Three hours before sunrise on an October night in 1759, Mikhaʾil Burayk, a Greek Orthodox resident of Damascus, was fast asleep. He woke up suddenly when everything around him started shaking. As the destruction caused by the nocturnal earthquake that interrupted Burayk's sleep was discovered, cries were heard all over the city: many houses had been razed, and parts of the Umayyad and other mosques were damaged. The disaster turned out to be a prelude to another, more violent one to strike a month later. On an evening in late November, a “mighty and fearsome earthquake” again hit the city. “Walls were torn down, foundations weakened, minarets of mosques collapsed, and the Umayyad mosque, with its minarets, domes, and baths was destroyed.” Many other buildings, including the Greek Orthodox church, were also ruined, and fires broke out all over the city. A mass exodus followed, involving people of all faiths and social backgrounds who had lost their homes. In gardens surrounding the city, the evacuees set up huts as provisional lodging.Footnote ¹

With the city in ruin, Ottoman authorities embarked on a swift yet carefully planned reconstruction effort. Impressive in scope, it involved a massive employment of manpower and equipment. In many ways it resembled another rebuilding effort that had taken place only four years earlier, in Lisbon. On 1 November 1755 a mighty earthquake shook the city, followed by a tsunami and fires that broke out all over the Portuguese capital. Houses of worship were destroyed; numerous people lost their homes and fled the devastated city. There, too, the authorities made plans to reconstruct the city. Yet there were some profound differences between Lisbon and Damascus in the nature of government involvement and the execution of rebuilding. They reflected certain dissimilarities between the two states in their perceived roles vis-à-vis their respective societies, as well as a marked divergence in their views of public and private.

This study examines the reconstruction of Damascus in the wake of the 1759 earthquake. It argues that popular Ottoman norms of privacy were a central factor in determining the state's priorities when choosing which areas to restore and whether to implement changes to the urban landscape. The state had various motivations for rebuilding the city: a desire to emphasize its Islamic nature; a need to reassert authority and prevent chaos; a concern for sultanic property, which reflected the ruler's prestige and patronage; and an interest in the well-being of subjects. As the discussion here will show, these considerations were closely related to one another and inextricably tied to a public–private dichotomy that the state sought to maintain. In 17th- and 18th-century western Europe, changing concepts of privacy help explain why authorities there saw earthquakes and fires as occasions for introducing social innovations and transforming relationships between rulers and ruled. In the Ottoman Empire, however, sultans regarded disasters as opportunities to enhance their authority and prestige rather than to challenge existing spatial arrangements and social conventions.

Privacy is a flexible concept that has been construed in various ways in different times and places. A division of space into “private” and “public” domains has existed in almost every society, yet where one ends and the other begins, and how rigid the divisions are, has been the subject of constant reinterpretation. Privacy itself has had multiple facets: it might refer to one's rights over one's body and the secrets of the mind; to certain activities that one typically performs alone or with a select group of partners, such as washing, eating, praying, or reading; to physical divisions between one's home, its immediate vicinity, and the world beyond; and, more broadly, to places—visible and intangible—that were outside the purview of the state. This study deals with the last two aspects in the Ottoman urban world of the 17th and 18th centuries. How these aspects of privacy were defined in the Ottoman context and understood by the state and its subjects has been the focus of very few studies and represents a lacuna in our knowledge of Ottoman society.Footnote ² In the present discussion, I look at concepts of spatial privacy formulated by chief religious scholars of the empire (şeyhülislāms). I then examine their practical application by evaluating Ottoman reports related to the reconstruction of Damascus following the 1759 earthquakes. The evidence has a great deal to tell us about Ottoman privacy, the state's role in urban public space, and the authorities’ perceived responsibility for preserving this public role.

PUBLIC, PRIVATE, AND SEMIPRIVATE: ISLAMIC AND OTTOMAN CONCEPTS

Islamic concepts of privacy have roots in the early days of Islam. From the beginning, Muslim scholars generally agreed that households should have a space inaccessible to outsiders that would be protected as such by law. Up to the 9th century, these scholars shared an “occupancy-based conception of privacy,” meaning that the classification of a place as private depended on its being regularly and lawfully occupied.Footnote ³ Jurists of later generations, especially from the 12th century onward, thought of the private domain as unrelated to ownership or occupancy. Instead, whether a place served as one's domicile determined its status as private or public, a definition that excluded shops and inns. The interior of a house was to be protected from intrusions, which included those originating in its immediate vicinity, whence one could oversee or overhear what was going on within the physical boundaries of the home.Footnote ⁴

In principle, all schools of Islamic law agreed that whatever was concealed within one's home and was not seen, heard, or known to others was no one else's business. However, under certain conditions—which were not agreed upon—behavior had to be treated as if committed in public, overruling the code of privacy.Footnote ⁵ It was thus permissible in some instances for neighbors or those passing by to enter a home in order to end a transgression. It was fairly clear, though, that even if wrongdoing was to be prevented by violating privacy, this should not be done in such a way as to expose the violator to government authorities. The state and its officials were part of the public domain, and they ought not to be concerned with one's private deeds. Mawardi (d. 1058) even went as far as suggesting that if a muḥtasib (or any government official) heard the sound of music coming from a home—an offense of a public nature—he should take action against the offender from the outside but should not attempt to expose any further wrongdoing by entering the house.Footnote ⁶ The private domain was thus out of reach to agents of the government. The duty of preventing or stopping certain violations that occurred in the private space primarily rested with neighbors, relatives, and passersby.

Despite a loosening of the distinction between private and public over the centuries,Footnote ⁷ Muslim society did not lose its notion of what was private or public. Religious rulings (fatwas) compiled by Ottoman şeyhülislāms indicate that while people's rights to privacy were not always respected by others sharing the same urban space, it was fairly clear what these rights were and what people living in a neighborhood could expect from one another. Fatwas addressed cases submitted to the office of the şeyhülislām by ordinary people or local judges seeking a ruling on a given issue; they may thus be viewed as representing, to some degree, Ottoman social norms and values.Footnote ⁸ In fatwa collections from the 17th and 18th centuries, the issue of privacy is discussed primarily in a section entitled “The Book of Walls” (kitāb al-ḥiṭān).Footnote ⁹ It deals with a person's rights regarding immovable property and obligations toward neighbors and the public in general. The section reveals quite a bit about the notions of the public and private prevalent in certain Ottoman cities and the ways the government understood them.

In cases discussed in the Book of Walls section of several fatwa collections, jurists outlined differences between public and private using categories of property defined by ownership. These included state-owned lands (miri), perceived to be public by nature, pious foundations (waqf/vaḳıf) that could be designated either as public or private, and privately owned lands (mülk). Because definitions of ownership did not always correlate with the function of a building or an institution—for example, a privately owned house could be used for public gatherings—scholars also designated properties by their function, as private (hāṣ) or public (ʿām). When jurists discussed roads and walkways, they used the terms nāfiẓ and ghayr nāfiẓ to denote a passage used by the public and one whose usage was restricted to one or several people, respectively. Sharing ownership of a courtyard or a walkway guaranteed one the right to use it, often referred to as the right of passage (ḥaḳḳ-i murūr). While everyone enjoyed this privilege on public roads (tarīḳ-i ʿām), passing through private property or using it regularly was contingent upon the consent of the property owner (mālik) or waqf administrator (mütevelli).

The terminology Ottoman jurists used suggests that the urban landscape encompassed three domains: public, private, and semiprivate.Footnote ¹⁰ The public area comprised places that one could enter without asking for permission, served many people, and were not considered residences.Footnote ¹¹ Mosques, bathhouses, inns, markets, and stores were part of the public domain, as were most streets, gates, waterways, and water fountains.Footnote ¹² The state was responsible for guaranteeing free passage and access to the city's public areas to all. Thus, the şeyhülislām Menteşizâde Abdürrahim Efendi (r. 1715–16) ruled that one must not violate any person's right to use a public road by constructing an overpass to connect two parts of a residence.Footnote ¹³ In another case, Abdürrahim ruled that one may not add a wall or fence to a house in a manner that obstructed passage, even if that wall was intended to prevent the flow of rainwater from the street to one's courtyard.Footnote ¹⁴ The public domain was protected not only against physical infringements but also against uncleanliness. Thus one resident who poured his apartment's sewage into a water fountain (çeşme) located on a main road was ordered by the court to restore the flow of clean water after passersby complained of a foul smell.Footnote ¹⁵ Another person dug a well in his courtyard that emitted an offensive odor that those coming to pray in the adjacent mosque found disturbing; the local judge (qadi) ordered the owner to cover the well.Footnote ¹⁶ Two other şeyhülislāms, Çatalcalı Ali Efendi (r. 1674–86, 1692) and Mehmet Feyzullah Efendi (r. 1688, 1695–1703), determined that the same rules applied to public buildings and institutions: those using them regularly could object to the opening nearby of factories or stores that produced loud noise or emitted unbearable odors and had the right to sue their owners for damage.Footnote ¹⁷

The boundaries of the private domain were determined by the physical contours of the home. These were not necessarily constant and could be redefined by the addition of rooms or the erection of a fence or a curtain around one's residence.Footnote ¹⁸ A private area in the Ottoman period resembled the private world depicted by earlier Muslim scholars: a place not to be accessed by uninvited strangers or unannounced guests. A primary purpose of the private domain was to protect women's living quarters from the eyes of neighbors. Thus a window that was opened in a new direction had to be blocked if it overlooked a neighbor's women's quarter; the private section of a residence, exposed by tearing down a structure or a wall, had to be concealed; and houses destroyed in fires had to be rebuilt to the exact specifications that had existed before, to ensure that no windows were placed where they would expose what residents of adjacent houses did not intend others to see.Footnote ¹⁹ The home was a sanctuary where a person could retreat from the surrounding world. Neighbors were expected not only to respect one another's privacy but also to refrain from taking any action that would prevent others from carrying out the most essential activities at home. When someone added a story to a house or expanded it in a way that limited a neighbor's access to daylight or fresh air, compensation had to be paid or the new section demolished.Footnote ²⁰ And as with the public domain, if anyone set up a business, such as a tannery or a soap factory, that produced noise or released pungent odors within a residential neighborhood, the denizens could demand the closure of the place or ask for recompense.Footnote ²¹ Ottoman jurist rulings confirm that people had the right to enjoy privacy without outside disturbance. At the same time, the numerous cases brought to the court seem to suggest that in dense neighborhoods, violations of privacy occurred quite often.

The norms of respecting other people's right to use public spaces and refraining from compromising their access to shared property also applied to the third type of urban space, the semiprivate domain. This was an area that was neither public nor entirely private. It included courtyards, walkways between houses, paths leading to several residences, water conduits and pipelines, and any movable property that was owned by more than one person or family.Footnote ²² The concept of semiprivate space existed in early modern European cities too. There, as in the Middle East, dependence on semiprivate areas decreased when technological developments allowed activities previously conducted outside the home—laundry, baking, using the toilet—to be performed indoors.Footnote ²³ In an early 18th-century fatwa, Abdürrahim Efendi delineates what appears to have been the semiprivate area while considering a particular instance: several houses had a road leading from each of them to the same gate, which then opened on to a major public road. The area between the gate and the door of each house belonged to all residents equally and no one had the right to block the road or prevent another from using it, even if one neighbor owned the majority of houses that shared the same entryway.Footnote ²⁴ In a sense, the common practice in Middle Eastern cities of locking up the gates of certain residential quarters at night also created temporary semiprivate areas, from which outsiders were excluded. Within that semiprivate zone, neighbors had to obtain the consent of all those involved when implementing changes to the landscape that affected others. For instance, one could not obstruct the flow of water in a pipe that also served other apartmentsFootnote ²⁵ or prevent access to a fountain or a stove used by several residents.Footnote ²⁶ Furthermore, the use of semiprivate space was guaranteed to all who shared it so long as it caused no apparent damage to anyone.Footnote ²⁷

Private and semiprivate spaces were safeguarded not only by social conventions and the numerous fatwas requiring adherence to physical boundaries but also by the very absence of the state from them.Footnote ²⁸ Even when criminal offenses were committed outside the public eye, it was the responsibility of the neighborhood residents, not state agents, to bring the accused to court. A qadi would interfere in disputes originating within the private domain only when the parties involved asked the court to do so, or when their neighbors did. Thus, in Damascus in 1749, a woman who had murdered her husband by cutting off his genitals for refusing to have sexual intercourse with her was carried to the court the next day by her neighbors.Footnote ²⁹ And in 1762, residents of an Aleppo neighborhood brought a couple to court, claiming that their house served for illicit encounters between men and women.Footnote ³⁰ The authorities, nonetheless, had some indirect control over the private and semiprivate space, through mechanisms that required people, in certain circumstances, to step outside of the private area and submit matters that took place there to public scrutiny. Residents of neighborhoods had a clear interest in turning in offenders: when a murder was committed, the government would impose an exorbitant collective fine on the inhabitants of the quarter from which the murderer was believed to have come unless the suspect was turned in.Footnote ³¹ Such a measure, while preserving the state's authority, relieved it of the need to enter private areas. The state's absence from the private and semiprivate domains was thus reflected in its reactive character. For the authorities to step in, someone had to invite them by submitting a petition—to the local qadi or governor or to Istanbul—requesting interference. When the government eventually moved in, the measures it took were guided by an effort to preserve its authority and prestige as well as a concern for its subjects’ well-being.

When major urban centers were afflicted by earthquakes, for example, the government's response was usually thorough and effective and sometimes rather swift.Footnote ³² Its aim was to restore public life by rebuilding the symbols of Ottoman power and patronage: the citadel, military barracks, mosques, and soup kitchens (ʿimāret). Such was the case after a series of earthquakes devastated considerable parts of the city of Damascus and adjacent towns in the last quarter of 1759. Multiple reports of the earthquake in the Ottoman archives, including orders to send in teams of builders and architects, suggest that restoring daily life in the provincial capital and its environs received high priority in Istanbul. These registers reveal much about the principles that guided the state's priorities in allocating imperial funds to reconstruct certain areas while leaving others to local or private initiatives. And the evidence found within those registers indicates an approach to state intervention quite different from the one prevalent in Europe at the time.

POSTDISASTER REBUILDING: THE PUBLIC AND THE PRIVATE

The first earthquake hit Damascus and surrounding areas on 30 October 1759, at around four o'clock in the morning. Its epicenter was probably somewhere south of the city, either in the Galilee or further west, in the Mediterranean. The quake caused some damage in Damascus while leaving other towns in the area, notably, Safed, Nazareth, Acre, and Sidon in almost complete ruin, killing hundreds of people and leaving many others homeless. A chain of aftershocks followed, culminating in a second quake on 25 November. With an epicenter in the Litani valley or the Biqaʿ, this second earthquake had a disastrous effect on the rural population in the area and wrought additional damage in places already hit on 30 October. Large parts of Damascus were destroyed, including the citadel, mosques, madrasas, soup kitchens, and various other structures.Footnote ³³

The earthquakes could not have come at a worse time. During the previous two years, the city's inhabitants had been struggling with famine, which had hit the entire region of Bilad al-Sham and caused many deaths. Worse still, around the time of the first quake, cases of plague were reported in Damascus and elsewhere in the region, in what would become a two-year epidemic claiming the lives of thousands and would be followed by another famine, lasting into the summer of 1766. The willingness of the Ottoman government to restore urban life in a demolished city was a crucial factor in people's ability to survive the crises. Thus, soon after the chain of earthquakes in Damascus ended, the state implemented an ambitious plan to rebuild the city. The project was remarkable in its scope and the amount of documentation it generated is impressive. The records for the project include the first forty pages of a 900-page registerFootnote ³⁴ as well as various other loose documents, individual orders, and petitions sent from Damascus to Istanbul and preserved in the Ottoman archives.

An examination of the Ottoman documentation leaves one with an initial impression that in selecting the structures for rebuilding, the state gave preference to renovating buildings and assisting institutions designed primarily to serve Muslims. The forty-page file mentioned previously comprises a set of work instructions issued to officials who were present in or sent to Damascus. The three most frequently mentioned buildings are the Umayyad, Selimiye, and Süleymaniye mosques. At least one of the three is featured in each of the work orders copied into the file, and many entries discuss the need to renovate all three, or other, smaller, mosques.Footnote ³⁵ In addition to mosques, the Ottomans planned the reconstruction of madrasas and soup kitchens, both institutions that served Muslims only and were usually part of a complex that included a mosque and sometimes a hospital.Footnote ³⁶

Appended to the work orders was a list of 430 full or partial structures that needed restoration, which was to be financed by the Ottoman treasury.Footnote ³⁷ The items were arranged in categories according to the mosque they were part of or in whose vicinity they were located, with each entry specifying measurements in length, width, and surface area, and, where applicable, the cost. The first of these is the Süleymaniye mosque. It has seventy-three entries: fifteen relating to the mosque itself; twenty-four to parts of the mosque or adjacent buildings, such as walls (divar), corridors (dehliz), gates (kapı), and domes (kubbe); two to religious schools; two to soup kitchens; and the rest to parts of unspecified buildings.Footnote ³⁸ Next come the Selimiye and its environs. Out of eighty-seven structures, thirty were directly related to the mosque; seventeen to adjacent walls, gates, and domes; three to soup kitchens; six to the nearby Muhyi al-Din al-ʿArabi (Ibn ʿArabi) tomb; and the rest are unspecified.Footnote ³⁹ The part of the register dealing with the Umayyad mosque and its surroundings contains 148 entries, of which ninety-seven deal specifically with the mosque. Most of the rest probably relate to it as well, although this is not explicitly specified.Footnote ⁴⁰ On the whole, a sizable segment—possibly a majority—of the works to be carried out according to the register focused on mosques and structures related to them.

Other sources on the postearthquake renovations in Damascus similarly focus on the rebuilding of mosques. The city's mosques are featured in a series of work orders written in Istanbul several months after the earthquake. Two decrees required the dispatch from Istanbul of a chief architect, one Hacı Ahmet, to oversee the reconstruction of the Sultan Süleyman mosque, a project that was to cost 18,932 guruş.Footnote ⁴¹ Another document describes a mosque, several walls within its complex, its dome, an adjacent waqf probably serving as lodging for the poor, and a hammam that were all destroyed, so that the five daily prayers could not be held there. The state appointed an architect to supervise a team of workers to fix the damages. Further, the Porte issued firmans concerning the required renovations of forty mosques and forty hammams.Footnote ⁴² The city-wide restoration project was also mentioned by a few Damascene residents, who witnessed the events and noted that the authorities sent officials to rebuild the city's mosques.Footnote ⁴³

The emphasis on rebuilding mosques and adjacent structures seems obvious, then, and rather expected. But mosques, religious schools, and soup kitchens were not the only objects of postearthquake state-funded renovations. The work orders compiled for Damascus in 1760 note that the state intended to fix other structures as well. For example, the title of one section in the reconstruction file refers to “the expenses of building and repairing the citadel of Damascus, the noble Umayyad mosque, the white minaret, the noble mosque of the deceased Sultan Süleyman Han, several schools and soup kitchens, and other places in the above-mentioned city.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Other work orders use a similar language to describe what needed to be done.Footnote ⁴⁵ In the register mentioned previously, the citadel (ḳalʿa-i Şam), the headquarters of the provincial governor, is repeatedly mentioned next to the three major mosques and other religious institutions.Footnote ⁴⁶ Similarly, there are orders to fix damage caused to gardens (bağ or bağçe), shops (dukkān), markets (çarşı), fountains (çeşme), and conduits used for water supply (suyolları).Footnote ⁴⁷ The list includes thirty-three references to the citadel and its redoubts (ṭabiye), sixteen to storehouses for wheat or barley (hınta or şaʿir anbarı), ten to various towers (kule) that had collapsed, six to military barracks (kışla), four to public kitchens (maṭbah), two to mills (maṭḥana), and one to a public oven (furun).Footnote ⁴⁸ Elsewhere, hammams, along with roads and bridges (maʿābir), are also mentioned.Footnote ⁴⁹ Although primarily used by Muslims—the majority of the population—there was nothing intrinsically Islamic about these institutions; non-Muslims too had access to grain storehouses, mills, and public ovens.

There were, therefore, diverse motivations that informed the Ottoman rebuilding priorities. Alongside a perceived responsibility for maintaining social welfare, a significant consideration was a concern for sultanic property. In Damascus and elsewhere, sultans built mosques and other foundations and bestowed their patronage on institutions inherited from earlier Islamic states. Sultans were eager to restore them because, beyond serving a religious function, they symbolized their regal beneficence. Some structures designated for state-sponsored renovation were sultanic property; the three big mosques and the citadel are obvious examples, and there may have been others about which we cannot be sure—the Ottoman registers do not usually reveal whether a certain market, water fountain, or school was founded or supported by a member of the Ottoman household.

One decree, issued on 27 April 1760, required the ranking of places awaiting renovation according to the amount of state funds involved and the urgency of getting the work done. The top item was the citadel; the Umayyad, Süleymaniye, and Selimiye mosques came next.Footnote ⁵⁰ It is easy to see why the state hastened to restore government functionality. In the chaos following the disaster, the state was keen to reassert its authority, and the citadel, as the seat of the governor, reflected that authority more than the mosques. Likewise, when an earthquake shook Foça (a coastal town seventy kilometers northwest of Izmir) on Tuesday, 2 July 1709, the old citadel, a wall in the port (liman), six towers located between the port and the arsenal (ṭophane), the Fatih Sultan Mehmet mosque, and several other mosques were completely destroyed. The orders were to restore more than thirty structures, with priority given to the citadel and the port.Footnote ⁵¹

This leads us to yet another consideration that guided Ottoman reconstruction decisions: regard for a public–private dichotomy. One thing the 430 sites mentioned in the Ottoman register for 1759 clearly had in common was their public function. In the aftermath of the Damascus earthquake (and perhaps other severe disasters requiring wide-scale rebuilding) the state displayed a commitment to restoring and regulating the rebuilding of structures and institutions that served the public or that were perceived to be part of the public space. Thus one finds in the register state property (miri) and waqfs but no private assets (mülk) or residences. Another document similarly elaborated the course of state-sponsored renovations. First, surveys should be conducted, listing everything that required fixing. These should be sent to Istanbul, and, after approval, work orders in the form of firmans would be issued. Once the instructions had reached Damascus, the architect in charge should promptly assign people to execute them and notify the pasha and the city's notables (aʿyān ve vücūh-i ahāli). In choosing the sites for restoration, the architect was directed to give special and immediate attention to the preservation of miri property.Footnote ⁵² In Damascus after the earthquake, houses were damaged, destroyed, or left deserted. Some of these houses were located in the vicinity of the Umayyad, Süleymaniye, and Selimiye mosques, and those in charge of the rebuilding were to single out those that were either miri or waqf then sell the former and rent out the latter.Footnote ⁵³

While the state underwrote the restoration of buildings that bore a clear Islamic function (mosques and madrasas) and many that did not (citadel and port structures), I have not been able to locate even one structure that specifically served only non-Muslims, such as a church or a synagogue, that was to be restored by the government. Moreover, among the waqfs targeted for restoration in the records, none were founded by Christians or Jews. This curious finding seems to lend support to the argument regarding the Ottoman principles of privacy. The state did not generally discriminate against Christians and Jews when responding to requests to assuage disaster-generated suffering. This was seen, for example, in a report from February 1765 quoting a petition by the people of Aleppo, who asked for a tax reduction due to the calamities their city had suffered from 1758/59 to 1762/63. In response, the government ordered a population survey to determine the number of households (ḥane) remaining in the city; this resulted in reassessment of the non-Muslim population, which led to a decrease in jizya revenues by about 75 percent.Footnote ⁵⁴ Similarly, a disaster of unclear nature that struck Damascus in 1672–73, killing many and forcing others to flee their homes, led to a state reassessment of the number of ḥanes per neighborhood and, subsequently, to a reduction in property taxes (avārıż). Christians and Jews, also subject to that tax, benefited from the adjustments as much as Muslims.Footnote ⁵⁵ Reassessment of taxes occurred in like manner in other places, such as Üsküp (Skopje) in 1652, after many fled the city due to a plague epidemic.Footnote ⁵⁶ In the same vein, it seems that whenever the authorities arranged for the shipping and distribution of grain to famine-stricken areas, all inhabitants of a city could equally benefit from it, as had been the case during the Mamluk period.Footnote ⁵⁷

Why were non-Muslims as eligible as Muslims for tax remissions and grain distributions but not offered assistance in restoring their damaged communal structures? The answer seems to be in the very nature of these buildings: in the state's eyes, they represented private rather than public sites. The government saw as its duty the upkeep of public or sultanic buildings in an urban public domain that was also, by definition, Islamic. Although the state did not overlook its non-Muslim subjects, it could not support buildings or institutions that excluded Muslims altogether, since areas that were off limits to Muslims or not intended for their use were not part of the public domain within which the state operated. An institution or a building did not necessarily have to be for Muslim use only to qualify for state-financed renovations, as the presence of storehouses, water fountains, and public ovens in the registers clearly indicates. But a church, a synagogue, or a site designed for the instruction of Christian or Jewish children represented a different category: their exclusion of the bulk of society, Muslims, lent them a status as private locations.

Other forms of aid, such as tax reduction and handing out grain, money, or clothes, were all announced or performed in the public domain: at the courthouse (where responses to petitions were read), on the street, or at a granary, bathhouse, or mosque; they did not require the state to enter the private world of its subjects. In fact, writing a petition to the authorities, or appearing at a place where goods were given out for free, entailed stepping out of one's private realm physically and mentally and taking one's personal miseries—otherwise concealed within the boundaries of the home or neighborhood—into the public arena. This meant giving up the anonymity the private space protected and exposing one's situation to public scrutiny. Such a system of state or even communal patronage, where people had to take the initiative and come forward with their needs to receive help, had prevailed in Middle Eastern societies before and during Ottoman times.Footnote ⁵⁸ The state's reluctance to intervene in the rebuilding of private homes did not mean that it was oblivious to the needs of its subjects. On the contrary, giving priority to reconstructing the citadel, mosques, and soup kitchens enabled the local government to resume its responsibilities, including the operation and support of charitable foundations. Rather than rebuilding private residences and thereby invading the private domain, the state aimed to restore its presence in and patronage over the city, so that its inhabitants could again approach it in public and ask for support.

That the Ottoman state did not reconstruct or regulate the reconstruction of buildings that had no public function (or, at least, did not plan for such renovations, according to extant accounts) raises the question of people's expectations of their government. In their fatwas, şeyhülislāms discussed instances in which owners of mülk property had to rebuild a place destroyed by fire. Without exception, the expenses fell on the landlords.Footnote ⁵⁹ Admittedly, in such cases, the queries could have been about ownership rather than privacy; the laconic language of the fatwas makes it difficult to tell. Yet they seem to reveal something about what the denizens of Ottoman cities expected the government to do for them and whether people found it acceptable that the state transcend the lines of public space when it benefited them. In general, Ottoman subjects had few expectations of their government: a fair procedure in court, supervision of market prices, and making food available in times of shortage or famine. They also expected the authorities not to step into private territory, not even when personal misfortune occurred. Lending a hand was first and foremost the duty of the family, community, or neighborhood; turning to the state for help was a last resort.Footnote ⁶⁰ Since the authorities, from the sultan down to local officials, were regularly engaged in charitable giving that was gratefully received by the needy, one might assume that if a sultan or a governor had intended to reconstruct private homes destroyed in an earthquake or fire, the owners would not mind the temporary invasion of their privacy. Yet there seems to have been no expectation that the state would initiate such measures, and in Damascus in 1760 there are no indications that it did.

URBAN PLANNING, NEW OPPORTUNITIES

The Ottoman reluctance to intrude in the private domain and to consider rebuilding plans that would alter a previously existing urban setting represented an approach to disaster recovery notably different from that of contemporary or even earlier western European states. The ways in which western European cities and states responded to natural calamities in early modern times reflected social changes that had been taking place since the 14th century. After the Black Death, authorities all over Europe began to search for ways to prevent future epidemics. Attention to personal and public hygiene increased, and measures were taken to ensure the cleanliness of streets and the removal of elements perceived to endanger public health, such as prostitutes and beggars.Footnote ⁶¹ By the 16th century, courts and city councils were regulating the disposal of waste of all types, announcing burial procedures, and limiting the presence of farm animals inside the city. To meet these ends, governments had to invade the private domain, interfering with and possibly affecting people's daily routines. In 1539, the French king Francis I issued an ordinance for Paris that prohibited the storage of excrement in homes and courtyards or its disposal into streets, mandated the installation of cesspools, and imposed fines on those who continued to raise farm animals within city walls.Footnote ⁶² Similar regulations were issued in other cities, such as Berlin, Breslau, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Vienna.Footnote ⁶³ Beyond increasing awareness of hygiene and a recognition that what was taking place in the private domain was affecting the public, such infiltrations of privacy reflected the authoritarian character of many early modern European states.Footnote ⁶⁴ Gradually, authorities were crossing boundaries and infiltrating areas that previously had been off limits.

These evolving concepts of private and public were put to the test with the occurrence of major disasters of the kind that destroyed sizable parts of a city and affected thousands of residents. The rebuilding of London after the Great Fire of September 1666 is a case in point. While in Damascus the state chose to renovate only certain areas and began the task promptly, the rebuilding of London involved comprehensive planning and took markedly longer. Assuming responsibility for London's restoration, King Charles II ensured that land was surveyed and a new grid set for the entire city. The plan eventually adopted and implemented, that of Christopher Wren, replaced the medieval landscape of warrens and alleys with wide streets designed for better passage, improved commercial activity, and enhanced ability of authorities to police residents. The rebuilding of London also introduced government (and city) regulation of matters that the authorities had not interfered with before, such as licensing the building and design of private homes. It marked a shift from past practices, as reconstruction, even when privately financed, had to conform to the rules outlined in a rebuilding act that governed the minutest details of house plans. This, one scholar has suggested, denoted a watershed for privacy, which was gradually redefined in subsequent decades.Footnote ⁶⁵ Government engagement on a similar level occurred in Lisbon following the 1755 earthquake. There, the secretary of state of King José I, Pombal, coordinated both emergency measures and a reconstruction project that included urban planning and extensive rebuilding, irrespective of the function of structures and institutions. In the new Lisbon, wide avenues replaced myriad narrow streets, and new sanitary, burial, and building regulations were announced.Footnote ⁶⁶

Large-scale disasters marked a turning point in the cultural, economic, and social life of cities in western Europe. For state and city authorities in the 17th and 18th centuries, a fire or an earthquake was an opportunity to reshape relationships between rulers and citizens and to introduce new concepts through careful urban planning. Insistence on new construction materials and architectural styles could change and sometimes improve living conditions, as well as redefine the private space and the division of homes into personal rooms and common areas. This in turn would affect people's interactions with family members and outsiders, the products they consumed, and how and when they performed daily activities. The shift from condensed residential neighborhoods built in the medieval period to wide and open streets and wider spaces between houses enhanced public hygiene and helped decrease the toll of future disasters. But these new realities also reduced the privacy that the seclusion of alleys had once provided and enhanced the infiltration of state and city authorities into areas previously inaccessible to them. People's expectations of their government were gradually transformed as well.

Whether disasters offered opportunities for structured change depended on several factors, including the availability of resources and organizational capacities. They also depended on popular notions of privacy and on social norms concerning the role of government and people's expectations of it. The evidence for the reconstruction of Damascus after the 1759 earthquake leaves no doubt that the Ottoman state had the resources and the organizational ability to transform the urban landscape of the city had it chosen to do so, just as the British, Portuguese, and other European governments had been doing since the 17th century. But in the empire, there are no indications that the definitions of private and public, the relationship between the two, and the place of the state within the public space had undergone such profound changes as they had in western Europe. The Ottomans did occasionally make changes to the city landscape after earthquakes and fires, for example, by issuing decrees preventing building practices conducive to the spread of fires and by forcing populations to migrate.Footnote ⁶⁷ Yet even then, the basic urban framework that divided a city into public and private domains was not altered, and the relationship between the state and its subjects—as well as people's expectations of their rulers—remained the same. The aim of postdisaster urban rebuilding in the 18th-century Ottoman Empire was not to reshape social or political realities but rather to restore predisaster conditions. Disasters such as the Damascus earthquake were a good opportunity to emphasize sultanic authority and patronage but not to redefine the relationship between the sultan and his subjects.