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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2016
This essay reconstructs a scandal in the fall of 1797 involving Ottoman governors, leaders of a notorious network of irregular soldiers cum bandits, and residents of the city of Filibe (Plovdiv in Bulgaria). It erupted over whether or not state officials should pacify successful bandit enterprises by co-opting their leaders. The scandal escalated into a crisis in which the large armies of the governors of Anatolia and Rumeli (the Ottoman Balkans) verged on clashing because each wanted to lead the state's lucrative war against Rumeli bandit networks. Imperial administrators issued dispatches regarding this scandal that were based on gossip and rumor circulating within the general population as well as among bandits. I draw on understandings of gossip as a social and cultural resource from linguistic anthropology to make sense of Ottoman political culture. I analyze these dispatches to uncover how the performance of these informal scripts featured prominently in correspondence with the Imperial Council and related surveillance reports, and thereby mediated resources, power, and authority among different agents of imperial violence. I show that gossip, rumor, and related forms of seemingly informal “talk” played a fundamental role in sovereign decision making. I also transpose methodologies and approaches of “history from below,” conceived by earlier generations of cultural anthropologists and historians, onto elite letters to ask new questions about information brokerage, the negotiation of power among different agents of imperial violence and their interlocutors, and the contested nature of imperial intelligence gathering and sovereignty.
1 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Hatt-ı Hümâyûn (hereafter HH) 2521İ.
2 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Cevdet Dahiliye 9678.
3 For more on the material and symbolic economy that revolved around Ottoman imperial officials’ dealings with irregular soldier-cum-bandit networks, see Esmer, Tolga U., “Economies of Violence, Banditry, and Governance in the Ottoman Empire around 1800,” Past & Present 224 (Aug. 2014): 163–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 The 1798 siege of Vidin was the second of three unsuccessful imperial sieges launched against Pasban-zâde ‘Osmân Paşa. In the winter–spring of 1798, close to one hundred thousand local and imperial troops lay siege to Vidin for over five months. Napoleon invaded Egypt with only twenty thousand men.
5 Since Max Gluckman's seminal 1963 essay on the topic, “Gossip and Scandal,” anthropologists have debated the role of gossip in society. Gluckman highlighted the inherently conflictual yet integrative function of gossip, arguing that its principal role is to contribute to social cohesion and to distinguish one group from another (Current Anthropology 4 [1963]: 307–16). His critics argued that gossip is more a tool people use to foster their own agendas and undermine those of others. Gossip is a form of “information management” and a valuable commodity to be accumulated and guarded, which may create or exacerbate conflict as easily as it contributes to group harmony. For a critical analysis of the debate, see Niko Besnier, Gossip and the Everyday Production of Politics (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2009).
6 On this point, see John Haviland, Gossip, Reputation, and Knowledge in Zinacantan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 45–46. Addressing the modern “gendering” of the term, Ivan Illich noted that “gossip” derives from the earlier English concept of god sip, which referred to a relationship close enough to make a person a godparent for a family's children. It referred to an adoption through ritual kinship by the house's men or its women. In Elizabethan times, the “gossip” lost his family ties and became a warm and close friend, sometimes as a drinking, boon companion. Only in the nineteenth century did the word become an abstract noun standing for idle talk, morphing into today's direct, negative association with women. See Illich, Gender (Los Angeles: Pantheon Books, 1982), 113–14.
7 Terms I have come across in other contexts are vesvese/vesâvis (diabolic mutterings) and kîl ü kâl or kîylükâl (gossip; title-tattle). For more on the Turkish inferential past tense, see Geoffrey Lewis, Turkish Grammar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 122–26. For a discussion of how such frames are a rhetoric of evidentiality, see Paz, Alejandro, “The Circulation of Chisme and Rumor: Gossip, Evidentiality, and Authority in the Perspective of Latino Labor Migrants in Israel,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 19, 1 (2009): 117–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Besnier, Gossip, 13.
9 As Susan Gal argues from the perspective of feminist theory, the private/public distinction is an ideological one. “Public and private are co-constitutive cultural categories … but they are also indexical signs that are always relative: dependent for part of their referential meaning on the interactional context in which they are used.” See “A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction,” Differences 13, 1 (2002): 77–95, 80CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Building on Gal, Alejandro Paz elaborates, “The establishing of a relatively public forum for communication in a group, often using broadcast modes of communication, stands in relation to more private forms, often using interpersonal modes. Yet the dichotomy works so that a more comprehensive public forum can be constituted that will recast seemingly public genres as relatively private in comparison; likewise, there are potentially more private or intimate contexts that can be generated as well.” See Paz, “Circulation,” 118.
10 Ibid., 119.
11 Besnier, Gossip, 13.
12 On distinctions between rumor, gossip, and scandal in journalism and mass communication, see White, Luise, “Between Gluckman and Foucault: Historicizing Rumour and Gossip,” Social Dynamics 20, 1 (1994): 75–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 Besnier, Gossip, 14–15.
14 See Wickham, Chris, “Gossip and Resistance among the Medieval Peasantry,” Past & Present 160, 1 (1998): 3–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Arlette Farge, Subversive Words: Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century France, Rosemary Morris, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
15 Uğur Kömeçoğlu, “Homo Ludens ve Homo Sapiens Arasında Kamusallık ve Toplumsallık: Osmanlı Kavehaneleri,” in Ahmet Yaşar, ed., Osmanlı Kahvehaneleri: Mekan, Sosyalleşme, İktidar (Istanbul: Kitap Yayınevi, 2009), n.p.; Dana Sajdi, ed., Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee: Leisure and Lifestyle in the Eighteenth Century (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008); and Shirin Hamadeh, The City's Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007). For the modern period, see Cengiz Kırlı, Sultan ve Kamuoyu: Osmanlı Modernleşme Sürecinde “Havadis Jurnalleri” (1840–1844) (Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası, 2009); and idem, “Coffeehouses: Public Opinion in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire,” in Armando Salvatore and Dale F. Eickelman, eds., Public Islam and the Common Good (Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2004), 75–94. For a recent critical approach to the boundaries between public and private spheres assumed in this literature, see Tülay Artan, “Forms and Forums of Expression: Istanbul and Beyond, 1600–1800,” in Christine Woodhead, ed., The Ottoman World (London: Routledge, 2011), 378–405.
16 For a different approach that makes preliminary remarks about the connections between rumor and governance through imperial chronicle-writing and compares the Ottomans with other early modern European polities, see Dağlı, Murat, “Bir Haber Şâyi‘Olduki: Rumor and Regicide,” Osmanlı Araştırmaları—The Journal of Ottoman Studies 35 (2010): 137–80Google Scholar.
17 Besnier, Gossip, 17. See also Sally Engle Merry, “Rethinking Gossip and Scandal,” in Donald Black, ed., Toward a General Theory of Social Control, vol. I (New York: Academic Press, 1984), 271–302.
18 James C. Scott's monographs together have been particularly influential in historians’ conceptualizing how the poor and weak use gossip, rumor, and other “hidden transcripts” in their struggles with powerful individuals and the state: The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979); Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); and Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
19 See Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); and Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Paulo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1987).
20 Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 32–33, 47.
21 Gal, Susan, “Language and Political Economy,” Annual Review of Anthropology 18 (1989): 349–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hanks, William, “Pierre Bourdieu and the Practices of Language,” Annual Review of Anthropology 34 (2005): 67–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22 The Ottoman military marketplace was comprised in large part of mercenary-style irregular soldiery who were key commodities bought by the highest bidder, but these individual military laborers were keenly aware of this status and manipulated it to their benefit against their elite interlocutors. See Esmer, Tolga U., “The Confessions of an Ottoman Irregular: Self-Representation and Ottoman Interpretative Communities in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Ottoman Studies 44 (2014): 313–40Google Scholar.
23 Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
24 Ibid., 258.
25 See Christopher Bayly. Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Upendra Baxi, “‘The State's Emissary’: The Place of Law in Subaltern Studies,” in Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey, eds., Subaltern Studies VII: Writings on South Asian History and Society (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 247–64.
26 Aymes, Marc, “The Voice-Over of Administration: Reading Ottoman Archives at the Risk of Ill-literacy,” European Journal of Turkish Studies 6 (2007)Google Scholar, http://ejts.revues.org/133.
27 On banditry and its role in state formation, see Karen Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Route to State Centralization (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).
28 For a study that demonstrates how thieving groups in India continue to play important roles in systems of watch and ward, intelligence supply, and conflict management on political levels ranging from disagreements between farmers to princely disputes, see Piliavsky, Anastasia, “A Secret in the Oxford Sense: Thieves and the Rhetoric of Mystification in Western India,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 53, 2 (2011): 296–302CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
29 Treated in corporatist terms, the a‘yân are said to have gained too much power in their rapacious accumulation of land as a result of the central government's replacing the ancient land-distribution and administrative system based on merit (i.e., the timâr system) with a more brutal tax-farming system, thereby becoming foes of the countryside and palace alike. For this classic take on the a‘yân, see Bruce McGowan, “The Age of the Ayans, 1699–1812,” in Halil İnalcık and Donald Quataert, eds., An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1916, vol. 2 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 637–724; and Zens, Robert, “Provincial Powers: The Rise of Ottoman Local Notables (Ayan),” History Studies: International Journal of History 3, 3 (2011): 433–47Google Scholar. For recent criticisms of this approach, see Gelvin, James, “‘The Politics of Notables’ Forty Years After,” Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 40, 1 (2006): 19–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mikhail, Alan and Philliou, Christine M., “The Ottoman Empire and the Imperial Turn,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, 4 (2012): 721–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
30 Esmer, “Economies.”
31 Ibid.
32 HH 2521İ.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid.
37 For instance, the late nineteenth-century Ottoman chronicler Ahmet Cevdet Paşa noted that upon first setting foot on the continent at the beginning of his commission to seek out and destroy Kara Feyzî, the unruly, violent behavior of Seyyid ‘Alî Paşa's Anatolian troops in Istanbul's different districts drew the palace's attention. Though Ahmet Cevdet Paşa mentioned struggles between El-Hac Mustafa and ‘Alî Paşa, he unsurprisingly omits Kara Feyzî's central role in this larger dispute. See Tarîh-i Cevdet, vol. 3 (Istanbul: Matba‘a-yı Osmaniye 1891–1892 [1309]), 292.
38 HH 2521İ.
39 “…ma‘iyyetimizde olan ‘asâkirin beynlerine ihtilâl ve teşvîş ilkâ eylemek mülâhazasıyla…”; HH 2521O.
40 HH 2521İ.
41 See Tuğ, Başak, “Gendered Subjects in Ottoman Constitutional Agreements, ca. 1740–1860,” European Journal of Turkish Studies 18 (Aug. 2014): 18–25Google Scholar, http://ejts.revues.org/4860.
42 In contrast, the court historian Cevdet Paşa (Tarîh-i Cevdet, 292) noted that various reports regarding the excesses of Seyyid ‘Alî Paşa's men in Istanbul and other parts of Rumeli at this time described these Anatolians as men no better than the mountain bandits (dağlı eşkıyâsı) they were commissioned to fight.
43 Leslie Peirce, Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 133–34, 179.
44 Cevdet Dahiliye 9678. A number of dispatches are bundled together under this call number: one dated 23 September 1797 and two 27 September 1797. For more on Seyyid ‘Alî Paşa's commission with ten thousand Anatolian troops to destroy Kara Feyzî's network, see Vera Mutafchieva, Kărdzhaliisko vreme, 2d ed. (Sofia: Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, 1993), 146–49. See also, İsmail H. Uzunçarşılıoğlu, “Vezir Hakkı Mehmed Paşa, 1747–1811,” Türkiyat mecuası 6 (1939): 177–286Google Scholar.
45 Cevdet Dahiliye 9678.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid.
48 Rumeli vâlîsi vezîr-i müşârunileyhin silâhdârına tenbîh ve merkûm silâhdâr dahi olvechle ta‘ahhüd itmiş olduğundan ta‘ahhüdlerinin mugâyiri … te‘addîyâta cesâret.
49 Cevdet Dahiliye 9678.
50 Ibid. Prior to the Filibe scandal, Kara Feyzî and his companions repeatedly feigned their willingness to disband and mend their ways in talks with lower-ranking officials. But they used these negotiations to increase their coercive power to extract more resources and manpower from communities throughout Rumeli. See Esmer, “Economies,” 179–82.
51 Cevdet Dahiliye 9678.
52 Ibid.
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid.
56 “Fe'emmâ hasbe'l-hâl işler bu dereceye gelüp tâ'ife-i eşkıyâ külliyyen nizâm ve bilâd ve ‘ibâdın fî-mâ-ba‘d âsâyîş-i emn ü râhatlarıyla evliyâ-yı na‘imâ efendilerimize da‘avât-ı hayr aldırmağa dâmen der-miyân gayret ve teşmîr-i bâzû-yı kudret ve hayr-hâh-i dîn ü devlet olduğum mülâbesesiyle bu vechle tahrîre cesâret kılınmıştır.” Ibid., my italics.
57 Gottfied Hagen, “Legitimacy and World Order,” in Hakan Karateke and Maurus Reinkowski, eds., Legitimizing the Order: The Ottoman Rhetoric of State Power (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 55–83.
58 Scholars studying forms of social disobedience in the Ottoman Empire acknowledge that there is still very little consensus on what constituted “mutiny” (‘isyân), “disorder” or “sedition” (fitne, fesâd), “rebellion” (tuğyân), and “banditry” (eşkıyâlık) and what the “typical” imperial responses to them were. See Jane Hathaway, ed., Mutiny and Rebellion in the Ottoman Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004).
59 See Tuğ, “Gendered Subject”; and Shahar, Ido, “Legal Pluralism and the Study of Shari‘a Courts,” Islamic Law and Society 15 (2008): 112–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
60 Petrov, Milen. “Everyday Forms of Compliance: Subaltern Commentaries on Ottoman Reform, 1864–1868,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 46, 4 (2004): 730–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
61 The failure to be attentive to the linguistic practices, or terminology and specific methods by which Muslim jurists discoursed on Islamic law is largely responsible for the view that Islamic law has remained unchanged since the tenth century. Khaled Abou El Fadl, Rebellion and Violence in Islamic Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 5–6.
62 The Imperial Council (dîvân-i hümâyûn) bypassed local courts as a first adjudication center for most serious crimes like organized banditry well before the late eighteenth century, largely because local officials colluded with criminal networks on the ground or were unable to police them. See Başak Tuğ, “Politics of Honor: The Institutional and Social Frontiers of ‘Illicit’ Sex in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Anatolia,” PhD diss., New York University (2009), 100, 137.
63 Cevdet Dahiliye 9678.
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid.
66 See Aymes, “The Voice-Over of Administration,” for how local tittle-tattle reported to Istanbul could constitute the grounds for dismissal of governors of late nineteenth-century Cyprus.
67 Benton, Search for Sovereignty, 53.
68 After 1803, Kara Feyzî and his network were pillaging areas alarmingly close to Istanbul. For example, see Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi HH 2637 (31 Oct. 1803).
69 HH 2521İ.
70 Ibid.
71 HH 2677. While this source is undated, it is clear from its content that it was written during the imperial siege of Vidin several months later.
72 Ibid.
73 Ibid.
74 HH 2677.
75 Ibid.
76 For a similar point in the context of late Mughal India, see Fisher, Michael H., “The Office of Akhbār Nawīs: The Transition from Mughal to British Forms,” Modern Asian Studies 27, 1 (1993): 45–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
77 HH 2521O.
78 HH 2521İ.
79 HH 2521O.
80 For more on the corruption and abuses of vezîrs and provincial governors in Ottoman history, see Baki Tezcan, The Second Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
81 Wickham, “Gossip and Resistance,” 5–12.
82 Benton, Search for Sovereignty, 101–2.
83 Stoler, Along the Archival Grain.
84 Cevdet Dahiliye 9678.
85 Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 30.
86 Bayly, Empire and Information.
87 Benton, Search for Sovereignty, 258.
88 HH 2777.
89 Ibid.
90 HH 12367.
91 HH 2110.
92 See HH 2667, 2253, and 2719C.
93 HH 2238. By 2 June 1798, reports arrived in Istanbul that Seyyid ‘Alî Paşa had the “traitor” Pasban-zâde ‘Osmân Paşa completely surrounded and his punishment was imminent; see HH 5970. At the same time, ‘Alî Paşa's peers complained he was unwilling to share heavy armaments and ammunition; see HH 2719B.
94 Y. Özkaya, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu Dağlı İsyanları (1791–1808) (Ankara: Ankara University Press, 1983), 57.
95 S. Aslantaş, Osmanlıda Sırp İsyanları (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2007).
96 Some of Kara Feyzî's plundering adventures in 1803 brought him as close as the outskirts of Istanbul.
97 After this scandal, from 1797 onward, the Filibe/Meriç River valley became the center of Kara Feyzî's plundering confederacy. See V. Mutafchieva, Kărdzhaliisko vreme.
98 Esmer, “Economies.”
99 Ibid.
100 To move beyond these divides and their ideological underpinnings, see Brian V. Street, Literacy in Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); and Hanna, Nelli, “Literacy and the ‘Great Divide’ in the Islamic World, 1300–1800,” Journal of Global History 2 (2007): 175–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
101 Horodowich, Elizabeth, “Introduction: Speech and Oral Culture in Early Modern Europe and Beyond,” Journal of Early Modern History 16 (2012): 301–13, 312CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
102 For recent scholarship that shows how political elite culture departs from convention by using the verbal forms and expressions originating from popular slang, in many of the same ways that lower social strata were thought to appropriate, mock, or parody dominant ideology, see Dumolyn, Jan and Haemers, Jelle, “‘A Bad Chicken Was Brooding’: Subversive Speech in Late Medieval Flanders,” Past & Present 214 (Feb. 2012): 45–86, 50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
103 Ibid.
104 Aymes, “Voice-Over,” 1–4.
105 Recent Ottomanist scholarship treats the overlap between the criminality of paramilitarism and state-craft as more of a modern phenomenon, which informed the transition from empire to nation-state. See Gingeras, Ryan, “Last Rites for a ‘Pure Bandit’: Clandestine Service, Historiography and the Origins of the Turkish ‘Deep State,’” Past & Present 206, 1 (2010): 151–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Uğur Ümit Üngör, “Rethinking the Violence of Pacification: State Formation and Bandits in Turkey, 1914–1937,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, 4 (2012): 746–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In contrast, scholars of the emergence of the empire have long talked about the Ottoman venture as a “plundering confederacy” comprised of unwieldy armies that the center found difficult to control. See Heath Lowry, The Nature of the Early Ottoman State (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003); and Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
106 See Esmer, “Economies”; and for other contexts, Fernando Coronil and Julie Skurski, eds., States of Violence (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press and Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2005).
107 My approach that theorizes the relations between gossip and informal talk on one hand and the mediation of imperial violence on the other has been influenced by the work of Leila Abu-Lughod. In her efforts to curb recent scholarship's enthusiasm for finding subaltern resistance anywhere and everywhere she heeded Foucault's warning that power has the propensity to lurk in covert places, just as power and resistance are always intertwined in complicated ways. See “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women,” American Ethnologist 17 (1990): 41–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and other Writings, 1972–1977, Colin Gordon, trans. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980).