In medieval Anatolian towns the market was more than a place of trade; it was the arena in which a community wrote and enforced its own rules. Who could open a shop and under what conditions, by what measure a good was sold, when an apprentice became a master, where a stranger passing through could find lodging: the institution that answered these questions was Ahilik. Because Amasya, from the Danishmendid and Seljuk era onward, was a busy town on the Yeşilırmak where the roads to Tokat, Sivas and Samsun met, it counts among the centers where this order was at work. In time Ahilik turned into the Ottoman tradesmen's guilds, and its traces reached the town's quarter names, its market habits and the relationship between master and apprentice.

There is not enough documentation to write a detailed Ahilik history specific to Amasya. The names of the Ahi sheikhs of the Seljuk and Ilkhanid periods and the locations of their lodges are largely unknown. What survives is the general working of Ahilik across Anatolia, together with Ottoman records in which Amasya's tradesmen, quarters and market can be seen in detail. The account below therefore combines the general framework with Amasya's concrete data and does not resort to guesswork where the record is silent.

From Futuwwa to Ahilik

The word ahi comes from the Arabic ahî, "my brother." Some scholars link the name to the Turkish word akı, "generous." Both explanations suit the organization's core values. The idea of brotherhood, grounded in the Qur'an and the hadith and holding an important place in Sufism, made Ahilik easy to spread. The decisive factor in its establishment in Anatolia, however, was the futuwwa organization. Futuwwa was a way of life that developed in Iraq and Iran from the eighth century, built on virtues such as manliness, generosity, keeping one's word and preferring others to oneself. From the ninth century, tradesmen's associations also appeared around this ideal. In Syria, Iraq, Iran, Turkestan, Andalusia, North Africa and Egypt, young unmarried workers known as fata (plural fityan) formed the core of these associations.

The Abbasid Caliph al-Nasir li-Din Allah (1180-1225) bound the futuwwa associations to political authority in order to strengthen a weakening central power. The Risalat al-futuwwa that he had Shihab al-Din al-Suhrawardi write for this purpose is regarded as the first charter of futuwwa as an institution. The caliph made his first contact with the Anatolian Seljuk state in 1204, in the reign of Kayhusraw I. The sultan's envoy Majd al-Din Ishaq, on his return from Baghdad, brought great mystics such as Muhyiddin Ibn al-Arabi, Awhad al-Din Kirmani and Sheikh Nasir al-Din Mahmud al-Khuyi to Anatolia. According to the accounts, the entry of Kayhusraw I, Kaykaus I and Kayqubad I into the futuwwa organization raised the standing of Ahilik in Anatolia and completed its foundation. The dispatch of Suhrawardi to Anatolia in Kayqubad's time is also considered an important link in this process.

Ahi Evran and the Founding in Anatolia

The person remembered as the founder of Ahilik in Anatolia is Sheikh Nasir al-Din Mahmud, said to have been born in the city of Khoy in Iran and later known as Ahi Evran. This mystic, who came to Anatolia from Central Asia, lived for a time in Denizli, Konya and Kayseri, traveled through many towns, then settled in Kırşehir and remained there until his death. That he was a historical figure is certain, but his real life is lost among legends. Different dates have been proposed for his death, from 1262 to a time between 1300 and 1317, and recent studies on the subject must be treated with caution because the sources they rely on have not been critically examined. The tradition that he worked as a tanner later led to his being honored as patron of the tanners' guild. In the Ottoman period the Ahi Evran Lodge in Kırşehir became the spiritual center of all craftsmen; its sheikhs bore the title Ahi Baba and delegated authority to Ahi leaders in other towns.

The members of this organization held wide influence in villages and border regions as well as in towns. Ahilik also embraced statesmen, soldiers, judges, madrasa teachers and Sufi sheikhs. In large towns the Ahis were divided into groups, each with its own lodge. In small towns different trades could form a single association. Where a system of this kind operated, the town's tradesmen gathered under the authority of one leader, and the market was shaped through that authority.

How the Organization Worked: From Apprentice to Master

In the Ahilik order, entering a trade meant going through a process of moral training. A child of about ten began work as a yamak, then passed through the stages of apprentice, journeyman and master. The apprentice first did simple tasks and learned both technique and the ethics of the work by watching his master. Passing to journeyman and master status required professional competence and merit. Apprentices could not open a shop until they had learned the trade thoroughly. The number of tradesmen and shops, the tools and the looms were limited, and production was kept to what demand required. When a journeyman proved himself, his work was shown to the masters, bought by masters and wealthy tradesmen, and the money collected became the new master's capital.

Entry into Ahilik took place by drinking sherbet and by being girded with the shed or peştamal (a ceremonial waist wrap) and putting on the şalvar. The yiğitbaşı girded the journeyman who was to become a master with the shed, accompanied by prayers; the ceremony showed that the candidate could now run his work on his own and that he had taken on responsibility toward the community. The most honest and respected master of the association, usually the senior in age as well, was chosen as its head and called the ahi. This person held an influence over the craftsmen like that of a sheikh. There was also a second head, called the yiğitbaşı or server, who kept order among the tradesmen.

The written principles of this order were collected in the futuwwatnamas. A person entering the organization first had to obey the religious and moral rules set out in these books. According to the futuwwatnamas, the qualities a member needed were loyalty, truthfulness, trustworthiness, generosity, humility, advising his brothers and calling them to the right path, forgiveness and repentance. Drinking wine, adultery, lying, backbiting and fraud counted among the behaviors that required expulsion from the trade. Quality control of goods and price setting were the basic duties of the associations. In this way the measure, quality and price of a good in the market ceased to be arbitrary, and deceiving the customer and unfair profit were prevented. The limit on profit was part of the same order, since the aim was a moderate living that respected the rights of both producer and consumer.

Ahis in the Seljuk and Ilkhanid Era

The weight of the Ahis in history became most visible in periods when state authority weakened. When central government was shaken in thirteenth-century Anatolia, the Ahi associations became the mainstay of order and solidarity in the towns. During the Mongol invasion they took on the role of local authority in the administration of some towns. It is known that they resisted Kayhusraw II after he killed his father Kayqubad I, and that after the defeat at Kösedağ they successfully defended Kayseri against the Mongols who had taken Tokat and Sivas.

Amasya was not outside this historical course. After the Battle of Kösedağ in 1243 the town came under Mongol governors, and then remained under the administration of Eretna, who ruled in Sivas, and his successors. The construction of buildings such as the Dârüşşifâ (1308) and the Gümüşlü Mosque (1326) in these two centuries shows that town life and the tradition of endowments continued. The sources are silent about the concrete activities of the Ahis in Amasya in this turbulent age.

Until the fourteenth century Ahilik carried religious, military and economic characteristics together. Afterward the organization turned increasingly into organized tradesmen's associations and economic activity came to the fore. Aşıkpaşazade counts the Ahis among the four groups active at the founding of the Ottoman state. It is known that many of the first Ottoman rulers and viziers were Ahi sheikhs, that Murad I was girded with the shed, and that Orhan Gazi took the Ahi title "ihtiyaru'd-din." Sheikh Edebali was also among the Ahi sheikhs.

Ibn Battuta's Observations

The most vivid testimony to the everyday appearance of Ahilik in Anatolia comes from the Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta, who toured Anatolia in the first half of the fourteenth century. Arriving around 1331, he met Ahis almost everywhere he went and described them as "a society with no equal in the world." According to him, the Ahis were unmarried young men with a trade; the person chosen as head built a lodge and furnished it with carpets, rugs and lamps. The members worked by day, brought their earnings to the head after the afternoon prayer, and the lodge's food and drink expenses were met with that money. If a guest arrived in the area that day, he was hosted at the lodge; if none came, the members still gathered at the lodge and ate together.

Battuta writes that in Antalya he was astonished to learn that a man in worn-out clothes and a felt cap who had invited him to a meal was in fact the head of the organization. In Ladik he describes two Ahi groups coming almost to blows over whose lodge would take the guest, and the matter being settled by drawing lots. In Kayseri he describes the lodge of Ahi Emir Ali as one of the finest he had seen in the Turkish lands up to that time. In Erzurum he was hosted at the lodge of Ahi Duman; when he wanted to leave the next day, the Ahi held him back, saying that hospitality among them lasted at least three days. The traveler's route after Sivas runs through Amasya, Gümüşhane and Erzincan to Erzurum. Although it is known that he passed through Amasya, no detailed account of his stay there is available, so the name of a lodge or an Ahi in the town cannot be given.

Market and Tradesmen in Ottoman Amasya

In the Ottoman period Amasya was an important sanjak center of the Rum province and in the early years was the province's center. Lying since antiquity on the trade road between Tarsus, Kayseri, Zile and Samsun, the town in the sixteenth century had a dye house, a candle house and a mint. Silk weaving was widespread. Because it lay on the road between Azerbaijan and Bursa, it was also an important market for Iranian silks. In the ten months of 1554-1555, the quantity of silk goods entering the town by official channels and weighed came to 10,632 lodra, about fifteen tons. This figure shows both the size of the market and how tightly the state's system of oversight worked.

In 1525 Amasya had fifty-five quarters, five of them non-Muslim, and an estimated population of eight thousand. By the end of the sixteenth century the population was approaching ten thousand. H. Dernschwam, a member of the Austrian embassy who visited the town in 1555, describes a dense settlement squeezed into a narrow valley, with mostly two-story mud-brick houses seeming to be piled one on top of another; he also notes that houses burned in a great fire on 14 April 1555 were rebuilt quickly and that the town had eleven mosques. The records of the early sixteenth century list nine mosques, ten madrasas, four lodges, six soup kitchens and fifteen baths.

In the seventeenth century Evliya Çelebi writes that Amasya had about 1,060 shops and that its markets were busy and rich; he counts fifty-three quarters and five thousand households. At the end of the nineteenth century Vital Cuinet reports nearly 2,500 weavers in the town. Amasya was among the pilot regions where cotton seed brought from Egypt was tried in 1863, and from 1864 an annual fair running from the fifteenth of December to the end of the month was established. These data show that over the centuries the town had a market life in which agriculture and craft were intertwined.

Quarter names also carry traces of this fabric. In the Amasya population register of 1840, among fifty-five quarters there is one called Ahi Sadettin, with twenty-five registered Muslim households. The same register also shows quarters whose names recall a trade or a workplace, such as Çırakçı, Gazgancı, Kılıççı, Kurşunlu, Pirinççi, Saraçhane and Bozahane. The origin of each of these names is not documented; yet the reflection of trades in quarter names can be read as a sign of the bond tradesmen formed with the urban fabric. As for Ahi Sadettin, the sources do not explain which person or lodge the name comes from.

Guild Order and the Internal Government of Tradesmen

In the Ottoman period Ahilik continued within the administrative structure of the tradesmen's guilds. From the time of Mehmed the Conqueror in particular it ceased to be a political force and became an organization regulating the affairs of the tradesmen's associations. Free tradesmen were organized on the principle of mutual oversight and cooperation rather than competition. Members of the same craft worked together and supervised one another. The hierarchy comprised the tradesmen's sheikh, the tradesmen's kethüda, the yiğitbaşı, master, journeyman and apprentice.

The kethüda ran the financial and administrative affairs of the association. His duties included preventing abuses, resolving disputes and, when necessary, referring them to the judge or the Imperial Council. The kethüda was chosen by the tradesmen and recorded in the register by the judge; later a berat from the government began to be obtained for this post. The yiğitbaşı looked after the proper training of apprentices, discipline and punishment, the girding of new masters with the shed, and the management of the association's common fund. It had become customary for the sheikh of the Ahi Evran Lodge in Kırşehir to be present at the appointment of the yiğitbaşı and at master ceremonies. This practice appears to have continued among the tradesmen of towns in Anatolia and Rumelia until the last years of the empire. The last two members of the board were called ehl-i hibre (ehl-i vukuf); these experts arbitrated disputes between tradesmen and merchants and set the price, the narh, according to the quality of goods and services.

The credit tradesmen needed was also met within an organized structure. In Ottoman society, cash waqfs, besides financing education, health and religious services, met the cash needs of tradesmen and people in economic difficulty at low rates of transaction. The 188 cash waqfs founded in Amasya and its surroundings between 1633 and 1914 secured the continuity of the religious and social institutions in quarters and villages, met the cash needs of people where they were founded, and with set rates of transaction held back excessive usury. What share tradesmen had in these waqfs is a subject for another study.

From Gedik to the End

Another dimension of the tradesmen's order was the gedik practice. Gedik meant the continuing right attached to implements such as shelves, cupboards and chests that tradesmen placed in waqf shops with the permission of the trustee. In the time of Süleyman the Magnificent the matter was debated again, and Ebussuud Efendi examined it in 1555-56 and submitted to the sultan that the practice was permissible. Some scholars date the acquisition of the sense of privilege by the gedik right from 1727. When the monopoly system in trade was abolished in 1853, the gedik lost its character as privilege and license and was again regarded as a right of use. With the Provisional Law on the Abolition of Gediks of 1913, gedik rights were liquidated and ninety percent of them disappeared.

With the end of the guild order, Ahilik's written rules also came to an end. Yet the continued appearance in records, in the first half of the nineteenth century, of terms such as Ahi Baba, yiğitbaşı, ustadship and kethüdaship shows that the name lived on for a long time. The yiğitbaşı, who sat on the tradesmen's boards of Anatolia in the early years of the Republic, is today symbolically re-enacted in Ahilik ceremonies. Amasya's tradesmen's chambers likewise present Ahilik as an organization founded in the thirteenth century under the leadership of Ahi Evran, built on ethics, craft, trade and mutual aid; its principles of training from apprentice to master and avoidance of unfair competition are still held up as examples today.

Chronology

1204: Caliph al-Nasir's first contact with the Anatolian Seljuk state concerning the futuwwa organization.

1243: Battle of Kösedağ; Amasya comes under Mongol governors.

1262: One of the dates given for the death of Ahi Evran (disputed).

Around 1331: Ibn Battuta's arrival in Anatolia.

1525: Fifty-five quarters in Amasya, about eight thousand inhabitants.

1554-1555: About fifteen tons of silk goods enter the town in ten months; Dernschwam's visit.

1840: The Ahi Sadettin quarter appears in the Amasya population register.

1853: Abolition of the monopoly system in trade.

1864: Founding of the December fair in Amasya.

1913: Abolition of the gediks.

Sources

Primary sources

  • Selim Özcan, H.1256 (1840) Tarihli Amasya Nüfus Defteri ile H.1260-1261 (1844-1845) Tarihli Amasya Temettuat Defterlerinin Karşılaştırmalı Değerlendirilmesi, Studies of the Ottoman Domain, 6/11, 2016

Academic studies

Other sources

Online sources