Imperial Ottoman

Economy · In depth

Ottoman Crafts, Guilds, and Manufacturing

The esnaf guilds, the imperial workshops of Ehl-i Hiref, the İznik and Kütahya ceramic industries, Damascus steel, and the great manufacturing centres of Bursa, Edirne, and Istanbul.

In 1557 the Venetian nobleman Nicolò de’ Conti walked into the kaftan-makers’ bazaar in Istanbul and counted forty-eight separate workshops, each with a single loom or a pair of looms, each run by a master whose kethüda sat on the guild’s standing committee. The Ottoman city was, on the evidence of such visits, a manufacturing city of small shops and many crafts, and the institutional form that held them together was the esnaf — the guild. From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century Ottoman cities produced silk, cotton, ceramics, carpets, metalwork, leather, paper, and a host of other goods that circulated within the empire and were exported across the world. The story of that production is the subject of this article; the broader framework is in the Ottoman economy and trade.

Key dates

  • 1402 — Timur defeats Bayezid I; the Ottoman interregnum briefly interrupts the Bursa and İznik industries.
  • c. 1490 — İznik quartz-frit ceramic industry reaches its first peak.
  • 1550s — Süleymaniye külliye of Istanbul; İznik tiles cover the imperial mosques.
  • c. 1620 — İznik industry in decline; Kütahya rising.
  • 1695 — Esham reform; sarraf (banker) houses become the financial counterpart of the guild system.
  • 1841–43 — Hereke court factory founded under Abdülmecid I.
  • 1838 — Anglo-Ottoman free-trade agreement begins the long collapse of urban manufacturing.

The esnaf guilds

The esnaf was the principal form of organization for urban craftsmen. Every trade had its guild, and every guild had a code of practice governing entry, training, production, and sale. A young man entered as an apprentice (çırak) at ten or twelve, became a journeyman (kalfa) after a period of years, and, if he accumulated the necessary capital and produced a masterwork, a master (usta) with the right to take apprentices and to sell in the guild’s market.

The guilds were religious congregations, social clubs, and quasi-political bodies. Each guild had a patron saint, a meeting room, a common fund for funerals and relief, and a corporate presence in the city’s Friday prayer. The internal hierarchy was not, as some older sources suggest, a single ladder. The kethüda (or ketkhuda) was the guild steward, the master of the guild as a corporate body, who represented the trade before the kadi and the governor. The yiğitbaşı was the head of a single workshop or oda (division), responsible for day-to-day discipline and quality control. The şeyh of the guild, where the position existed, was the religious officer. Treating these ranks as synonyms (a common error in the older literature) flattens what was a sophisticated two-tier leadership.

The state generally supported the guilds because they made tax collection, price control, and provisioning easy. The kadi could summon the guild masters and, with their cooperation, fix the narh (the official price) of bread, meat, and other staples in times of shortage. The state could also compel the guilds to supply the army, the court, and the imperial household at fixed prices. In return, the guilds enjoyed a degree of monopoly over production in their own cities. Suraiya Faroqhi’s Artisans of Empire (2009) is the best general account; for a specific case the Kanunname-i İhtisab-ı Bursa (the Bursa market-regulations codex, c. 1502) is invaluable — it lists the permitted widths of Bursa silk cloth, the permitted number of warp threads per karış (a measure of c. 68 cm), and the fines for adulteration.

Guild regulations were not always respected. Smuggling, substandard production, and price-cutting were common offences, and the kadi’s court was kept busy hearing complaints. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the system was in decline, undercut by European manufactured goods, particularly British cotton textiles, and by the liberalization of trade under the capitulations.

“No kalfa of the weavers’ guild shall take more than three apprentices at one time, and the period of apprenticeship shall be not less than three years. No master shall weave cloth of fewer than 1,200 warp threads to the karış; whoever does so shall pay a fine of 50 akçes to the guild and 50 to the ihtisab.” — Kanunname-i İhtisab-ı Bursa (c. 1502), article on the weavers.

The imperial workshops: Ehl-i Hiref

At the top of the manufacturing hierarchy stood the Ehl-i Hiref (Community of the Talented), the palace workshop organization. Founded in the fifteenth century and expanded under Süleyman, the Ehl-i Hiref employed several hundred master craftsmen in the Topkapı complex, organized into forty-one separate oda (chambers) under a chief called the Ehl-i Hiref kethüdası. The sections included weavers, tailors, embroiderers, gold- and silversmiths, jewellers, painters, illuminators, bookbinders, leather workers, furriers, makers of tents and wagon covers, and a small but important section of gunpowder makers and cannon founders. The nakkaşhane (the imperial studio) produced not only illustrated histories and Qur’ans but also designs for textiles, carpets, and architectural ornament.

The products of the Ehl-i Hiref were reserved for the court. Robes of honour called kaftan were given by the sultan to high officials, foreign ambassadors, and favoured servants, and they were the most visible products of the workshop. The kaftans were woven from Bursa silk and embroidered with gold and silver thread. The Ehl-i Hiref was a closed corporation organized by confession and ethnicity — Christians, Jews, and Muslims worked in separate sections, and the most senior and best-paid positions were held by Muslims. The devşirme-i hiref (the levying of Christian boys as apprentice craftsmen) was a smaller cousin of the janissary devşirme and supplied a steady stream of skilled labour. The workshop declined in the seventeenth century, and by the 1840s it had been reduced to a few remaining sections, but its products — the great kaftans, manuscripts, and prayer rugs of the Topkapı collection — are still the standard by which Ottoman craftsmanship is judged.

Silk: Bursa and Damascus

The most prestigious Ottoman manufacture was silk, and the subject is examined in detail in Ottoman silk textiles. Bursa had been a Byzantine and early Ottoman silk centre; the Seljuk silk tradition belonged to Konya, Sivas, and Aleppo, not Bursa. Damascus was a primary silk centre under the Mamluks and remained significant under the Ottomans: Damascene silk, woven in patterns that imitated the great Mamluk and Ottoman court textiles, was famous throughout the Mediterranean. The raw silk for both cities came from the overland trade routes, and the finished products were exported to Italy, France, and the Ottoman court.

Cotton and wool: Edirne, Salonica, Anatolia

Edirne, the second capital, was an important centre of woollen cloth, supplying broadcloth and lighter fabrics to the army and the court. Salonica had a substantial cotton industry, exported through the Aegean ports to Italy and France. Anatolia produced cotton and wool on a much larger scale, particularly in the Aegean and Mediterranean regions, and the growth of Smyrna as a great emporium in the eighteenth century was closely linked to the export of Anatolian cotton. After the Industrial Revolution, raw cotton from Anatolia and the Balkans was exported to the mills of Manchester and Lyon, and the local handloom weavers were eventually undercut by European factory production.

Ceramics: İznik and Kütahya

The brilliant quartz-frit ceramics of İznik, produced in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, are the most admired of Ottoman manufactures. The İznik industry built on a long tradition of Seljuk and Byzantine ceramic production and produced large plates, tiles, and architectural ornaments decorated with cobalt blue, turquoise, sage green, and the famous “Armenian bole” red. The tiles decorated the great mosques of Istanbul, Edirne, and Bursa; the plates appeared in the still-life paintings of the Dutch Golden Age.

The İznik industry declined in the seventeenth century, partly because of competition from imported Chinese porcelain and partly because of internal problems in the workshop. The centre of Ottoman ceramic production then moved to Kütahya, which produced a softer, more colourful ware that remained popular in the empire and was exported to Europe. Nurhan Atasoy’s İznik: The Pottery of Ottoman Turkey (1989) remains the standard reference; Walter Denny’s later work places the İznik tiles in the wider Mediterranean context.

Metalwork and arms: Damascus

Damascus was, from the medieval period, the most important centre of metalwork in the eastern Mediterranean. The city produced steel swords, knives, and armour decorated with gold and silver inlay, and the technique of damascening — patterns etched into steel and filled with gold or silver wire — was famous in Europe. The guild of the sinekârî (literally “match-makers”) in Damascus was primarily a guild of gun-stock and gun-lock makers, supplying the Ottoman army and navy. The “Damascus steel” blade is a separate case: the crucible (wootz) steel from which the famous blades were forged came mostly from India and was imported; the technique of inlay was Damascene but the raw material was not. Conflating the two, common in older popular accounts, is incorrect.

Leather, paper, and bookbinding

Leatherworking, in particular the production of Cordovan and Moroccan leathers, supplied saddlery, footwear, water bags, harnesses, and bookbindings to the imperial court, the army, and the export trade. The guild of the yemeniciler (slipper-makers) was one of the most numerous in Istanbul, and its products were sold as far as Central Europe. The first Ottoman paper mill was established in Bursa in the fifteenth century, and by the sixteenth the empire had a thriving paper industry centred on Bursa, Istanbul, and the Levantine cities; surplus was exported to Safavid Iran and Mughal India for miniature painting and calligraphy. The bookbinding workshops of Istanbul and the regional centres produced bindings in stamped, painted, and lacquered leather that were widely admired in Europe.

Jewellery and minor crafts

The jeweller’s trade, organized in the guild of the kuyumcular, was a substantial sector of urban production. The palace employed its own jewellers, who worked gold and silver, set precious stones, and produced elaborate regalia. Many of the techniques developed in the palace workshops — the intricate gold filigree known as telkâri, the cloisonné enamel called minakari, and the chased silver of the selimiye tradition — were carried into the private workshops of the cities and exported as luxury goods.

The long decline

Ottoman manufacturing began a long decline in the eighteenth century and was largely destroyed in the nineteenth. The causes were both internal and external. The capitulations gave European merchants the right to import goods at low tariffs, and the 1838 Anglo-Ottoman free-trade agreement reduced the customs duties that had protected Ottoman industry. The influx of cheap European textiles, particularly British cotton cloth, undercut local producers and destroyed the livelihood of countless weavers. The result was a hollowing-out of the urban manufacturing sector and a long-term shift of the Ottoman economy to the production of raw materials and foodstuffs for export.

Sources and further reading

  • Suraiya Faroqhi, Artisans of Empire: Crafts and Craftspeople Under the Ottomans (I.B. Tauris, 2009).
  • Donald Quataert, “Ottoman Handicrafts and Industry c. 1600–c. 1920,” in An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1914, ed. Halil İnalcık and Donald Quataert (Cambridge University Press, 1994).
  • Halil İnalcık, “The Hub of the City: The Bedesten of Istanbul,” International Journal of Turkish Studies 1 (1979–80): 1–17.
  • Nurhan Atasoy, İznik: The Pottery of Ottoman Turkey (Alexandria Press, 1989).
  • Walter B. Denny, “Dating the Turkish ‘Holbein’ Carpets,” in Oriental Carpet and Textile Studies (1987).
  • Metin Coşgel and Boğaç Ergene, “Inequality of Wealth in Ottoman Probate Inventories,” Journal of Economic History 71.4 (2011): 861–901.