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The Treaties of Erzurum (1823 and 1848) and the Changing Status of Iranians in the Ottoman Empire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Bruce Masters
Bruce Masters*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Wesleyan University
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Extract

Iranian merchants, artists, and scholars had an almost continuous presence in the Ottoman Empire from its very beginnings in the thirteenth century. After the Arab provinces were added to the empire in the sixteenth century, their numbers were further augmented by pilgrims on their way to the holy cities of the Hijaz and Iraq. As such, in terms of actual numbers, during any period of its history there were probably more Iranians resident in the Ottoman Empire than from any other foreign state. This assertion, however, cannot be proven empirically, for before the nineteenth century the Ottoman sultans did not recognize the Iranians as constituting a “nation” along the model they had established for the European communities resident in the empire.

Type
Research Article
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 24 , Issue 1-4 , 1991 , pp. 3 - 15
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 1991

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Footnotes

*

Support for the research of this article was provided by the Fulbright Islamic Civilization Research Program. Thanks also to the staffs of the Başbakanlik Arşivi (BBA) in Istanbul and the Syrian National Archives in Damascus for their assistance in making this research possible.

References

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20. Indian merchants in Baghdad had won the right to inventory the estates of the deceased from their own community in 1712, but gained no other rights and had no official representation at the Porte (Istanbul, BBA, MM 2777: 195).

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