Rivers of the Sultan

Author(s):  
Faisal H. Husain

Rivers of the Sultan offers a history of the Ottoman Empire’s management of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the early modern period. During the early sixteenth century, a radical political realignment in West Asia placed the reins of the Tigris and Euphrates in the hands of Istanbul. The political unification of the longest rivers in West Asia allowed the Ottoman state to rebalance the natural resource disparity along its eastern frontier. It regularly organized the shipment of grain, metal, and timber from upstream areas of surplus in Anatolia and the Jazira to downstream areas of need in Iraq. This imperial system of waterborne communication, the book argues, created heavily militarized fortresses that anchored the Ottoman presence in Iraq, enabling Istanbul to hold in check foreign and domestic challenges to its authority and to exploit the organic wealth of the Tigris-Euphrates alluvium. From the end of the seventeenth century, the convergence of natural and human disasters transformed the Ottoman Empire’s relationship with its twin rivers. A trend toward provincial autonomy ensued that would localize the Ottoman management of the Tigris and Euphrates and shift its command post from Istanbul to the provinces. By placing a river system at the center of analysis, this book reveals intimate bonds between valley and mountain, water and power in the early modern world.

1999 ◽  
Vol 31 (123) ◽  
pp. 305-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincent P. Carey

One of the bitterest fruits of human conflict is the resort to massacre. From the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572 to ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, combatants have regularly attempted to defeat their enemies through acts of indiscriminate killing. The history of early modern European colonial expansion is replete with such incidents. The remembering and recounting of them has become the stuff of historical and political controversy. The aim of this article is not to review these painful episodes, but to examine the sixteenth-century context in which these resorts to massacre occurred; to focus on one particular atrocity that achieved some notoriety in Ireland in the early modern period; and to suggest that a now largely forgotten episode, at Mullaghmast in County Kildare in 1578, was part of a pattern of conquest which implicated not only the soldiers and settlers who served in the Gaelic localities, but also the upper echelons of the English administration in Ireland. This pattern was accompanied by an apologetic ideology of civility and savagery best reflected in a central text, John Derricke’s Image of Irelande (1581). Derricke’s Image provides us with sufficient evidence to suggest that indiscriminate slaughter was an accepted tool in the effort to subdue Gaelic Ireland. Indeed, Derricke’s text adds weight to the conclusion that the atrocity at Mullaghmast in 1578 implicates no less a figure than Sir Henry Sidney, the quintessential renaissance English official in Ireland. Mullaghmast is important not only because it demonstrates the officially sanctioned brutality of the conquest, but also because it raises the question of how memory and history are constructed.


In the early modern period, Catholic communities in Protestant jurisdictions were impelled to establish colleges for the education and formation of students in more hospitable Catholic territories. The Irish, English and Scots Colleges founded in France, Flanders, the Iberian peninsula, Rome and elsewhere are the best known, but the phenomenon extended to Dutch and Scandinavian foundations in southern Flanders and the German lands. Similarly colleges were established in Rome for various national communities, among whom the Maronites are a striking example. The first colleges were founded in the mid-sixteenth century and tens of thousands of students passed through them until their closure in late eighteenth century. Only a handful survived the disruption of the French Revolutionary wars to re-emerge in the nineteenth century. Historians have long argued that these exile colleges played a prominent role in maintaining Catholic structures by supplying educated clergy equipped to deal with the challenges of their domestic churches. This has ensured that the Irish, English and Scots colleges in particular have a rich historiography laid out in the pages of Archivium Hibernicum, the Records of the Scots Colleges or the volumes published under the aegis of the Catholic Record Society in England. Until recently, however, their histories were considered in isolating confessional and national frameworks, with surprisingly little attempt to examine commonalities or connections. Recent research has begun to open up the topic by investigating the social, economic, cultural and material histories of the colleges. Meanwhile renewed interest in the history of early modern migration has encouraged historians to place the colleges within the vibrant migrant communities of Irish, English, Scots and others on the continent. The Introduction begins with a survey of the colleges. It assesses their historiographies, paying particular attention to the research of the last three decades. The introduction argues that an obvious next step is to examine the colleges in transnational and comparative perspectives. Finally, it introduces the volume's essays on Irish, English, Scots, Dutch, German and Maronite colleges, which provide up-to-date research by leading historians in the field and point to the possibilities for future research on this exciting topic.


Author(s):  
Nicole Mennell

The burgeoning field of animal studies has facilitated the exploration of human-animal relations across a variety of disciplines. Following the animal turn in humanities scholarship, a number of studies published in the late 20th and early 21st centuries have demonstrated that animals reflected the social, cultural, and political concerns of the early modern period in a unique manner due to a shift in the ways in which animals were viewed and valued. This shift was largely caused by the increasing commodification of animals, the discovery of new creatures through global exploration, a renewed interest in investigating and documenting all earthly beings, and an enhanced concern for animal welfare. A range of early modern texts reflect this shift in the perception of animals through engaged interaction with conceptions of the human-animal divide and interrogation of human exceptionalism. Animals also inhabit a multitude of early modern texts in a less prominent manner because, as is the case in the modern world, animals lived alongside humans and were a fundamental part of everyday life. While these texts may not at first seem to reveal much detail about the lives of animals and how they were viewed in the early modern period, the field of animal studies has provided a method of bringing nonhuman beings to the fore. When analyzing the representation of nonhuman beings in early modern texts through the lens of animal studies a thorough consideration of the context in which such texts were written and investigation of the lived experience of the animals they seek to portray is required in order to capture, what leading animal studies scholar Erica Fudge terms, a holistic history of animals.


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-132
Author(s):  
Ryan Szpiech ◽  
Katarzyna Starczewska ◽  
Mercedes García-Arenal Rodríguez

AbstractThis essay studies the translations of the Qur’ān into Romance languages in anti-Islamic treatises written by Christians in the Iberian Peninsula in the sixteenth century. It compares three such works (here calledAntialcoranesor ‘anti-Qur’āns’) that contain citations of the Qur’ān in Arabic, either in Arabic script or in transliteration, or both. These include theConfusión o confutación de la secta Mahomética y del Alcorán(1515) of Juan Andrés, theLumbre de fe contra la secta mahometana y el alcorán(1521) by Martín de Figuerola and theConfutación del alcorán y secta mahometana(1555) by Lope de Obregón. It also considers glosses found in the Latin Qur’ān made at the behest of the Italian cardinal Egidio (Giles) da Viterbo (1518). We argue that these works merit detailed study, along with more studied Latin translations, as part of a history of the translation of the Qur’ān in the early modern period.


2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (6) ◽  
pp. 511-525 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giuseppe Marcocci

In the past two decades, empires have increasingly attracted the attention of historians of the early modern period to the detriment of the traditional focus on states as the default political unit of analysis. The emergence of global history is not alien to this turn. This article maintains that our understanding of configurations of the early modern political map would only benefit from detaching the history of the state from its European trajectory and focusing on the multiple connections between states and empires across the world. Not only did both states and empires share the problem of having too much to rule, but their differences were not always so clear to the historical actors. Therefore, looking at their interactions at a local level might be a promising line to follow in future research.


2019 ◽  
pp. 68-93
Author(s):  
K.J. Kesselring

Chapter 3 turns to the history of private satisfaction-seeking, or feuding, and focuses on compensation for homicide. It shows that payments continued longer than we might have thought. When such compensation served as a means to bypass legal sanctions, it hindered the successful imposition of the king’s peace, let alone any emerging notion of a public peace. Mediated through the ancient mechanism of the appeal, however, compensation continued into the sixteenth century and beyond, thanks in part to the needs and actions of victims’ widows. But appeals did decline over the early modern period. Here, too, a statute of 1487 played a part, as did the uses judges made of the new manslaughter verdict. Judges and others derided appeals as ‘suits of revenge’, tainted by association with the feud and an approach to peace-making and satisfaction-seeking that had less and less legitimacy as public justice came to supersede private interests.


Author(s):  
Gayane Ayvazyan

The study of the Early modern period Western Armenian or Turkish-Armenian history did not interest the Soviet-Armenian historiography much. It was primarily subordi-nated to the Eastern Armenian historical priorities, and occupied a marginal place in the Soviet-Armenian historiographical system. The absence of study on the Turkish-Armenian history in the Soviet-Armenian historiographical system was not an acci-dental omission, but the result of the political attitudes of the Soviet historiographical thought, which [the attitudes], since the Stalin era, had not always derived from the Western Armenian historical reasoning.


2004 ◽  
Vol 77 (195) ◽  
pp. 111-126
Author(s):  
Claire Cross

AbstractFor thirty years after graduating from Oxford in 1932 Dickens, a devoted Yorkshireman, produced a stream of articles on the intellectual, social and political history of the county in the sixteenth century, which culminated in 1959 in his pioneering work Lollards and Protestants in the Diocese of York, 1509–58. After leaving Hull for London in 1962 he never found a county in the south of England to replace Yorkshire in his affections, and moved from the history of the Reformation in its local context to concentrate upon the national and international history of religion in the early modern period.


Author(s):  
Kyle Conrau-Lewis

In the history of the book, indexes emerged as a result of a number of developments in paratexts and organization. The earliest examples of this device varied significantly in layout, organization, and textual form. While various kinds of tables of contents are attested in the ancient world, the index is a much later innovation. The earliest use of indexes is found in legal and then scholastic and patristic texts in continental Europe; they were particularly useful for university students and preachers. Indexes served as aids to help them navigate the growing corpus of legal and theological compilations and commentaries. However, their format and function were variable: the manuscript evidence shows a great degree of experimentation, combining alphabetic, vocalic, and systematic orders of arrangement. In the early modern period, with increasing anxieties about how to organize and manage information, treatises instructed readers how to compile an index. In turn, from the 16th century and well into the 18th, writers cautioned against an excessive reliance on these book aids in lieu of reading the whole books and lampooned so-called “index learning.” The use of indexes in Greek, Hebrew, and Islamic book culture only began in earnest in the early modern period.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Paolella

Human trafficking has become a global concern over the last twenty years, but its violence has terrorized and traumatized its victims and survivors for millennia. This study examines the deep history of human trafficking from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period. It traces the evolution of trafficking patterns: the growth and decline of trafficking routes, the everchanging relationships between traffickers and authorities, and it examines the underlying causes that lead to vulnerability and thus to exploitation. As the reader will discover, the conditions that lead to human trafficking in the modern world, such as poverty, attitudes of entitlement, corruption, and violence, have a long and storied past. When we understand that past, we can better anticipate human trafficking’s future, and then we are better able to fight it.


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