Reforming Criminal Justice in the Ottoman Empire: Police, Courts and Prisons in Rusçuk, 1839-1864

This case study explores the experimentation phase of the Ottoman Tanzimat reforms on the criminal justice system in the city of Rusçuk from 1839-64. In particular, it investigates crime and punishment by focusing on police, courts, and prisons and how these institutions responded to reform efforts in Rusçuk, which became the capital of the Danube Province in 1864. It shows that the Ottoman government established new police forces (zaptiye) and modernised prisons in the city in 1846 immediately after their introduction in the imperial capital of Istanbul. At the same time, the government bestowed extensive judicial authority on the meclis-i kebir (a secular administrative council in the provinces), and to a lesser extent on the meclis-i muvakkat (temporary council), over criminal cases. While the Sharia courts continued to enforce Islamic criminal law, the meclis-i kebir took charge of enforcing the new penal codes of 1840, 1851, and 1858, and served as a precursor first to the secular courts of the 1864 Provincial Reform and then to the more centralised and standardised nizamiye courts of the 1870s. This study also analyses the types and frequency of crimes and the penalties they received. Based on Rusçuk’s prison registers, which contain the cases tried by the meclis-i kebir and meclis-i muvakkat, and the records of the meclis-i vala (Supreme Court) in Istanbul, it argues that the crime rate in Rusçuk was much higher than the one represented in the Sharia court’s records.