CHAPTER 8 Women, Wealth and Textiles in 1730s Bursa*

Suraiya Faroqhi

When Ottoman women outside of the palace milieu first entered the schol- arly agenda in the 1970s, their ability to own property and dispose of it even after marriage attracted a good deal of attention. After all in England until the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882, married women could not own property; and whatever they earned or inherited passed to their hus- bands. As for women living in fifteenth-century Italian cities, a study of shop- ping has demonstrated that in Florence or Ferrara, many if not most women were but rarely in a position to purchase textiles or other everyday needs; for their husbands did the marketing and kept a tight hold on the purse-strings.1 Islamic religious law, by contrast, allowed women to buy and sell and above all to inherit; and inherit they did, at least in the towns, as evident from the transactions recorded in the registers kept by the scribes of local judges all over Anatolia and the Ottoman Balkans. However, women’s shares amounted to only one-half of what a man in the same blood relationship to the deceased would have received. Furthermore, women could sue and be sued; and in ex- treme cases some females turned to the qadis’ courts to pursue their claims, often of a financial nature, even against a husband or brother. In urban areas where the qadi’s court was relatively easy to access, we can thus assume that many women succeeded in gaining control over their inheritances not merely in theory, but also in practice. Unfortunately, there is almost no evidence on rural women, the overwhelming majority of the Ottoman female population. As in the 1970s and 1980s economic history was a major priority, scholars of the time paid a good deal of attention to women’s property rights as well as the trades, crafts and money-lending by which some of them supplemented the support they received from their spouses and/or the sources of income which

* I am most grateful to Sinan Çetin (Bilkent University, Ankara) for creating the database with- out which I could not have written this study. 1 Evelyn Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy 1400–1600 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 222.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi ��.��63/9789004353459_010 214 Faroqhi they had inherited.2 As a result, the estate inventories of women, both from the non-tax-paying elite (askeri) and from the tax-paying subject population (reaya) garnered particular interest.3 However, with the “cultural turn,” which for Ottoman historians began sometime around 1990, priorities changed. First of all, scholars discovered the rich trove of archival documents concerning the ’ palace. As a result, the role of women who were members of the elite, who had been more or less marginalized during the earliest phase of Ottoman women’s studies, now reemerged as a favored topic, all the more as these digni- taries might have left pious foundations whose often extant buildings fascinat- ed art historians. If female members of the sultans’ households in due course became the mothers of sultans, they also played a role in politics, and thus came to interest “regular” historians.4 The topic of female slavery also gained importance in this context, as so many elite women had started their rise to prominence as slave girls in the palace or in some other elite .5 Furthermore, with respect to the principal source covering non-elite women, namely the court registers of the Islamic judges, scholars moved away from purely mining the documents for their content, as had been the custom during the previous fifteen years or so. Rather, they began to focus on method- ological questions which while of general importance, also were relevant to women. How did Ottoman subjects use the qadis’ courts? What kind of legal knowledge might an ordinary Ottoman town-dweller, male or female, have

2 Ronald C. Jennings, “Women in Early 17th Century Ottoman Judicial Records—The Sharia Court of Anatolian Kayseri,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 18.1 (1973), 53–114. 3 Haim Gerber, “Social and Economic Position of Women in an Ottoman City, Bursa 1600– 1700,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 12.3 (1980), 231–44; Suraiya Faroqhi, “Two Women of Substance,” in Festgabe an Josef Matuz, Osmanistik, Turkologie, Diplomatik, edited by Christa Fragner and Klaus Schwarz (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1992), 37–56. 4 Leslie Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Lucienne Thys-Şenocak, Ottoman Women Builders: The Architectural Patronage of Hadice Turhan (Surrey: Ashgate, 2007); Betül İpşirli Argıt, Rabia Gülnuş 1640–1715 (: Kitap Yayınevi, 2014); Murat Kocaaslan, Kösem Sultan Hayatı, Vakıfları, Hayır İşleri ve Üsküdar’daki Külliyesi (İstanbul: Okur Kitaplığı, 2014). 5 Hakan Erdem, Slavery in the Ottoman Empire and its Demise, 1800–1909 (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1996) is only marginally concerned with women. Female slaves do however occu- py center stage in Ehud Toledano, As if Silent and Absent, Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). The major reference is now Madeline C. Zilfi, Women and Slavery in the late Ottoman Empire: The Design of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) and most recently Betül İpşirli Argıt, Hayatlarının Çeşitli Safhalarında Harem-i Hümayun Cariyeleri (Istanbul: Kitap Yayınevi, 2017).