The historical interaction of the city with Its mahalles: Ottoman Edirne in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries

Abstract

This study analyzes the spatial, demographic, and socio-economic structures of Edirne –the second capital of the Ottomans- in the 1700s. The main aim of this dissertation is to understand the Ottoman city in the case of Edirne (Adrianople), taking its mahalles as the main unit of analysis. In doing this, I, based on a relational approach to the city, examine different layers of city life simultaneously, e.g. its physical, demographic, and socio-economic structures on the basis of the socio-spatial dimension of the mahalle. I analyze the primary sources such as avârız and kefâlet (surety) registers of Edirne through quantitative methods including hierarchical clustering, correspondence analysis and through GIS (Geographic Information Systems) applications. In this study, I focus on a single city and study it in a detailed manner with a methodology through which I will be able to, in the future, compare its socio-economic and topographic structures and historical development with those of other cities. I try to interpret the attributes derived from the archival sources, such as titles, occupations, ethno-religious identities, gender, and properties of the people in relation to the city spaces and to describe the ecological position of the city by focusing on the spatial neighborliness/conjunctions or distinctiveness of these attributes. In other words, I was able to reveal how these attributes concentrate at the mahalle level and how mahalles differ in terms of these attributes. Accordingly, mahalles got multi-definitions constituting certain zones or sectors with other mahalles on the basis of qualitative resemblance to each other different than the conventional districts (semt) defined by on the basis of topographical neighborhood. Besides, I was also able to visualize the change undergone by the city of Edirne in two different periods –1686 and 1703 – via different attribute profiles in two successive phases. This was an opportunity both to see what changed in the city and what did not and to interpret the interaction of the inner changes with the general historical context of the period under study. In this way, important developments were actualized in the relational methodology regarding the problem of following continuity, discontinuity and the change routes of different time series (sequences), which is among the most important methodological problems of historical studies.