ABSTRACT
The previous chapter discussed the place of Orthodox Christian institutions in the legal frameworks of the Ottoman Empire and how individuals navigated within these frameworks. This part of the book moves to another aspect of the law and focuses on legal matters concerning the people themselves. Just as it is in the other fields of Ottoman society that constitute the various chapters of this study, in law and justice too Ottoman traditional historiography maintains that communal courts were responsible for dealing with the cases of Orthodox Christians who in turn duly brought their conflicts to these institutions. This view however is not a result of an investigation of Christian courts of law or an examination of the imperial justice system from the perspective of non-Muslims. 1 It is yet another unquestioned deduction, or an assumption at best, of an all-encompassing communitarian approach to non-Muslim life in the Ottoman Empire. While this view is still surprisingly prevalent, a number of Ottomanists have already challenged it by studying non-Muslims who took their cases to Ottoman law courts. Scholars such as Ronald Jennings, Haim Gerber, Najwa Al-Qattan, Fatma Müge Göçek and Rossitsa Gradeva 2 among others have shown how Christians and Jews regularly used the Ottoman institutions of law and justice.
