Who counts? Ottomans, Early Modernity, and Trans-Imperial Subjecthood

Tucked deep into volume six of Hammer-Purgstall’s magnum opus, the Geschichte des Osmanischen Reiches, is an anecdote we can summarize as follows: in the summer of 1678, while the Ottoman army, waging campaign against the Tsardom of Russia, laid a second siege on Chyhyryn (central Ukraine), the grand chamberlain intercepted a bag containing twelve Russian letters. Marcantonio Mamuca della Torre, serving as the kaymakam’s dragoman, was charged with translating them but, not knowing Russian, he recruited a slave of the Polish legation to aid him, dragging him into the reis efendi’s tent for that purpose. The slave turned out to be a Jesuit in disguise, who was able therefore to translate the letters into Latin, allowing Mamuca della Torre to then finish translating the Latin into Ottoman within twenty-four hours, as instructed.¹

Several aspects of this brief anecdote are worth dwelling on: The interpersonal, distributed, and embodied dimensions of translation, its centrality to inter-imperial interactions, and the multilateral nature of diplomacy (the anecdote then continues with the Polish ambassador’s nephew being required to join the Ottoman military campaign). It underscores the role of serendipity in history (thank goodness for Jesuits in unexpected places!) and, especially, the instability of ethnolinguistic and political fault lines in this borderland (as in the imperial court). An Istanbulite by birth, Marcantonio Mamuca della Torre was the descendent of multiple Catholic Ottoman elite families and a relative by marriage of several Phanariot Orthodox dynasties as well. Shortly after his adventures in the Ukraine he would relocate to Vienna, become a member of the Habsburg War Council, and eventually secure noble title, landed property, and advantageous marriages for his children that would firmly entrench the family’s place in the Austrian and Hungarian landed aristocracy. His figure may be enigmatic and exceptional, but also emblematic of early modern Ottoman subjecthood. Indeed, his hyper-connected, trans-imperial trajectories raise fundamental questions about the very nature of subjecthood and subjectivity in the early modern Ottoman Empire. It brings into sharper relief the challenge of deciding who “counts” as an early modern Ottoman, from what vantage point, and to what analytical ends.

The ontological crisis of “early modernity,” in both its Europeanist, Ottomanist, and “global” iterations now seems to have been lain to rest. Whereas scholars are perhaps more mindful than ever that, conceptually, “early modernity” originates in decidedly Eurocentric epistemologies, the processes that define the period analytically are no longer seen as exclusively, or even primarily, limited to Europe. As newer generations of scholars have come to view Europe as emergent through its manifold interactions with a wider world, fewer scholars wonder whether “early modernity” existed. Clearly, this periodization, like any other, entails a fair degree of arbitrariness, a certain erasure of both internal heterogeneity and significant continuities with an elusive “pre” modern. The contested nature of “modernity” itself, and the teleological assumptions embedded in the “early” designation are all legitimate concerns, even if their elaboration has sometimes led to caricaturizing accounts of what came in its wake. At the current historiographical moment, the temporal boundaries of early modernity, forever porous and contentious, seem to require less policing. Within the field of Ottoman studies, the success of “early modernity” in establishing itself as a standard periodization seems to have been salutary on at least two levels: First, it has allowed the field finally to overcome the long Gibbonian shadow of “Golden Age” and “Decline,” to pay attention not simply to the continuities between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (and beyond), but to the myriad ways in which the latter was pivotal in shaping our perspectives on the former. Secondly, it has provided the idiom for an important, and still unfolding conversation about the deep embedding of the Ottomans in a Eurasian system of circulation and meaning-making. This has allowed Ottomanists to pay closer attention to the empire’s global connectivities. Even more importantly, it has facilitated precautious efforts by non-Ottomanists to integrate the Ottomans more fully into broader accounts of early modernity, less in the vein...