1 Islamic law and sultans

In Islamic religious law (şeriat) and also in Ottoman official writing, it was customary to describe the world as being made up of the Darülislam ('the house of

Islam') and the Darülharb ('the house of war'). Into the first category belonged

not only the domains of the Ottoman sultans themselves, but also those of other

Sunni Muslims, such as the Uzbek khans or the Mughuls of India. To what extent

the Ottoman elite believed that their sultan was the supreme ruler of the Islamic

world, to whom all others were expected to defer, is still in need of further investigation; here we will not attempt to decide this matter. Even more ambiguous

was the status of the Shi'ite state of Safavid Iran. In the mid-sixteenth century, a

famous Ottoman jurisconsult had refused to recognize the 'Kızılbaş' – one of

several terms of opprobrium favoured in Ottoman parlance for Shi'ites both Iranian and Anatolian – as part of the Muslim community. But especially after

militant Shi'ism had stopped being a major issue between the Ottoman and Safavid empires, as happened in the late sixteenth century, it is unlikely that this

exclusionist view remained the dominant one.4

Again in conformity with religious law, non-Muslim rulers who had accepted

to pay tribute to the Ottoman sultan were considered part of the Islamic world.

One such polity was Dubrovnik, a city-state that due to its size and location was

able to avoid most of the conflicts in which the Empire was involved, while the

town's wealthier inhabitants devoted themselves exclusively to Mediterranean

trade. Other dependencies of the Empire governed by non-Muslim rulers, and by

virtue of this relationship part of the Islamic world, that one might mention

include the principalities of Moldavia, Transylvania and Walachia in present-day

Rumania. Of course, the opposite was true whenever this or that ruler sided with

the Habsburgs or the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania and thus was at war

with the sultan. Thus the category, namely 'the outside world', that we have

adopted here cuts across two categories accepted by Ottoman writers themselves.

The Ottomans probably would have spoken of the Islamic world that recognized

the paramount status of the padişah in Istanbul on the one hand, and the domains

of the various rulers of 'the house of war' on the other. High points of interempire conflict apart, the 'Iranian question' might have been left diplomatically

in abeyance.

In discussing the relationship of the Ottoman elites with the world outside the

Empire's borders we have thus intentionally adopted a terminology that is more

vague than that employed by the relevant primary sources themselves. While at

first glance this seems a clumsy move, some advantages are, or so I think,

involved as well. For in reality, there was no 'iron curtain' separating the Ottoman elites and their tax-paying subjects from the world outside the borders of

the Empire, while the existence of a neat legal dichotomy between the Islamic

and non-Islamic worlds might cause us to think the exact opposite. In the

absence of actual war, foreign merchants from India, Iran, Georgia and the various countries of Christian Europe were admitted with few difficulties. In the