By drawing on documents from European archives, this article addresses everyday aspects of diplomacy in sixteenth-century Constantinople. It focuses on how various go-betweens mediated political, cultural, religious, and linguistic boundaries in the encounters between Ottoman grandees and European diplomats. By doing so, it shifts the focus from the office of the ambassador to a large number of informal diplomatic actors (Jewish brokers, dragomans, renegades, go-betweens, etc.) with different areas of competence, functioning in diverse networks of contact and exchange. Moreover, it accentuates the importance of Constantinople as a space of encounter between diverse ethnic and religious communities as well as a Mediterranean-wide center of diplomacy and espionage. The essay calls for a reevaluation of Eurocentric views that associate the birth and development of modern diplomacy only with Christian Europe and revises the historiography on Ottoman diplomacy by concentrating on vernacular diplomacy rather than the rigid theoretical framework drawn by the Islamic Law.
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John Watkins, “Toward a New Diplomatic History of Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Europe 38, no. 1 (2012): 1-14. Also see other articles in this special issue.
See Eric Dursteler, “Latin Rite Christians in Early Modern Istanbul,” in Osmanli Istanbulu I: I. Uluslararası Osmanlı İstanbulu Sempozyumu Bildirileri, 29 Mayıs–1 Haziran 2013, ed. Feridun Emecen and Emrah Safa Gürkan (Istanbul, 2014), 137-146.
See Gürkan, “Espionage in the 16th-century Mediterranean,” 377-384.
Pedani, In nome del Gran Signore, 25-6. Even though he arrived in Venice with Sokollu’s letters and not those of the sultan, the Venetians immediately treated him as an official envoy (p. 166). Also see. asv, SDelC, reg. 4, cc. 52v, 56v, 59v, 80v-81v, 84, 85, 88, 116.
Fodor, “An Antisemite Grand Vizier?” 197; Sahillioğlu, Koca Sinan Paşa, no. 8.
Tijana Krstić, “Illuminated by the Light of Islam and the Glory of the Ottoman Sultanate: Self-Narratives of Conversion to Islam in the Age of Confessionalization,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 51, no. 1 (2009): 35-63; here 44-45; Rothman, Brokering Empire, Chapter 3.
Gauri Viswanathan, “Coping with (Civil) Death: the Christian Convert’s Rights of Passage in Colonial India,” in After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton, 1995): 183-210; Tobias Graf, “Of Half-Lives and Double-Lives: ‘Renegades’ in the Ottoman Empire and Their Pre-Conversion Ties, ca. 1580-1610,” in Well-Connected Domains: Towards an Entangled Ottoman History, ed. Pascal W. Firges et al. (Leiden, 2014), 131-149; here 131-2.
Maria Pia Pedani, “Safiye’s Household and Venetian Diplomacy,” Turcica 32 (2000): 9-31, here 11.
Daniela Frigo, “Introduction,” in Politics and Diplomacy in Early Modern Italy: The Structure of Diplomatic Practice, 1450-1800, ed. Daniela Frigo, trans. Adrian Belton (Cambridge, 2000), 1-24, here 5-6.
Abou-El-Haj, “Ottoman Diplomacy at Karlowitz,” 498. For instance, Abou el-Haj states that the Ottomans “in the absence of necessity [ . . . ] had developed neither the formal apparatus for diplomatic communication nor the corps of trained personnel requisite for the negotiation of peace.” (p. 498-499). Although it was written decades ago, this article still preserves its relevance today (see fn. 3). More recently, Jeremy Black argued that the Ottoman Empire required diplomacy rather less than Tudor England, Valois France, or Sforza Milan. According to this, the strong Ottomans did not particularly need allies. Jeremy Black, A History of Diplomacy (London, 2010), 53-54.
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By drawing on documents from European archives, this article addresses everyday aspects of diplomacy in sixteenth-century Constantinople. It focuses on how various go-betweens mediated political, cultural, religious, and linguistic boundaries in the encounters between Ottoman grandees and European diplomats. By doing so, it shifts the focus from the office of the ambassador to a large number of informal diplomatic actors (Jewish brokers, dragomans, renegades, go-betweens, etc.) with different areas of competence, functioning in diverse networks of contact and exchange. Moreover, it accentuates the importance of Constantinople as a space of encounter between diverse ethnic and religious communities as well as a Mediterranean-wide center of diplomacy and espionage. The essay calls for a reevaluation of Eurocentric views that associate the birth and development of modern diplomacy only with Christian Europe and revises the historiography on Ottoman diplomacy by concentrating on vernacular diplomacy rather than the rigid theoretical framework drawn by the Islamic Law.
All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 1308 | 333 | 14 |
Full Text Views | 444 | 36 | 3 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 469 | 88 | 7 |