Making Jerusalem Ottoman

Amy Singer

Standard Arabic accounts of the Ottoman conquest of Jerusalem from the

Mamluks in 1516 have little to say about the event itself, largely because it oc-
curred with minimal conflict or upheaval. The city was taken without a fight in
the context of the Ottoman march south toward Cairo, after the battle of Marj
Dabiq near Aleppo in August 1516. Other military confrontations took place only
in Gaza and then in January 1517 at Raydaniyya, near Cairo. Yet a closer examina-
tion of the first half century of Ottoman rule after the conquest reveals that the
Ottomans invested enormous sums and energy to conquer Jerusalem, to make
it Ottoman, despite the absence of overt military action or opposition. These ex-
penditures reflect the extraordinary spiritual (and hence, political) status of the
city, which was disproportionate to its importance in terms of location, economic
capacity, and population size. As a holy city for Muslims, it drew Ottoman at-
tention, yet its position as a spiritual center for Christians was no less crucial in
determining its strategic importance. Thus, the process of Ottoman conquest in
Jerusalem was as deliberate and unequivocal as any military campaign.
The Ottomanizing of Jerusalem proceeded in several spheres of activity and
through different mechanisms. This chapter discusses the impact of construc-
tion, endowment, and administrative changes to explore one example of how
the Ottomans effected the change in imperial regime and invested in the process
of reshaping the places and peoples they conquered. The discussion is based on
Ottoman administrative and judicial archival sources, as well as on a careful ex-
amination of the early Ottoman building program in the city of Jerusalem and
the spatial logic of the city. Physical changes to urban spaces are more obvious,
perhaps, than those that occur in the minds and hearts of the people who inhabit
them. Yet such environmental changes are a compelling factor in reconfiguring
individual identity and the identification of an individual with a larger entity. It
is important to remember, however, that the Ottoman projects in Jerusalem were
only one example of the transformations to individuals and places that resulted
from becoming territorially Ottoman. Eventually, a comparison of the process in
this city with similar processes elsewhere—for example, in Bursa, Edirne, Istan-
bul, Aleppo, or Cairo—will contribute to refining our understanding of the gen-
eral aspects of Ottoman conquest and those more specific to any given location.

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