The City in the Path of Leviathan: Courtly Mobility and Imperial Residence Patterns as Factors in the Social History of Monarchy in the Towns and Cities of Ottoman Rumelia, c. 1650-1750

Utilizing perspectives from urban history, animal history, and court studies, this dissertation is the first large-scale study of Ottoman courtly mobility that focuses on the imperial court’s interactions with local human and animal populations. Taking up an approach that I call the “social history of monarchy,” it examines the local consequences of the migrations and residence patterns of the Ottoman imperial court as it moved amidst a network of municipalities, intermediate waystations, and other locales in the Balkans, Thrace, and parts of western Anatolia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Drawing on Ottoman archival materials, histories, imperial chronicles, ego-documents, and travelogues both foreign and Ottoman, I argue that courtly mobility can help bridge the gap between the “elite” institutional history of the Ottoman court retinue and the “everyday” experience of Ottoman humans and non-human animals by accounting for the ways in which the imperial retinue interacted with the world around it as it moved. Following a brief analysis of the language used to describe courtly mobilities in their variety of forms, chapters two through five discuss courtly-municipal engagement throughout the expansive geographic range of Ottoman courtly migrations in the late seventeenth century, from the beginnings of Sultan Mehmed IV’s (r. 1648-87) predominantly Edirne-based residence patterns in the late 1650s through Sultan Ahmed III’s (r. 1703-30) “return” to Istanbul in 1703. In them I argue that humans and other animals who dwelt in this province-spanning geography of courtly mobility were disproportionately exposed to the multifaceted influence of the Ottoman court “out-of-doors,” and I examine the diversity of local courtly impacts throughout the Ottoman Balkans and parts of Anatolia. Chapters six through eight demonstrate the sudden change in the spatial scope of mobilities following the regime-changing urban insurrection of 1703, the so-called “Edirne Event.” After 1703, I argue, there is a definitive shift in the geography of Ottoman courtly itineraries in that intra-local movement events within the broader metropolitan limits of Istanbul appear to have constituted the vast majority of court migrations, therefore concentrating the influence of the court within a single urban locale. This sudden transformation of the spatial scope of courtly-municipal engagement from the scale of the macroprovince to that of a metropolitan city may be the most extreme of its kind in Ottoman history, a fact which further necessitates its study with concerted attention towards its effects on local Ottoman populations.