Kayserili kâtip: Yazıcı Murtaza'nın el yazmalarında tabiat, toplum ve imparatorluk

This thesis examines how a mid-level Kayserite clerk from the early eighteenth century described and evaluated the urban and rural communities in the Ottoman lands. A versatile man from the village of Gesi in Kayseri, Yazıcı Murtaza worked as a clerk (yazıcı), farmer, teacher, and muezzin and traveled widely across the Ottoman lands, reaching as far as Basra in the East and Albania in the West. He also produced two volumes of manuscripts, one containing his travelogue and the other his poems, but both of which provide rich observations about his universe. This thesis analyzes and contextualizes this rich material in dialogue with other contemporary sources and secondary literature on Ottoman urban and environmental history. By reconstructing how a modest clerk from Central Anatolia viewed the world around him, this study also adds a hitherto neglected perspective to the existing scholarship on the early eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire, which has so far focused mainly on the worldviews of Istanbulite elites and, to a more limited extent, denizens of major Arab towns like Damascus.