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The figure of the renegade - a European Christian or Jew who had converted to Islam and was now serving the Ottoman sultan - is omnipresent in all genres produced by those early modern Christian Europeans who wrote about the Ottoman Empire. As few contemporaries failed to remark, converts were disproportionately represented among those who governed, administered, and fought for the sultan. Unsurprisingly, therefore, renegades have attracted considerable attention from historians of Europe as well as students of European literature. Until very recently, however, Ottomanists have been surprisingly silent on the presence of Christian-European converts in the Ottoman military-administrative elit...
Examines why the figure of the renegade-a European Christian or Jew who had converted to Islam and was now serving the Ottoman sultan-is omnipresent in writings on the fifteenth to seventeenth century Ottoman Empire, when the Ottoman sultans posed a major political, military, and ideological challenge to Christian princes in Europe.
The topic of religious conversion into and out of Islam as a historical phenomenon is mired in a sea of debate and misunderstanding. It has often been viewed as the permanent crossing of not just a religious divide, but in the context of the early modern Mediterranean also political, cultural and geographic boundaries. Reading between the lines of a wide variety of sources, however, suggests that religious conversion between Christianity, Judaism and Islam often had a more pragmatic and prosaic aspect that constituted a form of cultural translation and a means of establishing communal belonging through the shared, and often contested articulation of religious identities. The chapters in this...
In Well-Connected Domains, Pascal W. Firges, Tobias P. Graf, Christian Roth, and Gülay Tulasoglu showcase recent scholarship on the deep entanglements between the Ottoman Empire and the world beyond its borders, offering novel interpretations and fresh impulses for future research.
Well-Connected Domains offers a fresh perspective on the history of the Ottoman Empire as deeply connected to the world beyond its borders by way of trade, warfare and diplomacy, as much as intellectual exchanges, migration, and personal relations. While for decades the Ottoman Empire has been portrayed as largely aloof and distant from - as well as disinterested in - developments abroad, this collection of essays edited by Pascal W. Firges, Tobias P. Graf, Christian Roth, and Gülay Tulasoğlu highlights the deep entanglement between the Ottoman realm and its European neighbors. Taking their starting points from individual case studies, the contributions offer novel interpretations of a variety of aspects of Ottoman history as well as new impulses for future research. Contributors are: Sotirios Dimitriadis, Suraiya N. Faroqhi, Maximilian Hartmuth, Gábor Kármán, Aylin Koçunyan, Viorel Panaite, Nur Sobers-Khan, Michael Talbot, and Joshua M. White
Consumption Corridors: Living a Good Life within Sustainable Limits explores how to enhance peoples’ chances to live a good life in a world of ecological and social limits. Rejecting familiar recitations of problems of ecological decline and planetary boundaries, this compact book instead offers a spirited explication of what everyone desires: a good life. Fundamental concepts of the good life are explained and explored, as are forces that threaten the good life for all. The remedy, says the book’s seven international authors, lies with the concept of consumption corridors, enabled by mechanisms of citizen engagement and deliberative democracy. Across five concise chapters, readers are i...
"The Discovery of Ottoman Greece unearths forgotten research by the early modern philhellenist and Lutheran reformer Martin Crusius. His extensive study of Greek Orthodox life, including interviews with traveling alms-seekers, sheds light on European views of Greek decline under Ottoman rule as well as on the global ambitions of Lutheran reform"--
While the Ottoman conquest of the Mamluk realm in 1516-17 doubtlessly changed the balance of political power in Egypt and Greater Syria, the changes must be seen as a wide-ranging transition process. The present collection of essays provides several case studies on the changing situation during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and explains how the reconfiguration of political power affected both Egypt and Greater Syria. With reference to the first volume (2017), this second volume continues the debate on key issues of the transition period with contributions by scholars from both Mamluk and Ottoman studies. By combining these perspectives, the authors provide a more comprehensive and nuanced picture of the process of transformation from Mamluk to Ottoman rule.
In the early sixteenth century, a series of military campaigns between the Mediterranean Sea and Persian Gulf brought the entirety of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers under Ottoman control. This book offers a history of this rare political unification of the longest rivers in West Asia and its impact on the Ottoman state, provincial society, and the environment.
In A Seventeenth-Century Odyssey Gábor Kármán reconstructs the life story of a lesser-known Hungarian orientalist, Jakab Harsányi Nagy. The discussion of his activities as a school teacher in Transylvania, as a diplomat and interpreter at the Sublime Porte, as a secretary of a Moldavian voivode in exile, as well as a court councillor of Friedrich Wilhelm, the Great Elector of Brandenburg not only sheds light upon the extraordinarily versatile career of this individual, but also on the variety of circles in which he lived. Gábor Kármán also gives the first historical analysis of Harsányi’s contribution to Turkish studies, the Colloquia Familiaria Turcico-latina (1672).