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.