OTTOMAN EMPIRE - FOOD GIFTS AMONG RULERS AND CITY DWELLERS

Some scenes of food giving will come as no surprise to those familiar with late medieval and early modern Middle Eastern history, as they present a handful of rulers and grandees who distribute meals in person. Witness, for example, the deeds of Ottoman sultan Murad II (r. 1421–1444, 1446–1451) after the construction of a bridge that revitalized a region in Thrace:

"For the visitors coming and going, they made feasts, they cooked foods, and at the time when they established a soup kitchen, Sultan Murad himself brought religious scholars and fuqarâ from Edirne and came to this soup kitchen and for a few days made feasts and distributed [coins]. On the first day they cooked food, he gave food to the fuqarâ with his own blessed hand."

If we approach such scenes from the angle of reciprocity, what these rulers seek in return for their food gifts is obviously not other food gifts but rather a recognition of their fitness to rule and of their legitimacy. The image of a ruler personally involved in distributing food is common as a literary motif (a short, standardized anecdote in which the conventions of storytelling supersede historical accuracy). Since literary motifs frequently appear in the sources I used, we need to keep in mind that scenes depicting food-giving rulers might not be historically accurate in the sense that this particular ruler distributed food in this particular way at this particular time and place. Still, their frequency and a number of stylistic hints strongly suggest that, at least at a metaphorical level, a good ruler’s persona was widely assumed to entail the ability and, to some extent, the responsibility to distribute food. In that sense, the literary motif of the food-distributing ruler remains quite meaningful.

When we look at another segment of the population, the urban commoners, the most interesting observation derives from the collective character of their food giving. None of them appears as an individual benefactor, but a number of scenes depict them as groups offering food. These scenes depict various groups of craftsmen and city folk, including of course the followers of those that Ibn Battutah calls the Akhîs:

"The Akhî among them is a man who assembles the people of his trade and others from among the unmarried and free youth. He is their leader. And this organization is [called] futuwwah as well. He builds a zâwiyah [lodge] and puts in it the carpets and lamps and the necessary implements. His followers work in daytime to earn their wages, and they bring them to him after the afternoon prayer [to buy] what they need. With this, they buy fruits and foods and other things that are consumed in the zâwiyah. If on that day a traveler arrives in the city, they host him among themselves and have a feast for him, and he remains among them until he departs. And if none arrives, they gather their food and eat and sing and dance. They go back to their work in the morning and return after the afternoon prayer to their leader with what they gathered."

That ordinary urban folk appear as givers, rather than recipients, suggests that they enjoyed a high enough level of material comfort to have the ability to give, or more accurately, that they were perceived so. On the other hand, since they needed to get together in order to give at a meaningful level, their ability to give appears to have been limited in the first place. Beyond a shared place in the social hierarchy, both the social organization that this giving requires and the very fact that the primary sources use collective nouns to refer to the crowd argue for the existence of social cohesion among craftsmen, whereas it is much harder to see such coordination of activity among, say, the urban poor. In fact, the only other group that appears to be similarly organized is that of the dervishes, the members of Sufi brotherhoods. That the latter carried a clear sense of collective identity is apparent throughout the hagiographies of their spiritual masters. And indeed, Ibn Battutah’s mention (in the passage translated above) that single young craftsmen were also in the habit of sharing their living spaces does strengthen the possibility that this shared identity entailed a solidarity or sense of belonging going far beyond a mere public image.

Food Gifts and the Religious Folk 

This comparison between craftsmen and Sufis brings up the core concern of this chapter, the religious professionals (an expression I discuss shortly), whether they be scholars or dervishes, and the way their social identity appears when we examine it through the divide that runs between food givers and food recipients.

Interestingly, the highest ranking among people whose professional identity stems from religious activities appear as recipients rather than providers of food gifts. The way these many cases combine a remarkable consistency in contents with a variety of contexts makes it unlikely that these are no more than literary motifs. Thus, there seems to have been a common practice, when visiting a religious master, to bring along some simple but tasty food items such as fruits. These, incidentally, were snack foods (as opposed to the types of foods one would eat as part of a meal), but they needed to meet certain standards of refinement, as we can see from a mention that lentils were seen as too lowly a present for such an occasion. In any case, these foods were meant for immediate consumption, and after the master tasted them, they could be distributed among the people in attendance:

"One day, one of the beloved friends [dervish followers of Rumi] brought a fig to our master [Rumi] from the orchards of the brothers. [Rumi] picked up the fig and said: “Indeed, this is a nice fig, but this fig has a pit,” and he put it down. This dervish was surprised, for how could a fig have a pit? Modestly, he stood up, picked up those figs, and went away. After a while he came [back] and put another basket of those figs in front of Rumi. The latter ate one of them, declaring:
'This fig does not have a pit.” The Shaykh Muhammad Khâdim ordered that they be distributed to those present. The disciples were amazed by this intricate [feat]. When that dervish got out and went away, they followed him and asked him about the figs. He said, “By God, I had a gardener friend, and I could not find him in his orchard. Without his permission I gathered a basketful of figs and brought them to our master, intending to pay the gardener when I would see him. With the light of his sainthood, our master knew that, that was the pit of the fig. At that moment I went straight to the orchard of that friend and I bought those nice figs, gave him the price, and made them legal by him. In the end, [Rumi] of course accepted and ate them and bestowed his favor.'"

It is clear that, in such cases, the reciprocity implicit in the act of giving was to be found either in the shape of blessings received from the religious master or, for those who prefer a cynical interpretation, in the image of piety that would come with ostentatiously serving the spiritual leader. Either way, these examples make it clear that receiving food was not in itself the mark of an inferior social status. However, depictions of members of the elite receiving food were limited to the religious masters and did not extend to the political elite.

Looking at the lowest-ranking individuals in the religious hierarchy, often designated as fuqarâ, the modalities of gift giving shed further light on the social identity of religious professionals. Fuqarâ is a plural Arabic term literally meaning “the poor,” designating recipients of food in Arabic-, Persian-, and Turkish-language sources (both the Turkish and Persian languages, while grammatically very different from Arabic, borrowed a large proportion of their vocabulary from the latter). In some cases, the context leaves no doubt that the term fuqarâ actually means dervishes, the ascetic, monk-like followers of Sufism (Muslim mysticism). For example, in this passage from the hagiography titled Vilâyet-nâme, a money changer gives a dervish a donation for the religious master Haci Betkaş Veli:

"And he added a thousand more gold coins and said: 'Dervish, no matter how many religious masters you see, give this thousand gold coins to the fuqarâ who are in their service so that they can eat.'"

Another passage from the same source further points out that the religious fame of Hacı Betkaş brought to him a community of people that it designates, in successive sentences, as fuqarâ and then “dervishes” and “abdals.” An even clearer example of such religious use of the term appears in a vakfiye, or endowment deed, that specifies that the revenues of the endowed property should be given to the

"Mawlawî [followers of Rumi] fuqarâ who are engaged in the zâwiyah that follows the master Jalâl al-Musallah wa al-Dîn, the Rumi by burial and the Balkhî by origin, being located in [the city of] Qara Hisâr al-Dawlâh itself."

In other cases, the term is more ambiguous. In the three or four dozen vakfiyes that remain from that period, the word most often (though not always) appears as part of the set expression “ fuqarâ wa masâkîn” (the poor and destitute), and on most occasions, the expression refers to recipients of the charity provided by the endowments in passages that may or may not refer to dervishes. The word masâkîn (or its singular form, miskin) does not seem to appear by itself in the sources discussed here, but in a handful of cases the formulation specifically points out that the recipients of charity should be “Muslim fuqarâ.” Dervishes, of course, could only be Muslim, and the specification that these fuqarâ must be Muslim makes much more sense if we assume that, at least in these cases, the word fuqarâ strictly refers to the economic poor.

The sample of sources is too small to try and establish the extent to which the term fuqarâ meant the same thing for everyone. But this (at least partial) semantic overlap between dervishes and the economic poor seems to be more than a coincidence, as it is clear that the two categories overlapped in the eyes of the population as well. This is best exemplified in this anecdote related to Shams Tabrîzî, the spiritual advisor of famous Sufi poet Rumi:

"It is reported that, once, [Shams] lived in Damascus for a few years. More or less once a week, he would get out of his retreat and go to the shop of a sheep-head seller. Having given two copper coins, he would buy some head juice without fat and consume it. He would content himself with it for a week. He did this for a year. When the cook saw him acting this way for a while, he knew that [Shams] was among the people of piety and that he had taken up this burden by choice. The next time [Shams] came, [the cook] filled a bowl full of tharîd [a meat stew with crumbled bread] and its fat and presented him with two loaves of quality bread. [Shams] realized that the cook had become aware of his [spiritual] works. He immediately put down the bowl and, claiming, “I need to wash my hands,” he went out and immediately left the city.'"

The best sources for the period being hagiographies, their religious perspective creates some obstacles in our understanding of the facts on the ground. For example, the authors of the hagiographies most likely ignore the material concerns of individuals who chose to become dervishes out of a lack of economic opportunity, if such people existed. After all, they would not have wanted to trivialize the lifestyle of the dervishes by suggesting that some of them were mere unemployed bums. Yet the overlap in vocabulary can hardly be dismissed off-hand and does raise the possibility that, as forms of identity, dervishes and the secular destitute indeed shared some degree of conceptual kinship in popular imagination.

These observations make it difficult to believe that the religious professionals formed a single, coherent unit of social identity in the first place. It is indeed significant that the sources do not use any word that could at once refer to legal scholars at the imperial court and to the disciples of saintly figures such as Rumi or Haci Betkaş. From the tone of the sources, it rather seems that a high-ranking religious master would have identified himself and been identified by others as socially closer to the (secular) palace crowd than to mendicant dervishes, as would have been the case if “religious professional” was an important form of social identity.

Within the historiography of Anatolia from the end of Byzantine rule in 1071 to the rise of the Ottomans as an empire in the early fifteenth century, research on social history is still in its infancy. For many decades, scholars have simply filed the topic away in a box marked “Not Enough Sources.” But much more than new sources, what the period needs are fresh sets of eyes and brand-new questions. And indeed, the issues I discuss in this chapter do leave us with the strong impression that traces of this past are plentiful enough for us to go down to the street level and ask those who were about to become Ottomans how they understood the interactions between the identities that crisscrossed the society in which they lived.

By Nicolas Trépanier in "Living in the Ottoman Realm - Empire and Identity, 13th to 20th Centuries", edited by Christine Isom-Verhaaren and Kent F. Schull, Indiana University Press,USA, 2016, excerpts pp. 22-27. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.