Imperial Ottoman

Economy · Article

Ottoman Silk Textiles: The Silk Industry of Bursa and the Aegean

Bursa as the silk-weaving capital of the Ottoman Empire, raw silk from Gilan and Mazandaran, the named court textiles (seraser, kemha, çatma, atlas), and the great brocades and kaftans of the Topkapı wardrobe.

The first Ottoman silk mill in Bursa was, on the evidence of the Kanunname-i İhtisab-ı Bursa (the Bursa market-regulations codex of c. 1502), already a substantial industry in 1500, with several hundred looms producing cloth for the Ottoman court, the Italian market, and the Hajj. Bursa had been a Byzantine silk centre, taken by Orhan in 1326, and the Ottoman conquest turned the city into the western terminus of the Persian silk route. The industry lasted for three centuries; it collapsed under European factory competition in the nineteenth. The story of Bursa silk is the story of Ottoman luxury manufacture, and it is part of the larger Ottoman economy and trade.

Key dates

  • 1326 — Orhan takes Bursa; the city’s silk tradition enters Ottoman possession.
  • 1402 — Timur sacks Bursa; the industry recovers within a generation.
  • 1453 — Conquest of Constantinople gives Bursa silk direct access to the Italian market.
  • c. 1500 — Kanunname-i İhtisab-ı Bursa codifies the silk trade.
  • 1514 — Battle of Çaldıran opens the eastern silk route to Ottoman merchants.
  • c. 1560 — High point of the Bursa and Istanbul silk industries under Süleyman.
  • 1610s–1640s — Revolt of the Celali and the abkhazo disrupts the silk route from Persia.
  • 1838 — Anglo-Ottoman free-trade agreement; the long collapse of Bursa silk begins.

Raw silk from Persia

The Ottoman silk industry depended on raw silk imported from Persia. The mulberry trees of Gilan and Mazandaran, on the southern shore of the Caspian, produced the finest silk in the world; the Shamakhi district of the Caucasus produced a coarser but still valuable fibre; and the Uzbek caravans of Bukhara and Khiva brought a third grade of raw silk to the Istanbul and Bursa markets. The route from Tabriz to Sivas, Tokat, and Bursa is described in Ottoman trade routes and the silk road, and it was one of the most important overland arteries of the early modern world.

The Ottoman silk industry was not the only buyer of Persian silk. The Safavid state tried at various times to direct the silk trade through the Persian Gulf and the route to India, and the European Levant Company tried to buy the raw silk in Persia for direct export to Europe. The Ottomans, who had an interest both in the revenue and in the imported cloth, tried to keep the raw silk in the empire. The political control of the silk route was a recurring source of tension between the Ottoman and Safavid empires, and the war-and-peace cycles of the two states in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are partly intelligible as cycles of tariff and blockade on this road. Halil İnalcık’s 1960 article “Bursa and the Commerce of the Levant” remains the standard brief account.

The Bursa silk industry

Bursa had been a Byzantine silk centre, and the city was ideally placed to receive the raw silk from Persia and to ship the finished products to both Istanbul and the Aegean ports. The Seljuk silk tradition belonged to Konya, Sivas, and Aleppo, not to Bursa. Under Mehmed II and Bayezid II, Bursa was established as the principal silk-weaving centre of the empire, and the sultans gave generous support to the industry: the import of raw silk was subsidized, the looms of Bursa were exempt from certain taxes, and the finished products were reserved for export.

The industry was organized in the great külliye around the city’s central mosque and bazaar, with the silk han (merchants’ inns) clustered around the Ulu Cami and the Kapalıçarşı of Bursa. The weavers worked in small workshops, often with a single loom, and they were organized in the esnaf guild system. The most skilled weavers produced brocades and velvets for the palace, and the products of the lower-grade workshops were sold in the bazaar and exported to the Mediterranean. The great brocades of Bursa used silk imported from Persia, gold and silver thread imported from Europe, and natural dyes from a number of sources. The patterns were drawn from the Ottoman court tradition, and they often depicted the same tulips, carnations, and cloud bands that appeared on İznik ceramics and in the manuscripts of the palace studio. The brocades were used for kaftans, kaftan linings, prayer rugs, saddle cloths, and the furnishings of the palace, and the most elaborate pieces were given as diplomatic gifts to the rulers of Europe and Asia.

The named court textiles

A working vocabulary of Ottoman court silk is worth fixing, because the same terms appear throughout the literature. The principal named textiles were:

  • Seraser — gold-and-silver brocade, the most prestigious of all Ottoman court silks. The weft was a gold or silver strip wrapped around a silk core; the cloth was a lampas with the metal thread floating on the surface to catch the light.
  • Kemha — a twill with discontinuous wefts of two or more colours, used for kaftans and for furnishings. The technique is closely related to Byzantine lampas and to Italian seta brocades.
  • Çatma — polychrome silk, often with gold thread, used for ceremonial garments and for the lining of the great seraser kaftans.
  • Tafta — plain taffeta, the basic plain-weave silk, used for linings, for salta (overcoats), and for the underlayer of the kaftan.
  • Diba — silk brocade with silver thread, lighter than seraser and used for entari (undergarments) and for kaftan linings.
  • Atlas — silk satin, in Ottoman use a high-quality satin with a distinctive lustre, often in red or yellow. The word is the Arabic for “smooth.” Atlas was, with seraser, the imperial colour and texture.
  • Canfes — silk gauze, used for veils, for summer wear, and for the underlayer of the kaftan.
  • Kumaş — the generic term for silk fabric, used in the Kanunname-i İhtisab-ı Bursa and in the palace inventories when no more specific name applied.

These textiles were the formal court silks, and the Hazîne-i Hâssa (the palace wardrobe, distinct from the treasury proper) held tens of thousands of pieces at its eighteenth-century peak. The Topkapı Palace Museum’s textile collection is still the largest in the world, and the seraser and kemha pieces in the Topkapı and in the great European collections (the V&A, the Ashmolean, the Metropolitan, the Kunsthistorisches in Vienna) are the standard reference objects for the type. Nurhan Atasoy, Walter B. Denny, Louise W. Mackie, and Hülya Tezcan’s Ipek: The Crescent & the Rose (2001) is the standard scholarly catalogue.

A small but pointed aside on the Hırka-i Saadet (the Mantle of the Prophet), kept in the Has Oda of Topkapı: the relic was wrapped, in the Ottoman court tradition, in a kemerbest (a silk waist-sash, woven for the purpose in the Bursa workshops) and a kabaklama (a silk head-wrap) that were renewed periodically — the renewal was a court ceremony in its own right, and the relevant textiles are themselves among the great Bursa silks of the Ottoman period.

Routes to Istanbul and the Aegean

The finished silks of Bursa were shipped to the markets of the empire through two principal routes. The first was the overland road to Istanbul through Bozyük and Bilecik, used by the great caravans of merchants and protected by a chain of kervansaray built by the sultans. The second was the maritime route to the Aegean through the port of Mudanya on the Sea of Marmara. The silks of Bursa, like the carpets of Uşak, were exported through the port of Smyrna, where Venetian, French, and English merchants bought them under the capitulations. The silks were heavier and more expensive than the carpets, and the proportion exported through Mudanya to Istanbul (and from Istanbul to the Italian and French markets) was greater than for carpets; the parallel with Uşak should not be pressed too hard.

The two routes were linked by an internal Ottoman commercial infrastructure that was one of the strengths of the empire. The customs duties, the bazaar taxes, and the port fees were all sources of revenue, and the state had an interest in keeping the routes open. The disruption of the routes, by war or by plague, was a major economic event, and the chronicles of the period record several instances in which the closure of the Bursa–Istanbul road caused a sharp rise in the price of silk in the capital. Evliya Çelebi’s Seyahatname, vol. 3, has a detailed account of the Bursa silk industry c. 1640 that is still the most readable introduction.

Kaftans and court culture

The kaftan was the most visible product of the Bursa silk industry. Kaftans were long robes, often worn over a shirt and trousers, and they were the principal formal garment of the Ottoman court. The sultans gave kaftans to high officials, to foreign ambassadors, and to favoured servants, and the giving of a kaftan was a central feature of Ottoman court ceremony. The kaftans were woven in the imperial workshops of Ehl-i Hiref, and they were the most expensive and elaborate of all Ottoman textiles. The most famous of them, the court kaftans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, are now in the collections of the Topkapı Palace Museum and in the great museums of the world.

A note on terminology: the kaftan is the court robe proper, worn by the sultan and given as a robe of honour; the salta was a shorter, more formal overcoat with broad sleeves, often worn by senior officials; and the entari was the everyday long-sleeved undergarment worn by men and women of all classes. The three are often confused in European sources. A further note: the kaftan is a particularly Ottoman garment, neither Persian nor Byzantine in origin, but a court synthesis of Turkic, Persian, and Byzantine elements, with the üsküf cap and the kavuk headgear marking the dynasty’s Turco-Mongol roots.

The long decline

The Bursa silk industry was at its height in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and it began a long decline in the seventeenth. The causes were both internal and external: the Safavid and Mughal rivals were producing their own silks; the European import of Persian raw silk reduced the supply to Bursa; and the European fashion for lighter silks reduced the demand for the heavier Ottoman brocades. The final blow came in the nineteenth century, when European silks, produced by mechanized looms, undercut the hand-woven products of Bursa. The 1838 free-trade agreement — treated in detail in the article on the capitulations — completed the process, and the Bursa silk industry never recovered.

The long decline of the Bursa silk industry is a small but revealing chapter in the broader history of the Ottoman economy and trade. The industry that had made Bursa a great city for three centuries was destroyed in the nineteenth century by European competition, and the great kaftans of the court became historical curiosities. The history of Bursa silk, however, is a reminder of the long period in which the Ottoman Empire was a great manufacturing power.

Sources and further reading

  • Walter B. Denny, “Silk in the Ottoman Empire,” in The Cambridge History of Western Textiles, ed. David Jenkins (Cambridge University Press, 1992).
  • Suraiya Faroqhi, “Crisis and Change, 1590–1699,” in An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1914, ed. Halil İnalcık and Donald Quataert (Cambridge University Press, 1994).
  • Halil İnalcık, “Bursa and the Commerce of the Levant,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 3 (1960): 131–147.
  • Tülay Artan, “Ottoman Arts of War and Peace: The Question of Decline,” in The Ottoman World, ed. Christine Woodhead (Routledge, 2011).
  • Nurhan Atasoy, Walter B. Denny, Louise W. Mackie, and Hülya Tezcan, Ipek: The Crescent & the Rose: Imperial Ottoman Silks and Velvets (Azimuth Editions, 2001).
  • Evliya Çelebi, Seyahatname, vol. 3 (c. 1640), on Bursa (the standard readable account).