A Moveable Empire: Ottoman Nomads, Migrants, and Refugees

3. Toward Settlement

53 3 Toward Settlement I n 1691 a group of villagers in western Anatolia filed a petition with six judges who had jurisdiction over their region. In it they complained that seven of twenty-two tribes that had been ordered by the central government to settle in parts of western Anatolia had set up their tents not on the properties reserved for them but on communally held pasture land. From these sites the tribal members were letting their animals loose, causing damage to planted fields in the surrounding area. Tribal members were also raiding villages, looting property and food, and robbing travelers on public roads. The villagers described how their properties were breaking up and how they were becoming destitute. They pleaded with the government to intervene to protect them. The judges referred this complaint to Istanbul because it involved issues of primary concern to the central government. The government responded by reiterating the terms of the original decree, which had been written two years before, in 1689, ordering a large number of nomadic tribes to settle on land reserved for them. The response listed the names, brief histories , and leaders of the specific tribes, when and why they were ordered to settle, the precise locations and sizes of the areas they were supposed to settle in, and the terms of their settlement. The government urged the local 54 Toward Settlement authorities to see to it that the terms of the order were carried out fully and without delay.1 Among other things, this exchange is valuable for the detail included in it and the close attention with which the government’s response was obviously drafted. Far from being an isolated episode, this settlement order was part of a larger project. Indeed, the 1689 decree, which the central government reiterated in 1691, was one of a series of similar orders the Ottoman government issued around that time, all dealing with the sedentarization of tribes. Impressive as the government’s reiteration of its original order was, there is no way to discover whether it made any difference in getting the tribes to conform to the terms of their charge. Like most such cases, this one stops at this point, making further inquiry impossible. What is beyond dispute is that by the end of the seventeenth century, bringing about a more sedentary rural life had become a concern for the Ottoman government. Numerous orders were issued, their implementation was closely monitored , and government officials and tribal chiefs who did not comply were severely punished. This represents a significant departure from earlier methods of imperial rule, which relied on the continuing mobility of large numbers of imperial subjects to extend and exercise the authority of the Ottoman center. Interest was now growing on the part of the Ottoman rulers in creating a political unit with plainly demarcated borders that would contain people who were clearly identified, registered, and counted. To be sure, the completion of this shift took much longer than the brief span at the close of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century. It can be argued that the process was still incomplete even when the empire collapsed and disappeared at the end of World War I. Nevertheless, the first significant push in this direction can be seen in the Ottoman Empire in the last two decades of the seventeenth century. In the rest of this chapter, I first identify the external and internal factors that prompted the Ottoman government to begin regarding mobility not as an asset to be manipulated and taken advantage of but as a potential source of weakness to be contained. I continue with an assessment of three policies the Ottomans instituted in order to control the nomadic and migrant population. The first was the issuing of increasingly detailed directives that identified specific tribes for removal and resettlement. The second was the expansion of the empire’s network of guards and couriers and the enrollment of tribal members in it, a practice conceived as another way of bringing the tribes under closer government supervision. The third Toward Settlement 55 was the registration of nomadic tribes and other migratory groups into the military and their integration in specially constituted military units. The results of these policies, however, were not always what the central government intended. The main problem lay in implementation. Because the Ottoman bureaucracy was still relatively small, it was difficult to transmit...