scholarly journals The Dutch in the Levant: Trade and Travel in the Seventeenth Century

Belleten ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 75 (273) ◽  
pp. 373-386
Author(s):  
Himmet Umunç

Although Dutch connections with the Levant, especially in terms of pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and also within the context of the Crusades, may go back to the Middle Ages and perhaps even before, it was from the late sixteenth century onwards that these connections took a dramatic turn and were fully developed. Despite the political, economic, administrative and military problems with Spain after the 1560s, historically termed as the Eighty Years War (1567-68 to 1647-48), the States General of the Dutch Republic prudently took courageous steps and put in place sober policies to establish diplomatic relations with the Ottornan Empire and become a major player in the so-called "riches trade" with the Levant. Indeed, the Republic and the Ottoman Empire were both enthusiastic about forging their cooperation for mutual interests, and, from 1612 onwards, when the first Dutch diplomatic mission was set up in lstanbul, the Dutch primacy in the Levant was consolidated. Dutch merchants were granted by the Ottoman government special privileges and exemptions (i.e. the "capitulations") and, thus, strongly competed with, and even outplayed, other European trade colonies, especially the English, in the Levant. Along with the development of Dutch trade with the Ottoman Empire, there also began Dutch travels to the region. Among the early Dutch travellers, especially Cornelis de Bruijn (1652-1727), who stayed in Izmir and Istanbul for nearly three years (1678-1681) is of particular interest.

Author(s):  
Nikolay P. Goroshkov

The article analyzes how the personality of the first president of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, is reflected in contemporary Turkish art. This year marks exactly 140 years since his birth. To his achievements in the military and political arenas, cultural figures have dedicated many works in the visual arts, architecture, literature and cinema.  The trace of the first president of the Republic of Turkey remained in the works of both his contemporaries and in the works of authors today. Creativity is multifaceted, inspiration has no boundaries, along with them, culture was freed from prohibitions with the beginning of a new page in the history of the country. Her achievements became available to more people, the opportunity to touch the spiritual life and create it opened up along with the reforms of Mustafa Kemal Pasha to wide layers of the population. Immortal works have preserved for posterity the image of the father of the Turkish nation, and a characteristic feature of these works is the author's personal admiration for the deeds of Gazi. This undoubtedly leaves its mark on the work and the way in which a person is shown in the context of history, who took fate and the entire people into his own hands, mired in political, economic, cultural crises. But before giving an answer to the question "Who are you, Father of the Turks?", it is important, in our opinion, briefly to draw attention to the historical retrospective of the development of Turkish culture under the influence of the policy of two states that appeared, flourished and fell into decay on the peninsula of Asia Minor. The article briefly examines some of the features of the cultural policy of the last years of the Ottoman Empire and the first years of the republic.


The papers collected in this volume investigate the relationship between Southeast Asia and the Ottoman Empire. Southeast Asia has long been connected by trade, religion and political links to the wider world across the Indian Ocean, and especially to the Middle East through the faith of Islam. However, little attention has been paid to the ties between Muslim Southeast Asia—encompassing the modern nations of Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore and the southern parts of Thailand and the Philippines—and the greatest Middle Eastern power, the Ottoman Empire. The first direct political contact took place in the sixteenth century, when Ottoman records confirm that gunners and gunsmiths were sent to Aceh in Sumatra to help fight against the Portuguese domination of the pepper trade. In the intervening centuries, the main conduit for contact was the annual hajj pilgrimage, and many Malay pilgrims from Southeast Asia spent long periods of study in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, which were under Ottoman control from 1517 until the early twentieth century. During the period of European colonial expansion in the nineteenth century, once again Malay states turned to Istanbul for help. The chapters in this volume represent the first attempt to bring together research on all aspects of the relationship between the Ottoman world and Southeast Asia—political, economic, religious and intellectual—much of it based on documents newly discovered in archives in Istanbul. Individual chapters also trace the influence of Republican Turkey on Southeast Asian politics and culture.


2005 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 481-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
PAUL DUMONT

Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, various European Masonic obediences set up lodges throughout the Ottoman empire, many in Istanbul, while another important centre was Smyrna. Freemasons were also active in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Cyprus and Macedonia. Lodges were established in the main political, economic and cultural centres of the Empire. There was a strong parallelism between the Ottoman Masonic geography and that of European colonial expansion. It is easy to delineate the social and ethnic structure of lodges, but we know less about what was going on behind the walls of Masonic temples. For sure, Ottoman Freemasons, like their brethren in other parts of the world, when not busy with ‘table works’ or ceremonies, dedicated themselves to philanthropic activities. A considerable part of the annual income of the lodges was used to finance various charitable works (assistance to orphans, to brethren in distress …) and to fund educational institutions. The lodges were also places for the discussion and exchange of ideas about current themes: socialism, feminism, venereal diseases, progress of science, etc. Some mingled with politics, displaying a highly nationalistic discourse. The politicization of Ottoman/Turkish freemasonry climaxed during the years of the Young Turk revolution (1908–1914), when an autochthonous obedience was created. One of the goals of the new organization, coldly received by most European freemasonries, was to rid the Ottoman Empire of foreign penetration. After the proclamation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, this national freemasonry continued to flourish, except for 13 years between 1935 and 1948 when Masonic activity was banned.


1977 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Tittler

For all the pride which it engendered among contemporaries, who saw in the Tudor fisheries a nursery for English seamen and even a hallmark for the national identity, the fishing industry in the sixteenth century has received scant attention from English historians. This neglect has been doubly unfortunate. On the one hand, it leaves us in general ignorance of the industry itself: its organization, personnel, productivity, and economic importance in both national and regional terms. On the other, it has denied us the opportunity to observe a tradition-bound industry of considerable antiquity as it faced the political, economic, and technological changes of the post-medieval era.The format of an essay cannot reasonably encompass a detailed study of a major industry, but the selection of a particular case for study can at least present a helpful paradigm for the whole, and fill part of the void in the existing literature. The fishing industry of Great Yarmouth seems an appropriate choice. The fact that herring collected off the mouth of the River Yare each September for as far back as man can remember has made the association of Yarmouth and fishing as old as it is logical. Fishermen plied those grounds from at least the sixth century, making the town one of the earliest recorded fishing centres of Northern Europe, and well before the Conquest townsmen had dedicated their parish church to St. Nicholas, patron of fishermen. Throughout the Middle Ages Yarmouth stood alone as the chief supplier of herring, a dietary staple to the English market, and ranked near the top of the European fishing industry.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 392-407
Author(s):  
S. Leonczyk ◽  

Among those Poles deported to the USSR from the eastern provinces of Poland annexed by the USSR in 1939 were many families and children. The Sikorski–Mayski agreement, signed on 30 July 1941, opened the way for Poland and the USSR to resume diplomatic relations. The Embassy of the Republic of Poland set up agencies, so-called Delegations, whose mission was, among others, to implement decisions made by the Polish- Soviet commission. The commission provided welfare services for Poles, which included opening shelters, kindergartens, schools, and orphanages. Initially, from autumn of 1941 to summer 1942, the Soviet authorities supported the establishment of such educational care centers, although after July 1942, when the Polish delegations were dissolved, some of these were shut down, and Polish children were moved to Soviet schools and orphanages. This paper describes the situation of Polish orphanages in the USSR, especially in the Siberian region of the USSR and Kazakhstan. These educational care centers received aid from the Embassy of the Republic of Poland, located in Kuybyshev (Samara). However, they were also supported in the USSR by the Soviet authorities and Union of Polish Patriots (1943–1946), who helped Polish orphans. One such children’s home is the orphanage in Mala Minusa in Krasnoyarsk Krai. Thanks to its authorities, the Polish inmates of the orphanage, who broke away from their motherland during wartime to return there only after the end of the war, have not been forgotten.


Author(s):  
Michał Kuran

The aim of the study is to present at least three reasons why Old Polish writers of the latter half of the 16th century and 17th century wrote about Venice. The first one was the admiration in the nobility-ruled republican political system which emerged in the Republic of Venice, and which was considered as an attractive model by Old Polish thinkers and writers. They, e.g. Palczowski, Górnicki, and Wolan, expressed their convictions in their treatises. The second reason was that of the struggles of Christian states with the Ottoman Empire. Venice constituted the first potential ally and often a leader of European armies intended to participate in the often-planned anti-Muslim crusades. The study references the accounts of the visions of Venice as a leader of crusades as inscribed in the exhortation-related literature. The third reason was the perception of Venice as a safe port for pilgrims travelling to the Holy Land and, more broadly, to the territory of the Ottoman state via the sea. Its image emerged from the accounts of Old Polish pilgrims, travellers, and escaped slaves.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 104-128
Author(s):  
Chris Gratien ◽  
Emily K. Pope-Obeda

After multiple wars, Greece and the newly-founded Republic of Turkey made peace through the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne and the 1930 Treaty of Ankara. A critical component of this rapprochement was the mutual exchange of population and property involving the transfer of some two million people. As part of the exchange, Greek Orthodox inhabitants of the Republic of Turkey – with the exception of those who remained in Istanbul as of the Treaty of Ankara – became Greek nationals. This article explores how the agreements between Turkey and Greece indirectly facilitated a ‘second exchange’ involving the deportation of Ottoman-born Greeks from the United States during the 1930s. As the American deportation state grew to deport upwards of 20,000 people at the outset of the Great Depression, groups targeted by stringent immigration quotas such as communities of the former Ottoman Empire were deported in large numbers. The exchange of populations provided a framework for resolving the ambiguous nationalities of Greeks in the US, allowing American diplomats to secure Greek passports for prospective deportees. As we further demonstrate, only the terms of this agreement – not national affinity nor diplomatic relations with the US – could be invoked to secure these passports in a number of cases. When it came to immigration enforcement, how people self-identified in racial, ethnic, religious, or national terms was virtually irrelevant. What mattered was how states identified them.


2000 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 228-249
Author(s):  
Norman Housley

In one passage in his famous account, Friar Felix Faber described how ‘some dull and unprofitable pilgrims’ to Jerusalem in 1480 mocked the excited behaviour of the devout in the courtyard in front of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, ‘calling them fools, hypocrites and Beghards’. The incident is revealing of the spectrum of reactions provoked by the experience of the Holy Land in late medieval and Renaissance Europe. Here more than anywhere else, tension was generated by the inescapable paradox of Christology, God become man, and the conflicts which it set up between the immanent and the representational, the universal and the elect, the eschatological and the timeless. This occurred, moreover, within a physical setting which constantly reminded the sensitive pilgrim of the difficulty of reconciling the Old and New Dispensations. But the same electrical charge which caused the Holy Land as sacred space to provoke diverse and at times contradictory responses, endowed the Holy Land as idea with a remarkable attraction. There took place a number of different ‘migrations of the holy’, to use John Bossy’s phrase. To a large extent the status of the geographical Holy Land was weakened by these developments, but in at least one respect it was strengthened.


2013 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 434-480
Author(s):  
Adam Knobler

Abstract Anthropologists such as Mary Helms have noted a historical linkage between the phenomena of perceived distance and perceived power. In this article I apply this paradigm to the history of European imperial expansion between the twelfth and the sixteenth century. In the Middle Ages, European popes and kings imbued the mythic ruler Prester John with great power in part because he was unseen and believed to live at a great distance. By associating the Mongols, and the Ethiopians after them, with Prester John, both of these peoples became an embodiment of this distance/power paradigm in Western European eyes. Latins hoped that the Mongols or Ethiopians would use their “power” to assist the West in their crusading battles in the Holy Land. When the Portuguese and Spanish began their voyages of expansion, they applied the same paradigm to the peoples they encountered in Asia, Africa and the Americas. When distance between Europe and these other continents was breached, however, the Iberian view of the others’ power diminished. Simultaneously, the Spanish and Portuguese perception of their own power increased as they, not “Prester John”, became the conquerors of distance.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document