DANFront: An Environmental History of the Early-Modern Ottoman Military Frontier in the Middle and Lower Danube

Project team: Onur İnal (PI)
Deniz Armağan Akto (Prae-Doc/Researcher)

Funded by: FWF (Project number: PAT2459324)

DANFront seeks to examine the role of the Danube River in the Ottoman military expansion to Central Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries and the effects of this expansion on the riverine environment. It aims to uncover how the Ottomans used the Danube for their military and socio-economic needs to expand their influence in southeastern and central Europe. The project has two separate yet overlapping components. The first one deals with the Ottoman military organization along the Danube and its effects on the environment. The second centers around the environmental challanges posed by the Danube River, and the policies, institutions, and strategies the Ottomans developed to overcome these challenges. As part of the project, historical data from various Ottoman sources will be extracted, data sets will be created, and these data sets will be graphically visualized.

>>> https://danfront.univie.ac.at

Duration: 2024 → 2027 

 Odyssey across the Aegean. The Exodus of Greek Jews (1943 1944) and the Network of Collective and Corporate Actors affecting their Agency

Project team: Yavuz Köse (PI)
Julia Fröhlich (Praedoc)

Funded by ÖAW (Project number: FA434014)

Trans-Aegean migration as experienced by approximately 1,000 Greek Jews fleeing Axis extermination policy in Greece from 1943 to 1944 asks for a multi-dimensional discussion that captures individual perspectives and agency as well as external structures established through the interplay of individual and collective action on the meso and macro levels. Accordingly, my project seeks to intertwine the micro level of individual refugees’ experiences with the local level of small-scale support networks and the macro level that provides glances at corporate and collective actors. Even though some aspects and collective as well as corporate actors determining the context of the Greek-Jewish refugee movement have been extensively researched in isolation to one another, research has up to now refrained from discussing the connectivities, relations and mutual impact of these actors as well as contextual and individual-specific factors on one another and especially the individual refugee. My study thus aims at a more holistic presentation and discussion of the ‘realities’ in which individual refugees fleeing across the Aegean acted: It highlights their dependence on the network of corporate and collective actors as well as on the interplay of contextual and individual-specific factors. Additionally, it traces the impact of said network on individual refugees’ actions and perceived agency. Hence, this project broadens our understanding with regards to various forms of relations and impact inherent in the structures that constitute the framework of the individual’s actions, thereby contextualising the observed actions on various levels.

>>>

Duration: 2023 → 2025

 Grocers of Istanbul: Tracing Food Consumption through the Inheritance Inventories of Grocers (Bakkals) in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (GrocerIST)

Project team: Yavuz Köse (PI)
Sümeyye Hoşgör Büke (Postdoc)
Peter Andorfer (ACDH-CH)

Funded by FWF (P 35546)

The majority of food consumption studies in Ottoman historiography are limited to the life of those living in the palace and the ruling elite, by mainly paying attention to the adaptation of western table manners and changes in menus. Due to a lack of archival material, the food consumption of ordinary urban residents in the Ottoman Empire has remained a less researched subject. GrocerIST, by introducing previously unutilized sources to understand the food consumption of Ottoman urban households, aims to fill the gap in literature.
The main objective of GrocerIST is to reveal and analyse the food consumption patterns of inhabitants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Istanbul through the use of grocers’ (bakkal) inheritance inventories. By making comparisons across the centuries and different socio-economic conditions of the city, this project intends to discuss the food consumption of Ottomans within the frameworks of the internal and external political and socio-economic circumstances of the empire.
In order to systematically analyse a large quantity of archival material, GrocerIST will benefit from the digital humanities. By generating datasets and creating interactive maps provided by digital humanities, the project will be able to make well-set comparisons across the centuries and for different localities. It is anticipated that such efforts will enable the researchers to draw more precise conclusions about food consumption among Ottomans.
Grocers' inventories provide a valuable source that will allow the researchers to unearth the transformation of consumption patterns among the urban people of/in the various districts of the capital. For the first time, the project will supply a dataset of non-durable consumer goods/groceries and locate them on an interactive map of Istanbul. By incorporating additional sources, such as Ottoman newspapers, journals, and travelogues GrocerIST will also make the transition period from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and its effects on the consumption patterns, accessible. In this way, the project will trace the transformation faced by the grocers’ localities and their range of products.

>>> https://grocerist.univie.ac.at

Duration: 2022 → 2025

 The Oriental Outpost of the Republic of Letters. Sebastian Tengnagel (d. 1636), the Imperial Library in Vienna, and Knowledge about the Orient

Projektteam: Thomas Wallnig
Claudia Römer
Hülya Çelik
Chiara Petrolini
Pia Molino

Finanzierung: FWF (P-3051)

Not always has the Orient been the Orient. The academic public would agree today that “Orientalism” is a product of western minds with an imperial agenda, but not much of the discussion in the aftermath of Edward Said’s monumental statement has seriously considered historical settings before 1800. Hence it is still widely assumed that knowledge-power relations are intimate by-products only of Western European national state imperialism.

Around 1600, one of the realms actually bearing the title “empire” was the Holy Roman Empire. Its elected rulers, the Habsburg emperors, heirs to ideas of imperial universalism, strove to deal with issues of confessional war and colonial expansion, to balance the familial union with Spain and the competition with France, and, not least, to come to terms with the new south-eastern neighbour: The Ottoman Empire, which during the 15th and 16th centuries had conquered large parts of the Balkans and Hungary. It was certainly not the first nor the only encounter between the Muslim and the Christian world, nor was the imperial librarian Sebastian Tengnagel the first mediator of knowledge in this regard; but it was the first time that this encounter occurred in a context in which, on the “western side”, the systematic acquisition and curation of knowledge became an integral part of the process of state building.

Court libraries played a pivotal role in this process, as they not only became the material manifestations of a knowledge believed to be both universal and dynamic, but they also represented the scholarly arsenals from which to draw the weapons of intellectual warfare. At the same time, however, they were viewed as repositories of knowledge used, augmented and treasured by the citizens of the res publica literaria: an imagined community of scholars built on the ethics of friendship and the goal of a common enhancement of knowledge, yet also a filtered mirror of political, military and human tensions.

>>> geschichtsforschung.univie.ac.at/forschung/laufende-drittmittelprojekte/oorpl/

Laufzeit: 2018 → 2021

Project team: Tobias Völker
Yavuz Köse

Financing: DFG

The proposed research project centers on the oriental scholar and diplomat Andreas David Mordtmann (1811-1879). Mordtmann came to Istanbul in 1846 as chargé d´affaires for the Hanseatic cities of Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck; after his dismissal from this post in 1859 he became an Ottoman civil servant, working privately as an academic and journalist. His positioning between the German and the Ottoman culture as well as his various professional spheres of activity shape his distinctive perspective as scholar and historical witness. Possessing more first-hand information than most of his European contemporaries while being cut off from the institutional environs of established academia he described the political and social upheavals of the late Ottoman reform period known as Tanzimat (1839-1876) from an ambivalent in-between position. The analysis of the various writings he left behind will therefore focus on his particular transcultural outlook on late Ottoman history as well as the substantial impact of his research in the still young field of Ottoman studies. By positioning his writings in the context of the orientalist and occidentalist discourses of his time the study will thus make a substantial contribution to the history of Orientalist scholarship, complementing and challenging some of the common assumptions about the way how in the nineteenth century, pre-imperial German context knowledge about 'the orient' was produced.

>>> gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/326176633

Duration: 2017 → 2020

Projektteam: Cristina Vertan
Walther von Hahn
Alptuğ Güney
Iona Costa
Yavuz Köse

Finanzierung: Volkswagen Stiftung ("Mixed Methods" in den Geisteswissenschaften)

Dimitrie Cantemir was one of the most prominent figures at the end of XVIIth and beginning of the XVIIIth century in the cultural space of Central Eastern Europe. His works about the history of the Ottoman Empire and the Description of Moldavia were translated in English, German and French and remained capital works until the end of XIXth century. Cantemir's books are partially testimonies of things, events and places he experienced himself. This brings a plus of subjectivism in his writings which results in a scientific discussion about the validity of his historical style. Digital Humanities nowadays tend to use huge corpora ("big data") to achieve reliable results with computer-based technologies. However, behind all interpretations, such as reliability discussions, stands a hermeneutic approach, which is always qualitative in nature. Such research can be backed up by quantitative descriptions of the material. The scientific use of annotations is usually a positive ascription of features, such as "is reliable" or "is not reliable" and a statistics of the corresponding feature. This kind of approach ignores a fundamental aspect of the data, the vagueness of many assertions and thus the drawbacks of such crisp choice "is/is not". The project aims at investigating to which extent assertions found in Cantemir's original texts (in Latin) or in the translations in German and Romanian are: (a) consistent within the same text and across the originals, (b) reliable with respect to author's annotations or the annotations of further translators; (c) consistent and reliable across different language versions. The result of the project will be on the computer science side a prototype tool for computer-based hermeneutic reliability research in historical texts. On the humanistic side the project will deliver a reinterpretation of the hermeneutic cycle given external knowledge, the qualitative analysis performed by historians with the help of the computer based approach, and a comparative report.

>>> www.inf.uni-hamburg.de/inst/dmp/hercore/projects.html

Laufzeit: 2017 → 2020

Projektteam: Gisela Procházka-Eisl
Hülya Çelik

Finanzierung: FWF

The project, which was realized between 2011 and 2015, was financed by the Austrian Science Foundation FWF. It was carried out – including this digital edition – in large parts by Gisela Procházka-Eisl and Hülya Çelik, Oriental Institute, University of Vienna. There are some contributions by Adnan Kadrić, Orientalni Institut, University of Sarajevo.

The intention of this project is to explore certain aspects of the Early Modern Ottoman culture of learning, in particular those areas of learning used and cultivated outside the official Ottoman institutions of learning, the medreses.

Our sources for this investigation were the encyclopaedia Netaic ül-fünun of the 16th century scholar and poet Nevi and a number of six multi textual manuscripts (mecmūʿas) preserved in the Austrian national Library and the Austrian State Archives, both in Vienna.

The project had two main aims, one basically related to cultural history, the other to pragmatic philological issues:

1. As for cultural history we intended to explore the early modern culture of what can be called the “general” or “popular learning” of educated Ottomans with regard to its own historical context and cultural concepts. The Netaic and the mecmūʿas were investigated with regard to their sources, and the backgrounds of their authors and compilers, and of their readers and users. The question of the “popularization” of learning will be raised in particular with regard to the way in which the authors of these works made use of their sources, how the learning was presented, and how the works were used. Special attention is payed to the role of poetry in the Ottoman culture of learning and the way it was applied in the Netaic and the mecmūʿas.
2. The philological objectives of the project include the compilation of a full critical edition and translation of the Netaic as well as an edition and translation of selected parts of the mecmūʿas. The results were published in 2015 in two volumes: Gisela Procházka-Eisl, Hülya Çelik: Texts on Popular Learning in Early Modern Ottoman Times. Part I: Hidden Treasures: Selected Texts from Ottoman Mecmūʿas (Miscellanies). Sources of Oriental Languages and Literatures 119. Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University, 2015.
   Gisela Procházka-Eisl, Hülya Çelik: Texts on Popular Learning in Early Modern Ottoman Times. Part II: “The Yield of the Disciplines and the Merits of the Texts”. Nevʿī Efendi’s Encyclopaedia Netāyic el-Fünūn. In collaboration with A. Kadrić.
   Sources of Oriental Languages and Literatures 120. Harvard University, 2015.
3. We also created an open access digital edition which contains the complete edition of all the six miscellanies and the Netā'icü l-Fünūn. A word-by-word search of the complete material is possible at that website: there are annotated entries for personal names, place names, astronomical and astrological terms, text genres, folio numbers, and – because of the numerous medical/magical texts – for illnesses, plants, and the non-botanical substances used in remedies and recipes.

>>> mecmua.acdh.oeaw.ac.at

Laufzeit: 2011 → 2015