Abstract
The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ottoman-Habsburg marches were a fluid geographical space that stretched from the Dalmatian coast eastwards through what is today Croatia and Hungary, up to the Crimean Black Sea coast. This border zone has frequently been characterized as a line dividing two qualitatively different, antagonistic, and competing empires: the Christian Habsburgs and the Muslim Ottomans. As such this frontier has been depicted as a space which dichotomized and separated; a place of conflict, division, and mutual pugnacity; an arena for the retrospective reification of the clash of civilizations.1 The predominance of the nation as a means of delineating geo-political space and articulating identity, in conjunction with a series of Balkan conflicts, the September 11 attacks, and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, has exacerbated cartographies of difference, and exaggerated a belief in the enduring and irreconcilable hostility and difference between communities in this region and elsewhere.
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Notes
For the phrase “clash of civilizations” see Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996),
Bernard Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” The Atlantic Monthly, (September 1990) accessible online http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1990/09/the-roots-of-muslim-rage/304643/ (last accessed May 30, 2014). Both articles imagine the existence of a putatively homogeneous Western and Islamic civilization that are not only culturally incompatible, but are intrinsically hostile toward each other.
Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), x–xi; see also
Daniel Power and Naomi Standen, “Introduction,” in Frontiers in Question: Eurasia Borderlands 700–1700, ed. Daniel Power and Naomi Standen (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999).
See Mark Donnelly and Claire Norton, Doing History (London: Routledge, 2011), especially Chapter 6 for more on antirepresentationalism and its use in the context of historical narratives, and of course the work of Rorty especially
Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
One of the most articulate critiques of foundationalist or realist episte-mology is Wilfred Sellars. He attributed the term “the myth of the given” to the view that we can have knowledge of the world distinct from, and separate to, the conceptual processes and interpretative frameworks that facilitate perception. Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Volume I: The Foundations of Science and the Concepts of Psychology and Psychoanalysis, ed. Herbert Feigl and Michael Scriven (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956), 253–329. See also
Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, intro. Richard Rorty and study guide by Robert Brandom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
Santa Arias, “The Geopolitics of Historiography from Europe to the Americas,” in The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Barney Warf and Santa Arias (London: Routledge, 2009), 122–136, 124.
Worldmaking refers to Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianopolis: Hackett Publishing, 1978). See Robert J. Mayhew, “A Tale of Three Scales: Ways of Malthusean Worldmaking,” chapter 9 of this book for a more in-depth discussion of Goodman.
Edward Said, “Invention, Memory, Place,” Critical Inquiry 26 (2000): 175–192, 176.
Ibid., 182. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, 1st ed. (London: Verso, 1991, 1983), 6 quoting
Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1964), 169.
Jo Guldi, “The Spatial Turn in History,” http://spatial.scholarslab.org/spatial-turn/the-spatial-turn-in-history/index.html (last accessed May 12, 2014).
See Umit Özkırımlı, Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000) for a concise explanation of three main theories or approaches to nationalism.
John E. Joseph, Language and Identity: National, Ethnic, Religious (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) 114f; and Power and Standen, Frontiers in Question, 24f.
John A. Fine, When Ethnicity did not Matter in the Balkans. A Study of Identity in Pre-Nationalist Croatia, Dalmatia, and Slavonia in the Medieval and Early-Modern Periods (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006), 12–15.
Geza Dávid and Pal Fodor, “Introduction,” in Ottomans, Hungarians, and Habsburgs in Central Europe: The Military Confines in the Era of Ottoman Conquest, ed. Geza Dávid and Pal Fodor (Leiden: Brill, 2000), xi–xxvii, xviii, and xix–xx;
Lajos Fekete, Budapest a törökkorban [Budapest Under Turkish Rule] (Budapest: Királyi Magyar Egyetemi Nyomda, 1944), 308, quoted in
Geza Dávid, and Pal Fodor, “Hungarian Studies in Ottoman History,” in The Ottomans and the Balkans: A Discussion of Historiography, ed. Fikret Adanir and Suraiya Faroqhi (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 305–350, 318f.;
Geza Dávid, “Administration in Ottoman Europe,” in Süleyman the Magnificent and His Age. The Ottoman Empire in the Early Modern World, ed. Metin Kunt and Christine Woodhead (London: Longman, 1995), 71–90, 83 and 85–87;
Klara Hegyi, Török berendezkedés Magyarországon, [Ottoman Administration in Hungary] (Histöriá Könyvtár, Monográfiák 7 (Budapest: MTA Történettudományi Intézete, 1995), quoted in Dávid and Fodor, “Hungarian Studies in Ottoman History,” 320. For a detailed discussion of Hungarian historiography on this topic see
Claire Norton, “Narrating the ‘Yoke of Oppression’ Twentieth-Century Hungarian Scholarship of the Ottoman-Hungarian Borderlands,” in Nationalism, Historiography and the (Re)Construction of the Past, ed. Claire Norton (Washington: New Academia Press, 2007), 187–200.
M. R. Hickok, Ottoman Military Administration in Eighteenth Century Bosnia (Leiden: Brill, 1997), xi, and 114f,; and
Anton Minkov, Conversion to Islam in the Balkans: Kisve Bahası Petitions and Ottoman Social Life, 1670–1730 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 65 also discuss nationalist historiography and the back-projection of twentieth-century identities in Slavic, Bosnian, and Bulgarian contexts. See also
Claire Norton, “Nationalism and the Re-Invention of Early-Modern Identities in the Ottoman-Habsburg Borderlands,” Ethnologia Balkanica 11 (2008): 79–101 for a discussion of nationalism and its effect on Balkan histories especially in the context of nineteenth-century Ottoman and twentieth-century Turkish histories of the region.
Mark Stein, Guarding the Frontier: Ottoman Border Forts and Garrisons in Europe (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007), 6. To this extent it resembles an earlier Ottoman frontier region, that of the Byzantine-Ottoman frontier in Anatolia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which Colin Heywood, “The Frontier in Ottoman History,” in Frontiers in Question, ed. Power and Standen, 228–250, 233 described as a “zone of passage and interaction and a political barrier.”
See Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) for a good introduction to the Ottoman Empire and its rather heterogeneous nature.
Caroline Finkel, Osman’s Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300–1923 (London: John Murray, 2005), for examples of the integration of members of elite conquered families into the Ottoman administrative-military hierarchy.
Christine Isom-Verhaaren, “Shifting Identities: Foreign State Servants in France and the Ottoman Empire,” Journal of Early Modern History 8, nos.1–2 (2004): 109–34. While non-Muslims could attain relatively high status in the Ottoman administrative system, conversion to Islam was considered desirable if one wanted to attain high office. See Isom-Verhaaren’s discussion of Hüseyn, the subaşı of Lemnos and Christoph von Roggendorf.
The conversion and acculturation of peoples in the liminal spaces of the wider Mediterranean World are explored in a variety of works including: Nabil Matar Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000) especially Chapter 3;
Molly Greene, A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002)
Claire Norton, “Lust, Greed, Torture and Identity: Narrations of Conversion and the Creation of the Early Modern ‘Renegade,’” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 29, no.2 (2009): 259–268; “Conversion to Islam in the Ottoman Empire,” Wiener zeitschrift zur geschichte der neuzeit 7, no.2 (2007): 25–39;
Eric R. Dursteler, Renegade Women: Gender, Identity, and Boundaries in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011);
E. Natalie Rothman, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).
Caroline Finkel, “French Mercenaries in the Habsburg-Ottoman War of 1583–1606: The Desertion of the Papa Garrison to the Ottomans in 1600,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 55, no.3 (1992): 451–471, 465–468.
John Smith, The True Travels, adventures and Observations of Captain John Smith, In Europe, Asia, Affrica, and America, from Anno Domini 1593 to 1629 […] (London: Slater, 1630) cited in F. Pichler, “Captain John Smith in the Light of the Styrian Sources,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 65 (1957): 332–354.
Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, Stato militare dell’ Imperio Ottomano, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: Gosse et al., 1732), 1: 85, quoted in Mark Stein, “Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Forts and Garrisons on the Habsburg Frontier (Hungary),” unpublished PhD thesis, The University of Chicago, 2001, 152; and
Mehmet Zeki Pakalın, Osmanlı Tarih Deyimleri ve Terimleri Sözlüğü (Istanbul: Milli Eğitim Basimevi, 1983), III: 146.
Mehmet Zeki Pakalın, “Sekbân,” İslam Ansiklopedisi 10 (1966): 325–327, 326.
See Claire Norton, “Plural Pasts: The Role of Function and Audience in the Creation of Meaning in Ottoman and Modern Turkish Accounts of the siege of Nagykanizsa,” unpublished PhD thesis, University of Birmingham, 2005, Chapters 3 and 4 for a detailed discussion and analysis of the manuscripts in the corpus. A more cursory discussion can be found in
Claire Norton, “‘The Lutheran is the Turks’ Luck’: Imagining Religious Identity, Alliance and Conflict on the Habsburg-Ottoman Marches in an Account of the Sieges of Nagykanizsa 1600 and 1601,” in Das Osmanische Reich und die Habsburgermonarchie in der Neuzeit. Akten des internationalen Kongresses zum 150-jährigen Bestehen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, Wien, 22.–25. September 2004, Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, Erg. Bd. 49, ed. Marlene Kurz, Martin Scheutz, Karl Vocelka and Thomas Winkelbauer (Wien: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2005), 67–81; and Norton, “Nationalism and the Re-Invention of Early-Modern Identities.”
See Klara Hegyi, Egy világbirodalom végvidékén [On the Borders of a World-Empire] (Budapest: Gondolat, 1975) quoted in Dávid and Fodor, “Hungarian Studies in Ottoman History,” 319. Quotes from Dávid, “Administration in Ottoman Europe,” 87–88.
Istanbul, Millet Kütüphanesi, A.E.Tar.187 fol.18r, all translations by the author. The quote is from ms. A.E.Tar.187, but the other manuscripts in the corpus contain very similar versions of this event. The various manuscripts describe the forces allied with the Habsburgs as Hungarian and Croatian, but presumably this is being used here not as an ethnic descriptor, but more as a geographical or political identity and describes troops fighting for commanders who rule over estates in Croatia or Hungary. The word bandur or pandur has been used to describe a great variety of military units at different times, but it is generally understood to refer to Croatian troops who were associated with the office of the ban of Croatian, Dalmatia, and Slavonia and who were also employed in the service of the Habsburg Austrians. For references to pandur troops see Ferenc Szakály, “The Early Ottoman Period, Including Royal Hungary, 1526–1606,” in A History of Hungary, ed. Peter. F. Sugar (New York: Indiana University Press, 1990), 83–99, 96;
Kurt Wessely, “The Development of the Hungarian Military Frontier Until the Middle of the Eighteenth Century,” The Austrian History Yearbook 9–10 (1973–1974): 55–110, 77; and
Géza Pálffy, “The Origins and Developments of the Border Defence System against the Ottoman Empire in Hungary (Up to the Early Eighteenth Century),” in Ottomans, Hungarians, and Habsburgs in Central Europe, ed. Dávid and Fodor (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 3–69, 11.
Norton, “Nationalism and the Re-Invention of Early-Modern Identities,” and Claire Norton, “The Remembrance of the Siege of Kanije in the Construction of Late Ottoman and Modern Turkish Nationalist Identities,” Parergon 21, no.1 (2004): 133–153 explore the affect that Ottoman protonational and modern Turkish nation-state cartographies have had on the remembrance of this border space in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ottoman and Turkish histories and popular accounts of the sieges.
See Lajos Fekete, Türkische Schriften aus dem Archive des Palatins Niklaus Esterhazy 1606–1645 (Budapest: Esterházy Miklós nadór iratai, 1932), for a very friendly letter between the Ottoman governor of Buda and Johann Molard in 1618 which refers to the exchange of present and ambassadors.
Peter Sugar, “The Ottoman ‘Professional Prisoner’ on the Western Borders of the Empire in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Études Balkaniques 7 (1971): 82–91, 82 cites the letter located in the Hungarian National Archives, Budapest: Batthyany Family Archives, Collection No. P1313, Fascicle 249, Document 226a.
Gustav Bayerle, Ottoman Tributes in Hungary: According to Sixteenth Century Tapu Registers of Novigrad (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), 22.
A. Jones, and P. Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 3 have argued that the bestowal of gifts of robes, swords, and other items, figures an individual in a subordinate position in that their acts are available to be judged worthy or unworthy by those in power and rewarded accordingly. See Norton, “Plural Pasts,” 180–184 for a longer discussion of gift giving and how Tiryaki Hasan Pasha asserts his independence from imperial structures of authority and power.
Catherine Wendy Bracewell, The Uskoks of Senj: Piracy, Banditry and Holy War in the Sixteenth-Century Adriatic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 188.
By “better” I simply mean “better by my lights” as Richard Rorty might say. For other historians who consider that one of the most important functions of history is as a means of reflecting upon, and improving our society see Joan W. Scott. “History-writing as Critique,” and Beverley Southgate “Humani nil alienum: the quest for ‘human nature,’” both in Manifestos for History, ed. Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan, and Alun Munslow (London: Routledge, 2007), 19–38 and 67–76;
David Harlan, “Ken Burns and the Coming Crisis of Academic History,” Rethinking History 7 (2003): 169–192;
Hayden White, “The Burden of History,” in Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1978), 27–50;
Jocelyn Létourneau, A History for the Future: Rewriting Memory and Identity in Quebec, trans. Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott (London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004).
For an introduction to non-Eurocentric history see John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004),
John M. Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012);
J. M. Blout, Eight Eurocentric Historians (New York: Guilford Press, 2000). See also
Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). I take the phrase shared world from Greene, Shared World.
Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, 14 quoted in Bruce M. Russett, John R. Oneal, and Michaelene Cox, “Clash of Civilizations, or Realism and Liberalism Déjà Vu? Some Evidence,” Journal of Peace Research 37, no.5 (2000): 583–608, 584. Articles such as those by Russett et al. argue that “contiguity, alliances, and relative power, and liberal influences of joint democracy and interdependence, provide a much better account of interstate conflict” (583) than civilizational differences. In contrast
Edward Said, “The Clash of Ignorance,” The Nation (October 2001) available online http://www.thenation.com/article/clash-ignorance# (last accessed May 30, 2014), and
Amartya Sen, “Democracy as a Universal Value,” Journal of Democracy 10, no.3 (1999): 3–17 challenge Huntington’s categorization of communities into Islamic and Western civilizations arguing that this classification ignores the dynamic interdependency, interaction, and diversity of cultures.
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Norton, C. (2015). Liminal Space in the Early Modern Ottoman-Habsburg Borderlands: Historiography, Ontology, and Politics. In: Stock, P. (eds) The Uses of Space in Early Modern History. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137490049_4
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