A Moveable Empire: Ottoman Nomads, Migrants, and Refugees

1. Empire, State, and People

3 1 Empire, State, and People S everal years before I began writing this book, I noticed that the sources I was reading for another project repeatedly mentioned large numbers of nomadic tribes and other unsettled peoples who roamed the vast territories of the Ottoman Empire. According to these sources and the accounts of contemporary travelers and other observers, such groups were not confined to frontier areas or peripheral provinces but lived across the entire empire, even in urban areas. Furthermore, rather than figuring solely as carriers of dissent, in many instances migratory and nomadic groups actually mediated and imposed the will of the imperial center. It was particularly intriguing that the economic, political, and social changes the empire underwent in its long history—from roughly 1300 to 1922—and the Ottoman state’s repeated attempts to settle the tribes seemed not to have affected the position and prominence of tribal and other migratory groups. Tens of thousands of tribes, some encompassing thousands of people and animals, moved across great distances, crosscutting the Ottoman Empire, which at one point extended from Algeria in the west to the Iranian border in the east and from Crimea in the north to the Indian Ocean in the south. Together with the continuous migration of agricultural and urban workers within and across the many regions, this movement created a situation in 4 Empire, State, and People which at any time a significant part of the people living within the borders of the Ottoman Empire was on the move. Far from being leftovers from a previous era, these mobile groups and individuals had become integral parts of the Ottoman Empire. On one level, there is nothing surprising about the presence of large numbers of nomadic tribes and migrant workers in the Ottoman Empire. The lands the empire controlled for 600 years, from the Balkans to the Persian Gulf, cut across one of the five major areas of nomadic pastoralism in the world.1 Central Asian tribes that played key roles in the creation of the Ottoman and other polities in the Near East migrated through these zones and arrived in Anatolia in the medieval era as nomads themselves.2 At the same time, the mountainous terrain and the overall sparseness of population limited the development of large-scale sedentary farming in these lands. Instead, small to medium-size peasant farming became typical in large parts of the Ottoman Empire, and the farmers always depended on the availability of migrant labor.3 Hence, there are some answers to the question of why such a high degree of mobility exists in this part of the world. But if one asks how the nomadic tribes and itinerant workers managed to survive in an empire that was as bureaucratic and powerful as the Ottoman Empire, then the answer becomes less clear. Historians who tackled this issue in the 1930s and 1940s were more interested in exploring the role of nomadic tribes in the rise of the Ottoman Empire in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries than in the long-term coexistence of settled and migratory communities.4 Some of their studies were deeply ideological, seeking to “prove” the Turkishness of early tribes and show how that essence was maintained and carried over into the modern era.5 A third area of interest for these scholars was what role, if any, Islam played in this history, and if it did, what kind of Islam it was.6 In these studies the emphasis was especially on the Sufi orders that were organized in the frontier regions and on how such orders became the carriers of a uniquely “Turkish” version of Islam. Although these writers reflected a trend toward idealizing tribal forms, they shared an evolutionary understanding of history and considered tribal prominence as belonging to a more primitive stage that preceded the establishment of the central institutions of the Ottoman Empire.7 The question I pursue here is not the origins of the Ottoman Empire, the nature of its “Turkishness,” or the role played by Islam in the empire’s early expansion. I am interested in explaining how, despite the concerted Empire, State, and People 5 efforts of the Ottoman and subsequently the Turkish state, tribes and other migrant groups survived over such a long period of history. A significant body of literature is focused on this question, but primarily from the perspective of the resistance of ethnically or religiously...