Edirne in the Tanzimat Era (1839-1908)

XIX. century has been a century of transformation in many areas like administrative, economic, social, cultural and so on for the Ottoman Empire. In the last quarter of XVIII. the century III. Selim made and during the XIX. century in the reign of II. Mahmud, on going the reform movements reached its peak with the Gülhane Hatt-ı Hümayun, which was announced on 3 November 1839. With this rescript, which gave its name to a period, the state made promises such as equality in front of the law between Muslim and non-Muslim subjects, taxing according to the income of each person and determining the duration of the military service. There were different reactions to the rescript, both in the country and abroad. Statesmen decided to implement comprehensive and important reforms in provinces that were relatively close to the capital and thus more comfortable to control, Instead of implementing throughout the empire. One of these provinces is Edirne Province which is our subject of study. Edirne is a much larger province which includes Kırklareli, Tekirdağ, Gümülcine, Filibe, Gelibolu in our study period compared to today. Moreover, it is a cosmopolitan city with a large population of Greeks, Bulgarians, Armenians and Jews are living. For this reason, the success of the Tanzimat in Edirne is very important for Tanzimatist statesmen. This period was the region where separatist movements and banditry activities intensified especially in the Balkans. Again The Ottoman-Russian War of 1877-1878, which happened at the beginning of Sultan II Abdulhamid's reign and called "93 War de in our history, also resulted in a disaster for both the Ottoman Empire and the city of Edirne. During the war, the city of Edirne was invaded byRussia; again because of this war, the Ottoman Empire was exposed to a large wave of immigration from Rumelia and the Caucasus. The first stop for these immigrants from Rumelia was Edirne. We examined the implementation of the decisions taken in the fields of administrative, education, health and agriculture in the period of both II. Abdulhamid and Tanzimat in Edirne. We have tried to reveal the successes or failures of these practices and their reasons based on the documents in the state archive.