Ottoman Roads, Messengers and State Communications

From the sixteenth century into the empire’s final decades, Ottoman rulers and provincial officials moved orders through mounted couriers, replacement horses and staffed stations. The menzil network, reorganized in 1539, relied on local households as well as state officers. A public post founded in 1840 and telegraph lines introduced during the Crimean War added new routes for letters and official messages.

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Turning petitions into decrees

A ferman was a formal order issued in the sultan’s name; the sultan was the empire’s ruler, and the decree bore his tuğra, or calligraphic signature. Under the classical system of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, a governor’s report or a subject’s petition could be discussed by the Divan-ı Hümâyun, the central body for state decisions. If the matter required the ruler’s decision, officials presented it in writing or orally, sometimes with a short summary called a telhis. Chancery scribes, officials who drafted and authenticated state documents, then prepared the decree according to the council’s decision or the sultan’s instruction. Some orders followed a different route: major military, tax or other state matters could be prepared directly on the council’s decision and the ruler’s command.

The document joined a decision to an assigned action. A ferman could direct an official to carry out an order, resolve a stated matter or notify a district of the decision. Recipients were expected to act promptly; if they delayed, the chancery could send a second, more threatening command. A new sultan could also renew an earlier decree with a fresh tuğra, marking its authority under the new reign.

Couriers, stations and their upkeep

An ulak was an official courier. A written ulak hükmü authorized a courier to obtain fresh horses and provisions along the route. The stops that supplied these services were called menzils. Rather than ask one horse and rider to cover the full distance from Istanbul to a distant province, a message could move through a chain of stations, where the next courier took it onward. Important dispatches could also travel with one courier over a longer stretch. Each stage depended on people preparing animals, food and lodging before the messenger arrived.

In 1539, during the reign of Süleyman I (1520–1566), Lütfi Pasha, the grand vizier or chief minister, reorganized the system after complaints that couriers abused their right to requisition horses and supplies. Istanbul, in modern Turkey, stood at the center of three main branches into Anatolia and three into Rumelia, the empire’s European provinces; subsidiary roads connected them. Stations were spaced according to terrain, security and the practical availability of provisions. Recorded journeys between stops ranged from three to twenty-eight travel hours.

The chain had a local staff. A menzil emini supervised a station; a menzilci, often a resident of the area, was responsible for providing its services. Stable chiefs, grooms, room keepers, drivers and cooks cared for horses and travelers. Treasury payments, courier charges and local taxes financed the work. Men who served as menzilcis could receive exemptions from other taxes, an exchange that tied the state’s long-distance communications to local obligations and benefits. During wartime, the number of horses and the cost of keeping them rose. In some places the tax burden encouraged local station keepers to leave, so administrators changed the payment arrangements to restore service.

Those arrangements changed over time. Reforms in 1691 and 1697 set a fee of ten akçe, a unit of currency, per travel hour for a courier’s horse. From 1777, the government increasingly leased station duties to contractors. Couriers then paid for their own horse and food or fodder, transferring some immediate costs from station communities to the traveler.

A wartime route through Rumelia

In the eighteenth century, the Rumelian right branch, known as the Crimea–Black Sea Trade Road, carried official traffic through Silistre, on the lower Danube in present-day Bulgaria. Frequent wars raised the demands placed on its stations. Some stations had their capacity enlarged and were turned into granaries that could provision troops. Ottoman station registers record administrators adjusting the route’s staffing and supplies when particular stops struggled to keep operating.

Official service and private travel

The menzil system chiefly carried government dispatches. Ordinary correspondence and commercial news often moved with caravans or trusted travelers, who followed many of the same roads but did not automatically possess an official courier’s right to replacement horses. Some private users nevertheless made use of station facilities, despite restrictions; foreign diplomats and officials could also be allowed to use them. The people who traveled on these roads, from merchants to pilgrims, appear in the account of travellers.

A Cyprus council report dated 6 June 1849 recorded that officials heard an oral sultanic order for a tax increase of 350,000 piastres. The same report says a firman announcing the appointment of a new marshal was read and chanted aloud. Local councils therefore received some state decisions through both documents and public speech.

Public post and the telegraph

On 23 October 1840, the Ottoman government established the Posta Nezareti, a postal ministry intended to serve the empire’s residents and foreign visitors. The first post office, the Postahane-i Amire, opened in the courtyard of Istanbul’s Yeni Camii, or New Mosque. Its early staff included translators who rendered addresses written in languages other than Turkish. The first service carried letters and official papers; from January 1841 it also handled money orders and sample trade goods sent as parcels. The first convoy left Istanbul for Edirne on 28 October 1840; one for Anatolia followed on 2 November.

Post office clerks handled each letter as a chargeable item: they weighed it, set the fee according to weight and distance, and recorded the amount on the envelope and in a register. For much of this nineteenth-century reform period, recipients collected letters at the post office; an 1861 rule provided for letters left there to be delivered to the addressee. Historian Nesimi Yazıcı reports that in 1845 the central post employed 71 couriers in the Tatar post corps, while 21 postal directors served Anatolia and 13 served Rumelia. Regular routes used these couriers; outside them, local menzil workers, journal clerks and drivers carried ordinary letters and official papers. By 1868, Yazıcı counted 116 Tatar-post centers in Rumelia and 142 in Anatolia, alongside districts still served by local drivers.

A separate Telegraph Directorate was established in 1855, during the Crimean War (1853–1856). In a Morse electric telegraph, an operator tapped a key to send short and long electrical pulses; at the receiving station a sounder clicked the pattern, which another operator decoded into words for delivery. The Ottoman government’s first line ran from Istanbul to Edirne, both in modern Turkey. French engineers built it, and it was completed in time to carry news that the war had ended. From 1871, postal and telegraph administration were united under one ministry. Postal employees and local carriers still moved letters and documents through districts the wires did not serve.