Methods

To sort the names into classifications, I made the following assumptions: The patronym “Abdullah” indicates conversion to Islam, so all slaves named “bt. Abdullah” were converts. Slaves were allowed to keep their birth names until they converted, so any slave with a recognizably Ottoman Turkish name was a convert, even…

Continue reading

Sources and Works Cited

The records I used were transcribed from the Ottoman Turkish alphabet into the modern Turkish alphabet, turned into PDFs, and placed online by ISAM, the Istanbul Kadi Registers Project (www.kadisicilleri.org), which focuses on records from the greater Istanbul area. All of the communities represented were in the immediate vicinity of…

Continue reading

The Ladies of Istanbul

I entered the original version of this paper in the novice division in the 2018 St. Eligius Arts & Sciences Competition. In 16th-century Istanbul, names followed religion. Muslims, Greek Orthodox Christians, Armenian Orthodox Christians, and Jews each had their own name pools, with very little crossover even between branches of…

Continue reading

Books and Articles about Turkish Names

Sources about Period Onomastics ONOMASTICON TURCICUM. (L. Rásonyi’s Collection of Turkic Personal Names and the Method of its Publication). (T) M. Mehdi İlhan, “Some Pointers on the Importance of Personal Names in the Ottoman Detailed Cadastral Registers“ Post-Period and Undated Sources While these sources don’t address period names directly, they…

Continue reading