The Giving Divide

Food Gifts and Social Identity

in Late Medieval Anatolia

Nicolas Trépanier

People who lived in late medieval Anatolia did not write much about identity

in the abstract sense; in fact, Muslim sources from that period do not use any
word that could be translated as “identity” in its modern meaning. Yet it is clear
that they identified some people as part of the same group because they shared an
identity. This is most obvious in the ethnic labels that are the focus of most other
contributions to this volume. In this chapter, I approach the question in a way
that is less uniquely Ottoman, concentrating on the social hierarchy during the
period when the Ottomans came to power, fourteenth-century Anatolia.
The challenge here is to pry out answers to questions that the sources them-
selves never ask and explore a realm of consideration that they never explicitly
evoke. This requires an angle, a handle, which in this case will be food gifts. As a
voluntary form of social interaction loaded with meaning, the act of giving food
betrays quite a lot about the social identity of both the giver and the recipient. The
historian who identifies the givers and recipients of food and observes the context
and modalities of these food transfers can therefore offer insight into a layer of
identity that was at once deeply internalized and largely removed from any refer-
ence to t he state, et hnicit y, or relig ion. Ex t rapolat ing f rom scenes t hat depict food
gifts, in short, allows us to shed light on a period on which relatively little social
and cultural history has been written.

Sources and Methodology

The observations presented in this chapter are derived from a broader research
project in which I reconstructed the daily life of late medieval Anatolians. The
sources I used include the bulk of existing original texts composed in or describ-
ing Anatolia from the late thirteenth to the early fifteenth centuries. Among
those, the texts that yielded the richest material are hagiographical collections of
anecdotes that depict the miracles and wisdom of Muslim saints. Other types of
sources include vakfiyes, which are foundation contracts for pious endowments

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