University of Heidelberg

Henry Shapiro (Sabancı University, Istanbul) opened the workshop with a comparative discussion of the justifications for imperial power in Dursun Beğ's and Kritovoulos of Imbros's biographies of Mehmed the Conqueror (r. 1443, 1444, 1451–1481). Whereas the former author operated within a clearly religious paradigm in which Mehmed's rule is presented as divinely sanctioned and the existence of the sultan in fact necessary for the maintenance of the proper world order, Kritovolous's text very much harks back to classical Greek and Byzantine models, putting particular emphasis on the concept of tyche, explaining that the Ottomans had earned the right to rule through merit. Although wary of pressing this point too far, Shapiro noted that many of the ideas expressed by Dursun Beğ bear a striking similarity to those found in Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan.

In his paper on the political factions during the reign of Mehmed III (1595–1603), Aykut Mustak (Sabancı University, Istanbul) stressed the importance of studying the households of all political actors, not merely those of sultans and members of the royal family, for an understanding of the exercise of political power in a period in which one's affiliation to a particular person's household could make or break one's career. Mustak's criticism of approaches to this subject strongly influenced by network theory as failing to take into account the hierarchies existing within these households and the practical barriers to changing one's affiliation, thus missing the point, was contested on theoretical grounds, even if this characterization of previous scholarship may well be adequate.

Fabian Steininger (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany) undertook a comparative investigation of discourses of the Other in the seventeenth-century Ottoman and Habsburg empires through the examples of the travel narratives of Georg Christoph von Neitschitz and Evliya Çelebi. In their discursive strategies the two texts bear a surprising resemblance, alternating between outright dismissal and curiosity for foreign customs and practices, occasionally even recommending their adoption.

Mahmud Efendi's history of Athens written in the eighteenth century formed the centre piece of Gülçin Tunalı-Koç's (Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany) talk. The text is noteworthy since it seems to be the first attempt by an Ottoman official to present the city's ancient history to an Ottoman Muslim audience. Although contemporary to a re-awakening of interest in classical Greece elsewhere in Europe, Mahmud's enterprise seems to have been unconnected to this, driven perhaps more by his own interest in the place where he had long served as a kadı. Although one might criticize the text as a rather amateurish attempt replete with anachronisms, more sympathetic scholars would argue that Mahmud merely attempted to translate ancient concepts and institutions for contemporary Ottoman readers.

In a brief review of German-language commentaries on what Christian Europeans considered 'Turkish philosophy' in the late seventeenth century, Harun Küçük (University of California, San Diego, USA) not only pointed out the obvious misconceptions resulting from lack of knowledge and no more than a cursory interest in Ottoman thought, but also highlighted the achievements of authors such as Samuel Schelwig. Although never drawing on Ottoman texts and taking their ideas seemingly exclusively from European-language publications circulating at the time, the latter displayed a surprising sympathy towards this misunderstood subject.

Building on her research on slavery and mukataba contracts in court registers of sixteenth-century Istanbul, Nur Sobers Khan (University of Cambridge) emphasized the importance of the socio-legal boundary between slavery and freedom in the early modern Mediterranean. Crossing it usually necessitated the crossing of other boundaries such as those of language and religion as well. Thus, the study of slaves in the sixteenth century, and the numerous boundaries that they were forced to cross, contributes to our understanding of cosmopolitan identity in the early modern world. Not only people crossed these boundaries, however. There is ample evidence which suggests that legal formulae, e.g. for the manumission of slaves, too, moved between languages and legal traditions around the Mediterranean, an area of research requiring further enquiry into the intertextuality of slavery-related legal documents among various Mediterranean cultures.

The story of the renegade Ladislaus Mörth provided the case study through which Tobias Graf (Heidelberg University) explored the renegade phenomenon in the late sixteenth century. Recent research on the Ottoman military and weapons industry has rightly downplayed the importance of renegades to the transfer of military and naval technology. Rather, the examples of Mörth and others strongly suggest that, if anything, as a group they mattered most to the Ottoman state in diplomacy and secret intelligence.

In his investigation of deserters and prisoners of war in the context of the Ottoman-Russian and Ottoman-Habsburg conflicts around the turn of the nineteenth century, Will Smiley (University of Cambridge) showed the extent to which these individuals retained an important measure of agency, bargaining for their interests by manoeuvring between the different structures of servitude created by conscription, captivity, and slavery/serfdom. Whether this involved claiming special knowledge, specific nationalities, or even religious conversion, negotiations were effectively conducted through changes in one’s official identity. During the discussion, it was suggested that desertion might, in fact, be regarded as a pre-bureaucratic means of emigration.

Deniz Şimşek (Sabancı University, Istanbul) introduced his audience to eighteenth-century Istanbul through a short play contained in Pierre-François Viguier's Turkish grammar published in 1790. Viguier has thus far received little scholarly attention. This is all the more surprising since his grammar presents a most fascinating source for historians and historical linguists alike, permitting students to listen in on colloquial Ottoman Turkish as it was spoken in the late eighteenth century capital.

The British view of the immediate effects of the French Revolution in the Ottoman Empire, particularly Istanbul, was the subject of Pascal Firges's (Heidelberg University) paper. Dispatches to London make it clear that Robert Ainslie, the British ambassador in Istanbul, was alarmed by the distribution of French republican propaganda, the wearing of cockades, and such revolutionary civic festivities as planting the tree of liberty. His attempts to move the Ottomans to act against revolutionary activists, however, were unsuccessful. The Porte maintained that these were the internal affairs of the French and hence tolerated them as long as public order was not endangered.

Dr. William O'Reilly (University of Cambridge) offered a fresh perspective on the Millenarianism of Sabbatai Zevi. Zevi's work strongly suggests that he was familiar with a prophetic text written in sixteenth-century Christian Europe. At the time, however, the text in question circulated in manuscript only and was known to merely a handful of people. Meticulously tracing Zevi's place in international webs of commerce and correspondence in order to discover how an Ottoman Jew might have gained access to such an obscure piece of literature, O'Reilly unearthed a surprising link between the self-styled Messiah and England, where one original manuscript is still kept today.

Having recently undertaken research on a number of hüccets from the eighteenth-century Aegean kept in an Orthodox monastery on the island of Patmos, Christian Roth (Heidelberg University) presented a selection of legal cases found in these documents. Particularly in light of the Muslim minority on the Aegean islands, the frequency with which Christians had recourse to the kadı even in matters internal to the Christian community is striking. Although further research needs to shed more light on this issue, it would seem that the sultan's Christian subjects effortlessly switched between different legal cultures in order to obtain the best bargain.

British Consul Charles Blunt and the question of his contribution to local reforms in Thessaloniki on the eve of the Tanzimat were at the heart of Gülay Tulasoğlu's (Heidelberg University) paper. Not only did Blunt play a crucial role in establishing quarantine measures in this important port, but evidence suggests that influencing Ottoman decision-making towards 'modernization' on the ground through the consular presence was a policy consciously encouraged by the British ambassador in Istanbul and the Foreign Office in London. It was hoped that, because of their access to political authorities, well-informed consuls would cure the Ottoman Empire of what the British perceived as an ailment of inefficiency and corruption.

In the context of recent attention in Ottoman Studies to museums and archaeology, Maximilian Hartmuth (Sabancı University, Istanbul) presented the case of a civic initiative for the establishment of a 'museum' in Ottoman Bosnia around 1850. Put forward by a friar and educator with good connections to the Illyrian movement in the Habsburg South, the project was to prevent the loss of antiquities to collectors and museums abroad. Though a fervent supporter of the Tanzimat reforms introduced to Bosnia at that time by a renegade pasha whom he befriended, the project ultimately failed due to the protagonist's political activism.

Drawing on the concept of the 'cultivation of culture' developed by Joep Leersen, Marloes Cornelissen (Sabancı University, Istanbul) compared and contrasted the role of museums in the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic. Much more than in contemporary European museology, Ottoman and Turkish museums transmitted messages which situated the respective states in relation to their European neighbours, both making claims to their modernity and belonging to the European 'club' by widely differing means. That the Ottomans never adopted European museological models wholesale, moreover, can be seen as an attempt to reassert the Empire’s autonomy in the face of European imperial challenges.

Gizem Kaşoturacak (Sabancı University, Istanbul) provided an introduction to missionary schools in late nineteenth-century Anatolia, focusing especially on the activities of missionaries from the United States. Much of the success of such schools stemmed from the fact that they usually were at least bilingual, making them especially attractive for the children of merchants and professionals. This appeal, however, may have been confined to the secular advantage of education. It was not uncommon, after all, for a family to send their various children to schools attached to different denominations. Nevertheless American proselytizing among the Armenians was so successful as to lead to the creation and formal acceptance by the Porte of separate Armenian Catholic and Protestant millets.

Adam McConnel (Sabancı University, Istanbul) reminded participants of the usually forgotten American officers who served the Egyptian khedives and supported the modernization of the Egyptian military. Although by no means intended as formal assistance, such individuals seem to have served abroad with the permission of the US government. During the discussion it became clear that similar arrangements existed for example with Mexico. Since the majority of these officers had fought for the Confederates in the Civil War, it seems likely that permitting them to serve elsewhere acted as some sort of safety valve for potentially disgruntled career soldiers.

Outlining the issues surrounding the question of an alliance between Britain and the Ottoman Empire during the embassy of Sir Nicholas O'Conor in Istanbul (1898–1908), John Burman (University of Cambridge) identified Abdülhamid II as a shrewd diplomat who, aware of the Ottoman Empire's changing position vis-à-vis the European powers, sought to maintain the independence of his realm by remaining actively neutral, moving between the powers without committing to formal alliances.  

In his historiographical keynote speech delivered in conclusion of the workshop, Prof. Metin Kunt (Sabancı University, Istanbul) reflected on the search for a suitable framework for the analysis of Ottoman history. While the Empire has many unique features, it is clearly not so exceptional as to defy comparison. The Turco-Persian statecraft approach, although thus far the best model, is not entirely suitable for the study of the Ottoman state. Instead, Kunt proposed a modification which would be broad enough to encompass all of Inner Asia plus its sedentary belt, thus drawing the study of the Ottoman Empire more firmly into a global context. The ensuing discussion quickly cautioned that there is a fundamental tension between comparison's necessity for stable entities and the increasingly influential concept of fluid and extremely permeable boundaries. Nevertheless, for all practical purposes the two approaches were regarded as potentially complementary.