The ottoman empire: The age of ‘political households’ (eleventh-twelfth/seventeenth-eighteenth centuries)

Abstract

This chapter discusses the relations of the Ottoman rulers with neighbouring potentates and, at much greater length, the empire’s domestic affairs. Throughout the eleventh/seventeenth and twelfth/eighteenth centuries British power and ambitions affected the Ottomans only in a limited fashion: there was occasional friction between the British and the rulers of the three North African provinces, who in the Ottoman perspective were merely governors with some claim to autonomy. Ottoman princes in the eleventh/seventeenth and twelfth/eighteenth centuries lived isolated and often quite miserable lives in the section of the palace set aside for them, the so-called cage or qafes. In the early eleventh/seventeenth century, the mercenary rebellions that had been devastating Anatolia since the 990s/1580s known as the Jel?l? uprisings. A twelfth/eighteenth-century process of social differentiation among the urban population has been well studied with respect to certain towns of southeastern Europe, and something similar presumably happened in other parts of the Ottoman empire as well. © Cambridge University Press 2010.