Vexed Relationships with Rome

Sixteenth-century North Africa, the Forgotten Frontier between two rival empires, the Habsburgs and the Ottomans, came into the latter's orbit with the incorporation of the North African corsairs into the Ottoman empire. The employment of these corsairs and the incorporation of their lands created opportunities as well as problems. This article aims to highlight the reasons behind and the limits of the cooperation between North African corsairs and Istanbul when the importance of the former for the latter reached its zenith, in tandem with the Ottoman-Habsburg rivalry in the Mediterranean. It furthermore tries to demonstrate the details of the relationship between the imperial centre in Istanbul and the frontier provinces of North Africa with its centrifugal elites. Thus it reveals the diversity of Ottoman administrative practices as well as the pragmatism and flexibility of the Ottoman government. Finally, it delineates the role that the corsairs played in the shaping of the Mediterranean strategy of the Ottoman empire.

Spaces of Entanglement Andreas Kappeler (bio) The imperial turn, which for the past 25 years has directed the attention of historians toward empires, may have lost its first impetus, but as the journals Ab Imperio and Kritika as well as recent collective volumes and research projects have shown, it is by no means spent. The collapse of the Soviet Union initially revived interest in Edward Gibbon's question about "the decline and fall" of empires, but "imperiology" has since passed from explaining the breakdown of empires to asking not why they collapsed but how they survived for centuries, how they were organized and structured, and how imperial rule was established and maintained. Scholars have abandoned the metaphor of the "prison of peoples" for a more affirmative position that stresses the relatively peaceful coexistence of diverse peoples and societies under the rule of one dynasty, in contrast to the murderous history of the nation-state. This has led to various comparative projects, monographs, and collective volumes. Studies that examine the Romanov and Ottoman empires include Dominic Lieven's pioneering book as well as comparative projects and collective volumes edited by Alexei Miller, Alfred Rieber, and Kimitaka Matsuzato.1 These and other studies are mostly not comparative in the strict sense, however, but instead juxtapose chapters or articles on each of two or more empires and attempt a comparison only in the introduction and conclusion. Thus the potential of comparative history is far from exhausted. The most recent comparative study is the ambitious and stimulating Empires in World History by Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper. It encompasses a very long period from the ancient Roman and Chinese empires to the 20th century, including the Ottoman and Romanov empires, and places world history into an imperial framework: "Empires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as in [End Page 477] the sixteenth, existed in relation to each other." Questions of "imperial intersections," competition, and imitation are thus included.2 By adopting this orientation, the work reflects a new trend in "imperiology" that asks about contacts and interactions between empires. This new direction is connected with a trend in historical sciences toward cultural transfers, transnational history, histoire croisée, and shared or entangled history. The first such studies concerned the interactions between the Western maritime empires and between France and Germany; later ones examined those between Germany and Poland and between Germany and Russia (for example, the special issue of Kritika on Germany and Russia in the first half of the 20th century).3 The histoire croisée of the Russians and Ottomans has been neglected so far, despite its importance for both empires. It lasted at least five centuries, longer than the relations Russia had with any other empire. Their interactions were shaped initially by a competition for the heritage of the Byzantine and Mongol empires and by a military, political, and cultural preponderance of the Ottomans. During the 18th century, the balance of power was reversed and the relationship was characterized by numerous wars, most of them ending with Russian victories. One recent publication includes six contributions on the Ottoman Empire, six on the Russian Empire, and one (by Marsha Siefert) comparing communications in both empires. Although the book's title is Comparing Empires, the subtitle is about "encounters and transfers." The interactions concern, however, mainly transfers from Western Europe to the Ottoman and Romanov empires; direct Russo-Ottoman entanglements are treated only sporadically.4 In 2010, the first collective volume devoted to the entangled history of the Russian Empire with other empires was published. It is focused on cultural transfers from the West European empires to Russia, considered here as a European "imperium inter pares." Only two articles touch on the Ottoman dimension. Vladimir Bobrovnikov compares the experiences of Russia in the Caucasus and of France in Algeria—two regions, parts of which had formerly been under Ottoman rule—and looks for interactions between the two colonial powers as well as borrowings from the Ottomans. A case study on Bessarabia [End Page 478] by Andrei Kushko and Victor Taki deals directly with the Russo-Ottoman entanglement in the border region of Bessarabia.5 Whether the Ottoman Empire, too, was an "imperium inter...

According to the Treaty of Zohab (May 1639), following the end of a period of conflict between the Ottoman and Persian Empires, the frontier between them was not a line but a broad zone running through Armenia, Azerbaijan, the Western Zagros Mountains and as far south as Basra and the Persian Gulf. Isolated from distant capitals and inhabited by hostile Arab and Kurdish tribes jockeying for patronage from the rival empires, these border areas were extremely unsettled. Both empires fought over the revenues of the local tribes and repeatedly raided each other across the border. It was upon this volatile and unsatisfactory backdrop that a cooling of relations between the two empires at the end of the Napoleonic Wars provoked a bloody and damaging conflict that ultimately settled nothing.

Focusing on the pastoral nomadic tribe of Zilan, located at the intersection of the Ottoman, the Qajar and the Russian imperial borders, this article discusses the political and military relations between imperial states and nomadic tribes during the nineteenth century. It analyzes how the war-making, boundary-making and state-making attempts of these three rival empires on a tribal and frontier space shaped the social, political and economic organization of a nomadic tribe, its loyalties, alliances and allegiances. It argues that imperial states and tribes in this military frontier, rather than acting as two hostile camps, depended and needed each other in military, political and economic spheres. Such a long-lasting mutual interdependence not only transformed political and administrative structure of the tribal groups, but also forced empires to redraw their plans and projects according to tribal and frontier settings.

����� ��� There is a missing dragon in book 1 of The Faerie Queene that reveals a lot about how Edmund Spenser adapted medieval romance for use in Protestant England. In Spenser’s direct source for the dragon fight, Bevis of Hampton, two Christian kings from southern Italy had been ceaselessly at war, destroying the land, until they were turned into battling dragons for their sins (Bevis of Hampton 2611–60). 1 One flees north, through Tuscany, Lombardy, Provence, and ultimately to Koln (Cologne) in Germany. There Bevis kills it in a three-day fight, in which he is providentially saved by a well whose virtue heals and protects him from the dragon’s poison. The other dragon, however, flies to Rome, where “he there rested his cursed bones, some say in a caue of stones, / men say he is there yet, enclosed with clearkes wit” (Bevis of Hampton f. 122r). 2 This origin for Bevis’s dragon establishes part of its symbolic significance: Bevis’s worst enemies are not the Saracens, but Christians whose rivalries and betrayals leave him vulnerable. It is no accident that the fight occurs just as Bevis crosses from Muslim to Christian lands and the plot shifts from fighting Saracens to finally revenging himself on his archenemy, the Emperor of Germany. After the Reformation, Spenser could have rendered highly topical the fortuitous details of two dragons in Germany and Rome, with the English killing the German dragon but the Roman dragon enduring, enclosed by clerics’ wit. That he took only one means that, however similar the details may be, Red Crosse’s dragon is a very different beast from Bevis’s. Because of their wide-ranging symbolic potential, dragons are especially useful in revealing Spenser’s techniques of reforming romance. Since the image of the dragon as adversary is familiar from the Bible, especially from Revelation, dragon fights in romance often crystallize ideas of evil. They are thus useful emblems of religious conflict, and religious conflict changed with the Reformation. Bevis’s dragon marks Bevis’s passage

Edmund Spenser's praise of his sovereign's justice and mercy is clearly indicated at many points in the allegory of his "Legend of Justice," Book v of The Faerie Queene, and thus joins the many other artistic and popular glorifications of Elizabeth that appeared during the last two decades of her reign. It should be noted, however, that much of this glorification was not idle adulation, but was designed to answer specific criticisms of the Queen, to encourage loyalty, and, indeed, to protect the realm from foreign attack. In 1595, when the second three books of The Faerie Queene were published, protestant England was engaged in a continuing battle with Roman Catholicism and Spain. This battle had its propagandistic and theoretical side, and praise of Elizabeth was very important for the issues raised in this controversial literature. It is the thesis of this study that Book V of The Faerie Queene is more closely related to this controversial literature than has been previously recognised.

Early modern scholarship often reads the dramatic representations of the Muslim woman in the light of postcolonial identity politics, which sees an organic relationship between the West’s historical domination of the East and the Western discourse on the East. This book problematizes the above trajectory by arguing that the assumption of a power relation between a dominating West and a subordinate East cannot be sustained within the context of the political and historical realities of early modern Europe. The Ottoman Empire remained as a dominant superpower throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and was perceived by Protestant England both as a military and religious threat and as a possible ally against Catholic Spain. Reading a series of early modern plays from Marlowe to Beaumont and Fletcher alongside a number of historical sources and documents, this book re-interprets the image of Islamic femininity in the period’s drama to reflect this overturn in the world’s power balances, as well as the intricate dynamics of England’s intensified contact with Islam in the Mediterranean.

Early modern scholarship often reads the dramatic representations of the Muslim woman in the light of postcolonial identity politics, which sees an organic relationship between the West’s historical domination of the East and the Western discourse on the East. This book problematizes the above trajectory by arguing that the assumption of a power relation between a dominating West and a subordinate East cannot be sustained within the context of the political and historical realities of early modern Europe. The Ottoman Empire remained as a dominant superpower throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and was perceived by Protestant England both as a military and religious threat and as a possible ally against Catholic Spain. Reading a series of early modern plays from Marlowe to Beaumont and Fletcher alongside a number of historical sources and documents, this book re-interprets the image of Islamic femininity in the period’s drama to reflect this overturn in the world’s power balances, as well as the intricate dynamics of England’s intensified contact with Islam in the Mediterranean.

The boundaries of the Ottoman Empire span several centuries on a vast expanse, across the ancient continents of the world, with different races, diverse peoples and multiple faiths, and the Ottoman Empire was one of the forces that influenced the course of international politics at the time, and then it was weakened by the political balance and administrative, which was governed by the laws of the sultan between the central authority on the one hand, and those who carry out that policy from Baswat and Pikatagwat... and others on the other hand. The weakness is growing in state institutions and despite repeated attempts by some sultans to restore power and prestige to the body of the sprawling empire, it has achieved little or nothing. The first reformist calls were inspired by the spirit and principles of Islam in remedying the imbalance, and the reformers advocated the necessity of applying Islamic law within the various institutions, to return to its prosperous past, and on that basis the pioneering attempts were based on Islam and its basic principles at a stage where it did not expand The Ottoman Empire in the European-style quotation, as the European superiority was not as impressive as the Ottomans and pushed them to quotation, and the Ottomans were preparing themselves a major state during the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century, and during that stage many of the leaders of the movement tried Reform in the Ottoman Empire, doing self-reliant reforms not on the quotation from the West, including Shaykh al-Islam Saad Eddin Effendi, Osman II, Murad IV and others. The nature of the research required it to be divided into an introduction, six axes and a conclusion, the first axis addressed the beginning of the Ottoman retreat since 1683, and the signs of weakness experienced by the Ottoman state, as well as the emergence of European supremacy during that era, and the emergence of a number of early Ottoman reformers and their role in the beginnings The reform process. The second theme was devoted to the ways in which they showed Salim III in the reform, which led to his eventual execution, and the third axis was devoted to the study of the reign of Sultan Mahmud II at an important stage of the nineteenth century, with the appearance of a number of eminent personalities in Egypt and Iraq, as well as some changes of Europe. The fourth axis touched upon the Ottoman organizations, the efforts of a number of Ottomans and their influence on Western culture, which led to the promulgation of a number of important decrees (orders), including the line of Sharif kolkhanf in 1839 and the decree of Humayun in 1856, and a number of laws including the Land Law of 21 April 1858 The law of the Tarabo of 14 January 1859, as well as the state law of 1864, and its interpretation in the stabilization of the new correctional grounds. The fifth axis dealt with a brief presentation of the results of the movement of Ottoman organizations, and its influence in the Arab States, especially the state of Baghdad, and devoted the sixth (last) to the features of the Iraqi reformist Midhat Pasha, the most important administrative works in the state of Baghdad, as well as giving a brief presentation Of the subsequent changes to the reign of Medhat Pasha until the early 20th century. In conclusion, we tried to show the most important conclusions reached through the research hubs, seeking reference to several related sources including a number of research and university messages as well as the use of the International Information Network (Internet), and these sources can be identified through the margins Search or list of sources.

Reviewed by: Atlantic Environments and the American South ed. by Thomas Blake Earle and D. Andrew Johnson Tycho de Boer Atlantic Environments and the American South. Edited by Thomas Blake Earle and D. Andrew Johnson. Environmental History and the American South. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2020. Pp. xiv, 226. Paper $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-5669-3; cloth, $99.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-5648-8.) Atlantic Environments and the American South brings together contributions stemming from a 2016 symposium at Rice University that explored "the intersection of Atlantic, environmental, and southern historiographies" (p. 2). These fields, Thomas Blake Earle and D. Andrew Johnson explain in their introduction, "developed in response to specific contexts and certain questions that have largely forestalled cross-field pollination" (p. 2). Broadly speaking, the editors contend that historians of the Atlantic world have not sufficiently centered the environment in their "multivalent, sociocultural histories" of slavery and empire; the history of American South, understood as part of a circum-Caribbean or a British Greater Caribbean, provides a useful geographic lens through which to view that central role (p. 3). The collection does not propose a paradigmatic approach to such an intersectional history. Instead, its sections—"Slavery and Climate," "Slavery and Landscape," "Empire and Infrastructure," "Empire and Expertise"—suggest more nuanced understandings of the ways different peoples, rival empires, and competing epistemologies interacted with one another and with different, shifting environments to shape [End Page 326] the American South as both a distinct region and a node in the networks of exchange that constituted the Atlantic world. Bradford J. Wood, for example, argues in "Ocean Graveyards and Ulterior Atlantic Worlds: The Experience of Colonial North Carolina" that our axiomatic understanding of "the Atlantic Ocean as a means of connection" does not apply to North Carolina, whose treacherous coastline prevented the colony from establishing those connections that drove large-scale environmental change elsewhere and gave rise to the concept of a larger, interconnected Atlantic world (p. 113). Frances Kolb shows in "Profitable Transgressions: International Borders and British Atlantic Trade Networks in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 1763–1783" that the Mississippi River, designated a boundary between empires, instead fostered multidirectional exchange and movement in the borderlands of the Lower Mississippi Valley, with small Indigenous polities known as petites nations rejecting exclusive loyalty to either Great Britain or Spain when it came to trade. Sean Morey Smith shows how authors promoting settlement in the British colonies relied on various theories regarding hot climates and health, not just the "old ideas of latitudinal climate zones," to hail the "salubrious" qualities of England's overseas possessions (p. 21). Elaine Lafay notes in her chapter how planters in the antebellum South concerned themselves with proper ventilation of their own dwellings and those of their slaves, yet resisted slaves' attempts to improve their drafty quarters or enjoy the "fresh air" they equated with freedom and autonomy (p. 38). Environmental aspects of planters' control over slave labor also inform Hayley Negrin's chapter on Native women, whose traditional roles in crop cultivation the English disparaged as uncivilized but whose labor they nonetheless sought forcibly to employ in their fields, and Keith Pluymers's chapter on Bermuda, where the sought-after expertise of Afro-Bermudians was crucial to the development of both tobacco cultivation and slavery. Melissa N. Morris highlights the importance of Spanish and Indigenous crops and expertise to the rise of Virginia's tobacco culture, further stressing the exchange of environmental resources and knowledge among diverse peoples and places within the circum-Caribbean. Matthew Mulcahy's chapter on drought challenges notions of this world as singularly hot, wet, and plagued by hurricanes and shows how droughts severely impacted island populations and often spurred slave resistance and rebellion. Peter C. Messer's closing chapter on "The Nature of William Bartram's Travels," while somewhat incongruous, nevertheless underscores this collection's useful contribution to the scholarship: just as the nature of the American Southeast resisted classification according to the rigid taxonomies of old and prompted William Bartram to evoke the sublime and make it known on its own terms, so do the essays in this collection suggest fresh new ways that environmental history can...

Pilgrimage, Precarity, and Pandemics

Traditional interpretations of Spenser’s allegory, both moral and historical, have tended to identify Una as “Truth”, specifically the truth of the Reformed Church. Duessa, her opposite, has been identified as the whore who symbolizes Roman Catholicism, whilst Error has been interpreted as religious error, the enemy of the true word (heresy), or more generally as falsehood and sin. This paper explores Spenser’s demonization of the Catholic Irish in The Faerie Queene and A View of the Present State of Ireland (hereafter the View), attributed to Spenser since 1633. By no means do all the demons in The Faerie Queene represent Irish Catholics, but there is evidence of a particularly Irish Catholic dimension to Spenser’s depiction of Una, Duessa, and Error. In Book 1 of The Faerie Queene images of beauty are used by Spenser to endorse the status of Elizabeth I as head of the Protestant church and grotesque images are used to demonize the enemies of that church, and of Elizabeth. Spenser builds on the figure of Elizabeth as divine representative of Protestant reform to endorse his militant Protestant position throughout Book 1. In his delineation of the grotesque physical appearance of Una’s enemies, Spenser illustrates the contemporary demonization of two groups: women and the colonized Irish (including Irish women), both constructed as the Other. Such demonization is explicit in the View and is a feature of other colonialist writings. Spenser depicts the evil which he believes threatens the English Protestant state as sexually and morally degenerate.

The tragedy of Othello is a drama of conversion, in particular a conversion to certain forms of faithlessness deeply feared by Shakespeare's audience. The collective anxiety about religious conversion felt in post-Reformation England focused primarily on Roman Catholic enemies who threatened to convert Protestant England by the sword, but the English also had reason to feel trepidation about the imperial power of the Ottoman Turks, who were conquering and colonizing Christian territories in Europe and the Mediterranean. English Protestant texts, both popular and learned, conflated the political/external and the demonic/internal enemies, associating both the pope and the Ottoman sultan with Satan or the Antichrist. According to Protestant ideology, the Devil, the pope, and the Turk all desired to "convert" good Protestant souls to a state of damnation, and their desire to do so was frequently figured as a sexual/sensual temptation of virtue, accompanied by a wrathful passion for power. As Virginia Mason Vaughan (1994) has shown in her historicist study of Othello, Shakespeare's Mediterranean tragedy, set at the margins of Christendom, but at the center of global civilization, "exploits…perceptions of a global struggle between the forces of good and evil, a seeming binary opposition that in reality is complex and multifaceted" (27).1KeywordsSeventeenth CenturyChristian TheologyEarly Modern PeriodEnglish FascinationBlack Skin ColorThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The Ottoman Empire was a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state encompassing most of the modern Middle East and for much of its 600-year existence managed to rule its diverse peoples effectively. The study of minorities in the Ottoman Empire traditionally has had a narrow, statecentered focus or has ignored the state completely. Religious diversity has been examined in terms of institutions imposed by the state while communal histories have presented a picture of self-regulating and autonomous communities divorced from their Ottoman context. The authors of this book move beyond these approaches and instead seek to explore the unknown terrain that falls between the internal life of the community and the formal structures of the state. Topics in this volume include the fiscal functions of territorial communities on the Greek mainland in the 18th century; the use of Islamic courts by the religious minorities of Istanbul; the relationship of religion and urban segregation in Damascus; and the life of a Jewish educator in Edirne in the 19th century.

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on the publications of Garabed Panosian and examines the extent of readership achieved by the Armeno-Turkish newspapers in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. It specifically focuses on the linguistic, social, and political circumstances in which his newspapers were read. The readership of Panosian's newspapers was not only limited to Turkish monolingual Armenians but also extended to Armenian--Turkish bilingual Armenians. Moreover, his newspapers, along with other Armeno-Turkish materials, gained a non-Armenian readership. Thus, Panosian was able to use his newspapers to display the allegiance of Armenians to the Ottoman Empire, aiming at a favourable evaluation from government circles. Besides being a tool to reach out to Turkish monolinguals, Armeno-Turkish newspapers were also rich products of the culture of bilingualism and a medium shared by religiously diverse people. Thus, examining Armeno-Turkish materials elucidates the pluralistic society of the late Ottoman Empire.