Browsing by Subject "Ottoman Empire"

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    "The Abhorred Name of Turk": Muslims and the Politics of Identity in Seventeenth-Century English Broadside Ballads
    (2016-11) Sisneros, Katie
    From historiographies to dramas, captivity narratives to mercantile ledgers, Anglo-Muslim studies has been in pursuit of an overall conceptualization the uniquely insular English population had of the Muslim Turks of the Ottoman Empire. But to approach an understanding of what the English thought of the Turk, one must necessarily consider the broad range of socio-political and economic conditions of the various echelons of English society. This dissertation explores a popular literature that - although a significant number of these texts exist that deals with the crucial relationship between Christians and Muslims - has heretofore never been considered as a whole in the context of how they represent the Muslim Turk. Broadside ballads, consumed widely and across the social and economic spectrum, were more accessible to and often indeed written expressly for the poor population of England who were largely illiterate and had little to no expendable time or income, and the Turk was a favored metaphor in broadside ballad literature throughout the seventeenth century. I argue that the function of the term “Turk” in seventeenth century broadside ballads depended so much on (and whose fluctuation was so closely attuned to) local politics that the term was largely stripped of any meaning, functioning simply as an “enemy” against which the English compared themselves and defined proper “Englishness.” My dissertation moves from the early decades of the century and the drama and discourse around piracy, through the tumultuous English Civil Wars and Interregnum, and through the Exclusion Crisis and the invasion of Vienna by Ottoman forces in order to trace the evolution of the presence of the Turk in popular broadside ballad. My research shows that Muslims performed a crucial function in the construction of the English identity, and no body of literature illustrates how closely the term “Turk” was linked to “not English” as clearly as the popular broadside ballad.
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    A Castle in Dalmatia: Zemunik in the Veneto-Ottoman peace Negotiations of 1573-1574
    (Journal of Opinions, Ideas & Essays (JOIE), 2013-08) Tracy, James
    For a Europe that feared continuing Ottoman expansion, the Battle of Lepanto (1571) was a great relief. But the Ottoman Empire continued to be dominant in the eastern Mediterranean, and in southeastern Europe. The Republic of Venice, a partner in the great Christian victory of 1571, was soon forced to make peace with the sultan, acknowledging the loss of important overseas territories. This essay deals with the vain effort by Venetian diplomats to recover through negotiation a small but strategically important territory lost in the fighting of 1571- 1573. Although the Venetian government refused to recognize it at the time, the permanent loss of Zemunik castle meant that the Ventian province of Dalmatia now had to form an economic partnership with the Ottoman province of Bosnia in order to survive.
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    Containing Balkan nationalism: Imperial Russia and Ottoman Christians (1856--1912)
    (2008-08) Vovchenko, Denis Vladimirovich
    The dissertation is an analysis of the Russian relationship to Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire during the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. As a methodological approach, it uses the concepts of irredentism, Orientalism, and multiple modernities. The dissertation focuses on the debate around the Bulgarian Church Question in Russia and Greek lands. The discussion developed among intellectuals, ecclesiastics, and diplomats from the Crimean War to the First Balkan War (1856-1912) and inspired several visions of a supranational cultural and political union of Russia and its "unredeemed" populations in the Near East. The study argues that in the period under consideration traditional Pan-Orthodox irredentism had to compete with the more modern ethnic-based Pan-Slavism. Based on those examples, the dissertation suggests that irredentism is a discourse of both similarity and difference. It helps consolidate the national identity of the core group by mobilizing it for the cause conveniently situated abroad. In line with Orientalist hallmarks, irredentism others and genders the unredeemed as helpless victims. In contrast to Orientalism, irredentist discourse others the purported Self and leaves more room for the agency of the unredeemed. The three responses to the Bulgarian Church Question can be broadly defined as "Pan-Slavism," "Pan-Orthodoxy," and "Greco-Slavic world/cultural type" theory as a synthesis of the first two. These visions sought to resolve tensions between ethnic and religious elements in the identity of significant segments of the educated Russian society. All three visions were examples of Orientalist production of knowledge connected with political power. They ultimately aimed at creating a non-Western civilization based on shared culture and centered on Russia. The existing scholarly literature considers the proponents of these visions as conservative, neotraditional, and "anti-modern" on the assumption that there can only be one liberal Western model of modernity. The dissertation uses the concept of multiple modernities to situate Russian responses to the Bulgarian Church Question within the broader context of "the invention of tradition" in fin-de-siecle Europe. It suggests the strength and evolution of traditional religious and dynastic identities and institutions on the eve of the First World War.