Table Of ContentOttoman Dress
&
Design in the West
Ottoman Dress
&
Design in the West
A Visual History
of Cultural
Exchange
Charlotte A. Jirousek
with Sara Catterall
Indiana University Press
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
© 2019 by Sara Catterall and Zoë Miller-Lee
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information
storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Manufactured in China
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Jirousek, Charlotte, author. | Catterall, Sara, author.
Title: Ottoman dress and design in the West : a visual history of cultural exchange /
Charlotte A. Jirousek with Sara Catterall.
Description: Bloomington, Indiana, USA : Indiana University Press, 2019. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018032609 (print) | LCCN 2018037305 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253042194
(e-book) | ISBN 9780253042156 | ISBN 9780253042156q (hardback : qalk. paper) | ISBN
9780253042163q (pbk. : qalk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Clothing and dress—Turkey—History. | Fashion—Turkey—History. |
Europe—Civilization—Turkish influences.
Classification: LCC GT1400 (ebook) | LCC GT1400 .J57 2019 (print) |
DDC 391.009561—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018032609
1 2 3 4 5 23 22 21 20 19
Contents
Foreword: The World-Historical Importance
of the Ottoman Empire vii
Douglas A. Howard
Preface: Perspectives xi
Acknowledgments xvii
Sara Catterall
Timeline xix
1
Before the Ottoman Era, East and West 1
2
The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries 41
Emergence of the Ottomans
3
The Sixteenth Century 79
Reaching for the East
4
The Seventeenth Century 109
Shifting Power, Emerging Modernities
5
The Eighteenth Century 146
An Expanding World
6
The Nineteenth Century 186
Empires Bloom and Fade
Postscript 216
The Decline of Empire and the Rise of Globalism
Glossary 225
Index 229
Foreword
The World-Historical Importance of the Ottoman Empire
Douglas A. Howard
Histories of Europe have often looked like selfies, with the Ottoman Em-
pire photoshopped out of the picture. How would European history be
different with the Ottomans restored to the frame? This beautiful book
offers a sense of what that picture might look like, seen through the lens of
the evolution of dress and clothing.
In physical geography Europe is more or less a peninsula, the north-
western region of the great Afro-Eurasian land mass, bounded by the Baltic
Sea, the North Sea, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Mediterranean Sea. Before
modern times a person might travel overland, by foot or cart or pack ani-
mal, benefitting from the occasional bridge or river barge, all the way from
the Cape of Good Hope to Lisbon or Amsterdam or Venice in one direction
and Delhi or Busan or Hangzou in the other. And when in the 1860s the
Suez Canal was dug, it was Africa—not Europe—that was cut off from the
rest. For hundreds of years, about one-third of this European peninsula
was the Ottoman Empire.
What was the Ottoman Empire that was so prominently a part of Eu-
rope and is the focus of this book? In simplest terms, it was the part of the
world governed by the Ottoman dynasty, not just in Europe but also partly
in southwestern Asia and, after 1517, in northern Africa. Of several major
Afro-Eurasian empires of the early modern age—the Mamluk, the Safavid,
the Mughal, the Ming, the Habsburg, the Romanov—the Ottoman Empire
proved to be the most durable. The dynasty’s rule began around the year
1300 and lasted through the uniquely modern violence of World War I,
much of which it perpetrated. It only ended in 1922, when the last sultan
was dethroned by act of the national assembly of what was soon to be the
Republic of Turkey.
What made the empire so successful for so long is more difficult to ex-
plain but, for ease of discussion, we might point to three interrelated fac-
tors. One factor was a stable political structure created by the sultans of the
Ottoman dynasty. A second factor was a rich and variegated Ottoman
culture, emanating from a worldview that valued the human encounter
vii
with God, especially as experienced in pain and loss. A third factor was a
fiscal model to adequately manage and encourage prosperity. Unsurpris-
ingly, all of these evolved with time, none remaining quite the same over
the empire’s six centuries of rule, and so perhaps the most remarkable
feature of Ottoman history is the survival of the dynasty and its empire
through centuries of sometimes dramatic change.
The Ottoman dynasty arose in the conditions of the early modern age
or, as some would prefer to state, the late agrarian age. This was an age in
which, while the great majority of the human global population was oc-
cupied full-time with settled agriculture, the most powerful kingdoms
were built by originally seminomadic dynasties, mostly Turkic or Mongol,
that recognized the great vitality of long-distance commerce both by land
and by sea. With the Ottoman dynasty, as with the Safavid and the Mughal,
all Turkic, sovereignty originated in bonds between a charismatic warrior
hero (the sultan) and an equally charismatic saintly Sufi sheikh. Together,
their worldly and otherworldly power infused Ottoman success. After the
conquest of Constantinople, or Istanbul (1453), the sultan’s public persona
shifted, becoming more regal and remote. With Süleyman the Magnificent
(1520–66) and his successors, the sultans and family members increasingly
sought seclusion in the garden palace of Topkapı. The sultan’s extended
household governed the empire as his servants and thought of the subjects
as the sultan’s flock, which depended on their protection to flourish. The
flock included those who were not Muslim—Jews and Christians had al-
ways made up at least half of the entire population of the empire, and there
was no expectation that they should adopt Islam. Indeed the Christian
church hierarchy particularly was dependent on, and in some ways even
replicated, the imperial aura among its own communities.
The Ottoman sultans’ two main international rivals, the shahs of the
Safavid dynasty of Iran (founded 1501) and the emperors of the Mughal
dynasty of India (founded 1526), collapsed almost simultaneously in the
early 1700s and with them the traditional linkage of political-spiritual
charismatic monarchy. The Ottoman Empire withstood these upheavals.
Not that the sultans were any less respected than before, but internal and
external developments brought a growing emphasis on the empire as a ter-
ritorial realm. The sultan, seen more and more as the defender of the reli-
gion of Islam and of Muslims, developed a new image as an unassailable
autocrat leading the empire into modernity. Again the Ottomans were not
alone in this, as their new rivals—Europeans now, the Russian Romanovs
and the Austrian Habsburgs—exerted a similar royal persona. The terri-
tory of the Ottoman realm shrank steadily in size throughout this time. As
a result of the separation of Christian populations into independent king-
doms and the arrival of Muslims who fled or were expelled and forced to
migrate from these same newly minted Christian kingdoms, the popula-
tion of the Ottoman Empire shifted in balance, so that by the time of the
first true census (1880s) the empire’s population was nearly three-fourths
Muslims.
viii Foreword
At the core of the empire’s culture was the mystical experience of God,
seen paradoxically in the universal human experience of irretrievable loss.
The direct experience of God was something talked about, something
longed for and actively sought; it was respected and institutionalized in
Sufi dervish orders, and it drove cultural production in architecture, cal-
ligraphy, music, and literature, especially epic and lyric poetry. Sufi lodges
were important academies of higher learning in the sciences and humani-
ties, and the masters of the main Sufi orders were significant public figures.
However, Sufi orders were neither the sole interpretation of Islam within
the empire’s population nor the only institutionalized avenues through
which an education could be obtained or popular spirituality expressed.
Mystical Islam had parallels both in Ottoman Christianity, especially in
the Orthodox Hesychast movement, and in Kabbalistic Judaism. Repeated
challenges to the authority of the Ottoman dynasty arose from within Sufi
movements. One of these, the Kizilbaş movement, was particularly com-
promising because of its affiliation with the Safavid shahs of Iran. A grow-
ing reactionary movement clamored to define an acceptable fusion of Ot-
toman loyalty and Sunni Islam, giving the opening to popular preachers of
a more narrow and moralizing orthodoxy. After 1800, Ottoman religious
culture degenerated into Sunni chauvinism that drove violence first in a
purge of Bektashis and Kizilbaş (or Alevis, 1826) and then increasingly in
pogroms against Greek and Armenian Christians (especially in the 1890s).
The political and cultural evolution described above implied a similar
evolution in the empire’s fiscal model, since any such model arises from
definitions of prosperity. Ottoman fiscal flexibility and resiliency are a ma-
jor factor in accounting for the empire’s lengthy survival. Besides plunder
won in successful wars, early efforts were made to organize direct govern-
ment collection of taxes on agriculture and trade. Early modern limitations
of communication and transportation meant that the results of these ef-
forts were mixed, and eventually the empire relied more on revenue con-
tracting. At the same time, the endowed trust evolved into a powerful in-
strument of investment and development. These fiscal practices brought
long periods of prosperity despite the ups and downs of military victory
and defeat and were not really found wanting until competition arose from
joint-stock companies with government backing in the countries along the
North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean and Russian military power threatened
at the same time. After 1840, the sultans acquiesced to pressure and began
the Ottoman integration into the emerging global capitalist system, but
inability to make this transition quickly enough cost the empire significant
losses both militarily and financially.
As this book shows, throughout these centuries there was a constant,
back-and-forth mutual interest and influence between the Ottoman Em-
pire and the parts of Europe north and west of its borders. This history is
also not easy to characterize simply. Despite mutual suspicion and mutual
religious and ideological put-downs, there was also mutual respect and
even wary appreciation. Science and ideas as well as technology crossed
Foreword ix
