The Eighteenth Century: the Traditionalists 327
boundaries”).2 Ambassadors were sent to the European capitals and İbrahim
Müteferrika, a Hungarian convert who shall be examined in detail in the next
chapter, set up the first Ottoman printing press in 1726.3 On the other hand, it
is usually neglected that this “Ottoman Enlightenment” maintained close ties
and links with trends of thought, literature, and art that were prevailing in the
other Islamicate empires, and especially Iran, at the time.4 On the battlefield,
the collapse of the Safavid dynasty in Persia led to an Ottoman campaign that
succeeded in capturing large parts of its territories.
İbrahim Pasha’s rule ended abruptly in 1730 with the so-called Patrona Halil
revolt, named after one of its leaders, a low-level janissary. The revolt, in which
janissaries, petty artisans, and dispossessed members of the elite participated,
was supposedly a reaction to the extravagance and the “Frankish” manners of
the court, but it seems that matters such as heavy taxation (the infamous “tax
for campaign assistance”, imdad-ı seferiyye, for the new Iranian campaign that
had just begun, and other annual taxes imposed on the urban dwellers) and
the blocking of all means of upward mobility by İbrahim Pasha’s nepotism (as
had happened in 1703 with Feyzullah Efendi) were among the main reasons.
Moreover, the ongoing procedure of the identification of janissary power with
the interests of the Muslim urban strata should not be neglected; it was said
that thousands rushed to register themselves on the janissary lists after the
rebellion and the subsequent change in janissary leadership.5 In addition,
a much understudied aspect of the military revolts is their effects in the prov-
inces: it appears that, ostensibly through the janissary networks of trade and
patronage, both the 1703 and the 1730 revolt can be related to concurrent rebel-
lions in both Syria and Egypt.6
Ahmed III abdicated in favor of his cousin Mahmud I (r. 1730–54). Another
rebellion, less than a year after Patrona Halil, was suppressed quickly and
easily.7 Mahmud, probably under the influence of İbrahim Müteferrika’s ad-
vice, brought in Claude-Alexandre Comte de Bonneval (d. 1747), a French no-
bleman seeking employment: de Bonneval, after converting under the name
2 For a critique of the traditional representations and an attempt to formulate a new interpre-
tation, see Karahasanoğlu 2009. See also Salzmann 2000; Sajdi 2007; Hamadeh 2008; Küçük
2012; Erginbaş 2014.
3 I use here “Ottoman” as “Ottoman Turkish”, i.e. using the Arabic alphabet; Greek, Jewish, and
Armenian printing houses had been established earlier in Istanbul; see the survey by Pektaş
2015.
4 Erimtan 2007; Kurz 2011, 55.
5 Karahasanoğlu 2009, 215–216.
6 Hathaway 2004, 32–33.
7 See Olson 1977. According to Olson’s analysis, this rebellion bore the characteristics of a “food
riot” rather than a redistribution of power.