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Journal Title: Animals and people in the Ottoman
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Article Author: United States

Article Title: Introduction email: haduckk@lafayette.edu

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 Introduction

Similarly to members of other pre-industrial - and industrial - societies, the

subjects of the Ottoman sultans depended on the animals they raised and
whether they liked it or not, certain non-domestic animals sharing their home
environments had a profound impact on their lives as well. We will here
ignore the fact that sheep, chickens and other animals were sources of food,
for apart from a few exceptions our concern will be with living and not with
dead creatures. Hides made into leather and silkworms killed to make silk
cloth thus will not enter our purview either. But even in the realm of food
there are topics awaiting discussion. Quite apart from milk, yoghurt and
cheese, honey was in great demand, as it was one of the principal sweeteners
in a world where sweet foods were popular yet cane sugar was scarce and
expensive. Bee-keeping was therefore a common activity in Anatolian,
Balkan and Syrian villages.
For clothing and the outfitting of dwellings, animals also were
indispensable: the wool from local sheep served to make cloaks and vests of
different qualities, to say nothing of the kelims and carpets that made the
reputation of towns like Usak or Gordes in western Anatolia. Nomads and
semi-nomads manufactured tents and carpets out of felt and once again,
sheep produced the necessary raw material. As for mohair goats, they were a
specialty of central Anatolia and more specifically the Ankara region. Before
the late nineteenth century this animal, whose hair was combed out rather
than shorn, reproduced in this particular area and nowhere else: after
spinning the hair of Angora goats formed the raw material for light and
elegant fabrics.'
Animals were also the principal source of motor energy: in Istanbul,
where water power was at a premium and windmills for some reason had
never become popular, horses drove the numerous mills where the
inhabitants ground their flour.' In a less peaceful vein, before the late l700s
most gunpowder was also a product of horse-driven mills. For land-based

I Ozer Ergenc, "1600~1615 Ytllan Arasmda Ankara lktisadi Tarihine Ait Arasurmalar," in
Turkiye Iktisat Tarihi Semineri: Metinier-Tarnsmalar, 8-10 Haziran 1973, ed. Osman
Okyar and Onal Nalbantoglu (Ankara: Hacettepc Onivcrsitcsi, 1975), pp. 145-168.
2 Salih Aynural, istanbul Degirmenieri ve Fmnlan, Zahire Ticareti (Istanbul: Tarih Vakf
Yurt Yaym!an, 2001), p. 86.
12 Suraiya Faroqhi

transportation, the sultan's subjects relied almost exclusively on animal

power; and even navigation on the Danube could not have functioned very
well had there not been any pack-horses that pulled the boats upstream. In
eastern and south-eastern Anatolia, oxen were in use as beasts of burden; and
perhaps most importantly, these animals drew the plough. 3
Most ploughs were of the swing-plough (aratrumlkarasapan) variety.
But in some places the pulluk was also in use, which turned over the earth
and thus was often more efficient, yet unsuitable for hilly territory. Heavier
than the swing-plough, this item demanded even more animal power; and in
central Anatolia at least, buffaloes drew the plough wherever there were
swamps furnishing the reed to feed them. Throughout Anatolia moreover,
ox-drawn carts were common; and in eighteenth- and nineteenth century
Istanbul, women often went to the picnic grounds surrounding the city in
such conveyances, gaily decorated for the occasion.
However carts had to compete against camels: these animals were more
economical because they did not need any paved roads. Camels occasionally
transported goods even in the Balkans, as they had done in Byzantine times
as well; but in the peninsula carts were the principal means of transportation.
As for Anatolia the only camel breeds suitable for the local climate were
hybrids that took time and effort to produce, so that carts and camels
coexisted over the centuries. Things were different in Egypt and 'Greater
Syria', a term which for the sake of convenience we will use for the
territories of present-day Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Israel; for in these
regions the advantage of the dromedary was so great that it crowded out the
carts, which in Roman times had been the most common· means of
transportation"
Well-to-do travellers, but also the Ottoman court and army made
extensive use of horses. The sultans' rapid conquest of south-eastern and a
sizeable chunk of central Europe would have been impossible without the
famous cavalry of sipahis, both those domiciled in Istanbul and those who
held tax grants in the countryside and needed to bring both their own and
their retainers' horses to the army camp. Fine horses were a source of
prestige, and expensive: to celebrate these prized possessions their owners
often spent a great deal of money on saddles, saddlecloth and bridles. In
addition for Muslim males, to possess a richly caparisoned horse was a

l Xavier de Planhol, "Le bocuf porteur dans Ie Proche Orient et "Afrique du Nord," Journal
of theEconomicand SocialHistoryof the Orient,XII, 3 (t 969), pp. 298-321.
4 Richard W. Bulliet, The Camel and the Wheel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1975).
 Introduction 13

iimal substitute for personal jewellery in silver, that Islamic law did not - in
very
principle - permit them to use on their persons.
n. In
; and Ottoman dignitaries also typically went hunting on horseback; and in
this case they made extensive use of different birds of prey, some taken as
nestlings and others captured when fully grown. While much of our
iety. documentation concerns the royal hunt, provincial dignitaries and doubtless
earth a number of peasants too participated in this kind of chase whenever they got
rvier the chance' In certain circles in Anatolia eagles, the most impressive among
id in all birds of prey, might be venerated for their association with both physical
were and spiritual power: the seventeenth-century Ottoman traveller Evliya Celebi
rver, (1611-after 1683) described a ceremony in a remote Anatolian dervish lodge,
itury whose sheik went out once a year to feed the local eagles with horse meat:
yin supposedly the birds subsisted only on the sacrificial food sanctified through
contact with the holy man- In addition, Ottoman hunters also bred dogs
nore specifically for the chase; and the offices of certain high janissary
rally commanders originally had involved taking charge of the sultan's hounds
mes tsamsoncubast, zagarclba~I).7
tion, On a totally different level there were creatures that made life difficult
vere for Ottoman subjects and caused damages which could only be minimized
nels by expending significant funds and efforts. On the island of Cyprus, harvests
.ater quite often failed due to locust invasions; and while people believed that
the there was a certain kind of miraculous water that attracted birds which in
lese turn devoured locusts, in real life, it was necessary to bury the eggs or throw
the them into the sea before they hatched.' Moreover in southern and western
of Anatolia, the coastal plains in the summer were the breeding grounds for a
mosquito that transmitted malaria: as Evliya put it, even the donkeys of this
lade
id a
the
S Thomas T. Allscn, The Royal Hum in Eurasia" History (Philadelphia: University of
vho Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
and 6 Evliya Cclebi b. Dcrvis Mehcmmed ZIIli, Evliyu Ceiebi Seyahatruimesi, vol. 1I: Topkapt
of Sarayt Bagdal 304 Yazmasmm Transknpsyonu - Dizini, ed. Zek:eriya Kursun, Yiicel Dagh
iers and Seyit Ali Kahraman (Istanbul: Yap' Kredi Yaymlart, 1999), p. 234.
In 7 Francois Virc, "A propos des chiens de chasse saHiqi et zagari," Revue des Etudes
s a islamiques, 41 (1973), pp. 331-340; ismail Hekkt Uzuncarsth, Osmanli Devleti Teskildnndan
Kapukuln Ocaklan, 2 vols. (Ankara: Turk Tarih Kurumu, 194~-44), vol. I: Acemi Ocagl ve
Yeni~eri Ocagl, pp. 202-203.
g Ronald Jennings, "The locust problem in Cyprus," Bulletin of the School of Oriental and
mal a
African Studies, 51 (1988), pp. 279-313; Gilles Veinstein, "Sur 1es sauterelles Chypre, en
Thracc ct (,,11 Macedoine a l'epoque otromane," in Armagan: Fcstschriftfiir Andreas Tietze,
-ess, ed. Ingeborg Baldauf and Suraiya Faroqhi with Rudolf Vesely (prague: Enigma Corporation.
1994), pp. 211-226,
,.
,
I

..
I'

j - - - -c-' -"-- _
 14 Suraiya Faroqhi

region suffered from the disease' Moreover while the sultan's subjects who
lived in the seventeenth or eighteenth century were quite aware of these
sources of human misery, there were others more difficult to pin down: for it
was only in the 1800s that medical researchers discovered the role of rats
and fleas in the transmission of plague. By that time, however, enormous
numbers of people had died from this illness while still in their prime."
Approaching the topic
Yet in spite of this enormous impact of the animal world on human life,
with respect to Ottoman - and many other - territories, the number of
scholars dealing with the relations between humans and animals remains
. quite limited. This introduction will therefore focus on the sources available
for the study of relationships between people and animals in the Ottoman
world; many of them have so far been tapped but occasionally. Willy-nilly
our volume therefore is part of a pioneering effort, and some of the
weaknesses which it doubtless possesses are due to the tiny bibliography on
which it must depend.
Most of the authors included in this volume have studied documentation
from the central Ottoman provinces, with Istanbul at the centre of their
preoccupations. This focus is not merely a question of geography: for when
dealing with this region, apart from a few exceptional cases scholars are
concerned with archival documentation; and the relationship between
humans and animals is no exception to this rule. On the other hand, many
specialists concerned with the Arab provinces deal with works of sixteenth-
or seventeenth-century scholarship and/or belles let/res; only in a minority of
cases will archival records playa major role.
As an example of the document-based type of historiography dealing
with the Arab provinces in late Ottoman period, we might mention John
Chalcraft's study of Cairo cabdrivers who in the late nineteenth century went
on strike. In the dispute occasioning this as yet unusual action, a major bone
of contention was the intervention of the British-based Royal Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which wielded more power once the
British government had established colonial domination over Egypt. The
Society protested against the use of old and sick horses, and persuaded the

9 Evliya Celebi b. DCJVi~ Mehemmed Zrlli, Evliyd Celebi Seyahatniimesi, vol. IX: Topkapc
Sarayt Kiitiiphanesi Bagdat 306, Sii/eymaniye Kiuiiphanesi Perley Paso 462. SiUeymaniye
Kiuiiphanesi Hact Besir Ago 452 Numaralt Yazmalann Mukayese/i Transkripsyonu -
Dizini, 00. Yilcel Dagh, .Seyit Ali Kahraman and Robert Dankoff (Istanbul: Yapr KrOOi
Yaymlan, 2005), p. 109.
to Daniel Panzac, La peste dans i'Empire ottoman, 1700-1850 (Louvain: Editions Peeters,
1985).
 Introduction 15

colonial government to inflict stiff fines and impound sick animals. But the
cabbies that made a precarious living by operating carts and coaches in Cairo
saw this intervention as a threat. Even worse the cab-drivers also regarded
the Society's activities as a potent sign of a much detested foreign
domination, and the British government only ended the strike at the price of
downplaying the contentious issue of animal protection. 'I
But Chalcraft's work is in some ways exceptional: many authors
dealing with animals in the Arab provinces have continued a tradition
established by their medievalist confreres and analyzed works of Islamic
law, veterinary science and - on a totally different level - hagiography as
well. Although these approaches are of great importance, our volume with its
focus on Istanbul and Anatolia will highlight archival sources and the
insights they permit. Even so it is a major aim of our project to facilitate
contact and comprehension between different 'historical schools'; hopefully
historians of the Arab lands will become more interested in archival
materials and those dealing with the central provinces will pay more
attention to narrative sources.
Moreover many scholars who have dealt with the connection between
animals and humans are not necessarily historians: as the readers of our
volume will soon discover, geographers, literary scholars, people concerned
about animal rights and horse-lovers have all made important contributions.
Approaches vary; yet often we can learn from our colleagues. But first and
foremost, it is our task to broaden the source base available to scholars who
wish to study the connections between people and animals in the Ottoman
world.
Archival sources: kanunnarnes, sultanic commands, estate inventories,
temettuat defterleri and miscellaneous records
Unfortunately, that task is far from easy. Ottoman archival documents
form the principal source for the Ottomanist historian, yet for our topic they
arc notoriously hard to mine. Thus the famous tax registers of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries have a great deal to say on grain crops, cotton and
fruit, but data on animals are quite rare; evidently the officials responsible
for these surveys knew as well as we do that animals could be hidden before
the servitors of the sultan ever set foot in the village. Moreover when we do
have data on sheep or camels, they probably do not represent the total
holdings of a given settlement or nomad community, but rather those
animals that their owners could not possibly conceal without arousing the

II John Chalcraft, The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories: Crafts and guilds in Egypt
/863-/9/4 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004), pp. 164-183.
t6 Suraiya Faroqhi

suspicions of the tax collectors. It is therefore not really surprising that the
recent articles of Nicolas Michel, which with admirable precision and in
great detail, discuss Egyptian rural life in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries make only few and casual references to the peasants' oxen and/or
the sheep, camels and horses bred by the Bedouin."
Somewhat more systematic information is available on the hawks and
falcons that the sultans ordered from often remote areas to use on the
imperial hunt; separate sets of rules and regulations (kanunname) detailed
the responsibilities of the falconers who located the nests and kept an eye on
them until it was time to take out some of the young birds. Afterwards the
falconers fed and trained these creatures and with a great deal of care, finally
remitted them to the sultans' court. But in the Ottoman Empire as elsewhere,
circumstances often did not conform to the neat and orderly rules set out in
official regulations; and in the 1500s at least the administration emitted a
sizeable number of orders in an attempt to deal with refractory falconers and
local dignitaries anxious to acquire a share of the sultans' birds of prey.
While documentation on falcons and hawks is thus relatively abundant, the
administration was worried mainly about the irregularities that falconers and
public officials might commit on the long route between the rocky slopes
where the birds nested on the one hand, and the imperial aviary on the other.
Of course the well-being of the birds was a major concern, but the sultans'
office-holders did not go into the details of bird-keeping, and falconers for
the most part did not describe their activities in writing.
Given the rarity of lists and descriptions specifically detailing animals,
we rely to a great extent on incidental information. Here the chancery
registers of the Ottoman administration (Miihimme Defterleri) of which at
least a selection is now available in print are an indispensable source .of
information. Thus for example, sultanic commands connected to problems
that governors and their men encountered while on the road may give us
some information about the horses and camels that they rode." In some

12 Nicolas Michel, "Travaux aux digues dans la vallee du Nil aux epoques papyrologique et
ottomanc: une comparaison," in L 'agriculture institutionnelle en Egyple ancienne: Etar de
Ia question et approches interdisciplinaires, ed. Juan-Carlos Moreno-Garcia (Lille:
Universite Charles De Gaulle Lille 3, n. d.), pp. 253-276.
13 As examples compare lsmet Binark et alii (eds.), 3 Numarals Miihimme Defter; (966-
6811558-60), 2 vols. (Ankara: Basbakanhk Devlet Arsivleri Gencl Mtidtirltigii, 1993);
iidem, 5 Numaralt Miihimme Defteri (97311565-66), 2 vols. (Ankara: Basbakanhk Devlet
Arsivleri Gene! Mtidtirltigti, 1994); iidem, 6 Numaran MiilJimme Defteri 97211564-65, 3
vols. (Ankara: Basbakanhk Devlct Arsivleri Genel Mtidtirlilgii, 1995); iidem, 12 Numarals
Miihimme Defteri 978-97911570-72, 3 vols. (Ankara: Basbakanhk Devlet Arsivleri Gene!
Mildtirltigii, 1996).
 Introduction 17

cases we can supplement the latter by the reports of foreign travellers who
after all rented their mounts and thus came into contact with breeders and
owners.
As for a very specific kind of journey, namely the pilgrimage to Mecca,
some information is available at least for the sixteenth century: for the
central administration along with the governor of Damascus attempted to
regulate the activities of the men who rented camels to the candidate hajjis:
procedures for establishing prices or determining what should be done when
a pilgrim's mount died in the desertall give us valuable information about
camel management." But strangely enough although these questions must
have recurred year after year, our documentation is limited to the closing
years of the sixteenth century; presumably after about 1600, officialdom
stopped using the Miihimme Defterleri for the administration of the
pilgrimage caravan. Presumably Ottoman bureaucrats now employed special
registers that either have been destroyed or perhaps will emerge some day,
when the cataloguing of the archives is further advanced than is the case at
present.
Contrary to what we might expect given widespread decentralization, in
the eighteenth century, the correspondence of the Ottoman centre with many
of its provinces increased exponentially. Into the registers known as Vilayet
Ahkam Defterleri, the sultans' scribes have entered official responses to all
kinds of requests and queries from provinces such as Anadolu, Kararnan or
Mora (Morea, Peloponnesus). To search in these registers for texts involving
animals is a hopeless task; and for the most part, it is best to use whatever
chance finds come our way while gathering material on some other better
documented issue. But a dozen years ago, a selection of documents from the
Ahkam registers was published along with admirable registers. These
volumes all concern Istanbul and its suburbs, which for this particular
purpose were treated as a province although otherwise, the vilayet of
Istanbul was still in the remote future." As two of the ten volumes published
deal with rural life, this is a precious and moreover accessible source on the
animals that lived in and around the Ottoman capital during the later 1700s.
Other archival sources which occasionally provide information about
animals are the post-mortem inventories (tereke), which kadis were
supposed to compile when a deceased person left heirs that were minors or

14 Suraiya Faroqhi, Pilgrims and Sultans: The hajj under the Ottomans (London, New York: L
B. Tauris, 1994), pp. 48-51.
15 Ahmet Kal'a et alii (cds.) istanbul Kidiiyau I: istanbul Ahloim Defier/en. istanbul Tarim
Tanh; 1 and 2 (Istanbul: istanbul Bilyilksehir Belediyesi, 1997-98).
18 Suraiya Faroqhi

else absent; the kadt also established the identity of the legal heirs. In case
the deceased belonged not to the subject class but counted as a servitor of the
sultan, a special official known as the askeri kassam was in charge of
preparing the inventory, which in this case was a preliminary to a
complicated process: first the exchequer demanded the entire inheritance,
but after some time had elapsed, the family of the deceased office-holder
typically got part of the latter's property back." Moreover in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the estates of provincial magnates
were often confiscated; sometimes the treasury even was so short of money
that officials laid hands on the inheritances of people that they simply
considered wealthy although the deceased had not been servitors of the state
nor owed the exchequer any money. In this case as well, inventories were
necessary, and some of them enumerate the animals owned by the
deceased." For quite a few Ottoman dignitaries had animals: if in their
lifetimes, they had been possessed of agricultural lands, which could not be
inherited because they were state property, they still would have needed
oxen or buffaloes for cultivation. As the animals were privately owned, they
did appear in the inventories and so did the flocks of sheep that certain land-
holders also might have possessed. Notables and magnates rode horses and
that activity was a sign of their high status: some of them evidently were
proud oftheir well-supplied stables.
However many, if not most, surviving inventories concern townsmen,
and while these people often owned gardens, vineyards and a few animals,
most of these creatures lived in fields, woods and grazing lands, so that
estate inventories are only of limited assistance. For peasant inventories were
few and far between: where the late 1500s were concerned, as an exceptional
case a set of about fifty such documents has emerged from the kadi registers
of Konya documenting peasant estates from the village of Ladik in the
district of Said (today: Kadmham) to the north of the city." In addition,

16 Orner Liitfi Barkan, "Edirne Askeri Kassern'tna ait Tereke Defterleri (1545-1659),"
Belgeler, III, 5-6 (1966), pp. 1-479.
17 Yavuz Cezar, "Bir Ayanm Muhallefatr: Havza ve Kopru Kazalan Ayam KOT [smail-Oglu
Htiseyin (Mtlsadere Olayi ve Terekenin incelenmesi)," Belleten, XLI, 161 (1977), pp. 41-
78; Christoph K. Neumann, "Ann und Reich in Qaraferye: Untersuchungen zu
Nachlallregistem des 18. Jahrhunderts," Der Islam, 73, 2 (1996 [1997]), pp. 259-312.
Kor lsmail-Oglu Hiiseyin was a notable in a rural environment; the horses, sheep, donkeys
and cattle that he owned made up 9% of his fortune, a modest value which indicates that
he was not primarily a rancher. But even so, with over 30 horses his stables were well-
st~cked. It also is worth noting that even though Verroia/Qaraferye was a small town,
animals played a very minor role among the possessions studied in Neumann's article.
18 Suraiya ~aroqhi, "The peasants of Saideli in the late sixteenth century," Archivum
Ouomanicum, VlII (1983), pp. 215-250.
 Introduction 19

some rural dervish lodges also possessed agricultural enterprises including

horses, oxen and other animals. But to my knowledge, the only extensively
documented cases ofthis type concerned the Bektashis. When Mahmud II (r.
1808-1839) closed down this order upon dissolving the janissary corps in
1826, he also ordered the compilation of detailed and extensive inventories.
The records compiled on that occasion rather resembled post mortem estate
records, the major difference being that well-made inventories of Bektashi
lodges often contained notes about the disposal of the properties, animals
included. But admittedly, many inventories were anything but
'professionally' compiled, and many animals probably just perished."
During the last few years, researchers have begun to work with a rather
novel source, namely the Temettuat Defterleri that the Tanzimat bureaucracy
compiled during the 1840s in order to obtain an up-to-date overview over its
subjects' sources of income, which in tum was to serve as a basis for
taxation. These registers, when put together with a reasonable degree of
accuracy, included the farm animals and horses, donkeys and camels used
for transportation; but once again, there were problems in data collection,
and people of importance in their respective localities might get to pay less
than their wealth warranted." Perhaps' the records did not contain all the
animals that such personages might possess.
In addition, using the Temettuat Defterleri for the study of animals is
not easy because these registers due to their great bulk do not lend
themselves well to publication. Furthermore, scholars concerned with these
sources have not exactly prioritized animals, but rather dealt with totally
different problems including the methods of data collection, the activities of
rural traders and the genesis of private property in land. These priorities
make sense because before working with any set of data, the historian must
know how they were collected, how reliable they are and to what extent - if
at all - the data extracted from them lend themselves to extrapolation.
Moreover private or quasi-private property in land has long been regarded as
a key feature in the nineteenth-century mutations now described as 'Ottoman
modernity'. Environmental history still being very much a stepchild of
Ottoman historiography, there has been little interest in the data on animal
populations that these registers surely contain.

19 Istanbul, Basbakanhk Osmanh Arsivi (henceforth: BOA), Maliyeden mlidevver

(henceforth: MAD) 9771.
20 Alp Yiicel Kaya, "In the hinterland ofIzmir: Mid-nineteenth century traders facing a new
type of fiscal practice," in Merchants in the Ottoman Empire, ed. Suraiya Faroqhi and
Gilles Veinstein (Leuven: Peeters, 2008), pp. 261-280.
20 Suraiya Faroqhi

A totally different group of archival documents concerns the animals

kept in the palace menagerie: a substantial number is found in the section
Cevdet Saray of the Prime Minister's Archives in Istanbul. Most of the
material located to date concerns the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries: thus when elephants arrived at the Ottoman court either as
purchases or as gifts from foreign rulers, the palace administration had to
employ people who would take care of them; and payment records for these
- temporary - employees have occasionally survived. It was also necessary
to build or repair cages for the new arrivals: and once again it was the money
spent on such projects that prompted the sultans' accountants to keep a
record of lions, elephants and other exotic creatures.
Last but not least there were the animals entering the records of local
kadis: this could happen because their owners had sold them or else because
they were found in the possession of a thief. For horses and camels were
expensive beasts even though donkeys were not; so there was plenty of
incentive to steal. In other cases, animals were involved in accidents, such as
for instance when a child got hurt by a cart. Animals also might enter the
records if they had escaped from the custody of their owners and damaged
other people's fields or gardens; typically the land-holders would tum to the
court to demand reimbursement. Other cases involved animals that wound
up in the charge of the yave emini, an official who located fugitive slaves
and lost/escaped animals. This man farmed his charge and the fees he
collected were his remuneration, so that he was more than ready to apply to
the court to demand his money.
Until recently locating such texts was a more or less hopeless task, as
the scribes producing the kadi registers, organized their material - roughly -
by date, and the sometimes bulky volumes never contained indexes.
However recently two registers concerning Istanbul have appeared in print, a
real boon to the researcher especially because of the detailed indexing; one
of these is part of a project run by Cemal Kafadar concerning Istanbul intra
muros. As for the second one, it covers Uskudar and dates to the very
beginning of the sixteenth century, thus forming the first kadi register
covering a section of the Ottoman capital which has come down to us. The
editors of both these series plan to continue their respective projects."

21 Zeynep Tanm Ertug, Nejdet Ertug et alii (eds.), istanbul Mahkemesi J 2/ Numaralt Ser'iye
Stctli (Istanbul: Sabancr University Publications, 2006); Coskun Yilmaz, Bilgin Aydm find
Ekrern Tak (eds.), istanbul Kadt Sieilleri Uskudar Mahkemesi I Numarals Sieil (H.919-
927/Ml 51 3-1 521) (Istanbul: iSAM Yaymian, 2008).
 Introduction 21

Literary sources
Not every book, article or newspaper report can claim to be 'literature' .
in the sense in which we normally use this term, But here we will employ the
word 'literary' in a very broad sense: in other words including almost
everything that ever appeared in print. We only will disregard the forms and
questionnaires to be filled in, by which nineteenth and twentieth-century
administrations in the Ottoman Empire as elsewhere increasingly tormented
those of their subjects that happened to be literate. More conventionally the
term 'literary' will also include narrative sources such as chronicles and
poetry, but also jottings in notebooks (mecmua): for quite a few literate
Ottomans were in the habit of recording in such scrapbooks whatever they
considered relevant to their daily lives. In addition the category of 'literary
sources' also encompasses the innumerable travel accounts by Europeans
and more rarely, travellers from the Islamic world as well. In this case too
we will not look for literary quality when categorizing our text as a 'literary
source'.

Among the latter, once again Evliya Celebi occupies a special place.
For when this author travelled in Egypt for instance, he paid a good deal of
attention to the lore concerning the Nile and its denizens, especially the
crocodile and the hippopotamus. In this section of his great travelogue he
was interested more in telling tales about strange creatures than in nature
studies properly speaking. Moreover he had not even collected most of his
tales in situ, but used medieval Arabic sources that in the Ottoman world
formed the intellectual baggage of the elegant conversationalist." By
contrast he paid little attention to camels and horses; this is a great pity for
given his constant travels, Evliya must have gotten to know these creatures
quite well. But among his many virtues we must count his propensity to note
events, including occurrences involving animals that nobody else ever found
worth recording. One example must stand for many: when discussing the
town of Divrigi in eastern Central Anatolia he noted that here cats were bred
for sale: and 'cat brokers' sold these animals to distant places, especially to
Ardabil in western Iran where these animals apparently were much in
demand.')

22 This dimension has been explored in Jean-Louis Bacque-Grammont, Josephine Lesur-

Gebremariam and Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen, "Quelques aspects de la faune nilotique dans
la relation d'Evliyii Celebi, voyageur ottoman," Journal Asiatique, 296, 2 (2008), pp. 331-
374.
n Evliya Celebi b Dervis Mehemmed Zilli, Evliya Celebi Seyahatndmesi. Topkapi Sarayt
Bagdat 305 Yazmaslmn Transkripsyonu -Dizini, vol. III; 00. by Yiicel Dagh and Seyit Ali
Kahraman (Istanbul: Yapt Kredi Yaymlan, 1999), pp. 132-133.
22 Suraiya Faroqhi

Certain Ottoman literary texts in the narrow sense of the term also have
things to say about animals; thus the prose author Nergisi (d. 1635) wrote a
story about a man, apparently of some substance, who - in a dream - had
ordered his servant to kill a dog that had eaten some small fruit from his
garden." In the beyond, the dog complained about this injustice before
God's throne, and the divine judge punished the subject of the story by
depriving him of half the merit he had gained in life and in addition turning
him into a tree. In all likelihood once the study of Ottoman literature
progresses we will find other sources, often from a Sufi context, warning
against cruelty to animals.
Descriptions of Istanbul, Jerusalem and Cairo by visitors from Latin
Europe after a timid start in the 1400s became numerous from the sixteenth
century onwards, but animals were rarely a major topic. One exception
proving the rule is the mid-sixteenth century travelogue of Pierre Belon du
Mans who was an accomplished zoologist. Belon visited the Ottoman
Empire and wrote about its fauna, with a special interest in Egypt. But he
also produced some interesting observations on Anatolia: when visiting the
region of Antakya, he commented on the peasants' use of oxen as beasts of
burden. When tired after a long day's work these people also rode their
oxen; Belon presumably had not seen this mode of transportation before.
Near Adana, the author also encountered jackals and remarked on their
similarities to wolves and dogs, with the difference that they were inclined to
carry off whatever they found in the possession of unwary travellers
camping outside caravansaries."
Incidental information also can be gleaned from the account of Ogier
Ghiselin de Busbecq, ambassador of the Habsburg ruler Ferdinand I, who in
1558 succeeded his brother Charles V as emperor in the German-speaking
territories." Busbecq was so impressed by the performance of Ottoman
camels that he wanted to acclimatize them in central Europe; he also

24 Gisela Prochazka-Eisl, "Gerechtigkeit flir einen Hund: Eine Traurngeschichte aus der
{jamse des Nergisl,' Osmanli Arasurmatan, XXVItl (2006) (~ Prof Dr. Mehmet
(avu,oglu 'na Armagan, part IV), pp. 165- t 81.
25 Pierre Beton du Mans, Voyage au Levant (1553): les observations de Pierre Belon du
Mans de plusieurs singularites & chases tnemorables, trouvees en Grece. Turquie, Judee.
Egypte. Arabie & autres pays etranges (1553), ed. and introduced by Alexandra Merle
(Paris: Chandeigne-Librairic Portugnaisc, 2001), pp. 420-42t.
26 Ogier Ghisclain de Busbecq, Legationis turcicae epistolae quatuor, ed. Zweder von
Martels, translated into Dutch by Michel Goldsteen (Hilversum: Verloren, 1994), pp- 170-
171, 175.403. Because of its excellent index, this version is the most 'user-friendly' of all
that I have seen.
 Introduction 23

commented positively on the affectionate care that owners of horses gave to

these creatures, treating foals almost like members of the family.
Other travellers commented on the charity to animals that they observed
on the streets of Istanbul. Hans Jacob Breuning von Buchenbach, who set
sail from VenicelMalamocco to Jerusalem in 1579 but whose travelogue
appeared in print only in 1612, has left one of the more detailed accounts.
After discussing the ancestors of today's kebapcts in the business district of
Istanbul, the author noted that special salesmen offered low-quality meats
that passers-by purchased to feed the local dogs." Some people evidently
had their favourites among the city's canine population, and would ask the
vendor to throw the piece that they had bought to a specific dog. Dogs
therefore tended to gather near the kebapcts and follow people likely to feed
them. Cats by contrast - and Breuning is one of the few writers to provide
bits of information about them - normally congregated near the mosque of
Sultan Mehrned II and ate their meat perched on low roofs; people who
wished to feed them would throw the meat in the air. Some persons even
dropped bread into ponds so as to feed the fish.
Foreign visitors to Istanbul often gave short accounts of the sultan's
menagerie, which by the late 1500s had become a 'must see' among
gentlemanly visitors; this 'touristic tradition' also explains why many
accounts resemble each other quite closely. For the most part the animals
occupied a converted Byzantine church, and for a time, the palace design
office (nakkashaney apparently operated on an upper floor of the same
structure. In the 15~Os Reinhold Lubenau, a young pharmacist from
Kaliningrad/Konigsberg visited the place and took a special interest in the
hyenas that were then on display; due to his lack of experience he swallowed
'hook, line and sinker' the tall tales that the waiters told him about these
creatures." Other animals that never ceased to astonish European visitors
were lions and elephants, and they reported on the trainers who controlled
these beasts to such an extent that in major processions they could lead them
about the city without a cage. A young trader's servitor from Danzig/Gdansk
by the name of Martin Gruneweg was one of these astonished visitors; he
commented on the lions which he saw installed in rows of cages near the

27 Hans Jacob Breuning von Buchenbach, Orientalische Reij3 (Hildesheim: Olms, 2004;
reprint of the edition Strasbourg: Carolus, 1612), p. 85. One of the letters of dedication
preceding Brenning's account is dated to 1605. I thank Ralf Muller for pointing out this
source.
28 Reinhold Lubenau, Beschreibung der Reisen des Reinhold Lubenau, cd. Wilhelm Sahm, 2
vols. (Konigsberg: Fcrd. Beyers Buehhandlung, 1912-1930), vol. I, pp- [52-[53.
24 Suraiya Faroqhi

TOpkaPI palace and on another occasion, he observed the sultan's

elephants."
On the whole the numerous pilgrimage accounts to Jerusalem by
Catholic and Orthodox pilgrims are not very rich in accounts of flora and
fauna; after all pilgrims were supposed to concentrate on their religious goals
and shut out the profane world as far as possible. Moreover most pilgrimage
accounts were highly formulaic. But especially in the 1600s there were some
exceptions, particularly among the Protestants who visited the Holy Land for
purposes of edification although they did not believe in the acquisition of
religious merit through their peregrinations. Occasionally in these accounts
we find brief remarks on animals: thus Salomon Schweigger, Lutheran
preacher to the Habsburg ambassador Joachim von Sintzendorff, who served
in Istanbul from 1578 to 1581, has left a detailed account not only of the
time spent in Istanbul, but also of his trip to Jerusalem. With respect to the
care and feeding of animals, the author noted that when the barley was
green, Ottoman Turks sent their horses to pasture in the fields or fed the
plants to the animals in their stables; by this means, so they believed, the
horses would be protected against certain diseases." En route to Jerusalem
Schweigger stopped over in Egypt. Unfortunately he has lifted his account of
the crocodile directly from authors of Antiquity and other predecessors,
being also much given to interpreting the supposed behaviour of the animals
he met in the sense of the exempla popular among Christian preachers." As
for the French traveller and Jerusalem pilgrim Jean Paleme, who travelled in
the Ottoman Empire between 1581 and 1583, near Tripolis in Syria he noted
the abundance of turtles and when he passed by the site of modem Mersin,
he had something to say about Angora goats; but probably he got this
information from Pierre Belon, whose work was available by that time. For
Paleme certainly did not show any marked interest in animals." In addition
Russian pilgrims visiting the Holy Land in the seventeenth century also have
left some remarks on the fauna encountered while in the Ottoman lands.

29 Ralf C. Muller. Prosopographie der Reisenden und Migranten ins Osmanische Reich
(1396-1611) (Berichterstatter GUS dem Heiligen Riimischen Reich. au,Per burgundische
Gebiete and Reichsromania), 10 vols. (Lcipzig/Gennany:Eudora Verlag, 2006), vol. Ill,
pp. 178·266.
30 Salomon Schweigger, Eine newe Reyssbeschreibung at/55 Teutsch/and nach
Constantinopel und Jerusalem, introduced by Rudolf Neck (Graz: Akademische Druck-
und Verlags-Anstalt, 1964; reprint of the edition Nuremberg, 1608), p. 70.
:H Schweigger, Eine newe Reyssbeschreibung, pp. 260-261.
32 Jean Palerne, D 'Alexandrie Ii Istanbul: Peregrinations dans l 'Empire ottoman. 158 I-1583
ed. Yvelise Bemard (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1991), pp. 204, 224. '
 Introduction 25

Among seventeenth-century authors, the French scholarly traveller

Antoine Galland also has left interesting observations about the animals that
the Ottoman court displayed in public on special occasions." Further
information relevant to our topic is available in the seventeenth-century
account of the Nuremberg merchant Wolffgang Aigen, who spent seven
years in Aleppo and also travelled in Greater Syria. Aigen noted the presence
of bears in the mountains, but also mentioned more exotic creatures such as
chameleons, of which he believed that they lived on air." As a practical man
and a merchant, his concern however was more with animals that people of
his milieu considered suitable for food.
It is even more disappointing that Claude Granger, who travelled in the
Ottoman Empire between 1733 and 1737 also made but occasional remarks
about the animals he encountered. After all it was his job to find plants for
the royal gardens in Paris and thus we could have hoped for more interest in
the animal world. However Granger did at least produce a short account of
the fish living in the river Tigris and the snakes and spiders of Cyprus, which
he explored in some detail. Of special interest among Granger's notes
concerning this island is his account of hunters chasing birds with the help of
hawks and falcons. While, as we have seen, the sixteenth-century Ottoman
court had trouble receiving all the falcons it wanted and therefore in the later
1500s lost interest in direct procurement, in early eighteenth-century Cyprus
Granger encountered a whole village of falcon trainers who delivered three
birds a year to the governor of the island and, in exchange, enjoyed
exemption from a number of taxes. 35
A systematic search for references to animals in the numerous
travelogues of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will doubtless yield
more information, but nobody has as yet attempted to collect these bits and

33 Antoine Galland, Voyage a Constantinople (/672-1673), ed. Charles Schefer, preface by

Frederic Baudin (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2002), p. 135. This is a reprint of the 1881
edition.
J4 Wolffgang Aigen, Sieben Jahre in Aleppo (1656-1663): Ein Abschnitt aus den "ReifJ-
Beschreibungen" des Wolffgang Aigen, ed. Andreas Tietze (Vienna: Verlag des Verbandes
der wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaften Osterreichs, 1980), fols. 36r, 46v, 99r-99v.
35 Claude Granger, Voyage dans i'Empire ottoman, 1733-/737, du naturaliste Claude
Granger: Regence de Tripoli de Barbarie, Egypte. lie de Chypre, Levant, Mesopotamie;
correspondance avec fe comte de Maurepas, secretaire d'Etat a
fa marine, ed. Alain
Riottot (Paris: L'Hannattan, 2006), pp. 154-156,239. On falconers in Cyprus during the
1700s compare also: Ali Efdal etc.
Ali Efdal Ozknl, "Osmanh Idaresinde Krbns'ta Yetistirilen Aver Kuslan ve
Yeti~tiricileri," in Av ve Avcthk Kitabi, ed. by Emine Giirsoy Naskali and Hilal Oytun
(Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2008), pp. 229-236.
26 Suraiya Faroqhi

pieces, and unfortunately such a task is far too vast for the present author to
attempt here. However we will at least include a brief reference to two
important contributions by Frederic Hasselquist and Domenico Sestini."
Hasselquist was a Swedish medical doctor and protege of the famous
botanist Linnaeus who in the mid-1700s visited the Aegean islands, Izmir
and especially Egypt and Palestine. The author abundantly evidenced the
'superiority complex of the white male' that makes so many European
travelogues difficult reading and also was much more interested in plants
than in animals. But even so, he did have a good deal to say about Egyptian
fauna, including the high-quality donkeys on which non-members of the elite
moved around Cairo, the large cats living in that city, as well as the ibis and
other creatures including snakes." Sestini by contrast lived in Istanbul most
of the time although he travelled quite extensively in Anatolia. He was also a
disciple of Linnaeus; as a contribution to our topic he has left a short treatise
on hunting in the environs of the Ottoman capital.
We now will pass directly to the second half of the nineteenth century.
In this period at least in Istanbul there emerged a periodical press, and the
latter publications form an important source for the historian concerned with
the relationship between animals and people. For around 1900 there was
considerable debate about the dogs living on the streets of Istanbul; while
these animals did not have owners who fed and housed them, most city
dwellers accepted them as 'fellow urbanites' and appreciated the fact that
their bark warned the inhabitants of the town quarter they inhabited of the
presence of strangers. On the other hand, many foreign observers and also
the post-1909 city administration regarded feral dogs as a health risk and
also as a sign of 'backwardness.' This resulted in the infamous banishment
of a large number of dogs onto a deserted island in the Sea of Marmara,
where they were left to perish. As both sides to the dispute wrote articles for
the public press, the latter can be mined - and has been mined - for evidence
on changing attitudes to animals. Remarkably the presence of cats was never
challenged; and as a result it is almost impossible to find out anything about
the process by which cats 'colonized' Istanbul.

36 Frederic Hasselquist, Voyages dans te Levant. dans les annees /749. 50, 51 & 52,
contenant des observations sur / 'histoire naturel!e. la medicine, / 'agriculture & Ie
commerce, & particulierement sur I 'histoire naturelle de /a Terre Sainte, ed. Carl von
Linn~. translated from German by Marc A. Eidous (Paris: Delalain, 1769, reprint
Kessinger Publishing); Domenico Sestini, Beschreibung des Kanals von Konstontinopel.
des .d~igen Wein-. Acker- und Garten-Baues und der Jagd der Tiirken, translated by
Christian Joseph Jagemann (Hamburg: Carl Ernst Bohn, 1786).
37 Hasselquist, Voyages dans le Levant, pp. 79, 84,128-129.
 Introduction 27

Pictorial sources
We will begin with Ottoman miniatures: art historians have done very
little work on animal images, and therefore I crave the readers' pardon for
any inaccuracies. Like other potentates before and after them, Ottoman
sultans hunted on horseback and as we have seen, used dogs and falcons as
auxiliaries. Given the prestige of the royal hunts these events were favoured
topics for sixteenth-century miniaturists depicting the lives and deeds of
Ottoman sultans. Among the creatures hunted, gazelles and deer were
particularly in evidence; in addition the sultans and their attendants rode fine
horses. As we might expect, these latter creatures also appeared in battle
scenes and parades. But the depiction of animals for their own sake, a feature
common enough in Indian miniatures, was relatively rare in the Ottoman
context; and if such images did occur they typically focused on horses and
birds. J8 Moreover while Moghul emperors sometimes commissioned
portrait-style miniatures of favoured horses or falcons showing these
creatures in their uniqueness, the Ottoman court was but marginally
interested in having the particular characteristics of such animals recorded
for posterity: the generic seemed more important than the 'individual'.
As miniatures in the Ottoman world depended largely on palace
patronage, animals featuring in festivities and other events organized by and
for the court show up with relative frequency. Sometimes we are in for a
surprise: thus in a seventeenth-century miniature we encounter an armed
horseman wearing the mask of a steer and riding a horse disguised as an
elephant. Perhaps such combinations were merely products of the artist's
imagination." But it is also possible that similar items were part of festive
parades. From the famous miniatures of Levni illustrating the circumcision
of Ahmed's III sons in 1720, we know that at least one 'mock elephant' took
part: for a miniature shows the elephant-like contraption spitting fireworks
from its trunk; this effect would have been impossible had the animal been
real. Other imaginary creatures show up in miniatures depicting the signs
that supposedly were to precede the Last Judgement; thus animals exercised
the artists' creative imagination even though non-human creatures did not
feature very prominently in Ottoman miniatures."

38 Metin And, Turkish Miniature Painting: The Ottoman period, 3rd edition (Istanbul: Dost
Kitabevi, 1982), pp. 137-139.
39 And, Turkish Miniature Painting, p. 27.
40 And, Turkish Miniature Painting, p. 70. For animals appearing in festive parades see
Metin And, 40 Days, 40 Nights: Ottoman weddings, festivities, processions (Istanbul:
Creative Yayincthk ve Tamum Ltd Sirketi, 2000), pp. 152-163; idem, Osmanli Tasvir
Sanatlan: I Minyatiir (Istanbul: Tiirkiye i, Bankasr, 2004), pp- 281, 393-418.
28 Suraiya Faroqhi

Some additional evidence comes from the various albums of paintings

'from daily life' that European and later also Ottoman artists produced for a
European clientele: in correspondence to the verbal accounts already
discussed, we find pictures of Ottoman gentlemen buying birds from a street
trader and then setting them free as a meritorious act, or else a man of
modest status, perhaps a cook, feeding bits of meat or liver to stray· cats.
Horses, sometimes decorated and of impressive allure, formed part of
wedding and other processions, and the falconers of the sultans also cut a
fine figure. Elephants, rhinos, giraffes and camels figured in these volumes
because a European public considered them highly exotic." But once again
the animals appeared not as subjects of interest in and of themselves but
rather because they were part of the Istanbul scenery.
However an interesting set of woodcuts depicting the fauna of Egypt
can be found in the travelogue of Hans Jacob Breuning von Buchenbach,
who spent some time in Egypt on his way to Jerusalem and whom we have
already encountered as a witness to Ottoman charity towards animals."
Unfortunately I do not know whether the drawings on which the woodcuts
are based were the work of the author or of some other person. Breuning also
described the animals in question verbally, his account included the muskrat,
the ichneumon and of course the crocodile. The author knew that the storks
nesting in his native land spent part of their lives in Egypt, and understood
that some of these birds must have been based in that country for most of the
year, as he saw them when visiting Egypt in the month of August. In
addition there are the drawings of the eighteenth-century Russian pilgrim to
Jerusalem Vasilii Grigorovich-Barskii, which Svetlana Kirillina will
introduce in the present volume.
Further imagery has become available in the catalogue of a major
exhibition concerning horses in the Islamic Middle East and North Africa.
Certainly this exhibition was but marginally concerned with the Ottoman
Empire; and quite a large section highlighted the work of nineteenth-century
painters including Eugene Delacroix, who visited Algeria in the decades
after the French conquest and became fascinated with the local horses.
Where the Ottoman central provinces were concerned, one of the major
exhibits consisted of high-quality horse-gear produced in the 1600s and
today in the Kremlin museum; in all probability at least some of these pieces
had been brought to Moscow as gifts by the fur traders whose job it was to

41 Metin And, Istanbul in the 16th Century: The city. the palace, daily life (Istanbul: Akbank,
1994), pp. 148-155,217,232,234-235.
42 Breuning, Orientalische Reifi. pp. 135-167.
 Introduction 29

secure the luxury furs with which the sultans customarily honoured high
dignitaries.·3
Unfortunately the early photographers active in the Ottoman lands such
as Vassilaki Kargopouio, Guillaume Berggren, James Robertson and his son-
in-law Felice Beato, Pascal Sebag, Abdullah Freres or Ali Sami Bey also
produced images of animals only in exceptional cases." A photograph by
Vassilaki's son Konstantin shows one of the decorated ox-carts used by
well-to-do women for their outings, a motif that the elder Kargopoulo also
had depicted." On parade grounds, Ottoman officers might occasionally
appear together with their mounts; and in some cases the objective was to
show beautiful horses as well as the skills of their riders. In a totally different
mode, the scenes of misery showing Muslim refugees from the Balkans upon
arrival in the Ottoman capital included whatever livestock these families had
been able to salvage.
But on the whole the European customers of early photography studios
wanted pictures of real or imaginary 'typical Ottoman figures' as well as
cityscapes and depictions of major historical monuments, while Ottoman
patrons demanded carte-de-visite type and also other kinds of portraits.

43 Exhibition catalogue Chevaux et cavaliers arabes dans les arts d'Orient et d'Occident,
Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, 26 November 2002-30 March 2003, cd. Jean-Pierre
Digard et alii (Paris: Gallimard and Institut du Monde Arabe, 2002), pp. 149-159.
44 Renate Schiele and Wolfgang Muller-Wiener, 19. Yiizytlda istanbul Hayatt (Istanbul: n. p.,
1988), p. 80: a coach drawn by two horses; Gilbert Beauge and Engin Cizgen, Images
d'empire: Aux origine de la photographie en Turquie, Tiirklye'de fotogrofin oncideri
(Istanbul: IFEA and istanbul Fransrz Kultur Merkezi, n. d. probably 1992), p. 51: a
saddled camel in Izmir; p. 168: street dogs and a passer-by in Istanbul; p. 227: a cavalry
soldier on horseback; p. 231: Major Giritli Ismail Pasa and his trained horse; pp. 234-235 a
cavalry parade in Uskudar; p. 237: the coach of Sultan Abdiilhamid II and horses waiting
for their riders during the Friday prayers in Ytldrz mosque; Engin Cizgen,
Phosographer/Fotografa Ali Sami 1866-1936 (Istanbul: Haser Kitabevi, 1989), p. 44/1:
sheep and shepherd in Thrace; pp. 92-93/44: Major Giritli Ismail Pasa and his trained
horse; pp. 108-109/58: horses waiting for their riders during the Friday prayers in Ytldrz
mosque (bot~. these photographs also in Beauge and Cizgen, Images d 'empire, pp. 231 and
237); Engin Ozendes, Abdullah Freres: Osment, Saraytrun Fotografalan (Istanbul: Yapi
ve Kredi, 1998), p. 78: -a cavalry parade (see also Beauge and Cizgen, Images d'empire. p.
237); -p. 90: a street seller and street dogs; p.139: 'silhouetted' dogs. in a street; Nurhan
Atasoy (ed.), Ytldtz Sarayt Fotograf Albiimlerinden Yadigiir-t istanbul (Istanbul: Akkok
Yaymlan, 2007), p. 75: sheep grazing in front of the famous ancient plane tree of
Biiytlkdere; p. 101: goats grazing in front of the Byzantine land walls; p. 108: street dogs
in Galata, with local inhabitants looking on; p. 133: two packs of hunting dogs on a
country estate; p. 167: buffalo-drawn can used in the unloading of construction material in
the port oflstanbul; p. 295: selling sheep in front of Beyazit mosque.
45 Bahattin Ozruncay, Vassilaki Kargopoulo Photographer to His Majesty the Sultan
(Istanbul: BOS, 2000), pp. 95 and 269.
30 Suraiya Faroqhi

When it came to cityscapes, the sultans focused on modem institutions such

as train stations, barracks, schools, factories or hospitals. Surprisingly the
numerous photographs of the Bosporus show no evidence of the sea-gulls,
cormorants, crows and pigeons that enliven Istanbul seashores today: thus
the well-known breakwater of Haydarpasa, which today is always occupied
by sea-gulls and cormorants, in early photographs seems to have been totally
bare. In the older photographs this omission may be due to the fact that
moving objects could not be readily fixed on film, but for pictures taken
after 1900 this lack of birds really is surprising. Was the population of
seagulls and cormorants really much smaller a hundred or so years ago,' or
was there a specific reason for not showing them and perhaps even removing
them from the picture by means of retouches? At the present state of my
information I have no answer to this question. In a very few cases we see
images of animals raised on model farms. Of household pets there is little
evidence: apparently it was not fashionable to have children hold puppies or
kittens when their pictures were being taken, although the practice was not
unheard of.
As an exception to this relative lack of interest in animals on the part of
early photographers, we might mention the fairly numerous street scenes in
which dogs figured prominently. Given the controversy over Istanbul street
dogs mentioned above, several photographers have tackled the issue. In one
picture the observer watching the dogs is a man of gentlemanly appearance,
in another he seems to be desperately poor. Yet another photograph shows
the dogs alone, without any human beings in evidence. Presumably the
newspaper debate about the fate of Istanbul's dogs prompted the taking of
these pictures; perhaps some were even meant for reproduction by the public
press."
Ottoman archaeology is still in its beginnings and until very recently
archaeologists were in the habit of discarding the uppermost layers of any
site they were excavating, in order to arrive more quickly at the remains of
antiquity, the Byzantine and more recently the Seljuk finds. Unfortunately
the research on archaeology that is now beginning also has evidenced little
interest in the animals that inhabitants of the Ottoman countryside must have
bred. 'Certainly a vegetarian diet prevailed; but even so it is worth noting that
the index of the important new study ofUzi Baram and Lynda Carroll on the
historical archaeology of the Ottoman Empire contains entries for olives,

46 A number of these photographs. have been reproduced in Catherine Pinguet, Les chiens
d'/stanbul: Des rapports entre ['homme et l'animal de l'Antiquite a nos jours (St.
Pourcain-sur-Sioule: Bleu autour, 2008); my thanks to Nicolas Michel for providing me
with a copy.
 Introduction 31

grain, carobs, hashish and opium, but none for camels, cattfe or sheep."
However we can hope that in the not too remote future archaeologists will
get interested in the investigation of animal bones found on Ottoman sites.
A very provisional balance sheet
All summaries are highly subjective. With this warning in mind, we will
now survey the questions connected to the relationship between animals and
people, which historians of the Ottoman central provinces, in other words
Istanbul, the Balkans and Anatolia have studied during recent years.
Unavoidably given the available documentation, the state apparatus and its
demands upon the sultans' subjects and their animals have occupied centre
stage. Historians have focused on the question of how animals served to
underline the ruler's magnificence and on the other hand, how the
administration collected falcons, camels and horses to serve the royal hunt
but also the postal service and military campaigns. Other topics of
occasional interest include transportation services required by merchants and
other travellers. In a different line of thought, historians have studied the
plague, which however people of the early modern period did not normally
connect to the feeding habits and other activities of animals.
Attitudes to animals have come into view but rarely, apart from some
outside perspectives, including the manner in which seventeenth-century
Englishmen conceptualized Ottoman fauna." As we have seen, during the
last years of the Ottoman Empire's existence, under the government of the
Committee for Union and Progress (1908-1918 with interruptions) attitudes
towards animals living in the capital city changed considerably, and several
authors have discussed this development. In a totally different vein, images
of animals including fantastic creatures such as demons also have become a
subject of study."
To begin with the realm of representations: art historians who have
touched on animal imagery usually have not written works which indicate
their focus in the title. Rather paragraphs or chapters dedicated to this topic
appear here and there; and for people who like the present author are not art

47 Uzi Baram and Lynda Carroll (eds.), A Historical Archaeology of the Ottoman Empire:
Breaking new ground (Binghamton, NY: Kluwer Academic and Plenum Publishers,
2000).
48 Gerald Maclean, "The Sultan's beasts: Encountering Ottoman fauna," in idem, Looking
East: English writing and the Ottoman Empire before 1800 (Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 145-173.
49 John Michael Rogers, "The Chester Beatty Suleymanname again," in Persian Painting
from the Mongols to the Qajars: Studies in honour of Basil W Robinson, ed. Robert
Hillenbrand (London: 1. B. Tauris, 2000), pp. 187-200.
32 Suraiya Faroqhi

historians, locating such work is purely a matter of chance. John Michael

Rogers has studied the demons that in a manuscript from the time of Sultan
Bayezid II (r. 1481-1512) line up under the throne of the queen of Sheba: as
he has pointed out, the arrangement does not conform to Muslim models
depicting this scene. Possibly the sources were Spanish manuscripts that had
arrived in Istanbul in the baggage of the Jewish doctors who had migrated to
the Ottoman capital after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492.'0 But
in addition the demons, some of whom are dog-headed while others show
elephant-like ears, conform to medieval demonology in the Islamic tradition
of the Adjii'ib al-makhliikat, a testimony to the exchange of texts between
authors of different religions for which Islamic Spain was famous.
We know even less about the meanings conveyed by animal figures
that, especially in the Anatolian dervish milieu, sometimes decorated
domestic architecture and ceremonial implements. Serare Yetkin has
discussed a halberd from the dervish lodge of Haci Bektas, located in the
small central Anatolian town of the same name between Ankara and
Urgup." The halberd is dated to 1181/1767-68, and for the historian, this is a
rare piece of good fortune. But as the author has observed, the style is quite
'old-fashioned' for the period; and she has suggested links to medieval
artwork. Presumably the lion depicted on the halberd referred to the lion of
'Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, which was/is a major
element in the symbolism favoured by Bektashi dervishes and their
adherents. However, the author has not been able to demonstrate with the
same degree of confidence how the other animal shown on the halberd
connected to the Bektashi complex of images; for a horse transformed into a
unicorn does not playa major role in the symbol world of these dervishes.
Perhaps as she suggests, the creature was intended as a deer, an animal
which was in fact of some importance in the world-view of early Ottoman
dervishes.
Other representations of animals concern the realm of belles lettres. In
the Islamic context, charity is a virtue not only when practiced towards
human beings but also towards animals; but Ottomanist historians have not
often studied this aspect, and thus the recent article by Gisela Prochazka-Eisl
which we have just encountered definitely breaks new ground." The author
has looked for the literary models that Nergisi could have used, and has
found out that while there were several stories whose content resembled that

so Rogers, "The Chester Beatty Suleymdnname again."

SI Serare Yetkin, "Hact Bektas Miizesinde Bulunan Figiirlu Teber," Sanat Tarihi Yl1ilgl, 11
(1981),pp.I77-188.
52 Prochazka-Eisl, "Gerechtigkeit fiir cinen Hund."
 Introduction 33

recounted by the seventeenth-century Ottoman prose writer, none of them

was close enough for us to view Nergisi's work as merely a revamping of
older models. Evidently, the seventeenth-century author was anxious to get
across the idea that in the eyes of God, even a dog had a claim to fair
treatment, and although the writer was famous, or in some circles infamous,
for his complicated style, his story is more than a mere stylistic exercise.
Concerning the medieval Middle East and with but a minimal interest in
the Ottoman world, a recent study by Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen highlights
the role of dervish culture in shaping popular attitudes to animals; this
question still needs to be studied in the Ottoman context.53 It is rather a pity
that historians and ethnologists dealing with 'popular religion' in Anatolia
have mainly discussed attitudes to trees and rocks, but have tended to
downplay animals when studying the 'relics' of nature cults observed in
Anatolia during the first half of the twentieth century." Only the works of
Ahmet Yasar Ocak contain some reference to this problematic."
Herbert Eisenstein's study of animal accounts in Arabic literature
touches upon the Ottoman era only in passing, for instance when discussing
the work of the sixtccnth-eentury doctor Da'ud al-Antaki that Housni
Alkhateeb Shehada has treated in extenso in the present volume." Eisenstein
also gives us the summary of a book on pigeons/doves by the late Ottoman
author MIkhail Sabbagh (died 1816) that discusses the manner in which
these animals should be raised in order to permanently attach these birds to
the persons of their owners; this section is relevant to the article on
pigeons/doves found in the present book. But beyond these direct
connections, Eisenstein's book is important for the fullness of the material
covered: apart from works on the animal world properly speaking, among
other genres he has discussed the Koran and legal texts, poetry and belles
lettres, lexicography, historical and geographical works, medicine including
veterinary science and even the occurrence of animals in dream books.
Although the overwhelming majority of the authors treated by Eisenstein
flourished long before the Ottoman sultans appeared in the Arab world,

53 Mohammed Hocine Benkheira, Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen and Jacqueline Sublet, L 'Animal

en islam (Paris: Les lodes savantes, 2005), pp. 139-170.
54 Compare for example Hikmet Tanyu, Turklerde Tasla llgiti Inanclar (Ankara: Ankara
Universitesi Ilahiyat Fakiiltesi, 1967).
55 Ahmet Yasar Ocak, Beaast Menkibelerinde islam oncesi Motifler (Istanbul: Enderun,
1983), pp. 155-179.
56 Herbert Eisenstein, Einfiihrung in die arabische Zoographie: Das tierkundliche Wissen in
der arabisch-islamischen Literatur (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1991); the author has
also written a number of articles concerning this problematic, cited in the bibliography of
his work.
34 Suraiya Faroqhi

educated members of the Istanbul elite had read many of the texts that this
author had covered; and when people like Evliya Celebi penned their
accounts of the strange fauna of Egypt, they normally used the accounts of
their medieval predecessors.
We have highlighted 'representations' as a scholarly topic because it
ranks high on the agenda of contemporary scholars. However Ottoman
documents are for the most part concerned with much more utilitarian issues.
It was a major concern to supply the sultans' palace and thus underwrite the
magnificence for which it had become famous: in this vein, we possess a few
studies of sultanic hunting, which include the manner in which the palace
collected hawks and falcons; much less is known about hounds and horses.
In the 1970s Bistra Cvetkova focused on falconers, with special emphasis on
the sub-provinces of Nigbolu and Vidin, in the context of her work on
Balkan economy and society under Ottoman rule. Cvetkova' s main concern
was with the special status of the falconers; and she provided a detailed
study of the registers in which the rights and duties of the latter were on
record. Given the focus of Ottoman documents the actual hawks and falcons
were not - and could not possibly be - her major interest. Moreover
Cvetkova's vision of social and economic history fore-grounded
relationships between on the one hand, the peasants inhabiting the provinces
that were later to become Bulgaria and on the other, the Ottoman central and
provincial administrations." In a context where Bulgarian nationalism along
with a not very sophisticated version of Marxism formed the dominant
ideology, Ottomanists were in a difficult position; and as a result historians
of the rural world of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries had little time for
subjects considered marginal, including animals.
As for other creatures serving as auxiliaries in the sultan's chase, a
recent study by Tiilay Artan focuses on an early seventeenth-century
manuscript containing sections on the treatment of horses and the royal hunt.
This last section is quite a rarity, as books on hunting were not very popular
among Ottoman intellectuals." For the most part, the source deals with the

57 Bistra Cvetkova, "La fauconnerie dans les sancaks de Nicopol et de Vidin aux XVe et
XV Ie siecles," istanbul Universitesi Edebiyat Fakidtesi Tarih Dergisi, 32 (1979) (= Ord.
Prof Ismail HakJa Uzuncarstlt Hdura Sayls,), pp. 795-818. The author (1926-1982) also
referred to her monograph on the subject that in the late 19705 was in the course of
publication; I do not know whether it ever appeared.
58 Tilley Artan, "A Book of Kings produced and presented as a treatise on hunting,"
Muqarnas, 25 (2008) (= Frontiers of Islamic Art and Architecture: Essays in Celebration
ofOleg Grabar's eightieth birthday), pp. 299-330. Compare also several contributions in
Av ve Avalsk Kltabt, ed. by Emine Giirsoy NaskaJi and Hilal Oytun (Istanbul: Kitabevi,
2008)
 Introduction 35

justification of the actions of Ahmed I (r. 1603-1617), who had come to the
throne as a thirteen-year old youngster. Visitors of today's Istanbul
remember him as the sultan responsible for the construction of the famous
'Blue Mosque' as foreigners often call it; but in his own time, this building
project was much contested as Ahmed I had not gained any great victories
and some people therefore did not feel that he had the right to order the
construction of an elaborate mosque complex.59 Ahmed I also favoured
hunting; and this predilection may have prompted the anonymous writer to
produce his unusual treatise. Artan has suggested that the volume has
remained incomplete because of the sultan's death at a young age. Be that as
it may, the author clearly aimed at defending his ruler against accusations of
being too much interested in hunting and thus neglecting his royal duties.
Therefore he highlighted the chase as a training-ground for war against
infidels and heretics, and also as an opportunity for the sultan to meet people
outside of the court and thereby broaden his vision of the people that he
ruled. Given these preoccupations, we might once again expect the animals
to take a back seat; but as the manuscript has been lavishly illustrated by
competent miniature artists, this is far from being the case especially where
horses are concerned.
Other studies of the Ottoman court and its animals focus on the sultan's
menagerie, which as we have seen, was accessible to outsiders and a
favourite among foreign travellers. To my knowledge we do not possess a
statement by an Ottoman official explaining the importance of displaying
rare creatures to demonstrate the power of the sultan, so that our
interpretations remain somewhat speculative. Whatever comments survive
concerning possible meanings, occur in the works of foreign visitors and it is
best to view them with caution. In a recent article I have suggested that
Ottoman officials exhibited a tendency, well documented by the 'festival
books' of 1582 and 1720 (surname), of exposing the populace to an element
of danger. The latter was either quite real, as in the case of lions walking in
parades together with their keepers, or at least make-believe, for instance
when human beings disguised as bears attacked other humans and the latter
only discovered after a bad scare, that it was all a joke." In such a situation

59 Rhoads Murphey, "Politics and Islam: Mustafa Safi's version of the kingly virtues as
presented in his Ziibdetii'/ Tevdrih, or Annals of Sultan Ahmed, 1012-1023 A.H./1603-
1614 A.D.," in Frontiers a/Ottoman Studies: State, province, and the West, ed. by Colin
Imber and Keiko Kiyotaki, 2 vols. (London, New York: I. B. Tauris, 2005), vol. I, pp. 5-
24.
60 Suraiya Faroqhi, "Exotic animals at the Sultan's court," in eadem, Another Mirror for
Princes: The public image afthe sultans and its reception (Istanbul: The Isis Press, 2008),
pp, 87-10 I.
36 Suraiya Faroqhi

the aim may have been to show that the sultan's power was so great that he
could save his subjects even from wild and dangerous creatures like lions
and bears - or at least this was true during the age when the Ottoman rulers
were at their most confident, though not necessarily in later periods.
Transportation by water had its obvious limits given the empire's
geographical configuration; therefore the projects of Ottoman rulers both
military and civilian depended on the availability of horses and camels and
the administration paid considerable attention to transportation problems.
Among the pioneers to explore this complex were Tayyip Gokbilgin and
especially Cengiz Orhonlu." Gokbilgin discussed the role of nomads and the
services the latter performed for the sultans' armies and construction
projects, in which their possession of camels and horses obviously was
crucial. However given the early date of this book and the all but exclusive
concern of the Ottoman administration with the performance of people as
opposed to that of animals, it does not come as a great surprise that
Gokbilgin does not have much to say about the camels and horses raised by
Balkan nomads.
Cengiz Orhonlu worked in a similar fashion; his numerous articles on
transportation questions between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries
appeared in scholarly journals during the 1960s and 1970s and came out in
book foim only after his death. Orhonlu's approach was novel in that he took
account of the fact that not only members of the Ottoman administration
moved around and therefore needed mounts; merchants and other travellers
also entered his circle of vision. But for the most part Orhonlu focused on
river and sea travel, a fact that automatically limited his concern with
animals.
In Colin Heywood's two important studies of the Ottoman postal
system we find some albeit indirect information on the horses supplied to the
sultans' couriers." After all it was the responsibility of the men in charge of

61 M. Tayyip Gokbilgin, Rume/i'de Yiiriikler. Tatar/ar ve Evldd-s Fdtihiin (Istanbul: istanbul

[lniversitesi, 1957); Cengiz Orhonlu, Osman" lmparatorlugunda Sehircilik ve Ulastm
iizerine Arasttrmalar, ed. Salih Ozbaran (Izmir: Ege Universitesi Edebiyat Fakilltesi,
reprint 1984).
62 Colin Heywood, "The Ottoman Menzi/hane and U/ak System in Rumeli in the t 8th
Century," in Tiirktye'nin Sosya/ ve Ekonomik Tarihi (/07/-/920), ed. Osman Okyar and
Halil lnalctk (Ankara: Hacettepe Universitesi, 1980), pp. 179-186 (reprinted in idem,
Writing Ottoman History: Documents and interpretations (Aldershot and Burlington, VT:
Ashgate Press, Variorum, 2002, as article X); idem, "Some Turkish archival sources for
the history of the menzilhane network in Rumeli during the eighteenth century," Bogazif;i
Universitesi Dergisi - Beseri Bilimler/Humanities, IV -v (1976-77), pp. 39-55 (reprinted in
idem, Writing Ottoman History, as article IX).
 Introduction 37

wayside stations to make quality mounts available at short notice. In case

this did not happen, or else if the couriers were dissatisfied with their
animals and unwilling to make do until the next station, they might well
carry off any horses they encountered on the way. From the 1400s onwards,
we therefore find dervishes securing the privilege that official couriers could
not seize their horses. Furthermore, if the travellers inconvenienced or even
robbed by officialdom complained in Istanbul, the horses which they had
lost well might leave a paper trail.
For the most part Gokbilgin, Orhonlu and Heywood worked with
unpublished Ottoman archival documents. On the other hand, the French
geographer Xavier de Planhol used mainly European in addition to published
Ottoman sources and Turkish secondary literature to produce a number of
studies on the use of animals mainly in Anatolian contexts, including the
Angora goat, the ox serving as a beast of burden and the hybridized camel."
De Planhol aimed at writing comprehensive cultural histories of the Islamic
world, of which he produced a number, and he probably regarded his work
on Ottoman Anatolia as merely a part of this larger project. Nor were
animals a particular concern of his, for the author was just as interested in
the now long-extinct grape cultivation in the region of Trabzon or the use
that the inhabitants of the town of Denizli made of their gardens.
In a sense Xavier de Planhol's work parallels that of Richard Bulliet,
who in a now classical study investigated the rise of the camel in medieval
Middle Eastern society. Anatolia, where carts and camels coexisted over the
centuries, differed substantially from Egypt and Syria, where wheeled
vehicles, abundant in antiquity, virtually disappeared until the advent of the
railways." Camels were far more expensive in Anatolia than further south, at
least in part because it was difficult and costly to produce the hybrid types
descended from Bactrian camels and dromedaries that alone could survive in
the cool and humid mountains bordering the Black Sea coast." Using an epic

63 Xavier de Planhol, "Rayonnement urbain et selection animale: une solution nouvelle du

probleme de la chevre d' Angora," Secretariat d'Etat aux Universites, Comite des travaux
historiques et scientifiques. Bulletin de la section de geographie, LXXXII (1975-77), pp.
179-196; idem, "Le boeuf porteur"; idem, "La signification geographique du livre de Dede
Korkut," Journal Asialique, CCLIV, 2 (1966), pp. 225-244.
64 Richard W. Bullier, The Camel and the Wheel (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Pres);
Suraiya Faroqhi, "Camels, wagons, and the Ottoman state," International Journal of
Middle East Studies, 14 (1982), pp. 523-539 and eadem, "On Yedinci Ytizyrlm Ikinci
Yansmda Devecilik ve Anadolu Gocebeleri {Danismendli Mukaraasr)," in IX Turk Tarih
Kongresi. Kongreye Sunulan Btldiriler (Ankara: Turk Tarih Kurumu, 1988), vol. II, pp.
923-932.
ss Bulliet, The Camel and the Wheel, pp. 231-236.
38 Suraiya Faroqhi

recorded in the 1400s but whose genesis must go further back, Xavier de
Planhol has given a graphic account of the dismay of the Turkic immigrants
when confronted with the dense pine forests covering the mountains south of
Trabzon, uninhabited except by 'unbelievers' and their pigs. Only when the
appropriate camels became available did these areas open up to the
newcomers.
In 1993 the medievalist and specialist of Anatolian nomad life Faruk
Siimer published a study of horsemanship among the Turks, which accorded
a special place to the central Anatolian nomads known as the Atceken, once
famous for their horses." Following a general introduction concerning the
caliphal period the book focuses not directly on horses but rather on horse-
gear; the illustrations show non-courtly items with an emphasis on the
regional variations that the author had observed on basically utilitarian items
which however also contain a decorative element. Surner's work is
noteworthy for bringing together information from written sources with
elements of a material culture that he regarded as worthy of preservation
even though the economic and cultural changes of recent decades largely had
resulted in the disappearance of traditional Anatolian horsemanship.
In the same year Ali Abbas Cinar published a work of veterinary
science (baytarname) composed in 1836 by an unknown author; it belonged
to a long tradition of such writings, which had begun three centuries earlier,
in 1536, with the translation of a classical Arabic work into Ottoman
Turkish." The first section of the editor's lengthy introduction to the
baytarname, for which he used a number of similar works available in
Turkish manuscript collections, focused on the classification of horses and
the social roles attached to them. Different sicknesses of the horse and the
home-made remedies with which their owners treated them were the subject
of the second section. Approaching his texts from a strongly nationalist
viewpoint, the editor mainly wished to show how an originally 'foreign' text
had been assimilated in the Turkish milieu.
Studies on animals in agriculture have been very limited so far, but the
problematic recently has been taken up where Ottoman Egypt is concerned,
especially by Nicolas Michel and Alan Mikhail." Michel has discussed
animals working on the Egyptian dykes that canalized the Nile waters and

66 Faruk Siimer, Turklerde Atahk ve Binicilik: (Istanbul: Turk Ddnyast Arasurmaian Vakfi,
1983).
67 Ali Abbas Cinar, Tiirklerde At ve A/pM (Ankara: T. C. Kiiltur Bakanhgi 1993).
68 Michel, "Travaux aux digues" and Alan Mikhail, "Animals as property in early-modem
Ottoman Egypt," to be published in Journal of the Economic and Social History of the
Orient.
 Introduction 39

thus added greatly to the surfaces usable for agriculture. On the other hand,
Mikhail has focused on the ownership of animals, in other words the legal
aspect that has come to the forefront in much Ottomanist historiography
appearing in recent years. As both cattle and water buffaloes were expensive
beasts, they were often the most valuable possessions of those peasants
fortunate enough to own them. Villagers with fewer resources often held
mere shares in these animals; and this state of affairs might lead to
complications as many cows and female buffaloes could freely browse and
thus produced calves that might become objects of litigation. The articles by
Colette Establet and Michel Tuchscherer in the present volume tie in with
this emerging historiography.
We will only refer in passing to the conjunction of bacilli, fleas and rats
responsible for plague and other epidemics; for as we have seen, people of
the early modern period would not have regarded this disease as in any way
related to the animal world. For the medieval period, much of the major
work is due to Michael Dols, who has emphasized the different approaches
taken by Muslims and Christians with respect to contagion; these were to
persist in the l500s, l600s and l700s as well." By and large, Christians
considered it acceptable behaviour to flee those areas in which the disease
had manifested itself; if people remained of their own free will to succour'
the victims, they were often considered saints. In practical terms, this
behaviour meant that the plague spread to areas which otherwise might have
remained immune; but from an individual perspective, flight made sense as
it did in fact reduce the relevant person's chances of catching the plague. In
the Muslim world by contrast, people were expected to stay in place and
accept the will of God: by and large they did so. Daniel Panzac and more
recently Alan Mikhail have shown how these attitudes worked themselves
'out on the ground': while Panzac has emphasized the migrations of the
bacilli from fleas to rodents to people and from one region of the Ottoman
world to the next, Mikhail's concern is with the 'ecological system'
prevalent in a single region, of which the plague was an integral part."
Mikhail's work on the plague of 1791 in Egypt has shown how the epidemic,
in conjuncture with other natural disasters, created an environment in which
the survival ofhurnan beings came to be chancy at best.

69 Michael W. Ools, The Black Death in the Middle East (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1977).
10 Daniel Panzac, La peste dans l'Empire ottoman, 1700-/850 (Louvain: Editions Peeters,
t 985); Alan Mikhail, "The nature of plague in late eighteenth-century Egypt," Bulletin of
the History of Medicine, 82 (2008), pp. 249-275.
 40 Suraiya Faroqhi

As the last section of our survey, we briefly will turn to the debate
concerning the modem-style contrast between animal protection and the
ruthless exploitation of living beings that began during the last years of the
Ottoman Empire and is still on the agenda today. The most relevant study is
a recent book by Catherine Pinguet, who is also a contributor to our volume.
The author has analyzed the documentation in Ottoman and foreign
newspapers; from her account it appears that the debate on whether or not
the street dogs of Istanbul were to be tolerated was part and parcel of an
opposition between 'tradition' and 'modernity'. Many modernists were
avowed enemies of street dogs, although there were exceptions; thus the
one-time personal doctor of Sultan Abdulhamid II (r. 1876-1909) Spyridon
Mavroyeni, certainly not an out-and-out adherent of 'tradition', was an
ardent defender of the dogs' right to share Istanbul's living space. Pinguet's
book contains quite a few asides on the current situation; while in principle
today's Istanbul city administration says that most dogs should be spayed
and then turned loose, it seems that the funds available for this purpose are
. small and in spite of protestations to the contrary, all too often street dogs are
simply killed off."
Our contributors and their studies
Apart from this Introduction our volume will consist of four main
sections, named 'Representations', 'Animals at work', 'The Ottoman elite
enjoying its animals', and lastly 'Between aggression and protection'.
Benjamin Arbel's article "The attitude of Muslims to animals: Renaissance
perceptions and beyond" heads the first section. Discussing attitudes towards
non-human living beings current in the Muslim and Christian worlds of the
early modem period, Arbel paints a broad canvas, a kind of backdrop against
which we may read the following studies. The author concludes that
Muslims developed a notion that charity was due to all of God's creatures,
human as well as non-human. It was therefore acceptable to establish pious
foundations from which birds and other animals might benefit; and when in
the hands of people, animals were/are not merely instrumental but had a
God-given right to justice. Christian theology by contrast taught that animals
having no immortal souls, humans had a God-given right to treat them as
they saw fit. As a result in the Western world, notions that animals must be
protected typically resulted from a receding of theological world views, and
this process began in the Renaissance.
Arbel thus takes issue with those writers who assume that thinkers of
the Renaissance and humanism, with their glorification of man, of necessity

71 Pinguet, Les chiens d'lstanbul, p. 193.

 Introduction 41

felt that human beings could treat animals merely according to their own
concerns or even whims of the moment. To the contrary, through an analysis
of fifteenth-, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European travel writers who
visited the lands governed by the Mamluk and Ottoman sultans, Arbel points
out that in quite a few cases the authors described Muslim charity towards
animals either neutrally or even as a quality worthy of emulation. In some
thoughtful people the encounter with Muslim culture, through personal
witness or else mediated through literature, may even have stimulated a
more positive attitude towards the animal world.
This discussion introduces us to a variety of representations of animals
living in the Ottoman world; these are the work of Svetlana Kirillina, Hanife
Koncu and Dean Sakel. In "Representing the animal world of the Ottoman
Empire: the accounts of Russian Orthodox pilgrims (sixteenth - eighteenth
centuries)" Svetlana Kirillina studies the works of fourteen Russian pilgrims
of the 1500s, 1600s and 1700s, who on their way to the Holy Land, passed
through the Ottoman central provinces. To these Russians, travelling in
camel caravans was often a scary experience, although at least Bactrian
camels were not unknown in the Russian lands. Probably the pilgrims'
trepidation came more from' the crowds of human beings speaking in
unfamiliar languages than from the behaviour of the animals themselves.
Lack of experience with exotic creatures might lead to amusing
adventures: thus when visiting the sultan's lions in Istanbul one of the
pilgrims mistook a stuffed animal for the real thing and felt cheated when
discovering his mistake. To certain Russian visitors donkeys were something
of a surprise even though icon paintings of the Nativity frequently showed
this animal. In some cases the authors, not ever having seen a donkey in the
flesh as this creature does not tolerate the intense cold of the Russian winter,
apparently had viewed asses merely as a part of sacred history. Accordingly,
they were somewhat disconcerted to find that the image they knew had a
counterpart in the real world. In the same vein, the numerous crocodile
stories relayed by those pilgrims who had visited Egypt also had more
connection to the world of myth and legend than to any living animals. Quite
obviously our authors framed the beings that they saw or heard about in the
Ottoman Empire as forming part of their religious experience and also as a
source of astonishment and wonder. Negative reactions thus were not very
frequent. By contrast, the pilgrims were much less tolerant of certain human
beings they encountered, particularly the Bedouins with whose demands for
food and money they sometimes needed to comply. But in that respect their
attitude was not so different from that of Evliya Celebi who also considered
... _. .=_ =._.c-====~~----- _

42 Suraiya Faroqhi

no punishment too dire for Bedouins endangering the survival of the

pilgrimage caravan to Mecca."
Hanife Koncu's study "Doves/pigeons in Turkish classical poetry"
deals with the imagery of doves and pigeons found in Turkish-language
divan poetry of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. Known from Jewish,
Christian and Muslim religious literature, these animals with their colourful
wings, elegant flight, distinctive calls and long-time service to people as
carriers of messages have given rise to often elaborate imagery. As the call
of these birds resembles the question 'where to' in the Persian language, an
Ottoman poet has used it to express his disconsolate feelings when a more
fortunate rival chased him away from the door of his beloved. Or else the
wind of spring scattering about rose petals has been linked to a carrier
pigeon distributing letters, presumably from a beloved to a lover.
While Koncu focuses on the observation of nature that certain Ottoman
poets incorporated into their work, it is also interesting to note that these
writers usually used images of the plant and animal world as starting points
for daring similes and metaphors. The approach of these poets was certainly
very different from that of their twentieth-century colleagues such as for
instance Nazim Hikmet. When the latter created a verbal sketch of - for
instance - a steppe bird or animal he did so to evoke the atmosphere in
which to situate a story, but also to create an image of 'something
immediately recognizable and taken out of ordinary life' yet which had been
transmuted into poetry."
Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen takes us into the rather different world of
holy men in Mamluk and early Ottoman Egypt, focusing on Ahmad al-
Badawl, whose grave in the Delta town of Tanta remains a pilgrimage centre
even today. While historical information about this thirteenth-century figure
is very sparse, legend has made him into an immigrant from Morocco who
moreover was closely associated with the pilgrimage to Mecca and the
nostalgia of many Muslims for Arabia, the land of the Prophet Muhammad.
Badawf is of interest in our present context because of the closeness to

72 Evliya Celebi b. Dervis Mehemmed Ztlli, Ev/iyii Celebi Seyahatnamesi, vol. IX: Topkaps
Sarayi Kiuiiphanesi Bagdat 306, Siileymaniye Kiitiiphanesi Pertev Pasa 462, Sideymaniye
Kiuiiphanesi Hact Besir Ago 452 Numarah Yazmalarm Mukayeseli Transkripsyonu -
Ditini, ed. Yilcel Dagh, Seyit Ali Kahraman and Robert Dankoff (Istanbul: Yapr Kredi
Yaymlan, 2005), p. 295 and elsewhere.
73 Thus the murder of a baby by its mother and her lover in a lonely steppe village is
prefaced by the "most hopeless song in the world" sung by locusts and other insects; a kite
threateningly hovers over the scene and a passing fox throws the culpable couple a furtive
glance: Ndztm Hikmet, Memleketimden lnsan Manzaralan, 5 vols. (Istanbul: De
Yaytnevi, 1966-67), voL III, pp. 300-301.
 Introduction 43

camels that at least the hagiographers of the early seventeenth century

attributed to him: his unkempt appearance, rough behaviour and accesses of
fury reminded these authors of a male camel in rut, and they celebrated his
virility.
But at least as importantly legends first published in the nineteenth
century but possibly of far earlier vintage described Badawl as a being of
miraculous endurance, capable of carrying enormous loads. By this
characteristic the saint in the eyes of some of his followers resembled the tall
and vigorous dromedary that carried the so-called mahmal, an empty but
highly adorned palanquin by which Mamluk and later Ottoman sultans
asserted their sovereignty over the Hijaz. Even more potent was the mental
imagery in which the saint like a vigorous camel shouldered the miseries of
his followers and miraculously conveyed the latter to Arabia, where these
men and women hoped to experience joy and bliss in the presence of God
and His Prophet.
The fifth contribution, namely Dean Sakel's 'The Ottoman-era
Physiologus" concerns a sixteenth-century Greek-language version of the
ancient text known as the Physiologus in which animal stories of very
diverse backgrounds have been combined with the admonitions of a pious
Christian author. The time of writing remains unknown, as the oldest extant
manuscripts only date back to the early Middle Ages; and references to the
Physiologus in dated texts of late antiquity are often ambiguous. For the
authors who have cited stories occurring in this source may just as well have
known one or another of its 'predecessors' to say nothing of oral tradition: in
any case, the original Physiologus probably has been compiled between 200
and 500 CEo
Sakel's article discusses a fairly late exemplar of the Byzantine version
which had been copied throughout the medieval period. Furthermore he has
linked the manuscripts containing the particular version examined, which we
may call the 'Physiologus of Epiphanius' after the writer to whom this piece
has often erroneously been assigned, to the Istanbul Greek scholar Manuel
Malaxos. The 'Physiologus of Epiphanius' is an abridged version of the
Physiologus material intended to complement a far longer version of this
same text, whose author was the sixteenth-century bishop of Naupactos
(Lepanto) Damascenus Studites, a contemporary of Malaxos. As for the
latter, best known for his legal compendium called the Nomocanon, he made
a meagre living by teaching and producing manuscripts of his works for sale.
Sakel has concluded that the Byzantine version of the Physiologus must have
had its readers even in the later 1500s; for Malaxos would scarcely have
wasted his time on texts for which there was no immediate demand.
44 Suraiya Faroqhi

In the second section, focusing on animals at work, we will discuss the

studies of M. Erdem Kabadayi, Michel Tuchscherer and Colette Establet. In
his article "The introduction of merino sheep breeding in the Ottoman
Empire: successes and failures" Kabadayi focuses on the mid-nineteenth
century, when the sultan's government had become convinced that it needed
factories, particularly a woollen industry to satisfy the ever-increasing
demands of the military for uniforms.
After all with the destruction of the janissaries, the Jewish weavers of
Salonica who had so long been associated with this corps also had
disappeared, and now it was imperative to find entirely new sources of
woollen fabrics. Factories in Sliven - today in Bulgaria - and also in
Istanbul, some state-owned and others not, became the new producers. But
the government soon found out what manufacturers had long known, namely
that Balkan sheep produced wool of mediocre quality. As an answer to this
difficulty the Ottoman administration decided to import merino sheep from
Spain, especially rams that through cross-breeding with local ewes might
enable sheep-ranchers to upgrade their wool.
Official and private efforts to increase the quality and quantity of fibre
available to the factories at first were reasonably successful. However the
Empire as yet lacked a veterinary service to supervise cross-breeding; and
moreover the costs of the Crimean war and later the Russo-Ottoman
confrontation of the I 870s bankrupted the exchequer and soon terminated all
attempts at state-sponsored industrialization. With financial sovereignty a
thing of the past and the representatives of Ottoman state creditors - through
the Dette Ottomane - in control of crucial revenue sources, during the last
quarter of the nineteenth century the government was in no position to revive
attempts at improving sheep-breeds.
As our next step we will move back in time. In his study "Some
reflections on the place of the camel in the economy and society of Ottoman
Egypt" dealing with the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, Michel
Tuchscherer mainly has used travel accounts both European and Ottoman.
For as so often Evliya Celebi has provided a great deal of relevant
information, viewed moreover from the otherwise difficult-to-access
perspective of an Ottoman gentleman. In addition quite a few French authors
participating in the Description d 'Egypte project ordered by Napoleon
Bonaparte were interested in technology and thus have something to say on
the use to which the inhabitants of Egypt put their camels. Certainly the
work of these scholars was intended to further French control of Egypt and
they thus produced an early nineteenth-century example of arcana imperii.
But exactly for that reason the technological data should be reasonably
 Introduction 45

reliable, as Napoleon's short-lived government would not have benefited

from false information.
Tuchscherer's work discusses the camel as one of the major sources of
motor energy focusing especially on the differing uses to which
agriculturalists put their camels and oxen; while oxen ploughed and did other
work in the fields, camels carried grain to the threshing floor and afterwards
transported sacks full of wheat to Nile boats. Rice cultivators also had their
seedlings carried from the seed-beds to the more permanent fields on the
backs of camels. But these creatures were just as prominent in the urban
economy, the late sixteenth-century visitor Jean Paleme even claiming that
there were "thirty thousand" of these animals present in the city." In a
society which did not use carts and coaches, and where horseback-riding was
the closely guarded privilege of the male members of the elite, camels and
donkeys conveyed both persons and also loads. One of the never-ending
chores was the transportation of water. After all Cairo, with two to three
hundred thousand inhabitants one of the great metropolises of the early
modem Mediterranean region, was "locatedseveral kilometres away from the
Nile and had no source of water but the great river.
In long-distance trade based on Egypt, the camel at first glance seems to
have had few rivals; but Tuchscherer has demonstrated that in the long run,
boats successfully competed against these 'ships of the desert'. Thus in the
early sixteenth century camels had served merchants trading with Palestine
as well as the Hijaz and Yemen. But soon the development of the port towns
on the Mediterranean seaboard and the stabilization of Ottoman control over
the Red Sea enabled traders to profit from the relative cheapness of water
transport. Camels were thus less significant in the Egyptian economy of the
1600s than they had been a century earlier: and this observation should be a
warning against the facile assumption of all-out technological stagnation in
the Ottoman Empire during the early modem period.
In certain ways Colette Establet's work on Damascus "Live animals
owned by dead Damascenes: evidence from around 1700" parallels that of
Michel Tuchscherer, as she also has a good deal to say on camels and oxen.
However Establet's source base is quite different, as she deals with the
inventories of deceased Damascenes, both servitors and taxpaying subjects
of the far-away sultan in Istanbul. As a result her article answers questions
rather different from those treated by Tuchscherer. Particularly she
concentrates on the relationship between the prices of fodder and those paid
for oxen and horses. Due to the high price of most animal feeds few people

74 Jean Paleme, Voyage en Egypte, /58/, ed. Serge Sauneron (Cairo: IF AO, 1971), p. 69.
46 Suraiya Faroqhi

could afford to keep any beasts of burden and as a result transportation costs
were very high, especially as the little Barada River flowing near Damascus
could not compare with the Nile as an artery of transportation.
The upper class of Egypt in Mamluk as in Ottoman times had
developed a culture in which riding horses was the distinctive mark of the
male members of the governing elite. But Establet's article shows that the
will of the latter to protect this privilege against all comers was not nearly as
extreme in Damascus as in Cairo. In the Syrian metropolis a few well-to-do
and well-connected members ofthe subject class did manage to own horses;
but on the other hand, even relatively poor members of the military
establishment did the same thing, although they may have had a good deal of
trouble feeding their mounts. These men, but also the scribes who produced
the Damascus estate inventories, visibly appreciated horses; as a result the
documents described them in some detail, while camels and mules were
viewed as generic. In addition some horse-owners went to considerable
expense to decorate their animals with costly trappings; thus apart from
whatever workaday aims these animals may have served, they also
advertised the status of their owners.
Our third section dealing with the Ottoman elites enjoying their animals
is also the largest. Clearly this emphasis is an injustice in statistical terms as
many more animals served the taxpaying population. On the other hand, it is
also true that most extant sources deal with animals owned by members of
the governing establishment. The sultan's palace occupies centre stage; in
fact all contributions to this section but one deal with the animals that the
Ottoman rulers hunted, owned or received as diplomatic gifts. Although
Thomas Allsen's recent study of the royal hunt is not especially concerned
with the Ottoman sultans, focusing instead on Iran and China many Ottoman
rulers including Siileyman the Magnificent (r. 1520-1566), Aiuned I and
Mehmed IV (r. 1648-1687) spent a great deal of time and resources on
magnificent hunts." As elsewhere in Eurasia, game preserves were
established and elegant hunting pavilions constructed.
Gilles Veinstein's contribution "Falconry in the mid-sixteenth century
Ottoman Empire" deals with the different types of hawks and falcons present
in the sultans' aviary during the mid-1500s and the manner in which court
officers acquired them. For raptors generally needed to be raised by their
own parents; and thus villagers with special tax privileges supervised the
nests while a new generation of birds emerged, took the young animals out
when they were old enough and brought them to Istanbul. There the sultans'

75 Allsen, The Royal Hunt.

 Introduction 47

falconers selected those birds whose properties made them seem suitable for
the royal hunt.
The villagers' obligations were on record in special registers, and
Veinstein has focused on a relatively early item dated to 1552, during the
later years of the reign of Siilcyman the Magnificent. While the official in
charge did not cover all the regions that sometimes delivered falcons to the
Ottoman palace, he did include quite a few of them: in the Balkans the
districts of Filibe (today: Plovdiv), Zagra Yenice (Nova Zagora), Zagra Eski
(Stara Zagora), Giimiilcine (Komotini), as well as the entire sub-provinces
of Vize, Gelibolu (familiar to English speakers as Gallipoli), Kirkkilise
(Ktrklareli), Silistre (Silistra) and Vidin. Among the islands Semendirek
(Samothrace) and Aya Mavra (Leucade) also provided raptors, while in
western Anatolia, the districts and/or provinces of Manisa, Bolu and Karasi
sent birds as well. Furthermore, the mountains of south-western Anatolia
(Teke) were a major source of supply. Remarkably, from here the palace
procured not only falcons but also hoopoes. However by the mid-sixteenth
century the administration considered this system of raptor procurement
unsatisfactory; it is hard to determine whether the difficulties stemmed from
increased palace demand or were due to other reasons. Be that as it may
Gilles Veinstein has shown that in response to these difficulties the
administration increasingly demanded taxes instead of birds; in the long run,
this development must have meant that at least some raptor-procuring
villagers lost their special status and became ordinary taxpayers.
In "The Ottomans and hunting according to Julien Bordier's travelogue
(1604-1612)" Elisabetta Borrorneo has focused on the unpublished memoirs
of a Frenchman, thus dealing with the sultan's hunt from a rather different
perspective. Himself a passionate hunter Bordier, who made a living as a
squire to the French ambassador Jean de Gontaut-Biron, baron de Salignac,
was in charge of preparing the hunting parties of his master, who normally
set out into the woods several times a week. These hunts were however
pleasure trips only in part: for the ambassador often accompanied officials in
charge of the hunts of Ahmed I with whom he might conduct informal
negotiations. We may surmise that these dignitaries also ensured that the
ambassador did not poach on the game preserves of the Ottoman ruler. But
in addition to what transpired in the 'here and now' these men were well
placed to accede to high state office in the future, so that the ambassador if
he was lucky might build a network of useful alliances both for himself and
his successors.
Due to this exalted company Bordier was able to visit and describe in
some detail the kennels in which the royal hunting dogs lived in relative
48 Suraiya Faroqhi

luxury as befitted the high status of their master. Bordier also commented on
the gentle treatment that Ottoman subjects used when training their animals:
while he felt that as a result dogs or horses were not as thoroughly adapted to
human service as in France, he did appreciate the limited use of violence
against the creatures in question. Bordier also noted that shooting played but
a small part in the sultanic hunt, probably because it was more difficult to
kill an animal hit by a bullet in accordance with Islamic law than if it had
been caught by a falcon or wounded by an arrow. As a result the number of
animals 'bagged' was smaller than in the large hunts organized by European
courts.
In "Dogs, elephants, lions, a ram and a rhino on diplomatic mission:
animals as gifts to the Ottoman court" Hedda Reindl-Kiel has studied not
only the creatures mentioned in the title, but also costly horses. Presumably
we do not find these last-named animals in the title because the latter is
already very long: and thus the giraffes which also feature among the
presents of foreign potentates to the sultans likewise occur only in the text.
But in addition horses were favourites in the gift exchanges between Muslim
courts; on the other hand Hedda Reindl-Kiel is particularly interested in
creatures that the Ottoman sultan and his entourage would have considered
unusual.
Hunting dogs at first glance seem a most unsuitable gift to an
emphatically Muslim ruler; for according to Islamic belief they are unclean
animals. But in real life the sultans were interested in obtaining large and
fierce mastiffs suitable for the imperial hunt; and from an Ottoman
viewpoint perhaps it made sense to obtain them from non-Muslim sources
including at times the Habsburg emperors. Safavid envoys sometimes
presented the sultan with elephants that their rulers had obtained from India,
often with sumptuous caparisons; in 1620 a Safavid ambassador brought
along four of these massive 'tokens of prestige' in addition to two enormous
tigers and a rhino. While in India elephants featured in warfare, the Ottoman
court used them merely for display; but they significantly enhanced the
sultan's prestige and thus were acquired even when in the early nineteenth
century the Empire was in deep trouble.
As the last article covering the Ottoman court's relationship to its
animals, there is the study by Selcuk Esenbel'rOf birds and diplomacy: royal
gifts to Abdulhamid II". Hoping for the conclusion of a treaty, Japanese
noblemen and also the emperor repeatedly sent rare birds to this sultan (r.
1876-1909). Yet no fully fledged Ottoman and Japanese embassies ever
appeared in either Tokyo or Istanbul; for the Meiji government wanted an
'unequal treaty' of the kind to which the five European Great Powers had
 Introduction 49

forced the Chinese emperor to submit. Despite their totally different genesis,
by the late 1800s the capitulations that the Ottoman sultans had once granted
to European powers rather resembled these unequal treaties: and the
Ottoman side certainly was determined to avoid any further entanglements
of this kind." Formal diplomatic relations thus had to await the
establishment of the Republic of Turkey, when 'unequal treaties' were no
longer on the agenda.
But in the meantime, Yamada Torajiro (1866-1957) resided in Istanbul
for almost two decades while engaged both in trade and diplomatic
mediation. As apparent from a book that he wrote about his experiences, he
came to dearly love the Ottoman capital. Presumably it was upon Yamada's
suggestion that the Meiji government and visiting noblemen chose to present
rare birds to the palace: for an interest in these creatures was the hallmark of
a cultivated Japanese gentleman, and Yamada liked to emphasize the
'oriental' sensitivity common to the elites of both empires. Sending animals
that would have been of interest to the Japanese emperor and high-level
aristocrats thus was an acknowledgment of the Ottoman sultan's superior
taste and refinement. Abdulhamid IT responded in kind: he had a
thoroughbred Arabian horse dispatched to Tokyo where it seems to have
fathered a long line of noble animals.
Not only the Ottoman court but also wealthy provincials owned horses
and cherished them. Suraiya Faroqhi's "Means of transportation and sources
of pride and joy: horses in the hands of Ottoman officials and notables"
focuses on Anatolian examples from the period between about 1750 and
1850. Compared with the sultan's servitors deceased during the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries who owned relatively few horses, this attribute of
a gentlemanly lifestyle apparently was more easily accessible around 1800.
Not only a provincial magnate family with extensive rural holdings such as
the Kara Osmanogullan of Manisa but even Bektashi dervish sheiks in the
rural Balkans and western Anatolia could afford a well-filled stable; some of
these personages probably also had ambitions to gain recognition as
breeders. In addition horses served as gifts: among the Kara Osmanogullan a
son-in-law might present such an animal to his father-in-law, perhaps on the
occasion of his wedding. It would be of interest to know for what specific
purposes these provincial gentlemen employed their horses; did they use
them for hunting or polo matches? But on this subject I have not as yet
located any evidence.

76 Compare the article by Halil Inalcik: "Imtiya.zat. ti-The Ottoman Empire," in The
Encyclopaedia oj Islam. New Edition, vol. III, ed. Bernard Lewis, Charles Pellat and
Joseph Schacht (Leiden, London: E. J. Brill and Luzac & Co., 1965), pp, 1179-1189.
50 Suraiya Faroqhi

The last section "Between exploitation and protection" begins with a

study by Housni Alkhateeb Shehada "Arabic veterinary medicine and the
'Golden Rules' for veterinarians according to a sixteenth-century medical
treatise". This text was part of a long tradition of veterinary science - as
distinct from human medicine - in the Arab world, a body of knowledge
which ultimately went back to ancient Greek doctors. However, the writers
of antiquity actually referred to by Arab authors of veterinary texts often
remain obscure: the only works definitely cited are those of Theomnestus of
Magnesia, active in the years 310-340 CEo But apart from book-learning
obtained from Greek and Arabic sources, veterinarians of the Arab world
gradually came to rely more on their practical experiences and developed
enough self-confidence to admit this fact in writing. The trend towards
autopsy and experience was especially apparent in the veterinary literature
from the Mamluk period in Egypt and Syria (1250-1517 CE).
When Selim I (r. 1512-1520) conquered these provinces Arab
veterinary science continued to flourish: and Housni Alkhateeb Shehada has
focusedon Dii'ud b. 'Umar al-AntaJefwho died in Mecca in 1599 after a most
productive life: contemporaries compared him to no less a luminary than the
celebrated eleventh-century medical man Avicenna. AI-Antakf produced a
list of fundamental rules that any veterinarian must observe: he insisted on
the utmost cleanliness of all instruments used in treating animals so as to
avoid infection. Here the author showed his independence and pragmatic
spirit; for where human beings were concerned, infection was a contentious
issue often rejected on philosophical and theological grounds. But most
importantly al-Antakf insisted on the quality of mercy, which the
veterinarian needed to cultivate if he was not naturally inclined in that
direction: for animals were capable of feeling pain but unable to express
their sentiments in words, so that they were in special need of protection.
Housni Alkhateeb Shehada concludes with a discussion of the Islamic works
that enjoined compassion towards animals as well as the intellectual sources
of such precepts.
In the Introduction to his study "Animals during disasters" Mehmet
Yavuz Erler has focused on the limitations of our sources: as the contents of
the present volume amply demonstrate, Ottomans and non-Ottomans
normally wrote about animals only when they either were useful or else
harmful to human beings. However animals existed long before people ever
appeared on the scene and have a history of their own, even if that story was
written down only by humans and only in minute fragments. Thus for
example, Ottoman newspapers and archival documents deal with the
unfortunate encounters of Anatolian peasants and townsmen with wolves
 Introduction 51

and water-snakes and more frequently, with the nineteenth-century

migrations of men and animals following major droughts in Central
Anatolia. The authorities focused on the losses sustained by farmers who
needed to rebuild their livelihoods, while the pressures on animal
populations confronted with human encroachments upon their breeding
grounds and food resources generally remained in the shadow.
Erler has also dwelt on the internal contradictions of the central
government's policy: thus when the mohair goat, whose distinctive fine hair
had once made the prosperity of Ankara, first was successfully bred in South
Africa, the official position was that live angora goats should not be exported
so as to hinder the expansion.of the newly emerging African competitor. But
on the other hand goats sometimes went abroad because of the central
government's diplomatic concerns, for instance in answer to a request on the
part of the Vienna zoo. Nor was the government willing to lower the tax load
carried by the breeders: for as Erler has calculated, what appeared at first
glance as a tax break was in fact the exact opposite, as the newly assessed
tax decreased much less than the prices that breeders now received for
angora fibres. Thus not only animals but also peasants and breeders were
pretty much 'on their own' when confronting the hard times of the
nineteenth century.
The last two studies deal with the late 1800s and early 1900s. Catherine
Pinguet's contribution bears the title: "Istanbul's street dogs at the end of the
Ottoman Empire: protection or extermination". The author has focused on
three texts, all important but difficult of access: Spyridon Mavroyeni Pasha
(1817-1902), at one time doctor of Sultan Abdulhamid II, the Catholic
missionary P. Colomban and the Young Turk intellectual Abdullah Cevdet
(1869-1932).
Mavroyeni described himself as a mad lover of dogs (cynophile enrage)
who had kept these animals at his home throughout his existence; in the
book that he wrote towards the end of his long life he somewhat
idealistically described the street dogs of Istanbul as forming a republic of
their own, whose social arrangements might perhaps even serve as a model
for humans. More practically, he considered that these animals had a right to
share the urban living space with their human neighbours. Especially
interesting is his comparison of street dogs with the local beggars, who in
Mavroyeni's view also were bold and self-confident inhabitants ofIstanbul's
public spaces. Considering this dignitary's work as an indefatigable lecturer
on a variety of diseases, Mavroyeni was certainly not a traditionalist
indifferent to matters of public health and cleanliness. But for him being
52 Suraiya Faroqhi

modern did not mean that only well-regulated bourgeois and dignitaries had
a right to populate the public streets.
On this issue he was in profound contradiction to Abdullah Cevdet: for
this ideologue and publicist, incidentally also a medical man by training had
a profound aversion to street dogs, whose noise and assertive gregariousness
he absolutely detested. In 1909 Abdullah Cevdet even published a special
brochure on the subject. At first glance this matter may appear like a
journalistic dispute and simple conflict of opinion. But the whole matter
became much more serious when the Young Turk government, against the
resistance of many traditionally-minded inhabitants decided to deport the
dogs to an island in the Sea of Marmara, where the animals were left to
perish. P. Colomban's article was prompted by these distressing events:
while he did not in principle disapprove of the killing of stray dogs, the
massive slaughter on the streets and on the Marmara island was for him, a
conservative opponent of the Young Turks a welcome opportunity to
execrate the modern world and cruelty to animals at one and the same time.
Cihangir Giindogdu's "The animal rights movement in the late Ottoman
Empire and the early Republic: The Society for the Protection of Animals
(Istanbul, 1912)" begins with a discussion of animal rights associations in
England and France, on which the Istanbul Society visibly had modelled
itself. Remarkably the Istanbul activists did not at all refer to the public
resentment against the British Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals in Cairo, although the protesting cab-drivers certainly had received
some support from proto-nationalist middle class opinion in the Egyptian
capital. In Istanbul the early Society was very much a state affair; and high
dignitaries such as Said Halim Pasa held office in it.
Rank and file members certainly protested against the killing of
Istanbul's stray dogs, but to no avail. Given this situation, it is difficult to say
what motivated the adherence of high office holders; as individuals some of
them may have been opposed to the brutal killings but we cannot say which
members of the late Ottoman elite were in this position. It is more probable
that dignitaries close to the Young Turks considered the existence of such an
association as a hallmark of the 'civilisation' they were trying to implant.
The Society was inactive during the First World War and its immediate
aftermath, but revived during the Republic, albeit with different
membership. Top-level dignitaries were now less in evidence, and
connections to foreign societies with similar aims established through
teaching staff at Robert College. The Society had some success in pressuring
the city government of Istanbul to outlaw animal fights that did in fact
disappear within a few years; however in its refuges those abandoned cats
 Introduction 53

and dogs for which local volunteers could not fmd new homes were
routinely killed off. This contradiction - or hypocrisy as the writer Ahmed
Rasim eloquently pointed out - probably was once again due to the Society's
. concern with the creation of an 'orderly' city: watching scenes of blood and
gore was a reprehensible act and stray dogs were undesirable; on the other
hand there was no objection against the killing of 'unwanted animals'
provided it was done away from the public eye.
Before we jump in medias res
While I hope that the four sections of this book have some internal
coherence, there are also quite a few correspondences between articles in
different sections which insha 'allah will reinforce the unity of our volume.
Thus the issue of Muslim charity towards animals treated by Benjamin Arbel
in the first article re-appears in the very last section, when Housni Alkhateeb
Shehada discusses the ethics of veterinarians and Catherine Pinguet and
Cihangir Giindogdu treat the sad story ofthe stray dogs ofIstanbul. Attitudes
towards animals and imaginative literature depicting them are major
concerns for both Svetlana Kirillina and Hanife Koncu; they also emerge in
Dean Sakel' s study of the Physiologus. Yet some of the animal stories
related in nineteenth-century newspapers and studied by Mehmet Yavuz
. Erler in the context of animal exploitation and protection seem to belong to
the realm of the imagination as much as to the natural world.
Horses owned by provincials appear in the article on Damascus by
Colette Establet, where the scribes who produced the kadi's registers have
associated them with oxen, camels and donkeys; similarly the central
administration's officials who recorded the possessions of deceased Kara
Osmanogullan and deposed Bektashi sheiks were concerned with working
farms in their entirety, of which horses formed only"a modest part. Yet the
real domain of the horse, this elite possession par excellence was doubtless'
the Ottoman court, where as Hedda Reindl-Kiel has shown us, the sultan
received these noble animals from his own governors and also from foreign
royalty. Tiilay Artan has studied a manuscript on horses sponsored by the
Ottoman court; and even at a time of major financial difficulties - as Selcuk
Esenbel has shown - Sultan Abdiilhamid II had a noble stallion along with
its handler conveyed all the way to Japan. Esteem for horses united the
Ottoman elite, whether its members lived in Istanbul or in the depths of the
Anatolian and Balkan provinces.
Unavoidably our volume has concentrated on the viewpoint of human
beings, Ottomans as well as foreigners; Gilles Veinstein and Elisabetta
Borromeo even focus on the hunt. A history of animals that privileges the
viewpoint of Istanbul's stray dogs, the camels discussed by Michel
54 Suraiya Faroqhi

Tuchscherer or the merino sheep highlighted by M. Erdem Kabadayr is still

light years away, as Mehmet Yavuz Erler has eloquently reminded us. But at
least we have made a beginning ...