Volume 6 (2025), Edition 1

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, the widespread destruction and population displacements caused by the Ottoman-Safavid wars and the Celali revolts plunged Armenian communities of Anatolia and the Caucasus into a profound crisis....

The Ottoman Empire is often presented as a space in which a myriad of people using different languages coexisted. However, scholars have often taken multilingualism in the Ottoman world for granted and, despite some valuable exceptions, they have...

This paper examines the letters of the Ottoman Grand Vizier and commander-in-chief of the 1769 campaign, Yağlıkçızâde Mehmed Emin Pasha, in order to advance the understanding of Ottoman notions of expertise. Military expertise has always been...

How do members of a novel profession gain recognition for their expertise and negotiate its value? This article examines this historically rooted yet persistently relevant question by focusing on the experiences of agronomists, forestry engineers,...

In the last decades of the Ottoman Empire, literature in the Greek alphabet, namely in Greek and in Karamanli-Turkish, experienced an important increase in terms of the number of publications as well as the proliferation of published topics and the...

Debates in the 1940s surrounding the state-sponsored translation into Turkish of a central orientalist reference work, the Encyclopaedia of Islam, gave marginalized ulema and their supporters the opportunity to (re)claim interpretive authority over...

In this essay, I seek to illustrate the workings of rabbinic authority by means of a concrete historical example, a decision taken by Rabbi Elijah Mizraḥi (c. 1450–1526) in a particular constellation in Ottoman Constantinople around 1500. The...