The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It - Course Information

~ ON SOVEREIGNTY AND SUBJECTS ~ 43
usually became accessible to researchers long before their counterparts in the
Ottoman archives, it is not surprising that they have left profound traces in the
relevant historiography. This impact was reinforced by the fact that early republican
historiography in Turkey also was much inclined to dwell on Ottoman
‘corruption’ and ‘decline’. 63 In the nineteenth century, most European historians
strongly identified with the empire or nation-state of which they were subjects/
citizens. Ottoman historians, on their part, tried to explain the internal and external
developments that had first halted the Ottoman advance and then led to the
loss of ever more territories. 64 In this endeavour, after about 1850/1266–7 the
more prominent authors, to a greater or lesser degree, adopted the methodologies
current among European and American historians of their time; Fuat Köprülü’s
interest in frontier zones and their inhabitants is a well-known case in point. 65
How the Ottoman elite did not organize its relations with the
outside world in the 1560s/967–77
Yet interestingly enough, this emergence of a common methodology did not, for
a considerable time, result in a perspective on Ottoman history shared by Ottomanists
and Europeanists. In part, language barriers may have been responsible;
as long as Turkish scholars published all but exclusively in Turkish and Europeanist
historians did not normally know this language, scholarly interchange
remained difficult. But this cannot be the whole story, because even Europeanists
who were admirable linguists might write about the Ottoman Empire using only
a minimum of Ottomanist secondary literature, even if it was available in English.
This situation ensured that topoi such as ‘Ottoman decline’, which many
Ottomanists came to consider increasingly dubious as explanatory devices, continued
to be widely used, for instance, by scholars dealing with Balkan history.
On the other hand, Ottomanists have rarely addressed themselves to certain
issues crucial, for instance, to anyone attempting to place ‘corruption’ into a historical
context. We still possess all too few studies dealing with the purchase of
offices in an Ottoman context, a topic germane to the ‘corruption problem’ and
well studied for early modern France or Florence. Given the frequent sales and
purchases of Ottoman offices from the late sixteenth century onwards, this constitutes
a serious omission, even if the growing number of studies on lifetime taxfarming
and provincial power-holding are beginning to fill this gap at least in
part. 66 Only when we understand the historical context of what some contemporaries
and many authors of later periods regarded as corruption, will we able to
assess the extent to which such practices impinged on Ottoman relationships
with foreign rulers and their subjects.
As a result of these historiographical traditions, perspectives have become
seriously distorted. Studies dealing with matters pertaining to both Ottoman and
European history, including the diverse religious and political rivalries fought out
between Europeans in Istanbul, or else the supra-state contacts of the Orthodox
Church, are very often treated as if Ottoman officials had no interest in these