Research
Transottomanica: Eastern European-Ottoman-Persian Mobility Dynamics - Projects
To date, social and (trans)cultural ties between Russia, Poland-Lithuania, the Ottoman Empire and Persia from the early modern period to the beginning of the twentieth century have not been the subject of systematic historical study. The historical societies of the above-mentioned regions developed relationships that evolved and interconnected over centuries. The program will focus on the “transottoman” ties and communication practices which emerged as a consequence of mobility between these dominions and which have not previously become visible in studies of individual regions or bilateral relations. This approach promises to change our understanding of globalised European and Asian histories in a transcontinental context. Instead of constructing “one” new region, our “post-area studies” approach allows us to focus on several different contexts and fields of social interaction with different spatial and social ranges unified by the lens of mobility: Our focus will be on reciprocal processes of migration, knowledge circulation (travelling concepts), travel, trade and mobility of entire societies between Muscovy and then the tsarist empire, Poland-Lithuania, the Ottoman Empire and Persia. Since we are exploring undiscovered terrain, we will first carry out basic research. On the basis of these findings we will then develop suitable methodological tools for a new theory design that will take into account the specific requirements of our subject of research.
Transottomanica research programme in English and in German
Projects 2020-2023
- The 17th and 18th centuries were a highly complex period in the history of Georgia, in particular in its relationship with Iran, the Ottoman Empire and Russia. Officially divided since 1490, two major Christian kingdoms and a number of smaller principalities were bound together by a nostalgic longing towards a unified Georgian realm, but they had to face strong opposition by their imperial neighbors. The intensifying relations between Safavid Iran and Georgia, with many high-ranking members of the Georgian elite taking up military and administrative positions in Iran and the nominal conversion of Georgian kings to Islam, led to a growing circulation and transfer of knowledge and the vivid exchange of ideas and values. These were mirrored, in an exemplary way, in the Georgian historiography of this time. As part of a wider intellectual movement, the Georgian elites of this time endeavored to revive the tradition of Georgian historiography that had been dormant since the invasions of Timur in the early 15th century. Historiography became the central ideological instrument by which Georgian culture could distance itself from other cultural fields, especially from Iran and Iranian culture. All of these historical works actively negotiated questions of identity as one of the major characteristics of Georgian historiography of this period. Since most of them were authored in East Georgia, they mirror most strongly the issue of Iran-related alterity in their attempt to distance themselves from Iran and Iranian traditions and thus strengthening and developing their own identity.
- The present research project investigates and analyses seven central Georgian historiographical works stemming from this period. One can portray the renaissance of Georgian historiography as both a result of the process of Transottoman circulation of knowledge and as a critical reaction to it. This means that Georgian historiography was formed in a constant exchange with its Muslim neighbors Iran and the Ottoman Empire, conserving the existing knowledge of self and other in the historical memory for future generations in a narrative form. The main question is how Georgian historiography managed to both reinvent itself and to create new identities, using the Iranian other as ideological template and Iranian forms of historiographical writing as stylistic model: the creation of new patterns of terminology, the sacralization of imagined and abstract spaces, the creation of new historiographical models.
- The envisaged project analyses Ottoman-Russian mental entanglements by comparison of two reports written by two war captives. Both had fallen in a yearlong captivity during the same military conflict and wrote autobiographical texts about their years in custody. Necati Efendi (d. after 1776) was an Ottoman official and served as the registrar (defter emini) for Silahdar Ibrahim Pasha, the Ottoman commander in chief of the Crimea during the Ottoman-Russian War in 1768–74. Together with a group of Ottoman officials he became a prisoner of war for almost four years (1771–75), until he was released after the peace treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in July 1774. Back in Istanbul, Necati continued his profession as a member of the Ottoman bureaucratic echelon. This part of project (carried out by Gül Sen) relies on the captivity narrative of Necati Efendi, which is available in a number of extant manuscripts. Due to the structural and stylistic similarities, this narrative, entitled Tārīḫ-i Ḳırım (The History of Crimea), within the genre of Ottoman sefāretnāmes (embassy report). Pavel A. Levašev (d. 1820) was a Russian diplomat and served in Istanbul. At the beginning of the Ottoman-Russian War in 1768 he was imprisoned together with the diplomat Aleksej Michajlovič Obreskov. Later, as a captive of the Ottoman army, both traveled the land. After his liberation in 1771, Levašev went back to St Petersburg (together with Obreskov), where he started to work at the Collegium of Foreign Affairs. Levašev published his memoires of his captivity in St Petersburg in 1790 under the title Car’grader Briefe (Car’gradskie pis’ma) and Plen i stradanija rossijan u turkov – Captivity and Sufferings of the Russians among the Turks, a historical treatise spanning several centuries. This sub-project (carried out by Alexander Bauer) examines Levašev’s captivity narrative, which is already available in an edition, along with his other writings.
- By their texts, both Necati Efendi and Pavel A. Levašev contributed to the manifestation of Ottoman and Russian discourses on the “other”. The mutual perception must be seen against the backdrop of the increasing interconnections of the Russian-Ottoman space in the second half of the eighteenth century. On the Russian side, a kind of orientalism of its own was developed during the rule of Catherine II (r. 1762–96), whereas under Mustafa III (r. 1757–74) a first phase of reforms and diplomatic rapprochement with the European powers began. The war between two empires forced the protagonists into a mental confrontation with their opponents and compelled them to integrate themselves into their own imaginations. The project examines—in a comparative way—both captive narratives in a four step analysis: (1) The critical edition and translation of the Ottoman-Turkish manuscripts and the translation of the edition of the Russian texts; (2) text-based imaginations of the “other” in the context of the Russian-Ottoman cognitive interrelations in the Transottoman semiospheres (drawing on the concept of semiosphere, Lotman 1984) by means of narratological examinations; (3 )classification of the history of Russian-Ottoman relations in the second half of the eighteenth century; (4) embedding the texts in the coeval multicultural Transottoman context in Istanbul and St. Petersburg with focus on mobility, entanglements, and circulation of knowledge.
- Linguists and historians from Central and Eastern Europe, mostly Turkologists of Caraim-Jewish background from Poland like Sergej Szapszal and Ananiasz Zajaczkowski as well as Hungarian ethnographers and intellectuals such as Gyula Mészáros, Lászlo Rásonyi, Zajti Ferenc as well as Turkic exile intellectuals and experts from Azerbaijan (Ahmet Caferoglu), Crimea and Volga-region of Russia, Tatars and Bashkirs like Hamit Zübeyr Kosay, Zeki Velidi Togan, Abd. Inan influenced, co-shaped, and co-initiated the transfer of knowledge and sciences to Turkey. The contribution of those philologists, historians of culture and literature from CEE to the foundation of Turkish Turkology, language planning, history-writing and museum-building is enormous, but still mostly neglected by the international scholarship.
- Those scientists were, however, closely interwoven with Turkish academia (Fuat Köprülü, Ragip Hulusi Özdem) and entangled with each other. Being rooted in several academic cultures and discourse spaces, these scientists were amazing examples of “entangled intellectuals” and acted as “cultural brokers” between Kemalist Turkey, Central Europe, and Soviet humanities. The project analyzes the transfers of knowledge and sciences in the fields such as language, history, and culture to post-Ottoman Turkey. The transfers will be examined by revisiting the Turkish language reform, and the state-backed history-writing and the definition of Turkish popular culture under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk as well as in later years.
This project focuses on the protagonists of the Young Turk movement in the late Ottoman Empire, i.e. the political opposition movement against the Ottoman sultan Abdülhamid II. (r. 1876-1909), which included activists of different ethnic, social and religious backgrounds united by their common goal of establishing a constitutional regime, which was achieved in 1908. Many of these Young Turks—Tatars and Armenians alike—came from the Caucasus and Transcaucasus, the Crimea or the Volga-Ural region, but were active as journalists and revolutionaries on both sides of the Russian-Ottoman border. The project investigates how their Russian background—their education as well as their individual and collective experiences of Russian Tsarist rule—influenced these political actors' thinking and actions. It explores their specific hopes and expectations regarding the Ottoman Empire given their Russian background. It further examines what impulses they brought back to their Russian-ruled regions of origin. This overall question is to be examined regarding four aspects: First, the Tatar and Armenian revolutionaries’ transimperial networks and mobility across the Ottoman-Russian borders and beyond to European and North African places of exile. Second, probing the intellectual history, the impact of their Russian origin—personal contacts, reading histories, education, experiences or events—on these protagonists’ political thinking and priorities as well as their geographical framework of reference, which possibly differentiated them from their comrades originating from within the Ottoman Empire. Thirdly, concerning political practice, possible adoptions of Russian-inspired modes of political organisation, style or self-representation, as well as mutual relations and interactions between the various groups (Ottoman or Russian Turks/Tatars and Ottoman or Russian Armenians). Fourth, the influences of the encounters and experiences in the Ottoman Empire on the ideas of the commuters or returnees to the Russian realms. The main sources for the study will be the writings of the Young Turk protagonists themselves: on the one hand their memoirs and exchange of letters, and, more importantly, on the other hand their numerous writings published in the newspapers they founded and directed, printed in Russian, Ottoman, Armenian, Tatar, Azeri and French.
- Aim of the project remains the investigation and representation of the war experience of the soldiers of the Venetian army in the Ottoman regions of Dalmatia, Albania and Greece, which they conquered, occupied and largely lost again in the two Morea Wars 1684-1699 and 1715-1718. As with other forms, military forms of mobility do not only represent a link between departure and end point. It also includes crossing spaces and the resulting processes of translocalization and transculturalization. The approach of analyzing military mobility as "transcultural entanglement" has proven fruitful and will therefore be pursued in the second phase of the project. The study will be carried out on two levels, which correspond to two different types of sources: On the one hand, there are life-writings from Venetian and recruited representatives of the military elite (from officer cadet upwards). These documents - so far neglected by research - have proven to be exceptional sources for a more in-depth analysis of military mobility and interdependencies. Individual examples show how the soldiers compared their ideas of the war against the Ottomans and the Ottoman Empire itself with the existing reality and how their patterns of interaction and cooperation with "colleagues" of their own and foreign armies and "locals" in conquered territories changed.
- Production and intercultural transfers of military experience and military knowledge within the ethnically and religiously heterogeneous Venetian army, as well as between the armies of the two hostile camps and with "third" European powers, will also be examined using this material. On the other hand, previously unknown files of the Venetian military administration of the conquered territories were localized in the first phase of the project. These sources by state authorities, to a certain extent replace missing life-writings from Venetian rank and file. The intention formulated for the first phase of the project, to capture as many aspects of the life of non- commissioned officers and ordinary soldiers as possible, should therefore be continued. This applies to everyday life, from recruiting to the way to the theater of war, garrison, camp and field service, billeting and other encounters with the civilian population (including women) and, in a nutshell, experiences, interpretations and processing of combat and violence, desertion and captivity, homecoming or illness, injury and death.
- The project examines the mobility and culture of the Anatolian Armenians from the 16th to the 18th centuries using the example of the city of Tokat (Armenian Եւդոկիա Ewdokia) as an early modern economic and cultural center of the Armenians in Anatolia. While the early modern history of Armenians in Poland-Lithuania (Lwów-Lviv, Kamieniec, Zamość), the Crimea, the Safavid Empire (New-Julfa in Isfahan) and in Constantinople is more thoroughly researched, Anatolia remains largely in the shadow. Tokat became an important Armenian center since the late 16th century in the context of the Safavid-Ottoman wars, as Armenians fled from embattled regions further east to the safety of Tokat and contributed to the city’s economic and cultural development. At the time of the Celali uprisings many Armenians of Tokat moved west again – this time to the Crimea, Wallachia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – while maintaining strong ties with their former homeland. Mediating between Armenian communities of Iran, Anatolia and Eastern/Central Europe and their respective cultures, Tokat became a vibrant hub of the Transottoman cultural transfer.
- Historiographically, the early modern period in the history of Armenian communities has always been overshadowed by history of the medieval Armenian kingdoms, as well as modern Armenian history and the history of the Armenian Genocide. History of Armenian communities of Anatolia in the early modern period has therefore been little researched, and its reappraisal is an important desideratum. The project is based on a variety of contemporary Armenian, Ottoman, and Polish sources now preserved in numerous manuscript collections and museums in Armenia, Turkey, Italy, Austria, Poland, Ukraine, Iran and other countries. While much in the history of Tokat is unique, this case study is emblematic of the dynamics common to many other Ottoman cities with significant Armenian presence. Methodologically, the study relies on prosopographic data and biographies of economic actors, writers, translators and clergymen from and related to Tokat; these are processed primarily with the help of the Actor-Network Theory.
- Yusuf Karabıçak
- This project aims to study the circulation of ideas and institutional frameworks between the Russian and Ottoman Empires focusing on the Ottoman-Russian War of 1768–1774. The project’s focus is the Ottoman Empire’s Orthodox Christian populations and their relationship to the Ottoman ruling elite. This project will be carried out using material in Ottoman Turkish and Greek located in the archives in Turkey and Greece.
- There will be three phases to the project. The first one will concentrate on the Ottoman ruling elite in 1768 and earlier to determine the approach of different networks to the question of war and of the war’s legitimacy. This phase will situate Ottoman arguments for war both in their Ottoman and in the wider European context emphasizing the circulation of ideas. The second phase will focus on the propaganda by the Ottomans and Russians during the war and compare the arguments they used in order to convince different populations to ally with their imperial projects. The third phase will discuss the aftermath of the war focusing on the Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople. The aim of the third phase will be to question whether institutional frameworks are comparable and whether they “circulate” between the two empires.
Denise Klein
The aim of this project is to produce a monograph dealing with the experience of immigration to Istanbul between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. During that period, the capital of the Ottoman Empire was one of the most vibrant and diverse cities of the world, attracting newcomers not only from the provinces, but also from beyond the borders of the empire. Unlike existing scholarship that tends to discuss how the Ottoman state and the society of Istanbul dealt with the large influx of people in this period, this study adopts, for the first time, the perspective of the immigrants to investigate how those who came to the city seeking work or a better life experienced their moving to and settlement in a new place. While profiting from the scholarship on Ottoman immigration and the history of Istanbul, this book also makes extensive use of the results achieved in historical research on migration in other regions and eras. The book develops in six chapters tracing the journey of the immigrant from 1) the time he or she left home to 2) their first encounters within the city and 3) their reception by the locals. It then examines 4) the process of homemaking and 5) the ties that immigrants kept with their places of origin, finally investigating 6) the emotional impact of immigration on the individuals. The work is based on a large array of literary and archival sources, many of which are little known or studied. Most significant are sources with a pronounced personal character such as diaries, letters and poems, as well as biographical dictionaries. Histories, political and medical treatises provide additional information as do court decisions and imperial decrees.
Taisiya Leber
This research project is dedicated to the role of the printing press in the preservation and transmission of (post-)Byzantine knowledge in the Ottoman Empire, in the Ottoman tributary states of Moldavia and Wallachia and in Poland-Lithuania and Muscovy in the period between the end of the 15th and the first half of the 18th century. Since Greek printing was unable to establish itself in the Ottoman Empire in the Early Modern Period (with the exception of a short-lived press in Constantinople in 1627), Greek hierarchs consciously sought alternatives outside of the empire. While Western European printing centers like Venice are relatively well-researched, “Eastern European” projects of the Greeks, which ran over networks between Orthodox patriarchates, episcopal sees, monasteries and monks as well as the Greek diaspora, have been rather neglected.
As far as the context of the printed texts was concerned, the focus is on interreligious and interconfessional polemic. Tracts of this sort were printed in Lviv, Vilnius and Ostrog (all in Poland-Lithuania), as well as in Bucharest, Snagov and Iaşi (Wallachia and Moldavia) in Greek, Old Church Slavonic, Ruthenian or Rumanian and influenced the Early Modern process of the formation of an Orthodox confession. Another point of emphasis are catechisms and other instructional materials (grammars, primers) as well as the transmission of Byzantine canon law via printed books of prayer (euchologia), nomokanons and lawbooks in Eastern Europe. While the Byzantine legacy is often described outside of the Ottoman context, the Transottoman perspective allows by-contrast the analysis of the appropriation and transmission of Byzantine knowledge in Early Modern Eastern Europe in a larger context.
Dirk Sangmeister
The Silesian Michael Kosmeli (1773–1844) was a law graduate, a versatile man of letters, a multilingual translator, a gifted musician and holder of a PhD in botany, but during his whole life he never obtained a regular and permanent position. He did not even bother to settle down anywhere, instead he spent his whole life wandering around as an itinerant scholar and vagrant musician, crisscrossing numerous countries of Europe and even parts of Asia. As an individual he embodied the exact opposite of a classical bookish scholar. Kosmeli preferred to ramble in a traversal corridor, which linked East Germany and Eastern Europe with the Ottoman Empire. He frequently made stop-overs in Berlin, Breslau (Wroclaw), Riga, Reval (Tallinn), St. Petersburg, Moscow, Tiflis, Jassy and Constantinople, where loosely knit networks of scholars and friends provided him with shelter and advice. Some of his journeys even led him to Persia (Isfahan, Shiraz); according to contemporaries he considered to convert to Islam. Often years passed, before Kosmeli resurfaced and returned to Germany. He did not only cross geographical, political and religious borders with an astonishing ease and confidence but rather considered the Transottoman corridor his natural habitat.
As the author of the travelogues “Rhapsodische Briefe auf einer Reise in die Krim” (1813) and “Harmlose Bemerkungen auf einer Reise über Petersburg, Moskau, Kiew nach Jassy” (1822), as a translator primarily of poetry (from Polish, Russian, Modern Greek, Persian and other languages), as a man of letters being acquainted with some of the most renowned contemporary scholars and writers (among them Hammer-Purgstall, Goethe, Chamisso and Jean Paul) and as a musician frequently appearing on both national and international stages, Kosmeli can be considered the most mobile and versatile German agent in the Transottoman field in the early 19th century. He adopted and transferred a variety of texts, ideas and tunes between the West and the East, acting as an influencer in both directions. Despite his far reaching journeys, his wide stretched relations and his numerous publications, Kosmeli is a completely forgotten figure nowadays on whom only a single scholarly article has been published. By embedding his life in the broader context of Transottomanica, this research project has two goals: In a first step, it aims at a coherent reconstruction of Kosmeli’s adventurous life and travels by means of a biography in combination with an annotated bibliography and a critical edition of his correspondence. Based on this bio-bibliographical foundation, I will then undertake a second step by defining and analyzing his role in the transfer of knowledge within the Transottoman corridor and context by profiling his relations and interactions with scholars, writers and musicians in both West and East as well as highlighting his merits in adopting and transferring knowledge, texts, ideas, tones and tunes.
Ani Sargsian
From the 11th to 19th century, Persian was an important and highly influential language of literature, education, partly also of administration and diplomacy, in large regions of the Eastern Islamic World. The dynamics and dispersion of Persian as a language of literature, and a lingua franca, and its surprising vitality and continuity, have not yet been studied sufficiently. With Persian-Turkic dictionaries from the first half of the 16th century, this project selects a well-defined group of primary sources to study the importance and development of Persian as a lingua franca. During the first project phase, the prefaces and colophones of 26 dictionaries that had been composed between 1460 and 1600, were studied, edited and translated. A consistent picture of interrelations and dependencies between the authors of the dictionaries and of their motivations and aims emerged and a development of linguistic and cultural knowledge and its transfer over one and a half centuries could be sketched.
The follow-up project will broaden the source basis, the questions and aims of the project. Based upon the results of the first project phase, the aims and the steps of the working process of the second phase can be defined more exactly and concretely. The focus of the study is no longer on the prefaces, but on the dictionaries’ main text. In addition to Persian and Turkish, the Arabic elements contained in the dictionaries will also be systematically included. Based upon a database of ca. 300 words, the project will statistically investigate the interrelations and interdependencies of the dictionaries. From this database, ca. 30–40 words will be selected for a more detailed philological analysis with the aim to study the complex interrelation of the three languages Persian, Turkic, and Arabic, but also the semantic developments of lexemes, and terms of conceptual history. Besides, a smaller number of dictionaries will be selected to study the development of grammatical knowledge.
Tobias Sick
The research project seeks to analyse processes of translation and adaptation of works of Islamic mysticism written in the languages Persian, Arabic, and Turkish, which took place in various (border) regions of the Ottoman Empire during the 16th to 18th centuries. The focus of the project will be on the socio-cultural background of these processes, that is, the conditions underlying the selection, imitation, adaptation, transmission and reception of texts. The project will apply current approaches developed in the fields of material philology and translation studies in order to examine textual, paratextual, codicological, and visual aspects of manuscripts as well as the background of the translators themselves.
The analysis of the selected source material will allow insights into the socio-political fabric of Ottoman scholarly culture and book culture as well as networks of Sufi brotherhoods in the capital Istanbul and across the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire and its borderlands with Iran. Thereby it will be possible to illuminate from a transregional perspective how actors coming from different cultural milieus adapted norms and representations to objects in a particular context.
Anna Vlachopoulou
This project will contribute to the research of the social, economic and transcultural links between the Ottoman Empire and regions of Western and Central Europe, Russia and Asia. Taking the trading houses of the Greek families Rallis and Zarifis as a vantage point it aims at scrutinizing the mobility of people, capital, raw materials and goods between different world regions during the development of global capitalism in the long 19th century. The focal point will be on the social and cultural history of these two transimperial entrepreneurial dynasties as a whole as well as the phenomenon of typical transimperial (or Transottoman) biographies. The aim of the project is to lay the foundations for a comparative history of merchants and entrepreneurs, which includes Southeast European and Transottoman spaces.
The follow-up project aims at working out the female part of entrepreneurially relevant activities in the merchant houses of the Rallis and Zarifis families in their economical and socio-cultural dimensions. An important task will be developing research strategies to reconstruct this “female part” from the sources and to place it in the larger context of the general network activities. By expanding the previous project to include the women of the family and the enterprise, a more complete and more differentiated picture of Transottoman trading houses and individual Transottoman biographies, male and female, will be drawn. This opens up new perspectives of social change, the peculiarities of family business and the emergence of modern entrepreneurship in the 19th century.
Veruschka Wagner
The research project deals with the spatial and social mobility of slaves from the Black Sea region in 17th century Istanbul. The project will trace the biographies of the slaves, who are regarded as mobile actors, from their capture through the period of enslavement to their manumission. An important aspect here is their scope of action, their relationships and networks in social and (trans)cultural interdependencies. The investigation intended to provide insights into the role of slaves in society and their potential for co-determination, in order to be able to make statements about the phenomenon of slavery and the social structure. The study is based primarily on the Istanbul court files, but also on other registers and narrative sources. Methodologically, the project pursues an historical-critical, text-analytical and collective-biographical approach.
Projects 2017-2020 Working Group 2: Circulation of Knowledge
Ani Sargsian
From the 11th to the 19th century, Persian was an important and highly influential language of literature, education, and partly also of administration and diplomacy, in large parts of the „Eastern Islamic world“. The dynamics and dispersion of Persian as a language of literature, and a lingua franca, and its surprising vitality and continuity, have not yet been sufficiently studied. With Persian-Turkic dictionaries that were written in the Ottoman Empire of the first half of the 16th century, the project selects a well-defined group of primary sources to study the „life“ and development of Persian as a lingua franca, as an exemplary case study. By comparing the manuscript situation and by studying the prefaces and colophons of approximately 20 dictionaries, the project will address questions like the following: Did the authors of these dictionaries influence each other? In what ways did they interact? Were their works used in studying Persian? What do these dictionaries say about their reception? Regional specifics and the historical and religious context will be taken into account as factors that influence language use. By systematically exploiting an important group of primary sources, the project promises to also shed light on other, more general questions: What was the importance of Persian for the cultural identity of Ottoman poets? Did these consider Persian language and literature as part of a „cultural transfer“, or as an inalienable part of their own culture? Overall, the project promises to provide an important case study for a better understanding of Persian-Turkic cultural transfer.
Taisiya Leber
In Western and Central Europe the beginnings of printing meant important changes in the written culture and circulation of knowledge during the Early Modern era. In contrast, in the Ottoman Empire, manuscripts played a bigger role as a book-medium until the 18th century, especially for Muslim writings. However, printed books also circulated in the Ottoman Empire. They were produced by several printing houses founded among others in Constantinople (Jewish and Greek), Thessaloniki (Jewish), Goražde and Belgrade (Serbian) or imported from the big European centres of printing. It was the task of the Orthodox Church and the monasteries that possessed a high degree of autonomy and transregional contacts to preserve Byzantine written culture. The research project aims at examining the role of printed books in the circulation of knowledge within the Ottoman Empire, as well as the development of post-Byzantine networks between Orthodox patriarchates, bishoprics and monasteries that expanded far beyond Ottoman frontiers via Poland-Lithuania to Muscovy. Exchange within this region was particularly important in the post-Byzantine world, because of religious, cultural, political and ideological interdependencies that the project will examine from a transottoman perspective. The goal is to study printed books from the Ottoman area from the end of the 15th until the end the 17th century and to compare the forms and contexts of book production by different religious groups. Particular attention will be paid to the subject of the Byzantine heritage in the Ottoman Empire, as well as in Eastern Europe during the Early Modern period.
Barbara Henning and Necati Alkan
The project documents and maps out the complex semantic field which underlies discourses about establishing, negotiating and transgressing social boundaries in the Ottoman context, adopting a broad time frame that spans from the 16th to the early 19th century. Delving into the subject of social boundaries in the Ottoman world comes with the realisation that to merely translate modern and Western concepts is of limited use: The direct translation of “boundary“, the Ottoman term ḥadd, can indeed be encountered in the Ottoman sources. However, other notions, e.g. the idea of an involuntary mixing or mingling (iḫtilāṭ) when talking about social boundaries, need to be taken into account to do justice to the complexities and internal dynamics of the Ottoman discourse. For theoretical support, the project draws on the field of conceptual history: Ottoman notions of boundaries will be read as complex semantic configurations, whose specific genealogies and trajectories can be traced. Changes over time in meaning, strategies of translation and appropriations, as well as differences between various genres and contexts in Ottoman usage will be recorded to explore two key hypotheses: First, Ottoman semantics pertaining to sociocultural boundaries are subject to changes which are related to broader transformations within Ottoman society. Second, the Ottoman semantics under scrutiny here do not exist in a vacuum. Rather, they are products of continuous exchanges and transfers of knowledge, thus reflecting epistemological entanglements and shedding light on frameworks of interactions that extend beyond the territorial borders of the Ottoman Empire. In terms of source material, the project puts normative texts in conversation with sources describing individual and concrete instances of negotiations of social boundaries. Moments in which social boundaries are being discussed are tracked down in a wide variety of sources, including legal discourse, advice literature and fictional texts, with a geographical focus on the Ottoman provincial centres of Trabzon and Diyarbekir.
The study of Muslim modernities often focuses on leading figures in the cultural centres of the Islamic World. This project adopts a different perspective. It investigates modernisation discourses of European Muslims before World War I as transimperial processes of communication. Focusing on Russian Crimea and Habsburg Bosnia, it discusses the example of two regions that, unlike other areas of post-Ottoman Europe, were not affected by a process of radical de-Ottomanisation. Both Bosnian Muslims and Crimean Tatars maintained cultural and emotional bonds to other regions of the Ottoman Empire and to the old metropole Istanbul. This holds especially true for members of the elite, whose biographies were often marked by a high degree of mobility. The continuing transimperial networks played an important role in processes of cultural and social modernisation, during which patterns of modernity were not only taken over from the Imperial Russian or Habsburg rulers but transferred from the Ottoman Empire as well. Moreover, the analysis of the Bosnian Muslim and Crimean Tatar press before World War I demonstrates a keen interest in and a close observation of the Muslim brethren in other former borderlands of the Ottoman Empire. In some cases, research can even reconstruct direct processes of communication between Bosnian Muslims and Crimean Tatars. This project will concentrate on such processes. It asks how key concepts of the Muslim modernisation discourse were first negotiated in translocal communication processes and then translated into local contexts in order to get popularised. Interpreting the negotiation of modernity as a complex entanglement of communication, the project seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the making of Muslim modernities in general.
Eveline Dierauff
Together with the sub-project by Alexandra Gerykova, this project examines debates on collective identity among Jewish and Arab populations in Palestine around the turn of the 20th century. This sub-project investigates local concepts of collective identity, group relations as well as state and society building in Palestine in the years before, during and shortly after World War I. This was a period of rapid transformation from Ottoman imperial rule to the British Mandate and rising Palestinian-Arab nationalist aspirations. In several case studies, the project analyses how political concepts from various backgrounds were debated by intellectuals from the rising Palestinian middle class. As main sources the Arab press, diaries and other types of contemporary Palestinian literature will be examined. The Palestinian actors’ views were deeply shaped by concepts of modernity, the age of Ottoman reforms and the cosmopolitanism of a trans-Ottoman migration society in the Jerusalem and Jaffa regions. However, the most controversial discussions developed around the catastrophic events during the 1910s such as the Tripoli War (1911), the Balkan Wars (1912/13), the rise of the Arab Movement for Decentralization in 1913 and, finally, the end of the Ottoman regime during World War I that resulted in the establishment of new political structures by the colonial powers. As a consequence of the political crisis, rising concepts of nationalism began to replace former ideals of multi-confessional and multi-ethnic Ottoman unity.
One of the stipulations of the peace treaty of Jassy, which ended the Russo-Ottoman war of 1787–1792, was the exchange of diplomatic missions between St. Petersburg and Istanbul. Thus in January 1793, the Ottoman envoy Muṣṭafā Rāsiḫ Efendi embarked on his journey to the court of Catherine II. When he returned eighteen months later in July 1794, he presented Sultan Selīm III with two reports: one sefāretnāme (embassy report) written by his secretary Seyyid ʿAbdullah that described the delegation’s journey and diplomatic mission, and one ʿarīża (letter), which contained his own observations on Russian politics and society. These two texts are the main sources for the project. Apart from an annotated translation, the principal task is to establish what kind of information they provided to the Ottoman ruler and his counsellors. To this end, the texts have to be analysed within the framework of Ottoman embassy reports of the 18th century and against the backdrop of both Ottoman-Russian relations and the multicultural context in Istanbul at that time. To these Ottoman texts, the project adds the writings in Russian and German of members of the Russian delegation to Istanbul headed by General Mikhail Illarionovič Kutuzov, i.e. letters from the envoy to the empress and leading Russian statesmen and to his family as well as travel accounts by Heinrich Christoph von Reimers and Johann Christoph Struve. These three sets of texts, which have been subjected to little or no research to date, will be read in a comparative perspective and analysed with regard to their narrative strategies.
Albert Weber
The study aims at collecting quantitative data from diplomatic correspondences in order to determine at which stage the Central and Western European states became aware that Wallachia and Moldova changed sides to the Ottomans politically and militarily. This “Ottomanisation” meant that the Danube Principalities became Ottoman vassal states and that their elites were integrated into the Ottoman ruling system in South Eastern Europe. During the first half of the 15th century there existed a double, Hungarian-Ottoman vassalage of Wallachia and during the second half a Polish-Ottoman, while Moldova was a Hungarian vassal. The power relations within the region especially changed after the 1460s following the Ottoman conquest of Serbia (1459) and Bosnia (1463). Hungary withstood Ottoman expansion (Belgrade 1456, Bosnia 1476, Transylvania 1479) but did not have the financial and military means to shield the Principalities against growing Ottoman influence. The Wallachian and Moldovan elites therefore had to negotiate their positions towards the Ottomans and accepted the Hungarian or Polish suzerainty only symbolically. The study will investigate the strategies applied by the voivodes, the Wallachian and Moldovan rulers, to maintain their diplomatic access to their Catholic neighbours and their elite networks. It will also investigate the level of knowledge the latter states had about the situation in the Principalities.
Projects 2017-2020 Working Group 3: Object Mobility
Robert Born
For a long time, the phenomenon of tributary states of the Ottoman Empire was treated from the perspective of national historiographies and therefore often viewed negatively. Only in the last two decades has a departure from the narrative of the “Ottoman yoke” to the new paradigm of “Pax Ottomanica” emerged. In the period that followed, research increasingly turned its attention to the negotiation and exchange processes between the Sublime Porte and the tributaries located on the periphery of its sphere of influence. The current project focuses on the material components of these complex relationships and explores the roles of the principalities of Transylvania, Moldavia and Wallachia as zones of cultural, artistic and technological transfer between the Ottoman Empire, Persia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In addition to objects and goods that were part of diplomatic negotiation processes and rituals, imported luxury goods are the main focus of the investigations. The aim is to analyse the distribution of imports from the Ottoman Empire and Persia, as well as their integration into local cultural practices and the new meanings often associated with the use of these objects.
Stephanie Armer, Eva Bergt und Anja Kregeloh
Since 1952 the Germanisches Nationalmuseum has had among its holdings 55 Ottoman carpets from the 16th to the 18th centuries from the Protestant Parish Church in Bistriţa. This collection, unique in terms of its historical completeness, will, for the first time, be the subject of a comprehensive research project, which will analyse not only the significance of the carpets in the early modern period but also their identity-generating role in the 19th and early 20th centuries. From the mid-15th century on, the carpets, made in Anatolia, reached Transylvania and testify to the intensive commercial ties and the cultural exchange between the Ottoman Empire and Transylvania that was at times subject to Ottoman dominance. Art-historical and art-technological examinations of a representative selection of 20 carpets and analysis of written sources aim at identifying the carpets’ dates and places of origin as well as trade routes more accurately. As status symbols and gifts the carpets played a role in the representational culture of the German nobility and middle class as well as the guilds in Transylvania. Starting with the Reformation they found their way into Protestant churches, usually as donations, where, despite their Islamic roots, especially those of the prayer rugs, they were accorded functions in the liturgy and ceremonies. Sources such as inventories, sacristans’ registers and wills are expected to shed light on this. In the first half of the 19th century they were not greatly esteemed by the parishioners, as witnessed by their present condition. Yet they were a part of the German-speaking culture in Transylvania and assumed an identity-shaping role for the Transylvanian Saxons, who, in the course of Romanian nationalist endeavours in the 19th century, attempted via their own historical awareness to delimit themselves from the neighbouring ethnic groups. From 1907 on the carpets were treated as museum items, often filling large wall spaces in Protestant churches. There they were displayed as testimony to Transylvania’s economic heyday in the 15th to 17th centuries, which was strongly influenced by the Ottoman trading links.
Florian Riedler
In the second half of the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire redefined its connections with the world by modernising already existing transport infrastructures such as roads and introducing new transport technologies such as railways and steam shipping. The project will explore the imprint this modernisation of infrastructure had on transottoman connectivity with East-Central Europe by focusing on the Lower Danube. This area that was regulated by the International Danube Commission was in the focus of international investors and, after the creation of the Ottoman Danube Province in 1862, also a priority area of Ottoman reform policies. I am particularly interested in the way different economic and political priorities of Ottoman and non-Ottoman actors as well as their mental maps were defined and negotiated in planning processes and the realisation of infrastructure projects. In this respect Ottoman actors such as politicians and officials, but also local elites and merchants that expressed their needs and wishes through petitions to the government, will be in the focus. Overall, the history of transport infrastructures offers the opportunity to describe the transformation of mobility spaces in an age of rapid modernisation and, at the same time, to stay receptive to older forms of entanglements between the Ottoman world and East-Central Europe. It is a central thesis of the project that infrastructural modernisation not only followed the logic of European imperialist penetration, but was also influenced by Ottoman dynamics.
Stefan Rohdewald
Oil was discovered as a commodity of the future only at the end of the 19th century. The Russian Petroleum Production Company Nobel Brothers (Branobel) and Rothschild Frères in Baku, which quickly became the European bellwether in this new field of industrial activities parallel to the U.S. Oil fields, operationalized its extraction: The world’s first oil tanker named “Zoroastr” was used on the Caspian Sea. In addition to the railway to the Black Sea, in 1906 what was then globally the longest kerosene pipeline opened. Yet by 1913, the U.S. surpassed Russia as the biggest producer of petroleum. In the run for the oil fields that were expected to be found in the still-Ottoman Middle East an international struggle evolved, including Great Britain, Germany and France. The project designed for the priority programme Transottomanica aims at contributing several articles to a history of oil including the growing portfolio of oil products, their transport, the infrastructures involved as well as social conflicts and transimperial competition in the quest for modernity changed by techniques and industry between Russia, Persia and the Ottoman Near East.
The project focuses on entanglements between diplomacy and economy, gifting and the circulation of commodities in the northern contact zone of the Ottoman Empire vis-à-vis Poland-Lithuania, Muscovy and the Crimean Khanate. Muscovy especially left a rich corpus of sources such as envoys’ reports and diplomatic accounting books conveying information on type, quality and value of the gifts (called pominki in Russian, upominki in Polish, bölek/hazine in Crimean Tatar). The gifts largely consisted of furs. The practice of gifting in favor of the Khanate became a form of tribute in the Polish-Lithuanian case while in the Muscovite case it was the other way around with a preexisting system of tribute ( vyxod ) slowly transforming into mere gifting. Furthermore, the gifts can serve as an indicator for the state of these courts’ mutual relations. Due to the decentral concept of sovereignty in the Khanate, the institutionalised practice of pominki ecompassed a large part of the elites (the gifts for whom were rather called tiy iş in Tatar or žalovan ’e in Russian), a practice demanded by both sides, as peace could only be secured when all power holders of the Crimea received their share. Every shift in the internal fabric of power was thus documented and reflected in the pominki. But pominki offered not only symbolic, but also hard economic capital. Taking into consideration the extent of the gifting practices it is hardly believable that the furs were destined solely for the personal use of the Crimean Tatar elites. What then happened with the furs after they fulfilled their diplomatic purpose? Some sources indicate that Armenian and Greek merchants would pay themselves into the position of envoys of various Tatar petty nobles, so to receive their gifts and gain access to this highly valued commodity. Subsequently the furs must have diffused in Armenian and Greek networks of long-distance trade. Thus gifting in this area was molded by transregional economic demands. Understanding these processes may finally contribute to answering the question whether Muscovy was able to co-opt and prepare the incorporation of many small political entities thanks to a strategic gifting policy set into a favourable global/transregional economic context.
Albrecht Fuess
The research project will look at the distribution of resources within the geopolitical setting of the Transottomanica in the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. The case of metal will be taken as an example as metals, on the one hand, were vital as raw material for the military of this time period and, on the other hand, as bullion were a means of payment that was important because gold and silver were scarce in the Middle East. Contemporary Middle and Central Asian powers therefore increased their efforts to obtain metals. They looked for resources within their own realms and they relied on imports, which, however, were hampered by occasional trade boycotts. Starting from the Mamluk Empire, the project will follow the path of metal resources through the Transottomanica and investigate the extent of their mobility as a commodity.
Anthony Quickel
Aleksandr Osipian
Mehmet Tepeyurt