The Western Sephardic Diaspora

2021 ◽  
pp. 369-389
Author(s):  
Miriam Bodian
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Atlantic Coast ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Atlantic Trade ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Commercial Center ◽  
Sephardic Diaspora

The western Sephardic diaspora was created by descendants of Jews who underwent forced baptism in Portugal in 1497, just a few years after the expulsion from Spain had brought a flood of Jewish exiles across the border. These conversos, many of them crypto-Jews, became known as the “nação” (“nation”), a term that conveyed an ambiguous identity that had made them targets of the Portuguese Inquisition. At first, some immigrated to Iberian colonial lands or fled to Jewish communities in Italy and the Ottoman Empire. By the mid-sixteenth century, some who were active in the expanding Atlantic trade began settling in southwest France as “New Christians.” In the seventeenth century Portuguese ex-conversos were able to build a thriving, openly practicing Jewish community in the Atlantic commercial center of Amsterdam. This became the hub of a diaspora that eventually included the Caribbean and the Atlantic coast of North America. Although some of its traditions have been carefully preserved, by the mid-eighteenth century this once dynamic diaspora had lost much of its commercial and cultural vitality.

Trade and Politics Behind the Slave Coast: the Lagoon Traffic and the Rise of Lagos, 1500–1800

1983 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 321-348 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Law
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Coastal Lagoons ◽  
The West ◽  
Atlantic Trade ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Active Interest ◽  
European Trade ◽  
Westward Drift

The rise of Lagos, which became the principal port of the ‘Slave Coast’ at the end of the eighteenth century, can only be understood by reference to the interaction between the European Atlantic trade and the indigenous canoe-borne trade along the coastal lagoons. European traders in the sixteenth century used the Lagos channel and the lagoon to approach the Ijebu kingdom, where slaves and cloth were purchased, but this trade lapsed in the seventeenth century. The Lagos settlement originated as a fishing hamlet, but was occupied as a military base by Benin around the end of the sixteenth century. Benin expansion to the west may have been designed to prevent European trade with Ijebu, in the interests of a Benin monopoly. Lagos remained formally subject to Benin until the nineteenth century, but the decline of Benin power in the eighteenth century left it effectively independent. European sources of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries attest trade in cloth and slaves passing along the lagoons through Lagos to Allada and Whydah in the west. Although this pattern of trade has been assumed to date back to pre-European times, it was more probably a consequence of the European presence, and more specifically of the westward drift of European interest along the coast from Benin after the sixteenth century. European traders began to show an active interest in the lagoon trade to the east of Allada in the early eighteenth century, and again began to explore the possibility of using the Lagos channel to bapproach the inland lagoons. Lagos developed as an Atlantic port from the 1760s, exporting slaves and Ijebu cloth, but its importance was limited by its remoteness from any major source of slaves. Its emergence as a major port in the late eighteenth century was due to the disruption of slave shipments from ports further west by military pressure from Dahomey, which led to the diversion of slave supplies eastward along the lagoons for shipment from Lagos.

scholarly journals Istanbul Judeo-Spanish

2011 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Ignacio Hualde ◽  
Mahir Şaul
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Port Cities ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Spanish Speaking ◽  
Italian Peninsula ◽  
Western European ◽  
Spanish Speaking Population

The Judeo-Spanish speaking population of Istanbul is the result of migrations that were due to the edict of expulsion of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492. The Ottoman ruler Bayezid II provided a haven to the exiles in his realm, and many came as immigrants to the capital Istanbul and other major port cities in that year. A continuous trickle of immigration of Jews originating in Spain continued after that date, as some of those who had gone to exile in other Mediterranean and Western European countries eventually also decided to resettle in Ottoman cities. Some Spanish-speaking families continued to migrate from the cities of the Italian peninsula to Istanbul and other centers of the Ottoman empire up until the eighteenth century. Another stream included Hispano-Portuguese families, Jews who had resettled in Portugal after the expulsion but were forced to undergo conversion there in 1497, and after a period of clandestine Jewish existence started emigrating to other countries in the sixteenth century. First Bayonne in France, then Amsterdam and other Hanseatic cities became important centers for Hispano-Portuguese families that returned to Judaism, and these maintained relations with, and occasionally sent immigrants to, the Jewish communities of the Ottoman cities.

Eunuchs in the Ottoman Empire

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Hathaway
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Prisoners Of War ◽  
East African ◽  
Young Turks

Abstract This article surveys the employment of eunuchs in the Ottoman Empire. After placing the use of court eunuchs in a global historical context, the study turns to the earliest eunuchs in Ottoman employ, who were probably Byzantine prisoners of war. By the early fifteenth century, East African harem eunuchs had become an important element of the palace eunuch population, and the article discusses their procurement and castration. The construction of Topkap Palace in newly-conquered Constantinople during the 1450s laid the ground for the dichotomy between African harem eunuchs and white Third Court eunuchs. An equally important watershed occurred in the late sixteenth century, when the Chief Harem Eunuch assumed the supervision of the imperial pious endowments for Mecca and Medina, making him one of the most powerful figures in the empire. By the late seventeenth century, deposed Chief Harem Eunuchs often commanded the eunuchs who guarded the Prophet Muhammads tomb in Medina. The influence of all palace eunuchs decreased during the eighteenth century, as the grand vizier acquired ever more control over the empires administration. Nineteenth-century reforms dealt a permanent blow to the harem eunuchs authority, which ended entirely when the Young Turks disbanded the harem in 1909.Аннотация Статья рассматривает вопрос о привлечении на службу евнухов в Османскои империи. После общего обзора роли придворных евнухов в глобальном историческом контексте, исследование обращается к первым евнухам на османскои службе, которые вероятно были византиискими военнопленными. К началу XV в. восточно-африканские евнухи гарема стали важнои фракциеи среди дворцовых евнухов в статье рассматривается методика их отбора и кастрации. Строительство дворца Топкапы в недавно завоеванном Константинополе в 50-х гг. XV в. положило начало дихотомии между африканскими евнухами Гарема и белыми евнухами Третьего Двора. Не менее важным рубежом становится и конец XVI в., когда старшии евнух Гарема принял на себя обязанности по управлению имперскими благотворительными пожертвованиями в Мекку и Медину, что сделало этого сановника одной из самых могущественных фигур империи. К концу XVII в. низложенные главные евнухи Гарема часто принимали командование над евнухами, охранявшими гробницу Пророка Мухаммеда в Медине. Влияние дворцовых евнухов оказывается ослабленным в XVIII столетии, по мере того как великии визирь получал все большую власть над управлением империи. Реформы XIX столетия нанесли решающии удар по власти евнухов Гарема, которая полностью сошла на нет при расформировании его младотурками в 1909 г.

The Word

2021 ◽  
pp. 43-62
Author(s):  
Nerina Rustomji
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Eighteenth Century Literature ◽  
Feminine Beauty ◽  
Travel Writings ◽  
French And English ◽  
Century Literature

This chapter traces the French and English relationship with the Ottoman Empire and accounts for the introduction of the term “houri” in French in the seventeenth century and English in the eighteenth century. Through surveying sixteenth-century polemics about Islam, seventeenth-century travel writings, and eighteenth-century literature, the chapter argues that French and English writers used the idea of the houri as a source of critique in anti-Islamic polemics and travel writing even while their views of Islam and Islamic empires could be ambivalent. By the eighteenth century, writers also began to employ the term “houri” as a way to describe a model of feminine beauty.

The Musical Topic of the Mass in B Minor

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel R. Melamed
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Church Music ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
The Other ◽  
Entire Spectrum ◽  
Giovanni Pierluigi Da Palestrina ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

If there is a fundamental musical subject of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B Minor, a compositional problem the work explores, it is the tension between two styles cultivated in church music of Bach’s time. One style was modern and drew on up-to-date music such as the instrumental concerto and the opera aria. The other was old-fashioned and fundamentally vocal, borrowing and adapting the style of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, his sixteenth-century contemporaries, and his seventeenth-century imitators. The movements that make up Bach’s Mass can be read as exploring the entire spectrum of possibilities offered by these two styles (the modern and the antique), ranging from movements purely in one or the other to a dazzling variety of ways of combining the two. The work illustrates a fundamental opposition in early-eighteenth-century sacred music that Bach confronts and explores in the Mass.

TWO RENAISSANCES: URBAN POLITICAL CULTURE IN POST-REFORMATION ENGLAND RECONSIDERED

2001 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 239-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
PHILIP WITHINGTON
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Urban Renaissance ◽  
The Social ◽  
Reformation England ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Historiography

This review reconsiders the place and importance of urban political culture in England between c. 1550 and c. 1750. Relating recent work on urban political culture to trends in political, social, and cultural historiography, it argues that England's towns and boroughs underwent two ‘renaissances’ over the course of the period: a ‘civic renaissance’ and the better-known ‘urban renaissance’. The former was fashioned in the sixteenth century; however, its legacy continued to inform political thought and practice over 150 years later. Similarly, although the latter is generally associated with ‘the long eighteenth century’, its attributes can be traced to at least the Elizabethan era. While central to broader transitions in post-Reformation political culture, these ‘renaissances’ were crucial in restructuring the social relations and social identity of townsmen and women. They also constituted an important but generally neglected dynamic of England's seventeenth-century ‘troubles’.

Indo-Iranian trade and Indian merchants in Iran in the seventeenth century

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 196-206
Author(s):  
Sushil Chaudhry
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century

Commercial relations between India and Iran have existed since antiquity, but they particularly flourished from the latter part of the sixteenth century to the earlier part of the eighteenth century. Partly, this could be due to greater degree of security on the land routes established under the two contiguous empires, the Mughal and the Safavid. Partly also, it owed much to the changing pattern of Eurasian commerce: Iran obtained increasing amount of silver from Europe in return for its silk, and with this augmented supply of silver, Iran could buy more Indian goods, especially textiles. Much too was owed to the enterprise of merchants, the Armenians of New Julfa and the large members of Indian merchants (Multanis and Gujaratis) who, practically settled in Iran, engaged in both commerce and usury.1

scholarly journals “Turkish” Textiles in South-Eastern and East-Central Europe in the Early Modern Period: The Evidence of Transylvanian Customs Accounts

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 363-382
Author(s):  
Mária Pakucs-Willcocks
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Serial Data

Abstract This paper analyzes data from customs accounts in Transylvania from the middle of the sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth on traffic in textiles and textile products from the Ottoman Empire. Cotton was known and commercialized in Transylvania from the fifteenth century; serial data will show that traffic in Ottoman cotton and silk textiles as well as in textile objects such as carpets grew considerably during the second half of the seventeenth century. Customs registers from that period also indicate that Poland and Hungary were destinations for Ottoman imports, but Transylvania was a consumer’s market for cotton textiles.

scholarly journals Dynamics of Continuity and Change: Shifts in Labour Relations in the Potosí Mines (1680–1812)

2016 ◽  
Vol 61 (S24) ◽  
pp. 93-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rossana Barragán Romano
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Economic Sectors ◽  
Labour Relations ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
The One

AbstractLabour relations in the silver mines of Potosí are almost synonymous with the mita, a system of unfree work that lasted from the end of the sixteenth century until the beginning of the nineteenth century. However, behind this continuity there were important changes, but also other forms of work, both free and self-employed. The analysis here is focused on how the “polity” contributed to shape labour relations, especially from the end of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century. This article scrutinizes the labour policies of the Spanish monarchy on the one hand, which favoured certain economic sectors and regions to ensure revenue, and on the other the initiatives both of mine entrepreneurs and workers – unfree, free, and self-employed – who all contributed to changing the system of labour.

‘Sailing on the same uncertain sea’

2021 ◽  
pp. 77-96
Author(s):  
Douglas Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
West Indies ◽  
The West ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Imperial Rivalry

Although they were small, the islands of the Caribbean were central rather than peripheral to the idea of empire. By the seventeenth century, the islands of the Antillean archipelago were already integral to European imperial rivalry and—as a result—came to shape European notions of what empires were and what they were for. This chapter explores the shifting nature of these islands as they emerged to become imperial powerhouses in the eighteenth century. This transformation was set against the backdrop of the great upheavals of war and revolution. The shifting demography of the West Indies and their economic and strategic importance exposed them particularly to the threats created by the geopolitical maelstrom around them. This chapter argues that their island nature intensified how they were affected by, and responded to, the profound and unprecedented uncertainties of the Age of Revolutions.

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