Istanbul, as both port city and imperial centre, had developed into a metropolis by the early nineteenth century, with a population of around 360,000.3 In 1829, the male population of greater Istanbul comprised approximately 97,000 Muslims compared to 115,000 non-Muslims, who – in contrast to the empire as a whole – remained in the majority until the influx of Muslim
refugees from former Ottoman territories in the 1880s.4 Greater Istanbul was made up of the walled old city (containing the seat of imperial power and referred to as ‘Der saadet’ or ‘Asitane’) and the three towns (bilad-ı selase) or outer districts of Eyüb (north-west of the walled city), Galata (north of the Golden Horn), and Üsküdar (on the Asian side of the Bosphorus). Both administratively and socially, the city was organised into smaller neighbourhoods (mahalle) whose residents typically shared a common religion or hailed from the same region. While the mahalle was an important means of regulating social conduct and discouraged mixing between different confessional groups, such boundaries were less strictly observed in commercial or port areas of the city, most importantly in the former Genoese trading post of Galata, and became increasingly fluid during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.5
2 Philliou 2011, xvii. 3 Karpat 1985, 103. Findley (2010, 62) gives the figure of 375,000 for the 1830s. Cf. Başaran 2014, 56–62. On the particular dual character of Istanbul as both port city and imperial capital, see Eldem 1999a.
4 Karpat 1985, 86. The exact figures from the 1829/30 census (reproduced in ibid, 202) are: Muslims, 87,231; special groups (probably Muslim), 9,846; non-Muslims, 115,206. Amongst the non-Muslim population we find the following categories: Greeks, 49,323; Armenians, 48,866; Jews, 12,032; Catholics: 4,985.
5 Eldem 1999a, 152–8; Behar 2003. On the neighbourhood as a means of social control, see Wishnitzer 2014, 516–8
Source: Writing Music in Nineteenth-Century Istanbul Ottoman Armenians and the Invention of Hampartsum Notation Jacob Olley PhD in Music King’s College London 2017
https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/files/99028808/2018_Olley_Jacob_1239687_ethesis.pdf
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