scholarly journals A Struggle for Survival: Genoese Diplomacy with the Sublime Porte in the Face of Spanish and French Opposition

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (6) ◽  
pp. 542-565
Author(s):  
F. Özden Mercan
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Small State ◽  
Habsburg Empire ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
The Face ◽  
Strategic Factors ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Insight Into

Abstract During the sixteenth century Genoa became a significant ally of the Habsburg Empire. Shared political, commercial, financial, and strategic factors tied the Genoese patricians firmly to Spain. However, their alliance was by no means permanent. The relations between the Genoese and the Spanish crown were not without tensions and conflict. In the mid-sixteenth century, the combination of various factors set the stage for Genoa to reconfigure its alliances in the Mediterranean. Having fallen victim to the Habsburg and Valois conflict and being torn between the two, Genoa was forced to resort to an alternative imperial power, the Ottoman Empire, to protect its integrity and independence, as well as to engage in the Levant trade. This article focuses on this moment of crisis in Genoa and analyzes how it led the Genoese to consider shifting their alliance from the Habsburgs to the Ottomans, who were the former’s most compelling rival in the Mediterranean. Although the Genoese endeavor ultimately ended in failure, the idea of a potential alliance with the Ottomans and the efforts Genoa invested in its diplomatic negotiations provides insight into the strategies a small state used to survive at a time when imperial rivalry over the Mediterranean was escalating.

Prophecy and Politics in Istanbul: Charles V, Sultan Suleyman, and the Habsburg Embassy of 1533-1534

1998 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Finlay
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Reciprocal Relationship ◽  
Habsburg Empire ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Charles V

AbstractThree prophecies current in Istanbul in the summer of 1533 pointed toward the imminent destruction of the Ottoman empire by Christian powers. One of the predictions stated that Alvise Gritti, the bastard son of the doge of Venice, would bring about the ruin of the Ottomans. A confidant of Sultan Srlcyman and the grand vizier, Gritti was deeply involved in the war of the Ottomans against Charles V of the Spanish-Habsburg empire, as a commander of Ottoman troops, advisor on Western affairs, and governor-general of the Hungarian kingdom. Widely detested by Ottoman officials, however, Gritti felt that his power was waning in 1534. In response, he perhaps was inspired to play out his prophetic role, for he told an ambassador of Charles V that he would help the emperor's forces capture Istanbul while Sultan Süleyman was away at war. Millenarian speculation was widespread in the early sixteenth century, but sometimes it had direct consequences inasmuch as it came to figure in the calculations of political actors. Examination of the prophecies of 1533 within the context of the time nicely illustrates how prophecy and politics could have a reciprocal relationship, with the former being tailored to the occasion and the latter responding to apocalyptic foreboding.

Building the Frontier of the Habsburg Empire:

2019 ◽  
Vol 78 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dragan Damjanović
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Urban Design ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Habsburg Empire ◽  
Administrative Organization ◽  
New Public ◽  
Administrative Unit ◽  
Joseph Ii ◽  
The Military

The Military Frontier, an administrative unit within the Habsburg Empire, was established during the sixteenth century to consolidate the border with the Ottoman Empire. In Building the Frontier of the Habsburg Empire: Viennese Authorities and the Architecture of Croatian-Slavonian Military Frontier Towns, 1780–1881, Dragan Damjanović considers architecture and urban planning there from the time Emperor Joseph II assumed the throne until the Frontier was abolished in 1881. Beginning with an overview of the region's architecture, urban design, and administrative organization, Damjanović proceeds to an examination of how modernization processes and the gradual demilitarization of the Frontier affected architecture and planning there. As they did for other provinces, Viennese authorities commissioned numerous new public and church buildings for the region—part of a larger effort toward modernization. Showing the influence of a variety of styles then fashionable elsewhere in Central Europe, these buildings were nonetheless well adapted to their local circumstances.

State-Inflicted Violence and the Ethics of Suffering

2021 ◽  
pp. 122-155
Author(s):  
Michael Meere
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Mediterranean Basin ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Violent Death ◽  
Virtuous Action ◽  
Innocent Victim ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
The Mediterranean Basin

This chapter investigates two ways in which playwrights adapt violent historical subjects for the stage in Gabriel Bounin’s Soltane (1561) and Jean de Beaubreuil’s tragedy Regulus (1582). The loyal heroes from both are victims of state violence, though their stories unfold quite differently. In La Soltane, Moustapha obeys his father’s orders to visit him despite being warned his father will have him killed. In Regulus, Atilie remains loyal to his homeland (Rome) despite knowing the Carthaginians will punish his betrayal. However, whereas Bounin depicts Moustapha as an innocent victim of filicide, Beaubreuil paints Atilie as an arrogant warrior whose hubris causes his defeat in battle. Nonetheless, Atilie accepts his change in fortune and his violent death in Carthage. Thus, despite his flaws, he is a stoic exemplar who might inspire spectators to take virtuous action themselves. Further, while the stories take place in the Ottoman Empire and the Mediterranean Basin, they mirror the religious and civil wars of sixteenth-century France.

Exposed to All the Currents of the Mediterranean—A Sixteenth-Century Venetian Rabbi on Muslim History

AJS Review ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Jacobs
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Ottoman History ◽  
Major Subject ◽  
The Mediterranean

The Western perception of Islam as a belligerent religion owes many of its stereotypes not only to the Crusades, but also to the early modern rivalry between the Ottoman Empire and Christian Europe. Heated debates about the “Turkish menace” dominated European political discourse until the (second) Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683, as documented by the innumerable Turcica that circulated both swiftly and widely thanks to revolutionary advances in printing. Sixteenth-century Christian authors provided their eager readers with constantly updated versions of Ottoman history, as did some of their Jewish contemporaries. Probably the first Jew to make the Ottomans the major subject matter of his work was Elijah Capsali of Candia in Venetian Crete, who in 1523 completed a Hebrew chronicle titled Seder ءEliyahu Zuta (“Minor Order of Elijah”).

scholarly journals From Anatolia to Aceh

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-117
Author(s):  
Philipp Bruckmayr
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Migrant Communities ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Funded Research Project ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Scholars of Islam in Southeast Asia and the history of the Malay-Indonesianworld have long been aware of periods of intense contacts between the OttomanEmpire and the region. Most widely known in this context are the politicalexchanges between the Sultanate of Aceh and the Ottoman Empire ofthe sixteenth century in the face of Portuguese maritime domination in SoutheastAsia. Regional calls for Ottoman aid against the expanding Europeanpowers by Muslim rulers were voiced in the nineteenth century. Despite thislapse in documented political contacts, however, connections between the tworegions were also sustained and developed further throughout the interveningcenturies on a variety of levels, most prominently in the economic, religious,and intellectual spheres.Despite the pioneering work of scholars such as Anthony Reid since the1960s, these connections, including inter alia the holy cities and Yemen’sHadhramaut region, both important centers of Islamic learning for SoutheastAsian Muslims and the source of strong migrant communities settling in theMalay-Indonesian world, have received scant scholarly attention. It is againstthis background that the British Academy-funded research project “Islam,Trade, and Politics across the Indian Ocean” and the volume at hand, whichrepresents one of its major fruits, brings together new innovative research onall of the various aspects of this particular relationship. Hereby it must benoted that its scope extends at times well beyond the Ottoman era also intothe Republican era, and that, importantly, much of the documentary evidencerelied upon derives from newly discovered archival sources.The volume is divided into three thematic parts, preceded by two introductorychapters by the editors and Anthony Reid, respectively, which set thestage for the remainder of the book by reviewing the relationship’s general ...

scholarly journals Transnational Policing after the 1848–1849 Revolutions: The Habsburg Empire in the Mediterranean

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 412-437
Author(s):  
Christos Aliprantis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
State Building ◽  
Habsburg Empire ◽  
European State ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Official Police

This article investigates the policing measures of the Habsburg Empire against the exiled defeated revolutionaries in the Mediterranean after the 1848–1849 revolutions. The examination of this counter-revolutionary policy reveals the pioneering role Austria played in international policing. It shows, in particular, that Vienna invested more heavily in policing in the Mediterranean after 1848 than it did in other regions, such as Western Europe, due to the multitude of ‘Forty-Eighters’ settled there and the alleged inadequacy of the local polities (e.g., the Ottoman Empire, Greece) to satisfactorily deal with the refugee question themselves. The article explains that Austria made use of a wide array of both official and unofficial techniques to contain these allegedly dangerous political dissidents. These methods ranged from official police collaboration with Greece and the Ottoman Empire to more subtle regional information exchanges with Naples and Russia. However, they also included purely unilateral methods exercised by the Austrian consuls, Austrian Lloyd sailors and ship captains, and ad hoc recruited secret agents to monitor the émigrés at large. Overall, the article argues that Austrian policymakers in the aftermath of 1848 invented new policing formulas and reshaped different pre-existing institutions (e.g., consuls, Austrian Lloyd), channelling them against their opponents in exile. Therefore, apart from surveying early modes of international policing, this study also adds to the discussion about Austrian (and European) state-building and, furthermore, to the more specific discussion of how European states dealt with political dissidents abroad in the nineteenth century.

Iraq

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adeed Dawisha
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Ethnically Diverse ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Ruling Elites ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
State Governance ◽  
Insight Into

With each day that passed after the 2003 invasion, the United States seemed to sink deeper in the treacherous quicksand of Iraq's social discord, floundering in the face of deep ethno-sectarian divisions that have impeded the creation of a viable state and the molding of a unified Iraqi identity. Yet as this book shows in this superb political history, the story of a fragile and socially fractured Iraq did not begin with the American-led invasion—it is as old as Iraq itself. The book traces the history of the Iraqi state from its inception in 1921 following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and up to the present day. It demonstrates how from the very beginning Iraq's ruling elites sought to unify this ethnically diverse and politically explosive society by developing state governance, fostering democratic institutions, and forging a national identity. The author, who was born and raised in Iraq, gives rare insight into this culturally rich but chronically divided nation, drawing on a wealth of Arabic and Western sources to describe the fortunes and calamities of a state that was assembled by the British in the wake of World War I and which today faces what may be the most serious threat to survival that it has ever known. Featuring the author's insightful new afterword on recent political developments, Iraq is required reading for anyone seeking to make sense of what's going on in Iraq today, and why it has been so difficult to create a viable government there.

scholarly journals Urban Population in Anatolia in the Sixteenth Century: A Study of Kayseri, Karaman, Amasya, Trabzon, and Erzurum

1976 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald C. Jennings
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Population Growth ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Mediterranean Basin ◽  
Urban Population ◽  
Rapid Rise ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
The Mediterranean Basin ◽  
Fernand Braudel

The rapid rise in the population of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century is well known. Ömer Lütfi Barkan long ago published a table showing that twelve important Ottoman cities grew from a combined population of 142,562 in 1520/1530 to a population of 271,494 in 1571/1580; likewise he has shown that the population of five major provinces in Anatolia grew 59.9 per cent in the same period, from 872,610 to 1,360,474. Fernand Braudel supports the thesis that there was a general 100 per cent population growth throughout the Mediterranean basin in the sixteenth century, and Barkan claims that growth at the Ottoman end of the Mediterranean was even more dynamic. However, there is still need for specialized studies of Ottoman population and its flux in the sixteenth century.

scholarly journals Thirty Years in the Service of the Habsburgs: Insight into the Devoted Work of the Turkish Dragoman (Interpreter) Johann Adam Lachowitz (1678–1709)

2021 ◽  
Vol 148 (4) ◽  
pp. 745-767
Author(s):  
Hajnalka Tóth
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Living Conditions ◽  
Violent Death ◽  
State Structure ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Peace Treaties

The article focuses on the career and activities of Johann Adam Lachowitz. In December 1707, the Commander of Pétervárad (present day Петроварадин (Petrovaradin) in Serbia) nominated him as the head of a committee which met with the Ottoman commissaries on the border between the Habsburg and the Ottoman Empire. The committee was created to negotiate in the case of 55 Muslim and Greek merchants who were murdered in Kecskemét on April 3, 1707. The negotiations took almost one and a half years and were his last completed assignment. He died a few months later, just after the consensus was reached in May 1709. Lachowitz did not have a violent death, but one can assume that the deplorable living conditions he had to endure his whole life, might have largely contributed to his indisposition and subsequent death. This paper shall provide an insight into these living conditions. The research on the career of the Turkish interpreter, later the Chief interpreter and then the secretary, can further enrich the academic narratives about the lives, services and office advancements of the lower officials in the Habsburg diplomatic organization. The interpreters (in the presented case, the interpreters of Oriental languages (dragomen)) assisted both courts with their services, which were arduous and often required personal sacrifices. They were the backbone of all the diplomatic structures in the Sublime Porte, in Vienna and on the Habsburg–Ottoman border as well. The outbreak of conflicts, the process of peace making and the corroboration of peace treaties were dependant on their contributions. Even though they were not soldiers, they nevertheless risked their lives while serving in an especially influential part of the Habsburg state structure.

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