Research

“Gurbet Istanbul”: Being an Immigrant in the Ottoman Capital, 1500-1800

Denise Klein

The aim of this project is to produce a monograph dealing with the experience of immigration to Istanbul between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. During that period, the capital of the Ottoman Empire was one of the most vibrant and diverse cities of the world, attracting newcomers not only from the provinces, but also from beyond the borders of the empire. Unlike existing scholarship that tends to discuss how the Ottoman state and the society of Istanbul dealt with the large influx of people in this period, this study adopts, for the first time, the perspective of the immigrants to investigate how those who came to the city seeking work or a better life experienced their moving to and settlement in a new place. While profiting from the scholarship on Ottoman immigration and the history of Istanbul, this book also makes extensive use of the results achieved in historical research on migration in other regions and eras. The book develops in six chapters tracing the journey of the immigrant from 1) the time he or she left home to 2) their first encounters within the city and 3) their reception by the locals. It then examines 4) the process of homemaking and 5) the ties that immigrants kept with their places of origin, finally investigating 6) the emotional impact of immigration on the individuals. The work is based on a large array of literary and archival sources, many of which are little known or studied. Most significant are sources with a pronounced personal character such as diaries, letters and poems, as well as biographical dictionaries. Histories, political and medical treatises provide additional information as do court decisions and imperial decrees.

project publications:

• Klein, Denise. "Eine Stadt mit vielen Gesichtern: Migration und Differenz in Istanbul, 1453–1800". In Mobilität und Differenzierung: Zur Konstruktion von Unterschieden und Zugehörigkeiten in der europäischen Neuzeit, ed. by Sarah Panter, Johannes Paulmann, Thomas Weller, 143-182. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2023.
• Klein, Denise. “Living in a City of Migrants: The Risale-i Garibe on Difference and Belonging in Early Modern Istanbul.” Archivum Ottomanicum 40 (2023): 87–116.
• Klein, Denise. “Poetry of Exile: An Eighteenth-Century Tatar Prince in the Ottoman Balkans.” In Transottoman Biographies, 16th-20th c., ed. by Denise Klein and Anna Vlachopoulou. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2023.

The Venetian Army on Ottoman Soil 1684-1718: Translocalisation, Experience of War, Transculturation

Andreas Helmedach

The project explores the war experiences of soldiers in the Venetian army in Ottoman Southeastern Europe, that is in those territories of Dalmatia, Albania and Greece, which were conquered, occupied, and for the most part lost to the Ottoman Empire during the Morean (or Peloponnesian) Wars of 1684-1699 and 1715-1718. Military journeys are a core topic of migration history; the history of such mobility in the context of the Morean wars will lead towards a better understanding of transcultural processes in the Southeast European region. Similar to other forms of travelling, military journeys not only link up points of departure and arrival, but they also mean crossing through given spaces and territories. It is here that translocalisation and transculturalisation happen. Such processes in fact have always been constituent elements of soldiers’ and combatants’ war experiences. A central question is in which ways the circumstances of military campaigns in Ottoman Southeastern Europe molded the soldier's daily routines, perceptions, and experiences of war. The focus is on the life-worlds of officers, sergeants and ordinary soldiers. The project explores their daily routines during their voyages towards and away from the theatre of war; their service in the garrison, the camp, and the field; their encounters with civilians (not least with women); and how they came to terms with combat and violence, with desertion, imprisonment, slavery and (if the occasion arose) ransoming; with illness, wounds, disability, and death. The backdrop of these men’s experiences, imaginings, and discourses about their experience of “migration as transcultural entanglement” was the Ottoman Empire. From their socialization in their home countries they had to match new modes and patterns of interaction and cooperation both with their peers, who constituted the ethnic and religious heterogeneity of the Venetian army, and with the "locals", who also were heterogeneous as far as their ethnicity, religion, and social origin were concerned. The framework of early modern times seems particularly fitting to explore the transcultural processes involved, as it forced upon the men a particular intensity of interaction as such, but especially, beyond the battlefields, a cooperation with the “other”, with individuals who were considered „enemies“.

project publications:

• Helmedach, Andreas. “The Life and Crisis of a Venetian Soldier: Colonel Francesco Muazzo in the First Morean War (1684–1699).” In Transottoman Biographies, 16th-20th c., ed. by Denise Klein and Anna Vlachopoulou. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2023.

In the Triangle of the Great Powers: Interactional Spaces of the Kings and the Nobility from Eastern Georgia (1555-1724)

Nana Kharebava

This project deals with the interactional spaces of the Georgian kings and the nobility who maintained close socio-cultural and political interaction and communication with the royal courts of neighbouring countries like the Safavid, the Ottoman and the Russian Empires. Migration processes played a crucial role in the creation of interactional fields within the conflicting areas of expansion of these great powers. The timeframe of the project covers a period starting with the peace of Amasya (1555) up to the emigration of the last Safavid viceroy Vakhtang VI (alias Hosaynqoli Khan) from the Eastern Georgian Kingdom Kartli to the Court of the Tsar in 1724. It examines a set of political actors from the Eastern Georgian Kingdoms of Kartli and Kakheti, areas which were considered to be under the influence of the Safavids following the agreement in the peace treaty of Amasya between the Ottomans and the Safavids. A comparative historical analysis proves to be the best methodological approach in researching the interactional spaces of Georgian political actors who found themselves in a highly complex process of assimilation and differentiation towards Safavid culture and religion as well as under continuous influence of major political interests of the Ottomans and the Tsar. It is the aim of this project to explain the political behaviour of the Georgian Kings in the framework of migration, cross-cultural relations, mechanisms of maintenance of power as well as religious cultures which were expressions of a global development within the transottoman area.

project publications:

• Kharebava, Nana. “David’s Descendants: Legitimacy and Identity Representations of the Converted Safavid Viceroys in East Georgia (1580–1724).“ Eurasian Studies 21, no. 1 (2023): 66–100.
• Kharebava, Nana. “Transcending Borders in Vita and Post-Mortem: St. Queen Ketevan’s (1573–1624) Impact at the Safavid Court and Beyond.” In Transottoman Biographies, 16th-20th c., ed. by Denise Klein and Anna Vlachopoulou. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2023.

Entangled Revolutions: The Russian Factor in the Young Turk Movement

Elke Hartmann, Vahé Tachjian

This project focuses on the protagonists of the Young Turk movement in the late Ottoman Empire, i.e. the political opposition movement against the Ottoman sultan Abdülhamid II. (r. 1876-1909), which included activists of different ethnic, social and religious backgrounds united by their common goal of establishing a constitutional regime, which was achieved in 1908. Many of these Young Turks—Tatars and Armenians alike—came from the Caucasus and Transcaucasus, the Crimea or the Volga-Ural region, but were active as journalists and revolutionaries on both sides of the Russian-Ottoman border. The project investigates how their Russian background—their education as well as their individual and collective experiences of Russian Tsarist rule—influenced these political actors' thinking and actions. It explores their specific hopes and expectations regarding the Ottoman Empire given their Russian background. It further examines what impulses they brought back to their Russian-ruled regions of origin. This overall question is to be examined regarding four aspects: First, the Tatar and Armenian revolutionaries’ transimperial networks and mobility across the Ottoman-Russian borders and beyond to European and North African places of exile. Second, probing the intellectual history, the impact of their Russian origin—personal contacts, reading histories, education, experiences or events—on these protagonists’ political thinking and priorities as well as their geographical framework of reference, which possibly differentiated them from their comrades originating from within the Ottoman Empire. Thirdly, concerning political practice, possible adoptions of Russian-inspired modes of political organisation, style or self-representation, as well as mutual relations and interactions between the various groups (Ottoman or Russian Turks/Tatars and Ottoman or Russian Armenians). Fourth, the influences of the encounters and experiences in the Ottoman Empire on the ideas of the commuters or returnees to the Russian realms. The main sources for the study will be the writings of the Young Turk protagonists themselves: on the one hand their memoirs and exchange of letters, and, more importantly, on the other hand their numerous writings published in the newspapers they founded and directed, printed in Russian, Ottoman, Armenian, Tatar, Azeri and French.

project publications:

• Hartmann, Elke: Dashed Hopes: Perspectives of Ottoman-Armenian Elites on Russia, in: John Deak / Heather R. Perry / Emre Sencer (Hg.), The Central Powers in Russia’s Great War and Revolution, 1914-22: Enemy Visions and Encounters, Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers 2020, 111-132.
• Hartmann, Elke. „Schrecken und Utopie: eine Traumsequenz in Roupens ‘Erinnerungen eines armenischen Revolutionärs’.“ In A Kaukázustól a Lajtáig. Apokaliptika, identitás, történelem és művelődés Közép- és Kelet-Európában, hg. von Barbara Bank, Bálint Kovács und Norbert S. Medgyesy, 42-51. Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2023.
• Hartmann, Elke. “Roupen Der Minassian: Three Kinds of Agency.“ In After the Ottomans. Genocide’s Long Shadow and Armenian Resilience, hg. von Hans-Lukas Kieser, Seyhan Bayrakta and Khatchig Mouradian, 111-130. London: I.B. Tauris, 2023.
• Hartmann, Elke. “Framing Perspectives Between the Late Russian and Ottoman Empires: Trans-Imperial Mobility and the Shifts of Center and Periphery.” In Transottoman Biographies, 16th-20th c., ed. by Denise Klein and Anna Vlachopoulou. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2023.

“Next Year in Jerusalem“: Jewish Identity Concepts and Zionism Debates in the Transottoman Migration Society of Palestine between 1880 and 1925

Alexandra Gerykova

Together with the sub-project by Eveline Dierauff, this project examines debates on collective identity among Jewish and Arab populations in Palestine around the turn of the 20th century. This sub-project focuses on debates in the first two decades of the 20th century on collective Jewish identity among Jewish immigrants from Russia to Jaffa/Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. It shows how collective self-definitions of all social groups present in Palestine were redefined in translocal constructions of the near and distant “others”. As its main source the project analyses articles from contemporary local Hebrew newspapers that establish the collective identity of Jewish immigrants, but also elaborate on different outlooks between the Ashkenazim and Sephardim among them. In addition, these newspapers describe relations with Arabs and Christians, also observing from afar the escalating Jewish-Christian clashes in Russia and their repercussions. Furthermore, selected biographies and autobiographies of individual persons will be taken into account. These case studies lay out transregional debates of a society that was continuously changed by migration, particularly from Russia and the (formerly) Ottoman territories of South Eastern Europe. It was marked by the formation and fortification of new identity concepts as well as the transformation of national identity in the context of Ottoman constitutional patriotism after the Young Turk Revolution of 1908.

project publications:

• Gerykova, Alexandra. “Off to the Promised Land: Jewish Immigration to Late Ottoman Palestine.” In Transottoman Biographies, 16th-20th c., ed. by Denise Klein and Anna Vlachopoulou. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2023.

Slaves of the Black Sea Region in Istanbul: Spatial and Social Mobility in the 17th Century

Veruschka Wagner

The institution of slavery was an integral part of Ottoman society and continued to exist into the 20th century. The Ottoman system was characterized by its openness, which allowed slaves access to economic and social development. The research project will focus on this point and analyse on the basis of Court registers the spatial and social mobility of slaves originating from the Black Sea region in 17th-century Istanbul. The enslaved peoples’ places of origin as well as the period have hardly been taken into account in research on slavery in the Ottoman Empire, compared to other places and periods and especially in the here-intended combination. The increasing accessibility of sources simplifies analysis and enables examination of the period of a whole century. In contrast to perceptions of slavery as complete passive dependency of persons as Patterson’s image of social death evokes, the project will demonstrate that the enslaved possessed self-determined spaces of action and mobility that were linked to their (trans)cultural, economic, and personal relations. The project will give information about the legal status of slaves, their integration into a particular community, and their role in that community. The social and economic networks slaves were involved in and their exchange relationships within and between these networks are of particular importance. Central questions the project discusses are: What kind of mobility dynamics are shown by these flows? Were manumitted slaves really released into structures that allowed them to improve their legal and social positions? Was there a connection between the slaves’ careers and their regions of origin?

project publications:

• Wagner, Veruschka.“Şirmerd, Mosiye und Payidār - Sklaven im frühmodernen Istanbul, dokumentiert in den lokalen Gerichtsregistern.” In Sklaverei in der Vormoderne. Beispiele aus außereuropäischen Gesellschaften. Dhau. Jahrbuch für außereuropäische Geschichte, ed. Stephan Conermann, 83-98. Saarbrücken 2017.
• Wagner, Veruschka: “‘Speaking Property’ with the Capacity to Act – Slave Interagency in the 16^th and 17^th Century Istanbul Court Registers.” In Slaves and Slave Agency in the Ottoman Empire, ed. by Conermann, Stephan and Gül Şen, 213-236. Goettingen: Bonn University Press at V&R unipress 2020.
• Wagner, Veruschka. “Slaves, Philanthropy and Pious Endowments in Early Modern Istanbul.” Endowment Studies 4 (2020): 125–152.
• Wagner, Veruschka. “Mobile Actors, Mobile Slaves: Female Slaves from the Black Sea Region in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul.” Diyâr 2 (2021): 83–104.
• Wagner, Veruschka. "“Free Like Other Freeborn People” or Just Another form of Dependency? Questioning the Situation of Manumitted Slaves in Early Modern Istanbul". BCDSS Working Paper 06/2022.
• Wagner, Veruschka. “Modes of Manumission: What Terms Used for Emancipation Tell Us about Dependencies in Ottoman Society” In Slavery and Other Forms of Strong Asymmetrical Dependencies: Semantics and Lexical Fields, edited by Jeannine Bischoff and Stephan Conermann, 205-224. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2022.
• Wagner, Veruschka. “Lives in Pieces: Female Slaves and Mobility in Early Modern Istanbul.” In Transottoman Biographies, 16th-20th c., ed. by Denise Klein and Anna Vlachopoulou. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2023.

The Trading Companies Rallis and Zafiris in the Long 19th Century: A Contribution to the Global History of the Ottoman Empire

Anna Vlachopoulou

The project investigates the social, economic and transcultural entanglements between the Ottoman Empire and regions of Western Europe, Russia, and Asia. It takes the trading houses of the Greek families Rallis and Zarifis as a vantage point to scrutinise the mobility of people, capital, raw materials and goods between different world regions during the development of global capitalism in the long 19th century. By focusing on the social and cultural histories of these transimperial dynasties of entrepreneurs as well as their transimperial (or rather transottoman) biographies the project pursues the following objectives: First, it adds to a broader scholarly discourse aiming at a better understanding of the history of globalisation by interpreting regional connections and complementary spatial relations anew. Second, it explores the political and social contexts in which the Rallis and Zarifis families built their trading empires. Therefore, the project will examine the agency of important Ottoman protagonists taking part in transnational and worldwide economic interactions as well as their relationships with other interested parties like the Greek trading communities abroad.

project publications:

• Vlachopoulou, Anna. “Conquering the World, Remaining an Islander: The Merchant House Ralli in the 19th Century.” In Transottoman Biographies, 16th-20th c., ed. by Denise Klein and Anna Vlachopoulou. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2023.

Transcultural Mediators, Strategies and Entangled Modernities: Transportation and Infrastructure in the Imperial Ports of Odessa and Varna in the 19th Century

Lyubomir Pozharliev

The objective of the project is to reconstruct the transottoman interactions in the Black Sea region by analysing the establishment of the steam shipping transportation system in the 19th century and the infrastructures related to it. Biographies and practical intercultural mediation strategies of key figures in the port cities of Odessa and Varna will be central for the study. The development of the steam shipping transportation system had a cumulative effect upon the establishment of other types of transport infrastructures such as railways, roads, the post and the telegraph, as well as for the development of the trade, banking and insurance sectors. In the case of Varna, this concerned accounting and trade law, or in the case of Odessa, the education of captains, machine operators and other specialists. It also led to the introduction of new diplomatic relations such as consulates or companies’ international branches. The research will be divided into three parts. The first one reflects upon the roles of the two port cities as transimperial places of transfer of knowledge and transregional networks. The second one contextualizes the Varna and Odessa ports as centres of cross-cultural, commercial and political influence in the Ottoman and Russian Empires and beyond during the 19th century. Finally, the third and most important part analyses the very institutionalisation of the steam shipping transportation system in the Black Sea as a result of transcultural practices and experiences. The study will follow the methodological frame of the entangled histories and modernities in the fields of cultural history and biography studies. This includes the interpretative analysis of original sources such as normative documents, diaries and letters, the visual analysis of photo archives as well as network analysis.

project publications:

• Pozharliev, Lyubomir. “State Goals and Private Interests in the Development of Transport Infrastructure in the Russian Black Sea Region in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century.” Journal of Balkan and Black Sea Studies 3, no. 5 (2020): 71–96.
• Pozharliev, Lyubomir. “Mobility versus Networks: The Trans-Imperial Biography of Petar Popov (1832–1894), Founder of the First Bulgarian Steamship Company.” In Transottoman Biographies, 16th-20th c., ed. by Denise Klein and Anna Vlachopoulou. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2023.

Slavery and Loyalty: The Russian and Ottoman Empires

Christoph Witzenrath, Stanislav Mohylnyi

What is the relation of slavery and liberation in the contest between the Ottoman and Muscovite Empires for the loyalties of populations in the vicinity of the Black Sea? In the period from 1475 to 1700, slave raids and slave trade in the region between the Caucasus and Hungary corralled between two and three million people to markets mainly in the South. Muscovy fought this population drain by fortifying the steppe frontier, state sponsored ransom and expansionary ideologies of slave liberation; it employed Muslim subjects to achieve these ends. From early on, Muslim empires offered limited rights to the enslaved in order to develop loyal relations between masters, slaves and the state. In the Ottoman Empire, loyalty was often already practiced by slaves, who benefited from free movement or contractual manumission. Between these poles there were many transitions: mediators, merchants, diplomatic emissaries, clerics, translators and Cossacks with far-reaching connections, whose loyalties were decisive for ransoming the enslaved. Returning, manumitted or fleeing slaves themselves transited along these transottoman crossovers, the contexts of which were especially important since most former slaves remained with their Ottoman masters. The project looks at these crossovers from the Muscovite point of view and profits from Ottoman contexts accessible in the Transottomanica programme. How did Muscovy make sure that returning captives and kidnapped persons were loyal, despite their experience of extended periods of Muslim influence? How did Moscow try to inspire loyalty in Muslim Tatars who communicated extensively with their coreligionists on the other side of the steppe and in it? In terms of method, the project uses the toolbox made available by recent studies of loyalty which are based on Max Weber’s and Georg Simmel’s sociologies. In this way, archival sources such as slave narratives speaking about the transitions and reasons for leaving the Ottoman Empire will be analysed. Chronicles, saints vitae, murals as well as church rituals and plays formulated the ideology of Muscovy as New Israel and the tsar as the new Moses, who liberates Orthodox slaves as once the Israelites were liberated from Egyptian slavery.
The sub-project of Stanislav Mohylnyi will research the social history of the Hetmanate in the eithgeenth century through the prism of social status and attempts to change it by means of social subjugation. Attention is to be given to variagated factors that shaped social standing in the Hetmanate, such as  grassroots level relationships, the institutional framework and the policies of the Russian empire towards the Hetmanate.

project publications:

• Witzenrath, Christoph. The Russian Empire, Slaving and Liberation, 1480–1725: Trans-Cultural Worldviews in Eurasia. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022.
• Mohylnyi, Stanislav. “Frontier Bandits and Cultures of Violence: The Black Sea Steppe in the Mid-Eighteenth Century.” In Transottoman Biographies, 16th-20th c., ed. by Denise Klein and Anna Vlachopoulou. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2023.

Persian in the Ottoman Empire as Reflected in Selected Farhangs (Dictionaries) of the 16th Century: A Cultural Transottoman Configuration

Ani Sargsyan

From the 11th to the 19th century, Persian was an important and highly influential language of literature, education, and partly also of administration and diplomacy, in large parts of the „Eastern Islamic world“. The dynamics and dispersion of Persian as a language of literature, and a lingua franca, and its surprising vitality and continuity, have not yet been sufficiently studied. With Persian-Turkic dictionaries that were written in the Ottoman Empire of the first half of the 16th century, the project selects a well-defined group of primary sources to study the „life“ and development of Persian as a lingua franca, as an exemplary case study. By comparing the manuscript situation and by studying the prefaces and colophons of approximately 20 dictionaries, the project will address questions like the following: Did the authors of these dictionaries influence each other? In what ways did they interact? Were their works used in studying Persian? What do these dictionaries say about their reception? Regional specifics and the historical and religious context will be taken into account as factors that influence language use. By systematically exploiting an important group of primary sources, the project promises to also shed light on other, more general questions: What was the importance of Persian for the cultural identity of Ottoman poets? Did these consider Persian language and literature as part of a „cultural transfer“, or as an inalienable part of their own culture? Overall, the project promises to provide an important case study for a better understanding of Persian-Turkic cultural transfer.

project publications:

• Sargsyan, Ani. “Persian-Turkish Dictionaries of the mid-15th–16th Centuries: A Trajectory of Knowledge Mobility.” In Knowledge on the Move in a Transottoman Perspective: Dynamics of Intellectual Exchange from the Fifteenth to the Early Twentieth Century. ed. by Evelin Dierauff, Dennis Dierks, Barbara Henning, Taisiya Leber and Ani Sargsyan. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2021.
• Kirakosyan, Hasmik and Ani Sargsyan. “On the Appropriation of Lexicographic Methods of Kemālpaşazāde’s (1468–1534) Glossary Daḳāyiḳu l-ḥaḳāyiḳ.” Diyâr 2 (2021): 14–26.
• Sargsyan, Ani. “Three in One: Selected Fifteenth-Seventeenth-Century Persian-Turkish Dictionaries and the Acquisition of the “Three Languages” (elsine-i s̱elās̱e) in the Ottoman Empire.” In Elsine-i S̱elās̱e A Cultural Analysis of Transmission and Translation in the Ottoman Empire, ed. by Philip Bockholt, Hülya Çelik, Ludwig Paul and Ani Sargsyan. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2025. 

The Beginnings of Book Printing in the Ottoman Empire: The Role of Printed Books in the Transmission of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Heritage

Taisiya Leber

In Western and Central Europe the beginnings of printing meant important changes in the written culture and circulation of knowledge during the Early Modern era. In contrast, in the Ottoman Empire, manuscripts played a bigger role as a book-medium until the 18th century, especially for Muslim writings. However, printed books also circulated in the Ottoman Empire. They were produced by several printing houses founded among others in Constantinople (Jewish and Greek), Thessaloniki (Jewish), Goražde and Belgrade (Serbian) or imported from the big European centres of printing. It was the task of the Orthodox Church and the monasteries that possessed a high degree of autonomy and transregional contacts to preserve Byzantine written culture. The research project aims at examining the role of printed books in the circulation of knowledge within the Ottoman Empire, as well as the development of post-Byzantine networks between Orthodox patriarchates, bishoprics and monasteries that expanded far beyond Ottoman frontiers via Poland-Lithuania to Muscovy. Exchange within this region was particularly important in the post-Byzantine world, because of religious, cultural, political and ideological interdependencies that the project will examine from a transottoman perspective. The goal is to study printed books from the Ottoman area from the end of the 15th until the end the 17th century and to compare the forms and contexts of book production by different religious groups. Particular attention will be paid to the subject of the Byzantine heritage in the Ottoman Empire, as well as in Eastern Europe during the Early Modern period.

project publications:

• Leber, Taisiya. “Migracii pečatnikov i tipografij v ‘transosmanskom’ kontekste rannego Novogo vremeni.” In Istoriia knizhnoi kul'tury XV-XX vekov: v 2 ch.. Ch.2: K 100-letiiu nauchno-issledovatel'skogo otdela redkikh knig, hg. von D. N. Ramazanova, 5-20. Moskau: Pashkov Dom, 2018.
• Leber, Taisiya. “Female Patronage of Book Printing in the Transottoman Context,” /Učenye zapiski NovGU/, 5/30 (2020), no. 20.
• Leber, Taisiya. “Christian-Jewish and Jewish-Christian Polemics in the Transottoman Context.” In Knowledge on the Move in a Transottoman Perspective: Dynamics of Intellectual Exchange from the Fifteenth to the Early Twentieth Century, ed. by Evelin Dierauff, Dennis Dierks, Barbara Henning, Taisiya Leber and Ani Sargsyan. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2021.
• Henning, Barbara, Taisiya Leber. "Print Culture and Muslim-Christian Relations." In Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, Vol. 18, 39–61. Leiden: Brill, 2021.
• Leber, Taisiya. “The Early History of Printing in the Ottoman Empire through the Prism of Mobility.” Diyâr 2 (2021): 59–82.
• Leber, Taisiya. „Buchdruck und Wissensflüsse zwischen Ruthenien (östliches Polen-Litauen) und dem Osmanischen Reich während der Frühneuzeit.” Historische Mitteilungen 33 (2022): 183–202.
• Leber, Taisiya. “Orthodox Monastic Experience and Hermitic Practice in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.” In Orthodoxy on the Move. Mobility, Networks, and Belonging between the 16th and 20th century. Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Theologia Orthodoxa 68, no. 1 (2023), Special Issue edited by Grigore, Mihai-D., 129–146.
• Leber, Taisiya. “Hebrew Printing in Early Modern Istanbul: between Mobility and Stability.” In Arabic-Type Books Printed in Wallachia, Istanbul, and Beyond, ed. by Samuel Noble and Radu-Andrei Dipratu, 69–88. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024.

Concepts of Boundaries and the Construction of Sociocultural Difference in (Trans)Ottoman Contexts: Circulation of Knowledge, Conceptual Changes and Transfers, 16th-19th Centuries

Barbara Henning, Necati Alkan

The project documents and maps out the complex semantic field which underlies discourses about establishing, negotiating and transgressing social boundaries in the Ottoman context, adopting a broad time frame that spans from the 16th to the early 19th century. Delving into the subject of social boundaries in the Ottoman world comes with the realisation that to merely translate modern and Western concepts is of limited use: The direct translation of “boundary“, the Ottoman term ḥadd, can indeed be encountered in the Ottoman sources. However, other notions, e.g. the idea of an involuntary mixing or mingling (iḫtilāṭ) when talking about social boundaries, need to be taken into account to do justice to the complexities and internal dynamics of the Ottoman discourse. For theoretical support, the project draws on the field of conceptual history: Ottoman notions of boundaries will be read as complex semantic configurations, whose specific genealogies and trajectories can be traced. Changes over time in meaning, strategies of translation and appropriations, as well as differences between various genres and contexts in Ottoman usage will be recorded to explore two key hypotheses: First, Ottoman semantics pertaining to sociocultural boundaries are subject to changes which are related to broader transformations within Ottoman society. Second, the Ottoman semantics under scrutiny here do not exist in a vacuum. Rather, they are products of continuous exchanges and transfers of knowledge, thus reflecting epistemological entanglements and shedding light on frameworks of interactions that extend beyond the territorial borders of the Ottoman Empire. In terms of source material, the project puts normative texts in conversation with sources describing individual and concrete instances of negotiations of social boundaries. Moments in which social boundaries are being discussed are tracked down in a wide variety of sources, including legal discourse, advice literature and fictional texts, with a geographical focus on the Ottoman provincial centres of Trabzon and Diyarbekir.

project publications:

• Henning, Barbara. “Trajectories of Early-Modern Ottoman Advice Literature: Nas ̄ıhatna ̄mes  ̇ ̇as Sites of Transottoman Transfers of Knowledge.” In Knowledge on the Move in a Transottoman Perspective: Dynamics of Intellectual Exchange from the Fifteenth to the Early Twentieth Century, ed. by Evelin Dierauff, Dennis Dierks, Barbara Henning, Taisiya Leber and Ani Sargsyan. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2021.
• Henning, Barbara, Taisiya Leber. “Print Culture and Muslim-Christian Relations.” In Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, Vol. 18, 39–61. Leiden: Brill, 2021.

• Henning, Barbara. “From a Position of Privilege: Descendants of the Prophet Muhammad in Ottoman Syria as Stakeholders in 19th-century Reform Processes.“ Welt des Islams, Nov. 2024.

• Henning, Barbara. „Ein Urgroßvater aus Zentralasien für eine Tochter der Republik. Kollektivbiographische Perspektiven auf die Nachkommen des Propheten am Beispiel der Memoiren von Saffet Tanman (1912-2012).“ BIOS. Zeitschrift für Biographieforschung 35 (2024): 67–86.

Muslim Modernity as Local and Translocal Practice: Transimperial Entanglements of Modernisation Discourses between Russia, the Habsburg Monarchy and the Ottoman Empire

Dennis Dierks

The study of Muslim modernities often focuses on leading figures in the cultural centres of the Islamic World. This project adopts a different perspective. It investigates modernisation discourses of European Muslims before World War I as transimperial processes of communication. Focusing on Russian Crimea and Habsburg Bosnia, it discusses the example of two regions that, unlike other areas of post-Ottoman Europe, were not affected by a process of radical de-Ottomanisation. Both Bosnian Muslims and Crimean Tatars maintained cultural and emotional bonds to other regions of the Ottoman Empire and to the old metropole Istanbul. This holds especially true for members of the elite, whose biographies were often marked by a high degree of mobility. The continuing transimperial networks played an important role in processes of cultural and social modernisation, during which patterns of modernity were not only taken over from the Imperial Russian or Habsburg rulers but transferred from the Ottoman Empire as well. Moreover, the analysis of the Bosnian Muslim and Crimean Tatar press before World War I demonstrates a keen interest in and a close observation of the Muslim brethren in other former borderlands of the Ottoman Empire. In some cases, research can even reconstruct direct processes of communication between Bosnian Muslims and Crimean Tatars. This project will concentrate on such processes. It asks how key concepts of the Muslim modernisation discourse were first negotiated in translocal communication processes and then translated into local contexts in order to get popularised. Interpreting the negotiation of modernity as a complex entanglement of communication, the project seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the making of Muslim modernities in general.

project publications:

• Dierks, Dennis. “Scripting, Translating, and Narrating Reform. Making Muslim Reformism in the European Peripheries of the Muslim World at the Turn of the 20th Century.” In Knowledge on the Move in a Transottoman Perspective: Dynamics of Intellectual Exchange from the Fifteenth to the Early Twentieth Century, ed. by Evelin Dierauff, Dennis Dierks, Barbara Henning, Taisiya Leber and Ani Sargsyan. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2021.
• Dierks, Dennis. “Mediatising Violence and Renegotiating Commonality: Bosnian Muslim Press Reporting on the Italo-Turkish War (1911–1912).” Diyâr 2 (2021): 105–133.
• Dierks, Dennis. “Addressing Centre and Periphery: Interactions between Muslim Reformists in Cairo and Habsburg Bosnia-Herzegovina as Reflected in the Periodicals al-Manār and Behar.” In: Mobility Dynamics between Eastern Europe and the Near East. Exploring a Cross-Regional Shared History, ed. by Albrecht Fuess, Heidi Hein-Kirchner, Julia Obertreis and Stefan Rohdewald, 123-148. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2024.

(Christian) Arabs and (Russian) Jews: Identity and Zionism Debates in the Transottoman Migration Society of Palestine (1880-1925)

Eveline Dierauff

Together with the sub-project by Alexandra Gerykova, this project examines debates on collective identity among Jewish and Arab populations in Palestine around the turn of the 20th century. This sub-project investigates local concepts of collective identity, group relations as well as state and society building in Palestine in the years before, during and shortly after World War I. This was a period of rapid transformation from Ottoman imperial rule to the British Mandate and rising Palestinian-Arab nationalist aspirations. In several case studies, the project analyses how political concepts from various backgrounds were debated by intellectuals from the rising Palestinian middle class. As main sources the Arab press, diaries and other types of contemporary Palestinian literature will be examined. The Palestinian actors’ views were deeply shaped by concepts of modernity, the age of Ottoman reforms and the cosmopolitanism of a trans-Ottoman migration society in the Jerusalem and Jaffa regions. However, the most controversial discussions developed around the catastrophic events during the 1910s such as the Tripoli War (1911), the Balkan Wars (1912/13), the rise of the Arab Movement for Decentralization in 1913 and, finally, the end of the Ottoman regime during World War I that resulted in the establishment of new political structures by the colonial powers. As a consequence of the political crisis, rising concepts of nationalism began to replace former ideals of multi-confessional and multi-ethnic Ottoman unity.

project publications:

• Dierauff, Evelin. Translating Late Ottoman Modernity in Palestine: Debates on Ethno-Confessional Relations and Identity in the Arab Palestinian Newspaper Filasṭīn (1911–1914). Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2020.
• Dierauff, Evelin. “The Appropriation of Political Concepts in Hal ̄ıl as-Saka ̄k ̄ın ̄ı’s ‘Orthodox  Renaissance’ (1908–14).” In Knowledge on the Move in a Transottoman Perspective: Dynamics of Intellectual Exchange from the Fifteenth to the Early Twentieth Century, ed. by Evelin Dierauff, Dennis Dierks, Barbara Henning, Taisiya Leber and Ani Sargsyan. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2021.

What Did an Ottoman Sultan Know about the Russian Empire? Reports about Muṣṭafā Rāsiḫ’s Mission to St. Petersburg (1793/94)

Alexander Bauer and Caspar Hillebrand

associated project, DFG 298672076

One of the stipulations of the peace treaty of Jassy, which ended the Russo-Ottoman war of 1787–1792, was the exchange of diplomatic missions between St. Petersburg and Istanbul. Thus in January 1793, the Ottoman envoy Muṣṭafā Rāsiḫ Efendi embarked on his journey to the court of Catherine II. When he returned eighteen months later in July 1794, he presented Sultan Selīm III with two reports: one sefāretnāme (embassy report) written by his secretary Seyyid ʿAbdullah that described the delegation’s journey and diplomatic mission, and one ʿarīża (letter), which contained his own observations on Russian politics and society. These two texts are the main sources for the project. Apart from an annotated translation, the principal task is to establish what kind of information they provided to the Ottoman ruler and his counsellors. To this end, the texts have to be analysed within the framework of Ottoman embassy reports of the 18th century and against the backdrop of both Ottoman-Russian relations and the multicultural context in Istanbul at that time. To these Ottoman texts, the project adds the writings in Russian and German of members of the Russian delegation to Istanbul headed by General Mikhail Illarionovič Kutuzov, i.e. letters from the envoy to the empress and leading Russian statesmen and to his family as well as travel accounts by Heinrich Christoph von Reimers and Johann Christoph Struve. These three sets of texts, which have been subjected to little or no research to date, will be read in a comparative perspective and analysed with regard to their narrative strategies.

Political and Military Knowledge on the Eastern Danube-Carpathian Region in the 15th Century: The Ottomanisation of the Danube Principalities in the View of Central and Western European Diplomats

Albert Weber

associated project

The study aims at collecting quantitative data from diplomatic correspondences in order to determine at which stage the Central and Western European states became aware that Wallachia and Moldova changed sides to the Ottomans politically and militarily. This “Ottomanisation” meant that the Danube Principalities became Ottoman vassal states and that their elites were integrated into the Ottoman ruling system in South Eastern Europe. During the first half of the 15th century there existed a double, Hungarian-Ottoman vassalage of Wallachia and during the second half a Polish-Ottoman, while Moldova was a Hungarian vassal. The power relations within the region especially changed after the 1460s following the Ottoman conquest of Serbia (1459) and Bosnia (1463). Hungary withstood Ottoman expansion (Belgrade 1456, Bosnia 1476, Transylvania 1479) but did not have the financial and military means to shield the Principalities against growing Ottoman influence. The Wallachian and Moldovan elites therefore had to negotiate their positions towards the Ottomans and accepted the Hungarian or Polish suzerainty only symbolically. The study will investigate the strategies applied by the voivodes, the Wallachian and Moldovan rulers, to maintain their diplomatic access to their Catholic neighbours and their elite networks. It will also investigate the level of knowledge the latter states had about the situation in the Principalities.

Russian Scholars in the ‘Near East’: Archaeological Expeditions and Imperial Cultural Politics, 1856-1914

Thomas Bohn and Vitalij Fastovskij

associated project, DFG 403686305

In the course of the 19th century, the expansion of the Tsarist Empire towards the Black Sea and Central Asia stressed the political role of the scientific discipline of archaeology in the framework of Oriental Studies (vostokovedenie). This led to the establishment of specialised institutes at Universities and within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as well as scientific societies and international expert conferences. Researchers from the Russian Empire thus received multiple possibilities to discuss their theses that they obtained from research conducted during scientific expeditions. Of particular interest was the region designated by Russian orientalists as the “Near East” comprising of Arabic, Ottoman, Iranian, Kurdish, and Afghan studies. In this field, a region became the focus of scholarly attention that had been long exposed to competing interpretative hegemonies by imperial interests in territorial conflicts between the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire and Persia. Against this background, this project seeks to analyse the role of scientific expeditions of Russian archaeologists to the Balkans, to Palestine and to Persia (resp. Iran) for the Russian foreign cultural politics and the international circulation of knowledge.In the period between the end of the Crimean War (1856) and the beginning of World War I (1914), archaeological excavations not only served the purpose of scientific research on material remains, rather, archaeology functioned as an instrument of imperial cultural politics towards the near abroad. First, the scientific expeditions took an interest in the study of transnational cultural areas of assumed shared heritage. These areas at times stood in direct conflict with the existing lines of borders and thus fuelled the formation of new political alliances. In the second constellation, the competition with Western European states was the central motivation for Russian archaeological excavations as evident in the appropriation of the Christian heritage of the region. And third, archaeology provided the Russian Empire with the possibility to extend its sphere of influence by appropriating the past of culturally distinct spaces. These three constellations will be analysed in three chapters of a monograph by means of the case studies of the Russian Archaeological Institute in Constantinople, the Russian Mission in Palestine and the expeditions into Iran organised by the Eastern departments of Russian archaeological societies. The research will result in the publication of a monograph and an edited volume.

The Ottoman Tributaries Transylvania, Moldavia and Wallachia as Communication Spaces (16th-18th Centuries): Reflections on the Mobility of Objects, Network of Actors Transfer of Ideas from an Art Historical Perspective

Robert Born

For a long time, the phenomenon of tributary states of the Ottoman Empire was treated from the perspective of national historiographies and therefore often viewed negatively. Only in the last two decades has a departure from the narrative of the “Ottoman yoke” to the new paradigm of “Pax Ottomanica” emerged. In the period that followed, research increasingly turned its attention to the negotiation and exchange processes between the Sublime Porte and the tributaries located on the periphery of its sphere of influence. The current project focuses on the material components of these complex relationships and explores the roles of the principalities of Transylvania, Moldavia and Wallachia as zones of cultural, artistic and technological transfer between the Ottoman Empire, Persia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In addition to objects and goods that were part of diplomatic negotiation processes and rituals, imported luxury goods are the main focus of the investigations. The aim is to analyse the distribution of imports from the Ottoman Empire and Persia, as well as their integration into local cultural practices and the new meanings often associated with the use of these objects.

project publications:

• Born, Robert. "The Ottoman Tributaries Transylvania, Walachia and Moldavia: Reflections on the Mobility of Objects and Networks of Actors.” Diyâr 2, no. 1 (2021): 27–58. 

Trade with the Orient in the Early Modern Period and the Formation of Identity of the Transylvanian Saxons: The Ottoman Carpets of the Protestant Parish Church in Bistriţa (Romania) in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum

Stephanie Armer, Eva Bergt and Anja Kregeloh

Since 1952 the Germanisches Nationalmuseum has had among its holdings 55 Ottoman carpets from the 16th to the 18th centuries from the Protestant Parish Church in Bistriţa. This collection, unique in terms of its historical completeness, will, for the first time, be the subject of a comprehensive research project, which will analyse not only the significance of the carpets in the early modern period but also their identity-generating role in the 19th and early 20th centuries. From the mid-15th century on, the carpets, made in Anatolia, reached Transylvania and testify to the intensive commercial ties and the cultural exchange between the Ottoman Empire and Transylvania that was at times subject to Ottoman dominance. Art-historical and art-technological examinations of a representative selection of 20 carpets and analysis of written sources aim at identifying the carpets’ dates and places of origin as well as trade routes more accurately. As status symbols and gifts the carpets played a role in the representational culture of the German nobility and middle class as well as the guilds in Transylvania. Starting with the Reformation they found their way into Protestant churches, usually as donations, where, despite their Islamic roots, especially those of the prayer rugs, they were accorded functions in the liturgy and ceremonies. Sources such as inventories, sacristans’ registers and wills are expected to shed light on this. In the first half of the 19th century they were not greatly esteemed by the parishioners, as witnessed by their present condition. Yet they were a part of the German-speaking culture in Transylvania and assumed an identity-shaping role for the Transylvanian Saxons, who, in the course of Romanian nationalist endeavours in the 19th century, attempted via their own historical awareness to delimit themselves from the neighbouring ethnic groups. From 1907 on the carpets were treated as museum items, often filling large wall spaces in Protestant churches. There they were displayed as testimony to Transylvania’s economic heyday in the 15th to 17th centuries, which was strongly influenced by the Ottoman trading links.

project publications:

• Armer, Stephanie, Eva Hanke, Anja Kregeloh. “Rugs as Transottoman Commodities: The History of a Rug from Uşak.” In Transottoman Matters: Objects Moving through Time, Space, and Meaning, ed. by Arkadiusz Blaszczyk, Robert Born and Florian Riedler. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2021.
• Kregeloh, Anja, ed. Anatolische Teppiche aus Bistritz/Bistrița. Die Sammlung der Evangelischen Stadtkirche A. B. im Germanischen Nationalmuseum. Heidelberg: arthistoricum.net, 2023. 

Reconfiguring Transottoman Mobility: Transport Infrastructure in the Ottoman Danube Province in the Second Half of the 19th Century

Florian Riedler

In the second half of the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire redefined its connections with the world by modernising already existing transport infrastructures such as roads and introducing new transport technologies such as railways and steam shipping. The project will explore the imprint this modernisation of infrastructure had on transottoman connectivity with East-Central Europe by focusing on the Lower Danube. This area that was regulated by the International Danube Commission was in the focus of international investors and, after the creation of the Ottoman Danube Province in 1862, also a priority area of Ottoman reform policies. I am particularly interested in the way different economic and political priorities of Ottoman and non-Ottoman actors as well as their mental maps were defined and negotiated in planning processes and the realisation of infrastructure projects. In this respect Ottoman actors such as politicians and officials, but also local elites and merchants that expressed their needs and wishes through petitions to the government, will be in the focus. Overall, the history of transport infrastructures offers the opportunity to describe the transformation of mobility spaces in an age of rapid modernisation and, at the same time, to stay receptive to older forms of entanglements between the Ottoman world and East-Central Europe. It is a central thesis of the project that infrastructural modernisation not only followed the logic of European imperialist penetration, but was also influenced by Ottoman dynamics.

project publications:

• Riedler, Florian. “Integrating the Danube into Modern Networks of Infrastructure: The Ottoman Contribution.” Journal of Balkan and Black Sea Studies 3, no. 5 (2020).  
• Riedler, Florian. “Around the Black Sea in Forty-Five Days: Transottoman Space, Time, and Infrastructure.” In Transottoman Matters: Objects Moving through Time, Space, and Meaning, ed. by Arkadiusz Blaszczyk, Robert Born and Florian Riedler. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2021.
• Riedler, Florian. “Transport Technologies and Infrastructure in the Premodern Era.” In Handbook on the History and Culture of the Black Sea Region, edited by Ninja Bumann, Kerstin S. Jobst, Stefan Rohdewald, and Stefan Troebst. De Gruyter, 2024.

Petroleum: Commodity, Products and Infrastructures as Transottoman Entanglement around 1900

Stefan Rohdewald

Oil was discovered as a commodity of the future only at the end of the 19th century. The Russian Petroleum Production Company Nobel Brothers (Branobel) and Rothschild Frères in Baku, which quickly became the European bellwether in this new field of industrial activities parallel to the U.S. Oil fields, operationalized its extraction: The world’s first oil tanker named “Zoroastr” was used on the Caspian Sea. In addition to the railway to the Black Sea, in 1906 what was then globally the longest kerosene pipeline opened. Yet by 1913, the U.S. surpassed Russia as the biggest producer of petroleum. In the run for the oil fields that were expected to be found in the still-Ottoman Middle East an international struggle evolved, including Great Britain, Germany and France. The project designed for the priority programme Transottomanica aims at contributing several articles to a history of oil including the growing portfolio of oil products, their transport, the infrastructures involved as well as social conflicts and transimperial competition in the quest for modernity changed by techniques and industry between Russia, Persia and the Ottoman Near East.

project publications:

• Rohdewald, Stefan . “Petroleum: Commodity, Products and Infrastructures as Transottoman Mobilities around 1900.” In Transottoman Matters: Objects Moving through Time, Space, and Meaning, ed. by Arkadiusz Blaszczyk, Robert Born and Florian Riedler. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2021.
• Rohdewald, Stefan. “Securing the Flows of Oil in a Transottoman Context: Baku’s Oil, Infrastructures of Transportation, and Mendeleev as an Imperial Expert of Securitization (1850–1918).” In The Mobility-Security Nexus and the Making of Order: An Interdisciplinary and Historicizing Intervention, ed. by Werner Distler und Heidi Hein Kirchner, 208-226. London: Routledge, 2023.
• Rohdewald, Stefan. “Oil, Natural Gas, and More: Infrastructures of Energy around and across the Black and Caspian Seas since the Late Nineteenth Century.” In Handbook on the History and Culture of the Black Sea Region, ed. by Ninja Bumann, Kerstin Jobst, Stefan Rohdewald and Stefan Troebst. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2025. 

From Gifts to Commodities: Diplomatic Practices and their Economic Entanglements across the Black Sea and beyond

Arkadiusz Blaszczyk

associated project

The project focuses on entanglements between diplomacy and economy, gifting and the circulation of commodities in the northern contact zone of the Ottoman Empire vis-à-vis Poland-Lithuania, Muscovy and the Crimean Khanate. Muscovy especially left a rich corpus of sources such as envoys’ reports and diplomatic accounting books conveying information on type, quality and value of the gifts (called pominki in Russian, upominki in Polish, bölek/hazine in Crimean Tatar). The gifts largely consisted of furs. The practice of gifting in favor of the Khanate became a form of tribute in the Polish-Lithuanian case while in the Muscovite case it was the other way around with a preexisting system of tribute ( vyxod ) slowly transforming into mere gifting. Furthermore, the gifts can serve as an indicator for the state of these courts’ mutual relations. Due to the decentral concept of sovereignty in the Khanate, the institutionalised practice of pominki ecompassed a large part of the elites (the gifts for whom were rather called tiy iş in Tatar or žalovan ’e in Russian), a practice demanded by both sides, as peace could only be secured when all power holders of the Crimea received their share. Every shift in the internal fabric of power was thus documented and reflected in the pominki. But pominki offered not only symbolic, but also hard economic capital. Taking into consideration the extent of the gifting practices it is hardly believable that the furs were destined solely for the personal use of the Crimean Tatar elites. What then happened with the furs after they fulfilled their diplomatic purpose? Some sources indicate that Armenian and Greek merchants would pay themselves into the position of envoys of various Tatar petty nobles, so to receive their gifts and gain access to this highly valued commodity. Subsequently the furs must have diffused in Armenian and Greek networks of long-distance trade. Thus gifting in this area was molded by transregional economic demands. Understanding these processes may finally contribute to answering the question whether Muscovy was able to co-opt and prepare the incorporation of many small political entities thanks to a strategic gifting policy set into a favourable global/transregional economic context.

project publications:

• Blaszczyk, Arkadiusz. “From the Forests of Siberia to the Urban Jungle of Istanbul: The Ottoman-Muscovite Fur Exchange in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” In Transottoman Matters: Objects Moving through Time, Space, and Meaning, ed. by Arkadiusz Blaszczyk, Robert Born and Florian Riedler. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2021. 

Mobility of Resources in the Transottomanica: The Example of Metal and the Mamluk Empire

Albrecht Fuess

The research project will look at the distribution of resources within the geopolitical setting of the Transottomanica in the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. The case of metal will be taken as an example as metals, on the one hand, were vital as raw material for the military of this time period and, on the other hand, as bullion were a means of payment that was important because gold and silver were scarce in the Middle East. Contemporary Middle and Central Asian powers therefore increased their efforts to obtain metals. They looked for resources within their own realms and they relied on imports, which, however, were hampered by occasional trade boycotts. Starting from the Mamluk Empire, the project will follow the path of metal resources through the Transottomanica and investigate the extent of their mobility as a commodity.

project publications:

• Fuess, Albrecht. “Mobile Metals: On the Role of Natural Resources in the Geopolitical Context of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries.” In Transottoman Matters: Objects Moving through Time, Space, and Meaning, ed. by Arkadiusz Blaszczyk, Robert Born and Florian Riedler. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2021. 

Coffee and the Transottoman Trade Network

Anthony Quickel

associated project

project publications:

• Quickel, Anthony T. “Cairo and Coffee in the Transottoman Trade Network.” In Transottoman Matters: Objects Moving through Time, Space, and Meaning, ed. by Arkadiusz Blaszczyk, Robert Born and Florian Riedler. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2021. 

Social Uses of Luxury Goods: Oriental Carpets as Complex Social Messages in Early Modern Poland-Lithuania

Aleksandr Osipian

associated project

project publications:

• Osipian, Aleksandr. “Between Mercantilism, Oriental Luxury and the Ottoman Threat: Discourses on the Armenian Diaspora in the Early Modern Kingdom of Poland.” Acta Poloniae Historica 116 (2017): 171–208.
• Osipian, Alexandr. “Uses of Oriental Rugs in Early Modern Poland-Lithuania: Social Practices and Public Discourses.” In Transottoman Matters: Objects Moving through Time, Space, and Meaning, ed. by Arkadiusz Blaszczyk, Robert Born and Florian Riedler. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2021.
• Osipian, Alexandr. “Armenian Diasporas between the Golden Horde, Rus’, and Poland: Long-Distance Trade and Diplomatic Services.” In The Routledge Handbook on the Mongols and Central-Eastern Europe, ed. by Alexander V. Maiorov and Roman Hautala, 405-424. London: Routledge, 2021.
• Osipian, Alexandr. “Long Distance Trade and Armenian Migration to the Lands of Poland-Lithuania in 1350–1795.” Historische Mitteilungen 33 (2022): 155-182.

Divos ex Hominibus Factos: Amenhotep’s Sphinxes in St. Petersburg

Mehmet Tepeyurt

associated project

project publications:

• Tepeyurt, Mehmet. “Imperial Russia’s Egyptian Endeavors: The Purchase of Amenhotep’s Sphinxes.” In Transottoman Matters: Objects Moving through Time, Space, and Meaning, ed. by Arkadiusz Blaszczyk, Robert Born and Florian Riedler. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2021. 

Georgian Historiography of the 17th and 18th Century Modelling and 'Othering' Iran: Writing History in a Transottoman Context

Malkhazi Archvadze

The 17th and 18th centuries were a highly complex period in the history of Georgia, in particular in its relationship with Iran, the Ottoman Empire and Russia. Officially divided since 1490, two major Christian kingdoms and a number of smaller principalities were bound together by a nostalgic longing towards a unified Georgian realm, but they had to face strong opposition by their imperial neighbors. The intensifying relations between Safavid Iran and Georgia, with many high-ranking members of the Georgian elite taking up military and administrative positions in Iran and the nominal conversion of Georgian kings to Islam, led to a growing circulation and transfer of knowledge and the vivid exchange of ideas and values. These were mirrored, in an exemplary way, in the Georgian historiography of this time. As part of a wider intellectual movement, the Georgian elites of this time endeavored to revive the tradition of Georgian historiography that had been dormant since the invasions of Timur in the early 15th century. Historiography became the central ideological instrument by which Georgian culture could distance itself from other cultural fields, especially from Iran and Iranian culture. All of these historical works actively negotiated questions of identity as one of the major characteristics of Georgian historiography of this period. Since most of them were authored in East Georgia, they mirror most strongly the issue of Iran-related alterity in their attempt to distance themselves from Iran and Iranian traditions and thus strengthening and developing their own identity.

The present research project investigates and analyses seven central Georgian historiographical works stemming from this period. One can portray the renaissance of Georgian historiography as both a result of the process of Transottoman circulation of knowledge and as a critical reaction to it. This means that Georgian historiography was formed in a constant exchange with its Muslim neighbors Iran and the Ottoman Empire, conserving the existing knowledge of self and other in the historical memory for future generations in a narrative form. The main question is how Georgian historiography managed to both reinvent itself and to create new identities, using the Iranian other as ideological template and Iranian forms of historiographical writing as stylistic model: the creation of new patterns of terminology, the sacralization of imagined and abstract spaces, the creation of new historiographical models.

Transottoman Semiospheres: Pavel A. Levašev's (d. 1820) and Necati Efendi's (d. after 1776) Imaginations of the Other

Alexander Bauer, Gül Şen

The envisaged project analyses Ottoman-Russian mental entanglements by comparison of two reports written by two war captives. Both had fallen in a yearlong captivity during the same military conflict and wrote autobiographical texts about their years in custody. Necati Efendi (d. after 1776) was an Ottoman official and served as the registrar (defter emini) for Silahdar Ibrahim Pasha, the Ottoman commander in chief of the Crimea during the Ottoman-Russian War in 1768–74. Together with a group of Ottoman officials he became a prisoner of war for almost four years (1771–75), until he was released after the peace treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in July 1774. Back in Istanbul, Necati continued his profession as a member of the Ottoman bureaucratic echelon. This part of project (carried out by Gül Sen) relies on the captivity narrative of Necati Efendi, which is available in a number of extant manuscripts. Due to the structural and stylistic similarities, this narrative, entitled Tārīḫ-i Ḳırım (The History of Crimea), within the genre of Ottoman sefāretnāmes (embassy report). Pavel A. Levašev (d. 1820) was a Russian diplomat and served in Istanbul. At the beginning of the Ottoman-Russian War in 1768 he was imprisoned together with the diplomat Aleksej Michajlovič Obreskov. Later, as a captive of the Ottoman army, both traveled the land. After his liberation in 1771, Levašev went back to St Petersburg (together with Obreskov), where he started to work at the Collegium of Foreign Affairs. Levašev published his memoires of his captivity in St Petersburg in 1790 under the title Car’grader Briefe (Car’gradskie pis’ma) and Plen i stradanija rossijan u turkov – Captivity and Sufferings of the Russians among the Turks, a historical treatise spanning several centuries. This sub-project (carried out by Alexander Bauer) examines Levašev’s captivity narrative, which is already available in an edition, along with his other writings.

By their texts, both Necati Efendi and Pavel A. Levašev contributed to the manifestation of Ottoman and Russian discourses on the “other”. The mutual perception must be seen against the backdrop of the increasing interconnections of the Russian-Ottoman space in the second half of the eighteenth century. On the Russian side, a kind of orientalism of its own was developed during the rule of Catherine II (r. 1762–96), whereas under Mustafa III (r. 1757–74) a first phase of reforms and diplomatic rapprochement with the European powers began. The war between two empires forced the protagonists into a mental confrontation with their opponents and compelled them to integrate themselves into their own imaginations. The project examines—in a comparative way—both captive narratives in a four step analysis: (1) The critical edition and translation of the Ottoman-Turkish manuscripts and the translation of the edition of the Russian texts; (2) text-based imaginations of the “other” in the context of the Russian-Ottoman cognitive interrelations in the Transottoman semiospheres (drawing on the concept of semiosphere, Lotman 1984) by means of narratological examinations; (3 )classification of the history of Russian-Ottoman relations in the second half of the eighteenth century; (4) embedding the texts in the coeval multicultural Transottoman context in Istanbul and St. Petersburg with focus on mobility, entanglements, and circulation of knowledge.

project publications:

• Şen, Gül. “Between Istanbul and Saint Petersburg: War Captivity as a Part of Diplomacy in the Eighteenth Century.” In Ege Üniversitesi Türk Dünyası Araştırmaları Enstitüsü III. Uluslararası Türkiye-Rusya İlişkileri Sempozyumu Bildiri Kitabı, edç by Vefa Kurban, Hamit Özman, Recep Efe Çoban, 338–353. Ankara, 2023.
• Bauer, Alexander. “‘The Suffering of the Russians’: The Narration of Captivity and Suffering in the Imaginations about the Ottoman Stranger in Pavel Levašov’s Writings.” In Narratives of Dependency: Textual Representations of Slavery, Captivity, and Other Forms of Strong Asymmetrical Dependencies, ed. by Elke Brüggen and Marion Gymnich, 179–198. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024.
• Şen, Gül.  “Narrativity and Dependency: The Captivity of an Ottoman Official in St. Petersburg (1771–75).” In Narratives of Dependency: Textual Representations of Slavery, Captivity, and Other Forms of Strong Asymmetrical Dependencies ed. by Elke Brüggen and Marion Gymnich, 161–178. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024.

Transfer of Knowledge and Science, and Transnational Circulation of Ideas between Central and Eastern Europe and the Republic of Turkey: Polish-Caraim, Hungarian, and Russian Muslim Academicians and "entangled intellectuals" (ca. 1917-1950)

Zaur Gasimov

Linguists and historians from Central and Eastern Europe, mostly Turkologists of Caraim-Jewish background from Poland like Sergej Szapszal and Ananiasz Zajaczkowski as well as Hungarian ethnographers and intellectuals such as Gyula Mészáros, Lászlo Rásonyi, Zajti Ferenc as well as Turkic exile intellectuals and experts from Azerbaijan (Ahmet Caferoglu), Crimea and Volga-region of Russia, Tatars and Bashkirs like Hamit Zübeyr Kosay, Zeki Velidi Togan, Abd. Inan influenced, co-shaped, and co-initiated the transfer of knowledge and sciences to Turkey. The contribution of those philologists, historians of culture and literature from CEE to the foundation of Turkish Turkology, language planning, history-writing and museum-building is enormous, but still mostly neglected by the international scholarship.

Those scientists were, however, closely interwoven with Turkish academia (Fuat Köprülü, Ragip Hulusi Özdem) and entangled with each other. Being rooted in several academic cultures and discourse spaces, these scientists were amazing examples of “entangled intellectuals” and acted as “cultural brokers” between Kemalist Turkey, Central Europe, and Soviet humanities. The project analyzes the transfers of knowledge and sciences in the fields such as language, history, and culture to post-Ottoman Turkey. The transfers will be examined by revisiting the Turkish language reform, and the state-backed history-writing and the definition of Turkish popular culture under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk as well as in later years.

project publications:

• Gasimov, Zaur. Warschau gegen Moskau: Prometheistische Aktivitäten zwischen Polen, Frankreich und der Türkei 1918–1939. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2022.
• Gasimov, Zaur and Stefan Rohdewald. “Russian-Persian Entanglements in a Transottoman Context.” Comparativ 33, No. 2 (2023).
• Gasimov, Zaur. “Grenzgänger und Grenzräume. Verflechtungen zwischen Russland und der Türkei im 20. und 21. Jahrhundert.” In Mobility Dynamics between Eastern Europe and the Near East: Exploring a Cross-Regional Shared History, ed. by Albrecht Fuess, Heidi Hein-Kircher, Julia Obertreis and Stefan Rohdewald. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2024.

Transimperial Armenian Mobility and the Rise of Ottoman Tokat

Polina Ivanova

The project examines the mobility and culture of the Anatolian Armenians from the 16th to the 18th centuries using the example of the city of Tokat (Armenian Եւդոկիա Ewdokia) as an early modern economic and cultural center of the Armenians in Anatolia. While the early modern history of Armenians in Poland-Lithuania (Lwów-Lviv, Kamieniec, Zamość), the Crimea, the Safavid Empire (New-Julfa in Isfahan) and in Constantinople is more thoroughly researched, Anatolia remains largely in the shadow. Tokat became an important Armenian center since the late 16th century in the context of the Safavid-Ottoman wars, as Armenians fled from embattled regions further east to the safety of Tokat and contributed to the city’s economic and cultural development. At the time of the Celali uprisings many Armenians of Tokat moved west again – this time to the Crimea, Wallachia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – while maintaining strong ties with their former homeland. Mediating between Armenian communities of Iran, Anatolia and Eastern/Central Europe and their respective cultures, Tokat became a vibrant hub of the Transottoman cultural transfer.

Historiographically, the early modern period in the history of Armenian communities has always been overshadowed by history of the medieval Armenian kingdoms, as well as modern Armenian history and the history of the Armenian Genocide. History of Armenian communities of Anatolia in the early modern period has therefore been little researched, and its reappraisal is an important desideratum. The project is based on a variety of contemporary Armenian, Ottoman, and Polish sources now preserved in numerous manuscript collections and museums in Armenia, Turkey, Italy, Austria, Poland, Ukraine, Iran and other countries. While much in the history of Tokat is unique, this case study is emblematic of the dynamics common to many other Ottoman cities with significant Armenian presence. Methodologically, the study relies on prosopographic data and biographies of economic actors, writers, translators and clergymen from and related to Tokat; these are processed primarily with the help of the Actor-Network Theory.

project publications:

• Ivanova, Polina. “Non-Professional Expertise: On the Early Modern Transformations in Armenian Manuscript Production Viewed from Ottoman Tokat and Crimea.” Diyâr 6, no. 1 (2025). 

Crisis and Transformation of an Old Regime: Circulation of Ideologies and Institutions between Russian and Ottoman Empires, 1768–1774

Yusuf Karabıçak

This project aims to study the circulation of ideas and institutional frameworks between the Russian and Ottoman Empires focusing on the Ottoman-Russian War of 1768–1774. The project’s focus is the Ottoman Empire’s Orthodox Christian populations and their relationship to the Ottoman ruling elite. This project will be carried out using material in Ottoman Turkish and Greek located in the archives in Turkey and Greece.

There will be three phases to the project. The first one will concentrate on the Ottoman ruling elite in 1768 and earlier to determine the approach of different networks to the question of war and of the war’s legitimacy. This phase will situate Ottoman arguments for war both in their Ottoman and in the wider European context emphasizing the circulation of ideas. The second phase will focus on the propaganda by the Ottomans and Russians during the war and compare the arguments they used in order to convince different populations to ally with their imperial projects. The third phase will discuss the aftermath of the war focusing on the Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople. The aim of the third phase will be to question whether institutional frameworks are comparable and whether they “circulate” between the two empires.

project publications:

• Karabıçak, Yusuf Ziya. “Defending Polish Liberties: A Conceptual and Diplomatic History of the Ottoman Declaration of War on Russia in 1768.” Ab Imperio 1 (2022): 133–165..

• Karabıçak, Yusuf Ziya. “Enlightened Declarations: Ottoman and Russian Proclamations in the Ottoman‐Russian War of 1768–1774.” Journal for Eighteenth‐Century Studies 47, no. 3 (2024): 259–278.

• Karabıçak, Yusuf Ziya. “Expertise and Sedition: Perspectives from the Ottoman Army of 1769.” Diyâr 6, no. 1 (2025). 

Travels and Works of Michael Kosmeli (1773–1844): A Forgotten Key Figure in the Transottoman Corridor and Context

Dirk Sangmeister

The Silesian Michael Kosmeli (1773–1844) was a law graduate, a versatile man of letters, a multilingual translator, a gifted musician and holder of a PhD in botany, but during his whole life he never obtained a regular and permanent position. He did not even bother to settle down anywhere, instead he spent his whole life wandering around as an itinerant scholar and vagrant musician, crisscrossing numerous countries of Europe and even parts of Asia. As an individual he embodied the exact opposite of a classical bookish scholar. Kosmeli preferred to ramble in a traversal corridor, which linked East Germany and Eastern Europe with the Ottoman Empire. He frequently made stop-overs in Berlin, Breslau (Wroclaw), Riga, Reval (Tallinn), St. Petersburg, Moscow, Tiflis, Jassy and Constantinople, where loosely knit networks of scholars and friends provided him with shelter and advice. Some of his journeys even led him to Persia (Isfahan, Shiraz); according to contemporaries he considered to convert to Islam. Often years passed, before Kosmeli resurfaced and returned to Germany. He did not only cross geographical, political and religious borders with an astonishing ease and confidence but rather considered the Transottoman corridor his natural habitat.
As the author of the travelogues “Rhapsodische Briefe auf einer Reise in die Krim” (1813) and “Harmlose Bemerkungen auf einer Reise über Petersburg, Moskau, Kiew nach Jassy” (1822), as a translator primarily of poetry (from Polish, Russian, Modern Greek, Persian and other languages), as a man of letters being acquainted with some of the most renowned contemporary scholars and writers (among them Hammer-Purgstall, Goethe, Chamisso and Jean Paul) and as a musician frequently appearing on both national and international stages, Kosmeli can be considered the most mobile and versatile German agent in the Transottoman field in the early 19th century. He adopted and transferred a variety of texts, ideas and tunes between the West and the East, acting as an influencer in both directions. Despite his far reaching journeys, his wide stretched relations and his numerous publications, Kosmeli is a completely forgotten figure nowadays on whom only a single scholarly article has been published. By embedding his life in the broader context of Transottomanica, this research project has two goals: In a first step, it aims at a coherent reconstruction of Kosmeli’s adventurous life and travels by means of a biography in combination with an annotated bibliography and a critical edition of his correspondence. Based on this bio-bibliographical foundation, I will then undertake a second step by defining and analyzing his role in the transfer of knowledge within the Transottoman corridor and context by profiling his relations and interactions with scholars, writers and musicians in both West and East as well as highlighting his merits in adopting and transferring knowledge, texts, ideas, tones and tunes.

project publications:

• Sangmeister, Dirk. „‘Ein herlich derber Sünden-Naturalist und Gigant’: Zum 250. Geburtstag des vagierenden Schriftstellers und Maultrommlers Michael Kosmeli (1773-1844).“ Zeitschrift für Germanistik 33, no. 3 (2023): 686–692.

• Sangmeister, Dirk, Hg. Michael Kosmeli: Die Zwei und vierzig jährige Äffin. Das vermaledeiteste Märchen unter der Sonne. Berlin: Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, 2023.

• Sangmeister, Dirk. „Das genaue Gegenteil eines Stubengelehrten.“ In Bitte eintragen! Die Besucherbücher der Herzog August Bibliothek 1667–2000, hg. von Hole Rößler und Marie von Lüneburg. Wolfenbüttel: Herzog August Bibliothek, 2021.

• Sangmeister, Dirk. „Verwegener Vagant zwischen Abend- und Morgenland“. Damals 2023, no. 10: 45–46. 

Inner-Islamic Transfer of Knowledge in the Ottoman Empire: on Translations of Works of Islamic Mysticism within Transregional Sufi Networks in the Anatolian and Arab Provinces

Tobias Sick

The research project seeks to analyse processes of translation and adaptation of works of Islamic mysticism written in the languages Persian, Arabic, and Turkish, which took place in various (border) regions of the Ottoman Empire during the 16th to 18th centuries. The focus of the project will be on the socio-cultural background of these processes, that is, the conditions underlying the selection, imitation, adaptation, transmission and reception of texts. The project will apply current approaches developed in the fields of material philology and translation studies in order to examine textual, paratextual, codicological, and visual aspects of manuscripts as well as the background of the translators themselves.
The analysis of the selected source material will allow insights into the socio-political fabric of Ottoman scholarly culture and book culture as well as networks of Sufi brotherhoods in the capital Istanbul and across the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire and its borderlands with Iran. Thereby it will be possible to illuminate from a transregional perspective how actors coming from different cultural milieus adapted norms and representations to objects in a particular context.

project publications:

• Sick, Tobias. “On Ottoman Translations of Persian Mystical Advice Literature: The Transottoman Dimension of the Pandnāma-yi ʿAṭṭār.” In Elsine-i S̱elās̱e A Cultural Analysis of Transmission and Translation in the Ottoman Empire, ed. by Philip Bockholt, Hülya Çelik, Ludwig Paul and Ani Sargsyan. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2025. 

Russian Imperial Rule and Citizenship in the South Caucasus (1878-1914)

Gözde Yazıcı Cörüt

The Treaty of Berlin brought the Russo-Ottoman War (1877-78) to an end, and delineated a new border between the Russian and Ottoman Empires at the juncture of north-eastern Anatolia and the southern Caucasus. The three Ottoman sanjaks, Kars, Çıldır (including the Ardahan district) and Batum were ceded to Russia; soon thereafter Russian authorities established two separate administrative divisions, the provinces (oblasts) of Kars and Batum. My proposed project aims at examining Russia’s citizenship policies in these provinces (1878 – 1914) vis-à-vis concurrent Ottoman citizenship policies, which were rather entangled with border politics of both empires. Using case studies of Kars and Batum, and comparing these to other Ottoman and Russian geopolitical contexts, such as the Balkans and Central Asia, I will use imperial citizenship as a lens to consider the following, broad questions: How does imperial citizenship facilitate greater centralization and thus reform as a means of control and governance of imperial borderlands? Are these policies shaped by the politics of contiguous states, which have a stake in such contested border regions? How do citizenship policies affect political allegiances, cross-border movements, and the habitation of imperial borderlands by divergent ethnic and religious groups? And, finally, what strategies ought to be employed to avoid any cross-cultural difficulties that may arise?My hope is an original contribution to the comparative study of imperial transfers between Tsarist Russia and the Ottomans, by looking more closely than before at the competitive claims of the various actors on the Russo-Ottoman borderlands. This might well constitute a kind of virgin soil in the research sense, and, as such, promises to make a significant and original contribution to the broader discussion of the Ottoman and Russian imperial experience. Currently, “Empire Studies” is not only a growing field, but particularly interested in inter-imperial interactions and transfers, the topic of my current research. My short-term publication plan consists of an academic journal article, which will examine the case of Armenians who straddled the Russian and Ottoman Empires, and the limits of imperial power to monitor their lives and movement between 1878 and 1914. My long-term plan is to turn my PhD Dissertation (entitled ‘Ambivalent Loyalties and Imperial Citizenship on the Russo-Ottoman Border between 1878 and 1914: An Analysis of the Ottoman Perspective’ ) on the Ottoman Empire and current research on Tsarist Russia into a successful monograph. The working title for the monograph might be: Policies of Imperial Citizenship in the Ottoman and Russian Empires: A Perspective from Eastern Anatolia and the Russian Caucasus.

project publications:

• Yazıcı Cörüt, Gözde. Loyalty and Citizenship: Ottoman Perspectives on its Russian Border Region (1878–1914). Transottomanica 6. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2021.