ACADEMY OF SAINT GABRIEL REPORT 3084
http://www.s-gabriel.org/3084
************************************

09 Nov 2005
From: Ursula Whitcher 

Greetings from the Academy of Saint Gabriel!

You asked for our help in choosing a name appropriate for a janissary
of the Ottoman empire from 1500 to 1550.  You expressed specific
interest in the name <Aslan bin Mustafa>.

We'll start with some background information about the janissaries and
the Ottoman empire.  In particular, we'll discuss the languages of the
Ottoman empire, and tell you about the way we've transliterated Turkish
and Arabic.  Then we'll discuss your given name and offer suggestions
for a byname.  We'll finish with suggestions for your full name.

The janissaries were an elite infantry corps attached to the sultan's
household.  In your period, the janissary corps was composed of slaves
recruited as young boys from Christian villages within the empire.  This
process was known as <devs,irme>.  (Here we've used the comma <,> to
represent a hook beneath the 's'.) [1, 11]  Janissaries converted to
Islam; their names follow Ottoman and Islamic patterns, not Christian ones.

Because the janissaries were extremely powerful, some Ottoman citizens
who were not slaves joined their ranks.  The emperor was complaining
about janissary posts given to his Muslim subjects as early as 1577; by
the end of the seventeenth century, the janissaries were recruiting new
members primarily from the Muslim population, rather than through
conquest. [8]

Turkish and Arabic were both important spoken and written languages in
the Ottoman empire.  Until the twentieth century, Turkish was written in
a script based on Arabic; modern Turkish uses the Roman alphabet, with
certain special characters.  We've transliterated Arabic words using a
standard scholarly transcription.  Our sources for Turkish names use a
transliteration system based on modern Turkish.  We believe that when
the Ottomans recorded names which came from Arabic they used the
standard Arabic spelling, even when the Ottoman pronunciation was
different from the Arabic pronunciation.  However, because we
transliterate Arabic and Turkish names in different ways, we write names
borrowed from Arabic to Turkish differently: for instance, we write
<Abdullah> in Turkish contexts, and <`Abd Allaah> in Arabic ones.

The modern Turkish word <aslan> means 'lion'; an older form of this word
is <arslan>.  We found an Ottoman military commander named <Arslan> in
1554-56, and we found a janissary named <Arslan Bes,e> in
the 1660s.  (<Bes,e> is a title corresponding to one of the lower ranks
in the janissary command structure.) [6, 12]

We found the name <Arslaan> in an Arabic context as a given name used by
the Mamluks, soldiers and former slaves who ruled Egypt from 1250 until
the Ottomans conquered Egypt in the the early sixteenth century. [5]  We
found the form <Ars.laan> used by two sixteenth-century Jewish men who
appeared in court in Ottoman-controlled Jerusalem.  (The period after
the 's' represents a small dot below that letter.)  These court records
were written in Arabic.  One of the men named <Ars.laan> we found,
<Ars.laan ibn Ibraahiim>, appears to be the same person as <As.laan ibn
Ibraahiim>, whose name was recorded a year later.  We found several
other sixteenth-century Jewish men identified as <As.laan>. [7]

Members of the Ottoman empire were frequently identified by a single
given name.  For instance, the sultan Suleyman described the
sixteenth-century military commander Arslan as <Arslan> in a formal
letter, even though Arslan held the rank of <Pas,a> 'pasha'. [12]

Many of the references to Ottoman soldiers which we have found identify
them by a given name followed by a title indicating military rank;
examples include <Arslan Bes,e> and <ilyas C,avus,>.  (The 'i' in
<ilyas> represents an upper-case <I> with a dot above it.) [2, 4, 6]

We found a few examples of janissaries using a descriptive byname such
as <Ku"c,u"k> 'small' before their given name.  (Here the quotation
marks represent an umlaut or pair of small dots above the 'u'.)  Other
members of the sultan's household, many of whom held important offices
in the Ottoman bureaucracy, also used descriptive bynames before their
given names; examples include <Kara> 'black' and <Gu"rcu"> 'Georgian'.
[2, 3]  If you're interested in using a descriptive byname, we may be
able to find a few more examples; please let us know if you'd like us to
investigate this possibility.

In the Ottoman empire, former slaves and other converts to Islam
used the conventional patronymic <bin Abdullah>, literally "son of a
servant of Allah", rather than identifying themselves by their actual
fathers' names. [4, 9]  This practice followed a broader Islamic
pattern: the Mamluks, also former slaves, identified themselves in
Arabic as <ibn `Abd Allaah>, also "son of a servant of Allah". [10]
Since janissaries in your period were slaves, we recommend that you use
the Turkish <bin Abdullah> or Arabic <ibn `Abd Allaah> rather than
identifying yourself as <bin Mustafa>, "son of Mustafa": <Mustafa> is a
Muslim name, and we believe that only a man who was actually the son of
a Muslim named <Mustafa> would have used this patronymic.

Depending on the language and situation, the same name could appear in
many different forms.  In Turkish, your name might have been recorded
simply as <Arslan>, using a title such as <Arslan Bes,e>, or with a
descriptive byname, such as <Kara Arslan> 'black Arslan'.  Your name
might have appeared in a more formal Turkish document as <Arslan bin
Abdullah>.  In a document written in Arabic, it could have been recorded
as either <Ars.laan ibn `Abd Allaah> or <As.laan ibn `Abd Allaah>.

We hope this letter has been useful.  Please write to us again if any
part of this has been unclear or if you have other questions.
Contributing to the research and writing of this letter are: Alzbeta
Michalik, Gunnvor Silfraharr, Aleksandr called the Traveller, Arval
Benicoeur, Aryanhwy merch Catmael, Mari neyn Brian, Sion Andreas, and
Talan Gwynek.

For the Academy,

Ursula Georges and Giudo di Niccolo Brunelleschi
9 November 2005

--------------------

References:

[1]  Bernard Lewis, _Race and Slavery in the Middle East_, (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 9, 11-12.

[2] P.M. Holt, "The Career of Kucuk Muhammad (1676-1694)" (Bulletin of
the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol.
26, No. 2 [1963], 269-287) has an outline of janissary ranks in the
context of seventeenth-century Egypt. <Ku"c,u"k Muhammad> was a
jannisary. According to a Google search, it appears that <Ku"c,u"k> is
a byname meaning "small".

[3] Metin Ibrahim Kunt, "Ethnic-Regional (Cins) Solidarity in the
Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Establishment" (International Journal of
Middle East Studies, Vol. 5, No. 3 [June 1974], 233-239).  Kunt gives
the names of a number of seventeenth-century vezirs.  Like the
janissaries, the vezirs were slaves (or at least began their careers as
slaves). One of the most interesting bynames is that of the grand vezir
<Mere Hu"seyin Pas,a>; he apparently acquired the nickname <Mere>
because it means "Take him!" in Albanian, and this was the phrase the
vezir used to order the removal of the guilty from his presence.

[4] Ursula Georges, "Sixteenth-Century Turkish Names" (WWW: privately
published, 2002).
http://www.s-gabriel.org/names/ursula/ottoman/masculine.html

[5] J. Sauvaget, "Noms et Surnoms de Mamelouks" in _Journal Asiatique_
238 (1950), 31-58.  Sion Andreas transliterated the names from Arabic.

[6] Eunjeong Yi. _Guild Dynamics in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul:
Fluidity and Leverage_.  (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2004), p.69.

[7] Amnon Cohen. _A World Within: Jewish Life as Reflected in Muslim
Court Documents from the <Sijill> of Jerusalem (XVIth Century)_.
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Center for Judaic Studies,
1994).

Page    Date       Entry        Name
----    ----       -----        ----
35      1536-1537  408a         As.laan b. Fraym the Jew
54	1541-1542  460b         As.laan b. Fraayim the Jew
63	1546-1547  52g 	        khooja As.laan b. Ibraahiim
80	1550-1551  39c 	        Sulaymaan b. As.laan
83	1551-1552  27f 	        Sulaymaan b. As.laan
122	1570-1571  133d	        As.laan b. `Amraan
                                 alias "Abuu Karsha (Big Belly)"
131	1563   	   574b	        As.laan Yahuudaa
151     1572-1573  369f, 370c,  As.laan
                    371e         H.ad.r b. As.laan
                                 Khad.r b. As.laan
155     1574-1576  211c         Simh.a b. As.laan

59	1544-1545  502b	        Ars.laan b. Ibraahiim
187	1592-1593  49d 	        Ars.laan

[8] Raymond, Andre/, "Soldiers in Trade: The Case of Ottoman Cairo",
_British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies_, vol. 18, no. 1 (1991), p. 16.

[9] Ursula Georges.  "Ottoman Cauldron-Makers, 1643-1644" (WWW:
privately published, 2005).
http://www.s-gabriel.org/ursulageorges/onomastics/cauldron.html

[10] Academy of St. Gabriel Report #2932
http://www.s-gabriel.org/2932

[11]  Metin Kunt, "State and Sultan up to the age of Su"leyman:
frontier principality to world empire," in: _Su"leyman the Magnificent
and His Age: The Ottoman Empire in the Early Modern World_.  Metin Kunt
and Christine Woodhead, eds.  (London and New York: Longman, 1995).  p. 15.

[12]  Anton C. Shaedlinger, ed., _Die Schreiben Su"leyma:ns des
Pra"chtigen an Karl V., Ferdinand I. und Maximilian II aus dem Haus-,
Hof- und Staatsarchiv z Wien: Transkriptionen ud U"bersetzungen_, Wien:
Verlag der O"sterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1983, pp.
82-83, 105.