The Dragoman Renaissance

Diplomatic Interpreters and the Routes of Orientalism

E. Natalie Rothman

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501758508
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Europa medievale

In The Dragoman Renaissance, E. Natalie Rothman traces how Istanbul-based diplomatic translator-interpreters, known as the dragomans, systematically engaged Ottoman elites in the study of the Ottoman Empire—eventually coalescing in the discipline of Orientalism—throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Rothman challenges Eurocentric assumptions still pervasive in Renaissance studies by showing the centrality of Ottoman imperial culture to the articulation of European knowledge about the Ottomans. To do so, she draws on a dazzling array of new material from a variety of archives. By studying the sustained interactions between dragomans and Ottoman courtiers in this period, Rothman disrupts common ideas about a singular moment of "cultural encounter, " as well as about a "docile" and "static" Orient, simply acted upon by extraneous imperial powers.

The Dragoman Renaissance creatively uncovers how dragomans mediated Ottoman ethno-linguistic, political, and religious categories to European diplomats and scholars. Further, it shows how dragomans did not simply circulate fixed knowledge. Rather, their engagement of Ottoman imperial modes of inquiry and social reproduction shaped the discipline of Orientalism for centuries to come.

Thanks to generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, through The Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

Chapter 1

Localizing Foreignness

Forging Istanbul’s Dragomanate

A MINIATURE PAINTING OF THE bailate, the Venetian consulate in the Ottoman capital ca. 1660, offers us a rare contemporary visual representation of the institutional space in which dragomans were, quite literally, made (figure 1.1). It depicts a two-story building, fenced off from its surroundings, and encircled by a tree-lined garden. Seated on a wooden platform in the garden with their backs to the house are three men in Venetian breeches, cassocks, and ruffs, sporting rounded orange-striped caps on their heads. At the corner, a laborer, wearing a distinctly plainer shirt, breeches, and fez, draws water from a well. Through a window on the ground floor another man, dressed similarly to the ones gathered outside, is seen holding an open book. On the second-floor veranda three figures—a bearded man and a beardless youth in simple kaftans and fur-trimmed caps and another youth in Venetian clothing—lean against the railing. The bearded man and the Venetian youth seem to be conversing, while the other youth is standing aloof.

Through minute sartorial difference, this image codifies several intersecting socio-legal, ethno-religious, professional, and age hierarchies within the bailate. It underscores the volatile identity of dragomans and apprentice dragomans, who inhabited the bailate in growing numbers in the seventeenth century, and who at once formed its institutional core and its most contentious links to the surrounding Ottoman world beyond its walls. It is hardly an accident, therefore, that the two beardless apprentice dragomans in the image are clad in prototypical high-status Venetian and Ottoman Christian garb, respectively. These two sartorial prototypes are here metonymic of two important sources of recruitment into the dragomanate. They also index the transformative capacity of long apprenticeship in the bailate to turn local Catholic youth into loyal Venetian subjects while refashioning Venetian-born citizens into effectively localized members of Istanbul’s courtly and diplomatic milieu. A text accompanying the image reads:

Image of the house, where the Excellent Baili reside, enclosed by part of the orchard, and the hallway above, through which one walks. Below it are the rooms where usually the apprentice dragomans reside.1

The spatial and social reconfiguration of dragomans through long residency in the bailate is at the heart of this chapter, which centers on the myriad mechanisms through which apprentice dragomans were recruited, trained, employed, and imbued with a particular trans-imperial habitus. In order to appreciate the pivotal role of the bailate as a space of transformative socialization for future dragomans, the chapter first situates the evolution of the institution of the dragomanate itself at the intersection of Venetocentric, circum-Mediterranean, and Ottomancentric practices for mediating language and power. It then considers why and how dragomans became central to Venetian-Ottoman diplomacy, that is: how dragomans’ sources of recruitment and modes of socialization gave shape to particular modalities of diplomatic knowledge production.

Patrimonial Households and Trans-Imperial Spaces of Encounter

Historians of the early modern Ottoman state have long noted the important role played by large elite households in entwining domestic hierarchies with imperial politics. Through their far-reaching recruitment and training programs, it has been suggested, such households institutionalized and perpetuated ethnic heterogeneity at the empire’s core.2 These patrimonial households—starting with the imperial palace in Istanbul and extending to the households of military-bureaucratic elites in the provinces—served as training grounds for a large body of young cadets, who functioned simultaneously as both domestic and civil servants. Initially, candidates for the Ottoman imperial household were captured primarily through raids beyond the frontier and from among captives and prisoners of war. From the early fifteenth century, additional recruits were obtained through the formalization of the practice of devşirme, or child levy. This institution ensured the steady supply of enslaved boys for the imperial household from among the non-Muslim rural population of the provinces, especially the Balkans, where a changing percentage of boys and youth were removed from their parental homes and sent to the imperial center. By the late sixteenth century, however, raids, war booty, and the devşirme ceased to be the exclusive source of recruits into the imperial household. To supplement them, specialized personnel with specific skills or technical know-how were sometimes enlisted from among converts, “foreigners” beyond the frontier, and groups in Ottoman society previously deemed “unfit” for service.3

Regardless of provenance and method of mobilization, patrimonial households had the capacity to profoundly transform their inductees. Upon recruitment, cadets underwent a lengthy and rigorous regimen of what Cornell Fleischer has termed “deracination, education, and Ottomanization,” which molded them into loyal subjects suited for lifelong service to the dynast in key military and administrative roles.4 This protracted training could easily last over a decade. Recruits were first assigned to rural Anatolian (Turkish Muslim) families to learn the language and become accustomed to hard labor. Only then, after being schooled or apprenticed within the imperial household for several years, did they enter a variety of positions in the state’s expanding military-bureaucratic apparatus.5 Whereas cadets’ marriage was at first strictly limited, by the late sixteenth century the rules relaxed to the point that true service dynasties began to emerge, particularly among members of the imperial cavalry and other elite officeholders. Here, for the first time, membership in the Ottoman imperial household became a potentially heritable status, with sons of recruits gaining a sense of privilege by descent. These swelled the ranks and ultimately made the devşirme superfluous, leading to its de facto disappearance in the late seventeenth century.6

The transformation in household recruitment patterns at the turn of the seventeenth century and its implications for conceptions of subjecthood, loyalty, and bureaucratic professionalization have been well-documented not only in the Ottoman capital, but also in the military-bureaucratic elite households of the Ottoman Balkans, Egypt, North Africa, and the Arab provinces.7 Far less understood are the roles of recruitment into and training within expansive elite households in contemporary Venetian society. To be sure, Venetian historiography has emphasized rather the exclusivity and endogamy of the metropolitan patrician and citizen classes.8 Yet even in hyper-endogamous Venice, studies of elite households have outlined how extended, bilateral kinship orientation was instrumental in consolidating a patrician grip on political institutions, allowing families to weave dense networks of patronage through both the paternal and the maternal lines.9

Significantly, thus far the shared patrimonial principles and purposes—though not always actual practices—of Ottoman and Venetian elite households have gone unnoticed for the most part. This understudied confluence is especially intriguing in light of the prescribed, long sojourns at the Porte of many prominent members of Venice’s elites in their youth, precisely as a political and commercial apprenticeship. It is well worth asking, therefore, how assumptions about loyalty and subjecthood were engendered by Venetian and Ottoman elite kinship and household structures, and how associated roles were inhabited and manipulated by people who were familiar with—indeed, familiars of—both.

Such familiarity was cultivated most clearly in the Venetian bailate in Istanbul, an institution that served as a model for numerous other diplomatic residences in the Ottoman capital in its functioning as a central node in the production and circulation of dragoman-mediated knowledge. In fact, the Venetian dragomanate in Istanbul and its offshoots throughout the Venetian maritime colonies and in Venice proper are a prime example of how the Venetian state adapted prototypically Ottoman mechanisms of subject-making and integration through a large elite household. The emergence and transformation of the Venetian dragomanate underscores how Venetian and Ottoman household patterns and affective ties interacted and sometimes converged in the making of trans-imperial professional cadres.

Recruitment

By its heyday in the late seventeenth century, the Venetian dragomanate came to consist of no more than a dozen families, who supplied the bailate with most of its new apprentice dragomans generation after generation. Throughout the early modern period these families intensely and repeatedly intermarried, securing their tight control over apprentice dragoman positions, which became de facto heritable. Sojourning in the bailate in the 1770s, the physiologist Lazzaro Spallanzani observed that as soon as dragomans’ families have sons, “they dress them alla dragomana and lead them in their father’s footsteps.”10 The intergenerational transfer of skill and status embodied in dragoman positions was facilitated by the institutionalization of a specific official, subaltern dragoman rank, that of giovani di lingua (literally language youth, a calque of the Turkish dil oğlan), glossed here as “apprentice dragomans.”11 This neologism underscores both the strong element of apprenticeship and subordination implied by apprentices’ junior position, as they honed their linguistic and diplomatic skills and shadowed more seasoned dragomans, and the reality of their service as de facto dragomans, from regularly translating official Ottoman records into Italian to their more occasional and haphazard participation in court protocol, during public ceremonies, and when substituting for their seniors on their day-to-day rounds to the divan and to Ottoman officials’ home.

Initially, apprentice dragomans were to be recruited across Venetian territories with the explicit purpose of equipping them with the high skill and decorum required for diplomatic work in the Ottoman court. “There is no doubt,” observed the bailo Paolo Contarini in 1583,

that the service of one’s own [subjects] is more advantageous and has more public dignity than that of Turkish [i.e. Ottoman] subjects, because the [former], who are not preoccupied with showing respect, speak with daring, whereas the Turks are afraid to do so.12

Paul Rycaut, then secretary in the English embassy in Istanbul, was to make a very similar observation in The Present State of the Ottoman Empire almost a century later, pinpointing the problem of dragomans’ meek speech to their compromised juridical position as Ottoman subjects:

The reason of which Tyranny and presumption in these prime Officers over the Interpreters, is because they are most commonly born subjects of the Grand Signior, and therefore ill support the least word misplaced, or savouring of contest from them, not distinguishing between the sense of the Embassadour, and the explication of the Interpreter; and therefore it were very useful to breed up a Seminary of young Englishmen, of sprightly and ingenious parts, to be qualified for that Office; who may w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Localizing Foreignness: Forging Istanbul’s Dragomanate
• Chapter 2 Kinshipping: Casting Nets and Spawning Dynasties
• Chapter 3 Inscribing the Self: Dragomans’ Relazioni
• Chapter 4 Visualizing a Space of Encounter
• Chapter 5 Disciplining Language: Dragomans and Oriental Philology
• Chapter 6 Translating the Ottomans
• Chapter 7 Circulating “Turkish Literature”
• Epilogue: Dragomans and the Routes of Orientalism
• Notes
• References