Activities
Transottoman Retro-Perspectives: Eastern European-Near Eastern Shared History and its Global Implications
A conference to mark the conclusion of the priority programme Transottomanica (DFG SPP 1981) and future research.
At the end of 2023, the DFG Priority Program Transottomanica will draw to a close. We want to mark the end of the program with a conference that will reflect on Transottomanica’s outcomes and discuss new avenues of research.
In the past six years, Transottomanica conducted research on mobility dynamics and their spatial and societal consequences in all their dimensions between Eastern Europe and the Middle East from the early modern period to the twentieth century. We started from the observation that to date, social and (trans)cultural ties between Poland-Lithuania, Russia, the Ottoman Empire and Persia have not been the subject of systematic historical research. Therefore, the program focused on societal ties and communication practices in the context of a large transregional migration society, which emerged as a consequence of large scale mobility between these dominions. This approach promised to change our understanding of globalized European and Asian histories in a transcontinental context. Instead of constructing “one” new region, our “post-area studies” approach allowed us to look beyond the established area containers and focus on concrete contexts and fields of social interaction with different spatial and social ranges unified by the lens of mobility: Our focus was on reciprocal processes of migration, knowledge circulation, travel, trade and mobility of entire societies between Muscovy and then the Russian Empire, Poland-Lithuania, the Ottoman Empire and Persia, always including military dynamics. In the program’s publication series, we proposed a research perspective in an introductory volume (2019) and gathered preliminary results in three more volumes: Knowledge on the Move (2021), Transottoman Matters (2022), Transottoman Biographies (forthcoming 2023).
The conference will give opportunity to the working groups and research projects assembled in the program to discuss their results. Moreover, the event wants to open the horizon again and invite researchers with a similar approach to reflect on their relationship with Transottomanica. This can include a critical assessment of common concepts, a reflection on difficulties and avenues of future research that would productively enlarge and deepen the Transottoman approach.
Workshop organised by
Panel at MESA Annual Meeting 2023
Abstract:
The historical role of the Ottoman Empire as a sea power is still an understudied subject, despite a vast array of narrative and archival sources and especially in relation to its mobility dynamics within the cross-border macro-region of the “Transottoman space”, comprising the Black Sea, the Adriatic, the Mediterranean, and the Red Sea with their adjacent land and sea powers. Drawing on a variety of sources in different languages, this panel aims to explore various dimensions of Ottoman maritime history, covering the early period of Ottoman rule from the 15th to the 18th century, with a special focus on patterns of mobility in the Transottoman micro-region. The Ottoman Naval Arsenal (Tersāne-i Amīre) on the Golden Horn in Istanbul was the center of ship building and naval administration. Having been established in the fifteenth century, the Ottoman navy became a major protagonist in the ongoing conflict in the Mediterranean during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In spite of its effective organization and its military successes, the Ottoman navy was, with regard to technology, a highly conservative force, consisting mostly of rowing vessels, in particular the various types of galleys. This panel brings together original papers on Ottoman maritime activities, technologies, tactics, and organizations from a Transottoman perspective. A group of papers will discuss encounters with other sea powers, such as the Republic of Venice and the Knights Hospitaller, or other regional competitors such as the Mamluk Sultanate. Other papers will explore the internal politics, organizations, and technologies of early modern Mediterranean navies. Socio-economic aspects of the maintenance of a powerful naval force, such as supplying raw material for shipbuilding or the recruitment of laborers for the naval arsenal, will also be analyzed. The six papers of this panel will be based on a wide range of primary sources, from historiographical texts, like chronicles, diaries, biographies, to archival documents, such as state registers of the important affairs, prison registers of the naval arsenal, and senate minutes.
With contributions by Suraiya Faroqhi, Albrecht Fuess, Gul Sen and Andreas Helmedach.
More information here .
Panel at 54th German Historians' Day in Leipzig from 19 to 22 September 2023
Zaur Gasiomov (chair)
With contributions by:
Gözde Yazici-Cörüt (Leipzig)
Dennis Dierks (Leipzig)
Alexandr Osipian (Berlin)
More information at here .
Conference
Vernetzte Sprachen und Religionen entlang der Seidenstraße – von der Antike bis in die Frühe Neuzeit
29-30 June 2023, Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig
Session IV
Die Frühe Neuzeit: Übersetzungs- und Mobilitätsdynamiken
(Moderation
Sebastian Kolditz
)
11:45-12:30
Philip Bockholt
&
Tobias Sick
(Münster)
Die westliche Seidenstraße am Beginn der Frühen Neuzeit: Zu Übersetzungen persischer Ratgeberliteratur ins Türkische
12:30-13:15
Stefan Rohdewald
(Leipzig)
Transottomanische Implikationen der Seidenstraßen: Mobilitätsdynamiken via den Nahen Osten und das östliche Europa
Workshop organised by Yusuf Karabicak, Mainz. For more information see program.
Workshop at IEG Mainz organised by Denise Klein, Barbara Henning et al.
with Polina Ivanova (Giessen)
When Bayezid Pasha Met St. Nicholas: Reconsidering Post-conquest Amasya through the Prism of Armenian Memory Literature
More info here .
A conference organised by Philip Bockholt, Hülya Çelik, Ludwig Paul and Ani Sargsyan
Draft Program
April 27, 2023
18:00 Andrew Peacock (St Andrews):
Persian in the Lands of Rum: Texts, Translations and Transformations
April 28, 2023
9:30-11:00 Panel I: Ottoman Historiography and Persian Poetry
Ronnie Agassi Cohen (Jerusalem): Persian Epic Poems in the Service of Ottoman Historiography of the 15th and 16th Centuries
Veronika Poier (Vienna): Who decided? Arabic and Persian Inscriptions in the Context of Political and Artistic Agency in the Green Mosque of Sultan Mehmed I in Bursa (1419–1424)
Zakir Hussein Gul (Birmingham): Kemālpaşazāde’s Nigāristān: A 16th Century Ottoman Emulation of Saʿdī’s Gulistān and Jāmī’s Bahāristān
11:00-11:30 Coffee break
11:30-13:00 Panel II: Ottoman and Persian Poetry
Benedek Péri (Budapest): Ottomans and the First Ghazal of Ḥāfiẓ
Renaud Soler (Strasbourg): To Have a Heart Like a Kebab: History of a Metaphor in Persian and Ottoman Literature (11th–19th Centuries)
Kameliya Atanasova (Lexington, VA): Persian Poetry and Sufi Authority: A Look at an Early Modern Ottoman Qurʾān Commentary
13:00-14:00 Lunch
14:00-16:00 Panel III: Literature in Translation
Sacha Alsancakli (Paris): Reading Mustawfī in Turkish: On a Translation of the Nuzhat al- Qulūb Produced in 17th-Century Bidlīs
Philip Bockholt (Münster): Mirrors for Princes and the Emergence of an Empire: On the Production of Hümāyūnnāme Manuscript Copies in the 16th and 17th Centuries
Tobias Sick (Münster): Translating and Reading Persian Advice Literature in the Multilingual Ottoman Context: Tracing the Reception of the Pandnāma-yi ʿAṭṭār
Şeyma Benli (Istanbul): Riyāżü l-Ḳavāʿid Ḥiyāżü l-Fevāʾid: Maqāmāt-i Ḥamīdī’s Sole Translation into Ottoman Turkish by the 18th-Century Ṣelāḥaddīn ʿUşşāḳī
16:15 Manuscript Collection of the Gotha Research Library
19:30 Dinner
April 29, 2023
09:30-10:30 Panel IV: Transottoman Perspectives
Ludwig Paul (Hamburg): The Linguistic Ecology of the (Trans)ottoman Area
Stefan Rohdewald (Leipzig): Transottoman Perspectives on Usages of Persian North of the Ottoman and Persian Empires
10:30-11:00 Coffee break
11:00-12:30 Panel V: Ottoman Lexicography I
Ani Sargsyan (Hamburg): (Re-)Writing and/or Editing Tuḥfetü s-Seniyye ilā l-Ḥażreti l- Ḥaseniyye: The Trajectories of Learning Persian in the 16th–18th Centuries
Ali Shapouran (St Andrews): An Arabic-Persian Dictionary for Turkish Speakers: The Case of the Anonymous al-Mirqāt
Aslıhan Gürbüzel (Montreal) & Selim Kuru (Seattle, WA): Persian Primer or Literary Anthology? A Reader Oriented Approach to Tuḥfe-i Şāhidī
12:30-13:30 Lunch
13:30-14:30 Panel VI: Ottoman Lexicography II
Hülya Çelik (Bochum): Viennese Court Librarian Sebastian Tengnagel’s Persian-Turkish- Latin Dictionary Project and a Turkish Captive’s Multilingualism in 1614
Nil Palabıyık (London): English Orientalists and their Persian-Turkish Dictionaries
14:45-16:15 Tour of the Castle
16:30-17:30 Coffee break & Concluding discussion
19:00 Dinner
Organization: Barbara Henning, Ani Sargsyan, Taisiya Leber
Draft program
13th of April, Thursday
14.00: Greetings & Introduction: Barbara Henning, Ani Sargsyan, Taisiya Leber
14.30 – 15.30: Outcomes of the first workshop on expertise (2021)
Speakers: Andreas Helmedach, Yusuf Karabicak
15.30 – 16.00: Coffee break
16.00 – 17.30: Panel I: Modern Expertise
Chair: Barbara Henning
Aylin de Tapia, Cappadocia as a Field for Expertise: Paths of three Rum “experts” of Cappadocia in search of a historical identity
Meriç Tanık, Proving one’s worth: Ottoman agronomists’ and veterinarians’ rhetoric on the essential utility of their expert-knowledge
17.30 – 17.45: Coffee break
17.45 – 18.30: Keynote lecture by Elise Massicard (CNRS, Paris)
19.00: Dinner
14th of April, Friday
9.00 – 10.30: Panel II: Early Modern Expertise
Chair: Taisiya Leber
Hasan Çolak, Multilingualism as a form of transcultural expertise: A study of multilingual Ottoman Muslim intellectuals in the eighteenth century
Polina Ivanova, Manuscript as a site for expertise: MS 532 of the Matenadaran collection (Armenia)
11.00 – 12.30: Panel III: Early Modern Experts
Chair: Ani Sargsyan
Eda Genç Atalay, Eugenios Voulgaris and the Enlightenment in the Orthodox Church
Tomislav Matić (online), Croatian Experts on the Ottoman Empire in the 15th and 16th Century
12.30 –13.30: Lunch break
13.30 – 14.00: Publication Strategy – leading questions and steps on the way to the special issue
14.00 – 14.30: Coffee break
14.30 – 15.30: Final discussions
Organized by Henning Sievert, Department of Middle Eastern Studies (Islamwissenschaft), University Heidelberg, and by Gül Şen, Transottomanica. For more information visit: https://www.ori.uni-heidelberg.de/islamwissenschaft/veranstaltungen/springschool.html
Panel at MESA 2022, Denver
Session XIII-02, 2022 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, December 4 at 1:30 pm
- Dr. Suraiya Faroqhi -- Presenter
- Dr. Albrecht Fuess -- Presenter
- Dr. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky -- Discussant
- Dr. Gul Sen -- Organizer, Presenter
- Andreas Helmedach -- Presenter
-
In the second half of the fifteenth century, tensions increased between the Ottoman Empire and the Mamluk realm about the supremacy over Eastern Anatolia. In this conflict, new war techniques like the usage of firearms and canons plaid a vital role. However, the Mamluks were disadvantaged in the availability of the necessary resources and lacked specialists. Therefore, we observe an influx of European experts into the Mamluk realm where they served as interpreters and diplomats to European powers or as instructors for the Mamluk army about how to build and use the new arms. Still the full role of these Europeans is understudied. Little is known, as well about their personal mobility and how they actually came to the Mamluk Empire. When did they convert to Islam to serve in the army or administration? The present contribution will therefore gather the available information in Arab historiography and travel accounts of European pilgrims as well as biographies of Europeans like Ludevico de Varthema who served in the Mamluk army prior to returning to Europe. These texts and memoires will be scrutinized as well in order to see how the Ottoman and Mamluk Empires are depicted by these experts prior to their decisive conflict in 1516/17. By doing so the contribution will shed light as well on the process of "Ottoman-like" military and administrational reforms in the Mamluk Sultanate which actually meant that it became increasingly part of a Transottoman periphery.
-
The Republic of Venice and the Ottoman Empire were at war for much of the second half of the seventeenth century. There is significant research on the diplomatic and military history of these years. However, little is known about the impact these wars had on the people who fought them. This paper shall offer a bottom-up view at the Venetian-Ottoman encounters by investigating the military career and crisis of a Venetian officer, Colonel Francesco Muazzo. It describes the life of a soldier fighting the Ottomans across the Eastern Mediterranean and shows that Muazzo’s experiences of violence and mobility challenged his ideals and loyalties. These experiences eventually led him to write a history of the first Morean War, which contains some autobiographical elements and can be read as an ego-document. Francesco Muazzo’s active military service in the Venetian army put him on the path to sheer endless mobility from one theater of war to the next: Venice and Italy, Crete, Dalmatia, the Peloponnese, Athens and the sea and land passages connecting those places. This Transottoman mobility heavily imprinted on Muazzo’s biography and shaped the path of his life. The wars he fought brought him into contact with various people, both friend and foe, of different languages, religions, ethnicities and social backgrounds. Being exposed to many different ethnic idiosyncrasies, religions, traditions and value-systems helped Muazzo sharpen his own value-system and clarify his soldierly principles. He differentiated according to his values, not according to some version of “belonging”. Whenever his “own” prove to be incompetent, lie, cheat, or violate humanity, they are exposed and critizised scathingly - be they Muazzo’s fellow fighters in the army, Venetian noblemen, or his direct superior in the chain of command. The repeated violations of his principles and values led him into a process of estrangement: While Muazzo never lost his loyalty to Venice, his disappointment with the increasingly unprofessional conduct of war led him to a complete loss of confidence in the Venetian oligarchic ruling class and political system. Thus, an analysis of his work sheds light on many aspects of military mobilities in the Transottoman space in the second half of the seventeenth century.
-
Mehmed Necati Efendi (d. 1793) was an Ottoman official who was appointed as secretary to the Ottoman commander-in-chief of the Crimea during the Ottoman-Russian War of 1768-1774. After he was taken prisoner with a large group of Ottoman officials, he spent ca. four years in Russian captivity in St. Petersburg, only to regain his freedom after the Peace of Küçük Kaynarca in July 1774. Having returned to Istanbul, Necati Efendi wrote his memoirs on his detention on Crimea and then in St. Petersburg. Although regular Ottoman envoys to eighteenth century Russia wrote a number of embassy reports or comparable records, Necati’s memoires are the only known captivity narrative on this country from that period. As a historical source, the text is a unique document on the Ottoman-Russian relations and conflicts in the second half of the eighteenth century. From a Transottoman vantage point, this paper examines early modern war captivity as a special form of human mobility, which took place in the space between the Ottoman and the Russian Empire. It deals with the question how far Necati Efendi, as an Ottoman official, was able to narrate his forced mobility, i.e. the captivity, as an individual experience. As mobile actor and a war captive, he was not acting between clear-cut borders of the “self” and “others”, but in intertwined spheres, and eventually in his first-person narrative he reflects these multiple levels and dynamic processes. Furthermore, a close reading of this source contributes to a better understanding of the phenomenon of war captivity as a specific form of mobility dynamics as well as of inter-imperial relations and diplomacy in the Transottoman space in the eighteenth century.
-
The memoirs of two refugee women During the last years of the Ottoman Empire, refugees and deportees were everywhere. People became ‘transottoman’ without ever having planned such a thing, crossing borders because state officials forced them to do so and/or this seemed the only possibility of survival. Usually without vocational or professional training, women found enforced mobility especially traumatic. However, some young females took on the challenge and in a few instances, produced narratives reflecting their efforts to make a living in an unfamiliar environment. The present paper deals with two such memoirs, the work of female mobile actors using whatever family support remained available and building successful lives, aided by good health and plenty of energy. Descended from Muslim notables of Macedonia, Belkıs Halim Vassaf (1904-98) experienced her family’s flight as a child in primary school. By the time of arrival in the Anatolian town of Akhisar, she had lost both parents, but with the help of her half-brother Zekerya (Sertel) between 1918 and 1921, she attended the teachers’ training school (Darülmuallimat) in Istanbul as a boarder. While very detailed, the narrative of Belkıs Halim Vassaf is at considerable remove from the events narrated. She spoke her memoirs on tape in old age, and the tapes do not seem to be publicly available. Therefore, it is hard to say to what extent later experiences colored Halim Vassaf’s memories, nor can we exactly pinpoint the considerable interventions of her son, the author Gündüz Vassaf. Other editors may have added further layers of comment. A woman despite her male pseudonym, Cahit Uçuk (1909-2004) had lived in and around Salonika. She did not experience the turmoil of the Balkan Wars directly, deriving her account from the reports of her grandmother and father, a young official in the late Ottoman Balkans. Especially the grandmother narrated her experience of humiliation, robbery, and physical aggression. While Uçuk’s memoir provides a lively account, as a historical source, it is difficult to utilize; for the author did not specify who shared which parts of the story with her at what time. Despite their drawbacks, these two books are instructive to the historian as they reflect female experiences of war and flight, otherwise rarely recorded. We can only ‘peel off’ layers of intervention as far as possible, and otherwise, take the texts as primary sources for the views current at the time of (probable) composition.
Panel at MESA 2022, Denver
Session VIII-05, sponsored by Organized under the auspices of DFG Priority Programme 1981: Transottomanica, 2022 Annual Meeting
On Saturday, December 3 at 11:00 am
- Prof. Mostafa Minawi -- Chair
- Mr. Ibrahim Halil Kalkan -- Presenter
- Barbara Henning -- Organizer, Presenter
- Dr. Owen Miller -- Co-Author
- Mr. Yusuf Karabicak -- Presenter
- Ms. Bengisu Zeynep Ertugrul -- Presenter
-
This paper focuses on the status of the Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople following the Greek Revolution of 1821. Using Ottoman Turkish and Greek documents together with narrative sources from the period, it explores the creation of a new modus operandi between the Sublime Porte and the Patriarchate. The paper argues that the Patriarchate and its agents successfully negotiated a new position for themselves in the Ottoman Empire and managed to translate their spiritual power into an administrative leadership of their flock by 1830s. The Greek Revolution of 1821 fundamentally changed the status of the Greek-Orthodox populations of the Ottoman Empire. In the early months, the Sublime Porte found it difficult to differentiate between the revolutionary Greeks and the rest of the Ottoman Orthodox populations. Orders warning governors to be careful about possible Orthodox rebellions were sent to as far as Kars and Baghdad, while many documents spoke about the Ottoman Orthodox as though they were all in rebellion everywhere in the Empire. Rum milleti had thus two meanings: not only Ottoman Orthodox populations but also Greek nation in a modern understanding. This equalization of revolutionaries with Ottoman Orthodox subjects was symbolized in the execution of Patriarch Grigorios V in April 1821. However, even after the execution, the Sublime Porte had to make use of the Patriarchate to negotiate with the rebels or force them back to submission. Ottoman government needed the Patriarchate to go back to a status quo or at least to carry out an effective damage control. This gave the agents of the Patriarchate enough leeway to negotiate their status in the post-revolutionary Ottoman world. By 1830s, just before the creation of an independent Greek Kingdom, the Patriarchate managed to definitively differentiate the rebels and their newly independent country as Yunan and made itself the sole guarantor of the submission of the Rum milleti, now decisively meaning the Ottoman Orthodox populations. In this process, the Patriarchate also translated the religious primacy of its agents into administrative responsibility in Ottoman provinces opening the way for these prelates’ participation in Tanzimat councils.
-
This paper is set in the environs of the Eastern Anatolian town of Palu at the turn of the twentieth century. At the heart of this investigation is a puzzle: how did the local elite manage to maintain their power in the face of first Tanzimat (1839-1876) and then Hamidian centralization (1876-1908)? Based on the study of a range of primary sources, it appears that the local elites were able to ‘use’ the Armenian Question, and the fears of the central authorities, to their advantage. The elites increasingly presented themselves as “loyal Muslims” in the face of supposedly “seditious Armenians” to maintain control of the land. We therefore suggest an innovative perspective to study the Armenian Question, in which the concept of identity should be approached historically rather than as taken for granted. To deepen our conceptual perspective on the relationship between the question of identity and Armenian Question, we draw significantly on the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois and thereby resort to a comparison between the late nineteenth century Eastern Anatolia and contemporaneous history of post-Reconstruction South in the US, which will help us make sense of similar patterns of group boundary maintenance, retention of hierarchies and mass violence. Our paper relies primarily on a voluminous legal file compiled from the catalogues of the Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives, İstanbul composed by different segments of the region’s population, including Armenian and Muslim peasants, members of the local elite and Armenian religious dignitaries. It is based on a group of official complaints which accuse the district governor of Palu, Mehmed Tevfik, of brutality and corruption. The narrative emerging out of the official process they prompted, which involves basically an executive inquiry and legal prosecution, provides an incredibly telling prism to study the changing configuration of land, power, and identity in the region and as an extension the Armenian Question. Our research is complemented principally by a meticulous reading of the contemporaneous ABCFM reports and memoirs.
-
This contribution engages with discussions about hierarchy and social status in the period of transition from the late-Ottoman Empire into post-imperial settings. It takes the example of the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad (seyyid, pl. sadat) as a starting point to explore how members of a highly privileged group, to which access was closely monitored from both within the group and by the Ottoman authorities, dealt with sociopolitical changes in the late-19th century and subsequently navigated the end of the Ottoman Empire and the onset of secular and nationalist political orders in the region. It is of particular interest in this regard to trace and understand strategies that individual actors and communities relied on in their attempts to translate former status, privileges and resources into newly emerging contexts. The late-19th century correspondence that the highest representative of the seyyids in the Ottoman administration, the nakibü’l-eşraf in Istanbul, exchanged with community leaders in the provinces provides detailed insights into network structures and illustrates demands that were made from within the seyyid community. It emerges from these documents that already during the Ottoman reform period of the late-19th century, seyyids felt the need to safeguard existing privileges, notably with regard to taxation, exemption from military service and their representation in the provincial councils. In addition, the dossiers of the nakibü’l-eşraf permit to identify individuals in different Ottoman provinces who stand out as spokespersons of the local seyyid communities. The second part of the paper takes its cue from there, making use of local archives from Ottoman Syria with an emphasis on the region of modern-day Jordan to follow-up on these individual trajectories from the late-19th into the early-20th century, thus joining the view from the Ottoman central administration with a biographical approach that zooms in on local actors and their strategies in claiming and affirming status. These cross-readings of administrative discourses and local case studies add nuance to existing research into post-imperial transitions, pointing to a continuum and a lively back-and-forth of negotiations about privileges that begins already in the late-19th century, rather than a sudden transformation and complete devaluation of seyyid status after the end of the Ottoman Empire. A focus on actors and their strategies highlights attempts of translating a variety of former status markers – e.g. naming practices and titles, privileged access to resources and restricted bodies of knowledge or social standing, religious charisma and political influence – into new contexts.
-
This paper examines the concept of münevver, commonly translated as “intellectual,” in the historiography of the late Ottoman Empire and early republican Turkey. Combining quantitative and qualitative approaches in historical sociology, I trace the genealogy of münevver both as a concept and a social category that can be translated as “enlightened,” “luminary,” or “intellectual,” depending on the context. This social category was mobilized first by late Ottoman thinkers and writers such as Fuat [Köprülü] and Ziya [Gökalp] as a quasi-translation of the French intellectuel crystallized during the Dreyfus Affair. It was then adapted and re-defined by the ruling Republican People’s Party (RPP) in the formative years of the Republic of Turkey. The RPP leadership considered its local spokespeople as münevver, the Halk Hatipleri (People’s Preachers), a group of party members chosen to communicate viva voce the “values, principles, and ideas” of the new regime in the provinces. By analyzing a corpus of texts produced by ideologues and officers of the ruling party, I show how the notion of münevver in this post-imperial setting was linked to but varied from that of the “intellectual,” another social category that emerged in Europe, but particularly in France with the Manifesto of the Intellectuals. I contrast the elite conceptualizations of münevver found in canonical texts produced by key intellectual figures of early republican Turkey with a sociographic analysis of People’s Preachers, a group that the state-party regime charged with the responsibility of “enlightening” (tenvir) the “popular masses” (halk kitleleri). My analysis combines canonical (often published, edited, and re-edited) and noncanonical historical sources. It contributes to intellectual and social history by comparing normative and textual sources with historical sociology of circa 3500 party “preachers” selected between 1931 and 1950. In so doing, it demonstrates that münevver of early republican Turkey included a humbler and a larger body of local elites and notables whose distinctive social trait ranged from access to education, partnerships that persisted from empire to republic, and sometimes, simply literacy. Charging them with a kind of “responsibility of the intellectual,” the early republican leadership transformed different types of provincial elites, including civil servants and local notables, into party “intellectuals.”
New Area Studies - Transottoman Perspectives
Workshop at the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Islamic Studies, University of Bonn, 21-22 October 2022.
Convenors: Stephan Conermann, Zaur Gasimov, Veruschka Wagner
Panel at 14. Arbeitstagung der Arbeitsgemeinschaft „Frühe Neuzeit“ im Verband der Historiker und Historikerinnen Deutschlands.
With contributions by
Iwan Iwanov, Mainz:
Yusuf Karabicak, Mainz:
Enlightened Words, Grand Promises: Russian and Ottoman Declarations in the Ottoman Russian War of 1768–1774.
Alexander Bauer, Bonn:
Die Sprache von Gefangenschaft und Leid bei Pavel Levašov (1719-1820)
Gül Sen, Bonn:
Sprache der Gefangenschaft: Unfreiwillige Mobilität und Fremdheitserfahrung im osmanisch-russischen Kontext
Panel at DOT 2022
34. Deutscher Orientalistentag, 12-17 September 2022, Freie Universität Berlin
Organized by Gül Şen, chaired by Stefan Rohdewald & Gül Şen
13 September, 10:00–13:30
Albrecht Fuess, Mercenaries in the Mamluk army of the later 15th century
Yusuf Karabicak, Why did the Sultan execute Linchou Lainé?: Limits of a Transottoman career between Warsaw and Istanbul (1748-1760)
Alexander Bauer, Pavel Levašov: Diplomat als Gefangener und Geisel: Gewaltsame Mobilität im transottomanischen Raum (1769-1771)
Gül Sen: War Captives and Forced Mobility between Istanbul, Crimea, and St. Petersburg (1768-1775)
Zeynep Arslan Calik, Between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs: An Attempt to Reveal the Demographic and Socio-Economic Outlook of a Human Mobility (1823-1825)
Alexandr Osipian, Facilitating Human Mobility: Caravan Traffic between the Ottoman Empire, Poland-Lithuania, and Russia, 1500-1700
Panel at DOT 2022
34. Deutscher Orientalistentag, 12-17 September 2022, Freie Universität Berlin
12 September, 17:00–19:00
Ani Sargsyan, Was bleibt, was wird unterwegs verändert? Auf den Spuren von "travelling concepts" in persisch- türkischen Wörterbüchern (1447-1600) im transottomanischen Kontext
Hülya Çelik, Der Wiener Hofbibliothekar Sebastian Tengnagel (gest. 1636) bei der Übersetzung des Lebens von Timur Leng aus dem Osmanischen ins Lateinische
Tobias Sick, Zur Osmanischen Adaption und Rezeption des Pandnāma- yi ʿAṭṭār: Übersetzung als Prozess und Produkt im Osmanischen Reich der Frühen Neuzeit
Philip Bockholt, Übersetzung in der Frühen Neuzeit als Gemeinschaftsprojekt: Zur türkischen Fassung von al- ʿAinīs ʿIqd al-ǧumān
Panel at the Thirteenth Biennial Iranian Studies Conference
30 August–2 September 2022, University of Salamanca, Spain
For more information see https://associationforiranianstudies.org/sites/default/files/AIS%202022_Final%20version.pdf
Persian Linguistics 1: Chair: Rainer Brunner
Persian farhangs from India and the Ottoman Empire in a comparative perspective: Ludwig Paul
What could the prefaces tell us about the Persian learning in the Ottoman Empire? A look at selected Persian-Turkish dictionaries (farhangs) of the 15th -17th centuries: Ani Sargsyan
A New Phase of Translation? On the Translations of Persian and Arabic Chronicles in Ottoman Istanbul in the 18th century: Philip Bockholt
Session organised by Prof. Dr. Frank Hadler (GWZO) and Prof. Dr. Stefan Rohdewald (Universität Leipzig)at the
ICHS Poznań 2020/2022,
Commission Internationale des Études Historiques Slaves (CIEHS).
Thursday, August 25, 2022 from 9:00 to 12:30
Thursday, August 25, 2022 from 14:00 to 17:30
Friday, August 26, 2022 from 9: 00-12: 30
Transregional relations of Eastern Europe and the Near East belong to the most under- researched topics of international historiography. Focused on the encounters (Panel I), conflicts (Panel II), and cooperation (Panel III) of what might be called the Slavic and the Islamic Worlds the Commission Internationale des Études Historiques Slaves (CIEHS) intends to open the field from the Middle Ages to the Present for future investigation.
Opening
Words of Welcome by Giulia Lami (CIEHS President, University of Milan)
1. Slavs and Muslims - Neighbors, Combatants, Allies over Centuries: An Introduction Frank Hadler (CIEHS General Secretary, GWZO Leipzig)
2. The Slavic World: What’s in a Name?
Stefan Troebst (Berlin)
3. The Islamic World: What’s in a Name?
Nedim Zahirović (Independent Scholar, Halle)
Panel 1: Encounters
Chair: Márta Font (University of Pécs)
1. Muslims and the Islam in the Eyes of East-Central European Historians in the Late Middle Ages
Grischa Vercamer (University of Chemnitz)
2. The Curia on Religious Encounters and Economic Cooperation with the Ottomans in Posttridentine Dalmatia
Jadranka Neralic (Hrvatski Institut za povijest Zagreb)
3. Russian Islam and Slavdom between the Soviet and post-Soviet Eras
Giulia Lami (University of Milan)/Simona Merati (Florida International University
Panel 2: Conflicts
Chair: Giulia Lami (President of CIEHS)
1. Vakhtang VI. and the Russian-Iranian Conflict in the 1720s
Nana Kharebava (University of Marburg)
2. The Rearguard of European Civilization. Russian Historiographical Perspectives in the 19th Century on Muscovite/Russia's Fight Against Islamic States
Katarzyna Błachowska (University of Warsaw)
3. Islam Instrumentalized. Uses and Abuses of History in Polish anti-Muslim Discourses Monika Bobako (Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań)
Panel 3: Cooperation
Chair: Monika Saczynska-Vercamer (PAN Warszawa)
1. Transottoman Mobility Dynamics between the Near East and Eastern Europe: Constellations of Long Durée or just Situative Moments (1500-1950)
Stefan Rohdewald (University of Leipzig)
2. "Discussion Partners, Diplomatic Agents and Prisoners. The Catholic Missionaries' adventures in the Crimean Khanate in the 17th Century."
Natalia Królikowska-Jedlińska (University of Warsaw)
3. The Principality of Transylvania as Mediating Space between the Ottoman Orient and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth“
Robert Born (BKGE Oldenburg)
4. Cairo as a Cultural Centre of Eastern European Muslims at the Beginning of the 20th Century
Dennis Dierks (University of Jena)
The workshop wants to analyze slavery and other forms of strong asymmetrical dependencies in Ottoman South Eastern Europe. We look to the Ottoman Empire from different angles and are thus interested not only in an Istanbul-centered perspective, but also in studies concerning regional aspects in its European provinces and border-regions – from the Crimean Khanate to Dalmatia, from Hungary to Crete, including connections with neighbouring regions.
Flyer
Programm
THURSDAY, JUNE 23, 2022
9:00 – 9:30 AM (CEST)
Welcome and Introduction
Stephan Conermann, BCDSS, University of Bonn
9:30 – 11:00 AM - PANEL I:
Chair: Stephan Conermann, BCDSS, University of Bonn
Dependence in Rural 17th Century Wallachia, Daniel Ursprung (University of Zurich)
Slavery in the Romanian Principalities and the Ottoman Empire. A Comparative Approach, Viorel Achim (Nicolae Iorga Institute of History, Romanian Academy, Bucharest)
11:15 AM–12:00 PM - PANEL II
Chair: Veruschka Wagner, BCDSS, University of Bonn
The Role of Slavery in the Development of the Italo-Ottoman Unofficial Border in the Red Sea (1869-1902), Giorgio Ennas (European University Institute, Fiesole and Firenze)
12:15 – 1:00 PM
Organizational Meeting of the Research Group "The Ottoman Europe: Methods and Perspectives of Early Modern Studies on Southeast Europe" – open to any-one interested
1:00 – 2:30 PM - PANEL III
Chair: Stefan Rohdewald, Leipzig University
Kidnapped: Selling Free People into Slavery and Disputes about the Ownership of Slaves, Suraiya Faroqhi (İbn Haldun University, Istanbul)
The Relationship of Mutual Dependency: The Ottoman Empire and Its Captives, Cemal Çetin (Selçuk University, Konya)
2:45 – 4:45 PM - PANEL IV
Chair: Suraiya Faroqhi, İbn Haldun University, Istanbul
Slavery in the Crimean Khanate and the Ottoman Empire: a perspective from the Hetmanate sources, Stanislav Mohylnyi (BCDSS, University of Bonn)
Violent Crimes as Manifestation of Superiority in Crimean Society, Zeynep Dörtok Abacı (Bursa Uludağ University)
Slaves, Captives, and Prisoners: An Analysis of Interdependencies in Crimean Society, Fırat Yaşa (BCDSS Fellow, Düzce University)
4:45 – 5:30 PM – Final Discussion and concluding remarks
Kontakt
Jan Hörber
Event Coordinator
events@dependency.uni-bonn.de
+49 228 73 62945
Please register for the workshop
by June 16, 2022 via email.
We will then send you a specific link for this conference so that you can join the JITSI meeting.
Panel at CIEPO 24
Comité International des Études Pré-Ottomanes et Ottomanes
June 21-25, 2022
Aristotle University
Research Dissemination Center Thessaloniki, Greece
What could Persian - Turkish dictionaries say about the “experts of knowledge” in the 15-16th centuries?
Ani Sargsyan
Greek Hierarchs as Experts of Religious Knowledge in the Texts Adversus Judaeos
(15th – 17th Centuries)
Taisiya Leber
Guardians of Genealogy: Professional Culture and Expert Knowledge of the Nakibü’l Eşraf in post-Tanzimat Istanbul
Barbara Henning
Workshop organised by Zaur Gasimov and Stefan Rohdewald.
Please register one day in advance at: zgasimov@uni-bonn.de .
You find more information here .
Panel at MESA 2021 organized by Gül Şen
Yusuf Ziya Karabıçak: "Defending Polish Liberty: A History of the Ottoman Declaration of War on Russia in 1768"
Gül Sen: "Crossing Borders: Transottoman Semiospheres in Necati Efendi’s Narrative of Russian Captivity (1771-75)"
Stefan Rohdewald: "Constructing Alliances Beyond the Limits of Otherness: Warsaw and Istanbul vs. Saint Petersburg according to Piotr Potocki’s Embassy Report from 1789"
Stephan Conermann: "Johann Christian Struve and Heinrich Christoph von Reimers: Two German-Speaking Observers in the Russian Diplomatic Mission to Istanbul (1793-94)"
Suraiya Faroqhi: Discussant
The DFG Priority Programme (SPP) “Transottomanica: Eastern European-Ottoman-Persian Mobility Dynamics” looks at social and (trans)cultural ties between the Muscovite Tsardom and/or Petersburg Empire, Poland-Lithuania, the Ottoman Empire, Central Asia and Iran from the early modern period to the beginning of the twentieth century. After the completion of the first phase of the project (2017–2020) and the forthcoming publication of four thematic volumes (see: https://www.transottomanica.de/pub/vrseries ), the second phase will look more closely at specific phenomena of transregional mobility within the region under study.
Practices of translation between languages and the pragmatic transfer of translated texts into actual usage have emerged as the topic central to the majority of the sixteen research projects in our network. To discuss this topic in greater detail, we invite interested scholars to the medieval town of Marburg to share their expertise with us at a conference in October, 2021.
Flyer
Organised in collaboration with the research group "Das osmanische Europa" and
University of Zurich, Department of East European History
Dennis Dierks: Is there something like Transottoman intellectual history? The example of peripheral Muslim reformism
Barbara Henning: Descendants of the Prophet and their privileges as a topic in Ottoman political thought: Legacies and late-Ottoman re-interpretations