In the Ottoman period, the daily life of a city is most often traced through the registers kept in its kadi court. The division of an inheritance, the contracting of a marriage, the sale of a shop, the lease of a bathhouse or a quarrel between two neighbors entered the record to the extent that it was brought before the court. The sharia court registers (şer'iyye sicilleri) of Amasya form the most continuous series of such records for the city. The registers do not contain legal material alone. Prices, transfers of property, problems of public order, endowment accounts, imperial decrees and the names of the kadis who served in the city stand side by side on the same pages.

Ninety-five registers survive for Amasya. The earliest group reaches back to the seventeenth century, and the first twenty-two volumes cover the years 1034 to 1110 in the Islamic calendar, that is, 1624 to 1699. The description of these volumes, the identification of the kadis named in them and the list of theses written on them are the most solid starting point available to researchers of Amasya's history.

What a Sharia Court Register Is

The şer'iyye sicilleri are official registers kept by the kadi or by the kadi's deputy (nâib). In the sources they also appear under names such as kadi registers, kadi divan, court records or sicillât-ı şer'iyye. The registers received the cases heard in court, contracts that individuals made among themselves, inheritance divisions, marriage and divorce records, sales, leases and debts, arrangements concerning pious endowments, and copies of decrees and orders arriving from the center. For this reason the kadi cannot be described simply as a judge. He also worked as the city's notary, land registrar and civil governor, and he was obliged to enter everything he did into the book.

Legal literature distinguishes between kinds of record. A record that lacks the kadi's approval and ruling is called a mahzar, and one that carries the kadi's approval and ruling is called a sicil. The process by which these two concepts became technical terms can be followed in the literature, but the date at which such records began to be gathered into books has not yet been clarified sufficiently. When the registers began to be kept is also disputed. Some researchers hold that these books were kept systematically only in the Ottoman period. Others, such as Wael Hallaq, point to pre-Ottoman records from Mamluk Jerusalem and from Ardabil and argue that the tradition of the kadi's divan is older. Amasya supplies one example in this debate. A court record from the Seljuk and Ilkhanid period, kept in the Amasya court, has survived to the present. This document, published by Osman Turan in 1952, is a legal instrument concerning lending money at interest, and it shows that the city's tradition of the kadi's office extends back before the Ottomans.

Ottoman registers consist of two main types of document. The first type arises from transactions in the court. Judgments (i'lâm), deeds (hüccet) and estate inventories (tereke) belong here, and they were generally written in the front section of the book. The second type consists of copies of documents arriving from Istanbul, such as decrees (ferman), orders, rescripts, memoranda and patents (berat), and these were entered at the back of the book. Examples of fatwas and the kadis' personal notes also entered the same books from time to time. In large cities documents were kept in separate books according to type, while in small districts everything was gathered in one book. A judgment or deed record lists, in order, the city or district together with the neighborhood or village, the names, religion and titles of the persons, the subject of the case and its evidence, the ruling, the date and the names of those present at the hearing. Estate records add the heirs, the property, debts and credits, and the inheritance shares. Price-control (narh) records contain the prices of goods, and marriage and divorce records contain information about dower and maintenance.

The physical appearance of the books also shapes the nature of the records. Register books were usually narrow and long, in dimensions such as 15 × 45 centimeters, and the number of pages varied from ten or twenty to two or three hundred. Entries were mostly written in ta'lik, rik'a or divani script, and chronological order was not always observed. There are several reasons for this. Case records were first written as drafts and then copied into the book, documents from Istanbul were interleaved among the judgments and deeds, and confusion arose when scattered pages were rebound. For this reason a single book sometimes covers one year and sometimes several decades. The change of script in the entries and the change of the watermark on the paper are the main clues for understanding which pages were assembled afterwards.

The Emergence and Preservation of the Registers

The earliest known sharia court registers of the Ottoman state come from Bursa and date to 1455. Since the office of kadi has existed since the earliest Ottoman period, it may be supposed that older books were kept as well, but have not survived. The oldest known book in the Arab lands is the register of the Salihiyya Court in Egypt, dating to the 1530s. The official protection of the registers and the compilation of lists of them became possible only with the Instruction on the Sicillât-ı Şer'iyye and the Zabt-ı Deâvî Gazettes issued in 1873.

The survival of the books depended largely on chance. Researchers comparing Bursa and Edirne, two cities close to each other in demographic, political and economic weight, note that Bursa has 796 books, while the series of Edirne, beginning in 1538, stops at 690. A note in the first register of Mudanya, which includes records of 1645, offers an example of how books could disappear. That entry records that a locked wooden chest and twenty-six volumes of registers were left in trust with a person, and the note adds a warning not to let them be forgotten. It shows how fragile the system of safekeeping was.

The catalog of the registers in Turkey was published in Ahmet Akgündüz's work Şer'iye Sicilleri. This catalog records roughly seventeen thousand books, 9,883 of them belonging to Istanbul and 6,960 to other cities. The books outside Istanbul were collected from the libraries and museums of the cities where they were kept starting in 1941 and transferred to the National Library in 1991, and in 2005 the originals of 8,934 registers were handed over to the General Directorate of State Archives. The Amasya registers today appear in the Meşihat catalog of the Ottoman Archive under the reference BOA.MŞH.ŞSC.d.

The Office of Kadi

The Ottoman kadi is an official of the judiciary and of civil administration with a distinctive place among Islamic states. He belongs to the learned class (ilmiye) and is appointed by the state. Besides the conditions required of a kadi in the classical period, a particular course of education and a hierarchical order of promotion had to be completed. The Sahn-ı Semân madrasas founded in the time of Mehmed II, and later the Süleymaniye madrasas, were the centers of this training. A candidate who finished the madrasa applied to the office of the military judge (kazasker) and spent at least three years in a period called mülâzemet, a kind of apprenticeship, after which he was appointed to one of the smallest district judgeships. The sanjak judgeships of mevleviyet rank stood above these steps. In an important sanjak center such as Amasya, the judgeship was a prestigious post and one that carried heavy responsibility.

Kadis were appointed by imperial patent. Appointments and transfers were entered in the registers called rûznâmçe kept in the offices of the military judges of Anatolia and Rumelia. The patent of an appointment that had not been entered in the register was void, and the court of a kadi who took up office without a patent was called a "fuzulî court" (an unauthorized court). As a rule kadis were appointed to a district for a term of two years, though this term could be shortened or extended. After the seventeenth century lapses in this rule are observed. In the Amasya list of kadis, the repeated return of the same persons and the extension of terms suggest this flexibility.

The duties of the Ottoman kadi were not confined to the judicial sphere. The repair of roads, bridges and fountains on campaign, the supply of grain and fodder for the army, the collection of extraordinary levies (avârız), the supervision of markets, the setting of price controls, the oversight of endowment trustees and madrasas and the supervision of fortress guards were all the kadi's responsibility. A search, a raid or the arrest of certain persons could be carried out only on the kadi's order. Because there was no separate prosecutor, the kadi also conducted the investigation himself. The kadi was also the spokesman of the people before the central state. Requests such as moving a marketplace or exempting certain places from mountain-pass guard duty (derbend) were conveyed to the center by him on the people's behalf.

A kadi who could not hear every case in a wide district had deputies (nâib). The deputies carried out the kadi's duties in their own subdistricts, and the court staff consisted of registry clerks, the bailiff (muhzır) and the market inspector (muhtesib). The relationship between the kadi and the governor-general or the sanjak governor is disputed in the literature. Some authors maintain that the governor-general interfered in the rulings of the kadi's court, while others assert that the kadi was independent in his office. In the end the kadi was not entirely independent of the governor-general in his military and civil duties, but he was autonomous in his supervision of endowments and madrasas. In provincial administration the kadi, the treasurer (defterdar) and the governor-general or sanjak governor belonging to the executive authority (ehl-i örf) were conceived as three elements that balanced one another.

The structure of the judgeship began to change from the eighteenth century on. As the central administration weakened, local powers increasingly interfered in the kadis' duties, and a kadi who had lost the power of enforcement was in places obliged to come to terms with local groups such as the notables (ayan). The abolition of the Janissary Corps in 1826 ended the kadi's duties concerning public order, and when the Office of Market Supervision (İhtisap Nezâreti) was founded in the cities, municipal services passed out of the kadi's hands. With the founding of the Ministry of Endowments in 1836, supervision of the endowments was also taken from the kadis. The opening of new regular courts in criminal and commercial matters restricted the jurisdiction of the sharia courts to marriage, division of estates, divorce, credit and debt. The sharia courts were abolished by the law of 9 April 1924. After the Tanzimat the form of the registers changed as well. Page numbers were added to the books, rik'a was preferred to ta'lik because it was easier to read, the use of signatures and seals became widespread, and correspondence between the center and the provinces was moved into separate books.

The City Behind the Registers

To understand the kadi records of Amasya one has to look at the city's administrative position. When the city was in the hands of the Danishmendids, according to some studies it was besieged and taken by the commander Iltekin Gazi on 4 April 1075. The certainty of this date is disputed, yet it is known that at the beginning of the eleventh century the city was under Danishmendid administration. Passing to Anatolian Seljuk rule under Kılıçarslan II, the city was known in this period by the title Dârü'l-izz, and after the Battle of Kösedağ in 1243 it came under Ilkhanid influence. Caught in the middle of the struggle between Kadı Burhaneddin and Hacı Şadgeldi, Amasya was incorporated into Ottoman territory by Bayezid the Thunderbolt in 1398.

When it entered Ottoman administration it was given to Prince Mehmed (Çelebi Mehmed), and after him members of the dynasty likely to ascend the throne, such as Prince Murad (Murad II), Ahmed Çelebi, Prince Mehmed (Mehmed II), Alaaddin, Bayezid (Bayezid II), Ahmed, Mustafa and Murad (Murad III), were sent to the sanjak of Amasya. With Sivas and Tokat, Amasya was one of the sanjaks that formed the core of the Governorate-General of Rum founded in 1413, and as the seat of the governor-general it held a distinct importance. When the center of the governorate-general moved to Sivas, Amasya lost its status as the center. With the appointment of Prince Mustafa, son of Süleyman the Magnificent, as governor of Amasya, the city became an independent province separate from Sivas. After the killing of Prince Mustafa in 1553 it lost this status and was attached again to the Governorate-General of Rum.

The structure of the sanjak also shows the scope of the judgeship. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the sanjak consisted of the central district of Amasya together with the districts of Lâdik and Merzifon. The central district of Amasya at that time had six subdistricts and 321 villages. In 1576-1577 the number of districts rose to seven with the addition of Gümüş, Gedegra, Zeytun and Simre-i Lâdik. Evliya Çelebi says that in the middle of the seventeenth century the sanjak had nine districts, while documents of 1665 and 1671 show eleven and ten respectively.

Population and neighborhood figures differ according to the source. According to the survey register of 1520, Amasya consisted of 52 neighborhoods. Of these, 48 were Muslim and 4 were non-Muslim, and of the non-Muslim households 222 were Armenian, 73 Jewish and 21 Greek. According to another count, in 1525 the city had fifty-five neighborhoods, five of them non-Muslim. Both counts give a population of about eight thousand at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Evliya Çelebi speaks of five thousand households and twenty thousand inhabitants in the seventeenth century, but the geographical conditions of the city suggest that these figures are exaggerated.

The Amasya Sharia Court Registers

Number and Distribution of the Books

Neşe İnak's descriptive study of the first twenty-two of the ninety-five cataloged Amasya books, those belonging to the seventeenth century, offers the most detailed account of these volumes. These twenty-two books contain a total of 2,980 pages, 1,531 images and 8,629 documents. Of the documents, 4,653 are classified as zabıt and 3,976 as suret. The document counts are taken from the tabulation in Sibel Kavaklı's doctoral thesis.

The oldest known Amasya register is book no. 1, dated 1034-1036 (1624-1627). This book of 184 pages contains 710 documents, of which 378 are counted as zabıt and 332 as suret. Damp and decay have made some entries difficult to read. Considering the date on which Amasya entered Ottoman administration, books of earlier periods must also have been kept. If they exist, nothing is known about registers earlier than 1624. For this reason the period of Amasya's history before the seventeenth century cannot for the time being be learned from the registers.

The years covered by the books are discontinuous. This non-consecutive distribution shows that the records of some years are entirely missing. Book no. 2 covers 1632-1634, no. 3 covers 1634-1635, no. 4 covers 1642-1646, no. 5 covers 1643-1645 and no. 6 covers 1644-1647. Books no. 7 and 8 fall between 1648 and 1650. Books no. 9 and 10 cover 1651-1653, no. 11 covers 1653-1655, no. 12 covers 1656-1657, no. 13 covers 1659-1662, nos. 14 and 15 cover 1662-1665 and no. 16 covers 1665-1668. Book no. 17 belongs to 1672-1674, no. 18 to 1681-1682, no. 19 to 1688-1690, no. 20 to 1692-1694, no. 21 to 1694-1696 and no. 22 to 1697-1699. The dates overlap in places. Because the records do not all cover the same years, researchers have taken the dates in Akgündüz's catalog rather than those given in the Ottoman Archive. Only the date of register no. 4 differs between the two sources.

The Condition of the Books

The physical condition of the books varies. The damage caused by damp and decay increases as one goes back in time. In book no. 4 the tears between pages 92 and 111 are so extensive that most of the rulings cannot be read. In book no. 19 the ink has been erased by damp on many pages. By contrast, books no. 6, 12, 13 and 14 are largely undamaged and can be read comfortably. Book no. 20 is only 53 pages long, and since 20 of its 110 documents are zabıt and 90 are suret, documents from the center fill most of the book.

More than one script is used in the books. Most are written in ta'lik, but in book no. 1 one of four distinct script types is siyakat kırması and another is probably rik'a kırması, in no. 2 ta'lik, rik'a and divani are seen together, and in no. 22 divani, divani kırması, rik'a, ta'lik and nesih appear side by side. The Arabic phrases in the entries and the formulae peculiar to the registers make reading difficult and require expertise. In some books a ruling has been struck through and canceled. Examples are page 64 of book no. 3, page 93 of no. 4, pages 22 and 60 of no. 5, page 60 of no. 6 and page 77 of no. 10. There are also pages left blank. Pages 24 to 28 of book no. 8, pages 95 to 98 of no. 14 and pages 33 and 47-52 of no. 19 fall into this group.

Work Done on the Books

Half of the seventeenth-century registers have been transcribed by researchers. Fikret Yılmaz prepared the summaries of the rulings of book no. 1 as a master's thesis at Ege University in 1987. Merve Temiz worked on no. 3, Canan Yıldırım on no. 4, Hacer Bahadır on no. 5, Fatma Gül Töremiş on no. 7, Ümmihan Demir on no. 9, Elif Tümer on no. 11, Metehan Bozkurt on no. 15, Semra Kanat on no. 20 and Yılmaz Özdemir on no. 22. Book no. 10 was studied by both Ebru Keten and Mehtap Çiçek, and book no. 12 was the subject of Yusuf Gök's undergraduate thesis. Selim Yolcu worked on no. 8, and Yakup Tuncel's thesis also gives summaries of the rulings of books no. 8 and 9. Sibel Kavaklı prepared both a doctoral thesis and a book on the second half of the seventeenth century, and Nur Saide Kabadayı studied the socio-economic life of the second quarter of the century. No independent study has been made of books no. 2, 6, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19 and 21.

The Kadis of Amasya in the Seventeenth Century

The names of the kadis who served in Amasya in the seventeenth century have been compiled from the entries in the registers together with the fourth volume of Hüseyin Hüsameddin's Amasya Tarihi. Forty-six names are counted between 1033 and 1114 in the Islamic calendar. Some held the post once, and some returned several times. Çavuşzâde el-Hâc Mehmed Efendi was appointed to the Amasya judgeship in the years 1034, 1036, 1039 and 1042, Hayreddînzâde İbrâhim Efendi in 1029, 1032, 1048, 1052 and 1058, and Abdülbâki Efendi in 1079, 1087, 1090 and 1099. Hayreddînzâde Mustafa Efendi appears in office in 1064, 1069, 1075 and 1083, and Abdülfettâh Efendi in 1066, 1068 and 1077. Some names occur in only one register. Mevlana Veliyyüddin Efendi is mentioned in book no. 1, Mehmed Ankaravî in book no. 16 and Mevlana Sun'ullah Efendi in book no. 18.

According to the list, the terms of some kadis were extended, and some died or were appointed to another post. There were those dismissed because they did not come to their post or on the complaint of the people, and others whose reason for dismissal is unknown. The mention of Atâ Bey Müderrisi Hasan Efendi as kadi in 1043, 1045 and 1049 shows his connection with teaching in a madrasa. Indeed, lateral transfer was possible between the branches of teaching, legal opinion and judgeship. Among the names of the kadis, epithets such as "Tokatlı" and "Müftüzâde" and family names such as "Şeyh Muharrem Efendizâde" and "Hacı Efendizâde" stand out. Kavaklı's thesis separately treats the appointments of kadis in the second half of the seventeenth century and the manner of their appointment.

What the Registers Tell

The Amasya registers open onto a wide range of subjects. The topics researchers have brought out show this. Fikret Yılmaz drew from the records the effects in Amasya of the coin reform of 1624. Canan Yıldırım with Yılmaz Karadeniz examined prices in Amasya in 1642-1644, and Metehan Bozkurt with Gürkan Cevger did so for 1663-1665. Merve Temiz with Turan Açık evaluated the property sales in books no. 1, 2 and 3, and Hacer Bahadır with Yılmaz Karadeniz those of 1643-1645 in book no. 5. Gürkan Cevger with Metehan Bozkurt investigated conversions to Islam in the Amasya district between 1694 and 1738. Sibel Kavaklı has treated the inspection deeds concerning cases of death and injury, theft cases, and sexual offenses in the context of neighborhood pressure.

The subject matter of the records is not limited to crime and economy. From the books, according to the type of document, information can be drawn on the recruitment of soldiers, the army's provisioning and the upkeep of roads along campaign routes for military history, on judgments, decrees, demographic records and estate records for sociology, on family structure, betrothal and marriage, inheritance and property for private law, on crimes and penalties, kinds of taxes and tax collection for public law, and on endowment deeds and the repair of endowment buildings for the history of construction. Records of events such as earthquakes, fires and solar or lunar eclipses are found in the same books. In Amasya the sale of a woven product, the rent of a bathhouse or the account of an endowment gives the economic order of the city, and divorce and inheritance cases give the details of family life.

The eighteenth-century records show another face of the city. Twenty registers of the years 1750-1800 were surveyed, and books no. 50 and 51, covering 1761-1764, when cases of insult and cursing were relatively frequent, were examined in detail by Merve Karakulak. According to this study, in the second half of the eighteenth century Amasya was a sanjak governed by local notable families. The effects of the Celali rebellions, whose roots reach back to the sixteenth century, were strongly felt in the region, banditry spread in and around the city with the weakening of central rule, and public order almost disappeared. Murder, assault, theft, robbery, adultery, harassment, rape, cursing and insult are among the incidents reflected in the registers in this setting. The cases Karakulak examined were not treated merely as numerical data, and were read through the nature of the ethnic and religious identities turned into insults and through the forms of social othering. The phrase "He called me Qizilbash" in the title of Karakulak's article is a typical example.

Another study that selects sample cases from the records of 1750-1800 examined the legal position of women and violence against women, and argued that the Ottoman society's view of women was shaped by the Islamic law and the old Turkish law tradition. Karakulak's doctoral thesis on the daily life of Amasya in the second half of the eighteenth century also rests on the same records. This approach uses the books not only for establishing events but for deciphering the social fabric of the city.

Reading the Registers

The place of the registers in historical writing has changed over time. The first studies on the registers in Turkey began in the 1930s, and the articles titled "Şer'î Mahkeme Sicilleri" published by İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı in 1935 and by Talat Mümtaz Yaman in 1938 in the journal Ülkü are counted among the first examples in this field. Halil İnalcık, in his Bursa article of 1960, used the registers together with state archives in the framework of economic history, and Mustafa Çağatay Uluçay and İbrahim Gökçen were the first to draw on this source in local history. After the 1980s the registers began to be used intensively as a primary source of history.

On the other hand, which sections of society the registers represent and how much of what happened in court they reflect has remained a problem for historiography. After the 1990s the subject began to take its place in the literature. These debates do not dismiss the value of the registers and recommend diversifying sources rather than relying on a single type and analyzing the concepts used in the records as texts. This criterion applies to Amasya in particular. The entries in the registers directly reflect the daily life of the city, but they do not show events that never reached the court, people who did not appear before the kadi and transactions that were not recorded. This gap requires that the history of Amasya be read with the registers together with endowment records, survey registers, central archive documents and local sources.

Chronology

1071: After the Battle of Manzikert, Amasya is also named among the places granted as iqta to Melik Ahmed Gazi, founder of the Danishmendid state.

1075: According to some studies, Amasya is taken by Iltekin Gazi on 4 April.

1243: After the Battle of Kösedağ the Ilkhanids settle in Amasya.

1398: Bayezid the Thunderbolt incorporates Amasya into Ottoman territory.

1413: The Governorate-General of Rum, composed of the sanjaks of Sivas, Tokat and Amasya, is established.

1455: The earliest known sharia court registers of the Ottoman state are kept in Bursa.

1520: According to the survey register, Amasya consists of 52 neighborhoods.

1553: Prince Mustafa is killed, and Amasya is again attached to the Governorate-General of Rum.

1624: The records of the oldest known Amasya register begin (1034 in the Islamic calendar).

1699: The last Amasya register of the seventeenth century ends (1110 in the Islamic calendar).

1750-1800: The period covered by twenty Amasya registers, in which notable families governed.

1873: The instruction on the Sicillât-ı Şer'iyye, providing for the official protection of the registers and the compilation of lists of them, is issued.

1924: The law abolishing the sharia courts is enacted.

Bibliography

Primary sources

  • Yunus Uğur, "Şer'iyye Sicilleri", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 39, Istanbul 2010. https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/seriyye-sicilleri
  • Abdizâde Hüseyin Hüsameddin, Amasya Tarihi, vol. 4, ed. Hicabi Gülgen, Amasya Belediyesi Kültür Yayınları, 2022.
  • Ahmet Akgündüz, Şer'iye Sicilleri: Mahiyeti, Toplu Kataloğu ve Seçme Hükümler, Istanbul 1988-1989.

Academic studies

Online sources