Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-r7xzm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-17T19:17:04.029Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

14 - Egypt and Syria under the Ottomans

from PART III - MUSLIM ANATOLIA AND THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2011

Maribel Fierro
Affiliation:
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, Madrid
Get access

Summary

Introduction

The conquest of Syria in 922/1516 and of Egypt in 923/1517 by Sultan Selīm I (r. 917–26/1512–20) decisively altered the balance of power in the Middle East. The elimination of the Mamlūk sultanate and the incorporation into the empire of two of Islam’s former imperial capitals, Damascus and Cairo, strengthened the Ottoman dynasty’s position as the champion of Sunnī Islam at a time when their Safavid rivals were establishing Shīʿism as the religion of state in Iran. The sultan’s claim to be the heir apparent of the ʿAbbāsid caliphs was consolidated by the peaceful submission of Medina and Mecca to Selīm, following the fall of Cairo. The Muslim character of the Ottoman state was further enhanced by the demographic reality that Muslims had become the overwhelming majority of the sultan’s subjects for perhaps the first time in the empire’s history.

The reduction of Cairo and Damascus to provincial centres administered by a court that was at best forty-five days distant for an imperial messenger diminished their importance on the world stage and no Ottoman sultan after Selīm visited either. Yet Cairo was the political heart of the empire’s richest province and Damascus’ position as the starting point for the annual ḥajj caravan was crucial for the maintenance of the Ottoman sultan’s prestige as is demonstrated by one of his imperial titles, the ‘Servitor of the Two Holy Cities’ (khādim al-ḥaremeyn). Those at court in Istanbul could not be totally indifferent, therefore, to either city’s fate.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abdel-Nour, Antoine, Introduction à l’histoire urbaine de la Syrie ottomane (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle), Beirut, 1982.Google Scholar
Abu-Husayn, Abdul-Rahim, Provincial leadership in Syria, 1575–1650, Beirut, 1985.Google Scholar
Abu-Husayn, Abdul-Rahim, The view from Istanbul: Ottoman Lebanon and the Druze emirate, London, 2004.Google Scholar
al-ʿUrḍī, Abu’l-Wafāʾ al-Ḥalabī, Maʿādan al-dhahab fī ’l-aʿyān al-musharrafa bihim Ḥalab, Aleppo, 1987.Google Scholar
al-Ṣāliḥī, Muḥammad bin Kannān, Yawmiyyāt Shāmiyya, Damascus, 1994.Google Scholar
al-Ṭabbākh, Muḥammad Rāghib, Aʿlām al-nubalāʾ bi-taʾrīkh Ḥalab al-shahbā, Aleppo, 1977.Google Scholar
al-Anṣārī, Sharaf al-Dīn Mūsā bin Yūsuf, Nuzhat al-khāṭir wa bahjat al-nāẓir, 2 vols., Damascus, 1991.Google Scholar
al-Budayrī, Aḥmad al-Ḥallāq, Ḥawādith Dimashq al-yawmiyya, 1154–1175, Cairo, 1959.Google Scholar
al-Damūrdāshī, Aḥmad Katkhudaʾ ʿAzabān, al-Dimurdashi’s chronicle of Egypt: 1688–1755, ed. and trans. Crecelius, Daniel and Bakr, Abd al-Wahhab, Leiden, 1972.Google Scholar
al-Jabartī, ʿAbd al-Raḥman, ʿAjāʾib al-athār fī tarājim wa’l-athār, 7 vols., Cairo, 1958.Google Scholar
Bakhit, Muhammad Adnan, The Ottoman province of Damascus in the sixteenth century, Beirut, 1982.Google Scholar
Barbir, Karl, Ottoman rule in Damascus, 1708–1758, Princeton, 1980.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barbir, Karl, ‘Memory, heritage, and history: The Ottomans and the Arabs’, in Brown, L. Carl (ed.), Imperial legacy: The Ottoman imprint on the Balkans and the Middle East, New York, 1996 –14.Google Scholar
Barkey, Karen, Bandits and bureaucrats: The Ottoman route to state centralization, Ithaca, 1994.Google Scholar
Bodman, Herbert, Political factions in Aleppo, 1760–1826, Chapel Hill, 1963.Google Scholar
Bruce, Masters, ‘The view from the provinces: Syrian chronicles of the eighteenth century’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 114 (1993) –62.Google Scholar
Brummett, Palmira, Ottoman seapower and Levantine diplomacy in the age of discovery, Albany, 1994.Google Scholar
Burayk al-Dimashqī, Mikhāʾīl, Taʾrīkh al-Shām, 1720–1782, Harissa, 1930.Google Scholar
Cohen, Amnon, Palestine in the 18th century, Jerusalem, 1973.Google Scholar
Cohen, Amnon, Economic life in Ottoman Jerusalem, Cambridge, 1989.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, Amnon, The guilds of Ottoman Jerusalem, Leiden, 2001.Google Scholar
Crecelius, Daniel, The roots of modern Egypt: A study of the regimes of ʿAli Bey al-Kabir and Muhammad Bey Abu al-Dhahab, 1760–1775, Minneapolis, 1981.Google Scholar
Crecelius, Daniel, ‘Egypt in the eighteenth century’, in Daly, M. W. (ed.), The Cambridge history of Egypt, vol. II: Modern Egypt, from 1517 to the end of the twentieth century, Cambridge, 1998 –86.Google Scholar
Cuno, Kenneth, The pasha’s peasants: Land, society, and economy in Lower Egypt, 1740–1858, Cambridge, 1992.Google Scholar
Doumani, Beshara, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900, Berkeley, 1995.Google Scholar
Douwes, Dick, The Ottomans in Syria: A history of justice and oppression, London, 2000.Google Scholar
el-Nahal, Galal, The judicial administration of Ottoman Egypt in the seventeenth century, Minneapolis, 1979.Google Scholar
Establet, Colette, and Pascual, Jean-Paul, Familles et fortunes à Damas: 450 foyers damascains en 1700, Damascus, 1994.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Çelebi, Evliya, Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnamesi, vols. IX–X, Istanbul, 1984.Google Scholar
Faroqhi, Suraiya, Approaching Ottoman history: An introduction to the sources, Cambridge, 1999.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grehan, James, ‘Street violence and social imagination in late-Mamluk and Ottoman Damascus (ca. 1500–1800)’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 35 (2003) –36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Griswold, William, The great Anatolian rebellion 1000–1020/ 1591–1611, Berlin, 1983.Google Scholar
Haarmann, Ulrich, ‘Ideology and history, identity and alterity: The Arab image of the Turks from the ‘Abbasids to modern Egypt’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 20 (1988) –96.Google Scholar
Hathaway, Jane, The Arab lands under Ottoman rule, with contributions by Barbir, Karl, Harlow, 2008.Google Scholar
Hathaway, Jane, The politics of households in Ottoman Egypt: The rise of the Qazdaġlıs, Cambridge, 1997.Google Scholar
Hathaway, Jane, ‘Mamluk households’ and ‘Mamluk factions in Ottoman Egypt’, in Philipp, Thomas and Haarmann, Ulrich (eds.), The Mamluks in Egyptian politics and society, Cambridge, 1998 –17.Google Scholar
Hathaway, Jane, A tale of two factions: Myth, memory and identity in Ottoman Egypt and Yemen, Albany, 2003.Google Scholar
Havemann, Axel, Geschichte und Geschichtsschreibung im Libanon des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts: Formen und Funktionen des historischen Selbstverständnisses, Beirut, 2002.Google Scholar
Heyd, Uriel, Ottoman documents on Palestine 1552–1615: A study of the firman according to the mühimme defteri, Oxford, 1960.Google Scholar
Holt, P. M., Egypt and the Fertile Crescent, 1516–1922: A political history, London, 1966.Google Scholar
Hourani, Albert, ‘Ottoman reform and the politics of the notables’, in Polk, William and Chambers, Richard (eds.), Beginnings of modernization in the Middle East, Chicago, 1968 –68.Google Scholar
İnalcık, Halil, and Quataert, Donald (eds.), An economic and social history of the Ottoman Empire 1300–1914, Cambridge, 1994.Google Scholar
Irwin, Robert, ‘Gunpowder and firearms in the Mamluk kingdom reconsidered’, in Winter, Michael and Levanoni, Amalia (eds.), The Mamluks in Egyptian and Syrian politics and society, Brill, 2004 –39.Google Scholar
Khoury, Philip, ‘Continuity and change in Syrian political life: The nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, American Historical Review, 96 (1991) –95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kunt, İ. Metin, The Sultan’s servants: The transformation of Ottoman provincial government, 1550–1650, New York, 1983.Google Scholar
Mantran, Robert, and Sauvaget, Jean, Règlements fiscaux ottomans: Les provinces syriennes, Beirut, 1951.Google Scholar
Marcus, Abraham, The Middle East on the eve of modernity, New York, 1989.Google Scholar
Marino, Brigitte, Le faubourg du Mīdān à Damas à l’époque ottomane: Espace urbain, société et habitat (1742–1830), Damascus, 1997.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Masters, Bruce, The origins of Western economic dominance in the Middle East: Mercantilism and the Islamic economy in Aleppo, 1600–1750, New York, 1988.Google Scholar
Masters, Bruce, ‘The view from the province: Syrian chroniclers of the eighteenth century’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 114 (1994) –62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Masters, Bruce, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab world: The roots of sectarianism, Cambridge, 2001.Google Scholar
Meriwether, Margaret, The kin who count: Family and society in Ottoman Aleppo, 1770–1840, Austin, 1999.Google Scholar
Naʿīmā, Muṣṭafā, Tārīkh-i Naʿīmā, Istanbul, 1866–7.Google Scholar
Murphey, Rhoads, ‘Some features of nomadism in the Ottoman Empire: A survey based on tribal census and judicial appeal documentation from archives in Istanbul and Damascus’, Journal of Turkish Studies, 8 (1984) –97.Google Scholar
Mustafa Ali’s description of Cairo, 1599, ed. and trans. Tietze, Andreas, Vienna, 1957.Google Scholar
Yuzo, Nagata, Toru, Miura and Yasuhisa, Shimizu (eds.), Tax farm register of Damascus province in the seventeenth century, Tokyo, 2006.Google Scholar
Peirce, Leslie, The imperial harem: Women and sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire, Oxford, 1993.Google Scholar
Peirce, Leslie, Morality tales: Law and gender in the Ottoman court of Aintab, Berkeley, 2003.Google Scholar
Philipp, Thomas, Acre: The rise and fall of a Palestinian city, 1730–1831, New York, 2001.Google Scholar
Philipp, Thomas, and Haarmann, Ulrich (eds.), The Mamluks in Egyptian politics and society, Cambridge, 1998.Google Scholar
Piterberg, Gabriel, ‘The formation of an Ottoman Egyptian elite in the 18th century’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 22 (1990) –89.Google Scholar
Rafeq, Abdul-Karim, Al-ʿArab wa’l-ʿUthmāniyyūn, Damascus, 1974.Google Scholar
Rafeq, Abdul-Karim, ‘City and countryside in a traditional setting: The case of Damascus in the first quarter of the eighteenth century’, in Philipp, Thomas (ed.), The Syrian land in the 18th and 19th century, Stuttgart, 1992 –332.Google Scholar
Rafeq, Abdul-Karim, The province of Damascus, 1723–1783, Beirut, 1966.Google Scholar
Rafeq, Abdul-Karim, ‘The revolt of ʿAlīlī Pāshā Jānbūlād (1605–1607) in the contemporary Arabic sources and its significance’, in VIII. Türk Tarih Kongresi: Kongreye sunulan bildiriler, Ankara, 1983, vol. III –34.Google Scholar
Rafeq, Abdul-Karim, Buḥūth f ’l-taʾrīkh al-iqtiṣādī wa’l-ijtimāʿī li-bilād al-Shām fī ’l-ʿaṣr al-ḥadīth, Damascus, 1985.Google Scholar
Rafeq, Abdul-Karim, ‘The Syrian ʿulamāʾ, Ottoman law and Islamic Sharīʿa’, Turcica, 26 (1994) –32.Google Scholar
Rafeq, Abdul-Karim, Dirāsāt iqtiṣādiyya wa-ijtimāʿiyya fī taʾrīkh bilād al-Shām al-ḥadīth, Damascus, 2002.Google Scholar
Raymond, André, ‘The economic crisis of Egypt in the eighteenth century’, in Udovitch, A. L. (ed.), The Islamic Middle East, 700–1900, Princeton, 1981 –708.Google Scholar
Raymond, André, Cairo, trans. Wood, Willard, Cambridge, Mass. and London, 2000.Google Scholar
Raymond, André, Artisans et commerçants au Caire au XVIIIe siècle, 2 vols., Damascus 1973–4.Google Scholar
Raymond, André, The great Arab cities in the 16th–18th centuries: An introduction, New York, 1984.Google Scholar
Raymond, André, ‘The population of Aleppo in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 16 (1984) –60.Google Scholar
Linda, Schilcher, Families in politics: Damascene factions and estates of the 18th and 19th centuries, Stuttgart, 1985.Google Scholar
Singer, Amy, Palestinian peasants and Ottoman officials: Rural administration around sixteenth-century Jerusalem, Cambridge, 1994.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Singer, Amy, Constructing Ottoman beneficence: An imperial soup kitchen in Jerusalem, Albany, 2002.Google Scholar
Thieck, Jean-Pierre, ‘Décentralisation ottomane et affirmation urbaine à Alep à la fin du XVIIIe siècle’, in Kepel, Gilles (ed.), Passion d’Orient, Paris, 1992 –76.Google Scholar
Tucker, Judith, In the house of the law: Gender and Islamic law in Ottoman Syria and Palestine, Berkeley, 1998.Google Scholar
Voll, John, ‘Old ulama families and Ottoman influence in eighteenth century Damascus’, American Journal of Arabic Studies, 3 (1975) –59.Google Scholar
Watanpaugh, Heghnar Zeitlian, The image of an Ottoman city: Imperial architecture and urban experience in Aleppo in the 16th and 17th centuries, Leiden, 2004.Google Scholar
Winter, Michael, Egyptian society under Ottoman rule 1517–1798, London, 1992.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Michael, Winter, ‘The Ottoman occupation’, in Petry, Carl F. (ed.), The Cambridge history of Egypt, vol. I, Cambridge, 1998 –516.Google Scholar
Ze’evi, Dror, An Ottoman century: The district of Jerusalem in the 1600s, Albany, 1996.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×