Bordering Early Modern Europe 3447104023, 9783447104029

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Bordering Early Modern Europe

Edited by Maria Baramova, Grigor Boykov and Ivan Parvev

2015

Harrassowitz Verlag · Wiesbaden

Publication of the Center of Excellence in the Humanities “Alma Mater” (Regional Studies Program), Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” funded by the Scientific Research Fund of the Bulgarian Ministry of Education, Youth, and Science. Cover illustration: Christoph Weigel, Mappa der zu Carlovitz geschlossenen und hernach durch zwey gevollmächtigte Commissarios vollzogenen kaiserlich-türkischen Gräntz=Scheidung, Nürnberg 1710. (Universitätsbibliothek Bern, Zentralbibliothek, Sign.: ZB Ryh 6302: 42)

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.dnb.de abrufbar. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

For further information about our publishing program consult our website http://www.harrassowitz-verlag.de © Otto Harrassowitz GmbH & Co. KG, Wiesbaden 2015 This work, including all of its parts, is protected by copyright. Any use beyond the limits of copyright law without the permission of the publisher is forbidden and subject to penalty. This applies particularly to reproductions, translations, microfilms and storage and processing in electronic systems. Printed on permanent/durable paper. Printing and binding: Memminger MedienCentrum AG Printed in Germany ISBN 978-3-447-10402-9

Table of Contents Preface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . VII I. POLITICAL AND GEOSTRATEGIC BORDERS The Cartographic ‘Battle of the Rhine’ in the Eighteenth Century.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Heinz Duchhardt

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Between “Europe” and “Non–Europe”. The Balkans in the Plans for Peace and European Unity in the Sixteenth – Eighteenth Centuries. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Ivan Parvev The Distinctiveness of the Habsburg-Ottoman Border in the Eighteenth Century. . . . . 21 Jovan Pešalj Lice and Locusts or Allies and Brethren? The Ambivalent Attitude towards the Crimean Tatars in Early Modern Poland-Lithuania. . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Dariusz Kołodziejczyk Contesting the Frontiers of Late Medieval Political Culture: Mehmed the Conqueror (1432–1481) and Charles the Bold (1433–1477). . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Colin Heywood Alternative Paths Towards the Age of Mercantilism: The Venetian Project of the Scala Di Spalato. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Vera Costantini II. BORDERING REGIONS IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE Europe: Eighteenth-Century Definitions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Wolfgang Schmale Crossing Borderlines: The Approach of Austrian and German Travellers to the Ottoman Empire. . . . . . . . . . . 95 Karl Vocelka Europe in German Historiography before 1815.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Martin Espenhorst

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Negotiating Borders: Habsburg–Ottoman Peace Treaties of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 Maria Baramova The Process of Establishing the Border between Russia and the Ottoman Empire in the Peace Treaty of Adrianople (1713).. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 Tatiana Bazarova Russia’s Doctrine of the Ottoman Empire’s Bulgarian Provinces and Bulgarians (from Catherine ІІ to Alexander І).. . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 Plamen Mitev Living on the Edge of Christendom: Some Eighteenth-Century Croatian Perceptions of Europe and its Borders. . . . . . . . . . . 141 Naoum Kaytchev Regions and Borders During Revolutionary Transformations: The Example of the Papal Enclaves Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin in the Years of the French Revolution. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Rossitza Tasheva III. BORDERING “TURKEY IN EUROPE” The Role of Hâcı-Gâzi Evrenos and His Descendants in Endowing Zâviye-İmârets (Dervish Lodges-Soup Kitchens) in the Balkans: Scale – Intent – Duration.. . . . . . . . . . 163 Heath W. Lowry Shaping the Ottoman Borderland: The Architectural Patronage of the Frontier Lords from the Mihaloğlu Family . . . . . . . 185 Mariya Kiprovska Patronage of Ottoman Architecture at the Frontier: Thoughts and Materials. A Preliminary Overview. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221 Machiel Kiel The Borders of the Cities: Revisiting Early Ottoman Urban Morphology in Southeastern Europe. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243 Grigor Boykov Urbanization on the Ottoman Borders: Small Towns in the South-West Serhad of the Bosnian Eyalet from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries. . . . . . . . . 257 Kornelija Jurin Starčević Personal Names. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273 Place Names. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278 Contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283

Preface While the twenty-first century can generally be perceived as an increasingly “borderless” period in which national barriers and physical boundaries are progressively dismantled, it also witnesses the formation of newly created obstructions to meet the recent challenges of modernity. Historically speaking, this is not a unique phenomenon – old borders have always collapsed to create new ones, be they political, geographical, religious or conceptual. Nonetheless, the notion of borders as we define them today evolved largely during the Early Modern Period. Although generally borders are understood as divisions between cultures, languages and political and confessional systems, throughout Antiquity and the Middle Ages they were not conceived of as straight lines marking territories and political dominions. Borders and frontiers have mostly been perceived as symbolic areas which, instead of purely dividing, were rather contested and debated zones whose most pervasive feature was more often contact rather than separation. The dynamic and profound changes in Early Modern European society, such as the emergence of the idea of the territorial state, the great geographical discoveries and the beginning of modern cartography, shaped a new vision of the delineating border, whether linear or fixed. It was precisely during the Early Modern period that topographical features (such as rivers and mountains) and man-made landmarks (fortresses, etc.) began increasingly to serve as boundaries and clear geographical borders were established in Europe. The age of Confessionalism in Early Modern Europe also had a great impact on the evolving concept of the border as a line of division when, with the emergence of the Protestant states, for example, borders were increasingly associated with religious separation as well. Furthermore, the religious and political threat that Europe encountered in the face of the growing Ottoman Empire, which established itself firmly on European territory and came to dominate large parts of Europe for centuries, not only sketched new geographical, political and religious frontiers, but also fostered European separation along the ideological fault line of Muslim-Christian opposition. Certainly, all these developments made the Early Modern era the very period when the rather loose concept of border that had dominated throughout Antiquity and the Middle Ages was gradually consolidated in a more refined view of the concept of frontiers and spatial divisions in Europe. Yet, although during the Early Modern period the lines of religious, political and ideological separation crystallized to define a completely new notion of state and regional frontiers in the modern sense, recent scholarship tends to emphasize that modern concepts of national frontiers are not fully applicable to the Early Modern age. Thus, one is reminded that although the dichotomy in the Muslim-Christian religious divide was a raison d’être of

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Ottoman expansionistic policy in Europe and a guiding thread in European political strategy towards the Muslim state, the European-Ottoman borders could sometimes be a zone of contact and common compromise as well. The border regions established between the Christian and the Muslim worlds could be areas where trade and common interests dominated the lives of the communities, where people from different faiths could carry out common enterprises straddling both realms etc. When in 2012 a group of historians from the University of Sofia drew up a concept for the conference “Bordering Early Modern Europe”, we were seeking to examine the “Bordering” and “De-Bordering of Europe”, focusing on topics such as “Fear” as a line of division (and possibly of defence); the existence of sub-regions within Early Modern Europe in the context of natural and political borders; the frontier society’s perception of border; and, last but not least, the notion of “Europe” and of the “European Idea” in the Early Modern Period – or “Did Europe exist before 1800?”.1 The present volume includes the papers of nineteen historians from eleven countries who participated in the conference “Bordering Early Modern Europe” held in Sofia at the end of March 2013. This academic event was hosted by the Regional Program at the Center of Excellence in the Humanities “Alma Mater” at the St. Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia and succeeded in bringing together, in fruitful and stimulating scholarly exchange, a group of established senior scholars and fine researchers from the younger generation. Thus the purposefully sought diversity of views materialized not only at the level of the varied academic background of the group participating in the conference, but was also clearly reflected in these scholars’ inevitable generational differences in opinion. Building on the achievements of previous scholarship on European borders during the Early Modern period and on the current understanding of European boundaries, the essays in the present volume offer a new interpretation of various aspects of the theme of borders in Europe, as well as new impulses for future research. We hope that by bringing together these articles on diverse problems of the border theme, we are able to make a contribution to the better understanding of the multifaceted nature of the internal, external, political, religious, visible and invisible, shifting borders in Early Modern Europe. The contributions in the present volume can be grouped into several main themes, which must be perceived as a loose framework since some papers fall into more than one of the thus-proposed thematic divisions. The notion of fear as a possible demarcation mark including a wide variety of aspects is examined in the contributions by Baramova, Kaytchev, Kołodziejczyk, Parvev and Pešalj. One can clearly envisage the existence of a general paranoia in the Early Modern Kerneuropa that we might metaphorically label a Phobia of the East. In the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it primarily took the shape of Islamophobia and Turcophobia, a direct consequence of the expansionist character of the Ottoman Empire in the period. As a rule, the “fear of the East” had quite clearly perceptible religious and/or ideological dimensions. In the eighteenth century, however, the Phobia of the East gradually lost its Islamophobic and Turcophobic characteristics, paving the way for Russophobia, which in the nineteenth century became the major border discourse in relation to the East.

1 Indeed this is a paraphrase of Peter Burke’s popular article “Did Europe exist before 1700,” History of European Ideas 1 (1980): 21–29.

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Comparing East and West in terms of perceptions and Realpolitik, it seems that the Early Modern political bordering of Central vis-à-vis Western Europe displays a more rational balance of power considerations than the political bordering of Central and Western Europe vis-à-vis the East. The studies by Duchhardt, Espenhorst, Heywood, Schmale and Vocelka in this volume shed light on the variety of aspects that influenced the Central and West European perception of Europe in the eighteenth century. The eighteenth century also witnessed another clearly perceptible tendency – increased spatial fragmentation in comparison to the previous period. Stated differently, it seems that the regions of Europe had far greater internal delineation, while borders appear to have had a much clearer and more defined denotation. On the one hand, a possible explanation for these developments lay in the development of science and technology in general and of cartography in particular, which allowed a more precise bordering; thus a reflection can be sensed in geography and politics. This also seems to be a clear result of the dynamics of European power politics during the eighteenth century, especially after 1789. The same tendency can be examined within the internal borders of “Turkey in Europe”, but Balkan fragmentation appears to have had different roots that are more closely connected to the specifics of Ottoman rule in South-Eastern Europe and its gradual decay after the end of the seventeenth century, as seen in the contributions by Bazarova, Costantini, Mitev and Tasheva. Moreover, focusing on Ottoman border architecture and patronage in the frontier society, the articles by Boykov, Kiel, Kiprovska, Lowry and Starčević examine the peculiar frontier dynamics that shaped South-Eastern European territories under Ottoman rule, thus attempting to fill a lacuna of historiographical interest. *** We would like to express our gratitude to the institutions and individuals who have contributed to the publication of this volume. First, we would like to thank the Center of Excellence in the Humanities “Alma Mater” at the St. Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia, which financially supported the conference and the publication of its outcome. Without the benevolent support of Prof. Dr. habil. Ivan Ilchev, the President of the Center, and of Assoc. Prof. Dr. Kostadin Grozev, its Scientific Director, this could have hardly been achieved. Also we wholeheartedly thank Dr. Anne Simon from the University of London who had the tricky task of editing linguistically all the contributions. The fact that only two of the authors in the volume are native speakers of English bespeaks difficulty of Dr. Simon’s job. A number of other colleagues and graduate students at the University of Sofia offered invaluable assistance in organizing the conference and technical assistance in preparing the volume. Last, but not least, our gratitude goes to the Harrassowitz Verlag for including the volume in their publishing programme. We greatly appreciate such a positive reception! Sofia, 30 October 2014

The Editors

POLITICAL AND GEOSTRATEGIC BORDERS

The Cartographic ‘Battle of the Rhine’ in the Eighteenth Century Heinz Duchhardt Politics, and in particular international politics, are never just the domain of diplomats or, as the case may be, soldiers and officers, but are complemented by a rich accompaniment, composed by writers authoring relevant pamphlets and treatises, artists producing works of art as diverse as medals and paintings and quite possibly even musicians who set a tune to all that was happening. Indeed, anything that has a tactile appeal or appeals to the senses in general can also have a political function. It therefore does not come as a surprise that politics can also be ‘made’ with maps. I would like to illustrate this by way of an example drawn from the history of GermanFrench relations. Characterized by numerous conflicts in the Early Modern period, the tense relationships between Germany and France resulted in much diplomatic-political activity, a vivid publishing culture, but especially the wars, which time and again broke out along the shared border, the Rhine – from the wars of Francis I of France against the hereditary territories of Charles V to the Thirty Years’ War to the so-called Nine Years’ War to the War of the Spanish Succession, the War of the Polish Succession, the Seven Years’ War and then the French Revolutionary Wars. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Rhine corridor was the decisive theatrum belli, the geo-politically most contested region in Europe. Here the major protagonists – above all Louis XIV and Napoleon – could achieve their political aims, or suffered defeat. The wars already mentioned, as well as other wars had a lasting impact on the territorial alignment of this region: the Swiss Confederation, de facto already independent since 1499, and the Republic of the Seven United Provinces, dissociated from the Spanish Netherlands since 1581, had, in terms of international law, left the Holy Roman Empire as sovereign states in 1648 and thus accorded the Rhine corridor a new balance of power. The so-called Franche-Comté, a remnant of the once mighty kingdom of Burgundy as known from the fifteenth century, had fallen to France as a result of the Peace of Nijmegen; and while the territory did not reach quite as far as the Upper Rhine, it did have a profound influence on the balance of power in the region. The county of Artois, located in the far north of and somewhat removed from the Rhine, had already become, as a consequence of the so-called Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659), part of France. Metz, Toul and Verdun, imperial cities in Lorraine, which had pledged allegiance to the French Crown in 1552 and been orientated up the Rhine towards the Archdiocese of Trier, also left the Empire and were incorporated into France in 1648. Alsace, part of the Upper Rhenish Circle, was ‘reunited’ and together with the imperial city of Strasbourg incorporated into the French realm in the 1680s, disregarding the hopes to the contrary voiced on the German side for subsequent decades. Lorraine, likewise part of the Upper Rhenish Circle, became – after it had already sought independence

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from the Empire in 1542, had been at the mercy of various powers and had several times been occupied by French troops – part of France by way of a complex exchange in 1766. Whether the last remnants of the former Burgundian realm, the Spanish and, after 1714, Austrian Netherlands, would remain part of the Empire – this is something no one dared to guarantee in the eighteenth century. These remarks alone indicate how little was considered settled in the eighteenth century and underline the fact that the problem of the Spanish Netherlands, Lorraine and above all Alsace was still a rather fluid matter. No doubt this must have been a challenge for cartographers, to take political position by way of their maps. Both French and German maps confirm this assumption. To illustrate this point, first a French map printed by Hubert Jaillot in Paris in 1713 will be discussed. Jaillot was, of course, arguably the most important publisher of maps in Europe at the time. The map carries the title L’Empire d’Allemagne, distingué suivant l’étendue de tous les Etats, Principautés et Souverainetés, qui passent ou qui ont passée jusque à présent sous le nom d’Allemagne.1 If we ignore the ‘neighbouring provinces’ in the East, amongst them Silesia and Hungary, shown here in direct contradiction to constitutional law as belonging to the Empire, we can note that the United Provinces, contrary to the political developments of the seventeenth century, are still shown as belonging to the Empire; and Lorraine, without doubt still part of the Empire, as no longer belonging to it. A reason may be as has been argued elsewhere that the map aimed at making the Empire appear ‘overwhelmingly large’ in the final phase of the War of the Spanish Succession, whereas France, due to geographic constraints, had reached the limits of possible expansion2. What is more likely, however, is the thesis that very consciously day-to-day politics were pursued here, in the sense that the opposing States General, part of the Great Alliance, were denied the status of a real sovereign state, and that in the case of Lorraine associations and other prejudicial facts were established that had not yet been affirmed by politics. Anyone looking at the map was meant to have the impression that the future of Lorraine had already been sealed, in the interest and for the benefit of France, of course, as one would expect of France’s most influential publisher of maps at the time. This interpretation is supported by other maps which were, interestingly, also published by Jaillot. There exists a four-part series made by Henri Sengre and published with different finishing in 1705, a time of critical importance for the French Crown, when its territorial future was still an open chapter. Franche-Comté, Alsace and Lorraine are here shown, long before they legally and irreversibly became an integral part of France, as no longer belonging to the Empire. The same applies to maps of Europe published by Jaillot, such as the one dated 1692 (and another, reproduced here [plate 1], from 1724): Franche-Comté, Alsace and Lorraine are all shown as firmly located within the French borders.3 What we appear to have here is a cartographer-entrepreneur serving the political interests of the Crown – not so different from the medallists who, sometimes even as employees of the Crown, captured the achievements of the great rulers in metal. 1 The map is available at: www.philographikon.com/mapsgermany7.html, accessed May 2, 2014. 2 Uta Lindgren, “Die Grenzen des Alten Reiches auf gedruckten Karten,” in Rainer Müller (ed.), Bilder des Reiches (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1997), 37. 3 The same claim is illustrated by regional maps showing the Upper Rhine area in the early eighteenth century, e. g. one by Guillaume de l’Isle “Le Cours du Rhin au dessus de Strasbourg…”

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Could such official politics based on cartography as pursued by the French side leave German cartographers and publishers untouched? This question imposes itself all the more as it was the heirs of the Nuremberg cartographer and publisher Johann Baptist Homann who distributed the aforementioned maps in Germany: in other words, it was German publishers who, at least to some extent, propagated the position, largely considered illegal in German minds, of the greatest opponent of the Empire. One should not forget in this context, though, that in light of the indisputable dominance of French cartography, independent, non-copied German maps were extremely rare. Indeed, there are only two such maps dating to the early eighteenth century. One is by Johann Hübner and Johann David Köhler and dates to 1719. It was re-issued in 1732 and, judging from its cumbersome title, was already dated at that time: Imperium Romano-Germanicum in suos circulos divisum geograpice exhibitum, et in usum scholarum. It was based on the imperial circles and thus shows Alsace and, of course, Lorraine as still belonging to the Empire (plate 2). The second map is just a few years younger and was made by Matthias Seutter (only to be re-issued by Köhler, who held a Chair in History and Politics at the University of Altdorf near Nuremberg, shortly after4). It was essentially a “postal map”, being based on a map made by the Imperial Post Master Peter Nell from Prague. It first and foremost shows postal routes, but also incorporates Burgundy as well as the Swiss Confederation and the entire Netherlands into the Empire. The Novissima totius Europae in suos principaliores status accurate divisa Repraesentation (plate 3), undated but with certainty published in the early eighteenth century, did not go so far, but here, too, Alsace and Lorraine at least are shown as fully integrated parts of the Holy Roman Empire. The two German maps first mentioned most likely appeared somewhat dated and oldfashioned to most contemporaries, but in a way they were also “answers” to their French counterparts: like these they claimed territories and therefore had a political function as well. In contrast to the French maps, however, the German maps neither prepared nor accompanied any political initiatives – whereas the question of the recovery of Alsace, for example, featured prior to all peace negotiations in the early eighteenth century, it was not seriously discussed until immediately before and after the Congress of Vienna. As a matter of fact, neither Emperor nor Empire had any real possibility of containing French propaganda – last but not least because there did not yet exist even the trace of a centrally organized propaganda machinery in the Empire. Martin Wrede quite understandably excludes the area of cartography from his major study Das Reich und seine Feinde5 and concentrates on political journalism and ‘patriotic literature’ written in support of the Empire that illustrate the antagonism between the Empire and France, to mention but one of the Empire’s enemies. In the two-volume monograph Die Kunst im Dienst der Staatsidee Kaiser Karls VI.6 Franz Matsche traces the role of art in the conflicts between the last male of the House of Habsburg and the Bourbon ‘arch-enemy’. A similar work could be written on the cartography of the two protagonists, here France, there the Empire, critically assessing how the two had their respective territories cut into metal 4 Jöhann David Köhler, […] Bequemer Schul- und Reiseatlas […] nebst einer im Druck beygefügten kurtzen geographischen Anleitung (Nürnberg: Christoph Weigel, 1719), no. 7. 5 Martin Wrede, Das Reich und seine Feinde. Politische Feindbilder in der reichspatriotischen Publizistik zwischen Westfälischem Frieden und Siebenjährigem Krieg (Mainz: Phillip von Zabern, 2004). 6 Franz Matsche, Die Kunst im Dienst der Staatsidee Kaiser Karls VI. Ikonographie, Ikonologie und Programmatik des „Kaiserstils“, 2 half bindings (Berlin – New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1981).

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plates. Still, it would be to go too far to speak of cartographic warfare, as the cartographers on both sides worked for the state only in exceptional circumstances, if ever ‘officially’ worked for the state and as the publishers always pursued profit above all. Nonetheless, maps could certainly convey political messages in an efficient and plausible manner. That the French clearly dominated when it came to maps was due to their artistic-technical superiority and their ability to sell their products via the Netherlands and even German publishing houses to a large audience – that the Homann heirs, moreover, did not even have any scruples to include French maps with, in the eyes of the Empire, ‘incorrect’ messages in their atlases speaks volumes. German maps, by contrast, had a much smaller audience, due, in part, to the fact that they were quite dated in appearance and often based on route maps, a type of map no longer in demand. There thus was a clear winner in this cartographic ‘Battle of the Rhine’: the French publishers. Little was or, indeed, could be, done to counter this subtle French propaganda and no evidence exists that individual princes or free cities of the Holy Roman Empire attempted to suppress the sale of such maps with ‘incorrect’ messages. At the same time we know the same about the Rhine border as we know about other borders in the Early Modern period: In other words, that there existed neither a material nor an imaginary linear demarcation, but rather a hem of a border that resulted from shifting riverbeds, impenetrable alluvial forests and a general ambiguity over the terrain. As late as the early nineteenth century enormous efforts were required to measure even roughly the course of the Rhine between Baden and France.7 This basic requirement aside, France’s western border carried much symbolic power and it is no surprise that all efforts were made to always represent it in line with the political ‘philosophy’ of the day. In this, France was a great deal better than the Emperor and the Empire. The relationship between the French Crown, the (Habsburg) Emperor and the multitude of imperial estates was very tense in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Despite the example provided by France to many German princes in terms of her cultural and even political achievements, the mistrust that the Bourbons harboured more sinister plans with regard to the Empire’s territories and its overall stability outweighed in the end. Maps did their bit to fuel respective animosities and fears. Thus the study of the history of cartography can be a most exciting and rewarding exercise, providing valuable insight into broader political issues. We know that for the history of the twentieth century – just to remind the example of the German-Polish quarrels in the post-War period on the Oder-Neiße-Frontier –, but we find similar phenomena also in pre-modern times – and they are much less studied. (Translated by Uta Protz, Bremen)

7 Irene A. Bergs, “Amtliche Landesaufnahme am Oberrhein zu Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts in Baden und Frankreich,” in Uta Lindgren (ed.), Kartographie und Staat. Interdisziplinäre Beiträge zur Kartographiegeschichte (München: Institut für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, 1990), 37–46.

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Plates: 1. Carte d’Europe […] pour l’usage du Roy, Paris 1724 (Deutsches Museum München 1927 C 7). 2. Imperium Romano-Germanicum in suos circulos divisum, geographice exhibitum, et in usum scholarum ad mentem Ioh. Hübneri […] destinatum, Nürnberg 1732 (Deutsches Museum München 1927 C 32). 3. Novissima totius Europae in suos principaliores Status accurate divisa Repraesentatio, o. O. u. J. (Deutsches Museum München C 43). I am most grateful to the Deutsches Museum Munich for permission to reproduce plates 1–3.

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The Cartographic ‘Battle of the Rhine’

Plate 1

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The Cartographic ‘Battle of the Rhine’

Plate 2

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The Cartographic ‘Battle of the Rhine’

Plate 3

Between “Europe” and “Non–Europe” The Balkans in the Plans for Peace and European Unity in the Sixteenth – Eighteenth Centuries Ivan Parvev 1. The very considerable research being undertaken on the “Idea of Europe” and on European history in general constitutes, without doubt, a remarkable trend in recent historiography. No matter how greatly scholars are attracted by EU-funding, the quest for a “Common European history” can be traced back to the early 1990s and interest persists to this day.1 At the same time, some regions on the European periphery seem to remain in the shadow of the major changes which took place in Early Modern Western and Central Europe. There is, for example, no special work dedicated to the topic of “The Balkans and the Idea of Europe in the eighteenth century”. The present paper should therefore be regarded as a first step towards filling this regional gap in the search for a “Common European history”. 2. Before tackling the hard facts we should attempt to define some terms used in the text. What are, for example, “Plans for peace” and “Plans for European unity”? Or, perhaps, what are the “Balkans”? Different scholars will adhere to different views and that is quite normal for a mixture between art and science – as history can, well-meaningly, be described. So here are some possible definitions: Plans for peace are connected with ideas the adherents of which believe, more or less firmly, that war is something that could be avoided if only people would be open to negotiat1 Cf., for example, Jacques Le Goff, Die Geburt Europas im Mittelalter (München: C. H. Beck, 2004); Wolfgang Schmale, Geschichte Europas (Wien – Köln – Weimar: Böhlau, 2001); Klaus Martin Girardet, Die Alte Geschichte der Europäer und das Europa der Zukunft. Traditionen – Werte – Perspektiven am Beginn des 3. Jahrtausends (Saarbrücken: ASKO-Europa-Stiftung, 2001); Frank Nies, Die europäische Idee – aus dem Geist des Widerstands (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001); Bo Stråth (ed.), Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other (Bruxelles – Bern – Berlin – Frankfurt/M – New York – Oxford – Wien: Peter Lang, 2000); Michael Burgess, Federalism and European Union. The Building of Europe, 1950–2000 (London – New York: Routledge, 2000); Volker Steinkamp, Die Europa-Debatte deutscher und französischer Intellektueller nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Bonn: Zentrum für Europäische Integrationsforschung, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Discussion Paper C 49, 1999); Jean-Marc Ferry and Mark Hunyadi (eds.), L’idée d’un Etat européen. Die Idee eines europäischen Staates. The Idea of a European State (Zürich: Rüegger, 1998) (= Schweizerische Zeitschrift für politische Wissenschaft 4:4 (1998); Michael Heffernan, The Meaning of Europe. Geography and Geopolitics (London – New York – Sydney – Auckland: Arnold, 1998); Philippe Mioche (ed.), De l’idée européenne à l’Europe XIXe – XXe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1997); Walter Lipgens, Die europäische Integration (Stuttgart: Klett, 1995); Helmut Reinalter (ed.), Europaideen im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert in Frankreich und Zentraleuropa (Frankfurt/M. – Berlin – Bern – New York – Paris – Wien: Peter Lang, 1994); Josef Isensee (ed.), Europa als politische Idee und rechtliche Form (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1993); Walter Lipgens (ed.), Documents on the History of European Integration, vol 1: Continental Plans for European Union 1939–1945 (Berlin – New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1985).

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ing instead of fighting each other in order to achieve their aims. Religion and ideology are regarded as obstacles that can easily be overcome if the will to live in peace prevails. Plan for European unity is a project or a general idea which calls for a union, more or less well defined, of some or all European states. The purpose of the proposed unity lies within a broad range: namely, from a simple coalition for combating a common enemy to the foundation of a new, supranational state structure. The Balkans will be seen in this paper not as a term of contemporary geography, but rather as a “terminus technicus” with specific geo-political dimensions. The Balkans in this particular understanding include, as a political and religious reality, the territory between the Black Sea, the Adriatic and the Aegean which formed part of the political sphere of influence of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth-eighteenth centuries. The Habsburg or Russian lands in South-Eastern Europe will not, however, be regarded as part of the Balkans. Of course, such a definition of the Balkans is more geo-political than geographical, since all Early Modern Ottoman possessions and all Ottoman tributaries in Europe are included therein. At the same time, such a broad definition of the “Balkans” will allow us more clearly to see the moving border between Europe and Non-Europe in the south-eastern part of European continent as it is represented in the projects and plans under consideration. 3. The aim of the paper is not to list and to construct a simple narrative round all the known and not-so-well-known Early Modern plans for peace and for European unity. Rather the goal should be to understand the position (even: special position) of the Balkans in all these projects. Thus several questions must be answered, such as: Was that region an integral part of all these projects or did the intention exist of isolating that very region, assuming it was “non-European” or even a threat to “Europe”? All these plans, then, should be examined using the following criteria: whether they were metaphorically speaking pro- or contraBalkan; whether they include or exclude the Ottoman Empire; whether they include, for example, those Balkan principalities which were tributaries of the Sublime Porte, but were not under the direct rule of the Sultans etc. Here are eleven of the most prominent Early Modern plans for peace and for European unity listed in chronological order with a short description of their “Balkan” content: Pius II (1405–1464) Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, a well-known fifteenth-century intellectual who becomes Pope under the name of Pius II, actively uses all his influence to expel the Ottomans from Europe. He does not actually design a specific plan for European unity, but he is one of the first thinkers to use “Europe” and “Europeans” in a new way, stressing the fact that this part of the world was the home of Christianity and of all Christians. As Head of the Catholic Church he appeals more than once to the powerful European rulers of his time to settle their differences and, animated by the idea of solidarity vis-à-vis the “hereditary Enemy of Christ”, to join arms and stop the Ottoman expansion. In his words, all this has to be done because “we are endangered and killed in Europe itself, our homeland, our house, our seat”.2

2 Rolf Hellmut Foerster (ed.), Die Idee Europa 1300–1946. Quellen zur Geschichte der politischen Einigung (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 1963), 38–42; Denis de Rougemont, Europa. Vom Mythos zur Wirklichkeit (München: Prestel, 1962), 67–69.

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George Podiebrad (1420–1471) The title of the project from 1462/1463 is a Treaty for a Union of States between King Louis XI, King Georg of Bohemia and the High Council of Venice for Resisting the Turks. The fate of Orthodox South-Eastern Europe is discussed in detail and out of this arises a concrete task for the allies: True, one can regret the lot of the Greek Empire as well as the destruction of Constantinople and other provinces. On the other hand, if we strive for glory, we have to welcome these circumstances, for they help us to become defenders and keepers of the Christian name. For this reason we decide […] to put an end to all wars, raids and unrest […] and to form a Union which will keep peace, brotherhood and concord, for the praise of God and to preserve the Faith, for us, our heirs […], for all times to come.

The plan itself, however, does not deal with the question of what will happen with the Balkans politically after the expulsion of the Ottomans from Europe.3 Jean-Louis Vives (1492–1540) The French author demands the unity of the important Christian princes as a step towards organising a crusade against the Ottomans. In his De Europae Dissidiis et Bello Turcico Dialogus Opere Vives writes: The Christians still possess the part of Europe most capable of resistance – Germany. But if they do not stop fighting each other, they are lost. They should fortify Germany, fortify it with castles and walls, but first of all they should fortify it through the unanimity of its inhabitants. United they are invincible. They should work together to prevent the Turks from taking possession of Germany. Were this to happen, there would be little hope of saving the West as whole from the Turk. Then the danger would arise that the inhabitants who do not want to live under Turkish rule will emigrate with huge fleets to the New World.4

Maximiliеn de Béthune, Duke of Sully (1560–1641) The French duke’s project for European unity from 1632 is very detailed. The Christian Republic of Europe will consist of 15 states, which will have to defend themselves against two external enemies – Muscovy in the East and the Ottomans in the South-East. To achieve this, Hungary must become more powerful by adding new lands to its territory. This particular aspect of Sully’s plan could hardly be achieved without a radical re-design of Europe’s political borders at that time. Suffice it to note that the territory of the former Hungarian kingdom was divided into three parts – one Ottoman, one Habsburg and the principality of Transylvania.5 3 Foerster, Die Idee Europa, 43–50; Rougemont, Europa, 62–67. On the ideas of the Bohemian king and on the political atmosphere in Europe of that time cf. Jacob Ter Meulen, Beitrag zur Geschichte der Internationalen Organisation 1300–1700 (Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1916), 62–77. 4 Rougemont, Europa, 80–82. 5 Heinrich Schneider, Leitbilder der Europapolitik, vol 1: Der Weg zur Integration (Bonn: Europa Union, 1977), 50–52; Foerster, Die Idee Europa, 60–72; Rougemont, Europa, 88–94.

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Emeric Crucé (?–1648) Crucé published his plan in 1623 under the title Le Nouveau Cynée ou disours d’Estat représentant les occasions et moyens d’établir une paix generalle et la liberté du commerce par tout le monde. Aux monarches et princes souverains de ce temps. Contrary to the mainstream projects for European unity which regard the Ottomans as enemies, the author chooses another approach. Crucé proposes a plan for world peace for all the known lands on earth, including the empire of the Sultan. True, he sees the difference between Ottomans and Christians, but he still wants to reconcile them: I see these people [Turks and Christians – I.P.] as opposed to each other, because they are by nature enemies and have divided the whole world in two opposite camps according to their religious differences. Their reconciliation would therefore be a good step towards common peace.

Crucé thinks that all international conflicts should be solved by negotiation and not by war. For that purpose a permanent chamber should be set up in Venice. All states should have to send their delegates to discuss and manage all upcoming conflicts. The difficult diplomatic problems connected to rank are solved by a curious proposal: according to Crucé, the first position should go to the Pope, the second to the Ottoman Sultan “for he is the ruler of the Oriental Empire” and the Emperor and the King of France should come third.6 Johann Amos Comenius (1592–1670) In Komenski’s visions from the middle of the seventeenth century the world will become a union of states, but include solely Christian countries. The Ottoman Empire, with its lands in the Balkans, therefore remains outside his project. The main goal of mankind is to “preach Jesus Christ to all people. This light must be brought to the other nations in the name of our European fatherland. Therefore we must first unite among ourselves”.7 William Penn (1644–1718) In 1693 the founder of present-day Pennsylvania writes an Essay towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe by the Establishment of a European Dyet, Parliament, or Estates. Penn works out the idea of a union of princes which has certain similarities to the project of Crucé. The work includes some sentences about South-Eastern Europe, although the region is not mentioned explicitly. Reflecting on the number of representatives sent to the federal parliament by members of the union, Penn writes: And if the Turks and Muscovites are taken in, as seems but fit and just, they will take Ten a Piece more; […] A great Presence when they represent [Europe – I.P.] the Fourth, and now the Best and Wealthiest Part of the Known World; where Religion and Learning, Civilty and Arts have their Seat and Empire.8

6 Rougemont, Europa, 83–88. 7 Rougemont, Europa, 94–96. 8 Foerster, Die Idee Europa, 79–85; Rougemont, Europa, 97–102.

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Abbé de Saint Pierre (1658–1743) The plan of Charles-Irénée Castel de Saint-Pierre for eternal peace is published for the first time in Cologne in 1712. According to this idea, the “eighteen most important states of Europe” will form a union which can guarantee “all the Christian rulers full security for internal and external peace”. The lands of the Ottomans in the Balkans remain outside this grouping, but the union, joined by Russia, will strive to “sign treaties of defence with its Mohammedan neighbouring rulers, so everyone can keep the peace within their own borders […]”.9 Cardinal Giulio Alberoni (1664–1752) The purpose of the project can easily be understood if we consider its title – Progetto del Cardinal Alberoni per riddure l’Impero Torchesco all’obendienza dei Principi Christiani e per dividere tra di essi la conquista del medesimo.10 Alberoni obviously sticks to the traditions of the fifteenth-sixteenth centuries, in which the empire of the Ottomans is regarded as the “land of evil”, as an enemy with whom the endangered Christians have nothing to negotiate but against which they must fight until the Sultan is expelled, out of Europe at least. Baron Jakob Heinrich von Lilienfeld (1716–1785) Lilienfeld, a nobleman from Livonia, publishes his Neues Staatsgebäude in Leipzig in 1767. In his book the author proposes the convocation of a congress of the influential Christian states of Europe. The Ottoman Balkan lands are regarded as enemy territory and the Sultan as a ruler who must be opposed by force. The Baron writes, obviously inspired by the traditions of anti-Muslim and anti-Turkish commonplaces from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that Europe is still endangered: “These barbarians or non-Christians are Turks, Tartars, Corsairs, Moors […] There is no doubt that these barbarians will soon make use of the defencelessness of Europe”. To prevent this, the best solution would be, in his mind, to create orders of knights which will start fighting these “barbarians or non-Christians”.11 Edmund Burke (1729–1797) In his Two Letters Addressed to A Member of the Present Parliament, on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France, written in 1796 and 1797, Burke reflects, among other things, that: “The nations of Europe had the very same Christian religion, agreeing in the fundamental parts, varying a little in the ceremonies and in the subordinate doctrines”. Edmund Burke obviously regards the common religion as a condition for the peace between and unity of states in Europe.12 It is clear that a Muslim empire like that of the Ottomans cannot join such a community.

9 Rougemont, Europa, 102–108. Cf. some short biographical remarks in Foerster, Die Idee Europa, 271–272. 10 Rougemont, Europa, 109. 11 Rolf Hellmut Foerster, Europa. Geschichte einer politischen Idee. Mit einer Bibliographie von 182 Einigungsplänen aus den Jahren 1306 bis 1945 (München: Nymphenburger Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1967), 335; Foerster, Die Idee Europa, 102–108; Rougemont, Europa, 110. 12 Rougemont, Europa, 173–175. Cf. Edmund Burke, Select Works of Edmund Burke, vol. 2: Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. by E. J. Payne, with foreword and notes by Francis Canavan (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, Inc. 1990), 80, Library of Economics and Liberty [Online] available from http://www. econlib.org/library/LFBooks/Burke/brkSWv2c0.html, accessed 19 December 2013.

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*** 4. It is of course true that the above-listed and briefly described plans do not represent all the projects and ideas for European unity or for world peace which have emerged since the fifteenth century. However, they do belong to the most famous and the most brilliant Early Modern visions in this particular field. Some important results from analysing these plans are clear enough at first sight: for example, the simple fact that of the eleven listed projects only two (of Crucé and Penn) regard the Ottoman Empire as a part of the proposed union of states or the peace community. Thus they alone can be described as “pro-Balkan”. The remaining nine, in other words the vast majority, adopt a more or less unfriendly stance towards the Ottoman realm and its Balkan lands. They can be interpreted as “contra-Balkan”. With some minor exceptions, the plans for European unity and for eternal peace from the middle of the fifteenth to the end of the eighteenth centuries owe their very existence, or at least their founding impetus, to the specific history of the Balkans. The Ottoman (Muslim) expansion started in geographical Europe with the design of conquering the Balkan region and the will to penetrate further into Central Europe. Had that all been a mere idea and not a reality, one would hardly meet more plans for European unity than was the case in the Middle Ages, when such ideas were actually an exception. Due to the fact that the Muslim Balkans were regarded in the other parts of the continent, especially in Central Europe, as a source of great and imminent danger, the vast majority of the projects for European unity possess a clear-cut anti-Ottoman stand. Some of the plans are even explicitly elaborated for the purpose of opposing the imminent threat arising from Europe’s Muslim South-East. The separation of the geographical entity of South-Eastern Europe into two halves in the fifteenth – eighteenth centuries is clearly visible: the one half is “European” (or “Christian”) and ruled by the Hungarian and later by the Habsburg monarchs, or by Venice or PolandLithuania. The other one is “non-European” (or “Muslim”) and ruled directly by the Ottomans or via their vassal principalities in the Balkans. The idea for European unity in history is based on two important facts – the first is the “external threat” and the second is the clear definition of borders between “Europe” and “Non-Europe”. The majority of the authors of the plans from the fifteenth-eighteenth centuries want to build a firm antemurale christianitatis against the Ottomans. In trying to achieve this they define borders of separation in South-Eastern Europe as well, leaving the Balkans outside “Europe”. The “Big Bang” for the emergence of plans for European unity in modern times can be located without doubt inside South-Eastern Europe. From the very moment the Balkans became an Ottoman-Muslim bridgehead for expansion into Central Europe, they offered the actual reason for inventing such ideas. At the same time, the lands of the Balkans formed a barrier along which the border between “Europe” and “Non-Europe” was defined. Thus the notion that from the south-eastern corner of the continent threats were continually arising has very deep historical roots, which can explain, among other things, the vitality of such a cliché even in the present day.

The Distinctiveness of the Habsburg-Ottoman Border in the Eighteenth Century1 Jovan Pešalj Most international borders that divide South-East Europe today were drawn relatively recently, namely after 1878. However, Early Modern historians can point to a much longer history of territorial delimitation in that part of the continent. For centuries its territories were separated by demarcated boundaries quite similar in many of their characteristics to the present ones. Some studies identify the seventeenth century as the beginning of this process, while others go as far back as the fifteenth century. This contribution examines the state of research on external borders and delimitations in the Early Modern Euro-Mediterranean context. It focuses on the Habsburg-Ottoman frontier, following its transformation into a demarcated linear boundary at the end of the seventeenth and during the eighteenth century. By comparing it to other contemporary delimitations and demarcations, the most advanced changes in the Habsburg-Ottoman border and factors that contributed to its development are identified. Zonal Militarized Frontier: the Habsburg-Ottoman Border in the Sixteenth and the Seventeenth Century The Habsburg-Ottoman frontier was formally transformed into a linear boundary in 1699 with the Treaty of Carlowitz (Karlovci). The new border arrangement was very different from the border regime that had been in place before then. Before 1699, it had been an area of political instability and recurring violence, heavily militarized, with overlapping and competing jurisdictions. Ever since Ferdinand I Habsburg (1521–1564) had succeeded to the Hungarian throne in 1526, his new neighbour, the Ottoman Empire, had disputed the Habsburg claim to Hungarian territories. The sultan Süleyman I (1520–1566) first tried to keep the Kingdom of Hungary under the control of its Hungarian vassal, King John Szapolyai (1526–1540). After this arrangement failed to prevent the consolidation of Habsburg rule in the western and northern part of the kingdom, in 1541 the Ottomans assumed rule over Southern and Central Hungary, leaving the eastern parts to their vassal princes of Transylvania. The result was an actual division of Hungarian territories between 1 The work on this paper was funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), through the project no. P 25656 G16. The author wants to thank the organizers and the participants of the conference Bordering Early Modern Europe (March 2013, Sofia, Bulgaria) for their comments and suggestions; Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, Maria Pia Pedani for additional advice; Jeroen Duindam, Leo Lucassen and Josef Ehmer for their suggestions on how to improve the paper. Of course, they are not responsible for any remaining flaws.

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Habsburgs and Ottomans, while each side continued to insist formally on its exclusive right to the entire kingdom. The Ottomans attempted to realize their pretensions over the next two centuries, progressing slowly westwards and northwards and extending their already larger portion, but with limited success. An example of constant political instability, the Habsburg-Ottoman frontier was a zone that stretched more or less deeply beyond actual lines of division. The conflicts involving smaller units and smaller sieges, the Kleinkrieg, were tolerated even during official times of peace.2 The control of this “fluctuating transient inter state border”3 could change not only during wars, but in peace time too. The frontier was broad and heavily fortified, with a system of major and minor fortresses on both sides. The Habsburg side organized the Military Border, Militärgrenze, about 1000 km long, stretching from the Adriatic Sea to Upper Hungary (now Slovakia) and dotted with fortresses (120–130 in the sixteenth and 80–90 in the seventeenth century). The Ottoman frontier was also heavily fortified, with about 130 fortresses in the seventeenth century (most being conquered from the Habsburgs).4 The atmosphere of violence and insecurity had deeply influenced the border societies. A significant part of the population participated in conflict as members of border militias. Raids, pillaging, abductions for slavery or ransom were part of border life in this mobile society.5 The people outside the fortifications were particularly exposed. Here, the jurisdictions literally overlapped. From their fortresses in the Habsburg part of the kingdom, the Hungarian nobility and the Catholic Church forced the inhabitants of the Ottoman part to pay them taxes and duties. Many were thus doubly taxed, both by their Ottoman masters and by their titular Hungarian lords. This practice of dual rule or condominium (munāṣafa), with unclear and overlapping jurisdictions, stretched deep into Ottoman Hungary. In the sixteenth century, the Hungarian Estates and the Church managed to collect taxes from two-thirds of Ottoman Hungary; and from half the Ottoman-Hungarian territory in the seventeenth century.6 The Ottoman governors could not even prevent Transylvanian nobles, their nominal vassals, from collecting taxes from the sultan’s Hungarian subjects. Küçük Mehmed Pasha, 2 Gábor Ágoston, “The Ottoman-Habsburg Frontier in Hungary (1541–1699): A Comparison,” in Kemal Çiçek (ed.), The Great Ottoman – Turkish Civilization, vol. 1 (Ankara: Yeni Türkiye, 2000), 287. Lesser incursions had not been considered a sufficient reason for escalation into a full conflict from as early as the Ottoman-Hungarian treaty of 1483. See Mark Stein, “Military Service and Material Gain on the Ottoman-Habsburg Frontier,” in Andrew Charles Spencer Peacock (ed.), The Frontiers of the Ottoman World (Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press, 2009), 458. Incursions involving up to 4,000 men were mutually tolerated in the first half of the seventeenth century. See Charles W. Ingrao, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1618–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 20002), 34. 3 Robert J. W. Evans, “Essay and Reflection: Frontiers and National Identities in Central Europe,” The International History Review 14:3 (1992): 491–492. 4 Maria Pia Pedani, Dalla frontiera al confine (Venice: Herder, 2002), 15–16; Gábor Ágoston, “Defending and Administering the Frontier: the Case of Ottoman Hungary,” in Christine Woodhead (ed.), The Ottoman World (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2012), 227–228. 5 Pedani, Dalla frontiera al confine, 59–60; Ágoston, “Defending and Administering the Frontier,” 230–231. 6 Condominium existed both between the Habsburgs and Ottomans; and between the Ottomans and their Transylvanian vassals. According to some estimates, it covered almost all Ottoman Hungary, with the exception of Serb-settled Syrmia (Srem) in the south. See Gábor Ágoston, “A Flexible Empire: Authority and its Limits on the Ottoman Frontiers,” in Kemal H. Karpat and Robert W. Zens (eds.), Ottoman Borderlands: Issues, Personalities and Political Changes (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 24; Géza Pálffy, Povijest Mađarske: Ugarska na granici dvaju imperija (1526.–1711.) (Zagreb: Meridijani, 2010), 44; Ágoston, “Defending and Administering the Frontier,” 230–232.

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the Ottoman governor of Temesvár 1662–1663, thus complained to the Transylvanian Prince Mihaly Apafi, apparently without much success: We have written to you several times regarding the situation of [… our peasant subjects]. Let [the noblemen] withdraw their hand from them, for they are [sultan’s] subjects […] and cannot pay their taxes twice.7

The New Border Arrangement of 1699 This was about to change. The unsuccessful Siege of Vienna in 1683 and a succession of military defeats cost the Ottomans most of their Hungarian possessions. In 1699 the Ottomans accepted the new territorial division of the Pannonian Plain, concluding the Peace of Carlowitz. They kept only the Banat of Temesvár and a tiny piece of Syrmia (Srem). Particularly interesting was the territorial arrangement. Completely reversing previous principles, the Habsburg Monarchy and the Ottoman Empire decided to base their border arrangements on new foundations. From then on, the two empires were to be separated by a clearly defined linear boundary. The peace stipulated that a special commission, led by a Habsburg and an Ottoman commissioner, should demarcate the borderline during two months in spring 1699. This was to be done as accurately as possible by placing poles, stones and trenches as border marks. The borders were defined as sacrosanct, inviolable and unchangeable. Those who dared to move or remove the border marks were to be punished (Carl. Peace Treaty, 1699, Articles 5, 6, 18). The purpose of the border was to separate clearly Habsburg from Ottoman jurisdiction. From that moment on, it was explicitly forbidden to claim any jurisdiction, request any taxes or rights on the territory across the line marking the border (Carl. Peace Treaty 1699, Article 6). Both the border zone and condominium ceased to exist. The new arrangement contained several important elements stabilizing the new regime. One was the control of violence. A number of border fortresses were demolished8 and the building of new ones was prohibited. Most border settlements were to be left unfortified (“open”).9 The purpose of these measures was to discourage violence by leaving both sides more exposed and vulnerable to retribution. The second step was completely to forbid the use of cross-border violence during peacetime. Practices such as cross-border incursions, raids and pillaging were prohibited and those who disobeyed were threatened with severe punishment, while victims were promised the full restoration of stolen property or compensation. Duels were also forbidden.10 In addition to the prohibition of the use of violence by the border military, other possible sources of unrest and insecurity at the border were addressed too. It was forbidden to give refuge to rebels and malcontents from the other side. Both sides were obliged to fight banditry and to deny refuge to criminals that were active on the other side of the border line. The bandits who decided to become law-abiding subjects were to be settled away from the border, being deemed untrustworthy (Carl. Peace Treaty  7 Irina Marin, Contested Frontiers in the Balkans: Habsburg and Ottoman Rivalries in Eastern Europe (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), 13. 8 There were other motives for the demolition of some fortresses. The Habsburg condition on giving up the part of the Banat of Temesvár they controlled was that all existing fortification there be razed. The end result was a further demilitarization of the frontier. 9 Articles 2, 4 and 7 of the Peace Treaty of Carlowitz in Treaties, etc. between Turkey and Foreign Powers, 1535–1855 (London: Foreign Office, 1855), 48–51 (hereafter Carl. Peace Treaty 1699). 10 Articles 8 and 11, Carl. Peace Treaty 1699, 51–53.

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1699, Article 9). Finally, the Treaty of Carlowitz established the procedures and mechanisms for dealing with the border incidents and disputes that did arise despite the best efforts of both sides. To prevent eventual escalation, a special border commission was to be formed by both sides, based on the principle of parity. Its task was to investigate all disputes, hear witness testimonies and give instructions on how to resolve them. More difficult cases were to be forwarded to the central governments for resolution.11 This new regime was successfully implemented within a couple of years. Violence and other peacetime excesses of the past suddenly disappeared. Carlowitz 1699: a Unique Turning Point? This striking difference between the Habsburg-Ottoman frontier before and after 1699 has inspired some modern researchers to interpret it as an indication of a deep change in Ottoman politics. It has been suggested that it challenged some of the foundations of the Ottoman Empire. Abou-el-Haj has called the change “the closure of the Ottoman frontier, when the concept of the ‘open frontier,’ which characterized the Ottoman Empire from its foundation, was abandoned”. The clear demarcation of the “permanent political-linear boundary” and “adherence to the concept of inviolability of the territory of a sovereign state” indicate that the Ottoman Empire accepted modern principles of international law.12 It represented such a dramatic change in Ottoman politics that it inspired a rebellion in Constantinople and the deposition of Sultan Mustafa II (1695–1703), who had concluded this shameful peace.13 The year 1699 was identified as the moment when the concept of the “ever-expanding [Ottoman] frontier”, deeply influenced by the spirit of – gaza (Holy War), ended. The acceptance of linear borders and the abolishment of Kleinkrieg broke the continuity of Ottoman history from 1300 to 1700.14 From the Habsburg point of view, the post-Carlowitz Habsburg-Ottoman border was interpreted as the first “artificial border” of the Habsburg Monarchy, different from other “historical”, traditional Habsburg borders. For example, the outer borders of the Habsburg Kingdom of Bohemia had been considered well established and well known since the ninth century. The central government precisely demarcated them only in the late eighteenth century.15 Up until then, the actual divisions of territories and resources were known by local administrations and provincial governments, which took into account the claims and rights of individual estate owners. The post-1699 “artificial” Habsburg-Ottoman border, on the other hand, was determined from the top down by the central government and with scant regard to local claims and historic rights. The absence of historical borders 11 Article 11, Carl. Peace Treaty 1699, 52–53. 12 Rifaat A. Abou-el-Haj, “The Formal Closure of the Ottoman Frontier in Europe: 1699–1703,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 89:3 (1969): 467–469. 13 Rifa‛at Ali Abou-El-Haj, “Ottoman Attitudes Toward Peace Making: The Karlowitz Case,” Der Islam 51:1 (1974): 135–137. 14 Colin Heywood, “The Frontier in Ottoman History: Old Ideas and New Myths,” in Daniel Power and Naomi Standen (eds.), Frontiers in Question: Euroasian Borderlands, 700–1700 (London: Macmillan Press, 1999), 240–244. Similar conclusions, implying that the 1699 agreement was an exception for the Ottomans, whose borders usually stayed approximate and permeable, in Daniel Panzac, “Politique sanitaire et fixation des frontières: l’exemple Ottoman (XVIIIe –XIXe siècles),” Turcica 31 (1999): 88–89. 15 Walter Ziegler, “Die bayerisch-böhmische Grenze in der Frühen Neuzeit – ein Beitrag zur Grenzproblematik in Mitteleuropa,” in Wolfgang Schmale and Reinhard Stauber (eds.), Menschen und Grenzen in der Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin: Berlin Verlag Arno Spitz, 1998), 117, 121, 128.

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in the East before 1699 was explained by general Ottoman disrespect for boundaries16 and private estates. The underlying rationale explaining the rapid and clear change in Ottoman political principles in 1699 is an assumed transition from traditional Islamic views of relations with nonMuslim states to a more pragmatic approach in foreign policy. As Muslim rulers, Ottoman sultans were, according to sharia, only allowed to make temporary truces with infidel states. The purpose of a truce was to overcome temporary setbacks until the enemy could be defeated and his territory annexed to the land of Islam (darü’l-islam). Since zonal militarized borders caused political insecurity in enemy territories and facilitated the territorial expansion of the Ottoman Empire, the pre-1699 regime in Hungary appeared to be in line with sharia. The acceptance of the territorial integrity of a neighbouring Christian state after 1699, however, signalled a clear break with these principles. Defeated on the battlefield, the Ottoman sultans seemed to be forced into adopting modern principles of international law in order to protect their remaining possessions. Unfortunate developments had induced the Ottomans to accept ideas that appeared to be alien to their principles and practices. This interpretation has been questioned and criticized from several angles. From its foundation in the fourteenth century, the Ottoman state demonstrated considerable pragmatism in both internal and foreign policies, including the flexible interpretation of sharia to fit political realities. Ottoman legal practice devised solutions that reconciled formal respect for Islamic law with factual peace and co-operation with Christian states. The traditional form and conservative rhetoric of Ottoman international agreements, officially a unilateral act of generosity by the Muslim ruler, concealed the fact that many of these documents were actually the result of negotiations between equals and understood as bilateral documents by the other side. In addition, the treaties with far-off Christian states such as France, England or the United Provinces were practically permanent.17 Also, the absence of formal delineations and demarcations on the Habsburg–Ottoman border before 1699 did not mean that the territory in some parts of the frontier was not clearly divided between two sides. Provincial authorities and local inhabitants were well informed as to which side controlled which territory.18 Moreover, Ottoman land and revenue surveys conducted immediately after the incorporation of Hungarian territories into 16 Evans, “Frontiers and National Identities,” 490–492. 17 These seemingly irreconcilable perspectives were visible in the procedure as well. The negotiated final draft of the peace treaties (temessük), less formal in their form and not necessarily pronouncedly unilateral, was considered the final agreement by the other side. For the Ottoman side, the final peace agreements were unilaterally issued ‘ahdnames, whereby the source of the document is always the mercy of the Ottoman ruler. This was the case, for example, with the Habsburg-Ottoman treaty of Zsitvatorok in 1606, which apparently treated both party as equals, but was actually a draft. See Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, Ottoman Polish Diplomatic Relations (15th –18th Century): an Annotated Edition of ‘Ahdnames and Other Documents (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 3–7, 47–56, 68–85; Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, “Between the Splendour of Barocco and Political Pragmatism: the Form and Contents of the PolishOttoman Treaty Documents of 1699,” in Maurits van den Boogert and Kate Fleet (eds.), The Ottoman Capitulations: Text and Context = Oriente Moderno 22 n. s., 83:3 (2003): 673–677, 679; Alexander H. de Groot, “The Historical Development of the Capitulatory Regime in the Ottoman Middle East from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries,” in van den Boogert and Fleet, The Ottoman Capitulations, 575–604, 575–576, 579, 595. 18 Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, “Between Universalistic Claims and Reality: Ottoman Frontiers in the Early Modern Period,” in Christine Woodhead (ed.), The Ottoman World (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2012), 208–209.

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the Ottoman Empire had a function similar to that of maps. For example, both Ottoman and Habsburg border authorities regarded the Ottoman survey of 1546, the so-called Halil Bey’s defters, as an authoritative document. The Ottoman frontier administration used such documents to support their tax claims to particular villages and the Habsburg side to dispute them. The Ottomans made maps of important border fortresses, such as the map of Kanizsa from 1578–1580, which also shows the territory dependent on that fortress.19 In addition, border violence was not entirely uncontrolled. In the sixteenth century, both sides avoided militarily justifiable scorched-earth tactics because they needed frontier resources, above all food and wood for their fortresses and garrisons.20 The difference between the border regime before and after 1699 seems to be less striking than might appear at first glance. Moreover, the supposed importance of linear borders for peaceful frontier regimes is questionable. Ottoman borders with Poland-Lithuania were not precisely demarcated for decades. Still, for most of the time the two countries enjoyed friendly relations.21 In fact, the governments of most major European states did not systematically and formally demarcate their frontiers before the middle of the eighteenth century (and many much later). It was not a responsibility of the central government and it was not considered necessary. Linear delimitations had existed earlier, however, and had been used since Classical Antiquity. They were used locally and privately, but not usually to delimit territorial sovereignty on external borders. In Ancient Rome boundaries between private estates, demarcated by border stones, were considered sacrosanct. Similarly, many borders were delineated during the Middle Ages and marked by border stones, indented trees and mounds of earth. The borders of the bishoprics in the West were known from the tenth century and of many secular estates from twelfth. These borders had, however, a predominantly local character. The traditional periodical demarcations known as “perambulations” were local rituals in which old people transferred their knowledge to the younger generations. When such demarcated borderlines separated two communities that belonged to different states, they practically became international borders. However, neither the Romans nor their mediaeval and Early Modern successors used linear borders to delimit external frontiers. A theory of external state borders did not exist before the seventeenth century.22 During the eighteenth century, Saxony 19 Gábor Ágoston, “Where Environmental and Frontier Studies Meet: Rivers, Forests, Marshes and Forts along the Ottoman–Hapsburg Frontier in Hungary,” in Andrew Charles Spencer Peacock (ed.), The Frontiers of the Ottoman World (Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press, 2009), 63–64, 66; Palmira Brummett, “The Fortress: Defining and Mapping the Ottoman Frontier in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Peacock, The Frontiers of the Ottoman World, 31–32, 48; Ágoston, “Defending and Administering the Frontier,” 225. 20 Pálffy, Ugarska na granici, 144. 21 Kołodziejczyk, “Between Universalistic Claims and Reality,” 209. Also, the existence of linear boundaries did not mean that building of fortifications had completely stopped. During the first two decades of the eighteenth century twenty-four fortresses were build along Una and Sava, on the newly pacified Habsburg–Ottoman linear border; and a little later the Ottoman fortress of Vidin was rebuild to sustain an artillery attack. See Burcu Özgüven, “Palanka Forts and Construciton Activity in the Late Ottoman Balkans,” in Peacock, The Frontiers of the Ottoman World, 175, and Rossitsa Gradeva, “Between Hinterland and Frontier: Ottoman Vidin, Fifteenth to Eighteenth Centuries,” in Peacock, The Frontiers of the Ottoman World, 336. This was, however, only an adjustment to the fact that the border now ran through previously well-protected internal provinces that would be too exposed without new defensive strongholds. The pre-1699 density of fortifications was never reached again. 22 Peter Sahlins, Boundaries. The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), 2, 52; Evans, “Frontiers and National Identities,” 481–485; Reinhard Stau-

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and Prussia unsuccessfully attempted to resolve a border dispute involving the Koben Mill using local testimonies.This dispute was finally resolved when territorial changes during Napoleonic wars moved the frontier.23 Some European borders were so well known and well established that they were sometimes considered practically linear. This was the case with Bohemia, as previously mentioned. It was believed that the Tweed-Solway line had separated England from Scotland since the thirteen century; and that the border between Portugal and Spain had been fixed in the fifteenth century. However, the actual delimitations and demarcations were carried out much later: in the case of Bohemia, for example, not until the eighteenth century.24 The demarcation of Verdun in 843 that followed the division of the Carolingian Empire is usually considered a legend, since the commissaries lacked the necessary techniques to perform it properly. In a society that was politically particularized, external borders did not carry much significance.25 Early Modern travelogues and diaries attach little significance to the crossing of state borders.26 Mediaeval and most Early Modern European societies did not understand the state as a physical territory. Up until the age of Louis XIV the European monarchies had regarded themselves as the sum of persons, feudal rights and jurisdictions. At the local level, too, the territory of a village was imagined as series of rights of use enjoyed by its inhabitants, not as a physical space inside imagined lines.27 Sovereignty was, therefore, not territorial, but jurisdictional. Territorial expansion was, accordingly, primarily the acquisition of new

ber and Wolfgang Schmale, “Einleitung: Mensch und Grenze in der Frühen Neuzeit,” in idem (eds.), Menschen und Grenzen in der Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin: Berlin Verlag Arno Spitz, 1998), 13–14; Daniel Power, “Introduction: A. Frontiers: Terms, Concepts, and the Historians of Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” in Daniel Power and Naomi Standen (eds.), Frontiers in Question: Euroasian Borderlands, 700–1700 (London: Macmillan Press, 1999), 4; Pedani, Dalla frontiera al confine, 10–12, 45–46; Reinhard Stauber, “Grenze,” in Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2006 ), vol. 4, 1107, 1109. 23 Bernard Heise, “From Tangible Sign to Deliberate Delineation: The Evolution of the Political Boundary in the Eighteenth and Early-Nineteenth Centuries. The Example of Saxony,” in Wolfgang Schmale and Reinhard Stauber (eds.), Menschen und Grenzen in der Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin: Berlin Verlag Arno Spitz, 1998), 172–176. 24 Daniel Nordman, Frontières de France: de l’espace au territoire: XVIe – XIXe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 37; Walter Ziegler, “Die bayerisch-böhmische Grenze,” 117, 121, 128; Steven G. Ellis, “Defending English Ground: the Tudor Frontiers in History and Historiography,” in Steven G. Ellis and Raingard Eßer (eds.), Frontiers and the Writing of History, 1500–1850 (Hannover – Laatzen: Wehrhahn, 2006), 76; Günter Vogler, “Borders and Boundaries in Early Modern Europe: Problems and Possibilities,” in Steven G. Ellis and Raingard Eßer (eds.), Frontiers and the Writing of History, 1500–1850 (Hannover  – Laatzen: Wehrhahn, 2006), 30–31. The lines determined by the Treaties of Tordesillas (1494) and Saragossa (1529) that divided the non-European part of the globe between Spain and Portugal were the ideal of linearity. It would be difficult to see them as real political borders. See Vogler, “Bordres and Boundaries,” 36. 25 Nordman, Frontières de France, 75–77; Günther Lottes, “Frontiers between Geography and History,” in Steven G. Ellis and Raingard Eßer (eds.), Frontiers and the Writing of History, 1500–1850 (Hannover – Laatzen: Wehrhahn, 2006), 46–47. 26 Wolfgang Schmale, “‘Grenze’ in der deutschen und französischen Frühneuzeit,” in Wolfgang Schmale and Reinhard Stauber (eds.), Menschen und Grenzen in der Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin: Arno Spitz, 1998), 62. 27 Sahlins, Boundaries, 157.

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feudal rights.28 After new territorial acquisitions, appointed border commissaries attempted to list all villages, towns, fortresses and estates, with their rights and jurisdictions, in delimitation documents. The goal was to make exhaustive inventories with every single right and jurisdiction listed. When the commissionaires did occasionally go to the terrain and plant borders stones, it was usually in an area of great defensive significance, for example around a major border fortress. Maps and cartographers did not play a crucial role in this process.29 The various state jurisdictions (military, judicial, fiscal, trade and businessregulation, Church) did not always match territorially and sometimes crossed the external borders of states.30 The local inhabitants found their way pretty well through this complex system.31 The priority of rights and jurisdiction over the physical, territorial concept of state resulted in the existence of numerous enclaves and exclaves in mediaeval and Early Modern Europe, detached territories that were surrounded by foreign polities. Territorial fragmentation was gradually perceived as problematic from the seventeenth century onwards, when the mercantilist economic thinkers began to regard states as economic units.32 Compared to this situation, the borders between the Ottoman Empire and some of its other neighbours were much more advanced. In fact, the parallel histories of Venetian-Ottoman and Polish-Ottoman delimitations, undertaken decades or centuries before, undermine the supposed originality of the 1699 Carlowitz Habsburg-Ottoman border arrangement. The first known Venetian-Ottoman delimitation was carried out in the fifteenth century, after the Ottoman-Venetian peace treaty of 1479. After conquering the Serbian Despotate (1459), the Despotate of Morea (1460) and the Kingdom of Bosnia (1463), the Ottomans came into direct territorial contact with Venetian coastal territories in the Aegean, Ionian and Adriatic Seas. War between Venice and the sultan ensued (1463–1479). The border provisions based on the peace treaty of 1479 are strikingly similar to the post-1699 Habsburg-Ottoman arrangement. Territorial division was based on the actual military control of territory (uti possidetis, ‘alā ḥalihi), disregarding traditional boundaries. Some forts were demolished and the building of new ones was prohibited. The border commission established by the Ottoman-Venetian treaty delimited and demarcated new borders by 1481 and produced an official delimitation protocol. In same manner, borders were drawn and demarcated after subsequent Ottoman-Venetian conflicts, sanctioning territorial changes, up until 1718, when the two states ended their last war.33 Similar border practices existed between the Ottoman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Ottomans were interested in protecting their relatively populous vas28 Lucien Febvre, “Frontière: le mot et la notion” and “Frontière: limites et divisions territoriales de la France en 1789,” in Lucien Febvre, Pour une Histoire à part entière (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N, 1962), 18–19. 29 Nordman, Frontières de France, 125, 128–129, 143, 150, 167, 169, 205–207, 209, 214–215, 223–225, 227– 228, 259, 265–271, 273. When they existed, topographical representations were inaccurate, sometimes with conveniently invented mountain ranges. See Peter Sahlins, “Natural Frontiers Revisited: France’s Boundaries since the Seventeenth Century,” The American Historical Review 95:5 (1990): 1432. 30 Sahlins, Boundaries, 28–29. 31 Nordman, Frontières de France, 368–369, 384–386. 32 In the Middle Ages the lines of separation between the French king and his English vassal were often more important than the external borders of France. See Lottes, “Frontiers between Geography and History,” 50–51, 53. 33 Maria Pia Pedani Fabris, “The Ottoman Venetian Frontier (15th –18th Centuries),” in Kemal Çiçek (ed.), The Great Ottoman – Turkish Civilization, vol. 1 (Ankara: Yeni Türkiye, 2000), 174; Pedani, Dalla frontiera al confine, 39–42; de Groot, “The historical development,” 588–589.

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sal principality of Moldavia and surrounding areas. They suggested a precise drawing of the borders as early as 1542. The first delimitation was carried out in 1633. The next one started in 1673 after the Ottoman occupation of the neighbouring Polish province of Podolia. Interrupted by the resumption of hostilities, it was finally executed in 1680 and is well documented. The border was again revised and demarcated in 1703.34 The Ottomans may have demarcated their boundaries with Moldavia in the fifteenth century. In 1619 Sultan Osman II ordered the demarcation of borders with Safavid Persia, the other major Muslim power.35 The practice of drawing linear boundaries seems, therefore, to have been quite well established in relations between the Ottoman Empire and foreign powers. Ottoman-Venetian and Ottoman-Polish delimitation procedures were quite developed. The commissaries consulted old documents, including maps, went to the terrain and interviewed local dignitaries and witnesses. They supervised the placement of border marks and the demolition of some fortresses. At the end, delimitation protocols would be produced and exchanged. The protocols were often drawn up in two languages. A local judge, the kadı, would sign in the name of the Ottoman state. For the Ottoman side, the official demarcation document was the hududname, produced afterwards in the sultan’s court.36 Hududname or sınırname were the documents used not just for demarcating external, but also the Ottoman internal borders. They recorded the separation of the territories of pious foundations (vakıfs) from the state-owned lands.37 The external borders were to enjoy the same respect and sacrosanct status as vakıfs. This would also suggest that one of the sources of modern delimitations might have been Ottoman legal and administrative practice. Some researchers believe that the Ottomans initially adopted these practices from the Venetians. Linear delimitations could be traced back to the Ancient Romans and were usual in Italy by the time Venice concluded its first border agreements with the Ottoman Empire. The Venetians were the ones who insisted on clear territorial separation and linear borders. The zonal frontier was unacceptable to them, since it might introduce political instability in narrow strips of territory along the coastlines which constituted their overseas empire.38 The advanced character of demarcation protocols (they differed from the modern ones in calculating distances in hours of walking instead of in metres) led to the conclusion that the Habsburgs contributed little, by introducing modern cartography in the process.39 34 Kołodziejczyk, Ottoman Polish Diplomatic Relations, 57–67. 35 Kołodziejczyk, “Between Universalistic Claims and Reality,” 208. It is not clear, however, whether delimitation and demarcation of borders with Persia was eventually carried out. 36 The Ottoman-Venetian border was marked with piles of stones, crosses incised in trees, or big rocks. Since the Ottomans later considered the cross to be a Christian sign and so not appropriate for marking the Ottoman borders, a crescent was introduced in addition in the demarcations of 1703 and 1720. This might be the first time that the crescent was used as an official political symbol of the Ottoman Empire. On the Ottoman-Polish frontier the mounds of earth with poles in their centres marked the border in 1680. The Ottoman side of the pole was shaped like turbaned head, the Polish like a cross. See Pedani, “The Ottoman Venetian Frontier,” 172, 175–176; Pedani, Dalla frontiera al confine, 43–49; Kołodziejczyk, Ottoman Polish Diplomatic Relations, 57–67. 37 Kołodziejczyk, Ottoman Polish Diplomatic Relations, 57–67. 38 Pedani, “The Ottoman Venetian Frontier,” 171; Pedani, Dalla frontiera al confine, 39–40. 39 The Habsburg border commissioner, Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, introduced mapping in 1699– 1701. Marsigli also proposed the establishment of the sanitary cordon inside the Monarchy for the protection of the Habsburg lands from plague epidemics in the Ottoman Empire. See Kołodziejczyk, Ottoman Polish Diplomatic Relations, 57–67; Kołodziejczyk, “Between Universalistic Claims and Reality,” 207, 209.

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A more recent interpretation reverses the argument of Abou-el-Haj. The HabsburgOttoman frontier might, in fact, have been atypical before, not after, 1699. This was the result of specific circumstances in Hungary that did not exist elsewhere on the Ottoman frontiers. The competing claims of the Habsburgs and the Ottomans to the whole of Hungary after 1526 produced an unusual situation in which both sides exercised some jurisdiction over the same territory and the same subjects.40 The post-1699 arrangement would, therefore, be a kind of normalization, possible only after one side, in this case the defeated Ottomans, renounced their claim to the whole of Hungary, thereby removing this anomaly. In addition to adding scant innovation, the Habsburg-Ottoman border had, at first glance, very little in common with the “movement of delimitations” in which many borders in Western, Southern and Central Europe were precisely demarcated in the late-eighteenth century, including other borders of the Habsburg Monarchy. However, the border arrangements between the Habsburg Monarchy and the Ottoman Empire after 1699 were both original and relevant for wider developments in Europe. First, though, it is necessary to regard the arrangement of 1699 not as an isolated event but as the beginning of the process which was transforming the Habsburg-Ottoman frontier. The Comparison with Ottoman-Venetian and Ottoman-Polish Delimitations It is true that the Carlowitz Peace Treaty owed much to the preceding Ottoman-Venetian and Ottoman-Polish border regulations. However, regarded as a process that started in 1699 and then evolved during the eighteenth century, the history of the Habsburg-Ottoman border emerges as profoundly significant. During this time the demarcated boundary used by the Ottomans and other states as one of the possible frontier arrangements was transformed into the only possible border organization, a standard practice adopted later by other larger territorial monarchies and nation-states. During this process the concept of linearity was further developed and the border acquired new functions, such as the control and supervision of mobility. The modern border is unimaginable without these characteristics. In addition to being the Habsburg contribution to the procedure in 1699, the practice of mapping thus heralded broader changes that arrived during the next decades. The comparison with the Ottoman-Venetian and Ottoman-Polish delimitations may reveal how the development of the Habsburg-Ottoman border diverged from these previous models. Venetians were at least as interested in delimitations as their Ottoman neighbours, if not more so. That was not, however, a relationship between equals. Despite having clearly demarcated borders, Venetians paid tribute to the Ottomans: for example, for holding the island of Cyprus from 1517–1571. This indicates that the Ottomans did have some claims over territories controlled by the Venetians. The jurisdictions were not, therefore, exclusively separated. The political imbalance translated into the more active role that the Ottoman procedure played in the process. A local Ottoman judge, the kadı, signed the demarcation document, entered its content into local judicial records and gave a receipt, a hüccet, to the Venetians. At the Ottoman court, another copy of the Ottoman demarcation protocol was transformed into an official border document, a hududname, that was then granted to the Venetians. The unequal relationship manifested itself in other ways. In the 1520s, the lo40 Suraiya Faroqhi, “The Ottoman Empire Confronting the Christian World (1451–1774): a Discussion of the Secondary Literature Produced in Turkey,” in Elias Kolovos, Phokion Kotzageorgis, Sophia Laiou and Marinos Sariyannis (eds.), The Ottoman Empire, the Balkans, the Greek Lands: Toward a Social and Economic History: Studies in Honor of John C. Alexander (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2007), 91–93.

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cal Ottoman authorities in Dalmatia unlawfully seized some Venetian territory, divided it into tımars (state fiefs) and diverted its tax incomes to local sipahis, the provincial cavalry. Only after long negotiations in Constantinople did the Venetians receive their territory back. Violence on the border was not uncommon, especially after wars. The Ottoman local administrators sometimes protected the fugitives and bandits. The principle of border inviolability was not consistently respected. In addition, people moved freely across the borders, which also saw the periodic migration of cattle from the Ottoman hinterlands into Venetian territory and back.41 Therefore, the regime on the Venetian-Ottoman border lacked two important modern characteristics. First, respect for territorial separation depended overwhelmingly on the adherence of the stronger partner, the Ottomans. Second, no regime of mobility control was in place. In peaceful and healthy times, access to the respective territories was neither closely supervised nor restricted. Venice was a city-state and its overseas territories, where the delimitations occurred, were relatively small. The Habsburg-Ottoman delimitation was more comparable with delimitations between the Ottoman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Poland-Lithuania was a large monarchy, similar to the Habsburg Monarchy. The length of the Habsburg-Ottoman and Polish-Ottoman borders was similar. What could be learned from the comparison between the Habsburg-Ottoman and the Ottoman-Polish delimitations? Both in Ottoman-Polish and Habsburg-Ottoman relations, the Ottoman side introduced linear delimitations. The Habsburg plenipotentiaries at the Peace Congress in Carlowitz 1698– 1699, Count Wolfgang Öttingen and Count Leopold Schlik, initially suggested forming a frontier zone, a demilitarized and inhabited ‘no man’s land’ that would separate the two Empires and would include the territory along the rivers Mureș (Maros, Moriš) and Tisza (Tisa). The Ottoman plenipotentiaries, Rami Mehmed Pasha and Alexander Mavrocordato, however, rejected this suggestion. The sultan’s negotiators proposed instead clearly to separate territories by putting the boundary on the two rivers. Mavrocordato referred to a well-established Ottoman procedure of delimitations. He suggested designating special border commissioners that would mark the new Habsburg-Ottoman border in a “clear and unmistakable” manner by placing border marks on the terrain. The Ottomans also suggested demolishing some frontier fortifications and prohibiting the building of new ones. The Habsburg delegation agreed.42 The Habsburgs earnestly adopted demarcated linear boundaries as the standard border arrangement with the Ottomans. They adhered to it both when they were victorious in 1699, 1718 and 1791 and when they were not in 1739. Such adoption was not visible in the case of Poland-Lithuania. Polish and Ottoman versions of demarcation documents demonstrate some asymmetry. In the Ottoman document of 1680, the focus is on the borderline; in the Polish version, on villages. The Polish demarcation protocol is shorter; the description of the border is less precise, with few topographical marks. The Polish commissioners were content to name the villages that belonged to each side, implying that village boundaries were state boundaries. This implies that the Polish held the view, prevalent in Western Europe at 41 Pedani, “The Ottoman Venetian Frontier,” 172; Pedani, Dalla frontiera al confine, 42–44, 46, 64–67, 70. 42 The Ottoman effort to keep a foothold in Syrmia (Srem) near Belgrade resulted in the division of Syrmia between two sides with a straight line, exemplifying an “artificial” demarcated border of 1699. Rifa‛at A. Abou-El-Haj, “Ottoman Diplomacy at Karlowitz,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 87:4 (1967): 503–506. John Stoye, Marsigli’s Europe, 1680–1730: the Life and Times of Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, Soldier and Virtuoso (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 174–175.

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that time, of a delimitation document not as the division of physical space but as an inventory of possession.43 After the Ottoman defeat in the last Ottoman-Polish war, the demarcation protocol in 1703 was even shorter and less precise.44 The Polish side seems to have been less interested in the process of demarcation, which was carried out on the Ottoman initiative, but the Ottomans themselves were inconsistent. Once they lost the province of Podolia in 1699, their loss of interest in precise delimitations was reflected on the official document. Also, Poland-Lithuania restricted linear delimitations territorially. It successfully sabotaged the delimitation with the Cossacks in 1680, preserving its territorial pretensions and thus not unambiguously separating jurisdictions.45 The Habsburgs, on the other hand, progressively expanded linear borders to run the whole length of the Habsburg-Ottoman frontier. In 1699, a part of the Habsburg-Ottoman border remained undemarcated, namely, that between Habsburg Transylvania on the one side and the Ottoman vassal principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia on the other. The Treaty of Carlowitz defines it as the old border, “before this war”, even though Transylvania had just exchanged Ottoman suzerainty for Habsburg rule.46 In effect, historical borders between Transylvania, Moldavia and Wallachia remained unchanged. The jurisdictions were separated, but the actual borders, which were known to locals, were not demarcated. As Vienna gradually embraced clear territorial delimitations and demarcations, this part of the border was also precisely demarcated and mapped in the 1770s.47 Thus the whole Habsburg-Ottoman frontier was transformed into a precisely demarcated linear boundary, showing that this was a progressive and irreversible development. After the defining of “new” borders, the “old” ones were fixed as well.48 The Habsburgs also further developed the concept of linear separation. Logical and elegant on paper, the implementation of linear delimitation on actual terrain gave rise to ambiguities and was open to interpretation.49 The delimitations that followed rivers could be very complicated.50 How should river islands and resources be divided? How did chang43 Kołodziejczyk, “Between Universalistic Claims and Reality,” 211. 44 Kołodziejczyk, Ottoman Polish Diplomatic Relations, 545–554, 626–640; Kołodziejczyk, “Between Universalistic Claims and Reality,” 211. 45 Kołodziejczyk, “Between Universalistic Claims and Reality,” 211. 46 Article 1, Carl. Peace Treaty 1699, 48. The Treaty of Passarowitz repeats this definition, with, of course, the exception of the part of the border between Transylvania and the Lesser Wallachia, which was under Habsburg rule 1718–1739. The Article 1 of the Peace Treaty of Passarowitz, 21 July 1718, Treaties etc., 69–70. 47 Madalina-Valeria Veres, “Putting Transylvania on the Map: Cartography and Enlightened Absolutism in the Habsburg Monarchy,” Austrian History Yearbook 43 (2012): 151–154. 48 Followed also by the delimitation of internal borders (provincial, diocesan, municipal, parochial). See Andrea Komlosy, “State, Regions, and Borders: Single Market Formation and Labor Migration in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1750–1918,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 27:2 (2004): 145–147. 49 Disagreements regarding maritime borders, exclusive economic littoral areas and similar international border disputes persist to this day. 50 A number of questions arose: how should the use and possession of the river be defined? Should it be jointly used and possessed or divided? If divided, should the boundary line follow the thalweg (navigation route, where the river is deepest) or simply the middle of the water surface (and based on what water level should the division be made)? What if river islands were present? Should the islands be divided as well? If so, how and to which side should the newly emerging islands belong? What if a river changed its course (especially if the treaty defined it as the line of division)? How could water be used for navigation (including pulling barges upstream)? What about fishing, river mills, irrigation, regulation, the diversion of water for other uses?

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es in the course of a river (which were not rare) affect the boundary line? Gradually, the Habsburgs became aware of these ambiguities and took steps to find solutions. The Peace of Carlowitz (1699) placed a large section of the borderline on the rivers Mureș, Tisza, Sava and Una. While Vienna retained control over river islands on the Mureș, Tisza and Una (from Novi downstream), the islands on the Sava were shared with the Ottoman side (Carl. 1699, Articles 2 and 5).51 This produced a narrow zone of dual rule, a condominium. In addition, it was not clear whether subjects could use the whole river, for example for fishing, or only the part that was closer to the shore ruled by their respective rulers. The Peace of Passarowitz (Požarevac) in 1718 delayed the resolution of these uncertainties by temporarily pushing the borderline away from major rivers. The ambiguities reappeared in 1739, when the Habsburg-Ottoman border finally settled down on the Sava and the Danube. All islands were divided. A procedure for allocating control over new islands was developed (they were to be allocated to the side which governed the closer shore). Although the use of rivers nominally remained shared, the surface of the water was divided in the middle between the Habsburg Monarchy and the Ottoman Empire. Fishermen were not allowed to cross this imaginary line.52 Linear delimitations were further developed. Detailed maps of the division of Danube river islands53 are an additional testimony to Vienna’s initiative of drawing linear borders. This was not the case with the Ottoman-Polish delimitations. The Ottoman protocol of demarcation from 1680 was very detailed, including descriptions of border marks. The direction and length (in hours of walking) of borders were clearly indicated, as was the relationship to neighbouring Polish and Ottoman settlements. Even the section of the border in the steppe is very precisely described in this manner. The new demarcation protocol of 1703, however, shows some regression in detail and precision. Considerably shorter, it refers to general topographical features, but usually without directions or the length in hours of walking.54 It seems that for Poles and Ottomans principles of linearity were one of several possible border arrangements, not a single guiding norm. Linear principles were adjusted to suit specific interests at a particular moment. The Habsburg-Ottoman Border and the European “Movement of Delimitations” The development of the border between the Habsburg Monarchy and the Ottoman Empire was more similar to the “movement of delimitations” in Western, Central and Southern Europe from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards. The movement to delimitate borders involved most European countries. Both large and small states participated: France, Spain, the Habsburg Monarchy, Prussia, Bavaria, other German principalities, Swiss cantons and Italian principalities (such as Sardinia and Venice). The first systematic delimitations were carried out in the late 1730s and they were in full swing in the 1760s–1780s, reaching even colonies outside Europe (the borders on the small island of Santo Domingo in the Caribbean were delimitated in 1776/1778). The French Revolution and the ensuing wars interrupted the process, which continued long into the nineteenth century. Delimitations and demarcations were slow and lasted for decades. They involved extensive work on the 51 Articles 2 and 5, Carl. Peace Treaty 1699, 48–51. 52 Articles 1, 2, 4, and 7 of the Peace Treaty of Belgrade, 18 September 1739; Articles 1, 2 and 4 of the Convention about Limits, 2 March 1741, Treaties etc., 95–97, 109–111. 53 Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Vienna, Haus-, Hof-, und Staatsarchiv, StAbt Türkei IX, 1741 Donaugrenze Serbien-Banat. 54 Kołodziejczyk, Ottoman Polish Diplomatic Relations, 555–580, 626–635 (English translation).

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terrain by commissaries, slow negotiations, the exchange of territories to eliminate enclaves and exclaves, oaths of allegiance from new subjects, detailed mapping, the production of border protocols and the planting of border signs. A numerous teams of notaries, interpreters, engineers, secretaries, geometers and other government officials participated in these operations. Their work was supervised by central bureaucrats and diplomats.55 The general aim was to introduce uniform and singular delimitation practices, like those in the Habsburg-Ottoman case. These would make state territory more “legible” to central government and ensure easier administration with clearly separated territorial jurisdictions. As in previous delimitations between the Ottoman Empire and its Christian neighbours, the pre-condition were peaceful international relations in Europe. One of the few differences was the fact that border negotiations were opened in peacetime. The negotiating parties were treated as equals, irrespective of their military strength. Border negotiations were instigated to delimit space precisely, not to make territorial claims. The goal of negotiations was a compromise that would produce territorial cohesion. Bilateral border commissions disregarded ancient rights and claims. Due to this disregard for tradition, this process was also called “the advancement of the artificial border”.56 Peace did not imply complete demilitarization. In the early eighteenth century some border fortresses were modernized and expanded and new ones were erected on the Habsburg-Ottoman frontier. This should not be regarded as an insincere adherence to the maintenance of peace or the repudiation of the provisions of peace treaties that formally forbade the building of new frontier fortifications. Instead, this was a necessary adjustment of the territories that changed their status from protected internal provinces to exposed frontier areas. The density of fortifications did not reach that of the pre-1699 area. The expansion of the military border eastwards in the eighteenth century brought the border troops and violence under the close control of the central government in Vienna. The military defence of the frontier, the official purpose of the military border, was in practice overshadowed by the other tasks this institution performed.57 Both on the Habsburg-Ottoman frontier in 1699 and elsewhere in Europe half a century later, population density did not matter much for delimitations between large territorial states. This was a systematic, comprehensive process that included both better-populated and urbanized areas and those with scarce populations, even uninhabited deserts and swamps.58 The inhabitants of more populous agricultural areas were more interested in defining and dividing border resources than the inhabitants of steppes; and some territories 55 Sahlins, Boundaries, 93–95, 98–100, 238; Sahlins, “Natural Frontiers Revisited,” 1435–1443; Nordman, Frontières de France, 297–305, 317–321, 338–340, 348–349, 356–359, 363–365, 375, 381, 383. 56 The enforcement of peace on the borders of France, for example, was visible in language. Term frontière, used to denote militarized borders, became synonymous with the technical term and more neutral term limite previously used for boundaries. See Febvre, “Frontière,” 14, 16–17, 20–21; Sahlins, Boundaries, 96–97; Evans, “Frontiers and National Identities,” 488; Nordman, Frontières de France, 53–60, 319–320; 348–349, 356–359, 415–422; Steven G. Ellis, and Raingard Eßer, “Introduction: Early Modern Frontiers in Comparative context,” idem (eds.), Frontiers and the Writing of History, 1500–1850 (Hannover – Laatzen: Wehrhahn, 2006), 13–14; Stauber, “Grenze,” 1110. 57 From the 1730s, the Habsburgs increasingly used border troops in other European theatres of war. The Monarchy postponed the dissolution of the Tisza-Mureş Military Border until the 1750s, although the border had moved away three decades earlier. The Slavonian Border with its centre in Varaždin survived more than a century longer, having no territorial contact with the Ottoman Empire after 1699. The military border was also expanded into Banat of Temesvár and Transylvania. 58 Febvre, “Frontière,” 16–17.

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were effectively separated earlier.59 However, such territorial divisions, like those that had existed in parts of Hungary before 1699, were not systematic and formalized. They did not prevent overlapping jurisdiction, which is one of the important functions of the modern border. In 1699 and 1718 demarcation and clear territorial division were carried out in many areas that were depopulated or uninhabited.60 This was part of the process in which state territory became physical space, not a list of historical rights.61 Ancient measures for the size of a state, such as length and width, were regarded as obsolete. Instead, states were compared to one another in terms of surface and population.62 The new territorial organization of power was characterized as “territorial pragmatism”63 and manifested itself in an effort to create “closed borders” by exchanging territories and abandoning enclaves and exclaves in order to form a compact territory.64 In the changed relationship between the central government and its subjects, private estates were required to adjust to the external boundaries, not the other way round as previously. Moreover, like elsewhere in Europe, the central Habsburg governments showed little interest in local proprietary rights and claims.65 Inside new borders it would be easier to govern by fighting desertion, to enforce commercial policies and to guarantee public safety.66 Increasing reliance on maps was another sign of this process, using modern technical knowledge to make space more “legible”67 for central bureaucracy. From the eighteenth century onwards, mapping was developed enough even for border marks to be properly indicated.68 The new maps principally represented territory as a physical space and less as points of social and physical significance. Knowledge about space was thus impersonal and abstract, kept by a central administration.69 The new maps became the principal source of knowledge about the border, replacing local testimonies. From the 1740s, maps played a major role in delimiting the borders of France.70 The Habsburg-Ottoman frontier had already been mapped in 1699–1701; and mapping was an integral part of the delimitation process in subsequent Habsburg-Ottoman peace treaties. In the Peace Treaty of Sistova (Svishtov) 1791, a map of territorial changes was produced first and actual demarcations on the terrain were carried out second.71 59 Kołodziejczyk, “Between Universalistic Claims and Reality,” 211–212. 60 Vojin S. Dabić, “The Habsburg-Ottoman War of 1716–1718 and Demographic Changes in War-Afflicted Territories,” in Charles Ingrao, Nikola Samardžić, and Jovan Pešalj (eds.), The Peace of Passarowitz, 1718 (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2011), 191–208. 61 Nordman, Frontières de France, 306–307. 62 Heise, “From Tangible Sign to Deliberate Delineation,” 180–185. 63 Ellis and Eßer, “Introduction,” 13–14. 64 Febvre, “Frontière,” 16–17. 65 Article 8 of the Peace of Sistova, 4 August 1791, Haus-, Hof-, und Staatsarchiv, StAbt Türkei III 7. 66 Sahlins, Boundaries, 93–95. 67 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). 68 Evans, “Frontiers and National Identities,” 485–486. 69 Heise, “From Tangible Sign to Deliberate Delineation,” 171, 174, 177–178. 70 Nordman, Frontières de France, 407–408. 71 Articles 2 and 3, of the Separate Border Convention of Sistova, 4 August 1791, Haus-, Hof, und Staatsarchiv, StAbt Türkei III 7. The dynamics of delimitation indicate the significance of external frontiers. They were demarcated first, followed by internal borders. This was the process that continued well into the nineteenth century. See Evans, “Frontiers and National Identities,” 492–494. The whole surface of

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In one particular aspect the Habsburg border to the Ottoman Empire surpassed developments elsewhere in Europe in a remarkable fashion. In addition to being linear, peaceful and mapped, the Habsburg border with the Ottoman Empire gradually acquired new functions. From the 1720s a permanent sanitary cordon was established along the border to prevent the spread of epidemic diseases from the Ottoman provinces to Habsburg towns and villages. The cordon was manned by soldiers that supervised the borderline, prevented illegal crossings and guarded the legal crossing points; and by civilian officials in quarantine stations to which all cross-border migration was redirected.72 This regime of mobility control would have been unimaginable without the previous existence of linear borders and clear separation of territorial jurisdictions. The cordon was not only used to prevent the spread of epidemics, but was also the point where the trade between the Habsburg Monarchy and the Ottoman Empire was controlled and supervised. It was also used to supervise migration across the border and as an entry point to the larger system of supervision of Ottoman migrants inside the monarchy.73 These new, advanced functions were introduced in most other parts of Europe during the French Revolution or much later and today play as important a role as territorial separation. Conclusion The origin of linear borders on the Habsburg-Ottoman frontier is complex. It was clearly a model with which the Ottomans were very familiar and which they used both for external and internal boundaries. The fact that its character was already so advanced in the fifteenth century is an additional testimony to the advanced development of the Ottoman state in the early centuries of its existence in comparison to its neighbours. Its central government directed systematic land surveys of conquered territories and had a standing army decades and centuries before many other European states. However, as in these other cases, sometime during this development these models were standardized and not developed any further. In the meantime, in some parts of Europe the development of cartography and land surveys was gradually changing territorial divisions and the concept of sovereignty. Once the larger territorial states attained the bureaucratic capacities of city-states, they imitated the well-determined and well-preserved borders of urban communities. Borders not only served to designate territorial limits but were soon used, like city walls, to supervise and control entrances and exits from the respective territory, becoming a type of well-guarded city wall on the central level.74 These two ingredients, the linear delimitation and effective administration of frontiers, were part of the amalgam that the Habsburg border commissioner in 1699, the Italian Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, began to create. Combining the elements and adding new roles and functions, the Habsburgs further developed the model. A linear border was introduced along the whole length of the Habsburg-Ottoman border. New the state was being mapped, too, and entered into cadastres. See Nordman, Frontières de France, 327, 329, 519–521, 524. 72 Erna Lesky, “Die österreichische Pestfront and der k. k. Militärgrenze,” Saeculum 8 (1957): 82–106; Gunther E. Rohtenberg, “The Austrian Sanitary Cordon and the control of Bubonic Plague: 1710–1871,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 28:1 (1973): 15–23. 73 See Jovan Pešalj, “Some Observations on the Habsburg-Ottoman Border and Mobility Control Policies,” in Marija Wakounig and Markus Peter Beham (eds.), Transgressing Boundaries: Humanities in Flux (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2013), 245–256. 74 Evans, “Frontiers and National Identities,” 488; Nordman, Frontières de France, 399–402.

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rules and procedures were developed strictly to divide physical space and frontier resources. The central government had a leading role in arranging and enforcing border regimes. Local interests and conditions were of secondary importance in this process. Peace was enforced at the border in order to bring the use of violence under the strict control of central authorities. Finally, a regime of mobility control was introduced which put cross-border migration under state supervision and control. The combination of all these elements created a new border model that was already in place in the second half of the eighteenth century.

Lice and Locusts or Allies and Brethren? The Ambivalent Attitude towards the Crimean Tatars in Early Modern Poland-Lithuania Dariusz Kołodziejczyk In 1618 Szymon Starowolski (1588–1656), a fresh graduate of the University of Cracow who was soon to earn fame as one of the most prolific Polish Baroque writers, published a pamphlet in which he compared the Tatars to lice and locusts and proposed their ejection from the Crimea.1 A number of similar projects were developed in the following decades; and in the 1640s the governments in Warsaw and Moscow seriously contemplated a joint conquest of the Crimean Khanate. After the battle at Okhmativ (Pol. Ochmatów), fought on 30 January 1644, in which the Polish troops led by Crown Hetman Stanisław Koniecpolski routed a large Tatar slaving raid led by Tughay Bey, the commander of Perekop from the Arghın clan, the enthusiasm for war was so great in Poland that in February 1644 the PolishLithuanian Senate decided to cease the sending of traditional gifts to the Khan.2 The decision was equivalent to a declaration of war since the Tatars regarded the gifts as due tribute, sent by the Polish kings in return for the peace on the side of the Khan. In the fall of 1644, Hetman Stanisław Koniecpolski authored a memorandum proposing to enter an alliance with Muscovy and attack the Tatars. While Russia would conquer and colonize the Crimean Peninsula, Poland would annex the Tatar and Ottoman lands on the Black Sea shores, extending as far as the Danube.3 These plans never materialized due to the death of Tsar Michael Romanov in 1645 and that of Hetman Koniecpolski in 1646. The Polish king Vladislaus IV still nourished grandiose plans not just to conquer the Crimea, but to join Venice in her war against the Ottoman Empire, but the royal plans were utterly shattered due to fierce opposition in the Polish-Lithuanian Diet. While the Polish nobility

1 Szymon Starowolski, “Pobudka abo rada na zniesienie Tatarów perekopskich,” in idem, Wybór z pism, ed. by Ignacy Lewandowski (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy imienia Ossolińskich, 1991), 168 (the relevant extracts with reference to locusts and lice: “co to za szarańcza [...] naszę Ojczyznę pustoszy” and “Polacy wszom tatarskim odjąć się nie mogą”). 2 Bohdan Baranowski, Stosunki polsko-tatarskie w latach 1632–1648 (Łódź: Uniwersytet Łódzki, 1949), 131–148. 3 “Dyskurs o zniesieniu Tatarów krymskich i lidze z Moskwą,” in Stanisław Oświęcim, Stanisława Oświęcima Dyaryusz 1643–1651, ed. by Wiktor Czermak (Cracow: Akademia Umiejętności, 1907), 130–132; Korespondencja Stanisława Koniecpolskiego hetmana wielkiego koronnego 1632–1646, ed. by Agnieszka Biedrzycka (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Towarzystwa Naukowego “Societas Vistulana”, 2005), 67 and 704–705 (in earlier scholarship, the memorandum was dated to 1645). On the ensuing Polish-Russian negotiations regarding an anti-Crimean alliance, see Boris Florja [Floria], “Plany wojny tureckiej Władysława IV a Rosja (1644–1646),” Odrodzenie i Reformacja w Polsce 36 (1991): 133–145.

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might have contemplated a war against the Crimea, they certainly did not wish to provoke the Ottoman Porte.4 Nonetheless, in following years as well, whenever Warsaw and Moscow contemplated a mutual rapprochement, the idea of a joint invasion of the Crimea was revived, for example, in the years 1667 and again in 1686. After the Tsar decided to join the anti-Ottoman coalition formed as a result of the Second Siege of Vienna, Polish and Russian commissioners negotiated the conditions of a joint military action. The Polish negotiators then expressed their hope that the Russians would invade the Crimea, “put all the Tatars, like chicken, into a sack, and eat them, so that their name be no longer heard in the world”, while the Russian government seriously contemplated a forced resettlement of the Tatars to Asia Minor.5 What strikes one in the above Polish Early Modern discourse about the Tatars is the very offensive and aggressive language. Comparing human enemies to beasts, and especially to insects such as lice, serves to dehumanize them and does not augur well for them. Perhaps the most telling recent example is the treatment of Jews in Nazi propaganda. In the seventeenth century, the Poles also waged wars and suffered invasion by the Swedes, Russians and Ottoman Turks, but this author is not aware of such offensive language being applied by Polish writers to the above nations (admittedly, the Turks were sometimes labelled “infidel dogs”, but they were not compared to insects). Interestingly, the epithet hasharat (“insects”) was used by Ottoman and pro-Ottoman Arab authors in regard to Zaydi insurgents in Yemen, whom the Sunni Muslims regarded as heretics and hence not deserving to live.6 Similarly, seventeenth-century Polish authors used very offensive language towards the Ukrainian Cossacks, regarded not as peer warriors but as rebellious commoners who, in addition, belonged to the Orthodox Church, despised by Roman Catholics. Leaving aside the Polish Baroque and the spirit of the Counter-Reformation, the Tatars did not fare any better in the opinion of the European Enlightenment. In 1758 Emeric de Vattel, the famous Swiss lawyer who had entered the service of Augustus III, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony, published, in London, his monumental Law of Nations, in which he maintained that: those peoples, such as [...] certain modern Tartars who, though dwelling in fertile countries, disdain the cultivation of the soil and prefer to live by plunder, fail in their duty to themselves, injure their neighbors, and deserve to be exterminated like wild beasts of prey (méritent d’être exterminés, commes des bêtes féroces et nuisibles).7 4 Cf. Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, “The Ottoman Northern Policy as Seen from the Venetian Archives,” in Tuncer Baykara (ed.), CIÉPO Osmanlı Öncesi ve Osmanlı Araştırmaları Uluslararası Komitesi XIV. Sempozyumu Bildirileri, 18–22 Eylül 2000, Çeşme (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 2004), 417– 426, esp. 422 and 425. 5 See Vladimir Artamonov [W. Artamonow], “Rosja, Rzeczpospolita i Krym w latach 1686–1699,” in Krystyna Matwijowski (ed.), Studia i materiały z czasów Jana III Sobieskiego (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 1992), 19–46, esp. 29 and 32. 6 Cf. Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, “Between Universalistic Claims and Reality: Ottoman Frontiers in the Early Modern Period,” in Christine M. Woodhead (ed.), The Ottoman World (London – New York: Routledge, 2012), 205–219, esp. 214. 7 Emeric de Vattel, Le droit des gens ou principes de la loi naturelle, appliqués à la conduite et aux affaires des nations et des souverains (London: [s. n.], 1758), vol. 1, 78 [reprinted along with the English translation by Charles Fenwick in the three-volume edition: J. Brown Scott (ed.), The Classics of International Law (Washington: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1916); for the English translation of this extract, see vol. 3, 38]; the above passage, which goes on to justify the extermination of

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When the Crimean Khanate was finally annexed by Russia in 1783, few Western intellectuals would disagree with Empress Catherine II, who praised this move as the triumph of human civilization. One reason for such a hostile attitude towards the Tatars in Early Modern Poland was certainly the fear and anger caused by Tatar slaving raids. The number of Slavic slaves transported across the Black Sea between 1500 and 1700 might have approached two million and probably surpassed the number of black slaves transported in the same period across the Atlantic.8 Referring to just one Tatar raid, albeit a massive one, carried out by the Tatars in 1648, the Polish historian Andrzej Gliwa calculates that the demographic losses in the Land of Przemyśl (Ziemia Przemyska) alone exceeded 10,000 people. Of the 931 villages existing in that region, 426 were raided and 34 entirely destroyed.9 No less humiliating was the fact that the khans regarded the Polish kings as tributaries. Each year the Commonwealth sent to the Crimea cash and goods equal in value to 15,000 florins and even that did not entirely guarantee safety from Tatar raids.10 However, the hostile attitude towards the Tatars depicted above represents only one side of the coin. Often regarded as greedy savages, in the seventeenth century the Tatars simultaneously earned in Poland the reputation of trustworthy and valiant allies. The awareness of facing common dangers and common enemies contributed towards an improvement in mutual perception and as early as the sixteenth century Polish-Lithuanian and Tatar troops not once cooperated against Muscovy. In the mid-seventeenth century, the Tatars initially supported the great Ukrainian Cossack rebellion which broke out in 1648, but they soon realized that a total collapse of Poland-Lithuania was not in their proper interests. A telling declaration is contained in a letter by Khan Islam III Giray sent to King John II Casimir in 1653. Although still allied with the Cossack rebels and at war with Poland, the Khan yet conceded: I am the lord and monarch of the great Crimean hordes, and Your Royal Majesty is also the mighty lord and monarch of these lands [here]. Almighty God sees that I do not wish Your Royal Majesty anything wrong, [especially as you are] in such dire straits, because I ought to respect you, as one monarch should [respect] another monarch.11

Notwithstanding political exigencies, on the social level the Khan certainly preferred to be on good terms with the Polish king rather than with the Cossacks, presented in Polish propaganda as rebellious serfs. the North American Indians (though not those from Peru and Mexico who cultivated the soil), is also quoted in Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World. Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c. 1500–c. 1800 (New Haven – London: Yale University Press, 1995), 78–79. 8 Cf. Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, “Slave Hunting and Slave Redemption as a Business Enterprise: the Northern Black Sea Region in the Sixteenth to Seventeenth Centuries,” Oriente Moderno 86:1 (2006) = Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet (eds.), The Ottomans and Trade (Rome: Istituto per l’Oriente C. A. Nallino, 2006), 149–159. 9 See Andrzej Gliwa, “The Tatar-Cossack Invasion of 1648: Military Actions, Material Destruction and Demographic Losses in the Land of Przemyśl,” Acta Poloniae Historica 105 (2012): 85–120, esp. 113, 118, and the map appended after p. 120. 10 Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, The Crimean Khanate and Poland-Lithuania. International Diplomacy on the European Periphery (15th–18th Century). A Study of Peace Treaties Followed by Annotated Documents (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 445, 497–499, 504–506. 11 Kołodziejczyk, The Crimean Khanate and Poland-Lithuania, 309.

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In 1654, after the Ukrainian Cossacks recognized the suzerainty of the Russian tsar, the Tatars, fearing a further rise of Russia, decided to side with Poland-Lithuania. During the so-called “Long Alliance” (1654–1666), the Tatars and Poles fought alongside against the Russians and then against the Swedes, who invaded Poland-Lithuania in 1655.12 For some time, the Crimean khan remained the sole ally of the Polish king. Original as well as fake yarlıqs, issued in the name of the Khan and promising assistance against the invaders, were circulated among Polish nobles to incite resistance against foreign occupation. In order to sow terror among the Swedish troops and make them believe that Tatar reinforcements had come, the royal troops as well as irregular guerillas adopted a war cry of hałła hałła (Allah, Allah).13 Apart from military cooperation, similar social structures also helped to find common language. Tatar nobles jealously guarded their ancient liberties vis-à-vis the Khan just like the Polish nobles guarded theirs vis-à-vis the king. The ancient Mongol-Tatar institution of kurultay, or noble assembly, was reminiscent of the Polish sejm. Tatar and Polish nobles commonly entered formal brotherhoods (Pol. pobratymstwo or Tat. qarındaşlıq) which served as mutual security in the case of one of the partners falling prisoner to the other army. His “brother” was then meant to redeem him or at least to act as guarantor so that the captive could safely return home to collect the requested sum for his ransom.14 Interestingly, such brotherhoods concluded between Polish nobles and Tatar mirzas are not known to have existed between the Tatars and the Cossacks, whom the Tatar nobles apparently did not regard as peers.15 Many Tatars experienced captivity in Poland, taken prisoner as the result of failed raids. While the rank and file were usually settled on land as slaves and with time assimilated into the local society, the nobles could hope for redemption or the chance of release during the next peace between the khan and the king. In the years 1629–1634, such a fate befell the future Khan Islam III Giray, imprisoned in the castle of Rawa, where he enjoyed many opportunities to meet Polish dignitaries and even learn Polish. In the years 1648–1653, the Tatars, led by the very same Islam III Giray, assisted the Cossack rebellion and took part in numerous battles with the Polish troops. Then, in the years 1654–1666, the Tatars and the Poles fought alongside each other against the Russians and the Swedes. Whether at war or in alliance, there were numerous opportunities to learn each other’s customs and some12 For the term “Long Alliance”, coined in Polish historiography by Zbigniew Wójcik, see idem, “Some Problems of Polish-Tatar Relations in the Seventeenth Century. The Financial Aspects of the PolishTatar Alliance in the Years 1654–1666,” Acta Poloniae Historica 13 (1966): 87–102, esp. 89. 13 Bohdan Baranowski, “Tatarszczyzna wobec wojny polsko-szwedzkiej w latach 1655–1660,” in Polska w okresie drugiej wojny północnej 1655–1660, vol. 1: Rozprawy (Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1957), 453–489, esp. 465–473 and 478. 14 The institution of ritual brotherhood (pobratimstvo) was also common in the Balkans, especially in Montenegro; however, it seems to have been devoid of the specifically cross-cultural and cross-religious character of the brotherhoods concluded between the Poles and the Tatars: cf. Markus Koller, Bosnien an der Schwelle zur Neuzeit. Eine Kulturgeschichte der Gewalt (1747–1798) (Münich: R. Oldenburg, 2004), 49, 58. 15 This conclusion of the present author has been confirmed in conversations with Viktor Brekhunenko and Dmitrii Sen’, the foremost specialists on the culture of the Dnieper and Don Cossacks and their relations with Muslim neighbours. On the latter topic, see especially Dmitrii V. Sen’, Kazačestvo Dona i Severo-Zapadnogo Kavkaza v otnošenniakh s musul’manskimi gosudarstvami Pričernomor’ia (vtoraia polovina XVII v. – načalo XVIII v.) (Rostov on the Don: Izdatel’stvo Iužnogo Federal’nogo universiteta, 2009).

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times even language. Besides, Crimean society was anything but homogeneous and there were many Polish “renegades” who forged a career at the Khan’s court. Some of them may have been kidnapped, especially at a young age, which facilitated acculturation. Others might have arrived of their own free will.16 In the 1660s a prominent role in the Khan’s chancery was played by a certain Islam Bey, who had retained his Polish noble surname along with the new Muslim first name and Turko-Tatar title and signed his letters to Polish dignitaries as Isłan Bey Cegielski.17 A prominent Tatar diplomat and go-between in the same period was Dedesh Ağa, who spoke Polish, headed numerous embassies to Poland and even posed for the royal court painter, Daniel Schultz, who executed his portrait in a Polish outfit (a Muslim with an uncovered head!), depicted with his son and servants in the then-fashionable setting including a hunting dog, a hawk and a monkey.18 Hence it was no wonder that Polish was also used by the Crimean chancery, not only in the correspondence with the Polish court, but also in the correspondence with Berlin, Stockholm and Copenhagen. In fact, the whole issue of Polish attitudes towards the Tatars remains greatly underresearched and not much has been written since the classical studies by Bohdan Baranowski published over fifty years ago.19 On the one hand, the Tatars, adhering to Islam and attached to the nomadic way of life, fitted well the Orientalist topos of barbarous Asians, to be feared or despised, or both.20 On the other hand, their image was “softened” by everyday contact, military cooperation, trade and diplomacy. It must be remembered that thousands of so-called Lipka Tatars had inhabited Poland-Lithuania since the late-fourteenth century. Although they shared the Islamic religion with their Crimean brethren, at the same time 16 For the various reasons that motivated the so-called renegades arriving from Christian Europe to Islamic countries, cf. Bartolomé and Lucile Bennassar, Les Chrétiens d’Allah. L’histoire extraordinaire des renégats XVIe–XVIIe siècles (Paris: Perrin, 1989). 17 Cf. his letter to Chancelor Mikołaj Prażmowski from 15 May 1663, in Warsaw, Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych, Dział tatarski, karton [box] 61, teczka [folder] 57, no. 199. 18 The oil painting by Daniel Schultz, one of the best painters of the Polish Baroque, born into a German family in Danzig [Gdańsk], was executed in 1664 and is today kept in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg; cf. Kołodziejczyk, The Crimean Khanate and Poland-Lithuania, 238 [the painting is also displayed on the book’s front cover]. 19 On the perception of the Orient, including the Tatars, in Early Modern Polish literature and art, see especially Bohdan Baranowski, Znajomość Wschodu w dawnej Polsce do XVIII wieku (Łódź: Łódzkie Towarzystwo Naukowe, 1950); Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, “Rola islamskiego sąsiedztwa w kulturze i polityce Rzeczypospolitej,” in Adam Kaźmierczyk, Andrzej K. Link-Lenczowski, Mariusz Markiewicz i Krystyn Matwijowskieg (eds.), Rzeczpospolita wielu wyznań. Materiały z międzynarodowej konferencji Kraków, 18–20 listopada 2002 (Cracow: Księgarnia Akademicka, 2004), 441–448; Tadeusz Mańkowski, Orient w polskiej kulturze artystycznej (Wrocław – Cracow: Zakład Narodowy imienia Ossolińskich, 1959); Jerzy Nosowski (ed.), Polska literatura polemiczno-antyislamistyczna XVI, XVII i XVIII w.: wybór tekstów i komentarze (Warsaw: Akademia Teologii Katolickiej, 1974), vol. 1–2; Jan Reychman, Orient w kulturze polskiego Oświecenia (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy imienia Ossolińskich, 1964); idem, Znajomość i nauczanie języków orientalnych w Polsce XVIII wieku (Wrocław: Wrocławskie Towarzystwo Naukowe, 1950); Piotr Tafiłowski, “Imago Turci”. Studium z dziejów komunikacji społecznej w dawnej Polsce (1453–1572) (Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 2013); Janusz Tazbir, Poland as the Rampart of Christian Europe: Myths and Historical Reality (Warsaw: Interpress, 1989). 20 On such stereotypes, cf. Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, “Divided Sovereignty in the Genghisid States as Exemplified by the Crimean Khanate: ‘Oriental Despotism’ à rebours?” Acta Slavica Iaponica 32 (2012): 1–21, esp. 17–19.

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they served in the royal army, enjoyed tax exemptions and shared basic features of their political culture with the Polish-Lithuanian nobility.21 Hence, although the Tatars were often perceived as enemies, they could never become complete aliens.

21 On the Lipka Tatars, their history and legal status within Poland-Lithuania and their perception by noble Polish society, cf. Zygmunt Abrahamowicz, “Lipka,” in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 5 (Leiden: Brill, 19862), 765–767; Jacek Sobczak, Położenie prawne ludności tatarskiej w Wielkim Księstwie Litewskim (Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1984); Jan Tyszkiewicz, Tatarzy na Litwie i w Polsce. Studia z dziejów XIII–XVIII w. (Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1989); Andrzej B. Zakrzewski, “Tatarzy litewscy w oczach władzy i współmieszkańców, XVI–XVIII w.,” in Staropolski ogląd świata. Rzeczpospolita między okcydentalizmem a orientalizacją, vol. 1: Przestrzeń kontaktów, ed. by Filip Wolański, Robert Kołodziej (Toruń: Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek, 2009), 120–131.

Contesting the Frontiers of Late Medieval Political Culture: Mehmed the Conqueror (1432–1481) and Charles the Bold (1433–1477) Colin Heywood I The semantics of “frontiers” and “borders” and the historical/situational realities inherent in both terms are somewhat complex and multifaceted, and are best entered via a seminal article, now almost eighty years old, by Lucien Febvre.1 More recently, the medievalist Daniel Power has developed some of Febvre’s approaches in a fruitful way.2 To take a general view, it may be observed that from Antiquity down to the later Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, borders (i.e., what in subsequent centuries ‘became’ frontiers), in cultural as in political contexts, were often both fluid, depending on military success or failure, and permeable, capable of penetration, Chinese or Roman “walls” notwithstanding, by larger or smaller groups or individuals.3 In the post-Roman world, both within what became Europe and between Europe and its eastern (or southern) neighbours they frequently existed as an ill-defined zone, a series of frontier march-lands or disputed seas, and were distinguishable in cultural and social terms from their “settled” maritme or terrestrial hinterlands.4 Such 1 Lucien Febvre, “Frontière: le mot et le notion,” an essay which was first published in the Revue de Synthése Historique 45 (1928), Appendice, 31–44. It was republished in Febvre’s Pour une histoire à part entière (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1962), 11–24, and translated into English (“Frontière: The Word and the Concept”) by Peter Burke in his A New Kind of History: from the Writings of Febvre [sic] (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 208–218. 2 For a wide-ranging analysis of the problem of satisfactorily defining the pre-modern frontier, see Daniel Power, “Introduction. A: Frontiers: Terms, Concepts and the Historians of Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” in Daniel Power and Naomi Standen (eds.), Frontiers in Question: Eurasian Borderlands, 700–1700 (Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan Press, 1999), 1–12; cf. also some useful observations, harking back to Febvre’s work, in Power, The Norman Frontier in the Early Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 3 On the Roman limes and Roman frontier defences in general, see Benjamin Isaac, “The meaning of the terms limes and limitanei,” Journal of Roman Studies 78 (1988): 15–47; C. R. Whittaker, Frontiers of the Roman Empire: a Social and Economic Study (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); on the historical realities of the “Great Wall” of China see the old (1937) but still useful study by Owen Lattimore, “Origins of the Great Wall of China: a Frontier Concept in Theory and Practice,” in idem, Frontier History: Collected Papers 1928–1958 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 98–118; and Arthur Waldron, The Great Wall of China: from History to Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 4 For medieval frontiers of and in Europe see the papers collected in Robert Bartlett and Angus Mackay (eds.), Medieval Frontier Societies (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1989); a wider, “Eurasian” perspective is provided by the papers collected in Power and Standen, Frontiers in Question (see n. 1, above).

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zones of transition or conflict may have metamorphosed in later centuries into lines on a map, but in cultural terms zones, as much as frontiers, may be permeable, and – it goes without saying – cultural influences may also be seen to be exportable across their own conventional borders: the contextualities are multiple.5 Nonetheless, as Robert Darnton has observed, “[a]ll borders are dangerous. If left unguarded, they could break down, our categories could collapse, and our world dissolve in chaos”.6 Within the context of the present volume, and the borders between East and West, between the Ottomans and Central Europe, these are some aspects of cultural frontierality and its exportability which may be worth taking into consideration.7 II Currently this “exportability” has come to be applied to what is – again conventionally – termed the Renaissance and its perceived frontiers. The Renaissance, of course, possesses its own history, a historiography that has been approached from many angles, with both its nature and its chronological limits the subject of discussion and disagreement.8 In The Third Man, that masterpiece of mid-twentieth century film noir, the film’s anti-hero Harry Lime makes a sardonic observation on cultural history: you know what the fellow said…, in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed – they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce…? The cuckoo clock.9

To develop further this filmic critique of Renaissance Italian culture and alleged Swiss provincialism, we may bring in the currently unfashionable figure of Jacob Burckhardt, both as a more deserving representative of his country’s culture than the cuckoo clock and as – improbably – the anonymous ‘fellow’ lurking behind Harry Lime’s mordant observation.10 What is certainly the case is that, if Jules Michelet and Sir Walter Scott may be said to have 5 See the valuable discussion of the frontier as a historiographical problem by Robert I. Burns, “The Significance of the Frontier in the Middle Ages,” in Bartlett and Mackay, Medieval Frontier Societies, 307–330. 6 Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 193. 7 On the Wittekian geneses of the Early Modern Ottoman frontier with Europe see Colin Heywood, “The Frontier in Ottoman History: Old Ideas and New Myths,” in Power and Standen, Frontiers in Question (see n. 1, above), 228–250, reprinted in Heywood, Writing Ottoman History: Documents and Interpretations (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), § I (with identical pagination). See also the insightful and wideranging recent study by Dariusz Kolodziejczyk, “Between Universalistic Claims and Reality: Ottoman Frontiers in the Early Modern Period,” in Christine Woodhead (ed.), The Ottoman World (London: Routledge, 2011), 205–219, where he speaks (p. 206) of “[t]he once powerful vision of Paul Wittek” of the Ottoman ghazi frontier. 8 Eric Cochrane, Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), xi. 9 Graham Greene, The Third Man (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), 100, n. 78. 10 The screenplay for the film was written by Graham Greene; the quoted remark was added as an extemporized afterthought by Orson Welles (who played Lime) during shooting and left in by the film’s director, Carol Reed – cf. the ‘Introduction’ (by Andrew Sinclair) to Greene, Third Man, 6; Charles Drazin, In Search of the Third Man (London: Methuen, 1999), 74; and Rob White, The Third Man (London: BFI Publishing, 2003), 62. Was Welles acquainted with Burckhardt’s Civilisation of the Renaissance? It is an attractive but an unlikely hypothesis. The “fellow” may well have been the American painter

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effectively ‘invented’ the Middle Ages as a cultural concept, then Burckhardt, the nineteenth-century Swiss Altmeister of cultural history, virtually single-handedly ‘invented’ both the Renaissance as a functioning historiographical concept and the discipline of cultural history as the vehicle for that concept’s dissemination.11 It was Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (first published in 1860), the work by which the author became best known, which effectively brought the terms ‘Civilization’ and ‘Renaissance’, both as concepts and as modii operandi for future historians, into the light. Burckhardt, who spent virtually his whole working life and career at the University of Basle, was nothing if not a European through and through. Europe, from Classical Greece and Renaissance Italy (which he loved) to the industrialised and militarised later-nineteenth century (which he hated and mistrusted), formed the intellectual and cultural matrix within which he worked; and to Burckhardt it would appear that the rest of the world beyond the past or present cultural frontiers of Europe hardly counted.12 At a superficial level of enquiry, therefore, Burckhardt appears to have nurtured a rooted aversion to, and dislike of, Islam and all its works. Islam itself he described as ‘a low religion of slight inwardness’, and spoke of it in terms of “this aridity, this dreary uniformity”, “which is so terribly limited on the religious side”, and which “probably did more harm than good to Culture, if only because it rendered the people affected by it incapable of going over to another culture”.13 However, he could also write that ‘[t]he Seljuks had already made Islam honourable; in the fight against

James McNeill Whistler in a lecture, freely adapted by Welles, which he had given in 1885 (see Drazin, Search, 75). 11 Burckhardt did not – it goes without saying – invent the term ‘Renaissance’. In the age of historicism its usage in what Erwin Panofsky terms “a specific yet comprehensive sense” seems to appears first in a novel by Balzac (1829) and to be taken up post-1850 by Ruskin in his Stones of Venice (1851) and by Jules Michelet in Le Renaissance (1855), five years before the publication of Burckhardt’s work and three years before he began work on it, a situation both well-known and acknowledged by him (cf. Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, 2nd edition (New York and London: Harper and Row, 1970), 5, drawing on Johan Huizinga, “Das Problem der Renaissance,” in idem, Wege der Kulturgeschichte: Studien (München: Drei Masken, 1930), 89, ff.; cf. also Peter Gay, Style in History (London: Jonathan Cape, 1974), 149–150, for Michelet and the time-frame of Burckhardt’s work and the impassioned claim for Michelet, rather than Burckhardt, as the ‘inventor’ of the Burckhardtian Renaissance, made by Lucien Febvre, “Comment Jules Michelet inventa la Renaissance,” in idem, Histoire à part, 717–729, originally published in Studi in onore di Gino Luzzatto (Milan: A. Giuffrè, 1950); English translation (“How Jules Michelet invented the Renaissance”), in Burke, New Kind of History (see n. 1, above), 258–267, which fails to mention Burckhardt. 12 For a stimulating discussion of Burckhardt’s anti-teleological, anthropologising, structuralising and aestheticising “turn”, as a prefigurer of Post-Modernism, designed to preserve the integrity and historical unity of European civilisation and to circumvent the destructive modernising trends of his – and subsequent – times, see Jörn Rüsen, “Jacob Burckhardt: Political Standpoint and Historical Insight on the Border of Post-Modernism,” History and Theory 24:3 (1985): 235–246. 13 Jacob Burckhardt, Judgements on History and Historians, tr. by Harry Zohn (London: Allen & Unwin, 1958), 65 (cf. idem, Historische Fragmente, ed. Emil Dürr (Stuttgart, n.d.); Burckhardt, Reflections on History, tr. by M. D. Hottinger (London: Allen & Unwin, 1943), 88 (Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen über geschichtliches Studium [Gesammelte Werke, iv] (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1962), 72: “Der Islam, der eine so furchtbar kurze Religion ist, ist mit dieser seiner Trockenheit und trostlosen Einfachkeit der Kultur wohl vorwiegend eher schädlich als nützlich gewesen, und wäre es auch nur, weil er die betreffenden Völker gänzlich unfähig macht, zu einer andern Kultur überzugehen”).

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the Christians there awakens in it a moral greatness’.14 Contextually, Burckhardt’s stance was not surprising. During Burckhardt’s time at Basle, Oriental – let alone Islamic – studies were at a complete standstill.15 In fact, Burckhardt’s interest in – at least mediaeval – Islam was both extensive and profound.16 In his earliest study years he had “tinkered” with Arabic; and late in life, when he was composing the last version of his Lectures on the Middle Ages, he added an extensive section devoted to the history of Islam in the pre-Mongol era, beginning, not with Muhammad and the origins of Islam but – influenced possibly by Ranke – with the great war between the Byzantine and Sassanid empires, and a “destroyed world” on which the Arabs, watching from the sidelines, fell.17 Burckhardt, as some of his random observations testify, appears to have been interested in the Mongols and the Mongol empire as a late species of barbarian or nomadic statebuilding.18 For the post-Mongol Islamic world, and particularly for the Ottoman Empire, that omnipresent, feared and courted ‘significant other’ for fifteenth and sixteenth-century Europe, Burckhardt manifested an equal disdain and dislike. In another context he observed that ‘[t]he dominion of barbarian conquerors over civilized peoples is sometimes very lasting, as we can see by the example of the Turks’.19 In relation to Ottoman history before the “catastrophe” (as he termed it) of the Fall of Constantinople, Burckhardt’s interest was limited in the extreme. The reign of Bayzeid I, both its inception in the battle of Kossovo, and its destruction at the hands of Timur, does appear to have attracted his attention. In his university lectures in the winter semester of 1862/1863 he dwelt extensively if somewhat onesidedly on the battle of “Cossowa”; and in the following year he wrote enthusiastically to his correspondent and close friend Paul Heyse on the subject, drawing somewhat uncritically both on the “Lay” of Marko Kraljevic and on Volume I of the Austrian Orientalist Joseph von Hammer’s ten-volume Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches: “The loyalty of Milos in opposition to the murderous bloodlust between the sons of the Sultan [Bayezid I] would fill

14 Burckhardt, Judgements on History, 74. 15 Werner Kaegi, Jakob Burckhardt: Eine Biographie, 7 vols. (Basel: Benno Schwabe, 1947–1982), vol. 6/1, 213. 16 For a detailed account of Burckhardt’s intellectual involvement with Islam see Kaegi, Burckhardt, vol. 6/1, 211–236. 17 Kaegi, Burckhardt, vol. 6/1, 213 and n. 232. For a comparison of Burckhardt’s and Ranke’s treatment of Islam, cf. Hans Heinrich Schaeder, “Die Orientforschung und das abendländische Geschichtsbild,” in idem, Der Mensch in Orient und Okzident: Grundzüge einer eurasiatischen Geschichte (München: R. Piper, 1960), 397–423, at 407, ff. As Schaeder points out, responsibility for the historiographical “sundering” of European from Eurasian history appears to lie with Ranke (cf. the study by Ernst Schulin, Die Weltgeschichtliche Erfassung des Orients bei Hegel und Ranke (Göttingen: Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, 1958), which (cf. Kaegi, loc. cit.) includes some valuable closing remarks (pp. 289–300) on Burckhardt). 18 Cf. Burckhardt’s late fragments. Burckhardt seems also here to have followed his old teacher: cf. Leopold von Ranke, Weltgeschichte, vol. 7 (Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 19214), 243 (“die barbarische Feindseligkeit gegen die Kulturwelt”). As a masterstroke, Ranke concludes (p. 261) his chapter on the Mongols with the appearance and early progress of the Ottomans. Cf. Rudi P. Lindner, “How Mongol were the Early Ottomans?” in Reuven Amitai-Preiss and David O. Morgan (eds.), The Mongol Empire and Its Legacy (Leiden – Boston – Köln: Brill, 1999), 282–289. 19 Burckhardt, Reflections on History, 81 (Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, 67: “Herrschaft von erobernden Barbaren über Kulturvölker dauert bisweilen sehr lang, ja ewig, wie das Beispiel der Türken lehrt”).

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the entire piece” – Burckhardt was encouraging Heyse to consider writing a dramatic piece on the subject – “with the greatest possible tension”.20 Two quotations from Burckhardt’s Renaissance bring out well the ambivalence in Burckhardt’s – and of fifteenth-century Italian – attitudes to the Ottomans: – Great as was the terror felt for the Turks, and the actual danger from them, there was yet scarcely a government of any consequence which did not conspire against other Italian states with Mohammed II and his successors.21 – From a scoundrel like Sigismondo Malatesta – the ruler of Rimini, who is described by Burckhardt as ‘a bold pagan’ and ‘a combination of ‘unscrupulousness, impiety, military skill and high culture’ nothing better could be expected than that he should call the Turks into Italy.22

In this context, it may be suggested that the greatest problem regarding Burckhardt’s treatment of the Ottomans lies in his handling (more: in his failure to come to terms with) the mid-fifteenth-century figure of Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople, a Muslim ruler who was, in Renaissance terms, a tyrant to be matched with any of his Italian contemporaries, on the vices (and occasional virtues) of whom Burckhardt dwelt at length and with extreme pleasure.23 Obviously, Burckhardt viewed the Renaissance as a purely European phenomenon and saw the Ottomans as something entirely ‘other’, alien in every way to the European cultural tradition which he championed. The slavish adulation of Mehmed II by Italian Humanists and publicists of his time appears to have passed Burckhardt by; and his references to Mehmed are for the most part both incidental and fleeting, as demonstrated above. Nor does what has been termed 24 the ‘extensive and varied [Renaissance] historical literature’ on the Ottomans and (to a lesser degree) their Muslim neighbours, such as the Amyris (The Emir, i.e., Mehmed II), a remarkable, long Latin poem, in four “Books”, by Gio.-Mario Filelfo, the noteworthy son in an Ottoman context of an even more noteworthy father, celebrating the res gestae of Mehmed II, appear to have greatly interested him.25 Burckhardt’s exclusivist view is one which still found sympathetic echoes almost a century later among Central European practitioners of Ottoman history. A notable example is 20 Burckhardt to Paul Heyse, Basel, 19 Juni 1864, in Burckhardt, Briefe (ed. W. Kaegi), 10 vols., (Basel: Benno Schwabe, c.1949–c.1986), vol. 4, 150. 21 Burckhardt, Renaissance, 59 (Renaissance, 64: “… so groß der Schrecken vor den Türken und die wirkliche Gefähr sein mochte, so ist doch kaum eine bedeutendere Regierung, welche nicht irgend einmal frevelhaft mit Mohammed II. und seinen Nachfolgern einverstanden gewesen wäre gegen andere italienische Staaten”.) 22 Burckhardt, Renaissance, 21–22; 59; 136 (Renaissance, 64: ‘Von einem Verbrecher wie Sigismondo Malatesta erwartete man nichts Besseres, als daß er die Türken nach Italien rufen möchte’). 23 Cf. the stimulating discussion on the aesthetics of Burckhardt’s Weltanschauung in Gay, Style in History, 139–182. 24 See the concise but detailed overview of the relevant literature by V. J. Parry, “Renaissance Historical Literature in Relation to the Near and Middle East (with special reference to Paolo Giovio),” in Bernard Lewis and P. M. Holt (eds.), Historians of the Middle East (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 277–289. The citation is at p. 277. 25 Giovanni Mario Filelfo, Amyris, ed. Aldo Manetti (Bologna: Pàtron, 1978). On the Filelfos, father and son, see Paolo Viti, “Filelfo, Francesco,” in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 47 (Roma: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1997), 613–626 and Franco Pignatti, “Filelfo, Giovanni Mario,” in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 47 (Roma: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1997), 626–631 and the extensive literature cited therein.

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to be found in the essentially negative treatment of Mehmed II at the hands of the Bavarian Ottomanist, the late Franz Babinger, in a study on Mehmed II published more than half a century ago, and in the enthusiastic response of a number of the work’s reviewers.26 Conversely, attempts by Ottoman historians and others to place Mehmed II in a ‘Renaissance’ context are, in fact, not new: they may be traced back at least a century to attempts by Emil Jacobs and, later, by Adolf Deissmann, to demonstrate that this was the case.27 Subsequently, however, the testimony of some of the most relied-on of contemporary western sources, hitherto utilised by leading scholars as evidence for placing Mehmed II in a Renaissance context, has collapsed under the weight of closer forensic examination. Most notably the pioneer historian of the early Ottoman state, Paul Wittek, in a little essay on Mehmed II published in 1932, bought into Emil Jacob’s long-accepted account of the role of the Italian Humanist Cyriacus of Ancona as tutor/lector to Mehmed II at/during/after the siege of Constantinople.28 This was a belief which generated a vast amount of literature and provoked a number of unfounded assertions, not just by Wittek; but it has been shown convincingly by Julian Raby to rest on a textual misreading in the contemporary Venetian chronicler Zorzi Dolfin.29 In fact, there is nothing to prove that Cyriac tutored Mehmed II or even that he was in the Ottoman camp in 1453: by the time the city fell he was almost certainly already dead and buried in Italy.30 Equally suspect, it now seems is the testimony of the papal legate Jacopo Languschi regarding Mehmed II and the siege of Constantinople, which appears to be a clear case of plagiarism and lacks the independent authority of an eye-witness.31 More recently, cultural historians with an interest in Ottoman history (even if they may often not be possessed of the necessary linguistic skills32), or Ottoman historians – mainly art historians – such as Julian Raby with a predilection for cultural history have attempted 26 Franz Babinger, Mehmed der Eroberer und seine Zeit: Weltenstürmer einer Zeitenwende (München: F. Bruckmann, 1953); citations are from the English edition: Mehmed the Conqueror and his Time, ed. by William C. Hickman, tr. by Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); cf. also idem, “Mehmed II., der Eroberer, und Italien,” Byzantion 21:1 (1951): 127–170, reprinted in idem, Aufsätze und Abhandlungen zur Geschichte Südosteuropas und der Levante, vol. 1 (München: Trofenik, Südosteuropa Verlagsgesellschaft, 1962), 172–200. On the reception of Babinger’s work see Colin Heywood, “Mehmed II and the Historians: Babinger’s Mehmed der Eroberer during fifty years (1953– 2003),” Turcica 40 (2008): 295–344, reprinted in idem, Ottomanica and Meta-Ottomanica: Studies in and around Ottoman History, 13th–18th Centuries (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2013), 19–58. 27 Cf. Emil Jacobs, “Cyriacus von Ancona und Mehemmed II,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 30 (1919–1920): 197, ff.; Adolf Deissmann, Forschungen und Funde im Serai, mit einem Verzeichnis der nicht-islamische Handschriften im Topkapu Serai in Istanbul (Berlin and Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1933), 24, ff. (“Mehmed II. als Ost-West-Mensch”). 28 Paul Wittek, “Muhammed II,” in R. P. Rohden (ed.), Menschen, die Geschichte machten: Viertausend Jahre Weltgeschichte in Zeit- und Lebensbildern, vol.1 (Vienna: L. W. Seidel & Sohn, 19332), 557–561; English version in Paul Wittek, The Rise of the Ottoman Empire: Studies in the History of Turkey, Thirteenth-Fifteenth Centuries, ed. by Colin Heywood (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 163–168, with recovered footnotes (absent in original version; cf. pp. 162–163). 29 Julian Raby, “Cyriacus of Ancona and the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 43 (1980): 242–246, at p. 242. 30 See Wittek, Rise (ed. Heywood), 164–165, nn. 2, 4, with reference to Raby, “Cyriacus of Ancona”. 31 See Wittek (ed. Heywood), 163, n. 2 and 165, n. 4, drawing on Raby, “Cyriacus of Ancona,” 244–246. 32 The impassioned (and to a great extent unrealised) plea uttered nearly half a century ago by the late Richard Kreutel for bringing the two sides together through reliable text editions and accessible translations of Ottoman literary-historical works (“Osmanische Berichte über Kara Mustafas Feldzug gegen Wien,” Die Welt des Islams 12:4 (1969): 196–227, at 196–197) has largely fallen on deaf ears: the gulf

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to assess aspects of the life and career of Mehmed II within the context of the Renaissance rulers of his time.33 In cultural terms, Mehmed II was an Islamic and not a Renaissance ruler, although he was a tyrant whose unfettered devotion to ragione di stato and to the preservation of his political ascendancy by all means was certainly cast in the same mould as the Italian despots who were his contemporaries.34 But it is self-evident that Mehmed could never have been influenced – either directly or indirectly – by the leading ideas of the Italian Renaissance. If we accept Panofsky’s classic definition of the Renaissance, seen by Petrarch as the rediscovery of Antiquity, and the denigration of the intervening centuries of barbarism and religion between AD 300 and 1300 as a ‘Dark Age’ – “the triumph of religion and barbarism”, to employ Edward Gibbon’s immortal phrase, or, to use an Islamic term, a true jahiliyya, an “Age of Ignorance” – we are confronted with a concept, an attitude of mind, which is by definition totally unexportable and untransposable into an Ottoman/Islamic context, where the “Age of Ignorance” by definition relates to everything which precedes Islam: a cultural transposition too much even for an alleged “freethinker” such as Mehmed II has been seen to be.35 Indeed, as recent research has amply demonstrated, the fifteenth-century Ottoman cultural and intellectual world, together with its Timurid antecedents and congeners, was, in any case, part of another, non-European intellectual and cultural renascence (or “renaissance”) which lies outside the parameters of European Renaissance scholarship.36

between Ottomanists who are historians and historians who are not Ottomanists remains as wide as ever. 33 See Raby, n. 27 above. There is a rich field of recent studies of greater or lesser relevance to the above observation within the currently fashionable East / West interactive mode, to respond adequately to which in the present context would require a separate article. Inter alia, among works published since 2000, I mention Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West (London: Reaktion Books, 2000); Nancy Bisaha, Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Gerald Maclean (ed.), Reorienting the Renaissance: Cultural Exchanges with the East (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005; Margaret Meserve, Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2008); Andrea Pippidi, Visions of the Ottoman World in Renaissance Europe (London: Hurst and Company, 2012); Anna Contadini and Claire Norton (eds.), The Renaissance and the Ottoman World (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013). Cf., for a dissenting stance, Anna Akasoy, “Mehmed II as a Patron of Greek Philosophy: Latin and Byzantine Perspectives,” in Anna Contadini and Claire Norton (eds.), The Renaissance and the Ottoman World (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 245–256. 34 Cf. Wittek’s ascription of raison d’état to Mehmed II’s destruction of the pantheistic Hurûfî sect, which he had previously patronised (“Muhammad II,” in idem, Rise (ed. Heywood), 167). 35 Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (London: Paladin, 1970), 11. On the concept of jahiliyya – “all which is anterior to Islam” – see the article “Djahiliyya,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1953–2002), 383–384. For the topos of Mehmed II as a “freethinker” see Wittek, “Muhammad II,” in idem, Rise (ed. Heywood), 167. 36 See the indications relating to the fifteenth-century Ottoman (and Timurid) “new learning” associated with the Muslim intellectuals Sa’in al-Din Turka (d. 1431) and Abd al-Rahman al-Bistami (d. c. 1455), presented in brief form in Cornell H. Fleischer, “Ancient Wisdom and New Sciences: Prophecies at the Ottoman Court in the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries,” in Massumeh Farhad and Serpil Bağcı (eds.), Falnama: The Book of Omens (Washington, D.C.: [The] Arthur M. Sackler Gallery [and the] Smithsonian Institution, 2009), 231–243; 329–330 for the further references therein collected.

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III Thus, there may be little to be gained in pursuing further the well-ventilated question of whether Mehmed II, when considered in isolation, was, or was not, a Renaissance figure. The present chapter will take a different approach to the problem of Mehmed II as (at least in the Burckhardtian paradigm) a non-European figure in cultural terms, within the context of Early Modern Europe. Might it be possible to ask how Mehmed compared, in personal terms, with his European contemporaries as a ruler? Are there any parallels, comparabilities or cross-transferences in terms of behaviour, psychology, cultural stance or character that can be brought to bear in order to illuminate our discussions? The utility of this proposal can be demonstrated by introducing into the discussion the person and career of another mid-fifteenth century ruler and exact contemporary of Mehmed II who, although the product of a different and mutually opposed culture, manifested in his life and personality a high degree of comparability with him: Charles the Bold (1433–1477), the last Valois Duke of Burgundy.37 Charles the Bold, then, and Mehmed the Conqueror? A forced comparison? As it turns out, perhaps not, at least to those fifteenth-century Swiss and German local chroniclers who were forced to account for the actions of Charles the Bold, “der Türk in Okkzident” [the Turk in the Occident], comparing his violent career to that of Mehmed the Conqueror; nor to present-day European medievalists, but not to fifteenth/sixteenth century Ottoman chroniclers nor, it may be said, to present-day Ottomanists.38 Let us step back from the present and begin with a cento of quotations referring to the character and conduct of Charles the Bold, taken not from recent scholarship but mainly from the still not entirely neglected ‘épopée néogothique’ of the ten-volume Histoire des ducs de Bourgogne [1824] by the early nineteenth-century French civil servant, académicien and historian, Amable Burgière, baron de Barante.39 Barante’s success in rendering the individual historical personage ‘real’ as 37 On Charles the Bold, who has been better (and less controversially) served by historians than Mehmed II, see the studies by John Bartier, Charles le Téméraire (Brussels: Charles Dessart, 1944) and its 2nd edition, with additions and some magnificent illustrations, but without footnotes (Brussels: Arcade, 1970) and Richard Vaughan, Charles the Bold: The last Valois Duke of Burgundy (London: Longman, 1973; repr. Woodbridge, 2002, with additions by Malcolm Vale, Bertrand Scherb, Graeme Small and Werner Paravicini). The short study by Werner Paravicini, Karl der Kühne. Das Ende des Hauses Burgund (Musterschmidt Göttingen: Zürich and Frankfurt, 1976), together with Paravicini’s wide-ranging review article, “Bemerkungen zu Richard Vaughan: Charles the Bold,” Francia: Forschungen zur westeuropäischen Geschichte 4 (1976): 757–773, equally contain some valuable insights. In the context of the present article special mention must be made of Richard J. Walsh, “Charles the Bold and the Crusade. Politics and Propaganda,” Journal of Medieval History 3 (1977): 53–86. 38 See Claudius Sieber-Lehmann, “‘Teutsche Nation’ und Eidgenossenschaft. Der Zusammenhang zwischen Türken und Burgunderkriegen,” Historische Zeitschrift 253:3 (1991): 561–602; idem, “Der türkische Sultan Mehmed II. und Karl der Kühne, der ‘Turk in Okkzident’,” in Franz-Rainer Erkens (ed.), Europa und die osmanische Expansion im ausgehenden Mittelalter (Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, Beiheft 20) (Berlin: Duncker &Humblot, 1997), 13–38. 39 Amable-Guillaume-Prosper Burgiére, baron de Barante, Histoire des ducs de Bourgogne de la maison de Valois, 1364–1477 [1826] (10 vols., Bruxelles, 1839). For a cogent assessment of Barante (1782–1866) as a historian see the “Introduction” (by Yves Cazaux) to an abridged version of Barante’s Histoire (“Les Grands monuments de l’histoire,” 8, Paris 1969), xvii–xxxix, and Stephen Bann, “The Historian as Taxidermist: Ranke, Barante, Waterton,” Comparative Criticism 3 (1981): 32–38. The appellation “néo-gothique” is applied to Barante’s work by A. G. Jongkees, “Une Génération d’historiens devant le phénomène bourguignon,” in W. R. H. Koops, E. H. Kossmann and Gees van der Plaat (eds.), Johan Huizinga 1872–1972: Papers delivered to the Johan Huizinga Conference, Groningen 11–15 December

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opposed to making him conform to a classicising stereotype was already recognised by his contemporaries in the case of his depiction of Charles’s opponent, Louis XI of France;40 and his characterisations of the personality and actions of Charles the Bold, which are both remarkably vivid and insightful, can be developed to illustrate some instructive points of similarity with the later views of Wittek and other Ottomanist historians relating to Mehmed the Conqueror. General character: a ... man ... in whom notable gifts and strength (for action as well as activity) were at every moment forced to do the bidding of a brutalized, absolutely obstinate will’. This is Burckhardt, on Charles the Bold, adding that ‘... in practice this almost worked out as if he had been demented’, while stressing that he was ‘not a madman ... a madman one could have at least locked up, but not him’.41 Compare Wittek on Mehmed II: ‘Such grim behaviour on grounds of raison d’état fits in well with his character. Without pity, he had those cut down, where it mattered in order to punish resistance to his will and to protect the common weal.42

Men, and making use of them: (1) [Charles] saw in them only instruments of his own will, fit only to be made obedient to him: all were to be made use of insofar as they appeared to him to be submissive and precise in carrying out his orders.43

(2) [Charles] had around him to the very last moment [of his life] faithful and even devoted servants, because he always found those who, despite everything, would attach themselves to their prince and master, in that they looked on him as someone [far] above them. But all his people and all his troops ended up by holding him in utter contempt.44

1972 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 73–90, at p. 81. Barante’s work has never been translated into English; the translations supplied below are the work of the present writer. 40 See Bann, “Historian as Taxidermist,” 38. The contrast was made in the context of Barante’s critique of the portrait of Louis XI in Walter Scott’s novel Quentin Durward: in Guizot’s words, “Walter Scott a conçu un type plutôt qu’il n’a peint un individu” (François Guizot to Barante, 14 June 1823, cited in Bann, p. 38, n. 47). On the rivalry between Charles the Bold and Louis XI see Werner Paravicini, “Einen neuen Staat verhindern: Frankreich und Burgund im 15. Jahrhundert,” in Klaus Oschema and Rainer C. Schwinges (eds.), Karl der Kühne von Burgund: Fürst zwischen europäischem Adel und der Eidgenossenschaft (Zürich: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 2010), 23–40. 41 Burckhardt, Historiche Fragmente [Werke, vii], cited from Judgements on History and Historians, 91. 42 Details in Wittek, “Two Essays,” 168. 43 “Il ne voyait en eux que les instrumens de sa volonté et ne savait que s’en faire obéir; tous lui étaient bons lorsqu’ils semblaient dociles et exacts à le servir.” Barante, Histoire, vol. 9, 131. 44 “Il eut autour de lui jusqu’au dernier moment des serviteurs fidèles et même dévoués, parce qu’il s’en trouve toujours qui, malgré tout, s’attachent à leur prince et à leur maître, tant ils le regardent comme audessus d’eux. Mais tous ses peuples et tous ses soldats avaient fini par l’avoir dans une haine extrême.” Barante, Histoire, vol. 9, 130.

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Cast of mind: (1) Charles possessed a soul to which nothing could find an entry; it seemed, like his limbs on the day of battle, to be enclosed in steel armour.45 (2) Duke Charles felt affection for no man: his anger was violent, but cold, haughty and outrageous.46

Relations with women: He [Charles] had so little taste for the society of women that his attitude became a subject of calumny against him. 47

Desire for fame: His lust for glory and for power was transformed into a dream of imperium over the whole world. Accordingly he had burdened his subjects with taxes, his nobility with exhaustion, and launched himself into insane wars.48

Military capabilities: (1) Corrupted by pride, he had not turned out what he seemed above all to have been called to be: a great military leader. Apart from the expeditions against the unfortunate inhabitants of Liége, where he had to deal with demented insurrectionists, he succeeded in nothing, without even mentioning the conflict with the Swiss which he lost, he was seen to have been held in check before Amiens, Beauvais and Neuss.49 (2) ... if he was decisive in command, he did not know how to win the hearts of his troops, nor to impart to them that sort of joyous impetuosity which a leader inspires in spite of his harshness,

At the end: ... for himself [Mehmed II], he knew no pity. He took part personally in most of his campaigns, and his restless life quickly consumed itself. Medals and paintings from his last years depict him as worn out and gone to seed. At barely fifty-one years of age ... he died.50

45 “Charles avait une âme où rien ne trouvait accès; elle semblait, comme ses membres le jour de bataille, enfermée dans une armure de fer.” Barante, Histoire, vol. 9, 132. 46 “Le duc Charles n’aimait personne: sa colère était violent, mais froide, hautaine et outrageante.” Barante, Histoire, vol. 9, 130. 47 “Il eut même si peu de gout pour la societé de femmes, que ce fut un sujet de calomnie contre lui.” Barante, Histoire, vol. 9, 133–134. 48 “Son désir de gloire et de puissance s’était tourné à rêver l’empire du monde entier. Alors il avait accablé ses peuples d’impôts, sa noblesse de fatigues, et s’était précipité dans de folles guerres.” Barante, Histoire, vol. 9, 130. 49 “Corrompu par l’orgeuil, il n’avait pas même été ce qu’il semblait surtout appelé à devenir, un grand chef de guerre. Sauf les expéditions contre les malheureux Liégeois, où il avait eu affaire à des séditieux insensés, il n’avait jamais réussi à rien. Sans parler même de cette guerre contre les Suisses qu’il avait perdu, on l’avait vu échouer devant Amiens, Beauvais et Neuss.” Barante, Histoire, vol. 9, 130. 50 Wittek, “Two essays,” 168.

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[Charles] the Bold, that fighter and laborious plodder, that great issuer of meticulous orders ... who came to grief near Nancy..., where his ... followers found nothing left but a naked body already gnawed by the wolves.51 The death of Charles the Bold brought [for France] not peace, but rather ongoing centuries of war with the House of Habsburg.52

IV Lack of space must inhibit any wide-ranging enquiry into the extent to which these characterisations by Barante of Charles the Bold, and the parallel assessments relating to Mehmed II, help us to come to an understanding of both rulers. What is clear is that in accounting for the personality and activities of Mehmed II and Charles the Bold the historian must deal with mindsets which have little to do in intrinsic terms with the Renaissance per se, or even with fifteenth-century Burgundy or the Ottoman state, but bear a more general and recurrent character. The insights into the psychology of absolute rulers furnished in two works, now quite elderly, by the expatriate Romanian scholar Zevedei Barbu and the American psychohistorian Peter Loewenberg, may still possess some relevance to our subject matter.53 It may be added that Barbu himself, together with his Problems of Historical Psychology, would be worth further examination by historians rather than sociologists.54 The book appears not to have attracted any attention from historians when it first appeared and was little noticed even in the leading sociological journals; nonetheless, it appears to have become known, and approved of, by historians such as Michael Walzer, who describes it as an ‘interesting, occasionally exasperating, book’, and by Peter Loewenberg.55 What seems to be the case is that in the personality of Mehmed II we find intensified certain traits already present in the Ottoman variant of post-Mongol Islamic kingship. As to the effect of Mehmed II’s rule on Ottoman society, one may pick up on Barbu’s observation that “once paranoid personalities become frequent in a community, they react as a group upon their social environment by intensifying those aspects of it which support their paranoid type of behaviour; they create a rigid social organization based on power, in which suspicion, aggression, and strong in-group feelings become necessary forms of adjustment”.56 51 Febvre, “Michelet,” 725; tr. Burke, 263. 52 “Der Tod Karls des Kühnen brachte nicht den Frieden, sondern den Jahrhunderte währenden Krieg mit dem Hause Habsburg” (Paravicini, “Bemerkungen zu Richard Vaughan: Charles the Bold,” 773). 53 Zevedei Barbu, Problems of Historical Psychology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958); Peter Lowenberg, Decoding the Past: The Psychohistorical Approach (Berkeley – Los Angeles – London: University of California Press, 1969). 54 On Barbu (1914–1993) there appears to be little if anything in any reasonably accessible language (see Michael Finkenthal, “Zevedei Barbu – filosof, sociolog şi psiholg … englez?” [sic], Apostrof: Revista a Uniunii Scriitorilor, Annul 18, 4:203 (2007): 32–33; and Dan Culcer, “Zevedei Barbu: Un om de stiinta roman uitat?” Asymetria: Revue roumaine de culture, critique et imagination, accessed September 15, 2014,  http://www.asymetria.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=386 and, in English, a short biographical sketch on the University of Glasgow website: accessed September 15, 2014, http:// www.universitystory.gla.ac.uk/biography/?id=WH24132&type=P. Barbu’s academic career led him from Romania to Scotland and eventually to Brazil, where he died. 55 See Michael Walzer, “Puritanism as a Revolutionary ideology,” History and Theory 3:1 (1963–1964): 59–90, at p.76, n. 27; Peter Loewenberg, “Psychohistorical Perspectives on Modern German History,” Journal of Modern History 47:2 (1975): 229–279, at p. 269. 56 Barbu, Problems of Historical Psychology, 16.

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It may not be regarded as incorrect to view as conforming to this pattern the kul system as it became intensified in Mehmed II’s reign, together with continuous warfare against a series of external enemies both Christian and Muslim, especially when taken together with well-documented proscriptions of individuals at the whim of the ruler, or implacable acts of revenge. Barbu’s intention was to make a rapprochement between psychology and history, an approach which ties in with perceptions of the irrationality of medieval – and, increasingly of twenty-first century – civilisation as demonstrated by, for example, Johan Huizinga or Gustave von Grunebaum. In the case of the Ottoman state in the time of Mehmed II, as in the Burgundy of Charles the Bold, we see a powerful combination of irrationality (the influence of dreams; sudden rages and impulses of the ruler) and clear-headed ragione di stato (political murder; deportations; the engaging in massive state economic activity such as urban renewal, etc.).57 A deeper analysis of the language of the contemporary Ottoman chronicles, especially of Aşıkpaşazade, might help here, if we pick up on the observation by Lucien Febvre that “written language [is] a main mode of expression of the perceptual field of a community of people”.58 Can the Ottoman chronicles be interpreted in this light? A possibly fruitful objective should be, not to set the activity/characteristics of Mehmed II in a framework of a universal model of the human mind – even within, for example, such categories as “Oriental despotism” or Freudian concepts – but to follow Barbu in his illuminating enquiry into the problem of historical psychology and to stress the historical character of the individual human mind.59 The implications of this approach are a stress on the following: the human mind is historical in character; the historical process does not lie outside the realm of mental phenomena; the mind does not play a passive role in the historical process; and, at a more complex level: the mind is an integral part of the historical process. It is, therefore, determined by and at the same time determines the historical process; and also gives rise to the concept of psycho-social cycles in history: The historical development of a community can be viewed as being alternatively [sic] propelled by social and psychological conditions. In other words, historical causation moves in a circle from psychological to non-psychological factors.60

Kingship in medieval and ‘Early Modern’ Islam – and not only in Islam – is a dark subject, darker perhaps than most historians have been willing to acknowledge. Indeed, it is hard 57 Both Mehmed II and Charles the Bold have given historians nightmares and provoked almost violent counter-attacks on their part – compare Franz Babinger’s lengthy, effectively negative assessment of Mehmed’s character and personality (Mehmed der Eroberer, 449, ff; Mehmed the Conqueror, 409–432; cf. Heywood, “Mehmed II and the Historians,” 47–53) with Lucien Febvre’s compressed encapsulation (“Michelet,” 725) of his predecessor’s acute loathing for Charles the Bold – which shares many of Babinger’s feelings towards Mehmed II: “ ‘un demi-fou’…, ce mélomane passioné, cet homme qui, des heures durant, s’abîmait dans le contemplation muette des mers démontées et des flots en furie; le Téméraire qu’un peu de vin mettait en fièvre, que ses colères sanguines étouffaient … ce Picrochole [i.e., Rabelais’ stereotypical ‘bad king’ and initiator of vast and unfinishable projects, CH] qui ‘emprit tout’ mais ne finit rien…”. 58 Barbu, Problems of Historical Psychology, 17. 59 Barbu, Problems of Historical Psychology, 14. 60 Barbu, Problems of Historical Psychology, 14–15.

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not to feel instinctively that there is something monstrous in kingship wherever it manifests itself in extreme forms, e.g. under certain of the Ottomans or the Hohenstaufen, or in Muscovy under Ivan the Terrible, whether or not we go along with the medieval Islamic political theorists or the Muscovite theorist Ivan Peresvetov and accept the premise that kings are necessary for the “good order” of mankind. The methodological problems, however, are considerable. Barbu has observed that “… any attempt to establish the determining conditions of a historical event” – Barbu’s example is an extreme one, the rise of Nazism – takes one round in a circle in which psychological and non-psychological factors follow each other in a chain of cause and effect. It would however be erroneous to conclude that the psychological and cultural factors describe a sterile circle in history. The continuous movement from one to another ends up in a spiral.61

Peter Loewenberg cannot find any particular advantage in Barbu’s cyclical theory over a theory of mutual dynamic interaction, but points up the significance of Barbu’s observation that the same irrational emotional factors are operative in the individual’s mental life and in the collective social structure. This realization, he observes, will be of benefit to the historian: Provided that he is aware of the irrational character of such feeling, he has now in his hands a factor of a kind which can give him the clue to a series of other events of the period, such as the specific character of the economy, of political institutions, of international relations, of ideological trends. In other words, this very phenomenon opens his eyes to the structure, the ‘innere[n] Zusammenhang’ [internal cohesion] [Ranke] of events in a given historical period.62

V To look beyond the parallels in the character and psychology of their rulers, what might the Burgundy of Charles the Bold and the Ottoman state of Mehmed the Conqueror also be said to have possessed in common? An observer in the year 1470, looking at the states and polities which comprised the Northern European and Mediterranean world, could have observed two polities which had evolved in the course of the previous century-and-a-quarter and which now bid fair to be the rising powers of the second half of the fifteenth century. As opposed to what might be termed the historic polities of this region – Byzantium, the Mamluk Empire, Venice, the Holy Roman Empire, France – both the Duchy of Burgundy and the Ottoman state possessed a certain arriviste quality. They were relative newcomers on the international scene, one, the Ottomans, emerging from local obscurity only in the mid-fourteenth century to become within the following century a major player in both Anatolian and Balkan politics: a sequence of events taking place within the same timeframe which saw the creation and expansion of the Duchy of Burgundy, equally a two-part state, in the Franco-German borderlands between Holland and Piedmont. Both the Ottoman state and the Burgundian lands were governed by strong-willed rulers, devoted to warfare and incessantly on campaign, and manifesting, in the utterances ascribed 61 Barbu, Problems of Historical Psychology, 16. 62 Barbu, Problems of Historical Psychology, 15–16; 67–68; cf. Loewenberg, “Psychohistorical Perspectives,” 269.

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to them, pretensions to universal and even to world rule. Both states, in 1470, had reasonable prospects of becoming major powers and of enduring for centuries, yet within less than a decade the contrasting impact of fortune and misfortune had radically altered the situation. By the early months of 1477 Burgundy, as a relatively unified entity under its Grand Duke, had ceased to exist. Charles the Bold, incessantly pursuing a course of expansion which had put him on a collision course with the Swiss urban league of the Eidgenossenschaft, had, on 5 January 1477, led his army into defeat and destruction outside the walls of the fortress of Nancy. Charles himself had fallen in the battle. He left no direct male heir, only a daughter whose succession, at the time of his death, had not been adequately provided for. Mehmed II, on the other hand, facing an equally significant challenge at the same age as Charles had been when he met his death outside the walls of Nancy, had succeeded in vanquishing his own bitterest opponent and most dangerous Anatolian rival, the Akkoyunlu ruler Uzun Hasan, at the Battle of Terjan (Otluk Beli) in 1473.63 How had this divergence in fortune come about when the two rulers seemingly had so much in common, at least in terms of their historical psychology and world outlook?64 Are we in order in comparing them? It goes without saying that specialists in the history of latemedieval Burgundy have not tended to concern themselves overmuch with Ottoman history in the same period, and vice versa, despite some intriguing and valuable connections which bear largely on the crusading and Ottoman components of the history of late-medieval warfare.65 Nonetheless, some interesting parallels between the two states may be discerned. Both Burgundy and the Ottoman domains were, in their mid-fourteenth to mid-fifteenth century formative period, divided states – Burgundy was divided between the Flanders and Brabant on the one hand, and the county Duchy of Burgundy proper, centred on Dijon, on the other. The Ottoman state was divided between the Anatolian core of the old beylik lands and the new territories in Rumeli. Between Flanders and Dijon lay the gap, territorially never to be bridged, of Luxemburg; between Anatolia and Rumeli lay the equally unbridgeable Straits and the last remnants of Byzantium, including the old imperial capital. However – 63 On the psychic collapse of Uzun Hasan in the aftermath of Terjan see John E. Woods, The Aqquyunlu: Clan, Confederation, Empire, revised and expanded edition (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1999), 121. By coincidence, Uzun Hasan died on 5 January 1478, exactly a year after Charles the Bold, on the eve of the Muslim festival of ‘Îd al-Fitr (which would have commenced on 1 Shawwal – in AH 882 = 6 Jan. 1478), equally and finally undone by the rigours of a winter campaign against an equally under-regarded mountain opponent, in this case the Georgian kingdom of Kartli (Woods, The Aqquyunlu, 122–123). 64 See, for some invaluable insights, Barbu, Problems of Historical Psychology, Chapter III: “History and Emotional Climates,” 43–68). 65 See Colin Heywood, “Notes on the Production of Fifteenth-Century Ottoman Cannon,” reprinted and corrected version in idem, Writing Ottoman History, § XVI, which makes use (p. 7, ff.) of Jehan de Wavrin, Receuil des chroniques et anchiennes istories de la Grant Bretaigne, ed. by William Hardy, 5 vols. (London, 1864–1891), vol. 5, 5–119 (deals with Burgundian participation in the naval operations surrounding the Crusade of Varna, 1443–45). See now, Colin Imber, The Crusade of Varna, 1443–45 (Crusade Texts in Translation) (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2006), 107–166. It is noteworthy that European historians of Burgundy take as little account of Ottoman scholarship on Burgundian-Ottoman military and naval rivalry as do contemporary Ottoman historians when it comes to European non-Ottomanist scholarship on the subject; cf. Yvon Lacaze, “Politique “méditerranéenne” et projets de croisade chez Philippe le Bon: De la chute de Byzance à la victoire chrétienne de Belgrade (mai 1453– juillet 1456),” Annales de Bourgogne 41 (1969): 5–42, 81–132, and Jacques Paviot, La Politique navale des ducs de Bourgogne: 1384–1482 (Lille: Presses universitaires de Lille, 1995), 105–151.

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Mehmed II had joined the two halves of his state, symbolically, in 1453 and unified its two halves through a new imperial capital occupying and controlling both the Rumelian and Anatolian sides of the Straits; and through administrative centralisation. Charles the Bold, however, had failed to carve out by conquest or annexation a secure land bridge between his two principal domains and, it hardly needs to be said, had an infinitely less strategic site for his main sites of government. VI Were, then, the diametrically opposed outcomes for two such contemporary and comparable rulers as Mehmed II and Charles the Bold little more than the result of good fortune or its absence? Fortune and misfortune are unfashionable concepts nowadays amongst historians, and yet they may still possess some utility, if only epistemologically. We may turn once again to Burckhardt, who devoted to the subject a magistral, if perhaps now little-read lecture, ‘On Fortune and Misfortune in History’, which he delivered at the City Museum in Basle in 1871.66 In his lecture he came to no firm conclusions, except to stress the essential subjectivity of such judgements, which he termed ‘the deadly enemies of true historical insight’.67 Despite this severe stricture from an acknowledged Altmeister, the concept of fortune and misfortune in history may perhaps have a particular value when it is applied comparatively to the two sets of existential and synchronic phenomena discussed in the present paper. Most noteworthily, the careers, outlook and political stance of Charles the Bold and Mehmed the Conqueror which, although they apparently possessed a high degree of comparability across two very different cultures, nonetheless resulted (also apparently) in radically divergent outcomes, in Mehmed II’s case fortunate, in that of Charles the Bold apparently not. Burckhardt’s allowing of only an aesthetic value to human history, a stance which one commentator has defined as ‘the contemplative freedom of enjoying historical change and alteration as a spectacle of the human mind [acting] on the dark stage of natural forces’ may perhaps lend some support this view.68 Thus, to apply Burckhardt’s construct of fortune and misfortune in history, it may be regarded as fortunate, at least for the Ottoman dynasty and state, that Mehmed II was able to defeat Uzun Hasan at Terjan. Was it, then, a misfortune that the Burgundy of Charles the Bold disappeared so rapidly and completely after its Duke’s defeat in battle and death outside the walls of Nancy in January 1477? Did the Burgundian state collapse as a result of Charles the Bold’s over-ambitious and rash policies? Would it have survived if he had followed a policy which had been ‘less foolhardy’? Certainly Burckhardt and, following him, Johan Huizinga affected to believe that it would. Burckhardt imagined the Burgundian lands, in the lacerated and dismembered Europe of the sixteenth century, as ‘the great Western European island of peace, prosperity, art, industry, [and] undisturbed culture’.69 66 Jakob Burckhardt, “On Fortune and Misfortune in History,” in idem, Reflections on History, tr. by Marie Donald Hottinger (London: G. Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1943), 204–219. 67 Burckhardt, “Fortune and Misfortune,” 206. 68 Cf. Jörn Rüsen, “Jacob Burckhardt: Political Standpoint and Historical Insight on the Border of PostModernism,” History and Theory 24:3 (1985): 244. 69 Jacob Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, ed. by Werner Kaegi (Stuttgart: K.F. Koehler, 1957), 79, cited by Jongkees, “Génération d’historiens,” 82, n. 20; the passage is cited here from the English version in Burckhardt, Judgements on History and Historians, tr. by Harry Zohn (London: Allen & Unwin, 1959), 90.

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Conversely, it may be asked whether the Ottoman state would have experienced a fate comparable to Burgundy’s if Mehmed had died in battle with a victorious Uzun Hasan at Tercan in 1473. The Battle of Tercan, after all, had be,e at least in its initial stages, a fairly close-run thing. The answer is probably not: the Ottoman state structures were stronger and more resilient than those of Burgundy; and Mehmed had experienced and competent male heirs fit to succeed him. It is also worth remembering that despite its post-Nancy collapse, the northern half of Burgundy did survive, through the marriage of Charles’s daughter Marguerite to Maximilian I, to become in the end part of that wider Habsburg imperium of which Charles the Bold had perhaps so unrealistically dreamed. Charles V, ‘that most Burgundian of Habsburgs’ [Huizinga] acquired, along with the lands of his inheritance, a claim to universal empire which emerged as an exact counterpart to the Ottoman claims which also emerged fully-fledged in the first decades of the sixteenth century. Thus, in both the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires the imperial, universalist ideals crystallised in the early sixteenth century in fully-formed claims to universal sovereignty. Nor were the Habsburgs alone amongst the ultimate possessors of the Burgundian lands in planning and believing in universal empire. Louis XI of France’s descendants also saw themselves in this light; and it can be no coincidence that in his list of events generally reckoned to be either fortunate or unfortunate, Burckhardt should include amongst the former that ‘first Spain then Louis XIV, were eventually defeated in their plans for world domination, etc.’. 70 VII Historians are not supposed to be concerned with the ‘what if’s’ of history; despite the intermittent fashionability of allo- or possibilitive history.71 And yet... What if Charles the Bold had won the Battle of Nancy and Mehmed the Conqueror had lost the Battle of Terjan? How would the Burgundian state have evolved if the ‘moment, historically speaking, the duchy-revival of the old Carolingian “middle kingdom”, display[ing] some political as well as cultural signs of becoming a modern state in the wake of the Hundred Years’ War’ had lasted? What if this moment, described as ‘brief (hardly more than two generations) but pregnant’, had actually become more than a moment?72 If the Burgundy of Charles the Bold had managed to overcome its essential duality; and, if the Ottoman state had not, would the former have become a major unitary state occupying the middle ground of Europe between the Empire and France; and would the latter have remained split into its European and Asian halves (but what of Constantinople?: not after 1453, one must say)... Nancy was not Constantinople, after all. It is perhaps, then, not with Mehmed the Conqueror but with Uzun Hasan that Charles the Bold might be most fruitfully compared. John E. Woods has written eloquently of ‘the grandiose pretensions and heroic personality of the ruler that Uzun Hasan committed to a series of unsuccessful political’ – and military – ‘adventures’ between 1469 and 1473, which 70 Burckhardt, “Fortune and Misfortune,” 205. 71 See a particularly stimulating example of the genre in Manfred Eder, “Wenn das ‘Tausendjährige Reich’ mehr als ein dutzendjähriges gewesen wäre,” Saeculum 56:1 (2005): 139–169; more particularly, in relation to 1453, Heywood, “Mehmed II and the Historians,” 295–297. 72 Donald R. Kelley, “[Review of] Michael Zingel, Frankreich, das Reich und Burgund im Urteil der burgundischen Historiographie des 15. Jahrhunderts (Vortrage und Forschungen, Sonderband 40) Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke,1995,” Speculum 72:4 (1997): 1225–1226.

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‘ultimately deprived this fragile structure’ – scil. the Akkoyunlu state – ‘of all internal cohesion and thus aided in bringing about its final collapse’.73 Fortune and misfortune, in this context, seem to have been equally disbursed by the Fates; and it is perhaps in the case of Mehmed the Conqueror that his achievements ensured that the classical retribution of nemesis in the face of overweening hubris failed to materialise. In that sense, the political culture which ensured Mehmed’s, and denied Charles’s military and political success as would-be universal rulers obsessed with and formed in part by their perceived role models of Antiquity, was something held in common and thus a phenomenon which may be said to transcend the narrow limits of an “unexportable” European Renaissance culture as defined by Burckhardt.

73 Woods, Akkoyunlu, 110.

Alternative Paths Towards the Age of Mercantilism: The Venetian Project of the Scala Di Spalato Vera Costantini The centuries-long history of the Ottoman Empire has been, and somehow still is, approached by non-Ottoman historians from a teleological point of view.1 So challenging is the idea that the Middle East has been ruled by an independent, hegemonic state, that the European – or, rather, Eurocentric – culture and mentality need to keep celebrating its actual historical decay and ultimate end. The institutional experience of the Ottoman Empire is still either abused or sentenced to a damnatio memoriae.2 This is particularly true in those countries, whose lands were part of the Ottoman Empire, such as Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria and other Balkan countries, who by the way host the most extensive Ottoman archives in the world. As far as Italian historiography is concerned, Ottoman documents are seldom directly examined, even when dealing with the ever-fashionable topic of Mediterranean history. Leaving aside the deliberately overlooked period of the relations between Turkey and Italy after its unification, even the diverse relationships between the Ottoman Empire and the Ancient Italian States are traditionally investigated using sources other than Ottoman documents. This has contributed to the hesitation in historiographical advance from the late 1970s onwards. Many questions that had been posed by a generation of Italian historians deeply concerned with economic structures and models and influenced by Fernand Braudel have been abandoned in favour of topics that have more to do with methodological assumptions than with an actual interpretation of historical data.3 It would be hazardous to think that the development of a comparative approach alone would have protected Italian historiography in the uncertain circumstances currently affecting the Humanities. Nevertheless, what is certain is that the perspective offered by a different view of the same structures and events necessarily broadens the horizons of a discipline and makes it more difficult to weaken its cultural significance. The history of the Mediterranean and of the Ancient Italian States is now ready to be verified through Ottoman sources, in all their wide variety. Furthermore, the actual number and quality of Ottoman sources kept in Italian archives are far from being completely known. In the State Archives of Palermo, for example, Ottoman documents are classified as “unreadable Arabic documents”, which means that the memory of Ottoman interests in Sicily has been completely erased: in 1861, six Ottoman consuls were active on the island and now nobody there is able to read their documents. One may hold the difficulties of the language responsible for the non-involvement of Italian scholars and historians; but this assumption – however scientifically unacceptable – is in1 Is there only one way leading to Modernity, or, rather, is there only one Modernity? (Ariel Salzmann, Tocqueville in the Ottoman Empire. Rival Paths to the Modern State (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004). 2 Edhem Eldem, “Osmanlı Tarihini Türklerden Kurtarmak,” Cogito 73 (2013): 260–282. 3 Ruggiero Romano, Braudel e noi. Riflessioni sulla cultura storica del nostro tempo (Roma: Donzelli, 1995), 51–52.

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exorably called into question by the deeply-rooted tradition of Turkish and Turkic Studies in Italy.4 Another reason might be the previous, lengthy inaccessibility of Turkish archives, but then why should the perfectly accessible Ottoman documents kept in the Italian archives share the same destiny? And why should this reason not be null and void now that the Turkish archives have been opened? Rather, a peculiar strategy of State-building may be at the basis of this “repression”: after 1876, the new Italian ruling class let colonialism transmit a new ideology of consent.5 PostGaribaldi discourses on the pretended “Italianness” of Albania started to fill the pages of the national press, the Corriere della Sera printing among the most chauvinist anti-Ottoman prose.6 Now that the not-too-glorious age of Italian social-colonialism is only a distant memory, our historical tradition seems still gratuitously bound to the idea that the storia patria needs to be based on “native” sources, relegating Ottoman and, in general, foreign records to the status of an exotic curiosity for philologists, if not a rarity for antiquarians. The relevance of an eastwards-trend in international trade has been considered a structural aspect of the history of the Italian peninsula.7 The governments held by the destra storica were fully aware of its original character and kept encouraging it by building infrastructure in the country and by demanding high performance from Italian diplomacy abroad, especially in the Ottoman Empire.8 The close, substantial connection between trade, peace and diplomacy may be the Republic of Venice’s most precious bequest to the modern Italian State. A “quintessentially neutral” power, its ruling class constantly acted as a conflict-defusing factor in sixteenth-century Mediterranean affairs.9 As we shall see, this pattern continued with even greater intensity throughout the first decades of the following century, from the (propitious) abandonment of the Holy League (1573) until the War of Candia (1645). Venice was still among the leading industrial powers of the time and trade with the Ottoman Empire was vital to the very existence of the State. Nevertheless, after the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus, Venetian interests in the Eastern Mediterranean were destined to be seriously compromised. The loss of such an important base for their feudal business economy would soon have deprived the Venetian merchants of their privileged position in the commercial competition of the time. True, the Venetian network in Syria was so deeply rooted that the relatively short war in Cyprus did not have an immediate effect on commercial competition in the area: throughout the subsequent two decades, the merchants of Saint Mark’s continued to be the most influential and numerous trading nation in Aleppo.10 Nevertheless, this inertia was destined to end. Moreover, and partially as a consequence of these latesixteenth-century events, at the beginning of the seventeenth century the first crisis of production occurred in all its dramatic evidence.11 4 Ugo Marazzi (ed.), Turcica et Islamica: studi in memoria di Aldo Gallotta, 2 vols. (Napoli: Università degli studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”, Series Minor 64, 2003). 5 Giampiero Carocci, Storia d’Italia dall’Unità ad oggi (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1989), 54. 6 Vera Costantini, “L’Italia post-unitaria e gli Italiani dalle lettere degli ambasciatori del sultano,” in Daniele Guizzo (ed.), Acculturazione e disadattamento (Venice: Cafoscarina, 2009), 29–44. 7 Ruggiero Romano, Una tipologia economica, in Ruggiero Romano and Corrado Vivanti (eds.), Storia d’Italia, vol. 1: I caratteri originali (Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 1972), 286. 8 Federico Chabod, Storia della politica estera italiana dal 1870 al 1896 (Bari, Laterza, 1971), 563–599. 9 John Rigby Hale, La civiltà del Rinascimento in Europa: 1450–1620 (Milan: Mondadori, 1994). 10 Vera Costantini, Il sultano e l’isola contesa. Cipro tra eredità veneziana e potere ottomano (Torino: UTET Libreria, 2009), 166. 11 Ruggiero Romano, Tra due crisi: l’Italia del Rinascimento (Torino: Einaudi, 1971), 189.

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The crisis of the seventeenth century is considered a “general” crisis.12 This means that its causes and effects are traceable in many aspects of the economic life of the time: demographic, industrial and commercial. The English and the Dutch not only won the competition with the former leading economies of Venice, Florence, Genoa, etc., but also laid the foundations of a deal that was completely innovative in the economic history of the world. This process was neither quick nor sudden. On the contrary, throughout the second half of the preceding century the English had slowly proceeded towards what Richard Rapp has called “the unmaking of Venetian hegemony” in Mediterranean trade.13 Their first and most effective weapon had been to counterfeit Venetian fabrics. Lower-quality and cheap imitations of Venetian textiles were introduced into the Levantine markets and circulated with the fake brand of the lion of Saint Mark’s. This strategy was accompanied by a jump in the industrial system of textile production, supported – so energy economists argue – by mineral energy resources: coal and turf instead of wood.14 Consequently, lower production costs, together with daring choices of colours and materials, had the effect of expanding the market. More people had access to cheaper products. This did not mean that Venetian fabrics were about to disappear: on the contrary, the Sultan and the Ottoman élite would continue to favour Venetian luxury items throughout the existence of the Republic. What changed was the system of consumption on a wider scale.15 The Dutch and English merchants were paying for raw materials such as cotton and wool with (smuggled)16 American silver, partially recovered through the sale of the end products of their industry. This mercantilist scheme of proto-colonial penetration kept the Mediterranean – and the Ottoman Empire, more than any other state – at the centre of the world’s interests. The Mediterranean lands were at the same time both a space where raw materials were produced and a promising, socially diversified community of consumption. Varied strategies were adopted in order to intervene in the different social and institutional realities that came into contact with this new economy.17 In Southern Italy, for example, the English merchants substituted for the Venetian and Genoese network by developing a pattern of intervention focusing on re-exports.18 In general, English trade in Italy was mainly a transit trade, Livorno being an indispensable stopping-off point on the route taken by English ships sailing to the Mediterranean.19 In the Ottoman Empire, too, strategies are 12 Geoffrey Parker and Lesley M. Smith (eds.), The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 1; Eric Hobsbawn, “The General Crisis of the European Economy in the 17th Century,” Past and Present 5:1 (1954): 33–53. 13 Richard Tilden Rapp, “The Unmaking of the Mediterranean Trade Hegemony: International Trade Rivalry and the Commercial Revolution,” Journal of Economic History 35:3 (1975): 499–525. 14 Edward Anthony Wrigley, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 15 Marcello Carmagnani, Le isole del lusso: prodotti esotici, nuovi consumi e cultura economica europea 1650–1800 (Torino: Utet Libreria, 2010), 3–35; Geoffrey Parker, Europe in Crisis: 1598–1648 (London: Blackwell, 20012). 16 Zacarías Moutoukias, Contrabando y control colonial en el siglo XVII. Buenos Aires, el Atlàntico y el espacio peruano (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de America Latina, 1988). 17 Gigliola Pagano de Divitiis, Mercanti inglesi nell’Italia del Seicento. Navi, traffici, egemonie (Venice: Marsilio, 1997), 32–50. 18 Ibidem. 19 Fernand Braudel and Ruggiero Romano, Navires et marchandises à l’entrée du port de Livourne (1547– 1611) (Paris: Colin, 1951); Renato Ghezzi, Livorno e il mondo islamico nel XVII secolo. Naviglio e commercio di importazione (Bari: Cacucci Editore, 2007); Michela D’Angelo, Mercanti inglesi a Livorno

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difficult to generalize to a common pattern, each provincial situation – as well as that of the capital20 – needing more detailed inspection.21 Nevertheless, all these places had to cope with a new mercantilist approach in commercial transactions and ultimately suffered from it while finding their place within modernity.22 Indeed, the crisis of the seventeenth century introduced structural elements of inequality and disharmony among trading regions. Even today’s divergence between Northern and Southern European countries needs to be traced back to the seventeenth century in order to be properly understood.23 Now, what was the impact of this crisis on the economic policies of the period? Did the former leading economies react? It has been claimed that the Question d’Orient cannot be examined without also considering the answers provided to that question by the Orient(s) itself/themselves.24 Did the “old world”25 think about an alternative path towards the age of mercantilism?26 Though structural, the crisis has been described as relative and not absolute as far as the city of Venice was concerned.27 Mechanisms of old-regime social security – such as the guild system – prevented living standards from declining, the highest price of the crisis ultimately being paid by the countryside through re-feudalization methods. This pattern had the effect of protecting the industrial sector and, on a different, though interlinking level, made it possible for the Republican ruling class to establish autonomous priorities in the State’s economic policies. If an answer to the crisis has to be looked for, it must be in the Venetian commercial affairs. In 1577, a Jewish merchant named Daniel Rodriga presented to the Senate of the Republic a project for establishing an international port in the Dalmatian city of Spalato, formally part

1573–1737. Alle origini di una “British Factory” (Messina: Istituto di Studi Storici Gaetano Salvemini, 2004). 20 Edhem Eldem, Daniel Goffman and Bruce Masters, The Ottoman City between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir and Istanbul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Robert Mantran, Histoire d’Istanbul (Paris: Fayard, 1996). 21 Nelly Hanna, Making Big Money in 1600: The Life and Times of Isma’il Abu Taqiyya, Egyptian Merchant (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1998); Dina Rizk Khouri, State and Provincial Society in the Ottoman Empire: Mosul 1540–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Daniel Goffman, Izmir and the Levantine World, 1550–1650 (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1990); Elena Frangakis-Syrett, The Commerce of Smyrna in the Eighteenth century (1700–1820) (Athens: Center for Asia Minor Studies, 1992); Marie-Carmen Smyrnelis, Une ville ottomane plurielle: Smyrne aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (Istanbul: ISIS, 2006) and Suraiya Faroqhi, The Ottoman Empire and the World around It (London: I.B. Tauris & Co., 2006). 22 Bruce Masters, The Origins of Western Economic Dominance in the Middle East: Mercantilism and the Islamic Economy in Aleppo, 1650–1700 (New York: New York University Press, 1988), 191. 23 Ruggiero Romano, L’Europa tra due crisi (14. e 17. Secolo) (Torino: Einaudi, 1980). 24 Paul Dumont, “La période des Tanzimat (1839–1878),” in Robert Mantran (ed.), Histoire de l’Empire ottoman (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 459. 25 Paola Lanaro (ed.), At the Centre of the Old World: Trade and Manufacturing in Venice and the Venetian Mainland, 1400–1800 (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2006). 26 “[S]i sbaglierebbe a concludere […] che Venezia assistette inerte a questo declassamento di una marina mercantile che per secoli era stata il suo vanto” (Domenico Sella, “L’economia,” in Storia di Venezia, vol. 6 (Rome: Treccani, 1994), 654–658 and ibid, Commerci e industrie a Venezia nel secolo XVII. (Rome: Istituto per la collaborazione culturale, 1961). 27 Richard Tilden Rapp, Industry and Economic Decline in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976).

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of the Venetian stato da mar.28 The proposal was taken into consideration and ultimately accepted by the authorities. Basically, Rodriga’s project was to apply a policy of low customs duties in order to attract Ottoman goods to Spalato rather than to any other Eastern Adriatic port. Spalato being a Venetian colony, the ships would then have compulsorily left for the Serenissima. As the Levant Company had its Livorno, Venice could count on its Spalato. As a satellite free port, the Dalmatian city could become Venice’s feudal “subterfuge” in the new economy. One only has to look at a map to understand how slim the portion of Venetian territory was on the Dalmatian coast.29 Immediately beyond the border began the boundless paese turchesco. The project of the scala di Spalato had to count on the benevolent cooperation of the Ottomans or it could not exist. It has been asserted that economic history has its own chronology, independent of the traditional division of human history.30 Quite similarly, it may be argued that it has its own space too, equally independent from the geography drawn by institutional borders. In this sense, Early-Modern Venetian Dalmatia and Ottoman Bosnia were a concrete example of geographic contiguity and economic interdependence. There were towns under Ottoman rule whose natural port (“marina”) was beyond the border, in Venetian territory. Such was the case of Venetian Spalato (İsplit) and Ottoman Kilis (Clissa). The more critical and controversial the Balkan border became during the wars, the less intense it became during the longer periods of peace. A pervasive phenomenon of professional cross-migration had already been denounced on many occasions by Süleyman I (mid-sixteenth century): immediately before a military campaign against Persia, the Sultan had to repeat his orders for collecting salt for the army, since all of it was already entirely in the hands of the Venetian merchants, the Ottoman salt-works being monopolized by their network.31 The situation might be described in terms of the economic pervasiveness of the city-state of Venice towards the Ottoman periphery. The current oblivion of Early-Modern history makes everybody remember Ottoman Bosnia as a province far from its political centre, economically depressed and deeply harassed by ethnic disputes and colonial interests. This is mainly due to nineteenth-century and current events connected with this area, but also to the post-Fascist voluntary oblivion of Venice’s maritime power on the Eastern coast of the Adriatic. Moreover, it should also be remembered that Ottoman Bosnia corresponded to the western, farthest branch of a trade route whose cohesion was augmented by the unity of Ottoman rule. How this unity contributed to delaying the economic crisis has not yet been investigated.32 What emerges from the documents is that a whole stream of Eastern products, including, for example, Indian pepper, arrived in Bosnia by caravan.33 Together with local prod28 Renzo Paci, La “Scala” di Spalato e il commercio veneziano nei Balcani fra Cinque e Seicento (Venice: Deputazione di Storia Patria per le Venezie, 1971), 45–70. 29 Tea Mayhew, Dalmatia between Ottoman and Venetian Rule: Contado di Zara 1645–1718 (Rome: Viella 2008), 91–140. 30 Ruggiero Romano, Industria: storia e problemi (Torino: Einaudi, 1976). 31 M. Tayyib Gökbilgin, “Venedik Devlet Arşivindeki Vesikalar Külliyatında Kanuni Sultan Süleyman Devri Belgeleri,” Belgeler 1:2 (1964): 119–220 and Jean-Claude Hocquet, Le sel et la fortune de Venise, vol. 2: Voiliers et commerce en Mediterranée, 1200–1650 (Lille: Université de Lille, 1979). 32 Ömer Lütfi Barkan, “Le déclin de Venise dans ses rapports avec la décadence économique de l’Empire Ottoman,” in Aspetti e cause della decadenza economica veneziana nel secolo XVII, Atti del convegno 27 giugno – 2 luglio 1957 (Venice: Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore; Florence: Olschki, 1961), 275–279. 33 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi (herein BOA), A.DVN.MHM.D (herein Mühimme Defteri) 24, hüküm 43.

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ucts, such as wool, wax, cheese, thick felt, silk and semi-processed leather, these goods all reached Saray Bosna and then took different routes to reach the maritime coast westwards. Dubrovnik, Narenta, Makarska, Şebenik (Šibenik), Leş (Lezhë) and Castelnuovo (Nova) were the major access points to the sea. The Venetian project of letting the Balkan merchandise converge in Kilis and then Spalato was an attempt to clamp down on this fragmentation, preserving the cohesive nature of trade granted by the unity of the Ottoman lands. In this sense, the territory ruled by the Venetians played its traditional role of “natural” continuation of the Ottoman lands. Many authoritative words have been written about the compatibility of the two States.34 The project of the scala di Spalato may very well be considered as the extreme declination of this compatibility. The realization of the project could count on an already well-established Venetian network in the area. A Conte was in charge in the port of Spalato and another was in the nearby city of Zara, both submitting to a Provveditore Generale di Dalmazia, also established in Zara. These three public offices were assigned to patricians for three years. Moreover, just across the nearby Ottoman border, a Venetian consul – not necessarily a patrician – was appointed both in Kilis and in Saray Bosna, nowadays Sarajevo (Daniel Rodriga, for example, was in charge at the end of the sixteenth century). This institutional network, reaching deep into the Ottoman domains, somehow demonstrates the vitality of Venetian interests in the Balkans even before the actual establishment of the Scala. At the end of the sixteenth century, the target became to activate this network towards a new objective: allowing the route from Saray Bosna to Kilis, to Spalato and ultimately to Venice to become the preferential path for traded goods travelling westwards. In view of this target, the aforementioned network was integrated by other, not-necessarily institutionalized, figures with the task of facilitating co-operation with the Ottoman authorities established in Skopje, Sofia, and Saray Bosna, and with the merchants at all levels: […] vi commettemo che dobbiate immediate mandar quelle persone che voi stimarete buone per condur a fine questo negozio, facendolo trattar con quella circonspettione che dalli savii nostri sopra la mercantia vi è stata scritta, […] non interversando in ciò il nome pubblico, ma solamente il beneficio di quei sanzacadi et de mercanti […]35 – the Cinque Savi alla Mercanzia wrote in 1588 to the Rettori di Zara.

As suggested by this quotation, at this stage the Venetian ruling class chose to keep a low international profile on the project. The keyword was indeed circonspettione. Venetians were particularly careful not to let the project become an international affair. After the loss of Cyprus – or, according to traditional chronological divisions, after the Battle of Lepanto – Venice is relegated by historiography to the role of “regional power”. Was it really the case? Yes, would answer in reassuring tones the Venetian ruling class of the day, about whose rare pragmatism many illuminating words have already been written.36 But the reality looked different, and Venetians were playing their cards on a regional basis, in order to re-assess their hegemony on the contended transit trade of their Gulf, as the Adriatic Sea was called 34 Fernand Braudel, Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme (XVe–XVIIIe siècle), vol. 3: Le temps du monde (Paris: Armand Colin, 1979), 158. 35 Archivio di Stato di Venezia (herein ASV), Cinque Savi alla Mercanzia, I serie, b. 162, September 27th 1588. 36 Benjamin Arbel, “Sauterelles et mentalités. Le cas de la Chypre vénitienne,” Annales ESC 5 (1989): 1057–1074, reprinted in ibid, Cyprus, the Franks and Venice (London: Ashgate-Variorum, 2000), 1062.

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in those days. Who were the competitors and who the potential enemies? As stated by the Cinque Savi in a paper dated June 1589: [n]oi, presa informazione particolare et dal clarissimo messer Nicolò Bragadino, ultimamente ritornato di là, et da Daniel Rodriga, crediamo che i dubii dell’effettuarla si risolvono in dua molto principali, l’uno sopra le difficoltà che potranno esser poste dall’emino di Narenta et dal Sanzaco del Ducado, interessati molto per questa deliberazione, quello come datiaro di quella scala et questo come patrone del paese per dove convengono passar hora tutte le mercantie, le quali mutando scala converranno tralasciar quel camino con interesse di quel sanzacado. L’altra dubietà nasce dal timore che hanno tutti i mercanti per il pericolo del viaggio, potendo in molti luoghi del paese, per l’abondanza di boschi et altri siti esser assaliti et da Uscocchi et da altri […].37

The Ottoman authorities mentioned by the document occupied different positions in the local administration. The first – the emin of the port town of Narenta – was the person to whom customs duties were entrusted, either in exchange of a salary or, more often in this area, as a share of the income (iltizam). The second was the sancakbeyi of Duka, an administrative figure of middling importance, also appointed by the Sultan, who mediated between local demands and the beylerbeyi. The two of them nourished a direct or indirect interest in trade. Of course, the passage of a caravan through a city meant dependable sources of income under many aspects;38 therefore, it was not even necessary for the political authorities to have a direct interest in the goods actually traded – which, in many cases, they had – in order to intervene in favor of one route or another. These two figures were neither the only nor the most dangerous competitors of the newly established scala di Spalato. True, their bases were closer to Spalato than any other porttown and the growth of the latter would have deprived them of the flow of international goods. According to the Cinque Savi, both of them were to be easily neutralized through the well-known strategy of the negotio, which in this case consisted of obtaining the support of a higher placed authority (the beylerbeyi of Bosnia) and other local figures, playing on the rivalries between the servants of the Sultan. This strategy, which modern culture would classify as political or diplomatic, was, on the contrary, essentially organic to trade, this last being an activity far more complex than we may assume today. The Ottoman functionaries often embraced the Venetian cause out of financial interest, a share of the potential income being destined directly to them. Merchants from Ancona and from Dubrovnik, whose fortunes were subject to a sudden increase whenever military controversy pitched the Republic of Venice against the Ottoman Empire, were particularly annoyed by the establishment of an international port in Spalato. Certainly, their opposition would have been more challenging than anyone else’s for the Venetians, since both of these cities could have turned to the Pope and asked for support. The Venetians were certainly unwilling to deal with direct intervention by the Pope in economic affairs concerning the Gulf.39 Moreover, at the end of the sixteenth century – as in many other periods – the Pope’s intervention would have been immediately supported by the King of Spain, both of them being affronted since the Venetian abandonment of the Holy 37 ASV, Cinque Savi alla Mercanzia, I serie, b. 162, June 16th 1589. 38 BOA, Maliyeden Müdevver (MAD) 706, dating 3.C.986 AH (07.08.1578). 39 Paolo Sarpi, Dominio del Mar Adriatico della Serenissima Republica di Venetia (Venice, 1685).

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League. In other words, it was better to pass for an undervalued regional power than to put up with religiously disguised political interference.40 Moreover, both Spain and the Papacy could easily count on a third, promising ally in their fight for hegemony in the Adriatic: the Austrian monarchy was taking its first steps towards the Balkans, the Uskok piracy being its (irregular) maritime force.41 Almost two centuries later, at the end of the eighteenth century, Trieste would turn out to be the enduring and unquestioned winner in the Adriatic competition.42 Though inscribed in the same context, the auspicious circonspettione mentioned by the Cinque Savi was actually remarked on with regard to the central government of the Ottoman Empire. In this first stage, neither the Sultan nor the Grand Vizier were to be informed of the project. This strategy is openly described in Venetian sources, but may also be discernible in the Ottoman accounts of the time. Often, the Venetians instructed the bey of Kilis – and, through his mediation, the beylerbeyi of Saray Bosna – to realize infrastructure projects destined to facilitate the passage of caravans. Whether it was a bridge that needed to be built, or a forest to be cleared in order to flush out the innumerable bandits, the Venetians informed the Ottoman authorities and asked for prompt intervention. In some cases, the tasks were accomplished by the local administration, although intervention from Istanbul was frequently required, especially when permanent features of infrastructure, such as bridges or caravanserais, were planned. Should such circumstances occur, the local authorities informed first the Venetians of the necessity to contact the central government. At this first stage, the Cinque Savi would rather have spent money from the Republic’s Treasury than have the Sultan consulted on a project that was meant to be kept under wraps. In 1589, the Cinque Savi wrote: [m]a perché conviene per comodo delle mercantie et caravane ottener che nel paese turchesco, sopra il fiume della Citina lontano da Spalato meza giornata, sii da Turchi fabricato un ponte et havendo di ciò trattato il Rodriga, come egli asserisse, che il sanzaco suddetto, dal quale ha avuto per risposta che non vi porrà mano senza espresso comandamento della Porta, sarà necessario procurar in questo, mentre che nel fiume suddetto siino posti doi ponti sopra burchielle secondo l’uso d’Italia, perché comodamente et con prestezza passino le mercantie et caravane. A qual cosa, come crediamo che sarà facile ottenere, renderà anco minor pregiudizio alle cose pubbliche per quei rispetti che sono considerabili molto in questo proposito.43

After all, the heavy customs duty of the mezi noli, affecting the ships travelling to and from the rival ports of Narenta and Dubrovnik, was destined to cover the expenses needed for the construction of the lazaret and of any other infrastructure required for the full completion of the route (the customs house, bridges, watchtowers etc.). The lazaret itself was of prime importance in Venetian strategy: the strict sanitary measures adopted by the Serenissima not only served the purpose of preventing dangerous epidemics, but also allowed the authorities 40 Roberto Cessi, La Repubblica di Venezia e il problema adriatico (Padua: CEDAM, 1943). 41 Catherine Wendy Bracewell, The Uskoks of Senj: Piracy, Banditry and Holy War in the SixteenthCentury Adriatic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); Stevka Smitran, Gli uscocchi: pirati, ribelli, guerrieri tra gli imperi ottomano e asburgico e la Repubblica di Venezia (Venice: Marsilio, 2008) and Alberto Tenenti, Venezia e i corsari 1580–1615 (Bari: Laterza, 1961). 42 Ugo Tucci, “Una descrizione di Trieste a metà del Settecento,” Quaderni Giuliani di Storia 1:2 (1980): 95–114. 43 ASV, Cinque Savi alla Mercanzia, I serie, b. 162, 16th 1589.

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to let personal interpretations of those very measures become the rule. Ragusean ships were captured and dragged into the lazaret for exasperating quarantines in order to delay the delivery of the goods they transported.44 The project of the scala di Spalato was indeed at the centre of Venetian trade politics up until the War of Candia. Together with the relatively good performance of the industrial sector, the stubborn defence of the Spalato route may be considered as one of the measures that made the decline of the seventeenth century relative and not absolute as far as urban living standards were concerned. Venetian fabrics kept circulating in the market places of Sofia, Skopje and Saray Bosna for much longer than in the new and old trading centres of the Middle East, such as Aleppo, Izmir and Cairo, where the competition of the Northerners had been more successful. This interpretation tells us a lot about the capacities of a state to influence the economic vicissitudes that interfered with the life and means of its people. The firm intention of avoiding direct involvement by the Sultan in this first stage is confirmed by the Ottoman sources. The Sultan’s letters to his representatives in Bosnia dealt with all other topics but the scala di Spalato. Nevertheless, in some cases the Sultan ended up legislating in favour of the scala without actually being aware of the wrong he was doing to his authorities in Narenta or to his tributary vassals the Raguseans. These circumstances did not last more than twelve years. Very soon, the competition in the Adriatic became so bitter45 that an actual alliance between Venice and Istanbul was required in order to protect the route leading to and from Spalato. The scala had become the symbol of Venice’s independence and was supported by a strong political project, powered and argued for by such refined intellectuals as Paolo Sarpi. Sarpi challenged Grotius’s Mare Liberum on a conceptual basis and offered theoretical support to the Venetian sovereignty on the Adriatic.46 An undisputed protagonist of the period of the Interdetto, he foresaw the detrimental influence of the Pope on the relationships among the ancient Italian States and the emerging nations, and even proposed that Venice converts to Protestantism. Was this the price to be paid for an alliance with the only logical trading partner, the Ottomans? In 1605, when announcing the passage of a Venetian convoy to all the Ottoman kadıs and sancakbeyis settled along the route from Istanbul to Kilis, Sultan Ahmed I specified that it was to be conducted by a subject of his affectionate friend the Doge, wearing a white turban and a sword as distinguishing marks – optimistically used to discourage the many robbers and bandits infesting the Balkan forests.47 These two items – the white turban and the sword – had not been chosen by chance: on the contrary, they were the two gifts offered by the Sultan to a high-ranking officer as a reward for outstanding military performance. Obviously, the Venetians were aware that travelling disguised as rewarded soldiers of the Sultan, rather than in simple merchants’ attire, was the best way to avoid unexpected and unpleasant encounters on the Balkan routes. In his letter, which had been solicited by the Venetian ambassador in Istanbul, the Sultan specified that no harm was to be done to the members of the caravan and their properties. Safe conducts or safe-conduct-like documents 44 Paci, La “Scala” di Spalato, 80. 45 Alberto Bin, La Repubblica di Venezia e la questione adriatica, 1600–1620 (Rome: Il Veltro, 1992), 63. 46 Paolo Sarpi, Scrittura seconda che tratta del titolo del legitimo dominio sopra il Mar Adriatico. 1612, 12 april, in idem, Opere, ed. by Gaetano Cozzi and Luisa Cozzi (Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1969), 623–625 and Dea Moscarda, L’area alto adriatica tra sovranità imperiale e autonomia locale (Trieste: Deputazione di storia patria per la Venezia Giulia, 2002). 47 ASV, Bailo a Costantinopoli, Carte Turche, b. 250, document no. 12, dating 14.N.1013 AH (04.02.1605).

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of this kind are not rare in the Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi and, taken at face value, this source would be nothing more than a curious episode of cultural contamination. In reality, the goods transported by the convoy through the Ottoman Balkans had previously been taken from Venice to Spalato. The organization of this trip, from Venice to Istanbul via the Dalmatian port of Spalato, was meant to clear the way for the secure establishment of this new, western branch of the Balkan route leading to the capital of the Empire. An aura of newness pervades the project of the scala di Spalato when mentioned in the Venetian sources. It is frequently defined as questa nuova scala, more simply as nuova strada, or even as deliberazione. These formulations lead to the identification of two main features of the project: its character of innovation in the context of Venice’s commercial policies and its strict state-determined, endogenous or, more precisely, mercantilist nature. Foreign goods, ships, merchants and capital were attracted to Spalato thanks to the dutyfree transit regime. From there, the merchandise left for Venice, in a monopolistic system of trade. At the same time, extremely high duties were imposed on ships coming to Venice from the rival ports of Narenta, Dubrovnik and Ancona. The proceeds coming from these duties went towards the building of infrastructures in Spalato: the customs house, the lazaret and military or para-military fortifications such as watchtowers. The port-town of Spalato was known to the Ottoman central government. In some documents İsplit is defined kale, in others hisar, both words alluding to the fortifications that surrounded the town.48 Nevertheless, during the first stage of its establishment, from the early 1580s till the first decade of the seventeenth century, Spalato is not quoted as a trading centre, but rather as a fortified coastal citadel. This is due to the fact that the Venetians expressly wanted to keep their new route as secret as possible from the Sultan and the sources from Istanbul confirm the effectiveness of this strategy. Considering the relatively huge amount of letters sent from Istanbul to the various cities and towns of Bosnia, this province was particularly worthy of the Sultan’s attention. What is remarkable to the historian’s eye is that these letters happen to concern any topic, including those usually dealt with on a local basis. Some provinces present this pattern in particular moments, for example Basra during the war against the Safavids, or Cyprus immediately after the conquest; whereas the Ottoman provincial and local authorities in Bosnia kept receiving orders at a full and constant rate at least throughout the second half of the sixteenth century and into the first decades of the subsequent one. The impression that the reader of these documents might get is that in Bosnia even minor, ordinary topics might matter more than in other places in the Empire. The reason might be found in the peculiar historical position of this province, which bordered on Venetian Dalmatia, on Austrian Croatia and on the Republic of Dubrovnik. The proximity of three foreign states, of whom two were leading powers, had a decisive impact on Bosnian domestic affairs and the Sultan, aware of this trait of Bosnian politics, did not want his (distant!) voice to be the weakest in the chorus. In Bosnia, the possibilities of making any event a matter of international politics, if not a diplomatic case, were extremely high. Of the vast quantity of letters sent from Istanbul to the provincial and local authorities in Bosnia, Hersek and Albania, only a small amount actually concern international trade. Being firstly subjects of a neighbouring state, Venetians were not necessarily mentioned as traders. During the last war, the eastern coast of the Adriatic had been the scene of intense 48 See, for instance, ASV, Documenti Turchi, busta 11, d. 1214 and BOA, Mühimme Defteri 30, hüküm 121.

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fighting between the Venetian fleet and the Sultan’s patrols. Therefore, once the war was over, redefining the borders between the two states became an activity of prime importance, as was the reconstruction of the fortifications that had been shelled by the respective artilleries.49 The neutral vocation of the Republic becomes understandable when considering how circumstances radically changed when a peace treaty was under preparation. In an order dated 23 February 1573, Sultan Selim II announced to the bey of İnebahtı that peace had been concluded with “the Doge and the Senate”. Consequently, explained the Sultan, the attacks on the Venetian islands and ships had to cease immediately. Before this order – and, most probably, even afterwards, though illegally and certainly not as systematically as before – the subjects of the two states were engaged in constant attacks and raids against people and properties.50 A few months later, in an order to one of the future protagonists of the establishment of the Spalato route, the bey of Kilis, Selim II stated that, according to the peace treaty, those towns and fortresses that had been conquered by the Venetians during the last conflict had been re-integrated into the Ottoman Empire and were destined to prompt restoration.51 At the same time, according to another order to the same addressee a few days later, Venetian properties across the border were not to be attacked.52 On 4 October 1573, again, the bey of Kilis was asked to help the kadı of Saray Bosna in the compilation of the new provincial land and population survey (tahrir) regarding the newly acquired former Venetian properties.53 Two years later, the Venetian ambassador Giacomo Soranzo questioned the legitimacy of that survey, arguing that Bosnian western borders had been defined without any supervision by the Venetian counterpart.54 In response, Sultan Murad III asked the sancakbeyleri of Bosnia and Kilis, as well as the kadıs of Saray Bosna and Kilis, to get together with the Venetian commissioners and proceed to a full redefinition of the frontier. Moreover, such administrative issues gave birth to interesting debates over the ownership of the first harvest coming from soils that had just been declared subject to Ottoman rule.55 The issue of the definition of the frontier and, as we shall see, of its protection, was of major importance for the Ottoman central government. This may not seem directly concerned with trade. Nevertheless, even when investigating commercial affairs and networks, it is the broader political framework that should be reconstructed and considered in relation to local circumstances. When the imperial order announcing peace with the Republic reached the bey of Kilis, Daniel Rodriga, the inventor of the Spalato Project, was already active in the transit of goods from Narenta to Venice, in spite of the prohibitions due to the war.56 Trade was vital to the very survival of these regions and to Venetian industry. It was therefore clear that in such circumstances Venice was determined to fight for its share of the Balkan trade and that peace was to be concluded as soon as possible in order to allow the exchanges to be performed legally and directly by the subjects of the Doge – not by somebody else on their account. Given this discrepancy between the prescriptions of the 49 BOA, Mühimme Defteri 22, hüküm 420. 50 BOA, Mühimme Defteri 19, hüküm 102. 51 BOA, Mühimme Defteri 19, hüküm 194 and 201. 52 BOA, Mühimme Defteri 19, hüküm 122. 53 BOA, Mühimme Defteri 20, hüküm 224. 54 ASV, Documenti Turchi, b. 7, d. 829, Şaban’s first ten days of 983 (November 25th – December 3rd 1575). 55 BOA, Mühimme Defteri 23, hüküm 171, dating 8.C.981 AH (05.10.1573). 56 Paci, La “Scala” di Spalato, 49–50.

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Sultan and the actual circumstances of his well-protected territories, should we then assume a Bosnian or Albanian proclivity to disobey or rather an inclination to receive briberies? The specifics of that region and of that very age permitted an individual to perform a broad spectrum of activities which did not necessarily conflict with one another. A bey, officially appointed by the Sultan and formally representing the imperial law on a local or provincial level, might very well pick sides in the trade competition of the time, according to his own or his town’s advantages. Actually, the perspective of the central government should not be considered solely as a legal frame under whose surface real economic life took place. In some cases, as it was with the example of reiteration of orders that we discover, life was far more complicated.57 One of the main problems the Sultan had to face, in the Balkans as well as elsewhere in his domains, was represented by the many cases of prohibited goods being illegally sold to foreign merchants. Horses, for example, were an item traditionally forbidden for export, though frequently requested by Venetians, who generally ruled over too slim a portion of Dalmatian territory to raise animals. It was clear, for example, that if in Spalato pack animals were needed – as they were – it was in the Ottoman hinterland that the Venetian authorities would have bought them. Let us remember how relevant pack animals were in a pre-industrial economy: apart from the actual merchandise, the main energy source, timber, needed to be transported, in order to heat interiors, to construct buildings, to activate the main processes of industrial transformation, etc. Some economic historians have proposed calculating a pre-industrial society’s potential for urban development according to the ratio of human beings and pack-animals.58 Grains were also traditionally prohibited goods. On 6 January 1574, Selim II sent the same order concerning Venetian trade to a large number of addressees, respectively: the sancakbeyis and kadıs of Morea, Valona, Karlıeli and Selanik. “You all knew that Venetian ships coming from your ports were prevented from undertaking trade, their sails and helms having been seized and restrained”, wrote the Padişah.59 “Now it is no longer allowed that the aforementioned nation be prevented from trade. Therefore, it is only prohibited to give them goods other than beeswax, thick felt, leather, tools, silk, wool and cotton”. As soon as the formal prohibition on trade was removed, specific bans were introduced in order to regulate the flood of exports. A similar order was sent on 4 March 1574 to the bey of Bosnia.60 In his order in particular, we discover that the administration of the ports of Şebenik, Narenta, Dubrovnik and Castelnuovo, as well as the collection of the duties, were farmed out. The bey of Bosnia had to make sure that the contractors would not let grains, weapons and horses be sold to foreign merchants. Nevertheless, infractions must have been quite common. Together with the definition of the frontier and the willing-to-be-regulatory attitude towards exports, two more topics may be singled out in the Sultan’s letters, both of them directly related to trade: the issue of defence and the construction of infrastructure. It was not the first time that Ottomans and Venetians co-operated in preventing, or at least limiting, 57 Gilles Veinstein, “La voix du maître à travers les firmans de Soliman le Magnifique,” in idem (ed.), Soliman le Magnifique et son temps. Actes des IXe rencontres de l’École du Louvre (Paris: La Documentation française, 1992). 58 Paolo Malanima, Economia preindustriale. Mille anni dal IX al XVIII secolo (Milan: Mondadori, 20004). 59 BOA, Mühimme Defteri 23, hüküm 473. 60 BOA, Mühimme Defteri 24, hüküm 43.

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unsafe conditions at sea. In the South-Eastern Mediterranean, before the War of Cyprus, Venetians had captured Christian and Muslim corsairs and delivered them to the kadı of Antalya.61 It was in the interest of both states to minimize the damage caused by privateering activities. Corsairs could harm merchant ships as well as the population of the coast, which was susceptible to being kidnapped and enslaved. Although the general scheme of Ottoman-Venetian military co-operation remained the same, in the late-sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Adriatic, the situation was nevertheless different from that in Cypriot waters fifty years ago. In the Adriatic there were various types of privateering. As for the Dalmatian trade, the Uskoks were by far the most dangerous phenomenon. The indented geography of the Eastern Adriatic coast facilitated the secrecy of their movements, whilst Habsburg ambitions for the Gulf supported their actions against Venetian ships and Ottoman properties. To give an idea of the consistency of the phenomenon, in 1595 the uskoks got to the point of conquering Kilis, which was then liberated by joint Ottoman and Venetian patrols. The ships crossing the Gulf from Spalato to Venice and back became the main target of these Catholic privateers. The Venetians reacted vigorously, installing war ships that patrolled the route, but the problem had already reached such endemic proportions that the Habsburgs were keen to support them. As early as 1574 the Sultan informed the bey of Kilis that the topic of the uskoks had been discussed in Istanbul with the Venetian bailo and his diplomatic team (extraordinary ambassadors had been sent to the city one year before in order to discuss the terms of the peace).62 Selim II wrote explicitly to the bey of Kilis that action had to be taken in concert with the Venetians and that a joint fleet was about to be created with the aim of taking on the uskoks. In the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Lepanto, the two states were determined to face together an emergency created by an irregular squad, which actually fought for the Holy League proclaimed in 1571. While the Venetian ruling class were aware from the very beginning of the foreign influences hiding behind the uskoks, the Ottoman central government initially saw them as simple pirates. When, after the siege of Kilis, cannon balls with the Habsburg emblem were found in the fortress, even the Sultan had to review his interpretation of Northern Adriatic affairs and for Spalato trade a new era was about to begin.63 Security was not just an important issue on the sea. Bandits were considered a major problem and periodical deforestation was planned by the central government in order to make roads safer for the travelling merchants and caravans. Deforestation, together with the construction of bridges and caravanserais, were infrastructural operations that needed to be permitted and planned by the central government. In 1574, Selim II wrote to the kadıs of Hersek and Castelnuovo that on the suggestion of the nazır Mehmed (the superintendent of all the sources of revenue whose fiscal charging was farmed out), a han had to be built at the crossroads of Dubrovnik and Castelnuovo. The document is relevant for understanding how requests from local economic actors were transmitted to Istanbul and eventually acknowledged by the Sultan. In conclusion, at least until the first decade of the seventeenth century the Ottoman central government was not informed of the Spalato project. In spite of this, the Sultan inter61 Costantini, Il sultano e l’isola, 18. 62 Costantini, Il sultano e l’isola, ix–xi. 63 Bracewell, The Uskoks of Senj, 207–208.

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vened in many issues that were indirectly related to the establishment of the free port. What did the Ottoman perception of the scala consist of, then? A local and provincial viewpoint, sensitized by Venetian propaganda, must be differentiated from the perspective of the centre, unaware though active, as we have seen, in the fight against privateering and in commercial affairs. Already in 1578, in the earliest stage of the establishment of the scala di Spalato, a financial record from Bosnia noted an income of 5 000 akçe originating from a fiscal unit that consisted of the following items: “Road tolls from the way towards Isplit and Kilis together with the revenue from the salt-works called ‘of the foreigners’”.64 Indeed, the scala was at its (promising) dawn. Has the realization of the port of Spalato lived up to the expectations of the Venetian leading-class? Has it ever become an alternative path towards mercantilism? In order to answer to these two questions, it should be acknowledged that the project of establishing a preferential route connecting the Eastern and Western shores of the Adriatic truly met the needs of many merchants involved in the Balkan trade. Far from being a merely ideological move, imposed by hopelessly restrictive circumstances, the project of the scala may be considered as an actual logistic and infrastructural support to a varied spectrum of operators. Not by chance, the very idea of establishing a free-port in the city of Spalato came to a merchant, Daniel Rodriga, who even agreed at building part of the necessary infrastructure at his own expenses. Having been active in the Balkan trade since already few decades, Rodriga was certainly experienced enough to find a pragmatic solution to the scattered character of the Balkan way-outs to the Adriatic. Unsurprisingly, he referred to Venice as the most logical institutional partner: after all, since the fifteenth century, it had always been in the Republic’s tradition to greet the Ottoman conquest of the Byzantine Balkans as a remedy to their structural fragmentation, legitimately considered detrimental to trade. In this framework, the Spalato project may be contemplated as a path fairly considered as new to the commercial policies of the Republic, though consistent with its political traditions towards the Ottoman Balkans, and with its role of independent power. The efficiency of this “consistent-new” path did not only depend on the Venetian efforts and on the concerned cooperation of the Bosnian merchants and administration. Certainly, these were the two factors enabling its very existence. Nevertheless, in order to verify the Project’s validity as truly alternative path, it should maybe considered the whole economic and political context of the Italian peninsula at the beginning of the seventeenth century: not only the (re-)location of the Venetian industry within the new Mediterranean scenario, not only the position of the Republic’s leading class towards the Holy Siege, nor its cultural role, proudly opposed to the pontifical obscurantism, but the very institutional experience of the Republic was, indeed, radically alternative to any other Ancient Italian States.

64 BOA, MAD 706, dating 3.C.986 AH (07.08.1578), f. 15.

BORDERING REGIONS IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE

Europe: Eighteenth-Century Definitions Wolfgang Schmale1

Were we to adopt a bird’s-eye view and watch for signs and artifacts of the eighteenth century, we would be able to see that almost all European cities are characterized by a mixture of cultural and temporal strata, noticeable with varying degrees of clarity.2 Among the temporal strata dating prior to the era of profound dynamic urban development between 1850 and 1910, the eighteenth century stands out. Whether Saint Petersburg, Potsdam, Paris, Bordeaux, or Philadelphia – to mention but a few notable examples – even today such cities emphatically remain cities of the eighteenth century. The characteristics of eighteenthcentury urban development – mostly from the second half of the century – stand out clearly, having shaped basic city layouts. Viewed semiotically, the eighteenth century is very much present, and not only in urban environments. Indeed, the eighteenth century still dominates entire cultural landscapes, such as Lower Austria, for example, whose large convents and monasteries, like Melk Abbey, were completely renovated during this time. The eighteenth century’s enduring presence extends right down to the villages with their churches and chapels, and to the many pilgrimage churches, roadside crosses, palaces, and special-purpose structures. The eighteenth century distributed its distinctly European architecture throughout the world, creating important buildings that still testify to this century’s processes of globalization. Even in areas less subject to European influence, historical interdependencies led to innovations in urban construction. Many Moroccan cities received their imposing city walls, still standing today, in the eighteenth century. In Khiva in the Middle East, after a long dry spell in the khanate’s history, the late-eighteenth century featured the beginning of efforts to restore the region’s many religious structures. Indeed, numerous examples bear witness to dynamics outside Europe that distinguish the eighteenth century as a period whose defining characteristics applied not merely to narrowly European developments but extended to vast regions. Yet as significant as the eighteenth century was for the spread of European influence throughout the world, its visually similar features – in Europe and beyond – also marked the nascent formation of a singular European culture. The century’s enduring presence is not merely visual in nature; rather, it persists in other less visual sectors as well, for it generated new definitions of Europe and what it meant to be European. 1 I am grateful to Bernard Heise for his excellent work as a translator. 2 This text constitutes an abbreviated version of Chapter 6.4 “Kultur Europa” in Wolfgang Schmale, Das 18. Jahrhundert (Wien: Böhlau, 2012).

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The eighteenth-century conceptualization of human history as cultural history and the debate regarding the difference between the “ancients” and the “moderns” helped to develop “definitions” of Europe that for the first time strengthened the understanding of Europe – for all its plurality and diversity – as a “unity.” To a certain degree, these were idealistic constructions, but they had empirical foundations and referred to real circumstances. Real processes of Europeanization were underway – not only with respect to the rest of the world but most profoundly within Europe itself – and many developments featured very similar structural similarities. Such processes of Europeanization included acculturation processes, which, as initially in the case of Russia, could be politically desired or staged, or should be viewed as the result of socio-cultural exchange and transfer. The latter applies particularly to the Enlightenment, any narrowly defined cultural and intellectual products, and styles and aesthetics. Other Europeanization processes resulted from economic developments that had a permanent impact on the restructuring of legal, social and economic constitutions all across Europe, as in the case of the feudal system and estate-based society. At the same time, these developments were underpinned by global economic relations. Europeanization was forcefully advanced by the expansion of media – above all, the print media. Whether involving books, encyclopedias, newspapers, periodicals and journals (such as fashion journals and scientific and intellectual periodicals), pamphlets and printed illustrations, this expansion always entailed the development of distribution structures. The processes of Europeanization relied upon the extremely well-organized circulation of ideas and images (which ultimately left the censors helpless), complemented by the willingness to change, to reconfigure existing conditions according to principles held to be better and more viable for the future – by the “view into the future.” An orientation based on function and purpose replaced fixed guidelines based on religion or simply centuries-old traditions. During the first half of the eighteenth century, people still looked upon France as the exclusive cultural model, but during subsequent decades a growing number of other models became worthy of emulation. With its constitution elevated to the level of myth, England and its bourgeois and consumer society became emblematic of progressive, future-oriented principles that led to more freedom, equality and affluence. The United States of America, predicted already in 1800 to become a – if not the – leading economic and military power, supplied what was seen to be the model of a large democracy. Germany was held up as the leading model in philosophy and – as in the case of Prussia – rational state expansion. Science and technological innovations enabled enormous bursts of growth and economic booms, which, of course, were necessary in order to remain successful in the competition between nascent national states. In the eighteenth century, the concept of an estate-based social order, which had provided the standard for several centuries, noticeably eroded. To be sure, it by no means disappeared; feudal structures or their remnants showed signs of life not only in the eighteenth century but even during the early twentieth century, more vigorously at first and later less so. Bourgeois society, however, developed into the new social model, extending from North America, Western Europe and Atlantic Europe, to Eastern Europe. Atlantic Europe, with its close global ties, promoted the formation of consumer societies in the Netherlands, England and France, countries that counted among the precursors of bourgeois society. In spatial terms, bourgeois society advanced unevenly. In North America and Western and Central Europe, it characterized both urban and rural regions; in Eastern-Central Europe, Northern

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Europe (Scandinavia), and the Mediterranean, bourgeois society proved to be a predominantly urban phenomenon; meanwhile, it failed to develop in Russia and South-Eastern Europe until the second half of the nineteenth century. Within bourgeois society, the century’s cosmopolitan ambitions came to life. This can be discerned in the “ease” with which intense contacts, based on correspondence and personal in nature, were cultivated between Europe and the European societies of North America, extending beyond Europe’s western coast and deep into the interior. Connections with South America were more distant, yet they nonetheless formed part of the Atlantic historical and social region, sufficing to convey the fundamental objectives of the French Revolution and actively to contribute to the fermentation fuelling the rapid movements toward independence. Freemason associations and Illuminati orders extending all the way to Irkutsk provide well-known examples of expansive European-based networks. Structurally, this was not completely new, since trans-regionally established social groups – even ranging across extreme distances – had already existed during the Middle Ages, made up of members of religious orders, knights and nobles, “artists” and merchants, for example. During the course of the eighteenth century, however, the social base of such trans-regional actors significantly broadened. Purely in quantitative terms, the “Enlightenment” featured the active or passive participation of more people than any other historically documented trans-regional – that is, European – social group. They were connected through the print media, wide-ranging correspondence, travel (which grew faster thanks to the constant improvement of infrastructure – roads, shipping routes, technological innovation in carriage and barouche construction) and all kinds of associations and societies. We may, in fact, be more justified in speaking about a “European public” with reference to the second half of the eighteenth century than to today. This public expressed itself as a self-described Republic of Letters, constituted by virtue of shared interests in social philosophy, the sciences and literature and utilizing the instruments of correspondence, travel, personal relationships and various forms of sociability.3 Nowhere was the “citizen of the literary republic” a stranger. Knowledge of more than one language, translations, reports and critiques in periodicals, the exchange of letters and recommendations created this concrete European public. Underlying the various processes of Europeanization during the eighteenth century and the revolutionary period was an endeavour to define Europe as a singular culture. We shall now turn our attention to these unprecedented and extremely exciting developments. During the course of the eighteenth century, aspects of modernity, innovation, and rapid change accumulated. The period’s popular fashion journals provide a suitable metaphor, insofar as they facilitated the implementation of seasonal changes in fashion. One needed to change one’s visible external appearance in order to remain on the cutting edge. The eighteenth century’s valorization of change and innovation was also reflected by the period’s antiquarian comedies. Highly specialized in finding, describing, and cataloguing artifacts of Antiquity, antiquarians stood for what was old and past. In the eighteenth century they were easily viewed as comic figures, the proverbial followers of the ancients who were left far behind compared to those who followed fashion.4 In this respect, the famous literary and artis3 On the “Republic of Letters,” see Daniel Roche, Les circulations dans l’Europe modern: XVIIe-XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Hachette, Collection “Pluriel”, 20112), 698–728. 4 Ingo Herklotz, “Der Antiquar als komische Figur: Ein literarisches Motiv zwischen Querelle und altertumswissenschaftlicher Methodenreflexion,” in Ulrich Heinen (ed.), Welche Antike? Konkurrierende Rezeptionen des Altertums im Barock, vol. 1 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011), 141–179.

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tic debate known as the “quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns” extended even to fashion. The concern was not always in the first instance about the mere acceleration of change but rather about planned and, in principle, systemically based alterations and changes, as with fashion. How could an age so pervaded by this paradigm shift not also have produced an altered or even a new definition of Europe? All things considered, the eighteenth century sought to define Europe in a form that had never previously existed, even though, judging by external appearances, nothing was really new. The most important aspect in this respect was the definition of Europe as a culture. This occurred most explicitly in the development of the concept of culture, in cartography and historiography, in the field of anthropology and in iconography. The following discussions are based on key primary sources of the eighteenth century that we know were widely received. A certain disparity prevails regarding the geographical origins of these sources, but this is balanced at least in part by the European-wide processes of reception. It is worth emphasizing that we need to go beyond the narrower range of conceptions and ideas of Europe, since the process of defining Europe in the eighteenth century involved performative acts that produced long-lasting effects. 1. Redefining Europe in relation to Antiquity We begin by taking up a few suggestions and ideas from the book Anciens, modernes, sauvages by François Hartog, published in 2005, and enriching them with additional materials.5 The Classicist Hartog deals here with the lateseventeenth century’s “Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns”, as well as its reiterations and repercussions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The “Quarrel” contributed to a redefinition – or indeed a definition – of Europe in the eighteenth century. Hartog focuses first on Charles Perrault’s Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes, published in four volumes between 1688 and 1697. Perrault had already presented his important basic positions in his poem “Le Siècle de Louis le Grand” in 1687 at the Académie Française, but, if we take a broader view, this by no means marked the beginning of the Quarrel. We can already see its basic structure in the ancient debates about the fundamental contrasts between the old and young, while the Latin adjective modernus was evidently first coined in late-fifth century AD. Pope Gelasius apparently used the neologism for the first time in two letters in the years 494 and 495.6 Modernus meant “current,” “belonging to the present,” and the adjective took its place in the great debate regarding the differentiation between epochs, which ultimately always served the purpose of self-positioning. The quality of the present and one’s contemporaries in comparison with Antiquity was also the subject of the late seventeenth century’s “Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns”. Only one opinion could actually take shape within the proximity of Louis XIV, namely that the people of the present were more perfect than the people of Antiquity in all fields from literature, art and science to architecture. Perfect or parfait was, incidentally, a key concept in the contemporary definition of monarchie absol-

5 François Hartog, Anciens, modernes, sauvages (Paris: Galaade, 2005); also interesting in this regard is Veit Elm, Günther Lottes, and Vanessa de Senarclens (eds.), Die Antike der Moderne: Vom Umgang mit der Antike im Europa des 18. Jahrhunderts (Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2009). 6 On the history of the term and its object, see Jean-Robert Armogathe, “Postface,” in Anne-Marie Lecoq (ed.), La Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 799–849.

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ue, as was also – in France – the adjective français.7 Here the national context was already present in more than merely suggestive terms. When Richelieu – to follow Hartog’s thread once again – founded the Académie Française in 1635, he wanted French to become the “Latin of the Moderns”, an ambitious undertaking that was pursued all the more under Louis XIV. The Ancients vs. Moderns debate ultimately came to an end, according to Hartog, in the early nineteenth century with the recognition by Benjamin Constant, for example, that the perspective of the parallèle, that is, the comparison between Antiquity and the present, was misleading. This recognition entailed a radical change in the understanding of the ancient world and its ascribed significance for one’s own time. Hartog demonstrates that the quarrel involved a three-way relationship, hence the “savages” as the third concept alongside “ancients” and “moderns.” The three concepts mark a certain path of knowledge that, by and large, was probably western European in nature and led to the definition of Europe as a civilization or culture. The definition of Europe developed a new quality that set it apart from traditional definitions, known since Antiquity, which had been based on geography and enriched by elements of civilization. Perrault emancipated the “modern” from its ancient model. The “moderns” were no longer the famous dwarves which stood on the shoulders of knowledgeable giants (representing Antiquity) and thus saw further from those heights, as graphically conveyed by Bernard of Chartres in the twelfth century. Instead, the “moderns” were not merely on par with the ancients but better and more perfect (and, naturally, French). Over a century later, a more accurate understanding – namely that key concepts concerning Antiquity meant something different from what had previously been thought – would grow out of the conservative critique of the French Revolution (or its caricature), pertaining to key concepts like democracy and freedom. The critique would reveal that democracy in one’s own present could substantially only be representative democracy, not direct democracy as modelled by Athens or even Sparta, which the Jacobins had supposedly emulated too closely, inevitably leading to the Terror. Freedom was that of the individual, but not that of the Athenian citizen, whose freedom existed only within the framework of the collective of the free citizens of Athens. And so on. Here Antiquity no longer served as a model for emulation; it was no longer even being used in the sense of historia magistra vitae (history is life’s teacher). Rather, it constituted something past and finalized. This did not mean that people rejected other insights gained through scholars like Winckelmann; indeed, nobody questioned the notion that freedom’s only appropriate aesthetic form possessed the dimensions developed by Greek sculptors for the beautiful body. Instead, a connection was established between the degree of perfection of the arts and freedom. Without freedom, no artistic perfection. What, then, did “savages” have to do with all of this? In the sixteenth century, when Europeans needed to assign America’s inhabitants to their places within the European world view, the writings of Antiquity, replete with helpful expositions on barbarians and strange peoples, aided their comprehension. Following Aristotle, Europeans interpreted the developmental stage of so-called Indians as “childish”, which, if nothing else, provided arguments to justify slavery. In the eighteenth century, however, views changed radically. “Savages” became not merely “noble savages” but constituted a phenomenon designated in the subsequent scientific language as the “primitive”, that is, people who remained in 7 Details in Chapter 1 “Absolutismus,” in Schmale, Das 18. Jahrhundert.

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an original state. In 1724, Joseph-François Lafitau, a Jesuit who worked as a missionary in Canada, published the book Mœurs des sauvages amériquains comparées aux mœurs des premiers temps, in which he compared the “American savages” with the barbarians described by the ancient Greeks and Romans.8 This act of comparison, as opposed to merely using the insights of Antiquity to help him understand, set Lafitau’s approach apart from those of the past. According to Hartog, Lafitau came to the conclusion that the savages of his time in many respects resembled the barbarians of Antiquity. This developed into a model of thought, firmly established by the late-eighteenth century, according to which civilizations advanced through various life stages from childhood to adulthood.9 This naturally also included the idea of decline in old age, as evident in the extensive literature on the question of how Rome could collapse. The peculiar thing about this model of thought was that humanity as a whole did not move through these stages of life at the same time but rather each civilization advanced through them on its own. From the perspective of human history as whole, this meant a basic simultaneity of the non-simultaneous. With respect to the definition of Europe, as a result of this model Europe no longer merely functioned in the traditional schema of the four continents as the demographically, economically, scientifically, artistically and militarily dominant continent but rather constituted a distinct civilization and/or culture of its own: it was the only civilization in a state of mature adulthood and thus unique in the world. We find this model of thought not only among French writers but also, for example, with Herder, even if this model was sometimes challenged. Europe was thus left on its own in two different ways. Antiquity was over – it was recognized as something historically distinct, whose individual aspects, such as sculpture, might still be worth emulating with the goal of outperforming them, of being better; but it was no longer the giant whose shoulders supported contemporary Europe. At the same time, among the world’s remaining cultures or civilizations Europe was supposedly unique because it had presumably reached the highest developmental stage of the human spirit and thus the stage of mature adulthood in the development of civilization. 2. Definition of Europe in the historiography The development in the meaning of “culture” went hand-in-hand with the eighteenth century’s cultural-historical writing, which basically had a universal-historical orientation. The discovery of concepts like “culture” and “civilization” allowed for the systematic organization of the results of historical developments, making it possible to arrange them with an internal structural coherence. This coherence could be conceptualized both in terms of universal history or the history of humanity or, on a smaller scale, at a national level. Most Enlightenment authors published articles and/or monographs on cultural history. Planned in 1741 as a universal-historical project, Voltaire’s Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations et sur les principaux faits de l’histoire depuis Charlemagne jusqu’à Louis XIII, 8 The work also appeared in German translation in 1752–1753; see Joseph-François Lafitau, Die Sitten der amerikanischen Wilden im Vergleich zu den Sitten der Frühzeit, ed. with commentary by Helmut Rein (Weinheim: Acta Humaniora, VCH, 1987). 9 A good overview of the most important eighteenth-century works on this issue is provided by Rein’s commentary in ibid., 42–44. Also worthwhile is Iwan-Michelangelo D’Aprile and Ricardo K. Mak (eds.), Aufklärung, Evolution, Globalgeschichte (Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2010).

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can serve as a historiographical model for the eighteenth century.10 Voltaire completed the text’s final revision just a few months before his death in 1778: the initial draft had turned into a monumental historical work that preoccupied the European public. Originally, Voltaire had been interested in a history of the “human spirit” (esprit humain), which he sketched out in his “Philosophy of History.” To be sure, the work grew far beyond that over the years, but in the conclusion at the end of his universal history, Voltaire advanced this basic idea as the quintessence of the whole. For Voltaire, history, in the sense of a reflective process that is historiographically written down, starts in China at a time when in Europe – geographically conceived – knowledge or awareness of the written form does not yet exist. European history does not begin until the fall of Rome; only then, in the “chaos of our Europe”, does a “form” become apparent.11 Voltaire credits “our Europe” with having made immense progress since Charlemagne (“more people”, “more civilization”, “more wealth”, “more knowledge”), raising it to a level even higher than the Roman Empire.12 In the chapters entitled État de l’Europe (“State of Europe”) which begin with the division of the Carolingian Empire among Charlemagne’s sons, Voltaire summarizes the stages of European history. État de l’Europe consequently refers to the political circumstances, to the – avant la lettre – emerging European system of states. Yet Voltaire does not limit himself to political history; he also writes about cultural history and the history of everyday life, and about progress in arts and sciences. In Voltaire’s universal history, Europe means: (1) during the Middle Ages, Christianity; (2) during the Late Middle Ages, the Christian Republic, including the corresponding corporeal imagery; (3) in the Early Modern period, a political system. In addition, even though its geographical dimensions fluctuate, Europe is always (4) a memoryscape; and, last but not least, (5) a “civilization.” The awareness that Europe constituted a political system was particularly manifest during the eighteenth century, expressing itself in the concept of the balance of power. It seems significant that the formation of a Euro-political consciousness and historiographical reflections – engaged in backwards projection – on these processes henceforth occurred simultaneously. The reason for these new circumstances, due also to the emergence of Europe as a subject of historiography, was formulated by Herder in Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man (1784), a work whose approach became a model: Already at an early age…the thought frequently occurred to me whether – since everything in the world has its philosophy and science – that which concerns us most closely, the history of humanity as a whole, should not also have a philosophy and science?13

Herder begins his history of humanity with observations regarding Earth as a star among stars, links his analysis of the nature of man with his historical achievements and ends with 10 Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations et sur les principaux faits de l’histoire depuis Charlemagne jusqu’à Louis XIII, ed. by René Pomeau, 2 vols. (Paris: Garniers Frères, 1963). 11 Ibid., vol. 1, 203. 12 Ibid., vol. 2, chap. 197, 810f. 13 Johann Gottfried von Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit [1784–1785], ed. by Heinrich Kurz (Leipzig, n.d.), introduction, 10. The German version of Herder’s Ideen was widely distributed in Europe; in 1820, for example, it was printed in German in Stockholm und Uppsala, after it had already appeared in Swedish translation in 1814–1816. A French translation by Edgar Quinet appeared in 1834.

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Europe as a culture: “How did Europe attain its culture and the rank that, for this reason, it is due above other peoples?”14 Europe as culture: that is the subject bequeathed to the nineteenth century by eighteenth-century historiography (via Herder, who formulated this succinctly as the sum of a comprehensive work). One of the great historiographical works of the second half of the eighteenth century, fiercely discussed and controversial, was Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.15 Gibbon labored on the book for twenty years, citing the date of completion as June 27 1787. Still impressive today due to its narrative strength and rigour, the work represents the history of the Roman Empire from the imperial era to the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, thereby covering the formation and impact of Christendom as well as its significance for the so-called Fall of Rome, and the formation of an Islamic world and culture. Following pertinent events and actors, it reaches all the way to China and India. To be sure, Gibbon maintains the façade of his two main concepts – “decline” and “fall” – but, in truth, he describes fifteen hundred years of constant change, researching and revealing its driving forces and actors. For long stretches of text, one witnesses not a decline but rather the author’s fascinating attempt to clarify a massive amount of material and one of the eighteenth century’s most important questions. The result is a comprehensive history of Europe until the middle of the sixteenth century, framed by the worlds that surrounded and co-determined this Europe. The fact that the work is not merely about something that has been lost but also about contemporary Europe is readily apparent; moreover, Gibbon himself makes this unmistakably clear. Chapter 38 incorporates an interim summary entitled “General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West” in which he explicitly refers to the present. He views Europe as “one great republic, whose various inhabitants have attained almost the same level of politeness and cultivation”. Admittedly, there is continuous change, even with regard to the “balance of power”. However, “these partial events cannot essentially injure our general state of happiness, the system of arts, and laws, and manners, which so advantageously distinguish, above the rest of mankind, the Europeans and their colonies”.16 The defining characteristics of the Republic of Europe resemble those that Gibbon identifies in the first chapter with respect to the Roman Empire in the second century AD: “The gentle but powerful influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury”.17 As with Rome, so also with Europe, Gibbon sees, apart from internal conflicts, the main danger as external: threats by uncivilized “savages.” Gibbon, like Voltaire, includes natural catastrophes, climactic and other environmental influences in his inquiry into the causes of transformation and decline. This kind of holistic, complex perspective is what constitutes the late-eighteenth century’s concepts of civilization. The salvation-historical explanation of Christianity, on which the well-behaved Voltaire tirelessly slaved away in his historical work, represents a comparably simple mat14 Ibid., book 20, VI, concluding notes, 711. 15 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire [1787], 2 vols. in 1 (Chicago, 1952; 26th printing 1984). See the general characterization in Karl Christ, “Edward Gibbon,” in idem (ed.), Von Gibbon zu Rostovtzeff: Leben und Werk führender Althistoriker der Neuzeit (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972), 8–25. 16 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, 632. 17 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, 1.

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ter, whereas Gibbon’s connection between the transformation of the Roman Empire and Christendom – indeed, transformation in the sense of decline and Christendom – is incomparably more complex and requires its own parameters of research and inquiry. 3. Geographical definitions It was no coincidence that the eighteenth century reformulated the old question regarding the continent’s eastern boundaries on the basis of new criteria. Meant here is the debate regarding the Urals as the eastern geographical and natural boundary of Europe sparked by the Swedish officer Strahlenberg, who was captured in the Battle of Poltava in 1709.18 He travelled throughout the czarist empire and published his findings in Stockholm in 1730. He based his thesis regarding the Urals as a natural boundary on observations of the physical geography, vegetation, animals and minerals. Although he made an effort to reconcile his own views with Antiquity’s definitions of the eastern boundary, this did not change the fact that Strahlenberg deployed qualitatively new arguments derived from empirical, scientific observations. The steps required to turn the natural region into a cultural region were obvious and they soon were taken. Kant, for example, viewed the Urals as the eastern boundary in terms of geographical-physical, economic, and anthropological aspects. The dispute about the course of the eastern boundary south of the Urals did not actually change anything. In the eighteenth century, Europe was mapped as a cultural system. The world maps and general charts of the period generally represent the continents in single colours, so that a single glance is enough to reveal what was seen as a unit. People also thought in terms of unities when depicting Europe as a system of powers. Such a view entails an abstraction from regional diversity, which often meant not only historical-cultural but also political-constitutional diversity. The cartography reveals the same view that informs the period’s historiography, which starts with Europe as a system of powers that had formed after Charles V, as well as the various plans for Europe emanating from the large political entities. The map of Europe produced in 1706/7 and published in 1712 in Homann’s Neuen Atlas is quite typical, displaying the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation as a unity, but also Italy, which can perhaps be imagined as a cultural unity in terms of the eighteenth-century discussion of “italianità”, but certainly cannot be thought of as a political unity.19 This means that the representation of the system of powers was underpinned by the representation of Europe’s cultural components, which extended beyond political boundaries. Here, as in other thematic maps, the aforementioned eastern boundary plays an important role. Even though the boundary varied somewhat, such maps always clearly indicated it; but beyond this boundary, apart from settlements and topographical names, they no longer register cultural information. The map of Europe (by J.M. Hase) published by Homann Heirs in 1743, for instance, distinguishes the important major religions and denominations, forming three groups: (1) “Christian religions”; (2) “Islamic (Mahomedisch)”; and (3) “Pagan”. In the first group, distinctions are made between “Roman Catholic” (yellow), “Greek” (darker 18 William Henry Parker, “Europe: How Far?”, Geographical Journal 126:3 (1960): 78–297. Philipp Johann von Strahlenberg, Das Nord- und Ostliche Theil von Europa und Asia [1730] (Szeged: Universität Szeged, 1975). 19 Reproduced, for example, in Hans Wolff (ed.), Vierhundert Jahre Mercator, Vierhundert Jahre Atlas, “Die ganze Welt zwischen zwei Buchdeckeln”: Eine Geschichte der Atlanten (Weißenhorn: Anton H. Konrad, 1995), map 56.

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yellow), “Lutheran Evangelical” (red); “Reformed Evangelical” (turquoise), “Lutheran and Catholic” (dark orange) and “Catholic and Reformed” (green).20 The second group consists of the “Turkish or the Ottoman sect” and the “Persian or the Ali sect” (green). The category “pagan” is neither differentiated, nor precisely indicated on the map, nor assigned a colour. No distinctions are made between the Orthodox Churches – they are all called “Greek” – whereas Greece itself, as part of the Ottoman Empire, is displayed as “Islamic”. The surface of the Asiatic part of the Ottoman Empire is no longer coloured but only outlined in green. If one overlooks the fact that this colour system is very coarse, particularly when looking at religious diversity in Greece, only in geographical Europe does the map visualize denominations or religions as uniform entities within certain regions, whereas outside this geographically defined Europe, the map’s visualized information remains vague. Another oft-cited example is Gottfried Hensel’s map Europa Polyglotta, published in 1741, in which he uses lettering to record Europe’s languages.21 For the major languages, the map features transcriptions of the opening of the Lord’s Prayer, with the major denominations in mind. In addition, it uses colour to make distinctions based upon the biblical story of Noah and his three sons: Japhet (for Europe), Sem (for Asia) and Ham (for Africa). Yellow refers to Europe’s major Japhetic languages: Greek, German, and Illyrian-Slavonic. Red is assigned to Sem and green to Ham. Boxes with the various alphabets occupy the margins of the map. This kind of map reflects the vigorous debate in the eighteenth century on the major topic of “Europe and its languages”. At the same time, it remains closely bound up with interpretations coloured by the history of salvation – at a time when Voltaire, Gibbon and others had already initiated a new age of historiography. 4. Anthropological definitions of Europe Geography and anthropology stood in close proximity to each other during the eighteenth century. According to the basic school of thought, the conditions created by the natural space of certain continents or partial continents, together with climatic conditions, profoundly influenced their peoples. The categorizations of human beings undertaken during this century always also included a geographical component. Kant’s writings on anthropology and geography exemplify the extremely close connection between the two perspectives.22 The year 1735 witnessed the publication of one of the major works of the eighteenth century, Carl von Linnés’ Systema Naturae. During the course of the century, it appeared in an almost endless number of editions and versions, provoking extensive deliberations about the “European human”, the homo europaeus. Linné largely based his own distinction of the homo europaeus from the homo americanus, asiaticus and africanus (afer) on the traditional stereotypes that underlay the schema of the four continents. Nonetheless, his work marks 20 Ibid., map 56. 21 Printed and discussed, for instance, in Annegret Pelz, “Zum Abschied vom 5-DM-Schein: Eine Kurzbiographie der ‘Madame Europa,’” in Almut-Barbara Renger and Roland Alexander Ißler (eds.), Europa – Stier und Sternenkranz: Von der Union mit Zeus zum Staatenverbund (Bonn: Bonn University Press bei V&R unipress, 2009), 305–317, here 309, based on Hans Harms, Themen alter Karten (Oldenburg: Völker, Kartographie u. Verl., 1979). 22 Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, “The Color of Reason. The Idea of ‘Race’ in Kant’s Anthropology,” in Katherine M. Faull (ed.), Anthropology and the German Enlightenment: Perspectives on Humanity (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press; London – Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1995), 200–241.

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the beginning of anthropology as an independent science, which, through Blumenbach and many others, already developed racial (though not racist) approaches during the eighteenth century. It is worth mentioning in passing that Linné also counted the homo ferus (savage) and homo monstrosus as homo sapiens; but the simplistic continental schema continued remained influential as late as the 1780s. Samuel Thomas Soemmerring, for example, in Über die körperliche Verschiedenheit des Mohren vom Europäer (Mainz, 1784) wrote in broad terms about the Europeans and the “Negroes [Mohren]”. While he and his colleagues proceeded with precision (according to the standards of the time) in their dissection of corpses and descriptions of skin, organs, skeletons and brains, their creation of empirically based knowledge ceased in areas where their prejudices went unrecognized as such; instead, they conveyed such prejudices as apodictic truths. “The European” did not merely constitute a formulaic phrase but rather corresponded to an idea of unity that, for the time being, seemed not to require any further differentiation. With regard to anthropology, which rapidly mutated into racial anthropology, E.C. Eze speaks of an intertextuality that formed during the course of the eighteenth century from the reciprocal and multi-reciprocal readings and citations among a rather large number of people interested in anthropology and advocating enlightenment. Apart from Linné, participants included (arranged chronologically according to their relevant writings) Buffon (1748), Hume (1748), Kant (1764, 1775), Beattie (1770), Blumenbach (1776), Herder (1784– 1791), Soemmerring (1784 and more frequently), Jefferson (1787) and Cuvier (1797). The intertextuality also extended as far as Hegel.23 Following J.I. Israel, we also must include Lord Kames.24 The self-image of the homo europaeus was completely internalized during the eighteenth century. Europeans were no longer merely the inhabitants (lat., incolentes) of the European continent; in this sense of the term, “Europeans” had already existed in the Middle Ages. Rather, they now constituted either their own species, with its own customs and practices, within the category of human mammals; or they were already culturally-racially encoded and therefore superior to others, as demonstrated by countless eighteenth-century texts with reports or narratives from various regions throughout the world. Even though Frenchmen, Spaniards and Portuguese, for example, still make their appearance, the general category of the “European” seems to have become indispensable, especially when dealing with the representation of culturally different forms of behaviour. The assumption of a single origin of the human species – as also found, for example, in the Encyclopédie – did not prevent, as Buffon explained, the formation of great dif23 Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (ed.), Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Cambridge, MA – Oxford – Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1997; 1998; 2000), particularly the introduction. See also Katherine M. Faull (ed.), Anthropology and the German Enlightenment: Perspectives on Humanity (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press; London – Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1995); see also Mario Marino, “Noch etwas über die Menschenrassen: Eine Lektüre der Kant-Herder-ForsterKontroverse,” in Simone de Angelis, Florian Gelzer, and Lucas Marco Gisi (eds.), “Natur,” Naturrecht und Geschichte: Aspekte eines fundamentalen Begründungsdiskurses der Neuzeit (1600–1900) (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2010), 393–413. 24 Jonathan Irvine Israel, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750– 1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 248–256. The reference here is to Henry Home, Lord Kames, Six Sketches on the History of Man (Philadelphia: R. Bell & R. Aitken, 1776). See also Henry Vyverberg, Human Nature, Cultural Diversity, and the French Enlightenment (New York – Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

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ferences due to climactic and natural-geographical circumstances. For most authors, skin colour played a decisive role in the classification of people. White, as in the case of Hume, was often developed into a characteristic of cultural distinction in favour of the Europeans; yet in contrast, according to Kant, the “white race” included not only Europeans but also Arabians, Turks and many others. Blumenbach (1776) selected the “Caucasian race”, which for him also included Europeans, as the most eminent of all the supposed human races. Lord Kames assigned less significance to climactic differences for variations among peoples in various world regions, assuming polygenetic origins instead. The younger Georges Léopold Cuvier took up Blumenbach’s hypotheses in 1797. It should be noted that the concept of race did not automatically lead to a single cultural identity for one and the same supposed race; to arrive at such an identity, subdivisions were assumed within a “race”, so that, in the end, one nonetheless arrived at the European as something unique. The boundaries between a general anthropology of humanity and a more specialized anthropology of “European humanity” were fluid; and anthropology fanned out in multiple directions, with countless pedagogical works, investigations into the supposedly wild children in Europe that promised to produce inferences about human “cultivability”, and research about the soul, the senses and more.25 5. Iconography Apart from cartography, how did the eighteenth century symbolically represent Europe as a culture?26 Essentially, the allegory of the continent, which generally appeared not on its own but rather together with the allegories of Asia, America and Africa, fulfilled this purpose well.27 The continental allegories of the eighteenth century expanded on models from the second half of the sixteenth century, often distancing themselves from the specific models canonized by Cesare Ripa’s De Iconologia, which generations of artists had found especially useful in the period around 1600. Proceeding from the two Jesuit churches in Rome, the theme of civilization played an important role. Initially, it was associated with the pretensions of the Christian mission, thus even at this stage involving more than simply the succinct allegorical-emblematic representation of the continents. To be sure, the civilization allegories were widely used throughout Europe, but they were directed at various types of publics. Churches that were generally accessible probably represented, comparatively, the greatest degree of publicity. Such allegories abound above all in churches found in core Baroque regions,28 which is especially noteworthy in light of Peter Burke’s oft-cited question – “Did Europe exist before 1700?” – since in certain respects they popularized the representation of Europe as a culture in comparison to Asia, America, and Africa. 25 Among others, Julia V. Douthwaite, The Wild Girl, Natural Man and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the age of Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Richard Nash, Wild Enlightenment: The Borders of Human Identity in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 2003). 26 For numerous closely described and reproduced images, see Michael Wintle, The Image of Europe: Visualizing Europe in Cartography and Iconography throughout the Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 27 The continental allegories have a complicated early history. See the research project report: Wolfgang Schmale, Marion Romberg, Josef Köstlbauer and Martin Gasteiner, “Continent allegories in the South of the Holy Roman Empire: A Pictorial Discourse,” in Wolfgang Schmale (ed.), Time in the Age of Enlightenment (Bochum: Dr. Dieter Winkler, 2012), 295–297. 28 Ibid.

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Not all continental allegories of the eighteenth century can be classified as civilization allegories. Nonetheless, their appearance almost en masse demands attention and needs to be addressed. Continental allegories feature as frescoes, stucco work, faience and terracotta figures; on maps and frontispieces and as drawings in churches in villages, monasteries and towns; in the homes of citizens, in aristocratic and princely residences and in royal and imperial palaces. However, this sheer quantity – which, incidentally, is difficult to measure – evidently also contained a new quality that reflected a cultural self-awareness on the part of Europe and Europeans. The coexistence and juxtaposition of elements describing Europe in both traditional (not to mention stereotypical) and modern terms represented the transformation the Europe’s self-conception. This is exemplified by Giambattista Tiepolo’s ceiling fresco above the entrance staircase of the Prince-Bishop’s residence in Würzburg. Completed in 1752–1753, Tiepolo’s fresco is probably the most famous representation of continental/civilization allegories of the eighteenth century. Admittedly, this is not an example of the popularization of continental allegories, since the entrance staircase served only ceremonial purposes. Nonetheless, its central statements are probably representative for this era – the content displayed in epic breadth in Würzburg is elsewhere highlighted emblematically. Continental allegories with such broad narrative elements would not reappear until the era of Imperialism, as exemplified in the Paris Stock Exchange (Bourse de commerce, 1888–1889).29 Tiepolo’s ensemble of the allegories of the four continents yields a cultural history of humanity that, in terms of content, basically uses components consolidated during the eighteenth century. Europe represents the pinnacle of the history of civilization; and the path from the vestibule and the lowest step to the first landing, where Europe takes up the entire view, in itself leads to this conclusion.30 At the bottom, the visitor mounting the stairs looks first upon America, which represents human history’s lowest level of civilization. The figure of America, largely unclothed and riding on a giant, frightening alligator, dominates this civilization allegory. In so doing, she is situated near the ground. Everything is natural and wild; architecture is absent; a group of men stoke a fire that symbolizes the origins of civilization. Above the scene around America, a dark cloud rises toward the heavens. Closer inspection reveals a European voyeuristically observing both the scene around the fire and a naked, light-skinned woman; but it also discloses representatives of widely varying world regions and continents. Thus the men at the fire are not America’s original inhabitants but rather stem from other continents, presumably leading to the interpretation that all peoples of humanity once stood at this point of origin. With an outstretched arm, America points toward Africa; Africa indicates Europe, as does Asia, on the opposite side. “Architecturally”, Africa is assigned a tent; the people wear more clothes than in the America allegory; scenes of commerce are depicted. The figure of 29 Reproduced in Christian de Bartillat and Alain Roba, Métamorphoses d’Europe: Trente siècles d’iconographie (Turin: Bartillat, 2000), 126. 30 On the ceiling fresco, see Peter O. Krückmann (ed.), Der Himmel auf Erden: Tiepolo in Würzburg, 2 vols. (München – New York: Prestel, 1996). For interpretations of the ceiling fresco (apart from the images) see – in the same volumes – in particular Peter O. Krückmann, “Tiepolo in Würzburg: Fürstbischöfliche Repräsentation und die Kunst der Inszenierung,” vol. 1, 29–44; catalog section II, vol. 1, 98–121; Frank Büttner, “Ikonographie, Rhetorik und Zeremoniell in Tiepolos Fresken der Würzburger Residenz,” vol. 2, 54–62; Matthias Staschull, “Das Gewölbefresko im Treppenhaus der Würzburger Residenz: Maltechnische Untersuchung,” vol. 2, 128–147.

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Africa sits on a camel or a dromedary – it is difficult to tell – but in any event comparatively higher than America. In contrast to the America allegory, the figures are for the most part fully clothed. Appearing here, too, are representatives of various peoples and world regions, indicating that this second scene is relevant not only for the history of Africa but for human history in general. The African scene includes the three male Europeans situated near the tent, one of whom, stretched out and kneeling on the ground, is looking into the tent from below. The European is evidently a very curious creature, but keeps himself hidden. Asia represents the third level of the history of human civilization. She sits, fully clothed, on an elephant, thus higher than Africa, who in turn is already higher than America. A pyramid elevates her to an architectural level significantly above America and Africa; crucifixes refer to the origins of Christendom; a large ashlar with written characters – presumably Armenian – tells of the origins of writing. European-looking figures, including a regally clothed European woman, possibly meant allegorically, stand near the pyramid and the inscribed stone. A blond European – Tiepolo refers to him eponymously with a sign – looks toward the hill of crosses. The final and highest level is represented by Europe, both visually and spatially, for at this point the observer has reached the grandiose story – the festive staircase proceeds no higher. The stately architecture in the allegory speaks for itself. All the figures are luxuriously clothed; the usual attributes of European civilization are fully assembled: a book, musical instruments, painter’s tools, military attributes, etc. Unlike her three counterparts, Europe no longer sits on an animal but on a throne, which in turn is mounted on a stone dais. Beside her stands a white bull, her attribute from mythology. While colouring a globe at the feet of a stately and powerful Europe, the painting’s allegory gazes up at Tiepolo’s patron Prince-Bishop Karl Philipp von Greiffenclau, ascending to the heavens like Apollo. Apart from Europe, numerous female allegories are also depicted, in contrast to the other civilization allegories. Nonetheless, the represented activities – the concrete tasks – are performed by men, who are not allegories. The entire scene lacks any uncivilized wildness. Unlike in the other three allegories, the civilizing activities no longer refer to actions that ensure life and survival – that are close to nature, so to speak – but rather to the sublime, to culture. Despite the banality of the depicted contents (Tiepolo’s artistry itself, of course, is anything but banal!) the fresco clearly illustrates the features we have identified above as part of the concept of “being modern”. It means the present; and Europe is represented with the depiction of the highest level of civilization presently attained. The ceiling painting purposefully distinguishes the European through his explorative curiosity. He is to be found in every scene, not as a passive or affected party but as an agent of discovery and consummation. 6. Conclusion One could, perhaps, dismiss the sources invoked above as examples of one-upmanship. But they can all lay claims to having been widely received in Europe during their time. Above all, they also sum up a state of knowledge, so in this respect we can go so far as to view them as representative. In other respects, they were innovative and advanced the meaning of “modern”. Moreover, because of their wide public audience, they did so more effectively than the period’s lesser known and appreciated texts and iconographic representations. “Modern” in the context of the eighteenth century’s definition(s) of Europe meant the large-scale and clear delineation of Europe in terms of space, civilization, culture and anthropology in opposition to one or multiple Non-Europes. “Modern” meant abandoning a

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self-awareness based on the history of salvation in favour of a completely different historical understanding. “Modern” meant recognizing both a distinction from Antiquity and also processes of historical change and becoming post-Antiquity; indeed, it mean recognizing that, in a fundamental way, Europe originated as the historical arena of a nascent European system that only became possible after the fall of the Roman Empire. “Modern” meant Europe as a system, not only in terms of the “balance of power” but rather in all conceivable respects. “Modern” meant, finally, the accumulation of those defining elements that, during the eighteenth century, were conceptualized and correspondingly represented as a systemic framework. In the end, “modern” in the eighteenth century ultimately meant a positive selfimage that, supported by all of these partial definitions, was virtually unshakeable.

Crossing Borderlines: The Approach of Austrian and German Travellers to the Ottoman Empire Karl Vocelka In the context of our topic borders can be understood in two ways: as actual lines between two countries or as spiritual and mental divisions between different cultures. In using the term “border line” we have to remind ourselves of the trivial, well-known fact that words mean something very different nowadays from their meaning for the Early Modern period. Our perception of borders is determined by border-stations and, until recently, border-control, a clear act of transition from one country to another; and, especially for my generation, the perception of the Iron Curtain took the phenomenon of border to extremes. For the Ottoman Empire the “real border” was quite close to the centres of Christian countries: from the imperial city Vienna one could reach the Ottoman world in Hungary in just a short journey of few days. Different travellers organized their journey along different routes. Looking to the most important source for the perception of the border between the Ottoman Empire and the West, the travel diary or travel report, one soon sees that the border to the Ottoman Empire could be crossed in several ways. Some, like the Austrian aristocrat Hans Christoph von Teufel, came by ship from Venice to Dubrovnik and then travelled (obviously more or less alone) by horse to Istanbul in 40 days.1 He was an exception because most travellers we know about undertook their journey as a member of a group of pilgrims or diplomats. Due to a lack of sources we do not know how simple people – e.g. Hungarian peasants visiting relatives on the other side of the border – experienced this border situation, but we have numerous reports of imperial ambassadors crossing the border on their way to Constantinople/ Istanbul. These sources will be in the focus of this chapter. There are many diaries and travel reports by pilgrims (normally going directly to the Holy Land without touching Constantinople) but also by ambassadors or somebody travelling with their company.2 A good number of these sources were printed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; others were only handwritten documents and published much later.3 As the old printed works are not available in all libraries, some of them were re-edited in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. Some of the most important descriptions of the Ottoman 1 Michael Greil, “Den ohne grosse gedult ist nit müglich, durch die Turggey zu kommen”: Die Beschreibung der rayß (1587–1591). Analyse und textkritische Edition (Dipl. Wien, 2006). 2 Generally for the type of sources, Peter J. Brenner (ed.), Der Reisebericht: Die Entwicklung einer Gattung in der deutschen Literatur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989). 3 Inge Peschel, Die Darstellung des Osmanischen Reiches in der deutschsprachigen Reiseliteratur des 16. Jahrhunderts (Diss. Wien, 1978); an alternative version is offered Almut Höfert, “Ist das böse schmutzig? Das Osmanische Reich in den Augen europäischer Reisender des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts,” Historische Anthropologie 11 (2003): 176–192.

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Empire, and therefore some of the most important sources for our topic, should be mentioned briefly.4 One of the first imperial ambassadors to leave a travel diary was the Slovene Benedikt Kuripešić, who acted as a translator in the year 1530.5 Some years later we have a travel report from an employee of the House of Fugger who joined the imperial ambassador Augier Ghiselain de Busbecq (whose letters from the Ottoman Empire will be discussed later) in travelling to Constantinople and Amasya and left a very instructive description of his journey.6 Some sources from missions to the Sultan from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries add to our knowledge of the perception of the strange world of the Orient. The Styrian aristocrat Michael von Saurau travelled to Constantinople in 16677; his compatriot David Ungnad in 15728; the Protestant preacher Salomon Schweigger – who also translated the Koran (Qur´an) into German – travelled from 1576–15819; and the aristocrat Hans Ludwig Freiherr von Kuefstein in 1628.10 Some travellers extended their travel route and, besides Constantinople and the Holy Land, also reached India.11 Before the ambassador and his entourage left the Imperial Court in Vienna banquets were organized with friends, taking farewell for a journey that was dangerous – even when the ambassador and his party travelled as an official delegation. In the case of war, ambassadors were imprisoned in the famous – or, rather, infamous – Seven Towers (Yedikule) 4 For the bibliography see Irmgard Leder, Nachrichten über die Osmanen und ihre Vorfahren in Reiseund Kriegsberichten: Analytische Bibliographie mit Standortnachweisen 1095–1600 (Budapest: Akad. Kiadó, 2005); a good resource for geographical questions is Karl Nehring, Iter Constantinopolitanum: Ein Ortsnamenverzeichnis zu den kaiserlichen Gesandtschaftsreisen an die Ottomanische Pforte 1530– 1618 (München: Finnisch-Ugrisches Seminar an der Universität München, 1984). 5 Benedikt Kuripešić, Itinerarium der Botschaftsreise des Josef von Lamberg und Niclas Jurischitz durch Bosnien, Serbien, Bulgarien nach Konstantinopel, ed. by Eleonore Gräfin Lamberg-Schwarzenberg (Innsbruck: Verlag Wagner, 1910); and Benedikt Kuripešić, Itinerarium oder Wegrayß Küniglich Mayestät potschafft gen Constantinopel zudem Türckischen Keiser Soleyman, Anno 1530. Nachdruck der Ausgabe 1531 und Innsbruck 1910, ed. by Gerhard Neweklowsky (Klagenfurt: Wieser, 1997). 6 Wolfgang F. Reddig, Reise zum Erzfeind der Christenheit: Der Humanist Hans Dernschwam in der Türkei (1553–1555) (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus-Verlag, 1990); Franz Babinger (ed.), Hans Dernschwam, Tagebuch einer Reise nach Konstantinopel und Kleinasien (1553/55) (München, 1923, Neudruck Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1986); see also Christof Jeggle, “Die fremde Welt des Feindes? Hans Dernschwams Bericht einer Reise nach Konstantinopel und Kleinasien 1553–1556,” in Marlene Kurz, Martin Scheutz, Karl Vocelka and Tomas Winkelbauer (eds.), Das Osmanische Reich und die Habsburgermonarchie. Akten des internationalen Kongresses zum 150-jährigen Bestehen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung Wien 22.–25. September 2004 (Wien – München: Oldenbourg, 2005), 413–426. 7 Michael von Saurau, Orttenliche Beschreybung der Rayß gehen Constantinopel, mit der Pottschafft von Kaysser Maxmillian dem anderen in die Dürgkey abgeferdigt, anno im 1567, ed. by Konrad Wickert (Erlangen: Universitäts-Bibliothek Erlangen – Nürnberg, 1987). 8 Andreas Ferus, Die Reise des kaiserlichen Gesandten David Ungnad nach Konstantinopel im Jahre 1572 (Dipl. Wien, 2007). 9 Salomon Schweigger, Zum Hofe des türkischen Sultans, ed. by Heidi Stein (Leipzig: Brockhaus Verlag, 1986). 10 Karl Teply, Die kaiserliche Großbotschaft an Sultan Murad IV. 1628: Des Freiherrn Hans Ludwig von Kuefsteins Fahrt zur Hohen Pforte (Wien: Schendl Verlag, 1976). 11 Christa Amstler, Die Reise in den Orient unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Reise Hans Christoph Teufels (1587–1591) (Dipl. Wien, 1995); Martina Lehner, Georg Christoph Fernbergers Fahrt auf den Sinai, ins Heilige Land, nach Babylon, Persien und Indien (1588–1593). Eine Kulturgeschichte des Reisens in der Frühen Neuzeit (Wien: Folio Verlag, 2008).

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in Istanbul and faced many other risks and hazards. After the credentials of the Emperor had been handed in to the ambassador, the journey started.12 By ship the group passed Bratislava/Pressburg and entered the “wild world of border fortresses”.13 Though borders had been defined officially in the treaties between the two countries as a clear line, this contradicted the concept of “borders” of an originally nomadic tribe like the Turks. A specific type of border situation is the military border in Croatia, which is well studied, therefore will be omitted from this chapter.14 Outside Croatia the border stretched from the river Drau/Drava to a point south-west of Debrecen and was more or less stable between 1568 and 1683. Generally speaking, the border region was a diarchy or condominium of the two powers. With the help of Hungarian soldiers from the border fortresses Hungarian aristocrats and monasteries demanded financial contributions from their peasants in the Ottoman part of Hungary. These possessions could also be sold, given in mortgage and bequeathed. The same situation can be found the other way round: Ottoman taxes were also raised in the border region ruled by the Habsburgs. This somehow fuzzy border was not typical only for the Ottoman border, but can be found in other European territories as well and appears characteristic for the Early Modern Period.15 In Ottoman thought there was, on the one hand, the accepted border line of the treaties (called hudud or sınır); and, on the other, a border stripe called the uç which designated the border of the darü’l-islam and the darü’l-harb, the border between Islamic territory and the territory of the “unfaithful”. It was only in 1699 that the Sultan accepted a closed, fixed frontier which had to be respected.16 The border was for them a strip of ground, was permeable and did not clearly separate the citizens of one country from those of another. Religious faith and dependence on aristocratic lords defined where a person belonged, not a ”modern” definition of citizenship. The stipulated, defined border near the River Danube lay between Komorn (Hungarian: Komárom; in Slovak Komárno) and Gran/Esztergom. According to an Ottoman legend, Sultan Süleyman here planted three poles on which he cast a terrible spell. When a company of travellers arrived in Komorn, where the wooden wall of the fortress (the so called palanka) was decorated with heads of slaughtered Turks, they could already see Gesztes, 12 Karl Teply (ed.), Kaiserliche Gesandtschaften ans Goldene Horn (Stuttgart: Steingrüben Verlag, 1968), 77 f. 13 Teply, Kaiserliche Gesandtschaften, 78. See Mark Stein, Guarding the Frontier. Ottoman Border Forts and Garrisons in Europe (London – New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007). 14 Gunther E. Rothenberg, The military border in Croatia 1740–1881: A study of an imperial institution (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1966); Karl Kaser, Freier Bauer und Soldat: Die Militarisierung der agrarischen Gesellschaft an der kroatisch-slawonischen Militärgrenze (1535–1881) (Wien: Institut für Geschichte der Universität Graz, Abteilung Südosteuropäische Geschichte, 1997). 15 Klára Hegyi, Le condominium hungaro-ottoman dans les elayets hongroises, Actes du premier congrès international des études balkaniques et sud-est européennes, vol. 3 (Sofia: Academie Bulgare des Sciences, 1969), 593–603; and Gábor Ágoston, “A flexible Empire: Authority and its limits on the Ottoman Frontiers,” in Kemal Karpat (ed.), Ottoman Borderlands: Issues, Personalities and Political Changes (Madison Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 15–32. See also Markus Koller, Eine Gesellschaft im Wandel: Die osmanische Herrschaft in Ungarn im 17. Jahrhundert (1606–1683) (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2010), 10 ff. and especially 21 ff. and http://www.steiner-verlag.de/uploads/tx_crondavtitel/ datei-datei/9783515096638_p.pdf, accessed June 11, 2014. 16 Maria Pia Pedani, Dalla frontiera al confine (Venezia: Herder, 2002); and Colin Heywood, “The Frontier in Ottoman History: Old Ideas and New Myth,” in Daniel Power and Naomi Standen (eds.), Frontiers in question: Eurasian Borderlands 700–1700 (Basingstoke: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 228–250.

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one of the Ottoman fortresses, and Totis/Tata, which was in the possession of the Emperor and defended by 170 reckless Christian soldiers.17 Here the transition into the Ottoman Empire started, following an inflexible hieratic ritual. The encounter acquired the character of an omen expected with eagerness, for if one ambassador arrived at the central pole an instant earlier than the others, this was taken as symptom of the inferiority of the country he represented.18 Thus both sides reacted very carefully, since neither the imperial nor the Ottoman ambassador wanted to take the first step and both had to retain the prestige of their respective ruler.19 The group of travellers were taken over by the Ottoman authorities in an open field where three trees grew on a hill – maybe the choice of this scenario was rooted in the above-mentioned legend about Süleyman. In the travel diary of the Jesuit Paul Tafferner,20 who accompanied Count Paul Leslie to Constantinople, he reports that the ambassador in the company of Feldmarschall Ludwig Raduit de Souche and the Imperial Commissioner Hilarius Feichtinger were received by the Paşa of Stuhlweissenburg/Székesfehérvár and the Beg (bey) of Gran. The troops on one side played cymbal and whistles and on the other side timpani and trumpets; both fired their guns.21 The welcome was celebrated with a banquet – if it was not Ramadan – and the first encounter with unknown food, which did not have to be “Turkish” but could also be “Hungarian”. For example, Schweigger writes about a sort of “Turkish” bread called bogatsch which is definitely a Hungarian food.22 The slow process of entering another world continued with the reception in Gran and Ofen/Buda (a part of Budapest). In the different narratives by travellers the second important aspect of crossing the border line – the “others” and their “strange” behaviour – already started to become important in these Hungarian cities. The observation of aspects of “exotic life” in the Ottoman Empire took up more space in the diaries the longer the journey lasted. Especially in the early sixteenth century these notes are interesting and important for all studies on daily life in the Ottoman Empire.23 On the long journey on the River Danube to Belgrade/Beograd and then the 1,100 km following the old military route (Heeresstraße) to Constantinople, the ambassadors and their party witnessed many unfamiliar things. In Buda 17 Stephan Gerlach, Stephen Gerlachs deß Aeltern Tage-Buch, der von zween glorwürdigsten Römischen Käysern, Maximiliano und Rudolpho beyderseits den Andern dieses Nahmens, höchstseeligster Gedächtnüß, an die Ottomannische Pforte zu Constantinopel abgefertigten, und durch den wohlgebohrnen Herrn Hn. David Ungnad ... mit würcklicher Erhalt- und Verlängerung deß Friedens, zwischen dem Ottomanischen und Römischen Käyserthum ... glücklichst-vollbrachter Gesandtschafft. Auß denen Gerlachischen ... nachgelassenen Schrifften, herfür gegeben durch seinen Enckel Samuelem Gerlachium (Frankfurt am Main: Zunner, 1674), 7. 18 Teply, Die kaiserliche Großbotschaft, 33. 19 Salomon Schweigger, Ein newe Reyssbeschreibung auss Teutschland nach Constantinopel und Jerusalem. Nachdruck der Ausgabe Nürnberg 1608, Einleitung von Rudolf Neck (Graz: Akademische Druckund Verlagsanstalt, 1964), 7. 20 Bruno Zimmel, “Johann Gruebers letzte Missionsreise: Ein Beitrag zur oberösterreichischen Biographie,” Oberösterreichische Heimatblätter 9 (1957): 161–180. 21 Paul Tafferner, Caesarea Legatio quam mandante Imp. Leopoldo I. ad Portam Ottomannicam suscepit (Vienna: Leonhard Christoph Lochner, 1672), 19 f. 22 Schweigger, Ein newe Reyssbeschreibung, 10–14, see Wolfgang F. Reddig, “Jugurth ist Ir beste Speyse: Türkische Sprache und Kultur im Spiegel spätmittelalterlicher und frühneuzeitlicher Reiseberichte,” Das Mittelalter 2,1 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1997): 135–150. 23 Suraiya Faroqhi, Kultur und Alltag im Osmanischen Reich: Vom Mittelalter bis zum Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts (München: Beck Verlag, 1995).

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some of the travellers already visited a mosque for the first time and were surprised by the fact that the whole floor was covered by carpets and they had to take off their shoes.24 The topic of seeing and describing the “other” has become became a very important field of historical research in the last years, dealing with cultural differences between Europeans, people from the New World and, of course, Islamic people.25 Facing another culture and the awareness of the otherness of people and their behaviour is an elementary human experience.26 It may generally be observed that the more people know about the “other” the more positive an image is developed, so it seems that there is a clear connection between the distance to other cultures and the lack of knowledge about them.27 In this examination of foreign cultures contradictions between reality and the stereotypes familiar to the observers frequently occurred. What was the information, what were the stereotypes ambassadors and their company brought with them in their luggage to the Ottoman Empire? Or, to retain the metaphor of this chapter: what were the borderlines in their head like? In public opinion of the Early Modern Period the Ottomans were the arch-foes of Christianity, the scourge of God for the Sins of the Christians and one had to fight them by spiritual weapons, prayer and processions.28 The “Turks”, as contemporary sources call them, were reinterpreted in Central Europe especially by the Reformation, starting with Martin Luther’s appraisal of the “Turks”. They were connected to Apocalyptic figures, were seen as Gog and Magog and as Antichrist.29 This religious interpretation of the Turks can 24 Wilhelm Sahm (ed.), Beschreibung der Reisen des ehrenvesten, namhaften und wolweisen Herren Reinholtt Lubenauen des Eltter, Rahtsverwandten der loblichen Altenstadt Konigsbergk in Preussen, so ehr im Jahr 1573, 5. Augusti angefangen und ao. 1589 den 17. Octobris glucklichen vollendet … (Königsberg, 1914; Reprint Frankfurt am Main: Institut für Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaft, 1995). 25 Urs Bitterli, Die “Wilden” und die “Zivilisierten”: Grundzüge einer Geistes- und Kulturgeschichte der europäisch-überseeischen Begegnung (München: Beck Verlag, 2004); Manfred Brocker and Heino Heinrich Nau (eds.), Ethnozentrismus: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen des interkulturellen Dialogs (Darmstadt: Primus-Verlag, 1997); Ekkehard Witthoff, Grenzen der Kultur: Differenzwahrnehmung in Randbereichen (Irland, Lappland, Russland) und europäische Identität in der frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt am Main: Lang Verlag, 1997); Stefan Deeg, “Das Eigene und das Andere: Strategien der Fremddarstellung in Reiseberichten,” in Paul Michel (ed.), Symbolik von Weg und Reise (Bern: Lang Verlag, 1992), 163–191; Michael Rohrschneider and Arno Strohmeyer (eds.), Wahrnehmungen des Fremden. Differenzerfahrungen von Diplomaten im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2007); Wolfgang Schmale and Reinhard Stauber (eds.), Menschen und Grenzen in der frühen Neuzeit (Berlin: Spitz Verlag, 1998); Almut Höfert, Den Feind beschreiben. Türkengefahr und europäisches Wissen über das Osmanische Reich 1450–1600 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2003); Wolfgang Geier, Südosteuropa-Wahrnehmungen: Reiseberichte, Studien und biographische Skizzen vom 16. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006). 26 Gert Dressel, Historische Anthropologie. Eine Einführung (Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 1996); Albrecht Classen, “Das Fremde und das Eigene,” in Peter Dinzelbacher (ed.), Europäische Mentalitätengeschichte (Stuttgart: Kröner Verlag, 1993), 429–450. 27 Stefan Schröder, Zwischen Christentum und Islam: Kulturelle Grenzen in den spätmittelalterlichen Pilgerberichten des Felix Fabri (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2009). 28 Maximilian Grothaus, Der “Erbfeindt christlichen Namens”: Studien zum Türken-Feindbild in der Kultur der Habsburgermonarchie zwischen 16. und 18. Jahrhundert, 2 vol. (Diss. Graz 1986), see also Karl Vocelka, “Das Türkenbild des christlichen Abendlandes in der frühen Neuzeit,” in Erich Zöllner and Karl Gutkas (eds.), Österreich und die Osmanen (Wien: Österreichischer Bundesverlag, 1988), 20–31. 29 Richard Lind, Luthers Stellung zum Kreuz- und Türkenkrieg (Diss. Gießen, 1940); Richard Ebermann, Die Türkenfurcht: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der öffentlichen Meinung in Deutschland während der Reformationszeit (Diss. Halle/Saale, 1904); Hermann Ehrenfried, Türke und Osmanenreich in den Vor-

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also be seen in the popular prints and pamphlets of the time.30 In these pamphlets their authors point out the sinful life of the Christians, who curse, fornicate, steal and rob, are proud, eat and drink too much and do not show any penitence. For this reason God has sent the Turkish menace.31 There were good reasons why European potentates adopted this interpretation, for a population which, full of fear of the Turks, behaves morally was very much in the interest of the state.32 All this might usefully be discussed in connection to the phenomenon of social disciplining.33 The image of the Turks in popular prints is full of stereotypes and topoi: the Turks cut open the bellies of pregnant women; they spear babies on their lances or on fence posts; and commit all other imaginable cruelties.34 In war, propaganda always tends to blame the enemy alone for the cruelty of war, but of course the Christian troops also behaved in a similar way, committing murder, rape and robbery, as a few examples of text and image stellungen der Zeitgenossen Luthers: Ein Beitrag zur Untersuchung des deutschen Türkenschrifttums (Diss. Freiburg, 1961); John W. Bohnstedt, The infidel Scourge of God: The Turkish menace as seen by German pamphleteers of the Reformation era (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1968). 30 For this topic see Karl Goellner, Turcica, 3 vols., 1 vol. Die europäischen Türkendrucke des 16. Jahrhunderts 1501–1550, 2 vol. Die europäischen Türkendrucke 1551–1600, 3 vol. Die Türkenfrage in der öffentlichen Meinung Europas im 16. Jahrhundert (Bucureşti: Acad. Republicii Socialiste România, 1961–1978). See also Senol Özyurt, Die Türkenlieder und das Türkenbild in der deutschen Volksüberlieferung vom 16. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (München: Fink Verlag, 1972); and Meike Hollenbeck, “Die Türkenpublizistik im 17. Jahrhundert – Spiegel der Verhältnisse im Reich?,” Mitteilungen des Instituts für österreichische Geschichtsforschung 107 (1999): 111–130. 31 Newe Zeitung, vnd Trawrlied. Von dem Erbärmlichen verlust, der Königlichen Statt vnd Vöstung Stulweissenburg, in nider Vngern, wie die von dem Erbfeind Christlichen Nahmens, dem Türggen, auff den 29. Tag deß Monats Augusti, in dem 1602. Jahr … erobert worden ist (o.O., 1602) “Der Gebot Gottes man bricht acht / sein Nam gelästert wirdt mit macht / von Frawe und von Mann. Jedermann bey dem schwert vnd flucht / on allen scheuch / gottloß verrucht. Geitz / Wucher vnd Bettriegerey / vnzüchtig wesen / Rauberey / die Hoffart vnd der Pracht. Das Fressen Sauffen / füllerey / bey jederman sich findt ohn scheu. Weil dann kein Buß verhanden ist / so strafft auch Gott zu dieser frist / mit mancher schwören Plag. Deßwegen kompt der Türgg herauß / der thut Tyrannisch halten Hauß.” 32 Hans Joachim Kissling, “Türkenfurcht und Türkenhoffnung im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert: Zur Geschichte eines Komplexes,” Südostforschungen 23 (1964): 1–18. 33 For the paradigm of social disciplining see Winfried Schulze, “Gerhard Oestreichs Begriff “Sozialdisziplinierung in der Frühen Neuzeit”,” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 14 (1987): 265–302; Wolfgang Reinhard, “Sozialdisziplinierung – Konfessionalisierung – Modernisierung: Ein historiographischer Diskurs,” in Nada Boškovka (ed.), Die Frühe Neuzeit in der Geschichtswissenschaft: Forschungstendenzen und Forschungserträge (Paderborn: Schöning Verlag, 1997), 39–55; Richard Schmidt, “Sozialdisziplinierung? Ein Plädoyer für das Ende des Etatismus in der Konfessionalisierungsforschung,” Historische Zeitschrift 265 (1997): 639–682. 34 Karl Vocelka (ed.), Mitteleuropa und die Türken: Politische und kulturelle Beziehungen zwischen zwei Kulturkreisen (Wien: Bundesministerium für Unterricht und Kunst, 1983), comment on folia 2a; see also Drey warhafftige newe Zeitung: Die erste / Des grawsamen Erbfeindes des Türckens / welche er vor kurtzer Zeit in Persien an der Stadt Morehel begangen / vnd vber 20.tausent Menschen jämmerlich ermordet … (Prag: Johann Schumann, 1593): „Doch haben die Türckischen Hundt / den Sieg erhalten zu der stundt / … was noch bey leben waren / habens gefangen genommen an / ihnen vbel mit gefahren. Die Kinder vnter zehen Jahren / habens gebunden bey den Haaren / gehenckt wol an die pfosten, darnach mit Pfeilen zu der frist / sie jämmerlich erschossen. Was Weibs Personen anbelangt / denen habens than grosssen Zwang / sie geschendt an jhren Ehren / die darnach bunden an die Säul / jämmerlich thun ermorden. Die Brüst geschnitten von ihrem Leib / wann sie hatten ein schwangers Weib / haben den Leib auffgerissen / die Frucht genommen an dem End / vnd an die Wand geschmissen“.

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show.35 People who travelled in the Ottoman Empire sketch a very different picture of it. The problematic situation is that scholars consider these texts a source for “reality” in the Ottoman Empire on the one hand; and these texts influence other descriptions on the other, so we move in a vicious circle. Unfortunately, the imperial ambassadors did not have to submit a written report about the results of their mission – as, for example, the Venetian ambassadors did – but only gave an oral report. Thus the information and orientation of a new ambassador was only possible in an informal way. Two of the most important books which formed the ideas about the “Turks” were the writings of Georgius de Hungariae,36 whose book was translated and commented on by Martin Luther; and Augier Ghiselain de Busbecq.37 Georgius de Hungariae develops a very positive image of the Turks, praising the simplicity of their houses, the morality of women – which means for him perfect subordination under male power – the discipline in the army, the respect for religious rules, the ban on pictures, the devotion during the religious service and the high standards of hygiene. In his interpretation these positive facts are an illusion created by the Devil to make people convert to Islam. Moreover, Busbecq (and many others) see positive aspects in Turkish life: the Turks are quiet, there is no quarrelling, no gambling with either cards or dice, considerable cleanliness, no heaps of garbage or excrement, no carousing and heavy drinking.38 The main difference from our perspective would have been the fact that in the Ottoman Empire another religion dominated. Of course, in the Balkans travellers were not terribly aware of this fact as most of the people they met were still Christians, although Christians of different religious orientations: Lutherans and Calvinists in Hungary, Unitarians (called Arians) and Orthodox. It is quite surprising that a thorough theological discussion of Islam cannot easily be found in the travel diaries, though some of the authors were Protestant or Catholic clergymen like the Jesuit Tafferner or the Protestant Superintendent Samuel Gerlach.39 Non-Christian people were classified as misbelievers like the Muslims and heathens like the native population in the two Americas, who did not know about the Christian religion. 35 Die Eroberung von Buda, Ölbild auf Leinwand von Charles Herbel 1886 (Hofburg, Innsbruck, Salle des Gardes); see Vocelka, Mitteleuropa, comment on folia 20 b. 36 Reinhard Klockow (ed.), Georgius de Hungariae: Tractatus de moribus, conditionibus et nequicia Turcorum. Traktat über die Sitten, die Lebensverhältnisse und die Arglist der Türken (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 1993); and Carl Göllner (ed.), Chronica und Beschreibung der Türkei. Mit eyner Vorrhed D. Martini Lutheri. Unveränderter Nachdruck der Ausgabe Nürnberg 1530 sowie fünf weitere „Türkendrucke“ des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts (Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 1983). 37 The Turkish letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, imperial ambassador at Constantinople, 1554–1562. Translated from the Latin of the Elzevir edition of 1633 by Edward Seymour Forster (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 2005); Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq, Augerii Gislenii a Busbequio Ferdinandi Rom. Imp. ad Suleimannum Turciae Imp. ordinarii oratoris, de re militari contra Turcam instituenda consilium (Bardi Pomeraniae: ex officina Ducali, 1594); Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq, Avgerii Gislenii Bvsbeqvii D. Legationis Tvrc. Epistolae IV. Eiusdem De re militari contra Turcam consilium & Solimanni Turc. Imp. legatio ad Ferd. I. Imp. Rom. in quibus mores, et res a Turcis per septennium gestae (München: Raphael Sadeler, 1620). 38 Ernst Dieter Petritsch, “Fremderfahrungen kaiserlicher Diplomaten im Osmanischen Reich (1500– 1648),” in Michael Rohrschneider and Arno Strohmeyer (eds.), Wahrnehmungen des Fremden, 345– 366, esp. 249. 39 See Teply, Kaiserliche Gesandtschaften.

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The non-believers like the Islamic peoples cannot be converted but should be killed “with the sword”.40 The Christian travellers reacted to Islam in different ways: whereas a Humanist like Busbecq was free of value judgements,41 the merchant and Humanist Hans Dernschwam was full of prejudice. His criticism of Islam, which he calls a “doggish religion”,42 is not theologically founded, but talks about formalities. He states that Turkish priests are uneducated donkeys who know nothing about music;43 talks about the public ritual washing as an act of prostitutes;44 and describes prayer in the mosque as the behaviour of geese putting their heads on the earth and their backsides in the air.45 His observation and analysis of Ottoman society is generally full of misunderstandings: he characterized the Turks as lazy, claiming only the slaves work; he also lacks insight into the specific structure of the cities and the legal system and characterizes Ottoman society as a peasant society.46 Other observations by travellers have to do with strange people and institutions. Strange figures like wire-dancers, wrestlers (pehlivans), courtiers wearing the fur of wild animals like lynx and leopard47 were observed by travellers; and many other impressions formed part of their description. Already in Buda one institution was visited that was very different from Western Europe, namely, the Turkish bath. Not all travellers enjoyed it, for the warm mineral water was not very good for one of the most frequent diseases, namely, gout.48 Thus what German or Austrian travellers experienced in the Ottoman Empire was ambiguous and depended on the far-from-uniform preconceptions of the Ottoman Empire they took with them. Whereas the popular prints and pamphlets (the Newe Zeitungen) would paint a very negative picture of the Ottoman Empire and the Turks, with considerable stress on the cruelty of the arch-foes of Christianity, the scourge of God seen mostly from a religious background, some of the travellers’ diaries would offer a more differentiated impression. Some of the rather positive aspects of Ottoman society (cleanliness, the efficient administration and judicial system and the lack of monks, seen as especially positive by the Protestants) can also be found in the descriptions of the journeys of that period. However, in considering the different cultures in Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire there was also a mental border line to be crossed. The new and exotic world was, on the one hand, 40 Urs Bitterli, Alte Welt – neue Welt: Formen des europäisch-überseeischen Kulturkontakts vom 15. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert (München: Beck Verlag, 1986), 59. 41 See The Turkish letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq (note 37). 42 Hundtz religion, see Babinger, Dernschwam, 247. 43 „Ir pfaffen seind alle ungelertte esel – Wissen auch keine Musica nicht“, see Babinger, Dernschwam, 71. 44 „Darbey waschen sich also, wer do wjl, von dem gemainen volckh ein jeder offentlich, unuarschampt wie die altten huren“, see Babinger, Dernschwam, 71. 45 „Also thun die andern hernach wie die gense die kopffe auff die erden legen und die arsche in die hoche reckhen, wie tauch enten auff den theichen“, see Babinger, Dernschwam, 51. 46 Compare Pervin Tongay, “Die europäische Sicht auf den Fremden in den Berichten des 16. Jahrhunderts. Das Bild der Türken und Azteken im Vergleich,” in Marlene Kurz, Das Osmanische Reich und die Habsburgermonarchie, 393–411, esp. 399 f. 47 Schweigger, Ein newe Reyssbeschreibung; “Wolf Andreas von Steinachs Reisebericht (Beschreibung oder Verzaichnusz des Wegs, der Stätt, Orth und Fleckhen von Steinach aus dem Enstall im lande Styer auf Constantinopel zue, wie ichs, Wolf Andre von Stainach, Anno 1583 geraist mit dem wolgeboren Herrn Herrn Pauln Freiherrn von Eytzing …),” Steirische Geschichtsblätter 2 (1881): 195–254; Adam Wenner, Tagebuch der kaiserlichen Gesandtschaft nach Konstantinopel 1616–1618, ed. by Karl Nehring (München: Finnisch-Ugrisches Seminar an der Universität München, 1984). 48 Teply, Kaiserliche Gesandtschaften, 119–121.

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perceived with fear and led to xenophobic reactions; on the other hand, it was experienced as fascinatingly new and led to forms of exoticism which in the Early Modern Period were manifested in numerous engravings and paintings depicting this different Oriental world.

Europe in German Historiography before 1815 Martin Espenhorst 1. “The world has existed for 6000 years, which is a long, unbelievably long time”, wrote August Ludwig Schlözer,1 the historian and member of the Enlightenment, in his work on universal history in 1772.2 It was in the nineteenth century that the history of the world would acquire an entirely new temporal magnitude, initially based on archaeological evidence from construction projects amongst other things; and later, after World War II, due to astronomical research. Today we reach as far back as 10 to 15 billion years: the Big Bang, dinosaurs, Neanderthals. Are pre-modern studies on universal history thus obsolete?3 Or are they interesting precisely because of new challenges in a globalized world? Or even because some people are working on new world histories, such as the representatives of the religious right in the US who are trying to explain the world in biblical rather than scientific and archeological terms? However, there are many more reference points for Early Modern works on universal history than already mentioned, one of which is the spatial and temporal order and classification of the world. After all, the modern man of the twenty-first century also classifies the world into the first world, the emerging and developing world, East and West, centre and periphery. Pre-modern works on universal history are thus important sources if one is interested in what people did and did not know about continents, people, countries, cities, nobility and the Church Fathers; and if one wishes to know what they considered to be truthful and reliable information on spaces, locations and borders. Universal histories mirror what people thought about the world and its order. They established systems, hierarchies and tableaus of people, nations and states, established their borders and spaces and cemented differences that shape our mental maps and collective consciousness to this day. Universal histories, in Germany, were the supreme aspiration of Enlightened historiography before 1815 and the establishment of Historicism in the nineteenth century.4 On the one 1 August Ludwig Schlözer, Vorstellung Seiner Universal-Historie (Göttingen – Gotha: Dieterich, 1772), 59. 2 (Selection:) August Ludwig v. Schlözer, Vorstellung seiner Universal-Historie (1772/73): mit Beilagen [Nachdruck der Ausgabe (Göttingen – Gotha: Dieterich, 1772)]. New edition by Walter Blanke (Waltrop: Spenner, 1997). 3 Wolfgang E. J. Weber, “Universalgeschichte,” in Michael Maurer (ed.), Aufriß der Historischen Wissenschaften, vol. 2: Räume (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2001), 15–98. 4 Ulrich Muhlack, Geschichtswissenschaft im Historismus und in der Aufklärung. Die Vorgeschichte des Historismus (München: Beck, 1991).

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hand, only few scholars dared to embark on such an ambitious path; and even fewer were able to succeed. On the other hand, we can find a great number of publications in English, French, German, Italian and Latin. From around 1660, a new universal or world history was published somewhere in Europe almost every year, not always a work in its own right, but a new anthology, an introduction, a translation, a list of tables or a map, a new edition or a sequel. Quite often universal histories were not completed; and sometimes they resembled log-style questionnaires, especially when they were supposed to serve as textbooks. There is a wealth of publications from around 1500 to around 1800 which has never been sufficiently researched. The published images alone would provide enough material for a research project; and given that abundance of source material, universal histories lend themselves particularly well to an examination of the global image of “Europe” at the time, as well as the evolution of its self-image. This chapter will offer some initial ideas and insights into this topic. In the context of world history, how was Europe constructed? How did people describe and interpret it, differentiate it from other continents, morph and translate it? This chapter discusses Early Modern “Europe” as a continent, an idea and an area of peace and culture. 2. The early world chronicles – i.e., by Hartmann Schedel (1493),5 Johannes Naucler (1516)6 or even Johann Carion (1533)7 – are partly based on the theory of the six or seven ages of the world by Isidore of Seville and Augustine respectively; and partly on the teaching of the Four Empires – the Babylonian Empire of Nebuchadnezzar, the Median/Persian Empire, the Alexandrian or Greek Empire and the Roman Empire, a classification that also determines Carion’s new chronicle edition of 1572. The Protestant-influenced works of Johann Sleidan8 at the end of the sixteenth and Johann Boecler9 in the seventeenth century shaped the writing of universal history for a while.10 Around 1685–1694, Christoph Cellarius11 restructured the system of universal history into ancient, medieval and modern history, creating the order that is in place to this day. Even if this canonical classification were not uncontested, a Göttingen scholar, August Ludwig Schlözer,12 intentionally deviated from it, favouring a two-age solution by excluding the medieval period. Nevertheless, the universal history by Cellarius is considered a milestone in 5 Hartmann Schedel, Weltchronik. Nachdruck [der] kolorierten Gesamtausgabe von 1493, with an introduction and commentary by Stephan Füssel (Augsburg: Weltbild, 2004). 6 Johann Naucler, Memorabilium omnis aetatis et omnium gentium chronici commentarii (Tübingen: Anshelm, 1516). 7 Johannes Carion, Chronica durch M. Johan. Carion vleissig zusamen gezogen, meniglich nützlich zu lesen (Wittenberg: Rhau, 1533). 8 Johann Sleidan, De quattuor summis imperiis (Argentorati: Rihel, 1556). 9 Johann Boecler, Historia universalis a mundo condito usque ad Christi nativitatem; praemittitur ejusdem Historia principum schola, itemq[ue] Dissertatio de utilitate ex historia universali capienda (Argentorati: Schmuck, 1680). 10 (Selection:) Matthias Pohlig, Zwischen Gelehrsamkeit und konfessioneller Identitätsstiftung: Lutherische Kirchen- und Universalgeschichtsschreibung 1546–1617 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007). 11 Christoph Cellarius, Historia Vniversalis. Breviter Ac Perspicve Exposita, In Antiqvam, Et Medii Aevi Ac Novam Divisa, Cvm Notis Perpetvis (Ienae: Bielckius, 1720). 12 Martin Peters, Altes Reich und Europa. Der Historiker, Statistiker und Publizist August Ludwig (v.) Schlözer (1735–1809) (Münster: LIT, 2003 [2nd edition 2005]).

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historiography. From 1770 onwards, apart from talking about “universal history” or “world history”, scholars coined the terms “human history” or “history of humankind” and began to publish the first “cultural histories”, inspired by fledgling studies on natural history.13 The year 1815 was an important date because the great projects of the Leipzig World History and the translation of the Halle World History ended. The multi-volume work by Christoph Schlosser, which started publication in 1815, is the latest of the works in the period under consideration. In German historiography it marks the shift from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, creating a link between the History of the Enlightenment and Leopold von Ranke. Universal history has been much less researched than might be expected, a fact that was recognized at the Conference of German Historians in Aachen in 2000, when they introduced a section entitled “World Histories/Histories of Worlds: Universal History in the Early Modern Period”. At that conference, a number of important topics in the history of Early Modern universal history were identified. Here four main aspects will be presented, modified and expanded. Universal histories were primarily concerned with reconciling biblical information about the earth, its countries and people with that from historical sources as well as first-hand experience from journeys and expeditions. Indeed, in Early Modern times there was a great need to write universal histories, if only because people were faced with a flood of new information and knowledge from all over the world which somehow had to be squared with the existing biblical status quo ante. We tend to talk about the secularization of universal history, meaning the move from biblical history towards mundane, general and political history; or the marginalization of the biblical world order, including its concept of the origin of mankind. Thus one can differentiate between profane-political and religious universal histories; while the latter, after the Reformation, were inspired by either Catholic or Protestant theologies. All in all, readers were not necessarily interested only in the strange and different, but also in what they considered their own. Not only did Europeans’ attempts to create an image of what was “other” and strange, of far-away, exotic continents, remain “idiosyncratically European” – e.g., research on China barely scratched the surface for a long time – but so did their look at themselves. Universal histories, at least the later ones, qualified and compared the contribution of different countries, people and states to world history. Universal history was written in the Early Modern period, at a time when history was increasingly turning into a scientific field in its own right; and it was not a coincidence that, first, this was also a time when people were seeking theological and religious self-assurance and confirmation. Second, pre-modern states and polity as well as the pre-modern state system were being created. Universal and world histories were organized according to epochs and periods that often related to peace treaties, underlining, describing and evaluating different political and constitutional forms of organization. The authors of universal histories in the eighteenth century were, therefore, particularly interested in international law and the practices of peace treaties. In 1754, the Umständliche Geschichte der Europäischen Friedensschlüsse und Verträge was published (the French original was written by Gabriel Bonnot de Mably with annotations by Jean Rousset de Missy); it addressed the significance of European peace treaties from the perspective of universal history, calling peace treaties the archives of na-

13 Thomas Nutz, “Varietäten des Menschengeschlechts”. Die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in der Zeit der Aufklärung (Köln: Böhlau, 2009).

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tions, “containing the works of all peoples, their mutually binding promises, the laws to which they have subjected themselves and the rights they have achieved or lost.”14 This brings us straight to the idea of making pre-modern peace treaties accessible and collecting them. As early as 1751, an encyclopedia of pre-modern peace treaties was published, the title of which pointed to the significance of European peace treaties from the perspective of universal history. The goal of the encyclopedia was to “provide the equivalent of a universal state history, primarily of more recent times”.15 Universal history – and this aspect has never been actively studied to this day – has always been a history of peace as well. Indeed, there was no lack of inner-European conflicts at the times of the Thirty Years’ War and the Reformation. Third, universal histories developed in a European scientific area. They were often translated into other languages; and the process of transferring knowledge (or the lack thereof) often resulted in adaptations that could prove contentious. A tight network existed between England, the Holy Roman Empire, France and the Netherlands, a collaboration that led to the work published in Halle by the theologians Sigmund Jakob Baumgarten and Johann Salomon Semler over a period of more than half a century, from 1744 to 1814. The title reveals the interweaving between the different contributing countries, since it was based on an English-language edition, with adaptations of the Dutch annotations: Uebersetzung der Algemeinen Welthistorie die in Engeland durch eine Geselschaft von Gelehrten ausgefertiget worden.16 Fourth, universal histories were increasingly concerned with phenomena of natural history. Aside from contemporary political theory and Oriental Studies, there were many other important influences on universal history: the scientific observations by Carl von Linné and many of his students; and later those by Georges-Louis Buffon; as well as reports and pictures from the travels of James Cook and George Forster to Tahiti. 3. The authors of universal and world histories faced a number of special challenges. They had to master as many languages as possible; to have access to the relevant literature – a well-stocked library nearby was a must – and be knowledgeable not only in history, but also philosophy, theology, geography, statistics and political science; and, starting in the 1770s, anthropology as well. In the second half of the eighteenth century it became increasingly 14 Gabriel Bonnot Mably, Umständliche Geschichte der europäischen Friedens-Schlüsse und Verträge zur Erläuterung der gegenwärtigen Kriegs-Unruhen. Nebst denen wichtigen Anm. des Hrn. Rousset aus dem Franz. ins Dt. übers. (Frankfurt/M.: J. G. Garbe, 1756). 15 Christian Friedrich Hempel, Allgemeines Europäisches Staats-Rechts-Lexicon, oder Repertorium Aller, sonderlich in den letzt verwichenen 5. Seculis, bis auf heutigen Tag, zwischen den hohen Mächten, in ganz Europa, geschlossenen Friedens-Allianz-Freundschafts-Commercien- und anderer HauptTractaten, auch der eigenen Fundamental-Gesetze eines Staats; so unter ihre gehörigen Titul, und diese in Alphabetische Ordnung, gebracht worden: Dabey man überdieß jedem Tractate eine gründliche Geschichte desselben vorgesetzt, nichtsweniger das Werck, zur Erläuterung, mit andern HistorischGeographischen Anmerckungen, auch darzu dienlichen Genealogischen Tabellen, versetzen; Daß es mithin, Statt einer Univeral-Staats-Historie, vornemlich der neuern Zeiten, in gewisser Masse, dienen kann (Franckfurth – Leipzig: Spring, 1751). 16 Siegmund Jakob Baumgarten (ed.), Uebersetzung der Algemeinen Welthistorie die in Engeland durch eine Geselschaft von Gelehrten ausgefertiget worden: Nebst den Anmerkungen der holländischen Uebersetzung auch vielen neuen Kupfern und Karten, vol. 1 (Halle: Gebauer, 1744).

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important to become an integrated part of the academic community at universities; and towards the middle of the eighteenth century, the discipline of history was far too well established to offer much room for dilettantes and writers crossing over from other fields. As noted in the introduction: not everyone was suited to writing a universal history. Johann Gottfried Herder and Friedrich Schiller, Jean-Jacques Bossuet or Voltaire, despite the considerable attention they later attracted, were outsiders and shaped universal history before 1815 less than might appear today, mainly because their works were not published before the end of the eighteenth century. Thus Friedrich Schiller’s definition in the essay Was heißt oder zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte17 has been considered a classic by succeeding generations, but not by his contemporaries in the eighteenth century. More influential universal historians of the Early Modern period include the astrologer and astronomer Carion (1499–1537) from Magdeburg; the French-Dutch-German diplomat and jurist Sleidan (1506–1556); the English – almost forgotten – theologian Simpson (1578–1651); the theologian and linguist Helwig (1581–1617) from Gießen; the Professor of Eloquence Boxhorn from Leiden; the Strasbourg Professor of Rhetorics and History Boecler (1611–1672); or the German-Dutch historian Offerhaus (1699–1779) – to name but a few of the significant universal historians from England, France, the Empire and the Netherlands. The list also covers much of the area where works on universal history originated. These include Nuremberg, Wittenberg, Halle and Göttingen as well as Strasbourg, Leiden, Groningen, London and Paris. In addition there was the Danish Professor of History in Copenhagen, Ludwig Baron Holberg, whose Kurze Vorstellung in die allgemeine WeltHistorie (“Short Introduction to Universal History”)18 was translated into several languages during the eighteenth century. We cannot, however, count Poland in this group, although many universal histories, such as the one by Schedel, had focused on Poland. The biographies of universal historians differed from one another in many ways: Johann Christoph Eichhorn, a professor at Göttingen around 1800 and author of the Weltgeschichte (1818–1820), only left his house to go to the nearby auditorium. His teacher and mentor August Ludwig Schlözer, however, lived in Sweden and Russia for several years. The life of Sir Walter Raleigh (c. 1552–1618), who published his world history in 1614, is even worthy of a film. Through his seafaring he had explored a number of countries and continents, including Europe, the West Indies and South America, yet he only found the time to write his History of the World (1614) while in prison for 13 years. Another, very different, kind of story was the life of the universal historian Johann Sleidan (1506–1556), who kept crossing and mediating between law and diplomacy, theory and practice. The Portuguese missionary Francisco Álvares (1465–1540), co-author of Cosmographia, which had been translated into German and was well-known in the Empire until the end of the sixteenth century, travelled as far as Ethiopia and India with his calling. From today’s perspective, the biography of the French universal historian Pierre d’Avity (1573–1635) is also of considerable interest. His main work was published from 1613 onward: Les Estats, empires, et principautéz du monde: 17 Thomas Prüfer, Die Bildung der Geschichte. Friedrich Schiller und die Anfänge der modernen Geschichtswissenschaft (Köln: Böhlau, 2002); Ulrich Muhlack, “Schillers Konzept der Universalgeschichte zwischen Aufklärung und Historismus,” in Otto Dann (ed.), Schiller als Historiker (Stuttgart – Weimar: Metzler, 1995), 5–28. 18 (Selection:) Ludvig Baron von Holberg, Kurze Vorstellung der allgemeinen Welt-Historie (Synopsis Historiae Universalis) in Frag und Antwort, zum Gebrauch der ersten Anfänger (Berlin – Stralsund: Lange, 1771).

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représentez par la description des pays, moeurs des habitans, richesses des provinces, les forces, le gouvernement, la religion, et les princes qui ont gouverné chacun estat.19 Ludwig Gottfried (1584–1633), who collaborated closely with Matthäus Merian, translated it into German and also wrote his own chronicle that was in use up to the eighteenth century. Pierre d’Avity improved on his research methods by undertaking expeditions around the world and drawing on them in his work. 4. For a long time the authors differentiated between just three continents: Africa, Asia and Europe. America was still called an island in a work on universal history as late as 1576 and subsumed into the New World together with the Magellan Islands. America, Asia, Africa Europe and Magellana were the five known continents at the end of the sixteenth century. This began to change in 1600 and America was included in the continental club. Still, even Pierre d’Avity’s famous Les Estats, empires, et principautéz du monde talked about the West Indies instead of America. It becomes clear that these continents formed some kind of space-time-continuum. Schlözer’s Universal-Historie, published in 1772, is a good example. Creation – Flood – Moses – these are epochal thresholds from the Bible placed by Schlözer in the early era. Troy and the foundation of Rome followed. Recent history – that is, more recent universal history – began, according to Schlözer, with the “small people from Westfalia” – the Franks. Schlözer himself, a Frank from Hohenlohe, certainly displayed a Euro-centric perspective here, yet possibly it was even more strongly influenced by regional history. Next he starts to address Europe. In Schlözer’s universal history, Europe evolves from the partition of the Roman Empire by Theodosius; and with it began not the medieval but the new era: that is, old history is immediately followed by new history. Despite Cellarius, Schlözer does not include a section on “middle history”. To him, Europe was both a continent and an epoch, a space of change, of revolution and new beginning. Europe plays a special role in the early world chronicles – as a frame of reference, i.e., for the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. This includes the world chronicle published in 1493 by Hartmann Schedel. Schedel divides the world into seven ages: Creation of the world – Flood – birth of Abraham – King David’s Empire (about 1000 BC till the Babylonian Exile) – birth of Christ – the present. The seventh era deals with the Anti-Christ, death and the end of all things as well as Judgment Day. Schedel describes the sixth era as being rich in “profane” news, including its cities, popes, kings, princes and other personalities living in and outside Europe. Europe receives a separate chapter, which is added like an appendix after the seventh and last era – a kind of post-history, written by Piccolomini. Schedel does not try to systematize the European countries, but rather “journeys” through them. This tour d’Europe of the seventh and last age “Das letst alter” begins in what is now Eastern Europe20 – that is (starting on fol. CCLXIII) in Poland – and leads the readers via Hungary and Wallachia to Turkey and Greece, Croatia, Germany, Prussia, Frisia, Franconia, Bavaria, Alsace, Saxony and Austria, then to Denmark, Sweden and Norway. It ends with Spain and 19 Pierre d’Avity, Les Estats, Empires, Et Principavtez Dv Monde. Representez par la Description des Pays, moeurs des habitans […]. Auec L’origine de toutes les Religions, et de tous les Cheualiers et ordres Militaires (Paris: Chevalier, 1613). 20 Füssel points out that it is not a closed concept, but only supplements. Schedel, Weltchronik. Kolorierte Gesamtausgabe von 1493, 666. This position cannot and should not be questioned.

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Portugal. Particular attention is paid to Eastern European countries such as Poland; and the Turks appear in a clearly negative light. The chronicle ends with praising the German nation in the context of Europe, its rise and bloom: Nun ist Germania oder Teuetsche nation von den alten Geschichtschreibern viel versäumt. Denn damals waren ihre innere und heimatliche Gegend oder Zugang mit Wasserflüssen verhindert. Aber nach Hinlegung der abergöttischen Anbetung und nach Annehmung christlichen Wesens ist diese teuetsch nation züchtiger worden und zu grossem Aufschwung gekommen.

(Germania or the German nation was overlooked by the old historiographers, because access to its interior and home regions had been hindered by waterways. Yet after it renounced its heathen worship and embraced Christianity, this German nation has become more virtuous and experienced a great upswing in its fortunes.)21 This section describes the phenomenon of the German nation’s cultural rise and in other parts that of Europe itself. According to Schedel, geographical barriers had prevented the necessary exchanges for cultural refinement, and the scholars in the eighteenth century pursued that idea. Johann Christoph Gatterer, for instance, attributed the rise of the small Europe, which had been held back by “barbaric darkness” and “ignorance”, to the transfer of knowledge with African and Asian peoples. The story about the “refinement” of Europe as a historical process is therefore hardly an invention by the Enlightenment, but rather a stereotypical theme in universal history. Europe is thus constructed according to a) space and time; as well as b) progress. Another aspect is the religious one. The first sentence in the German translation of Francisco Álvares’ General-Chronicen from 157622 is: Europa. Dieses ist der Theil deß Erdbodems / welches wir heutiges tages die Christenheit nennen.23 Christianity and Europe were basically synonymous. However, Álvares goes on to say that the Christian faith had been eradicated by the Turks in some places. Schedel, too, heavily criticizes Turkey, lamenting the Ottomans’ supposedly poor contribution to cultural development. The edition by Carion from 1578 even includes Melanchthon’s essay as an appendix: Von notwendigkeit des Kriegs wider [...] die T[ue]rcken. Interestingly, the calumny of the Turks was reduced in the course of the seventeenth century. Schlözer even labelled them a “noble people”. However, some ideas on Europe persisted over the centuries and were adopted without question by Enlightenment philosophers. The space-quality relationship is another topic that was repeated until the eighteenth century. The argument went that, despite being the smallest part of the world, Europe was nevertheless the best and later also the most enlightened one. Francisco Álvares, in his General-Chroniken, differentiates between three inner-European areas: a) the most noble provinces of Europe; b) the Nordic landscapes; and c) islands. Russia is, as a matter of course, counted among the noble provinces; England, Scotland and Ireland among the is21 Hartmann Schedel, Weltchronik (Nürnberg, 1493), fol. 286r. 22 Francisco Álvares, General Chronicen: Das ist: Warhaffte eigent=liche vnd kurtze Beschreibung vieler namhaffter [...] Landtschafften / Erstlich deß [...] Herrn Priester Johanns ... Kœnigreichen vnd Herrschafften [...] Zum andern ein gemeine Beschreibung deß gantzen Erdbodens / in drey Buecher getheilt [...] Zum dritten vnd letzten / ein kurtzer Summarischer doch verstendtlicher Außzug vnd Beschreibung derneuw erfun=denen Jnseln / Americe vnd Magellane [...] Pauli Orosij [...] Jetzt auffs neuw ...ver=teutscht [...], hg. v. Sigmundt Feyrabendt (Frankfurt/M.: Reffeler, 1576). 23 Ibid., 1.

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lands. The Europeans, according to Álvares, excel among all peoples in astuteness, audacity and perception, so much so that they “have almost conquered the entire world.” Schlözer – and his universal history is used as a foil here – divides Europe into a southern and a northern half, as opposed to a nobler northern one and islands. He also differentiates between a number of additional countries; yet he, too, argues that Europe dominates the rest of the world. This proves that even the fledgling criticism of European colonialism was hardly an idea original to the Enlightenment. The above-mentioned French nobleman Pierre d’Avity undertakes quite a different, rather empirical analysis as early as 1613/1620. In a manner similar to Schedel, he “walks through” the individual countries, starting in England, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Italy, the Holy Roman Empire, Poland, Denmark, Sweden etc. China, Persia and Turkey are covered in separate chapters, as well as the possessions of European states in America, Asia and Africa. Finally, we turn to once more one aspect of the European state system: the balance of power, a common justification for political events in universal histories. One example is the work by Johann Georg Essich (1645–1705), who died before his Kurze Einleitung zu der allgemeinen weltlichen Historie was published in 1707.24 A tenth edition came out in 1773. The balance of power appears as a phenomenon of universal history, not only starting with the work Utrecht/Rastatt/Baden (1712–1714), but already in the sixteenth century. The works of Essich and his successors even show some analogies to Asian political orders. On the one hand, this underlines the extent to which universal histories were politicized, legalized and converted toward the profane. On the other hand, however, some authors, including Schlözer, see the balance of power as an instrument for restoring a calm, peaceful order. According to the universal historians, Paradise was lost, irreversibly. However, they concede to humankind that they could and should create a stable and sustainable area of peace, despite the sobering reality of war. 5. Conclusion Throughout this chapter it has become obvious that German historiography is too limited a scope. After all, pre-modern writing on universal history reached out into a European, scientific area, where it was translated into many different languages. In the Holy Roman Empire, in particular, could be found scholars with the appropriate language skills who could translate from English, French or Dutch. Even if there were no conferences and conventions at the time, a European space of universal historiography did indeed exist. Scholars have often overlooked the fact that there were different types of universal and world histories in the Early Modern Period. This poses the danger of comparing apples with pears. The term universal and/or world history comprises all sorts of different formats, such as Bible stories, educational textbooks, Church histories and histories of nations. Another format is that of the philosophical universal history, which covers the basics of history, methods and approaches and often the beginning of development theories as well. However, those do not fall into the category of classic universal histories, since the latter rather address continents, their peoples and their history. In universal histories focusing on nations, Europe is presented as a success story – beginning with barbarianism and paganism and ending with the domination of the world. 24 Johann Georg Essich, Kurtze Einleitung zur Allgemeinen weltlichen Histori. Neben einer Zeit-Rechnung, und Erd-Beschreibung. Zum Gebrauch eines Fürstlichen Gymnasii (s.l. 1707).

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Surprisingly, the Greeks and Romans are marginalized compared to the North, i.e. the French and the Germans. It also became clear that, in a comparison between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, the hierarchies of inner-European countries and peoples were turned upside down. Schedel, for instance, starts his tour d’Europe in Poland in today’s socalled Eastern Europe, ending it in Spain and Portugal, while later writers took precisely the opposite direction. Universal histories are fascinating, not so much because of their philosophical and theoretical approach to history, but rather because they convey a contemporary tableau of states, peoples and landscapes. The question as to whether those were “true” or “false” is of minor importance. Rather, we should look at how the writers’ portrayal differs from that of their predecessors; and to what extent they were willing to adapt to new states of knowledge in multiple editions over the years. We should further study this kind of translation and the transfer of scholarship and content, because it would bring us closer to answering the question of how universal histories evolved and how knowledge was transmitted across spaces, borders and locations in the pre-modern period.

Negotiating Borders: Habsburg–Ottoman Peace Treaties of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Maria Baramova During the Early Modern period and the “revolution in cartography” a gradual transition from “diffusivity” to “linearity” took place in the way lines of delineation, and borders in general, were perceived and visualized.1 This change can, of course, be tracked primarily in Central, Western and Northern Europe, while in the South-East, where the dominant power was the Ottoman Empire, a kind of “open frontier” continued to exist until the end of the seventeenth century.2 It was only with the peace treaty signed with the Habsburgs in 1699 that the Ottomans agreed to a joint border commission being formed which had the task of drawing up the new borders in places where natural boundary markers were missing.3 One such place was the territory of the Temesvár Banat, which remained in the possession of the Sultan and where borders had to be fixed in this new way. This strange belatedness in South-Eastern Europe can be explained by the specifics of European-Ottoman relations during the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, which were actually dominated by the Islamic interpretation of war and peace.4 The “discourse of borders”, whether in the sphere of practical politics or as a subject of legal and historical treatises, was fuelled not least by the increasing number of European military conflicts: it suffices to recall the Thirty Years War in the seventeenth century or the War of the Spanish and Austrian Succession in the eighteenth century. Naturally, during the subsequent peace congresses an issue of paramount importance was the problem of delineation, the future of territories or their division, not to mention the need for exact boundaries to be drawn on (political) maps. Of course, here we should also emphasize the role played 1 Steven G. Ellis, Raingard Eßer, “Introduction. Early Modern Frontiers in Comparative Context,” in Steven G. Ellis, Raingard Eßer (eds.), Frontiers and the Writing of History, 1500–1850 (Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2006), 14–15; Reinhard Schneider, “Lineare Grenzen. Vom frühen bis zum späten Mittelalter,” in Wolfgang Haubrichs, Reinhard Schneider (eds.), Grenzen und Grenzregionen. Frontières et régions frontalières. Borders and Border Regions (Saarbrücken: Saarbrücker Dr. und Verl., 1993), 51–68. 2 Maria Baramova, “Border Theories in Early Modern Europe / Grenzvorstellungen im Europa der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Europäische Geschichte Online (EGO), hg. vom Institut für Europäische Geschichte (IEG), Mainz European History Online (EGO), published by the Institute of European History (IEG), Mainz December 3, 2010, accessed June 15, 2014, http://www.ieg-ego.eu/baramovam-2010-de URN: urn:nbn:de:0159-2010092151. 3 Rifaat A. Abou-el-Haj, “The Formal Closure of the Ottoman Frontier in Europe: 1699–1703,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 89:3 (1969): 469–470. 4 Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, Geschichte des Osmanischen Reiches. Grossentheils aus bisher unbenützten Handschriften und Archiven, vol. 7 (Pest: C. A. Hartleben, 1831), 24 ff.

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by the new media (journals, newspapers, etc.) in the public’s visualization of boundaries and concepts of frontier.5 What actually characterized the process of negotiating borders if we look at HabsburgOttoman conflict in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? At first we should, of course, recall that although contacts between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans date back to the midfifteenth century, in practice the “Turkish problem” was actually put on the political agenda of the Holy Roman Empire only after the Battle of Mohács (1526).6 The first Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1529 shocked the Christians of Central Europe to such an extent that any doubts about the true intentions of the Sublime Porte disappeared; and as a consequence military confrontation with the Sultan soon became a major problem for the Habsburg rulers. This “clash of empires” was also marked by a clear-cut ideological confrontation: the Ottomans led the a Holy War (Jihad/gaza) against Christendom, while the Habsburgs were the defenders of the Res publica Christiana. In this, at least, agreement ruled on both sides. Despite some Habsburg successes at the Battle of Lepanto (1571) or the Battle of St. Gotthard (1664) before the early 1680s, the Sublime Porte managed to maintain its supremacy in East Central Europe and the Balkans. The second Ottoman siege of Vienna (1683), however, became a turning point after which the Habsburgs abandoned their defensive position and gradually began to raise imperial claims to South-East Europe. The eighteenth century was a period of transition for Habsburg-Ottoman relations. While in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Ottomans had almost entirely dominated them, after the Peace of Karlowitz (1699) the Habsburgs launched an active policy aimed at expansion in Eastern European and Balkan lands, hitherto ruled by the Sultan.7 Although the monarchs in Vienna did not manage to retain their claim to supremacy in the Balkans in the long run, also coming under pressure from Russian ambitions regarding Constantinople and the Peninsula in general, the Austrian Habsburgs nevertheless became an important factor in South-East European politics. Despite the three Habsburg-Ottoman wars in the eighteenth century, relations between Vienna and Constantinople/Istanbul remained relatively calm and balanced. Moreover, after 1699 the overall picture of the Ottomans in Europe changed considerably – the “arch-enemy of Christianity” gradually became the “exotic strangers from the East”, ruling one giant non-Christian state that was uncivilized and backward, but which was no longer a threat to either the Holy Roman Empire or to the res publica Christiana.8 From its very beginning the state of the Ottoman Turks grew and developed into a global empire thanks to an ideology oriented towards constant military expansion. Therefore, the idea of a border in its classic sense was actually absent, more or less according to the principle: If you want to conquer the world, you are not supposed to stop fighting, that is, to agree 5 See Martin Wrede, Das Reich und seine Feinde. Politische Fernbilder in der Reichspatriotischen Publizistik zwischen westfälischem Frieden und Siebenjährigem Krieg (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2004); Ivan Parvev, Land in Sicht. Südosteuropa in den deutschen politischen Zeitschriften des 18. Jahrhunderts (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2008), 80–90; 131–137; 183–187. 6 Winfried Schulze, Reich und Türkengefahr im späten 16. Jahrhundert. Studien zu den politischen Auswirkungen einer äußeren Bedrohung (München: C. H. Beck, 1978); Carl Göllner, Turcica: Die europäischen Türkendrücke des XVI. Jahrhunderts, vol. 3 (Bukarest: Editura Academiei R.P.R., 1978). 7 Ivan Parvev, “‘Krieg der Welten’ oder ‘Balance of Power’: Europa und die Osmanen, 1300–1856,” in Irene Dingel, Matthias Schnettger (eds.), Auf dem Weg nach Europa: Deutungen, Visionen, Wirklichkeiten (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), 131–145. 8 Wrede, Das Reich und Seine Feinde, 210–216.

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to a border (and peace) with your enemy. The so-called “Uj culture” to which the Ottomans adhered was designed not to reinforce the existing frontier but rather to expand it through military pressure.9 This tradition was also preserved after the Ottoman conquest of SouthEast Europe. The “border” continued to be a more-or-less floating, ever-expanding reality created by military commanders and units, sometimes acting on their own and almost independently of the central Ottoman government. The main objective of this “Uj culture” was offensive attack, not a defensive strengthening of an already established border line.10 The problem of establishing and fixing borders in the context of Habsburg-Ottoman relations went through different stages which were directly related to the ups and downs of the military conflict between the two powers in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. The decades between the end of the fourteenth and the middle of the sixteenth century had been characterized by successful and aggressive Ottoman expansion – a glorious time for the Sultans, when defining borders was regarded as useless. These wide areas of conflict witnessed continuous military clashes between Christians and Muslims which essentially corresponded to the Islamic concept of a “World of War” (darü’l-harb).11 Since the Jihad, or Holy War against the infidels, was in theory regarded as permanent – which meant that “eternal peace” with Christian rulers and states was not meant to exist – the division of territories after a “ceasefire agreement” or “truce” between the warring parties had to have the character of a “demarcation line” and of a “permanent border”. Of course, we should not forget here the two intermediate categories of “borderness” according to Islamic law: the “World of Jihad” (darü’l-cihad), relating to territories already in Muslim hands but not yet firmly conquered and ruled by Muslims; and the “World of Covenant” (darü’l-’ahd) – a term relating to Muslim lands where non-Muslims were allowed to live after paying a poll tax, the so-called ciziye.12 Only at the end of the seventeenth century, when the Ottomans suffered their first political and military disaster, were they forced to accept the understanding of borders which had already established itself as a concept in international relations inside Christian Europe. As already mentioned, the peace treaty of Karlowitz marked the end of Ottoman expansion in Central Europe and was, at the same time, the starting point for Habsburg advance into the Balkans. If we compare these two periods – the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries on the one hand and the eighteenth century on the other – we find several differences between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans when it comes to “negotiating the border”.13 The first 9 The idea of the so-called “border society” was suggested for the first time at the beginning of the twentieth century by the Austrian historian Paul Wittek. See Paul Wittek, The Rise of the Ottoman Empire, edited by Colin Heywood (London: Routledge, 2012); Paul Wittek, La Formation de l’Empire Ottoman, edited by V. L. Ménage (London: Ashgate, 1982). Cf. Halil İnalcık, “Periods in Ottoman History, State, Society, Economy,” in Halil İnalcık, Günsel Renda (eds.), Ottoman Civilization (Ankara: Ministry of Culture, 2004), 41–59. 10 Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, “Between Universalistic Claims and Reality: Ottoman Frontiers in the Early Modern Period,” in Christine Woodhead (ed.), The Ottoman World (London – New York: Routledge, 2012), 204–208. 11 Viorel Panaite, The Ottoman Law of War and Peace: The Ottoman Empire and Tribute Payers (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 84–86; 111. 12 See more: Kołodziejczyk, “Between Universalistic Claims and Reality,” 206. 13 Karl-Heinz Ziegler, “The Peace Treaties of the Ottoman Empire with European Christian Powers,” in Randall Lesaffer (ed.), Peace Treaties and International Law in European History. From the Late Middle Ages to World War One (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 338–364.

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to stand out is the following: with the Treaty of Karlowitz the diffuse boundary between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans in Central Europe was transformed into a clear, fixed border of a linear type separating two neighboring countries rather than being more or less a battlefield for a Kleinkrieg – or, rather, for systematic Ottoman raids into Habsburg lands in times of peace.14 This in turn resolved the dispute about border zones in some Hungarian areas, which in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were actually the subject of joint rule, a curious Ottoman-Habsburg “condominium” in the border belt of villages.15 In the spring of 1699 border commissions agreed for the first time to identify and fix a real border between the two empires; and for this purpose they used natural markers like rivers (the Danube, Tisza, Maros, etc.), but also man-made artefacts like boundary stones and castles, some of which were to be erased.16 According to the provisions of the Treaty of Karlowitz, Belgrade, the Temesvár Banat and a small part of Syrmia were to remain under Ottoman rule, this time with precise borders and clearly differentiated from Habsburg domains.17 One of the most important features of the peace talks between Vienna and Constantinople was the principle of uti possidetis, which was strictly adhered to during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This meant in practice that the new border, no matter how diffuse it might become after that, should mirror the demarcation line in place after the last HabsburgOttoman military campaign. Such was the case with the Treaties of Zsitvatorok (1606), Vasvár (1664) and, of course, Karlowitz (1699).18 After 1699 this principle was still adopted, but not always and not very strictly. For example, according to the Treaty of Belgrade (1739)19 and the Peace of Sistova (1791)20 the Habsburgs had to return Belgrade to the Ottomans, although the fortress was still in Habsburg hands and had not been conquered by the Turks. In the first case Austrian rule in Belgrade lasted for more than twenty years; in the second, for nearly two. In other words, through negotiation the Sublime Porte twice managed to become master of a city which the Ottoman troops had not previously taken by storm. Until the end of the seventeenth century the Habsburgs never fought their Turkish wars alone but relied on the military and political assistance of their allies against the Sultan. Vienna preferred, quite understandably, not to abandon its partners and sign a separate treaty with the Ottomans. The phenomenon of pax separata was therefore unknown in 14 See Colin Heywood, “The Frontier in Ottoman History: Old Ideas and New Myths,” in Daniel Power, Naomi Standen (eds.), Frontiers in Question. Eurasian Borderlands, 700–1700 (New York: Macmillan, 1999), 241–242; Cf. Abou-el-Haj, “The Formal Closure,” 467–468. 15 For more about the existence of the so-called condominium see Gabor Agoston, “Flexible Empire: Authority and its Limits on the Ottoman Frontiers,” International Journal of Turkish Studies 9 (2003): 23–27; Kołodziejczyk, “Between Universalistic Claims and Reality,” 208. 16 “Friede von Karlowitz”, in Theatrum Europaeum, oder außführliche und warhafftige Beschreibung aller und jeder denckwürdiger. Theatri Europaei Continuati Funffzehender Theil, vol. 15: Das ist: Abermalige Außführliche Fortsetzung Denck- und Merckwürdigster Geschichten, Welche ihrer gewöhnlichen Eintheilung nach an verschiedenen Orten durch Europa, Wie auch in denen übrigen Welt-Theilen vom Jahr 1696 an biß zu Ende dieses Seculi 1700 sich begeben und zugetragen (Frankfurt am Mayn, 1707), 518–523. Cf. “Peace Treaty of Carlowitz,” in Treaties, etc. between Turkey and Foreign Powers, 1535–1855 (London: Foreign Office, 1855), 48–51. 17 “Friede von Karlowitz”: articles no II–V; Cf. Karl-Heinz Ziegler, “Völkerrechtliche Beziehungen zwischen der Habsburgermonarchie und der Hohen Pforte,” Zeitschrift für Neuere Rechtsgeschichte 18 (1998): 177–195. 18 Ziegler, “The Peace Treaties,” 345–346. 19 “Definitive Treaty of Peace. – Belgrade, September 18, 1739,” in Treaties, etc., 93–103, article no 1. 20 “Treaty of Peace. Sistovo, August 4, 1791,” in Treaties, etc., 124–131.

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Habsburg-Ottoman peace negotiations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was only at the end of the eighteenth century that Vienna signed its first really separate peace with the Sublime Porte in 1791. Their Russian ally was, of course, informed, but the fact that Catherine the Great knew about Austria’s intentions could hardy hide the fact that the Habsburgs had abandoned their allies in the until-then joint Turkish war. To a certain extent the Peace of Belgrade of 1739 did have some elements of a separate agreement with the Ottomans, but as a whole the war of 1736–1739 was enclosed in the terms of a loyal alliance. The eighteenth century marks other important changes in the process of “negotiating borders and peace” between Vienna and Constantinople/Istanbul. Until 1698–1699 negotiations between the warring parties had been conducted without any intermediaries and were consequently the result of direct bilateral talks. Mediators were allowed to join in peace negotiations for the first time in the autumn of 1698, when the ambassadors from England and the Netherlands to the Ottoman capital arrived in Karlowitz. They must have played an important role in the relatively smooth process of negotiating the terms of peace. Starting with the end of the seventeenth century, a Habsburg-Ottoman peace treaty could also be the result of a peace congress and not necessarily the consequence of direct bilateral negotiations alone, quite often conducted at the front line itself. We have two classic examples for such peace congresses – that of Karlowitz (1699) and of Passarowitz (1718). Of course, we should emphasize here that the outcome of these congresses was not the drawing-up of one general treaty signed by all parties involved, but rather two or more bilateral agreements signed by the Sultan and one Christian power respectively. The first general treaty to end a military conflict with the Ottoman Empire in Europe was signed in Paris in 1856, when the Crimean War reached its final stages. Negotiating the border between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans in 1699 became a major turning point in the process of making and keeping peace between the two powers in the eighteenth century. However, during the decades after 1699 it turned out that greater geopolitical stability was enjoyed in those parts of the border that matched natural markers like the Rivers Danube, Tisza, Sava and Maros. It was, therefore, probably not necessarily a coincidence that Belgrade and the surrounding area remained in Austrian hands for only twenty years since, according to Prince Eugen, the front line of 1717, which later became the border of Passarowitz, was strategically very difficult to defend due to its lacking strong natural borders.21 It is interesting to observe how the process of “negotiating the border” was represented in the printed media of the eighteenth century. As a result of the widespread distribution of newspapers and political journals and, of course, as a result of the reading public’s desire to know everything about every war, the text of almost every Habsburg-Ottoman political agreement can be found printed, sometimes in extenso, in the original language or a German translation. In other words, “negotiating the border” as a political process was much more public and much more visible than had been the case during the two preceding centuries.22 Of course, the above-mentioned public sphere of the Habsburg-Ottoman peace process was not without its natural limits. For example, when in 1747 the Austrians negotiated with the Sublime Porte to remove from the Treaty of Belgrade (1739) the article stipulating that 21 Rhoads Murphey, “Twists and Turns in the Diplomatic Dialogue: the Politics of Peacemaking in the Early Eighteenth Century,” in Charles Ingrao, Nikola Samardžić, Jovan Pešalj (eds.), The Peace of Passarowitz, 1718 (West Lafayette: Pardue University Press, 2011), 77–78. 22 Parvev, Land im Sicht, passim.

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the peace should last for 26 years, wanting to make it permanent instead (“Entfristung”), none of the media mentioned a single detail of the negotiations or printed the full text, or even part of the Convention of 1747, which was signed by the two powers.23 When at the end of the eighteenth century a Russian statesman analysed the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (1774), he was quite laconic. In his view the agreement reflected the simple fact that Russia was powerful and the Ottoman Empire weak. Maybe he was not wrong. To borrow this metaphor, we can conclude that the peace agreements signed between Vienna and Constantinople in the eighteenth century also reflect the balance of power between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans. Of course, we should keep in mind that the HabsburgOttoman political equilibrium in the Balkans at that time was in reality much more balanced, including the process of “negotiating the border” with all its peculiarities.

23 See Maria Baramova, “Pax Belgradensis – Pax Perpetua? Deutungen und Missdeutungen in den deutschen Medien der 1740er Jahre,” in Martin Espenhorst (ed.), Unwissen und Missverständnisse im vormodernen Friedensprozess (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), 109–126.

The Process of Establishing the Border between Russia and the Ottoman Empire in the Peace Treaty of Adrianople (1713)1 Tatiana Bazarova Usually the history of war comes to an end with the signing of a peace treaty. As a rule, the fixing of the new frontier comes last, following the signing of official documents and the ratification of treaties. However, the process of creating official borders can be extended over months (even years) due to the impossibility of recording all nuances on paper. Russia and Sweden faced such problems after the conclusion of the Peace Treaty of Nystad, which had ended the Great Northern War (1700–1721). Furthermore, Russia and the Ottoman Empire had faced this problem even earlier, when the Peace Treaty of Adrianople was signed (1713). In November 1710 the Ottoman Empire declared war on Russia. According to the decree of Sultan Ahmed III, this war was the Turkish answer to military preparations by the Russian state (for instance, the creation of a navy on the Azov Sea and construction of fortresses along the border).2 The Pruth campaign became the culmination of this war. On 9 July 1711 the Russian army was surrounded by Ottoman troops three times greater in number. Although Field Marshal General Boris P. Sheremetev nominally commanded the Russian army, the actual leader of the troops was Peter the Great. In this extremely unfavorable to Russia situation the Tsar decided to appoint his Vice-Chancellor, Baron Peter P. Shafirov, to negotiate peace with the Turks. Of all the people in the Russian military camp he possessed the richest diplomatic experience. In his diploma of authorization is written: “Whatever Our Vice-Chancellor will generate and decide, that will be strong and indisputable”.3 In his instructions to Baron Shafirov the Tsar expressed his readiness to cede to the Sublime Porte the territories and fortresses won in the Azov campaigns of 1695–1696. Peter the Great was also ready to give back to the Swedes Livonia, Pskov and other provinces; and to recognize Stanislaw I Leszczyński as King of Poland.4 1 I would like to express my thanks to my colleague Maria Proskuriakova for help and advice in translating my article into English. 2 Pis’ma i Bumagi imperatora Petra Velikago (hereafter: PiB), vol. 9, part 1 (Moscow: Izdate’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1962), note to no. 4203, 351. 3 PiB, vol. 11, part 1 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1963), no. 4567, 316. 4 In 1704, after the Swedish invasion of Poland, Augustus II was removed from the Polish throne since he had been the ally of Peter the Great in the Great Northern War. On 12 July 1704 the Warsaw Sejm proclaimed as Polish King the former Governor of Poznan, Stanislaw Leszczyński, who had supported the Swedes. In 24 September 1705 the new king was crowned in Warsaw in the presence of Charles XII of Sweden. In 24 September 1706, after the invasion of Saxony by the Swedish army, Charles XII and Augustus II signed the Treaty of Altranstädt. Augustus II had to renounce the Polish crown in favour of Stanislaw Leszczyński, break the alliance with Peter and pledge to quarter the Swedish army in Saxony.

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On 12 July 1711, after intense negotiations, P. P. Shafirov managed to sign the peace treaty on conditions acceptable to the Tsar. The Ottoman Empire achieved its main goal in the war, namely, the return of Azov with its surroundings. In addition, the Taganrog, the Kamennyi Zaton and fortresses on the mouth of the Samara River had to be demolished. At the same time Russia retained its main gains from the Great Northern War. It followed from the peace treaty that P. P. Shafirov and M. B. Sheremetev (the son of the Field Marshal General, who suggested the beginning of peace negotiations) had to go to Istanbul. They were to remain in the Ottoman capital until the full implementation by Russia of its assumed obligations.5 The stay of ambassador-hostages (the Turkish side explicitly called them amanats)6 in the Ottoman Empire lasted for years. The “Eternal Peace”7 signed on the bank of the River Pruth lasted for only a few months. Soon the Porte accused Peter the Great of not fulfilling his assumed obligations. On 9 December 1711 a new war was declared, although military operations did not commence.8 The situation was resolved by negotiations between the Russian ambassadors in Istanbul and the Ottomans. The Turks declared war on Russia two more times during next two years (on 31 October 1712 and on 13 April 1713). However, after these declarations events developed along the same lines: the Ottoman army did not cross Russian borders, but the way was open for diplomatic talks. In addition to the Treaty of Pruth the Russian ambassadors signed treaties in Istanbul (5 April 1712) and in Adrianople (13 June 1713). All these treaties signed by P. P. Shafirov and M. B. Sheremetev foresaw the return of Azov and its surroundings to the Ottomans and the demolition of the newly built Russian fortresses. They also fixed the conditions for constructing new fortresses and the rebuilding of old fortifications by both sides. But a special provision for delimitating the borders between the two states was added only in the last treaty. The term “border” had already appeared in official Russian documents in the fourteenth century. The first explanatory dictionary of Russian, published at the end of the eighteenth century by the Russian Academy of Sciences, had defined “border” as the line separating one state from another.9 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the fortresses and zasechnyie lines (abatis lines) were established for the defence of the Southern and South-Western boundaries of Russia. During Peter the Great’s reign the construction of fortresses remained as before an important means of binding newly acquired territories to the state. The peace treaty between Russia and the Ottoman Empire signed in 1700 for a period of 30 years fixed the changes in the territory of both states. The articles of the Treaty of Constantinople left the drawing of borders to Russian and Ottoman commissioners. However these clauses were to come into force after some of the fortresses conquered by the Russians during the war were returned to the Turks, who on their side had to destroy them. Of course this slowed down the process of fixing the new border and a few years passed before the pro-

5 6 7 8 9

Peter the Great never recognized Stanislaw Leszczyński as Polish King. After the Battle of Poltava (1709) Augustus II with the support of the Russian Tsar, took over the throne of Poland. From 1702 P. A. Tolstoy resided in Istanbul as a permanent diplomatic representative of Russia at the Ottoman court and was imprisoned after the declaration of war in November 1710 in the fortress of Yedikule. Amanat from Arabic – hostage. The Term “Eternal Peace” was used in all Russian text versions of the Treaty of the Pruth. Nikolay N. Molchanov, Diplomatia Petra Velikogo (Moscow: Meždunarodnyie otnosheniya, 19903), 296. Slovar’ Akademii Rossiiskoy, 6 parts (St. Petersburg: Imperatorskaya Akademiya nauk, 1783–1794), part 2, 322.

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cess of establishing clear borderlines started. In these years Russians and Ottomans accused each other of attacking the border, a practice which strained diplomatic relations between the two states. It was not until October 1704 that a partial delimitation was agreed upon.10 At Azov certain land marks, “signs” (priznaki), were made on the ground by the Kuban side, but the border lines defining other territories were drawn only on paper. It was Peter the Great’s decision not to create any “obvious signs” (yavnyie znaki), his main idea being to protect the traditional occupations of local inhabitants – fishing and hunting, salt production and chopping timber – in these “desert lands”. The written agreement regarding the border (mezhevaya zapis) appeared on 22 October 1705. It should be underlined that in the early 1710s a great number of participants in those events were still alive. According to the Treaty of Adrianople (1713) Russia lost the lands conquered in the Azov campaigns of the 1690s. Peter the Great “took his hand away” from Ukraine and Zaporizhian Sich on the right bank of the Dnieper. The Porte was forbidden to build fortresses and other fortifications near the Samara River, while Russia had no right to erect fortifications at the Arel’ River (Orel’).11 The representatives of both states were supposed to establish the border from the spot where the Rivers Samara and Arel’ flowed into the River Dnieper in the middle of the land that divides these two rivers and along the line of the former border, which had been established before Peter’s Azov campaigns. The articles on the division of territories were added to the last signed contract because of the frequent attacks by Tatars on Russian lands (as far as Penza and Kiev) during the unstable situation on the border (so-called smutnyie godyi) (1711–1713) and, of course, because of the reciprocal actions by Cossacks and Kalmyks on Ottoman soil. The Russian ambassadors (P. P. Shafirov, P. A. Tolstoy and M. B. Sheremetev) hoped to leave the Ottoman Empire immediately after the exchange of letters of ratification. Russia fulfilled the main requirements of the Turks in regard to fortresses at the end of 1711 and beginning of 1712. However, this time the Ottoman government decided not to free the Russian diplomats till the work of the border commission had been completed.12 P. P. Shafirov and M. B. Sheremetev spent several years in the Ottoman Empire, including nearly half a year in the Yedikule Prison. It should be mentioned that Peter A. Tolstoy had been Ambassador to Istanbul since 1702 and imprisoned twice during that time. Due to their living conditions at the Sublime Porte, the ambassadors were extremely interested in the implementation of the articles of the contract. They used every opportunity to influence the Russian and Ottoman governments and also the members of the border commissions. The activity of Russian diplomacy in the Ottoman Empire from 1711–1714 has repeatedly formed the focus of scholarly attention.13 Nevertheless, the problem of establishing the 10 Svetlana F. Oreshkova, Russko-turetskie otnosheniya v nachale XVIII v. (Moscow: Nauka, 1971), 32, 36. 11 Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoy Imperii. Sobranie pervoe: 1649–1825, 45 vols. (Saint Petersburg: Tipografiya II Otdeleniya sobstvennoy ego imperatorskogo velichestva kantselyarii, 1830), vol. 5, 1713– 1719, no. 2687, 36–43; PiB, vol. 13, part 1 (Moscow: Nauka, 1992), no. 6040, 180–186. 12 The Ottoman government did not prevent the return to Russia of D.A. Bestuzhev-Ryumin, who brought the instrument of ratification from St. Petersburg. T. K. Kryilova, “Russkaya diplomatiya na Bosfore v 1711–1714 gg.,” in Lyubomir G. Beskrovnyiy (ed.), Meždunarodniye svyazi Rossii v XVII–XVIII vv.: Ekonomika, politika, kul’tura: Sbornik statey (Moscow: Nauka, 1966), 444. 13 T. K. Kryilova, “Russko-turetskie otnosheniya vo vremya Severnoy voinyi,” Istoricheskie zapiski 10 (1941): 250–279; eadem, “Russkaya diplomatiya na Bosfore v 1711–1714 gg.,” 410–446; Oreshkova, Russko-turetskie otnosheniya v nachale XVIII v., 138–187; Vladimir A. Artamonov, Rossiya i Rech Pospolitaya posle Poltavskoy pobedyi (1709–1714) gg. (Moscow: Nauka, 1990), 89–142.

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border between Russia and the Sublime Porte during this period has not been the object of research. Moreover, the activity of the Russian and Ottoman commission has until now remained an unknown episode in the history of the relations between these states. Meanwhile a considerable amount of data has come to light in Russian archival collections, the most important of which is the material from the collection in the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts containing documents on “The Relations between Russia and Turkey” (RGADA, Fond 89). Studying these documents sheds light on the main questions in Russian-Turkish relations in the early 1710s. One of the most remarkable documents is the report (stateynyi spisok) by the Russian commission on delimitation drafted on 26 August 1714.14 The correspondence between P. M. Apraksin and P. P. Shafirov also represents a unique source for the history of the problem under consideration. Some of the diplomatic correspondence regarding the peace negotiations and activity of the border commission from the above-mentioned archival collection has been published in the multi-volume edition “Letters and Papers of Tsar Peter the Great”.15 An equally large complex of documents concerning the work of the border commission is now kept in the Archive of the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences. It includes a considerable part of the correspondence of Ambassadors P. P. Shafirov and M. B. Sheremetev with P. M. Apraksin, B. P. Sheremetev and members of the border commission.16 Certainly, the investigation of these materials reveals the main problems and stages in the division of lands between Russia and the Ottoman Empire after the Peace Treaty of Adrianople. They also reveal the “mechanism” of the work of the commissions for establishing borders in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. Finally, on 13 June 1713 the Russian ambassadors officially signed the Treaty with the Ottomans. Peter the Great received the news of the peace agreement with the Ottoman Empire a month later on 13 July. The next day the Tsar sent the decree to Field Marshal General B. P. Sheremetev in Kiev. He ordered one of General A. A. Veyde’s divisions, consisting of six regiments, to be sent immediately to St. Petersburg. Peter the Great intended to use them in the campaign against Sweden.17 Meanwhile, the new Russian-Ottoman treaty was to be ratified. According to the treaty, Peter’s deed of ratification had to be delivered to Istanbul no later than three months after the signing of the peace treaty. On 20 July Ambassador D.  A.  Bestuzhev-Ryumin left St. Petersburg with the deed of ratification.18 On 29 August he arrived in Adrianople; and on 8 September the Russian ambassadors had an audience with Sultan Ahmed III. The Turks ratified the Peace Treaty of Adrianople in October 1713. Translating the text into Ottoman and negotiating on the writing of one of the titles of Peter the Great in the Ottoman version of the text occupied a considerable amount of time. P. P. Shafirov, as well as the other Russian representatives in Istanbul, attempted to convince the Russian government to begin delimitation as soon as possible as this was a condition of their return to Russia. As early as 23 June 1713 Vice-Chancellor Shafirov addressed 14 Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts (hereafter: RGADA), fond 89, opis’ 1, 1714, number 11. 15 In PiB materials for 1712 and 1713 were published in vols. 12 (Moscow: Nauka, 1975, 1977) and 13 (Moscow: Nauka, 1992, “Drevlehranilische”, 2003). 16 Materials of P. P. Shafirov’s and B. P. Sheremetev’s field offices are kept in the collection “Field Office of A. D. Menshikov” (Fond 83). 17 PiB, vol. 13, part 2 (Moscow: “Drevlehranilische”, 2003), no. 6109, 59. 18 Scientific-Historical Archive of the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, fond 83, opis’ 1, no. 6150, fols. 1–2.

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a petition to Peter the Great. He asked the Tsar to order the Governor of Kiev, Dmitriy M. Golitsyn, and the Governor of Azov, Admiral Fyodor M. Apraksin, to form the border commissions. The Tsar sent only one decree, addressed to the Governor of Kiev D. M. Golitsyin and demanding that men be chosen for the division of lands.19 Then Golitsyin had to report the results to the Bender commandant (serasker) Osman Pasha. According to the Russian vision of this process, afterwards Osmanpasha was to send Ottoman commissioners.20 Apparently, in St. Petersburg it was believed that the demarcation of territories between Russia and the Ottoman Empire lay within competence of the local administration of the borderlands. Since the Porte stated their intention to delimit the lands in three different places (near Kiev, between the Samara and Arel’ Rivers and near Azov), the Russian government agreed to divide the commissioners into groups, which took place in November 1713. The Russian commissioners were ordered to use as model for delineation the boundary records of the clerk Yemelyan Ukraintsev, who in 1705 had drawn the Russian-Ottoman border near Poland by the River Bug and through the steppe to the Dnieper River. Copies of these records and the text of the Treaty of Adrianople were sent to the heads of the commissions. Governor Golitsyin was called to St Petersburg in November 1713. For this reason the specification of the border to Right-Bank Ukraine (which belonged to Poland, except for Kiev and it surrounding lands) and the border between the Rivers Samara and Arel’ was entrusted to B. P. Sheremetev.21 He was ordered to choose commissioners at his own discretion and Sheremetev was soon to formulate some specific criteria. Members of the commission were to be selected from military men not lower in rank than Colonel or LieutenantColonel (or higher). They were to be not only noble, but also clever. The representative of the Ukrainian Hetman Ivan Skoropadskii was also to be included in the commission. Sheremetev had to provide the Russian commissioners with the same number of soldiers as the Ottoman commissioners and also to send translators “for translation and interpretation” (dlya perevodu i tolmachestva).22 The Field Marshal General promoted Luka Chirikov to the rank of Major-General, so that he presided over the commission for determining the border near Kiev. This commission also included the Auditor-General Fedor Glebov, who was characterized as “a skillful man” (chelovek iskusnoy) who knew Latin; Colonel Pankratii Kozlovskoy; and a representative of the Ukrainian Hetman General khorunžii Ivan Sulima.23 Delineating the border around Azov was initially entrusted to Admiral F. M. Apraksin. He received the same instructions and a copy of the peace treaties from St. Petersburg as did Sheremetev.24 However, F. M. Apraksin, like other governors, was recalled to St. Petersburg at the end of the year. Finally, in December 1713 the Admiral’s elder brother, Peter Apraksin, received order to be in charge of the process of delimitation. He commanded the Russian 19 Ibid., fol. 1. 20 Ibid., no. 6201, fols. 1–2. 21 Ibid., fol. 1v. 22 Ibid., fol. 1; no. 6246, fols. 1–1v. 23 Ibid., no. 6424, fol. 4. Initially General khorunžii was responsible for the protection of the Hetman’s large banners (chorągiew). In fact, he led the investigation in cases of crimes involving the Ukrainian military; sometimes he headed the personal guard of the Hetman. In wartime he could command separate divisions of Cossacks. 24 Ibid., no. 6201, fols. 1v–2.

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troops in the Ukraine and was stationed in Kharkov. The Head of the Foreign Chancellery G. I. Golovkin ordered interpreters and officials with a knowledge of Ottoman, Polish and Latin to be sent from Moscow to the heads of the commissions.25 Thus, in accordance with the Tsar’s decree, Boris Sheremetev and Peter Apraksin had to form the commission, instruct the commissioners, provide them with copies of the peace treaties and boundary records, provide them with soldiers and workers for the construction of border marks and supply them with provisions and forage. They themselves were obliged to intervene in the process of dividing the land only in the case of disputes between Russian and Ottoman commissioners. In addition, furs worth a thousand rubles were sent from Moscow for Sheremetev’s and Apraksin’s disposal. The furs were given to them “to use at [their] own discretion” (upotrebit’ pri tom dele po ih razsmotreniyu).26 The historian Marina Babich, who had used other sources, maintains that the two Russian commissions for the delimitation of land were finally formed on 4 December 1713 and were not dissolved until 17 November 1714.27 Thus, these commissions had a complete staff and were ready to start delimitation by the end of 1713. However, despite the fact that Shafirov stubbornly continued to insist on the immediate beginning of land division,28 the process could not start in 1713 due to the slowness of the Turkish side. Ottoman commissioners refused to begin delimitation because of the harsh winter weather and lack of forage for the horses.29 At the end of 1713 – beginning of 1714 Vice-Chancellor Shafirov corresponded regularly with Peter Apraksin and Boris Sheremetev, who informed him about every, even slight, change in the situation. On the other hand, the Vice-Chancellor’s awareness of Ottoman affairs and established network of secret agents allowed him to learn and transmit secret information to the commissioners. On 8 January 1714 Shafirov, who had learned about the suspension of Polish-Ottoman negotiations on the confirmation of the Treaty of Karlowitz (1699), forwarded the news to the Governor of Kiev D. M. Golitsyin. Shafirov was worried about possible Turkish claims to the territory near Kiev.30 After the winter was over the commissioners had still not started their work. On 10 April 1714 Field Marshal General again explained to Shafirov the cause for this delay with the Turkish unwillingness to begin the delimitation. The Ottoman commissioners continued to use the bad weather as an excuse.31 On 2 June 1714 the Vice-Chancellor sent his interpreter to the Ottoman dragoman (interpreter and translator) Ioannis Mavrokordato to ascertain the true situation. It emerges from the dragoman’s words that the Porte had delayed the start of demarcation near Kiev because it had hoped for some territorial concessions from Poland in the Zadneprovskaya Ukraine (Right-Bank Ukraine).32 Therefore Shafirov demanded that the Ottoman government offer him an official answer as to why 25 Ibid., no. 6207, fol. 1v. 26 Ibid. 27 Marina Babich, Gosudarstvennyie uchrezhdeniya XVIII v.: Komissii petrovskogo vremeni (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2003), 208. 28 PiB, vol. 13, part 2, note to no. 6369, 553. 29 Scientific-Historical Archive of the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, fond 83, opis’ 3, no. 10, fol. 215. 30 Ibid., fol. 26. 31 Ibid., opis’ 1, no. 6424, fol. 2. 32 Ibid., opis’ 3, no. 10, fols. 385v–386.

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they had not started demarcation near Kiev. A few days later the Russian ambassadors in Istanbul received notice from the Ottoman authorities that the Sublime Porte agreed to cede Zadneprovskaya Ukraine to the Poles.33 Hence, Russia and the Ottoman Empire had only to establish the borders between the Rivers Samara and Arel’ and nearby Azov. The commission was formed by P. M. Apraksin and headed by the Voronezh and Vice-Governor of Azov S. A. Kolyichov. After that the commission had to await the arrival of Ottoman representatives to start their work. The Vice-Governor had received Apraksin’s decree of 10 January 1714 and as early as 15 January arrived in Kharkov, where Apraksin’s headquarters were located.34 The Commandant of Ryibinsk, Ivan Tevyashov, and Commandant of Korotoyak, Andrei Palibin, and the representatives of the Ukrainian Cossacks, Vasilii Zhuravskii and Jacob Lizogub, were also invited to the commission.35 The commission was allowed to take two squadrons of dragoons (900 men), a battalion of soldiers (500 men) and irregular Cossack troops (1000 men).36 At Apraksin’s request a clerk (pod’yachii), Ivan Klishin, and translator of the Greek, Italian and Turkish language, Ivan Suda, were sent to him from Moscow.37 In February 1714 Shafirov sent to the commission the Tatar Murtaza Tyafkelev, who was the son of another interpreter, Ramazan (he was on hand at Sheremetev).38 Shafirov, who knew the problem with the translators of Turkish in Moscow, had paid for M. Tyafkelev’s studies of Turkish and Arabic (both reading and writing) in Istanbul. The Vice-Chancellor assumed that the Ottoman commissioners would provide the documents in Turkish, because of “their obstinacy”. He expressed his concerns with the words: “Our translators from the Tatar people know nothing in Turkish”.39 Kolyichov received credentials from Apraksin that were sent from the ambassadorial office (posol’skaya kantselyariya). He had to pass one of them to the Ottoman commissioners and keep the other for himself. The Vice-Governor also received, as a model of delineation, the boundary records (meževyie zapisi) drawn up by Yemelyan Ukraintsev with the Ottoman commissioners in 1705; extracts from the clauses of the Treaty of Eternal Peace with Poland (1686); maps; samples of the calligraphy for the full titles of Peter the Great and the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire;40 and also sables and other valuable furs to the value of 700 rubles.41 Apraksin gave the commissioners instructions (nakaz) in which were specified different reciprocal actions depending on the actions of the Ottoman commissioners.42 Kolyichov had to furnish accounts before Apraksin; and Apraksin in turn had to write reports to St. Petersburg. 33 PiB, vol. 13, part 2, note 6369, 554. 34 RGADA, fond 89, opis’ 1, 1714, no 11, fols. 6–6v. 35 PiB, vol. 13, part 2, note to no 6369, 553–554. 36 RGADA, fond 89, opis’ 1, 1714, no. 11, fol. 9v. 37 Scientific-Historical Archive of the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, fond 83, opis’ 1, no. 6334, fol. 2; no. 6346, fol. 1. 38 Ibid., opis’ 3, no. 10, fol. 65.

39 Ibid, no. 8, fol. 217. 40 RGADA, fond 89, opis’ 1, 1714, no. 11, fol. 14. 41 Ibid., fol. 14v, 32–32v. 42 Ibid., fols. 7–9.

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At the beginning of April Apraksin sent a letter with an offer to the Ottoman commissioners in Bender telling them to come to Perekop. He also ordered the Russian commissioners to expect the Ottomans on the River Arel’. Then both groups were to meet each other and start their work. On 16 April he complained to P. P. Shafirov that the Ottoman commissioners had spent the winter in one of the fortresses on the River Danube, Izmail, because of the inconvenience of the route. They were going to come from the fortress of Izmail to Perekop by 23 April, then go to the River Dnieper towards the mouth of Samara River, where they expected to meet the Russian commissioners. According to Apraksin’s message, the Russian commissioners had been in complete readiness for ten weeks. The only problem was that they had no information about the place of their meeting with the Turks, namely whether it would be on the banks of the River Dnieper or at Azov.43 As early as spring 1714 the first problems appeared in the coordination of the Russian and Ottoman commissions’ actions. On 2 May the Russian commissioners went to the insignificant fortress of Nehvorosch on the River Arel’. They arrived there ten days later, on 12 May. On the same day the commissioners sent dragoons to look for their Turkish colleagues. However, the dragoons found nobody and returned. Not until 21 May did a courier from Kharkov, accompanied by a man sent by the Crimean Tatars, arrive in the Nehvorosch. They reported that the Ottoman commission had gone from Perekop to Sheremetev in Lubna.44 And that the Field Marshal General had directed them back to P. M. Apraksin.45 Soon S. A. Kolyichov received a letter from the Ottoman commissioners with a proposal to build a bridge over the River Samara to facilitate the crossing of the Ottoman commission with their guards consisting of 700 Turks and 700–800 Tatars. The Vice-Governor decided to organize the crossing on vessels. For this purpose eight large boats were brought with the workmen from Perevolochna to the Samara River. However, the boats were not needed. The Turks built themselves a small bridge in a narrow place and crossed the river. Despite this, the Ottoman commissioners could not reach the meeting place – the River Protoch’ – that had been agreed on with the Russians. As they explained later, this was due to the stupidity of their quartermasters.46 The first conference of the Russian and Ottoman commissioners was not held until 4 June. Under the preliminary arrangement the members of the commissions decided to settle down in two field camps (staniy), erecting the tents (nam’otiy) opposite each other. Between the two camps a large sultan’s tent was placed for the negotiations. The partners ceremoniously set off in the barouches at two o’clock, accompanied by soldiers and Russian war music, to the first meeting of the Russian and Ottoman commissioners. The Ottoman commission was headed by the Keeper of the Sultan’s Seal (nişancı) Ibrahim Efendi and included El Hac Mehmed Efendi, Kadymurat Efendi and a representative of the Crimean Khan Mehmed aga (Commandant of Perekop). After mutual accusations of being late and the traditional coffee-drinking, the Russian commissioners showed their credentials and asked the Turks to do the same. The Ottomans said that they did not have them, though they had instructions and a copy of the Treaty of Adrianople. Then the 43 Scientific-Historical Archive of the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, fond 83, opis’ 1, no. 6442, fols. 2v–3. 44 Lubna (or Lubny) was the small town (fort) in Ukraine. 45 RGADA, fond 89, opis’ 1, 1714, no. 11, fols. 36–43. 46 Ibid., fols. 58v–60.

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translator Tyafkelev read aloud the seventh clause of the agreement that had dealt with the delimitation of land. Finally, the commissioners started to develop the principles of establishing the border between the two states. The Russians offered to delimit the territory according to the status quo of 1705. The borders were marked by means of natural boundaries (urochischi) and rivers. The border was fixed in the boundary records (meževyie zapisi) without the building of barrows. This principle would allow the rapid completion of the commissioners’ work. Nonetheless, this suggestion was immediately rejected by the Ottoman side. The head of the Ottoman commission, Ibrahim Efendi, argued that the Tatars would not honour the border without barrows and would consider this land their own. The Russian commissioners were forced to yield.47 At the first conference they decided to define the middle of the land between the Rivers Samara and Arel’ by the traveling time of horses that step evenly (raz’ezdom s chasami). The place was to be marked by two barrows: one barrow on the Samara side and another on the Arel’ side 3 arshina (2 134 m) high. Then the commissioners decided to go from the Dnieper to the sources of the Rivers Samara and Arel’ and to construct the same barrows. The Russian members of the border commission were required to keep records and at the end of every day to pass them to all commissioners. The first patrols (30 Russians and 30 Ottomans) were held on 5 and 6 June 1714. The Russian and Turkish messengers returned in the evening and delivered identical data to both sets of commissioners. The commissioners agreed that the middle of the land between the rivers had been found. In accordance with tradition, they exchanged gifts. On June 8 the Russian commissioners (who were instructed to complete delimitation as soon as possible) proposed the construction of the barrows in four places at a distance of 5–6 hours from one other. However, the Ottoman commissioners rejected this proposal on the pretext that such signs would be difficult to find. Finally, it was decided to establish five frontier marks instead of four.48 On 9 June the first barrows were constructed. One of them was made by the Russian workers, another by the Turkish. The distance between them was approximately 9,6 m.49 For several days the process of land-delimitation progressed quickly and without conflict. Every day one frontier mark was set. Thus, in the first region five frontier marks had already been constructed by 14 June. The Russian commissioners said that according to the opinion of elderly local inhabitants the origins of the Samara and Arel’ had been identified. Consequently, they offered to fix the delimitation on paper. The head of the Ottoman commission Ibrahim Efendi didn’t agree with that and even threatened to break off negotiations and leave. Finally, on his proposal an additional sixth sign was established at the River Ternovka on 19 June.50 Such rapid delimitation, which took place almost without disputes, was facilitated by the clear record in the Treaty of Adrianople, which determined that the border should follow “in the middle of the rivers” up to the river heads. By contrast, further land division up to the Don caused controversy. The text of the Treaty stipulated the return to the Ottoman Empire 47 Ibid., fol. 67–73v. 48 Ibid., fol. 77–78v. 49 Ibid., fol. 94. 50 Scientific-Historical Archive of the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, fond 83, opis’ 1, no. 6599, fols. 3–3v.

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of its former possessions that had been lost after the capture of Azov by the Russians. However, a clear delimitation of the territories in this area had never existed. Furthermore, the questioning of the locals made the situation even more confused. The Russian commissioners had the important task of ensuring the safety of the fortresses of Bakhmut and Thor. During the negotiations they repeatedly emphasized that these fortresses were “old possessions of His Majesty the Tsar”. The Ottomans had intended to establish the border in the three-hour horse distance ride from these fortresses. However, the commissioners were able to insist on their point of view in this fundamental question and they succeeded in moving the border further south. On 1 July the two commissions came to the River Tuzlovaya, which covered the approaches to the fortress of Azov from the north. It is no surprise that this territory was very important for the Ottoman commissioners. The residents of Azov and the Don Cossacks, called as witnesses, entered into a fierce dispute over the rights to use forests and lands where the grass was mowed (pokosyi).51 It was impossible to identify who had originally owned these local lands. The head of the Ottoman commission proposed to leave the disputed territory in the joint usage of the Cossacks and the residents of Azov. Then Ivan Tevyashov, who replaced the sick Kolyichov at the negotiations, insisted on delimitation for the reason that an unclear situation could provoke further quarrels and lead to armed conflict. Finally, a compromise was reached. The River Tuzlovaya became the border. The last border mounds were constructed on the banks of the Don on 11 July 1714. In total seventeen frontier marks were established, each of them represented by two artificial hills. The new border was fixed not only in the boundary records, but also on drawings. Thus, marking the borders between the territories of the two states took somewhat more than a month. Besides the territorial disputes the commissioners had to deal with the problem of different names for the same geographic features. It was solved by asking local people, as well as studying the areas on the maps; and by sending the Russian and Turkish representatives to contentious feature for a visual inspection. According to the Treaty of Adrianople, in the area near the Arel’ River, which remained in the possession of Russia, Russian strongholds ( fortetsii) and insignificant forts (palanki) that had already existed as outposts against the Tatar invasions could be retained by Russia. In this connection a dispute arose between the commissioners about the meaning of “palanka”. The head of the Ottoman commission Ibrahim Efendi argued that, according to the Treaty, only a fortress with military men and guns came under the definition of the word palanka. He insisted that the Cossack settlements located near the river were ordinary farmhouses with pastures, and consequently should not be kept by the Tsar. The Russian side rightly insisted that palanka, meaning a place fenced round with a paling, had to be regarded as such “even with one armed Cossack therein”. The Russians underlined the fact that a few dozen people could fit into these fortifications.52 The commissioners endured a variety of problems with translation. The Ottoman commissioners not only did not have credentials and maps, but also lacked a translator fluent in Russian. In the Ottoman commission were, however, a Zaporizhian Cossack who was able to read Russian and also an Ottoman interpreter (tolmach’) who understood Russian but

51 RGADA, fond 89, opis’ 1, 1714, no. 11, fols. 153–156. 52 Ibid., fol. 157–157v.

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could not read it. Thus the Cossack had to read documents aloud and the Ottoman interpreter in his turn was to listen and translate them into Turkish.53 The Russian commissioners had also to confront the Ottomans on the question of the title of Peter the Great. The problem arose for the first time on 17 July. When the sixth frontier mark was constructed, the Russian commissioners offered to the Ottomans to exchange records. Through the translation of the Ottoman-Turkish texts the Russian commissioners found that Peter was named therein as “Moscow Tsar”. As already mentioned, the Russian delegates had a sample of how to write Peter’s full title. They also were ordered to name him in official documents as “His Majesty the Tsar”. Moreover, Peter the Great had begun to claim the title of Emperor subsequent to the Victory of Poltava (1709), a title clearly manifested in Russian official propaganda of the time, for instance, by the symbolism of fireworks. Therefore, in the texts of international treaties the use of the inferior title “Moscow Tsar” was absolutely unacceptable to Russia. The Russian commissioners corrected the title “Moscow Tsar” to the title “His Majesty the Tsar” in the records submitted by the Turks and sent the text back to the Ottomans with the translator M. Tyafkelev. The translator was warned that, if the Turks did not agree to this change, he could offer to leave an empty space in the document. Ibrahim Efendi, however, refused these suggestions on the grounds that in the ratification of the peace treaty the title “Moscow Tsar was used”.54 Kolyichov, who had no diplomatic experience, was perplexed because in his copy of the treaty the title “His Majesty the Tsar” was used. Ivan Suda clarified the situation. He was engaged in the translation of letters and charters from Turkish in the ambassadorial office (Posol’skaya kantselyariya). He explained that the Turks named Peter the Great “Moscow Tsar” in all correspondence. The Ottoman Commission flatly refused to accept the argument that Sultan Ahmed III had already accepted Peter the Great’s letters and charters with his full official title. Following their instructions, the Russian commissioners decided to report the problem to Apraksin.55 As a result he strictly forbade any concessions in this matter.56 Apparently, Shafirov attempted to influence the situation from Istanbul. He sent a letter to the second-ranking Ottoman commissioner Mehmed Efendi. As the clerk (pod’yachii) Ivan Klishin reported to the Vice-Chancellor, the letter was secretly handed to Mehmed Efendi, but he could not influence the position taken on this question by the head of the Ottoman commission.57 Following long disputes the Russian representatives managed to persuade the Turks to draw up the boundary records (mežvye zapisi) without mentioning titles. On 13 July, they exchanged written testimonies.58 According to tradition the Russian and Ottoman commissioners exchanged presents. In Sheremetev and Apraksin’s opinion, the commission’s work had been carried out perfectly. Russia returned to its borders established before the Azov campaigns, but due to the efforts of the Russian commissioners received additional 53 Scientific-Historical Archive of the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, fond 83, opis’ 1, no. 6679, fol. 8. 54 RGADA, fond 89, opis’ 1, 1714, no. 11, fols. 115–116v. 55 Ibid., fol. 117v. 56 Ibid., fol. 159. 57 Scientific-Historical Archive of the St Petersburg Institute of History of the RAS, fond 83, opis’ 1, no. 6053, fol. 3–3v. 58 Ibid., fol. 1v.

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land from the Crimean Tatars, having secured the approaches to the fortresses of Thor and Bakhmut. It should be noted that Vice-Chancellor P. P. Shafirov played an important role in the successful establishment of the new Russian-Ottoman border. Sheremetev and Apraksin reported to Shafirov on every action they made in addition to their reports, which they sent to the Russian capital. Shafirov, who was in Istanbul, could give a qualified solution to questions more quickly than if requests were sent to St. Petersburg. Vice-Governor Kolyichov and Ivan Klishin also reported to Shafirov on the situation on the border. In this way they contravened Apraksin’s orders to write only to him. After the completion of the first phase of delimitation, Apraksin sent to the Vice-Chancellor in Istanbul the land map on which a new frontier was marked.59 Shafirov in his turn offered advice on the problems and attempted to help the commissioners, involving his contacts at the Ottoman court. For instance, in August 1714 he was able to bribe the Turkish scribe and thus learn the secret contents of the Ottoman commissioners’ reports.60 What was the importance of the territories demarcated between the two states for Russia? In 1704, regarding the first delimitation, the Tsar expressed readiness to renounce two or three versts in the steppe.61 Thus, in order to preserve peaceful relations with the Ottomans Peter the Great was inclined to abandon any claims to uninhabited lands in favour of the Ottoman Empire.62 Ten years later Field Marshal General B. P. Sheremetev adhered to the same point of view. He hurried P. M. Apraksin to finish delimitation as soon as possible, so that his son could return home. He advised renouncing part of these barren lands. The border established in 1714 was confirmed once again in 1720 by the Eternal Peace Treaty of Constantinople. However, Russia’s problem of access to the Azov Sea remained acute till the 1730s. It was during the reign of Empress Anna Ioannovna that the issue was resolved and the borders between the two states were redrawn as a result of the RussianTurkish War of 1735–1739.

59 Ibid., no. 6688, fols. 2–2v. 60 Ibid., no. 7893, fols. 1v–2. 61 Most likely, it means the distance approximately in 2–3 km (1 versta = 500 sazhen = 1066,8 m). 62 PiB (St. Petersburg: Gosudarstvennaya tipografiya, 1893), vol. 3, no. 719, 156.

Russia’s Doctrine of the Ottoman Empire’s Bulgarian Provinces and Bulgarians (from Catherine ІІ to Alexander І) Plamen Mitev Russian policy on the Ottoman Empire is among the most popular topics in Balkan history during the Early Modern period. For nearly two hundred years now, scholars from various countries have studied both individual aspects and the overall development of the complex, dynamic relations between the two empires. Numerous and diverse source materials have been introduced into scholarly circulation; and publications dedicated to the Russo-Turkish conflicts during the eighteenth century, fateful for the whole of Europe, comprise a huge mass of monographs, themed collections, studies and articles.1 Even the most superficial review of several generations of scholarship shows that a commonly accepted notion of Russia’s strategic interests in Europe’s South-East in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has long been prevalent in both the specialized and the popular literature. It states that originally St. Petersburg’s great goals were to acquire an outlet and, later, territorial expansion in the Black Sea region and, subsequently, to impose control on the Straits. While, of course, the interpretation of specific facts and events varies among the representatives of the different historiographical schools, in general scholars in the Humanities do not enter into controversy about, or hold diametrically opposed opinions on, the main parameters of Russia’s doctrine of the Ottoman Empire and the Balkans. To achieve the above aims, Russian governments used a diverse arsenal of diplomatic, economic, political and military means, the effectiveness of which depended on numerous circumstances. While an important part within the Russian doctrine was also played by the effort to achieve liberation on the part of the Christian nations subjected to the Sublime Porte, the most effective means proved to be the military campaigns against Turkey. It is not by mere chance that it was precisely in the eighteenth century that Russia became Constantinople’s most dangerous enemy: in the period from Peter the Great to the end of 1 Irina Dostyan, Rossiya i Balkanskiy vopros. Iz istorii russko-balkanskih politicheskih svyazey v pervoy treti ХІХ veka (Moscow: Nauka, 1975); Ol’ga Orlik, Rossiya v meždunarodnyih otnosheniyah 1815–1829 gg. (Moscow: Nauka, 1998); Vitaliy Shеrеmеt, Imperiya v оgne. Sto let voyn i reform Blistitel’noy Portyi na Balkanah i Blijnem Vostoke (Moscow: Аviar, 1994); Leonid Nežinskiy, Аnatoliy Ignat’ev (eds.), Rossiya i Chernomorskie prolivyi (ХVІІІ–ХХ stoletiya) (Moscow: Меždunarodnyie otnosheniya, 1999); Grigoriy Arsh, Irina Dostyan, Vladilen Vinogradov et al. (eds.), Меždunarodnyie otnosheniya na Balkanah, 1815–1830 gg (Moscow: Nauka, 1983); Vladilen Vinogradov et al. (eds.), Меždunarodnyie otnosheniya na Balkanah, 1830–1856 gg (Moscow: Nauka, 1990); Igor Ivanov (ed.), Ocherki istorii Ministerstva inostrannyih del, vol. 1 (Moscow: Оlma меdia grupp, 2002); Sergey Tihvinskiy (ed.), Geopoliticheskie faktoryi vo vneshney politike Rossii. Vtoraya polovina ХVІ–nachalo ХХ veka (Moscow: Nauka, 2007); Matthew Anderson, The Eastern Question, 1774–1923 (London: Macmillan, 1966); Lewis C. B. Seaman, From Vienna to Versailles (New York: Routledge, 1964), etc.

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Alexander I’s rule, i.e., for a little more than a hundred years, the two empires confronted each other six times. Curiously enough, many common features can be found in the apparently different fate of the two empires during the “long” eighteenth century. For about a century, ten rulers belonging to the same dynasty (the Romanov and the Osman families) took turns in St. Petersburg and Istanbul respectively. Both Russia and the Ottoman Empire straddled East and West, Europe and Asia. Both countries were forced by circumstances to experience a number of internal collisions, fight strong external rivals and look for ways to overcome their obvious failure to keep up with the “other” Europe. Even the reform efforts of Russia’s Tsars and Turkey’s sultans ran in a similar direction at the same ponderous rate and almost in temporal parallel. It suffices to look at the policies of Peter the Great and Ahmed ІІІ, of Catherine ІІ and Selim ІІІ, to be convinced. Even the most superficial comparison would show, however, that while there are many similarities in the development of the two countries, Russia was more successful in overcoming the challenges of the Early Modern period than Turkey, especially in terms of St. Petersburg’s obvious success on the battlefield. Originally, the strength of the two empires was almost equal, but with each new war Russia strengthened its position and influence on the Balkans. While Peter I’s Pruth River Campaign had ended as an outright catastrophe, during the conflict in 1735–1739 Russia managed to restore its control over Azov; and through the Peace Treaty of Belgrade (1739) it obtained privileges for its subjects trading within the Ottoman Empire equal to those of all other European countries. Russia’s supremacy was most evident under Catherine II (1762– 1796), when the victorious Russian campaigns on the Balkans dramatically altered the balance of power between Russia and Turkey.2 The military success went beyond Russia’s territorial expansion. The government in St. Petersburg also managed to gain other benefits. For example, in the area of trade, new and extensive privileges were obtained. For the first time, the Porte was forced to allow Russia to open consular offices in all Ottoman provinces. From a purely political aspect, Catherine II obtained the right to patronize the Orthodox Church on the Balkans and guarantee the autonomous status of Wallachia and Moldavia.3 Russia’s achievements in the eighteenth century give us a good idea of the main building blocks of Russian foreign policy toward the Ottoman Empire at the time. However, the major challenge for researchers remains to answer the question as to when the development of a clear, overall, long-term doctrine in Russia’s policy toward Turkey took place. Were Peter the Great’s, Anna Ioannovna’s or Catherine II’s actions part of a carefully considered and consistently implemented strategy; or did each ruler, under the pressure of external circumstances or acting on their own whim, undertake action against the Sublime Porte? Furthermore, the analysis of the pre-history of each Russo-Turkish conflict in the eighteenth century suggests the important conclusion that, until Catherine II’s wars, catalysts for tension in the relations between the two empires included the Polish question and the problem with the Tatars. During the next decades, and even throughout nineteenth century, these two factors exercised decreasing influence on Russia’s attitude toward Turkey and, gradually, the great Eastern Question with all its bottle-necks, its insoluble Balkan and common 2 Vladilen Vinogradov (ed.), Vek Ekaterinyi II. Dela balkanskie (Moscow: Nauka, 2000); Gladys Scott Thomson, Catherine the Great and the Expansion of Russia (London: English Universities Press, 1961); Simon Dixon, Catherine the Great (Edinburgh and London: Longman/Pearson, 2001). 3 Elena Družinina, Kyuchuk-Kaynardžiyskiy mir 1774 goda: ego podgotovka i zaklyuchenie (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1955).

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European aspects, came to the fore. It is precisely during this rearrangement of priorities in St. Petersburg’s foreign policy towards Constantinople that a new understanding of the general Russian doctrine of the Ottoman Empire’s destiny gradually unfolded in Russian diplomatic circles. This, in turn, would lead to a serious change in the main aims and their means of achievement. It can be hardly denied that with her military campaigns against Turkey in 1768–1774 and 1787–1791, Catherine ІІ aimed to strike a heavy blow against the integrity of the Ottoman Empire. Through the peace treaties signed in Küçük Kaynarca (1774) and Jassy (1791), St. Petersburg was guaranteed considerable gains in the Northern Black Sea region. In 1783, Catherine II also acquired Crimea. Thus, at the end of the eighteenth century, Russia not only realized its ambitions for an outlet on the Black Sea, but also declared openly its claim to play the role of a dominant power in South-East Europe. Even if the notorious “Greek project” turned out to be a carefully premeditated and calculated propaganda move, the Russian Tsaress was undoubtedly tempted by the thought of having her name associated with dislodging the Ottomans from the Balkans. It is no accident that Catherine II’s first biographers tell us how, during her visit to the Crimea in 1787, the Tsaress had an inscription reading “The Road to Constantinople” mounted above the gates of the newly built fortress of Sevastopol. Catherine II’s plans from 1772, namely to have Wallachia and Moldavia united in an autonomous principality and grant its government to Prince Poniatowski, may be interpreted in the same light.4 In the autumn of 1790, the idea of uniting Wallachia, Moldavia and Bulgaria into a common Christian principality of Dacia was launched.5 Paul І’s ascent to the throne in 1796 apparently created a twist in Russo-Turkish relations. In 1798, the two recent enemies even became part of a common coalition with England, Austria and Sicily against France. Such a “change”, however, may not and must not be explained by any reconsideration of Russia’s priorities toward the Ottoman Empire, but rather by radical and dynamic changes in the political macro-framework of the old Continent on the verge of the new century. These changes explain how and why such seemingly strange alliances as that between Russia and Turkey existed. It is precisely in this context that the documents in scholarly circulation provide no reason, at least for the time being, to assume that for the four-and-a-half-year rule of Paul І (17 November 1796 – 23 March 1801) anyone from St. Petersburg government circles seriously considered the development of a concept for a turning point in Russo-Turkish relations. The flexible policy toward Constantinople implemented by Paul І did not change after the enthronement of Alexander І in 1801. Proof of this can be found in the first more detailed instructions to St. Petersburg diplomatic staff across Europe, personally approved by the Tsar. Thus, on 17 July 1801, Russia’s representative in Berlin, Alexei Kridener, received instructions explicitly stating that the Tsar insisted on contributing, by all possible means, to the preservation of the Ottoman Empire since the “weakness and poor governance” of this country were the best guarantee for Russian interests.6 Similar viewpoints are also comprehensively documented in the correspondence with Russia’s ambassador to Vienna, 4 The plan failed due to strong opposition from Vienna – see the analytical overview of Russian foreign policy by the editors of the periodical “Russkaya beseda”: “Troynstvennyi soyuz,” Russkaya beseda 2:2 (1857): 1–2. 5 Pompei N. Batyushkov, Bеssаrаbiya. Istoricheskoe оpisanie (St. Petersburg: Obshtestvennja pol’za, 1892), 128. 6 Andrey Gromyiko (ed.), Vneshnyaya politika Rossii ХIХ i nachalo ХХ veka. Dокumentуi Rossiyskogo ministerstva inostrannyih del, Series 1, vol. 1 (Moscow: Politizdat, 1961), 54.

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Count Andrei Razumovsky, and the plenipotentiary to Constantinople, Vasiliy Tamara. In a letter to Count Razumovsky from 10 September 1801, Alexander І even admits that his desired policy towards Turkey did not allow him “to remain indifferent to anything that could jeopardize this empire’s independence and integrity”.7 How sincere and lasting were the intensions of Catherine II’s grandson? Was the attitude toward the Sublime Porte imposed by him in 1801–1802 again dictated only by the events connected with Napoleon’s increasingly ambitious campaigns across Europe? Many facts point in exactly this direction and give experts reason to claim that Russia accepted the idea of maintaining the status quo on the Balkans only as a temporary formula which, as soon as an opportunity arose, would be quickly forgotten in order to realize Catherine’s old dreams of Russian control over Constantinople and the Straits. It suffices to remember the twists and turns in Russo-French relations in the period 1801–1812 and their direct influence on St. Petersburg’s policy toward the Sublime Porte; Russian diplomats’ active contacts with the organizers of the First Serbian Uprising; and the Russo-Turkish War in 1806–1812. It is interesting to note that it was precisely in the early nineteenth century that proRussian leanings among the active figures in the Balkans liberation movements saw a notable increase. Indicative of the various initiatives undertaken by representatives of local Christian populations is the project of the Bishop of Backa, Jovan Jovanovich, which he proposed to Alexander І in October 1804, launching the idea of creating a new Serbian state as a result of a future uprising of Serbs, Bulgarians, Wallachians and Moldavians, who were to be supported by Russia with arms and, if necessary, with a military campaign against Turkey. The future Prince of Serbia was to be the Tsar’s brother Constantine. In February 1805, Bishop Jovanovich wrote a new proclamation, even mentioning a strong, sizable Slavonic-Serbian kingdom spreading from the Black Sea to the Adriatic and ruled over by “Constantine Nemanić” (the Russian Tsar’s brother was to take the dynastic name of Stefan Neman).8 Similarly, the director of the Lyceum in Tsarskoe Selo, Vasiliy Malinovsky, envisaged the establishment of an alliance between the Slavonic nations in the form of a federation of independent states (1803); the Bishop of Karlowitz, Stefan Stratimirović, advocated the establishment of a Slavonic-Serbian state under Russian patronage (1804); Ivan Zambin and Atanas Neković petitioned for the protection of Bulgarians within the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of lands “patronized” by Russia similar to the Danube kingdoms (1806). Whether prompted by the intensification of Russia’s policy in the Mediterranean, or by memories of Russia’s military success over Turkey and Catherine II’s plans to destroy the Ottoman Empire, the above projects testify that, in the early nineteenth century, the hope of the vassal nations within the Sublime Porte that “Grandfather Ivan” would help them cast off the foreign yoke was considerably strengthened. Do all these facts, however, refute the assumption that, following Alexander I’s enthronement, Russia once again adopted the doctrine of the “weak neighbour” in relation to the Sublime Porte? Indeed, Alexander І’s instructions on preserving the integrity of the Ottoman Empire in 1801–1802 can be explained by the turbulent and dramatic cataclysms in Europe caused by Napoleon’s campaigns. However, an objective look at the progress of Russo-Turkish relations throughout nineteenth century points to a different interpretation of familiar facts – an 7 Ibid., 86–92, 202–203. 8 Irina Dostyan, “Planyi оsnovaniya slavyano-serbskogo gosudarstva s pomosch’yu Rossii v nachale ХІХ v.,” in Yu. Bromley, V. Karasev, V. Konobeev, I. Kostuyshko, E. Naumov (eds.), Slavyane i Rossiya. К 70-letiyu so dnya roždeniya S. А. Nikitina (Moscow: Nauka, 1972), 98–107.

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interpretation beyond the phraseology of official diplomacy and beyond romantic historiographic mythologies of the nineteenth-century Balkans. Without going into details about the authors of the new Russian doctrine and their arguments, it should be pointed out that the policy towards Turkey imposed by Alexander І has its own purely “Russian” motives. Furthermore, once adopted under the pressure of common continental conflicts in the early nineteenth century, the doctrine of the “weak neighbour” proved beneficial to Russian governments and hence they started implementing it in a consistent manner although they apparently retained their hostile vocabulary in relation to the Porte and, at certain moments, even undertook military campaigns against it. In a nutshell, the new doctrine included the thesis that it was more beneficial for Russia to have the economically backward, militarily weak and politically unstable Turkey for a neighbour instead of independent or vassal Balkan countries with an unclear short-term and long-term attitude toward St. Petersburg. Modern Russian historiography, albeit still timidly, admits that for a certain period the Asian Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs indeed relied on the “weak neighbour” doctrine in Russo-Turkish relations, but this was only true for the 1830s and 1840s, when St. Petersburg took full advantage of its triumphant victory in the war of 1828–1829, realized in the Treaty of Adrianople.9 The fate of the Bulgarian political question, however, gives us reason to assume that from Alexander I’s enthronement to the war in 1877–1878, Russian diplomacy started implementing a more flexible, more tempered and more “selective” policy in South-East Europe, one characterized by the intention of preserving Turkey as a weak and predictable neighbour and rival. Only at certain moments, when the development of the Eastern Question or the political situation in Europe required that strength be displayed or employed to protect its strategic interests in the Balkans, Middle East or Middle Asia, did St. Petersburg temporarily renounce its “weak neighbour” policy and, through its military campaigns south to the Danube River, contribute to yet another reduction of Ottoman possessions in Europe. In all these cases, however, the opportunity to solve the Bulgarian Question was completely ignored, although Bulgarians were part of the political speeches made by Russian diplomats, politicians and military men. The fact that the strategy for Russo-Turkish relations adopted in 1801–1802 was not temporary camouflage disguising Peter’s and Catherine’s old ambitions to occupy Constantinople and the Straits is obvious: for example, from the position consistently defended by Alexander  I and his government during the Russo-Turkish War, which broke out in 1806. Both before and after the War, Russia, repeatedly and in various forms, openly stated before the Porte and other European countries that it did not intend to reshape Balkan borders. While the sole territorial claim originally launched related to the Danube Principalities, later even this claim was reduced to the idea of the annexation of Bessarabia. The war from 1806–1812 could claim to be the “strangest” war in the history of RussoTurkish relations. After the Russian army occupied Wallachia and Moldavia for nearly two years no specific action was undertaken to transfer military operations south to the Danube. The Russian commanders did not take advantage of either the times of trouble in the Empire caused by the continued Ayan uprisings and Kurdzhalii raids across Rumelia, or even of the bloody political turns in Constantinople that led to the consecutive dethronements of Selim ІІІ (1807) and Mustafa ІV (1808). Instead of taking a powerful offensive to the Balkan Mountains and Adrianople and ending the war as soon as possible, St. Petersburg preferred 9 Vinogradov, Меždunarodnyie otnosheniya na Balkanah, 1830–1856 gg, 7–61.

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to wait and negotiate; and, in the meantime, the starving population in the Ottoman capital survived due to the large quantities of grain imported from Ukraine and Crimea through the Russian Black Sea ports. Of course, the aforementioned “oddities” during the first phase of the war could be easily explained by the developments in Russo-French relations that also directly influenced St. Petersburg’s Balkan policy. However, these “oddities” continued over the following years when the Russian army at last undertook a stronger offensive to the south of the Danube. It would be enough to remember the orders of General P. Bagration, in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief of the Moldavian army (July 1809 – March 1810), whereby he expressly recommended to his officers not to allow the Bulgarian population to arm themselves and launch independent uprisings in the rear of the Turkish army. His successor, General Nikolay Kamensky (February 1810 – March 1811) “unexpectedly” gave up the planned campaign towards Tărnovo and from there to the south of the Balkan Mountains in return for ineffective Russian action in the Vidin region which was supposed to support the Serbian insurgents in Belgrade. The plundering and burning of settlements like Silistra, Svishtov and Nikopol shows, on the other hand, the predetermined perception of Bulgarian lands as merely a manoeuvring ground for military action that, sooner or later, was to be given back to the Porte. The same applies to the disregard for Sofroniy Vrachanski’s “Petition” (Molba) from May 1811, which suggests the creation of autonomous Bulgarian province within Russia. A continuation of the “weak neighbour” policy commenced in 1801–1802 can be also be found after the signature of the Peace Treaty of Bucharest. On 26 February 1814, for example, the Montenegrin Bishop Dometian Vladević (who for many years had been the secretary of the Montenegrin Bishop Petar I Petrović-Njegoš) sent from the Kiev Lavra a letter to Nikolay Petrovich Rumyantsev proposing that “Russia take the patronage of the whole of Serbia and Bulgaria”,10 but the proposition remained unaddressed by Russian diplomacy. Similarly unsuccessful attempts by representatives of the vassal Balkan population to attract St. Petersburg’s attention also took place during the following years; and the instructions of Russia’s Foreign Ministry to the Ambassador to Constantinople, Grigoriy Stroganov (August 1816 – July 1821), expressly highlighting the need to maintain Turkey’s integrity include the best proof of St. Petersburg’s intention of continuing to rely on its “weak neighbour” doctrine.11 Some years later, the same thesis was included in the famous “Note” by Dmitry Dashkov from the autumn of 1828 presented to the attention of Nikolay І and proving convincingly that the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire was not beneficial to Russia since the possible new Slav countries on the Balkans would be unstable and susceptible to external influence by the other great powers.12 The principles of Russia’s strategy towards Turkey reformulated at the beginning of Alexander I’s rule remained effective throughout nineteenth century, notwithstanding the fact that that same century saw three new wars between the two empires; and the Balkans and other European countries continued to see St. Petersburg as the Ottoman Empire’s most 10 A. Bažova, E. Kudryavtseva, V. Hevrolina, N. Hitrova (eds.), Politicheskie i kul’turnyie otnosheniya Rossii s yugoslavyanskimi zemlyami v pervoy treti ХІХ veka. Dokumentyi (Moscow: Nauka, 1997), doc. 61, 81–82. 11 Orlik, Rossiya, 81. 12 Elena Kudryavtseva, “Russkaya diplomatiya i planyi gosudarstvennogo ustroystva Serbii v pervoy polovine XIX v.,” in Vladimir K. Volkov (ed.), Dvesti let novoy serbskoy gosudarstvennosti. K Yubileya nachala Pervogo serbskogo vosstaniya (1804–1813) (St. Petersburg: Aleteya, 2005), 106–107.

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dangerous enemy and most fervent supporter of the vassal Christian population. While the examples supporting such a working hypothesis are many, just one more will be mentioned here – the Peace Treaty of Adrianople from September 1829. The situation was unique. The Russian army had seized Adrianople, the Sultan’s empire was on its knees and absolutely helpless and the European public rushed to applaud Field-Marshal Diebitsch’s triumph. Any great power, at any time and any epoch, would have been more than satisfied with such an ending to a successful military campaign, but what did Russian diplomacy actually do? Instead of realizing the cherished dream of its tsars and all European nations – to destroy the Ottoman Empire once and for all – it “forgot” about the Bulgarians and drew up a treaty that partially solved the Greek and the Serbian problems, strengthened Russia’s influence and at the same time established the conditions for a diverse range of opportunities for St. Petersburg’s future intervention in Balkan affairs in its role of a fair arbitrator. Curiously, the Russian government’s decision to sign the peace treaty with the Porte and preserve the Empire’s integrity without continuing its campaign to Constantinople was made on 4 September 1829, i.e., two days after the Treaty of Adrianople was signed. No one in Russia, however, thought of accusing General Diebitsch of acting too hastily or arbitrarily because, as Russian researchers admit, the Commander-in-Chief of the Danube army was well aware of Nikolay I’s personal intention in this matter: to prevent the Ottoman Empire’s final dislodgment from Europe.13 Here is one more nuance in the new Russian doctrine. As mentioned above, the victories over Turkey during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries make the Russian expansion on the Balkans a powerful factor, one stimulating the political activity of the Christian nations subject to the Sultan. Regardless of the fact that Catherine II and her successors followed their own interests with regard to the Sublime Porte, Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians, Montenegrins and Wallachians perceived Russia’s actions through the prism of their hopes for a speedy deliverance from the yoke of the sultan’s will. Russian rulers were well aware of this and took consistent care to present their Balkan undertakings as a noble and just cause and to strengthen Turkish subjects’ faith in St. Petersburg’s mission of liberation. Apparently, this was mutually beneficial. Russia acquired an ally in the form of the subjected Christian reaya; and the Balkan nations, confident in the sincerity of Russia’s policy, began organizing new campaigns and movements for liberation. However, the discrepancy between objective Russian interests and the longing of the Greeks and South Slavs for liberation must not be underestimated because, in addition to all the positive aspects of Russian influence on the Balkan revival, for an entire century – from Küçük Kaynarca to San Stefano – the political fight of the Balkan nations proved entirely dependent on the attitude of the Asian Department and actually served Russia’s strategic plans. Indicative of the “Janus-faced” Russian policy toward the Balkans is an instruction from the Foreign Minister in St. Petersburg, Karl Nesselrode, to P. Rickman (Second Counsellor to the Ambassador to Constantinople, Apolinariy Butenev) from 8 March 1834 concerning Russia’s desire to make the Sublime Porte permit a Russian officer to draw a detailed shipping map of the Anatolian Black Sea coast (from the River Rioni to Constantinople). In his draft, the Russian Vice-Chancellor offered to Rickman to remind the Turkish government that the support provided by Nikolay I to Sultan Mahmud ІІ in 1833 against the Egyptian 13 Еlena Kudryavtseva, Russkie na Bosfore. Rossiyskoe posol’stvo v Konstantinopole v pervoy polovine ХІХ vekа (Moscow: Naukа, 2010), 45.

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separatist Mehmed Ali Pasha was the best proof that Russia no longer harboured “hostile” intentions toward Turkey. Such a confession probably appeared inappropriate to Nesselrode and in the final version of the instruction the relevant lines were deleted. This unintentional and minor “clerical” incident is a good illustration of the discrepancy between official statements and actual policy in relation to the Ottoman Empire.14 What is curious about such facts is not only the continuity in the implementation of the “weak neighbour” doctrine under Alexander І and Nikolay І, but also the excuses used by politicians and diplomats to conceal Russia’s refusal to employ a policy of “force” à la Catherine ІІ towards Turkey. Thus, the “traces” of the above “excuses” for St. Petersburg’s unwillingness to engage in the radical resolution of individual aspects of the Eastern Question can be found not only in official Russian propaganda, but also in Russian historiography. An example is provided in the study by Viktoriya Hevrolina dedicated to the major topic of Russian Slavophiles during the second half of the nineteenth century. Tracing Alexander I’s policy toward the South Slavs, the author supports the thesis that while the Russian government implemented consistent action to liberate the vassal Christian population from Turkish rule and establish a “Slav federation” on the Balkans, the resolutions of the Congress of Vienna (1815) and the establishment of the Holy Alliance buried this Slav’ “dream” since they prevented Russia from realizing its intentions.15 The only opportunity for Russia in post-Napoleonic Europe remained the search for diplomatic means of implementing the Russo-Turkish treaties of 1812 and 1829.16 For good or bad, the destiny of the small nations has always been subject to the interests of the great powers. The important thing is whether these nations’ political elites realize this and how far they manage to retain their national dignity and protect their national interests. In this sense, the thesis that in early nineteenth century Russian diplomacy started observing the “weak neighbour” policy toward Turkey, whatever the support for it, should not be regarded as a reproach to Russia or a denial of its real role in the political emancipation of the Balkan nations. Moreover, their liberation was paid for by Russian bloodshed across the battlefields of Dobrudja, Moesia and Thrace. Should we, however, because of this finding, keep silent or begin to acknowledge the other faces of Russian diplomacy in the Balkans?

14 Ibid., 96. 15 Viktoriya Hevrolina, “Problema “Rossiya i Slavyanskiy svyat” v russkoy obschestvennoy myisli pervoy polovinyi XIX veka,” in Russiya meždu Zapada i Iztoka, XVIII – nachaloto na XXI vek. Stranitsi ot istoriyata (Sofia: Akademichno izdatelstvo “Marin Drinov”, 2011), 86. 16 Viktoriya Hevrolina, “Problema “Rossiya i Slavyanskiy svyat” v russkoy obschestvennoy myisli pervoy polovinyi XIX veka,” in Konstantin Nikiforov (ed.), V “inter’ere” Balkan. Yubileynnyi sbornik v chest’ Irinyi Stepanovnyi Dostyan (Moskva: Probel, 2010), 259.

Living on the Edge of Christendom: Some Eighteenth-Century Croatian Perceptions of Europe and its Borders Naoum Kaytchev Writing as late as the eighth decade of the eighteenth century, the Slavonian author Matija Antun Relković chose to employ a well-established Biblical motif: the division of the world by Noah between his three sons. Thus “Great Asia” was allotted to the eldest, Shem; Africa to Ham; whereas the most junior brother, Japheth, chose Europe. Noah preferred to stay with his youngest son, i.e., in Europe. Relković further enriched and re-wrote the classical Old Testament motif by adding that Noah’s people were not able to divide America at the time for they were unaware of its existence.1 Relković’s scheme once again points to the lingering importance of Christian thinking and imagining for the broader visualization of space and culture, even when presumably secular. According to the thesis affirmed by Gerard Delanty, the idea of Europe emerged in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as a ‘secular version of Christendom’. After the wars of religion during the Reformation and the seventeenth century, the old denominational unity was further shattered; and the idea of Europe came to symbolize the cultural, political or spiritual community that still existed.2 The aim of this contribution is further to elucidate the complex interrelationship between ideas on Christendom and Europe as employed by some mid- and late-eighteenth-century Croatian intellectuals. Our main focus is on two major, influential authors of the time: Baltazar Adam Krčelić  (1715–1778) and Matija Antun Relković (1732–1798). Since the former was a priest, whereas the latter was a worldly soldier from a younger, “more advanced” generation, one would expect Relković to employ somewhat bolder secular notions, including those on Europe. Indeed, in his widely popular verse work Satir he formulates direct pleas for reform and cultural transformation that were entirely in tune with the principles of the Enlightenment. One of the central topics of his spirited, ironic verses was that of the “schools”, presented in two totally different versions: initially as wretched establishments inherited from the dark past, later as their antithesis – novel and enlightening, sponsored by the blessed emperors Maria Theresa and Joseph II. However, Relković originated from the specific region of Slavonia that half a century previously had still been under the Ottoman Empire and subject to various forms of 1 Matija Antun Relković, Djela (Zagreb: Jugoslavenska akademija znanosti i umjetnosti, Stari pisci hrvatski 23, 1916), 156. 2 Gerard Delanty, Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality (London: Macmillan, 1995), 65.

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Islamization. Born in 1732, he was raised in a native land still struggling with fresh memories of Muslim domination. Writing in his vernacular Shtokavian Slavonian dialect he clearly aimed at a wider public from the lower social strata. Impressed by the achievements of Europe in general – and in particular Prussia, where he had been a prisoner of war during the Seven Years’ War – in Dresden in 1762 he published the initial version of Satir with the explicit aim of bettering the life of his native Slavonians.3 The book generated heated polemic but was ultimately an unexpected success. Emboldened by this accomplishment, Relković re-worked and expanded his oeuvre in a more ambitious second edition printed seventeen years later in Slavonia itself, in Osijek. This book also enjoyed an unrivalled success at the time.4 While the ideas were novel the author preferred to convey them in a familiar, conventional form that would be accessible for his eventual readers. Like the popular Dalmatian poet Andrija Kačić Miošić he emulated the verse form of the customary folk epic of the wider South Slav region. Tradition was followed not only as poetic structure but also as substance: Relković adhered to two well-established patterns of the Early Modern Croatian-Slavonian narrative: the notions of the Turkish/Muslim all-endangering threat and of Christianity as a general framework and ultimate authority on all important issues. The central image generating all trouble for his beloved Slavonia was that of the ‘Turks’ – it symbolized the all-important ‘Other’ in both state and religious incarnation. The conquest by “Soliman” (Süleyman I) was presented as a human and economic disaster. Previously fruitful fields were rendered almost barren for they were semi-deserted and seeded only with corn. Beautiful vineyards were also abandoned. Even more regrettable was the spiritual and social contamination that affected the local Slavonian population. Indeed, the core of the first edition of Satir aimed to expose the moral degradation of contemporary Slavonia that allegedly stemmed from the Ottoman inheritance. This wretched picture was contrasted with the virtues of Christianity, which should be followed. The motif of Christian versus Muslim, Croat/Slav/Slavonian versus Turk was already well established in Croatian-Slav narratives; it formulated clear borders between two completely different worlds. Despite the loss of some vital areas, Croatia was nevertheless destined to survive on the edge of, but still within, the Christian spiritual world. One of the important symbolic mythomoteurs of Croatian identity was that of the ‘bulwark of Christendom’ (antemurale Christianitatis). Croatia was linked to this metaphor from the early decades of the sixteenth century, more specifically in the years around the Fall of Belgrade in 1521. According to reliable extant sources, in the aftermath of the Fall the Archduke of Austria, Ferdinand von Habsburg, publicly appreciated Croats as a “chivalrous Christian people” that “stand like a shield” before the imminent threat from the East. More importantly, the symbol was employed by the Croatian nobles and writers themselves: as early as July 1523 the Croatian Count Krsto Frankopan, in a memorandum to the Pope Adrian VI, counselled that Croatia was “the bulwark or gate to Christendom”. This figure of speech, however, subsequently gained decisive prominence after the famous Battles of Szigeth (Szigetvár) in 1566 and Sisak in 1593. The defence of Szigetvár by a small Croatian garrison led by Ban 3 [Matija Antun Relković], Satyr iliti Divyi csovik u vershe Slavoncem (Dresden, 1762), accessed on August 8, 2013, dk.nsk.hr/stara_knjiga/NSK_SK_ID20. 4 Tomo Matić, Prosvjetni i književni rad u Slavoniji prije Preporoda (Zagreb: Hrvatska akademija znanosti i umjetnost, 1945), 67–77.

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Nikola Šubić Zrinski was an important topos in Early Modern Croatian literature up to and including the famous precursor of modern Croatian nationalism, Pavao Ritter Vitezović.5 The latter’s emotional epic poem Odiljenje sigetsko (1684) remains within the traditional opposition of Christian versus Muslim; the image of the “Turks” symbolizes the long-established threat both to the state and the religion of the Croats. Unlike his later post-Karlowitz writings, here Vitezović does not pay any special attention to space or geography. He concentrates entirely on the symbolic imagining of Szigetvár fortress; the city and the battle are overtly compared to the archetype, the campaign to win Troy, thus claiming worldwide importance. In a rare, explicit, geographical reference Vitezović attributes to Süleyman the Magnificent the distinction of being a conqueror of Asia and Egypt, ruler of the Hungarians and nearly all Slavonians, a menacing threat to the “Latins”, Spaniards and Germans...6 In this opposition, as in the whole poem, the term “Europe” is not even mentioned for it continues to be redundant in a narrative subsumed by references to Christendom and God. Relković continues the traditional Early Modern Croatian-Slavonian line of narrative; yet he also adopts some important changes. In tune with his Enlightenment age he is critical of his own community and outlines many deficiencies in his native Slavonians. Despite the novelty of his approach, he is quick to resort to traditional explanations: he blames Slavonian susceptibility to the impact of the foreign Eastern for all deficiencies. Turkish influence is held responsible for all local vices: ignorance and contempt of schooling, inefficient cultivation of the land, superstitious habits, inappropriate feasts, the decline of family morality, even women’s encouragement to brides to resist the advances of their lawful husbands and, for a certain time, avoid child-bearing in order to preserve youth and beauty. The author is equally disdainful of the popular South Slav epic cycle glorifying Marko Kraljević and exposes the inglorious historical role of the real Marko, the Ottoman vassal Marko Mrnjavčević, who died miserably in the battle of Rovine in 1395. In Relković’s view the adoption of the wrong epic on the wrong hero was also a trick by the Ottomans.7 By using traditional religious vocabulary in this way, the author introduces new content into the old dichotomy, anticipating the classical nineteenth-century notions of civilization and progress that were destined to triumph over barbarity and backwardness. Relković work involves another transformation even more important for our focus. While overtly glorifying the virtues of Christendom – for example, that his compatriot Slavonians should “follow all Christian peoples” – his powerful value judgements are accompanied by some specific geographical connotations. Thus the old women (babi) could learn their incantations only from Egypt. The arch-enemy, the Turks, settled by Sultan Suleiman, came explicitly from Asia. On the other hand, blessed improvements came from the opposite direction: the elite horses donated by the Emperor from Vienna, while silkworms came 5 Ivo Žanić, “The Symbolic Identity of Croatia in the Triangle Crossroads-Bulwark-Bridge,” in Pål Kolstø (ed.), Myths and Boundaries in South-Eastern Europe (London: Hurst & Co., 2005), 35–42. This paragraph, as well as the whole contribution, borrows theoretical terms and approaches from works such as Anthony Smith, Ethnic Origin of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995) and Zrinka Blažević, Ilirizam prije Ilirizma (Zagreb: Golden Marketing, 2008). Cf. Zrinka Blažević, “Indetermi-Nation: Narrative Identity and Symbolic Politics in the Early Modern Illyrism,” in Balázs Trencsényi and Márton Zászkaliczky (eds.), Whose Love of Which Country. Composite States, National Histories and Patriotic Discourses in Early Modern East Central Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 203–223. 6 Pavao Ritter Vitezović, “Odiljenje sigetsko,” Građa za povijest književnosti hrvatske 29 (1968): 153. 7 Relković, Djela, 75–76, 82–86, 111. See also: Ekrem Čaušević, “‘Turci’ u Satiru Antuna Matije Relkovića (1732–1798),” Prilozi za orijentalnu filologiju 47–48 (1997–1998): 67–84.

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from the symbolic “Latinia”.8 The Old Testament story of Shem, Ham and Japheth explicitly evokes the images of the three different continents. Thus, although in nascent form and only implicitly, Relković endows the still-dominant notion of Christendom with some wider, potentially secular, elements and binds them with the vague geographical notion of Europe. His older contemporary Baltazar Adam Krčelić went one step further. Despite being a cleric and serving many years as a canon in the centre of Croatian ecclesiastical life, the Bishopric of Zagreb, the logic of his main oeuvre is more secular than that of Satyr. Equally importantly, he shifts his attention away from the traditional Christian-Ottoman dichotomy. One reason for this is the genre and addressee of his chief work, Annuae, which was not intended for immediate public consumption. His text is of the type of the famous Secret History by Procopius of Caesarea and includes a mixture of personal diary and memoirs. Immortalizing the years from 1748 to 1767, this work came close to being burnt after the author’s death in 1778, yet survived and was printed in the early twentieth century. Due to its frankness, insight and plethora of information on myriad diverse phenomena, it is an unrivalled source for understanding the world of eighteenth-century Croatia. Reflecting the changed balance of power after the Treaties of Karlowitz (1699), Passarowitz (1718) and Belgrade (1739), its author does not pay much attention to the Turkish threat. He was immune from other extremes as well. For example, despite being a patriot and personally engaged in returning to Zagreb and preserving and continuing the texts of Pavao Ritter Vitezović, unlike the latter he was not an aggressive proponent of Croat-Habsburg expansion to the South-East. When, in 1765, Vienna showed interest in the islands of Krk and Cres, formerly held by the Croatian magnate family of Frankopan, and demanded from the Ban and the Estates of Croatia that they report on circumtances of their surrender to Venice, Krčelić frostily advised the Sabor that the subject lies outside the authority of the Croatian Kingdom and that therefore the archive evidence of the interstate treaties should be sought not in Zagreb but in Vienna. Far from being an enthusiastic supporter of prospective Austrian-Croatian expansion, Krčelić sympathised with the inhabitants of the islands who were allegedly frightened by the Austrian generals’ regime on the adjacent Military Frontier and preferred the preservation of the current Venetian rule.9 Krčelić’s text is preoccupied with internal intrigues and power struggles in his small patria, the Croatian-Slavonian entity centred around Zagreb within the wider framework of the Hungarian kingdom and the Habsburg state conglomerate. Yet despite his deep focus on local issues, having been raised in Vienna and Bologna, he had clear ideas on the wider picture as well.10 In the process he created an advanced notion of Europe. Though this is not the central theme of his writings he nevertheless regularly uses the actual term “Europe”. More personally, and convincingly, it means the wider world of higher and respected learning. Thus he considers it necessary to include a brief entry on the death of Ludovico Muratori, who is characterized as a “man respected for his erudition in the whole of Europe, made immortal by his numerous famous works”. Krčelić himself was in direct or indirect intellectual exchange with numerous and distant centres as far away as 8 Relković, Djela, 74, 78, 111, 132, 134. 9 Baltazar Adam Krčelić, Annuae ili historija: 1748–1767 (Zagreb: Jugoslavenska akademija znanosti i umjetnosti, Hrvatski latinisti 3, 1952), 488–489. 10 Teodora Shek Brnardić, Svijet Baltazara Adama Krčelića: obrazovanje na razmeđu tridentskog katolicizma i katoličkog prosvjetiteljstva (Zagreb: Hrvatski institut za povijest, 2010).

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Belgium and the Netherlands. In one of the most emotional, key paragraphs legitimizing his entire personality he confesses: For the love of fatherland… I devoted myself to science; in order to free the fatherland from darkness and from previous prejudices, partially by directing the behaviour and prejudices of influential office-holders towards the principles of law and justice and partially by enlightening their sons, I started to prevail over their allegedly faultless demonstrations; I asserted that only the omniscient person might be considered faultless and is faultless. Therefore I devoted myself to the political-historical sciences and, reading French, Belgian and other books and taking them as model, I began from scattered remnants to clarify the conditions and the state of my fatherland.11

Krčelić overtly associated and bound his most important ideals – patriotism and belief in the power of knowledge – with devotion to values shared in the wider geographical area. All these intellectual references implicitly or explicitly unite into and engender the encompassing image of Europe. On the other hand he uses the term Europe with a more concrete and perceptible meaning, namely, to convey the notion of a clearly defined political state system.12 This is very plainly demonstrated in the habitually employed phrases “Rulers of Europe”, “European rulers”, “Balance [of power] in Europe”. The author offers an elaborate explanation of its structure in his lengthy discussion on the possible reasons for the Seven Years’ War, which is presented as a pan-European conflict. Multiple potential causes are analysed (the Austrian aspiration to re-incorporate Silesia or to weaken Prussia; conflict over influence in Poland through the election of its future king; Vienna’s wish to install the future Joseph II as Holy Roman Emperor and so on), but in author’s view the war was rooted in the Austrian desire for profound economic self-advancement and emancipation that in the long run was detrimental to strategic English financial and naval interests and to its control over the “balance of Europe”. In conclusion, Krčelić lists his recipe for better future government by his monarchy so that “Austria… could, by means of her wealth, manage to hold in her hands the balance of Europe. I most sincerely wish for to her as my ruler”. According to this vision, “Europe” coincides with the totality of the states involved directly or indirectly (like Spain, Naples and Sicily through its Bourbon dynasties) in the Seven Years’ War. One should note the unambiguous inclusion of Russia into the thus-defined European community. Krčelić, like the majority of statesmen at that time, respected the military might and abilities of the Romanov monarchy. In contrast, the regions to the South-East – the Ottoman Empire and the adjacent Danube principalities – are largely neglected. The Sublime Porte is definitely seen as outside this “Europe of the Seven Years’ War”; only once is Turkey mentioned seriously during the discussion, in a conditional perspective – as a potential future tool that might be used by the Protestant powers of England and Prussia to achieve the degradation of Austria. The south-eastern border of Europe is not clearly defined, but at least for the moment it seems to coincide with the Habsburg-Ottoman one. 11 Krčelić, Annuae, 63, 475. 12 On the established pan-Continental perception of Europe as political system and on idea of the Balance of Europe: Wolfgang Schmale, Geschichte Europas (Wien – Köln – Weimar: Böhlau, 2000), 179–187; Bulgarian edition: Wolfgang Schmale, Istoriya na Evropa (Sofia: Petǎr Beron & Pleyada, 2005), 184– 192. Krčelić had internalized these ideas and employed them as an axiomatically accepted wisdom that required no proof.

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Krčelić’s discussion goes on to imply that the world system itself – as far as it is considered – was an extension of this European political structure. His reflections on the relations between Continental powers occasionally include overseas issues, mainly in South America and the West Indies. These territories are perceived as dependent on the will of the European states. On only one occasion in the text is Europe influenced by America and not the other way around: the story of Nicolas, a leader of the local insurgency against Spain and Portugal who was allegedly proclaimed the Jesuit King of Paraguay in 1756, widely affected the European public. Krčelić’s imagination views this as a sign of a certain scheme for reordering the world; more practically, the account was employed all over Europe, including by Krčelić’s like-minded friends in his native Croatia, as proof of Jesuit wrong doings. In all other cases the influence and domination originated from the European side. According to this perspective, the dominance in Europe was almost tantamount to that over the entire world: advising his sovereign on the optimal form of government, the author conjures up not only the image of the mastery of strictly Continental politics: If Austria, Poland and Russia devote themselves to initiatives on dry land, if they cultivate their fields and hills and promote crafts, they will easily bring the Northerners into submission and will have in their hands the balance of the world.

Krčelić’s reasoning on the roots of war and on the nature of European politics elucidates his already mentioned trend towards secularisation. He explicitly discusses and rejects the claims for the allegedly religious Catholic-Protestant nature of the conflict. The cleric dryly notes that rulers from both denominations had more important priorities than the dissemination of their own faith. Even the Protestant sovereigns had to wage warfare in order to protect commerce because a substantial number of their subjects were entirely dependent on it.13 This leads us to another important feature of the frank text of Annuae: the previously idealistic image of Christendom has evaporated from its pages. Although the author was a believer who accepted God’s ultimate authority, he points bitterly to the various disagreements within the Christian world – and not only between Catholics, Protestants or Eastern Orthodox Schismatics. He poignantly notes the prevailing worldly considerations of rulers and their subjects, as well as the uneasy, calculated relations between the Habsburgs and the Pope. Even the Catholic Church as an institution is far from playing the previous role of the romantic spiritual symbol of Christendom. The author dwells at length on various internal intrigues and petty struggles within the Church itself. Being a secular diocesan cleric, Krčelić was opposed to monastic orders and openly expressed his detestation of them, especially the Jesuits or Paulines. Numerous influential prelates and hierarchs are depicted in a negative light, above all his superior and arch-enemy Francis Thauszy, who from 1752 until his death in 1769 served as Bishop of Zagreb. Thus while the image of a united Christendom – as distinct from Christianity, which was still at the core of author’s beliefs – dissipates from the surface of the text, another distant, vague but entirely positive and all-encompassing idea appears – Europe – that projects spiritually powerful and affirmative notions of shared cultural values. It has an equally important political dimension as well – different struggling nations are ultimately united in one common European political structure with its system of mutual political balances. 13 Krčelić, Annuae, 295–298, 304–316.

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The examination of the texts of the Croatian authors leads us to important observations. While they still ultimately adhere to Catholic religious norms, in their texts Christendom gradually becomes irrelevant as a designation for territories united in a shared spiritual and political community. Substitutes such as “all Christian peoples” are sometimes used, yet they cannot conceal the obliteration of the previous image. The texts are explicit in their view that Croatia/Slavonia belongs to a still-extant, and clearly perceived, wider cultural and political community with a vast territorial reach. They experience considerable difficulty in labelling the new commonality, yet gradually the term “Europe” starts to fill the vacuum. Outwardly it was a secular notion, but in fact it continued to accept the essential teachings of Christianity, which served as its distant cultural basis. “Europe” rested on intellectual notions that evolved continuously out of the previous centuries of “Christendom”.14 All in all, Croatian thinking on Europe could easily be described as part of a pan-European evolution. Learned men of letters started to embrace and emulate the same intellectual models that could be discerned in nuce somewhat earlier in more central or western parts of the Continent. Eighteenth-century authors still perceived Croatia as existing on the edge of Christendomcum-Europe: they tended to view the European border as shifting and potentially changing but in general coinciding with the Habsburg-Ottoman frontier. Nevertheless, the “boundary” or “fortress” mentality was conspicuously less prominent than in previous centuries. This would pave way to further evolution of ideas about the European border in the following centuries.

14 Mary Anne Perkins, Christendom and European Identity: the Legacy of a Grand Narrative since 1789 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004), argues for the continuing presence of these cultural notions after 1800, constituting “Europe-as-Christendom”.

Regions and Borders During Revolutionary Transformations: The Example of the Papal Enclaves Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin in the Years of the French Revolution Rossitza Tasheva In June 1790, when the French National Constituent Assembly was working on the enormous task of reforming all spheres of social and political life in France, the inhabitants of Avignon, a city situated in the valley of the River Rhône, which for centuries had been owned by the Holy See,1 appealed to the Assembly to reunite the papal enclave with the French state.2 The request appeared to be insignificant. The Deputies, busy with other duties, ignored the letter from the citizens of Avignon. However, a few days later the region around Avignon – the Comtat Venaissin (County of Venaissin), also a papal possession3 and enclave in France, addressed to the National Assembly a demand which was the very opposite to that by Avignon. According to the Comtadins, the French should not annex foreign territories; they should remain true to the principle they had recently adopted guaranteeing complete renunciation of territorial expansion.4 Thus the National Assembly of France faced a problem that soon came to be called the Avignon Affair. It proved difficult to find a solution, not only because the issue was complicated on an international level, but also because it caused deep division both in a region in the heart of South-Eastern France and among the Deputies of the French National Assembly. Why did the papal subjects in Avignon and Comtat assume opposing positions and why were they so deeply divided that the tension between them escalated into a bloody civil war 1 Since the end of the tenth century Avignon had been in the possession of the Counts of Provence and Toulouse; and at the end of the thirteenth century part of the city temporary fell under the rule of the French Kings Philip III and Philip IV. In 1348, the heiress to Avignon, Joanna, Queen of Naples and Countess of Provence, sold the city to Pope Clement VI for the sum of 80,000 gold florins. 2 Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860. Recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des Chambres françaises. Première série, 1787 à 1799. Imprimé par ordre du Sénat et de la Chambre des députés; sous la dir. de M. J. Mavidal,... et de M. E. Laurent [further AP], vol. 16, 256 (17 June 1790). 3 Since the end of the tenth century Comtat Venaissin had been in the possession of the Counts of Toulouse. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, two of them, Raymond VI and his son Raymond VII, were defeated in the Albigensian Crusade and, according to the terms of the Treaty of Paris in 1229, Comtat Venaissin became the possession of the Church. In 1271 Comtat fell under the rule of the French King Philip III, who three years later ceded it to Pope Gregory X. In 1317 Pope John XXII expanded Comtat with the exclave of Valréas, bought by Baron Humbert de Montauban. 4 AP, vol. 16, 405–407 (22 June 1790). In its address, the Representative Assembly of Comtat Venaissin referred to the decree of the French National Assembly of 22 May 1790, in Article 4 of which it was solemnly declared, “That the French nation renounces the undertaking of any war with a view to making conquests, and that it will never use its forces against the freedom of any people.” See the text of this famous decree in AP, vol. 15, 661–662.

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that lasted for many months? With what arguments did the French revolutionaries decide to undertake their first territorial expansion? What was the fate of the former papal enclaves after their reunion to France? These questions are addressed in the present chapter. *** On the eve of the French Revolution, the inhabitants of Avignon and Comtat Venaissin did not differ significantly from the French in the neighbouring provinces of Provence and Languedoc. They spoke the same languages – French and Provençal – they had the same culture and customs and, in addition, within the kingdom of France they enjoyed the status of French subjects, which gave them the right to hold ecclesiastical, civil and military offices.5 It could be said that their reunion with France had been prepared long previously. A significant difference from the French was that the citizens of Avignon and the Comtadins were obliged to obey the authority of a foreign ruler – the Pope in Rome and the Italian officials sent by him – but the “Italian yoke” under which they were forced to live was, however, compensated for to a certain extent by one extremely important privilege, namely not having to pay state taxes and or to perform military duties. Despite the “soft”, “paternal”6 rule of the Pope, in the spring of 1789 Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin were set alight by the flames of the Revolution. To a considerable extent, revolutionary developments in the region were determined by a conflict that had long been ripening between the papal administrators and the local population, who insisted on greater participation in the government structures of the city and the county. There were also numerous protests against seigneurial and Church taxes. However, the factor that triggered anger and the people’s revolt was external. Under the conditions of the economic crisis of 1788 and 1789, the news from France about the convocation of the Estates-General, about the writing of Cahiers de Doléances (lists of grievances) and later about the abolishment of the division of society into Estates and of feudal taxes inspired the papal subjects to undertake the same actions.

5 For a brief review of the history of Avignon and Comtat Venaissin before their final reunion with France, see Claude-France Hollard et Bernard Thomas, “France, Avignon, Comtat, XIIIème siècle-1791,” in René Moulinas (ed.) La réunion d’Avignon et du Comtat à la France. Actes du colloque, organisé par l’Association départementale du bicentenaire de la Révolution et par l’Académie de Vaucluse, 21 septembre 1991 (Avignon: CDDP de Vaucluse, 1992), 23–41. For this period the present article also used the works of Jean-Pierre Papon, Histoire générale de Provence, 4 vols. (Paris: Moutard, 1776–1786); Joseph Guérin, Discours sur l’histoire d’Avignon, suivi d’un aperçu sur l’état ancien et moderne de cette ville, et sur les monumens et les objets qui peuvent fixer l’attention des voyageurs (Avignon: Veuve Guichard, 1807), 9–57; Aristide Mathieu Guilbert, Histoire des villes de France avec une introduction générale pour chaque province, vol. 4 (Paris: Furne, 1845), 73–120; Léopold de Gaillard, Deux enclaves de l’ancienne France: Orange et sa principauté, Avignon et le comtat Venaissin (Paris: Impr. de Soye et fils, 1892); Thomas Okey, The Story of Avignon (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1911). 6 On 18 November 1790, in his speech at the French National Assembly in defence of papal authority in Avignon and Comtat Venaissin, Abbot Jacquemart, a Deputy from Anjou, declared: “There has never been a softer and more paternal rule than that of the Pope” (AP, vol. 20, 524). This view has also been adopted by a number of authors of historical works: see, for instance, Louis Loubet, Carpentras et le Comtat-Venaissin avant et après l’annexion: étude historique (Carpentras: Tourrette, 1891), 22; Charles Soullier, Histoire de la révolution d’Avignon et du comté Venaissin en 1789 et années suivantes, 2 vols. (Paris: Seguin aîné, 1844), vol. 1, 4; Gaillard, Deux enclaves de l’ancienne France, 78.

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Initially, the Avignon and Comtadin patriots carried out revolutionary activities that were similar in character.7 In the spring 1790, the residents of Avignon forced the papal vicelegate to approve the establishment of a new municipal organization formed by representatives of the local people’s assemblies and proclaimed that they would be guided by the rules of the French Constitution. In their turn, the Comtadins, despite the Pope’s disapproval, managed to revive their ancient Estates-General, which had not been summoned since the time of the religious wars and, along the French model, organized the writing of Cahiers de Doléances. However, it soon became clear that the inhabitants of Avignon and those of Comtat had different projects for their future. In Avignon the attempt by Pius VI to defend his rights by cancelling all innovations led to further division between the pro-French-minded revolutionaries and the papal supporters – mainly clergymen and noblemen. The people’s revolt of 10 June 1790 against the papists led to the final breaking of relations with Rome. Executions of local aristocrats began and on 12 June the citizens voted for the reunion of Avignon with France. At the same time, the Comtadins showed that they were far more restrained than the citizens of Avignon when it came to encroaching on the power of their ruler. In May 1790, the local Estates-General opened their meetings in the capital of Comtat Venaissin, the city of Carpentras; they renamed themselves a Representative Assembly; and by a large majority the Assembly declared the adoption of the French Constitution and all revolutionary laws of France, but with the express stipulation that it did so as long as these laws were in compliance with their locality and the respect due to the sovereign. That condition was particularly highlighted in the address which the Comtadin Representative Assembly sent to the French Constituent Assembly in June 1790.8 According to the Comtadins, the Pope should accept the necessary constitutional limitations, but keep his executive authority over the county. The reasons for the opposing opinions of Avignon and Comtat on the most important issue on the agenda – reunion with France or not – could mainly be found in the economic and social structures of the region. Avignon, former capital of Christianity, located on a large navigable river, was a highly developed, thriving city. Although stagnating to some extent during the eighteenth century, it boasted the thriving production of and trade in silk fabrics, coloured textiles and printed materials. Even before the Revolution a strong pro-French party had formed there, a base for the future party of the patriots.9 It consisted of local lawyers, producers and merchants who, to the highest degree, managed to take advantage of the temporary reunion of Avignon and Comtat by the French King Louis XV in the period from 1768 to 1774. Under the authority of the French monarch all papal officials were replaced by representatives of the local intelligentsia and the high duties on goods exported to France were cancelled, which caused a noticeable economic recovery. Comtat was a less economically developed zone dominated by villages in which the local Catholic priests enjoyed great prestige and influence. In the view of the majority of the 7 For the revolutionary events in Avignon and Comtat, see René Moulinas, Histoire de la Révolution d’Avignon (Avignon: Aubanel, 1986); Pierre Charpenne, Les grands épisodes de la Révolution dans Avignon et le Comtat, 4 vols. (Avignon: impr. H. Guigou, 1901); Soullier, Histoire de la révolution d’Avignon et du comté Venaissin, 2 vols. 8 “… nous venons d’adopter la Constitution française et tous les décrets de l’Assemblée nationale de France, compatibles avec notre localité et avec le respect dû au souverain.” AP, vol. 16, 406. 9 See, Pierre Charpenne, Histoire des réunions temporaires d’Avignon et du Comtat Venaissin à la France, 2 vols. (Paris: C. Lévy, 1886), vol. 1, ix; vol. 2, 180.

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Comtadins reunion with France would have far more disadvantages than advantages. First, it would hurt the strong pro-Catholic feelings of the inhabitants because the French National Assembly had refused to recognise Catholicism as the official religion. It would also lead to higher taxation and the obligation to perform military service. As for the elimination of duties in trade relations with France, that issue hardly concerned the Comtadins as most of them traded with a variety of agricultural products mainly within their own region.10 The local newspaper Annales du Comté Venaissin clearly revealed what the people of Comtat relied on, namely, preserving the power of the Pope: “We shall have peace, French laws and shall not pay taxes.”11 Obviously the Comtadins wanted to benefit from the French Constitution, but not to observe the obligations following from it. There was another and by no means insignificant reason for the explicit refusal of the Comtadins to accept the Avignon idea for reunion with revolutionary France. That was the traditional hostility that the Comtadins felt towards the city of Avignon. It was due, on the one hand, to the obvious superiority of Avignon to their own capital Carpentras; and, on the other hand, to the fact that the Comtadins were often obliged to go to Avignon on unpleasant occasions – either to appear before the Avignon higher courts, or to pay the taxes due to the numerous Avignon secular and spiritual lords. Therefore, when in March 1790 the Avignon revolutionaries offered their colleagues, the Comtadin revolutionaries, the merger of the two papal states into one, in order to unite their forces and in that way more easily to overcome the resistance of the local conservatives, of the Pope and his representatives, that initiative was met with great suspicion in Comtat. The Comtadins expressed their concern that they would fall entirely under the influence and power of Avignon, because Avignon would in all probability become capital of the two united states.12 The ideological differences caused the deterioration in relations between the revolutionary leaders in Avignon and those in Comtat. On that basis, a fierce propaganda war began between the two papal states. It was waged from the pages of the local newspapers and the tribunes of the political clubs that had emerged. The Comtadins presented Avignon as a centre of anarchy; and the people of Avignon argued that the capital of Comtat, Carpentras, had become the haunt of aristocrats, the centre of fanaticism and prejudice.13 The Avignon propaganda was the major factor in building the image of Comtat as a counter-revolutionary 10 See, Martine Lapied, “La contre-révolution et l’opposition au rattachement à la France dans le Comtat Venaissin (1789–1791),” in François Lebrun et Roger Dupuy (eds.), Les Résistances à la Révolution. Actes du colloque de Rennes, 17–21 septembre 1985 (Paris: Imago, 1987), 133–140; Martine Lapied, “La question religieuse et le refus de la France révolutionnaire dans le Comtat Venaissin,” in Religion, Révolution, Contre-Révolution dans le Midi, 1789–1799. Colloque international tenu à Nîmes les 27 et 28 janvier 1989 (Nîmes: J. Chambon, 1990), 59–63. 11 Quoted from Albert Mathiez, Rome et le clergé français sous la Constituante (Paris: A. Colin, 1911), 212, note 1. 12 Moulinas, Histoire de la Révolution d’Avignon, 38–40; René Moulinas, “L’élaboration d’un nouveau droit international: Avignon, le Comtat et le droit des peoples à disposer d’eux mêmes (1789–1791),” in idem (ed.), La réunion d’Avignon et du Comtat à la France. Actes du colloque, organisé par l’Association départementale du bicentenaire de la Révolution et par l’Académie de Vaucluse, 21 septembre 1991 (Avignon: CDDP de Vaucluse, 1992), 51. 13 See, Jonathan Skinner, “Vendée et petites Vendées: L’exemple du Comtat Venaissin, une Vendée papale? Et de la Provence, une Vendée provençale?,” in Yves Marie Bercé (ed.), La Vendée dans l’histoire. Actes du colloque (Paris: Perrin, 1994), 54–55; Lapied, “La contre-révolution et l’opposition au rattachement à la France dans le Comtat Venaissin,” 134.

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zone, an image, which long dominated and created a false impression about the conflict in the region. Meanwhile an additional factor appeared which contributed to a sudden escalation of the tension, causing “fermentation of the old yeast of hatred”14 between Avignon and Carpentras. Many municipalities in Southern Comtat, the most economically developed territory in that papal province, with towns that had been maintaining good trade relations with Avignon, refused to obey the Comtadin authorities in Carpentras and federated with Avignon. Comtat Venaissin appeared to be threatened with secession. The conflict between the two formed hostile camps – Avignon and Southern Comtat, on one hand; and Central and Northern Comtat, on the other – hand; lasted for many months and caused trouble not only for the local residents and authorities, but also for the French National Assembly, to which Avignon had clearly expressed its desire to become part of revolutionary France. The Avignon Affair appeared on the agenda of the Assembly in June 1790 and was discussed for more than a year until 14 September 1791, when a decree was adopted announcing that Avignon and Comtat Venaissin were “an integral part of the French state”. The debates in the French National Assembly were long and difficult, because as a basis for their request the citizens of Avignon had referred to a principle which at that time had not yet been officially adopted into international law: the principle of the right of peoples to self-determination. At the end of the eighteenth century, though not officially recognized, that principle was so popular that no one dared to deny it, even the strongest opponents of the reunion of Avignon and Comtat. The essence of the Avignon Affair was most clearly revealed by Maximilien Robespierre, who in his speech of 18 November 1790 before the French National Assembly solemnly declared: The importance of this affair is not measured by the area of the Avignon territory, but by the loftiness of the principles which guarantee the rights of people and nations. The cause of Avignon is that of the universe; it is the cause of freedom.15

From the statements of the French Deputies it became clear that they all realized the enormous historical significance of the problem which they had to solve; and in justifying their position for or against the reunion they were not satisfied merely to point out the usual pragmatic considerations, but raised their thoughts to a high theoretical level, penetrating deep into the issues of natural law. At the same time, the participants in the discussion acknowledged that Europe was not yet governed by the rules of natural law; it recognized only public law and contracts. Therefore, even those French revolutionaries who wholeheartedly supported the people’s rights advanced a series of arguments based on positive law, on signed contracts governing the rights over territories. They were well aware that

14 In the words of Raymond de Verninac de Saint-Maur, sent by the French National Assembly, along with the other commissioners on a special peacemaking mission in the region of Avignon and Comtat Venaissin. See Raymond de Verninac de Saint-Maur, Des troubles d’Avignon et du Comté Venaissin, depuis le mois d’août 1789, jusqu’à ce jour ([S.l.]: Micro Graphix 1993, reprod. de l’éd. de Paris: C. F. Perlet, an IV de la liberté [1792]), 9. 15 “Ce n’est pas sur l’étendue du territoire avignonnais que se mesure l’importance de cette affaire, mais sur la hauteur des principes qui garantissent les droits des hommes et des nations. La cause d’Avignon est celle de l’univers; elle est celle de la liberté.” AP, vol. 20, 525.

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an annexation that was illegal in the eyes of the European governments could have serious international consequences.16 In the French National Assembly the cause of Avignon was defended by the Deputies of the Left, among whom Charles François Bouche, Jacques Menou, Jérôme Pétion, and Maximilien Robespierre were the most active. Although referring to the people’s right to determine their own political status, they all first and foremost tried to prove that the Pope had no legitimate reason to exercise his authority over both Avignon and Comtat. According to them, the Treaty of 1348 by which Joanna Queen of Naples and Countess of Provence had sold Avignon to Pope Clement VI was invalid for a number of reasons: the Queen had been a minor at the time; according to the will of her legator she had not been entitled to carry out acts of alienation; it was doubtful whether the price had been paid. Furthermore, Avignon and Comtat had been part of Provence; and according to the will of the last Count of Provence, Charles IV the county had passed into the possession of the French King Louis XI and his successors. The principle of prescription could not be applied to papal possession either, because it was only applicable when possession had been uninterrupted and all monarchs after Louis XI had demonstrated their rights over Avignon and Comtat, including thrice reuniting those territories with the domain of the Crown by military occupation.17 In the field of natural law the main thesis of supporters of the reunion was based on the – in their view obvious – truth that sovereignty belonged to the nation. As holders of the sovereignty, the people of Avignon were free and independent; they had the right to overthrow through revolution the despotic rule of the Pope (which, moreover, had not been established by their will) and to decide themselves how to be governed.18 The orators of the Left also paid attention to the fact that the reunion of Avignon and Comtat would bring important economic and political advantages to France. The French kingdom would certainly benefit from a region with remarkable natural resources, hardworking people and flourishing industries. The incorporation of Avignon and Comtat into France would ensure the integrity of France’s territory at precisely the time when the abolition of internal customs barriers was in progress; and, further, it would deprive the enemies of the Revolution of a possible base where they could organize themselves to fight against the French Constitution.19 16 For the philosophical and legal aspects of the discussion in the French National Assembly on the Avignon Affair see, Moulinas, “L’élaboration d’un nouveau droit international,” 45–67; Jean-Jacques Clere, “Le rattachement d’Avignon et du Comtat à la France: approche juridique (1789–1791),” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 290 (1992): 571–587; Albert Sorel, L’Europe et la Révolution française, vol. 2: La chute de la royauté (Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit et Cie, 1887), 99–104. 17 AP, vol. 10, 208–211 (report of Charles François Bouche, Annex 2 to the meeting of the National Assembly of 21 November 1789); AP, vol. 18, 374 (Charles François Bouche, 27 August 1790); AP, vol. 20, 474–476 (Jérôme Pétion, 16 November 1790); AP, vol. 20, 526 (Maximilien Robespierre, 18 November 1790); AP, vol. 25, 452–461 (Jacques Menou, 30 April 1791); AP, vol. 25, 491–494 (Guillaume GoupilPréfeln, 2 May 1791). 18 AP, vol. 20, 476–481 (Jérôme Pétion, 16 November 1790); AP, vol. 20, 526–528 (Maximilien Robespierre, 18 November 1790); AP, vol. 25, 459–460 (Jacques Menou, 30 April 1791); AP, vol. 25, 500–501 (Maximilien Robespierre, 2 May 1791). 19 AP, vol. 10, 212 (report by Charles François Bouche, 21 November 1789); AP, vol. 18, 375–376 (Charles François Bouche, 27 August 1790); AP, vol. 20, 480 (Jérôme Pétion, 16 November 1790); AP, vol. 20, 528 (Maximilien Robespierre, 18 November 1790); AP, vol. 30, 581–582 (Jacques Menou, 12 September 1791).

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The defenders of the Pope’s rights came from the ranks of the conservative Right in the French National Assembly. Among them Pierre Victor Malouet, Stanislas ClermontTonnerre, Abbot Claude Jacquemart and Abbot Jean Sifrein Maury stood out. They challenged each of their rivals’ claims to the “positive right” of France over Avignon and Comtat,20 but they themselves admitted that the historical and legal documents contained too many ambiguities and contradictions concerning that issue.21 Therefore, with even more passion and zeal, the Deputies of the Right joined the debate about the “natural law” of peoples to decide their fate for themselves. The opponents of reunion believed that the principle of national sovereignty could not be challenged, but that its practical application should meet certain requirements. Pierre Victor Malouet, for example, fully agreed with the idea that “every nation has the right to declare itself free, independent and to change its government”, but he urged “this precondition, the will of all to be manifested freely and through legal and solemn forms.”22 According to the orators of the Right, the vote of the people of Avignon could be considered neither as freely given, nor as unanimous, because it was held in days of rebellion and executions when “the blood is still smoking” and thousands of people, especially property owners, were forced to save themselves by escaping. The question was also raised as to whether an Avignon nation existed as something separate, independent from the residents of the other papal states. If that was assumed, the risk would be faced that any town, village or province in France might want to separate from the state. Moreover, the same could happen with the French colonies. Finally, if France reunited with Avignon, European rulers, being afraid their provinces might follow the Avignon example, would join forces to attack France.23 Faced with so many arguments for and against reunion, the French National Assembly repeatedly postponed the solution of the Avignon Affair. Another factor played a significant role, namely, the concern of the French revolutionaries to prevent worsening relations with the Pope at a time when France was involved in radical reform of the Church through the adoption, in July 1790, of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. On 20 November 1790 Honoré Gabriel Riqueti Mirabeau appealed to the Deputies to be guided primarily by “the interests of the moment.”24 Although Mirabeau did not provide any specific explanation, it became clear to his colleagues what he meant: if the Assembly irritated Pius VI, depriving him of his temporal power over the territories in the valley of the River Rhône, he would not give his support to ecclesiastical reform in France, which in turn would lead to a schism in the French Church and most probably to a civil war. On the contrary, by prolonging the debates on the Avignon Affair, the National Assembly could keep the Pope in suspense, threatening

20 See, for instance, the defence of the historical rights of the Pope in the speeches of Stanislas ClermontTonnerre on 20 November 1790 and 2 May 1791 in AP, vol. 20, 560–562; vol. 25, 501–502; and Abbot Jean Sifrein Maury on 20 November 1790 and 3 May 1791 in AP, vol. 20, 566–572 and AP, vol. 25, 532–536. 21 AP, vol. 20, 530 (Louis Marie Florent du Châtelet, 18 November 1790). 22 AP, vol. 25, 498 (2 May 1791). 23 AP, vol. 18, 369–370 (François Denis Tronchet, 27 August 1790); AP, vol. 18, 371–372 (Pierre Victor Malouet, 27 August 1790); AP, vol. 20, 532–533 (Abbot Charrier de La Roche, 18 November 1790); AP, vol. 20, 562–563 (Stanislas Clermont-Tonnerre, 20 November 1790); AP, vol. 20, 572–578 (Abbot Jean Sifrein Maury, 20 November 1790); AP, vol. 25, 494–495 (Joseph Henri de Jessé, 2 May 1791). 24 AP, vol. 20, 563.

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silently to deprive him of Avignon and Comtat if he did not approve the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.25 While the Deputies in the French Assembly were arguing, the tension in Avignon and Comtat grew stronger. Between the two camps – the supporters and the opponents of the reunion – an armed conflict broke out. Both sides competed in violence and cruelty, but the leadership in that respect was undoubtedly taken by the Avignon Army, which had adopted the name the braves brigands. It included in its composition around 3,000 volunteers, led by Jourdan Coupe-Tête (Head-Cutter), who was notorious for his brutality and ferocity. The region was devastated by a fratricidal civil war, accompanied by massacres, arsons and robberies. Under these conditions, most of the municipalities in Comtat held assemblies, which voted massively in favour of the reunion with France. Their stated motive was “the state of complete abandonment and despair”26 in which they had been placed by their monarch. However, even after this the war continued with the same force and cruelty as before, because the leadership of the opposition against Avignon was assumed by a powerful new military-political organization – the Union of Sainte Cécile, at the head of which stood the nobles of Northern Comtat. They had an outright counter-revolutionary orientation: the defence of the Ancien Régime and the absolute power of the Pope. The National Assembly of France, which had repeatedly been asked to intervene in the conflict, was scared that the war might spread to the neighbouring French territories. It sent three of its Deputies as mediators, who helped the warring parties finally to make peace on 14 June 1791. The French mediators then organized a referendum to clarify the true opinion of the former papal subjects on the main issue – their reunion with France. The results of the vote were listed in the final report on the Avignon Affair read by the Deputy Menou in the French National Assembly on 12 September 1791. It became clear that not only the citizens of Avignon had expressed their will “rather [to] die than not [to] be French.”27 The rapporteur stated that of all 98 municipalities, 52 had voted for reunion with France, 19 had voted for the Pope and 27 had not voted at all, but 17 of the non-voting municipalities had expressed their desire to be reunited with France in April and May 1791. Considering the population living in the voting municipalities, Menou indicated that of the 152 919 residents of Avignon and Comtat 101 046 had voted for France.28 He particularly emphasized the fact that the vote had been perfectly free, which was evident from the gratitude to the French mediators expressed in the documents of the municipalities which had voted for the Pope. They had declared their satisfaction that the attending French troops and national guards had ensured “freedom of opinion, security of persons and property.”29 These results, along with the Pope’s decision, which had become known in the spring of 1791, officially to condemn the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, helped the Deputies of 25 See, on this issue, Mathiez, Rome et le clergé français sous la Constituante, 206, 226, 232–233. 26 Quoted from Lapied, “La contre-révolution et l’opposition au rattachement à la France dans le Comtat Venaissin,” 135. See also the speeches of Stanislas Clermont-Tonnerre and Abbot Jean Sifrein Maury of 2 May 1791, who disputed the results of the voting of the Comtadin municipalities in AP, vol. 25, 503–508, 536–539. 27 Léopold Duhamel, Documents sur la réunion d’Avignon et du Comtat-Venaissin à la France, 1790–1791 (Paris: A. Picard, 1891), 31 (Minutes of the counting of the votes in Avignon, 15 July 1791). 28 AP, vol. 30, 580. 29 AP, vol. 30, 481.

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the French National Assembly to overcome their hesitation. They adopted the Decree of 14 September 1791 on the reunion of Avignon and Comtat, basing themselves primarily on the historical rights of France over those territories, but strongly emphasizing the freely expressed will of the affected population.30 Thus, combining in a strange but original way two mutually exclusive principles – on the one hand, the old principle of the right of ownership over a territory and the transfer of that right by inheritance; and, on the other hand, the new principle of the right of the people to reject the power of their ruler – the French National Assembly found a way out of the tangled Avignon Affair.31 However, the solution to the problem of Avignon and Comtat came too late to save the local citizens further bloodshed. Relations between the revolutionaries and the papists were so tense in the region that one of the worst massacres happened after the reunion, namely, in October 1791, when, in order to avenge the murder of one of the local patriots, the most radical revolutionaries in Avignon captured and killed 60 suspected papists, throwing their bodies into the Glacière Tower at the Papal Palace.32 The news of these bloody events shook the whole of France. The assassins, called Glacierists, were arrested, but in March 1792 they were granted amnesty by the French Legislative Assembly. The Deputies were afraid that the Counter-Revolution was gradually gaining strength in the South of France and decided that the time was not suitable for taking legal action against the revolutionaries. After the reunion of the former papal provinces Avignon and Comtat, the problem of their integration into the French state came to the fore. Their integration proved to be a complex process and proceeded very slowly. First, the French legislators began with the administrative organization of the newly acquired territory. They decided that Avignon and Comtat should not together form a new French département, but be separated and connected to two different départements due to the political opposition still prevalent in the region and the “spirit of civil war.”33 By decrees adopted by the Constituent Assembly on 23 September 1791 and by the Legislative Assembly on 26 March 1792, it was enacted that the city of Avignon and Southern Comtat should form the district of Vaucluse, which should be connected to the département of Bouches-du-Rhône; and that the city of Carpentras together with Central and Northern Comtat should form the district of Ouvèze, connected to the département of Drôme.34 In the new districts all French laws immediately entered into force, except those relating to taxes. The election of new administrative and judicial officers in Vaucluse and Ouvèze took months, but most painful proved to be the introduction of the French tax system. The region was so devastated by the civil war that in March 1792 the Legislative Assembly granted it financial assistance to the amount of 200 000 livres, which was divided between all the municipalities in the new districts. In these times of economic distress, unemployment and pov30 AP, vol. 30, 631–632. 31 On 2 May 1791, Pierre Victor Malouet paid special attention to the incompatibility of the two principles on which discussions were carried out in the Assembly. See, AP, vol. 25, 497; see also, Chimène I. Keitner, The Paradoxes of Nationalism. The French Revolution and Its Meaning for Contemporary Nation Building (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007), 205, note 61. 32 For detailed research on these events, see René Moulinas, Les massacres de la Glacière. Enquête sur un crime impuni. Avignon 16–17 octobre 1791 (Aix-en-Provence: Édisud, 2003). 33 AP, vol. 31, 243 (Antoine d’André, 23 Sempenber 1791). 34 AP, vol. 31, 241–245; vol. 40, 490–495. Article 20 of the final revision of the Decree of 26 March 1792 stipulates “amnesty for all crimes and offenses related to the revolution, performed in Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin till 8 November 1790.”

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erty, most of the population refused to declare their property, thus hindering the introduction of taxes on land and income. To a large extent, for precisely the reason that the residents of Vaucluse and Ouvèze could receive another postponement of their taxes, in early 1793 the local revolutionaries took the initiative of merging the two districts into a new département, whose administration, composed of people from the region, would be the only institution able to establish and organize taxation.35 The new département of Vaucluse, with its administrative centre Avignon, was established on 25 June 1793. The official reasons for its formation, mentioned in the decree of the French National Convention, were purely geographic – natural features, on one hand; the need for all municipalities to be relatively close to the main city on the other. However, the real reasons were clearly identified by the Deputy Nicolas Billaud-Varenne: “Marseille [the administrative centre of the department of Bouches-du-Rhône] is in a state of open counterrevolution... We should remove Avignon from Marseille’s dictatorship.”36 From the turbulent department of Bouches-du-Rhône were cut another two districts, Apt and Orange, which were also included in the new département of Vaucluse. With the development of the French Revolution, the region of Avignon and Comtat remained very uneasy. Further divisions into opposing camps developed and the bloody conflicts continued. The Jacobin Terror of 1793–1794 was followed by the White Terror of the Royalists in 1795. Nearly 1 300 inhabitants preferred to emigrate abroad in order to seek refuge from the political confrontations and economic impasse.37 In the following years, gangs of brigands continued to terrorize the population. The final peace was established with the assumption of power by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799, when General Ferino, authorized by the First Consul of the French Republic General Bonaparte to restore order in several départements in the South of France, including in Vaucluse, issued an order to a Military Commission to sentence to death by firing squad within twenty four hours any participant in an armed group, any person caught carrying arms without special permits or without a passport, anyone who had seized another person’s property or who in any way had assisted the brigands.38 The Military Commission horrified the gangs so much that they dispersed and peace and tranquillity were ultimately restored. It is appropriate to pay attention to another party strongly interested in the Avignon Affair – the Pope, Pius VI. What was his position in relation to the revolutionary events in his French possessions? Initially, with the help of delegates sent by him, the Pope tried to stop the course of the revolution in Avignon and Comtat, but lacked the necessary armed force to do so. Later he insisted that the French King send troops to protect his rights as a sovereign. For Pius VI, as for the French National Assembly, the two issues – Church reform in France and the Avignon Affair – were most closely related. The Pope knew that if he did not approve the revolutionary changes in the Church in France, he would lose his possessions in the Rhône Valley. Therefore, he hesitated for many months as to what position he should express on the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Finally, as a result of strong pressure from the French counter-revolutionary emigrants, he decided to condemn it and to seek protection 35 Moulinas, Histoire de la Révolution d’Avignon, 197–198, 260–263, 293. 36 AP, vol. 67, 453–454. 37 Donald Greer, The Incidence of the Emigration During the French Revolution (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1966), Table I, 111. 38 See the text of this order in Charpenne, Les grands épisodes de la Révolution dans Avignon et le Comtat, vol. 4, 438–441.

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for his secular interests in the European courts. After the victories of Napoleon Bonaparte in Italy, the Pope was forced officially to recognize the reunion of Avignon and Comtat Venaissin with France. In accordance with the Treaty of Tolentino (19 February 1797), he unconditionally renounced all rights that he could claim over the specified territories. The revolutionary events in Avignon and Comtat Venaissin on one hand created movement for the abolition of the old political borders, but on the other they contributed to the formation of new borders – socio-political, informal but clearly outlined, borders that separated the supporters from the opponents of reunion, the reformers from the conservatives, the extremists from the more moderate, the revolutionaries from the counter-revolutionaries. The people of Avignon and the Comtadins paid “the price with their blood”39 for their desire to become French and be free, but the drama they had gone through did not pass without a trace. Through their experience a new principle in the international law was introduced and its practical application experimented with for the first time, a principle that was destined for a great future – the principle of the right of peoples to self-determination.

39 In the words of Jean Duprat, President of the Election Assembly of the département of Vaucluse (a meeting on 24 August 1793). See Léopold Duhamel, Documents sur la réunion d’Avignon et du ComtatVenaissin à la France, 1792–1793 (Paris: A. Picard, 1893), 37.

BORDERING “TURKEY IN EUROPE”

The Role of Hâcı-Gâzi Evrenos and His Descendants in Endowing Zâviye-İmârets (Dervish Lodges-Soup Kitchens) in the Balkans: Scale – Intent – Duration Heath W. Lowry Scale In a series of recent books, this author has sought to draw attention to the role played in the fourteenth-century Ottoman conquest of the Balkans by the Uc Beys (March Lords), chief among whom was Hâcı-Gâzi Evrenos.1 By examining the extant architectural remains of their building programmes attention has been drawn to the generally overlooked fact that their conquests were accompanied by extensive infrastructural development, chief amongst which was the construction of zâviye-imârets (Dervish Lodges-Soup Kitchens), designed to meet the needs of travellers, the poor and the dervishes who provided the backbone of the akıncı forces they commanded. The present paper focuses on what is known in regard to the zâviye-imârets (dervish lodges-soup kitchens) constructed by Hâcı-Gâzi Evrenos and his descendants in what today is Northern Greece. The important sixteenth-century Ottoman chronicler Gelibolulu Mustafa ‘Âli provides us with a clue in regard to the extent of Evrenos’ activity in this regard in his Kitâbü’t-Târīh-i Künhü’l-Ahbâr: And then there was the Famous Commander, that is, Evrenos Bey, who was the patron of pious deeds, the doer of good works, the courageous man who engaged in holy war, the tall and handsome man, he of excellent character, he who was a prince of the powerful. Most of the villages

1 See: 1) The Shaping of the Ottoman Balkans, 1350–1550: Conquest, Settlement & Infrastructural Development of Northern Greece (İstanbul: Bahçeşehir University Press, 2008) [Turkish: Osmanlı Döneminde Balkanların Şekillenmesi, 1350–1550: Kuzey Yunanistan’ın Fethi, İskânı ve Altyapı Gelişmesi (İstanbul: Bahçeşehir Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2008)]; 2) In the Footsteps of the Ottomans: A Search for Sacred Spaces & Architectural Monuments in Northern Greece (İstanbul: Bahçeşehir University Press, 2009) [Turkish: Osmanlıların Ayak İzlerinde: Kuzey Yunanistan Mukaddes Mekânlar ve Mimarî Eserleri Arayış Yolculukları (İstanbul: Bahçeşehir Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2009)] 3) with İsmail E. Erünsal, The Evrenos Dynasty of Yenice-i Vardar: Notes & Documents (İstanbul: Bahçeşehir University Press, 2010) [Turkish: Yenice-i Vardar’lı Evrenos Hanedanı: Notlar & Belgeler (İstanbul: Bahçeşehir Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2010)]; 4) The Evrenos Family & the City of Selânik (Thessaloniki): Who Built the Hamza Beğ Câmii & Why? – Evrenos Ailesi ve Selânik Şehri: Hamza Beğ Câmii Niçin ve Kimin Tarafından Yapıldı? (İstanbul: Bahçeşehir University Press: Occasional Papers in History #2, 2010); and, 5) Fourteenth Century Ottoman Realities: In Search of Hâcı-Gâzî Evrenos – On Dördüncü Yüzyıl Osmanlı Gerçekleri: Hacı-Gazi Evrenos’un İzinde (İstanbul: Bahçeşehir University Press: Occasional Papers in History #5, 2012).

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Heath W. Lowry and towns comprising the interior of Rumeli were his conquests. That renowned Commander, he and his son have endowed pleasant soup kitchens (imârets) in seven different locations.2

As illustrated in Table I & Map II below, Evrenos, two of his sons and one grandson were in fact responsible for the construction and endowment of no fewer than nineteen such soup kitchens.

Map 1: Western Thrace & Macedonia showing the sites of Hâcı-Gazi Evrenos’ imârets

2 Lowry, The Shaping of the Ottoman Balkans, 43; Gelibolulu Mustafa ‘Ali Efendi, Kayseri Raşid Efendi Kütüphanesi’ndeki 901 ve 920 No.lu Nüshalara Göre Kitabü’t-Tarih-i Künhü’l-Ahbar, ed. by Ahmet Uğur, Mustafa Çuhadar, Ahmet Gül, İbrahim Hakkı Çuhadar, vol. 1, part 1 (Kayseri: Erciyes Üniversitesi Yayınları, 1997), 126 (Fol. 27b–28a). The Turkish text reads: “Fe-ammâ eşher-i ümerâsı Evrenos Beğ’dir ki, sahib-i hayrât, râgıb-i meberrât, şir-merd-i pişe-i cihâd, şeh-levend-i kerâmet-nihâd bir emir-i büzürgvâr idi. Rûm-ili’nin İc-il’i hükmündeki kurâ ve kasabâtı ekseriyyâ ol feth itmişdir. Ol emir-i nâm-dâr kendinin ve evlâdının yedi yerde ‘amâyir-i latifesi vardır.”

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TABLE I.: Fourteenth & Fifteenth Century Ottoman İmârets & Zâviye-İmârets in the Balkans Endowed by Hacı-Gâzî Evrenos & his Descendants3 #

Date

Location

Name & Function of Site

References

1

Circa: h. 765 (1364)

İpsala

Gâzi Evrenos İmâreti

Evliya, 2003: p. 168

2

Circa: h. 766 (1365)

Gümülcine [Gr.: Komotini]

Gâzi Evrenos Zâviye-İmâreti Note: Never converted into a mosque

Evliya, 2003: p. 38 [V209a] Lowry, 2008: pp. 41–47 Lowry, 2009: pp. 136–137 Lowry/Erünsal, 2010: pp. 86–88 TT Def. 167: pp. 13, 18–19

3

Circa: h. 786 (1385)

Siroz [Gr.: Serres]

Gâzi Evrenos Zâviye-İmâreti Note: Never converted into a mosque

Ayverdi, 1966: pp. 525–526 Ayverdi, 1982: pp. 293–94 Balta, 1995: p. 139 Zengin, 2004

4

h. 794 (ca. 1392)

Selânik [Thessaloniki]

Gâzi Evrenos İmâreti

Ayverdi, 1982: p. 274

5

Circa: h. 802 (1400)

Yenice-i Vardar [Gr.: Giannitsa]

Gâzî Evrenos Bey Kârbânsarây-İmâreti

Evliya, 2003: p. 77 [V230b] Lowry/Erünsal, 2010: p. 104

6

Circa: h. 802 (1400)

Vodina [Gr.: Edessa]

Gâzî Evrenos Bey Câmii-İmâreti

Ayverdi, 1982: p. 306 Ayverdi, 2000: p. 306

3 Sources: Ayverdi, 1966: Ekrem Hakkı Ayverdi, Osmanlı Miʻmârîsinin İlk Devri: I. Ertuğrul, Osman, Orhan Gaazîler, Hüdavendigâr ve Yıldırım Bâyezîd, 630–805 (1230–1402) (İstanbul: Baha Matbaasi, 1966); Ayverdi, 1973: Ekrem Hakkı Ayverdi, Osmanlı Miʾmârîsinde Fâtih Devri, 855–886 (1451–1481) (İstanbul: Baha Matbaası, 1973); Ayverdi, 1982: Ekrem Hakkı Ayverdi, Avrupa’da Osmanlı Mimarî Eserleri, IV. Cild, 4.,  5.,  6. Kitab: Bulgaristan, Yunanistan, Arnavutluk (İstanbul: İstanbul Fetih Cemiyeti, 1982); Ayverdi, 2000: Ekrem Hakkı Ayverdi, Avrupa’da Osmanlı Mimarî Eserleri, IV. Cild, 4., 5., 6. Kitab: Bulgaristan, Yunanistan, Arnavutluk, 2nd edition (İstanbul: İstanbul Fethi Derneği Yayınları, 2000); Balta, 1995: Evangelia Balta, Les vakıfs de Serrès et de sa region (XVe et XVIe s.) (Athènes: Centre de Recherches Néo-Helléniques, 1995); Lowry, 2008: Heath W. Lowry, The Shaping of the Ottoman Balkans, 1350–1550: Conquest, Settlement & Infrastructural Development of Northern Greece (İstanbul, Bahçeşehir University Press, 2008); Lowry, 2009: Heath W. Lowry, In the Footsteps of the Ottomans: A Search for Sacred Spaces & Architectural Monuments in Northern Greece (İstanbul: Bahçeşehir University Press, 2009); Lowry/Erünsal, 2010: Heath W. Lowry and İsmail E. Erünsal, The Evrenos Dynasty of Yenice-i Vardar: Notes & Documents (İstanbul: Bahçeşehir University Press, 2010); Yüksel, 1983: İ. Aydın Yüksel, Osmanlı Mimârîsinde II. Bâyezid, Yavuz Selim Devri (886–926/1481– 1520) (İstanbul: İstanbul Fetih Cemiyeti, 1983); Zengin, 2004: Zeki Salih Zengin, “İlk Dönem Osmanlı Vakfiyesinden Serez’de Evrenuz Gazi’ye Ait Zâviye Vakfiyesi,” Vakıflar Dergisi 28 (2004): 101–120; Evliya, 2003: Evliyâ Çelebi b. Derviş Mehemmed Zıllî, Evliyâ Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi. 8. Kitap: Topkapı Sarayı Kütüphanesi Bağdat 308 Numaralı Yazmanın Transkripsiyonu – Dizini, ed. by Robert Dankoff, Seyit Ali Kahraman, Yücel Dağlı (İstanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2003); TT Def. 370: 370 Numaralı Muhâsebe-i Vilâyet-i Rûm-ili Defteri (937/1530). I: Paşa (Sofya) ve Vize Livâları ile Sağkol Kazâları (Edirne, Dimetoka, Ferecik, Keşan, Kızıl-ağaç, Zağra-i Eski-hisâr, İpsala, Filibe, Tatar-bâzârı, Samakov, Üsküb, Kalkan-delen, Kırçova, Manastır, Pirlepe ve Köprülü), Dizin ve Tıpkıbasım (Ankara: Başbakanlık Devlet Arşivleri Genel Müdürlüğü, 2001); TT Def. 167: 167 Numaralı Muhasebe-i Vilayet-i Rum-ili Defteri (937/1530). I: Paşa Livası Solkol Kazâları (Gümülcine, Yenice-i Kara-su, Drama, Zihne, Nevrekop, Timur-hisarı, Siroz, Selanik, Sidre-kapsi, Avrat-hisârı, Yenice-i Vardar, Kara-verye, Serfiçe, İştin, Kestorya, Bihlişte, Görice, Florina) ve Köstendil Livâsı, Dizin ve Tıpkıbasım (Ankara: Başbakanlık Devlet Arşivleri Genel Müdürlüğü, 2003).

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Heath W. Lowry

7

h. 820 (ca. 1417)

Yenice-i Vardar [Gr.: Giannitsa]

Gâzî Evrenos Bey Câmii-İmâreti

Ayverdi, 1982: p. 306 Evliya, 2003: p. 77 Lowry, 2009: pp. 12–13 Lowry/Erünsal, 2010: pp. 29–34

8

Circa: h. 844 (1440–1441)

Karaferya [Gr.: Veria]

Gâzî Mehmed Bey İmâreti [Evrenosoğlu]

Başbakanlık Arşivi: C.MF. dosya #150, gömlek #7464

9

Circa: h. 853 (1450)

Yenice-i Vardar [Gr.: Giannitsa]

Barak Bey İmâreti [Evrenosoğlu]

Ayverdi, 1982: p. 320 Başbakanlık Arşivi: C.EV. dosya #475, gömlek # 24028

10

Circa: h. 853 (1450)

Yenişehir-i Fener [Gr.: Larissa]

Barak Bey Câmi-İmâreti [Evrenosoğlu] [Died after: 1460]

Ayverdi, 1982: p. 325 Başbakanlık Arşivi: C.EV. dosya # 475, gömlek # 24028

11

Circa: h. 853 (1450)

Yenişehir-i Fener [Gr.: Larissa] Bey Tatarı Köyü

Gâzî Barak Bey İmâreti [Evrenosoğlu] [Died after: 1460]

Ayverdi, 1982: p. 329

12

h. 869 (1464–1465)

Edirne

[Çandarlı] İbrahim Çelebi [Paşa] Câmi-İmâreti

Ayverdi, 1973: pp. 209–210, 232

13

Circa: h. 874 (1470)

Yenice-i Vardar [Gr.: Giannitsa]

Gâzî Hacı İsâ Bey Câmiİmâreti [Evrenosoğlu]

Ayverdi, 1982: p. 320 Başbakanlık Arşivi: C.Ev. dosya #401, gömlek #28063 Lowry/Erünsal, 2010: pp. 110– 111 & pp. 115–116

14

Circa: h. 874 (1470)

Yenice-i Vardar [Gr.: Giannitsa]

Şeyh Abdullah al-İlahi İmâret-Câmii [Built by Şemseddin Ahmed Bey – Evrenosoğlu]

Evliya, 2003: p. 77 Lowry/Erünsal, 2010: pp. 24–28

15

Circa: h. 895 (1490)

Tatar Bazarı [BG: Pazardžik]

İmâret-i Ahmed Bey bin Evrenos Bey [Evrenosoğlu]

TT Def. 370: p. 109

16

h. 895 (ca. 1490)

Yenice-i Vardar [Gr.: Giannitsa]

İmâret-i Ahmed Bey bin Evrenos Bey [Evrenosoğlu]

Ayverdi, 1982: p. 319 Başbakanlık Arşivi: C.BLD. dosya #133, gömlek #6618

17

h. 895 (ca. 1490)

Peçan Kazası [Gr.: Kozana?]

[Gâzî] Ahmed Bey bin Evrenos Bey İmâreti [Evrenosoğlu]

Başbakanlık Arşivi: C.MF. dosya #18, gömlek #9124

18

Before: h. 904 (1498–1499)

Yenice-i Vardar

[Şemseddin] Ahmed Bey Câmi-İmâreti [Grandson of Gâzî Evrenos]

Ayverdi, 1982: p. 319

19

h. 904 (1498–1499)

Vodina [Gr.: Edessa]

[Şemseddin] Ahmed Bey Câmi-İmâreti [Grandson of Gâzî Evrenos]

Yüksel, 1983: p. 410

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Map 2: Showing locations in Thrace & Macedonia of the imârets endowed by Hâcı-Gazi Evrenos & his descendants, 1383–1500

Intent The German traveller Salomon Schweigger’s description of the Ottoman imâret institution (1577) A starting point for our examination of the Ottoman institutions of the imârets and hans/ kervânsarays (inns for travellers) must be the description found in the work of the German traveller Salomon Schweigger,4 who served as the Protestant Pastor attached to the Habsburg Ambassador to Istanbul, Joachim Freiherr von Sinzendorff, in the years 1577–1581.5 Schweigger, who crisscrossed the Balkans en route to and from İstanbul, gives us one of the clearest glimpses into just how these key Ottoman institutions functioned. Indeed, the detail he provides on both allows us to infer that he was not only a keen observer, but also someone who understood the importance of the all-too-often-overlooked role played by these types of facility: After schools their most important institution is that known as the imâret [imarerth], that is, ‘poorhouses’. The pious foundations of virtually all mosques which do not have a school contain a building known as the imâret. These are not places for the poor and needy to stay in, rather they are built for the purpose of feeding such individuals. Each has a cook, who prepares 4 The first German edition of this work is: Ein Newe Reyssbeschreibung Auss Teutschland Nach Constantinopel und Jerusalem, Mit Hundert Schönen Newen Figuren In III Unterschiedlichen Büchern. Auffs Fleissigst Eigner Person Verzeichnet Und Abgerissen Durch Salomon Schweigger (Nürnberg: Johann Lantzenberger, 1608). More recently, an excellent Turkish translation has appeared: Salomon Schweigger, Sultanlar Kentine Yolculuk, 1578–1581, trans. by S. Türkis Noyan & edited/annotated by Heidi Stein (İstanbul: Kitap Yayınevi, 2004), 247. 5 Schweigger, Sultanlar Kentine Yolculuk, 14.

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Heath W. Lowry food for the poor and needy. It is customary that everyone be given a mixed meat and rice dish, a drink called bosa (boza), which is made from a watered down fermented millet, and a loaf of bread. From this charity, everyone – rich, poor, Christian, Jew or Turk – without any distinction, may partake. This custom is of particular value for travellers. Every traveller may stay for three days in an imâret and take advantage of all its offerings; however if one stays more than three days it arouses suspicion and you will be shown the road.6

A second European traveller who benefited from the largesse of the Balkan imârets was the Frenchman Pierre Belon, whose work, written in 1547, describes İbrâhim Paşa’s imâret in Kavala: Taking into account that there are hardly any hostelries in Turkey let us speak about the great building which İbrâhim Paşa erected in Kavala, which the Turks call a Carbasharra [sic. Kervansaray]. He also built a mosque next to the hostel, where all who pass by are lodged and fed. Our group was only three in number, with our horses, and we were given food for three days in succession without paying anything and without any trouble... Nobody, be he Christian, Jew, Muslim or idolater is refused here.7

As one might well expect, the most valuable source on this subject (as for so many others) is the work of the seventeenth-century Ottoman traveller Evliyâ Çelebi. His Seyahatnâme8 names over thirty Balkan imârets whose services were open to Muslim and non-Muslim alike. A typical example is his description of the İbrahim Paşa imâreti in Tatarbazarcık: The kervansaray of the Favorite İbrahim Paşa, the vezir of Süleyman Hân: In the vicinity of the harem is a great soup kitchen. Every night and every day, all its guests, regardless of whether they are unbelievers or sinners, may stay in this kervansaray. After sunset, all souls are provided from the kitchens of Keykâvûs, at every fireplace, a copper tray containing a serving of wheat soup, and for every person a loaf of bread and a wax candle; while for every horse a measure of grain is provided. May God ensure that this benefactor’s largesse never ends, and may God bless his soul.9

These descriptions share one common theme: namely, the services of the Balkan imârets they describe were available to Muslim and non-Muslim alike. While there are a few references to the services of imârets in Bursa and İstanbul providing services to non-Muslims 6 Schweigger, Sultanlar Kentine Yolculuk, 247. 7 Alexandra Merle (ed.), Voyage au Levant: les observations de Pierre Belon du Mans de plusieurs singularités et choses mémorables, trouvées en Grèce, Turquie, Judée, Égypte, Arabie et autres pays étrangers (1553) (Paris: Éditions Chandeigne, 2001), 190–191. 8 Heath W. Lowry, In the Footsteps of Evliyâ Çelebi: The Seyahatnâme as Guidebook (İstanbul: Bahçeşehir University Press, 2012). 9 Evliyâ Çelebi b. Derviş Mehemmed Zıllî, Evliyâ Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi. 3. Kitap: Topkapı Sarayı Kütüphanesi Bağdat 305 Numaralı Yazmanın Transkripsiyonu – Dizini, ed. by Seyit Ali Kahraman, Yücel Dağlı (İstanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1999), 219. Turkish text: “kârbânsarây-ı Makbûl İbrâhîm Paşa-yı vezîr-i Süleymân Hân: …Bu haremin bir cânibinde bir azîm imâret-i dârü’z-ziyâfesi var. Her şeb [u] rûz cemî‘i müsâfirîn eğer kefere ve fecere bu mihmânsarâyda sâkin ola. Ba‘de’l-mağrib cemî‘i huddâmlar matbah-ı Keykâvûs’dan her ocak başına birer bakır sini içre birer tas buğday çobrası ve âdem başına birer nânpâresi ve birer şem‘-i revgân dânesi verirler ve her at başına birer tobra yem verirler. İlâ mâşâallah sâhibü’l-hayrât böyle vakf-ı dâ’im eylemiş, rahmetullahi aleyh.”

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in the fifteenth century,10 no such mentions have been encountered in the sixteenth century and thereafter. In particular, while Evliyâ Çelebi waxes eloquent on this aspect of the Balkan soup kitchens, notably in his descriptions of the imârets he visited in Anatolia and the Arab lands, he is strangely silent on the subject of their intended clientele. Extant soup kitchens (imârets) endowed by Hâcı-Gâzi Evrenos: Gümülcine (1383) & Yenice-i Vardar (1417) Of the seven soup-kitchens endowed by Hâcı-Gâzi Evrenos, two (those in Gümülcine and Yenice-i Vardar) are extant today. That established in Gümülcine in 1383 has been beautifully restored, whereas his Yenice-i Vardar soup-kitchen from 1417 is little more than a ruined shell. Both of these facilities are known to have continued to function up until the opening decade of the twentieth century. Evliyâ Çelebi provides the following description of Evrenos’ Gümülcine soup kitchen as he saw it in the 1750s: [In Gümülcine] there are two soup kitchens for the feeding of the poor. Of these, the imâret of Gâzî Evrenos distributes generous portions of delicious foods both morning and evening. At all times separate copper trays of food are provided for each group of three or five individuals. In addition, the administrator of the foundation provides a measure of grain for every traveller’s horse. This is a large pious foundation.11

The Ottoman chronicler Müneccimbaşı [Ahmed b. Lütfullah] in his Camiü’d-Düvel, paid particular attention to the role of Hâcı-Gâzi Evrenos and his descendants as endowers of imârets in the lands they conquered: Most of western Rumeli was conquered by Evrenos Bey. After he had lived in Gümülcine for a period, he turned his home there into an imaret and han and moved to Siroz (Serres). After he had conquered Vardar Yenicesi he turned his home in Siroz into an imaret and han and moved to Yenice. Until his death in ___ [Note: the year was left blank by author] he resided there. He and his sons were responsible for many conquests and numerous charitable institutions in Rumeli. His descendants are still alive today and the position of administrators (mütevelli) of these pious foundations is still in their hands.12 10 Heath W. Lowry, “Random Musings on the Origins of Ottoman Charity: From Mekece to Bursa, İznik and Beyond,” in Nina Ergin, Christoph K. Neumann, Amy Singer (eds.), Feeding People, Feeding Power: Imarets in the Ottoman Empire (İstanbul: Eren Yayınları, 2007), 69–79. 11 Evliyâ Çelebi b. Derviş Mehemmed Zıllî, Evliyâ Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi. 8. Kitap: Topkapı Sarayı Kütüphanesi Bağdat 308 Numaralı Yazmanın Transkripsiyonu – Dizini, ed. by Robert Dankoff, Seyit Ali Kahraman, Yücel Dağlı (İstanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2003), 38. The Turkish text reads: “... Cümle iki added me’kel-i imâret-i fukarâdır. Cümleden Gâzi Evrenos imâretinin subh [u] mesâ gûnâ-gûn ni’met-i nefîsesi hâss u âmma mâh u sâl bi’l-guduvvi ve’l-âsâl üç âdeme ve beş âdeme birer sini ta’âm dâ’imdir. Ve her müsâfirînin atlarının başlarına birer alîf cânib-i vakfdan mütevellî verir, gâyet ma’mûr evkâf-ı azîmdir.” 12 Müneccimbaşı [Ahmed b. Lütfullah], Camiü’d-Düvel, edited, translated and annotated by Ahmed Ağırakça (İstanbul: İnsan Yayınları, 1995), 126. The Turkish text reads: “Rumeli’nin batı tarafının çoğunu Evrenos Bey fethetmiştir. Bir müddet Gümülcine’de oturmus, sonra oturduğu evi bir imâret ve han yaparak Siroz’a gitmişti. Vardar Yenice’sini fethettikten sonar Siroz’dake evini de imaret ve han yaparak Yenice’ye gitti. ___ yılında vefat edinceye kadar orada kaldı. Kendisinin ve evlâdının Rumeli’de büyük fetihleri ve birçok hayır kuruluşları vardır. Nesli günümüze kadar devam etmekte olup vakıflarının mütevelliliği onların elindedir.” See, also: Müneccimbaşı Ahmed Dede, Sahaif-ül-

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Likewise, the chronicler Gelibolulu Mustafa Künhü’l-Ahbâr calls special attention to Evrenos’ endowing soup-kitchens, naming those in the towns of Gümülcine, Siroz and Yenice-i Vardar: And then there was the Famous Commander, that is, Evrenos Bey, who was the patron of pious deeds, the doer of good works, the courageous man who engaged in holy war, the tall and handsome man, he of excellent character, he who was a prince of the powerful. Most of the villages and towns comprising the interior of Rumeli were his conquests. That renowned Commander, he and his son have endowed pleasant soup kitchens (imarets) in seven different locations. It is related that when this famous Commander was residing in Gümülcine he was disturbed by some incident and moved to Siroz. At that point in time he turned his houses [in Gümülcine] into a soup kitchen (imaret). Afterwards he was unhappy and left there [Siroz] as well. When he came to Yenice Vardar he settled down there. Then he endowed his houses in Siroz to his imaret (soup kitchen). When the time had come that he journeyed to the other world [died] his palace in Vardar was also turned into a soup kitchen (imaret). It is well known that the aforesaid pious foundation is permitted to be the recipient of the incomes of several prosperous villages...13

Map 3: Map of Western Thrace showing the walled town of Gümülcine (Komotini) Ahbar fî Vekayi-ül-a’sâr, translated and edited by İsmail Erünsal (İstanbul: Tercüman 1001 Temel Eser: #37, ND), 130. 13 Gelibolulu Mustafa ‘Ali Efendi, Kitabü’t-Tarih-i Künhü’l-Ahbar, 126 (Folio 27b–28a). The Turkish text reads: “Fe-ammâ eşher-i ümerâsı Evrenos Beğ’dir ki, sahib-i hayrât, râgıb-i meberrât, şīr-merd-i pīşe-i cihâd, şeh-levend-i kerâmet-nihâd bir emīr-i büzürgvâr idi. Rûm-ili’nīn İç-il’i hükmündeki kurâ ve kasabâtı ekseriyyâ ol feth itmişdir. Ol emīr-i nâm-dâr kendiniñ ve evlâdınıñ yedi yerde ‘amâyir-i latīfesi vardır. Menkûldür ki, ol emīr-i nâm-dâr evellâ Gümülcine’de temekkün itmiş, bir husûsa incinüb Siroz’da temekkün ider. Andağı evlerini ‘ayniyle ‘imâret ta’yīn itmiş. Ba’dehû Siroz’da dahī hazz itmeyüb göçmüş. Vardâr Yeñicesi’ne varub ikâmet itmiş. Bu kerre Siroz’daki evleri de ‘amâyir yirine mülhak itmiş. Vaktâ ki, sefer-i Âhiret’e gitmiş Vardâr’daki sarây dahī ‘imâret olmuş. Meşhûrdur ki, mezbûr evkâfda müsa’ade kasdına birkaç karye-i ma’mûre recâ itmiş…”

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Gümülcine: The Hâcı-Gâzi Evrenos Zâviye-İmâreti (Soup Kitchen-Dervish Lodge) [Built as a residence in ca. 1365 & converted into an imâret in 1383]

Gümülcine: Side Room of the Hâcı-Gâzi Evrenos Zâviye-İmâreti (Soup Kitchen-Dervish Lodge) [Built: ca. 1365]

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Gümülcine: Entrance of the Hâcı-Gâzi Evrenos Zâviye-İmâreti (Soup Kitchen-Dervish Lodge) [Built: ca. 1365]

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Gümülcine: Avlu of the Hâcı-Gâzi Evrenos Zâviye-İmâreti (Soup Kitchen-Dervish Lodge) [Built: ca. 1365]

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Gümülcine: Showing original plaster in the Avlu of the Hâcı-Gâzi Evrenos Zâviye-İmâreti (Soup Kitchen-Dervish Lodge) [Built: ca. 1365]

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Gümülcine: Showing dervish balta (Battle Axe) Inscribed on the original plaster in the Avlu of the Hâcı-Gâzi Evrenos Zâviye-İmâreti (Soup Kitchen-Dervish Lodge) [Built: ca. 1365]

Map 4: Map of Central Macedonia showing the town of Yenice-i Vardar (Giannitsa)

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Evliya Çelebi provides us the following description of the hospitality he enjoyed at HâcıGâzi Evrenos’ imâret in Yenice-i Vardar: And there are a total of three imârets (soup kitchen) facilities for the feeding of the poor and indigent. These are the Receb Çelebi soup kitchen, the soup kitchen of the Şeyh İlâhi theological seminary, and the soup kitchen of Gâzî Evrenos’ mausoleum. Their generosity is open to all, the rich and the poor alike and the upper class and normal people. These are soup kitchens whose generosity rivals that of Keykâvus, which are open to all, even to fire-worshippers and Jews, day and night.14

The Hâcı-Gâzi Evrenos İmâreti & Câmii in Yenice-i Vardar (Giannitsa) in a ca. 1912 photograph [Built: ca. 1395]

14 Evliyâ Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi, 8. Kitap, 77. The Turkish text of this passage reads: “Ve cümle üç aded dâru’z-ziyâfe-i me’kel-hâne-i fakîrânı vardır. Cümleden Receb Çelebi imâreti ve Şeyh İlâhî medresesi imâreti ve Gâzî Evrenos türbesi imâreti. Bunların bay [u] gedâya ve hâss u âmma ni‘metleri dâ’imdir kim şeb [ü] rûz matbah-ı Keykâvus›undan muğân u cuhûdâna bile bezl-i ıt‘âm-ı âm olunur.”

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The Hâcı-Gâzi Evrenos İmâreti in Yenice-i Vardar (Giannitsa) in a ca. 1930 photograph [Built: ca. 1395]

Evliyâ Çelebi’s version of the no longer extant restoration inscription on the Hâcı-Gâzi Evrenos İmâreti & Câmii in Yenice-i Vardar [Built: ca. 1395]: Text: Ammere’l-İskender min nesli Gâzî Evrenos, Dâre hayrı ceddihi’l-a’lâ fe’amme nef’uhâ, Ecruhâ fî dârı’l-uhrâ cennetü’l-me’vâ lima Câe fî târîhihâ dârun karârun ecruhâ

Translation: İskender, from the line of Gazi Evrenos, rebuilt the house of charity [= imâret = soup kitchen] of his ancestor and disseminated its advantages. In return for which may his place in the next world be Paradise. So the phrase: dârun karârun ecruhâ provides its date [ = h. 916 (April 10, 1510 – March 30, 1511)]

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The present day status of the Hâcı-Gâzi Evrenos İmâreti in Yenice-i Vardar (Giannitsa)

The present day status of the exterior rooms of the Hâcı-Gâzi Evrenos İmâreti in Yenice-i Vardar (Giannitsa)

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The present day status of the interior of the second floor of the Hâcı-Gâzi Evrenos İmâreti in Yenice-i Vardar (Giannitsa)

The present day status of the interior of the Hâcı-Gâzi Evrenos İmâreti in Yenice-i Vardar (Giannitsa)

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Remains of original décor on the walls of the Hâcı-Gâzi Evrenos İmâreti in Yenice-i Vardar (Giannitsa)

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Comparing the Hâcı-Gâzi Evrenos İmârets in Gümülcine [top] & Yenice-i Vardar [bottom]

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Map 5: Conquests of Hâcı-Gâzi Evrenos in Thrace & Macedonia: 1357–1417

Duration An anecdote from a 2011 visit made by the author, accompanied by twenty-five of Evrenos’ descendants, to the lands he conquered in what is today Northern Greece, will illustrate both the longevity of his legacy and the impact of his pious endowments. One of our first stops was at the recently restored soup kitchen (imâret) built by Evrenos in the Western Thracian town of Gümülcine (Komotini) in the 1360s. Its restoration was paid for by the Metropolitan of the Orthodox Church in Gümülcine and, in return, it today serves as the city’s Church Museum. It is looked after by an elderly priest named Papas Dimitrios, a fact which helps explain its rather irregular opening hours. Forewarned of our arrival, Dimitrios was waiting by the door. He asked me who my guests were and when informed they were the descendants of Hâcı-Gâzi Evrenos, who had endowed the soup kitchen 550 years earlier, tears came to his eyes. Then he began kissing the hands of his visitors, young and old alike. When he regained his composure he explained that he had been the son of a very poor family. As a child, when he and his siblings would complain of hunger, their father would relate to them how as a youngster his family had been even poorer and he had always been hungry. Indeed, the only time Dimitios remembered ever having a full stomach was on Fridays when his own father would visit the Evrenos imâret and return home with bowls of soup, pilav and loaves of freshly baked bread. Those who query the reasons for the staying power of the Ottoman Empire, i.e., those who question how it could successfully have ruled for centuries a Balkan population with which it shared no common languages, history, religion or culture, should have witnessed the scene. This was a state which from its inception had provided a social network to meet the needs of its citizens. As seen in Table I., Evrenos and his immediate descendants alone

183 were responsible for endowing nineteen soup kitchens throughout what today is Northern and Central Greece. Many of them continued to feed the poor of all faiths for centuries. If we are to ever comprehend the real nature of Ottoman rule in the Balkans, we must never lose sight of the fact that no matter how the region was conquered, namely, with a sword in one hand, it was the ‘loaf of bread’ the Ottomans bestowed with the other hand which played a pivotal role in their ability successfully to rule the region for half a millennium. No one is more rightfully deserving of credit for the implementation of this policy than Hâcı-Gâzi Evrenos.

Priest Dimitrios, director of the Komotini (Gümülcine) Church Museum housed in the restored Hâcı-Gâzi Evrenos İmâret

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Priest Dimitrios and the Evrenosoğlus at Evrenos’ Gümülcine İmâret [August 2010]

Shaping the Ottoman Borderland: The Architectural Patronage of the Frontier Lords from the Mihaloğlu Family1 Mariya Kiprovska The “frontier theme” has been central to, and essential for, early Ottoman history ever since the state’s nascent years at the turn of the thirteenth century, for the Ottoman polity emerged in Bithynia as a frontier principality (uc begligi) on the frontier between the Byzantine and Seljuk territories in Western Asia Minor. Although the nature of Ottoman expansion and particularly the role of the gaza/Holy War ideology2 in the first centuries of Ottoman territorial extension have repeatedly been discussed,3 among historians consensus seems to reign 1 I would like to acknowledge and thank the American Research Institute in Turkey for offering me a doctoral research fellowship funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, as well as the Turkish Cultural Foundation for granting me a PhD dissertation fellowship in 2010, in the course of which I collected most of the material used in the present article and was able to conduct detailed field research in Bithynia, Turkish Thrace and in present-day Bulgaria. 2 It was initially the Austrian scholar Paul Wittek who argued that the gaza/Holy War was the foundation and the driving force of the early Ottoman state as it influenced its further territorial expansion. Paul Wittek, The Rise of the Ottoman Empire (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1938). Wittek’s views on the Ottoman frontier, expressed in a number of his works, are also discussed by Colin Heywood, “The Frontier in Ottoman History: Old Ideas and New Myths,” in Daniel Power and Naomi Standen (eds.), Frontiers in Question: Eurasian Borderlands, 700–1700 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), 228–250. A number of Wittek’s works discussing the gazi nature of the Ottoman state have recently been published in English by Heywood. Paul Wittek, The Rise of the Ottoman Empire: Studies in the History of Turkey, Thirteenth-Fifteenth Centuries, ed. by Colin Heywood (London – New York: Routledge, 2012). 3 The doyen of Ottoman studies, Halil İnalcık, to whom modern researchers owe much for the elucidation of the earliest period in the formation of the Ottoman state, stresses the importance of the Islamic gaza (Holy War) ideology as one of the foundational principles of the frontier principalities in western Asia Minor and a fundamental characteristic of Osman’s beglik in particular. Cf. Halil İnalcık, “Foundation of Ottoman State,” in Hasan Celâl Güzel, C. Cem Oğuz, Osman Karatay (eds.), The Turks, vol. 3: Ottomans (Ankara: Yeni Türkiye, 2002), 46–73. For a discussion of the gazi nature of the first Ottoman centuries with rather contradictory conclusions by both authors, see Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley – Los Angeles – London: University of California Press, 1995) and Heath Lowry, The Nature of the Early Ottoman State (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003). See also Ali Anooshahr, The Ghazi Sultans and the Frontiers of Islam: A Comparative Study of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods (London – New York: Routledge, 2009). The historical contextualization of Ottoman gaza ideology and how it evolved over time are issues which have recently been discussed by Linda Darling in her articles “Contested Territory: Ottoman Holy War in Comparative Context,” Studia Islamica 91 (2000): 133–163 and “Reformulating the Gazi Narrative: When Was the Ottoman State a Gazi State?” Turcica 43 (2011): 13–53.

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regarding the expansionistic character of the early Ottoman state, which in its formative period, according to some authors, clearly possessed an active “expansion frontier”.4 It has been argued that the Ottomans’ “open/gazi frontier”, characterized by incessant warfare by the gazis in the Abode of War (darü’l-harb) – since they wished to expand the Abode of Islam (darü’l-islam) at the expense of non-Muslim territories – came to an end with the Ottomans’ acceptance of a demarcated frontier on the signing of the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699.5 Recent research has challenged this view, demonstrating that a delineated frontier was by no means alien to the Ottomans prior to the end of the seventeenth century, as some demarcations on Ottoman frontiers date back as far as the fifteenth century.6 Nonetheless, with an ever increasing interest in the Ottoman frontiers,7 we are now more familiar not only with the legally defined boundaries of the Ottomans with their neighbours, but with the peculiarities of the everyday life in the border regions as well. Current research generally acknowledges that the frontier area in the Early Modern period should be addressed as a space rather than a demarcation line, with an emphasis on communication rather than the limitation of the border regions, where the commonality of the frontier population on both sides of the border was accentuated.8 Moreover, it was not only the frontier population who 4 In Colin Heywood’s view, in the period between 1300 and 1700 the Ottoman state clearly possessed an active expansion frontier. This was especially valid for the Rumelian uc from 1353 to 1453, which “appears to be an “expansion frontier” in highly developed form.” Heywood, “The Frontier in Ottoman History,” 231, 240. 5 Rifaat A. Abou-el-Haj, “The Formal Closure of the Ottoman Frontier in Europe: 1699–1703,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 89:3 (1969): 468–470; Heywood, “The Frontier in Ottoman History,” 241. 6 For the Ottoman-Venetian demarcations from the late-fifteenth century see Maria Pia Pedani, Dalla Frontiera al Confine (Roma: Herder, 2002), 39–58. A comprehensive examination of the pre-Karlowitz Ottoman demarcated linear boundaries is presented by Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, “Between Universalistic Claims and Reality: Ottoman Frontiers in the Early Modern Period,” in Christine M. Woodhead (ed.), The Ottoman World (London: Routledge, 2012), 205–219. See also his Ottoman-Polish Diplomatic Relations (15th –18th Century): An Annotated Edition of ʻAhdnames and Other Documents (Leiden – Boston – Köln: Brill, 2000), 57–67. The conceptualisation of the Danube River as a natural barrier and actual boundary in Western political writings, which can be identified two centuries prior to the Peace of Karlowitz, is examined by Maria Baramova, “Did the Danube exist in Habsburg Power Politics in South-Eastern Europe before 1699?” in Maria Baramova, Plamen Mitev, Ivan Parvev, Vania Racheva (eds.), Power and Influence in South-Eastern Europe, 16th –19th century (Berlin – Münster: LIT, 2013), 25–35. 7 The most recent contributions on the topic include Kemal Karpat and Robert Zens (eds.), Ottoman Borderlands: Issues, Personalities and Political Changes (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2003); Mark Stein, Guarding the Frontier: Ottoman Border Forts and Garrisons in Europe (London – New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007); Andrew C. S. Peacock (ed.), The Frontiers of the Ottoman World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 8 Suraiya Faroqhi, The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It (London – New York: I.B. Tauris, 2004), emphasizes that in the Early Modern period there existed a common world which was not divided by either political or confessional borders, but rather was characterized by constant contact between the Ottomans and Europe. It has convincingly been argued that the border territories, often dominated by continuous raids, disorder and anarchy, were indeed a contact zone where trade and common life between the communities were shared. Pedani, Dalla Frontiera al Confine, 59–72; and eadem, “Beyond the Frontier: The Ottoman-Venetian Border in the Adriatic Context from Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries,” in Almut Bues (ed.), Zones of Fracture in Modern Europe: the Baltic Countries, the Balkans, and Northern Italy (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 2005), 45–60. The same is observed by Mark Stein in regard to the Ottoman-Habsburg frontier in Hungary, where the population shared ties that crossed

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were pragmatic in their daily life along the frontiers, since the Ottoman sultans themselves took a rather pragmatic and flexible approach to dealing with neighbouring states and border provinces, even guaranteeing the local autonomy of some territories within the confines of the Empire.9 However, although the examination of the complexities of the Ottoman borders in historiography to date has emphasized different characteristics of Ottoman frontiers, such as the political, geographical and military features of the frontier concept, many aspects of the moving dynamics of frontiers still await examination.10 Ottoman Borders from within There is hardly any need to argue that the borders had a significant impact on the historical development of the Ottoman state from the outset. After its emergence beyond the western Seljukid Anatolian marches as a frontier principality bordering the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman state’s initial growth and territorial expansion were dominated by a distinct frontier culture and organization. Research over the past decades has emphasized that the frontier territories in Bithynia, where the Ottoman polity came into being, were less antagonistic in character and should be regarded also as a zone of interaction, collaboration and cultural mix, characterized by a hybrid culture, a result of the intermingling of the Turkish/Seljukid/ Islamic and Byzantine/Christian influences.11 Yet, in terms of organization, the frontier state political boundaries and were equally favoured by the opportunity for economic advancement along the frontier. See his Guarding the Frontier; and idem, “Military Service and Material Gain on the OttomanHapsburg Frontier,” in Peacock, The Frontiers of the Ottoman World, 455–468. Various opportunities for enrichment along the frontier are discussed by Colin Heywood, “A Frontier without Archaeology? The Ottoman Maritime Frontier in the Western Mediterranean, 1660–1760,” in Peacock, The Frontiers of the Ottoman World, 493–508. The phenomenon of frontier “pobratimstvo” on the border, a territory of persistent conflict and violence, clearly shows the existence of a frontier society characterized by cohesion and tolerance in which common interests and values were shared by Christian and Muslim frontiersmen alike. See Wendy Bracewell, “Frontier Blood-brotherhood and the Triplex Confinium,” in Drago Roksandić and Nataša Štefanec (eds.), Constructing Border Societies on the Triplex Confinium (Budapest: Central European University, 2000), 29–45. 9 Ottoman pragmatism and accomodationist policies toward the established administrative structure in the conquered lands are to be observed in the Eastern Anatolian provinces, where the central government allowed the existence of semi-autonomous districts under the yurdluk-ocaklık and hükümetocaklık system, by which local pre-Ottoman rulers held the hereditary governorship of these “family provinces”. This seems to be a prevailing theme in the volume of Karpat and Zens, Ottoman Borderlands, especially the articles of Gábor Ágoston, Tom Sinclair and Mehmed Öz. See also Tom Sinclair’s contribution to Peacock, The Frontiers of the Ottoman World, 211–224. Cf. Hakan Özoğlu, Kurdish Notables and the Ottoman State: Evolving Identities, Competing Loyalties, and Shifting Boundaries (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 53–54. The same pragmatic approach, which the sultans adopted in dealing with lands at the southern and north-eastern frontiers of the Empire, is examined by Kołodziejczyk, “Between Universalistic Claims and Reality,” 208–217. Cf. Halil İnalcık, “Autonomous Enclaves in Islamic States: Temlîks, Soyurghals, Yurdluk-Ocaklıks, Mâlikâne-Mukâta’as and Awqâf,” in Judith Pfeiffer and Sholeh Quinn (eds.), History and Historiography of Post-Mongol Central Asia and the Middle East. Studies in Honor of John E. Woods (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 2006), 126–128. 10 Besides its extensive contribution in regard to the Ottoman fortifications along the imperial borders, the volume edited by Peacock, The Frontiers of the Ottoman World, brings to the fore the significance of archaeological research while examining different aspects of the Ottoman frontiers as well. 11 Kafadar, Between Two Worlds; Heath Lowry, The Nature; Karen Barkey, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 28–65; Keith Hopwood, “Low-Level Diplomacy between Byzantines and Ottoman Turks: the Case of Bithynia,” in

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of the Ottomans largely adopted and resembled the organization of the Seljukid marches. Each of the Seljukid marcher districts in Anatolia was under the command of a governorgeneral, who was appointed by the central authority and under whose nominal control were the hereditary leaders (begs) of the Turkoman tribes in the marches.12 Taking the lead of the conquest beyond the Seljukid borders, these begs of the marches, among whom was Osman Beg, succeeded in establishing small border states and created in their own turn a system of subordinated loyalties with distinguished leaders of smaller warrior groups, who were then entrusted with the governing of the marcher districts, successively acquired through conquest in Byzantine territories.13 Tracing the organization of the Ottoman conquests and the subsequent administration of their moving frontiers in the following centuries, one is compelled to agree with Halil İnalcık’s observation that the “institutions and traditions of the marches which existed at the time of ‘Osman Ghazi lived on in Ottoman history, moving, however, to new frontiers”.14 The outlying marcher districts of the growing state had a distinct organization and special position in the provincial administration. They were entrusted to powerful marcher lords (uc begleri) from the state-founding dynasties such as the Evrenosoğlu, Mihaloğlu, Turahanoğlu, İshakoğlu, and Malkoçoğlu, who ruled them more or less autonomously. This special status of the bordering regions and the more or less independent behaviour of the begs of the marches, İnalcık argues, not only resembled the position of Osman Gazi under the Seljuks but influenced the state’s historical existence for centuries.15 Certainly, examining the border regions under the administrative and military governance of these marcher lords would shed more light not only on their personal power and influence, but along with scrutinizing the peculiarities of the Ottoman marches, it would definitely enrich our understanding of the multi-faceted nature of Ottoman frontier society in particular and of the evolving Ottoman state-building process in general.16 Jonathan Shepard and Simon Franklin (eds.), Byzantine Diplomacy. Papers from the Twenty-Fourth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Cambridge, March 1990 (Aldershot: Variorum, 1992), 151– 155; idem, “The Byzantine-Turkish Frontier c. 1250–1300,” in Markus Köhbach, Gisela ProcházkaEisl, and Claudia Römer (eds.), Acta Viennensia Ottomanica, Akten des 13. CIEPO-Symposiums, Wien, 21–25. Sept. 1998 (Vienna: Institut für Orientalistik, 1999), 153–161; Linda Darling, “The Development of Ottoman Governmental institutions in the Fourteenth Century: a Reconstruction,” in Vera Costantini and Markus Koller (eds.), Living in the Ottoman Ecumenical Community. Essays in Honour of Suraiya Faroqhi (Leiden – Boston: Brill, 2008), 17–34; eadem, “Reformulating the Gazi Narrative,” 20–27. 12 Halil İnalcık, “The Emergence of the Ottomans,” in P. M. Holt, Ann Lambton and Bernard Lewis (eds.), The Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 1 A: The Central Islamic Lands from Pre-Islamic Times to the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 263–266; idem, “Foundation of Ottoman State,” 47–52; idem, “Periods in Ottoman History, State, Society, Economy,” in Halil İnalcık and Günsel Renda (eds.), Ottoman Civilization, vol. 1 (Ankara: Ministry of Culture and Tourism, 2004), 31–52; idem, “Osmanlı Devleti’nde Uc (Serhad)lar,” in idem, Doğu BAtı. Makaleler II (Ankara: Doğu Batı Yayınları, 2008), 45–60. 13 Halil İnalcık, “Osmanlı Beyliği’nin Kurucusu Osman Beg,” Belleten 71:261 (2007): 491–496. 14 İnalcık, “The Emergence of the Ottomans,” 283. 15 Halil İnalcık, The Ottoman Empire, the Classical Age, 1300–1600 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), 104–105. 16 Kafadar, Between Two Worlds, stresses the multi-layered nature of the Ottoman frontier milieu in which these noble families exercised vast authority and contextualizes their changing position within the framework of the changing centralizing vision of Ottoman policy. Lowry, The Nature, emphasizes the importance of the state-founding families in order to elucidate the manner in which the Ottoman state was founded and to stress the “Islamo-Christian” synthesis prevailing during the first centuries

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The prominent families of frontier lords are usually referred to in scholarly literature as enjoying special status in the Ottoman frontier regions,17 holding a hereditary governorship in these districts and retaining relative autonomy vis-à-vis the central Ottoman administration.18 They possessed a large number of their own retinues and slaves, as well as huge hereditary estates in the areas under their governance, emerging practically as territorial magnates as well.19 Their authority in the marcher districts was attested to by their right to allocate timar-estates to their own retinues as late as the fifteenth century (when the first Ottoman survey registers were compiled).20 Most importantly, their power in the Ottoman polity was most purely attested by their interference in the Ottoman dynasty’s internal political struggles for supremacy21 – they were a major factor during the Ottoman civil war among the sons of Bayezid I (1389–1402) that followed the dissolution of the empire after the battle of Ankara (1402),22 during the first years of Murad II’s (1421–1451) rule when his supremacy was contested by yet another pretender for the Ottoman throne, Düzme Mustafa,23 or even as

of the Ottoman state-building process. The declining prominence of the frontier nobility, in itself an incarnation of the traditions and culture of the marches, was masterfully contextualized within the framework of the Ottoman dynasty’s centralizing policy by Zeynep Yürekli, who examines the raidercommanders’ architectural patronage of Bektashi shrines in the context of the increased social cohesion of the marginalized segments of Ottoman society. See her Architecture and Hagiography in the Ottoman Empire: The Politics of Bektashi Shrines in the Classical Age (Ashgate, Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Studies, 2012). 17 Although the special position of the border regions under the governance of these marcher lords’ families is generally acknowledged by modern scholarship, it is striking to find no particular study on any of these dynasties in the recent publications devoted to the Ottoman frontiers (Karpat and Zens, Ottoman Borderlands and Peacock, The Frontiers of the Ottoman World). Only Colin Heywood, in his article on the frontier in Ottoman history, emphasizes the autonomy enjoyed by the frontier lords in the marcher districts to stress the complexities of the Ottoman uc. Heywood, “The Frontier in Ottoman History,” 239–240. 18 İnalcık, “The Emergence of the Ottomans,” 283–286; Irène Beldiceanu-Steinherr, “En marge d’un acte concernant le pengyek et les aqinği,” Revue des études islamiques 37 (1969): 21–47; Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650. The Structure of Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 186–188; Pal Fodor, “Ottoman Warfare, 1300–1453,” in Kate Fleet (ed.), The Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. 1: Byzantium to Turkey, 1071–1453 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 204–205. 19 This phenomenon is already addressed by Ömer Lütfi Barkan, “XV ve XVI Asırlarda Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda Toprak İşçilerinin Organizasyonu Şekilleri. III: Rumeli’ndeki Kulluklar ve Ortakçı Kullar,” İstanbul Üniversitesi İktisat Fakültesi Mecmuası 1:4 (1940): 397–447; idem, “Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda Bir İskân ve Kolonizasyon Metodu Olarak Vakıflar ve Temlikler,” Vakıflar Dergisi 2 (1942): 359–360; idem, “Türk-İslâm Toprak Hukuku Tatbikatının Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda Aldığı Şekiller. III: İmparatorluk Devrinde Toprak Mülk ve Vakıflarının Hususiyeti,” in idem, Türkiye’de Toprak Meselesi – Toplu Eserler 1 (İstanbul: Gözlem Yayınları, 1980), 249–280. The hereditary family vakfs (pious foundations) of the marcher lords are the subject matter of virtually all recent studies on these noble families. Cf. the literature cited in footnotes 24–26 and 37–43 in particular. 20 Halil İnalcık, “Ottoman Methods of Conquest,” Studia Islamica 2 (1954): 103–129; idem, “Stefan Duşan’dan Osmanlı İmparatorluğuna: XV. Asırda Rumeli’de Hıristiyan Sipahiler ve Menşeleri,” in 60. Doğum Yılı Münasebetiyle Fuad Köprülü Armağanı (İstanbul: Osman Yalçın, 1953), 207–248. 21 İnalcık, “The Emergence of the Ottomans,” 285–286. 22 Dimitris Kastritsis, The Sons of Bayezid: Empire Building and Representation in the Ottoman Civil War of 1402–1413 (Leiden – Boston: Brill, 2007), 135–194; idem, “Religious Affiliation and Political Alliances in the Ottoman Succession Wars of 1402–1413,” Medieval Encounters 13 (2007): 222–242. 23 Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1481 (Istanbul: Isis Press, 1990), 91–95.

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late as the beginning of the sixteenth century when Selim I (1512–1520) relied largely on the support of the Balkan begs to come to power.24 While this general assessment of the prominence of the noble families of frontier lords holds true, it mainly focuses on their military strength and centrifugal actions during times of political instability and pays little attention to the authority they exercised in the frontier provinces under their direct governance. Noteworthy in this respect is the pioneering work of Machiel Kiel, who drew attention to the architectural patronage of the marcher lords in a number of localities in the Balkans and thus opened the way for a more detailed analysis of their role in the governing of the border provinces.25 Recently, the systematic studies by Heath Lowry on the Evrenosoğlu family of frontier lords and on the territories under their direct control have demonstrated that its members were not only the actual conquerors of large areas in the Balkans, where they established their headquarters, but were indeed responsible for the infrastructural development and shaping of the regions under their governance, both transmitting the permanent intensions of the Ottoman presence there and expressing the governing mastery of the power-holders.26 It is commendable that interest in the history of the marcher lords’ families and the lands they controlled has recently been increasing, enriching our knowledge of the mechanisms used by them to administer the border territories, as well as unveiling the scale and basis of the authority they enjoyed in the Ottoman Empire.27 24 H. Erdem Çıpa, Yavuz’un Kavgası: I. Selim’in Saltanat Mücadelesi (İstanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2013), 145–220. 25 A number of Kiel’s studies are accessible in his collected volume of articles Studies on the Ottoman Architecture of the Balkans (Aldershot: Variorum, 1992). A more general assessment of the architectural heritage of members of the noble families and its role in conquering the Balkan territories is presented by the author in his “The incorporation of the Balkans into the Ottoman Empire, 1353–1453,” in Kate Fleet (ed.), The Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. 1: Byzantium to Turkey, 1071–1453 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 138–191. 26 Heath Lowry, The Shaping of the Ottoman Balkans, 1350–1550: Conquest, Settlement & Infrastructural Development of Northern Greece (İstanbul: Bahçeşehir University Press, 2008); with İsmail E. Erünsal, The Evrenos Dynasty of Yenice-i Vardar: Notes & Documents (İstanbul: Bahçeşehir University Press, 2010); The Evrenos Family & the City of Selânik: Who Built the Hamza Beğ Câmii & Why? (Istanbul: Bahçeşehir University Press, 2010); Fourteenth Century Ottoman Realities: In Search of Hâcı-Gâzi Evrenos (İstanbul: Bahçeşehir University Press, 2012); see also Lowry’s contribution in the present volume. 27 It is impossible to cite here all the studies dealing with the raider-commanders’ families and their architectural patronage for they pursued a rich programme of building, single representatives of which have been the subject of scholarly attention. Apart from those already cited in previous footnotes, more recent works addressing these families and their heritage in a broader frame include: H. Çetin Arslan, Türk Akıncı Beyleri ve Balkanların İmarına Katkıları (1300–1451) (Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı, 2001); idem, “Erken Osmanlı’nın Fetih ve Yerleşim Sisteminde Akıncı Beylerinin Stratejik Önemi,” in Kemal Çiçek and Salim Koca (eds.), Türkler, vol. 9 (Ankara: Yeni Türkiye, 2002), 116–121; Theoharis Stavrides, “Alternative Dynasties: the Turahanids and the Ottomans in the Fifteenth Century,” Journal of Turkish Studies 36 (2011): 145–171; Levent Kayapınar, “Osmanlı Uç Beyi Evrenos Bey Ailesinin Menşei, Yunanistan Coğrafyasındaki Faaliyetleri ve Eserleri,” Abant İzzet Baysal Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi 1:8 (2004): 133–142; idem, “Teselya Bölgesinin Turahan Bey Ailesi ve XV.–XVI. Yüzyıllardaki Hayır Kurumları,” Abant İzzet Baysal Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi 1:10 (2005): 183–195; Mustafa Özer, “Turhanoğulları’nın Balkanlar’daki İmar Faaliyetleri,” in Balkanlar’da İslâm Medeniyeti II. Milletlerarası Sempozyumu Tebliğleri, Tiran, Arnavudluk, 4–7 Aralık 2003 (Istanbul: IRCICA, 2006), 247–279; idem, “Mihaloğulları’nın Anadolu ve Balkanlar’daki İmar Faaliyetleri,” in Doğu–Batı Bağlamında Uluslararası Türk Dili ve Kültürü Kongresi Bildirileri (Konstantin Preslavski Üniversitesi, 26–29 Ekim 2002 Şumnu–Bulgaristan) (Şumen, 2004), 344–364;

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In light of current research, one could more confidently state that the key players in the Ottoman expansion and the de facto masters of the moving frontier were members of the Ottoman frontier nobility from the old state-founding families such as the Evrenos, Mihal, Turahan, Malkoç and Paşa Yiğit clans and their descendants.28 These marcher lords (uc begleri) were not only in command of large portions of the Ottoman armies in Rumeli (the Balkans), but were entrusted with the governing of the border districts as well. Moreover, the post of governor of the sancaks along the borders of the Empire was passed down from father to son, i.e., these Ottoman notables retained hereditary rights to governorship along the frontiers. An illustrative example for this hereditary governance is a sultanic decree (berat) issued by Bayezid I in December 1390 to Mihaloğlu ‘Ali Beg granting him and his descendants a hereditary sancakbeglik as a reward for his bravery and companionship to the Sultan’s father, Murad I (1362–1389).29 The territory covered by the sancakbeglik, that is, the governorship over a province, is not defined in the document, but from posts later held by family members it is obvious that the Mihaloğlu marcher lords were entrusted with the governing of several border districts, as control of the sancaks of Vidin, Niğbolu, Silistre, Semendire and Hersek was passed down from father to son in the family until the end of the sixteenth century.30 Ayşe Kayapınar, “Kuzey Bulgaristan’da Gazi Mihaloğulları Vakıfları (XV.–XVI. Yüzyıl),” Abant İzzet Baysal Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi 1:10 (2005): 169–181; Orlin Sabev, “The Legend of Köse Mihal,” Turcica 34 (2002): 241–252; idem, “Osmanlıların Balkanları Fethi ve İdaresinde Mihaloğulları Ailesi (XIV.–XIX. Yüzyıllar): Mülkler, Vakıflar, Hizmetler,” OTAM (Ankara Üniversitesi Osmanlı Tarihi Araştırma ve Uygulama Merkezi Dergisi) 33 (2013): 229–244; Mariya Kiprovska, “The Mihaloğlu Family: Gazi Warriors and Patrons of Dervish Hospices,” Osmanlı Araştırmaları 32 (2008): 193–222; Ayhan Pala, “Rumeli’de bir Akıncı Ailesi: Gümlüoğulları ve Vakıfları,” Hacı Bektaş Veli Dergisi 43 (2007), accessed January 20, 2014, http://hbvdergisi.gazi.edu.tr/index.php/TKHBVD/ article/view/949/938. The family of Evrenosoğlu and especially its founder, Evrenos Beg, are the subject of Ayşegül Kılıç’s research interest. Her most recent and comprehensıve contribution on the topic is her book Bir Osmanlı Akıncı Beyi Gazi Evrenos Bey (İstanbul: İthaki, 2014). Notable is the interest of Grigor Boykov in the history and architectural heritage of the raider-commanders of lesser prominence such as the Minnetoğulları. Cf. his “In Search of Vanished Ottoman Monuments in the Balkans: Minnetoğlu Mehmed Beg’s Complex in Konuş Hisarı,” in Maximilian Hartmuth and Ayşe Dilsiz (eds.), Monuments, Patrons, Contexts: Papers on Ottoman Europe Presented to Machiel Kiel (Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 2010), 47–68. 28 See, for example, Heath Lowry, “Early Ottoman Period,” in Metin Heper and Sabri Sayarı (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Modern Turkey (Abingdon – New York: Routledge, 2012), 5–14. 29 “... emreyledim ki [Mihal Beg oğlu Ali Beg’in] evlâdlarının evlâdlarına batnen ba‘de batnin ve karnen ba‘de karnin sancak virilüb ... Gazi ‘Ali Beg lalamın evlâdlarına sancak begligi virüb ...” The content of the berat is preserved in three copies: Nüzhet Paşa’s Ahvâl-i Gazi Mihal (Der Sa’adet, 1315 (1896/97), 45–47; Yaşar Gökçek, “Köse Mihal Oğulları” (İstanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Mezuniyet Tezi, 1950), 74. Obviously a copy of the document was kept by family members from the Plevne branch, who presented a copy to the sultanic administration in the late-nineteenth century to assure their right of possession over the vakf property in the region of Pleven (Plevne). See Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, İstanbul [hereafter: BOA], Yıldız Tasnifi, Evkaf Nezareti Maruzatı (Y. PRK. EV.), dosya 1, gömlek 90, from 20 January, 1891. It is highly probable that it is the same document which the Bulgarian scholar Yurdan Trifonov saw among the papers kept by the Mihaloğlus in Pleven, the contents of which he presented in abridged form in his “Mihal-beyovtsi v predanieto i istoriyata,” Bălgarska istoričeska biblioteka 3 (1929): 220. The contents of the berat were most recently interpreted by Lowry, The Nature, 62–63; and at some length by Sabev, “The Legend of Köse Mihal,” 247–252. 30 Olga Zirojević, “Smederevski sandjakbeg Ali beg Mihaloglu,” Zbornik za istoriju Matitsa Srpska (1971): 9–27; M. Tayyib Gökbilgin, “Mihaloğulları,” in İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 8 (1960), 285–292.

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Moreover, granted vast landed properties (mülk) by the sultans as reward for their successful military expeditions, members of the thus-formed frontier nobility emerged as territorial magnates along the borders as well. The privately owned lands were subsequently transformed into pious foundations (vakf ), thereby retaining hereditary status and remaining in the family’s possession for centuries. Usually these landed properties were bestowed on the beneficiaries with large privileges and enjoyed relative immunity in terms of their financial as well as administrative matters, as determined by the principle of mefrûzü’l-kalem ve maktu’u’l-kadem,31 which meant that they were “absolutely free as crossed out from the state tax registers and freed from the interference of the state agents.”32 Having guaranteed the absolute proprietorship of the warlords in their extensive vakf possessions, the state essentially allowed the existence of what İnalcık labels “autonomous enclaves”,33 or, in Barkan’s wording, “states within the state”,34 within the territory of the Ottoman Empire. Thus, retaining hereditary rights to governorship in the marcher districts and obtaining relative autonomy in their private domains, the marcher lords became the actual rulers of these areas. Naturally, gaining prominence on the battlefield and accumulating large resources in their hands, the noble families of frontier lords were the biggest architectural benefactors along the territories of the Ottoman borders, leaving a profound imprint on the shaping of the then-borderland. In the context of the architectural legacy of the frontier nobility, it is worth recalling that shared Turkish expectations anticipated that profits derived from conquest would be redeployed in the service of society. Thus, in a very real sense, conquest sustained empire-building.35 In addition, bearing in mind that even the Ottoman sultans were expected to build their sultanic mosques and larger complexes using only their share of spoils from battles fought against the lands of the non-Muslims,36 one may safely suggest that the marcher lords’ architectural patronage in their power bases in the borderlands was a direct result of their successful conquests along the borders with Christendom and provides actual testimony to the nature of the Ottoman frontier par excellence. Founding cities at the borderland: vakfs and urban structures Indicative of the frontier nobility’s administrative mastery in governing the border districts under their command, compared by some authors to the administration of the Anatolian begliks,37 are the cities which the border lords established as their own power bases in the territories under their governance. Indeed, a number of towns in the Balkans have evolved largely as a result of the generous patronage of different members of the frontier lords’ dynasties. To understand the scale of their impact on the urban development in the territories they 31 Barkan, “Toprak Mülk ve Vakıflarının Hususiyeti,” 253 and 256; İnalcık, “Autonomous Enclaves in Islamic States,” 112–113. 32 İnalcık, “Autonomous Enclaves in Islamic States,” 112. 33 İnalcık, “Autonomous Enclaves in Islamic States,” 112. 34 Barkan, “Vakıflar ve Temlikler,” 360. 35 Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh, The Image of an Ottoman City: Imperial Architecture and Urban Experience in Aleppo in the 16th and 17th Centuries (Leiden – Boston: Brill, 2004), 11. 36 Gülru Necipoğlu-Kafadar, “The Süleymaniye Complex in Istanbul: An Interpretation,” Muqarnas 3 (1985): 113; eadem, The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), 59–60; Howard Crane, “The Ottoman Sultan’s Mosques: Icons of Imperial Legitimacy,” in Irene A. Bierman, Rifa‘at A. Abou-El-Haj and Donald Preziosi (eds.), The Ottoman City and Its Parts: Urban Structure and Social Order (New York: Aristide D. Caratzas, 1991), 204. 37 Barkan, “Vakıflar ve Temlikler,” 359–360.

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controlled and administered, one needs to look no further than the biggest modern Balkan cities. It suffices to note that, originally created as powerbases of the frontier lords along the Ottoman periphery by members of these noble families, two have emerged as the present day capitals of Balkan countries – namely Skopje (Ott. Üsküb) and Sarajevo (Ott. Saray Bosna). The first developed as a result of the building enterprises of its conqueror, Paşa Yiğit Beg, and thereafter of his descendants, İshak Beg and İshakoğlu İsa Beg,38 while the latter was virtually founded by İsa Beg and later patronized by members of other noble families.39 Like the above-mentioned examples, several other Balkan cities have developed largely through the extensive architectural patronage of the frontier lords. The Evrenosoğlu family left their mark on the development of Gümülcine (mod. Komotini),40 Siroz (mod. Serres),41 Selânik (mod. Thessaloniki)42 and, most outstandingly, Yenice-i Vardar (mod. Yanitsa),43 which became the 38 Gliša Elezović, Turski spomenici u Skoplju (Beograd: Rodoljub, 1927?); idem, “Skopski Isaković i Paša Yigit beg,” Glasnik Skopskog naučnog društva 11:5 (1931–1932): 159–168; Eran Fraenkel, “Skopje from the Serbian to the Ottoman Empires: Conditions for the Appearance of a Balkan Muslim City” (PhD diss., University of Pennsyvania, 1986); Dragi Gjorgiev, Skopje od turskoto osvojuvanje do krajot na XVII vek (Skopje: Institut za Nacionalna Istorija, 1997); Mustafa Özer, Üsküp’te Türk Mimarisi (XIV.– XIX. yüzyıl) (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2006); Lidiya Kumbaracı-Bogojeviç, Üsküp’te Osmanlı Mimarî Eserleri (İstanbul: ENKA, 2008); Maximilian Hartmuth and Ines Tolić, “Turkish Coffee and Béton Bruit: An Architectural Portrait of Skopje,” European Architectural History Network Newsletter 40 (2010): 22–36; Grigor Boykov, “Reshaping Urban Space in the Ottoman Balkans: a Study on the Architectural Development of Edirne, Plovdiv, and Skopje (14th – 15th centuries),” in Maximilian Hartmuth (ed.), Centres and Peripheries in Ottoman Architecture: Rediscovering a Balkan Heritage (Sarajevo: Cultural Heritage Without Borders, 2011), 32–45. 39 Hazim Šabanović, “Dvije najstarije vakufname u Bosni,” Prilozi za orijentalnu filologiju 2 (1951): 7–29; idem, “Postanak i razvoj Sarajeva,” Radovi naučnog društva Bosne i Hercegovine 13:5 (1960): 71–89; Mehmed Mujezinović, “Musafirhana i tekija Isa-Bega Ishakovića u Sarajevu,” Naše Starine 3 (1956): 245–52; Behija Zlatar, Zlatno Doba Sarajeva (XVI. Stoljeće) (Sarajevo: Svetlost, 1996), 24–79; Ines Aščerić, “Neke napomene o problemima iz historije Isa-Begove tekije,” Prilozi za orijentalnu filologiju 52–53 (2002–2003): 339–350; York Norman, “An Islamic City? Sarajevo’s Islamization and Economic Development, 1461–1604” (PhD diss., Georgetown University, 2005); idem, “Imarets, Islamization and Urban Development in Sarajevo, 1461–1604,” in Nina Ergin, Christoph K. Neumann, Amy Singer (eds.), Feeding People, Feeding Power: Imarets in the Ottoman Empire (Istanbul: Eren, 2007), 81–94. 40 Machiel Kiel, “Observations on the History of Northern Greece during the Turkish Rule: Historical and Architectural Description of the Turkish monuments of Komotini and Serres, their Place in the Development of the Ottoman Turkish Architecture, and their Present Condition,” Balkan Studies 12 (1971): 415–444; idem, “The Oldest Monuments of Ottoman-Turkish Architecture in the Balkans: The Imaret and the Mosque of Ghazi Evrenos Bey in Gümülcine (Komotini) and the Evrenos Bey Khan in the Village of Ilıca/Loutra in Greek Thrace (1370–1390),” Sanat Tarihi Yıllığı 12 (1983): 127–133; Lowry, The Shaping of the Ottoman Balkans, 41–47, 80–84; Ayşegül Kılıç, “Guzât Vakıflarına Bir Örnek: Gümülcine’de Gazi Evrenos Bey Vakfı,” in Mehmet Kurtoğlu (ed.), Balkanlarda Osmanlı Vakıfları ve Eserleri Uluslararası Sempozyumu, İstanbul–Edirne, 9–10–11 Mayıs 2012 (Ankara: Vakıflar Genel Müdürlüğü, [n.d.]), 259–276; Kılıç, Gazi Evrenos Bey, 116–125. 41 Lowry, The Shaping of the Ottoman Balkans, 84–85; idem, Fourteenth Century Ottoman Realities, 25–44; Evangelia Balta, Les vakıfs de Serrès et de sa region (XVe et XVIe s.) (Athènes: Centre de Recherches Néo-Helléniques, 1995), 251–273; Zeki Salih Zengin, “İlk Dönem Osmanlı Vakfiyelerinden Serez’de Evrenuz Gazi’ye Ait Zâviye Vakfiyesi,” Vakıflar Dergisi 28 (2004): 103–120; Kiel, “Observations on the History of Northern Greece,” 415–444; Kılıç, Gazi Evrenos Bey, 125–136. 42 Lowry, The Evrenos Family & the City of Selânik; Kılıç, Gazi Evrenos Bey, 136–147. 43 Machiel Kiel, “Yenice-i Vardar (Vardar Yenicesi – Giannitsa): A Forgotten Turkish Cultural Center in Macedonia of the 15th and 16th Century,” Studia Bizantina et Neohellenica Neerlandica 3 (1971): 300– 329; Lowry and Erünsal, The Evrenos Dynasty of Yenice-i Vardar; Ayşegül Çalı, “Bir Osmanlı Vakıf

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family’s ancestral residence. In the same way, the Turahan family promoted the development of Thessaly, where the towns of Yenişehir (mod. Larissa) and Tırhala (mod. Trikala) saw the greatest architectural patronage on the part of family members.44 The same patronage of urban centres is to be observed in the Mihaloğlu family, who dominated the architectural and historical development of several towns in the Balkans. Ottoman administrative and financial documents show that within the pious endowments and private properties in the province of Rumeli there were a number of cities in the hands of private individuals who established their charitable foundations there. It is unsurprising that most of the towns were held by the Ottoman sultan himself, as income from them was allocated to the support of sultanic endowments such as mosques or ‘imarets. It is noteworthy, however, that three of the privately owned urban settlements were in the hands of the Mihaloğlu family, who had established themselves in, and built anew, the towns of Pınarhisar (Eastern Thrace, Turkey), İhtiman (modern Central Bulgaria) and Plevne (modern Pleven in Danubian Bulgaria). Granted to the Mihaloğlus in full proprietorship and retained as their ancestral domains for centuries, the development of these settlements in fact not only mirrors the administrative mastery of the frontier lords in governing the border areas, but also reveals the true nature of their authority over the farthest Ottoman frontiers, their place in and impact on the Ottoman social order as a whole. Pınarhisar Pınarhisar (Byz. Brysis) lies at the foot of the Strandja Mountain (Tr. Yıldız Dağları or İstranca Dağları) and prior to the Ottoman conquest was a part of the Byzantine defence system against the Bulgarian kingdom to the North of the mountain range.45 The three fortified cities forming this defensive line, namely the Byzantine fortresses of Saranta Eklesias (Ott. Kırkkilise), Brysis (Ott. Pınarhisarı) and Bizye (Ott. Vize), were captured in 1369,46 when sultan Murad I (1362–1389) launched an offensive against them. During this campaign a certain Mihaloğlu was one of Murad’s high-ranking commanders and played a key role Şehri: Yenice-i Vardar,” in Balkanlarda Bıraktıklarımız, II. Ulusal Mübadele ve Balkan Türk Kültürü Araştırmaları Kongresi, 22–23 Kasım 2008 (Samsun, 2009), 32–47; Kılıç, Gazi Evrenos Bey, 150–160. 44 Machiel Kiel, “Das türkische Thessalien: etabliertes Geschichtsbild versus osmanische Quellen. Ein Beitrag zur Entmythologisierung der Geschichte Griechenlands,” in Reinhard Lauer and Peter Schreiner (eds.), Die Kultur Griechenlands in Mittelalter und Neuzeit: Bericht über das Kolloquium der Südosteuropa-Kommission, 28. – 31. Oktober 1992 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), 109–196; Kayapınar, “Teselya Bölgesinin Turahan Bey,” 183–195; Özer, “Turhanoğulları’nın Balkanlar’daki İmar Faaliyetleri,” 247–279. 45 The first Ottoman conquests of the Strandja Mountain slopes were accomplished during the reign of sultan Murad I. After spending the winter of 1368–1369 in his newly built palace in Edirne, the Sultan launched an offensive against the Byzantine fortresses of Saranta Eklesias (Kırkkilise/Kırklareli), Brysis (Pınarhisar) and Bizye (Vize). The only detailed account describing these events can be found in the work of İdris-i Bitlisî, Heşt Bihişt, ed. by Mehmet Karataş, Selim Kaya and Yaşar Baş (Ankara: Bitlis Eğitim ve Tanıtma Vakfı, 2008), vol. 1, 327–331. It is more popular in Hoca Sadeddin’s later Tâcü’t-Tevârih; in this part of his narrative he translates Bitisî’s account from Persian into the Ottoman language. Hoca Sadeddin Efendi, Tâcü’t-Tevârih, ed. by İsmet Parmaksızoğlu, vol. 1 (İstanbul: Başbakanlık Kültür Müsteşarlığı Kültür Yayınları, 1974), 135–137. 46 The chronology of these events is discussed at length by Halil İnalcık, “Murad I,” Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 31 (2006), 156–164, 157; idem, “Polunya (Apollunia)- Tanrı-Yıkdığı Osmanlı Rumeli Fetihleri Kronolojisinde Düzeltmeler (1354–1371),” in Zeynep Tarım Ertuğ (ed.), Prof. Dr. Mübahat S. Kütükoğlu’na Armağan (İstanbul: İstanbul Üniversitesi, 2006), 27–57.

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during the siege of Bizye. According to narrative tradition, Murad I attacked first the fortress of Kırkkilise, which was taken fairly easily and from which the soldiers acquired rich spoils. Thereafter, the army besieged Pınarhisar, but since it was a very strong fortress the Byzantine garrison held off the Ottoman attack for some time. When the Ottomans finally took the castle, all its defenders were taken captive and those who had resisted were slaughtered.47 According to the account, while the Sultan was still besieging Kırkkilise, he sent an army led by a certain Mihaloğlu to lay siege to the fortress of Vize, which held off the blockade until the above-mentioned castles were captured. When Kırkkilise and Pınarhisar were finally seized, Murad arrived with his army at the already-besieged Vize and joined the troops of Mihaloğlu. After a month of blockade the fortress surrendered.48 Although Vize was conquered in 1369, the Ottomans could not establish full control over it and it was later used as a bargaining chip in the political relations between the Ottomans and the Byzantines, only being brought under permanent Ottoman control during the mid-1420s.49 Apparently this was not the case with the other two fortresses, Kırkkilise and Pınarhisar, which remained under Ottoman control after their conquest. Moreover, the continuously disputed control over the castle of Vize, which constantly changed hands, meant that the governance of the lands in Ottoman hands had to be assigned to an experienced and trustworthy military commander. It seems that the organization of the newly established Ottoman frontier with the Byzantines was entrusted to a Mihaloğlu family member. The erection of a monumental complex, comprising a mosque, a bath-house and a covered market (bedesten), in the city of Kırkkilise bears testimony to Mihaloğulları control over this border area. On the porch of the single-domed mosque an early nineteenth-century repair inscription reveals the name of its founder, Mihaloğlu Hızır Beg, and the date of its construction, 1383/1384, suggesting that this might have been the person mentioned in the chronicles simply as Mihaloğlu who played an important role during the conquest of the area.50 More proof for Mihaloğlu family control over the border (uc) with Byzantium and the best embodiment of their authority in the region were their private landed properties in the very same area.51 Although according to Ottoman narrative tradition a member of the Mihaloğlu 47 Bitlisî’s and Sededdin’s texts diverge in this part of the narrative, as the former does not include the capture of the fortress of Pınarhisar, whereas the latter describes it briefly and places it between the capture of Kırkkilise and Vize. İdris-i Bitlisî, Heşt Bihişt, 329; Hoca Sadeddin Efendi, Tâcü’t-Tevârih, 136. 48 İdris-i Bitlisî, Heşt Bihişt, 329–330; Hoca Sadeddin Efendi, Tâcü’t-Tevârih, 135–137. 49 For the chronology of events in the fight for control over the bordering fortresses after their initial conquest by the Ottomans, see A. Bakalopulos, “Les limites de l’empire byzantine depuis la fin du XIVe siècle jusqu’à sa chute (1453),” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 55:1 (1962): 56–65; and Machiel Kiel, “A Note on the History of the Frontiers of the Byzantine Empire in the 15th Century,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 66 (1973): 351–353. 50 Özcan Mert, “Kırklareli Kitabeleri,” İstanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Tarih Dergisi 25 (1971): 155–162. 51 In 1938, the Bulgarian scholar Georgi Ayanov published an article dealing with land ownership in the north-east Strandja region. Having the chance to examine the private documents (tapu and sened) of some of the Bulgarian immigrants who left Turkey after the Balkan Wars, Ayanov discovered that they all came from a place known as “Gazi Mihal toprağı”, i.e., “the land of Gazi Mihal”. Apparently the documents which the Bulgarian scholar explored refer to the territory of the large charitable foundation of Gazi Mihal’s fifteenth-century zaviye complex in Edirne. This endowment comprised a considerable number of villages surrounding the town of Pınarhisar and at the beginning of the twentieth century was still in the hands of Gazi Mihal’s descendants. Georgi Ayanov, “Privilegirovani oblasti v Severoiztočna Strandža: a) vakăf na sultan Mehmed Han; b) Hasekiya; v) vladeniyata na Odrinskite Gaazi Mihalovtsi

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family played a decisive role in the Ottoman conquest of the area in 1369, it was only at the beginning of the fifteenth century that Sultan Mehmed I (1413–1421) bestowed on another family member, Gazi Mihal Beg, considerable tracts of land in the region, including the then-village of Pınarhisarı.52 The income from the thus-formed charitable foundation was all spent on the maintenance of the monumental complex of Gazi Mihal Beg in the capital Edirne, comprising a T-shaped zaviye/‘imaret, a large double bath and a bridge over the River Tundja.53 (ills. 1–3) Ottoman taxation registers (tapu tahrir defterleri) reveal that Pınarhisar, mentioned at the beginning of the fifteenth century as a village, was chosen as a centre of the Mihaloğulları domain and quickly developed into a small town.54 The town received a boost in its development in the course of the sixteenth century with the erection of a number of public buildings under the patronage of two members of the Mihaloğlu family, Yahşi Beg and Mahmud Beg, the two sons of Mihaloğlu İskender Beg, one of the most active akıncı commanders during the reigns of Mehmed II (1444–1446 and 1451–1481) and Bayezid II (1481–1512) and leader of numerous campaigns in Bosnia and across the Danube River.55 Yahşi Beg appears to have been the biggest architectural patron of the town and built the necessary social and religious buildings for the emerging urban centre. He was the patron of the zaviye/‘imaret in Pınarhisar, which was named after him, of the town mosque and the bath-house (hamam). (Gaazi Mihal topraa),” Arhiv za Poselištni Proučvaniya 2 (1938): 34. Cf. Volkan Ertürk, “Osmanlı Devrinde Vize Sancağındaki Selâtin ve Ümera Vakıfları (1530–1613),” Turkish Studies – International Periodical For The Languages, Literature and History of Turkish or Turkic 8:5 (2013): 296–297. 52 The original document for the conveyance of these lands to Gazi Mihal is not preserved but, according to a later deed of 1514 confirming the land possessions of Gazi Mihal’s pious foundation, the villages of Pınarhisar, Geredelü, Poryalu, Urumbeğlü, Sazara and Manastır were granted to the latter by Mehmed I. Later on Mihaloğulları ownership was confirmed by Bayezid II; and finally Selim I also approved their right of possession over the mentioned lands. Cf. M. Tayyib Gökbilgin, XV–XVI. Asırlarda Edirne ve Paşa Livâsı. Vakıflar – Mülkler – Mukataalar (İstanbul: Üçler Basımevi, 1952), 246. 53 Gazi Mihal Beg can be safely identified with Mihaloğlu Mehmed Beg, who was one of the most vigorous military leaders during the dynastic struggles after the battle of Ankara (1402). He was elevated to the post of beglerbegi during Musa Çelebi’s reign and was subsequently imprisoned by the victorious sultan Mehmed I. He then rose to prominence once more in the reign of Murad II (1421–1444 and 1446–1451), who released him from Tokad prison to use him in his struggle for the throne against the claimant Düzme Mustafa, which, according to the chronicles, cost Mihaloğlu his life. Mihal Beg was buried in Edirne next to the monumental complex (zaviye/‘imaret, hamam and a bridge) commissioned by himself in H. 825 (1421/22), shortly before his death. The dedicatory inscription of the complex was published and analyzed in detail by Fokke Theodoor Dijkema, The Ottoman Historical Monumental Inscriptions in Edirne (Leiden: Brill, 1977), 17–18. Details about the vakf foundation in support of the complex are presented by Gökbilgin, XV–XVI. Asırlarda Edirne ve Paşa Livâsı, 245–246. Cf. Sedat Emir, “Edirne Mihal Bey Zaviyesi,” Arredamento Mimarlık 265 (2013): 98–105. 54 370 Numaralı Muhâsebe-i Vilâyet-i Rûm-İli Defteri (937/1530) I: Paşa (Sofya) ve Vize Livâları ile Sağkol Kazaları (Edirne, Dimetoka, Ferecik, Keşan, Kızıl-ağaç, Zağra-i Eski-hisâr, İpsala, Filibe, Tatarbâzârı, Samakov, Üsküb, Kalkan-delen, Kırçova, Manastır, Pirlepe ve Köprülü) (Ankara: T. C. Başbakanlık Devlet Arşivleri Müdürlüğü, 2001), 262. Further details of the development of Pınarhisar in the course of the sixteenth century can be found in Mariya Kiprovska, “Pınarhisar’s Development From the Late Fourteenth to the Mid-Sixteenth Century: The Mihaloğlu Family Vakf Possessions in the Area,” in Grigor Boykov, Ivaylo Lozavov, Daniela Stoyanova (eds.), Cities in South Eastern Thrace: Continuity and Transformation (Sofia: Sofia University Press) (forthcoming 2015). 55 The military campaigns in which İskender Beg participated along with his more famous brother, Alaeddin ‘Ali Beg of Plevne, are discussed by Agâh Sırrı Levend, Gazavât-nâmeler ve Mihaloğlu Ali Bey’in Gazavât-nâmesi (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2000), 181–196.

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The erection of the zaviye/‘imaret should be placed sometime between 1530 and 1541, when it appears for the first time in the Ottoman registers.56 It must have been a monumental structure, since in the mid-seventeenth century Evliya Çelebi mentions it as the most important building in the town. It was lead-covered and according to the Ottoman traveller there was no other building of such monumentality in Pınarhisar, although he also makes a note of two mosques and a small hamam.57 One of these mosques, possibly the one around which a city quarter arose, and the bath-house must have been erected by the same Yahşi Beg, because the maintenance of the mosque was listed in the expenditure of his ‘imaret, as the hamam was yielding 1500 akçe annually.58 This public bath was to remain the only one in the small town. According to Evliya it was a very small building which was not frequented by the locals because almost everyone had a bath at his own house.59 The brother of the greatest architectural patron of Pınarhisar, Mahmud Beg, on the other hand, commissioned the building of the monumental türbe (mausoleum) of Binbiroklu Ahmed Baba outside the town, which appears once to have been the nucleus of a larger dervish hospice.60 The convent must have been erected in the period between 1542 and 1569, when it appears for the first time in the registers. It is explicitly mentioned as “zaviye-i Ahmed Baba”, as part of the endowment of Mahmud Beg ibn-i Mihal Beg, who had donated the income from one village to the dervish convent. Moreover, there is strong evidence to suggest that the patron saint of the convent was in fact a historical figure, a member of the Mihaloğlu family, who had endowed the erection of a mausoleum in his name, was worshiped by his own descendants and venerated as a saint by the locals.61 (ill. 4) By and large, the development of Pınarhisar and its immediate vicinities was undoubtedly dominated by members of the Mihaloğlu family. Their names had been associated with this place ever since the first Ottoman conquest of the region and subsequently Mihaloğlu family members were responsible for the repopulation and revival of the town after its violent conquest. Being practically owned by the family for centuries and chosen as their place of residence, the town of Pınarhisar and its immediate surroundings became a natural stage for the architectural patronage of family members, who were responsible for the erection of 56 In the registration of 1530 (370 Numaralı Muhâsebe-i Vilâyet-i Rûm-İli Defteri (937/1530)) the ‘imaret of Yahşi Beğ is not listed. It was recorded for the first time in the next registration of the pious endowments (vakf ) in the region, which can be dated to 17–26 April 1541. See BOA, Tapu Tahrir Defteri [hereafter: TT] No. 286, 86. 57 Evliyâ Çelebi b. Derviş Mehemmed Zıllî, Evliyâ Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi. 6. Kitap: Topkapı Sarayı Kütüphanesi Revan 1457 Numaralı Yazmanın Transkripsiyonu – Dizini, ed. by Seyit Ali Kahraman, Yücel Dağlı (İstanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2002), 71. Kâtib Çelebi, who also describes the small town at approximately the same time, mentions only one mosque and one public bath but provides no further details on the buildings. See Rumeli und Bosna. Geographisch beschrieben von Mustafa Ben Abdalla Hadschi Chalfa, translated and edited by Joseph von Hammer (Wien: Im Verlage des Kunst- und Industrie-Comptoirs, 1812), 20. 58 BOA, TT 286, 86. 59 Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnamesi, 6. Kitap, 71. A photograph of the building before its demolition is kept in the Municipal Archives in Pınarhisar. It was published by Mustafa Özer, “Pınarhisar Çevresindeki Osmanlı Dönemi Yapıları,” Yöre Dergisi 8:86–87–88 (2007): 57. 60 Mariya Kiprovska, “Legend and Historicity: the Binbir Oklu Ahmed Baba tekkesi and its founder,” in Maximilian Hartmuth and Ayşe Dilsiz (eds.), Monuments, Patrons, Contexts: Papers on Ottoman Europe Presented to Machiel Kiel (Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 2010), 29–45. 61 The legends and the historical evidence of Ahmed Baba/Beg’s existence are discussed at some length in Kiprovska, “Binbir Oklu Ahmed Baba tekkesi,” 30–38.

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the public buildings in the area, an act which should be regarded as an expression of both their power and influence in the region and of their endeavours to revitalize it as the actual local rulers. İhtiman The initial establishment and further development of present-day town of İhtiman (about 50 km south-east of Sofia) must be attributed to another branch of the Mihaloğlu family whose members chose it as a place of residence and who were subsequently referred to in Ottoman sources by the epithet İhtimanî/İhtimanlu/İhtimanoğlu.62 The foundation of the town can be ascribed to Mihaloğlu Mahmud Beg, whose pious foundation (vakf ) in the area (which in the sixteenth century, apart from the small town, included eighteen villages and two mezra‘as) supported the upkeep of the charitable complex built by him in the newly founded town of İhtiman, also part of his landed property.63 The incomprehensibility of the narrative sources regarding the Ottoman conquest of the area allows little certainty as to the actual manner in which the immediate vicinities of Sofia were conquered and under whose military leadership this was accomplished.64 However, according to some authors the etymology of the place-name İhtiman, derived from the phrase ahd ü amân, i.e. agreement and mercy, reveals the true nature of the conquest of the region, which must have been subjugated by the Ottomans through negotiations with the locals and thus was less violent.65 Indeed, this hypothesis agrees with the fact that the Byzantino-Bulgarian fortified settlement Stipion/ Stiponje continued to exist in the immediate vicinity of İhtiman during the Ottoman period 62 In a synoptic register of the sancak of Niğbolu from 884 H. (1479/80) the ze‘amet of Gigen appears to have been in the hands of İsa Bali, son of Bali Beg İhtimanî. Cf. National Library “Sts. Cyril and Methodius”, Sofia, Oriental Department, OAK 45/29, fol. 41a. İhtimanoğulları Kasım and Mehmed Beg were among the supporters of the prospective sultan Selim I in his struggle for the throne in 1511. The two brothers joined the troops of Selim at Akkirman on his way to the capital. Cf. Çıpa, Yavuz’un Kavgası, 216, 219. It was in all probability the very same İhtimanlu Kasım Beg, one of prince Selim’s supporters, who in 1521/22 held the sancakbeglik of Humus. See Ömer Lütfi Barkan, “H. 933–934 (M. 1527–1528) Malî Yılına Ait Bir Bütçe Örneği,” İstanbul Üniversitesi İktisat Fakültesi Mecmuası, 15:1–4 (1953–1954): 306. 63 Semavi Eyice, “Sofya Yakınında İhtiman’da Gaazî Mihaloğlu Mahmud Bey İmâret-Câmii,” Kubbealtı Akademi Mecmûası 4:2 (1975): 49–61; idem, “Gazi Mihaloğlu Mahmud Bey Camii,” in Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 13 (1996), 462–463; Machiel Kiel, “İhtiman,” in Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 21 (İstanbul, 2000), 571–572; idem, “Four Provincial Imarets in the Balkans and the Sources About Them,” in Ergin, Neumann, Singer, Feeding People, Feeding Power, 106–109; Rumen Kovachev, “Opisi za istoriyata na grad Ihtiman ot XVI–XVII vek,” in Svetlana Ivanova (ed.), Etnicheski i kulturni prostranstva na Balkanite. Sbornik v chest na prof. Tsvetana Georgieva, Part 1: Minalo i istoricheski rakursi (Sofia: Universitetsko izdatelstvo “Sv. Kliment Ohridski”, 2008), 226–243; Sabev, “Osmanlıların Balkanları Fethi ve İdaresinde Mihaloğulları Ailesi,” 239–240. 64 The Ottoman narrative tradition ascribes the conquest of the area to the numerous raids led by Lala Şahin Paşa. Cf. İnalcık, “Murad I,” 156–164. 65 Constantin Jireček, Die Heerstrasse von Belgrad nach Constantinopel und die Balkanpässe (Prag, 1877), 91–92; idem, Pătuvaniya po Bălgariya (Sofia: Nauka i izkustvo, 1974), 167–168; Kiel, “İhtiman,” 571; idem, “The incorporation of the Balkans into the Ottoman Empire,” 166–167. The seventeenthcentury Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi also claims that the name İhtiman reflects the way in which the town was conquered by the Ottomans, i.e., ahd-i emân, but obviously misidentifies the Ottoman town İhtiman as the medieval stronghold Stipion. Cf. Evliyâ Çelebi b. Derviş Mehemmed Zıllî, Evliyâ Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi. 3. Kitap: Topkapı Sarayı Kütüphanesi Bağdat 305 Numaralı Yazmanın Transkripsiyonu – Dizini, ed. by Seyit Ali Kahraman, Yücel Dağlı (İstanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1999), 220.

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and was inhabited exclusively by Christians, an indication of a plausible truce concluded with the conquerors in exchange for certain privileges, including the preservation of the inhabitants’ previous places of residence.66 While the role of Mihaloğlu family members in the actual conquest of the area cannot be ascertained, their impact on the region’s further development is undeniable. It appears that the actual founder of the present-day town of İhtiman was Mahmud Beg from the house of Mihal. Although the original conveyance charter granting lands in full proprietorship to Mihaloğlu Mahmud Beg is not preserved, Ottoman administrative records from the sixteenth century reveal the story behind Mahmud Beg’s landed estate. According to the earliest Ottoman registration records from the beginning of the sixteenth century, which include İhtiman, it appears that the endowment was established on the basis of a title deed (mülkname) bestowed on Mahmud Beg by the late sultan Bayezid II and later reaffirmed by his successors.67 Despite the fact that the development of the vakf is well recorded, little is known about the personality of its founder. The only narrative source mentioning Mahmud Beg and his connection to İhtiman is the fifteenth-century history of Enverî, according to which Mahmud Beg was a son of İlyas Beg, himself a su-başı and close companion of Bayezid I at the battle of Ankara against Timur (1402), where he lost his life heroically. The late İlyas Beg was, as Enverî suggests, a son of Balta Beg, with whom Mihal Beg (supposedly Köse Mihal) came from Şam (Damascus).68 The fact that Enverî claims that at the time he was writing his 66 Kiel, “İhtiman,” 571; idem, “The incorporation of the Balkans into the Ottoman Empire,” 167; Kovachev, “Opisi za istoriyata na grad Ihtiman,” 228–229; BOA, TT 130 (from 1525/6), 604–605; BOA, TT 409 (from 1525/6), with no apparent pagination [=comp. p. 298]; BOA, TT 145 (from 1525/6), 139; BOA, TT 370 (370 Numaralı Muhâsebe-i Vilâyet-i Rûm-İli Defteri (937/1530)), 202; BOA, TT 236 (from 1544/5), 620–621; BOA, TT 492 (from 1570/1), 738a–739; BOA, TT 539 (last quarter of the sixteenth century), 718–719; BOA, TT 566 (last quarter of the sixteenth century), 690–691; Tapu ve Kadastro Genel Müdürlüğü, Ankara [hereafter TKGM], Kuyud-u Kadime Arşivi [hereafter KuK] No. 61 (an exact copy of the two previous registrations, kept in BOA), fols. 363b –364a. 67 According to the registration of 1519 (BOA, TT 82, 335), the lands in the plane of Ihtiman were granted to Mahmud Beg, son of Mihal, by the late sultan Bayezid. From the following defters it becomes clear that the mülkname was indeed issued by Bayezid II, since it was later corroborated by his descendants, sultan Selim [I] and sultan Süleyman [I], which affectively identifies the late Bayezid as Bayezid II. Cf. BOA, TT 130 (from 1525/6), 597–598; BOA, TT 409 (from 1525/6), 584 [=comp. p. 295]; BOA, TT 370 (370 Numaralı Muhâsebe-i Vilâyet-i Rûm-İli Defteri (937/1530)), 202; BOA, TT 236 (from 1544/1555), 607; BOA, TT 492 (from 1570/1), 724. The registration from the late sixteenth century includes the same information and adds that this land ownership was corroborated by sultan Selim II (1566–1574). Cf. the defters from the last quarter of the sixteenth century: BOA, TT 539, 704; BOA, TT 566, 676; TKGM, KuK 61, fol. 356b. 68 Enverî, Düstûr-nâme, ed. by Mükrimin Halil Yınanç (İstanbul: Devlet Matba’ası, 1928), 90–91; Necdet Öztürk (ed.), Fatih Devri Kaynaklarından Düstûrnâme-i Enveri, Osmanlı Tarihi Kısmı (1299–1465) (İstanbul: Kitabevi, 2003), 40–41. This passage in Enverî’s text was first interpreted by Yaşar Gökçek and became the basis for the genealogy established by Gökbilgin of the family members of the first generations and the İhtiman branch in particular. See Gökçek, Köse Mihal Oğulları, 33–34; and idem, Türk İmparatorluk Tarihinde Akıncı Teşkilâtı ve Gazi Mihal Oğulları (Konya: Alagöz yay., 1998), 48, 76; Gökbilgin, “Mihal-oğulları,” 286, 290–291. Machiel Kiel misunderstood Enverî’s text and suggested that it was not his father İlyas Beg but Mahmud Beg himself who lost his life in the battle of Ankara. Machiel Kiel, “İhtiman,” 571; idem, “Four Provincial Imarets in the Balkans,” 106; idem, “The incorporation of the Balkans into the Ottoman Empire,” 167. Kiel’s erroneous interpretation of the source was reiterated time and again in later studies, including by the author of the present article. Cf. Mariya Kip-

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text (shortly before its completion in 1465) Mahmud Beg had settled and was still living in İhtiman prompted the assumption that he must have been active during the reigns of either Murad II or Mehmed II.69 Whatever the case, if one takes Enverî’s account as historically valid, it appears that in 1465 Mahmud Beg was already advanced in years and had withdrawn from military duties to his İhtiman residence, since his son Mahmud Begoğlu Bali Beg was already old and experienced enough to be the leader of a foot (yaya) regiment in Ottoman Bithynia in 1466.70 It is plausible, therefore, to accept the information from the sixteenthcentury defters regarding the establishment of Mahmud Beg’s endowment in the area during the reign of sultan Bayezid II as historically accurate and genuine.71 Although the sources at hand do not allow any further elucidation on the personality of the Mihaloğlu benefactor, it is beyond doubt that Mahmud Beg’s rather large pious endowment was created to support the upkeep of the zaviye in the town of İhtiman. (ills. 5 & 6) The zaviye, for the support of which the vakf was established, appears to have formed the nucleus of the newly founded town; around it a number of other public buildings were erected by the family (a hamam, hans, a mekteb and a medrese), thereby forming the urban core. The currently neglected and ruinous structure is indeed an early example of a distinct type of buildings in early Ottoman architectural development, variously categorized as  zaviyemosque, eyvan-mosque, reverse T-shaped mosque, Bursa-type mosque, ‘imaret-mosque or cross-axial mosque.72 These were initially constructed as multi-functional buildings – offerrovska, “Ruins of Past Glory: the Earliest Standing Ottoman Building in Bulgaria,” on-line publication for the Ottoman Architectural Heritage in Bulgaria (OAHB) (May 6, 2009), accessed January 20, 2014, http://www.oahb.org/category/ihtiman/; Aleksandar Antonov, “Prinos kăm razvitieto na rannoosmanskata arhitectura na Balkanite. Zavietata na Mahmud bey v Ihtiman i na Evrenos bey v Gyumyurdžina,” in Rumen Genov, Tsvetana Cholova, Lachezar Stoyanov (eds.), Etnosi, kulturi i politika v Yugoiztochna Evropa. Yubileen sbornik s materiali ot nauchna konferentsiya, posvetena na 70-godishninata na Prof. Tsvetana Georgieva, Sozopol 2007 (Sofia: Nov Bălgarski Universitet, 2009), 42; Kovachev, “Opisi za istoriyata na grad Ihtiman,” 232. 69 Eyice, “Sofya Yakınında İhtiman’da Gaazî Mihaloğlu Mahmud Bey İmâret-Câmii,” 59–61; idem, “Gazi Mihaloğlu Mahmud Bey Camii,” 462–463; Gökbilgin, “Mihaloğulları,” 289. Ekrem Hakkı Ayverdi assumes that the Mahmud Beg of İhtiman was indeed connected to the Plevne branch of the family, being a son of Hızır Beg-oğlu İskender Beg, the brother of Plevneli ‘Ali Beg. Taking into account that the Mahmud Beg to whom Ayverdi refers was a character from the sixteenth century, his supposition should simply be disregarded. Cf. Ekrem Hakkı Ayverdi, Avrupa’da Osmanlı Mimarî Eserleri, IV. Cild, 4., 5., 6. Kitab: Bulgaristan, Yunanistan, Arnavutluk (İstanbul: İstanbul Fetih Cemiyeti, 1982), 53. As for the identity and architectural patronage of the sixteenth-century Mahmud Beg, son of İskender Beg, cf. Kiprovska, “Binbir Oklu Ahmed Baba tekkesi,” 32–33. 70 The somewhat intricate story behind the Mihaloğlu family’s ancestral domains in the region of Bithynia and their hereditary leadership over the Harmankaya foot soldiery is discussed in detail by Mariya Kiprovska, “Byzantine Renegade and Holy Warrior: Reassessing the Character of Köse Mihal, a Hero of the Byzantino-Ottoman Borderland,” in Selim Kuru and Baki Tezcan (eds.), Defterology: Festschrift in Honor of Heath Lowry = Journal of Turkish Studies 40 (2013): 254–258. 71 Machiel Kiel’s firm conviction that the founder of the vakf died in 1402 on the battlefield near Ankara prompted him to assume that the endowment was created much earlier and, after being abrogated by Mehmed II, was restored to its previous owner during Bayezid II’s rule. Cf. Kiel, “İhtiman,” 572; idem, “Four Provincial Imarets in the Balkans,” 106–107. Kiel’s theory was accepted and reproduced by Antonov, “Prinos kăm razvitieto na rannoosmanskata arhitectura na Balkanite,” 42. The content of the Ottoman documents, however, neither makes it explicit nor implies that an abrogation had ever taken place. 72 Aptullah Kuran, The Mosque in Early Ottoman Architecture (Chicago – London: Chicago University Press, 1968), 71–135; Semavi Eyice, “İlk Osmanlı Devrinin Dini-İçtimai Müessesi Zâviyeler ve ZâvıyeliCamiler,” İstanbul Üniversitesi İktisat Fakültesi Mecmuası 23:1–2 (1962–1963): 3–80; Doğan Kuban,

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ing shelter for the dervishes and travellers, feeding the needy and providing a prayer space for Muslims – and were only later, in the course of the sixteenth century, used exclusively as mosques, as in most cases a minaret was added to the original structure.73 The specificity of the architectural type of the T-shaped buildings, which were built exclusively in the early Ottoman period up to the end of the fifteenth century, led Semavi Eyice to conclude that the zaviye in İhtiman was built by Mahmud Beg in his lifetime during the fifteenth century.74 Some architectural characteristics of the building in İhtiman, however – namely the barrelvaulted prayer hall – led Machiel Kiel to assume that its construction must be assigned to the period between 1380 and 1395/1400.75 Whether constructed by Mahmud Beg himself in the fifteenth century or by one of his ancestors at the end of the fourteenth century, the zaviye became the focal point of the newly emerging urban centre. In the mid-sixteenth century it was still providing shelter and food for travellers, who must have been numerous considering the favourable position of İhtiman at the junction of two important road arteries – the main diagonal road from Istanbul to Belgrade and the one leading to the Adriatic shore via Samokov and Kyustendil. The guests of the zaviye were fed with wheat gruel and on Friday nights a rice dish was served.76 The running and maintenance of the zaviye were partially supported by the income from the nearby public bath (hamam),77 whose construction must be ascribed to the same patron, since identical masonry techniques and brick decoration similar to the zaviye were employed, suggesting a common construction date as well.78 (ills. 7 & 8) Other buildings the income from which must have also supported the upkeep of the zaviye were the inns in the town. In the seventeenth century Evliya Çelebi testifies to the existence of three hans in İhtiman, as he makes special mention of the large Beg hanı, suggesting that Osmanlı Mimarisi (İstanbul: Yem Yayınları, 2007), 75–122; Sedat Emir, Erken Osmanlı Mimarliğinda Çok-İşlevli Yapılar: Kentsel Kolonizasyon Yapıları Olarak Zâviyeler, 2 vols. (İzmir: Akademi Kitabevi, 1994); Zeynep Oğuz, “Multi-Functional Buildings of T-type in Ottoman Context: A Network of Identity and Territorialization” (MA thesis, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, 2006). An overview of the territorial spread of the zaviye/‘imarets built in the Balkans prior to the fall of Constantinople is presented in Kiel, “The incorporation of the Balkans into the Ottoman Empire,” 159–191. The role of these buildings in the urbanization process of a number of Balkan cities is discussed by Boykov, “Reshaping Urban Space in the Ottoman Balkans,” 32–45. 73 Kiel, “The incorporation of the Balkans into the Ottoman Empire,” 159–191. 74 Eyice, “Sofya Yakınında İhtiman’da Gaazî Mihaloğlu Mahmud Bey İmâret-Câmii,” 59–61; idem, “Gazi Mihaloğlu Mahmud Bey Camii,” 462–463. 75 Kiel, “İhtiman,” 571; idem, “The incorporation of the Balkans into the Ottoman Empire,” 167; idem, “Four Provincial Imarets in the Balkans,” 106. Further details on the building techniques and measurements of the zaviye are to be found in Kr. Miyatev, “Prinosi kăm srednovekovnata arheologiya na bălgarskite zemi,” Godishnik na Narodniya muzey za 1921 godina (1922): 248–252; Eyice, “Sofya Yakınında İhtiman’da Gaazî Mihaloğlu Mahmud Bey İmâret-Câmii,” 59–61; idem, “Gazi Mihaloğlu Mahmud Bey Camii,” 462–463; Antonov, “Prinos kăm razvitieto na rannoosmanskata arhitektura na Balkanite,” 45–48. 76 Kiel, “Four Provincial Imarets in the Balkans,” 108–109. 77 BOA, TT 492, 725; TKGM, KuK 61, 357a. 78 Kiel, “The incorporation of the Balkans into the Ottoman Empire,” 167; idem, “Four Provincial Imarets in the Balkans,” 106. A detailed description of the buildings is presented by Miyatev, “Prinosi kăm srednovekovnata arheologiya na bălgarskite zemi,” 249–252. Architectural plans of the buildings in Ihtiman were published by Aleksandar Antonov, “Văznikvane i razvitie na osmanskite arhitekturni kompleksi po Diagonalniya păt v bălgarskite zemi prez XVI–XVII vek,” in Rossitsa Gradeva (ed.), Istoriya na myusyumanskata kultura po bălgarskite zemi. Izsledvaniya, vol. 7 (Sofia: IMIR, 2001), 523–530.

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in all probability its patron was a member of the Mihaloğlu family.79 Another han frequently used by travellers was known by the name Mihal, which indicates that at least one more inn was built either by Mahmud Beg himself or by one of his descendants.80 Additionally, the Mihaloğulları also sponsored two educational institutions in the small town – a mekteb and a medrese, both of which were mentioned in the sultanic decrees kept by the last manager (mütevelli) of the foundation, Mihaloğlu Yusuf Ragıb Beg.81 Of these, only the location of the medrese can safely be affirmed, since in 1921 parts of its massive stone foundations were still visible under the newly built elementary school opposite the zaviye.82 At present, the only representatives of the rich architectural patronage of the Mihaloğlu family in their residential powerbase in İhtiman are the ruins of the zaviye and the well restored hamam, currently used as an art gallery. Practically owned by the family for several centuries, the town’s very existence and further development were a result of its Mihaloğlu masters’ authority and administrative abilities, skilfully manifested in the built environment through their architectural benefaction. Plevne The residence of the family which saw the most extensive architectural patronage on the part of the Mihaloğlus was the city of Plevne (mod. Pleven) in today’s Northern Bulgaria. The Ottoman capture of its medieval predecessor Storgosia is recorded in none of the narrative sources, but it is logical to suppose that it was taken either in 1388 during the campaign of the Grand Vizier Çandarlı ‘Ali Paşa or in the course of the following decade after the battle of Rovine (1395). The only source which suggests that Mihaloğulları were involved in the conquest of Plevne and the region around it is the seventeenth-century Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi, who ascribes the conquest to Gazi Mihal Beg at the time of Murad I.83 Be that as it may, given the late-fifteenth-century reality, when Plevne became the seat of Mihaloğlu ‘Ali Beg and the nucleus of his large endowment in the region, one is tempted to presume that members of the family were involved in the conquest of the area.84 Indeed, Ottoman administrative records from the fifteenth century unanimously testify to the family’s connection to the region prior to the establishment of ‘Ali Beg’s pious foundation there in support of the buildings he erected in the small town of Plevne. It appears that in 1479/80 the large prebend holding (has) of the governor (mir-i liva) of Niğbolu province was in the hands of Mihaloğlu İskender Beg,85 whereas other zeamet holdings in the area were held also 79 Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi, 3. Kitap, 220. 80 The Frenchman Quiclet testifies to the existence of two caravanserais in 1657, one known by the name Beg Han and the other, in which he apparently stayed, by the name Mihal Han. Cf. Les voyages de M. Quiclet à Constantinople par terre. Enrichis d’annotations par le Sieur P.M.L. (Paris, 1664), cited after Bistra Tsvetkova (ed.), Frenski pătepisi za Balkanite XV–XVIII v. (Sofia: Nauka i Izkustvo, 1975), 221. 81 Gökçek, Köse Mihal Oğulları, 34. 82 Miyatev, “Prinosi kăm srednovekovnata arheologiya na bălgarskite zemi,” 248–249. 83 Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi, 6. Kitap, 95. 84 The military exploits of ‘Ali Beg, one of the most vigorous akıncı commanders from the fifteenth century, are described by Zirojević, “Smederevski sandjakbeg Ali beg Mihaloglu,” 9–27 and Levend, Gazavât-nâmeler, 187–195. 85 National Library of Bulgaria “Sts. Cyril and Methodius”, Oriental Department [hereafter: NBKM], OAK 45/29 (from 1479/80), fol. 3a–4b; also published in Nikolay Todorov and Boris Nedkov (eds.), Turski izvori za bălgarskata istoriya, vol 2: Dokumenti ot XV vek (Sofia: Bălgarska akademiya na naukite, 1966), 161–165.

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by Mihaloğlu family members.86 The zeamet of Plevne, which included the town of Plevne itself and several surrounding villages, was held by a certain Mehmed Beg.87 The fact that less than a decade later Plevne and some of the villages from the zeamet became part of the private property of Mihaloğlu ‘Ali Beg, who subsequently endowed the income from them to his pious foundation, makes it plausible that the aforementioned zaim of Plevne was his relative. Nevertheless, taking into account that in 1479/80 only nine Muslim and eleven Christian households, including that of a widow, were registered in Plevne, there can be little doubt that the virtual promoter of the urban centre and its biggest benefactor was ‘Ali Beg, who built the initial buildings in the small settlement, attracted the majority of the new settlers by exempting them from some taxes and subsequently provided for the maintenance of his buildings by endowing the income from the surrounding villages for the upkeep of his charitable foundation at the very end of the fifteenth century.88 The endowment deed of ‘Ali Beg was drawn up in 1496 and although its Arabic original is now lost, it has survived in several later copies.89 The vakfiye testifies to the large landed estates of the endower in the districts of Lofça, Vidin and Plevne, which included many villages, mezra‘as, agricultural lands and forests, part of the income and produce from which were to be spent on the maintenance of the charitable buildings the benefactor had erected in Vidin and Plevne. It becomes clear that at the time when the endowment charter was drawn up (1496), ‘Ali Beg had already built in Plevne a bath-house (hamam), a mosque (mescid), a dervish convent (zaviye), a soup kitchen for the poor (‘imaret), an elementary school (mekteb) and a theological collage (medrese), for the upkeep of which he has endowed the income from his privately owned land in the area.90 86 The zeamet of Gigen was held by İsa Bali, son of Bali Beg İhtimanî (NBKM, OAK 45/29, fol. 41a); whereas the zeamet of Lofça was in the hands of ‘Ali Beg’s son Yakub Beg (NBKM, OAK 45/29, fol. 49b). 87 NBKM, OAK 45/29, fols. 38a–38b. 88 Yurdan Trifonov, Istoriya na grada Pleven do Osvoboditelnata voyna (Sofia: Dărjavna Pechatnitsa, 1933), 36–53; Barkan, “Vakıflar ve Temlikler,” 360–361; Machiel Kiel, “Urban Development in Bulgaria in the Turkish Period: The Place of Turkish Architecture in the Process,” International Journal of Turkish Studies 4:2 (1989): 108–112; idem, “Plewna,” in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 8 (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 317–320; Kayapınar, “Kuzey Bulgaristan’da Gazi Mihaloğulları Vakıfları,” 169–181; Sabev, “Osmanlıların Balkanları Fethi ve İdaresinde Mihaloğulları Ailesi,” 233–239. 89 The sixteenth-century poet Za‘ifî, once a müderris in the medrese of Plevne, was asked by family members to translate the original vakfiye into the Ottoman language. The translation was included in Za‘ifî’s Külliyât-ı Zaʿifî, ms. Topkapı Palace Library, Revan 822, fols. 181a–184a. See Robert Anhegger, “16. Asır Şairlerinden Za‘ifî,” İstanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Türk Dili ve Edebiyatı Dergisi 4:1–2 (1950): 133–166, 162–163. For other copies of Za‘ifî’s Külliyât see Gönül Alpay Tekin, “Zaifi Külliyatının Yeni Bir Nüshası Hakkında,” Journal of Turkish Studies 2 (1978): 107–125, 117. Cf. Levend, Gazavât-nâmeler, 359–360. An abridgment of the endowment deed is presented also by Nüzhet Paşa, himself a descendant of the family, in his Ahval-i Gazi Mihal (İstanbul: Dersa‘adet, 1315/1896–7), 86–91. Finally, a Bulgarian translation of the vakfiye kept by family members in Plevne was published by Georgi Balaschev and Diamandi Ihchiev, “Turskite vakăfi v bălgarskoto tsarstvo i dokumenti vărhu tyah,” Minalo: Bălgaro-makedonsko nauchno spisanie 1:3 (1909): 243–255. 90 Levend, Gazavât-nâmeler, 359; Nüzhet Paşa, Ahval-i Gazi Mihal, 88; Balaschev and Ihchiev, “Turskite vakăfi v bălgarskoto tsarstvo,” 244. The income from the public bath in Plevne to be spent on the upkeep of ‘Ali Beg’s ‘imaret is listed in the vakf registers from sixteenth century. Cf. BOA, TT 370 (370 Numaralı Muhâsebe-i Vilâyet-i Rûm-İli Defteri (937/1530)), 522; BOA, TT 382, 688. Apart from the ‘imaret, hamam, mosque and medrese, Evliya Çelebi mentions that ‘Ali Beg had also built a mekteb in the town. The Gazi Mihal Han, which he also describes, might well have been erected by the same patron. Cf. Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi, 6. Kitap, 96.

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(ill. 9) Except for the arable lands, forests and rivers, on the banks of which the numerous vakf mills were grinding the wheat for the ‘imarets and whose exact borders were defined in the document, ‘Ali Beg donated to his pious foundation the income from twenty villages and the town of Plevne, which were his own private property. Indeed, something about which the endowment deed does not give details, but to which later Ottoman tax records issued by the central administration unanimously attest, is the fact that ‘Ali Beg was the person who actually populated previously deserted land on his estate, re-creating formerly uninhabited villages and thereby increasing both the number of the settlements in his private domain and its revenues. Apparently, Bayezid II initially granted to ‘Ali Beg three villages (Plevne, Dolna Giriviçe and Kışin) and large plots of empty land with absolute immunity in terms of their financial administration: i.e., the state did not interfere in the management of these lands and gave their owner the right to collect all taxes, including the poll-tax from the Christians.91 Under these conditions, the mülk of ‘Ali Beg, consisting of only three villages at the time when it was granted, was repeatedly enlarged, as in a short time the owner succeeded in increasing the number of inhabited places to twenty-four by attracting and settling on the empty land peasants who had previously escaped registration and who must have found the tax-exemption policy of the landowner truly appealing.92 Having increased substantially the incomes from his landed possessions, ‘Ali Beg subsequently endowed a share of their revenues for the upkeep of his mosque and ‘imaret and another share for the maintenance of his zaviye in Plevne.93 Additionally, being guaranteed absolute proprietorship over his private property, the landed magnate of the region provided for his own offspring and close entourage by granting his sons and manumitted slaves plots of land from his own estate.94 Thus, confirmed in full proprietorship over their own landed properties, the descendants of ‘Ali Beg in their turn secured the right of inheritance for their own progeny and practically guaranteed the ownership of the Mihaloğlu family in the area for centuries. Some of ‘Ali Beg’s children and grandchildren also established pious foundations in support of the buildings already constructed in the urban centre of Plevne95 or for the upkeep of those erected by themselves.96 In the sixteenth century the grandson of ‘Ali Beg, 91 BOA, TT 382, 675. Certain parts of this register (but under its old call number, i.e. 611) concerning the private properties of Mihaloğlu family members have been published by Barkan, “Toprak Mülk ve Vakıflarının Hususiyeti,” 256–260, 267–270. See also Kiel, “Urban Development in Bulgaria,” 108–109; Kayapınar, “Kuzey Bulgaristan’da Gazi Mihaloğulları Vakıfları,” 172–173; Sabev, “Osmanlıların Balkanları Fethi ve İdaresinde Mihaloğulları Ailesi,” 235. 92 BOA, TT 382, 675, 714, 717, 723; Barkan, “Vakıflar ve Temlikler,” 341, 360–361; idem, “Toprak Mülk ve Vakıflarının Hususiyeti,” 256–260, 267–270. 93 BOA, TT 370 (370 Numaralı Muhâsebe-i Vilâyet-i Rûm-İli Defteri (937/1530)), 521–522; BOA, TT 382, 675–714. Cf. Sabev, “Osmanlıların Balkanları Fethi ve İdaresinde Mihaloğulları Ailesi,” 235. 94 Barkan, “Toprak Mülk ve Vakıflarının Hususiyeti,” 258–260, 267–271; Sabev, “Osmanlıların Balkanları Fethi ve İdaresinde Mihaloğulları Ailesi,” 235–237; Kayapınar, “Kuzey Bulgaristan’da Gazi Mihaloğulları Vakıfları,” 173–176. 95 Sabev, “Osmanlıların Balkanları Fethi ve İdaresinde Mihaloğulları Ailesi,” 238; Kayapınar, “Kuzey Bulgaristan’da Gazi Mihaloğulları Vakıfları,” 175–176. 96 Based on the information from the Külliyat by Za‘ifî, who served as a müderris in the medrese there and claims that he was asked by the family (kavmi) of Hızır Beg to translate the vakfiye of ‘Ali Beg from Arabic to Turkish, it was erroneously believed that ‘Ali Beg’s son Hızır Beg was the founder of a second institution of higher education (medrese) in Plevne. Here Hızır Beg, obviously referring to ‘Alaeddin ‘Ali Beg’s father, should not be confused with ‘Ali Beg’s son and certainly was not a founder of another medrese, where the poet Za‘ifî was teaching. Cf. Kiel, “Urban Development in Bulgaria,” 111 and idem, “Plewna,”

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Süleyman Beg (an offspring of the oldest son of ‘Ali Beg, Hasan Beg), sponsored a mekteb which, according to Evliya Çelebi, was, together with the mekteb of Gazi ‘Ali Beg, the most notable among the seven schools in town.97 Süleyman Beg was also the patron of one of the most imposing Friday mosques in Plevne, which was known locally as Kurşunlu Cami‘i and, according to its dedicatory inscription, was built in 969 H. (11 September 1561 – 30 August 1562).98 (ills. 10 & 11) A whole city quarter grew around it, as its name unequivocably indicates, i.e., Mahalle-i Cami‘i-i Süleyman Beg.99 The erection of several other small mosques (mescid) in Plevne can also be ascribed to Mihaloğlu family members. The sixteenth-century Ottoman registers of the Plevne region testify to the existence of a number of city quarters named after the mosques on which the neighbourhoods were centred. Thus, one finds listed the quarter mescid-i Halil Voyvoda,100 whose patron can certainly be identified as a member of the family. Halil Voyvoda was a relative, most probably a cousin, of Mihaloğlu ‘Ali Beg’s son Mehmed Beg and appears to have ensured the safety of the previously uninhabited village of Ralyova,101 which had become a gathering place for robbers, by populating it with close to three dozen of his own men, who enjoyed certain privileges in terms of tax-exemption.102 At least four more neighbourhood mosques were endowed by members of the family, three of them women. It appears that one of the wives of Mihaloğlu ‘Ali Beg, the mother of his son Hızır Beg, was the benefactress of mescid-i valide-i Hızır Beg103 in the city quarter of 318. For this passage in Za‘ifî cf. Anhegger, “16. Asır Şairlerinden Za‘ifî,” 162. Nor is Kiel’s information accurate that in the registration of 1550 (TT 382, 675–688) there was in Plevne a whole neighbourhood and a mescid by the name of Hızır Beg. Cf. Kiel, “Urban Development in Bulgaria,” 111. Indeed, currently we possess no data suggesting that any of ‘Ali Beg’s sons erected any building in the town of Plevne. 97 Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi, 6. Kitap, 96. 98 Yurdan Trifonov reports that Süleyman Beg Cami‘i was also known by the name Koca Süleyman Beg Cami‘i or Kadı Süleyman Beg Cami‘i. At the time he was writing the building was still intact and he could see the dedicatory inscription still in situ above the entrance. Trifonov was the first to give the numerical value of the chronogram in the inscription in which the mosque’s date of construction is coded. Trifonov presented the chronogram as “mescid-i aksa-i sani oldu” and its numerical value as the mosque’s year of construction as 927 H./1521. Trifonov, Istoriya na grada Pleven, 44–45. Trifonov’s reading was questioned by Machiel Kiel, who has proposed a later dating of the building, i.e., 981 H. (1573/4). Cf. Kiel, “Plewna,” 318 and 320. Indeed, although the building itself was demolished long ago, its dedicatory inscription is exhibited in the Historical Museum in Pleven and although it is now broken at the left bottom corner, it appears that there are no missing parts and the chronogram is well legible. A thorough examination of the inscription actually shows that there is another small word in the chronogram, which appears at the end of each line. In consequence, the numerical value of the chronogram, which now should be read as “mescid-u aḳṣa-ī sanī oldu, bīl”, corresponds to the year 969 H. (11 September 1561 – 30 August 1562). Felix Kanitz, who passed through Pleven in 1871, drew a sketch of the mosque, which was then known by the name Kadı Camisi. Cf. Felix Kanitz, Donau-Bulgarien und der Balkan. Historisch-GeographischEthnographische Reisestudien aus den Jahren 1860–1876. vol. 2 (Leipzig: Hermann Fries, 1877), 198. 99 This neighbourhood appears for the first time in the registration of 1579. BOA, TT 713, 155. 100 BOA, TT 382, 681. 101 Modern Ralevo, 13 km. to the south of Pleven. 102 BOA, TT 382, 759; Barkan, “Toprak Mülk ve Vakıflarının Hususiyeti,” 270–271. Barkan has misread the name of the village as Dalıka instead of the correct Ralyova. Kayapınar, “Kuzey Bulgaristan’da Gazi Mihaloğulları Vakıfları,” 174. 103 From a vakf register from 1540 (NBKM, OAK 217/8, fols. 34b –35a) it becomes clear that the mother of Hızır Beg created a pious foundation in support of her mosque, endowing the income from six shops for the salary of the imam and for the maintenance of and repairs to the building. Cf. Bistra Tsvetkova (ed.), Turski izvori za bălgarskata istoriya, Vol. 3: Dokumenti ot XVI vek (Sofia: Bălgarska akademiya na naukite, 1972), 467.

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the same name.104 One of the daughters of ‘Ali Beg, whose name also remains unclear, erected her own mosque in Plevne. Her name, as that of her father’s wife, rests in the shadow of the prominent men of the family, in this case her famous brother Mehmed Beg, since her own mosque was known as mescid-i hemşire-i [sister of] Mehmed Beg.105 It appears that part of the mosque’s inner space was occupied by a tekke,106 which makes it plausible that she was the patron of one of the six tekkes described by Evliya Çelebi in Plevne. The only woman who engraved her personal name on the urban fabric of Plevne was ‘Ali Beg’s granddaughter and Mehmed Beg’s daughter, Hatice Sultan. Hatice Sultan erected a mosque in Plevne, for the upkeep of which she endowed the income from one hereditary village107 and which also became the nucleus of a neighbourhood of the same name.108 Mihaloğulları continued to build in Plevne in the following centuries as well. One more mosque was erected in 1663 by a certain Süleyman, son of Mahmud Paşa from the family of Mihal.109 It was a massive structure but was torn down after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877/8, as were most other Ottoman buildings in the town. To all the edifices whose benefactors can be identified as members of the Mihaloğlu family, one should add some of the commercial buildings as well. When Evliya Çelebi visited Plevne, he noted the existence of six caravanserais and specifically mentioned that of Gazi Mihal Beg, which had been ruined after an attack by the Wallachian Michael the Brave at the end of the sixteenth century and was later restored by the family to its previous impressiveness.110 The name used for the han by the Ottoman traveller leaves little doubt that it was originally erected by a member of the family, possibly by Mihaloğlu ‘Ali Beg himself.111 Trying to evaluate the architectural heritage of the Mihaloğlu family in their residential power base in Plevne, one is faced with an ambitious building programme. The structures patronized by different members of the family included a respresentative of every type of religious or secular building – mosques, dervish convents (zaviye), public soup kitchens (‘imaret), bath-houses (hamam), elementary and theological schools (mekteb and medrese) and caravanserais (han). Indeed, along with the family’s absolute proprietorship of vast territories in the area, which they held for several centuries, it was the rich architectural beneficence of the Mihaloğulları which elevated Plevne to their most celebrated ancestral domain. Of this 104 BOA, TT 382, 678. 105 NBKM, OAK 217/8, fols. 34b; Tsvetkova, Turski izvori za bălgarskata istoriya, vol. 3, 467. Orlin Sabev has suggested that the actual benefactor of the mosque was Mehmed Beg himself, but the entry in the register clearly shows that it was his sister (hemşire). Sabev, “Osmanlıların Balkanları Fethi ve İdaresinde Mihaloğulları Ailesi,” 238. 106 In 1540 the income from twenty-five shops in Plevne was to be spent on the salaries of the imam and muezzin in the small complex of Mehmed Beg’s sister, as well as on the repair costs both for the mescid and for the tekke inside the mosque. NBKM, OAK 217/8, fols. 34b; Tsvetkova, Turski izvori za bălgarskata istoriya, vol. 3, 467. 107 Barkan, “Toprak Mülk ve Vakıflarının Hususiyeti,” 269–270; Sabev, “Osmanlıların Balkanları Fethi ve İdaresinde Mihaloğulları Ailesi,” 238; Kayapınar, “Kuzey Bulgaristan’da Gazi Mihaloğulları Vakıfları,” 175. 108 BOA, TT 713, 155. 109 Trifonov, Istoriya na grada Pleven, 64. 110 Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi, 6. Kitap, 96. 111 It must have been the very same caravanserai where Felix Kanitz stayed in 1871. It was described by him as an old edifice situated in the very heart of the çarşı with a magnificent view of Plevne’s most beautiful mosque (i.e. Süleyman Beg), of which Kanitz drew a scetch from his window. Kanitz, Donau-Bulgarien und der Balkan, 197–198.

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remarkable heritage only a few remains could be still seen in Pleven at the beginning of the twentieth century: the double bath-house of the town’s actual founder ‘Ali Beg, the mosque of his grandson Süleyman Beg and, most importantly, the remnants of the former residence of the family, known up until the 1930s by the name Saray, i.e., the Palace.112 (ill. 12) In the seventeenth century it was described by Evliya Çelebi as a quadrangular fortification in the inner part of which the Mihaloğulları had erected a magnificent, many-storeyed palace where they lived and from where they governed the area.113 Currently only the southern section of the walls that once surrounded the family mansion is preserved and it is obviously lower than it used to be, since in the early 1930s Yurdan Trifonov could still see a marble lion’s head displayed conspicuously next to the main entrance at a height of 7–8 metres.114 (ill. 13) It seems that the palatial house was quite ostentatious and, along with the architectural patronage of the Mihaloğulları regional power-holders, should be understood as a token of their absolute supremacy in the region. Ideological implications of the endowed buildings: a question of architectural meaning and audience The idea that architecture embodies the values of a particular society and links them to the power and authority of the architectural patron is not new, but it has primarily been examined through imperial Ottoman architecture and the royal household’s patronage; and largely been studied in the context of the urban fabric of the Ottoman capitals Bursa, Edirne and Istanbul.115 It has been argued that the mosques and larger complexes in the urban centres were used by their benefactors to manifest their power and were tangible symbols of the values, authority, power and legitimacy embodied in the person of the ruler.116 It is widely acknowledged that architecture was also used as a colonizer of space, encouraging the development of settlement in uninhabited places,117 and was one of the key mechanisms facilitating the growth of urban centres.118 The development of the three cities examined above certainly exemplifies the pivotal role of the architectural monuments in their actual urban development. Moreover, being not only exclusively dominated by the architectural patronage of the Mihaloğulları, but actually held in their absolute proprietorship, Pınarhisar, İhtiman and Plevne have indeed been moulded by the frontier lords to become their urban residences and a stage for their power, authority and ideological values. Moreover, as much 112 Trifonov, Istoriya na grada Pleven, 61 (plan of the walled part of the palace), 62–63. 113 “Mihaloğulları çâr-kûşe handaksız bir küçük kapulu kal‘a şekilli bir sûr inşâ edüp içinde kat-enderkat sarây-ı azîm binâ etmişler kim ta‘rîf ü tavsîfden müstağnî bir sarây-ı mu‘azzamdır kim içine beş âdem girse yerim dar demez. Cümle Mihaloğlu beğler bunda sâkin olup hükm-i hükûmât ederler.” Cf. Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi, 6. Kitap, 95. 114 Trifonov, Istoriya na grada Pleven, 63. 115 Crane, “The Ottoman Sultan’s Mosques,” 173–243; Watenpaugh, The Image of an Ottoman City; Oya Pancaroğlu, “Architecture, Landscape, and Patronage in Bursa: the Making of an Ottoman Capital City,” Turkish Studies Association Bulletin 20:1 (1995): 40–55; Aptullah Kuran, “A Spatial Study of Three Ottoman Capitals: Bursa, Edirne, and Istanbul,” Muqarnas 13 (1996): 114–131; Necipoğlu, The Age of Sinan; Çiğdem Kafesçioğlu, Constantinopolis/Istanbul: Cultural Encounters, Imperial Vision, and the Construction of the Ottoman Capital (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009). A commendable exception is Yürekli, Architecture and Hagiography in the Ottoman Empire. 116 Crane, “The Ottoman Sultan’s Mosques,” 173. 117 Barkan, “Vakıflar ve Temlikler,” 279–386; Necipoğlu, The Age of Sinan, 71–76. 118 Crane, “The Ottoman Sultan’s Mosques,” 173–243.

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as the cities in themselves represent power and express power relations,119 one is reminded that the perception and undertsanding of the city by its inhabitants should also be taken into account when trying to understand its meaning.120 In fostering the development into urban centres of the settlements under their control, their Mihaloğlu masters indeed created, through the endowed architectural infrastructure, a visual environment which also incorporated ideological imagery. Members of the family supported the construction of religious, commercial, educational and charitable structures; as the institutional framework for this patronage, the waqf (pious foundation) was an important component in the development of their newly founded towns and provided a fundamental means of creating networks of authority in their domains.121 The buildings erected by the Mihaloğlu family in the urban centres they endowed were intended to serve ideological functions, transmitting the message of the power and charity which they displayed to a distinct group of immediate beneficiaries who inhabited both the urban and rural parts of their vast estates. It suffices to cast a glance at the inhabitants of the Mihaloğulları landed properties to identify the audience of the built environment. Since the family of Mihal held its vast territorial estates in full proprietorship and was therefore the beneficiary of all income derived from them, its members were the ones naturally concerned with the improvement and revitalization of their domains. It is not surprising, therefore, that one of the Mihaloğlu family’s main concerns while managing their ancestral domains was their repopulation. One of the principal methods applied by the landlords in their efforts at revitalization was to settle previously unregistered semi-nomadic peasants (haymane) on their private lands by offering them certain tax-exemptions, thereby reviving previously deprived areas on the one hand and earning a reputation as benevolent rulers on the other.122 Another effective means of repopulating territories, one employed by the Mihaloğulları to settle desolate parts of their domains and, indeed, to recreate whole

119 Richard van Leeuwen, Waqfs and Urban Structures: the Case of Ottoman Damascus (Boston – Leiden – Köln: Brill, 1999), 2–3, 23–30, 179. 120 Donald Preziosi, “Introduction: The Mechanisms of Urban Meaning,” in Bierman, Abou-El-Haj and Preziosi, The Ottoman City and Its Parts, 4–5. 121 Barkan, “Vakıflar ve Temlikler,” 279–386; Çiğdem Kafesçioğlu, “‘In the image of Rum’: Ottoman architectural patronage in sixteenth century Aleppo and Damascus,” Muqarnas 16 (1999): 77. Cf. Oded Peri, “The waqf as an instrument to increase and consolidate political power: the case of the Khasseki Sultan waqf in late-eighteenth-century Ottoman Jerusalem,” Asian and African studies 17 (1983): 47–62. 122 This process can be best illustrated by the enlargement of the Plevne family vakf. See BOA, TT 382, 675, 714, 717, 723. Barkan, “Toprak Mülk ve Vakıflarının Hususiyeti,” 256–260, 267–270 and idem, “Vakıflar ve Temlikler,” 341, 360–361. Cf. also Kiel, “Urban Development in Bulgaria,” 108–109; Sabev, “Osmanlıların Balkanları Fethi ve İdaresinde Mihaloğulları Ailesi,” 235; Kayapınar, “Kuzey Bulgaristan’da Gazi Mihaloğulları Vakıfları,” 172–173. The policy of attracting new settlers can be further observed in the family possessions in the area of Pınarhisar, where some of the Christian villages saw unprecedented demographic growth, part of which should certainly be attributed to the settlement of previously unsettled peasants and semi-nomads (haymane). In the registration from 1569 (BOA, TT 541) the distribution of the newly registered villagers in four of the biggest and most rapidly growing settlents in the area is as follows: in the village of Küçük Adoki there were 9 (BOA, TT 541, 137–139); in Büyük Adoki 28 (BOA, TT 541, 152–156); in Sazara 30 (BOA, TT 541, 156–163); and in Yeniceköy 63 (BOA, TT 541, 141–150).

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settlements, was to deport settlers from the territories which they had conquered beyond the Ottoman borders and relocate them on their own private lands.123 The settlers brought in by way of deportation may not have arrived of their own free will on Mihaloğulları estates, but they still enjoyed the status of freemen – re‘aya. Yet there were a good number of people who had been deprived of their freedom: they were taken prisoners of war and as such became the property of the Mihaloğlus. Being active military leaders in the Ottoman vanguard, members of the family naturally came into possession of large numbers of slaves as part of their share of the military spoils. These slaves of the frontier begs, already denoted in the sources as freedmen (‘atîk, mu’tak, or azad), were also settled on their landed properties.124 Another sizable portion of the population settled in the residential centres of the Mihaloğlus were members of their military entourage. Initially taken as prisoners of war, these ghılmânân (pl. of ghulâm)125 were personally bound to their Mihaloğulları masters, while acting as a dependable élite force and as personal bodyguards to their patrons. Naturally, belonging to the Mihaloğulları’s closest military companions, these ghulâms followed their masters into their centres of residence and were therefore found in their power bases.126 Unsurprisingly, another discernible share of the population in the Mihaloğulları ancestral vakfs were their own military retinues. Among the inhabitants of their vast landed properties 123 Barkan, “Vakıflar ve Temlikler,” 360–361; Sabev, “Osmanlıların Balkanları Fethi ve İdaresinde Mihaloğulları Ailesi,” 236; Kayapınar, “Kuzey Bulgaristan’da Gazi Mihaloğulları Vakıfları,” 174. 124 In a lengthy study Barkan has observed that it was customary for the frontier begs to settle their war captives in the territories of their waqfs. This was the case with many of the villages associated with the pious foundations of Timurtaş Beg, İshak Beg of Üsküb and Evrenos Beg. Moreover, it appears that whole villages were created as a result of the resettling of prisoners of war on these noble families’ landed estates. Cf. Barkan, “XV ve XVI Asırlarda Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda Toprak İşçilerinin Organizasyonu Şekilleri,” 397–447. Traces of these prisoners of war can be found in all three of the family’s vakf estates: they were present in Pınarhisar (BOA, TT 286 (from 1541), 70; TKGM, KuK 548 (from 1569), 70b–71b = BOA, TT 541, 134–136), Plevne (BOA, TT 382, 675–682) and in the İhtiman ancestral domain, where a whole village essentially appears to have been created by some of the relatives of the founder of the İhtiman pious endowment, Mihaloğlu Mahmud Beg, and by his emancipated slaves. It appears in the sources as karye-i Havlı – azadgân-i ve h‘işâvendan-i merhum Mahmud Beg [the village Havlı, manumitted slaves and relatives of the late Mahmud Beg] (BOA, TT 82, 336–337; BOA, TT 130, 604; BOA, TT 409, comp. p. 298; BOA, TT 370, 202; BOA, TT 236, 609–610; BOA, TT 492, 734–735; TKGM, KuK 61, 361b–362a = BOA, TT 539, 714–715 = BOA, TT 566, 686–687). Manumitted slaves of the Evrenosoğulları were also settled in the centre of their ancestral domain Yenice-i Vardar. Cf. Lowry and Erünsal, The Evrenos Dynasty of Yenice-i Vardar, 110, 119. 125 Halil İnalcık, “Ghulām, IV: Ottoman Empire,” in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 1085–1091. 126 The registers of the pious foundation in İhtiman list several of the ghulâms settled in the village of Havlı among the manumitted slaves and some of the kinsmen of Mihaloğlu Mahmud Beg, the founder of the waqf. A group of these devotees personally bound to the beg were living in the town of Plevne as well. Although they were not designated ghulâms, the 20 individuals, registered with the term mensubân-i Süleyman Beg (affiliates of Süleyman Beg, or the ones attached to Süleyman Beg), must indeed represent his own retinues. The nature of the bond between the master and his closest military companions is probably best illustrated by the example of Hasan Beg’s dependants in one of his villages in the region of Plevne. The village of Diseviçe, granted to him from his father, hosted 15 of his military companions, who were mentioned as nökerân-i Hasan Beg. Here the term nöker is used as synonymous with ghulâm, but it is noteworthy that it originated from a well-known Mongol institution, denoting the close bonds and the patron-client relationship between the master and his personally attached slaves. Cf. the sources cited in fn. 122.

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one finds large numbers of both akıncıs (raiders) and yürüks (semi-nomadic stock-breeders, also organized as a separate corps in the Ottoman army charged with paramilitary services) settled all over their patrons’ domains, but mainly concentrated in the territory around İhtiman.127 Evidently, many of the residents on the landed property of the Mihaloğulları were personally bound to their masters, who provided for their living, be they tax-exempt subjects or military retainers. Indeed, retaining the right to manage their domains with almost full autonomy, the powerful marcher lords from the family of Mihal created a mini-state, a microcosm of a frontier principality, within the confines of the Ottoman Empire, where they could import population, encourage migration, grant lands on their own behalf to their closest entourage: in short, could exercise complete control over their subjects and generate an extended household similar to that of an independent ruler. As is to be expected, the socio-religious complexes built by the Mihaloğlu raider-commanders and the whole visual environment of their capitals were meant to be read by the actual populace of the same environment, i.e., by all components of the frontier milieu gathered around the charismatic leaders of the frontier forces. Modelling the urban fabric of their powerbases, the Mihaloğulları fostered a symbolic shaping of their domains which on the one hand resonated in the conveyance of religiosity, justice, devotion to learning, charity and generosity by the benefactors; and on the other created a network of dependant loyalties among their subjects.128 Undoubtedly, some of the ideological principles of the Mihaloğlu benefactors were epitomized by the zaviye/‘imaret buildings, which were erected in all the cities under their patronage and intended to serve a distinct group of the frontier society, namely the mendicant dervishes. Keeping in mind that the Mihaloğulları were closely linked to the erection of four of the principal dervish convents in the Balkans, i.e., the zaviye of Otman Baba and the hospices of his disciples – Akyazılı Baba, Kıdemli Baba and Demir Baba (ills. 14–17) – one is tempted to suggest that the immediate audience of the family’s architectural patronage were all elements of frontier society, as was typical for the early stages of the expanding Ottoman state.129 Probably the best embodiment of the ideological values of the family of Mihal, exemplifying their devotion to the values of the old frontier, was their extensive patronage of the shrine-complex of Seyyid Battal Gazi in Anatolia, a symbol of the gazi­-dervish alliance and a gathering place for all dissatisfied and marginalized segments of Ottoman society.130 Thus, 127 The earliest known tax registers of the region so-far date from the beginning of the sixteenth century and testify to the existence of a large family estate, which, besides the town of İhtiman, included 20 villages around it. In almost half these villages the greater number of residents were registered either as yürüks or as akıncıs. Likewise, the villages from the pious foundation in which these individuals were registered were included in separately compiled yürük and akıncı registers, a fact which on its own bears irrefutable testimony to the origins of and occupation by the Muslim residents of the waqf villages. 128 Halil İnalcık, “Matbakh. 3: In Ottoman Turkey,” in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 6 (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 809–813; Crane, “The Ottoman Sultan’s Mosques,” 173–243; Amy Singer, Constructing Ottoman Beneficence: an Imperial Soup Kitchen in Jerusalem (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 131–157; Gülru Necipoğlu, Architecture, Ceremonial, and Power: The Topkapı Palace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1991), 69–72; Heath Lowry, “The ‘Soup Muslims’ of the Ottoman Balkans: Was There a ‘Western’ & ‘Eastern’ Ottoman Empire?” Osmanlı Araştırmaları 36 (2010): 97–133. 129 Kiprovska, “Gazi Warriors and Patrons of Dervish Hospices,” 193–222. 130 Yürekli, Architecture and Hagiography in the Ottoman Empire.

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it would not be an overstatement to consider the architectural patronage of the Mihaloğlu family typical of the Ottoman frontiers. Further detailed studies on the rest of the marcher lords’ dynasties will certainly strengthen this argument and will reveal many more important specifics of the evolving Ottoman policy and society.

Illustration 1: The zaviye-‘imaret of Gazi Mihal Beg in Edirne, built in 1421/2. Photo by the author, 2010.

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Illustration 2: The double bath (hamam) of Gazi Mihal Beg in Edirne. Photo by the author, 2010.

Illustration 3: The bridge over the River Tundja, part of Gazi Mihal Beg’s complex in Edirne. Photo by the author, 2010.

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Illustration 4: The mausoleum (türbe) of Binbiroklu Ahmed Baba near Pınarhisar. Photo by the author, 2010.

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Illustration 5: The zaviye of Mihaloğlu Mahmud Beg in İhtiman. Photo by the author, 2010.

Illustration 6: The zaviye of Mihaloğlu Mahmud Beg in İhtiman. Photo by the author, 2010.

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Illustration 7: The bath (hamam) of Mihaloğlu Mahmud Beg in İhtiman. Photo by the author, 2010.

Illustration 8: The bath (hamam) of Mihaloğlu Mahmud Beg in İhtiman. Photo by the author, 2010.

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Illustration 9: The double bath (hamam) in Plevne – the only surviving building of Mihaloğlu ‘Ali Beg’s rich architectural patronage in the town during the early nineteenth century. Photo from the Central State Archives in Bulgaria, archival fond 3 K, inventory 7, archival unit 344, sheet 40, year: 1877–1907.

Illustration 10: Kurşunlu Cami‘i in Pleven (left), built by Mihaloğlu Süleyman Beg, a postcard from the 1930s. Courtesy of Kaan Harmankaya.

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Illustration 11: The dedicatory inscription of Kurşunlu Cami‘i in Pleven, currently exhibited in the Historical Museum in Pleven. According to the chronogram at the last line, mescid-u aḳṣa-ī sanī oldu, bīl, it was built in 969 H. (11 September 1561 – 30 August 1562). Photo by the author, 2010.

Illustration 12: The walled palace (saray) of the Mihaloğulları in Pleven as depicted on a steel engraving from 1878, representing the siege of Plevne during the Russo-Turkish war of 1877/1878. Engraved by Edward Paxman Brandard, printed by J. Ramage, William Mackenzie publisher, London. Courtesy of Kaan Harmankaya.

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Illustration 13: The remnants of the wall once surrounding the Mihaloğulları palace (saray). Photo by the author, 2010.

Illustration 14: Otman Baba’s mausoleum (türbe) near Hasköy (mod. Haskovo, Bulgaria), once part of a dervish convent. Photo by the author, 2010.

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Illustration 15: Akyazılı Baba’s mausoleum (türbe) near Balçık (mod. Balchik, Bulgaria), once part of a dervish convent. Photo by the author, 2010.

Illustration 16: Kıdemli Baba’s mausoleum (türbe) near Yenice-i Zağra (mod. Nova Zagora, Bulgaria), once part of a dervish convent. Photo by the author, 2010.

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Illustration 17: Demir Baba’s mausoleum (türbe) near Isperih (Bulgaria), once part of a dervish convent. Photo by the author, 2010.

Patronage of Ottoman Architecture at the Frontier: Thoughts and Materials. A Preliminary Overview Machiel Kiel The words “Ottoman Frontier in South-Eastern Europe” almost immediately conjure up Hungary, Slavonia and Dalmatia, the latter two being parts of Croatia today and during the Middle Ages; and also Northern Bosnia. Danubian Bulgaria and the Dobrudja, the dry steppe land on the “knee” of the Danube, now divided between Bulgaria and Rumania, come less automatically to mind. Yet it was there we could find the largest fortifications built by the Ottomans in their European territories: Vidin, Rusçuk/Russe and Braïla; not forgetting the imposing Fortress Quadrilatère Rusçuk-Silistra-Varna-Šumen. An even older “frontier” ran much further south, with Sofia, Üsküb/Skopje or Yenice-i Vardar/Giannitsa being important locations for the concentration of Ottoman military forces long before they became inland centres. As far as patronage along the old frontier in the late-fourteenth to early sixteenth centuries is concerned, the limited amount of preserved material shows that Great Mosques (Ulu Cami), with nine-domes on four pillars, were only constructed in the largest cities of all – Edirne, Filibe/Plovdiv and Sofia – and in a somewhat reduced size also in Dimetoka/Didymoteichon. In the other great centre, next in size to Edirne, namely, Selânik/Thessaloniki, there was no need to build an Ulu Cami because some of the large Early Christian basilicas were available. The city had been taken by storm after a long siege and, according to the generally accepted concept of Praeda Militaris, belonged to the conquerors.1 Of the other major type of building, the “T-Plan Mosques”, good representatives are still standing in Edirne (five examples), Skopje (two) and in Ihtiman and Plovdiv in Bulgaria and Komotini and Thessaloniki in Greece (one example each). There must have been many more and it would be a good idea to search for them in the sources and literature. This article will concentrate on the frontiers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The T-Plan buildings were no longer built after 1525–1530, bringing us automatically to the frontiers as they came into being during, or after, the above-mentioned dates. The history of Ottoman fortification is a much neglected subject. In 2010 Osprey Publishers brought out a slim volume by David Nicolle and Adam Hook, which covers more than the usual fifteenth- and sixteenth-century works on the Dardanelles and Bosphoros and provides a useful introduction.2 Soon we may expect a major publication by Mahir Aydin of Istanbul University. Great buildings have been erected by the Ottomans in the Rusçuk–Silistra–Varna–Šumen Quadrilatère, but of the first three very little remains.3 1 Fritz Redlich, “De Praeda Militari”: Looting and Booty, 1500–1815 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1956). 2 David Nicolle and Adam Hook, Ottoman Fortifications, 1300–1710 (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2010). 3 Machiel Kiel, “Kaponnieren an der Unteren Donau. Ein Neupreußisches Fort der ehemaligen türkischen Donaulinie bei Silistra (N.O. Bulgarien),” in Volker Schmidtchen (ed.), Festung, Garnison, Bevölkerung. Historische Aspekte der Festungsforschung. Die Vorträge d. 2. Internat. Kolloquiums zur

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Around Šumen whole generations of fortress works are preserved, beginning during the Russo-Turkish War of 1768/1774 and further strengthened in every generation of artillery development by a line of new, detached forts, up-to-date and boasting the most modern works in Western and Central Europe. The buildings in Šumen are mostly preserved but practically unstudied. The only well-preserved fort (built 1850/1851) of Mecidiyye Tabya of Silistra might be shown here as an illustration of this type of fortress construction on the Ottoman frontier. (ill. 1) To say anything definite about the patronage of Ottoman architecture in the former frontier areas of the Balkans is a risky affair. In general terms, possibly three per cent of everything built by the Ottomans between 1371 and, say, 1800 survived the action of time and especially of men. In the border areas the percentage is even lower! In Bosnia much more is (or was) preserved. In typical old border areas such as Syrmia (Srem) and Slavonia or Dalmatia there must have been hundreds of mosques that could have told us something about the nature and quality of the architecture.4 What is preserved from the Ottoman sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in these large districts is, however, about as little as what is still standing from the pre-Ottoman period. One example is the village church of St. Mary in Morović in Syrmia, which still has its thirteenth-century Romanesque choir and fifteenthcentury Gothic nave; or the Lučićke Crkva near Lipovać, just inside the Croatian border, which, for a provincial environment, had rich late-Gothic net-vaults and brick masonry of the highest quality. The fine Gothic chapel of the Castle of Bač in Bačka, or the great lateRomanesque monastery church of Arača near Novi Bečej in the Banat should be mentioned in this context.5 Sremska Mitrovica To understand the problem, and to give a first impression of the patronage of Ottoman architecture in border areas, some examples will be given. The Syrmian town of Sremska Mitrovica was conquered by the Ottomans in 1521, together with the key fortress of Belgrade. Together with the town of Ilok on the Danube (with its mighty medieval castle) it was the seat of the sancakbeyi – later pasha – of Sirem. According to the tahrir register of Sirem from 1578, (Sremska) Mitrovica had over 700 households, four mosques and some mescids. In June 1663, in his very detailed description of the town, Evliya Çelebi mentions Festungsforschung, Minden (29. – 31. Oktober 1982) (Wesel: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Festungsforschung, 1982), 151–166; idem, “The History and Development of Ottoman Turkish Fortified Towns, 16th–19th Centuries Shown by the Examples of Avlonya/Vlore (S. Albania), Vidin, Varna and Silistra (Danubian Bulgaria),” in Doğan Yavaş (ed.), Savunma Hatlarından Yaşam Alanlarına Kaleler: 19. Kaleli Kentler Semposyumu, 8–11 Ekim 2009 / 19th Walled Towns Symposium, October 8–11, 2009 (Bursa: Osmangazi Belediyesi, 2011), 278–295. 4 Generally on the border areas cf. Adolf Karger, Die Entwicklung der Siedlungen im westlichen Slawonien: ein Beitrag zur Kulturgeographie des Save-Drau-Zwischenstromlandes (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1963); Nenad Moačanin, Turska Hrvatska: Hrvati pod vlašću Osmanskog Carstva do 1791 (Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska, 1999); idem, Town and Country on the Middle Danube 1526–1690 (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2006); idem, Požega i Požeština u sklopu Osmanlijskog Carstva (1537–1691) (Jastrebarsko: Slap, 1997); idem, Slavonija i Srijem u razdoblju osmanske vladavine (Slavonski Brod: Hrvatski institut za povijest, 2001). 5 Đorđe Mano-Zisi, “Prilog ispitivanju Arače,” Rad Vojvođanskih Muzeja 2 (1953): 76–84; Machiel Kiel, “Notes on the Medieval Architecture of the Danubian Lowlands and Their Historical Background. Gothic Architecture in Syrmia and Bačka,” Revue des Etudes Sud-Est Européennes 10:2 (1972): 191–218.

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six mosques and six mescids in Mitrovica, as well as five medreses, three dervish convents, six hans/caravansaray and three hamams. The six mosques and three of the five medreses are given by name and the place where they were situated.6 Evliya’s description is too detailed for a routine, clichéd description (as he sometimes provided). In Evliya’s time the town had grown to 1500 houses and was the largest in the entire province. The traveller explicitly remarks that the town was very prosperous (gayet ma’mûr); and every year in the summer a fair took place which lasted 40 days and attracted large numbers of people. In 1669 the English traveller Edward Browne also calls “Metrouitza, a large town”, and likewise mentions the fair.7 One of the patrons of the public buildings mentioned by Evliya, Bayram Bey, is known to have been the governor of Sirem in 1559. In 1560 he was responsible for the new tahrir registration of Sirem and in 1566 was in charge of the sancak of Semendire (Smederevo), with Belgrade as its main centre (only 70 km east of Mitrovica). Kuyumcı Murad Pasha, who also had a great mosque built in Mitrovica, was in charge during the conclusion of the Treaty of Zsitvatorok in 1606. The greatest patron of Mitrovica was Gazi Bayezid Bey, active in the second half of the sixteenth century. He fell most probably at the battle of Sisak in 1593 and was buried in a large domed and lead-covered mausoleum in the yard of the great foundation in Mitrovica. This consisted of a monumental domed mosque, a medrese, han, mekteb, hamam (the best in town) and a block of 29 shops in the Bazar. From all these buildings nothing remains in Mitrovica today. Osijek/Esseg In the Ottoman period (1522–1687) the Slavonian town of Osijek witnessed considerable development. According to the city’s historian, Ive Mažuran, in 1565 Osijek had a garrison of 109 men and a Muslim civilian population of 233 households. Next came 59 households of Christians, altogether about 2,500 inhabitants. In 1579 there were 319 Muslim households and 26 Christian households, giving around 4,000 inhabitants. As sources Mažuran used the tahrirs of 1565 and 1579. In a report from 1620 1,000 houses are mentioned. By 1680 this number had gone up to 2,300 households, which gives a total population of almost 15,000.8 The town had a number of mosques. They are basically known from seventeenth-century drawings and from a description by Evliya Çelebi from 1663 (1073). Evliya notes that the number of mihrabs (mosques, mesdjids, tekkes) was 66, which is simply impossible. As the best-known mosque in the town he mentions that of Sultan Süleyman near the Gate of the Citadel. Previously it had been a church but was not very beautiful. In the middle of the town was the large domed mosque of Kasım Pasha, which was visible from far away (as all the old drawings show). In the Varoš, in the market district and a much visited location, was the Mosque of Mustafa Pasha of Filibe (Plovdiv) from 1563. Both mosques had a me6 Evliya Çelebi Mehmed Zıllî ibn Derviş, Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi, vol. 6, ed. by Ahmed Cevdet (İstanbul: İkdam Matba’ası, 1318/1900), 173–176; Evliyâ Çelebi b. Derviş Mehemmed Zıllî, Evliyâ Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi. 6. Kitap: Topkapı Sarayı Kütüphanesi Revan 1457 Numaralı Yazmanın Transkripsiyonu – Dizini, ed. by Seyit Ali Kahraman, Yücel Dağlı (İstanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2002), 102–103. 7 Edward Browne, A Brief Account of Some Travels in Hungaria, Servia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Thessaly, Austria, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, and Friuli: As Also Some Observations on the Gold, Silver, Copper, Quick-silver Mines, Baths, and Mineral Waters in Those Parts: with the Figures of Some Habits and Remarkable Places (London: T.R. for B. Tooke, 1673), 38. 8 Ive Mažuran, Srednjovjekovni i turski Osijek (Osijek: Zavod za znanstveni rad Hrvatske akademije znanosti i umjetnosti; Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 1994), 121–122 (tahrir 1565), 132–135 (tahrir 1579), and 239–240.

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drese and mekteb in their compounds, as well as domed mausolea for their founders. The central dome of Kasım Pasha’s mosque was so big that the portico in front of it needed five domes on six substantial, shining, white marble columns, instead of the usual three. The mosque as a whole was without equal in the entire border zone (serhad). Neither Buda nor Belgrade, Kanizsa, Erlau or Temesvár boasted such a beautiful and artistically ornamented mosque. Next to mosques and medreses there were four dervish convents; six hans; one enormous, castle-like caravansaray; and a large public bath (of Kasım Pasha) with lead-covered domes. Gazi Kasım Pasha is known to have been sancakbeyi of Mohács between 1543– 1545; from February 1548 to May 1551 Governor-General of Buda; and from 1552–1555 the first Ottoman governor of the newly founded eyalet of Temesvár. In 1557 and 1558 he was governor-general of Buda and in 1559 and 1560 again of Temesvár. In Pécs (Fünfkirchen) he built the largest mosque in the city and a hamam. The mosque, converted into a church, still stands today.9 His great works in Osijek were built when he was beylerbeyi of either Buda or Temesvár, offices that enabled him to build on a grand style. The near-contemporary historian Gelibolu’lu Ali notes that Kasım died in Temesvár. Ibrahim Peçevî, himself from the area, notes the main lines of Kasım’s carrier.10 The Ottoman Who’s Who, the Sicill-i Osmani, notes that he died towards the end of the reign of Sultan Süleyman, thus around 1565.11 More information about him is given by Géza Dávid.12 Of all the Ottoman buildings in Osijek nothing remains. On the central square of the old town (Tvrdje) of Osijek, the foundations of Kasım’s mosque and türbe, preserved under the earth, have been marked in the pavement. His mosque in Pécs, with a grand dome of 16,36 m diameter (or more than four times the size of the largest dome of the Middle-Byzantine period), still shows the extent of Kasım’s patronage.13 Đakovo (Djakovo) A complete surprise was the discovery, in the early 1980s, that the greater part of the Church of All Saints in the Slavonian town of Đakovo was in fact a single-domed Ottoman mosque masked by a heavy coat of Baroque plaster and a Neo-Classical façade. This was the Mosque of Arnavud Memi Beyoğlu İbrahim Bey. (ills. 2–5) Memi Bey the Albanian had been governor of Herzegovina and in 1526 had participated in the conquest of Central Slavonia. İbrahim Pasha is thought to have been his son, but is more likely his grandson. İbrahim is attested in 1604 as sancakbeyi of Kyustendil (W. Bulgaria) and in 1621 as governor-general of Bosnia. İbrahim’s family had a link with Đakovo. In 1660 Evliya Çelebi met İbrahim’s nephew, who was residing in the family’s saray in Đakovo. During the restoration of All Saints Church in the 1980s, the Municipality of Đakovo, the population and the ecclesiastic authorities – Đakovo is the seat of a Roman Catholic Bishopric – wished to restore the 9 Gyözö Gerö, Türkische Baudenkmäler in Ungarn (Budapest: Corvina, 1976); idem, Az oszmán-török építészet Magyarországon (Dzsámik, türbék, fürdök) (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1980). 10 İbrahim Peçevi, Peçevî Tarihi, ed. by Murat Uraz, vol. 1(İstanbul: Neşriyat Yurdu, 1968), 25. 11 Mehmed Süreyya, Sicill-i Osmanî, vol. 4 (İstanbul: Matba‘a-i ‘Amire, 1315/ 1897), 48. 12 Géza Dávid, “An Ottoman Military Career on the Hungarian Borders: Kasım Voyvoda, Bey, and Pasha,” in Géza Dávid and Pál Fodor (eds.), Ottomans, Hungarians, and Habsburgs in Central Europe: the Military Confines in the Era of Ottoman Conquest (Leiden – Boston – Köln: Brill, 2000), 265–297. 13 Ekrem Hakkı Ayverdi, Avrupa’da Osmanlı Mimarî Eserleri, I. Cild, 1., 2. Kitap: Romanya, Macaristan (İstanbul: İstanbul Fetih Cemiyeti, 20002), 199–206; Gerö, Az oszmán-török építészet Magyarországon; Slobodan Ćurčić, Architecture in the Balkans: From Diocletian to Süleyman the Magnificent (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).

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Ottoman character of the building, which was declared to be “the only surviving mosque in Slavonia”. At the same time everyone wanted to preserve the monumental Baroque and Neo-Classical façade and the tower of the church. This was done and the whole project is described in a book by two Croatian architects.14 It is said that in Slavonia at least six other mosques are still hidden underneath a Baroque covering, serving for centuries as churches. Szigetvár The same, but less dramatically, has happened in Szigetvár in Hungary, where most of the Mosque of Ali Pasha, with a dome of over 13 m, remains preserved and incorporated into a church. According to the text of an Ottoman inscription over the main entrance of the mosque, handed down by Evliya Çelebi, it was completed in 997 (1589). The date is given in numbers as well as a chronogram (câmi‘-i şerîfî – makâm-i a’lâ), which excludes mistakes.15 Szigetvár is primarily known for the siege of 1566, when Sultan Süleyman died just a day before the strong island-fortress in the swamps was finally conquered. Although very limited in number, the examples given here, together with two other mosques in Hungary (Yakovalı Hasan Pasha in Pécs, and Malkoç Bey in Siklos) suggest the conclusion that in sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the patrons of architecture favoured the single-domed mosque above all other types. In the last forty years the remaining Ottoman monuments in Hungary have seen careful, expert restoration and reconstruction work. The restoration of the Malkoç Bey Mosque in Siklos in the south of the country has won a Europa Nostra Prize for exemplary restoration. In Hungary there are more books and studies about Ottoman monuments than there are monuments themselves, culminating in 2003 in the monumental volume on The Archaeology of the Ottoman Period in Hungary.16 The monuments of Ottoman architecture preserved in Hungary, especially the mosques, very clearly show that this was the very edge of the Islamic world. There is a certain dryness in these buildings, which lack the elegance or sophistication of the kind we see in the mosques and hamams of Thessaloniki, Serres or Skopje. It is good provincial architecture; and the source of models and inspiration was not Bursa, Edirne or Istanbul but rather the more important buildings in Bosnia. Many of the Muslim settlers in Hungary came from the largely Islamicized Bosnia, where a somewhat stiff provincial version of Ottoman architecture was developed. From Bosnia this found its way to the newly developing Islamic centres in Hungary. Livno, Western Bosnia The history and development of the little town of Livno in Western Bosnia offers a textbook example for a settlement just behind the frontier that grew from a hamlet beneath a hilltop-castle to the capital of the border Sandjak of Klis. Before World War II Livno had six splendid domed mosques, all from the sixteenth century. For Bosnia this number is very high. Only Sarajevo had more, seven in all, of which six remain standing. Mostar, capital of 14 Božica Valenčić and Tone Papić, Župna crkva Svih Svetih u Đakovu  (Zagreb: Republički zavod za zaštitu spomenika kulture, 1990). 15 Evliyâ Çelebi, Evliyâ Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi. 6. Kitap (ed. by Kahraman–Dağlı), 516. 16 Ibolya Gerelyes and Gyöngyi Kovács (eds.), Archaeology of the Ottoman Period in Hungary: Papers of the Conference held at the Hungarian National Museum, Budapest, 24–26 May 2000 (Budapest: Hungarian National Museum, 2003).

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Herzegovina, had three; Banja Luka, second city of Bosnia, only two. From the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we have information about three other mosques in Livno, buildings of a simpler kind. Today three of the domed mosques survive, as well as two of the woodcovered ones, all five situated in the Upper Town on the plateau. The years of construction of these mosques, as well as the happy fact that we have no fewer than seven tahrir defters about the town, make Livno an ideal and unique example for the patronage of Ottoman architecture on the frontier. Livno is a small town (1991: 10,080 inhabitants), the largest urban centre of the northwest of Bosnia; and was for centuries a Muslim centre of importance in this remote corner of the Islamic world. Today half its population are Muslim, the other half being RomanCatholic Croats. Especially the old town, situated on a plateau high above the grassy Livno Plain (Livansko Polje), with breath-taking views towards the mountains of Dalmatia, counts among the most beautiful in Bosnia, albeit little visited and even less known among Ottoman scholars. The name of the town is variously written Livno, Hlivna, Ottoman İhlivne. The latter was used in pre-Ottoman times as name for a district (župa) and was later given to the town which became its centre. Livno as a town was founded and developed by the Ottomans in the early sixteenth century, but its origin, as a castle dominating a vast rural area, is much older. Livno is first mentioned in 952 in the De Administrando Imperio of the Byzantine scholar/emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus as a district of the Croatian kingdom. It remained part of the Croatian state until 1326, when it was incorporated into the medieval Bosnian state under Ban Stephan Kotromanić (1322–1353). In 1400 the Bosnian King Ostoje gave Livno and its territory to the vojvode Hvorje Vukčić. This is the first time that a castle is mentioned in Livno: Bistrički Grad.17 The Bistrica is a karst river, springing fully-fledged from a cave in the upper town of Livno. The castle was probably constructed in the course of the fourteenth century, when Bosnia saw a whole wave of castle building. Between 1448 and 1454 Livno was in the hands of ‘Herceg’ Stjepan Vukčić Kosača, the founder of the Duchy of Herzegovina. In 1463, on the downfall of the medieval Bosnian kingdom, the castle of Livno was briefly occupied by an Ottoman force, but was soon lost again. Most probably it was incorporated into the Ottoman domains in 1468. The tahrir of 1485 is the first source to confirm that Livno was definitely part of Ottoman territory. From then onwards we can follow the spectacular development from hilltop castle to Muslim town. A small open settlement must have existed below the hilltop castle, containing the small Franciscan monastery of St. Ivo. This is first mentioned in 1369. Both the open settlement and the monastery disappeared in the war-torn fifteenth century. The development from hamlet to town is better shown in the form of a table. (table 1) Livno was a stock-breeding community with an economy very suitable to unstable frontier districts. The inhabitants paid one gold coin ( filuri) per year as tax. There were no Muslim civilians in the place. No data are available about the number of soldiers in the garrison in the late fifteenth century. Some sixteenth-century lists of pay for the garrisons of Bosnia suggest 25 – 30 men, but not more. Between 1489 and 1516 Livno developed from a small village into the embryo of a new town. The taxation register BOA, T.D. 56 from 1516 shows 63 Christian and two 17 Marko Vego, Naselja bosanske srednjevjekovne države (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1957), 13 (Bistrički Grad = Livno).

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Muslim households. By then the settlement had the status of “varoš” or open town/suburb, but was still paying the “filuri-tax” of one gold coin per household. Table 1: Population development of Livno, 1485–2003. Year and (source)

Population Muslim Households

Christian Households 11 26 haymane 18 6 haymane

Total

% Muslim

37

0%

24

0%

1485 (BOA, TD 18)

0

1489 (BOA, TD 24)

0

1516 (BOA, TD 56)

2

63

65

3%

1528 (BOA, TD 157)

91

7

98

93 %

1550 (TD 284)

231

14

245

94 %

1574 (TD 533)

653

6

659

99 %

1626 (Georgiceo)

800 houses

1665 (Evliya Çelebi)

1 400 houses

1858 (Giljferding)

500

1910 (Austrian census)

365 Muslim inhabitants

200 Serbian 100 Croatian 430 Croatian 160 Serbian Christian inhabitants

800 houses

62 %

955 houses

38 %

Total

% Muslim

1948 (Yugoslav census)

3 280

1961 (Yugoslav census)

5 181

1981 (Yugoslav census)

2 714

9 002

30 %

1991 (Yugoslav census)

3 900

10 080

39 %

2003 (Yugoslav census)

5 000

10 000

50 %

Livno was situated very close to the dangerous frontier with Venetian territory, only 36 km away across the plain and behind a chain of low mountains from which raids into the Ottoman territory were easy and frequent. (ills. 6 & 7) Among the three preserved sixteenth-century single-domed mosques of Livno is the Balaguša Mosque. Scholarly literature maintains that this building was erected in the H. 920, 1514. That the available Ottoman population and taxation registers show this to be impossible has not been taken into account. No one would build a mosque in a small village just for two Muslim households. The “mosque of 1514” is, in fact, based on a wrong reading of the (difficult) building inscription above the entrance (see below). Between 1516 and the next register of 1528 (BOA, T.D. 157) military events completely changed the situation of Livno. In 1521/1522 the Ottomans under Gazi Husrev Bey succeeded in capturing a whole chain of Venetian fortresses and pushed the frontier back behind a second range of mountains. They had captured the castles of Drniš, Obrovac, Ostrovica,

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Petrovo Polje, Sinj, Skradin, Vrlika and Zrmanja, thereby turning Livno into an inland town, far away from the dangerous frontier. In the years between 1521 and 1528 the settlement changed its face completely. It grew from 65 households to 98 households, but the population had radically changed its religious composition. Now 91 households were Muslim but only seven households had remained Christian. Almost half the Muslim heads of household were recent converts, as the register shows. It also points to immigrants from Herzegovina and elsewhere. This new Muslim population consisted for a large part of craftsmen: tailors, weavers, makers of goat-hair rope (mutaf ), saddlers, shoemakers, a tanner, a sword-maker and a goldsmith. The great changes in Livno reflect intentional government policy. Shortly after the conquest of the above-mentioned castles and the moving of the frontier farther west, a government official, Sinan Çavuş, erected the first Friday mosque in Livno, situated in the middle of the old town on the plateau. The register of 1516 does not mention it and there was no need for such a building. In 1528 the mosque is mentioned as the centre of the first of the town’s Muslim wards (mahalle). According to popular lore in Livno Sinan Çavuş had either been a vekil of the Sultan, or was treasurer of the famous Gazi Husrev Bey. It is also remembered that this mosque was the first Friday Mosque of the town, popularly known as Džumanuša, from Džuma/Cum‘a. The second Muslim mahalle was grouped around the mescid of Hamza Ağa Ljubunčić, who was then commander of the Azaps of the castle of Obrovac. Livno further benefitted from acquiring the status of town (kasaba) by being allowed a weekly market and considerable tax reductions for the citizens. They no longer paid the filuri tax and were exonerated from the avariz-i divaniyye ve tekâlif-i örfiyye, the extraordinary levies and duties which included the unpopular forced labour for state building projects. In 1537 the strong mountaintop castle of Klis, overlooking the Adriatic Sea and the important Venetian stronghold of Spalato/Split, was taken by the Ottomans and its lands, including Western Bosnia, were made into the new sancak of Klis. As Klis itself was too peripheral and too vulnerable, the sancakbeyis came to reside with their staff in Livno. This factor, too, stimulated the rapid expansion of the town. In the 22 years between 1528 and 1550 Livno grew dramatically, more than doubling in size. In 1550 (T.D. 284) it had 245 households, of which 231 were Muslim. Meanwhile the Christians had doubled from seven to 14 households, which means 94% of the population were Muslims. Between 1550 and 1574 the town again doubled in size and now stood at 456 households, 99 % of which were Muslim. The town was now the third largest settlement in Bosnia. This rapid development can also be seen in the expansion of the number of craftsmen. In 1528 there was one tanner in Livno; in 1550 there were forty. Leatherwork had become an important factor in the Livno economy, working on the products of the vast herds of sheep and cows grazing in the endless pastures nearby. The economic expansion can also be seen in the number of water mills driven by the wild river Bistrica. The 1550 register mentions 22 water mills, while that of 1574 records 50 mills! By 1550 the town had one mosque (Džumanuša) and three mescids, of which two were new (the Mesdjid of Pehlivan Hasan and the Mesdjid of Hüseyin Ekmekcizâde). There was also a hamam in the town, which can be inferred from a person mentioned in the register of 1550 as being “hamamcı”. In 1574 four new mosques are mentioned in the register: the Mosque of Mehmed Ağa, of Perko Mehmed Sipahi (built in 971, 1563/64) and of Sokollu Ferhad Bey, sancakbeyi between 1566–1574, who also built a big han in Livno. Sokollu

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Ferhad Bey is best known for his remarkable mosque in Banja Luka, the Ferhadiye, centre of a large complex. The way the number of mosques developed is another nice illustration of what had happened in Livno. (table 2) It can well be seen that between 1550 and 1574 the mescid of Hamza Ağa Ljubunčić was replaced by a new Friday Mosque, built by Bali Ağa Ljubunčić, a relative of Hamza. This is the mosque which has been misdated to 1514, when there were no Muslim civilians and the varoš did not yet exist. The date of the building is given in an Ottoman chronogram, unskillfully carved by an inexperienced calligrapher and stonecutter. It was intended to contain the date in the words: be-zihnî kalem (with the pen of intelligence). What we see on the stone seems to read like be-zehebî kalem, which yields indeed 920/1514. With zihnî containing the letter -nûn- we have 50 years more and arrive at 970, which is 1561/1562 A.D. and fits well between the tahrirs of 1550 and 1574. However, neither Mujezinović nor Ayverdi took the trouble to look in the rich, albeit difficult sources. Table 2: The mosques of the city of Livno18 in West-Bosnia according to the tahrir defters of the sixteenth century. 1516 BOA, TD 56

1528 BOA, TD 157

1550 BOA, TD 284

1574 BOA, TD 533

1604 TKGM, Kuk 475

No mosques

Mosque of Sinan Ç. (Džumanuša)

Mosque of Sinan Ç. (Džumanuša)

Mosque of Sinan Ç. (Džumanuša)

Mosque of Sinan Ç. (Džumanuša)

Mesdjid of Hamza Ağa Ljubunčić

Mesdjid of Hamza Ağa Ljubunčić

Mesdjid of Bali Ağa (Balaguša)

Mesdjid of Bali Ağa Ljubunčić

Mesdjid of Pehlivan Hasan

Mesdjid of Pehlivan Hasan

Mesdjid of Pehlivan Hasan

Mesdjid of Hüseyin Ekmekçizâde

Mesdjid of Hüseyin Ekmekçizâde Mosque of Mehmed Ağa Mosque of Ferhad Bey Sokollović

Mesdjid of Hüseyin Ekmekçizâde Mosque of Mehmed Ağa Mosque of Ferhad Bey Sokollović Mosque of Lala Mustafa Sokollović Mosque of Hacı Üveys (Glavica)

For the seventeenth century we have two sets of dates with which to follow the main outlines of the development of Livno: Georgiceo’s espionage report of 1626, giving a total of 800 houses; and Evliya Çelebi in 1665, giving the impossible number of 1400 houses. The numbers given by the great Russian scholar in 1858 (and in those years Consul in Bosnia) and those in the carefully conducted Austrian census of 1910 show that Evliya’s number are a free invention. (table 1 and ills. 8–11)

18 The Mosque of Sinan Çavuş had the nickname Džumanuša. The Mosque of Bali Ağa Ljubunčić was called Balaguša. Mustafa Pasha’s mosque was known as Begluk or Lala Pašina. Perko Mehmed Sipahi’s mosque was known as Perkuša.

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Livno is exceptional for a frontier district in that so many objects are still preserved. Not far away is the little town of Drniš in Dalmatia, conquered by the Ottomans in 1522.19 Seventeenth-century engravings and drawings published by Seid Traljić show that this small town (1991: 4,600 inhabitants) had no fewer than five domed mosques. One of them remains partially preserved, converted into the church of St. Ante in the same way as the mosque in Đakovo. A little distance away from St. Ante still stands a well-preserved but topless minaret, rare in Croatia.20 The Drniš mosque is small and the four others do not look much bigger. The same is true for the Livno mosques. This brings us to patronage and finances. Those building at the frontier did not belong to the highest ranks of society, nor did they dispose of a large amount of money. In Livno we see as patrons two ağas, a çavuş, a hacı, a sipahi and two sancakbeyis, the latter commanding a strategically important district but not rich at all. One of them, Ferhad Bey, later on became the beylerbeyi of the eyâlet of Bosnia. This, and the fortune gained from the ransom of a high-ranking Habsburg nobleman, the young Count of Auersperg (30,000 gold Ducats!), enabled him to engage in a vast building scheme, recreating in the late 1570s and 1580s the whole city of Banja Luka. His buildings included a great mosque, a similarly great medrese, a mektep, caravansaray, hamam, ambar, imaret, aqueduct, covered market and a total of 200 shops, paved streets with covered drainage canals on both sides, and two bridges. Here we see the patronage of a great warlord at its best.21 In May 1993 the buildings of the külliye which still existed were wantonly destroyed by Bosnian Serb extremists, but by May 2012 plan for their reconstruction was almost finished. The work has been executed with loving care and great skill, incorporating retrieved original pieces. The destruction of the building was documented, published and deeply bewailed by another Bosnian Serb, Aleksander Ravlić.22 The Ferhadiye Mosque of Banja Luka is one of the few in Bosnia which is more than a simple single-domed mosque. Only the Husrev Bey Mosque in Sarajevo is bigger. These two building are the only ones in Bosnia that have (or had) a whole, large külliye around them. Those patrons from the lower echelons favoured the single-domed mosque because it is relatively cheap but at the same time monumental. It was the symbol of Sunni Islam in the provinces of the Empire and was also greatly favoured by the class of Cadis, as is still magnificently illustrated by the buildings in Bitola/Manastır, the second city of the Republic of Macedonia. An exception has to be made for the buildings of Karagöz Mehmed Bey in Mostar from 1558 (mosque, medrese, han, imaret), which are of a high quality but modest in size because at the time the complex was built Mostar comprised only a few hundred houses. Mostar’s great time was to come in the second half 19 Dr. fra Karlo Kosor, “Drniška krajina za turskog vladanja,” Kačić: Zbornik Franjevačke provincije Presvetog Otkupitelja 11 (1979): 125–192. 20 For the mosques of Drniš in Dalmatia see: Ivan Zdravković, Izbor građe za proučavanje spomenika islamske arhitekture u Jugoslaviji (Beograd: Jugoslavenski Institut za zaštitu spomenika kulture, 1964), 140–145; idem, “Džamija, minare i tvrdjava u Drnišu,” Prilozi za povijest umjetnosti u Dalmaciji 10 (1956): 190–198; Seid M. Traljić, “Drniš šestnaestog i sedamnaestog stoljeća,” Radovi Instituta Jugoslavenske akademije znanosti i umjetnosti u Zadru 19 (1972): 393–404. For a survey of all of the Ottoman foundations in Dalmatia in the beginning of the 17th century see: Fehim Dž. Spaho, “Džamije i njihovi vakufi u gradovima Kliskog sandžaka početkom XVII vijeka,” Anali Gazi  Husrev-begove biblioteke 5–6 (1978): 217–230. For a new survey in English cf. Kornelia Jurin-Starčević’s article in the present volume. 21 Asim Muftić, “Moschee und Stiftung Ferhad Paša’s in Banja Luka” (PhD diss., Leipzig, 1941). 22 Aleksandar Aco Ravlic ́, Banjalučka Ferhadija: ljepotica koju su ubili (Rijeka: AARiS, 1996).

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of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries. Its monuments and the pious foundations that maintained them were most described in greatest detail by Hivziya Hasandedić in 2000.23 In conclusion could be said that in the frontier districts of the Empire much was invested by the frontier commanders, with the single-domed mosque as a clear favourite. During the time when these districts were incorporated into the Empire (1520s–1530s), the famous T-plan buildings of the earlier period, also greatly promoted by the lords of the frontiers, were already “out of fashion”. Whether some of the frontier warriors of the sixteenth century still adhered to less “Orthodox” currents of Islam is not easy to say. The great warlord Yahyapaşaoğlu Mehmed Bey, conqueror of Slavonia, was active as a sponsor of the outspokenly heterodox convent of Otman Baba in Bulgarian Thrace, where he had added huge new buildings and where a broken inscription, once situated above the entrance of one of these long-since disappeared buildings, still records his death (“...Yahyapaşaoğlu Mehmed Bey yâd oluna”) and asks for a prayer for his soul.24 The great frontier warrior, however, is also known to have been the builder of the largest Ottoman structures in Belgrade: mosque, medrese, mektep, imaret, caravansaray, sebil, çeşme and his own mausoleum/türbe; and beyond the compound he built numerous shops in the bazar and an open-air prayer space (musalla) outside the town. Mehmed Bey/Pasha’s great buildings in Belgrade stood in 1548. Most of them disappeared in and after 1688. The mosque survived until deep into the nineteenth century and is known from descriptions and old drawings.25 It was a large single-domed structure,26 again showing the popularity of this type of building, especially in a town that was the great Ottoman bulwark par excellence at the frontier.

23 Hivzija Hasandedić, Mostarski vakifi i njihovi vakufi (Mostar: Medžlis Islamske zajednice, 2000). 24 Evliyâ Çelebi b. Derviş Mehemmed Zıllî, Evliyâ Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi. 8. Kitap: Topkapı Sarayı Kütüphanesi Bağdat 308 Numaralı Yazmanın Transkripsiyonu – Dizini, ed. by Robert Dankoff, Seyit Ali Kahraman, Yücel Dağlı (İstanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2003), 342–344. 25 Aleksandar Fotić, “Uloga vakufa u razvoju orijentalnog grada: beogradski vakuf Mehmed-paše Jahjapašića,” in Jovanka Kalić, Milosav Čolović (eds.), Socijalna struktura srpskih gradskih naselja (XII–XVIII vek) (Smederevo: Muzej u Smederevu – Beograd: Odeljenje za istoriju Filozofskog fakulteta u Beogradu, 1992), 149–159; idem, “Yahyapaşa-oğlu Mehmed Pasha’s Evkaf in Belgrade,” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hung. 54:4 (2001): 437–452 (enriched version of the foregoing). 26 Ljubomir Nikić, “Džamije u Beogradu,” Godišnjak grada Beograda 5 (1958): 151–206.

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Illustration 1: Mecidiyye Tabya of Silistra, built in 1850/51.

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Illustration 2: Church of All Saints in the Slavonian town of Đakovo, formerly mosque of Memi Beyoğlu İbrahim Bey, ca.1610. Photo by the author, 2009.

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Illustration 3: Baroque facades (1770s) of the Church of All Saints in Đakovo, formerly mosque of Memi Beyoğlu İbrahim Bey, ca.1610. Photo by the author, 2009.

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Illustration 4: Church of All Saints in Đakovo with remains of the mosque inside. Drawing: Božica Valenčić and Tone Papić, Župna crkva Svih Svetih u Đakovu (Zagreb: Republički zavod za zaštitu spomenika kulture, 1990).

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Illustration 5: Mosque of İbrahim Bey in Đakovo. During the restoration of the 1980s the three-domed portico was symbolically indicated by a modern concrete structure. Photo by the author, 2009.

Illustration 6: Upper city and plain of Livno (Western Bosnia) with the former frontier with Venetian Dalmatia in the background. Photo by the author, 1970.

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Illustration 7: Livno seen from higher up with Bali Ağa’s Mosque in the foreground. Photo by the author, 2003.

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Illustration 8: Livno, mosque of Hacı Üveys (Glavica), 1588 (996 H.). Photo by the author, 2001.

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Illustration 9: Interior of Hacı Üveys (Glavica)’s mosque during restoration. Photo by the author, 2001.

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Illustration 10: Livno, Begluk Džamija of Lala Mustafa Bey Sokollović, 1577/78 (985 H.). Photo by the author, 2001.

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Illustration 11: Livno, top: remains of the castle; bottom: the Balaguša Mosque of Bali Ağa Ljubunčić, 1561/62 (969 H.). The single-domed mosque completely dominates this frontier town. Photo by the author, 2001.

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The Borders of the Cities: Revisiting Early Ottoman Urban Morphology in Southeastern Europe Grigor Boykov The towns and cities in the Ottoman realm and various aspects of urban life have long attracted scholarly attention. A growing number of fine studies examine the demography, the architecture, the spatial order and urban morphology of the cities controlled by the Ottoman dynasty, thus adding valuable detail to our general understanding of urban development in the Empire. Modern historiography traditionally makes a distinction between the cities in the Arabic-speaking parts of the Ottoman state and those in the “core provinces”, i.e. Anatolia and Rumelia (Asia Minor and the Balkans).1 Even this distinction, however, as general as it may be, has been questioned in recent studies, which argue for a revision of the traditionalist division between the urban centres spread over the vast territory of three continents unified and held by the Ottomans for several centuries. Indicating that the classification was based solely on ethno-cultural grounds, Pierre Pinon, who derives evidence from architectural typologies, housing and the urban fabric, argues that the real division between the cities in the Ottoman Empire must not be seen as a clear-cut split between the Arab and the core provinces, but rather that there existed a loose line that divided the ‘Turko-Balkan’ and ‘Arabo-Ottoman’ worlds and their respective cities.2 The dividing line, 1 The cities of the Mashriq and the Maghreb, the main focus of the French school in the past, were on their own a subject of ongoing scholarly debate. The concept of the “Islamic city” in the early French tradition has been criticized in a growing number of modern publications: Ira Lapidus, Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967); André Raymond, “Islamic City, Arab City: Orientalist Myths and Recent Views,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 21:6 (1994): 3–18; Eugen Wirth, Die orientalische Stadt im islamischen Vorderasien und Nordafrika: städtische Bausubstanz und räumliche Ordnung, Wirtschaftsleben und soziale Organisation (Mainz: Phillip von Zabern, 2002); Gilles Veinstein, “La ville ottoman,” in Mohamed Naciri and André Raymond (eds.), Sciences sociales et phénomènes urbains dans le monde arabe: actes du colloque de l’Association de Liaison entre les Centres de recherches et documentations sur le monde arabe (ALMA), Casablanca, 30 novembre – 2 décembre 1994 (Casablanca: Fondation du Roi Abdul-Aziz Al-Saoud pour les études islamiques et les sciences humaines, 1997), 105–114. An overview of the discussion to date can be found in the Introduction “Was there an Ottoman City?” in Edhem Eldem, Daniel Goffman, Bruce Masters (eds.), The Ottoman City between East and West: Aleppo, İzmir, and İstanbul (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1–16. 2 Pierre Pinon, “Essai de définition morphologique de la ville ottomane des XVIIIe –XIXe siècles,” in Verena Han, Marina Adamović (eds.), La culture urbaine des Balkans, 3, La ville des Balkans depuis la fin du Moyen Age jusqu’au début du XXe siècle (Paris – Belgrade: Académie Serbe des Sciences et des Arts, Institut des Études Balkaniques, 1991), 147–155; idem, “Essai de typologie des tissus urbains des villes ottomanes d’Anatolie et des Balkans,” in 7 Centuries of Ottoman Architecture: a Supra-National Heritage (Istanbul: YEM Yayın, 2000), 174–188; idem, “Ottoman Cities of the Balkans,” in Salma K. Jayyusi, Renata Holod, Attilio Petruccioli and André Raymond (eds.), The City in the Islamic World, vol. 1 (Leiden – Boston: Brill, 2008), 146–147.

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in Pinon’s view, crosses Anatolia, approximately linking Antalya with Erzurum and thus contrasting the Arabo-Ottoman part (where Seljuq architecture is present, but more notably where “the Byzantine substratum was early covered over by Arab and Seljuq conquests”) to the Turko-Balkan part (roughly from Bithynia to the western Balkans), in which “the Byzantine dominance persisted the longest”.3 Halil İnalcık’s pioneering studies on Istanbul, on the other hand, stress the existence of a strong Islamic tradition in organizing urban space and urge a more balanced approach that reconciles the “over-idealized interpretation of Islamic social institutions” and “totally ignoring the determining role of Islamic norms”.4 The argument that the existence of earlier Arabo-Seljuqid or Byzantine bases defined the division between the Ottoman cities with regard to their architectural and spatial development seems quite valid and has also been adopted by other historians who have recently written on urban development in the Ottoman Empire.5 Nevertheless, the historiography dealing with the Ottoman city to date has not advanced enough to allow a well-developed debate on the subject. Instead, as is justly pointed in the introductory sentence of the late Professor Veinstein’s contribution to the debate, “In the present state of our knowledge, dealing with the Ottoman town consists primarily in pondering the very notion of “Ottoman town,” not only in terms of contents, but also of application”.6 General studies on the transition of the Byzantino-Slavic urban centres in the Balkans after they fell into the hands of the Ottoman rulers and the subsequent development and transformation of these centres in the emerging Muslim empire are extremely scarce. The national Balkan historiographies argue mostly over the continuity of local urban tradition as opposed to the novelties brought by the Ottomans. Scholars who contributed to the discussion on the nature of the ‘Balkan city’ or the ‘Ottoman city in the Balkans’, perhaps most often led by national sentiment, were inclined to overemphasize all aspects of their preferred thesis, turning a blind eye to the argumentation that contradicted it. It is perhaps accurate to state that the debate over the nature of the ‘Balkan city’ was triggered in the 1950s by the Turkish historian Ömer Lütfi Barkan. He accentuated the decisive role played by the Ottoman rulers in the remodelling of the urban centres in the European possessions of the Empire. In Barkan’s view, in the post-conquest years – as a result of purposeful state policy and the implementation of the will of the sultans, who “had at their disposal all of the Empire’s resources” – the development of urban life in the Balkans was significantly shifted.7 On the one hand, the central role of the Ottoman state in the revitalization and even re-creation of the cities in the Balkans was implemented through conscious efforts 3 Pinon, “Ottoman Cities of the Balkans,” 147. 4 Halil İnalcık, “Istanbul: an Islamic City,” Journal of Islamic Studies 1 (1990): 1–23; idem, “Fatih, Fetih ve İstanbul’un Yeniden İnşaası,” in Dünya Kenti İstanbul/İstanbul World City (İstanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 1996), 22–37; idem, “The Ottoman Survey of 1455 and the Conquest of Istanbul,” in 550. Yılında Fetih ve İstanbul/The Conquest and Istanbul in the 550th Anniversary (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2007), 1–14. 5 Gilles Veinstein, “The Ottoman Town (Fifteenth-Eighteenth Centuries),” in Jayyusi, Holod, Petruccioli and Raymond, The City in the Islamic World, 216. Similar view is also supported by Fatma Acun, “A Portrait of the Ottoman Cities,” Muslim World 92:3–4 (2002): 255–286. 6 Veinstein, “The Ottoman Town,” 205. 7 Ömer Lütfi Barkan, “Quelques observations sur l’organization économique et sociale des villes ottomanes des XVIe et XVIe siècles,” Recueils de la Société Jean Bodin pour l’histoire comparative des institutions, vol. 7, La Ville 2: Institutions économiques et sociales (Bruxelles: De Boeck Université, 1955), 291.

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to remodel the inherited spatial order by constructing a large communal mosque, equipped with a multitude of other buildings that provided social services for the locals, and by clearly defining a new market area (çarşı). On the other hand, in Barkan’s view, the central power was also responsible for providing settlers to the thus-modified cities by encouraging, or often even by orchestrating, a mass immigration of Anatolian Turks into the Balkan urban centres. Applying this policy in a systematic manner, the Ottoman central authority secured the rapid development of all cities lying on the strategic or commercial routes in the Balkans. Thus, the population of all important cities in the region turned predominantly Muslim and therefore Turkish.8 Emphasizing the decisive role of the sultans in the urban development and the creation of new towns in the Ottoman Balkans, Barkan neglects the importance of other dominant figures (such as the akıncı ucbeyis, for instance) in the process and completely discounts the spontaneous emergence of new towns.9 Moreover, in Barkan’s thesis the impact and importance of the conversion to Islam of local Christian population is reduced to a minimum. This theme was later developed even further by Turkish nationalist historiography claiming that the Muslims residing in the cities in the Balkans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were virtually all ethnic Turks and that urban space was therefore shaped in accordance to an existing Turkish tradition.10 In the second half of the twentieth century Barkan’s thesis, which portrays a drastic discontinuity in urban life in the Ottoman Balkans, was criticized by Bulgarian Marxist historiography. Nikolai Todorov developed a diametrically different hypothesis that insisted on the large degree of continuity between the medieval Byzantino-Slavic and Ottoman urban traditions.11 Minimizing, if not disregarding, the role of Anatolian Turkish settlers in the Balkan cities, Todorov emphasizes the role of religious conversion as the main factor explaining the apparently overwhelming Muslim majority in some of the larger cities. Moreover, in this author’s view, the masses of Turkish settlers that appeared in the Balkans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were almost exclusively semi-nomadic Turkomans (Yürüks) who had no connection to urban life in the Ottoman Balkans.12 In his principal work on the ‘Balkan city’, which remains the only monograph on this topic, Todorov fully develops his argument for the continuity of local urban tradition, pointing to the existence of a multitude of towns and cities in the Balkans in which the Christian population had a significant majority over the Muslims. The cities in which the Muslims prevailed, largely as a result of conversion to Islam in his view, were those located on the strategically important spots in which the Ottoman authorities wished to establish stronger control and thus 8 Barkan, “Quelques observations sur l’organization économique et sociale,” 290, 294; idem, “Quelques remarques sur la constitution sociale et démographique des villes balkaniques au cours des XVe et XVIe siècles,” Istanbul à la jonction des cultures balkaniques, méditerranéennes, slaves et orientales, aux XVIe–XIXe siècles (Bucarest: Association Internationale d’Études du Sud-Est Européen, 1977), 279–301. 9 “il ne s’agit généralment pas de formations spontanées, mais de produits de la volonté des Empereurs.” Barkan, “Quelques observations sur l’organization économique et sociale,” 291. 10 İlhan Şahin, Feridun Emecen, and Yusuf Halaçoğlu, “Turkish Settlements in Rumelia (Bulgaria) in the 15th and 16th Centuries: Town and Village Population,” International Journal of Turkish Studies 4:2 (1989): 23–40. İlhan Şahin, “XV. ve XVI. Yüz Yılda Sofya–Filibe–Eski Zağra ve Tatar Pazarı’nın Nüfus ve İskân Durumu,” Türk Dünyası Arıştırmaları 48 (1987): 249–256. 11 Nikolai Todorov, “Po nyakoi văprosi na balkanskiya grad prez XV–XVII v.,” Istoricheski pregled 1 (1962): 32–58. 12 Nikolai Todorov, Balkanskiyat grad XV–XIX v.: sotsialno-ikonomichesko i demografsko razvitie (Sofia: Nauka i Izkustvo, 1972), 45–46.

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secure unconditional loyalty by enforcing the Muslim element.13 This view was adopted by Bulgarian historiography and turned into a standard framework within which the additional data presented in a number of later studies were interpreted.14 In spite of the unquestionable merits of the research conducted by Balkan and Turkish historians in the past decades, which offers abundant data for many towns in Ottoman Rumelia, they have not departed too radically from the Barkan-Todorov discourse, which itself appears to have been fuelled more by nationalistic emotions rather than by genuine academic controversy.15 What seems apparent to an unbiased eye is the fact that, in spite of strong theoretical cases, both Barkan’s and Todorov’s views on the development of the urban centres in the Balkans seem very limiting and rigid. As probably often happens with pioneering works of this kind, based on a very limited number of sources, the two conflicting hypotheses present generalized models of Ottoman urbanization policies and practice that involve considerable oversimplification. When, however, this theoretical framework is tested in practical research on individual regions of the Ottoman Balkans, one inevitably faces a much more complex picture which, to a great extent, questions the usability of the construct proposed by Barkan or Todorov. In a lengthy contribution that focuses on the urban development of a limited part of the Ottoman Balkans (namely the territory of modern Bulgaria), the Dutch historian Machiel Kiel argues that the views of both Barkan and Todorov can be seen as “valid in a restricted number of cases”, but merely represent a “simplified version of a much richer reality”.16 He concludes that there was no uniform pattern of urban development in Ottoman Bulgaria because the historical conditions and local circumstances differed from one district to the other. In Kiel’s view, the best way of studying the urbanization processes in the Ottomantime Balkans is to examine it province by province, thus acknowledging the diverse circumstances of the local history which shaped the development of the cities there.17 He therefore 13 Todorov, Balkanskiyat grad, 49–59. 14 Petăr Koledarov, “Kăm văprosa za razvitieto na selishtnata mreža i neynite elementi v sredishtnata i iztochnata chast na Balkanite ot VII do XVIII v.,” Izvestiya na Istituta za istoriya 18 (1967): 89– 146; Zdravko Plyakov, “Za demografskiya oblik na bălgarskiya grad prez XV – sredata na XVII vek,” Istoricheski Pregled 5 (1968): 29–47; Strashimir Dimitrov, “Za priemstvenostta v razvitieto na Balkanskite gradove prez XV–XVI vek,” Balkanistika 2 (1987): 5–17; Svetlana Ivanova, “Gradovete v bălgarskite zemi prez XV vek,” in Boryana Hristova (ed.), Bălgarskiyat petnadeseti vek: sbornik s dokladi za bălgarskata i obšta kulturna istoriya prez XV vek (Sofia: Narodna Biblioteka “Sv. Sv. Kiril i Metodiy”, 1993), 53–65. 15 Certainly more nuanced studies have also been published, such as those by Aleksandar Stojanovski, Gradovite na Makedonija od krajot na XIV do XVII vek: demografski proučuvanja (Skopje: Zavod za unapreduvanje na stopanstvoto vo SRM “Samoupravna praktika”, 1981); or Adem Handžić, “O formiraniu nekih gradskih naselja u Bosni u XVI stoljeću,” Prilozi za orijentalnu filologiju 25 (1975): 133–168, who emphasize the important role of state-supported pious endowments in the process of establishing new cities in Bosnia etc. 16 Machiel Kiel, “Urban Development in Bulgaria in the Turkish Period: the Place of Turkish Architecture in the Process,” International Journal of Turkish Studies 4:2 (1989): 81–83. This study was published as a book in Turkish translation Bulgaristan’da Osmanlı Dönemi Kentsel Gelişmesi ve Mimari Anıtlar (Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı, 2000). 17 Kiel, “Urban Development,” 83. Testing Kiel’s view on the urban development in Bulgaria, I have extended his argumentation farther, pointing out that even studying much smaller territory such as Upper Thrace demonstrates a great diversity of urban models. Grigor Boykov, “Balkan City or Ottoman City? A Study on the Models of Urban Development in Ottoman Upper Thrace (15th – 17th c.),” in Halit Eren

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suggests that “with a bit of unavoidable simplification, the towns of Ottoman Bulgaria may be divided into five groups according to the way they emerged”.18 Sharing Kiel’s conviction that the models of urban development in the Ottoman Balkans can be best observed through a systematic study of different regions, his framework can be elaborated much further, producing a scheme that, with all due scepticism, can be utilized in a Balkan-wide range.19 However, as important as it is, the fact that the development of the cities in the Ottoman Balkans varied from an uninterrupted continuity of the existing Byzantino-Slavic infrastructure to a complete modification and recreation of the urban centres does not cast much light on the question of how the Ottomans changed the space of the existing cities that they chose to modify. Was there a repetitive pattern that can be regarded as a programme or a system for ‘Ottomanizing’ the cities that they mastered? In the case that an Ottoman programme for modifying the space of some of the conquered cities indeed existed, what was the driving force that inspired the change? Was it always the will of the almighty Ottoman rulers, as suggested by Barkan, or there were other important factors and players too? Lastly, was the programme for changing the spatial order of the pre-Ottoman cities also employed when the Ottomans came to create cities on their own? Answering these questions, even if only partially, is of primary importance for understanding the way in which the fabric of the Ottoman cities in the Balkans was laid down and what kind of urban morphological adaptations and innovations were introduced on European soil by the dominant circles of Ottoman society. Evidently the way in which the Ottomans built their cities, or remodelled the inherited ones, was not static, but was, rather, a complex system that changed with time and was naturally influenced by a number of factors. Nevertheless, scholarship to date seems to agree on the fact that in the Ottomans’ perception the Turko-Balkan cities of their realm (or at least the larger and important centres) must have had a big congregational Friday mosque (in the majority of the cases a sultanic establishment) and a clearly defined market area (çarşı). As valid as this opinion may seem, it appears that it only reflects a later stage in the development of the Ottoman urbanizing concept. In its nascent period, i.e. when the Ottomans took possession of the first larger Byzantine urban centres in Bithynia and made their first steps on Balkan soil, they sought to propagate their supremacy over the city through the construction of a different type of building, a T-shaped zaviye/imaret (for want of a better term) situated outside the confines of the walled parts of these cities. These multifunctional buildings, that had a floor plan of a reversed “T”, were variously referred to in their dedicatory inscriptions, endowment deeds and other contemporary sources by terms such as imaret, zaviye or tekke, sometimes used interchangeably even in a single source. Entrusted to sheikhs, they combined in a single structure an elevated oratory in an either vaulted or domed open space (eyvan), a domed central hall and two to four side-rooms/guestrooms (tabhanes) that were equipped with fire places, shelves for storing personal belongings, etc. The tabhanes that served as temporary lodging facilities were usually accessed through the central hall or a specially designed vestibule, but in a multitude and Sadık Ünay (eds.), Proceedings of the Third International Congress on the Islamic Civilisation in the Balkans, 1–5 November 2005, Bucharest, Romania (Istanbul: IRCICA, 2010), 69–86. 18 Kiel, “Urban Development,” 83. 19 I have proposed eight general groups into which most cases of urban development in the Balkans during the Ottoman period fit. See Grigor Boykov, “Mastering the Conquered Space: Resurrection of Urban Life in Ottoman Upper Thrace (14th – 17th c.)” (PhD diss., Bilkent University, 2013), 8–14.

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of cases doors in the lateral façades also provided direct access from outside. The domed central hall and the adjacent prayer eyvan lay on the same axis, but were purposely divided in elevation. In most cases the oratory stood about a metre higher from ground level and was accessed by means of several steps. Special niches, meant to hold the shoes of the worshippers (pabuçluks) that were placed near the stairs, clearly indicate that the only part of these buildings that was originally carpeted and therefore used for prayers was actually the elevated eyvan, while the rest of the space must have been used for other purposes.20 The exact function of these buildings is still debated in scholarly works but one may fairly safely assume that on the one hand they provided ritual space while on the other they offered shelter to important travellers and esteemed itinerant dervishes such as Otman Baba, for example. In many instances they also functioned as the convents of influential Anatolian and Rumelian mystic brotherhoods. Recent studies argue that in some cases the T-shaped multifunctional buildings were used as housing by mighty border commanders such as Evrenos Bey; and were only subsequently transformed into charitable institutions (imarets) that distributed food to a poor and clearly defined clientèle.21 The T-shaped zaviye/ imarets seem to have enjoyed a rather complex evolutionary development. In all likelihood they originated from the pre-Ottoman Anatolian Sufi convents of the Ilkhanid period and served as “urban colonizers” in the Ottoman era.22 These buildings turned into the most important tool used by the Ottomans in adapting the morphology of the cities in their domain in accordance to their understanding of urban spatial hierarchy. The first Ottoman rulers, essentially no different to any local Anatolian emir of that time, inherited the established tradition in seeking representation through architectural patronage that aimed at changing the existing spatial order of cities.23 The notable difference between Osman Gazi (1299–1324) and his son Orhan (1324–1362) and the rest of the local rulers of Anatolia was the fact that the Ottoman state emerged at the edge of the then-Muslim world and its territorial expansion was directed only towards Byzantium. Consequently the Byzantine cities that fell into Ottoman hands completely lacked the Seljuk base of their eastern counterparts; and therefore the rulers from the emerging dynasty of Osman seized cities built in accordance with different urban traditions and spatial order. The Ottomans had to introduce the first Islamic symbols into the previously entirely Christian environment 20 On the spatial arrangement and architectural layout of these buildings, variously referred to in related scholarship as “T–type mosques”, “eyvan mosques (cross axial mosques)”, “mosques with zaviyes”, “Bursa–type mosques” etc., see Aptullah Kuran, The Mosque in Early Ottoman Architecture (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1968), 71–135; Semavi Eyice, “İlk Osmanlı Devrinin Dini-içtimai Müessesesi Zâviyeler ve Zâviyeli–camiler,” İstanbul Üniversitesi İktisat Fakültesi Mecmuası 23:1–2 (1962–1963): 3–80; Sedat Emir, Erken Osmanlı Mimarlığında Çok-işlevli Yapılar: Kentsel Kolonizasyon Yapıları Olarak Zâviyeler, 2 vols. (Izmir: Akademi Kitabevi, 1994); Doğan Kuban, Osmanlı Mimarisi (Istanbul: YEM Yayın, 2007), 75–122. For an up-do-date survey of the standing T–shaped buildings and a detailed discussion of the existing literature, see Zeynep Oğuz, “Multi-functional Buildings of T–type in Ottoman Context: a Network of Identity and Territorialization” (M.A. thesis, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, 2006). 21 Heath Lowry, The Shaping of the Ottoman Balkans, 1350–1550: the Conquest, Settlement & Infrastructural Development of Northern Greece (Istanbul: Bahçeşehir University Publications, 2008), 41–47. 22 Emir, Çok-işlevli Yapılar, vol. 1, 15. 23 For a recent overview of the architectural changes that took place in the post-Seljuk Anatolian principalities (beyliks) see Howard Crane, “Art and Architecture,” in Kate Fleet (ed.), The Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. 1: Byzantium to Turkey, 1071–1453 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 266–277.

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of the Bithynian cities revived during the Laskarid rule of the Nicaean Empire. It seems to have been in this very early formative period that the Ottoman rulers proved skilled in establishing, under the rulership of the house of Osman, a compromise mode of existence between the two seemingly opposing sides. These were, on the one hand, the frontier elite warriors, who embraced gaza (holy war against the infidels and misbelievers) as their leading ideology, the ahi brotherhoods and the wandering dervishes who dominated the spiritual life of the Turcoman subjects that roughly comprised the Muslim strata in the then-Ottoman society; and on the other the local non-Muslim population of the conquered towns and cities of Asia Minor.24 It was in this early stage that the Ottomans adopted a distinct way of remodelling the Byzantine cities which shifted the hierarchy of space and embodied a statement of the permanency of the ruling dynasty. A pattern that can be observed in most urban centres reshaped by the Ottomans provides a firm ground for portraying the efforts of the rulers of the Ottoman state in this direction as a purposeful programme in which the T-shaped buildings played a key role. On the one hand, the conquerors installed themselves within the walled parts of the Byzantine cities, where in the majority of the cases a cathedral church was converted to a Friday mosque, thereby not only providing the Muslim congregation with a place for worship but also displaying the triumph of Islam. Soon after this act several smaller mosques (mahalle mescids) and a bathhouse (hamam), needed for the ritual ablutions, were also established in the walled parts of the larger cities. These changes, as drastic as they may seem at a first glance, did not, however, have a significant impact on the inherited spatial order. The important difference, on the other hand, was made with the erection of a T-shaped zaviye/imaret, the construction of which in the majority of the cases began simultaneously to or shortly after the conquest of the city. These buildings were always placed outside the confines of the Byzantine citadel and built in close relation to other buildings such as soup kitchens for the poor, baths, medreses, etc. and were even often fenced round by a protective wall. The location where the first Ottoman buildings ‘colonized’ the space beyond the protected parts of the city was as a rule selected with utmost care. Organically integrated into a city’s topography, the complexes of the T-shaped zaviye/imarets occupied previously uninhabited areas and set the direction for the expansion of the Muslim city. Ideally these complexes were meant to shift the focus of economic life in the city. Supplemented by a commercial infrastructure, the quarters that emerged around the earliest T-shaped buildings were often subsequently transformed into a new urban core and main market district (çarşı) of the expanding Muslim city. The erection of a large imperial Friday mosque (Ulu Cami’) on this spot sanctioned the completion of the process of transformation and the materialization of a fully developed Ottoman model for a new commercial core in the remodelled city. Once the central part was established, new complexes of T-shaped buildings defined the outer boundaries of the Ottoman city. Depending on the city’s magnitude, one, or up to a dozen, T-shaped buildings, placed at the important road arteries, surrounded the new urban core. While the patronage of the great Friday mosques which marked the new urban core in a resounding display of the triumph of Islam over Christian lands remained reserved for the Ottoman rulers, the construction of T-shaped zaviye/imarets was by no means only a sul24 Certainly the picture of the border society in the early Ottoman state is far more complex. See Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: the Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

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tanic prerogative. On the contrary, the early sultans’ tradition of establishing bridgeheads in a predominantly Christian environment through the erection of T-shaped multifunctional buildings was adopted by the people who constituted the driving force of the Ottoman advance in the Balkans, the border raider commanders, and implemented in the zones under their influence. Looking for practical examples in support of the framework established above, one must simply follow the Ottoman advance in Western Asia Minor and the Balkans and trace, in chronological order, the erection of the principal Ottoman buildings in the conquered cities. Examining in consecutive sequence the structures that focused the patronage of the sultans and other grandees, regardless of whether they are still standing or are now lost, reveals quite clearly the Ottoman programme for the remodelling of the inherited urban space. After the conquest of Bursa in 1326,25 for instance, Orhan converted the Byzantine monastery of St. Elias, located inside the castle (today’s Tophane), and laid his father’s body to rest in a baptistery there (later to become known as Gümüşlü Kümbet). He also constructed a royal residence for himself, a small mosque and a bath in the approximate vicinity of the saray (1337) at about the same time as several other small mosques (mahalle mescids) were erected within the walled city.26 Once settled within the stronghold of Bursa, Orhan commissioned a T-shaped zaviye/imaret (completed in 1339–1340) along with several other service buildings on empty, flat terrain only a few hundred metres east of the elevated citadel (today’s Taşkapı district).27 Contrary to Gabriel’s argument that the growing Muslim population of Bursa must have caused the construction of Orhan’s complex, it was the T-shaped multifunctional building that gathered settlers for a new Muslim urban core.28 It seems apparent that Orhan aimed at establishing a new Muslim institution on a previously unoccupied and, what at the time must have appeared isolated, location. The protective wall which once fenced in the complex of Orhan clearly attests to this fact. Orhan’s programme for expending the boundaries of Ottoman Bursa outside the citadel was apparently very successful. Orhan’s successor Murad I and his tutor Lala Şahin contrib25 On the lengthy blockade and conquest of Bursa see Halil İnalcık, “Osmanlı Beyliğini Kurucusu Osman Beg,” Belleten 71:261 (2007): 479–537; idem, “Osmanlı Sultanı Orhan (1324–1362): Avrupa’da Yerleşme,” Belleten 73:266 (2009): 77–107. Cf. Heath Lowry, Ottoman Bursa in Travel Accounts (Bloomington, Indiana: University of Indiana, Ottoman & Modern Turkish Studies Publications, 2003). 26 Albert Gabriel, Une capitale turque Brousse–Bursa (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1958), 23–51; Ekrem Hakkı Ayverdi, Osmanlı Mimârîsinin İlk Devri, 630–805 (1230–1402) (İstanbul: Baha Matbaası), 58–89. The mosque of Orhan is likely to have been replaced by the Şehadet Cami, built by Murad I. Orhan’s much debated dedicatory inscription sits above the entrance to this mosque, but due to its nineteenth-century restoration today the mosque preserves little of the original look of Murad I’s structure. See Heath Lowry, The Nature of the Early Ottoman State (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 33–44, for a detailed bibliography and discussion to-date. For a brief survey of early Ottoman architecture in Bursa see Crane, “Art and Architecture,” 276–277. 27 Apart from the T-shaped zaviye/imaret, Orhan’s complex included a medrese demolished in the nineteenth century to create space for the city hall in Bursa; an imaret, which stood until the 1950s, the so-called Bey Hanı; and a hamam, the male section of which has survived and is known today as Aynalı Çarşı. The complex was sacked by the Karamanid Emir Mehmed Beg in 1413 and repaired/rebuilt by Bayezid Paşa, the vizier of Mehmed I (1413–1421), in 1417. Emir, Çok-işlevli Yapılar, vol. 2, 18–50. Gabriel, Une capitale turque, 43. 28 Gabriel, Une capitale turque, 43. For further details on Bursa’s spatial, demographic and economic development see the fine study by Özer Ergenç, XVI. XVI. Yüzyılın Sonlarında Bursa: Yerleşimi, Yönetimi, Ekonomik ve Sosyal Durumu Üzerine Bir Araştırma (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2006).

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uted to the consolidation of the new market district and erected a commercial infrastructure of primary importance for its development: the Kapan hanı and the so-called Bezir hanı, which is no longer extant.29 Nevertheless, the final mark on the urban landscape that truly elevated the area east of the citadel as Bursa’s new commercial core came into sight only seven decades after the Ottomans seized the city. Celebrating the triumph of Islam over the crusading army led by King Sigismund (1387–1437) at the battle of Nicopolis in 1396, Bayezid I (1389–1402) commissioned the enormous Ulu Cami’ of Bursa. The monumentality of this imperial mosque not only clearly indicates the increasing importance of the most significant Ottoman urban centre at that time, but also embodies the claim of the dynasty to permanent rule over the lands that formerly belonged to Christendom.30 The efforts to promote the new urban core did not undermine the tendency to expand the space occupied by Bursa. Once more the T-shaped zaviye/imarets and their complexes were used by the Ottoman rulers as colonizers that expanded the territory of the city. In 1365– 1366 Orhan’s son Murad I commissioned such a complex, located about two kilometres west of the citadel of Bursa in the then rather isolated and remote suburb of Çekirge. Three decades later his successor Bayezid I also completed a complex centred on a T-shaped zaviye/imaret, thus setting the northeastern boundaries of the city. Standing east of the stream of Gökdere, one and a half kilometres from the centre, at the time of its construction the so-called Yıldırım complex must have appeared as distant and isolated as that built by his father in Çekirge. After the turbulent decade following Bayezid I’s defeat at the battle of Ankara (1402), Mehmed I displayed the consolidation of his rule by endowing one of the richest T-shaped zaviye/imaret complexes (in regard to decoration or ornamentation) that was ever constructed by the Ottomans (1419–1421). The magnificent Yeşil complex, centred on a massive T-shaped building with two tabhanes on each side, was also placed at a considerable distance from the urban core of Bursa and the very new great mosque. More than a kilometre southeast of Ulu Cami’, the complex of Mehmed I was certainly built on an empty spot on the eastern bank of the Gökdere. The last T-shaped building in Bursa subject to royal patronage was Murad II’s complex, located west of the citadel, more than one and a half kilometres distant from the city centre. It was built between 1424 and 1428 and, just like his father’s complex, it must have been meant to celebrate the triumph of Murad II over the pretenders to the throne. Tracing the rest of the T-shaped imaret/zaviyes in Bursa, built by Ottoman dignitaries such as Timurtaş Paşa (1404), Baba İshak/Ebu İshak Kazeruni (restored by Mehmed II in 1479, but certainly a much earlier establishment) and Hamza Bey (1461), one can clearly envisage a well-defined circle with the great mosque of Bayezid I and the urban core in its centre and a multitude of complexes centered on T-shaped buildings placed on the periphery.31 Bursa was so extensively developed solely because it focused the attention and architectural patronage of virtually all Ottoman sultans prior to the conquest of Constantinople. 29 Bezir hanı, built by Lala Şahin Paşa in the second half of the fourteenth century, stood until the early 1900s. When damaged by a great fire in the commercial district it was demolished. 30 Further details on the spatial arrangement of Bursa in the first centuries of Ottoman rule can be found in Aptullah Kuran, “A Spatial Study of Three Ottoman Capitals: Bursa, Edirne, and Istanbul,” Muqarnas 13 (1996): 114–131; Oya Pancaroğlu, “Architecture, Landscape, and Patronage in Bursa: The Making of an Ottoman Capital City,” Turkish Studies Association Bulletin 20:1 (1995): 40–55. 31 See Oğuz, “Multi-functional Buildings of T–type,” 112–115, for a complete list of T-shaped buildings; and the plans of Bursa included in Gabriel.

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Nevertheless, the pattern of Bursa’s spatial development can also be observed in many other localities, a situation which certainly indicates an established system of morphological adaptations (or, more precisely, a system in a process of development) used by the Ottomans for remodelling the space of conquered cities. When Nicaea (İznik) fell into Ottoman hands in 1331,32 apart from converting the church of St. Sophia that was located in the core of the city immediately after the conquest, Orhan ordered the construction of a T-shaped zaviye/ imaret outside the fortified Byzantine city, next to the Yenişehir Gate on the road towards Bursa. Oktay Aslanapa, who excavated Orhan’s now ruined zaviye/imaret and bath in an olive grove near Yenişehir Gate, claims that the complex was commissioned by Orhan even prior to the conquest of İznik.33 This view, shared by other scholars, seems to conflict with the available sources. On the one hand, the unearthed dedicatory plate of the imaret provides the date 1335, i.e. four years after the conquest; on the other, narrative tradition also seems to agree with this fact.34 According to the Ottoman chronicler Aşıkpaşazade, when Orhan seized the city he converted the principal church into a Friday mosque; a monastery was made into a medrese and at the exit of the Yenişehir gate he commissioned an imaret, which was entrusted to Hacı Hasan, a disciple of sheikh Ede Bali.35 When the building of the imaret was completed, Orhan served the first meal with his own hands on the night of its opening, an act which clearly indicates the great significance of the earliest Ottoman establishment in İznik.36 Placing the T-shaped building outside the fortified city demonstrates Orhan’s aspiration to leave a visible imprint on the urban landscape, just as he will do four years later in his capital, Bursa.37 What makes İznik quite different from Bursa is the enormous size of the 32 Halil İnalcık, “The struggle between Osman Gazi and the Byzantines for Nicaea,” in Işıl Akbaygil, Halil İnalcık, Oktay Aslanapa (eds.), İznik throughout History (İstanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası, 2003), 59–83. 33 Oktay Aslanapa, “İznik’te Sultan Orhan İmâret Câmii Kazısı 1963–1964,” Sanat Tarihi Yıllığı (1964– 1965): 16–31; idem, “Turkish Architecture at Iznik,” in Işıl Akbaygil, Halil İnalcık, Oktay Aslanapa (eds.), İznik throughout History (İstanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası, 2003), 223–226. 34 The dedicatory inscription was found broken into pieces in the course of the excavations and parts of it are missing. Nevertheless, the date Şevval 735 A.H. (1335) can be undoubtedly deduced. Abdülhamit Tüfekçioğlu, Erken Dönem Osmanlı Mimarîsinde Yazı (Ankara: T.C. Kültür Bakanlığı, 2001), 19–22. 35 According to narrative tradition, Ede Bali, a prominent figure from Vefa’i-Baba’i mystical order, was a father-in-law of Orhan’s father Osman Gazi. Kafadar, Between Two Worlds, 128–129. 36 Aşıkpaşazade Tarihi. Tevârih-i Âl-i Osman, ed. by Ali Bey (İstanbul: Matba’a-i Amire, 1332/1916), 42–43: “He [Orhan Gazi] established an imaret (soup kitchen) at the edge of the Yenişehir Gate [ ... ] When the doors of the imaret were first opened and its first food prepared, it was distributed by the blessed hands of Orhan Gazi himself. He served as the imaret’s apprentice on the opening evening.” Translation quoted from Heath Lowry, “The ‘Soup Muslims’ of the Balkans: Was There a ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ Ottoman Empire,” in Donald Quataert and Baki Tezcan (eds.), Beyond Dominant Paradigms in Ottoman and the Middle Eastern/North African Studies: A Tribute to Rifa’at Abou-El-Haj. Special issue of Osmanlı Araştırmaları/The Journal of Ottoman Studies 36 (2010): 102–104. 37 Two more T-shaped buildings in the region are associated with Orhan. He commissioned a zaviye for Postinpuş Baba (prior to 1348) near the town of Yenişehir and an imaret in the town of Bilecik (most likely 1330s), seized earlier by his father Osman Gazi. Both of the buildings had extramural location. For details see Oğuz, “Multi-functional Buildings of T–type,” 21–23. On the functions of some of these early Ottoman establishments in the region see Heath Lowry, “Random Musings on the Origins of Ottoman Charity: From Mekece to Bursa, İznik and Beyond,” in Nina Ergin, Christoph Neumann and Amy Singer (eds.), Feeding People, Feeding Power. Imarets in the Ottoman Empire (Istanbul: Eren, 2007), 69–79.

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fortified city. It seems that Ottomans never managed to provide enough settlers for the large territory of the Hellenistic city, enclosed by a double wall.38 Despite this, it seems that the Ottoman method for colonizing space was still implemented. The only notable difference was that in this case the Ottomans had to colonize the empty space lying between the walls of the sizable city and the converted cathedral of St. Sophia that naturally fulfilled the role of the main congregational mosque in the urban core.39 It was Orhan’s son Murad I who commissioned the next T-shaped zaviye/imaret near the eastern gate of the city. Commemorating his royal mother, Murad I’s spectacular Nilüfer imareti in İznik was completed in May 1388.40 About that time the son of Murad I, Yakub Çelebi, also completed a T-shaped multifunctional building that was placed at the southern edge of the city.41 The location of these buildings shows that in the second half of the fourteenth century the largest part of the city remained unoccupied; therefore expansion beyond the city walls was not only unnecessary but also unthinkable. Orhan’s imaret outside the city walls, as ambitious as it was, appears to have remained somewhat too distant and it is probably not by chance that it is the only T-shaped building in İznik not standing today. The zaviye/imarets of Murad I and his son Yakub, together with a number of neighborhood mosques (some of them magnificent buildings endowed by Ottoman grandees such as the Çandarlıs, others of more modest nature like Hacı Özbek’s), transformed the architectural order of İznik, maintaining close ties with the inherited urban fabric. Turning to the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans one notices that the same pattern was implemented by the new masters on European soil, too. Very little is known about the changes that took place in Adrianople (Edirne) immediately after Murad I took possession of it in 1361.42 Moreover, all the buildings he commissioned suffered an unfortunate fate and have not survived to the present day. Nevertheless, one can assert that, like his father in İznik, Murad I converted a large church located in the walled part of the city into the mosque of Aya Sofya, thus displaying the triumph of Islam and providing the Muslim community with a Friday mosque. Promulgating Edirne as his capital, Murad I ordered the construction of a royal palace and a number of service buildings, which in fact must have been the first 38 Heath Lowry, “Ottoman İznik (Nicaea): Through the Eyes of Travelers & as Recorded in Administrative Documents, 1331–1923,” in idem, Defterology Revisited: Studies on the 15th & 16th Century Ottoman Society (Istanbul: ISIS Press, 2008), 109–209. 39 İznik is not unique in this respect. A century later, when the Ottomans established control over the second largest city in the medieval Balkans, Thessaloniki (Selânik), they faced a very similar spatial issue. However, unlike İznik that never regained its population, Selânik was a densely populated metropolis throughout the Ottoman period and its inherited urban fabric was organically integrated by the Ottomans. Alexandra Yerolympos, Urban Transformations in the Balkans (1820–1920): Aspects of Balkan Town Planning and the Remaking of Thessaloniki (Thessaloniki: University Studio Press, 1996). 40 Franz Teaschner, “Das Nilufer-‘Imaret in Isnik und seine Bauinschrift,” Der Islam 20 (1932): 127–137. 41 Yakub Çelebi was killed by his brother Bayezid I on the battlefield of Kosovo, therefore the building must have been commissioned prior to 1389. 42 The date of the conquest of Adrianople is debated, but the present work sides with Halil İnalcık, “The Conquest of Edirne (1361),” Archivum Ottomanicum 3 (1971): 185–210. For arguments in favour of a later date for the fall of Adrianople into Ottoman hands, see Irène Beldiceanu-Steinherr, “La conquête d’Andrianople par les Turcs: la pénétration turque en Thrace et la valeur des chroniques ottomans,” Travaux et Mémoires 1 (1965): 439–461; Elizabeth Zachariadou, “The Conquest of Adrianople by the Turks,” Studi Veneziani 22 (1970): 211–217; Aleksandır Burmov, “Türkler Edirne’yi ne Vakit Aldılar,” Belleten 13 (1949): 79–106.

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Ottoman establishments outside the walls of the old Byzantine Adrianople. However, neither the converted church of St. Sophia, photographed in the nineteenth century,43 nor Murad I’s palace, demolished in the sixteenth century in order to clear space for the construction of the magnificent Selimiye mosque, are extant today.44 At the turn of the fourteenth century Murad I’s successor Bayezid I, in a ‘Bursa manner’, placed a T-shaped zaviye/imaret at a considerable distance from the walled parts, thereby extending the Ottoman presence beyond Edirne’s natural border, the Tundja River.45 Sultan Bayezid I’s Edirne edifice certainly lacked the grandeur of his Bursa complex, built a few years earlier, but it set an important trend. More accurately, this building transferred onto European soil the Ottoman system of adapting the urban morphology that had been established in Anatolia in the preceding decades. In the course of the next forty years four more T-shaped zaviye/imaret-centred complexes, commissioned respectively by Gazi Mihal (1421),46 the beylerbeyi Yusuf Paşa (1429),47 Sultan Murad II (1435)48 and Mezid Bey (1441),49 appeared on the outskirts of Edirne. Situated on the periphery of the city, these buildings encircled the newly established Ottoman city while a new commercial core was also established outside the fortified Byzantine town. The growing importance of Edirne as a capital of the Ottoman state called out for the construction of an imperial great mosque. It was commissioned by Bayezid I’s sons in the first decade of the fifteenth century and, imitating Bursa’s development, the commercial district of Edirne shifted to a new location outside the walled town.50 Edirne’s “Ottomanization” greatly resembles the transformation of Bursa in the fourteenth century. A new urban core emerged around an imperial mosque and several commercial buildings, while a number of T-shaped zaviye/imarets endowed by the rulers or high-ranking dignitaries surrounded the city, thus marking its outer boundaries. Two decades after Eski Cami’ was completed Murad II commissioned a new imperial mosque in the central part of the city, the so-called Üç Şerefeli mosque, which not only elevated Edirne’s status, but also experimented with form and revolutionized the design and construction techniques of the great imperial mosques of the Ottomans.51 43 The Byzantine church of St. Sophia stood within the walled part of Edirne until the early twentieth century. For a recent study on this building and a reprint of the photograph taken in 1888 by Gh. Léchine, Russian Consul in the city, see Robert Ousterhout and Charalambos Bakirtzis, The Byzantine Monuments of the Evros/Meriç River Valley (Thessaloniki: European Center for Byzantine and PostByzantine Monuments, 2007), 167–171. 44 Abdurrahman Hıbrî, Enîsü’l-müsâmîrin: Edirne tarihi, 1360–1650, ed. by Ratip Kazancıgil (Edirne: Türk Kütüphaneciler Derneği Yayınları, 1996), 14; Ayverdi, Osmanlı Mimârîsinin İlk Devri, 295. 45 Aptullah Kuran, “Edirne’de Yıldırım Camii,” Belleten 27:111 (1964): 419–438; Ayverdi, Osmanlı Mimârîsinin İlk Devri, 484–494; Oktay Aslanapa, Edirne’de Osmanlı Devri Abideleri (İstanbul: Üçler Basımevi, 1949), 2–6. 46 Ekrem Hakkı Ayverdi, Osmanlı Mimârîsinde Çelebi ve II. Sultan Murad Devri, 806–855 (1403–1451) (Istanbul: İstanbul Fetih Cemiyeti, 19892), 386–393; Kuran, The Mosque, 86–87. 47 Ayverdi, Çelebi ve II. Sultan Murad Devri, 377–381; Kuran, The Mosque, 89–90. 48 Suheyl Ünver, “Edirne Mevlevihanesi Tarihine Giriş,” in Emin Nedret İşli and M. Sabri Koz (eds.), Edirne: Serhattaki Payıtaht (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1998), 623–627; Ayverdi, Çelebi ve II. Sultan Murad Devri, 405–415; Kuran, The Mosque, 124–125. 49 Ratip Kazancıgil, Edirne İmaretleri (İstanbul: Türk Kütüphaneciler Derneği Yayınları, 1991), 45–49; Ayverdi, Çelebi ve II. Sultan Murad Devri, 397–400; Kuran, The Mosque, 126–127. 50 Ayverdi, Çelebi ve II. Sultan Murad Devri, 150–162; Kuran, The Mosque, 154–158. 51 Ayverdi, Çelebi ve II. Sultan Murad Devri, 422–62; Godfrey Goodwin, A History of the Ottoman Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson, 20032), 97–102.

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The function of the T-shaped buildings as the earliest ‘colonizers’ of the space beyond the walled parts of the towns seized by the Ottomans was adopted and widely used by the mighty akıncı commanders in the Balkans. These dynasties of elite warriors not only constituted the driving force of the Ottoman conquest in the region, but they also semiautonomously ruled and administered the territories under their control. Recognizing the leadership of the House of Osman, the lords of the marches naturally adopted the method of remodelling the urban order established by the ruling dynasty and implemented it in their own domains. For instance, the leader of the Ottoman advance along the Aegean cost of Thrace and Macedonia, Gazi Evrenos Bey, commissioned and built a T-shaped multifunctional building soon after he seized the city of Gümülcine (mod. Komotini). The building of Evrenos, the oldest standing Ottoman monument in the Balkans, located outside the Byzantine citadel, was in all probability used as a residence by Evrenos Bey before he relocated his power base westwards and the building begun service as an imaret.52 Similarly, the first Muslim buildings in Ottoman Üsküb (mod. Skopje), the capital of the modern state of Macedonia, were commissioned by the conqueror and actual master of the city, Paşa Yiğit Bey. Placing his buildings below the pre-Ottoman citadel, Paşa Yiğit instigated a development of the Muslim city that replicated on a smaller scale the transformation of Bursa. The complex that reclaimed the territory lying beyond the citadel soon turned into a new commercial district, while the descendants of the conqueror commissioned new T-shaped buildings that extended the boundaries of the Muslim city.53 In the Balkan context, the T-shaped zaviye/imarets were used not only as colonizers of urban space transformed by the Ottoman rulers or the semi-independent lords of the marches, but were also turned into a key element of the border lords’ programme for establishing new towns. The power base of the descendants of Köse Mihal, the town of İhtiman in Central Bulgaria, for instance, came into being thanks to the construction of a T-shaped zaviye/imaret and a number of other service buildings commissioned by Mahmud Bey at the turn of the fourteenth century.54 Half a century later, when İshakoğlu İsa Bey built for himself a power base at the Bosnian uc (border zone), modern Sarajevo, he applied the already 52 Machiel Kiel, “The Oldest Monuments of Ottoman-Turkish Architecture in the Balkans: the Imaret and the Mosque of Ghazi Evrenos Bey in Gümülcine (Komotini) and the Evrenos Bey Khan in the Village of Ilıca/Loutra in Greek Thrace (1370–1390),” Sanat Tarihi Yıllığı 12 (1983): 117–138; Lowry, The Shaping of the Ottoman Balkans, 41–47. 53 On the building of Paşa Yiğit, also known as Meddah Baba Cami’, and his nearby bath and other service buildings, none of which remain standing today, see Lidiya Kumbaracı-Bogoyeviç, Üsküp’te Osmanlı Mimarî Eserleri (İstanbul: ENKA, 2008), 168–171; Mustafa Özer, Üsküp’te Türk Mimarisi (XIV.–XIX. yüzyıl) (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2006), 187–188; Gliša Elezović, Turski spomenici u Skoplju (Beograd: Rodoljub, 1927), 4–9. For an argument that the earliest establishment in Skopje was indeed a T-shaped imaret/zaviye see Grigor Boykov, “Reshaping Urban Space in the Ottoman Balkans: a Study on the Architectural Development of Edirne, Plovdiv, and Skopje (14th–15th Centuries),” in Maximilian Hartmuth (ed.), Centres and Peripheries in Ottoman Architecture: Rediscovering a Balkan Heritage (Sarajevo: Cultural Heritage Without Borders, 2011), 41–45. 54 On the development of the town of İhtiman, built anew a few kilometres from the abandoned medieval stronghold of Shtipone, see Kiel, “İhtiman,” in Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 21 (İstanbul, 2000), 571–572; Semavi Eyice, “Sofya Yakınında İhtiman’da Gazi Mihaloğlu Mahmud Bey İmâret-Camii,” Kubbealtı Akademi Mecmuası 2 (1975): 49–61; Machiel Kiel, “Four Provincial Imarets in the Balkans and the Sources About Them,” in Nina Ergin, Christoph Neumann and Amy Singer (eds.), Feeding People, Feeding Power. Imarets in the Ottoman Empire (Istanbul: Eren, 2007), 97–120; Mariya Kiprovska, “Ruins of Past Glory: the Earliest Standing Ottoman Building in Bulgaria,” on-

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established system for “urban planning” by placing a communal mosque and commercial infrastructure at the point which had to become a new urban core, while the outer boundaries of the settlement were designated by a T-shaped zaviye/imaret.55 Examining the way in which some of the cities in the Ottoman realm were transformed, one can detect a pattern that is common enough to be regarded as an established system for the remodelling of the urban space. Most often the space beyond the fortified town seized by the Ottomans was first colonized by a complex centred on T-shaped multifunctional building. Later, the growing city space reclaimed this complex, incorporating it into the newly formed urban core, the commercial district (çarşı), while new T-shaped buildings extended the Ottoman presence and urban boundaries to further, previously unoccupied, locations. It is likely that this system, which manifested itself under the Ottomans, came as the result of longer evolutionary path which began with the dissolution of centralized Seljuk rule in Anatolia. Adopted and developed by the early Ottoman rulers, the method for spatial adaptation of the Anatolian cities under Ottoman rule was transferred to the Balkans and further elaborated by the central authority and the powerful raider commanders alike. Moreover, it seems that in many instances when new towns were created ex nihilo the Ottomans applied the same system, in which a communal mosque (either endowed by the sultan or another grandee) and a number of commercial buildings designated the urban centre while one or multiple T-shaped zaviye/imaret placed on the main road arteries marked the outskirts of the town and encouraged its development in a thus-determined direction. Thus, by examining the multitude of cities under Ottoman rule in Asia Minor and the Balkans one can cautiously, but at the same time quite confidently, state that the Ottoman model of urban morphological adaptation originated in Western Bithynia when the first cities lacking a Seldjukid base came into Ottoman hands and that the system was applied and further and elaborated in a Balkan context as well.

line publication for the Ottoman Architectural Heritage in Bulgaria (OAHB) (May 6, 2009), accessed February 20, 2014, http://www.oahb.org/category/ihtiman/. 55 Vladislav Skarić, “Postanak Sarajeva i njegov teritorijalni razvitak u 15. i 16. vjeku,” Glasnik Zemaljskog Muzeja u Sarajevu 41:2 (1929): 41–55; Hazim Šabanović, “Postanak i razvoj Sarajeva,” Radovi Naučnog Društva Bosne i Hercegovine 13:5 (1960): 71–89; Behija Zlatar, Zlatno Doba Sarajeva (XVI. Stoljeće) (Sarajevo: Svetlost, 1996), 25–38. İsa Bey’s original buildings were destroyed during the Austrian assault on the city, but the endowment deed of his zaviye strongly suggests that it was a T-shaped multifunctional building. It must have had three wings, including also a courtyard, and a stable and had to provide services to the poor Muslims ( fukarai’l-muslimin), theology students (talebetu’l‘ilm), descendents of the Prophet (sadat), warriors of the faith (guzat) and travellers (enbai’l-sebil). See Hazim Šabanović, “Dvije najstarije vakufname u Bosni,” Prilozi za orijentalnu filologiju 2 (1951): 7–29; Mehmed Mujezinović, “Musafirhana i tekija Isa-Bega Ishakovića u Sarajevu,” Naše Starine 3 (1956): 245–52; Ines Aščerić, “Neke napomene o problemima iz historije Isa-Begove tekije,” Prilozi za orijentalnu filologiju 52–53 (2002–2003): 339–350.

Urbanization on the Ottoman Borders: Small Towns in the South-West Serhad of the Bosnian Eyalet from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries Kornelija Jurin Starčević Serhad: The End of Frontier The Ottoman Empire paid special attention to its European borders in the period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Even though the south-western frontier comprised only a section of the border area of the Ottoman Empire in Europe, it was an extremely important part of the Ottoman military frontier-fortification system which extended in a long semicircular arch from Northern Africa, through the Mediterranean and the Danube region all the way to Crimea and the Caucasus. During the Early Modern period the Ottoman Empire shared the border in these areas with two leading Christian powers with which it fought for domination in Central and Mediterranean Europe: the Habsburg Monarchy and the Venetian Republic. Therefore from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries this south-western edge of the Empire, although slightly to one side of the main military routes that led to Buda and Vienna, played an important role in the imperial plans of the sultan’s court and divan. Due to its geostrategic significance this area was organized as a military frontier of the sancaks of Klis, Krka, Bihać, and, partly Herzegovina in the eyalet of Bosnia. In Ottoman sources, particularly in registers of important matters (mühimme defterleri), this part of the frontier is often called “the end of frontier” or “the edge of frontier” (intiha-yı serhad). The Ottoman term serhad originates from the Persian for border, frontier.1 And the Encyclopedia of Islam translates this concept as upper frontier, boundary.2 Geographically, it is the name of a mountain region in the South-East Iran on the border to Pakistan. Palmira Brummett believes that the meaning of serhad is closest to the English terms frontier area, garrisoned area, march.3 The simplest answer to the question of where the south-western frontier began and ended is that the serhad extended as far as the border of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Venetian Republic. However, in historiographic research it is not always easy to determine where the border of the Ottoman Empire ended and that of the Habsburg Monarchy began because in the period from 1500 to 1700 the border line between these two states was not firmly 1 James W. Redhouse, An English and Turkish Dictionary in Two Parts: English and Turkish Dictionary and Turkish and English Dictionary (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1856), 733. 2 Clifford E. Bosworth, “Sarḥadd,” in Encyclopedia of Islam, second edition (Leiden: Brill Online Reference Works). 3 Palmira Brummett, “Imagining the Early Modern Ottoman Space, From World History to Piri Reis,” in Virginia H. Aksan and Daniel Goffman (eds.), The Early Modern Ottomans. Remapping the Empire (Cambridge – New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 24.

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defined. The first precisely measured and physically marked border – between the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg Monarchy in present-day Croatia – was established only at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century.4 Until then, there had stretched between these two states a forested and hilly belt of “no-man’s-land” in parts as wide as ten kilometres, without permanent civilian settlements, but furnished with sentry boxes (çardak) and towers (kule) of the two states in which military troops observed the surrounding area. As the forts were conquered, the jurisdictions of the state governments shifted and with them the border belt. Between the Ottoman Empire and the Venetian Republic there were several attempts to establish a firmly defined and physically marked border, especially in the hinterland of the Venetian towns of Split, Trogir, Šibenik and Zadar. Questions of demarcation, “double” taxation and dual possession over the land in the Adriatic hinterland had started from the third decade of the sixteenth century and were very important in the diplomatic and political relations between these two states.5 During the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries Ottoman-Venetian boundary commissions met several times to demarcate and revise the border on land because the authorities tried to establish clearly what belonged to each state. Natural barriers, such as rivers, brooks, dikes, hills or trees served as demarcation markers; as did artificial barriers like wooden marks, heaps of earth or stone, ruined or renewed forts and towers. Considerable evidence exists that both sides sometimes agreed to use old medieval borders between villages as a border line between two states. Nonetheless, the border was constantly an issue of misunderstanding on the part of the local Venetian and Ottoman inhabitants and communities, as well as the topic of diplomatic negotiations between the Venetian bailo and the Porte.6 After the peace treaty signed in Sremski Karlovci in 1699, an internationally verified boundary was finally determined and drawn into contemporary political maps creating the point at which the demarcation lines between the Ottoman Empire, the Habsburg Monarchy and the Venetian Republic intersected. This point was situated to the northwest of the town of Knin and became known in historiography as the Triplex Confinium or Tromeđa (three-

4 Published demarcation document in Ešref Kovačević, Granice Bosanskog pašaluka prema Austriji i Mletačkoj Republici po odredbama Karlovačkog mira (Sarajevo: Svjetlost 1973). 5 The first preserved Ottoman document about mentioned disputes dates from 1531 and it is published in M. Tayyib Gökbilgin, “Venedik Devlet Arşivindeki Türkçe Belgeler Kolleksiyonu ve Bizimle İlgili Diğer Belgeler,” Belgeler 5–8:9–12 (1968–1971): 19–20. 6 For details about demarcation issues see: Snježana Buzov, “Vlaška sela, pašnjaci i čiftluci: krajolik osmanlijskog prigraničja u 16. i 17. stoljeću,” in Drago Roksandić, Ivan Mimica (eds.), Triplex Confinium (1500–1800): Ekohistorija (Split – Zagreb: Književni krug – Zavod za hrvatsku povijest, 2003), 227–241; Elma Korić, “Uloga Ferhad-bega Sokolovića u utvrđivanju granica između Osmanskog Carstva i Mletačke Republike nakon završetka Kiparskog rata 1573. godine,” Anali Husrev-begove biblioteke 33 (2012): 133–144; Vjeko Omašić, Mletačko-tursko razgraničenje na trogirskom području nakon Ciparskog i Kandijskog rata i njegove posljedice (Trogir: Muzej grada Trogira, 1971); Maria Pia Pedani, “Beyond the Frontier: The Ottoman-Venetian Border in the Adriatic Context from Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries,” in Almut Bues (ed.), Zones of Fracture in Modern Europe: the Baltic Countries, the Balkans, and Northern Italy (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 2005), 45–60; Vicko Solitro, Povijesni dokumenti o Istri i Dalmaciji (Split: Književni krug, 1989), 245–253; Seid Traljić, “Tursko-mletačke granice u Dalmaciji u 16. i 17. stoljeću,” Radovi Instituta Jugoslavenske Akademije Znanosti i Umjetnosti u Zadru 20 (1973): 447–458.

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boundary area).7 This was also the first time it was unmistakably determined where the “protected lands” (memalik-i mahruse) of the Ottoman sultan ended in this part of Europe. It is more difficult to define the borderland with relation to the Ottoman hinterland and to determine how far from the border the serhad stretched inland. In accordance with the theorists of Borderlands Studies M. Baud and W. van Schendel, who distinguished between three geographic zones of the borderland – the border heartland, intermediate borderland and outer borderland, which differ according to how far the border influences the everyday lives of people living near it – in the process of defining the concept of borderland one needs take into account not only military but to an even greater extant social, demographic, cultural and even anthropological traits. According to their classification, in the border heartland people’s lives are strongly marked by the border and their social network is adapted to the border and depends on it; most frequently these are the areas peripheral to the development of a centralist state. In the intermediate borderland the influence of the border is constantly felt, but the intensity of influence varies from intermediate to weak. The last zone, quite away from the border feels its influence only under certain circumstances. In the everyday life of this zone the border plays practically no part, but certain events and political storms can absorb the whole zone and occasionally subject it to the dynamics of the border. In this way borderlands can extend to encompass entire countries.8 If we accept the afore-mentioned division, we could say that the serhad was the border heartland of the Ottoman Empire, although the continuity of development over almost two hundred years within Ottoman global social and political structures contributed to the deletion of institutional differences between the deeper hinterland and the frontier. The serhad never became a formally and legally distinct administrative unity in the way in which, for example, the Military Border existed within the Habsburg Monarchy. On the frontier, too, the authorities of the Ottoman state introduced recognizable institutions which existed in the rest of the country, such as the timar-sipahi system, devşirme, the institution of kadı and kadı courts, Sharia (şeriat) and secular kanun legal regulations, taxes, religious endowments (vakıf ), buildings characteristic of Islamic civilization etc.9 However, the specifics of the development of the area in relation to the deeper hinterland are also visible. They were primarily the consequence of an advanced organization of defence and military activities due to the proximity of enemy territory. A greater number of fortifications with military garrisons paid in cash (ulufeci), the emergence of the institution of captaincies, weaker economic development, a lower percentage of civilian and agrarian folk and a larger share of military and cattle-oriented people, a generally sparser population, a war economy, specific cultural behaviour patterns (the institutional phenomenon of brotherhoods between Ottoman Muslims and Christians from the Venetian and Habsburg’s imperial systems) etc. – these are only some of the elements distinguishing the frontier from the deeper hinterland. A further such element was the weaker urbanization of space, because conflict directly and indirectly affected the depopulation, and slower development, of urban settlements closer to the border. Moreover, there existed a specific pattern of urban evolution because all towns gradu7 Kovačević, Granice Bosanskog pašaluka, 63, 107; Drago Roksandić, Triplex Confinium ili O granicama i regijama hrvatske povijesti 1500–1800 (Zagreb: Barbat, 2003), 14–19. 8 Baud Michiel and Willem van Schendel, “Toward a Comparative History of Borderlands,” Journal of World History 8:2 (1997): 221–222. 9 Nenad Moačanin, Turska Hrvatska: Hrvati pod vlašću Osmanskog Carstva do 1791 (Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska, 1999), 45, 55–57, 58–74.

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ally developed from the military strongholds. Even though the urbanization of the frontier during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was limited, there is no doubt that certain Ottoman forts outgrew their military framework and acquired stronger civilian, i.e. central functions. The whole south-west of the Bosnian eyalet eventually became criss-crossed by small towns with a population of several thousand which had emerged from forts. The main subject of this paper are precisely such towns, towns to which the war represented a factor of urban development and which developed out of immense fear on south-western borders. Fortifications as the Core of Urban Life on the Serhad Since the south-western border was strategically highly significant, the Ottoman authorities established a line of forts (kale, hisar) which stretched along the border from the River Una to the River Neretva. The forts monitored the borderland, but also controlled land and water ways, strategic passes, bridges, marketplaces and the like. They housed the administrative centres of nahiyes and sancaks; and served to accommodate commanders, soldiers and their families, court and religious officers, local officials and clerks, including sancakbeyis and their escorts, artisans and merchants. During wartime they were refuge centres for the local population from the suburban and village surroundings. In other words, forts were the most important element in the defence of the Ottoman frontier, but also the core of urban life because it was only where the basic preconditions existed – a fort and its military troops – that the civilian urban life could emerge. Even though many forts from the pre-Ottoman period were destroyed in conquest and then abandoned, strategically significant forts from the Late Middle Ages were renovated by the Ottoman authorities immediately after conquest and invested with smaller military units. According to data from the first military records regarding the south-western serhad, between 1520 and 1530 there were 17 active forts between the River Una and the River Neretva housing a permanent military garrison consisting of a symbolic number of 771 paid soldiers.10 There were only a small number of soldiers for the defence of such a long border because the monitoring of the frontier, beside the permanent contingents in the forts was also carried out by regular cavalrymen (sipahis), raiders (akıncıs) and semi-military groups from the ranks of the reaya (Vlachs, voynuks and derbendcis) who were, for this service, exempt from certain tax obligations.11 At the same time the Ottoman Empire pursued a policy of expansion on its northern European borders, so on this south-western frontier it manned more strongly only strategically vital forts which were also the strongholds for future conquests towards the West. As a consequence of the gradual shifting of the Ottoman 10 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi (BOA), Tapu Tahrir Defteri (TTD) No. 91, 150, 164 and Maliyeden Müdevver (MAD) No. 540. 11 For particular tax immunity for the mentioned paramilitary orders in south-west serhad see published primary sources: Branislav Đurđev, Nedim Filipović, Hamid Hadžibegić, Muhamed Mujić, Hazim Šabanović, Kanuni i Kanun-name za Bosanski, Hercegovački, Zvornički, Kliški, Crnogorski i Skadarski sandžak (Sarajevo: Veselin Masleša, 1957), 31–33; Fehim Spaho and Ahmed Aličić, Opširni popis Kliškog sandžaka iz 1550. godine (Sarajevo: Orijentalni Institut, 2007), 48. For status of various paramilitary orders and groups with special duties in different parts of the Ottoman Empire see the following studies: Yavuz Ercan, Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda Bulgarlar ve Voynuklar (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1986); Cengiz Orhonlu, Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda Derbend Teşkilâtı (İstanbul: Eren, 1990); Aleksandar Stojanovski, Raja so specijalni zadolženia vo Makedonija (vojnuci, sokolari, orizari i solari) (Skopje: Institut za nacionalna istorija, 1990); Milan Vasić, Martolosi u jugoslovenskim zemljama pod turskom vladavinom (Sarajevo: Akademija nauka i umjetnosti Bosne i Hercegovine, 1967).

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frontier westwards and southwards during the sixteenth century the number of forts under Ottoman control kept increasing. This increase stemmed not only from the conquest and reparation of enemy forts but also from the attempts to strengthen defences in vulnerable sections of the frontier and so the Ottomans themselves erected new fortifications where necessary. These were large stone forts like Makarska, Novi Obrovac, Sedd-i İslam near Gabela, Petrinja etc. but also wooden palankas12, smaller towers and so forth. In time the defence system of the Ottoman south-western frontier was organized in such a way that it consisted of, first, several key forts with an exceptional military force and wider regional significance in defence, ringed by smaller forts; and, second, a larger number of smaller forts of local significance which stretched out like a long chain.13 Key forts had an important geostrategic location and were therefore well manned (they could house several hundred men, even a few thousand), strongly fortified by ramparts, separate towers, sentry boxes, palankas and linked to smaller forts with which they formed a defensive unit. They protected the corridor to the interior and on them depended the safety of a much wider space, namely the whole of Bosnian eyalet. Such forts became Bihać, Kostajnica, Kladuša, Novi, Udbina, Bilaj Bunić, Klis, Sedd-i İslam in Ravni Kotari, Zemunik, Knin and Livno. Among them were a larger number of smaller forts, mostly situated on elevated and naturally protected positions, in which were housed smaller military garrisons in charge of overseeing a limited area (like Nučak, Zadvarje, Čačvina, Strmica, Velin, Nadin, Brekovica, Ripač etc.). Relatively strong fortifications were also located near the marketplaces, harbours and iskeles14 where trade between the Venetian Republic and Ottoman Empire was conducted such as Sedd-i İslam at the River Neretva, Makarska, Obrovac and Skradin on the Adriatic coast; or next to the main traffic routes leading from the interior towards the coast (forts like Sinj, Vrlika, Vrgorac, Gračac etc.). All in all, in this area in the mid-seventeenth century (1643) the Ottomans maintained around a hundred smaller and larger forts in which there were more than 8,100 soldiers paid in cash by the sultan’s treasury/state revenues.15 Besides paid garrisons, in forts a little further from the border were soldiers who were possessors of collective grants (gedük timarı) allocated to individuals according to military rank and 12 Palanka is a fortification made of earth-filled wooden palisade. For more details on palanka: Burcu Özgüven, “Palanka Forts and Construction Activity in the Late Ottoman Balkans,” in Andrew Charles Spencer Peacock (ed.), The Frontiers of the Ottoman World (Oxford – New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 156–171; David Nicolle, Ottoman Fortifications 1300–1710 (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2010), 21–29, 32. 13 Ottomans used very similar patterns of defensive fortification development also in Hungary as well: cf. Klára Hegyi, “The Ottoman Network of Fortresses in Hungary,” in Géza Dávid and Pál Fodor (eds.), Ottomans, Hungarians and Habsburgs in Central Europe. The Military Confines in the Era of Ottoman Conquest (Leiden – Boston – Köln: Brill, 2000), 163–195. 14 The section of a harbour where Ottoman and Venetian goods were storaged, exchanged and sent to inland or to Venice was called iskele in the Ottoman language and scalla in Venetian. 15 This figures are based on military record of soldiers paid in cash in the Bosnian eyalet from 1643, preserved in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (ÖNB) Vienna as Codices mixti (MXT) No. 627. Cf. Adem Handžić, “O organizaciji krajine Bosanskog ejaleta u 17. stoljeću,” in Vasa Čubrilović (ed.), Vojne krajine u jugoslovenskim zemljama u novom veku do Karlovačkog mira 1699: zbornik radova sa naučnog skupa održanog 24. i 25. aprila 1986 (Beograd: Srpska akademija nauka i umetnosti, 1989), 85–89; Kornelija Jurin Starčević, “Vojne snage Kliškog i Krčko-ličkog sandžaka pred Kandijski rat – osmanska vojska plaćenika,” in Damir Agičić (ed.), Zbornik Mire Kolar Dimitrijević (Zagreb: FF press, 2003), 79–93.

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merit. Although it has proved impossible to estimate the number of soldiers paid by gedük timars their number was not negligible. Gradually the Ottomans succeeded in building a true military bulwark, especially around the River Una, with strong forts and numerous detachments. They were so successful that the Habsburg Monarchy army was not able to dislodge them even during the skirmishes which followed after the failed Siege of Vienna (1683–1699). It was there that the biggest towns (by population) emerged which can be considered military towns, i.e. transitional forms between forts and true urban settlements whose development, especially after the danger had subsided, continued parallel to urban development in other parts of the Empire. Urban settlements Several criteria distinguish a town from a mere fort on the frontier: size (generally a greater concentration of population), the status of a settlement in the Ottoman tax records (varoş, kasaba), and functions performed by the settlement (educational, economic, religious, administrative, political, transit). Generally speaking, the towns on the frontier had a higher population density and performed certain merchant-artisanal, administrative, educational, religious and other functions, although not necessarily all in the same settlement. The military or strategic function is not crucial for this investigation because every single fortification on the frontier fulfilled such role. In this way more than twenty settlements of urban type developed in the south-west serhad by the mid-seventeenth century. In the first years after the conquest there was practically no civilian population in the forts. Civilians moved in gradually, on the incentive of the government or through their own initiative, from the neighbouring Bosnian and Herzegovinian areas to supply the military with food and provisions; and for a while they lived within the fort walls. In time, as the size of the civilian, and particularly the Muslim, population increased, artisans and merchants began to settle outside the fort in the suburbium where the first mosque or the mescid (small mosque) was erected. Towns in the section of frontier towards the Venetian Republic demonstrate faster civilian development in the period of peace between the Cyprus and Candian Wars (between 1573 and 1645) and towards the Habsburg side of the border after 1610, when the political relations with the Habsburg Monarchy stabilized and fortifications gained more central functions. In the category of towns in a broader sense we can include some forts for which there are no data in the tax records regarding civilian population in the suburbium. The inhabitants of the suburbium were not included in these records as long as they were engaged in military duties (e.g. Novi, Obrovac, Vrana, Nadin, Udbina, Gračac, Perušić etc.) and while they were on the pay roll of the military garrison. The military population were listed in these records only if they were active in business, lived in the mahalle and perhaps owned taxable realestate. For this reason, in the suburbium of some forts the merchant and artisanal population were never or scarcely registered in the records. On the other hand, western narrative sources note settlements around the forts. Suburbia are clearly visible on engravings and other visual material as well. Let us mention one example. In Ottoman tax records from 1550 and 1574, Vrana is registered as varoş but without any details about civilian population or mercantile activity.16 The next tax records, those from 1604, mention only three Muslim 16 Spaho and Aličić, Opširni popis, 438; BOA, TTD No. 533, 724.

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and three Christian households (hane) in varoş Vrana.17 According to the description by a western spy from 1620, Vrana had more than 200 houses in the fort, and altogether more than 300 men capable of bearing arms in the fort and suburbium.18 According to Ottoman military records Vrana had 85 ulufecis in 1616 and 103 in 1643.19 At the beginning of the seventeenth century there were at least two mosques, one primary school (mekteb) and one public bathhouse (hamam) in the suburbium. Moreover, Vrana was a seat of a nahiye, a captaincy and a residence of a Halil Bey, sancakbeyi of Krka, who had his splendid mansion/palace (saray) there. In 1644 kapudan Yusuf Paşa Mašković started to construct a huge inn (han) near the fort which still exists today. In the mid-seventeenth century the Venetian Leonardo Foscolo reported to Venice that there were 500 houses in Vrana.20 On Vincenco Coronelli’s plan, published in 1690, houses outside the fort can be clearly seen, as well as a mosque and a han. On another plan it is obvious that the Vrana suburbium had two mosques.21 Without any doubt Vrana became a small frontier town, even if it is not possible to trace any of these facts in Ottoman tax registers. Ottoman taxation records differentiate between the varoş and kasaba, of which many definitions exist in Ottoman historiography.22 Two are relevant here. According to two older Bosnian-Herzegovinian Ottoman scholars, a settlement could gain the status of kasaba if it had at least one mosque (which implies the existence of a sizable Muslim population), a market square and inhabitants who engaged predominantly in merchant-artisanal activities. These scholars claim that the act of proclaiming a settlement a kasaba represented an important administrative-legal act. For a settlement to obtain the status of şehir, it had to have at least four mosques, several buildings characteristic of Islamic civilization, a majority of Muslim population and a more pronounced trade role.23 More recently, Nenad Moačanin stresses the limited applicability of this theory only to the territory of the Bosnian sancak where towns and true urbanity emerged in the Ottoman era. We accept his thesis that kasaba needs to be equated with “town” in the broadest sense, since notwithstanding how 17 Tapu ve Kadastro Arşivi Genel Müdürlüğü, Kuyud-u Kadime Arşivi (TKGM, KuK) No. 475/13, 159. 18 Franjo Rački, “Prilozi za geografsko-statistički opis bosanskoga pašalika,” Starine Jugoslavenske Akademije znanosti i umjetnosti 14 (1882): 183. 19 Jurin Starčević, “Vojne snage,” 89. 20 For more details see: Seid Traljić, “Vrana i njezini gospodari u doba turske vladavine,” Radovi Instituta Jugoslavenske Akademije Znanosti i Umjetnosti u Zadru 18 (1971): 343–375. 21 Vincenco Coronelli’s plan of Vrana is published in: Mirko Marković, Hrvatski gradovi na starim vedutama i planovima (Zagreb: AGM 2001), 484. 22 For general introduction into the Ottoman urban history and development of the Ottoman towns see: M. Tayyib Gökbilgin, “Kanuni sultan Süleyman Devri Başlarında Rumeli Eyaleti Livaları, Şehir ve Kasabaları,” Belleten 20:78 (1956): 247–294; Suraiya Faroqhi, Towns and Townsmen in Ottoman Anatolia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Ronald Jenings, “Urban Population in Anatolia in the Sixteenth Century: a Study of Kayseri, Karaman, Amasya, Trabzon and Erzurum,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 7 (1976): 21–57; İlhan Şahin, “Urbanization and the Social Structure of the Ottoman Empire,” in Tülay Duran (ed.), The Ottoman Empire in the Reign of Süleyman the Magnificient I (Ankara: Historical Research Publishing unit, 1988), 183–196; Nikolai Todorov, The Balkan City 1400–1900 (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1983). Explanation of term kasaba: G. Deverdun, “Ḳaṣaba,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, second edition. 23 See Hazim Šabanović’s explanation of the term “kasaba” and “şehir” in the glossary at the end of his translation of Evliya Çelebi’s “Seyahatname” in Evlija Čelebi, Putopis (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1967), 623–624, 646, 650. Also: Adem Handžić, “O formiranju nekih gradskih naselja u Bosni u 16. stoljeću. Uloga države i vakufa,” Prilozi za orijentalnu filologiju 25 (1975): 134–135.

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it developed, it is over the required minimum, while the term şehir already includes connotations of real urbanity and cultivation.24 With the term varoş the Ottoman administration denoted town settlements, i.e. suburbia exclusively or predominantly peopled by a Christian population engaging in non-agrarian occupations. This does not mean that the inhabitants did not work in agriculture, but that they were not self-sufficient homesteaders because they also had other occupations (such as selling their own agrarian produce on the town square, especially the produce of viticulture) and that, if they abandoned working on the land, they would not have to pay a special tax payable by farmers.25 On the other hand, in tax registers the term varoş sometimes denoted a settlement whose inhabitants paid land tax even though the number of Muslims and soldiers might have been relatively large. However, since the varoş undoubtedly showed livelier development of trading and other central functions, it is included under the category of town settlements. Mercantile activity was crucial for the development of towns, but this kind of activity could not take place on the serhad without the strict permissions of the Ottoman authorities. Based on one entry preserved in mühimme defteri for kasaba Imotski (1567/68) one could conclude that the state issued permits for a weekly trade market (hafta pazarı) under the fort or even in the fort itself.26 Through such rules the state directly influenced the process of urbanization on the frontier. The inhabitants of settlements given the right to the weekly market were most often exempt from unpopular labour duties for the state and special levies (avarız-ı divaniye, tekâlif-i örfiye). They even no longer had to pay land tax (despite carry on agricultural activities) but only a tithe on agricultural production. Sometimes Muslim inhabitants who pursued agricultural activities were not burdened with the land tax because of their proximity to the border zone. Town folk held various agrarian lands (vineyards, meadows, fields, olive groves, orchards) within the town boundaries and in the surrounding areas, the surplus produce from which they sold in the town square. Sizable agrarian plots in the vicinity of towns and forts were also held by soldiers, as their own çiftliks.27 Soldiers cultivated those plots on their own or with their families or even with slave or hired workers and sold the produce to Venetian markets. In this way they could survive long months without pay from Istanbul. A good example of a military town and a key fort on the border to the Habsburg Monarchy is Bihać. Soon after it was conquered in 1592 Bihać became the strongest Ottoman fort from the River Drava to the Adriatic Sea; it contained 638 soldiers in 1616, while in 1643/4 it housed 1219 paid soldiers.28 As the “key to Bosnia”, the fort of Bihać remained one of the best guarded points of the whole frontier zone during the whole Ottoman administration, the seat of captaincy, the river navy, sancak, kaza and nahiye. The fort itself was thoroughly renovat24 Nenad Moačanin, Town and Country on the Middle Danube 1526–1690 (Leiden – Boston: Brill, 2006), 67–70. 25 Ibid., 70–71. A study of varoş institution as a fiscal and “self-government” non-territorial corporation of the urban Christian population provides: Svetlana Ivanova, “Varos: The Elites of the Reaya in the Towns of Rumeli, Seventeenth – Eighteenth Centuries,” in Antonis Anastasopoulos (ed.), Halcyon Days in Crete V. Provincial Elites in the Ottoman Empire (Rethymno: Crete University Press, 2006), 201–247. 26 BOA, Mühimme Defteri (MD) No. 7, 518, mühimme no. 1489. 27 Çiftlik: (1) Land workable by a pair of oxen, or a farm in which the fields make up a unit workable with a pair of oxen by a peasant family within the çift-hane system; (2) A big farm consisting of several raiyyet çiftliks under the control of an absentee landlord; (3) Any plantation-like agricultural exploitation. For further explanation cf. Halil İnalcık, An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, vol. 1: 1300–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 108–109, 114–117, 145–153, xlvi. 28 Nenad Moačanin, Turska Hrvatska, 62.

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ed and modernized according to contemporary knowledge of modern fortification construction; and through it the defence of the Bosnian eyalet was significantly improved.29 The tax records from 1604 show that there were 1 imam, 64 married and 5 unmarried taxable artisans and merchants within the fort walls; 37 of them were soldiers or military officers. Outside the fort was a varoş inhabited by Vlachs (138 hane), not by regular reayas.30 If we are to believe a seventeenth-century engraving, there were at least two mosques in the fort; one of them a church dedicated to St. Anthony which in 1592 had been converted into a mosque locally called Fethija which still exists.31 Between 5,000–6,000 people lived in Bihać at the time.32 Another good example of a military town is Kostajnica, conquered in 1556. Due to its strategic and traffic importance as the most important crossing across the River Una and passage to Habsburg Monarchy territories, it became a mighty fortification and the seat of a captaincy. It had 330 paid soldiers in 1586, 769 in 1616 and 896 in 1643.33 Kostajnica also acquired significant administrative functions as the centre of a kaza and nahiye, as well as economic functions as a marketplace and a customs-point. According to the tax registers from 1604 the fort contained one mahalle with 105 married and 8 unmarried taxable individuals plus 3 clergymen, one mahalle of the mosque of Haci Hüseyin outside the fort with 95 married and nine unmarried adult taxable individuals, three clergyman, and a varoş with 23 households.34 The key fort towards the Venetian Republic was Klis, in the immediate vicinity of Split. There the Ottomans established a compact system of defence consisting of several smaller forts (Kamen, Kuk, Lončarić) with Klis as its most important fort in the centre. Next to Klis passed an important trade route which linked Split to Sarajevo, so the state authorities wanted to protect it by any means. Its exceptional strategic location, strong town walls and towers, a numerous army (in 1643 in the Klis fort itself there were 279, while in surrounding fortifications another 300 men)35 and strong armaments made Klis the strongest Ottoman fortification along the Adriatic coast. Klis also became seat of a sancak, a kaza and captaincy. However, Klis developed into a settlement of civilian importance due to the possibility of trade between the Empire and Venice; it was here that the state collected the highest amount of trade taxes in the square, higher than in any other town (ihtisab and bac-i bazar together: 6,000 akçe).36 At the beginning of the seventeenth century in the Klis suburbium about 60 taxable households of artisans and merchants were registered; and it is also worth mentioning that among them were several wholesale traders (tüccar) with quite sizable business enterprises.37 29 According to historical sources (mostly drawings and engravings), during the Ottoman administration the fort of Bihać was square and fortified by double walls. The fort had three entries, with oak doors iron-bound on the outside. From three sides the fort was surrounded by deep moats filled with water, and from the fourth side flowed the River Una. Furthermore, it had four towers and nine bastions on which cannons were mounted. Today the only preserved parts are the so-called Captain’s Tower (Kapudan kulesi) and parts of the ramparts. Plans are published in: Marković, Hrvatski gradovi, 307–317. 30 Adem Handžić, Opširni popis Bosanskog sandžaka iz 1604. godine, 4 vols. (Sarajevo: Bošnjački institut Zürich – Orijentalni Institut u Sarajevu, 2000), vol. I/2, 565–566. 31 The Gothic Church of St. Anthony was turned into a mosque and given the name Fethiye cami’i (“mosque of the conquest”) to commemorate Ottoman conquest of the town. 32 Moačanin, Turska Hrvatska, 62. 33 Handžić, “O organizaciji krajine,” 86–89. 34 Handžić, Opširni popis, 547–549. 35 Jurin Starčević, “Vojne snage,” 89. 36 TKGM, KuK No. 475/13, 135–139. 37 Kornelija Jurin Starčević, “Islamsko-osmanski gradovi dalmatinskog zaleđa: prilog istraživanju urbanog razvoja u 16. i 17. stoljeću,” Radovi 38 (2006): 126.

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While in certain interior parts of the Empire the development of an urban infrastructure was mostly left to run its natural course, on the frontier the government intentionally influenced the transformation of a military fort or even village into a town. The system of trusts founded by state decree played a crucial part by ordering the sancakbeyi to erect a mosque, a lower religious school, shops and other buildings necessary for the fort to start functioning as a town. Two examples will be cited here. The first is Zemunik which the Ottomans conquered in the Cyprus War. The civilian part of town started to be called kasaba after the sancakbeyi of Klis, and later the Bosnian beylerbeyi, Ferhad bey Sokollu erected a mosque in it. According to tax records from the beginning of the seventeenth century Zemunik had a total of 92 Muslim tax-paying households, eight unmarried adult Muslims and 19 Christian households38 while the Venetian chronicler Franjo Difnik writes of Zemunik that in the fort there were more than fifty houses, and outside it “more than eight hundred hearths, inhabited by more than two thousand souls, around twelve hundreds of which were than capable of bearing arms”.39 In the period between 1574 and 1580 the same sancakbeyi erected in the village of Gornje and Donje Hrvace (Upper and Lower Hrvace) in the Cetina area, a mosque, a mekteb and a certain number of shops because the village was situated on an important transport communication route from the coast to the interior. At the same time, between the Venetian Republic and the Sublime Porte plans were set in motion to establish a Spalatian port, so it was necessary to ensure that the roads were safe and the village would develop into an urban settlement. The village Hrvace thus became a kasaba inhabited exclusively by Muslims. Records from the beginning of the seventeenth century list houses of clergymen, 59 households of married Muslims and 31 unmarried adult Muslims.40 It was the only unfortified town on the long south-west frontier. On the same traffic route several other kasabas developed near forts such as Sinj and Vrlika. Thus the state, by giving state lands into the private property of illustrious Ottoman stewards, attempted to develop the necessary infrastructure and direct the urban development in accordance with state needs. The trusts were crucial for the development of Drniš as well. By the mid-sixteenth century Drniš had become a varoş under the kale, and at the beginning of the seventeenth century it was called a kasaba. Evliya Çelebi stresses that it was such an enormous town that every year a hundred to a hundred and fifty of its people went on the pilgrimage to Mecca.41 He calls Drniš a şehir. The 2001 edition of Evliya Çelebi’s original manuscript (autograph) confirms the existence of few mosques covered with lead roofs, higher religious schools (medrese) and many other buildings erected around a çarşi (han, bezistan, shops, a public kitchen, probably a hamam since the town had a water supply system, sahat kulesi – the Islamic variant of a clock tower built only in the town sites with a higher level of urbanity, such as Sarajevo). Under Ottoman rule Drniš became a prosperous town and an important marketplace with a rich group of merchants whose shops were, according to Evliya, worth more than a hundred thousand guruş.42 In the first half of the seventeenth century Drniš grew into a real little seminary of Islamic civilization on the serhad where the works of the standard contemporary 38 TKGM, KuK No. 475/13, 303–308. 39 Franjo Difnik, Povijest Kandijskog rata u Dalmaciji (Split: Književni krug, 1986), 115–116. 40 TKGM, KuK No. 475/13, 129–130. 41 Evliyâ Çelebi b. Derviş Mehemmed Zıllî, Evliyâ Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi. 5. Kitap: Topkapı Sarayı Kütüphanesi Bağdat 307 Numaralı Yazmanın Transkripsiyonu – Dizini, ed. by Yücel Dağlı, Seyit Ali Kahraman, İbrahim Sezgin (İstanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2001), 257. 42 Ibid., 257.

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Islamic education were transcribed. On Vincenco Coronelli’s depiction of Drniš from the second half of the seventeenth century there are five mosques in total: four in the suburbium and one in the fort.43 Although Franjo Difnik writes that Drniš was a town with approximately 1500 to 2000 hearths,44 according to one espionage report from the second decade of the seventeenth century, probably based on an Ottoman tax record, varoş Drniš had only 200 houses and 300 men.45 In less developed and urbanized parts of the Empire, like the region in question, such a town represented a true centre of Ottoman civilization on the serhad. During the Candian War, in February 1648 Drniš was destroyed and burnt down, and the population dislocated.46 Today in Drniš only a few fragments remain of monuments of Islamic material culture (the remnants of a mosque of the founder serasker Halil Hoca converted into the church of St. Anthony; the remnants of the foundation of another mosque with a minaret and the remains of a tower). If the historical sources of the Ottoman and Venetian provenance which speak of the number of townsfolk are compared, the incongruity in the data is evident. It can be explained by the endeavours of the western espionage reports, and even Evliya Çelebi’s “Seyahatname”, to give detailed information about the total number of houses, especially the military houses in the forts, while the official Ottoman tax records list only that population engaged in civilian occupations. Thus the houses as physical objects always outnumbered the taxable households listed in the records. Even though the towns contained many more people than those recorded the low total number of taxable units in kasabas and varoşes still shows that urbanization did occur in frontier conditions. Valuable historical sources depicting forts and suburbia below them include plans, sketches and panoramas of Ottoman forts which were secretly and hastily made by Venetian and Habsburg military engineers and cartographers in order to establish and weaken the military strength of the Ottomans in the south-west serhad. Such plans and sketches are extremely important and, together with Ottoman military and tax records, offer a good basis for research not only into Ottoman fort construction and the changes introduced by the Ottomans into the late-medieval architecture they found on site, but also into the urban and social structures of frontier settlements. Some are fairly reliable in their depictions of strong forts with a small number of houses in the suburbium, reminiscent of feudal castles from the pre-Ottoman period.47 Unlike other Ottoman towns deeper in inland, small towns on the frontier had only a maximum of two or three mosques with a minaret, mescids and a primary religious school, and only secondarily other types of buildings necessary for their inhabitants such as court, hamam etc. As the first Muslim inhabitants were military the first mosque was erected in the fort and it was most frequently a converted church to which a minaret was added.48 Only 43 Coronelli’s plan of Drniš see in: Seid Traljić, “Drniš šesnaestog i sedamnaestog stoljeća,” Radovi Instituta Jugoslavenske Akademije Znanosti i Umjetnosti u Zadru 19 (1972): 393–404. 44 Difnik, Povijest Kandijskog rata, 167. 45 Rački, “Prilozi za geografsko-statistički opis,” 180. 46 Difnik, Povijest Kandijskog rata, 167–172. 47 A large number of such historical sources are published in: Marković, Hrvatski gradovi, 243–302, 307–318, 458–461, 483–490, 505–523, and 563–581. 48 Preserved examples of such conversions in the research area are: Fethija mosque in Bihać previously the church of St. Anthony; medieval church of St. Mary in the fort of Klis which was turned into a mosque in 1537, and for whose maintenance the first sancakbeyi Murad Bey created an endowment. When the Ottoman rule ended in Klis in the mid seventeenth century the building was converted back into the church of St. Vitus.

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afterwards was a mosque built in the suburbium, together with the Muslim quarter. The town square or çarşı was most often located in the civilian part of town, below the fort, but it could also be situated within the fortified space of the fort, as in Bihać. In frontier towns those crafts were well-developed which could serve military purposes or produce simpler goods for export to the nearby Venetian market. In all town settlements, from the moment when they were first registered in taxation records, the most numerous artisans were those necessary for the elementary survival of the fort and the suburbium, such as smiths, saddle-makers, blacksmiths, cutlers, tanners, shoemakers, tinkers, carpenters, tailors, furriers and grocers. Other crafts were linked to the size and functional significance of the town, and very frequently implied a higher level of urbanization. This is the case with butchers, goldsmiths, hamamkeepers, slippers-makers, etc. Frequently found in tax records were inhabitants without a specified occupation. According to N. Moačanin, tax registers did not record their occupation because it was not important from the perspective of the central or provincial government. One can assume these were farmers who could additionally engage in small trade, transport, services for the rich etc.49 Soldiers and their families comprised the majority of townsfolk in frontier towns. Military officers especially played an important role in the socio-economic life of some towns since the military provided all those necessary for the everyday functioning of vital state offices (kadı, naib, katib, emin etc.), town dignitaries and religious officials (imam, hatib etc). In the confessional structure there was explicit domination by the Muslim population. For example, of 109 taxpayers in Knin, the center of sancak Krka at the beginning of the seventeenth century, as many as 94.5% were Muslims (103), and only 5.5% Christians (6).50 A similar ratio applied to almost all kasabas. The share of converts among civilian inhabitants was generally very high: out of 103 Muslim taxpayers in Knin 19 of them (or 18.4%) had Abdullah (“slave of God”) inscribed instead of their father’s Christian name, a clear indication for religious conversion. It is very probable that most of them were freed and converted slaves. The fortificatory role had long-term consequences for the development of towns – fortification systems not only hindered the spatial growth of towns, but even more their qualitative development. Constant minor warfare, which prevented a more intense development of urban culture and civilization, directly and indirectly affected the stagnation and depopulation of towns. As is visible from Evliya’s descriptions, in periods of war suburbia would become deserted, the civilian population would take shelter within the walls or escape to safer areas, while the military ranks would organize for military countermeasures. They could be joined by the remaining citizens, who were grouped into smaller armed bands called harami, and would make raids across the border. Western observers were well aware of this and in their espionage reports frequently listed not only how many soldiers there were in towns on the Ottoman side, but also how many inhabitants were capable of bearing arms. Many towns on the frontier defended themselves primarily by raising their citizens to arms. In this way small town-forts managed to survive and enter the eighteenth century when the concentration of people in them instigated a stronger development of trade, administrative and culturaleducational institutions.

49 Moačanin, Town and Country, 76. 50 TKGM, KuK No. 475/ 13, 292–293.

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A plan of Ottoman Klis in Giuseppe Rosaccio’s travelogue, year 1598. Source: Mirko Marković, Hrvatski gradovi na starim vedutama i planovima (Zagreb: AGM, 2001), 566.

The remnant of the Ottoman material culture in Klis today: church of St. Vitus, previous mosque built by Murad Bey Tardić Photo by the author

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A plan of Ottoman Bihać, year 1686. Source: Mirko Marković, Hrvatski gradovi na starim planovima i vedutama (Zagreb: AGM, 2001), 316.

The remnants of the Ottoman material culture in Bihać today: a) The mosque, previous church of St. Anthony of Padua b) Captain’s tower Photos by the author

Urbanization on the Ottoman Borders

A tower with parts of wall of Drniš’s fortress Church of St. Anthony, previous mosque

The remnants of the Ottoman material culture in Drniš today Photos by the author A minaret of an unknown mosque

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The remnants of the Ottoman material culture in Drniš today Photo by the author

Personal Names

Abou-el-Haj, Rifa‘at 24, 30 Adrian VI 142 Ahmed Baba 197, 200, 213 Ahmed III 121, 124, 131, 134 Akyazılı Baba 210, 219 Alaeddin Ali Bey, Mihaloğlu see Mihaloğlu Alaeddin Ali Bey Alberoni, Giulio 19 Alexander I 133, 134, 136, 137, 138, 140 Ali Paşa, Çandarlı see Çandarlı Ali Paşa Ali Pasha 225 Álvares, Francisco 109, 111, 112 Anna Ioannovna 132, 134 Apafi, Mihaly 23 Apraksin, Fyodor M. 125 Apraksin, Peter M. 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 131, 132 Aristotle 83 Aşıkpaşazade 56, 252 Aslanapa, Oktay 252 Auersperg, Andreas von 230 Augustus II 121, 122 Augustus III 40 Avity, Pierre d’ 109, 110, 112 Babich, Marina 126 Babinger, Franz 50, 56 Bali Ağa Ljubunčić 229, 237, 241 Bali Bey, Mihaloğlu/İhtimanî see Mihaloğlu Bali Bey Balta Bey, Mihaloğlu see Mihaloğlu Balta Bey Baranowski, Bohdan 43 Barante, Amable Burgière de 52, 53, 54, 55 Barbu, Zevedei 55, 56, 57, 58 Barkan, Ömer Lütfi 192, 205, 209, 244, 245, 246, 247 Baud, Michiel 259 Baumgarten, Sigmund Jakob 108 Bayezid I 48, 189, 191, 199, 251, 253, 254 Bayezid II 196, 199, 200, 204 Bayezid Paşa 250 Bayram Bey 223

Beattie, James 89 Belon, Pierre 168 Bestuzhev-Ryumin, Dimitriy Andreevich 123, 124 Billaud-Varenne, Nicolas 158 Binbiroklu Ahmed Baba 197, 213 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich 89, 90 Boecler, Johann 106, 109 Bossuet, Jean-Jacques 109 Bouche, Charles François 154 Brandard, Edward Paxman 217 Braudel, Fernand 63 Brekhunenko, Viktor 42 Browne, Edward 223 Brummett, Palmira 257 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc de 89, 108 Bunić, Bilaj 261 Burckhardt, Jacob 46, 47, 48, 49, 53, 59, 60 Burke, Edmund 19 Burke, Peter 45, 90 Busbecq, Augier Ghiselain de 96, 101, 102 Butenev, Apolinariy 139 Çandarlı Ali Paşa 202 Carion, Johann 106, 109, 111 Catherine II 41, 119, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 139, 140 Cellarius, Christoph 106, 110 Charles the Bold 45, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60 Charles V 3, 60, 87 Charles XII 121 Chirikov, Luka 125 Clement VI 149, 154 Clermont-Tonnerre, Stanislas 155, 156 Comenius, Johann Amos 18 Constant, Benjamin 83 Constantine of Russia 136 Constantine Porphyrogenitus 226 Cook, James 108 Coronelli, Vincenco 263, 267 Crucé, Emeric 18, 20 Cuvier, Georges Léopold 89, 90 Cyriacus of Ancona 50

274

Personal Names

Darnton, Robert 46 Dashkov, Dmitry 138 Dávid, Géza 224 Dedesh Ağa 43 Deissmann, Adolf 50 Delanty, Gerard 141 Demir Baba 210, 220 Dernschwam, Hans 96, 102 Diebitsch, Hans Karl Friedrich Anton von 139 Difnik, Franjo 266, 267 Dolfin, Zorzi 50 Düzme Mustafa 189, 196 Ede Bali 252 Eichhorn, Johann Christoph 109 El Hac Mehmed Efendi 128 Enverî 199, 200 Essich, Johann Georg 112 Evliyâ Çelebi 165, 166, 168, 169, 176, 177, 197, 198, 201, 202, 205, 206, 207, 222, 223, 224, 225, 227, 229, 266, 267, 268 Evrenos Bey 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 191, 193, 200, 209, 248, 255 Eyice, Semavi 198, 200, 201 Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi 89 Febvre, Lucien 45, 56 Feichtinger, Hilarius 98 Ferdinand I Habsburg 21, 142 Ferhad Bey, Sokollu see Sokollu Ferhad Bey Filelfo, Giovanni Mario 49 Forster, George 108 Francis I 3 Frankopan, Krsto 142, 144 Gabriel, Albert 250, 251 Gatterer, Johann Christoph 111 Gazi Husrev Bey 227, 228 Gelasius I 82 Gelibolulu Mustafa Âli 163 Georg Podiebrad of Bohemia 17 Georgius de Hungariae 101 Gibbon, Edward 51, 86, 87, 88 Gliwa, Andrzej 41 Golitsyn, Dmitriy M. 125, 126 Golovkin, Gavriil Ivanovich 126 Gottfried, Ludwig 110 Gregory X 149 Greiffenclau, Karl Philipp von 92 Grunebaum, Gustave von 56 Hacı Üveys 229, 238, 239 Halil Bey 263

Halil Hoca 267 Hammer, Joseph von 48

Hamza Ağa Ljubunčić 228, 229

Hamza Bey 251 Hartog, François 81, 82 Hasandedić, Hivziya 231 Hase, Johann Matthias 87 Hatice Sultan 206 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 48, 89 Helwig, Christoph 109 Hensel, Gottfried 88 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 84, 85, 86, 89, 109 Hevrolina, Viktoriya 140 Heyse, Paul 48, 49 Heywood, Colin 189 Hızır Bey, Mihaloğlu see Mihaloğlu Hızır Bey Holberg, Ludvig von 109 Homann, Johann Baptist 5, 6, 87 Hook, Adam 221 Hübner, Johann 5 Huizinga, Johan 56, 59 Hume, David 89 Hüseyin Ekmekcizâde 228, 229 İbrahim Bey, Arnavud Memi Beyoğlu 224, 233, 234 İbrahim Çelebi 166 Ibrahim Efendi 128, 129, 130, 131 İbrahim Paşa, Maktul 168 İbrahim Pasha 224 İlyas Bey 199 İnalcık, Halil 188, 192, 244 İsa Bali, Mihaloğlu/İhtimanî see Mihaloğlu İsa Bali İsa Bey, İshakoğlu see İshakoğlu İsa Bey İshak Bey 193, 209 İshakoğlu İsa Bey 193 Isidore of Seville 106 İskender Bey, Mihaloğlu see Mihaloğlu İskender Bey Islam Bey 43 Islam III Giray 41, 42 Isłan Bey Cegielski 43 Israel, Jonathan Irvine 89 Ivan the Terrible 57 Jacob, Emil 50 Jacquemart, Claude 154, 155 Jaillot, Hubert 4 Jefferson, Thomas 89 Joanna I of Naples 149, 154 John II Casimir 41 John XXII 149 Joseph II 141, 145 Jovanovich, Jovan 136

Personal Names Kamensky, Nikolay 138 Kames, Henry Home 89, 90 Kanitz, Felix 205, 206 Kant, Immanuel 87, 88, 89, 90 Karagöz Mehmed Bey 230 Kasım Bey, Mihaloğlu/İhtimanlu see Mihaloğlu Kasım Bey Kasım Pasha 223, 224 Kıdemli Baba 210, 219 Kiel, Machiel 190, 199, 201, 246, 247 Klishin, Ivan 127, 131, 132 Köhler, Johann David 5 Kolyichov, Stepan Andreevich 127, 128, 130, 131, 132 Koniecpolski, Hetman Stanisław 39 Köse Mihal 199, 255 Kotromanić, Stephan 226 Kozlovskoy, Pankratii 125 Krčelić, Baltazar Adam 141, 144, 145, 146 Kridener, Alexei 135 Küçük Mehmed Pasha 22 Kuefstein, Hans Ludwig Freiherr von 96 Kuripešić, Benedikt 96 Kuyumcı Murad Pasha 223 Lafitau, Joseph-François 84 Lala Şahin Paşa 198, 250, 251 Languschi, Jacopo 50 Leslie, Paul 98 Leszczyński, Stanislaw 121, 122 Lilienfeld, Jakob Heinrich von 19 Lime, Harry 46 Linné, Carl von 88, 89, 108 Lizogub, Jacob 127

Ljubunčić, Bali Ağa see Bali Ağa Ljubunčić Ljubunčić, Hamza Ağa see Hamza Ağa Ljubunčić

Loewenberg, Peter 55, 57 Louis XI 17, 53, 60, 154 Louis XIV 3, 27, 60, 82, 83 Louis XV 151 Luther, Martin 99, 101

Mably, Gabriel Bonnot de 107 Mackenzie, William 217 Mahir Aydin 221 Mahmud Bey, Mihaloğlu see Mihaloğlu Mahmud Bey Mahmud Paşa 206 Mahmud ІІ 139 Malkoç Bey 225 Malouet, Pierre Victor 155, 157 Marko Kraljević 143 Marsigli, Luigi Ferdinando 29, 36 Matsche, Franz 5

275

Maury, Jean Sifrein 155, 156 Mavrocordato, Alexander 31 Mavrokordato, Ioannis 126 Mažuran, Ive 223 Mehmed Ağa 128, 228, 229 Mehmed Ali Pasha 139 Mehmed Ali Pasha 139 Mehmed Bey, Karamanoğlu 250 Mehmed Bey, Mihaloğlu see Mihaloğlu Mehmed Bey Mehmed Bey, Yahyapaşaoğlu 231 Mehmed Efendi 131 Mehmed I 196, 250, 251 Mehmed II 45, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 196, 200, 251 Melanchthon, Philipp 111 Menou, Jacques 154 Mezid Bey 254 Michelet, Jules 46 Mihal Bey/Gazi Michal 191, 195, 196, 197, 202, 203, 206, 211, 212, 254 Mihaloğlu Alaeddin Ali Bey 191, 196, 200, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 216 Mihaloğlu Bali Bey 198, 200, 203 Mihaloğlu Balta Bey 199 Mihaloğlu Hızır Bey 200, 204, 205 Mihaloğlu İsa Bali 198, 203 Mihaloğlu İskender Bey 196, 200, 202 Mihaloğlu Kasım Bey 198 Mihaloğlu Mahmud Bey 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 209, 214, 215 Mihaloğlu Mehmed Bey 196, 198, 203, 205, 206 Mihaloğlu Süleyman Bey 205, 206, 207, 209, 216 Mihaloğlu Yahşi Bey 196, 197 Miošić, Andrija Kačić 142 Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti 155 Missy, Jean Rousset de 107 Moačanin, Nenad 263, 268 Montauban, Humbert de 149 Müneccimbaşı, Ahmed b. Lütfullah 169 Murad Bey Tardić 267, 269 Murad I 191, 194, 195, 202, 250, 251, 253, 254 Murad II 189, 196, 200, 251, 254 Murad III 73 Muratori, Ludovico 144 Mustafa II 24 Mustafa Pasha Sokollu/Sokollović see Sokollu/ Sokollović Mustafa Pasha Mustafa ІV 137 Napoleon I 3, 136, 158, 159 Naucler, Johannes 106 Neković, Atanas 136 Nemanić, Constantine 136

276

Personal Names

Nesselrode, Karl 139, 140 Nicolle, David 221 Nikolay І 138, 139, 140 Offerhaus, Leonardus 109 Orhan 165, 248, 250, 251, 252, 253 Osman I 165, 188, 248, 249, 250, 252, 255 Osman II 29 Osman Pasha 125 Otman Baba 210, 218, 231, 248 Öttingen, Wolfgang 31 Palibin, Andrei 127 Panofsky, Erwin 47, 51 Paşa Yiğit 191, 193, 255 Paul І 135 Pehlivan Hasan 228, 229 Penn, William 18, 20 Peresvetov, Ivan 57 Perko Mehmed Sipahi 228, 229 Perrault, Charles 82, 83 Peter I 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 127, 131, 132, 133, 134, 137 Petrarch, Francesco 51 Philip III 149 Philip IV 149 Piccolomini, Aeneas Silvius 16, 110 Pinon, Pierre 243, 244 Pius II see Piccolomini, Aeneas Silvius Pius VI 151, 155, 158 Poniatowski, Stanisław August 135 Postinpuş Baba 252 Power, Daniel 45, 185 Procopius of Caesarea 144 Quiclet, Jean Promé 202 Quinet, Edgar 85 Raby, Julian 50 Raleigh, Walter 109 Rami Mehmed Pasha 31 Ranke, Leopold von 48, 52, 57, 107 Ravlić, Aleksander 230 Raymond VI 149 Razumovsky, Andrei 135, 136 Relković, Matija Antun 141, 142, 143, 144 Richelieu, Armand Jean du Plessis de 83 Rickman, Peter 139 Ripa, Cesare 90 Robespierre, Maximilien 153, 154 Rodriga, Daniel 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 73, 76 Romanov, Michael 39 Rosaccio, Giuseppe 269 Rumyantsev, Nikolay Petrovich 138

Saint Pierre, Charles-Irénée Castel, Abbé de 19 Saurau, Michael von 96 Savoyen, Eugen von 119 Schedel, Hartmann 106, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113 Schendel, Willem van 259 Schiller, Friedrich 109 Schlik, Leopold 31 Schlosser, Christoph 107 Schlözer, August Ludwig 105, 106, 109, 110, 111, 112 Schultz, Daniel 43 Schweigger, Salomon 96, 98, 167 Scott, Walter 46, 53 Seid Traljić 230 Selim I 190, 196, 198, 199 Selim II 73, 74, 75, 199 Selim ІІІ 134, 137 Semler, Johann Salomon 108 Sen’, Dmitrii 42 Sengre, Henri 4 Seutter, Matthias 5 Seyyid Battal Gazi 210 Shafirov, Peter Pavlovich 121, 122, 123, 124, 126, 127, 128, 131, 132 Sheremetev, Boris Petrovich 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 131, 132 Sheremetev, Mikhail Borisovich 122, 123, 124 Sigismund I 251 Simpson, Edward 109 Sinan Çavuş 228, 229 Sinzendorff, Joachim Freiherr von 167 Skoropadskii, Ivan 125 Sleidan, Johannes 106, 109 Soemmerring, Samuel Thomas von 89 Sokollu Ferhad Bey 228, 229, 230 Sokollu/Sokollović Mustafa Pasha 229, 240 Soranzo, Giacomo 73 Souche, Ludwig Raduit de 98 Stefan Neman 136 Stjepan Vukčić Kosača 226 Strahlenberg, Philipp Johann von 87 Stratimirović, Stefan 136 Stroganov, Grigoriy 138 Suda, Ivan 127, 131 Süleyman Bey, Mihaloğlu see Mihaloğlu Süleyman Bey Süleyman I 21, 67, 97, 98, 142, 143,168, 199, 223, 224, 225 Sulima, Ivan 125 Sully, Maximiliеn de Béthune 17 Szapolyai, John 21 Tafferner, Paul 98 Tamara, Vasiliy 135

Personal Names Teufel, Hans Christoph von 95 Tevyashov, Ivan 127, 130 Thauszy, Francis 146 Tiepolo, Giambattista 91, 92 Timur 48, 165, 199 Timurtaş Paşa 251 Todorov, Nikolai 245, 246 Tolstoy, Peter Andreyevich 122, 123 Trifonov, Yurdan 207 Tughay Bey 39 Turahan Bey 190, 191, 194 Tyafkelev, Kutlu-Muhammed Mameshich 128, 131 Ukraintsev, Yemelyan 125, 127 Ungnad, David 96, 98 Uzun Hasan 58, 59, 60 Vattel, Emeric de 40 Veinstein, Gilles 244 Verninac de Saint-Maur, Raymond de 153 Vitezović, Pavao Ritter 143, 144 Vives, Jean-Louis 17

277

Vladević, Dometian 138 Vladislaus IV 39 Voltaire, Arouet, François-Marie 84, 85, 86, 88, 109 Vrachanski, Sofroniy 138 Vukčić, Hvorje 226

127,

Walzer, Michael 55 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 83 Wittek, Paul 50, 51, 53, 185 Woods, John E. 58, 60 Wrede, Martin 5 Yahşi Bey, Mihaloğlu see Mihaloğlu Yahşi Bey Yakovalı Hasan Pasha 225 Yürekli, Zeynep 189 Yusuf Paşa 254 Yusuf Paşa Mašković 263 Zambin, Ivan 136 Zhuravskii, Vasilii 127 Zrinski, Nikola Šubić 143

Place Names

Aachen 107 Adrianople/Edirne 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 128, 129, 130, 137, 139, 165, 166, 193, 194, 195, 196, 207, 211, 212, 221, 225, 253, 254, 255 Adriatic Sea 16, 22, 28, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 75, 76, 136, 186, 201, 228, 258, 261, 264, 265 Aegean Sea 16, 28, 255 Africa 88, 90, 91, 92, 110, 112, 141, 257 Akkirman 198 Akkoyunlu 58, 61 Albania 64, 72 Aleppo 64, 71 Alsace 3, 4, 5, 110 Altranstädt 121 Amasya 96 America 80, 81, 83, 90, 91, 92, 110, 112, 141, 146 Amiens 54 Anatolia 58, 169, 188, 210, 243, 244, 248, 254, 256 Ancona 50, 69, 72 Ankara 189, 196, 199, 200, 251 Antalya 75, 244 Arel’/Orel’ 123, 125, 127, 128, 129, 130 Asia 40, 66, 88, 90, 91, 92, 110, 112, 134, 141, 143, 185, 243, 249, 250, 256 Athens 83 Austria 79, 110, 119, 135, 142, 145, 146, 279 Austrian Netherlands 4 Avignon 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159 Azov 121, 122, 123, 125, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 134 Azov Sea 121, 132

Belgium 145 Belgrade 31, 33, 58, 98, 118, 119, 134, 138, 142, 144, 201, 222, 223, 224, 231 Bender 125, 127 Berlin 43, 96, 135 Bessarabia 137 Bihać 257, 261, 264, 265, 267, 268, 270 Bithynia 185, 187, 200, 244, 247, 256 Bitola/Manastır 165, 196, 230 Bizye see Vize Black Sea 16, 39, 41, 133, 135, 136, 138, 139 Bohemia 17, 24, 27 Bologna 144 Bordeaux 79 Bosnia 28, 67, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 196, 221, 222, 224, 225, 226, 228, 229, 230, 236, 246, 257, 264 Bosnian eyalet 257, 260, 261, 265 Bosphoros 221 Bouches-du-Rhône 157, 158 Braïla 221 Bratislava/Pressburg 97 Brekovica 261 Brysis see Pınarhisar Bucharest 138 Buda 98, 102, 224, 257 Bug 125 Bulgaria 63, 135, 138, 185, 194, 202, 205, 216, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 224, 246, 247, 255, 256 Burgundy 3, 5, 52, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60 Bursa 168, 169, 200, 207, 225, 250, 251, 252, 254, 255 Byzantine Empire 48, 57, 58, 187, 195, 248

Babylonian Empire 106 Bačka 222 Baden 6, 112 Bakhmut 130, 132 Balchik/Balçık 219 Banja Luka 226, 229, 230 Basle 47, 48, 59 Bavaria 33, 110 Beauvais 54

Čačvina 261 Cairo 71 Canada 84 Candia 64, 71 Caribbean Sea 33 Carlowitz see Karlowitz Castelnuovo/Nova 68, 74, 75 Caucasus 257 Çekirge 251

Preface Central Europe 15, 20, 30, 46, 80, 99, 115, 116, 117, 118, 222 Cetina 266 China 45, 85, 86, 107, 112 Clissa see Klis Cologne 19 Comtat Venaissin 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 157, 159 Constantinople/Istanbul 17, 24, 31, 48, 49, 50, 60, 66, 70, 71, 72, 75, 86, 95, 96, 97, 98, 116, 118, 119, 120, 122, 123, 124, 127, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 167, 201, 207, 221, 225, 244, 251, 264 Copenhagen 43, 109 Cossowa 48 Cracow 39 Cres 144 Crimea 39, 40, 41, 135, 138, 257 Crimean Khanate 39, 41, 278 Croatia 72, 97, 110, 142, 144, 146, 147, 221, 230, 258 Cyprus 30, 64, 68, 72, 75, 262, 266 Dacia 135 Dalmatia 31, 67, 72, 221, 222, 226, 230, 236 Damascus 199 Danube 33, 39, 97, 98, 118, 119, 128, 136, 137, 138, 139, 145, 186, 196, 221, 222, 257 Dardanelles 221 Debrecen 97 Denmark 110, 112 Dijon 58 Dimetoka/Didymoteichon 165, 196, 221 Djakovo/Đakovo 224, 230, 233, 234, 235, 236 Dnieper 42, 123, 125, 128, 129 Dobrudja 140, 221 Dolna Giriviçe 204 Don 129, 130 Donje Hrvace 266 Drava/Drau 97, 264 Dresden 142 Drniš 227, 230, 266, 267, 271, 272 Dubrovnik 68, 69, 70, 72, 74, 75, 95 Eastern Europe 16, 17, 18, 20, 80, 81, 110, 113, 115, 221 Edessa see Vodina Edirne see Adrianopel Egypt 143 Eidgenossenschaft see Swiss Confederation England 25, 27, 80, 108, 109, 111, 112, 119, 135, 145 Erlau 224 Esseg see Osijek Esztergom see Gran Ethiopia 109

279

Filibe see Plovdiv Florence 65 France 3, 4, 5, 6, 18, 19, 25, 27, 28, 33, 34, 35, 53, 55, 57, 60, 80, 83, 108, 109, 112, 135, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159 Franche-Comté 3, 4 Franconia 110 Frisia 110 Fünfkirchen see Pécs Gabela 261 Gelibolulu 163, 164, 170 Genoa 65 Geredelü 196 Germany 3, 5, 17, 80, 105, 110 Giannitsa see Yenice-i Vardar Gigen 198, 203 Gökdere 251 Gornje Hrvace 266 Göttingen 106, 109 Gračac 261, 262 Gran/Esztergom 97, 98 Greece 47, 63, 88, 110, 163, 165, 182, 183, 221 Groningen 109 Gümülcine/Komotini 165, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 181, 182, 183, 184, 193, 221, 255 Habsburg Monarchy 23, 24, 30, 31, 33, 36, 257, 258, 259, 262, 264, 265 Halle 107, 108, 109 Haskovo/Hasköy 218 Hersek 72, 75, 191 Herzegovina 224, 226, 228, 257 Hlivna see İhlivne Hohenlohe 110 Holland see Netherlands Holy Land 95, 96 Holy Roman Empire 3, 5, 6, 57, 87, 108, 110, 112, 116 Hungary 4, 17, 21, 22, 25, 30, 35, 95, 97, 101, 110, 186, 221, 225, 261 İhlivne see Livno Ihtiman 194, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 207, 209, 210, 214, 215, 221, 255 Ilok 222 India 86, 96, 109 Ionian Sea 28 İpsala 165 Iran 257 Ireland 111 Isperih 220 İsplit see Split Istanbul see Constantinople

280

Preface

Italy 29, 46, 47, 49, 50, 63, 64, 65, 87, 112, 159 Izmail 128 Izmir 71 İznik/Nicea 169, 252, 253 Jassy 135 Kanizsa 26, 224 Karaferya/Veria 166 Karlıeli 74 Karlowitz/Carlowitz/Sremski Karlovci 21, 23, 24, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 116, 117, 118, 119, 126, 136, 143, 144, 186, 258 Kavala 168 Kharkov 126, 127, 128 Kiev 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 138 Kilis/Klis/Clissa 67, 68, 70, 71, 73, 75, 76 225, 228, 257, 261, 265, 266, 267, 269 Kışin 204 Kladuša 261 Knin 258, 261, 268 Komorn/Komárom/Komárno 97 Komotini see Gümülcine Kossovo 48 Kostajnica 261, 265 Kozana 166 Krk 144 Krka 257, 263, 268 Kuban 123 Küçük Kaynarca 120, 135, 139 Kyustendil 201, 224 Larissa see Yenişehir-i Fener Leiden 109 Leipzig 19, 107 Lepanto 68, 75, 116 Lesser Wallachia 32 Lezhë/Leş 68 Lipovać 222 Livansko Polje 226 Livno/İhlivne/Hlivna 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 236, 237, 238, 240, 241, 261 Livonia 19, 121 Livorno 65, 67 Lofça 203 Lončarić 265 London 40, 55, 109, 185, 217 Lorraine 3, 4, 5 Lubna 128 Luxemburg 58 Macedonia 164, 167, 175, 182, 230, 255 Magdeburg 109 Magellan Islands 110

Makarska 68, 261 Mamluk Empire 57 Manastır see Bitola Maros/Mureş/Moriš 31, 33, 34, 118, 119 Marseille 158 Mecca 266 Metz 3 Middle Asia 137 Middle East 49, 63, 71, 79, 137 Moesia 140 Mohács 116, 224 Moldavia 29, 32, 134, 135, 137 Mongol Empire 48 Montenegro 42 Morea 28, 74 Moscow 39, 40, 126, 127, 131 Mostar 225, 230 Muscovy 17, 39, 41, 57 Nadin 261, 262 Nancy 55, 58, 59, 60 Narenta 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74 Nehvorosch 128 Neiße 6 Neretva 260, 261 Netherlands/Holland/United Provinces/ States General 3, 4, 5, 6, 25, 57, 80, 108, 109, 112, 119, 145 Neuss 54 Nicaea see İznik Nicaean Empire 249 Niğbolu see Nikopol Nijmegen 3 Nikopol/Nicopolis/Niğbolu 138, 191, 198, 202, 251 North America 80, 81 Northern Europe 115 Norway 110 Nova see Castelnuovo Nova Zagora 219 Novi 33, 262 Novi Bečej 222 Novi Obrovac 261 Nučak 261 Nuremberg 5, 109 Nystad 121 Obrovac 227, 228, 261, 262 Oder 6 Ofen/Buda 98 Offerhaus 109 Okhmativ/ Ochmatów 39 Orel’ see Arel’ Osijek/Esseg 142, 223, 224 Ostoje 226

Place Names Ostrovica 227 Ottoman Empire/Ottoman state 16, 18, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 36, 39, 48, 50, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60, 63, 64, 65, 66, 69, 70, 73, 88, 95, 96, 98, 99, 101, 102, 115, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 127, 129, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 139, 140, 141, 145, 169, 182, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 192, 199, 210, 243, 244, 248, 249, 254, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261 Padua 270 Pakistan 257 Palermo 63 Pannonian Plain 23 Paris 4, 7, 79, 91, 109, 119, 149, 250 Passarowitz/Požarevac 32, 33, 119, 144 Pécs/Fünfkirchen 224, 225 Penza 123 Perekop 39, 127, 128 Perevolochna 128 Persia 29, 67, 112 Petrinja 261 Petrovo Polje 228 Philadelphia 79 Piedmont 57 Pınarhisar/Brysis 194, 195, 196, 197, 207, 208, 209, 213 Pleven/Plevne 191, 194, 196, 200, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 216, 217 Plovdiv/Filibe 165, 193, 196, 221, 223, 255 Podolia 29, 32 Poland / Poland-Lithuan ia / Polish-Lithuan ian Commonwealth 20, 26, 31, 32, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 121, 122, 125, 126, 127, 145, 146 Poltava 87, 122, 131 Portugal 27, 111, 113, 146 Potsdam 79 Poznan 121 Prague 5 Pressburg see Bratislava Protoch’ 128 Prussia 27, 33, 80, 110, 142, 145 Pruth 121, 122, 134 Przemyśl 41 Pskov 121 Pyrenees 3 Rastatt 112 Ravni Kotari 261 Rawa 42 Republic of Saint Marko see Venice Rhine V, 3, 4, 6 Rhône 149, 155, 157, 158

281

Right-Bank Ukraine 125, 126 Rimini 49 Rioni 139 Ripač 261 Roman Empire 85, 86, 87, 93, 106, 110 Rome 26, 67, 84, 85, 86, 90, 110, 150, 151 Rovine 143, 202 Rumeli/Rumelia 58, 137, 164, 169, 170, 191, 194, 243, 246 Russe/Rusçuk 221 Russia 19, 39, 41, 42, 80, 81, 109, 111, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 127, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 145, 146, Ryibinsk 127 Saint Gotthard 116 Saint Petersburg 43, 79, 123, 124, 126, 127, 128, 129, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 277 Samara 122, 123, 125, 127, 128, 129 Samokov 201 San Stefano 139 Santo Domingo 33 Sarajevo/Saray Bosna 68, 70, 71, 73, 193, 225, 230, 255, 265, 266 Saranta Eklesias 194 Saray Bosna see Sarajevo Sardinia 33 Sassanid Empire 48 Sava 26, 33, 119 Saxony 26, 40, 110, 121 Sazara 196 Scandinavia 81 Scotland 27, 55, 111 Şebenik 68, 74 Sedd-i İslam 261 Selânik see Thessaloniki Semendire 191, 223 Serbia 28, 136, 138 Serres/Siroz 165, 169, 170, 193, 225 Šibenik 68, 258 Sicily 63, 135, 145 Siklos 225 Silesia 4, 145 Silistra/Silistre 138, 191, 221, 222, 232 Sinj 228, 261, 266 Sirem 222, 223 Sisak 142, 223 Sistova see Svishtov Skopje/Üsküb 68, 71, 165, 193, 196, 209, 221, 225, 255 Skradin 228, 261 Slavonia 141, 142, 147, 221, 222, 224, 225, 231 Slovakia 22

282

Place Names

Sofia 68, 71, 198, 221, 277, 278, 279 South America 81, 109, 146 South-East Europe 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 81, 115, 116, 117, 135, 137, 221 Spain 27, 33, 60, 69, 70, 110, 112, 113, 145, 146 Spalato see Split Spanish Netherlands 3, 4 Sparta 83 Split/Spalato/İsplit 63, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 228, 258, 265 Srem see Syrmia Sremska Mitrovica 222, 223 Sremski Karlovci see Karlowitz States General see Netherlands Stipion/Stiponje 198 Stockholm 43, 85, 87 Storgosia 202 Straits 58, 59, 133, 136, 137 Strandja Mountain/Yıldız Dağları 194 Strasbourg 3, 109 Strmica 261 Stuhlweissenburg/Székesfehérvár 98 Šumen 221, 222 Svishtov/Sistova 35, 118, 138 Sweden 109, 110, 112, 121, 124 Swiss Confederation/Eidgenossenschaft 3, 5, 58 Syria 64 Syrmia/Srem 22, 23, 31, 118, 222 Székesfehérvár see Stuhlweissenburg Szigeth/Szigetvár 142, 143, 225 Szigetvár see Szigeth Taganrog 122 Taşkapı 250 Temesvár 23, 34, 115, 118, 224 Terjan 58, 59, 60 Thessaloniki/Selânik 74, 165, 193, 221, 225, 253 Thor 130, 132 Thrace 140, 164, 167, 170, 182, 185, 194, 231, 246, 255 Tırhala 194 Tisza/Tisa 31, 33, 34, 118, 119 Totis/Tata 98 Toul 3 Toulouse 149 Transylvania 17, 21, 32, 34 Trier 3 Trikala 194 Trogir 258 Troy 110, 143 Tundja 196, 212, 254 Turahan 190, 191, 194 Turkey 23, 63, 110, 111, 112, 124, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 145, 168, 185, 194, 195 Tuzlovaya 130

Udbina 261, 262 Ukraine 123, 125, 126, 127, 128, 138 Una 26, 33, 260, 262, 265 United Provinces, Republic of see Netherlands United States of America 80 Uppsala 85 Üsküb see Skopje Utrecht 112, 278 Valona 74 Valréas 149 Varna 58, 221 Vasvár 118 Vaucluse 157, 158 Venice/Venetian Republic/Republic of Saint Marko 17, 18, 20, 28, 29, 31, 33, 39, 57, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 75, 76, 95, 144, 257, 258, 261, 262, 263, 265, 266 Verdun 3, 27 Veria see Karaferya Vidin 26, 138, 191, 203, 221 Vienna 5, 23, 32, 33, 34, 40, 95, 96, 98, 116, 118, 119, 120, 135, 140, 143, 144, 145, 257, 262 Vize/Bizye 165, 194, 195, 196 Vodina/Edessa 165, 166 Voronezh 127 Vrana 262, 263 Vrgorac 261 Vrlika 228, 261, 266 Wallachia 32, 110, 134, 135, 137 Warsaw 39, 40, 43, 121, 278 West Indies 109, 110, 146 Western Europe 30, 33, 80, 102, 115 Westfalia 110 Wittenberg 109 Würzburg 91 Yedikule 96, 122, 123 Yemen 40 Yenice-i Vardar/Giannitsa 165, 166, 169, 170, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 193, 209, 219, 221 Yenişehir-i Fener/Larissa 166, 194, 252 Yıldız Dağları see Strandja Mountain Zadar 258 Zadneprovskaya Ukraine 126, 127 Zadvarje 261 Zagreb 144, 146, 279 Zara 68 Zemunik 261, 266 Ziemia Przemyska 41 Zrmanja 228 Zsitvatorok 25, 118, 223

CONTRIBUTORS Dr. Maria BARAMOVA is Assistant Professor in the Early Modern History of South-Eastern Europe in the Faculty of History, Department for Byzantine and Balkan Studies at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”. Her main research interests and publications include the history of Early Modern Ottoman-Habsburg political relations and geopolitics, the history of warfare, peace treaties, and environmental history. She has been Research Fellow at the University of Vienna, the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, and the Leibniz Institute for European History, Mainz. E-mail: [email protected] Dr. Tatiana BAZAROVA is senior researcher and the main keeper responsible for the Russian section of the Archives at the St. Petersburg Institute of the History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Scientific and Historical Archive and Sources Study Group. Her main research interests and publications focus on Russian history and the research into sources from the first half of the eighteenth century. E-mail: [email protected]. Dr. Grigor BOYKOV is a Research Fellow at the Center for Regional Studies and Analyses and offers courses in the Department of History, Sofia University. Previously he was a Research Fellow at the Netherlands Institute in Turkey and held an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the American Research Institute in Turkey. He has published on historical demography, urban planning and the architecture of the Balkans in the Ottoman period. E-mail: [email protected] Dr. Vera COSTANTINI is Assistant Professor of the Economic History of the Mediterranean and Ottoman Language and Paleography at the “Ca’ Foscari” University, Venice. Her research and publications deal with late-sixteenth-century Mediterranean space according to Ottoman sources; nineteenth-century Ottoman diplomatic sources on early Italian state and nation-building processes; Ottoman-Venetian economic contacts in the Adriatic. An Associate Research Fellow at the Italian Academy at Columbia University in 2011, she is member of the Italian Society of Economic Historians (SISE). E-mail: [email protected] Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. Heinz DUCHHARDT holds Chairs of Early Modern and Modern History at the Universities of Bayreuth and Münster respectively and was Director of the Institute of European History, Mainz, from 1994 to 2011. Since 2009 he has been President of the Max Weber Foundation. His research interests and publications include international relations in pre-modern Europe, Early Modern peace treaties, the discussion on Europe, the revolutionary and Napoleonic era and the history of the discipline and of historiography. He is member of several European academies. E-mail: [email protected] Dr. Martin ESPENHORST (né PETERS) is a Research Fellow at the Leibniz-Institute for European History (2003–2014), was lecturer at Penn State University, Pa./USA (2002) and has received

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Contributors

grants from the Academy of Budapest and the University of Marburg (1991–1993). His main interests and publications are connected to the History of Sciences in Early Modern times, the History of Peace 1500–1800, cooperation theories in the nineteenth century. Email: [email protected] Prof. Dr. Colin HEYWOOD is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Maritime Historical Studies Centre, University of Hull. His main research interests and publications are focused on Ottoman history in the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries, and Mediterranean maritime history in the Early Modern period. He is also a Research Associate at SOAS, University of London; and has recently been visiting professor at the University of Chicago and the University of Cyprus. E-mail: [email protected] Dr. Naoum KAYTCHEV is Assistant Professor in the Modern History of South-Eastern Europe at the Faculty of History, Department for Byzantine and Balkan Studies at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”. His main research interests and publications are focused on problems of nation-building and nationalism, as well as on the history of education and textbook research in the context of the nineteenth-century intellectual and social history of Croatia, Serbia and Bulgaria. E-mail: [email protected] Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Machiel KIEL was Professor at the University of Utrecht and has worked as a Professor and Guest Professor at Harvard and Moscow State University; he was Director of Research at the CNRS in Paris. He last held the post of Director of the Netherlands Institute in Turkey and at the same time taught Islamic Architecture at Istanbul Technical University. His research interests and publications are dedicated to the History and Art of the Ottoman Balkans. In 2013 he was made an Honorary Member of the Turkish Historical Society and in 2014 received the Grand Medallion of Merit of the Turkish Republic. E-mail: [email protected] Mariya KIPROVSKA is a Research Fellow at the Center for Regional Studies and Analyses at the University of Sofia “St. Kliment Ohridski”. Her research and publication focus on Ottoman conquest in the Balkans and the role of the raider (akıncı) commanders’ families in the process; the incorporation of the Balkan elite into the Ottoman state; the role of the Ottoman border nobility in the state-building processes in the Empire; and, more recently, environmental history and modern Turkish history. E-mail: [email protected] Prof. Dr. Dariusz KOŁODZIEJCZYK is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Warsaw and at the Polish Academy of Sciences. He has published extensively on the Ottoman Empire, the Crimean Khanate and Early Modern diplomacy. He is currently Vice-President of the Comité International des Études Pré-ottomanes et Ottomanes (CIEPO) and has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Notre Dame, Hokkaido University and the Collège de France. E-mail: [email protected] Prof. Heath W. LOWRY has been the Atatürk Professor of Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies at Princeton University since 1993. Between 1983 and 1993 he established and directed the Institute of Turkish Studies in Washington, D.C. Currently he teaches and serves as an Advisor to the Bahçeşehir University Board of Trustees. His research interests and publications are focused on various topics related to early Ottoman history and frontier society in the Ottoman Balkans. E-mail: [email protected] Prof. Dr. Plamen MITEV is Professor of Bulgarian History (eighteenth to nineteenth centuries) in the Faculty of History, Department for Bulgarian History at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”. His main research interests and publications are connected to the history of the Bulgarian National Revival, the Bulgarian National revolution in the eighteenth to nineteenth century, economic

Contributors

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history and demography, the Eastern Question and the Balkans, Russia and the Balkans during the Crimean War of 1853–1856. Since 2007 he has been Dean of the Faculty of History at Sofia University. E-mail: [email protected] Dr. habil. Ivan PARVEV is Associate Professor in the History of South-Eastern Europe (sixteenth to nineteenth centuries) in the Faculty of History, Department for Byzantine and Balkan Studies at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”. His main research interests and publications include Austrian-Ottoman and German-Ottoman political relations in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, the Eastern Question and the Balkans in European power politics of the nineteenth century. Since 2007 he has been Head of the Department for Byzantine and Balkan Studies. E-mail: [email protected] Jovan PEŠALJ is a doctoral candidate at the Institute for History, Leiden University. He works in the Department of Economic and Social History at the University of Vienna. His current research and publications are focused on the eighteenth-century mobility-control regime on the HabsburgOttoman border. E-mail: [email protected] Univ. Prof. Dr. Wolfgang SCHMALE is Professor for Modern and Contemporary History in the Faculty for Historical and Cultural Studies, Department of History, Vienna University. His main field of research and publications is general European history with a special focus on the eighteenth century, French and legal history as well as men’s studies and the Digital Humanities. He has been Visiting Professor at the Hebrew University Jerusalem, Université Paris 1 SorbonnePanthéon, Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”. E-mail: [email protected] Dr. Kornelija Jurin STARČEVIĆ is Assistant Professor in Early Modern Croatian and Ottoman History at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the History Department at Zagreb University. Her main research interests and publications are dedicated to the History of CroatianOttoman relations in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, Ottoman social, demographic, economic and military history related to the Western Balkans, Ottoman Heritage, and Frontier Studies. E-mail: [email protected] Dr. Rossitza TASHEVA is Associate Professor in Modern History in the Faculty of History, Department of Modern and Contemporary History at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”. Her research and publications focus on the social and political history of France: the evolution of Absolutism, the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, Enlightenment thinkers, the Jacobins in the French Revolution, French International Relations during the Revolution, and the French CounterRevolution in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries – ideas, actions and tendencies. E-mail: [email protected] Univ. Prof. Dr. Karl VOCELKA is a retired Professor for Central European History at the University of Vienna and was for many years Head of the History Department. He also taught for many American programmes in Vienna and organized different historical exhibitions in Austria. His main research and publication interests lie in the Early Modern Period, the history of the Habsburg dynasty and Ottoman-Habsburg relations. E-mail: [email protected]