Bogac A. Ergene

This project involves a systematic analysis of early-modern court records from Kastamonu in north-central Anatolia to determine how social groups in Ottoman provincial society participated in legal processes, interacted with other groups in the legal arena, and benefited from the court’s operations at various points during the eighteenth century. In this analysis, the Islamic court will be represented as a theater in which social relationships acted out. This will be the first study in Ottoman history-writing that explores changes in the class character of the court’s operations over time, depicting the functions that the court served in a highly stratified social environment and characterizing how these functions might have changed in a tumultuous episode of Ottoman history.