Oppression and salvation : annotated legal documents from the Ottoman Book of Complaints of 1675

The pheno­menon of comp­laints was a central tenet in the ideo­logy of the Ottoman Empire, an obses­sion it inhe­rited from former Middle Eastern empires, Islamic and pre-Islamic. Atten­tion was directed in parti­cular to the tendency of state offi­cials to over­step the bounds of their autho­rity, exploi­ting vast areas of the coun­try­side to enrich them­selves at the expense of the poor citi­zens and, as a conse­qu­ence, to under­mine the legiti­macy of the ruler himself. On the other hand, so many comp­laints of harsh abuses might give the impres­sion that the Ottoman Empire in its enti­rety should have collapsed as a conse­qu­ence. In the first place, the Şikayet Defteri is a legal docu­ment because many of the comp­laints stem from the point of depar­ture that a certain Shari’a law has been broken, viola­ting the natural rights of certain groups of citi­zens. More important than this, however, the Şikayet is a legal docu­ment from an addi­tional, metho­do­lo­gical perspec­tive: the docu­ment provides a perspec­tive on the Kadi, his court, and his posi­tion in the state, which are unli­kely to be obtained from any other source. Parti­cu­larly, such infor­ma­tion cannot be had from the Kadi record (sicill) itself, as this source only looks at itself from the inside, solving day-to-day prob­lems.