 Well, thank you very much for this opportunity to come here again and address this audience. And I want to begin by just saying that when Professor Dr. Hoppe initially suggested this theme for my presentation this afternoon, I was very excited about it. I had published on a similar subject about 15 years ago, and I was very interested in having the opportunity to revisit some of these ideas. And I knew at the time that I was opening a can of worms as the American expression goes, but I didn't realize exactly how big the can was or how many worms were going to be in it when I started scooping around, until I started poking around in there. And as I started to do the research and write this paper, it ended up, I ended up writing a slightly different paper than I had intended to. And it addresses some questions that are a little bit different than those implied in the title, but they will, I hope, be of some interest to this group nevertheless. What I ended up doing with this project was framing this question of this multi-legal system in the Ottoman Empire within the broader context of inter-communal relations in the empire, that is to say relations between Muslims and non-Muslims. And so that's really the broader context in which these remarks are framed. And I think that if my remarks have any relevance at all, it's within that particular context rather than perhaps a more narrow legal context. And in particular what I'm trying to do in this paper is I try to explore a problem of Ottoman historiography that a number of people, including myself, have explored in different contexts. And that's the way in which the state of inter-communal relations changed over time. And most students of the Ottoman Empire argue that before the 19th century, inter-communal relations, again it is to say relations between Muslims and non-Muslims in the empire, the state of those relations was generally pretty cordial. And I don't want to sort of sugarcoat this or anything like that, but it's just to say that in general the inter-communal relations before the 19th century are regarded as cordial, some scholars believe even further than that, but almost everybody agrees that something happens in the 19th century to deviate this level of relationships. That is to say that inter-communal relationships decline, the peacefulness of these inter-communal relationships decline during the 19th century. And what I try to do in this paper is to try to explore why that might be. And what I'm going to suggest is the answer to that question is tied up with changes in the legal position and the legal administration of the different communities in the empire. So that's what I'm going to do, and in particular, more to the point, what I'm going to argue is before the 19th century, the Ottoman Central administration, the Ottoman Central government largely stayed out of this area to a great extent. It didn't say anything about inter-communal relations. It left those arrangements, it left the relations between Muslims and non-Muslims to the local people, the people in the local regions to work out. Conversely, it's interesting that it was during the 19th century, the early 19th century, when the Ottoman state began to centralize everything and to some extent, I think, the points that Mr. Akhilo brought out were something connected to this. But during the 19th century, the Ottoman state began a project of centralization, including a centralization and codification of Muslim-non-Muslim relations. And what I hypothesize is that that's connected, that has a causal relationship for the deterioration of the relations between Muslims and non-Muslims in the empire. And that's the general hypothesis I wanted to explore, and I'm going to try to do that within the context of law. And Professor Hup-Hup is very good opening remarks. He urged us all to have fun, and those of you who know me know I'm a fun-loving kind of guy. But what I'm going to be doing in this paper is reading a lot of legal cases. And reading legal cases, except perhaps for lawyers and masochists, isn't generally considered to be very fun, and I try to make this as fun and enjoyable as possible. So I'm just sort of warning you that that's the bulk of the evidence I have for this paper today. Anyway, so before I dive into those hilarious knee slappers of legal cases, I want to say a few words about Ottoman law in general and about the legal position of the Sultan's subjects more generally. Now, this is a huge topic in and of itself, and I'm about to say it'll be barely scratched the surface of it, so I apologize for any errors of omission. I may commit here, I'm sure to commit, but this is just a very, kind of a very, very brief overview of this. Theoretically, in the pre-19th century Ottoman Empire, the Şeriyat, or the Şeriyat as it's called in Turkish, was the supreme law of the land. This was in practice supplemented by other kinds of law, other sources of law. The most important were edicts, imperial edicts, called kanun related to the Latin word canon, of course, and also customary laws. Now these latter two sources of law, by the way, were largely codified and organized. The kanun and the body of customary law were largely codified and reorganized by the great 16th century Ottoman sultan Südeman, who the Europeans call the magnificent, but is known in Turkish as kanuni or the lawgiver. Now the kanun and this customary law were not part of Şeriyat, but they were not supposed to contradict Şeriyat either. And the reason I bring this in is because some legal scholars of the Ottoman Empire have said that sometimes in the legal decisions handed down by the judges, the Qadi's Qada in Turkish in this evening, we're going to the Qadi's castle, the Qadi Calisi. The name of the town. But some scholars have speculated that the judges or the Qadi's, when handing down these decisions, sometimes kind of mix these things up a little bit. So this is sort of a caveat that not all of the decisions they reached were based strictly on Şeriyat, although nothing they decided was supposed to be a direct contradiction to the Şeriyat. Now the interesting challenge that the Ottoman authorities faced within this context was that for the first 200 years of their empire, the first 200 years of the Ottoman Empire, the majority of their subjects were not Muslims. And even after that, until the very beginning of the 20th century, non-Muslims made up a very large minority in the empire. So the question that they faced the early Ottoman sultans were how are they to rule their non-Muslim subjects? Now here we need to get into some of the turf wars of Ottoman history and in particular Ottoman historiography and in particular the very contentious literature surrounding what has come to be called the mulet system. And here I'm going to engage in a little myth breaking here. Until very, very recently, until the past 20 years or so, the accepted story about how the sultans governed their non-Muslim subjects had to do with this thing called the mulet system. And this story goes like this. After 1453, after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, the sultan established three nations or mulets. And these three were the Greek Orthodox mulet, the Armenian Grugori mulet, and the Jewish mulet. And each one of the two Christian mulets were headed by the patriarchs of those particular faiths. And the Jewish mulet was headed by a person with a title of Grand Rabbah. And all three of them had their headquarters in Constantinople. And the story continues. Around each of these people, each of these religious figures, the Ottomans built a system in which the three different mulets, these three different non-Muslim communities, were ruled by their religious authorities. And these clerics were in charge of education, taxation, and the legal administration of each mulet, and were responsible to their respective patriarchs, or Grand Rabbi, as the case may be, in Constantinople, who was in turn responsible to the sultan. Now this story of the mulet system, it was also usually, not always, but frequently in the historiographic, in the historiography, it was tied to a general view of inter-communal relations in which the non-Muslim population was strictly segregated from the Muslim one. But these two communities were strictly segregated, kept strictly apart from one another, only interacting very rarely and in very superficial ways. And many versions of this story also implicitly or explicitly include a kind of oppression narrative in which this mulet system is part of the broader system of Muslim oppression of the Christians. In this kind of narrative, the mulet system functions as a way of keeping Christian populations subjugated to its clerical masters who in turn were slaves of the sultan. Now this story, what's very interesting about this story, is that it was developed largely in the 19th century by European scholars who relied on the oral traditions of the Christian communities. And during the second half of the 20th century, when people actually learned how to read the Ottoman sources and went into the Ottoman archives and started poking around, what was very interesting was that they found no evidence of this at all. They couldn't find any evidence that such a system ever existed. What was very interesting, though, is when they were starting to do this research in the 19th century, it did exist. So what probably happened was that in the 19th century, as this very system was developing, the people back projected this onto an earlier time. They invented these foundation myths to explain the existing realities of the time. So in other words, virtually all Ottoman historians today believe that there was no system in the sense of there being a... And the Ottomans, by the way, loved systems. They had systems for all sorts of other things. But there was no actual system for regulating Muslim-non-Muslim relations in the sense that they're having been a centralized, codified, regular set of rules and relations governing the conduct of the non-Muslim population through a central administration, a central clerical administration based in Istanbul. Now there were indeed Greek Orthodox Christian and Gregorian Armenian patriarchs in Istanbul from very early, at least since the end of the 1400s. But those people seem, until very, very late in the history of the empire, to have been responsible really just for their flocks there in and around the imperial metropolis. So most historians now say that instead of a systematic organization for ruling the non-Muslim population, the Ottoman central administration more or less left the local communities to figure it out for themselves. They left the local communities up to figuring these matters out for themselves so that in many ways what we end up with is a kind of communal autonomy for the non-Muslim peoples of the empire. That resembles the structures of this so-called millet system. But importantly, these institutions and practices were the result of local forces and customs, in many cases predating the Ottoman conquest. So for example, the local parish priests in say, Ottoman southeast of Europe were perfectly free to build and staff their own schools in which they could teach in their own languages. Similarly, Christian and Jewish clerics were free to carry on any sort of religious theological debates that they might have with one another. This also implies some very interesting things about the familiar narrative of segregation and oppression that accompanied much of the older writing about the millet system. So this new way of thinking about Ottoman inter-communal relations in the pre-19th century, rather than presenting a landscape in which Muslims were superior to Christians per se as blocks of people, as groups of people. Instead, this new research demonstrates or suggests, maybe a better way of putting it since a lot of this is still tentative, that individual social and political power was much more, that individual social and political power was much more a function of wealth, connections to important individuals or personal charisma and other factors than simply being a member of one or the other of these religious communities. Now, I want to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater here because the growing consensus among Ottoman historians about this millet system, this revisionist literature questions only the notion that the non-Muslim communities were ruled directly from the capital, from Istanbul, through their different church authorities. The idea that the local non-Muslim communities retained legal and confessional autonomy has been generally retained and that's what I want to do with the second part of my remarks. He's explored that, this legal and communal autonomy that existed on the local level, on the basis of these local arrangements. So what did this legal autonomy look like? I'm glad you asked me that question. The non-Muslim population generally, in terms of legal matters now, the non-Muslim population had the option to use its own laws and its own courts. So if there were ever a dispute between two members of a Christian or Jewish community, they could use their own courts staffed by their local clerical authorities. Similarly, these local courts had wide authority on matters of personal law. So inheritance, marriage, divorce, things like that. Now there were a few exceptions to this rule. So capital crimes, for instance, and acts of rebellion or sedition were always tried in the Sharia courts. As were, and this is very important, as were crimes or suits, crimes or legal suits, involving members of different religious communities. So in other words, if a Christian had brought a suit against a Muslim, that was tried in the Sharia court. Now the older literature on the subject in keeping with this overall narrative of a generally oppressed Christian population always made very much of the fact that in these cases, the cases in which a Christian and Muslim were both involved, one the case was tried in a Sharia court, and in a Sharia court, non-Muslims could not testify as witnesses against Muslims. And this fact has been endlessly repeated in the secondary literature, usually with the implication that it left the non-Muslims completely at the mercy of their Muslim accusers. Now what I want to do with the next 10 minutes or so is to unpack this a little bit and to look at some recent studies of court records. These are some two very interesting sources I found in which scholars examined thousands of court records. Actually, one looked at the records of these Sharia courts to see what they could find in them, and these are both from the 18th century, so they're rather late, but they predate the period of centralization of the empire. And they're from two very different places. There's one study is from Ottoman Syria, 18th century Ottoman Syria by Najwa al-Katan, and the second one is from Ottoman Cyprus by Kemal Cicek. And what these works suggest is that the Muslim and non-Muslim populations seem to have been remarkably well integrated, that they don't seem to have been segregated at all. They seem to have been closely tied together by commercial, residential, and personal relations. They also suggest, at least in these two times and places, so we have to be careful to combine ourselves with the evidence we have here, but still, this evidence suggests that non-Muslims readily made use of the Sharia courts instead of their own courts, even when they had disputes with one another. I'm going to skip over some more of this, and I think you can go right to some of these cases, because I know that's what you're all waiting to hear. So let me just see if there's anything else here we need to do by. Okay, I think we'd skip that. So let's do that. Let's then just take a look at some of these cases and see what we find. And again, the things I was interested in exploring here were a couple of things. One, what do these cases tell us about the way that Muslims and non-Muslims interacted in general terms? And then secondly, what do these cases tell us about how they interacted legally in a court of law, especially in cases where Muslims and Christians were in court together, where Christians, remember, could not testify as witnesses against Muslims? So first of all, let's look at a couple of cases in which non-Muslims are involved. Now remember, non-Muslims, as long as the, for personal law or things like that, they were not obliged to go to the Sharia court. They could go to their own courts, which had the force of law. So these cases are particularly interesting, I think, again, because they involve non-Muslims. And a lot of these non-Muslim cases actually involve cases of inheritance or divorce, because the Sharia has different rules about inheritance and divorce. And for certain kinds of people, especially women, they were actually more, women considered them more strategically beneficial to go to a Sharia court instead of their own court. I'll give you just a couple of cases here. This first one is from Chi-Chek's article on Ottoman Cyprus. Pavli Bint Yani, of the village of Samaria in Kyrenia, brought a claim against Andoni de Valdi de Loyola, claiming that the legacy of her deceased son, Siraco, should be given to her. But the deceased's cousin took as his share one ox and 40 goats, claiming that he was one of the heirs. She further drew the attention of the cata to the fact that according to the Islamic law of inheritance, this is an Orthodox Christian woman pleading her case to the cata, she said, according to the Islamic law of inheritance, he, her cousin, could not be heir to the estate of her son as one of his cousins. Having learned and confirmed by the witnesses that the defendant was indeed the deceased's cousin, the cata ruled out his airship according to the Sharia and ordered the defendant to return the property mentioned to the claim. So wasn't that interesting? First of all, the challenges, some of our maybe ideas about the subservience, and the general picture we have of a subservient, oppressed, silent female population, it also suggests some interesting things about what the Christian population knew about the Sharia and about the particulars of Sharia, at least in terms of inheritance. I mentioned the manner of divorce. According to canon law, it was very difficult for Christians or Jews, Christian or Jewish women to initiate divorce proceedings, but that's allowed in the Sharia. So we find a lot of cases of divorce in Sharia courts. These are a couple, and these are the summaries by Dr. Al-Tatan that I wanted to just mention. In 1781, Mariam in France, O'Ala Ankun, went to the Muslim court in Damascus in order to terminate her marriage to Yusuf O'Ala in Musa Al-Kastraman. She also submitted to the court that she voluntarily released him from material support as well as from his debts. So he was getting off easy, whatever the case was. He, in turn, agreed to pay child support for their infant son in the amount of 140 perush for seven years. Here's another case. Rama bin Shihada went to court with two Muslim men, so she brought two Muslim witnesses, even though this was an intra-Jewish matter, two Muslim men who presented her case regarding her marriage to Aru-Tin O'Ala Al-Aruin. The latter had, shortly after marrying and living with her for a year and five months before court hearings, left town and abandoned her without material support. After taking an oath as to the veracity of her claims, she requested a divorce, which the Cadi, who first advised patients, granted her. So again, this is a very personal matter, an intra-communal case, but these women decided to take these cases to the Sharia court in Damascus. Now let's move rapidly on to cases where Muslims brought suit against Christians. What's very interesting in the case of Cicek, in his examination of court records in Cyprus, he used about 2,000 cases altogether, and in those, 17% of those cases involved suits brought by Muslims against Christians. Now we would think that the Muslims, the older secondary literature seems to have assumed that the Muslims' routine capitalized on their legal advantages to use the courts to oppress the non-Muslims, but the cases presented by Cicek and Al-Katan complicate this picture considerably. Both claim, they don't provide me all of their cases, but both claim that they find only a handful of cases which are obviously motivated by such crass considerations. And the cases that they do present are many cases in which Muslims actually lose their suits. And here are a couple that I thought were really particularly interesting. This is a case of a recent convent. One would expect that in a case like this, the Qadi, if he was motivated by some sort of crass prejudicial concerns, might want to side with a recent convent to Islam, but let's see how this case turns out. Mustafa, a Christian man who had converted to Islam 10 days earlier, he had just converted, sued his still Christian mother, Mariam bin Mikhail, for allegedly holding his share of the legacy left by his long-ceased father. In its summary of the case, the court recognized the religious affiliations just mentioned, but proceeded to rule on the case by reference to the Sharia rule of evidence, which in this case, vindicated the defendant in spite of her religion and gender. So this was a case where the Muslim accuser lost. Here's another similar case. This one involves a lone dispute. This one also, I think, is very interesting on a number of levels. So this is from 17th of November, 1713, in Cyprus. Halil Basha ibn Hussein of the Leuphonic village in Mechariah accused Yoram Ivalet Pavlo of not paying his debt of 20 kurush, which he had lent him previously. He demanded from the Qada, so this is the Muslim Halil Basha, demanded from the Qada that Yorgi should be made to pay his debt. However, when the Qada asked to set forth evidence for his accusation, he failed to provide the court with any concrete evidence. Therefore, in accordance with the Sharia, the Qada offered the accused Yorgi an oath of innocence. Yorgi swore by the God who sent down the gospel on Jesus, the upon him. Accordingly, the accuser has been prohibited from litigation without evidence. Now again, this is a very interesting case, not only because the Qada ruled in favor of the Christian, but that he let him swear oath of innocence on the gospel. The next set of cases I wanted to look at, and I'm almost done here, is cases where Christians brought suit against Muslims. Now here again, one thing I found interesting was that in the cases from Cyprus, Dr. Cicek found 70% of all these cases that involve both Muslims and Christians were Muslims bringing suit against Christians, and 16% of these inter-communal cases were Christians bringing suit against Muslims, almost exactly the same proportions of these guys suing one another. But again, the Christians are allegedly in a very weak state because they can't testify against Muslims. So here's the case. This one I thought was very interesting because this is a high level case. This is right at, this is really kind of a Washington Post material here. This was from the 20th of May, 1709. Papafilippo volat filipo, so a priest. Papafilippo of the Terbion de Corte in Nicosia brought a suit against the Cahude that's a kind of steward or a major donor, a very important figure. The Cahude Mehmet Aga ibn Abba Rahman. His statement was as follows. This is the priest giving the statement to the court. The accused Cahude came to my premises and accused me of preparing to complain to the imperial government about him and his men. He forced me to give him 50 kurush in cash and cloth worth 16 kurush. When I complained in the office of the Vizier of the Island, Yusuf Pasha, he admitted that he took from my premises illegally the stated amount of cloth and money, yet he still had not given it back. The Cahde asked about the incident, but he denied the charge. Upon his denial, the Cahde asked the accuser to bring forth evidence. So the Cahde asked the priest, okay, where's your evidence? The priest presented two respectable Muslim witnesses. The Zayn, or kind of a thief holder, I guess, Mustafa Aga of the Karamanzadeh quarter and Zayn Aliata of the Ahmat Pasha quarter. The witnesses, these two high-powered Muslim witnesses, testified on behalf of the accuser, the priest, half a few people, that the accused had previously admitted to charge in the counsel of the then governor. The Cahde ordered the defendant to return the cloth and the money in the evening. What a case. There are all kinds of other things going on there, some issues of loyalty, and maybe some other kinds of internal politics. But again, the priest was able to get two very high-powered Muslim witnesses to testify against a very important member of their own religious community. Since I'm running out of time, I'm not going to read the rest of these, but I do just want to wrap this up by saying that these data do have some problems, it seems to me. First of all, we don't know from these secondary sources what percentage of suits were won by Christians or Muslims. It seems that this information could tell us something about my hypothesis. But it still seems to me that the very wide range of cases we have here involving people from different classes seem to suggest that the blatant anti-Christian rulings by the Cahde, if they did exist in this body of data, were probably exceptional. Furthermore, the fact that such a large percentage of cases involved Christians choosing to use the Sharia port to bring suit against their fellows suggests that they must have had at least some trust in these authorities, otherwise they just would have gone to their own clerical ports to have these intra-religious disputes resolved. Perhaps even more interestingly, however, is that we can use these cases to reconstruct the picture of what life was like for these people. Rather than a population segregated and strictly segregated along religious lines, it seems like Christians, the Christians and Jews and Muslims and Ottoman Cyprus and Syria had all sorts of relationships with one another, as businessmen, workers, farmers, administrators, and so on. And this situation helps to explain the sorts of remarkably mixed settlement patterns that one finds in the Balkans and much of the Middle East well into the 20th century. I began my presentation with some words about the challenges to the old idea of the Ottoman mullet system, and I want to close with a kind of postscript about the fate of the system. Because as a matter of fact, such a system, an actual system, was indeed established in the Ottoman Empire during the 19th century. And what's fascinating about this, from my point of view, is that the Ottomans set up this system, the 19th century mullet system, as part of their overall centralizing project involving all of their subjects. In other words, the point the Ottomans had in setting up the mullet system in the 19th century was not really to provide autonomy for the non-Muslim population or anyone for that matter. It was part of their overall project of centralizing all authority in the imperial government. The Ottoman administrators and bureaucrats at this period wanted to systematize and centralize the state's relationships with all its subjects. What this meant for the non-Muslims was the subjugation of all of their communities throughout the entire empire, not to their local authorities or to any sort of local traditions that had grown up over the centuries, but to their respective patriarchs and Constantinople, it also meant a regularization of all of their laws and traditions to further complicate this matter, the Ottoman authorities were simultaneously introducing new secular law codes on top of all of this based on European models to which everyone was subject without regard to their religion. Ironically, this strategy contributed to the growth of inter-communal tension. Very quickly, the Muslim and non-Muslim residents of the small towns and the countryside of the empire came to see themselves not as fellow farmers or fellow residents of the same village who maybe had personal connections or interests based on their local economic and personal interactions, but as members of great and powerful organizations with their centers and far-off Istanbul. To make matters more contentious still, the numerous ethnic and linguistic communities lumped into these new state-sponsored mulets soon chafed at their control by the distant patriarchs. Thus, in the most famous example, Bulgarian-speaking Orthodox Christians and their parish priests found themselves under increasingly direct rule from the Orthodox patriarch, almost always a Greek in Istanbul. The increased tensions between the Bulgarian and Greek-speaking congregations in the empire led to the demands by the Bulgarians for their own mulet, which was then granted by the Sultan in 1870. Finally, growing numbers of secular-minded intellectuals educated in Europe had imbibed the ideals of the Enlightenment and Romantic nationalism. They saw in these new mulets not the more or less arbitrarily created bodies of the centralizing Ottoman state, but as embryonic national states, and they used those mulets then as vehicles for their national project. The efforts of these young nationalists ultimately destroyed the empire and created untold suffering for millions of people. Thank you very much.