This article lays groundwork for a more systematic history of the Ottoman gendarmerie (jandarma), here with special emphasis on the men in the corps and their working conditions. The gendarmerie, which before 1879 reform the Ottomans called asakir-i zabtiye, was a provincial paramilitary police organization established by bureaucrats of the Tanzimat state during the 1840s on an ad hoc basis.Footnote ¹ This force later acquired a more uniform and centralized character, becoming the empire's principal internal security organization. Through this paramilitary police institution, 19th-century Ottoman bureaucrats aimed to extend their authority into the provinces, which at that time could be described as only marginally under Ottoman sovereignty according to contemporary definitions of the term. From the late 18th century on, extending state sovereignty to recognized territorial boundaries emerged as a vital need for most European states as well as the Ottoman Empire. Along with other modern military and civil institutions and modern administrative practices, introducing various types of paramilitary provincial police forces enabled governments in Europe to enhance and extend their authority over territories in which it had been limited. The gendarmerie thus emerged in both Europe and in the Ottoman Empire as integral to modern state formation and its technologies of government. Although acknowledging the Pan-European context of the gendarmerie's emergence and its theoretical ramifications, the present article is concerned more with the Ottoman context within which this police corps was established, evolved, and took on a uniquely Ottoman form.

In the Ottoman Empire and across continental Europe, the gendarmerie played a vital role in the making of modern bureaucratic states. Yet, it is interesting to note that, apart from Clive Emsley's relatively recent book and articles, comparative and theoretically grounded studies of gendarmeries are notably scarce.Footnote ² This deficiency is even more surprising in the Ottoman case, considering the proliferation of studies on administrative reform of the Tanzimat era (1839–76) and the following periods. Early historians of Ottoman administrative reform, including Roderic Davison, Bernard Lewis, and Stanford Shaw, who produced their major contributions during the 1960s, clearly appreciated the significance of introducing modern governmental institutions to the provinces.Footnote ³ Davison's account of provincial inspections in the 1850s and other experiments that paved the way for the Provincial Law of 1864, for example, remains an important contribution to the field.Footnote ⁴ However, this early literature emphasizes mostly civil-administration reforms. Although these historians acknowledged the importance of military reform and highlighted early attempts at establishing a modern standing army, they were not consistent in pursuing the development of military institutions. The gendarmerie remained entirely outside their purview. As noted by Emsley, scholars’ nearly universal indifference toward modern provincial policing practices and institutions may reflect an urban bias in social and political theory, the traces of which can be discerned clearly in the historiography on modern state formation throughout the 19th century.Footnote ⁵

Parallel to this tendency, one can also detect a partiality to central institutions of government, which might further explain historians’ disinterest in the gendarmerie.Footnote ⁶ During the past couple of decades, however, new approaches have emerged, benefiting from sociological theories of “bringing the state back in.”Footnote ⁷ Ottoman historians have begun to borrow conceptual tools to analyze state formation, such as Michael Man's infrastructural power concept and Anthony Giddens’ notions of surveillance and administrative power. They have been influenced also by Foucauldian concepts, particularly governmentality, an analytical tool that has enabled historians to explore disciplinary aspects of modern politics through microtechnologies of power in the context of everyday social life.Footnote ⁸

These conceptual tools have opened new vistas for students of Ottoman history who are interested in modern governmental institutions and practices in provincial settings. Recent scholarship on this issue has made significant contributions to the field. More important, at least for this article, is the broader epistemological framework that informs these new studies. The new literature has broadened the spectrum of historical agents to include a new cast of central and local, as well as domestic and international, actors. It has also complicated the analysis of modernity in general, and state formation in particular, as an outcome of social and political struggles and negotiations within this broader cast of agents. Historical sociology and Foucauldian view may encourage narratives of modern state formation as a progression of history without reference to actual historical actors. Historians of the Ottoman provinces, however, have been careful to conceptualize governmental institutions not as abstract reifications but rather as political practices of flesh and blood historical agents. They have included a broad range of historical actors in their narratives.

The present article contributes to this recent historiographical shift. It conceptualizes the Ottoman gendarmerie not simply as an institution, but also as political and administrative practices in everyday life in the provinces and the countryside. From this perspective, the gendarmerie enables us to explore an understudied aspect of modern state formation: human interactions within the context of quotidian politics.

Among other civil and military institutions and practices, the gendarmerie can be called a major infrastructural apparatus of the Ottoman state in its efforts to extend central governmental authority to distant provinces. During the Tanzimat period, the first act of an Ottoman governor, before introducing administrative reform, was to establish a gendarmerie regiment or company in that province. Other branches of government followed. These corps were engaged primarily with pacification of the countryside and with various tasks that had remained neglected or beyond the central government's reach, such as military conscription, arbitration of disputes, and registration of lands and revenues. Ottoman bureaucrats bundled all these tasks under the banner of restoring and maintaining security and order. They sought to legitimize reforms by asserting that they were acting in the best interest of local inhabitants, although they did not pay particular attention to indigenous suffering—or so the record suggests.

The extension of central government administrative apparatuses into provinces and rural districts, which one may term the “governmentalization” of the Ottoman state, could, from another perspective, be conceptualized as a kind of “colonization” of the countryside, especially in view of the deeply rooted and often resistant local traditions of social organization and governance.Footnote ⁹ This latter perspective highlights the gendarmerie as a practice that reflected the central government's new conception of law and justice and that played a vital role in this detraditionalizing, deculturalizing, and therefore arguably colonial venture. In the Çukurova region, for example, the pacification and sedentarization of tribal confederations and the introduction of Tanzimat institutions through military-like operations were reminiscent of other forms of historical colonial expansion in their social engineering and resource-allocation effects. Cevdet Pasha, head of the reform division (Fırka-i Islahiye), with its extraordinary powers, revealingly termed these implementations a “conquest” of the region.Footnote ¹⁰ Similar to many historical examples of colonization, in such comprehensive reformist drives as this, military and civilian aspects of administrative reform intermingled to such an extent that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish them. This article considers the introduction of the gendarmerie and other administrative apparatuses of the modern state into provinces as integral to the “colonization of the countryside.” Such an approach helps us view more clearly the actual historical actors on the ground. It also helps us avoid a reified conception of the modern state and its formation as a natural progression of history toward a state embodying a normatively defined rule of law.

The present article explores the history of the Ottoman gendarmes, the men in the corps, within the larger administrative and institutional context of the late 19th-century empire. As noted above, although urban and rural policing institutions played an important role in 19th-century Ottoman history, there is no special study of these institutions, and little is known about their practices. Elements for such a historical study do exist, particularly regarding the police and gendarmerie; however, available studies, mostly prepared by republican representatives of these same institutions during the 1930s and 1940s, cannot be considered scholarly by contemporary standards. They are, however, useful reference works that provide detailed information about evolving laws and regulations defining these institutions.Footnote ¹¹

Over the past two decades there has emerged, especially among young scholars, an increasing interest in the history of policing institutions and practices in the Ottoman Empire.Footnote ¹² Yet although dissertation proposals and projects in progress on such topics as urban crime and punishment, surveillance practices, military institutions, and conscription systems are clearly on the increase, the provincial police have received hardly any attention. Indeed, 19th-century Ottoman historiography yields little on the practices and institutions of rural social control or changing conceptions of crime and justice in the rural milieu. In this respect, a study of the gendarmerie as a state institution active in the countryside enables historians to balance the previously mentioned urban bias in the literature, and to articulate the dynamics of modern governance and administrative policies across the urban–rural spectrum.

This article focuses mainly on the period following 1879, during which the gendarmerie grew to considerable size, with regiments in almost every province of the empire, and at the same time acquired a relatively more uniform character, especially as compared with previous periods. As so little is known about policing institutions of the empire in general and its gendarmerie in particular, the next section provides context, a bird's-eye view of the early and mid-19th century and a brief chronology of the institution in its early phase, that is, up to the reorganization of 1879. After that, I sketch a social profile of the men in the corps, including details about working conditions and wages, as well as work stoppages initiated by gendarmes for various reasons. During the 1880s and 1890s the recruitment of non-Muslims into the gendarmerie became an important aspect of administrative reforms launched in the eastern provinces, where Armenians constituted a considerable portion of the population; this issue is examined in a separate section.

The relationship between the gendarmerie and the rural population, or gendarmes’ daily interactions with ordinary peasants, remains outside the scope of this article. This topic, which obviously has potential for revealing much about 19th-century Ottoman social history, entails a different set of research questions, theoretical conceptualizations, and sources.

HISTORICAL SETTING AND CHRONOLOGY OF THE OTTOMAN GENDARMERIE

The Ottoman gendarmerie was by no means a peculiar institution or administrative practice. It emerged within the context of a sea change in political and administrative technologies across Europe. In historical terms, one can hardly overemphasize this Pan-European context extending from the late 18th to the mid-19th century. The French Gendarmerie Nationale, created in 1790 after the reorganization of the prerevolutionary Maréchaussée, provided the model for gendarmeries elsewhere. During the Napoleonic period and its immediate aftermath, gendarmeries were created in most of the German lands, for example, in Bavaria and Prussia in 1812. Emsley discusses these developments in the context of central governments’ attempts to extend their authority into provinces and to impose stricter supervision over them.Footnote ¹³ In Italy the gendarmerie came into being alongside unification, thus playing a leading role in building the unified Italian state.Footnote ¹⁴ In Russia from 1811 onward, independent companies of internal security forces organized militarily were responsible for pursuing deserters, runaway serfs, and criminals, and for protecting public buildings. In 1825 Nicholas I brought together elements of various internal security forces and established the first Russian gendarmerie corps.Footnote ¹⁵ In the Habsburg Empire, the gendarmerie was formed following the revolutions of 1848, although its institutional precedent dates back to the Napoleonic period.Footnote ¹⁶

Antecedents of the Ottoman gendarmerie may be seen as early as the first years of the 19th century. A deployment of local military companies (nizam-ı cedid ortaları) in certain provincial centers in 1802, together with the creation of reserve army units (asakir-i redif taburları) in the provinces in the mid-1830s, could be considered as first steps toward building a centralized provincial police corps.Footnote ¹⁷ Both initiatives had been proposed as part of a major overhaul of the Ottoman military that spanned the last quarter of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century, and that sought increased centralization deemed necessary for adoption of new warfare technologies. Both institutions were also to perform policing functions as part of their mandate to maintain security and order in the provinces.

The Ottoman gendarmerie resembled gendarmeries elsewhere in Europe, where this type of paramilitary policing force remained thin on the ground. Prussia, for example, had a force of 2,700 in 1848, which means roughly one gendarme per 12,000 inhabitants. By 1890 that number had increased to just over 4,600 and to 5,600 at the outbreak of World War I.Footnote ¹⁸ The tiny Prussian gendarmerie stands at the high end of the spectrum. At the other, we have the Habsburg lands, where conscripts reached a peak of 18,985 in 1857, when the empire's population stood at 30 million. On the eve of World War I, there were 14,400 gendarmes for a population of almost 50 million in the Habsburg lands, which means approximately one gendarme per 3,500 inhabitants.Footnote ¹⁹ In terms of numbers, the Ottoman gendarmerie appears to stand closer to Prussia, reaching a peak of 37,943 in the 1870s, in an empire of approximately 27 million inhabitants, although the corps’ number shrank to 26,507 following the 1879 reorganization.Footnote ²⁰ The Ottoman gendarmerie thus appears substantial on a per capita basis—roughly one gendarme per 1,000 inhabitants—despite its sparse distribution over the geographical extent of the empire.

As long as European gendarmeries remained small in size, states had no choice but to employ other forces available to them—regular and irregular, military and civilian. Governments relied on various combinations of regular army troops, gendarmeries, citizen militias, and civilian police to maintain everyday order and to contain popular unrest. Prussia, for example, relied on its army to deal with insurgencies throughout the 19th century.Footnote ²¹ The situation was similar in 19th-century Russia, where the government was unable or unwilling to commit resources to reforming and enlarging its gendarmerie and police force and consequently relied heavily on military detachments to suppress public disorder.Footnote ²² Even in Russian provinces with gendarmerie regiments, whenever there was a major disturbance, the government did not hesitate to employ other means, generally the military complemented by irregulars. Throughout 19th-century Prussia, Russia, Austria, and the Ottoman Empire, regular army units played a major role in maintaining domestic order and security. As the gendarmerie is a paramilitary type of institution, its use tended to confirm the military nature of policing across continental Europe and the Ottoman Empire.

The need for more order and uniformity in the provinces, apparent since the reign of Mahmut II (1808–39), if not earlier, along with the need for an instrument against domestic-security threats before resorting to the nation's regular army, eventually led to the 1840 decision to create gendarmerie (asakir-i zabtiye) regiments and battalions.Footnote ²³ The gendarmerie underwent various reorganizations from the 1840s to 1879. Even before the Provincial Law of 1864 set rules for a uniform provincial administrative system, the government took major steps in this direction at the initiative and under the supervision of numerous provincial inspectors, of whom Cevdet Pasha was the most prominent. The Provincial Law of 1864 and later the 1869 Gendarmerie Law were important steps in setting the legal and administrative foundations of a uniform and centralized gendarmerie corps.

In this period, placing gendarmerie forces under civilian administration ensured government control of the provinces. Troop hiring and discipline was handled by the directorate of police (Zabtiye Müşiriyeti), and the command of gendarmes and the authority to deploy them within the provinces rested with governors. During the 1870s, the Ottoman government tried its best to implement the existing laws and regulations, creating gendarmerie regiments and battalions in every province and district. Yet, increasing social and political disturbances; peasant uprisings with nationalist overtones, particularly in the Balkans and, later, in the eastern provinces; and budget difficulties, which intensified during the second half of the century, severely strained all initiatives for creating and maintaining a uniform gendarmerie corps under civilian control. As a result, the Ottoman domestic security apparatus lacked uniformity and remained patchy and paramilitary in nature for most of the 19th century.

Although evident throughout the century, the unevenness of this system manifested distinctive characteristics at various moments and in various parts of the empire. During the mid-19th century, for example, Ottoman authorities frequently employed regular army units, the gendarmerie, or irregular units of armed men (başıbozuk) to ensure provincial security. In some cases, as on the frontiers of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1860s, the government even continued to rely on a “military border” system: village inhabitants were permitted to bear arms and were held responsible for border security with the Habsburg Empire in exchange for tax and military exemptions.Footnote ²⁴ To maintain security and order in the countryside prior to the 1860s, the government authorized contractors as military chiefs (sergerde) and paid them an allowance. These military chiefs were responsible for hiring the men necessary to police the countryside.

From the second half of the 1860s on, the government replaced these irregular forces with gendarmerie. The new gendarmerie law had been drafted by a commission established at the Bureau of the Chief of Staff; members of the commission came from military backgrounds, except for Cevdet Pasha. As Cevdet Pasha complained later, the law they prepared was based on military principles,Footnote ²⁵ meaning that large units of gendarmerie regiments, battalions, and companies were centered in provincial and district centers, leaving villages and rural districts vulnerable to abuses by irregular units.Footnote ²⁶ In Ottoman Bulgaria of the 1860s and 1870s, for example, the main cause of peasant complaints, various forms of protest, and widespread popular uprisings were abuses committed by irregular units and gendarmes. As is well known, the Ottoman government resorted to these irregular forces to suppress the Bulgarian insurrections of 1876. This action only intensified the discontent.

Throughout the 19th century, the Ottoman police system as a whole retained its military character. Until the late 1890s the Ottoman government proved unable or unwilling to create extensive urban civilian police forces in the provinces. Only Istanbul was furnished with an urban police force of significant size. Although civilian police units patrolled in up to a dozen provincial centers from 1894 on, the total number of men employed in all these civilian units in 1894 appears to be only 779, and gendarmes numbered 26,507.Footnote ²⁷ The government preferred to locate paramilitary gendarmerie regiments in provincial centers and not in small districts or villages. It left routine maintenance of order in small towns, hamlets, and villages to the communities or, more often, to irregular units, like the Hamidiye Light Cavalry of the eastern provinces. The cavalry abused inhabitants of the region, Armenian or Kurdish peasants, and massacred many Armenians during and after the 1890s.

As reflected in its internal security system, the Ottoman state had limited capacity to “colonize” its hinterlands. It is true that beginning in the 1840s, the Ottoman state succeeded in extending its rule to the empire's many regions by establishing gendarmerie regiments in every province. As this corps remained thinly spread, the government also resorted to other means, such as regular troops and irregular units.

The aftermath of the Russian–Ottoman war of 1877–78 constituted a radical turning point in the development of the empire's policing institutions. In accordance with the Cyprus Convention and then the Berlin Congress of 1878, European powers pressured the empire to carry out comprehensive reforms in finance, policing, prisons, justice, education, and public works. Whereas the reform program, known in diplomatic circles as “the administrative reforms in European and Asiatic Turkey,” appears to be a response to European demands, it also reflected the Ottoman government's genuine desire to introduce, strengthen, and fine-tune modern administrative practices in the provinces. From the European perspective, at stake was the status of Armenians in eastern Anatolia, Bulgarians, and other Christian subjects in the empire's remaining European provinces. Having emerged from complex, and to some extent interrelated, external and internal conditions, the reform program proposed, for example, a reasonable representation of Christians in the administration, including the provincial security forces.

The reform plan included a critical reorganization of the gendarmerie (asakir-i zabtiye). It also revamped the government's method of tax collection in order to relieve the gendarmerie of regular responsibility for this task. The rationale for this separation of functions stemmed in part from the poor reputation that the corps had acquired for extorting harvest produce from peasants, especially at tax time. Although tax collection had not been its primary mission, the gendarmerie had, over time, turned into the government's de facto internal revenue collection agency, a role that distracted the force from its primary duty of maintaining order and security. In 1879 the Ottoman government moved quickly to establish the Gendarmerie Department (Jandarma Daire-i Merkeziyesi), under the jurisdiction of the chief of staff, and attached gendarmerie units to this new administrative apparatus. For its part, the civilian directorate of police, which had administered the gendarmerie until 1879, was converted into a modern police force (under the new name, Zabtiye Nezareti) responsible for policing urban centers. The Ottoman gendarmerie had served as a paramilitary police organization under the civil authority of the Interior Ministry and the provincial governors, at least on paper. After the 1879 reorganization, the gendarmerie became a police organization under the command of the chief of staff. As we shall see below, however, these changes, aimed at introducing modern governing methods into distant provinces, were circumscribed by limitations of the treasury. In addition, the complex international and domestic political context of the late 19th-century empire shaped not only the gendarmerie's organization but also the everyday experiences of the rank and file, as illustrated by the following snapshots of life in the gendarmerie corps in the post-1879 period.

THE MEN IN THE GENDARMERIE CORPS

From an ordinary Ottoman subject's point of view, a position in the gendarmerie was first and foremost a way to earn a living. Impressive numbers of young men enlisted in the corps from the establishment of the first gendarmerie units in 1840 through numerous reorganizations throughout the century. Indeed, the figure of 38,000 in service in the late 1870s arguably serves as an indicator of the significance that this employment opportunity represented to young, indigent Ottomans. This corps represents a significant population within the Ottoman workforce, meriting a social history of its own.

Seen from the institutional or “social control” perspective, disciplinary organizations such as the urban police and the gendarmerie fulfilled functions espoused by the administrative elite. The gendarmerie was doubtless a mechanism for carrying out the ruling elite's policies in the provincial context. Experiences of individual gendarmes indicate that the corps was more than a tool, however; they also illustrate complexities of late 19th-century Ottoman society and politics. Following is a social profile of late-Ottoman gendarmes, with the help of such details as selection criteria for the corps and daily working conditions.

Two major factors restricted employment opportunities and depressed working conditions offered by the gendarmerie: the number of men seeking employment in the countryside and the state treasury's capacity to finance a force of 30,000–40,000. Massive migrations from the Balkans and the Caucasus in the latter half of the 19th century generated favorable labor market conditions for the government. Yet, chronic budgetary problems that intensified in the 1870s and after constrained the government's ability to adequately finance the gendarmerie reform initiatives described previously. The result was onerous working conditions for men in the force.

Two sources—namely, published regulations for enlistment and archival information on recruits—shed light on the background of the young men who served in the gendarmerie.Footnote ²⁸ The regulations did not set particularly strict requirements, thus granting authorities discretionary powers in line with a pragmatism and flexibility observable in the management of the corps as a whole. Rules for entry were drawn up as early as the 1840s, then reviewed and systematized in 1869 and 1870.Footnote ²⁹ Still, selection criteria from the 1840s to the 1870s provided no more than a few details on preferred traits or characteristics, and subsequent gendarmerie regulations of 1880 and 1903 offered only slight changes to these.Footnote ³⁰

In principle at least, the gendarmerie was open to individuals from all social groups regardless of religious or ethnic identity. The 1869 regulations, for example, state only that entry was restricted to men between the ages of twenty-one and fifty,Footnote ³¹ with the provision that those under twenty-five should not exceed a third of the total.Footnote ³² These criteria changed only slightly over the next decades. The 1903 regulations, a verbatim translation of French law, changed the age range, to twenty-five to forty-five.Footnote ³³ Subsequent regulations made more dramatic modifications. As of 1910, for instance, only men between twenty and twenty-six were accepted.Footnote ³⁴ No strict rules governed health and fitness. Regulations stated that applicants should be healthy, physically fit, able-bodied, and not shorter than 166 cm (about 5 feet 4 inches). These requirements, interestingly, did not apply to those with reading and writing skills.Footnote ³⁵

According to a rule dating from the 1840s, the ideal gendarme was single and in the case of a widower, did not have children.Footnote ³⁶ This rule remained on the books until as late as 1910.Footnote ³⁷ Rigorous working conditions and low pay probably explained such a rule, although it was likely among the most lightly enforced. Gendarmes often enough diverged from this ideal: not only were married men accepted into the force, but they also were allowed to visit their families at home once a week.Footnote ³⁸ For officers there was no requirement as to marital status and number of children.

The term of service for the rank-and-file gendarme was two years, after which it could be renewed on a yearly basis. This limited tenure was more likely to have been strictly enforced because keeping a man in the force for an extended number of terms would result in demands for pension rights; officers in the zabtiye and the gendarmerie benefited from pensions at retirement, as did their counterparts in the regular army corps. Yet some enlistees did manage to remain in the corps for years; a gendarme of Izmir, for example, in active service up to an advanced age, is described as having a white mustache and heavy eyeglasses.Footnote ³⁹ Although money was deducted from gendarmerie officers’ pay to finance retirement funds, the rank and file did not have this social right as their employment was not considered permanent. Officers earned their right to a pension at thirty years of service, although the officer or his wife or children were also granted pension rights in the event of work-related disability or loss of life.Footnote ⁴⁰

As gendarmes embodied the state and its law in the everyday life of peasants, from the official perspective a gendarme should first and foremost command respect. Authorities sought to prevent individuals of “doubtful” character or background from entering the force. Although this criterion was most likely applied informally, a handful of other, more concrete requirements filtered out men with questionable reputations or criminal records. For example, regulations barred candidates with a parent or sibling convicted of homicide.Footnote ⁴¹ In practice, however, enforcing this requirement was probably difficult because, as will be discussed, archival records reveal a number of cases of convicted criminals serving in the gendarmerie.

Most gendarmes appear to have been illiterate. The tasks of the gendarmerie did not require literacy, and regulations were tailored accordingly. Given the absence of universal primary education in the 19th-century empire, authorities had little choice in the matter. Literacy was rewarded, however: the rare candidates who possessed basic literacy skills were clearly preferred to those who did not. Knowledge of Ottoman Turkish was compulsory, but those who also spoke the language of one of the empire's ethnic communities were preferred—understandably, because the gendarme's duties involved direct interaction with polyglot rural communities.Footnote ⁴² According to a report from Sivas, the corps in 1903 announced a search for individuals fluent in Armenian and with translation capabilities.Footnote ⁴³ In Syria under the governorship of Midhat Pasha, new gendarmes were required to be literate in Arabic and Turkish.Footnote ⁴⁴

One of the more interesting sought-after characteristics that emerged from regulatory documents was distance: a gendarme was supposed to be a stranger to the region he policed. The Ottoman government apparently achieved partial success in this regard. Although statistics on recruits’ geographical origins are scanty at the moment, available documents suggest that a sizeable proportion of corps members were recruited from the province in which they served. Data on the Beirut police corps, for example, reveal that thirty-four of the sixty-two policemen serving in Beirut in 1894 came from the province of Damascus, whereas the remaining recruits hailed from provinces ranging from Belgrade to Baghdad and from the Danube to Cyprus.Footnote ⁴⁵ Was this cosmopolitanism a reflection of the corps or of the civilian population of Beirut? In either case, it may imply that Ottoman authorities preferred men without strong local bonds but did not always have that option.

For those serving in their province of birth, authorities paid attention not to assign a recruit to his natal village or neighborhood, where he might come under the influence of friends and relatives. Counterbalancing this consideration was the benefit of a recruit's familiarity with sociocultural and other features of the province he patrolled, including knowledge of the terrain. In addition, stationing gendarmes at a reasonable distance from friends and relatives was thought to be good for morale.Footnote ⁴⁶ The flexible, pragmatic approach reflected in such arrangements appears to be strongly in evidence for all types of policing institutions, not only in the Ottoman Empire, but also in other contemporary states throughout the 19th century.Footnote ⁴⁷ In addition to semilocal recruitment, Ottomans tapped other sources, such as immigrant populations. Important among these were Circassians, who reached the empire in great numbers particularly during and after the 1877–78 crisis, settling in various regions and providing manpower for the gendarmerie. In Transjordan, the gendarmerie was composed of both locals and recruits from other parts of Syria. Here, Circassian and Chechen settlers, many of whom had had formal military training, were represented in large numbers.Footnote ⁴⁸

The Transjordan case illustrates the strong possibility that employing refugees in the corps was a timely and, considering the numbers, not insignificant means for integrating them into Ottoman society. Charged with reorganizing the zabtiye corps in accordance with the gendarmerie reform law of 1879, Syrian Governor Midhat Pasha sought to vary the ethnic composition of the heavily Kurdish corps. He succeeded in attracting many non-Kurds, including more than 100 Syrian Christians and several Jews.Footnote ⁴⁹ Employing Circassian immigrants in the gendarmerie was not unique to Ottoman Transjordan or Syria. In Bitlis, authorities established a new force of flying (seyyare) battalions in 1904, enrolling about 250 gendarmes and officers, almost all of whom were Circassian immigrants. Their deployment in a region in which Kurdish Hamidiye Light Cavalry Regiments’ feuds and raids had become problematic suggests intentional use of a group that may have been considered more capable of checking the turbulence of the Kurdish tribes.Footnote ⁵⁰ Indeed, Ottoman authorities frequently employed Circassian gendarmerie regiments in eastern Anatolia to quell disorder during the 1890s, despite indications that they joined in massacres of the region's Armenian population.Footnote ⁵¹

As already noted, these cases point to a pragmatism regarding recruitment and deployment. Aside from this general insight, however, laws and regulations provide only scant information for sketching a profile of “the average Ottoman gendarme.” Evidence testifies to a considerable degree of idiosyncrasy in recruitment practices. It appears that the majority of gendarmes in the sixth battalion of the Baghdad regiment, stationed on the border with Iran, were convicted criminals, murderers, and fugitives of Iranian origin.Footnote ⁵² This is just a more striking example among several others showing the induction of individuals with criminal records, who did not always make reliable recruits. For example, a group of brigands from Yemen employed in the Trablusşam corps (in Lebanon), along with some local Druze, ended their gendarme careers by deserting the corps.Footnote ⁵³ Irregularity, it appears, was more the rule than the exception. Given the empire's geographical expanse and variety of political and social conditions, we might view this irregularity as a kind of norm, reflecting, on the one hand, the government's limited means to implement new governmental techniques consistently throughout its distant provinces, and, on the other hand, the diversity of backgrounds and everyday experiences of men working in the zabtiye and gendarmerie.

WORKING CONDITIONS AND WAGES OF THE GENDARMES

Gendarmerie work was not intended to be long term, and labor market conditions and the pay likely determined rank-and-file recruits’ attitudes toward the job. We can hardly exaggerate the state treasury's financial difficulties during the period under study. In these years, when public security concerns rose to alarming levels in most parts of the empire, available zabtiye forces fell short of meeting the challenge. Although flush with potential recruits, the government could not even meet its primary commitments, including salaries of regular government employees and army officers, a large portion of the government's total expenditures. These conditions obviously limited authorities’ ability to recruit men of the desired quality and quantity for the zabtiye and gendarmerie corps.

The government did not impose a single-wage scheme but rather left this decision to governors and provincial administrative councils; thus, zabtiye and gendarme salaries varied from one province to another. Fixed standards of remuneration would have been unrealistic because local labor market and price conditions fluctuated dramatically from one region to another. Although practical for Ottoman authorities, this practice complicated the historian's job, as statistics on zabtiye and gendarme wages for the 19th century are scattered and inconsistent.

Archival sources provide some wage information. In Konya province, for example, the salary of an ordinary foot gendarme was 75 piastres a month in 1880. A corporal was paid 81 piastres and a sergeant 98 piastres. The wages of zabtiye officers were somewhat higher: a second lieutenant received 137 piastres and a lieutenant 225. Captains and majors earned 362 and 725 piastres, respectively. In addition, ordinary zabtiyes were paid 45 piastres, lieutenants and captains 90, and majors 555 piastres in lieu of bread rations. The cavalry zabtiyes’ salary schedule was about 20 percent higher. They also received, depending on their rank, 250 or 325 piastres for a bread allowance and upkeep of their horses.Footnote ⁵⁴ In Kastamonu, another Anatolian province, figures from the same year appear similar to Konya's. In this province, a foot soldier zabtiye received 79 piastres a month and a cavalry zabtiye 98.Footnote ⁵⁵ In Syria in 1879, foot-soldier gendarmes received 80 piastres and cavalry gendarmes 130.Footnote ⁵⁶ Konya can be regarded as a typical province, with the wages offered there representing what an average gendarme could make for his services: 4.8 piastres a day, bread rations included.Footnote ⁵⁷ By comparison, a construction day-laborer in Konya normally earned 7 piastres a day, making the gendarme's take-home pay seem small indeed.Footnote ⁵⁸

The life of a gendarme thus appears to have been difficult, not only because his salary was low, but also because it was frequently delayed or paid in small installments.Footnote ⁵⁹ During the period in question, salaries of all types of government employees were often delayed for months. In Kozan in 1880, for example, the government's budgetary straits were painfully obvious: the district governor, other high bureaucrats, and zabtiyes did not receive their pay for six months.Footnote ⁶⁰ In Maraş province, gendarme salaries arrived sixteen months late in 1900.Footnote ⁶¹ Although these examples may seem dramatic, in some provinces salaries were in arrears not for months but for years. Consider, for instance, the story of one Ali Sabri, a sergeant in the Kosovo gendarmerie regiment, who in 1901 petitioned authorities that he had not been paid on a regular basis for about ten years. He also complained that he had received no compensation for maintenance of his uniform for the prior two years.Footnote ⁶² Similar examples abound in archival sources. In Tekfurdağı, again in 1901, salaries were apparently not disbursed for eighteen months.Footnote ⁶³ In Priştine, both foot and cavalry gendarmes went nine months without pay; failure to collect the annual tax in this district may have caused the delay.Footnote ⁶⁴ In Cezair-i Bahr-i Sefid (the Aegean Islands) in 1902, salaries were delayed about twenty months.Footnote ⁶⁵ The frequency of these complaints apparently did not decrease in the years that followed.Footnote ⁶⁶ A case in point is Ahmet, son of Mehmet, a sergeant major in the gendarmerie at Kırcaali. His salary had not been paid for eight and a half months. Losing hope, Ahmed and his friends proposed to authorities that they be paid not in cash but in an equivalent value of maize.Footnote ⁶⁷

Given that gendarmes earned low, uncertain wages while entrusted with considerable authority to collect taxes, it is hardly surprising to learn of cases in which they abused their positions.Footnote ⁶⁸ Observers pointed out that irregularity of income was the major cause of gendarmes’ ill behavior toward villagers, a problem that frequently occurred during routine patrols. Gendarmes were generally quartered with local inhabitants during patrols or when stationed in a given locality. Housed and fed at villagers’ expense, they distributed receipts more or less regularly for what they received, although in most cases these receipts fell short of reflecting what was actually provided and were seldom, if ever, reimbursed.Footnote ⁶⁹ The government's financial difficulties, which resulted in insufficient salaries and nonpayment of the gendarmerie and regular troops, thus encouraged corruption and all manner of irregularities. Contemporary observers frequently reported from the field that low and uncertain salaries made it difficult for authorities to attract the “respectable” individuals that an ideal Ottoman gendarmerie needed.Footnote ⁷⁰

The financial difficulties of the last two decades of the 19th century not only made life in the corps difficult for ordinary recruits, but they also constrained the government's efforts, launched in 1879, to modernize the gendarmerie. In most provinces the old asakir-i zabtiye system persisted throughout the 1890s, but the gendarmerie model remained a distant vision. In Sivas, Mosul, and Adana, for example, the new gendarmerie corps was not established even by 1896.Footnote ⁷¹ Bingazi was still relying on its zabtiye in 1898, but that year in Yemen the reorganization had just been initiated.Footnote ⁷² Even in some provinces closer to the capital, such as Ankara and Hüdavendigar, the new model had not been implemented by 1902 and 1903, respectively.Footnote ⁷³ Again, in Basra and Işkodra, asakir-i zabtiye corps remained intact as late as 1903.Footnote ⁷⁴ Through the late 1880s, the provincial security force resembled a patched-up, make-do version of the old system. With financial and other problems hampering reorganization and reconstruction, the government was forced to implement its plan one region at a time rather than overhauling the system as a whole simultaneously.

From 1879 through the 1890s, wages fell into arrears and the state reduced the number of men employed in the zabtiye and gendarmerie forces. Archives hold numerous complaints from provincial governors about the insufficiency of security forces under their authority and requests for additional mounted recruits. In response, the government in most cases proposed a reduction in gendarmes’ salaries to generate savings for additional hiring. This occurred in Midilli, where an ordinary policeman's salary was 300 piastres per month. Here, local authorities were counseled to offer a new recruit 200 piastres, enabling them to hire additional men.Footnote ⁷⁵ In Işkodra, before the gendarmerie reform was put into application, the number of zabtiye recruits was reduced by means of forced retirement.Footnote ⁷⁶

GENDARMES AND WORK STOPPAGES

To protest low wages and poor working conditions, recruits had few options beyond resigning from the corps, an option that was exercised often enough to make the dropout rate a severe problem for provincial authorities. Budget constraints paralyzed officials just when they needed to double the forces under their command to restore public security. Governors sent telegram upon telegram to Istanbul requesting immediate payments but with little effect. Under such circumstances, it is not surprising to find luckless gendarmes complaining to authorities, abandoning their posts, and even speaking of mutiny. In Baghdad, for example, unpaid wages were the reason gendarmes gave for deserting their “arms and posts” in 1903, and this force eventually dwindled to a point that seriously jeopardized public security in the province. The provincial administrative council decided to call in regular army troops where needed.Footnote ⁷⁷

The government's decision to make a 40 percent cut in the budgetary allowance for the gendarmerie in 1897 marked a turning point. Adverse repercussions became evident in following years. In Adana and Aleppo, for example, a large majority of recruits abandoned their posts in 1899.Footnote ⁷⁸ In the province of Syria in 1902, police officers and zabtiye recruits drifted off one after another, leaving ten policemen and 200 zabtiyes. As the governor explained in a memo to the Interior Ministry, only four or five men per district remained in the province, making policing all but nonexistent.Footnote ⁷⁹ Another document from the same year indicates that the situation in Aydın was not much different. After encountering difficulties in tax collection, local authorities tried to delegate the task to gendarmes, but the majority resigned after months without pay.Footnote ⁸⁰

Authorities’ response to deserting gendarmes reflected, in most cases, realism and expediency, if not tolerance. In the case of Aleppo mentioned previously, the Interior Ministry stated that it was normal for a man to give up his post when not remunerated regularly.Footnote ⁸¹ This pragmatic response implies acknowledgment of the legitimacy of gendarmes’ protests to a certain extent. Central government authorities in Istanbul ordered the bureaucracy to find a way to immediately disburse gendarmes’ salaries in order to secure their return to provincial regiments. Although authorities in Istanbul took a forbearing, perhaps paternalistic, approach to most deserters, in some cases, for instance in Adana in 1902, they sent strict orders that protest leaders be identified and properly punished. In a carrot-and-stick case from the same year, two of nine gendarmes who had been summoned from Çatalca for service in Istanbul refused to abide by the order on the grounds that they had received no more than half the salary promised during the previous month of Ramadan.Footnote ⁸² This time an investigation of the two gendarmes was ordered but only following full payment of their wages.Footnote ⁸³

ARMENIANS IN THE GENDARMERIE AND THE HAMIDIAN REGIME

During the 19th century, Ottoman administrators faced a difficult dilemma, torn between the need to mold a universal Ottoman citizenship implying civil equality of all Ottoman subjects, on the one hand, and ambivalence regarding non-Muslim participation in public administration, particularly in the military and internal policing structures, on the other hand. Principles regulating Muslim and non-Muslim roles in government services, both civil and military, had already undergone significant changes following the Tanzimat edict of 1839 and especially the reform decree (islahat fermanı) of 1856, proclaimed in the aftermath of the Crimean War. As a result of these imperial edicts, non-Muslims were admitted to employment in Ottoman public administration in greater numbers than had been the case in the past. In 1855, the government announced that non-Muslims should serve in the military. No significant progress was made in this area until 1909, when non-Muslims were officially proclaimed liable to military conscription.Footnote ⁸⁴ Although several studies focus on the status of non-Muslims in the military, to date none in any language examine their role in the Ottoman gendarmerie corps.

Prior to 1879, authorities did not categorically reject non-Muslim participation in the gendarmerie corps, although they remained highly skeptical about admitting these groups into the military. For example, when the reform division introduced administrative reform in Zeytun, local gendarmerie companies were filled half by Muslim and half by Armenian subjects.Footnote ⁸⁵ Although known to doubt the efficiency of non-Muslim military service, Cevdet Pasha was the person behind this arrangement in Zeytun. After the Russian–Turkish war of 1877–78, Armenian participation in the gendarmerie took a decisive turn. By signing the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, the Ottoman government committed itself to implementing reforms in the eastern provinces in which Armenians constituted a significant segment of the population. These reforms intended to protect Armenians from Circassians and Kurds and to secure their representation in local government. The treaty further required representation of non-Muslims in local police forces and gendarmeries in proportion to their percentage of the total population.Footnote ⁸⁶

Bringing Armenian subjects into the gendarmerie proved particularly complex. Although a few Ottoman officials in both central and local governments made sincere attempts to bring an equitable proportion of Armenians into the corps, they encountered hardships. An empire-wide government survey conducted in 1894 to establish the proportion of Armenians and other non-Muslims in the police force and gendarmerie revealed that little had been accomplished in this regard. As the “administrative reform in Asiatic Turkey” principally concerned the Armenian minority, official statistics compiled from the survey allocated one column to this ethnic group but bundled all other non-Muslim subjects into another. According to this source, the number of men employed in the gendarmerie was 26,507, of whom 77 were Armenian and 771 were non-Muslim recruits from other ethnic communities.Footnote ⁸⁷

Many factors contributed to this poor Armenian showing. British counselors in the region described local Armenian indifference to the corps, for example. According to an observer, one reason for this lack of enthusiasm was that “the importance of gendarmerie service for the Armenian nation was not understood by the lower classes.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Yet non-Muslim elites in general voiced concerns about inadequate representation in local courts and local administration, including the gendarmerie.Footnote ⁸⁹ The survey results indicate that the Armenian elite's advocacy apparently failed to persuade lower-class Armenians to enlist in the corps.Footnote ⁹⁰

We may assume that the government's incapacity to provide for maintenance and salaries was another factor behind Armenians’ lack of enthusiasm. Local authorities in the eastern provinces, for example, frequently complained of payment irregularities, which, they said, explained the Armenians’ disinterest, resulting in officials’ inability to meet quota goals.Footnote ⁹¹ This was a problem not only in the eastern provinces, but also closer to the capital, and poor pay might have been as much a deciding factor as payment irregularities. The governor of Izmit, for example, blamed low wages.Footnote ⁹² The governor of Adana, where salaries were paid regularly, echoed that assessment.Footnote ⁹³ Other provinces made the same complaint: it was reported that in Bitlis the only option was to employ Muslims in positions meant for Christians as long as the force suffered from low salaries and lack of regular payment.Footnote ⁹⁴ Another memorandum from Bitlis explained that most non-Muslims there were craftsmen or otherwise employed in some profession, indicating that the issue was complex and not a matter of ethnoreligious identity alone. The memorandum concluded that the only way to attract this segment of society was to offer better pay.Footnote ⁹⁵

As mentioned previously, Ottoman authorities were divided regarding the employment of non-Muslims, particularly in the gendarmerie. In contrast to the reform minded, some officials opposed the use of Armenians in the security force. For example, Saadettin Paşa, who was responsible for investigating the disturbances and massacres of 1896 in Van province, held that Christian gendarmes had been giving less than satisfactory service; he accused them of insubordination and of disobeying orders in failing to arrest Christian suspects.Footnote ⁹⁶ Saadettin Paşa's unfavorable view notwithstanding, authorities expressed willingness to employ Christians in Anatolia and Rumelia although preferably on the basis of merit rather than according to their proportion of the population.Footnote ⁹⁷

Regardless of whether Ottoman officials were in favor of Armenian participation in the gendarmerie, the Hamidian regime's security concerns and policy preferences regarding eastern Anatolia complicated the situation. Gendarmerie reform was under way but making little progress due to financial difficulties. The regime consequently relied on the Fourth Army Corps stationed in the region and, beginning in 1890, on Hamidiye Light Cavalry regiments. Both forces were put under the command of Zeki Pasha, who was sent to the region by Abdülhamit II, with extraordinary powers.Footnote ⁹⁸ Thus, the policing of the provinces and countryside in the east was left once more to the military. The Hamidiye regiments operated mostly as irregular militias. Moreover, most of the gendarmerie units were populated by Circassian immigrants, who were apparently responsible for considerable disturbances in the region.

Overall, the gendarmerie did not generate a sense of shared Ottoman citizenship. It was not effective even in fulfilling its policing duties. The Porte was able to keep the eastern provinces under control only by resorting to a three-tiered security system: regular military troops, a gendarmerie that employed often rowdy Chechen and Circassian newcomers to Ottoman lands, and Kurdish tribes incorporated into the Hamidiye Light Cavalry. However, the fallback, ad hoc security and policing technologies employed could hardly be termed infrastructural.