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