times, resulting in the degradation and even destruc-

tion of all forests. The last wild trees had disappeared probably even before

Ottoman times. On the southern slopes of the Taurus, under conditions better

suitable for tree growth, intensive branch- and leaf-cutting for fodder has led

to progressive degradation in our own time.

In the Turkish Black Sea region and in the western Caucasus, on the other

hand, forests could survive to a great extent. In this area of humid climate, the

difﬁculties of clearing, and especially of keeping agricultural lands free of new

forest growth, reduced agricultural expansion. It was not before the middle

of the twentieth century that hazelnut plantations all along the southern and

eastern Black Sea coast, tea in the eastern coastlands and potato ﬁelds higher up

in the mountains marked the beginnings of modern agriculture. The increase

of population during the last decades of the twentieth century has been partly

responsible for moving the limits of agriculture further up the hills.

In the Pontic mountain range, the higher Balkan chains and the western

Caucasus, the Alpine zone of vegetation offers remarkable possibilities for

the survival of humans and their animals. Thanks to precipitation all year

round we ﬁnd here not the thorny, summer-dry highland steppes of most

Mediterranean mountains, but rich green pastures of fresh grasses throughout

the summer months, similar to the corresponding zone of the Alps. Compared

to regions further south a greater number of sheep per square unit may be

grazed here. On the other hand, frequent fog and precipitation make life

20 Wolf-Dieter H

utteroth, ‘Yı

gılca kazasında Karadere vadisi’,

Istanbul Co

grafya Enstit

Dergisi 7, 12 (1961), 166–9.

21 Louis, Pﬂanzenkleid Anatoliens; Wolf-Dieter H

utteroth and Volker H

ohfeld, T

urkei

(Darmstadt, 2002).