The Logic of Fire: on Conflagrations in Early Modern Istanbul and the Limits of Database-Driven Historical Research

Abstract

How were fires distributed across time and space in early modern Istanbul? This article proposes an ontology designed to answer this question by atomizing historical fires into discrete spatio-temporal moments for processing within a relational database and GIS software. It draws on eighteen months spent closely reading a range of primary sources composed in Ottoman Turkish, Armenian, Armeno-Turkish, Dutch, English, French, German, and Italian, and georeferencing Jacques Pervititch’s more than two hundred fire insurance maps of Istanbul. In theory, a database built on this ontology could remain faithful to the original source material while highlighting long-term patterns in the temporal and spatial distribution of the city’s fires, and situating these trends within their broader social, political, and legal contexts. In reality, such an approach has significant analytical limitations because the amount of data entry required far exceeds the timeline of a standard research project conducted by an individual scholar. This article examines the analytical potential of digital methods combined with traditional qualitative analysis in studying historical disasters, and highlights the practical constraints undermining such database-driven historical research.