Abstract:

This dissertation aims at establishing the interplay between disease and empire in the historical example of the early modern Ottoman Empire of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It also aspires to reconstruct a historical narrative of plague outbreaks in the Ottoman lands between 1453 and 1600. The dissertation is constituted of two complementary parts. The first part (Chapters 1-3) examines the growth of the Ottoman Empire and its impact on plague. By tracing the territorial growth of the Empire through conquests and the subsequent establishment of networks of communication, trade, and information between the newly conquered territories, as well as the growth of new urban centers, Chapters 1-3 show that the plague had attained new channels through which it could spread over a more extensive area. The dissertation analyzes the outbreaks of plague between 1453 and 1600 in three distinct periods, each treated in one chapter.

Chapter 1 focuses on the outbreaks of plague between 1453 and 1517. The outbreaks of this period are analyzed within the newly emerging east-west axis in the Mediterranean. Chapter 2 covers the outbreaks of plague between 1517 and 1570, with a special focus on the emergence of multiple networks of trade and communication that tied the Mediterranean, Anatolia, the Balkans, and the Black Sea basin to the extended networks of Central Asia and the Indian Ocean. Chapter 3 examines the outbreaks of plague in the Ottoman lands between 1570 and 1600, which are analyzed within the context of the integration and consolidation of multiple networks, with Istanbul at their intersection.

The second part of the dissertation (Chapters 4-6) is devoted to discussions of how the outbreaks of plague, which were a by-product of the Empire, in turn shaped the perception, attitudes, and the responses of Ottoman society of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the disease. Chapter 4 traces the changing perceptions of the disease through the metaphors and imagery used in Ottoman historical texts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, within the urban context of Istanbul. Chapter 5 explores the genre of Ottoman plague treatises and demonstrates that the notions of contagion were embraced by the learned Ottoman elite, and were gradually harmonized and made compatible with the tenets of Islamic law and constituted the basis for legal policies of the early modern Ottoman state in the sixteenth century. Chapter 6 analyzes the means and measures by which the Ottoman central administration tried to monitor, control, and fight the plague epidemics in the late-fifteenth and, especially, the sixteenth centuries. Through an analysis of the preventive measures for maintaining urban hygiene, controlling burial practices during outbreaks of plague, monitoring the health of the members of the military class, regulating the medical profession and professionals, and providing medical services and education, the chapter tries to locate the growing involvement of the state in matters of health during the course of the sixteenth century. In particular, the chapter shows that successive and harsh plague outbreaks of the sixteenth century prompted a series of changes that can be viewed as the beginning of a new conception of "public health" in early modern Ottoman Empire.