Download PDF | The Ottoman Age of Exploration, By Giancarlo Casale, Oxford University Press (2010).
302 Pages
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ome years ago, shortly after graduating from my PhD program, I presented my mother with a copy of my dissertation. In retrospect, this was probably a cruel thing to do. But she dutifully spent several hours slogging through its pages, until finally, after closing the back cover and looking up with an encouraging smile, she said, “Well, the acknowledgments are definitely my favorite part For the record, it is my sincere hope that most readers of the present work will not be of the same opinion. Still, I have to admit the wisdom in Mom’s words, for there are few parts of the writing process quite so gratifying as the chance to acknowledge the long list of debts accumulated over many years of hard work.
So let me begin by thanking someone who is sadly no longer with us: the late and much lamented Sinasi Tekin, who lived just long enough to see me safely exit the hallowed halls of Harvard University with diploma in hand. Since then, in my vainer moments, I have sometimes imagined that the experience of sharing with me some of his vast knowledge of the Ottoman Turkish language was exactly how Sinasi Bey had hoped to spend his golden years—although my generally appalling performance in his classes suggests rather the opposite view. In any case, I am certain that had it not been for his limitless patience, wisdom, and good humor, the book before you would quite simply have never been completed.
Similarly, a special and all-too-rarely acknowledged debt of gratitude is owed to my academic advisor, Cemal Kafadar, who more than a decade ago dragged me, kicking and screaming like a beardless deushirme recruit, into the strange and terrifying world of Ottoman history. It is only recently, having survived the ordeal, graduated from the palace school, and gained a comfortable appointment for myself in the provinces, that I am finally in a position to appreciate my time spent with him.
Many other individuals have contributed to my research in ways they may not even realize. Salih Ozbaran, through his many pioneering books and articles on the history of Ottoman-Portuguese relations, has been a continual source of inspiration through- out my work, although we met in person on only one brief occasion. In a more handson fashion, Gary Shaw and Bruce Masters of Wesleyan University, Wheeler Thackston and James Hankins of Harvard, and Hakan Karateke, now of the University of Chicago, have all been mentors to me and, throughout the years, tireless advocates.
My colleagues from graduate school, especially Selim Kuru, Dimitri Kastritsis, Aaron Shakow, Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, Ash Niyazioglu, Erdem Cpa, Bruce Fudge, T. J. Fitzgerald, Rachel Goshgarian, Emine Fetvaci, and Nicolas Trépanier, all served as constant intellectual companions and occasional dance partners (or, in some cases, the reverse) during my most formative years of work on this project. Naghmeh Sohrabi, another member of this group, gets a special line of acknowledgment all her own, since on a previous occasion she failed to receive one and made me pay dearly for the omission. Also included in this category, in an ex officio capacity, is my longtime friend Chris Woods, despite (or perhaps because of) the laudable suspicion with which he generally views academic life.
During my time in the field as a research fellow in Istanbul, I was equally fortunate to benefit from the guidance of many selfless archivists and librarians, particularly Ahmed Kili¢ of the Basbakanlik State Archives, Gtilendam Nakipoglu and Zeynep Celik of Topkapi Palace Library, Ulkii Altindag of the Topkap: Palace Archives, and Hawva Kog at the Istanbul Archaeology Museum, as well as the entire staff of Stileymaniye Library.
In addition, Tony Greenwood of the American Research Institute in Turkey provided both hospitality and timely institutional support on more than one occasion; Mahmut Ak of Istanbul University kindly shared his expert knowledge of Ottoman geography; and Tarig Noor, now of the University of Khartoum, proved endlessly patient in helping me confront the horrors of miihimme paleography. Meanwhile, Louis Fishman was my perpetual partner in crime, both at the archives and in many of Istanbul’s less reputable nocturnal establishments, as was Pino Cossuto. Steve Bryant and Joseph Logan were also regulars at the nocturnal establishments, although during the daytime, our paths tended to diverge. For similar reasons, I would also like to express my appreciation and deep affection for all Istanbul-based members of both the Cipa and Griffin families.
During my much briefer stay in Portugal, the staffs of the Biblioteca Nacional, the Torre do Tombo Archives, and the Lisbon Fulbright Office were all extraordinarily helpful. An enormous debt of gratitude is also owed to Jorge Flores, Isabel Miranda, Andre Cuckov, and Sarah Watson.
Since arriving at the University of Minnesota in 2005, I have been blessed to find myself in the most supportive environment a young scholar could hope for. 1 am particularly grateful to Carol Hakim, Michael Lower, Carla Rahn Phillips, Jim Tracy, M.J. Maynes, Eric Weitz, Marguerite Ragnow, and Bali Sahota. The University of Minnesota also provided me with generous institutional support, including a McKnight Summer Research Fellowship in 2006, a single-semester leave in the fall of 2007, a Grant-in-Aid for Faculty Research from fall 2007 to spring 2009, and a fellowship at the Minnesota Institute for Advanced Study in the fall of 2008.
An embarrassing number of other institutions, both private and public, also contributed generous financial support for my research. These include Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Social Science Research Council, the American Research Institute in Turkey, the Fulbright-Hayes fellowship program, the Institute for Turkish Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Koc Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations.
Esteemed colleagues at several outside institutions were kind enough to read drafts of various versions of this manuscript and to provide me with invaluable feedback. These include Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Walter Andrews, Daniel Headrick, Alex Snell, Hardy Griffin, and two anonymous readers from Oxford University Press. In addition, Rebecca Moss, Scott Lesh, and Felipe Rojas helped me prepare the illustrations that appear in this book, and my research assistant John Wing (now Prof. Wing of the College of Staten Island) prepared the maps. I am equally grateful to my editor Susan Ferber, for all of her wise advice and attention to detail. All remaining errors in the text, of which I am sure there are too many to count, are naturally mine alone.
Before concluding, I must also say a word about my dizzyingly complicated family, whose convoluted and mercurial organization has played no small part in informing my understanding of sixteenth-century Ottoman court politics. Yet through it all, each of its individual members has displayed unfailing confidence in me, even when I had none in myself, and loved me always, as I love all of them. In this sense, no matter how dispersed across the globe or divided into rival households they may find themselves in the future, for me they will always be united between the pages of this book.
Finally, I would like to thank Sinem Arcak for things too numerous and too personal to enumerate here. But most of all, I thank her for making Minnesota, quite contrary to all conventional wisdom, the warmest home I have ever had.
A NOTE ON SOURCES
ne of the most daunting obstacles to studying the history of Ottoman over-
seas exploration is the scarcity of the kind of relevant and easily accessible sources that inform more traditional studies of Ottoman political history during the early modern period. For a number of reasons discussed in more detail in the following pages, most contemporary Ottoman chronicles and narrative histories pay very little attention to events in the Indian Ocean, focusing instead on developments in the imperial capital and the core areas of the empire in the Balkans and in Asia Minor. While there are, to be sure, some notable exceptions to this trend, in general the historian is forced to look elsewhere for sources with enough information to allow a satisfactory reconstruction of events.
One important alternative is provided by Ottoman archival documents. These are very rich for the second half of the sixteenth century, and in this book, I have made particularly heavy use of the Mihimme Defterleri collection of the Basbakanlik State Archives in Istanbul. These “Registers of Important Affairs” are essentially day-today, verbatim records of the sultans’ outgoing correspondence with their own provincial officials, as well as with visiting dignitaries from abroad and with foreign heads of state. Most remain unpublished, but they are well catalogued and relatively complete from the mid-1560s, and even before this date, they survive in fragmentary form.
When available, I have also made generous use of the sultan’s incoming correspondence, although regrettably, this is a body of evidence that survives in a much more haphazard state of conservation than the outgoing correspondence preserved in the miuhimme registers. Of the documents still extant, some are housed in the archives of Istanbul's Topkapi Palace Museum; others, especially the sultans’ epistolary exchanges with foreign leaders, are preserved in bound volumes of hand-copied letters known as miinse’atndmes, today scattered in a number of different manuscript collections.
Alongside these archival documents, another important body of evidence for this study is a group of Turkish-language works that until now have been underutilized as historical sources: cosmographies, geographies, maps, travel narratives, and other original examples of sixteenth-century Ottoman discovery literature. While these often contain very little in the way of information about specific dates or events, they prove extremely useful for reconstructing the worldview that Ottoman leaders used as they devised a blueprint for imperial expansion. And since these works and their authors actively shaped this Ottoman worldview as much as they reflected it, in my narrative they also appear as protagonists of the story in their own right.
In addition, I have relied heavily on a number of texts in languages other than Ottoman Turkish, at least to the extent that my own linguistic capabilities have made possible. Of these, perhaps the most important are several copious, multivolume published collections of administrative, ecclesiastical, and diplomatic correspondence from the Portuguese Estado da India. These have been supplemented by the works of contemporary Portuguese chroniclers (of which the multivolume Décadas of Diogo do Couto have proven especially valuable), by unpublished documents from the Torre do Tombo Archives in Lisbon, and by a variety of other Western sources, ranging from Venetian and French consular reports to narratives of travel by European visitors to both the Ottoman Empire and the Indian Ocean.
Finally, the significance of contemporary sources in Arabic and Persian should by no means be discounted, although my woefully inadequate knowledge of these languages has led me to make unabashed use of modern translations whenever possible. I have also used English editions of Ottoman Turkish sources in a few cases when they are available. All other translations are my own, with the original text in most instances appearing in the footnotes. In a few places, I have made translations from French translations of Arabic sources rather than from the original, which is also indicated in the notes.
THE TRANSCRIPTION SYSTEM EMPLOYED IN THIS BOOK
‘The transcription of Ottoman Turkish into the Latin alphabet is a perpetual problem for historians. No system is entirely satisfactory, and the one I have chosen is, I fear, even less so than most. For the sake of legibility, I have elected not to fully transcribe Ottoman ‘Turkish proper names, instead writing them in their closest approximation to modern American English spelling. Against many people’s better judgment, I have also decided not to use any characters from the Modern Turkish alphabet to clarify pronunciation, since for non-Turkish speakers, these tend to make things more confusing, rather than less so. The only exception has been made for the Turkish “8” or “soft g,” a silent letter with no real English equivalent or even approximation. As for place-names, in similarly unsystematic fashion I have used the most common English spelling, or in the few cases where none exists, its closest equivalent according to standard English pronunciation.
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