Singer | 125populations. In eastern Anatolia, the Sunni Ottoman state attacked groups sym-
pathetic to the Shiɇite Safavids in neighboring Iran when they appeared to be
colluding with the enemy as well as proselytizing among the local populations.
In a related, empire-wide move, the Ottomans tried to ensure that there was a
Sunni-affiliated mosque in every town and village.
Jerusalem as the Ottomans Encountered It
The three successive Ottoman imperial capitals—Bursa, Edirne, and Istanbul—
offer distinct models of settlement and Ottomanization, each in turn (re)con-
structed and (re)organized to become the hub of the state. In each case, some
Byzantine monuments were converted to Ottoman ones. In both Bursa and
Edirne, the city expanded beyond its previous physical limits. In contrast, Istan-
bul took over Constantinople from within, in a few cases destroying structures
but for the most part converting places or filling in the empty spaces that had
opened up over long years of gradual depopulation within the walled city. It was
first dramatically altered as the Haghia Sophia was converted into a mosque and
the Church of the Holy Apostles was destroyed, and then it was more extensively
reshaped from a Christian and Byzantine into a Muslim and Ottoman metropo-
lis, with the holidays of the Muslim calendar and the muezzin’s call to prayer;
new buildings, languages, and recipes; and a nonrepresentational visual aesthetic
taking over the public sphere.
The process of Ottomanizing Jerusalem was similar to the conquest of Con-
stantinople in that it did not expand the urban parameters. Yet the techniques
used to Ottomanize the city were dictated by a different set of realities. Islam was
already the predominant religion in the city and had been the faith of the previ-
ous, Mamluk, rulers. The Ottomans did not, and could not, destroy the Church
of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem as easily as they did that of the Holy Apostles
in Istanbul. The former marks the site of Adam’s burial, Jesus’s crucifixion, and
his place of burial and resurrection, while the latter simply contained the tombs
of the Byzantine emperors. The different choices reiterate the flexible attitudes
and policies of the Ottomans toward their conquests, a flexibility that reflected
the plurality of situations, purposes, and meanings of these conquests.
On the surface, Ottoman Jerusalem did not seem to offer any immediate
frontiers. Once conquered, the city was well inside Ottoman political boundaries.
It was not an important trading port for the desert sea. Nor was it located at any
significant ethnic or linguistic juncture. No city wall existed to make it a fortress
town. On the other hand, Jerusalem was actually situated only some forty miles
from its port of Jaffa on the Mediterranean coast. The eastern Mediterranean wa-
ters still constituted a hotly contested zone of the frontier remaining between the
Ottomans, the Venetians, and the Hapsburgs in the sixteenth century. Rhodes