Mapping the Hajj, Integrating Muslims 77Ottoman legal affairs and undermine Ottoman control over the empire’s popu-
lations. Some complained that the European powers had “invented” a cholera
threat as an excuse to expand their presence into Ottoman Arabia.^92 Whether or
not Russia’s Jeddah consuls were actively recruiting Bukharan émigrés to
become Russian subjects, this was how Ottoman officials perceived the situation,
and it increased their resistance to the consulate’s authority. Some apparently
saw the Jeddah consulate as part of a broader strategy by Russia to erode Otto-
man authority over its subjects. In the case of Celal, officials in the Hejaz noted
that he also carried documents from the Russian consul-general in Constanti-
nople, and they complained to the Ottoman government that the consul-general
in Constantinople “considers all Bukharans to be Russian subjects.”^93
Ottoman resistance to the authority of the Jeddah consulate was an ongoing
and frustrating problem for Levitskii, and would be also for his successors.
Starting in 1895, he complained repeatedly to the Russian embassy in Constan-
tinople that Ottoman officials were blocking him from resolving pilgrims’
estate cases, partly for economic reasons. For centuries, these estate cases had
been the exclusive domain of Ottoman officials, and an important source of
financial enrichment both for them on an individual level and for state coffers.
The Ottoman state’s organization of the pilgrimage was an enormous and
costly undertaking, and was funded in part by proceeds from unclaimed estates
of deceased pilgrims, of which there were many.^94 There were also strategic rea-
sons for this resistance. Since the 1880s, when European consulates began to
proliferate in Jeddah, because of the rise of colonial subjects making the hajj
and trading in Arabia, the Ottomans had introduced various measures to
tighten their control over the region and the pilgrimage.^95
But Levitskii was within his rights in seeking to resolve estate cases and other
legal issues for Russian subjects. As Ottoman officials discovered in discussing
his complaints, a little-invoked article of a 1783 Russo-Ottoman trade agree-
ment gave Russian diplomatic officials authority over the estates of all Russian
subjects who died while in Ottoman lands.^96 The Ottoman government had no
choice but to order its officials in the Hejaz to stop intervening in these cases,
with mixed results. Throughout the 1890s and early 1900s, Russia’s Jeddah con-
suls would continue to complain about Ottoman officials interfering in their
efforts to support Russia’s hajj pilgrims, as numerous petitions of the Russian
embassy to the Ottoman government attest.^97
As Levitskii grappled with these challenges, he also worked steadily to com-
pile data and intelligence on the hajj for the Foreign Ministry. As a Russian-
speaker with limited knowledge of Islam or Arabia, he relied heavily on the