Sources: Ottoman record-keeping and the Turkish Prime Ministry Archive

The Ottoman section of the Prime Ministry Archive in Istanbul contains a wealth of material for the study of petitioning. The type of material preserved and its organization in the archive owes much to the concerns of the palace bureaucracy, and so offers informative clues about the imperial government's attitude to petitions. While introducing the sources that are the basis for this article, I will also give an overview of developments in the palace's handling of petitions from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century.

Prior to the mid-seventeenth century, the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn kept copies of its responses to petitions in the Mühimme Defterleri (Registers of Important Affairs). These registers contain copies of outgoing correspondence on many different aspects of imperial business, as well as responses to petitions, and have been one of the major sources for modern historians of the empire. In the mid-seventeenth century the palace began to keep a second series of registers devoted exclusively to responses to petitions – the Şikayet Defterleri (Registers of Complaints).Footnote ¹³ The creation of this new archival unit may represent a decision by the palace to pay greater attention to petitions; it could also have been the result of an increase in the number of petitions that were sent.Footnote ¹⁴ Most likely, both these causes were involved and were symbiotically related: the palace may have responded to increasing numbers of petitions by reforming its procedures for handling them, and the improved efficiency of the palace's processes may have encouraged more people to petition.

The imperial orders logged in the Şikayet Defterleri contain often terse summaries of the petitions to which they responded, followed by the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn's command. The purpose of these registers was to keep records of all orders that were issued, so that these could later be verified. I will give an example of the palace using its archives in this way below. For historians, these registers are vital.Footnote ¹⁵ For a start, we must assume that these registers were fairly comprehensive, giving us an overview of the type and frequency of petitions received in a particular year.Footnote ¹⁶ The registers also show us how the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn responded to petitions, revealing what petitioners got out of petitioning. These orders, however, show only the end result of the petitioning process. We learn nothing about the bureaucratic procedures that led to the issue of an order, nor anything about how petitioners composed their petitions and phrased their demands. To answer such questions it is necessary to examine original petitions – something which, for the most part, previous scholars working on petitioning have not done.Footnote ¹⁷

During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, while the imperial palace took great care to archive its own orders, it was not so meticulous in preserving petitions themselves. The assumption of some scholars that original petitions have not survived is, however, mistaken.Footnote ¹⁸ Plenty of original petitions are available in the Prime Ministry Archive, in a series of uncatalogued boxes labelled Divan Kalemi. This series houses assorted loose documents connected with the business of the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn, and incoming petitions are found alongside various kinds of outgoing correspondence and notes used for internal communication between the different departments of the bureaucracy. From 1742, the number of surviving petitions increases dramatically, as the result of another shift in Ottoman record-keeping practices. In this year the palace created a new department specifically to handle incoming petitions, and many thousands of these petitions are found in the series of boxes bearing its name – Şikayet Kalemi (Complaints Department). The creation of a special department to process and archive petitions coincided with the emergence of another new series of registers: the Vilayet Ahkam Defterleri (Registers of Provincial Orders). This series was a further refinement of the system for archiving the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn's responses to petitions, consisting of several separate sub-series for orders resulting from the more important provinces. These bureaucratic and archival reforms seem to have been part of another effort to improve the imperial government's responsiveness to its subjects, that could have both been prompted by and further encouraged a growing stream of petitions.

The boxes of petitions in the Prime Ministry Archive constitute a significant body of material written by, or at the behest of, ordinary Ottoman subjects. As such, they deserve greater attention from scholars. Ottoman historiography is often criticized for being state-centric: a quality that results from historians’ overwhelming reliance on sources produced by the state and its institutions. While petitions were written to conform with these institutions’ norms, they nevertheless represent the initiative and agency of Ottoman subjects, helping us to see how they attempted to use the imperial government's power, and what they saw as the imperial government's proper role. They allow us to study the imperial government from the perspective of the provincial subject.

By using original petitions we can also better tell the story of the petition's journey to and through the imperial palace in Istanbul. They not only give insight into how petitions were composed, and the constraints under which petitioners operated, but they also bear marks of the bureaucratic process they underwent at the palace. The paper bearing the petition was annotated by different officials as it made its way through the various palace departments. In the following sections I trace the progress of a petition from its composition in Egypt, through its conveyance to the palace in Istanbul, and through the palace's bureaucracy.

The life of a petition, stage 1: composition

Petitions are uniformly written in formal Ottoman Turkish and are highly formulaic. All petitions consisted of a variant of the following formula:

1. 1) A prayer for the Sultan's health, with appropriate honorifics (e.g. devletlü, merḥametlü, Sulṭānım ḥażretleri sağ olsun).

2. 2) A phrase in the third person, usually describing the petitioner as a slave, introducing the petition (typically ʿarż-ı bende budur ki or ʿarżuḥāl-ı ḳulları budur ki).

3. 3) A description of the petitioner's problem.

4. 4) A request, usually for the issue of a document (emr-i şerīf ricā olunur).

5. 5) The phrase “the decision remains yours, my Sultan” (emr ü fermān Sulṭānımındır).

6. 6) A signature, in which the petitioner again describes him or herself as a slave (bende fulān).

In Egypt, even highly literate petitioners would often have had to hire a scribe to compose their petition in a language that was foreign to most Egyptians. Many Turkish-speakers would also have required assistance if they were not familiar with the formal register and the necessary formulae. The existence of professional petition-writers known as ʿarżuḥālcis in the Ottoman empire is well known, although this group of people is not particularly well understood. Richard Wittmann suggests that most ʿarżuḥālcis in Istanbul were retired scribes from the imperial bureaucracy.Footnote ¹⁹ The Ottoman traveller Evliyā Çelebi, describing Cairo in the 1670s, claimed that there were 45 professional ʿarżuḥālcis, among whom were many highly proficient Turks from the central lands of the empire.Footnote ²⁰ Perhaps such scribes had come to Cairo in the service of Ottoman governors or other officials and settled there, finding an outlet for their skills in private practice. It is also possible that kadis in Egypt composed petitions on behalf of those under their jurisdiction. Many of the kadis employed in Cairo and in the Egyptian sub-provinces were products of the imperial college system and would have been competent writers of Turkish; petition-writing may have been an important function of kadis, especially in the smaller towns. While most petitioners probably sought professional help, there are enough petitions containing scrappy handwriting or grammatical errors to suggest that some did not bother, or relied on people with a tenuous claim to professionalism. ʿArżuḥālcis were not as indispensable to legal life as lawyers are today.

How did a petitioner make his or her case? In the example given at the start of this article, al-Ḥājj Muṣṭafā based his demand that his Christian neighbour Banūb be prevented from living in a house taller than his by appealing to customary practice, rather than to a point of law. Banūb's offence was to have altered the status quo: vażʿ-ı ḳadīmini tağyīr eyleyüb. This is despite the fact that there were clear legal grounds on which Muṣṭafā could have made a complaint: Islamic law prohibited non-Muslims from owning buildings taller than those of the Muslims living in the same town. The fatwa obtained by Muṣṭafā from the Şeyhülislām, if it gave the basis for the opinion (many fatwas do not), would have referred to the relevant legal texts. Muṣṭafā's choice shows the power of tradition as a legitimizing factor in Ottoman society.Footnote ²¹ Of course, whether Muṣṭafā himself really felt a deep concern for tradition, or whether he simply recognized it as a rhetorical strategy that could produce the desired result, is another question. As well as tradition, petitioners would often claim that their adversaries were violating the sharīʿa, or sometimes the sharīʿa and the ḳānūn (Sultanic law). Petitioners never explicitly identified particular points of law on which to base their claims, however: they simply claimed that the law had been violated.

The life of a petition, stage 2: conveyance to the palace

Once an Egyptian petitioner had produced a petition, how did he or she deliver it to the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn? The idealized image of the petitioning process was of the Sultan receiving petitions personally while riding to mosque or on campaign. In the sprawling Ottoman empire of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, this function was necessarily delegated and the process bureaucratized. A litigant could present a petition in person, but it would be received by an official on the Sultan's behalf and then passed on to the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn. According to Colin Imber, during the seventeenth century the chief white eunuch was charged with receiving petitions at the outer door to the palace grounds.Footnote ²²

Many petitioners did present their petitions in person, and the accounts of European travellers describe a dramatic ritual in which petitioners would run through the palace grounds holding a burning mat above their heads, the smoke of which would alert the Sultan to the injustice they suffered.Footnote ²³ Similar rituals – the performance of a prescribed and prominent act in order to bring something to the sovereign's attention – were associated with petitioning in other pre-modern societies. Examples include the “chain of justice” of ancient Persian epics, pulled to ring a bell in the ruler's quarters and in use in Mughal India, and the Norman cry of “Haro! Haro! Haro! A l'aide, mon prince, on me fait tort”, which, if pronounced on bended knee with arms held aloft, would immediately suspend any argument and have it transferred to the ducal court.Footnote ²⁴ Political theatre such as this was an integral part of ideologies of the just prince, in which injustice was necessarily the result of the ruler's ignorance. But while rituals like these are colourful, they should not obscure the fact that in the Ottoman empire petitioning was at heart a bureaucratic encounter. Public performance of a ritual was not necessary: submission of the written document was all that was required.

Despite the expense and danger of travel, some provincial petitioners, including some from as far as Egypt, journeyed to Istanbul to present their petitions in person. Contemporary chronicles provide examples of petitioners making this choice when the stakes were particularly high. The eighteenth-century soldier-chronicler Damurdāshī records that during 1698–99 the people of Banī Suwayf and al-Bahnasā in Upper Egypt sent a petition to Istanbul complaining that they suffered frequent bedouin raids, and that the local authorities were turning a blind eye due to bribes from the bedouin. They elected a local shaykh called Muḥammad to submit their petition, and he sailed to Istanbul in a merchant ship from Alexandria.Footnote ²⁵ Damurdāshī also relates an event from the governorship of Ḥasan Pasha al-Silāḥdār (1707–09) in which the six Cairo regiments other than the Janissaries sent a petition complaining about the Janissaries’ monopolization of urban tax-farms and their protection of certain merchants against the city's authorities.Footnote ²⁶ The regiments selected six people, one representing each regiment, to travel to Istanbul and submit the petition. The Janissary officers got wind of their plot, and composed their own petition that listed the various offices held by their rivals. They demanded that if they were to lose any of their privileges then their rivals should lose something too. The Janissary counter-petition was also submitted in person, by a Janissary of Istanbul origin. According to Damurdāshī, he bumped into the six rival petitioners in Alexandria and they ended up travelling on the same boat.Footnote ²⁷

Most petitioners, however, and particularly those engaged in mundane disputes, would not have travelled to Istanbul in person, but would have relied on courier networks to transport their petitions to the palace. In order to understand how great a burden the sending of a petition represented, it would be useful to know how much courier services cost, and how long it took a letter to arrive. Unfortunately, scholarly work on Ottoman postal communications is sparse. Colin Heywood has studied the official network of post-stations in Rumelia, but his work focuses on land transport, and the faster and more usual route between Egypt and Istanbul was by sea.Footnote ²⁸ It is not clear whether there was an official post on this route as systematic as that on the main land routes in Rumelia and Anatolia. Nor is it clear whether the official postal system was open to ordinary petitioners. It seems likely that at least some petitioners would have relied on private couriers connected with merchant networks to deliver their petitions, but it is not possible to say how expensive this might have been.Footnote ²⁹

It is easier to comment on how long petitions would have taken to reach Istanbul. The sea journey from Alexandria to Istanbul took twelve days.Footnote ³⁰ From Cairo, there was the additional journey by river to Rosetta, and then along the coast to Alexandria. There would also have been delays waiting for transport at each interchange. The chronicler Aḥmad Shalabī reports that the news of Sultan Aḥmed III's accession to the throne on 27 Rebīʿü’l-evvel 1115 (10 August 1703) arrived in Cairo during Rebīʿü’s-sānī: he does not give the day of arrival, but this at least shows that messages could arrive within a lunar month.Footnote ³¹ A new Sultan was major news, and a few scattered examples suggest that official mail was usually somewhat slower. Imperial orders were often copied into the registers of al-Bāb al-ʿĀlī, Cairo's main sharīʿa court. Unfortunately, the scribes did not usually note the date of arrival,Footnote ³² but on occasion they did, allowing comparison with the date of the order itself. An order issued on 5 Cemāẕiyü’l-evvel 1075 (24 November 1664) arrived in Cairo on 19 Receb (5 February 1665); another dated late Şevvāl 1092 (3–11 November 1681) arrived on 23 Ẕī’l-ḥicce (3 January 1682).Footnote ³³ This suggests that non-urgent mail may have taken around two months to make the journey one-way. This means that petitioners in Egypt could have expected to wait more than four months for a reply: there would have been a further delay as the petition was processed by the palace. And, of course, given the nature of early modern travel there was always the potential for lengthier, unexpected delays. Petitioning added considerably both to the cost of a lawsuit and to its length: litigants approaching the sharīʿa court directly could expect to have their disputes resolved swiftly, often on the same day.

The life of a petition, stage 3: procedure at the palace

The procedure followed by the palace when responding to petitions was bureaucratic rather than judicial. There was no public or private hearing attended by the parties to the dispute. Even if the petitioner travelled to the palace in person, he or she would not usually be granted an audience: the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn based its decisions on the paperwork alone.Footnote ³⁴ Only the petitioner's case was considered: his or her adversary did not have a chance to respond.Footnote ³⁵ It is not surprising, therefore, that the orders issued in response to petitions rarely gave definitive instructions, and often simply instructed the local kadi or governor to deal with the matter according to the sharīʿa. While the procedure was bureaucratic rather than judicial, however, it could still contain an investigative component. When the petitioner referred to a fact that could be verified in the palace's archives, the official conducting the initial review of the petition would check the petitioner's claim and annotate a copy of the relevant document by the side of the petition before passing it on.

The palace's procedures are illustrated well by the petition reproduced in the appendix. This petition, concerning a dispute over the supervisorship of a vaḳıf (endowment), was sent by Muṣṭafā ibn al-Shaykh Aḥmad Muḥammad of Cairo during the first half of 1676.Footnote ³⁶

Muṣṭafā's petition itself was confined to the lower left-hand part of the paper. This convention was universally observed and allowed for substantial annotation to be made by palace bureaucrats. When the petition reached the palace, the first official annotation simply noted the date of its arrival: late Rebīʿü’s-sānī 1087 (3–11 July 1676).

The petition was then reviewed by a junior official. Muṣṭafā claimed that he was the rightful supervisor of the endowment of Muḥammad Abū ’l-Saʿūd al-Jāriḥī, and that this position had been granted to him and his descendants by the Sultan in recognition of his having repaired the endowment's buildings, mosque and finances after the endowment had become impoverished through mismanagement. He claimed to possess four appointment deeds (berāts) and an imperial decree (fermān) from Istanbul confirming his position, as well as an order issued by the governor in Egypt; his post was also recorded in the official register in Cairo. Nevertheless, people who bore “grudges and ill-will” were interfering and attempting to take his position from him. Muṣṭafā asked for a further decree guaranteeing his position and that of his descendants.

As it rested on title granted by the palace, Muṣṭafā's claim could be verified using the palace's archives. Muṣṭafā identified the fermān already in his possession by its date – mid Rebīʿü’l-evvel 1077 (11–20 September 1666). The junior official reviewing his petition duly looked up the copy of this fermān that was filed at the palace. This previous fermān, as Muṣṭafā claimed, confirmed that the supervisorship of the endowment belonged to Muṣṭafā and his descendants. The junior official annotated the text of the fermān at the top right of the petition, before passing it on to the next bureaucrat in the process.

This senior official was the decision maker. Who exactly the decision-making official was is not clear. The petitions themselves were always addressed to “my Sultan”. Of course, the petitions were in fact handled not by the Sultan himself but by his Dīvān-i Hümāyūn, which was presided over by the Grand Vizier. But given the enormous quantity of petitions, and the humdrum nature of many of them, it seems unlikely that the Grand Vizier was involved in every one. Decisions on most petitions would have been made by a lower-ranking member of the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn's staff, with only the most important being shown to the Grand Vizier. The official with responsibility for deciding which petitions were sent higher up clearly wielded considerable influence, but unfortunately this stage of the process is invisible.

The senior official first reviewed the petition and the annotations made by the junior official. On Muṣṭafā's petition, we can see that he confirmed that Muṣṭafā's claim was genuine on the strength of the fermān that the junior official had copied on to the paper, and he signified this by scribbling “correct” (ṣaḥīḥdir) above it. On this basis, the official decided to issue an imperial order in Muṣṭafā's favour, reconfirming his right, and his descendants’ right, to the supervisorship of the endowment. The official wrote an instruction to this effect at the top left of the paper. This instruction was written in large letters with a thick pen. Often, though not in the case of Muṣṭafā's petition, the official would scatter gold flakes on to the still-wet ink.

The document was then passed on to the scribe whose job it was to draw up the imperial order. Although I have not seen the particular imperial order that resulted from this petition, based on the virtual uniformity of other such orders sent to Egypt I can say that it would have been addressed to both the governor and the chief kadi in Cairo. The palace would have ordered the governor and the kadi to ensure that Muṣṭafā's right was not compromised. Prior to sending the order, a copy would have been made for the palace's records. Upon its arrival in Cairo, a further copy may have been made in the registers of Cairo's main sharīʿa court, al-Bāb al-ʿĀlī.

Explicit instruction

In some cases, the imperial order issued in response to a petition explicitly instructed the kadi to reach a particular decision: in what follows I call these specific orders. I begin my analysis with specific orders, as these are the most obvious way that an order could impact the subsequent court hearing. The Dīvān-i Hümāyūn did not, however, usually issue specific orders. The most common order was an instruction simply to hear the matter according to the sharīʿa, which I will call an unspecific order.Footnote ³⁷ As discussed above, the palace dealt with petitions using a bureaucratic rather than a judicial procedure: there was no hearing, and only the petitioner was able to present his or her case. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn usually issued an unspecific order, delegating to the kadi the tasks of ascertaining whether the petitioner's claim was true and judging accordingly. What requires explanation is the fact that the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn, having heard from only one party to a dispute, did sometimes issue a specific order, directing the kadi to reach a particular judgment.

During the second half of 1085 (late 1674 to early 1675), a man called Aḥmad Nūr al-Dīn sent a petition to the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn. Ahmad had endowed a mosque and two colleges in Cairo, and had stipulated in the endowment deed that the supervisor of the endowment should be appointed from his male line.Footnote ³⁸ His father ʿAlīm had held the position of supervisor, but when he died a replacement had been appointed from outside his family, contrary to the stipulations of the endowment. Aḥmad had previously obtained an order from the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn, and the case had been heard by a kadi, who had issued Aḥmad with a legal deed (ḥuccet) in his favour. Aḥmad had also procured a fatwa in support of his claim. Apparently, people from outside his family had continued to interfere in the endowment, which had led Aḥmad to approach the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn a second time. The imperial order resulting from this petition explicitly directed the kadi and the governor in Cairo to enforce the terms of the deed and the previous order, and to prevent any further interference from outsiders in Aḥmad's endowment.Footnote ³⁹

Another example of a specific order is the response to a petition submitted by Yūsuf ibn Shaykh ʿAbd al-Jawād, Shaykh Sarāmī and Shaykh Maḥmūd Ḥamūdī in early 1140 (late 1727 to early 1728). Yūsuf, Sarāmī and Maḥmūd had been appointed joint supervisors of the Sufi lodge of ʿĀbidīn and Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn in the Lower Egyptian town of Bilbays, a small mosque in the village of Santīḥ, and the endowments of Sayyid Aḥmad, Abū Shaʿbān and Sayyid ʿĀlī in the village of Mūfa. They had an imperial appointment deed (berāt) confirming their positions. However, they claimed that unnamed individuals were preventing them from taking control of these institutions and endowments. The order issued by the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn in response to their petition explicitly instructed the kadi and the governor in Cairo that the three men must be given control in accordance with their appointment deed.Footnote ⁴⁰

Similarly, in late Cemāẕiyü’l-evvel 1109 (5–14 December 1697), a woman called ʿĀyisha sent a petition and obtained an imperial order explicitly ordering the kadi and the governor in Cairo to grant possession of a merchant hostel, several shops and some properties in the vicinity of the Khān al-Khalīlī market in Cairo to an agent she had appointed. ʿĀyisha held the usufruct of these properties, as had her ancestors, and she had a deed authorizing her to assume possession of them.Footnote ⁴¹

What the cases of Aḥmad Nūr al-Dīn, Yūsuf and his friends, and ʿĀyisha had in common was that all revolved around claims that were verifiable with documents. It was this that allowed the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn to issue specific orders. All three cases centred on a person's right to supervise an endowment or on a person's title to property. These rights had all previously been established or confirmed by an authority that had issued the petitioner with a document.

Yūsuf and his friends had been issued with an imperial appointment deed (berāt). While they were far away in Lower Egypt, the imperial government in Istanbul would have kept a copy of the appointment deed, as it did with all documentation that it issued. The Dīvān-i Hümāyūn's staff would have looked up the appointment deed in the palace's archives to check the veracity of Yūsuf's claim. I illustrated this process in part 1, with the example of Muṣṭafā ibn al-Shaykh Aḥmad Muḥammad, the supervisor of the endowment of Muḥammad Abū ’l-Saʿūd al-Jāriḥī.

Aḥmad Nūr al-Dīn referred to a previously issued imperial order in his petition, as did Muṣṭafā ibn al-Shaykh Aḥmad Muḥammad. Likewise, palace bureaucrats would have been able to locate a copy of this document in their archives and check Aḥmad's claim. Aḥmad also had a deed issued by a kadi (ḥuccet) as a result of an earlier litigation, although it is not clear whether the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn would have been able to consult this. Furthermore, as Aḥmad's endowment was of considerable size, it is possible that the palace archives held a copy of the endowment deed. As the issue at stake was the stipulations of the endowment deed, a palace bureaucrat could also have used this to verify Aḥmad's claim.

ʿĀyisha, on the other hand, did not refer to a previously issued imperial order or appointment deed. She did, however, have a deed issued by a kadi (ḥuccet), either as a result of a previous litigation, or because she had gone to the kadi and provided him with evidence of her right in order to obtain an authoritative document. This document had not been issued by the central government in Istanbul, and so a copy would not necessarily have been available in the palace's archives. ʿĀyisha, however, presented her petition in person, and so may have brought her own copy of the deed with her.Footnote ⁴²

In these three cases, the facts had already been established by an authoritative body: either the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn itself, another arm of the palace bureaucracy, or a kadi. The role of the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn was not to adjudicate: the Dīvān did not have to determine whether the claim of the petitioner was true. Its role was rather to enforce the consequences of a right that had already been established. The Dīvān-i Hümāyūn was ordering its subordinates – the governor and the chief kadi of Egypt – to ensure that these consequences were realized.

Oversight

In some cases, then, the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn issued specific orders directing the kadi to reach a particular judgment. In such cases it is easy to see the appeal of petitioning for the petitioner: he or she received a judgment in his or her favour from the highest authority in the empire. However, the majority of orders issued in response to petitions were unspecific: they contained simply the generic instruction that the kadi should hear the matter according to the sharīʿa. What did the petitioner gain from such an order that justified the time and expense involved in sending a petition? One possible answer is that all petitioners hoped for a specific order, but that most were unlucky. This seems unlikely: as explained above, the decision whether to issue a specific or an unspecific order was based on transparent factors that would have allowed a petitioner to gauge with some degree of accuracy what kind of order he or she would be likely to receive. In what follows, I will suggest that even an unspecific order could have been a desirable outcome for the petitioner.

Ḥācī Muṣṭafā, a veteran of the Bostancı regiment, sent a petition to the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn during early 1086 (early to mid 1675). Ḥācī Muṣṭafā claimed that Ḥaydar and Dāwīd, two money changers in Cairo, had borrowed from him 322,000 Egyptian para and had given him a sealed deed (memhūr temessük) confirming the debt. Subsequently, they had repaid 75,000 para but were refusing to return the remainder.Footnote ⁴³ Ḥācī Muṣṭafā requested that the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn order the immediate repayment of the debt, but the Dīvān ordered simply that the matter be heard according to the sharīʿa.Footnote ⁴⁴ Ḥācī Muṣṭafā possessed a document confirming the original loan, but proof that a debt had once existed could not prove that it still existed. Ḥaydar and Dāwīd might claim that they had repaid the entire sum, or at least more than the 75,000 para that Ḥācī Muṣṭafā admitted. Regardless of what Ḥācī Muṣṭafā requested in his petition, if he was familiar with the legal process then he cannot have expected to be issued with a specific order in his favour.

If Ḥācī Muṣṭafā's petition resulted only in an order to the kadi in Egypt to hear the matter according to the sharīʿa, what good did it do Ḥācī Muṣṭafā? One impact the order had was to inform the Egyptian governor of the case. This was routine with orders sent to Egypt. All of those I found were jointly addressed: usually to the governor and the chief kadi in Cairo, sometimes to the governor and the kadi of another Egyptian town. Even if the case was ultimately resolved in the sharīʿa court by the kadi, a jointly addressed order made the governor responsible for ensuring that it was carried out satisfactorily. By sending a petition, a litigant could involve multiple authorities in his or her case.

There are two main reasons why a litigant might want to involve the governor as well as the kadi in his or her dispute. One possibility is that the litigant might anticipate not receiving a fair hearing before the kadi. The litigant might suspect the kadi of being corrupt. Or, if the litigant's adversary was a powerful person locally, the litigant might fear that the kadi would find it difficult to resist the adversary's influence.

The second possibility is that the litigant might doubt the kadi's ability to have his judgment enforced. The fact that Ottoman kadis had weak enforcement powers has been noted elsewhere.Footnote ⁴⁵ Petitioning records provide documentary evidence that even when a litigant had obtained a favourable settlement in a sharīʿa court, he or she might still be led to petition the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn – probably to try to have the kadi's judgment enforced. Even when a petition does not claim that the dispute had previously been heard by a kadi, the decision to send the petition may still have been prompted by the kadi's lack of enforcement powers. Experienced litigants would have been well aware of the limits of the kadi's powers. They may have petitioned, thereby involving the governor who had coercive force at his disposal, when they anticipated that otherwise their adversary would simply ignore the kadi's judgment.

The example I use here is difficult to follow as it involves three different people called Muṣṭafā. They are distinguishable, however, as one has the prefixed title “al-Ḥājj” and another has the suffixed military rank “Çorbacı”; the third I will call by his name only. This case is an example of a person sending a petition to Istanbul after a favourable sharīʿa court judgment failed to resolve the dispute. In early 1109 (mid to late 1697), Muṣṭafā sent a petition to the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn. He reported that Sīdī ʿUthmān, a resident of the Egyptian port of Rosetta and the manumitted slave of his late uncle al-Ḥājj Muṣṭafā, had died without leaving any children. In the absence of prior heirs, ʿUthmān's estate should have passed to al-Ḥājj Muṣṭafā, as his former owner, and thence to Muṣṭafā, as al-Ḥājj Muṣṭafā's heir.Footnote ⁴⁶ Moreover, ʿUthmān's wife had also died without children, and so her estate should have passed to ʿUthmān, and thence to Muṣṭafā. However, Muṣṭafā had not been present in Rosetta in order to claim his right, and both ʿUthmān's and his wife's estates had been seized by Muṣṭafā Çorbacı. Muṣṭafā Çorbacı claimed the estates on behalf of his wife, on the grounds that she was also a manumitted slave of the same owner. Muṣṭafā claimed that he had legally established his claim to the estates, and that he had received a legal deed (ḥuccet) confirming this.Footnote ⁴⁷ Nevertheless, Muṣṭafā Çorbacı continued to refuse to hand over the estates. In response to Muṣṭafā's petition, the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn ordered the kadi and governor in Cairo that the matter be heard according to the sharīʿa.Footnote ⁴⁸

Prior to sending his petition, Muṣṭafā had won a lawsuit against Muṣṭafā Çorbacı in a sharīʿa court: he stated that he had established his claim and received a ḥuccet confirming this. Probably, this first lawsuit was conducted in the sharīʿa court of Rosetta. Despite victory in court, the dispute had dragged on, as Muṣṭafā Çorbacı had ignored the verdict, so Muṣṭafā sent a petition. The Dīvān-i Hümāyūn responded with an unspecific order, as we would expect, since they only had Muṣṭafā's word that his story was accurate.Footnote ⁴⁹ However, by addressing the order to the governor as well as to the chief kadi, the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn charged him with ensuring that the dispute was resolved. The governor had coercive force at his disposal, and so assuming that Muṣṭafā's story turned out to be true, he could compel Muṣṭafā Çorbacı to comply with the kadi's judgment.

Petitioning the Sultan could, then, have a direct impact on the course of the resulting court case. In some circumstances, a petitioner could hope that the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn would explicitly back his or her claim. If this was not possible, the intervention of the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn would at least involve the governor of Egypt in the case, which could both prevent judicial corruption and ensure enforcement of the kadi's judgment. Beyond such direct impacts, however, petitioning could also produce less tangible benefits for the petitioner. To understand these, we need to consider the nature of Ottoman judicial procedure and the social and psychological dynamics of disputing.

Intimidation through documentation

Many petitioners assembled multiple documents in pursuit of their claims. The resentful neighbour who introduced this article, al-Ḥājj Muṣṭafā of Ziftā, obtained a fatwa from the Şeyhülislām and then requested an imperial decree from the Sultan in his campaign to have the top floor removed from his neighbour Banūb's house. Aḥmad Nūr al-Dīn obtained a fatwa before he sought the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn's help in his attempt to regain control of his endowment. Muṣṭafā ibn al-Shaykh Aḥmad Muḥammad, the supervisor of the endowment of Abū ’l-Saʿūd al-Jāriḥī, had already obtained a decree from the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn and an order from the governor of Egypt to accompany his four appointment deeds, and had registered his position at Cairo's sharīʿa court, before he petitioned Istanbul for a further order in his favour.

The amassing of authoritative documents by Ottoman litigants has been noted by other scholars. Several of the Greek Orthodox clerics studied by Michael Ursinus paired a fatwa with an order from the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn; one third of the petitioners in Richard Wittmann's study of the legal activities of Istanbul's non-Muslim population did so.Footnote ⁵⁰ Leslie Peirce described litigants in sixteenth-century ʿAyntāb assembling collections of a variety of types of document in support of their claims – fatwas, orders from the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn, a decree from an Istanbul kadi, orders from the provincial governor-general in Marʿaş, and the imperial “edicts of justice” called ʿadāletnāmes.Footnote ⁵¹

From the perspective of a historian, one possible response to Ottoman subjects’ evident enthusiasm for bolstering their legal claims with documents would be to try to delineate the procedural place and the legal impact of each genre of document within the judicial process. But this line of enquiry is of limited use in explaining the attraction of documents for Ottoman litigants. While deeds issued by kadis and imperial appointment deeds could be used to establish facts such as title to property or appointment to an official position, fatwas and orders from the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn were technically of little value in adjudication. A fatwa merely gave the mufti's opinion of the legal implications of a hypothetical situation: the plaintiff still had to prove that the situation outlined in the fatwa was an accurate representation of the facts.Footnote ⁵² Likewise, an imperial order could usually only order further investigation by a kadi, as the Dīvān-i Hümāyūn had only heard one side of the story. From a technical legal perspective, then, a litigant's collection of fatwas and imperial orders served no purpose: it amounted to “redundancy in documentation”, in Peirce's phrase.Footnote ⁵³

Peirce also suggested that in sixteenth-century ʿAyntāb people perceived documents as being arranged in a hierarchy, some more powerful than others.Footnote ⁵⁴ That such a perception would have been, from a legal perspective, inaccurate, is not important. It is worth considering whether certain documents, regardless of their technical value as evidence or authority, could have had an impact on the social dynamics of the courtroom.

In imagining such an impact, it is important to bear in mind the nature of Ottoman judicial procedure. The crucial point is that Ottoman sharīʿa courts – or indeed any courts adhering to sharīʿa procedure – were adversarial rather than inquisitive. The kadi's role was not to investigate, but rather to provide a procedural framework in which two litigants were able to conduct a dispute. If one of the litigants was able to establish his or her case within the procedural and evidentiary boundaries that the kadi enforced, then the kadi would issue a judgment in his or her favour.Footnote ⁵⁵ Responsibility for the progress of the adjudication, then, rested with the litigants. In fact, individual litigants bore a far greater degree of responsibility than do their counterparts in modern adversarial legal systems such as that of the United States. There was no office of prosecutor, and so victims of crime had to conduct the prosecution themselves.Footnote ⁵⁶ There was no professional intermediary class of lawyers, and so litigants had to construct their cases and assemble evidence themselves.Footnote ⁵⁷ Similarly, the defendant bore the responsibility for his or her defence. Once the plaintiff had issued a suit, it was up to the defendant to admit or deny the plaintiff's claim. If the defendant denied the claim, and the plaintiff responded by producing evidence, it was up to the defendant to issue a counter-claim and provide evidence for that if he or she wanted to continue to resist.

In this context, a barrage of authoritative documents could have had a significant intimidating effect on a legal adversary. Particularly in situations in which a plaintiff faced a less experienced defendant, such a tactic could accentuate the power dynamic. Authoritative documents could be used to intimidate the defendant into conceding defeat. The imperial order a petitioner received was a symbolic representation of the Sultan's power. The document would have been illegible to most litigants in Cairo: in a language foreign to most Egyptians, and in any case written in the dīvānī script, designed to look elegant rather than to read easily, and impenetrable to the uninitiated. But crowned with a ṭuğra, the Sultan's stylized signature, and with flakes of gold scattered across the ink, it was a document designed to impress. That such documents were sought and valued by Cairenes says much for the continued prestige of the Ottoman Sultanate.

We should also consider the performative nature of the act of petitioning. By going to the trouble and expense of sending a petition, and by appearing to know how to work the system, a litigant could convey an impression of him or herself as possessing legal knowledge and as having sufficient resources to pursue a legal battle aggressively. The act of petitioning not only produced a document but also indicated that the petitioner had financial means and determination, and that continued resistance would not result in peace. This might encourage the defendant to concede; it might also convince him or her to comply with the kadi's verdict.Footnote ⁵⁸ As illustrated above with the case of the three Muṣṭafās, a successful sharīʿa court hearing was often only one stage in a litigant's dispute – enforcement was another battle. The meaning of authoritative documents, such as the imperial orders procured by petitioners, can only be fully understood if we consider not just their technical legal value, but also their role in the broader culture of disputing.