Tamriko Lekiashvili
Doctor of History
Associate Professor
University of Georgia
Tbilisi, Georgia
ORCID: 0009-0003-6249-8721
t.lekiashvili@ug.edu.ge
Tea Meshvelishvili
Doctor of History
Associate Professor
University of Georgia
Tbilisi, Georgia
ORCID: 0009-0005-5556-6970
t.meshvelishvili@ug.edu.ge
Previously unknown firmans and cards concerning Georgia from the 16th century preserved in the National Archives of Turkey
For historians, primary written sources are of great importance. Based on such sources, it is possible to not only reconstruct historical events but also to systematically study the functioning of state structures, the type of administrative governance, and economic characteristics. For researchers of Georgian history, Ottoman sources represent invaluable material. After a research trip to Istanbul, several hundred 16th-century documents (mainly firmans and hukms) were brought back, some of which have been transcribed and translated. In the material at our disposal, even though Georgia was mentioned only indirectly in some cases, we gained valuable information about the Ottoman land tenure system (land grants, incentives, confiscations) and the structure and functioning of the imperial administration. Additionally, an essential aspect of working with the source material involves identifying Georgian geographical names that are distorted or misspelled in the documents. As it's known, expressing Georgian phonetic patterns using the Arabic script is particularly difficult. Most of the original names have been lost. Therefore, based on information found in Georgian sources and academic publications, we attempted to reconstruct the original Georgian toponyms as they appeared in the Ottoman documents. Here, too, we encountered significant challenges in reading Georgian names and subsequently determining the identities of these persons. The sources we studied are firmans – imperial decrees – which, due to their specific nature, pertain to various orders related to specific events. From this perspective, it was particularly interesting to identify the basis or justification for each decree, which allowed us to assess the corresponding historical event within its proper context. The aim of this article is to determine the historical context of the presented firmans and berats, to compare the toponyms mentioned in the sources with Georgian geographical names, and to identify the individuals referred to in the documents. The research is based on qualitative methods, primarily the source-critical (source analysis) approach. Specifically, the selected documents we retrieved were evaluated and interpreted within the framework of historical events and correlated with Georgian sources. Using this method, we attempted to compare the toponyms mentioned in the Ottoman sources with Georgian geographical names and to identify them accordingly.
Keywords: firman, berat, Toponym, Identification of persons.