II. Abdülhamid Döneminde Osmanlı İstihbarat Ağı (1876-1909)

Abstract

Intelligence gathering activities of Ottoman Empire and impact of such activities on decision-making process are one of the less understood subjects of Ottoman history. In particular, the purported ignorance of Ottomans about Europe, not sufficiently following and understanding the European politics by them and prejudiced and exact generalizations about which their foreign policy preferences are faulty take the advantage of weakness of the literature related to intelligence works. In fact, Ottoman Empire attached the special importance to the intelligence activities in order to be informed about the current situation, threats around it and their enemies from its establishment. It may be said that Ottomans follow the examples of Medieval Islamic states and Seljuk that succeed them as being in some other applications of the empire. Ottoman rulers always wanted to keep active the intelligence activities and mechanisms both in maintaining the peace and order in the country, and in counterworking against the intelligence works of hostile/opponent states. As seen in other examples worldwide, intelligence collection methods and processing of information and establishing the mechanisms for this purpose required the certain process and experience. Even though there is not any intelligence structuring in the today’s standards in Ottoman Empire until the beginning of century XX, it is observed that a special importance is attached to the intelligence activities and that it is benefited actively from those activities. In this work, it is tried to reveal the structure and function of Ottoman intelligence network during the period of Abdulhamid II. Our final target is to reveal how the intelligence network, which the ruling elites of government of that period and especially, Abdulhamid II attach the great importance to, is used as one of the fundamental tools both in protecting the government’s authority specific to “Yıldız Palace” in internal policy and in directing the policies of empire in the foreign policy during the period of Abdulhamid II when the empire enters into a critical phase under the impact of changing internal and external conjuncture giving particular importance to the structural and functional sides of this network. Furthermore, in this work, the channels and strategies, which Ottomans used in order to provide intelligence, are discussed specific to the period of Abdulhamid II, and the intelligence network is examined in the provinces and beyond borders, not only the Ottoman’s central intelligence.