E. Kolovos, «Insularity and Society in the Ottoman Context: The Case of the Aegean Island of Andros (Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries)», Turcica 39 (2007), 49-122.
The paper investigates the island society of Andros, in the Aegean Sea, under the impact of the development and transformation of Ottoman maritime networks of communication, administration, war and commerce in the Mediterranean, between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. The research focuses, through the study of the Ottoman tax registers of 1670/71 from the Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, on the formation of new social powers on the island, a class of Christian Orthodox landowners, who succeeded under the Ottomans the former Frankish feudal lords in the top of the social hierarchy, together with the development of communal and ecclesiastical administration. In the same vein, the Ottoman documents from the local kadı court, which have been preserved on the island’s archives, are studied here as evidence of the interaction between Ottoman administration and local society, through the active involvement of the island’s powerful social actors in the local Ottoman administration of law.
