the black death in early ottoman territories - Bilkent University

subject is evident, plague has been mentioned in a number of publications as a
causative agent in the historical process. However, any assertions concerning the
impact of plague epidemics on Ottoman history are hampered by the fact that no
studies are available that try to elucidate the patterns of frequency of outbreaks and
their exact localisation.
In view of this apparent void, it is the aim of this thesis to bring together a
number of data that illustrate the impact of the disease on the early Ottoman
society from the first Black Death outbreak to the first half of the 16th century.
The relative abundance of sources for the latter half of the 16th and for the 17th
century and the territorial expansion of the Ottoman Empire in that period would
have widened the scope of this inquiry too much, and made the amount of material
too unwieldy to process within the framework of a master's thesis.
The Black Death was not the first pandemic to reach the region under
investigation. The Justinian plague pandemic had preceded it, shaping attitudes
towards it and providing local populations with some knowledge of the disease. In
order to appraise this influence and to understand the interplay of human behavior
and the promulgation of the disease, the first chapter and introductory section of
this thesis deals with the biological fundamentals of the disease as well as with its
place in general human history. The next section then focuses on the Black Death
and the Ottomans specifically. Chapter two gives an overview of the
historiography of the subject, as well as methodological considerations of the
sources. Chapter three analyses the way the epidemic arrived and spread in the
Ottoman territory and the occurrence of subsequent outbreaks with a chronology
of plague outbreaks in Ottoman territory for the period under consideration.
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