Transottoman Matters: Objects Moving through Time, Space, and Meaning [1 ed.] 9783737011686, 9783847111689

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Transottomanica Osteuropäisch-osmanisch-persische Mobilitätsdynamiken

Band 4

Herausgegeben von Stefan Rohdewald, Stephan Conermann und Albrecht Fuess

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Arkadiusz Blaszczyk / Robert Born / Florian Riedler (eds.)

Transottoman Matters Objects Moving through Time, Space, and Meaning

With 26 figures

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Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über https://dnb.de abrufbar. Gedruckt mit freundlicher Unterstützung der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) im Rahmen des SPP 1981: Transottomanica: Osteuropäisch-osmanisch-persische Mobilitätsdynamiken (Projektnummer 313079038), www.transottomanica.de. © 2022 Brill | V&R unipress, Theaterstraße 13, D-37073 Göttingen, ein Imprint der Brill-Gruppe (Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, Niederlande; Brill USA Inc., Boston MA, USA; Brill Asia Pte Ltd, Singapore; Brill Deutschland GmbH, Paderborn, Deutschland; Brill Österreich GmbH, Wien, Österreich) Koninklijke Brill NV umfasst die Imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau, Verlag Antike und V&R unipress. Dieses Werk ist als Open-Access-Publikation im Sinne der Creative-Commons-Lizenz BY International 4.0 („Namensnennung“) unter dem DOI 10.14220/9783737011686 abzurufen. Um eine Kopie dieser Lizenz zu sehen, besuchen Sie https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Jede Verwertung in anderen als den durch diese Lizenz zugelassenen Fällen bedarf der vorherigen schriftlichen Einwilligung des Verlages. Umschlagabbildung: Detail of Star Ushak, Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, loan from the Protestant Parish Church A. C. in Bistrit,a, inv.no. Gew 4927. Photograph: Monika Runge. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlage | www.vandenhoeck-ruprecht-verlage.com ISSN 2626-9449 ISBN 978-3-7370-1168-6

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Contents

Acknowledgements

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

7

Arkadiusz Blaszczyk / Robert Born / Florian Riedler Introduction: Movable Objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

9

Florian Riedler Around the Black Sea in Forty-Five Days: Transottoman Space, Time, and Infrastructure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Albrecht Fuess Mobile Metals: On the Role of Natural Resources in the Geopolitical Context of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Anthony T. Quickel Cairo and Coffee in the Transottoman Trade Network . . . . . . . . . . .

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Stefan Rohdewald Petroleum: Commodity, Products and Infrastructures as Transottoman Mobilities around 1900 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Arkadiusz Blaszczyk From the Forests of Siberia to the Urban Jungle of Istanbul: The Ottoman-Muscovite Fur Exchange in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 Alexandr Osipian Uses of Oriental Rugs in Early Modern Poland-Lithuania: Social Practices and Public Discourses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173

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Contents

Stephanie Armer / Eva Hanke / Anja Kregeloh Rugs as Transottoman Commodities: The History of a Rug from Us¸ak . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219 Mehmet Tepeyurt Imperial Russia’s Egyptian Endeavors: The Purchase of Amenhotep’s Sphinxes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273 Stefan Rohdewald Conclusion: A Transottoman Lens on Object Mobilities in a longue durée . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305 List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315

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Acknowledgements

Transottoman Matters is the outcome of the collaborative effort of the members of working group 3 “Object Mobility” during the first phase of the priority program “Transottomanica” (2017–2020). The program including this publication was generously funded by DFG (project no. 313079038). We discussed the ideas of this volume at a series of workshops for which we thank all the hosting institutions and in particular the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg. The museum provided a stimulating location for the collaboration of art historians and historians on the topic of materiality. Of the many colleagues who gave us input we particularly have to single out Michał Wasiucionek and Yuka Kadoi. They read and commented on an earlier version of the manuscript and encouraged us in many ways. In the technical and linguistic preparation of the manuscript we received great help by Tamara Ganjalyan, Felix Behrens, Chris Abbey, and Melissa Favara. Thank you for making Transottoman matters matter. The editors, May 2021

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Arkadiusz Blaszczyk / Robert Born / Florian Riedler

Introduction: Movable Objects

This volume analyzes historical processes of mobility by focusing on material objects. It is our principal thesis that flows of things, objects or materials are the key for any understanding of the nature and scope of a social relational space transformed, constituted and shaped through mobilities. Mobility—as a shorthand for various related processes of migration, transfer, entanglement and translation—involves human actors, immaterial elements such as ideas and knowledge, but also objects in various forms and functions. For example, as material infrastructures, they form the basis for transport and travel; as goods they are the object and purpose of trade or gift exchange. In all of these cases, objects are deeply entangled with human actors as well as immaterial elements. By focusing on the ways in which objects determined certain historical processes of mobility and how their social meaning and materiality was transformed in these processes, we hope to gain a deeper insight into the question of how mobility defined trans-regional relations from a long-term perspective. The case studies presented in this volume are part of a collaborative effort to reconstruct from the particular perspective of objects and materiality a mobility space we call Transottomanica. Rather than to denote a fixed geographical entity, the term Transottomanica is used in a heuristic fashion, identifying a changing set of entanglements and transfers sustained by flows and networks between the Middle East and Eastern Europe. The name refers to the fact that, between the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, many of these flows and networks originated in or passed through the Ottoman Empire. But the other empires that dominated the Middle East and Eastern Europe in the early modern period such as Poland-Lithuania, Russia and the Safavid Empire in Persia are also an integral part of this research perspective. A focus on this area will act as a balance to the lively scholarly interest in transfers between Western Europe and the Orient. Moreover, where transfers between the Middle East and Eastern Europe were studied, they have been often conceptualized as bilateral relations between states or empires. Examples of goods such as silk, which was traded between Persia and Western Europe via Russia, or carpets that were exported

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from Anatolia to Transylvania, before they ended up in a museum in Germany, show that in general, mobility networks were more complicated than that. We will come back to the historical and geographical framing and its implication for research in the last part of this introduction. First, we want to address some of the conceptual approaches, which have highlighted the role of objects and materiality, and discuss how these are connected to the central topic of this collection: mobility. In particular, we want to identify three forms of mobility—geographical, symbolic, and temporal—which were constitutive for the entanglement of objects and society and which therefore are central to the case studies in this volume.

The Material Turn and Mobility For some time now, social sciences and the humanities have discussed ways to reintegrate objects, things, and materiality as a balance to the fixation on texts, discourses, and social constructivism. The “material turn,” which has been extrapolated from these discussions, consists of multiple approaches with sometimes very different origins and aims within their specialist disciplines.1 The preoccupation with material culture is by no means as new as the “material turn” discourse might suggest; in some disciplines such as archaeology or art history, objects have always been in the focus. But recent studies and approaches like “The social life of things,”2 “Things that talk,”3 “The power of things,”4 or, in a more general fashion, the actor-network theory (ANT)5 go further in one aspect: they award things a high degree of agency, or even their own biographies.6 Es1 For a survey of the debate about the investigation of material culture in the humanities, see, Timothy J. LeCain, The Matter of History: How Things Create the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 67–139 and Hans Peter Hahn, Manfred K.H. Eggert and Stefanie Samida, “Einleitung: Materielle Kultur in den Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften,” in Handbuch Materielle Kultur: Bedeutungen, Kontexte, Disziplinen, ed. Hans Peter Hahn, Manfred K. H. Eggert and Stefanie Samida (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2014), 1–12. 2 Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 3 Lorraine Daston, ed., Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (New York: Zone Books, 2004). 4 Liselotte Saurma-Jeltsch and Anja Eisenbeiß, eds., The Power of Things and the Flows of Cultural Transformations: Art and Culture between Europe and Asia, (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2010). 5 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 6 Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 64–91.

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pecially historians who also have been attracted to the new focus on objects have remained highly skeptical regarding such conceptual claims and the fear of a “specter of anthropomorphism” is very present among them.7 Even if there is no conciliation yet in the controversial debate about the agency of objects as it is, especially defended by ANT, the debate itself has raised awareness of the properties of things. This volume does not follow a unitary approach regarding these conceptual questions; its contributors take various positions as to the objects on which they focus and their ontological status. Rather, they will be exploring a specific characteristic of these objects: their mobility in a transregional or translocal context. We want to discern three dimensions of mobility displayed by the objects, which the contribution will address in different combinations. These dimensions—geographical, symbolic, and temporal mobility—in various ways connect objects to humans, attest to their social embedding, and thus create social relational spaces. Geographical mobility constitutes the first dimension. Many of the objects and resources discussed in the following such as metal, coffee, oil, fur and carpets were traded over long distances. Luxury objects, especially, acquired added value because they came from far away. The circulation of goods is a classic topic of economic history. In its formulation by Braudel or Wallerstein, the area upon which this volume focuses was seen as an isolated world that later formed a periphery of the world system centered on Western Europe.8 This volume seeks to make a contribution to a line of research that voices critique of these models because of their fixation on Europe and the associated models of center and periphery. The new wave of investigations influenced by the emergent postcolonial studies emphasizes the existence of large-scale economic systems within the framework of an Islamic network already spanning Asia, Africa, and Europe in the Middle Ages.9 What several contributions to this volume will add to this economic perspective is a focus on the material infrastructures as well as the means of transportation that enabled trade and travel. To isolate a very concrete notion of 7 Marian Füssel, “Die Materialität der Frühen Neuzeit: Neue Forschungen zur Geschichte der Materiellen Kultur,” Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 42, no. 3 (2015): 452–453. Also cf. Paula Findlen, ed., Early Modern Things: Objects and Their Histories, 1500–1800 (London: Routledge, 2013); Kim Siebenhüner, “Things that matter: Zur Geschichte der materiellen Kultur in der Frühneuzeitforschung,” Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 42, no. 3 (2015): 373–409. 8 Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Ottoman Empire and the Capitalist World-Economy: Some Questions for Research,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 2, no. 3 (1979): 389–398; Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, vol. 3, The Perspective of the World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 9 Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World-System A.D. 1250–1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

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mobility in our chosen area, we focus on the creation and maintenance of infrastructures, e. g., roads for pack animals, navigable waters for boats as well as resting places and storehouses for travelers and their goods. Many of the large empires of the region starting with the Romans and later the Mongols, the Ottomans or the Safavids were particularly apt in organizing and profiting from such infrastructures. But modern technical installations such as pipelines or railways will also be in the focus of some of the contributions to this volume. By looking at these new infrastructures, the development of Transottoman connections in the nineteenth-century era of globalization can be examined. Infrastructures and transport technologies are material objects and at the same time tightly integrated into social processes that organize mobility. That is why they have been labeled socio-technical systems and their reflexive interaction with society has been stressed.10 An approach that integrates the material and social sides of infrastructures very well is the actor-network theory, which stresses the heterogeneous nature of technology as a system or “network,” which consists of technical, natural, social, and political elements. All of these are equally important in giving a particular shape, force and durability to the network and its single elements. Artifacts, natural objects, and human beings are all treated the same in this approach that sees no fundamental difference between the social and the material.11 While typically applied to modern technology, ANT has also been used to analyze the construction and maintenance of historical trade networks such as the sixteenth century spice route from India to Portugal.12 Trade routes are a most durable and complex form of mobility networks that sometimes can exist over centuries. In them, geographical objects such as rivers, mountains, passes or plains interact with technology and human actors. While in many cases trade networks were purely local, on a yet larger scale, trade routes could also be transregional and therefore naturally direct the perspective to the types of connections that we want to examine under the chosen spotlight. Symbolic mobility is the second dimension that shows the entanglement of objects with human society. There seems to be a consensus that objects are able to 10 Cf. the case studies in Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, eds. The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). 11 John Law and Annemarie Mol, “Notes on Materiality and Sociality,” The Sociological Review 43, no. 2 (1995): 274–294. 12 John Law, “Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering: The Case of Portuguese Expansion,” in The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 111–134; id. “On the Methods of Long-Distance Control: Vessels, Navigation and the Portuguese Route to India,” The Sociological Review 32, no. 1 (1984): 234–263.

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trigger or even enforce certain reactions in social interaction. They are far from passive, but can change societies in which they are circulating. Examples are the luxury goods that will be examined later in this volume, which offer the possibility of social distinction and can fortify political bonds when they are given as gifts. Systems of value and identity concepts are closely related to objects and their use, and these systems can change according to the availability of these objects. Regarding mobility, this means that things move not only on a geographical, but also on a symbolical level. Things move people, and they are in motion themselves. In this interaction, objects are encoded in different ways, e. g., as gifts or merchandise, and receive a central position in various social interactions such as gift exchange, barter, trade, and bribery. Famously, Marcel Mauss has conceived gift exchange in opposition to economic rationale and as an antipode to the commodity.13 Since then, many scholars have doubted this strict separation. As Gadi Algazi points out, what defines the character of a gift is its “relative position within available repertoires of models of exchange.”14 In other words, where there is no free access to a market, gifts are at a high risk of commoditization and under pressure of maintaining the gift-fiction. Arjun Appadurai has addressed the question of commoditization with his “regimes of value”-concept and the terms commodity phase, commodity context and commodity candidacy. Any object has a certain candidacy or potential to enter the commodity phase of its existence depending on the commodity context. Of course, candidacy, phase and context can be applied to the gift as well. Thus, gifts can move from one regime of value to another, if the prerequisites of gift candidacy and context (e. g. diplomatic contact) are met thanks to a certain “degree of value coherence.” This degree need not be high for the exchange to happen. Rather, the difference might contribute to the creative transformation/transvaluation of the objects exchanged. A drastic example of such transformation/transvaluation can be observed with the example of European silver items brought to the Ottoman Empire as diplomatic gifts. As Hedda Reindl-Kiel observed, the artwork was not much appreciated by the Ottomans and the silver vessels and boxes frequently ended up in the furnace, with the envoys issuing complaints. The Ottoman regime of value in the face of these items was characterized by a different set of aesthetics and a different evaluation of silver as raw material. Thus, the Ottoman lack of silver and

13 Cf. Andrej Rus, “‘Gift vs. Commodity’ Debate Revisited,” Anthropological Notebooks 14, no. 1 (2008): 81–102. 14 Gadi Algazi, “Introduction: Doing Things with Gifts,” in Negotiating the Gift: Pre-Modern Figurations of Exchange, ed. Gazi Algazi, Valentin Groebner, and Bernhard Jussen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), 22.

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their need to produce coins directly affected the gift exchange.15 Other objects chosen for the case studies in this volume such as fur are also examples of a high degree of symbolic mobility according to the social context and the nature of the exchange. Finally, there is a third dimension of temporal mobility, when objects move through time. Art historians in particular engage with the full life cycle of an object from its creation, its use, its devaluation as rubbish, to its possible musealization. In each of these phases, objects acquire traces of how they were created and used, which together with textual evidence about their preservation can tell the whole story of geographical and symbolic mobility. Moreover, when objects are put in a museum, their symbolic value might change considerably. According to art historian Karl-Sigismund Kramer, the symbolic meaning of an object is built through personal relations with people, and it is based upon the material, the form and the function of an object. However, these ascriptions can change during the object’s history of use and musealization.16 The extent to which an object is actually able to testify to its provenance, its history and the change of its semantics can only be determined by a critical view on the original object with its traces of production and use in combination with the corresponding written sources. Temporal mobility poses a special challenge for the contributions to the present volume in the various ways in which the examined objects have been handed down to the present day or alternatively have entirely vanished. The range comprises preserved realia like Transylvanian rugs, depictions, and references in written sources with varying information content. Especially in the cases of ephemeral things such as raw materials and infrastructures, secondary forms like, for example, still-existing petroleum lamps, which have been developed in the consequence of the availability of oil, have to be considered, too. An approach that brings together these three dimensions outlined above in a particularly concise manner is that of object itineraries.17 It was proposed in light of the limitations of terms such as object biography to avoid the clear cuts of the birth and death metaphor and instead stress movement, including periods of stasis, and focus on the multiple cycles of existence of things. In contrast to the 15 Hedda Reindl-Kiel, “Der Duft der Macht: Osmanen, islamische Tradition, muslimische Mächte und der Westen im Spiegel diplomatischer Geschenke,” Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 95 (2005): 226–231. 16 Karl-Sigismund Kramer, “Dingbedeutsamkeit: Zur Geschichte des Begriffes und seines Inhaltes,” Anzeiger des Germanischen Nationalmuseums 1995: 22–32. 17 Hans Peter Hahn and Hadas Weiss, “Biographies, Travels and Itineraries of Things,” in Mobility, Meaning and the Transformations of Things: Shifting Contexts of Material Culture through Time and Space, ed. Hans Peter Hahn and Hadas Weiss (Oxford: Oxbow, 2013), 1–14; Rosemary A. Joyce and Susan D. Gillespie, “Making Things out of Objects that Move,” in Things in Motion: Object Itineraries in Anthropological Practice, ed. Rosemary A. Joyce and Susan D. Gillespie (Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research, 2015), 12.

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image of free movement inherent in the approach of traveling objects, object itineraries also addresses the issue of limitations of mobility as caused by power hierarchies and cultural differences.

Setting the Stage The resources, objects, and materials in the focus of the following case studies are examples of the historical entanglements between the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Their itineraries established what we call Transottoman connections. Because of their inherently social nature, objects—much like human actors and ideas, which are in the focus of two parallel volumes—are indicators of the reach and character of social relational spaces that historically manifested in networks of trade and exchange. This section of the introduction will explain the geographical and historical frameworks in which the objects moved as examples of Transottoman social relational spaces. As already indicated, the term Transottoman describes neither a new area nor a bounded historical region, but is used in a heuristic fashion to help us to write an entangled history of the Middle East and Eastern Europe. In the past, historians have either neglected these entanglements or acknowledged them only as the bilateral—mostly military and diplomatic—relations between states such as the Ottoman Empire, Poland-Lithuania, Russia, and Persia.18 Transottoman, as we understand the term, transcends this immediate political dimension. Nonetheless, it makes reference to the Ottoman Empire because this state was at the crossroads of many of the mobility processes in the focus of the present volume. This has temporal as well as geographical implications, which define the boundaries of the Transottoman heuristic approach. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the formerly tiny beylik in the north west of Anatolia had become a cross-continental empire by incorporating large parts of the Middle East and the Balkans, extending as far north as to the PolishLithuanian borderlands of modern-day Ukraine. Subsequently, the Ottoman Empire became a neighbor of Muscovy/Russia, which started to venture into the disintegrating Genghisid world. In the East, the Ottomans competed with the Safavids over the Caucasus and Iraq. The rise of the Ottoman Empire coincided with the formation and success of other early modern empires from the Ming and Qing in China, the Moghuls in 18 E. g. Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, Ottoman-Polish Diplomatic Relations (15th–18th Century): An Annotated Edition of ‘Ahdnames and Other Documents (Leiden: Brill, 2000); Brian J. Davies, Warfare in Eastern Europe, 1500–1800 (Leiden: Brill, 2012); Willem Floor, ed., Iran and the World in the Safavid Age: International Contact and Political Development in Early Modern Persia (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015).

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India, and the Safavids in Persia to the Habsburgs in Europe, which were not only structurally very similar, but were also linked in numerous ways by practices of mobility.19 These included the exchange of diplomats and military experts, long distance trade, and also the adoption and adaptation of ideas of legitimacy or artistic styles. From a world historical perspective, Transottoman connections form part of a global era of mobility and exchange between early modern empires.20 However, it would be wrong to describe this world from a purely imperial point of view because it also comprised a series of vassal, tributary, or semiindependent entities from Kurdistan, Georgia, Circassia, and the Crimean Khanate to Transylvania, Moldavia and Wallachia, the Mamluk Sultanate/Egypt and Syria. Such polities at the imperial peripheries and interstices are central to the history of mobilities and connections. The following sections will briefly review those entities and their relation to larger regions, which are most relevant for the objects addressed in this volume. A primary example of these connecting spaces is East Central Europe, whose core was made up of the former kingdoms of Hungary and Bohemia, the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth and the Danubian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. Bordering on the Tatar steppe and the Ottoman Empire to the east and the dominions of the Venetian Republic and Habsburg rulers to the west, this historical region played a key role not only as a theater of war, but also as an area of intense cultural contacts and entanglements. In recent years, this has received increasing attention in historical scholarship.21 Maybe the best-researched phe19 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “A Tale of Three Empires: Mughals, Ottomans, and Habsburgs in a Comparative Context,” Common Knowledge 12, no. 1 (2006): 66–92; Stephen Frederic Dale, The Muslim Empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2010); Giancarlo Casale, “The Islamic Empires of the Early Modern World,” in The Cambridge World History, vol. 6, The Construction of a Global World, 1400–1800 CE, part 1, Foundations, ed. J. Bentley, S. Subrahmanyam, and M. E. Wiesner-Hanks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 323–344. 20 Suraiya Faroqhi and Elif Akçetin, eds., Living the Good Life: Consumption in the Qing and Ottoman Empires of the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 5–6; Dale, Muslim Empires, 131–132. 21 Filip Wolan´ski and Robert Kołodziej, eds., Staropolski ogla˛d ´swiata, vol. 1, Rzeczpospolita mie˛dzy okcydentalizmem a orientalizacja˛: Przestrzen´ kontaktów (Torun: Marszałek, 2009); Nurhan Atasoy and Lale Uluç, Impressions of Ottoman Culture in Europe, 1453–1699 (Istanbul: Armaggan, 2012); Pál Ács and Júlia Székely, eds., Identitás és kultúra a török hódoltság korában (Budapest: Balassi Kiadó, 2012); Ays¸en Anadol, ed., Distant Neighbour, Close Memories: 600 Years of Turkish-Polish Relations, Exhibition Catalogue (Istanbul: Sakip Sabancı Museum, 2014); Robert Born and Andreas Puth, eds., Osmanischer Orient und Ostmitteleuropa: Perzeptionen und Interaktionen in den Grenzzonen zwischen dem 16. und 18. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2014); Michał Wasiucionek, The Ottomans and Eastern Europe: Borders and Political Patronage in the Early Modern World (London: I.B. Tauris, 2019).

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nomenon is the self-orientalization of large parts of the nobility of the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth associated with the idea of Sarmatism. Oriental luxury goods such as textiles, rugs and weapons imported from Safavid Persia and the Ottoman Empire as well as the textiles and military equipment produced in factories and workshops founded in the eastern regions of Poland-Lithuania furthered the establishment of a material culture, combining Oriental and local components.22 While Poland-Lithuania remained a rival of the Ottomans politically, territories such as Transylvania, Moldavia and Wallachia were closely integrated into the Ottoman orbit as tributary states. In the past, historical scholarship has focused on the question of their legal status much more than on the question of their entanglement with the Ottoman Empire through mobility practices.23 In our context, it is important to stress that, most immediately, these tributary states became markets and transit zones for the trade of Oriental objects.24 In the case of Wallachia and Moldavia, consumption of Ottoman dress and styles sometimes had deeper implications. For their elites, they could be indicators of their “Ottomanization,” i. e., their integration into the imperial networks of patronage and power. In these cases, objects were often not traded, but distributed through gift exchange.25 Here they could enter minor circuits of gift exchange and experience transvaluations and transformations in, among others, an Orthodox sacral context.26

22 Magdalena Długosz and Piotr O. Scholz, eds., Sarmatismus versus Orientalismus in Mitteleuropa / Sarmatyzm versus Orientalizm w Europie S´rodkowej (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2012); Adam Jasienski, “A Savage Magnificence: Ottomanizing Fashion and the Politics of Display in Early Modern East-Central Europe,” Muqarnas 31 (2014): 173–205; Robert Born and Michał Dziewulski, “The Influences of the Ottoman Orient on the Court Culture in Europe,” in The Sultan’s World: The Ottoman Orient in Renaissance Art, ed. Robert Born, Guido Messling, and Michał Dziewulski, (Brussels: Palais des Beaux-Arts / Krakow: Muzeum Narodowe / Hamburg: Hatje Cantz, 2015), 69–73; Dirk Uffelmann, “Importierte Dinge und imaginierte Identität: Osmanische ‘Sarmatica’ im Polen der Aufklärung,” Zeitschrift für OstmitteleuropaForschung 65, no. 2 (2016): 193–214. 23 On these political entities, see: Gábor Kármán and Lovro Kuncˇevic´, eds., The European Tributary States of the Ottoman Empire in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 24 Mária Pakucs-Willcocks, “Economic Relations between the Ottoman Empire and Transylvania in the Sixteenth Century: Oriental Trade and Merchants,” in Osmanischer Orient und Ostmitteleuropa: Perzeptionen und Interaktionen in den Grenzzonen zwischen dem 16. und 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Robert Born and Andreas Puth (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2014), 207–227. 25 Michał Wasiucionek, “Conceptualizing Moldavian Ottomanness: Elite Culture and Ottomanization of the Seventeenth-Century Moldavian Boyars,” Medieval and Early Modern Studies for Central and Eastern Europe 8 (2016): 39–78. 26 Robert Born, “The Ottoman Tributaries Transylvania, Wallachia and Moldavia: Reflections on the Mobility of Objects and Networks of Actors,” Diyâr 2 (2021): 27–58.

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Another connecting space was the Black Sea, which linked its littoral regions with each other, giving us good reason to speak of a Pontic world from prehistoric times until the end of the eighteenth century.27 Especially in the late Middle Ages, this area played a predominant role in long-distance trade, functioning as a “plaque tournante” (Bra˘tianu) for even wider-ranging connections between the Far East, the Eastern Mediterranean, Italy and the Baltic Sea.28 Central to connections over and across the Black Sea was the Crimea, where caravan and sea routes came together. The Ottomans had already conquered the commercially important Genoese port cities of the Crimea in the late fifteenth century and established a politically rather atypical situation in the long-term history of the region: For roughly three hundred years, the Ottoman Empire gained hegemony over the shores of the Black Sea and partly restructured its flows of traffic and trade. Therefore, with some exaggeration, the sea has been dubbed an “Ottoman Lake.” Only in the late eighteenth century was this political structure ceded to a likewise atypical Russian-Ottoman bipolarity.29 On the northern shores of the Black Sea, the Ottomans shared power with the Crimean Khanate as a vassal state and close ally. Even more than for the tributary states in East-Central Europe, the relationship between the Ottoman center and the Tatars was in constant flux and can hardly be described as one of sovereignty/ suzerainty. While at times the Crimean khans conducted an independent foreign policy vis-à-vis the other Eastern European states, especially from the late seventeenth century onward, the Ottomans made sure that the Khan would more closely follow general directives from Istanbul.30

27 Charles King, The Black Sea: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Stella Ghervas, “The Black Sea,” in Oceanic Histories, ed. David Armitage, Alison Bashford, and Sujit Sivasundaram, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 234–266. 28 Gheorghe Ion Bra˘tianu, “La mer Noire, plaque tournante du trafic international a la fin du Moyen Age,” Revue Historique du Sud-Est Européen 21 (1944): 36–69; Andrew C.S. Peacock, “Black Sea Trade and the Islamic World Down to the Mongol Period,” in The Black Sea: Past, Present and Future, ed. Gülden Erkut and Stephen Mitchell (Ankara: British Institute at Ankara, 2007), 65–72; S,erban Papacostea, La mer Noire carrefour des grandes routes intercontinentales, 1204–1453 (Bucharest: Institutul Cultural Român, 2006). 29 Halil I˙nalcık, “The Black Sea and Eastern Europe,” in An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1914, ed. Halil I˙nalcık and Donald Quataert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 271–315; Y. Eyüp Özveren, “A Framework for the Study of the Black Sea World, 1789–1915,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 20, no. 1 (1997): 77–113. 30 Natalie Krolikowska, “Sovereignty and Subordination in Crimean-Ottoman Relations (Sixteenth–Eighteenth Centuries),” in The European Tributary States of the Ottoman Empire in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. Gábor Kármán and Lovro Kuncˇevic´ (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 43–65; Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, The Crimean Khanate and Poland-Lithuania: International Diplomacy on the European Periphery (15th–18th Century) (Leiden: Brill, 2011).

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A third important connecting space within the Transottoman context was the Caucasus.31 Such a perspective has to stand ground against an old image of the Caucasus as an impermeable “barrier”: As early as in Late Antiquity, the massive mountain chain served as a template for the wall or gate of Alexander that banned the savage North (the unclean nations “Gog and Magog”) from the civilized South—an image that was already discarded by contemporary Arab travelers.32 Many centuries later, in the wake of the military expansion of the Tsarist Empire into this region, the Caucasus was again reimagined as a barrier, this time between a Christian and an Islamic world.33 Such perspectives ignore the fact that in the Middle Ages, this area was a zone of confluence of cultural currents from the Byzantine Commonwealth and the Islamicate kingdoms.34 In the seventeenth century, actors from the Caucasus such as the converts to Islam, the ghulams, alongside the Armenian merchants from Julfa, assumed an important role in the struggle for centralization and consolidation of the power basis of the new Safavid rulers and simultaneously had their own share in creating new transcultural forms of art as expressed in the then-new Safavid capital of Isfahan.35 Other maritime and land-based connecting spaces between the empires such as the Red Sea, Iraq, and the Eastern Mediterranean could be added to the list.36 Similar to the northern examples we have focused on above, they often have a history that goes beyond the Early Modern period. As in the case of Transottomanica itself, for the present volume it is interesting to see how historical scholarship has used processes of mobility such as trade and exchange to con31 Raoul Motika and Michael Ursinus, eds., Caucasia between the Ottoman Empire and Iran, 1555–1914 (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2000); Stephen Rapp, Jr., “Chronology, Crossroads, and Commonwealths: World Regional Schemes and the Lessons of Caucasia,” in Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History, ed. Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and A. Yang (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005), 167–201; Ivan Biliarsky , Ovidiu Cristea, and Anca Oroveanu, eds., The Balkans and Caucasus: Parallel Processes on the Opposite Sides of the Black Sea (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2012). 32 Emeri van Donzel and Andrea Schmidt, Gog and Magog in Early Syriac and Islamic Sources: Sallam’s Quest for Alexander’s Wall (Leiden: Brill 2010). 33 Firouzeh Mostashari, On the Religious Frontier: Tsarist Russia and Islam in the Caucasus (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006). 34 Nina G. Garsoïan and Bernadette Martin-Hisard, “Unité et diversité de la Caucasie médiévale (IVe–XIe s.),” in Il Caucaso: Cerniera fra Culture dal Mediterraneo alla Persia. Settimane di Studio sull’Alto Medioevo 43 (Spoleto: Presso la Sede del Centro, 1996), 275–347. 35 Sussan Babaie et al., Slaves of the Shah: New Elites of Safavid Iran (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004); Ina Baghdiantz-McCabe, “Caucasian Elites and Early Modern State Building in Safavid Iran,” in Les Arméniens dans le commerce asiatique au début de l’ère moderne / Armenians in Asian Trade in The Early Modern Era, ed. Sushil Chaudhury and Kéram Kévonian (Paris: Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2008), 92–98; Emma Loosley, Messiah and Mahdi: Caucasian Christians and the Construction of Safavid Isfahan (London: East & West Publishing, 2009). 36 Jonathan Miran, “Mapping Space and Mobility in the Red Sea Region, c. 1500–1950,” History Compass 12, no. 2 (2014): 197–216; Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000).

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ceptualize these regions. Also in the case of sub-imperial political entities, the above discussion has highlighted the way in which such mobility processes have been one of their key characteristics in providing to their elites a unique cultural and material capital. The case studies in this volume build on this research tradition, but try to transcend it through a change in perspective. By keeping their focus on objects and resources rather than on regions, they do not only show the connection of more than one region. Additionally, the importance given to the itinerary of objects reveals how connectivity worked under the concrete historical circumstances. In many of the case studies, the infrastructures that mediate between the objects and their geographical and social itineraries constitute a vital part of our understanding of mobility processes.

The Contributions The present volume is roughly structured according to the different dimensions of mobility outlined above. Several of them are often combined in the single contributions because they determine each other in the objects that are examined. Florian Riedler’s chapter, “Around the Black Sea in Forty-Five Days: Transottoman Space, Time, and Infrastructure,” gives an overview of the means of sea and land transportation as well as the predominant routes of trade and travel in the Black Sea area as a core region of Transottoman exchanges. Adopting a long-term historical perspective, the chapter pays special attention to the formation of Ottoman mobility networks and routes at the end of the fifteenth century and their adaption to increasingly global flows and infrastructures in the course of the nineteenth century. In his chapter, “Mobile Metals: About the Role of Natural Resources in the Geopolitical Context of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” Albrecht Fuess examines the role of metals as a strategic military resource for the three competing states of the Ottomans, the Safavids, and the Mamluks at the turn of the fifteenth century. The chapter maps metal deposits and available routes and infrastructures of trade in these three states. It seeks to explain how the lack of resources determined the end of the Mamluk state, which was conquered by the Ottomans at the beginning of the sixteenth century as a decisive step in the Ottoman expansion. The next chapter by Anthony T. Quickel, “Cairo and Coffee in the Transottoman Trade Network,” continues this Mediterranean perspective by examining the coffee trade from its beginning in the sixteenth century. As the chapter demonstrates, this trade hinged on the Ottoman conquest of Egypt and Yemen and the capacity of different merchant networks to distribute coffee further.

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Coffee became a commodity with a truly Transottoman character when it also spread to Europe. In his chapter, “Petroleum: Commodity, Products and Infrastructures as Transottoman Entanglement Around 1900,” Stefan Rohdewald, focuses on the exploitation of oil, especially in Baku, but also in other parts of the Middle East and East Europe. The chapter demonstrates how oil began to be produced in an existing Transottoman framework: experts circulated in Russia, Poland, and the Ottoman Empire, and oil exports used existing transport infrastructures on the Black Sea and the Caspian. However, with its rising importance, the stream of oil was quickly integrated into global flows of trade. This can serve as an example of the radical transformation of Transottoman connections at the beginning of the twentieth century. Arkadiusz Blaszczyk’s chapter, “From the Forests of Siberia to the Urban Jungle of Istanbul: The Ottoman-Muscovite Fur Exchange in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” focuses on the changes of value fur underwent in the chain of exchanges on its way from Siberia to Istanbul. Not only did the price go up, but fur was also physically transformed and was used to produce coats, robes of honor or other items of clothing with different monetary and symbolic values. The next chapter by Alexandr Osipian, “Uses of Oriental Rugs in Early Modern Poland-Lithuania: Social Practices and Public Discourses,” offers a similar interpretation of the revaluation of this luxury object. Carpets were imported to PolandLithuania in large numbers from Persia or the Ottoman Empire. Especially noblemen and kings used them to express status and prestige. In their new environment they became part of the political culture and therefore also the aim of a critical discourse against unnecessary luxury. Anja Kregeloh, Stephanie Armer, and Eva Hanke in their chapter, “Rugs as Transottoman Commodities: The History of a Rug From Us¸ak,” also focus on this very mobile object. The authors try to reconstruct the history of one particular rug that came from Anatolia to the Transylvanian city of Bistrit,a, or Bistritz in German, in the sixteenth century and today is part of a collection of rugs in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg. This rug, which displays a typical Anatolian pattern with Persian influence, acquired new, mostly representational purposes, e. g. as a gift of honor, when it was transported to Transylvania. The chapter follows the protracted story of transvaluation into the twentieth century, when Oriental carpets became sources of identity for the Transylvanian Saxons in Romania. The chapter by Mehmet Tepeyurt, “Imperial Russia’s Egyptian Endeavors: The Purchase of Amenhotep’s Sphinxes,” presents the story of the radical re-contextualization of an antique object of art, which was transported from Egypt to Russia. The principal aim of acquiring the statues was their aesthetic appeal and the opportunity to imitate other European powers in displaying them. However,

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the Russian interest in Egyptian antiques developed against the background of older connections to the Middle East and used political channels to the Ottoman government, which helped to buy the statues. One of the biggest challenges for the contributions to this volume is how to integrate new conceptual outlooks in focusing on objects. Paradoxically, many works that are inspired by the “material turn” suffer from a blind spot, i. e., that they very rarely address the materiality of the objects on which they focus. Often it is only their quality of being an object that is addressed and examined by way of texts or images as sources. Therefore, some scholars distinguish between a “history of things” and a “history from things” that refers to the objects themselves as sources.37 “The constant transformation of individuals and their culture, of time, of places, and functions, leaves ‘written’ traces on the object”38 that have to be read instead of looking at a historical image which might only have a very tenuous relation with historical reality. Therefore, Gudrun M. König has called for a “right of veto of things.”39 Although not all of the following contributions can approach their objects of scrutiny from the perspective of an epistemic equilibrium between material objects and their representations, all share a sensitivity toward this question and try to address it according to the possibilities of their respective disciplines. Thus, beyond doubt they can shed new light on the connecting role of material objects within the “twilight zones” of such different area studies as Eastern European and Oriental Studies as well as fields like history and art history.

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Krolikowska, Natalie. “Sovereignty and Subordination in Crimean-Ottoman Relations (Sixteenth–Eighteenth Centuries).” In The European Tributary States of the Ottoman Empire in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, edited by Gábor Kármán and Lovro Kuncˇevic´, 43–65. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Law, John. “On the Methods of Long-Distance Control: Vessels, Navigation and the Portuguese Route to India.” The Sociological Review 32, no. 1 (1984): 234–263. –. “Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering: The Case of Portuguese Expansion.” In The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, edited by Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, 111–134. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. –, and Annemarie Mol. “Notes on Materiality and Sociality.” The Sociological Review 43, no. 2 (1995): 274–294. LeCain, Timothy J. The Matter of History: How Things Create the Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Loosley, Emma. Messiah and Mahdi: Caucasian Christians and the Construction of Safavid Isfahan. London: East & West Publishing, 2009. Miran, Jonathan. “Mapping Space and Mobility in the Red Sea Region, c. 1500–1950.” History Compass 12, no. 2 (2014): 197–216. Motika, Raoul, and Michael Ursinus, eds. Caucasia between the Ottoman Empire and Iran, 1555–1914. Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2000. Mostashari, Firouzeh. On the Religious Frontier: Tsarist Russia and Islam in the Caucasus. I.B. Tauris: London, 2006. Özveren, Y. Eyüp. “A Framework for the Study of the Black Sea World, 1789–1915.” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 20, no. 1 (1997): 77–113. Papacostea, S,erban. La mer Noire carrefour des grandes routes intercontinentales, 1204– 1453. Bucharest: Institutul Cultural Român, 2006. Peacock, Andrew C.S. “Black Sea Trade and the Islamic World Down to the Mongol Period.” In The Black Sea: Past, Present and Future, edited by Gülden Erkut and Stephen Mitchell, 65–72. Ankara: British Institute at Ankara, 2007. Pakucs-Willcocks, Mária. “Economic Relations between the Ottoman Empire and Transylvania in the Sixteenth Century: Oriental Trade and Merchants.” In Osmanischer Orient und Ostmitteleuropa. Perzeptionen und Interaktionen in den Grenzzonen zwischen dem 16. und 18. Jahrhundert, edited by Robert Born and Andreas Puth, 207–227. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2014. Rapp, Stephen, Jr. “Chronology, Crossroads, and Commonwealths: World Regional Schemes and the Lessons of Caucasia.” In Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History, edited by Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal and A. Yang, 167–201. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005. Reindl-Kiel, Hedda. “Der Duft der Macht: Osmanen, islamische Tradition, muslimische Mächte und der Westen im Spiegel diplomatischer Geschenke.” Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 95 (2005): 195–258. Rus, Andrej. “‘Gift vs. commodity’ debate revisited.” Anthropological Notebooks 14, no. 1 (2008): 81–102.

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Saurma-Jeltsch, Liselotte, and Anja Eisenbeiß, eds. The Power of Things and the Flows of Cultural Transformations: Art and Culture between Europe and Asia. Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2010. –. “About the Agency of Things, of Objects and Artefacts.” In The Power of Things and the Flows of Cultural Transformations: Art and Culture between Europe and Asia, edited by Liselotte Saurma-Jeltsch and Anja Eisenbeiß, 10–22. Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2010. Siebenhüner, Kim. “Things that matter: Zur Geschichte der materiellen Kultur in der Frühneuzeitforschung,” Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 42, no. 3 (2015): 373–409. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. “A Tale of Three Empires: Mughals, Ottomans, and Habsburgs in a Comparative Context.” Common Knowledge 12, no. 1 (2006): 66–92. Uffelmann, Dirk. “Importierte Dinge und imaginierte Identität: Osmanische ‘Sarmatica’ im Polen der Aufklärung.” Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung 65, no. 2 (2016): 193–214. Van Donzel, Emeri, and Andrea Schmidt. Gog and Magog in Early Syriac and Islamic Sources: Sallam’s Quest for Alexander’s Wall. Leiden: Brill 2010. Wallerstein, Immanuel. “The Ottoman Empire and the Capitalist World-Economy: Some Questions for Research.” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 2, no. 3 (1979): 389–398. Wasiucionek, Michał. “Conceptualizing Moldavian Ottomanness: Elite Culture and Ottomanization of the Seventeenth-Century Moldavian Boyars.” Medieval and Early Modern Studies for Central and Eastern Europe 8 (2016): 39–78. –. The Ottomans and Eastern Europe: Borders and Political Patronage in the Early Modern World. London: I.B. Tauris, 2019. Wolan´ski, Filip, and Robert Kołodziej, eds. Staropolski ogla˛d ´swiata. Volume 1, Rzeczpospolita mie˛dzy okcydentalizmem a orientalizacja˛: Przestrzen´ kontaktów. Torun: Marszałek, 2009.

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Florian Riedler

Around the Black Sea in Forty-Five Days: Transottoman Space, Time, and Infrastructure

Introduction Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days is one of the iconic novels on the topic of nineteenth-century globalization. On the evening of October 2, 1872, its main character Phileas Fogg embarks on his famous journey that takes him from London via Suez, Bombay, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Yokohama, San Francisco and New York, to finally arrive back home. Among the main protagonists in this journey are the infrastructures and means of transportation, mainly railways and steamships that literally drive the novel forward. Published in 1873, the novel weaves together existing travel connections and timetables that are dramatically set in contrast to gaps in the networks of travel infrastructures. A railway line that has not been completed, a steamer that runs out of coal or simply a connection missed because of an unforeseen event—every reader from the time of the novel’s publication until today is familiar with such problems. Much of the novel’s success derives from turning our daily struggle with transport infrastructure into an adventure on a global scale. While today every child knows Verne’s Eighty Days, readers are hardly so familiar with his novel Keraban the Inflexible. Published ten years later, the novel sends its main character Keraban, a Muslim Istanbul tobacco merchant, together with a small party of friends on a journey around the Black Sea. To avoid a new tax levied when crossing the Bosphorus, the stubborn Keraban rather takes the land route from Istanbul via Tulcea, Odessa, the Crimea, Poti and Trabzon back to Üsküdar, Istanbul’s quarter on the Anatolian side, where his villa is located. Similarly to Eighty Days, the reader is taken on a round trip that also includes a race against time. Keraban has to be back in Istanbul within 45 days to oversee the marriage of his adoptive son. In contrast to Fogg’s journey, this round trip does not take place across the three-dimensional space of the globe, but on the flat surface of a special geographical setting: the Black Sea region that Verne depicts as a world of its own, a special kind of Orient. Although this region is crisscrossed by modern transport infrastructures such as railways and steamship lines, be-

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cause Keraban is notoriously seasick and as a conservative defies all modern innovations, these modern means of transportation are excluded from the novel. By way of this arbitrary construction—which says much about Verne’s orientalist prejudices—Keraban’s old fashioned English coach, peasant carts, horses, camels as well as a donkey that take him along the land route become central nonhuman actors of the journey around the Black Sea. While both of Verne’s novels stand at the threshold to a future of global travel and communication, with Keraban’s journey the reader’s attention is purposefully shifted to the past, when transport was more primitive, but nonetheless could enable travel around the whole Black Sea as the novel demonstrates. Verne is returning to the topic of transport that had already been a central element of the plot of his 1876 novel Michael Strogoff: The Courier of the Czar. In this chapter, I will examine the Black Sea as a medium of transregional connections from a perspective of longue durée. I see Keraban the Inflexible as a symptom of the residual power of a spatial arrangement that was on the threshold of dissolving in the late nineteenth century, when the novel was written. Certainly, Verne’s novel has little factual information or personal observations to offer that go beyond what every European could read in nineteenth-century travelogues, guide books or newspaper articles, which the author sometimes mentions as his sources. While the novel only displays a very superficial understanding of Ottoman society, culture and politics, its author seems well informed about the infrastructures of transport and communication in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In the following, I will complement this information with accounts and experiences of earlier real travelers such as the merchant Martin Gruneweg from the sixteenth, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier and Evliya Çelebi from the seventeenth, Nikolaus Kleemann from the eighteenth, as well as Xavier Hommaire de Hell from the nineteenth century. In the light of the Transottoman vantage point of this volume, I seek to situate the Black Sea in a larger framework of connections. For Verne, the Black Sea offered a theatrical stage for his rather conventional stories. He depicts it as a stillpredominantly pre-modern Oriental and Ottoman world set apart, although there are signs of a profound transformation that Keraban prefers to ignore. In contrast, in the following I will stress those connections that reach beyond the immediate hinterland of the Black Sea and will demonstrate their inertia before they dissolve in global connections of the nineteenth century. My contribution seeks to examine the shifting mobility space of Transottomanica by focusing on routes of trade and travel and the material infrastructure and equipment that stabilize them. On a conceptual level, I propose to understand infrastructure and equipment as the material elements of heterogeneous (mobility)networks in which other elements such as humans or natural forces were also involved. To understand the shape and force of mobility net-

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works and especially their durability that together turn them into stable routes of trade and travel, it is useful to examine human and non-human actors in these networks on equal terms in the way that has been proposed by the actor-network theory.1 While material infrastructures will be the overall focus of this chapter, at the beginning, natural elements will have to be mentioned, too. Geographical features and climate conditions together with material infrastructures and technology as well as human actors such as merchants and travelers determine durable routes that this chapter will map. Because the Black Sea is in the geographical center of Transottoman connections, transport infrastructures and routes, shipping as a basic means of transport plays an important role. However, land connections that either circumvent the sea or connect the coast to the hinterland are also an integral part of transport networks that often combine land and waterways. The following section of this chapter will review the position of the Black Sea in the geography of trade and travel from a long-term perspective. In the next section, I will examine how the Ottoman Empire settled in this geography when it took possession of the sea and its coasts toward the end of the fifteenth century. In this section, a focus will be on the material infrastructures that enabled exchange and communications with Poland, Russia, and Persia across and around the Black Sea. The last section will then deal with the transformation of these routes and networks up to the end of the nineteenth century—the time of Keraban’s journey—under the influence of fundamental technological and political changes.

The Black Sea as a Space of Mobility and Communication On a fundamental level, geography and environmental conditions determined the way the Black Sea could act as the center of a space of communication and exchange for the bordering regions as well as in more extended trade and migration networks. Navigation on the Black Sea was not easy due to the frequent and severe storms and the lack of natural harbors on many parts of its coasts. However, the comparative proximity of its north and south coasts with the Crimean peninsula jutting out as a natural springboard was an advantage for communication between these two coasts. Moreover, there are two prevailing counter-clockwise currents that almost automatically transport ships from the 1 John Law, “On the Methods of Long-Distance Control: Vessels, Navigation and the Portuguese Route to India,” The Sociological Review 32, no. 1 (1984); id., “Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering: The Case of Portuguese Expansion,” in The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987).

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Crimea to the middle section of the Anatolian coast. Therefore, it is likely that even under the very primitive technological conditions of the Bronze Age, shipping routes across the Black Sea that went beyond mere coastal traffic already existed.2 These natural conditions were the basis for the long-lasting success of the port cities on the Crimea such as Chersonesus, Soldaia (Turk. Sudak) and Theodosia (Caffa, Turk. Kefe, Russ. Feodosija) as well as those on the Anatolian coast such as Sinope (Turk. Sinop) and Trapezos (Turk. Trabzon). The cross-sea connection played a continuous role, e. g., in interconnecting the Greek Black Sea colonies and, in the first century BCE, forming the economic basis of the Pontic kingdom under Mithridates VI that included the north and south Black Sea coast.3 Moreover, the Byzantines, the merchants from Kiev in the tenth, as well as the Seljuks in the thirteenth century, profited from this north–south connection that joined the economies of the steppe with its main resources, such as animals and slaves, to Anatolia, which exported cotton and silk products.4 Other harbors relied on waterways that entered the Black Sea. The most important example is the Bosphorus, the route to the Marmara Sea and the Aegean, which determined the prominence of Byzantium. Tanais (Tana, Turk. Azak, Russ. Azov) at the mouth of the Don owed its importance as a harbor and strategic point to a similar logic. Finally, Ochakiv (Turk. Özi), near to ancient Olbia at the mouth of Dnieper and Bug, Tyras (Maurocastro, Rum. Cetatea Alba, Turk. Akkerman, Ukr. Bilhorod) at the mouth of the Dniester, as well as Chilia (Turk. Kilia) and Vicina (Turk. Isakça, Rum. Isaccea) in the Danube delta are similar cases in point. Of these waterways that connect the Black Sea to its surrounding regions, without doubt, the Bosphorus was the most important one. The easy interconnection between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean led to episodes of close symbiosis. In Antiquity, Greek settlers from Ionia founded the cities on the Black Sea coast; in the Middle Ages, Genoa and Venice dominated the Black Sea trade and, for a certain period, made the Crimean cities a part of their colonial empires. Intermittently, the Black Sea belonged to empires such as the Roman, the By2 Alexander A. Bauer and Owen P. Doonan, “Fluid Histories: Culture, Community, and the Longue Durée of the Black Sea World,” in New Regionalism or No Regionalism? Emerging Regionalism in the Black Sea Area, ed. Ruxandra Ivan (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 18. 3 Jurij G. Vinogradov, “Der Pontos Euxeinos als politische, ökonomische und kulturelle Einheit und die Epigraphik,” in Pontische Studien: Kleine Schriften zur Geschichte und Epigraphik des Schwarzmeerraumes, ed. Heinz Heinen (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1997). 4 Charles King, The Black Sea: A History (London: Routledge, 2016), 69–70; Thomas S. Noonan, “The Dnieper Trade Route in Kievan Russia, (900–1240 A.D.)” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1979), 35–42; Claude Cahen, “Le commerce anatolien au début du XIIIe siècle,” in Mélanges d’histoire du moyen âge dédiés à la mémoire de Louis Halphen, ed. Charles-Edmond Perrin (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1951).

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zantine or the Ottoman Empires that also controlled parts of the Mediterranean. This recurring constellation has led scholars such as Fernand Braudel to the conclusion that the Black Sea was not an independent unit of analysis, but a mere appendix of the Mediterranean. Although they were harder to navigate than the Bosphorus, the rivers entering the Black Sea such as the Danube, Dniester, and Don—and even the much smaller Rioni in Georgia—also served as lines of trade and communication into the hinterland. However, they were always paralleled by road connections that took over at difficult places. The Dnieper was blocked by rapids only 300 kilometers inland from its mouth. Similarly, the Danube delta was not easy for larger ships to pass and was again blocked at the Iron Gate, a series of rapids, approximately 800 kilometers from its mouth. In Antiquity, Greek colonies such as Tomis that were founded at the mouth of the Danube used the river to trade with their immediate hinterland. Only in the Roman period, when the Danube became the border of the empire, was it made accessible along its whole course. When Trajan conquered Dacia, a system of roads was constructed to bypass the Iron Gate. However, like the Black Sea itself, the Danube constituted the periphery of the empire and therefore was of minor importance for trade.5 In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, at a time when the Genoese dominated shipping and trade on the Black Sea, they included the Danube in their ventures. They shipped Italian cloth, Anatolian silk and Oriental spices to their colonies at the mouth of the Danube from whence these goods were transported overland to Wallachia and Moldavia and further on to Halycˇ (Pol. Halicz) and Lviv (Pol. Lwów, Germ. Lemberg). On an alternative route, Oriental goods also flowed via Transylvania toward Hungary and Southern Germany. Via the lower Danube, the Genoese exported grain, wax, cow hides and fish. It is also highly likely that they sailed up the Danube until they reached the Iron Gate.6 Only in the nineteenth century, with its regulation and the technological innovation of steam shipping, which will be discussed in the last section, did the Danube become a transregional line of communication beyond this breaking point. The rivers to the north such as Dnieper and Don offered a route into the immediate northern hinterland, but also established a trans-regional connection to the Baltic Sea. The most important and durable of these was the VarangianByzantine trade route that followed the Dnieper. In the eighth century CE, West 5 W. G. East, “The Danube Route-Way in History,” Economica 37 (1932): 321. 6 Constantin C. Giurescu, “The Genoese and the Lower Danube in the XIIIth and XIVth Centuries,” The Journal of European Economic History 5, no. 3 (1976); Zsigmond Pál Pach, “Die Verkehrsroute des Levantehandels nach Siebenbürgen und Ungarn zur Zeit der Könige Ludwig von Anjou und Sigismund von Luxemburg,” in Europäische Stadtgeschichte in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit, ed. Werner Mägdefrau (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1979).

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European slave merchants and their Scandinavian security personnel, the Varangians, together with local helpers, had already opened this trade route. Over the centuries, the commercial outposts on it developed into cities that united into the Kievan Rus. This imperial formation drew its wealth from taxing the trade in fur and slaves flowing from the north to the south and in Oriental goods going in the opposite direction.7 Trade peaked in the tenth century, resulting in several trade agreements between Byzantium and the Rus. During this period, each year a small flotilla of Rus merchants sailed to Constantinople following a route along the western shore of the Black Sea.8 The symbiosis between trade geography and state building in the steppes north of the Black Sea was brought to perfection by the Khanate of the Golden Horde from the late thirteenth to the first half of the fourteenth century. Very similarly to the other successor states of Genghis Khan’s empire, the Golden Horde that centered on the lower Volga was dependent on the taxable income of merchants. This concerned the north–south trade routes along the Volga and the Don but also the east–west trade in silk and other luxury goods from China and India. For some time, the Golden Horde successfully re-directed a substantial part of the Silk Road trade to a route along the Amur Darya, passing north of the Caspian, crossing the Volga at Sarai, the khanate’s capital, to reach the Black Sea ports of Tana and Caffa, from whence goods were shipped to Constantinople.9 The Golden Horde’s rival Genghisid dynasty, the Ilkhanids ruling Persia, also undertook a re-routing, benefitting the Black Sea trade. To harm their enemies, the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt and Syria, the Ilkhanids attempted to divert overland trade with Indian and Chinese goods away from the usual route via Baghdad to the ports of the Levant. Instead, merchants were enticed to pass on a northern route via the Ilkhanid capital Tabriz to the Black Sea port of Trabzon.10 The geographically and chronologically wide-ranging overview above focused on mobility networks of different range that crossed the Black Sea at various historical periods before the Ottomans. From their non-human components, I have foregrounded the natural ones that established certain historical patterns of trade and communication routes. The material infrastructures that were also part of these networks, such as harbors, storage and transport facilities, will be examined in greater detail in the next section. Drawing attention to mobility networks that connected the coasts with each other and their various hinterlands, several scholars have attempted to define a

7 Omeljan Pritsak, “The Origin of Rus’,” The Russian Review 36, no. 3 (1977). 8 Noonan, “The Dnieper Trade Route,” 24–33. 9 Virgil Ciocîltan, The Mongols and the Black Sea Trade in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 95–114. 10 Ibid., 114–139.

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Black Sea region or “world” that could serve as an independent unit of analysis.11 At the same time, the Black Sea was always integrated into larger transregional networks of mobility. Such networks could be very extensive when they organized long distance trade e. g. along the Silk Road, the Dnieper route or into the Mediterranean. In this case, the function of the Black Sea was what Bra˘tianu described using the railway metaphor of the turntable (plaque tournante) in reference to the multiple entrance and exit points the sea had to offer.12 The next section will examine how these two types of networks were reconfigured when, starting at the end of the fifteenth century, the Ottomans managed to unite the Black Sea under one political authority.

Ottoman Black Sea Routes At the end of the fourteenth century, the Ottomans gained control over the entry to the Marmara Sea when they moved their arsenal and fleet to Gallipoli at the Hellespont. With the conquest of Constantinople, they also controlled the entry to the Black Sea and subsequently directed their expansion toward the Anatolian Black Sea coast, taking Amasra (Gr. Amastris) from the Genoese in 1459, Sinop from the local emir in 1461 and, in the same year, Trabzon, which was ruled by a Byzantine dynasty. In 1475, an Ottoman fleet conquered the coastal cities on the Crimea and the city of Azak at the mouth of the Don. A decade later Kilia on the mouth of the Danube and Akkerman were also occupied; finally, in 1538, the Bucak, the coastal area between Danube and Dniester, as well as Özi became Ottoman, but these territories remained disputed for a long time between the Ottomans and Poland-Lithuania.13 The Ottomans only began to take control of the eastern Black Sea coast from the middle of the sixteenth century. In their conflict with the Safavids, they made 11 Y. Eyüp Özveren, “A Framework for the Study of the Black Sea World, 1789–1915,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 20, no. 1 (1997); id., “The Black Sea World as a Unit of Analysis,” in Politics of the Black Sea, ed. Tunç Aybak (London: I.B. Tauris, 2001); Owen Doonan, “The Corrupting Sea and the Hospitable Sea: Some Early Thoughts Toward a Regional History of the Black Sea,” in Koine: Mediterranean Studies in Honor of R. Ross Holloway, ed. Anthony S. Tuck and Derek B. Counts (Providence: Joukowsky Institute of Archaeology Publications Series, 2010); Charles King, “Is the Black Sea a Region?,” in The Black Sea Region: Cooperation and Security Building, ed. Oleksandr Pavliuk and Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze (London: Routledge, 2016). 12 Gheorghe Ion Bra˘tianu, “La mer Noire, plaque tournante du trafic international a la fin du Moyen Age,” Revue Historique du Sud-Est Européen 21 (1944). 13 Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, “Inner Lake or Frontier? The Ottoman Black Sea in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Enjeux politiques, économiques et militaires en mer Noire (XIVe– XXIe siècles): Études à la mémoire de Mihail Guboglu, ed. Faruk Bilici, Ionel Cândea, and Anca Popescu (Bra˘ila: Muse´e de Bra˘ila, E´ditions Istros, 2007).

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subjects of the western Georgian kingdoms; in 1579, they directly occupied Poti (Turk. Fas¸) and then controlled almost the entire Black Sea coast.14 Only after these conquests would the Black Sea be called an “Ottoman Lake”; however, bear in mind that formal Ottoman control was never total, as e. g. the frequent seventeenth-century raids of the Cossacks on the Crimea and the Anatolian coast show. The Crimean cities offer an example of how trade was rearranged after the Ottoman conquest. After taking Caffa from Genoese control, the city continued to prosper, exporting fish, butter, locally produced cloth, as well as slaves that the Tatars captured in the northern regions. Although for a couple of years Italian merchants continued to be active in this inner Black Sea trade, the connection to Italy was severed.15 While even before the Ottoman conquest, in the middle of the fourteenth century, trade on the land route with India and China had ceased to work, other long-distance connections, e. g. those with Poland and Russia, continued. Moreover, trade between the north and south coasts boomed, and Istanbul became the focus of this trade. Thanks to food supplies and animal products, such as hides and wax, which ships brought from the entire Black Sea area, Istanbul could grow into the largest city in Europe.16 According to a contemporary French merchant, this pattern of trade remained predominant until the last quarter of the eighteenth century.17 The infrastructures of transport and communication, especially those that were of strategic relevance to the Ottomans, were also part of the process of integrating the Black Sea into the empire. For example, an Ottoman arsenal was build up in Sinop whose shipbuilding capacity came just behind Istanbul/Galata and Gallipoli. The Ottoman fleet operating in the Black Sea eradicated piracy, until the seventeenth-century Cossack raids set in. At the end of the sixteenth century, the Ottoman state created an official network of sea routes that was mainly used to supply troops with grain, but was also used for Ottoman officials’ journeys. One route extended from Istanbul along the western Black Sea coast to the mouth of the Danube, where it connected to the line of the Danube flotilla.

14 Carl M. Kortepeter, “Ottoman Imperial Policy and the Economy of the Black Sea Region in the Sixteenth Century,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 86, no. 2 (1966). 15 Gilles Veinstein, “From the Italians to the Ottomans: The Case of the Northern Black Sea Coast in the Sixteenth Century,” Mediterranean Historical Review 1, no. 2 (1986): 226–229. 16 Halil I˙nalcık, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age 1300–1600 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), 129–133. 17 Antoine Ignace Anthoine de Saint-Joseph, Essai historique sur le commerce et la navigation de la mer Noire (Paris: Agasse, 1805), 5–9.

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The second route on the Black Sea followed from Istanbul/Üsküdar along the Anatolian coast to Fas¸ (Poti).18 The famous seventeenth-century Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi (1611–1687?) offers an example of how these sea routes worked in practice. In summer 1640, at the beginning of his almost forty years of travels in the Ottoman Empire and beyond, Evliya started out as a member of a military expedition to Azak to recapture the city from the Cossacks. The flotilla he was part of went from Istanbul via Trabzon to Fas¸. There, Evliya took the opportunity to explore the Georgian hinterland before his party continued along the coast to its destination at the mouth of the Don.19 Sea routes operated in coordination with the Ottoman road network that was used by the military, traveling officials and post riders. Major routes were fitted with stations (menzil) for changing horses at regular intervals.20 The system resembled the yam of the Mongolian Empire that was also taken over by the Russians. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, there were nine major yam routes centering on Moscow; to the south-east they reached Astrakhan, to the south they reached the border with Poland-Lithuania.21 Likewise, the Ottoman road network radiated out from the imperial capital of Istanbul: three routes lay on the European and three on the Anatolian side of the Bosphorus. They were to integrate the empire, but some of these routes extended beyond the borders to connect the Ottoman Empire with the neighboring countries of Poland-Lithuania, Russia, and Persia. The Ottomans took over many of these routes from their imperial predecessors—the Romans, the Byzantines or the Seljuks in Anatolia. From the latter the Ottomans also inherited caravanserais as an important service infrastructure, which they extended to the European part of their empire. Moreover, the Ottomans were famous bridge-builders and also strengthened and paved main roads, especially when they needed to transport heavy military equipment, such as cannons. But was it really possible to travel by road around the Black Sea, and did the “Ottoman Lake” really have a seaside promenade as Keraban’s story suggests? Of the three trunk roads in Rumeli, the European part of the Ottoman Empire, which radiated out from Istanbul, the right-hand route connected the Ottoman 18 Yusuf Halaçog˘lu, Osmanlılarda Ulas¸ım ve Haberles¸me (Menziller) (Istanbul: I˙lgi Kültür Sanat Yayıncılık, 2014), 139–152; Cemal Çetin, “Anadolu I˙skele ve Kara Yolu Bag˘lantıları (XVI. Yüzyıl Sonları),” The Journal of Academic Social Science Studies 8, no. 28 (2014). 19 Evliya Çelebi, Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1996–2003), 2:47– 69. 20 Halaçog˘lu, Osmanlılarda Ulas¸ım; Colin Heywood, “Ulak,” The Encyclopaedia of Islam: New Edition 10: 800–801. 21 Gustave Alef, “The Origin and Early Development of the Muscovite Postal Service,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 15, no. 1 (1967); Roland Cvetkovski, Modernisierung durch Beschleunigung: Raum und Mobilität im Zarenreich (Frankfurt: Campus, 2006), 89–94.

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capital with the Upper Danube. This route and the administrative area it formed, the Right Corridor, sag˘ kol in Ottoman, did not immediately follow the Black Sea coast, but ran inland (with important stations at Aytos and Provadia instead of the ports Burgas and Varna) to cross the Danube at Tulça (Rum. Tulcea) and I˙sakça (Rum. Isaccea), where at certain times the river was so shallow that it could be forded. Beyond the Danube, the route continued via Akkerman on the mouth of the Dniester to its ultimate destination of Özi, an important fortress at the mouth of the Dnieper.22 After the sea voyage described above, Evliya Çelebi used this land route several times and gave an account of its smaller stations and bigger cities. In 1656, while on an important official mission, he made the trip from the port city Mangalia near Constant,a (Turk. Köstence) to Istanbul along the land route in three days.23 In contrast to a sea voyage, travel on the land route was less dangerous and travel times were more predictable. At the Lower Danube, different routes converged that connected the empire to its northern neighbor, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many Polish-Lithuanian diplomatic missions traveled to Istanbul; there was also frequent traffic from trade caravans along these routes. The caravans brought Oriental textiles, weapons, and other luxury goods to Poland where these goods fulfilled an important cultural function in the selfrepresentation of the Polish nobility. The Ottoman authorities tried to supervise all travelers from the north by obliging them to stay on the official route.24 Until the second half of the sixteenth century, the route that crossed from Moldavia and Wallachia into Transylvania with its main entrepots of Bras,ov (Germ. Kronstadt, Hung. Brassó) and Sibiu (Germ. Hermannstadt, Hung. Nagyszeben) and from there went further on into Central Europe also still was in operation. Here, Oriental goods such as spices, textiles and leather were traded, but in a more modest volume.25 We are well informed about trade along the Polish branch of this route by the writings of Martin Gruneweg (1562–1618?) of Gdan´sk (Germ. Danzig). In the 1580s, he traveled to Istanbul six times as the apprentice of an Armenian merchant. In his account, Gruneweg paid much attention to the service infrastructure 22 Halaçog˘lu, Osmanlılarda Ulas¸ım, 95–101. 23 Evliya, Seyahatnâme, 5:55. 24 Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, “Polish-Ottoman Trade Routes in the Times of Martin Gruneweg,” in Martin Gruneweg (1562–nach 1615): Ein Europäischer Lebensweg, ed. Almut Bues (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009). 25 Mária Pakucs-Willcocks, “Economic Relations between the Ottoman Empire and Transylvania in the Sixteenth Century: Oriental Trade and Merchants,” in Osmanischer Orient und Ostmitteleuropa: Perzeptionen und Interaktionen in den Grenzzonen zwischen dem 16. und 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Robert Born and Andreas Puth (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2014).

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such as caravanserais, where caravans composed of up to 40 wagons could rest, and particularly the fountains along the way, where horses and travelers could drink. He never mentioned the road surface, but only the bridges that allowed his caravan to cross the smaller rivers. However, even a dirt track road was an important piece of infrastructure. This becomes clear when considering that Gruneweg’s caravan once had to drive “uber feltt” (cross-country) to avoid the Ottoman army on the march, which blocked the road. Although the country was flat, the way became difficult for the wagons and horses and the caravan could not make more than two miles a day.26 The caravan of several merchants who traveled together for security reasons usually assembled in Lviv. It was composed of big transport wagons as well as of smaller travel coaches for the merchants.27 They crossed the Dniester at Hotyn (Turk. Hotin) and from there went south-east, either keeping on the left bank of the Prut or on its right bank, including a stop at the Moldavian capital Ias,i. At Isakça, they crossed the Danube with boats big enough to load four wagons and several of the smaller coaches and up to 30 horses at once.28 In his account, Evliya mentions the trade from the Danube in the opposite direction. According to him, each year 2,000 wagonloads of salted fish were exported overland from Ismail at the Danube to Poland and Russia.29 From the Danube, Gruneweg’s caravan proceeded south along the main road via Dobrich (Turk. Pazarcık), Provadia and Aytos to Edirne before reaching Istanbul as its final destination. It took six to seven weeks for a caravan to go one way and the same amount of time to return home with its goods that mostly consisted of silk. Armenian merchants from Poland did not only travel south to Istanbul. As Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1605–1689), who traveled to India six times between 1641 and 1667 describes, there was also a trade route from Poland to Persia. Merchants made their overland journey by wagon via Moldavia, Akkerman and Özi to Caffa, from whence they went by ship to Trabzon and followed the route to Persia that had already been used in the Middle Ages under the Ilkhanids.30 Although the Ottoman part of the menzil-route officially ended at Özi, at least temporarily, there were two further stations at Caffa on Crimea and at Azak on the mouth of the Don, which suggests that even these cities were not entirely 26 Martin Gruneweg, Die Aufzeichnungen des Dominikaners Martin Gruneweg (1562–ca. 1618) über seine Familie in Danzig, seine Handelsreisen in Osteuropa und sein Klosterleben in Polen, ed. Almut Bues (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2008), 2:871–872. 27 Gruneweg, Aufzeichnungen, 2:687. 28 Ibid., 2:712–713. 29 Evliya, Seyahatnâme, 5:58. 30 Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, The Six Voyages of John Baptista Tavernier, Baron of Aubonne, Through Turky, into Persia and the East-Indies, For the Space of Forty Years (London: Godbid and Pitt, 1677), book 3, ch. 7:115.

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relying on maritime traffic in their communication with Istanbul.31 Azak was literally at the end of the Ottoman road and at the beginning of routes into the steppe that were controlled by their vassals, the Crimean Tatars. In 1569, the city was the starting point of the unsuccessful Ottoman military expedition against Astrakhan in the Volga delta, 800 km to the east, a city that Muskovy had occupied roughly a decade earlier. The Ottoman geostrategic aims of this expedition were directed against Muscovite expansion as much as against Safavid Persia. As an ideological benefit, by conquering Astrakhan the Ottoman sultan would have re-opened the route for Mecca pilgrims from Central Asia. The Ottomans were also attracted to Astrakhan as a center of trade on the Volga route that circumvented the Black Sea in connecting the Middle East to Northern Europe.32 This trade route had already been very active from the ninth to the thirteenth century. When Muskovy took control of the route in the middle of the sixteenth century, it again gained in importance, but only began to flourish in the seventeenth century under the management of Armenian merchants from Isfahan/New Julfa, who exported Persian silk to Russia and Western Europe.33 Evliya claims that in the mid-seventeenth century, trade on this route from the Persian silk producing provinces via Derbend at the Caspian to Kazan and to Crimea was usually operated on the land route by employing wagons (araba) and not by sea and river or with the usual camel caravans.34 In the end, the Ottoman attempt to conquer Astrakhan failed because of the difficult transport conditions. The plan to dig a canal between the Don and the Volga proved impossible. Moreover, unlike the Cossacks, the Ottomans did not manage to use the portage between the two rivers and thus deploy ships against Astrakhan. Their failure to move heavy artillery along the caravan route sealed the fate of the campaign, and most of the Ottoman army died of thirst and hunger when they retreated to Azak.35 Along the entire east coast of the Black Sea, the Ottoman state did not support a network of official routes, and its influence was restricted to fortresses and cities such as Anapa, Sohumkale (Georg. Sukhumi), Fas¸ (Georg. Poti), and Batum (Georg. Batumi). By road, these cities were rather connected with the hinterland than amongst each other. In his account of his first journey, Evliya called at31 Halaçog˘lu, Osmanlılarda Ulas¸ım, 101. 32 Akdes Nimet Kurat, “The Turkish Expedition to Astrakhan’ in 1569 and the Problem of the Don-Volga Canal,” The Slavonic and East European Review 40, no. 94 (1961): 14–15. 33 Hermann Kellenbenz, “Der russische Transithandel mit dem Orient im 17. und zu Beginn des 18. Jahrhunderts,” Jahrbücher Für Geschichte Osteuropas 12, no. 4 (1964); Tamara Ganjalyan, “Armenian Trade Networks,” European History Online (EGO), accessed July 4, 2019 URL: http://www.ieg-ego.eu/ganjalyant-2016-en URN: urn:nbn:de:0159-2019031107. 34 Evliya, Seyahatnâme, 2:152–153. 35 Kurat, “Turkish Expedition to Astrakhan’.”

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tention to the importance of the river Fas¸ (Georg. Rioni), which he likened to the Danube. From the point where the river was no longer navigable, its valley offered easy access inland to Tiflis and from there to historical Azerbaijan. It was probably this function as a route to the east that made some writers believe that the river was directly connected to the Caspian Sea—a geographical misconception that Evliya saw it necessary to correct.36 In the nineteenth century, when the Caucasus came under Russian control, this route became important for modern infrastructural development again, as we will see in the next section. Only at Trabzon, the most important harbor on the Anatolian Black Sea coast, was there again a connection to the main Ottoman overland routes. A road crossed the Pontic Alps and linked the port city with Erzurum in inland Anatolia. Erzurum was the official end point of the Anatolian Left Corridor (sol kol), which was formed by a route from Istanbul following the river valleys south of the North Anatolian Mountains. At the same time, Erzurum was the starting point of two routes into Persia, a northern one via Kars and Yerevan and a southern one via Bayazıd (today Dog˘ubayazıt in Turkey) and then following the Aras river valley to Tabriz.37 Evliya traveled on these routes from Istanbul to Tabriz extensively and made many notes on the stations on the way and the travel infrastructure such as khans and caravanserais.38 Until the eighteenth century, the route via Erzurum was the most direct one between the silk producing regions in northern Iran and the Ottoman Empire. In the mid-seventeenth century, according to one source, six to ten caravans from Iran arrived in Istanbul each year.39 Silk was also distributed to two other West Anatolian centers: Since the fourteenth century, Bursa had been an important entrepot in the silk trade between Iran and Europe and a place where silk was also processed. Even in times of war between the Ottomans and Safavids, this connection remained uninterrupted.40 From the beginning of the seventeenth century, Bursa was joined by Izmir. Both destinations were served by routes that deviated from the left corridor and then crossed the Anatolian plateau.41 The Ottoman-Persian trade has been described in detail by Jean-Baptiste Tavernier. Despite his many warnings against thieves and brigands, Tavernier’s account demonstrates how well-traveled and well-maintained the route was 36 Evliya, Seyahatnâme, 2:56. 37 Franz Taeschner, Das anatolische Wegenetz nach osmanischen Quellen, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Mayer & Müller, 1924). 38 Evliya, Seyahatnâme, 2:88–246. 39 I˙nalcık, Ottoman Empire, 146. 40 Murat Çizakça, “A Short History of the Bursa Silk Industry (1500–1900),” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 23, no. 1–2 (1980); András Riedlmayer, “OttomanSafavid Relations and the Anatolian Trade Routes, 1603–1618,” Turkish Studies Association Bulletin 5, no. 1 (1981). 41 Taeschner, Das anatolische Wegenetz, 1:186–219 and 2:1–9.

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around the middle of the seventeenth century. Special attention was given to the part of the route close to the Ottoman capital: the Grand Vizier “caus’d all the Ways to be Pav’d and Pitch’d, [from the Bolu mountains] even as far as Constantinople.”42 Conceived as a practical guide for merchants, Tavernier’s account also pays special attention to the service infrastructure such as caravanserais for the camel caravans that were the main means of transportation on Anatolian routes.43 In any case, the land routes were considered safer than traveling by sea. Although it was possible to go from Istanbul to Trabzon and from there via Erzurum to Tabriz, Tavernier noted at the time, “there are few that will venture upon this Sea where there is no good Anchorage; besides that it is subject to prodigious Tempests, from which there are very few good Ports to defend them; which is the reason it is call’d Cara-denguis, or the Black Sea: The Eastern people giving to all things, mischievous and dangerous, the Epithet of Black.”44 Clearly, Martin Gruneweg also belonged to the group of merchants who preferred the land route. The caravans he was part of proved very reliable and could operate throughout the year with only minor delays. Sometimes these caravans had to change their route slightly because heavy rainfall made rivers impassable. But even a snowstorm that hit Gruneweg’s caravan in January 1586 in Moldavia could not stop it, but only resulted in a delay of a few days as well as some serious cases of frostbite among the drivers.45 Ships never occurred to Gruneweg as an alternative way of travel and it is possible that he actually never saw the Black Sea—not even on his most spectacular journey from Edirne to Lviv by air. Infected with plague and high fever, Gruneweg traveled with an angel who took him from his deathbed to fly with him back home to Poland and show him the monastery where he was to become a monk after his recovery. When the two crossed the Danube, the angel lifted Gruneweg high into the air and indicated a city in the distance to the left-hand side, Rome; needless to say, Gruneweg did not bother to turn his head to the right towards the sea.46 The Black Sea was more central to Evliya’s personal geography, and he traveled it extensively by ship during his first journey. However, he, too, had a serious lifethreatening experience: While on his way back home from Crimea, he was shipwrecked in a violent storm, which he barely survived by clinging to a piece of wood. His ship, with all of his companions still aboard, sank. He was washed

42 43 44 45 46

Tavernier, Six Voyages, I.2:4. Ibid., I.10:45–49. Ibid., III.7:114. Gruneweg, Aufzeichnungen, 2:968–970. Ibid., 2:1019–1020.

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ashore in Dobruja, and when he finally reached Istanbul, he vowed never to board a ship on the Black Sea again.47 At the end of the account of his first journey, Evliya recapitulates the extent of the Black Sea, its geographical features, the rivers that enter it and its principal harbors, and concludes: “The coasts around the Black Sea including the Sea of Azov comprise altogether 6060 miles. And if you would circle it on land adding up the stations [konak] the surroundings of the Black Sea have 150 stations or a journey of five months. With each station amounting to twelve hours, the Black Sea can be circled in five months. Such a vast sea it is.”48 At the end of the nineteenth century, in Verne’s calculation for his imaginary traveler Keraban, the perimeter of the Black Sea was 650 Turkish “agatchs,” which is approx. 2800 kilometers or 700 Ottoman miles, a mile being the distance a horse travels in one hour.49 The Black Sea had shrunk considerably as compared to Evliya’s calculated 1800 hours. In the following, I will juxtapose Evliya’s calculation, that of a weathered earlymodern Ottoman traveler, with that of Verne—the late nineteenth-century French armchair traveler. Obviously, Verne’s forty-four days of travel time relied on new geographic information and a technological revolution, which had fundamentally transformed the Black Sea region. Likewise, the Black Sea no longer was located in just one imperial framework, but effectively became partitioned between Russia and the Ottomans. The next section will review these transformations and their effect on the Black Sea as a mobility space and its Transottoman connections. This consisted not only of an immense acceleration of traffic because of modern means of transportations, but also of new sources of friction such as state borders and quarantine regimes.

Modern Transformations The process of political and territorial changes that ultimately brought parts of the western as well as the whole northern and eastern Black Sea coasts under Russian control began in the eighteenth century. In 1739, after Peter the Great had already occupied the city for a short period at the end of the seventeenth century, Azov became permanently Russian as the empire’s first foothold at the Black Sea coast. In the war of 1768–1774 Russia won other fortresses on the northern Black Sea coast as well as on the Crimea and gained the right of navi47 Evliya Çelebi, An Ottoman Traveller: Selections from the Book of Travels of Evliya Çelebi, trans. Robert Dankoff and Sooyong Kim (London: Eland Publishing, 2011), 47–55. 48 Evliya, Seyahatnâme, 2:76, my translation. 49 Jules Verne, Kéraban-le-têtu (Paris: Hetzel, 1883), part I, ch. 5:46.

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gation on the sea and through the Bosphorus for merchant ships flying the Russian flag. In 1787, Catherina the Great’s trip from St. Petersburg to Crimea symbolically underlined the Russian claim to the area. In a succession of wars lasting until 1829, Russia won the entire Black Sea coast, stretching from the Danube delta to Poti. The Russian expansion was followed by a profound economic transformation. The colonization of the newly-won territories called New Russia successively turned the steppe into agrarian land. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, New Russia, but also Wallachia and Moldavia, began to increase their grain production. While the grain of the region had hitherto been sent mainly to Istanbul, it was now exported to Western Europe where the Napoleonic wars and industrialization in general had created a big demand. Grain exported via the Black Sea absolutely dominated the European import market until the middle of the nineteenth century, after which it was pushed to the second rank by North American wheat.50 Grain exports depended on the development of new transport infrastructures and trade routes across the Black Sea. In 1783, even before the grain boom commenced, the French merchant Antoine-Ignace Anthoine de Saint-Joseph established a company in Kherson, a new Russian port on the mouth of the Dniepr, to trade with his hometown of Marseille. Russian goods that until then had been transported to the Baltic Sea were now to be shipped along the Dniepr to the Black Sea. In the reminiscent account of his enterprise, Anthoine offers a vivid picture of the late-eighteenth-century trade routes. He even proposed reviving the Indian trade via the Indus, the Caspian Sea and the Volga toward the Black Sea.51 Trade was conducted from newly founded or re-christened harbors along the northern Black Sea coast such as Kherson, Taganrog, Rostov-on-Don, and Nakhichevan and from the harbors on the Danube, such as Bra˘ila and Galat,i. However, the most significant of all these ports was Odessa, which was founded in 1794 in the location of a Tatar town and became a free port and the regional metropolis. Similarly to the other Russian Black Sea ports, it was populated by Ukrainian and Jewish immigrants from the north as well as Greeks and Armenians originating from the region or from the Ottoman Empire. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Greek merchants, who were organized in internationally operating family firms, dominated trade—import of wine and other Mediterranean foodstuffs and export of wheat—before Jewish companies took over the leading position in the second half of the century. These Greek merchants, 50 Patricia Herlihy, Odessa: A History, 1794–1914. 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 96–108, 204–210. 51 King, Black Sea, 154–156.

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many of whom originated from the island of Chios, had the language and cultural skills, the business know-how and, most importantly, owned the ships to become the main operators of the grain exports.52

Fig. 1: Odessa’s port with a typical cart delivering grain. Illustration by L. Benett from J. Verne, Kéraban-le-têtu (Paris: Hetzel, 1883), 81. Source: gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Until the 1870s, bulk cargo such as grain was still handled largely by sailing ships. It was only in later decades that technological innovation in motor and ship design made steamships more economical. Nonetheless, ever since steamships had first entered the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea in the 1830s, they had become the heralds of a new age that revolutionized sea transport. 52 Gelina Harlaftis, “The Role of the Greeks in the Black Sea Trade, 1830–1900,” in Shipping and Trade, 1750–1950: Essays in International Maritime Economic History, ed. Lewis R. Fischer and Helge W. Nordvik (Pontefract: Lofthouse, 1990); Evrydiki Sifneos, Imperial Odessa: Peoples, Spaces, Identities (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 112–117.

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Independent of winds and seasons, steamships could establish regular and speedy connections. Their domain became the transport of passengers, mail and valuable goods. As a consequence, British, French, Austrian, Russian and Ottoman companies created steamer lines that regularly served the ports of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean and connected them to Europe.53 Steamboat technology also revived the Danube as an international route of trade and traffic. By 1718, Austria had won the right of free navigation on the Danube from the Ottomans. However, during the whole eighteenth century this trade route was little used. The voyage down the Danube, which the Austrian merchant Nikolaus Kleemann undertook in 1768, vividly demonstrated the difficulties of travel on an unregulated river: the various ships Kleemann hired were often delayed, damaged or destroyed by adverse winds, sandbanks, fog, dead trees in the water, eddies and rocks; the most dangerous of these obstacles was the Iron Gate. After reaching the Danube delta in Kilia, Kleemann transferred to the land route to transport his goods to Crimea, while other goods had already been sent from Rusçuk (Bulg. Ruse) to Istanbul. Just as Gruneweg had done, Kleemann traveled in a caravan of wagons to Karasubazar (Ukr. Bilohirsk) in Crimea with a group of Greek and Armenian merchants who were going in the same direction. For his return journey, the land route was blocked because of the Russian-Ottoman war, so that Kleemann had to go by ship to Istanbul—a journey that included the usual storm.54 By a series of other ventures, the Danube became more established as a trade route. In 1782, two Austrian riverboats made the journey to the Danube delta where they loaded their goods onto a Russian ship that transferred them to Kherson. In the following decades, there were several such expeditions, which were also commercially successful and which greatly increased the knowledge in Austria about the lower Danube and the Black Sea region.55 But it was not before the use of the steamboats of the Erste Donau-Dampfschiffahrts-Gesellschaft, founded in 1829, that a more regular line of trade and communication under the difficult hydrological conditions of the river could be established. After only a few years, the company extended the original line operating between Vienna and Belgrade to Galat,i and later via the Black Sea to 53 Gelina Harlaftis and Vassilis Kardasis, “International Shipping in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea: Istanbul as a Maritime Centre, 1870–1910,” in The Mediterranean Response to Globalization before 1950, ed. S¸evket Pamuk and Jeffrey G. Williamson (London: Routledge, 2000), 245–249; David M. Williams and John Armstrong, “An Appraisal of the Progress of the Steamship in the Nineteenth Century,” in The World’s Key Industry, ed. Gelina Harlaftis, Stig Tenold, and Jesus M. Valdaliso (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 53. 54 Nicolaus Ernst Kleemann, Tagbuch der Reisen von N.E. Kleemann (Prag: von Schönfeldische Schriften, 1783). 55 Hans Halm, “Die Entdeckung der Donau als Welthandelsstraße,” Der Donauraum 5 (1960).

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Istanbul.56 In 1882, a traveler could go from Budapest to Galat,i in approx. 80 hours. However, throughout the nineteenth century, the Iron Gate remained a bottleneck even after two attempts to regulate it in the 1830s and 1890s. Regulation works in the delta, the dredging of the main navigation channel as well as the elimination of the sandbank at its mouth, were more successful. Starting in 1856, one of the first international organizations, the European Commission of the Danube, composed of representatives from Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Britain, France, Prussia, and Sardinia supervised these infrastructural works.57 By constructing new ports, introducing new means of transportation and proposing new routes, engineers created the new mobility space gradually emerging in the nineteenth century. One of them was the French mining engineer and geologist Xavier Hommaire de Hell who undertook two extended journeys, in 1838–42 and 1846–48, in the wider Black Sea region together with his wife Adèle. For the first time, the couple traveled the Black Sea on a steamer from Istanbul to Odessa in 1838. According to their description, it was a dull fifty-hour trip according to schedule, demonstrating the big advantage of steam as compared to sailing ships.58 From the sea, the city presented itself to the Hommaire de Hells with European-style buildings and boulevards where people made their evening promenade and listened to a military band. But before they could join this scene of civility, they had to pass the imposing and fortress-like quarantine station, which guarded the city. The couple had to spend two weeks in this institution with the character of a prison in the location of a seaside grand hotel. All their material belongings, including their clothes, were fumigated to disinfect them, which is a reminder that it was not only the human travelers, but also their objects and vehicles, which were suspected to be vectors of disease.59 The Hommaire de Hells experienced and acknowledged the efficiency of the Russian quarantine infrastructure as it had developed along the southern border since the eighteenth century. In the 1829 outbreak of the plague, which had been particularly severe in Odessa, the whole city had been put under military quar56 Harald Heppner, “Die großen Wasserstraßen und ihre Bedeutung,” in Der Weg führt über Österreich: Zur Geschichte des Verkehrs- und Nachrichtenwesens von und nach Südosteuropa (18. Jh. bis zur Gegenwart), ed. Harald Heppner (Vienna: Böhlau, 1996). 57 Luminita Gatejel, “Imperial Cooperation at the Margins of Europe: The European Commission of the Danube, 1856–65,” European Review of History: Revue Européenne d’histoire 24, no. 5 (2017); Florian Riedler, “Integrating the Danube into Modern Networks of Infrastructure: The Ottoman Contribution,” Journal of Balkan and Black Sea Studies 3, no. 5 (2020). 58 Xavier Hommaire de Hell, Les steppes de la mer Caspienne, le Caucase, la Crimée et la Russie méridionale: Voyage pittoresque, historique et scientifique (Paris: Bertrand and Strasbourg: Levrault, 1843), 1:4. 59 Ibid., 1:5–12.

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antine, which was supposed to block all movement along the roads to and from the city. But usually it was the borders to the Ottoman Empire that were guarded, especially since the increasing contacts with the Ottomans through war and migration. Starting in the early nineteenth century, there were quarantine stations operating along the river Dniester and the whole northern Black Sea coast including Crimea. When the border moved to the Danube, the cordon was established at Ismail without giving up the Dniester line, which was abolished only in 1833.60 In the three subsequent years, while Xavier was employed by the Russian government as a mining expert, the Hommaire de Hells explored the province of New Russia. Additional trips took them to Astrakhan, the Caspian, and the Caucasus. The three-volume account of their four years spent in Russia, which was in substantial parts written by Adèle, draws together geological, geographical, ethnological, and economic observations about the region. In general, their account paints the picture of a region in the process of a big transformation, where prosperous islands of modernity such as the city of Odessa contrasted with stillmedieval ways of life in the countryside. Antiquity, present in the numerous remains, offered an additional historical layer. This juxtaposition between old and new also concerned the means of transportation and infrastructures of travel, to which Xavier as an engineer was particularly attentive. The second journey under the auspices of the French government, undertaken mostly by Xavier alone, offers many examples of the varying cruising speeds that governed the Black Sea in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1846, Hommaire de Hell started out from Istanbul to Varna, albeit not in a steamer but in a traditional sailing boat. The vessel called at many of the small ports of the Bulgarian Black Sea coast and sometimes was stuck for days because of adverse winds. However, owing to this slow progress, Hommaire de Hell could make geological, geographical and historical observations. He recorded the boom of port cities such as Burgas, Varna, Balchik—where Evliya had been washed ashore 200 years earlier —and Galat,i on the Danube, mainly due to new opportunities for trade in cereals.61 After a trip to the Moldavian capital of Ias,i, which involved passing through the quarantine at Galat,i, Hommaire de Hell returned by steamer to Istanbul, not without encountering difficulties at the confluence of the Danube into the Black Sea at Sulina where at low water a sandbank blocked the navigation channel, which was permanently cleared only a decade later by the work of the European Danube commission. 60 Andrew Robarts, Migration and Disease in the Black Sea Region: Ottoman-Russian Relations in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 139–140. 61 Xavier Hommaire de Hell, Voyage en Turquie et en Perse exécuté par ordre du gouvernement français pendant les années 1846, 1847 et 1848 (Paris: Bertrand, 1854), I.1:123–166.

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From Istanbul, Hommaire de Hell went exploring on the Anatolian Black Sea coast. In 1847, he traveled from Istanbul to Trabzon, parts of the way on horseback, parts in small sailing boats. Both means of travel were difficult, one because of the bad roads, the other because of periodically adverse winds. In the small ports along his way, he took note of the traditional shipbuilding industry that produced all kinds of sailing ships, but also of the new coaling stations for the steamers that called in the bigger ports such as Sinop, Samsun and Trabzon.62 In Trabzon, he turned inland toward Tabriz and from there further on to Teheran and Isfahan. However, since he was not a merchant, he did not follow the direct route, but integrated a tour through south-eastern Anatolia, including a trip down the Euphrates with a kelek, a raft kept afloat by inflated sheep skins. From Van he crossed into Iran without being able to locate the exact position of the border. After a tour through northern Iran, in 1848, Hommaire de Hell died from fever in Isfahan and was buried in New Julfa, the quarter of the Armenian silk merchants. In 1882, when Keraban set out to circle the Black Sea in his coach, mobility on the Black Sea had accelerated and the means of modern transportation had differentiated further. For long-distance trade, steamers were replacing sailing ships; for the traveler, there now were more regular steamboat connections among the Black Sea port cities and to outside ports. On Thursday, August 17, the day his journey began, Keraban would have had the opportunity to travel the Black Sea by boarding a ship in the passenger port at Tophane. According to contemporary travel guides, a direct steamer by the Compagnie Russe de Navigation à vapeur et de Commerce went every Monday and Thursday to Odessa in approx. 39 hours. From Odessa, there was a connection twice a week to Kerch serving all the ports on the Crimea (48 hrs.). Steamers from Kerch served the eastern Black Sea coast to Poti (60 hrs.), from whence it was possible to complete the round trip to Istanbul calling at Batumi, Trabzon, and I˙nebolu in approx. 100 hours.63 Other companies such as the French Messageries maritimes and the Austrian Lloyd also served the routes Istanbul–Odessa and Istanbul–Danube. Together with these European companies, the Ottoman S¸irket-i Mahsusa served the route along the Anatolian Black Sea coast. Steam power had also begun to affect land transportation around the Black Sea, where numerous railway lines were constructed to connect the coast with the hinterland. In the Ottoman Empire the Constant,a–Cernavoda line, opened in 1860, as well as the Varna–Ruse line, opened in 1867, both were designed to 62 Ibid., I.2:305–378. 63 Hermann Julius Meyer, Meyers Reisebücher: Der Orient, vol. 2, Syrien, Palästina, Griechenland und Türkei (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1882), I–XXIII; Thomas Mitchell, Handbook for Travellers in Russia, Poland, and Finland, 3rd rev. ed. (London: J. Murray, 1875), 343–344, 389.

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shorten travel time between the Danube and the Black Sea harbors by avoiding a passage through the delta. However, despite numerous plans to connect the Danube with the Aegean, there was no railway equivalent to the early modern Ottoman Right Corridor and therefore no direct rail connection between the Ottoman Empire and Russia.64 In 1882, to reach the Russian network a traveler from Istanbul had to go by train via Edirne to Yanbolu (Bulg. Yambol), roughly 100 km inland from the Black Sea coast. The line was extended to the port of Burgas only in the 1890s, when the region had become part of Bulgaria. There were 180 km of road to cross from Yanbolu north to reach the Varna–Ruse railway, from which there was a connection to the Rumanian network by crossing the Danube to Giurgiu. Via Bucharest the traveler would reach the Russian network either at Galat,i or at Ias,i, crossing the Prut over a bridge built by Gustave Eiffel. Connecting the Russian center around Moscow to the ports of the Black Sea was an old plan that the Russian government finally realized during the boom years of rail construction in the late 1860s and early 1870s. While the Kiev–Odessa line followed military considerations, a west-east line from Odessa via Kremenchuk on the Dniepr to Kharkiv was to facilitate the transportation of agricultural products.65 In the same years, ports such as Nikolayev (Ukr. Mykolaiv), Sevastopol, Taganrog and Rostov-on-Don were connected to the emerging Russian rail network, too. While the opening of the Rostov–Vladikavkaz line in 1875 made the Northern Caucasus accessible by railway, of all the Eastern Black Sea ports only Poti and Batumi had a railway connection. In 1873, the Transcaucasus railway was opened between Poti and Tiflis and by 1883 was extended to Baku and Batumi. This railway became an important trade route, especially for the export of oil from the Caspian.66 As Verne fashioned Keraban into an anti-Phileas Fogg, who strictly refused to board a steamer or a train, his journey became longer and more complicated— but certainly also more interesting to the reader. Moreover, by this special construction of the plot, the different means of transportation turn into principal material actors, which, similar to human actors, are not just neutral, but fully integrated into the moral universe of the novel. Trains and steamships not only 64 Vahdettin Engin, Rumeli Demiryolları (Istanbul: Eren, 1993), 43–50; Boriana AntonovaGoleva, “Concessions and Mirages along the Lower Danube: The Town of Silistria in the Plans of Foreign Railway Promoters during the Mid-1850s,” Journal of Balkan and Black Sea Studies 3, no. 5 (2020). 65 Frithjof Benjamin Schenk, Russlands Fahrt in die Moderne: Mobilität und sozialer Raum im Eisenbahnzeitalter (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2014), 70–73; Boris Belge, “(Dis)Connected: Railway, Steamships and Trade in the Port of Odessa, 1865–1888,” Journal of Balkan and Black Sea Studies 3, no. 5 (2020). 66 Schenk, Russlands Fahrt, 81–83.

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stand for the modern world, which Keraban despised, but they are also his enemies’ favorite means of travel. Additionally, a small sailing ship, a tartane, is part of the enemy camp, which strives to prevent Keraban’s timely arrival in Istanbul. By kidnapping the fiancée of Keraban’s adoptive son from Odessa and bringing her to Trabzon, this tartane in my opinion vaguely recalls the slave trade that in the past had been an inherent part of Black Sea routes. The geographic reference points to the trade in Slavs captured by the Tatars. However, the facts that the fiancée was herself a Muslim and that the slave trade had disappeared completely since the late eighteenth century when the Tatars were subjected by Russia show that it is a rather vague reference. Slave trade in the Black Sea region was a subject of public debate in Europe until the 1860s, particularly in reference to the enslavement of Muslim Circassians and Christian Georgians who were sold to the Ottoman Empire.67 In an act of poetic justice, the tartane sinks in the inevitable Black Sea storm. Keraban’s coach is certainly the most central among the novel’s non-human actors. It is described as an old-fashioned (antique) stagecoach made in England,68 to contrast it to the world of modern transport, but also to individualize it and define its special character. By placing Keraban’s coach in the general technological development of the time, in the following I will address the evolution of land transport in the Ottoman Empire leading up to the nineteenth century. In the early-modern Ottoman context, horse- or ox-drawn wagons were used to carry large capacities of goods in places where camels were not available. These wagons were not built for high speed. As Gruneweg’s and Tavernier’s examples show, in the Balkans carts and wagons were used to a greater extent than in Anatolia, where ox carts operated only on a village level and camel caravans served in long-distance trade. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in large cities such as Istanbul the Ottoman court and the elite slowly began to adopt horse drawn carts, albeit mainly to transport women and children. Apparently, this fashion spread to other courts; Kleemann witnessed the arrival of the Crimean Khan’s harem in “six old-fashioned coaches similar to the country coaches in Vienna partly covered in green and partly in red fabric. Other carts were only painted and they had a tight mesh instead of windows.”69 In the nineteenth century, modern coaches imported from Europe, i. e., coaches with metal springs instead of strap suspension systems, became an indicator of conspicuous consumption. Soon, such coaches were also produced in the Ottoman Empire. 67 Y. Hakan Erdem, Slavery in the Ottoman Empire and Its Demise, 1800–1909 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 102–107. 68 Verne, Kéraban, I.5:51. 69 Kleemann, Tagbuch, 92.

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However, for a long period these were used exclusively by private owners; public transportation of mail and passengers by stagecoaches only began in the 1860s. The first stagecoach lines in Ottoman Europe operated along the route from Istanbul to Belgrade and towards Ruse, the capital of the Ottoman Danube Province.70 The reason for this late development of a public transport system was also connected to the Ottoman government’s difficulties in establishing a modern road network. Speed and reliability of coaches were directly related to good roads with a level, durable and weather-proof surface. In the second half of the eighteenth century, French and British engineers had developed new road building techniques that used several layers of gravel, which were pressed together by the vehicles using these roads to create a durable surface. From the 1830s, Ottoman politicians increasingly became aware of the importance of transport infrastructure for the economic development of the country. But even upgrading an important connection such as the Istanbul–Edirne road proved difficult. In 1844, the government rejected the proposal of an Austrian engineer due to cost concerns; in other parts of the country roads were modernized only piecemeal over the next two decades.71 Hommaire de Hell, on his second journey, also addressed the lack of good roads as one of the main obstacles to the economic development of the Black Sea coast of Ottoman Europe and its hinterland. The transportation of grain by carts drawn by buffaloes for export through ports such as Burgas or Varna made this product extremely expensive.72 Only the 1860s, in the framework of a reform of the provincial administration, was road building finally intensely pursued. It was implemented first in the Ottoman Danube province where, in addition to many village roads, the connections between the centers of the province such as Sofia, Ruse, Pleven (Turk. Plevna) and Varna, were also modernized.73 In the province of Edirne, comprising the Black Sea coast south of the Balkan mountain range, priority was given to the east–west connections and to those with ports such as Burgas.74 70 I˙lhan Tekeli and Selim I˙lkin, “Osmalı I˙mparatorlug˘u’nda Ondokuzuncu Yüzyılda Araba Teknolojisinde ve Karayolu Yapımındaki Gelis¸meler,” in Çag˘ını Yakalayan Osmanlı! Osmanlı Devleti’nde Modern Haberles¸me ve Ulas¸tırma Teknikleri, ed. Ekmeleddin I˙hsanog˘lu and Mustafa Kaçar (Istanbul: IRCICA, 1995), 406–430. 71 Florian Riedler, “Building Modern Infrastructures on Ancient Routes: Road and Rail Development in Nineteenth-Century Edirne,” in The Heritage of Edirne in Ottoman and Turkish Times: Continuities, Disruptions and Reconnections, ed. Birgit Krawietz and Florian Riedler (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), 446–449. 72 Hommaire de Hell, Voyage en Turquie, 1:218. 73 Milen V. Petrov, “Tanzimat for the Countryside: Midhat Pas¸a and the Vilayet of Danube, 1864–1868” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2004), 135–142. 74 Riedler, “Building Modern Infrastructures,” 449–455.

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In his novel, Verne does not mention any problems, but leaves the impression that Keraban’s coach effortlessly glided along the traditional roads from the moment he left Istanbul. Neither does he mention quarantine stations at the various borders Keraban had to cross. The novel is about speed, and delays are only integrated, if they are caused by dramatic events. Keraban followed the northern route via Kırkkilise (today Kırklareli in Turkey) to the port of Burgas before he regained the classical route to the Danube that Gruneweg and Evliya had already taken. Only in special terrain does the road itself become a topic in Verne’s novel, i. e., when passing the foothills of the Balkans or when crossing through the Danube delta, where the coach got stuck in the mud. After narrowly escaping an attack of wild boars, Keraban crossed into Russia and soon arrived at Odessa.75 In Russia, too, overland transport was a challenge. Until the eighteenth century, when the central state began to invest more into the construction and maintenance of roads, most particularly into the improvement of the connection between Moscow and the new capital of St. Petersburg, rivers served as the main arteries of trade and travel.76 In winter 1584, on their way to Moscow, even Gruneweg and his wagon-using Armenian merchants transferred to river barges at Kiev to go up the Desna. Only when the river began to freeze, sledges were hired to continue the way. When the ice proved thick enough, they used the river itself as a carriageway.77 Following the Napoleonic wars, a new road construction program was implemented in Russia. Between 1817 and 1833, the road between Moscow and St. Petersburg was upgraded to a macadamized highway, and other important connections followed, mainly those leading to Russia’s western border. The coach companies that operated on the main lines from the 1820s revolutionized not only the velocity, but also the culture of travel in Russia.78 In New Russia, road construction remained a permanent issue throughout the nineteenth century. Before 1850, it seems that the province did not have a single modern road.79 In his account of his first trip to the northern Black Sea region, Hommaire de Hell deplored the generally bad condition of the roads that were only laid out as dirt tracks but were not macadamized (chaussées). An additional 75 Verne, Kéraban, I.6. 76 Tracy Nichols Busch, “Connecting an Empire: Eighteenth-Century Russian Roads, from Peter to Catherine.” The Journal of Transport History 29, no. 2 (2008). 77 Gruneweg, Aufzeichnungen, 2:898–914. 78 Alexandra Bekasova, “The Making of Passengers in the Russian Empire: Coach-Transport Companies, Guidebooks, and National Identity in Russia, 1820–1860s,” in Russia in Motion: Cultures of Human Mobility Since 1850, ed. John W. Randolph (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012). 79 Cvetkovski, Modernisierung durch Beschleunigung, 163.

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Fig. 2: Keraban’s coach. Illustration by L. Benett from J. Verne, Kéraban-le-têtu (Paris: Hetzel, 1883), 56. Source: gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque nationale de France.

problem was the lack of bridges that made traveling especially difficult in the rainy seasons of spring and autumn, when roads turned into mud and small creeks became impassable streams.80 This was a problem not only for travelers, but, more importantly, for the whole economy of New Russia, because most of its grain was transported to the ports of export by ox carts. Only when grain transport increasingly switched to rail in the 1870s did this transport became quicker and more reliable. However, even then transport costs remained comparably high, which was one of the reasons why Russian grain lost its predominant position on the world market in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.81 While traveling in Russia, Keraban’s progress was troubled more by shortcomings of the service infrastructure than by the material condition of the roads. 80 Hommaire de Hell, Les steppes, 1:335–336. 81 Herlihy, Odessa, 64–71, 216–222.

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As in the Ottoman Empire, Keraban made use of the official post stages, but at critical junctures he was delayed because there were no fresh horses available. On one occasion in Crimea, Keraban had to use camels instead of horses as draft animals to be able to continue his journey. This substituting of camels for horses, which was also reported by other travelers, clearly indicated to the reader the arrival in the Orient.82 After crossing the straits of Kerch on a ferry, Keraban continued along the coastal road of the eastern Black Sea coast, crossing the foothills of the Caucasus without any difficulties. The traveler profited from an infrastructure that the Russians had begun to build in the 1850s and by which they were able to subject Circassia, the area north-west of the Caucasus mountains.83 This road formed an alternative to the ancient Transcaucasus route along the coast of the Caspian Sea that had already been mentioned by Evliya, as well as to the ancient mountain route via the Darial gorge to Tiflis. The latter route became known as the Georgian Military Highway when, beginning in the late eighteenth century, the Russian army successively enlarged and paved it and fitted it with bridges for its operations in Transcaucasia.84 During the smooth passage along the eastern Black Sea coast, Verne’s novel suddenly reaches its dramatic climax with the violent death of its main character —at least when we consider objects as actors equal to humans. Near Poti, Keraban’s coach is struck by the train to Tiflis, because it does not clear the tracks in time. In this scene, railways, whose tracks the coach had crossed occasionally— near Istanbul, near Varna, and on the Crimea—, demonstrate their superior power. As the coach was completely destroyed, Keraban’s progress was considerably retarded and the odds in the race to reach Istanbul at a certain date turned against him. Until reaching the Ottoman border at Batumi, the traveling party had to rely on horses, which proved inconvenient, because Keraban was too fat to ride. At last, in a village on the Ottoman side an araba, a peasant cart on two wheels, replaced the coach.85 No sooner than Trabzon, an upgrade becomes possible: the araba is exchanged for a talika,86 “an unshapely wooden box, but on springs and with protection against the rain, which is very comfortable for the Oriental, but can only be used by a European who is not used to sit à la turca if 82 Verne, Kéraban, I.13:152; Edmund Spencer, Travels in Circassia, Krim-Tartary, &c. (London: Colburn, 1837), 2:155. 83 Edmund Spencer, Turkey, Russia, the Black Sea, and Circassia (London: Routledge, 1854), 226–227, 304–305. 84 Nikolas K. Gvosdev, Imperial Policies and Perspectives towards Georgia, 1760–1819 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 60–61; Reinhard Nachtigal, Verkehrswege in Kaukasien: Ein Integrationsproblem des Zarenreiches, 1780–1870 (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2016). 85 Verne, Kéraban, II.2:224. 86 Ibid., II.10:327.

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you should improvise a seat with a suitcase or a bunch of hay with a blanket spread over it.”87

Fig. 3: Anatolian peasant cart. Illustration by L. Benett from J. Verne, Kéraban-le-têtu (Paris: Hetzel, 1883), 224. Source: gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Trabzon had developed into the major port on the Anatolian Black Sea coast, since it had been connected to international steamship lines. Because of the diminished transport costs, British merchants reopened their trade with Persia on the Trabzon–Tabriz route. The land route was still operated with camel caravans, but—in contrast to the early modern trade patterns—now, the import of British goods was more important that the export of Persian silk. Trade along this route peaked in the 1860s, but there was strong competition from the Poti–Tiflis 87 Meyer, Reisebücher, 572. My own translation.

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route by river and road and later also by railway. In the 1880s, Russian protectionist custom duties eventually shut the latter route, and most of the trade deviated to the Persian Gulf.88 Parallel to the boom of trade, the Ottoman government also modernized the road connection from Trabzon to Erzurum. Besides economic considerations, the authorities also awarded the road an important strategic role. After a decade of construction work, the new road was inaugurated in 1871, but remained under constant repair over the next decades.89 Verne mentions this road, which connected Trabzon to the century-old inland trade routes, as well as the caravans that go from the city to Persia.90 But he sends Keraban along the coast, where between Trabzon and Samsun a coastal menzilroute had been established in the nineteenth century.91 From Samsun, Keraban passed the string of smaller Black Sea ports such as Sinop, I˙nebolu, and Ereg˘li as he approached Istanbul. Probably owing to his lack of information on this route, Verne depicts Keraban’s progress as smooth and trouble-free. Only when Keraban’s party attempted to take a shortcut through the interior of the country did the roads become difficult, before it finally reached Üskükar, the quarter on the Anatolian side of the Bosphorus. By literally emerging from the wilderness and stumbling into the modern city, Keraban completed his journey around the Black Sea in exactly 45 days.

Conclusion The routes that criss-crossed the Black Sea region established multiple connections between the coasts, their immediate hinterlands and, in some cases, more distant regions such as the Middle East, Northern Europe or Iran. Together they constituted a flexible mobility space that was the arena of Transottoman social interaction. To examine the role of material objects in this mobility space, this chapter demonstrated how objects were a constituent part of routes defined as durable networks. These networks were formed by the interplay of a heterogeneous set of actors that consisted of natural entities—sea currents, winds, rivers, sandbanks and rocks—, material objects—roads, coaches, rails, quays, 88 Charles Issawi, “The Tabriz–Trabzon Trade, 1830–1900: Rise and Decline of a Route,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 1, no. 1 (1970). 89 Fulya Özkan, “The Role of the Trabzon–Erzurum–Bayezid Road in Regional Politics and Ottoman Diplomacy, 1850s–1910s,” in The Ottoman East in the Nineteenth Century: Societies, Identities and Politics, ed. Yas¸ar Tolga Cora, Dzovınar Derderian, and Ali Sipahi (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016). 90 Verne, Kéraban, II.9:314. 91 Halaçog˘lu, Osmanlılarda Ulas¸ım, 94.

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ships—as well as living beings—merchants, inn keepers, conductors, drivers, camels, horses. While the natural actors in particular were very durable and almost unaffected by time, their involvement in mobility networks was nonetheless mediated by political and technological conditions. The successive incorporation of the whole Black Sea into the Ottoman Empire from the end of the fifteenth century rearranged many routes and stabilized them until the end of the eighteenth century. We are well-informed about these routes by the accounts of human actors in the mobility networks. Three merchants, Gruneweg, Tavernier, and Kleemann, gave detailed information on particular routes, their travel infrastructures and trade opportunities. They were chosen as examples of the enduring trans-regional extent of many mobility networks that we label Transottoman. Of the early modern travelers, Evliya literally had the broadest horizon. As he followed so many different routes across and around the Black Sea, he experienced and described it as a distinctive space embedded in the Ottoman world. The technological development of the nineteenth century did not only fundamentally change the mobility networks. Transottoman routes were substituted for those that connected the region to the flows of globalizing trade and traffic. The political bipartition of the Black Sea further slowly eroded the vision of one region. Around the middle of the century, Hommaire de Hell still could acknowledge many of the old routes because of his interest in history and geography. His itineraries made him the last Transottoman traveler before his untimely death in Isfahan, one of the hubs of early modern Transottoman trade networks. The impression that the Black Sea region was a space of the past is even stronger regarding Verne’s imaginary traveler, Keraban, his itinerary and means of transportation—these are as artificial and fantastic as Verne’s more famous visions of a technological future. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Black Sea as a mobility space had splintered to a large degree, being ruled by different paces of development. Verne’s attempt to sell the Black Sea to his readers as part of the Orient was subverted by the modern mobility networks that even Keraban could not ignore.

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Giurescu, Costantin C. “The Genoese and the Lower Danube in the XIIIth and XIVth Centuries.” The Journal of European Economic History 5, no. 3 (1976): 587–600. Gruneweg, Martin. Die Aufzeichnungen des Dominikaners Martin Gruneweg (1562– ca. 1618) über seine Familie in Danzig, seine Handelsreisen in Osteuropa und sein Klosterleben in Polen, edited by Almut Bues, 4 vols. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2008. Gvosdev, Nikolas K. Imperial Policies and Perspectives towards Georgia, 1760–1819. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000. Halaçog˘lu, Yusuf. Osmanlılarda Ulas¸ım ve Haberles¸me (Menziller). Istanbul: I˙lgi Kültür Sanat Yayıncılık, 2014. Halm, Hans. “Die Entdeckung der Donau als Welthandelsstraße.” Der Donauraum 5 (1960): 92–100. Harlaftis, Gelina. “The Role of the Greeks in the Black Sea Trade, 1830–1900.” In Shipping and Trade, 1750–1950: Essays in International Maritime Economic History, edited by Lewis R. Fischer and Helge W. Nordvik, 63–95. Pontefract: Lofthouse, 1990. Harlaftis, Gelina, and Vassilis Kardasis. “International Shipping in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea: Istanbul as a Maritime Centre, 1870–1910.” In The Mediterranean Response to Globalization before 1950, edited by S¸evket Pamuk and Jeffrey G. Williamson, 233–265. London: Routledge, 2000. Heppner, Harald. “Die großen Wasserstraßen und ihre Bedeutung.” In Der Weg führt über Österreich: Zur Geschichte des Verkehrs- und Nachrichtenwesens von und nach Südosteuropa (18. Jh. bis zur Gegenwart), edited by Harald Heppner, 91–106. Vienna: Böhlau, 1996. Herlihy, Patricia. Odessa: A History, 1794–1914. Sec. ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Heywood, Colin. “Ulak.” The Encyclopaedia of Islam: New Edition 10: 800–801. Hommaire de Hell, Xavier. Les steppes de la mer Caspienne, le Caucase, la Crimée et la Russie méridionale: Voyage pittoresque, historique et scientifique. 3 vols. Paris: Bertrand and Strasbourg: Levrault, 1843–1845. –. Voyage en Turquie et en Perse exécuté par ordre du gouvernement français pendant les années 1846, 1847 et 1848. 4 vols. Paris: Bertrand, 1854–1860. I˙nalcık, Halil. The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age 1300–1600. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973. Issawi, Charles. “The Tabriz-Trabzon Trade, 1830–1900: Rise and Decline of a Route.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 1, no. 1 (1970): 18–27. Kellenbenz, Hermann. “Der russische Transithandel mit dem Orient im 17. und zu Beginn des 18. Jahrhunderts.” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 12, no. 4 (1964): 481–498. King, Charles. “Is the Black Sea a Region?” In The Black Sea Region: Cooperation and Security Building, edited by Oleksandr Pavliuk and Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, 13– 26. London: Routledge, 2016. –. The Black Sea: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Kleemann, Nicolaus Ernst. Tagbuch der Reisen von N.E. Kleemann. Prag: von Schönfeldische Schriften, 1783. Kołodziejczyk, Dariusz. “Inner Lake or Frontier? The Ottoman Black Sea in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” In Enjeux politiques, économiques et militaires en mer Noire (XIVe–XXIe siècles): Études à la mémoire de Mihail Guboglu, edited by Faruk

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Bilici, Ionel Cândea, and Anca Popescu, 125–139. Bra˘ila: Muse´e de Bra˘ila, E´ditions Istros, 2007. –. “Polish-Ottoman Trade Routes in the Times of Martin Gruneweg.” In Martin Gruneweg (1562–nach 1615). Ein Europäischer Lebensweg, edited by Almut Bues, 167–174. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009. Kortepeter, Carl M. “Ottoman Imperial Policy and the Economy of the Black Sea Region in the Sixteenth Century.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 86, no. 2 (1966): 86– 113. Kurat, Akdes Nimet. “The Turkish Expedition to Astrakhan’ in 1569 and the Problem of the Don-Volga Canal.” The Slavonic and East European Review 40, no. 94 (1961): 7–23. Law, John. “On the Methods of Long-Distance Control: Vessels, Navigation and the Portuguese Route to India.” The Sociological Review 32, no. 1 (1984): 234–263. –. “Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering: The Case of Portuguese Expansion.” In The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, edited by Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, 111–134. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. Meyer, Hermann Julius. Meyers Reisebücher: Der Orient. Vol. 2, Syrien, Palästina, Griechenland und Türkei. Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1882. Mitchell, Thomas. Handbook for Travellers in Russia, Poland, and Finland. 3rd rev. ed. London: J. Murray, 1875. Nachtigal, Reinhard. Verkehrswege in Kaukasien: Ein Integrationsproblem des Zarenreiches, 1780–1870. Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2016. Noonan, Thomas S. “The Dnieper Trade Route in Kievan Russia (900–1240 A.D.).” PhD diss., Indiana University, 1979. Özkan, Fulya. “The Role of the Trabzon–Erzurum–Bayezid Road in Regional Politics and Ottoman Diplomacy, 1850s–1910s.” In The Ottoman East in the Nineteenth Century: Societies, Identities and Politics, edited by Yas¸ar Tolga Cora, Dzovınar Derderian, and Ali Sipahi, 19–41. London: I.B. Tauris, 2016. Özveren, Y. Eyüp. “A Framework for the Study of the Black Sea World, 1789–1915.” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 20, no. 1 (1997): 77–113. –. “The Black Sea World as a Unit of Analysis.” In Politics of the Black Sea, edited by Tunç Aybak, 61–84. London: I.B. Tauris, 2001. Pach, Zsigmond Pál. “Die Verkehrsroute des Levantehandels nach Siebenbürgen und Ungarn zur Zeit der Könige Ludwig von Anjou und Sigismund von Luxemburg.” In Europäische Stadtgeschichte in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit, edited by Werner Mägdefrau, 60–91. Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1979. Pakucs-Willcocks, Mária. “Economic Relations between the Ottoman Empire and Transylvania in the Sixteenth Century: Oriental Trade and Merchants.” In Osmanischer Orient und Ostmitteleuropa: Perzeptionen und Interaktionen in den Grenzzonen zwischen dem 16. und 18. Jahrhundert, edited by Robert Born and Andreas Puth, 207–227. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2014. Petrov, Milen V. “Tanzimat for the Countryside: Midhat Pas¸a and the Vilayet of Danube, 1864–1868.” PhD diss., Princeton University, 2004. Pritsak, Omeljan. “The Origin of Rus’.” The Russian Review 36, no. 3 (1977): 249–273. Riedler, Florian. “Building Modern Infrastructures on Ancient Routes: Road and Rail Development in Nineteenth-Century Edirne.” In The Heritage of Edirne in Ottoman

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and Turkish Times: Continuities, Disruptions and Reconnections, edited by Birgit Krawietz and Florian Riedler, 207–232. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020. –. “Integrating the Danube into Modern Networks of Infrastructure: The Ottoman Contribution.” Journal of Balkan and Black Sea Studies 3, no. 5 (2020): 97–120. Riedlmayer, András. “Ottoman-Safavid Relations and the Anatolian Trade Routes: 1603– 1618,” Turkish Studies Association Bulletin 5, No. 1 (1981): 7–10. Robarts, Andrew. Migration and Disease in the Black Sea Region: Ottoman-Russian Relations in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries. London, New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. Schenk, Frithjof Benjamin. Russlands Fahrt in die Moderne: Mobilität und sozialer Raum im Eisenbahnzeitalter. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2014. Sifneos, Evrydiki. Imperial Odessa: Peoples, Spaces, Identities. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Spencer, Edmund. Travels in Circassia, Krim-Tartary, &c. London: Colburn, 1837. –. Turkey, Russia, the Black Sea, and Circassia. London: Routledge, 1854. Taeschner, Franz. Das anatolische Wegenetz nach osmanischen Quellen. Vol. 1. Leipzig: Mayer & Müller, 1924. Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste. The Six Voyages of John Baptista Tavernier, Baron of Aubonne, Through Turky, into Persia and the East-Indies, For the Space of Forty Years. London: Godbid and Pitt, 1677. Tekeli˙, I˙lhan, and Selim I˙lkin. “Osmalı I˙mparatorlug˘u’nda Ondokuzuncu Yüzyılda Araba Teknolojisinde ve Karayolu Yapımındaki Gelis¸meler.” In Çag˘ını Yakalayan Osmanlı! Osmanlı Devleti’nde Modern Haberles¸me ve Ulas¸tırma Teknikleri, edited by Ekmeleddin I˙hsanog˘lu and Mustafa Kaçar, 395–440. Istanbul: IRCICA, 1995. Veinstein, Gilles. “From the Italians to the Ottomans: The Case of the Northern Black Sea Coast in the Sixteenth Century.” Mediterranean Historical Review 1, no. 2 (1986): 221– 237. Verne, Jules. Kéraban-le-Têtu. Paris: Hetzel, 1883. Vinogradov, Jurij G. “Der Pontos Euxeinos als politische, ökonomische und kulturelle Einheit und die Epigraphik.” In Pontische Studien. Kleine Schriften zur Geschichte und Epigraphik des Schwarzmeerraumes, edited by Heinz Heinen, 1–73. Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1997. Williams, David M, and John Armstrong. “An Appraisal of the Progress of the Steamship in the Nineteenth Century.” In The World’s Key Industry, edited by Gelina Harlaftis, Stig Tenold, and Jesus M. Valdaliso, 43–63. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

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Albrecht Fuess

Mobile Metals: On the Role of Natural Resources in the Geopolitical Context of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

Introduction Within the framework of the Transottomanica project, mobility serves as a lens to trace connectivity and networks in the wider region under study. Besides the mobility of individuals or groups, the project also considers the role of circulating material objects and artifacts. Some commodities like vegetables can only be transported over a small distance before they go bad. In contrast, luxury goods are in such a demand on global markets that they are frequently transported over long time periods and vast distances from the producer to the client. Some goods like leather have to be processed to make them capable of traveling and being transported. In the case of the metal resources, which will be examined in this article, the mobility depends upon the location where they are found and where they can be processed. It is easier, for example, to extract metals in regions that are populated and offer good living conditions as the extraction and transport require considerable manpower. It goes without saying that societies that possess metals, especially bullion, within their realms have an advantage in terms of material wealth as compared to societies who have to import them. Therefore, in recent decades scholars have stressed that the study of materiality and resources is important, or as Christine Mitchell puts it: “The study of media, culture and communication has undergone a theoretical and methodological turn towards materiality.”1 As the quotation shows as well, materiality was looked at mainly in written sources and cultural practices. Looking at the objects themselves seemed to be of less significance. However, in the context of the cultural turn in the humanities from the early 1970s onward, materiality and objects and their function in human communication processes became more and more connected to the actual objects and artifacts, and the study of material 1 Christine Mitchell, “Materiality: Tracking a Term, Tackling a Turn,” in Kritische Perspektiven: ‘Turns’, Trends und Theorien, ed. Michael Guno, Martin Kypta, and Florian Öchsner (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2011), 281.

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culture entered human sciences as a vital and thriving field. Remarkably, only German scholarship has actively declared a material turn, an expression that is only randomly found in the texts of non-German scholars.2 However, what is meant by the term material turn are aspects that go back to the works of Arjun Appadurai and Bruno Latour. Appadurai stressed the fact that “a commodity is a thoroughly socialized thing” and its sociability lies in its social potential to be more than only a product, artifact etc.3 In stating this, Appadurai combines the research on materiality with social science and underlines the fact that commodities have the potential to “act” as well. Taking this further and following the point of view that commodities or things can be used in human communication processes, Bruno Latour and others have developed since the 1980s the actor-network theory (ANT). The ANT sees networks not as solid constellations or established parts of social structures; it does not look at settled things, “but [at] what moves and how this movement is recorded”.4 What has been criticized is that ANT does presume that things have agency and does not restrict agency to humans or other living creatures. On the contrary, ANT just states that networks are created by movement and actors can be human, nonhuman or whatever else.5 This of course contradicts customary anthropomorphic scientific approaches and therefore criticism had to be expected, but the discussion did reach a new level. Going too much into this scientific debate is beyond the scope of this paper, but in the case of the study of raw materials and especially metals, ANT provides some vital insights. As long as metals lie in their deposits, their role in creating networks is nil. Only when detected, refined, processed, transformed, sold and resold do they gain a role and importance. These specific roles, however, are dependent upon time and space. In the sixteenth century, bronze, for example, played a tremendous role and was more valuable than in other time periods. Gold has had a high price since very early history, but in other circumstances, an iron dagger has been much more useful, especially in open combat. Killing someone with a weapon made of gold, for example, is much more expensive and diminishes the chances of the attack succeeding as gold is not as hard as iron. Therefore, the value and usefulness of an object changes in specific circumstances, and the value is activated and augmented mostly through the object

2 Just as brief evidence: The only Wikipedia article on material turn is in German. 3 Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 6. 4 Bruno Latour, “On Actor-Network Theory: A Few Clarifications,” Soziale Welt 47, no. 4 (1996): 378. 5 Ibid., 373.

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being moved. This is somewhat comparable to the physical process of moving a body high up a mountain, which increases its potential energy. Raw materials therefore become material commodity only when moved out of the depositories. However, in regions where you do not have the raw materials, you need to import them in a refined state such as melted, purified, etc. They have to be extracted and transported with the technical means of the time. Moreover, you have to pay the producer the price for extracting and producing an exportable product. If products like iron, copper and tin are important from a military perspective, export from enemy countries might even be restricted and a premium has to be paid to smugglers. It is often very complicated to obtain the quantities needed for your plans. The state with a greater amount of metal ores is at an advantage. Not only can it maximize its profits in times of peace, it can also limit its exports in times of war. Bullion in the form of gold and silver coins is easier to transport and smuggle and not as easy to control as the large quantities of metal needed for the weapons industry. There is an even larger reservoir of clients who are interested in precious metals than in ordinary metals, which usually mainly interest official actors. This can be shown by the depicted hierarchy of metals in historic encyclopaedias concerning metals. Since antiquity, these encyclopaedias start with the description of gold, before descending to iron and lead.6 Another interesting aspect for historians to look at is the lifecycles of materiality and objects, i. e. the “biographies of objects.”7 In the context of natural resources, it is quite intriguing to follow metals from the ore to the product. However, while of course special objects have a distinct life span, in the case of metal, at least the core ingredients cannot disappear and are therefore somehow immortal, if we want to stick with the metaphor of a biography. They can be changed, transformed, re-used, quite often melted or buried in the ground again, but they will just not go away. Therefore, it might be wise not to speak of biographies of raw materials, but to only use the life metaphor if these materials have come to life by being transformed into objects, like coins, jewelry, artifacts, weapons or tools. However, metals are vital for human societies and the question of control over them is a frequent matter of dispute. As will be shown in the following, it is good to have the raw material and control its subsequent mobility; it is bad, though, if you have neither of the two. 6 Bruno Reudenbach, “‘Gold ist Schlamm’: Anmerkungen zur Materialbewertung im Mittelalter,” in Material in Kunst und Alltag, ed. Monika Wagner and Dietmar Rübel (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2002), 4. 7 Hans Peter Hahn and Hadas Weiss, “Introduction: Biographies, Travels and Itineraries of Things,” in Contexts of Material Culture through Time and Space, ed. Hans Peter Hahn and Hadas Weiss (Oxford: Oxbow, 2013), 2.

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Environmental Geography At this point, geography and the availability of metal resources come into play. Questions of geography have long been neglected in historiography, but as Karl Schlögel reminds us: “History does not occur solely in time, but in space as well” (Geschichte spielt nicht nur in der Zeit, sondern auch im Raum).8 Karl Schlögel, who is a specialist in Eastern European History, warns against over-emphasizing textual evidence. As the learning of the necessary language skills is very time consuming, historians of the Middle East want to show their hard-earned knowledge and unwittingly tend to neglect the space where history happens. Space and geography play a decisive role in explaining specific historic settings. For example, the geopolitical settings of the Mamluk, the Ottoman and the Safavid Empires of the fifteenth and the early sixteenth century were quite different from each other. By comparing the Mamluks with the Ottomans and the Safavids through a geopolitical lens, it becomes clear that in their clashes over political supremacy, they fought as well over resources and fertile land. The Ottoman-Mamluk war of 1485–1491 over Cilicia was in its main parts a military quest for wood in times of a very ambitious Ottoman naval program under Sultan Bayezid II.9 But as we will see below, the availability of metals also played a vital part in the ongoing struggle.

Ottoman Environmental Geography In the course of the fifteenth century, the Ottoman Empire emerged as an important state with territories in Asia and Europe alike. That meant that it had enemies on both continents. The Kingdom of Hungary presented the most prominent European enemy at its northwestern border. In the east, large parts of Anatolia were already under Ottoman control, but the Ottomans tried to expand their territories to the detriment of the Mamluks and the successor states of the Ilkhanids. In 1481 at the time of the death of Sultan Mehmed II (r. 1451–1481), the size of the empire was around 850,000 square kilometers. Combined with its vassal states like the large Khanate of the Crimea, the Ottoman Empire had reached a very impressive extent.10 Therefore, the Ottomans controlled large

8 Karl Schlögel, Im Raume Lesen wir die Zeit: Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik, third ed. (Frankfurt: Fischer 2009), 9. 9 Hans Joachim Kissling, “Betrachtungen über die Flottenpolitik Sultan Bayezids II. (1481– 1512),” Saeculum 20, no. 1 (1969): 35–43. 10 Josef Matuz, Das Osmanische Reich: Grundlinien seiner Geschichte (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985), 68.

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parts of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea and developed an interest in naval warfare and transport. The European part of the realm was the economic powerhouse in the fifteenth century. The Balkans represent a very mountainous region where basins and high mountain ranges interchange. The Danube and its confluents transport water through the Wallachian plain into the Black Sea. Advantageously, this plain had enough irrigation for agriculture, and the Danube could be used as a means of transportation. The climate of the Balkans is Mediterranean at the coast and moderate in the continental inland. In its northern part and in the mountainous regions, winters are frosty and full of snow and summers are hot and dry. The European part represents the more fertile environment and the economic backbone of the empire. According to Halil I˙nalcık, in 1475, it counted for 80 percent of Ottoman state revenues.11 The Asian side of the Ottoman Empire covered large parts of Asia Minor. It bordered on the Black Sea in the north, on the Aegean Sea in the west and on the Mediterranean in the south. The eastern border was disputed with its eastern neighbors; in the northern part of the frontier, until 1473 and the battle of Bashkent, conflicts arose with the Turcoman federation of the Aq Qoyunlu, and after 1501 with the emerging Safavid realm. Conflicts with the Mamluks on the southern part of the eastern border were bolstered through the existence of the principalities of the Turcoman beys of Ramadan and, more importantly, Dhu’lQadr. In principle, the Mamluks regarded these two border regencies as their vassals, but the Ottomans increasingly contested this view as they succeeded in increasing their influence in the region throughout the fifteenth century. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the beys of Ramadan were more or less already leaning toward the Ottoman side.12 Within the Anatolian part, the Black Sea region is constituted by a rocky coast with rivers that cascade through the gorges of the coastal ranges. Further inland, mountains form a chain parallel to the Black Sea coast. Access to the hinterland is provided by a few narrow valleys cutting through the high mountains, which rise from 1,800 to 4,000 meters. The slopes of the mountain range are forested at the northern side toward the Black Sea. The Anatolian plateau begins at the Aegean coastal plain and stretches inland between the two mountainous regions in the north and the south into Central Anatolia, where the northern and southern mountain ranges converge. The semi-arid Anatolian plateau varies in elevation 11 Halil I˙nalcık, An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, vol 1, 1300–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 55. 12 Shai Har-El, Struggle for Domination in the Middle East: The Ottoman-Mamluk War, 1485–91 (Leiden: Brill, 1995).

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from 600 to 1,200 meters from west to east. Forests are limited to the northwest and northeast of the plateau. To the south of the Anatolian plateau, the Taurus Mountain range towers over 2,000 meters high and separates the narrow coastal plains of the Mediterranean from the plateau. The climate of the region of the east where the Pontus and Taurus mountains converge into the Anti-Taurus (up to 3,000 meters) is rough and is more severe than on the Anatolian plateau, which has a continental climate with distinct seasons. In the east of the plateau, the temperature often descends to minus thirty or forty degrees in winter. Summers are hot and dry, with temperatures above thirty degrees Celsius. In the coastal regions of the Mediterranean, winters are considerably milder and the temperature does not fall below five degrees.

Safavid Environmental Geography The Safavid Empire of the early sixteenth century extended geographically over present-day Iran, Azerbaijan and Iraq, until large territories in the north and west including Iraq were ceded to the Ottomans after the treaty of Amasya in 1555. The size of the realm covered some 2,000,000 square kilometers under Shah Ismail (r. 1501–1515). However, in contrast to the Ottoman realm at the same time, around 70 percent of the Safavid state consisted of deserts and wastelands. The largest deserts were the salty Dasht-e Kavir in the center and the Dasht-e Lut in the south. Like Anatolia, much of the geography of the Safavid Empire was constituted by a vast, high plateau 1,200 to 1,500 meters above sea level.13 The regions of the plains of Khu¯zista¯n and the Persian Gulf littoral represented the lowest parts, both of which are just above sea level. The coastal strip to the south of the Caspian Sea was even slightly below sea level. The central plateau is framed by high mountain ranges: the Alborz mountain range with its peak, Mount Damavand, at 5,604 meters to the north and the Zagros to the west and south. There are few large rivers in Safavid Iran. The Ka¯ru¯n, the biggest river, flows from the Zagros mountain range through Khu¯zista¯n and into the Persian Gulf. The River of Isfahan, the Za¯yanda-ru¯d loses itself like other rivers on the plateau in sands or swamps.14 Iran’s climate varies considerably and is mostly arid and semiarid, but subtropical along the Caspian coast and the northern forests. At the Caspian Sea, temperatures stay just below zero in winter and reach around 30 degrees in 13 David Morgan, Medieval Persia, 1040–1797 (London: Longmann, 1988), 4. 14 Ibid.

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summer. In the Zagros basin, you find severe winters below zero, heavy snowfall and hot summers. The central and eastern basins are arid and very hot. The coastal regions at the Gulf have mild winters, but very humid and hot summers. The regional geography was perhaps harder for humans than within the Ottoman Empire, but it had strategic advantages. The Safavids managed to hold on to large parts of their empire at the beginning of the sixteenth century because Ottoman armies with their heavy equipment were reluctant to follow the Safavids over the high mountain passes of the Zagros into the Iranian high plateau as they feared that they could not find provisions in a hostile, arid area. Geography plays a decisive role and has lasting consequences in human history. In the sixteenth century, despite their ongoing military successes in open battles, the Ottomans could never surpass Safavid defensive strategies, which used the terrain so well. In contrast to the Ottoman Empire, in the Safavid Empire, large and heavy items like metals were not transported by roads or shipping, but with caravans on minor roads, which could become difficult to pass once it rained.

Mamluk Environmental Geography Like its contemporary Ottoman Empire, the Mamluk Empire was composed of two major parts, Egypt and Greater Syria (bila¯d al-sha¯m). Altogether, the size of the Mamluk Empire reached around 1,350,000 square kilometers with Egypt alone counting for 1,000,000 square kilometers. However, only five percent of Egyptian soil is arable, i. e. the area along the river Nile and its delta. Egypt’s borders are the Mediterranean to the north, the Red Sea and the Sinai to the east, Sudan to the south and Libya in the west. Apart from the Nile valley, the majority of the Egyptian landscape is composed of sandy deserts, especially toward Libya in the west. It rains infrequently in Egypt and usually only in the winter months. Temperatures average around 30–40 degrees Celsius in summer. In winter, the average temperature ranges between 13 and 21 degrees Celsius. Snowfall can occur on the mountains of Mount Sinai and quite rarely in some of the northern coastal cities. The Nile is essential for Egypt’s agriculture as every year a predictable flooding replenishes the soil and allows a consistent harvest all through the year. Egypt is separated from Syria by the arid and rocky Sinai Peninsula. The mountains and rocks are considerably smaller toward the north of the Sinai. At the Mediterranean shore, there is a large coastal plain, which ensured good transportation ways between Egypt and Syria and was vital for the connection of both parts. Geographically, Syria is quite distinct from Egypt. It consists of two parallel highland ranges, running from north to south divided by a rift-valley. In the north of this rift-valley lies the bed of the river Orontes. The Jordan and Leontes

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run southwards through the central sector of the rift-valley. The Leontes flows into the Mediterranean north of Tyre, in contrast to the Jordan continuing southwards to the Dead Sea. The western highland range includes the Jabal Ansa¯rı¯ya in the north, Mount Lebanon in the center and the Palestinian hills in ˙ the south. The coastal plain is narrow, but important settlements have been located there since Antiquity. The Anti-Lebanon Mountains are generally lower than the Lebanon range. On the eastern side of the Anti-Lebanon starts the Syrian Desert, which extends to the Euphrates.15 The climate of central Syria is usually dry. Agriculture is limited to the coastal regions and the north. In the semi-arid steppe to the east of the mountain ranges, annual temperature can vary between five degrees Celsius in winter and 37 degrees Celsius in summer. The Mediterranean coast is warm and very humid. Especially on top of the mountain ranges, there can be frost and regular snowfall in winter. The Hijaz with the Holy Cities Mecca and Medina also belonged to the Mamluk Empire, but their strategic role was limited, as were agricultural opportunities. However, the region contributed through the yearly pilgrimage to the income of the Mamluk sultanate. Tab. 1: Geographical settings at the end of the fifteenth century in the Middle East End of the Ottoman Empire fifteenth century size ca. 850,000 km2 (without vassal states) landscape mountain ranges, plains, high plateaus and green coastal strips; surrounded by sea; fertile to semi-arid soil; land is mainly arable; large forests.

Safavid Empire

Mamluk Empire

2,000,000 km² (with Iraq) mountain ranges in the west and north. 10 percent of soil arable without irrigation; 20 percent with irrigation.

ca. 1,350,000 km2 Egypt: Nile valley and desert; Syria: mountain ranges, plains and green coastal areas in the west; desert in the east. 4 percent of land exploitable in Egypt; in Syria around 20 percent

What can be deduced so far when looking at the geographical setting of the three empires from a comparative perspective is that they were very large entities; however, the Mamluk and Safavid Empires were covered with deserts and semiarid regions to a much greater extent than the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans, in contrast, had a long way to travel from the north of the Balkans to Eastern Anatolia, though they also still had long coastlines and forests to build a fleet, 15 Peter Malcolm Holt, The Age of the Crusades: The Near East from the Eleventh Century to 1517 (London: Longman, 1986), 2–3.

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which made transportation easier. Most importantly, the Ottomans could feed more people through their agricultural production, especially that of the Balkans, than their rivals, and they also had more water through rain, lakes and rivers. So, we already see some advantages for the Ottomans in this geopolitical comparison, but what does this mean for the question of natural resources and their transportation? To answer this question, the geographical settings of the Near and Middle East are also important. It was in these living conditions of the geographical and environmental settings that resources like metals had to be extracted, refined and then transported by humans.

Metal As for the resource situation in the Middle East in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, we have to take into account the geographical conditions for finding and extracting metal ores. Many regions of the Middle East are uninhabited deserts with very harsh living conditions. Finding metal, extracting and refining it represented an incredibly hard task with the contemporary technology. Nowadays, we know about deposits in the deserts of Egypt and Iran, but the contemporaries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries did not, and presumably, they would not have been able to build the necessary infrastructure beyond big cities and the caravan routes. Still, in ancient Egypt, mines were exploited in the eastern desert and the Sinai, but presumably the weather was wetter at that time and minerals were extracted from the surface. “Most of the deposits are small or occur in concentrations that are too low to be commercially profitable today. This has been attributed to the fact that such minerals are usually found near the tops of igneous formations, and in the case of the Red Sea Mountains and Sinai, many hundreds of feet of this kind of rock have already been eroded away, taking their valuable deposits with them.”16 In the time under scrutiny for the present study bullion was very important as were all kinds of metals that could be used in the emerging firearms industry. Therefore, these two sorts of metals will be examined with additional scrutiny in the following.

16 Bonnie M. Sampsell, The Geology of Egypt: A Traveller’s Handbook (Cairo: AUC Press, 2014), 161.

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Bullion For the Middle East, a vital resource is bullion, which can be minted in order to boost the economy. Unfortunately, bullion is found only very seldom in the Middle East and West-Asia. In this context, a quotation from the ninth century Arab Christian Author Jibrı¯l ibn Nu¯h from his book Kita¯b al-i‘tiba¯r fı¯ al-malaku¯t (Book of the Consideration of the Heavenly Realm) comes to mind, in which he explains that the scarceness of bullion is in fact a blessing from god: “Just look how precious gold and silver are and how the reason of humans fails when they try to produce them themselves. If they should succeed in learning how to make them, then there would be much too much gold and silver on earth. The price would fall and they would become worthless. In the end, they could not be used any more in selling and buying, other transactions, and for the taxes the sultan receives. It would make no more sense to gather them and save them for one’s children. God has given humankind the ability to make brass out of copper, glass from sand and other things, which do not harm. One can remark therefore that people can experiment with things which are not dangerous to them but are forbidden to do so with dangerous things.”17 The problem in the context of Mamluks, Ottomans and Safavids, however, was not that they were not able to produce it, but that only the Ottomans had ores on their land and were able to extract them in larger quantities.

Gold Gold was very scarce in the Mamluk Empire and the European import was much needed. Originally, gold had come to Egypt from the Wa¯dı¯ al-‘Ala¯qi region to the southeast of Aswan, and often gold had been taken as well from Pharaonic graves, as according to some authors many ores had already been heavily exploited in Pharaonic times.18 Amar Baadj, in contrast, has pointed out that these mines were still working in the Fatimid period, but that the Ayyubid takeover of Egypt in the late twelfth century caused a disruptive change, as the Ayyubids needed much more gold to fight the crusaders. Gold resources were therefore exploited more quickly. In addition to that, the region in the Eastern Desert fell into turmoil. Thereafter it 17 Here cited after: Wim Raven, “Gottesbeweis: Der Schöpfer beugt Inflation vor,” Lesewerk Arabisch und Islam, June 2, 2018, https://lesewerkarabisch.wordpress.com/2018/06/02/gotte sbeweis-der-schoepfer-beugt-inflation-vor-2/. 18 Sampsell, The Geology of Egypt, 160.

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seems that the mines were again used by the Mamluks until around the year 1350, when there was nothing more to extract with the known technology.19 External gold came mainly from West Africa, the famous bila¯d al-takru¯r.20 Mamluk chronicles preserve the memory of two visits by rulers from bila¯d altakru¯r in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries on their way to Mecca. They flooded the market with such amounts of gold that the dinar lost considerably in value vis-à-vis the silver dirham. In 1324, the ruler of Mali (bila¯d al-takru¯r) Mansa¯ al-Mu¯sa¯ gave the sultan a himl (camel load) of pure gold and apparently ˙ carried with him as much as 100 himl of gold, which he generously distributed ˙ among the people during his pilgrimage.21 But around the fourteenth century, the gold of bı¯la¯d al-takru¯r did not reach Egypt any longer. According to Labib, the Europeans managed to redirect this gold trade to the north through trade with the Maghreb. When the Portuguese installed themselves at the coast of West Africa, they took a firm grip on the African gold.22 Gold had therefore to be bought very expensively from European traders, which resulted in a gold flow from Europe to Alexandria and constantly increasing prices.23 In general, the loss of the trans-Saharan gold trade meant a heavy blow for the Mamluk economy and caused a fluctuating exchange rate between gold dinars and silver dirhams, which unsettled the markets.24 After the conquest of Cyprus in 1426, the ransom of 200,000 ducats the Cypriots had to pay for the release of King Janus resulted in a considerable influx of gold. The first payment of 50,000 ducats arrived in Muharram 831/ October ˙ 1429 in Cairo. Sultan al-Ashraf Barsba¯y (r. 1422–1438) immediately had the ducats re-minted as so-called ashrafı¯ dinars, and this helped the Mamluk Empire to abandon the use of the Venetian ducat.25 In the following time period, the annual tribute of 8,000 ducats the kingdom of Cyprus had to pay to the Mamluks,

19 Amar Baadj, “The Political Context of the Egyptian Gold Crisis during the Reign of Saladin,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 47, no. 1 (2014): 121–138. 20 Subhi Y. Labib, Handelsgeschichte Ägyptens im Spätmittelalter (1171–1517) (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1965), 261. Takru¯r was the name of a regency in West Africa around the year 1000. In later Arabic usage people from West Africa were then generally called ahl al-takru¯r, see: Umar al-Naqar, “Takru¯r: The History of a Name,” The Journal of African History 10, no. 3 (1965): 365–374. 21 Al-Maqrı¯zı¯, Kita¯b al-sulu¯k li-ma‘rifa duwal al-mulu¯k, ed. Muhammad Mustafa¯ Ziya¯da (Cairo: ˙˙ Matba‘a Lajnat al-Ta’lı¯f wa-Tarjam wa-Nashr, 1956), 2:255. ˙ ˙ Handelsgeschichte Ägyptens, 272. 22 Labib, 23 David Jacoby, “Between Venice and Alexandria: Trade and the Movement of Precious Metals in the Early Mamluk Period,” Mamluk Studies Review 21 (2018): 115–136. 24 Ian Blanchard, Mining, Metallurgy and Minting in the Middle Ages, vol. 3, Continuing AfroEuropean Supremacy, 1250–1450 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2005), 1191–1207. 25 Jere L. Bacharach, “The Dinar vs. the Ducat,” International Journal for Middle East Studies 4 (1973): 88.

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ensured a steady source for re-minting.26 Minting was carried out in Alexandria and Cairo. The general gold scarcity let Sultan Qa¯yitba¯y (r. 1468–1496) debase the dinar and fix the weight at 3.37 grams instead of the 3.41 grams under Sultan Barsba¯y (r. 1422–1438). The Mamluk historian Ibn Iya¯s tells us furthermore that the gold dinars under the last Mamluk sultan Qansawh al-Ghawrı¯ represented a tre˙ mendous cheating of the people.27 During the period under study here, the main exporter of gold to Mamluk Alexandria was Venice. In the fifteenth century, they purchased gold from Upper Hungarian mines through merchants from present day Sopron (Ödenburg).28 The first descriptions of Ottoman gold coins are to be found in European sources from the 1420s onward. Before that time, the Ottomans relied on silver coins. The influence of the Venetian ducat was clearly felt in the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman authorities followed the Mamluk example and struck gold coins similar to the ducat in 1477 after a fifteen-year war with Venice had ended. The new gold coins were called hasene or sultani and their weight (3.572 gr. to 3, 51 gr) and fineness was slightly greater than the ashrafı¯ and the ducat. “Despite two small adjustments in the sixteenth century, the weight and the fineness of the sultani remained basically unchanged until late in the seventeenth century.”29 The introduction of gold coins in the Ottoman Empire acknowledged the great role of gold coins in the Mediterranean trade, where the Venetian ducat had become the prime means of international trade. Minting its own gold coins displayed the importance of the Ottoman Empire to the Europeans and the Mamluks alike as the leading Muslim gold coin until that time had been the Mamluk ashrafı¯. The gold of the Ottomans came from Europe in exchange for Oriental goods, or it was extracted in the Ottoman Balkans.30 In contrast to the Ottomans and Mamluks, the Safavids were not able to install a long-lasting gold currency. Iran was said to have had a gold mine in Khorasan, but it does not seem to have still been in use in Safavid times. The region of Iran always encountered problems acquiring gold because all of it had to be imported.31 Therefore, not enough gold coins could be struck on a regular basis. In 26 Albrecht Fuess, “Was Cyprus a Mamluk Protectorate? Mamluk Influence on Cyprus between 1426–1517,” Journal of Cyprus Studies 11, no. 28–29 (2005): 22. 27 Ibn Iya¯s, Bada¯’i‛ al-zuhu¯r fı¯ waqa¯’i‛ al-duhu¯r, ed. Mohamed Mostafa, (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1960), 4:153. 28 Blanchard, Mining, 3:1008. 29 S¸evket Pamuk, “Evolution of the Ottoman Monetary System,” in An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, ed. Halil I˙nalcık (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 2:953–954. 30 Pamuk, “Evolution of the Ottoman Monetary System,” 2:955. 31 Rudi Matthee, Willem Floor, and Patrick Clawson, The Monetary History of Iran: From the Safavids to the Qajars (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013), 30.

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the Ilkhanid period, the traditional name for the Islamic gold coin dinar was even used for silver coins as well.32 At the beginning of the Safavid era, there was not even a current name for gold coins. They were commonly just referred to as tala, i. e. gold pieces, but sometimes named ashrafı¯s as well, using the name of the Mamluk gold coin.33 Shah Ismail struck these new gold coins, copying the Mamluk and Ottoman monetary binary gold and silver system.34 This remained an exception, though. Until its end in the eighteenth century, the Safavid Empire was very much in need of bullion and therefore seems to have increased its silk production according to its trade needs as Floor and Clawson mention: “The argument here is that Safavid Iran’s foreign trade was driven by its need to acquire gold and silver. Those metals served as the basis for Safavid Iran’s money supply and were also needed to finance imports from the economic superpower of the day, India. Our argument suggests that Europe had ample gold and silver, taken from Latin America, which Europeans used to finance luxury imports. In our view, the Safavid silk trade was to a considerable extent the by-product of Latin America’s exploitation, European desire for silk, and Iran’s bullion needs.”35

Silver The Silver dirham is the second classic Muslim coin. Traditionally a gold dinar of one mithqa¯l (4.25 gr.) corresponded to 20 to 25 dirham. After the introduction of the gold ashrafı¯ of 3.41 gr. following the Venetian ducat, the ratio changed. The silver dirhams of the early fifteenth century were thinner, lighter, but of finer silver than their predecessors.36 A main problem in the production of silver coins in the Mamluk Empire of the fifteenth century was that silver became very scarce for decades. As silver had to be imported from Europe, this reflected the “silver famine” of the time in Europe. Mines in Central Europe had been emptied with the customary extraction methods, and many of the precious metals had already left Central Europe in the direction of the Levant in order to pay for spices and other goods; 32 Monika Gronke, Derwische im Vorhof der Macht: Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte Nordwestirans im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1993), 232. 33 Willem Floor, Economy of Safavid Persia (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2000), 71. 34 Ibid., 76. According to table 2 (Floor, Economy of Safavid Persia, 72). Floor argues that there are two different gold coins under Ismail, a so-called mithqa¯l gold coin of 4 grams and an ashrafı¯ of 3.45 grams. 35 Willem Floor and Patrick Clawson, “Safavid Iran’s Search for Silver and Gold,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 32, no. 3 (2000): 352. 36 Warren Schultz, “The Monetary History of Egypt, 642–1517,” in The Cambridge History of Egypt, ed. Carl Petry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1:336.

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from the Levant precious metals flowed to India.37 According to Peter Spufford, the African and Hungarian gold and the Serbian and Bosnian silver did not suffice at that time to compensate for the outflow to the East, which challenged the international economy.38 In Egypt, the sultans were accused of having deliberately stopped minting silver coins.39 There was even the claim that the silver was disappearing to Europe from the Mamluk Empire.40 When Martin Claus of Gotha then solved the problem of flooding in the silver mines in the late fifties of the fifteenth century, mining resumed to pre-crisis levels.41 Moreover, new mines were discovered like the one at Schwats in Tyrol in 1448 and later near the town of Joachimsthal in Bohemia in 1516. Unfortunately, there were no deposits of silver ore in Mamluk Egypt to exploit. Because of the scarcity of silver in the fifteenth century, copper was increasingly used for coins. “As late as 1436 the Mamluk regime banned the use of silver for making vessels and utensils, and the people of Cairo were repeatedly instructed to deliver whatever silver they had to the mint.”42 The difficulty of obtaining a consistent amount of silver and its high price due to transportation from Europe were the reasons why silver coins were debased regularly in the Mamluk Empire of the fifteenth century.43 The Ottomans minted their first silver coin in 1326 during the reign of Sultan Orhan (1324–1360). Its name was akçe, meaning “white.” In the European west, it was called asper. It weighed 1.15 grams in the beginning of the fourteenth century and although its weight did change during the following periods, its fineness was upheld up to the end of the seventeenth century.44 Mints were established in close proximity to the silver mines in the Balkans. The akçe was the basic monetary unit of the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth century. During the above-mentioned “silver famine,” the Ottomans then prohibited the exportation of bullion in order not to be dependent on European producers. All bullion, be it local or imported, had to be transported to the mints in order to produce coins.45

37 Peter Spufford, Money and its Use in Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 355. For the negative trade balance of the Middle East vis-à-vis India, see as well the contribution of Arkadiusz Blasczcyk in the present volume. 38 Ibid., 356. 39 Al-Maqrı¯zı¯, Sulu¯k, 4:28–29. 40 Boaz Shoshan, “Exchange-Rate Policies in Fifteenth Century Egypt,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 29, no. 1 (1986): 42. 41 M.M. Postan, Medieval Trade and Finance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 171. 42 Shoshan, “Exchange-Rate Policies,” 50; Al-Maqrı¯zı¯, Sulu¯k, 4:977; Ibn Iya¯s, Bada¯’i‛, 2:170. 43 Blanchard, Mining, 3:1209. 44 Pamuk, “Evolution of the Ottoman Monetary System,” 950. 45 Ibid., 951.

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Safavid silver coins had a very fine alloy and were smelted and purified before being coined as Persian currency.46 However, all silver for the production of coins had to be imported.47 Similar to gold, the main source of import in order to mint silver coins in the Safavid realm was the Ottoman Sultanate. Therefore, the Ottoman enemy had a strategic advantage over its Iranian neighbor in its ability to make the bullion flow run dry.48 The name of the silver coins of the Safavids was shahis. The denomination dirham was apparently also used, but there was no actual coin with that name.49

Copper Paying with copper coins was limited to local business and trade and was usually not accepted by officials when dealing with the state or paying taxes. Speaking of copper involves repeating the same principal outline that was already mentioned for silver as they shared similar trajectories and supply properties. The Ottoman Empire had its own abundant resources and Mamluks and Safavids had to import them, which made it more expensive for them.50 Lately Francesco Appelaniz has shown that starting with 1495, copper played an increasing role in Mamluk Venetian commerce, as Venice now paid for spices with copper instead of silver. The increased imports of the Venetians apparently reached the ears of the Ottomans as well, who flooded the copper market of Alexandria.51 It is unclear why copper became important in these transactions. I would not think that the Venetians forced it on the Mamluks, as at that period of time silver was available again and Venetians could have traded with it. I would argue that the Mamluks did not demand copper to mint it, but rather that they needed it for military purposes as copper is a vital ingredient for the casting of bronze cannons.52

46 47 48 49 50

Floor, Economy of Safavid Persia, 73. Floor, Clawson, “Safavid Iran’s Search,” 352. Matthee, Floor, and Clawson, The Monetary History of Iran, 51. Floor, Economy of Safavid Persia, 73. S¸evket Pamuk, A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 38. 51 Francisco Javier Appellániz, Pouvoir et finance en Méditerranée pré-moderne: Le deuxième état mamelouk et le commerce des épices (1382–1517) (Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2009), 251–252. 52 For the issue of the development of Ottoman and Mamluk firearms, see: Albrecht Fuess, “Les Janissaires, les Mamlouks et les armes à feu: Une comparaison des systèmes militaires ottoman et mamlouk à partir de la moitié du quinzième siècle,” Turcica 41 (2009): 209–227.

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Tab. 2: The bullion situation in the Middle East in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

gold silver

Ottoman Empire scarce, some mines in the Balkans abundant

copper abundant

Safavid Empire Mamluk Empire none, had to be imported none, had to be imported mainly via the Ottomans mainly from Venice to Alexandria none, had to be imported none, had to be imported mainly via the Ottomans mainly from Venice to Alexandria some, used for minting

scarce, had to be imported

Metals for Military Use Concerning ore deposits, Agoston states, “Unlike many of its rivals, the Ottoman Empire possessed rich ore deposits that were crucial in establishing domestic production capabilities.”53 Iron and copper could be found in large quantities; however, the Sultanate lacked tin. This could constitute a problem as the majority of Ottoman cannons were cast of bronze, a copper/tin alloy. Tin therefore quite often had to be smuggled from Europe, as the pope had banned the export of tin, copper and iron to the enemies of Christianity.54 But in the sixteenth century, enough European states—especially the Anti-Habsburg powers—provided the Ottomans with the necessary tin. Here geography came into play as well in the form of favorable borders, trade routes and geostrategic constellations. Thanks to almost constantly good diplomatic relations with Poland-Lithuania, Ottoman merchant-envoys could buy large amounts of tin there. Still, they were occasionally subjected to arbitrary transgressions by Polish local customs officials and their noble superiors. It is probably for that reason that they were buying mostly scrap metal in the form of old cups, plates, and bottles, which were transported in barrels mixed with other metal scraps of iron, brass, etc.—they were not only cheaper, but also more likely to pass customs controls. On one occasion, in 1561, a Polish voivode confiscated, among other things, four barrels of tin (48 kantar, i. e. close to three tons), whose return Sultan Süleyman demanded for several years with unknown result.55 Persia gained increased access to the Russian market, a potential source of re-exported European tin, after the 53 Gabor Agoston, Guns for the Sultan: Military Power and the Weapons Industry in the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 165. 54 On the tin routes from Europe to the Middle East, see Blanchard, Mining, 3:1544. 55 Andrzej Dziubin´ski, Na szlakach Orientu: Handel mie˛dzy Polska˛ a Imperium Osman´skim w XVI–XVIII wieku (Wrocław: Leopoldinum, 1998), 149–151; Zygmunt Abrahamowicz, ed., Katalog dokumentów tureckich, vol. 1 (Warsaw: Pan´stwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1959), no. 164, p. 162–163, no. 170, p. 167, no. 189, p. 185.

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conquest of Astrakhan in 1556, but it was not before 1687 that the tsar lifted the ban on the export of iron, copper and tin to Persia.56 Iron was found especially in present-day Bulgaria and Anatolia. Lead was extracted in the empire’s silver mines.57 Copper was found in rich deposits in the Balkans and Anatolia, especially at the Black Sea near Trabzon.58 Regarding the natural resources necessary to produce gunpowder, firearms and cannons, from our modern perspective Safavid Persia was potentially richly endowed with a variety of metals and minerals. However, most of the potential mining sites were located in very hostile natural surroundings and less populated areas so that transportation would have been very expensive. Therefore, most mineral resources were imported, despite the fact that they could have been found and exploited in Iran itself.59 Lead mines were found near Kerman and Yazd, but demand was apparently not very high. Iron was to be found at several places in Safavid Persia, and there was no scarcity of this element. Apparently, there was no great shortage of copper either, but the main purpose for which people extracted it was coinage.60 In contrast to the Ottomans and Safavids, the Mamluks completely lacked many of these important military resources. It seems that iron was very sparse in Mamluk times. In Syria only one iron mine near Beirut is mentioned by the Arab traveler Ibn Battu¯ta for the year 1326. From Beirut, the iron was then exported to ˙˙ ˙ Egypt.61 In general, it seems that there was a shortage of metals and gunpowder ingredients in the Mamluk Empire as the Mamluks had to ask the Ottomans for these materials when they fought the Portuguese in naval encounters in the Red Sea at the beginning of the sixteenth century.62 In order to become self-sufficient in the making of guns and casting of cannons, the Mamluks looked for necessary ingredients like copper in their realm. Apparently, there were some ores for local minting use, but nothing compared to the Ottoman mines. In January 1509 the architect (al-mi‘mar) Khayrbak, who had been ordered to ‘Aqaba to erect towers and a khan, sent stones to Sultan Qa¯nsawh al-Ghawrı¯ in which he claimed to have found copper (al-nuha¯s al˙ ˙ asfar). The sultan had the metal inside the stones cast and found out that there ˙ 63 were only negligible quantities of copper inside. 56 Jarmo T. Kotilaine, Russia’s Foreign Trade and Economic Expansion in the Seventeenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 451–453. 57 Agoston, Guns for the Sultan, 174. 58 Ibid., 171. 59 Ibid., 303. 60 Ibid., 66, 305. 61 Ibn Battu¯ta, Rihlat Ibn Battu¯ta (Beirut: Da¯r Sa¯dir, 1964), 62. ˙˙ ˙ ˙Gunpowder˙˙and ˙ Firearms in the ˙ Mamluk Kingdom: A Challenge to a Medieval 62 David Ayalon, Society (London: Frank Cass, 1978). 130, fn. 258. 63 Ibn Iya¯s, Bada¯’i‛, 4:144; Ayalon, Gunpowder and Firearms, 130, fn. 258.

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Copper, lead and tin were apparently very scarce. In Syria, the Ottomans would later on extract saltpeter in large quantities near Aleppo and sulfur at the Dead Sea.64 The Mamluks did not know, so it seems, about these saltpeter deposits. When they prepared for their naval encounters against the Portuguese in 916/ 1510–11, they requested material help from the Ottomans and received 300 guns, 30,000 arrows, copper, iron, timber and large quantities (40 qantar) of good ˙ quality saltpeter (ba¯ru¯d mutayyab).65 However, because this assistance by the ˙ Ottomans did not happen on a regular basis, the Mamluks had to rely much more on Venetian imports and help from European renegades in order to cast cannons and receive firearms. In the fifteenth-century Middle East, other very important natural resources for the cannon and firearms industry also were in demand. Saltpeter (potassium nitrate) was necessary for gunpowder production. There are large natural deposits in India, Arabia and China, where suitable climatic conditions prevail, i. e. high temperatures and humidity. In most of Europe, this important ingredient of gunpowder was lacking except for in Ottoman lands.66 For example, there were production centers in the sancak of Silistre and near Edirne in the Balkans. In Asia Minor, there were several sites, and by the seventeenth century, thousands of families were making saltpeter for the gunpowder industries.67 Sulfur could not be extracted from Ottoman soils in the same ample qualities as saltpeter. It was very hard work to extract the sulfur from the ore, and in the Ottoman Empire, only insufficient quantities of it could be found in the provinces of Van, Moldavia, on the Island of Melos, and especially in Macedonia.68 Because of the relative scarcity of sulfur, it had to be transported from a distance for production processes in the gunpowder mills. The charcoal needed for melting processes was produced in Asia Minor, especially from oak.69 In the 1510s, a man came to the Mamluk sultan Qa¯nsawh al-Ghawrı¯ and told ˙ him that he had found saltpeter near al-Karak. He had it cooked and remarked that this was excellent saltpeter. The sultan rejoiced and bestowed upon the man 10 dinars. He ordered the extraction of much more of the saltpeter.70 However, even if saltpeter was now available in larger quantities, the lack of sulfur (kibrı¯t) was severely felt during preparations for an expedition against the Portuguese in 919/1514. The price soared, but still little was found.71 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

Agoston, Guns for the Sultan, 99–100. Ibn Iya¯s, Bada¯’i‛, 4:201. Agoston, Guns for the Sultan, 97. Ibid., 98. Ibid., 100. Ibid., 103. Ibn Iya¯s, Bada¯’i‛, 4:204. Ibid., 355.

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Tab. 3: The situation of metals and products for military use in the Middle East of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. End of fifteenth Century saltpeter

Ottoman Empire

Safavid Empire

potentially there, but not mined in the early sixteenth century sufficient, long potentially there, unclear, if altransportation ready mined in large quantities distance in the sixteenth century

shortage, in 1516 large quantities were found near al-Karak shortage at the beginning of the sixteenth century

charcoal

abundant

enough, if needed

iron

abundant

abundant

could be obtained, but not an everyday good scarce, only one mine near Beirut

copper tin

abundant not sufficient, had to be imported

sufficient –

scarce scarce

lead

abundant

sufficient

scarce

sulfur

abundant

Mamluk Empire

Conclusion What conclusion to draw from this discussion of geography and resources, especially when knowing that the Ottomans conquered the Mamluk Empire completely in 1517 and crushed the Safavids decisively in 1514? The Ottoman Empire had the largest size, the largest population, and all of the resources needed for the context of the early sixteenth century. On top of that, they had the best infrastructure to ensure the mobility of metals. The Safavids were second to the Ottomans in terms of population and resources, but they had just constituted their empire and were not yet aware of all geographical potentials. In any case, their potentials were not as high as in the Ottoman realm. The Mamluks stood no real chance; they were disfavored in the aspects depicted here. However, these disadvantages had come with deliberate choices they had made at the beginning of their reign. They had declined to expand towards Western Anatolia and deliberately chosen to destroy the harbors at the Syrian-Palestinian coast in order to prevent the crusaders from coming back. Still, the situation at the end of the fifteenth century was against them; for example, the sheer distance between Cilicia and the Mamluk heartland in Egypt made it impossible to exploit the forests in the same manner in which the Ottomans did later. Another aspect that

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went against them was that transportation within their empire was comparatively easy on land routes, so they did not really need to build a transport fleet as the Ottomans did. The Mamluks did not need harbors for inner Mamluk local trade or transportation of agricultural products. The trade routes from the capital of Cairo to Syria were quite comfortable along the coastline, until they then split from Gaza to the different cities in Syria. There was no need for ships, and traveling by land was usually more secure. In contrast, the trade routes inside Anatolia were difficult due to the high mountain ranges. That is why the Ottomans chose to transport goods by ships. It was also vital for them because they possessed many islands. Once they started to build a transport navy, they had to protect it with a military navy and hired seaman from the islands as experts. So, this development was triggered by geography. And of course, the Ottomans had the necessary resources of timber and metal for building a fleet and army fit for the sixteenth century. So, if we look at the Middle East at the specific point in time at the turn from the fifteenth to the sixteenth century, we can acknowledge that all went in favor of the Ottomans. They had all the resources needed to be highly competitive at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and no matter how hard the Safavids and Mamluks tried to overcome this obstacle, they were doomed to fail. At least the Safavids were definitely saved by geography and the Iranian high plateau, but the same roads that made transport easy within the Mamluk Empire let the Ottomans advance quickly with the help of their navy toward Cairo. The Ottomans had the best success not only in extracting metals from the ores, but also in ensuring their mobility and bringing them to the places where they needed them just in time.

Bibliography Abrahamowicz, Zygmunt, ed. Katalog dokumentów tureckich. Vol. 1. Warsaw: Pan´stwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1959. Agoston, Gabor. Guns for the Sultan: Military Power and the Weapons Industry in the Ottoman Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Appadurai, Arjun. “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value.” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 3–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Appellániz, Francisco Javier Ruiz de Galarreta. Pouvoir et finance en Méditerranée prémoderne: Le deuxième état mamelouk et le commerce des épices (1382–1517). Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2009. Ayalon, David. Gunpowder and Firearms in the Mamluk Kingdom: A Challenge to a Medieval Society. London: Frank Cass, 1978.

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Baadj, Amar. “The Political Context of the Egyptian Gold Crisis during the Reign of Saladin.” International Journal of African Historical Studies 47, no. 1 (2014): 121–138. Bacharach, Jere L. “The Dinar vs. the Ducat.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 4 (1973): 77–96. Blanchard, Ian. Mining, Metallurgy and Minting in the Middle Ages. Vol. 3, Continuing Afro-European Supremacy, 1250–1450. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2005. Dziubin´ski, Andrzej. Na szlakach Orientu: Handel mie˛dzy Polska˛ a Imperium Osman´skim w XVI–XVIII wieku. Wrocław: Leopoldinum, 1998. Fuess, Albrecht. “Was Cyprus a Mamluk Protectorate? Mamluk Influence on Cyprus between 1426–1517.” Journal of Cyprus Studies 11, no. 28–29 (2005): 11–28. –, “Les Janissaires, les Mamlouks et les armes à feu: Une comparaison des systèmes militaires ottoman et mamlouk à partir de la moitié du quinzième siècle.” Turcica 41 (2009): 209–227. Floor, Willem. Economy of Safavid Persia. Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2000. – and Clawson, Patrick. “Safavid Iran’s Search for Silver and Gold.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 32, no. 3 (2000): 345–368. Gronke, Monika. Derwische im Vorhof der Macht: Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte Nordwestirans im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1993. Har-El, Shai. Struggle for Domination in the Middle East: The Ottoman-Mamluk War 1485– 91. Leiden: Brill, 1995. Hahn, Hans Peter and Hadas Weiss. “Introduction: Biographies, Travels and Itineraries of Things.” In Mobility, Meaning and Transformations of Things: Shifting Contexts of Material Culture through Time and Space, edited by Hans Peter Hahn and Hadas Weiss, 1–14. Oxford: Oxbow, 2013. Holt, Peter M. The Age of the Crusades: The Near East from the Eleventh Century to 1517. London: Longman, 1986. Ibn Battu¯ta, Rihlat Ibn Battu¯ta. Beirut: Da¯r Sa¯dir, 1964. ˙˙ ˙ ˙ ˙˙ ˙ ˙ Ibn Iya¯s, Bada¯’i‛ al-zuhu¯r fı¯ waqa¯’i‛ al-duhu¯r. Edited by Mohamed Mostafa, 4 vols. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1960–1975. I˙nalcık, Halil, ed. An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire. Vol 1, 1300–1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Jacoby, David. “Between Venice and Alexandria: Trade and the Movement of Precious Metals in the Early Mamluk Period.” Mamluk Studies Review 21 (2018): 115–136. Kissling, Hans Joachim. “Betrachtungen über die Flottenpolitik Sultan Bayezids II. (1481– 1512).” Saeculum 20, no. 1 (1969): 35–43. Kotilaine, Jarmo T. Russia’s Foreign Trade and Economic Expansion in the Seventeenth Century. Leiden: Brill, 2004. Labib, Subhi Y. Handelsgeschichte Ägyptens im Spätmittelalter (1171–1517). Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1965. Latour, Bruno. “On Actor-Network Theory: A Few Clarifications.” Soziale Welt 47, no. 4 (1996), 369–381. Al-Maqrı¯zı¯. Kita¯b al-sulu¯k li-ma‘rifa duwal al-mulu¯k. Edited by Muhammad Mustafa¯ ˙ ˙˙ Ziya¯da. 4 vols., 12 parts. Cairo: Matba‘a Lajnat al-Ta’lı¯f wa-Tarjam wa-Nashr, 1934–1973. ˙ Matuz, Josef. Das Osmanische Reich: Grundlinien seiner Geschichte. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985.

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Matthee, Rudi, Willem Floor, and Patrick Clawson. The Monetary History of Iran: From the Safavids to the Qajars. London: I.B. Tauris, 2013. Morgan, David. Medieval Persia 1040–1797. London: Longmann, 1988. Mitchell, Christine. “Materiality: Tracking a Term, Tackling a Turn.” In Kritische Perspektiven: ‘Turns’, Trends und Theorien, edited by Michael Guno, Martin Kypta, and Florian Öchsner, 281–300. Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2011. ‘al-Naqar, Umar. “Takru¯r: The History of a Name.” The Journal of African History 10, no. 3 (1969): 365–374. Pamuk, S¸evket. “Evolution of the Ottoman Monetary System.” In An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire. Vol. 2, 1600–1914, edited by Halil Inalcik, 947–985. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Postan, M.M. Medieval Trade and Finance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Raven, Wim. “Gottesbeweis: Der Schöpfer beugt Inflation vor.” Lesewerk Arabisch und Islam, June 2, 2018, https://lesewerkarabisch.wordpress.com/2018/06/02/gottesbeweisder-schoepfer-beugt-inflation-vor-2/. Reudenbach, Bruno. “‘Gold ist Schlamm’: Anmerkungen zur Materialbewertung im Mittelalter.” In Material in Kunst und Alltag, edited by Monika Wagner and Dietmar Rübel, 1–12. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2002. Sampsell, Bonnie M. The Geology of Egypt: A Traveller’s Handbook. Cairo: AUC Press, 2014. Schultz, Warren. “The Monetary History of Egypt, 642–1517.” In The Cambridge History of Egypt. Vol. 1, Islamic Egypt, 640–1517, edited by Carl Petry, 318–338. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Schlögel, Karl. Im Raume Lesen wir die Zeit: Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik, third ed. Frankfurt: Fischer, 2009. Shoshan, Boaz. “Exchange-Rate Policies in Fifteenth Century Egypt.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 29, no. 1 (1986): 28–51. Spufford, Peter. Money and its Use in Medieval Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

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Anthony T. Quickel

Cairo and Coffee in the Transottoman Trade Network

Few beverages are so absolutely identified with a culture as is coffee with the Ottoman Empire. After a rocky start, it was ubiquitous and beloved, and its rise was nearly analogous to the economic wealth of the empire. However, for centuries before, it was spices that were the supreme global commodity moving across the known world. With respect to the Islamicate ecumene, they moved from the Indian Ocean through the Red Sea to Cairo and then onward into the Mediterranean basin and beyond. Driven largely by the desire to secure spices and other commodities and to cut out intermediaries, Europe set sail starting a so-called Age of Discovery. The emergence of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean, and then later the Red Sea, began a conflict between that kingdom and the Mamluk Sultanate alongside the emerging Ottoman Empire; this struggle may be understood as one of the contributing factors in the Ottoman conquest of Mamluk Egypt.1 Primarily concerned with control over the trade networks that supplied spices to Cairo and the Mediterranean, the Mamluk spice trade declined during the fifteenth century. While Lane convincingly showed a recovery in this trade a century later, another commodity was also on the rise.2 Coffee, which had only recently made its debut, was increasingly traded along the same supply networks that had solely carried spices in the previous period. With origins in Ethiopia and Yemen, coffee spread throughout the Hijaz and initially arrived in Cairo with Sufis and Yemeni students and merchants. Within a few decades, this caffeinated commodity could be found throughout the Eastern Mediterranean and Ottoman world setting off controversy and religious debates nearly wherever it appeared, yet this innovation was to stay. Egypt and Yemen became intertwined in the early Ottoman period for both political and economic reasons. And eventually the great Ottoman households of 1 Andrew C. Hess, “The Ottoman Conquest of Egypt (1517) and the Beginning of the SixteenthCentury World War,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 4, no. 1 (1973): 55–76. 2 On this issue, see: Frederic C. Lane, “The Mediterranean Spice Trade: Further Evidence of its Revival in the Sixteenth Century,” The American Historical Review 45, no. 3 (1940): 581–590.

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Cairo rose alongside the profits of their trades, especially in Yemeni coffee. Soon, the coffee trade also extended throughout the other Ottoman realms and then onward into Europe. The movement and trade of this commodity, outside of the Red Sea, remains understudied. This paper seeks to better understand the Transottoman trade of coffee as a commodity, from its entry through the Red Sea to its onward exchange with faraway Ottoman provinces, which were increasingly becoming addicted. In doing so, this paper will show how the emergence of coffee initially supplemented and then replaced the spice trade, using the infrastructure of that formerly-supreme good alongside the strengthening political and economic ties between Egypt and Yemen. Furthermore, it will look at the economic effects this had on the emergence and rise of the great Ottoman households in Cairo in the facilitation of that exchange. Finally, it will argue that coffee was a truly Ottoman commodity, found throughout the empire, and across its borders, being a truly Transottoman good. Doing this, an overview of the fuller picture of the Transottoman coffee trade may emerge and the networks that bound it together may be more completely envisioned and understood.

Coffee Wakes Up: The Emergence of a Drink The Ottoman chronicler, ibn al-‘Ima¯d al-Hanba¯lı¯ (d. 1679 CE) relates a tale from ˙ Abu¯ al-Tayyib al-Ghazzı¯ (d. 1651 CE) who tells that the prophet Solomon was the ˙ first to roast coffee beans, which he got from Yemen, in order to cure the sickness of a town. After imbibing, the afflicted were cured completely. After this, according to the story, coffee was forgotten again until the sixteenth century CE, when it was rediscovered.3 While a wonderful tale, al-Ghazzı¯ is certainly wrong on one account: the dating of coffee’s rediscovery. While it is not possible to exactly pinpoint the emergence of coffee both generally and into the Islamic world, more specifically, the drink is certainly visible in Arabic sources starting from the fifteenth century. That coffee had its origins in the Ethiopian highlands is well accepted, and later European writers created a tale of a shepherd being the first to realize its powers by watching the beans’ stimulating effect on his sheep.4 From Ethiopia, the beans made their way to Yemen, a fact realized by al-Jazı¯rı¯ (c. 1558), who was an important sixteenth-century writer on the topic of coffee. In addition to discussing its provenance, he also warns his reader about dating the drink’s introduction to the Arab/Islamicate world: 3 Ibn al-‘Ima¯d al-Hanba¯lı¯, Shadhara¯t al-dhahab fı¯ akhba¯r man dhahab (Cairo: Maktabat al˙ Qudsı¯, 1931/32–32/33), 8:40. 4 Ralph S. Hattox, Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), 13.

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We say [that this account pertains to] the Yemen alone [lit., not anywhere else] because the appearance of coffee [was] in the land of Ibn Sa‘d al-Dı¯n and the country of the Abyssinians and of the Jabart, and other places of the land of ‘Ajam, but the time of its first [use] is unknown, nor do we know the reason.5

While Hattox and others place the arrival of coffee in the Islamic world, and in Cairo specifically, in the second half of the fifteenth century—on the basis of other Arabic sources—al-Jazı¯rı¯ states emphatically that it arrived in Cairo at the beginning of the sixteenth century with Sufis.6 He tells that Sufis learned of the drink’s stimulant properties and realized that it would allow them to stay awake for the performance of their religious exercises and rituals.7 That the bean, its liquid byproduct, and its introduction into the Islamicate world were associated with the Sufi movement may be seen throughout the historical chronicles.8 This particular association, on the part of the chroniclers, seems to be well-founded in that the drink’s initial consumption was well established among Sufi orders following its introduction. As Sufi worship services (dhikrs) are generally held at night, the adherents found a welcome aid in the completion of their devotion. Thus, Hattox argues that it is possible to conclude—on the basis of no earlier references in the historical sources—that coffee was first introduced into the Islamicate lands from Yemen in the mid-fifteenth century. And given the near complete association by late medieval and early modern writers of coffee with Sufi adherents, it is likewise reasonable to assume that it was this movement that served as the first transmitter.9

Coffee on the Move: The Hijaz, Cairo, and Beyond It is not possible to know how quickly and widespread coffee consumption became among the general population in Yemen, or whether it was Sufis or merchants who first moved the commodity northward into the Hijaz. As Sufis were not necessarily reclusive, unlike Christian monastics, their presence in Yemeni society may have spread coffee usage amongst the population there. From awareness of its consumption, merchants may have moved the coffee northward into the Hijaz; however, Sufis themselves may have performed this function as well. In any case, coffee first arrived in the Hijaz in the late fifteenth 5 Translation, after Hattox, Coffee, 13. He cites: ‘Abd al-Qa¯ dir ibn Muhammad al-Jazı¯rı¯, ‘Umdat ˙ Chrestomathie arabe, al-safwah fı¯ hill al-qahwah, 3 vols., sec. edition, ed. A.I.S. De Sacy (Paris: ˙ 1:145.˙ 1826), 6 Hattox, Coffee, 14–16, 22; al-Jazı¯rı¯, ‘Umdat al-safwah, 1:142–145. ˙ 7 al-Jazı¯rı¯, ‘Umdat al-safwah, 1:142–143. ˙ 8 Hattox, Coffee, 14–26. 9 Ibid., 25.

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century.10 While it is not possible to precisely date the coffee beans’ first arrival there, its first concrete date in the historical record comes from its first, of many, controversies: 1511 CE. This controversy, narrated again by al-Jazı¯rı¯, arose after the muhtasib (a market inspector-cum-overseer of public values) of Mecca came ˙ across a group of men drinking coffee and behaving as if they were consuming alcohol in a tavern. Alarmed by the situation, he chastised the men and set a meeting of the scholars of Mecca to determine the drink’s religious permissibility.11 While the scholars ruled that the drink was impermissible, as a result of a sham trial—in al-Jazı¯rı¯’s opinion—the official verdict from Cairo, which arrived later, ruled against social gatherings, but not the drink itself.12 Coffee was now permissible, and its popularity and consumption would only grow. Coffee’s first arrival in Cairo is a bit easier to date than its arrival in Hijaz. The chronicler ‘Abd al-Ghaffa¯r states that the commodity first arrived in the Mamluk capital during the first decade of the sixteenth century. He places it squarely in the Yemeni living quarters (riwa¯q al-Yaman) of al-Azhar.13 Again, the Sufis living in these lodgings were said to be the first consumers, and the chronicler states that a ceremonial manner for its consumption had developed: the shaykh would circulate the coffee among the worshiping Sufi devotees during dhikr.14 Soon thereafter, coffee consumption was spreading to the neighborhood surrounding al-Azhar, where it was no longer only part of the Sufi religious circle, but spreading amongst the general population as well. It is probably from the demand that this consumption generated that the budding starts of the coffee trade began. Thus, by the end of the first decade of the sixteenth century, coffee had firmly entered the Islamicate culinary and cultural scene, and its consumption was well established. In both the Hijaz and Cairo, coffee arrived from Yemen, and it was probably amongst Sufi spiritual circles that the drink first made its entrance. How it spread onward to Istanbul, however, is not as clear. According to Hattox, the first mention of coffee with regards to the Ottomans is during the Hajj of 1544 CE, when the Ottoman sultan banned both its consumption and sale. However, this “prohibition was observed for all of about a day, Jazı¯rı¯ tells us, and then things returned to normal.”15 The renowned Ottoman scholar Kâtib Çelebi (d. 1657 CE) records that coffee first arrived in Asia Minor in 1543 CE and “was

10 11 12 13 14 15

Ibid., 28–29. Ibid., 30–37. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 27–28. Ibid., 38.

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met with a hostile reception, fetwas [sic] being delivered against it” as elsewhere.16 In the end, he says that the prohibitions came to nothing, and “one coffee-house opened after another.”17 Yet, Kafadar places the arrival of coffee in Istanbul even earlier than these coffeehouses of Asia Minor: “When the grand admiral [Barbaros Hayreddin Pasha] endowed his home as one of the properties committed to the family waqf that he registered in 1539, the property included a kahve odası, a coffee chamber.”18 So by the early to mid-sixteenth century, coffee was certainly in the Ottoman capital. Peçevi (d. 1640 CE) dates the city’s first coffeehouse—as a commercial institution—to 1554–55 CE, when two Syrians from Aleppo, named Hakam and Shams, opened a shop.19 This is the traditional story of the arrival of ˙ the coffeehouse in Istanbul. However, on the basis of a dated chronogram, Kafadar places the advent of the coffeehouse in Istanbul slightly earlier in 1551– 52 CE.20 Everywhere coffee went, from the Hijaz to the Ottoman capital, it stirred up controversy in its wake. Condemnation and prohibition followed, but when these were turned aside, the road was opened for coffee’s trade and distribution. With demand growing and an expanding market throughout Western Europe, the Red Sea trade routes between Egypt and Yemen became the central stage of the coffee trading world for over a century and formed the political and economic yoke of those two regions.

Egypt and Yemen: Bound in Politics and Coffee Coffee became popular at an auspicious moment. Hanna demonstrates that the rising price of spices around 1600—vis-à-vis the emergence of European spicetrading competitors—was coupled with the new popularity of and demand for coffee.21 This confluence of effects aided and accelerated the commodity’s commercialization. Meanwhile, coffee’s rise was historically concurrent with the 16 Kâtib Çelebi, The Balance of Truth, transl. and ed. Geoffrey L. Lewis, (London: Allen and Unwin, 1957), 60. 17 Ibid. 18 Cemal Kafadar, “How Dark is the History of the Night, How Black the Story of Coffee, How Bitter the Tale of Love: The Changing Measure of Leisure and Pleasure in Early Modern Istanbul,” in Medieval and Early Modern Performance in the Eastern Mediterranean, ed. Arzu Öztürkmen and Evelyn Birge Vitz (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 247. 19 I˙brahm Peçevi, Ta¯rı¯h-i Peçeîi (Istanbul: Matbaa-i Amire, 1864), 1:363. 20 Kafadar, “How Dark,” 249. 21 Nelly Hanna, “Coffee and Coffee Merchants in Cairo, 1580–1630,” in Le commerce du café avant l’ère des plantations coloniales, ed. Michel Tuchscherer (Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 2001), 92–97. Also see: André Raymond, Artisans et commerçants au Caire XVIIIe siècle (Damascus: Institut français de Damas, 1973–1974), 107–156.

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Ottomans’ efforts to establish sovereignty over Yemen. The Ottoman conquest of Egypt (1517 CE) solidified the empire’s control over the Red Sea and the Hijaz, and it was from Egypt that the Ottomans would extend their reach to Yemen and the source of the coffee trade.22 Yemen was, while under Ottoman rule (1538– 1636 CE), one of the empire’s most geographically distant and isolated territories. During this period, Egypt and Yemen were tethered together by both the political contrivances of the empire as well as the economic links of trade. So intense were these connections that Hathaway argues that the two provinces “existed in a virtual symbiosis.”23 Many of the governors of Egypt were sent to Yemen to assert Ottoman authority and administer the province. Likewise, when successful in Yemen, an administrator could be sent to govern Egypt.24 Egypt’s Ottoman military regiments were also instrumental in pacifying and stabilizing Yemen and strengthened the ties between the two provinces; this fact was to be critical to the rise of janissary households within the Red Sea coffee trade.25 Because of these political ties, it is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that many of the governors and military rulers involved in the pacification and eventual rule of Yemen were also of the very same households that became most heavily involved in the trade of the province’s chief commodity. The dynamics of these military/merchant households among the Egyptian and Yemeni elite have been partially studied.26 Hathaway has shown how several Turkic military families asserted themselves in Cairo’s political and commercial scenes, serving within the political power structure of both Cairo and the ports of Yemen while also profiting greatly from gaining access to the trade networks of the Red Sea.27 Several of the households made their fortunes in controlling the tax-farms related to the ports involved in the coffee trade. Egypt’s janissary officers were firmly in control of these iltizams, especially of the customs placed on the Red Sea and Nile ports through which Yemeni coffee passed. The Gedik 22 Michael Winter, Egyptian Society under Ottoman Rule, 1517–1798, (London: Routledge, 1992), 17. 23 Jane Hathaway, “The Ottomans and the Yemeni Coffee Trade,” Oriente Moderno, Nuova serie, 25/86, no. 1 (2006): 162. 24 Ibid.; and, Winter, Egyptian Society, 19, 31, 38–39, 43–44. 25 A household is a group of individuals, who may or may not be kin, under the patronage of an individual or the individual’s line. In the case of the janissary households of Cairo, these were groups of individuals or clients, both civilian and military, that centered around the patronage and support of a janissary officer and his family. For a further explanation, see: Jane Hathaway, The Politics of Households in Ottoman Egypt: The Rise of the Qazdag˘lıs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 17–31. 26 André Raymond, “Soldiers in Trade: The Case of Ottoman Cairo,” Bulletin of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies 18, no. 1 (1991): 16–37. 27 Jane Hathaway, A Tale of Two Factions: Myth, Memory, and Identity in Ottoman Egypt and Yemen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), passim; eadem, The Politics, passim; eadem, “The Ottomans,” 161–171.

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household held tax-farms on the customs collected at the Mediterranean ports of Alexandria, Rosetta, and Damietta.28 While other goods were also passing through these ports, coffee from Yemen was one of the major commodities traded there. André Raymond recounts that “in 1720, when difficulties appeared for the departure of particularly important cargoes, the consul [French consul in Egypt] deplored the death of [Gedik] Mehmet, Grand Customs Officer and Kiaya [sic] of the Janissaries […] as ‘our only protection.’”29 Hathaway states that, he— Gedik Mehmed Kahya—“allowed French merchants to export coffee from Egypt without paying exorbitant taxes, doubtless in exchange for reciprocal favours.”30 It is worth noting that before these households became holders of the iltizams relating to the customs houses, Jews and Copts were frequently their multazims (tax farmers)—at least initially.31 The amount of control non-Muslims had over these customs houses—along the Nile or on the Mediterranean or Red Seas— varied over time and was subject to the edicts of both the Ottoman governor and the sultan.32 Customs duties on Yemeni coffee and other Red Sea commodities were not only levied in the Mediterranean ports, nor was it only there that the Egyptian janissary households had monopolies. Throughout the Red Sea as well, officers from Egypt’s janissary regiment were involved in trade and owned the ships that plied the sea.33 Additionally, these households also used their political control over the annual pilgrimage to Mecca in conjunction with exerting influence over the Red Sea trade.34 Hathaway explains the dynamic: Duties connected to the annual pilgrimage to Mecca added to the Janissaries’ control over the transport of coffee. Red Sea ships typically stopped at Jidda, where coffee was sold to pilgrims. Ships coming from Egypt with grain for the Holy Cities could presumably reload at Jidda with coffee. Three Janissary officers from Egypt served as official protectors of the pilgrimage caravan all along its route; by the early 18th century,

28 Hathaway, “The Ottomans,” 169. 29 Raymond, Artisans, 177, “en 1720, au moment où des difficultés apparaissent pour la sortie de cargaisons particulièrement importantes, le consul déplore le décès de Mehmet, Grand douanier et Kiaya des Janissaires […] notre seule protection.” 30 Hathaway, “The Ottomans,” 169. 31 Nelly Hanna, “Egyptian Civilian Society and Tax-Farming in the Aftermath of the Ottoman Conquest,” in Conquête ottomane de l’Égypte (1517): Arrière-plan, impact, échos, ed. Benjamin Lellouch and Nicolas Michel (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 219–220; Winter, Egyptian Society, 199–204. 32 Winter gives a detailed overview of non-Muslims in administering Egypt’s customs houses and the challenges they faced. See Winter, Egyptian Society, 199–204. 33 Hathaway, “The Ottomans,” 169. ˘ âwisˇ al34 Ibid.; and see, for example: Michel Tuchscherer, “Le Pèlerinage de l’émir Sulaymân G Qazduglî, sirdâr de la caravane de la Mekke en 1739,” Annales Islamologiques 24 (1988).

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officers of the Kazdag˘lı household monopolized all these posts, creating a lucrative nexus of pilgrimage and coffee trade.35

Even as these linkages between Egypt and Yemen were built during the years of Ottoman control of the latter province, trade was seemingly not disrupted by the end of the empire’s sovereignty of Yemen. In fact, the Red Sea coffee trade is understood to have peaked several decades after the end of Ottoman rule in the late seventeenth century, and the fortunes of some of the wealthiest of the janissary households were made after the Ottomans left Yemen.36 The coffee trade was not solely the realm of the janissary households of Cairo that grew out of the Ottoman control of Egypt and Yemen. Alongside these officers were also civilian merchants, notably from Syria and the Maghrib. Having come to Cairo for a variety of reasons, they were enticed to stay because of the money that could be made in the city. Syrians in Cairo were numerous, and many were involved in the Red Sea trade. Even more specifically, almost half of those Syrian merchants in the city during the eighteenth century were from Aleppo. This fact—of a shared place of origin—almost certainly helped to facilitate trade internally amongst the group and helped lead to their dominance overall.37 The Aleppians, while a majority of the Syrians, were not alone in using their regional origins to strengthen bonds and facilitate cooperation in their new surroundings in Cairo. Hanna argues in her study of the Abu¯ Ta¯qı¯yya family that ˙ they also used their ties to other merchants in Cairo who were from their original 38 town of Homs. Her study of one particular merchant provides an important overview of Cairo’s business scene in the early seventeenth century, a time in which coffee was particularly ascendant as a commodity.39 Maghribis composed another important community in Cairo, one that was particularly involved in the Red Sea and coffee trade.40 Furthermore, the Maghribi community is interesting for studying the Transottoman mobility of commodities as it was particularly important in helping to move goods beyond the Ottoman Empire’s frontiers into western North Africa and across the Saharan Desert. While the Syrians were essential in moving coffee and other commodities throughout the Red Sea, Egypt, and the Levant, the Maghribis were truly Transottoman, moving within and without the empire. For this reason, they merit a more detailed exposition. 35 Hathaway, “The Ottomans,” 169. 36 Ibid., 168. 37 Raymond, Artisans, 477–479; Nelly Hanna, Making Big Money in 1600: The Life and Times of Isma‛il Abu Taqiyya, Egyptian Merchant, (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998), 24. 38 Hanna, Big Money, 24. 39 Ibid., passim. 40 Husam Muhammad Abdul Mu‛ti, “al-Buyu¯t al-tuja¯rı¯yya al-maghribı¯yya fı¯ Misr fı¯ al-‛asr al˙ ˙ ‛Uthma¯nı¯,” (PhD diss., Mansura University, 2002).

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Maghribi families were spread throughout Islamicate lands, and their family networks were critical to their trade. From trans-Saharan routes to the Red Sea, family connections played a very important role in facilitating transactions over large distances. Several of the most important Maghribi coffee trading families in Cairo, the Fa¯si, al-Bana¯nı¯, Jallu¯n, and Jassu¯s, all had family members not only in Cairo, but also in Jidda and Mecca.41 Many of these families, at various times, were also involved in the Indian textile trade, and family members and agents could be found in that distant land as well. The al-Bana¯nı¯ family, for example, had different branches in sub-Saharan Africa for the gold trade and yet others in Syria and the Red Sea port locations. One such family member, Hajj al-‘Arabı¯ ibn Ahmad, traveled regularly with his uncle to Timbuktu to import gold to Egypt and export Egyptian and Indian textiles. In the Red Sea region, some of the alBana¯nı¯s had settled in Jidda and Medina. These branches of the family helped to facilitate the Red Sea coffee trade with the Cairo branch, making all of the individual merchants involved, and from a broader perspective, the extended family, much richer.42 Cooperation existed not only within a family, but also between separate ones. In order to grow profits and increase trade, different families often worked together. A cooperation between the Jassus family and the al-Gharya¯nı¯ al-Tar˙ a¯bulsı¯ family at the turn of the eighteenth century led to one particular alGharya¯nı¯ becoming one of the most important importers of coffee from Jidda and leaving a fortune at the time of his death.43 A final Maghribi family whose mastery of family networks and role in the coffee trade became so legendary that the family assumed a major position within not only the economic story of Cairo, but also its cultural and political life as well was that of the al-Shara¯ybı¯s. Their family story serves as an excellent example of the manner by which a foreign merchant family could enter the Cairene market scene and eventually profit in extraordinary ways. Two Shara¯ybı¯ brothers, Qa¯sim ibn ‘Ali and ‘Abd al-Qa¯dir, came to Egypt from Fez around the years 1625–1630 CE, arriving during hajj and probably having then been enticed to stay because of the economic opportunities they found in the city. With coffee on the ascendant, they made their move to trade the commodity, with initial intentions to sell the good in Fez. In time, Qa¯sim remained in Cairo, with his branch of the Shara¯ybı¯ family eventually going on to prominence. His brother ‘Abd al-Qa¯dir moved and settled in Jidda, perhaps to facilitate trade. The brothers therefore laid the 41 Husam Muhammad Abdul Mu‛ti, “The Fez Merchants in Eighteenth-Century Cairo,” in Society and Economy in Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean, 1600–1900: Essays in Honor of André Raymond, ed. Nelly Hanna and Raouf Abbas, (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2005), 125–130. 42 Ibid., 128–129. 43 Ibid., 128.

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foundation for a family trade network that would last for over a century.44 ‘Abdul Mu’ti tells the story from there: “The branch of ‘Abd el-Qadir [sic] acted as agents for their cousins in Cairo, which was one of the reasons Muhammad ibn Qa¯sim ˙ became one of the most prominent merchants in Cairo during the mid-sev45 enteenth century.” By the end of that century, the family had become even wealthier and more prominent yet, with one of the members becoming Sha¯h Bandar al-Tujja¯r (the head of the merchants guild) of Egypt from 1695 to 1697. The family continued to be prominent merchants throughout the remainder of the eighteenth century and remained so until the middle of the nineteenth century.46

Egypt and Connecting the Red and Mediterranean Seas The janissary/merchant households alongside the Syrian, Maghribi, and other merchants of Cairo were critical in moving coffee from Yemen, up the Red Sea, and to Cairo. They also, at times, were a part of its onward movement to markets throughout the Islamicate world as well. As stated before, the Maghribi merchant families of Cairo helped to move coffee beyond the Ottoman Empire across the northern coast of Africa, while Syrian merchants helped move the commodity northward into the Levant and into Asia Minor. However, in parallel to spices and with its ever-greater commodification, coffee was bound for the sea. Both Ottoman and European vessels helped to move coffee onward across the Mediterranean into the Ottoman heartlands of Asia Minor and the Balkans, to Istanbul, and into Western European ports. Fundamental to this network were the ports of Suez, Alexandria, Rashı¯d (Rosetta), and Damietta; the first city being on the Red Sea and the latter three being on the northern Mediterranean coast. Goods moving up the Red Sea from Yemen disembarked in Egypt at various points. However, by the Ottoman period, Suez became the province’s chief port, and by the end of the century, some ships were even bypassing Jidda—a required stopping point—and heading straight to Suez.47 From Suez, goods would move overland to Cairo and its river port of Bu¯la¯q before going down the Nile to one of Egypt’s Mediterranean ports.48 All three of the Mediterranean ports were used for shipping goods to both Ottoman and Western European destinations. The changing fortunes and development of 44 45 46 47

Ibid., 132–133. Ibid., 133. Ibid., 133–137. Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 183. 48 The Nile River flows from south to north; going downstream, therefore, means northward.

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Alexandria throughout the Ottoman period has been thoroughly examined.49 Rashı¯d gained prominence during this period because Alexandria was difficult to access from Cairo. A canal that had historically connected the port city to the Nile often silted up and was increasingly impractical for shipping. Instead, goods went to Rosetta and then onward to Alexandria by various means. Some of the coffee passing through Egypt did leave from Rashı¯d and Damietta directly, helping both cities to gain importance as trade entrepôts, but Rosetta was of foremost importance in connecting goods coming down the river from Cairo with Alexandria. Reimer argues that while Rosetta grew immensely in importance and size during the Ottoman period, having its “heyday,” it never “eclipsed” Alexandria, which “remained [Egypt’s] only Mediterranean port which could accommodate ships of great size[, and i]ts excellent anchorage made it the busiest port in the southeast Mediterranean.”50 From Alexandria, goods, prominently including coffee, embarked on the great north-south sea highway heading to Smyrna and Istanbul, and this was “the main axis of the network on which the other routes to Macedonia, Crete, Syria, and the Maghrib were connected.”51 While Ottoman merchants were important to the shipment of coffee and other commodities both inside and outside of the empire, European transporters increasingly took over.52 Panzac shows that in 1785, European ships were 47 percent of the total number entering and departing from Alexandria harbor but carried more than three-quarters of the total value of goods. Furthermore, from the European ships that passed through Alexandria harbor in that year, 87.9 percent of the ships were conducting trade within the Ottoman Empire itself.53 Thus, throughout the Ottoman period, foreign merchant ships gradually took over the shipping of goods throughout the Mediterranean, including between the empire’s cities, notably along the Alexandria–Smyrna–Istanbul main sea-lane. Most of the coffee leaving Alexandria’s harbor by the end of the eighteenth century, therefore, must have been carried on European ships, even if destined for other cities within the Ottoman realms. In any case, coffee was now journeying around the Mediterranean basin to both cities near and far, within the Ottoman Empire and without, having made its way from Yemen, through the Red Sea, disembarking in Suez, overland to Cairo, down the Nile to Rosetta, and then outward from Alexandria. 49 Michael J. Reimer, “Ottoman Alexandria: The Paradox of Decline and the Reconfiguration of Power in Eighteenth-Century Arab Provinces,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 37, no. 2 (1994): 107–146. 50 Ibid., 114. 51 Daniel Panzac, “International and Domestic Maritime Trade in the Ottoman Empire during the 18th Century,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 24, no. 2 (1992): 195. 52 Ibid., 196–204. 53 Ibid., 197.

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Coffee and the Empire: A Truly Transottoman Commodity The rise in the popularity and spread of coffee is an amazing tale in the life of a commodity. From controversial beginnings, coffee soon spread throughout the Ottoman Empire and became a quotidian drink far and wide. Starting outside of the Ottoman territory, in a province at what would eventually become the empire’s farthest extent, it was not long before coffee entered other lands that the empire was also soon to subsume. The critical tie in the coffee network, however, was Cairo. Cairo became the key nodule in the distribution of the commodity at a propitious moment—the future of spice trade was precarious and Egypt was about to be conquered by the Ottomans, integrating the province into an even larger market. The spread of the Ottoman Empire also helped to open up spaces for coffee to make inroads. The Balkans serve as an especially good example of the movement of coffee within the Ottoman realms. Coffee probably arrived in the Balkans shortly after the commodity appeared in Istanbul in the mid-sixteenth century. It is first historically attested, however, in 1579 CE when it appears with a merchant in the port of Pest, and by 1591/92 CE there was at least one fully functioning coffeehouse established in Sarajevo.54 Coffee would entrench itself into the commercial life of the Balkans much as elsewhere within the Ottoman Empire. A recent study of a Salonican (Thessaloniki) merchant shows how important coffee had become in the region.55 Salonica’s port had an Egyptian market (Mısır çars,ısı), and coffee and cotton were the major imports. In the case of Salonica, it appears that the majority of the imported coffee was coming from Rashı¯d, and the merchants of Salonica had agents in that Egyptian port.56 Salonica served as one of the major ports for the Balkans, and it was from there that much of the coffee would be shipped throughout the interior of the region.57 Thus, Salonica served as one of the northern hubs on the Mediterranean’s shipping highways that moved coffee and other goods around the eastern part of the sea, fueling Ottoman domestic trade. It is worth reiterating here that Panzac’s study of Ottoman maritime trade in the late eighteenth century demonstrated that this internal/domestic Ottoman trade—of which coffee was a 54 Aleksandar Fotic´, “The Introduction of Coffee and Tobacco to the Mid-West Balkans,” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 64, no. 1 (2011): 90. For a further discussion of coffee’s introduction into and circulation within the Balkans, see also: Michał Wasiucionek, “Introduction: Objects, Circuits, and Southeastern Europe,” Journal of Early Modern History 24 (2020): 303–316. 55 Eyal Ginio, “When Coffee Brought about Wealth and Prestige: The Impact of Egyptian Trade on Salonica,” Oriente Moderno, Nuova serie, 25/86, no. 1 (2006): 93–107. 56 Ibid., 95. 57 Ibid., 97.

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major component—had a far higher value than that conducted with external partners.58 If the accepted view that coffee was introduced to the Islamicate lands in the middle to late fifteenth century is correct, then it is truly astounding how quickly coffee became pervasive throughout the Ottoman Empire. Within roughly a century of its arrival, coffee was consumed in every stretch of the realm; it was also increasingly being consumed in Western Europe, a tale already well told by others. More amazing still is that coffee continued to be grown only in the highlands of Yemen, and so regardless of its destination, its origin remained fixed. It is almost certainly because of this that Egypt, and especially Cairo, was anchored as the node around and through which the vast majority of the coffee trade flowed. It was not until the late eighteenth century that French coffee, grown in the Antilles, finally dislodged Yemen’s and Egypt’s monopoly on the trade. Thus, in its genesis, spread, and consumption coffee was a truly Ottoman commodity and its trade, from Yemen to the farthest stretches of the empire and beyond, encompassed and went beyond the borders of empire.

Bibliography Abdul Mu‛ti, Husam Muhammad. “al-Buyu¯t al-tuja¯rı¯yya al-maghribı¯yya fı¯ Misr fı¯ al-‛asr ˙ ˙ al-‛Uthma¯nı¯.” PhD diss., Mansura University, 2002. –. “The Fez Merchants in Eighteenth-Century Cairo.” In Society and Economy in Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean, 1600–1900: Essays in Honor of André Raymond, edited by Nelly Hanna and Raouf Abbas, 117–141. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2005. Casale, Giancarlo. “The Ottoman Administration of the Spice Trade in the SixteenthCentury Red Sea and Persian Gulf.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 49, no. 2 (2006): 170–198. –. The Ottoman Age of Exploration. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Faroqhi, Suraiya. “Coffee and Spices: Official Ottoman Reactions to Egyptian Trade in the Later Sixteenth Century.” Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 76 (1986): 87–93. Fotic´, Aleksandar. “The Introduction of Coffee and Tobacco to the Mid-West Balkans.” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 64, no. 1 (2011): 89–100. Ginio, Eyal. “When Coffee Brought about Wealth and Prestige: The Impact of Egyptian Trade on Salonica.” Oriente Moderno, Nuova serie 25/86, no. 1 (2006): 93–107. Hanna, Nelly. “Coffee and Coffee Merchants in Cairo, 1580–1630.” Le commerce du café avant l’ère des plantations coloniales, edited by Michel Tuchscherer, 91–101. Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 2001.

58 Panzac, “International and Domestic,” 202–203.

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–. “Egyptian Civilian Society and Tax-Farming in the Aftermath of the Ottoman Conquest.” In Conquête ottomane de l’Égypte (1517): Arrière-plan, impact, échos, edited by Benjamin Lellouch and Nicolas Michel, 211–223. Leiden: Brill, 2013. –. Making Big Money in 1600: The Life and Times of Isma‛il Abu Taqiyya, Egyptian Merchant. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998. Hathaway, Jane. “The Ottomans and the Yemeni Coffee Trade.” Oriente Moderno, Nuova serie 25/86, no. 1 (2006): 161–171. –. The Politics of Households in Ottoman Egypt: The Rise of the Qazdag˘lıs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. –. A Tale of Two Factions: Myth, Memory, and Identity in Ottoman Egypt and Yemen. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Hattox, Ralph S. Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996. Hess, Andrew C. “The Ottoman Conquest of Egypt (1517) and the Beginning of the Sixteenth-century World War.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 4, no. 1 (1973): 55–76. Ibn al-‘Ima¯d al-Hanba¯lı¯. Shadhara¯t al-dhahab fı¯ akhba¯r man dhahab, 8 vols. Cairo: ˙ Maktabat al-Qudsı¯, 1931/32–32/33. al-Jazı¯rı¯, ‘Abd al-Qa¯dir ibn Muhammad. ‘Umdat al-safwah fı¯ hill al-qahwah, 3 vols., second ˙ ˙ ˙ edition, edited by A.I.S. De Sacy. Paris: Chrestomathie arabe, 1826. Kafadar, Cemal, “How Dark is the History of the Night, How Black the Story of Coffee, How Bitter the Tale of Love: The Changing Measure of Leisure and Pleasure in Early Modern Istanbul.” In Medieval and Early Modern Performance in the Eastern Mediterranean, edited by Arzu Öztürkmen and Evelyn Birge Vitz, 243–269. Turnhout: Brepols, 2014. Kâtib Çelebi. The Balance of Truth, translated and edited by Geoffrey L. Lewis. London: Allen and Unwin, 1957. Lane, Frederic C. “The Mediterranean Spice Trade: Further Evidence of its Revival in the Sixteenth Cenutry.” The American Historical Review 45, no. 3 (1940): 581–590. Özbaran, Salih. “Ottoman Expansion in the Red Sea.” In Cambridge History of Turkey. Vol. 2, The Ottoman Empire as a World Power, 1453–1603, edited by Suraiya Faroqhi and Kate Fleet, 173–204. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Panzac, Daniel. “International and Domestic Maritime Trade in the Ottoman Empire during the 18th Century.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 24, no. 2 (1992): 189–206. Peçevi, I˙brahm. Ta¯rı¯h-i Peçeîi, 2 vols. Istanbul: Matbaa-i Amire, 1864–1867. Raymond, André. Artisans et commerçants au Caire XVIIIe siècle, 2 vols. Damascus: Institut français de Damas, 1973–1974. –. “Les documents du Mahkama comme source pour l’histoire économique et sociale de l’Egypte au XVIIIe siècle.” In Les Arabes par leurs archives, XVIe–XXe siècle, edited by Jacques Berque and Dominique Chevallier, 125–139. Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1976. –. “Soldiers in Trade: The Case of Ottoman Cairo.” Bulletin of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies 18, no. 1 (1991): 16–37. Michael J. Reimer. “Ottoman Alexandria: The Paradox of Decline and the Reconfiguration of Power in Eighteenth-Century Arab Provinces.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 37, no. 2 (1994): 107–146.

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˘ âwisˇ al-Qazduglî, sirdâr de la Tuchscherer, Michel. “Le Pèlerinage de l’émir Sulaymân G caravane de la Mekke en 1739.” Annales Islamologiques 24 (1988): 155–206. Wasiucionek, Michał. “Introduction: Objects, Circuits, and Southeastern Europe.” Journal of Early Modern History 24 (2020): 303–316. Winter, Michael. Egyptian Society under Ottoman Rule, 1517–1798. London: Routledge, 1992.

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Stefan Rohdewald

Petroleum: Commodity, Products and Infrastructures as Transottoman Mobilities around 1900

Introduction In 1913, the U.S. had surpassed Russia as the world’s largest producer of oil again, as had been the case earlier, before 1910. However, Russia remained by far the second most important oil producing country until the revolution. These proportions were observed and given imperial symbolic importance: Dr. Ivan Ozerov, a member of the Russian State Council, the upper house of the Russian parliament, and professor at Moscow University, a specialist on Urbanist theory, published a full-color diagram showing this information in 1917. It was published under the bellicose headline “What Are We Fighting for?” to illustrate his book with the title “New Russia,” containing also chapters on “The New Man” and “Our Relationship with the U.S.”1 It was not without reason that oil was chosen here to play a central role in this imagination of a global, interimperial fight for the future of Russia and its place in the world. The Russian Empire had been financed by the export of commodities and raw material for a long time—oil is still a crucial commodity of Russian foreign trade and has been since the nineteenth century. Oil was discovered as a commodity of the future only at the end of the nineteenth century. First, its extraction was important in Habsburg Galicia and in Ottoman Wallachia. But quite soon, Baku was topping everything that had been known earlier: here, the Russian Oil-Producing Association of the Brothers Nobel, Branobel, was founded. In addition, and running in parallel to the railway from the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea, what was then globally the longest oil pipeline was opened in 1906. In the run for the oil fields that were thought to linger in the still-Ottoman Middle East, an international struggle evolved, which was eventually militarized in World War I. 1 The diagram published separately illustrated the relevant passage in the book Ivan Ozerov, Novaia Rossiia (Petrograd: Kopejka, 1917), 257, cf. Aleksandr A. Matveichuk and Igor G. Fuks, Tekhnologicheskaia saga: “Tovarishchestvo neftianogo proizvodstva bratev Nobel” na vserossiiskikh i mezhdunarodnykh vystavkakh (Moscow: Drevlekhranilishche, 2009), 295.

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From a Transottoman perspective, this article analyzes oil as an example of an increasingly relevant commodity, to which social or cultural regimes of value (Appadurai) were attached. In the context of ever-dense global entanglements in trade and consumption, oil—just as cotton2 or coal, which remained the most important source of energy globally by far until the Second World War—became and remains to this day one of several key factors for an understanding of discussions about energy and of the energy household of any modern society. Regimes of value in regard to oil evolved in the United States during the nineteenth century, but, with actually no delay, also in Russia—especially at the shores of the Caspian Sea—and soon after that also in Austria, the Ottoman Empire, Persia, and elsewhere, thus expanding and constituting a global context with a Transottoman focus from the beginning. World War I can already be seen as a war driven by and partially caused by the fight for the new fuel. In its results, with the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, among others, it set the course for (post)imperial trade, cooperation and rivalry globally and in the regions in our focus to this day. In line with other projects within the Transottoman framework, I will approach the issue with a focus on Transottoman spatial social networks, using new approaches to the history of knowledge and its circulation, to commodities and their flows, to material culture and its social meaning, to infrastructure, consumption, the mobilities of agents and New Imperial History. A Transottoman history of oil should include the growing portfolio of oil products, their transport, and the infrastructures involved as well as the workers on the oil fields, social conflicts and transimperial competition in the quest for modernity changed by techniques and industry between Russia, Persia and the Ottoman Near East. Without presupposing steady spatial structures, social relational actional spaces have to be sketched out within and structured by the mobility dynamics connected to oil. Of special interest are evolving new centralities, hinge functions and tensions produced by the flows of oil and anything related to it locally, both within the Transottoman focus and globally. Regionally, this example is especially suitable to document the growing importance of the Black Sea, owing to its intensified interaction with the Caspian Sea, thus enlarging the Black Sea as a historical region as delimited by Eyüp Özveren3 and empowering it to become a central area of an even larger and globalized space.

2 Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014); Sven Beckert, “Cotton: A Global History,” in Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History, ed. Jerry H. Bentley et al. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), 48–64. 3 Y. Eyüp Özveren, “A Framework for the Study of the Black Sea World, 1789–1915,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 20, no. 1 (1997).

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Experts, Techniques and Knowledge about Materials in Circulation The state of the art of research on oil and its exploitation and usage is most often set in national frames of research, while the global context merely serves to highlight the meaning of national records.4 But the new interest in oil evolving after 1850 has to be embedded into a Transottoman context, too, to elucidate its importance for larger spatial and transcontinental developments. Baku-based historians, for example, stress the fact that the engineer V.N. Semenov worked with drilling techniques in Baku as early as 1846.5 Polish historians, on the other hand, are eager to point out the—well-studied—oil industry in Galicia to be the oldest one: as early as 1853, lamps consuming kerosene were used in Lviv.6 This fuel was derived from petroleum, not from coal, as had been done from 1850, when Abraham Gesner developed lamps that burned oil derived from coal in Halifax. This kind of oil ran out of stock quickly, however, as had happened earlier in the case of whale oil and fish oil. The kerosene, which came into use in Lviv, was developed by Ignacy Łukasiewicz, who had studied pharmaceutics and mineralogy in Cracow and Vienna and had gained knowledge about oil there.7 Contemporary nicknames such as “Eastern European Pennsylvania,” “Galician El Dorado” or “Galician California” and, later, “Galician Sodom” or “Polish Baku” exemplify globalized localizations of the growing oil industry in today’s Western Ukraine.8 Romanian historians and the National Oil Museum9 in Ploies,ti claim three world records, too, yet for Wallachia: in 1857, an annual production of more than 207 tons was officially registered, the first modern refinery opened and Bucharest introduced the world’s first public street lighting fueled by kerosene.10 However, these local details of certainly global importance must be embedded into a narrower spatial context, evolving with a growing dynamic of its own between Baku, Galicia and Romania: the translation of experts’ knowledge evolved in interimperial communication and new agent networks, which consolidated in exactly this exchange of innovations. In 1862, American techniques 4 One exception: Jan Arend, Russlands Bodenkunde in der Welt: Eine ost-westliche Transfergeschichte 1880–1945 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017). 5 Mir-Jusif Fazil ogly Mir-Babaev, Kratkaia istoriia azerbaidzhanskoi nefti (Baku: Azerneshr, 2009), 36. 6 Alison Fleig Frank, Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 240–241. 7 Roman Mierzecki, “Przemysł naftowy w Polsce w XIX i XX wieku,” Analecta 8, no. 2 (1999): 57–58. 8 Frank, Oil Empire, 12. 9 Gheorghe Buzatu, A History of Romanian Oil (Bucharest: Mica Valahie Publishing House, 2011), 1:37, footnote 77. 10 “Oil museum,” website operated by the “ROPEPCA, Romanian Petroleum Exploration and Production Companies Association”, accessed February 18, 2019, http://www.ropepca.ro/en /articole/oil-museum/59/.

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of percussion drilling were applied in Europe for the first time in Galicia, which quickly turned into a global hub of these techniques.11 In Wallachia, in the Caucasus—in Grozny—and in Baku, Galician and American experts soon became active.12 In Baku, Robert Nobel tested the then-known methods in 1876, but was without success at first because of the special geological conditions on the spot. Consequently, he developed new procedures, using steam engines and electricity. Soon, international and imperial experts in the exploration of new oil fields, materials sciences and soil sciences worked in Baku. The universities and the Academy of Sciences in Petersburg became important for the engineering of large refineries and chemical laboratories in Baku. The chemist Dmitrij Mendeleev, globally renowned for having developed the periodic table of elements, and other professors taught engineers directly in Baku.13 Thus, oil exploitation turned into a concern of an imperially-oriented Russian intelligentsia: in 1876, Mendeleev traveled for the government to Pennsylvania and, after his return, proposed to build the refineries not “in Baku, but in Russia, in the centers of our productive forces”:14 There’s a lot of oil. This is no longer just being awaited, as only some time ago, but it is a reality. Now, these lots have to be brought to work, to enlighten and lubricate Russia, East and West. To accomplish this is too much for the people of Baku alone—they have done their part, and with glory. Now we need new Russian forces and minds, foresightedness and agility […].15

However, this national and political argumentation of an international expert fostering his imperial fatherland did not succeed in overturning the economic arguments of the Nobel brothers: Baku would remain a boomtown and grow into a global center of innovation in oil exploitation, the development of new products and of techniques of transport. Seasonally, a large number of unskilled land workers migrated there from Central Russia and Persia, but also more and more international specialists and educated workers lived in the city.16 The Caspian Sea and Baku, which had belonged to Russia since 1828, now quickly became the nucleus of new networks or entanglements as well as rivalries between Russia, the 11 Robert James Forbes and Denis R. O’Beirne, The Technical Development of the Royal Dutch/ Shell, 1890–1940 (Leiden: Brill, 1957), 12. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Dmitrii Mendeleev, Gde stroit neftianye zavody? (St. Petersburg, 1881), as republished in Dmitrii I. Mendeleev, Sochineniia, ed. V.G. Khlopin (Leningrad: Izdatelstvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1949), 10:274. Cf. John P. McKay, “Baku Oil and Transcaucasian Pipelines, 1883–1891: A Study in Tsarist Economic Policy,” Slavic Review 43, no. 4 (1984): 614–615. 15 Mendeleev, Gde stroit, 265. 16 As observed by Martin Hahn: Juliane C. Wilmann, Dietrich von Engelhardt and Gerrit Hohendorf, eds., Im Kampf gegen die Cholera: Der jüdische Arzt Martin Hahn (1865–1934) als Forschungsreisender in Russland (Münster: LIT, 2012).

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Ottoman Empire and Persia. Moreover, the whole area was affected by mobility dynamics, which also involved the earlier Polish-Lithuanian regions now located inside Russia: numerous insurgents and later revolutionary workers of the whole empire were deported to Baku to work in the oil fields.17 Here, Polish experts played a remarkable role in the development of knowledge about oil and its exploitation: Witold Zglenicki, born in 1850 near the quickly growing industrial city of Łódz´, studied mining in Petersburg and was a pioneer in extracting oil from deposits under the sea floor starting in 1893. In 1900, the Shah of Persia decorated Zglenicki with an award after he had explored oil deposits inside the Russian sphere of influence in Persia, too. In his last will, Zglenicki granted an endowment for the advancement of “overall-European culture,” which is why he soon was called a Polish Nobel. According to Zglenicki, economic capital gained by the exploitation of oil should be turned into cultural capital. Indeed, among Zglenicki’s partners were the brothers Nobel and the Rothschild family. Whenever governmental interests and policies are developed, the private aims of the people involved with and furthering these agendas must be taken into account: the engineer and industrial entrepreneur Immanuel Nobel had fled Sweden after a bankruptcy for Petersburg. He gained his new fortune by producing sea mines for the Russian Empire during the Crimean War, but also by producing steam engines. In 1914, 69.5 percent of Baku’s petroleum-related products were exported from the three largest possessors of fields: 1) Branobel, whose logo contained the Atəs¸gah, a Zoroastrian and Hindu temple with an eternal flame fueled by oil, 2) Royal Dutch, and 3) the General Russian Oil Association controlled by the Russian Armenian Aleksandr Mantashov.18 Among the important associations dealing with oil were also several enterprises owned by Jewish Russian entrepreneurs stemming mostly from the “Pale of Settlement,” the former Polish-Lithuanian territories within the Russian Empire, consolidating Transottoman networks between Baku, the territories of today’s Ukraine and Belarus’ as well as the rest of Europe and Palestine.19 Yet even some Muslims of the poorest origins, such as Zeynalabdin Taghiyev, owned enterprises, too.20 All of the oil enterprises of Baku were organized in a separate association in 1883.21

17 Wilmann et al., Kampf, 203. 18 Mir-Babaev, Kratkaia istoriia azerbajdzhanskoi nefti, 231. 19 A very impressive and voluminous rendering: Verena Dohrn, Die Kahans aus Baku: Eine Familienbiographie (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2018). 20 Mir-Babaev, Kratkaia istoriia azerbajdzhanskoi nefti, 48, 55–56, 105–107, 119–131. Cf. entries in Igor S. Zonn et al., eds., The Caspian Sea Encyclopedia (Heidelberg: Springer, 2010), 393; Xiaobing Li and Michael Molina, Oil: A Cultural and Geographic Encyclopedia of Black Gold (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2014), 1:383–384. 21 McKay, “Baku Oil,” 610.

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The quest for oil in the Ottoman Empire intensified only much later—even though British merchants had already brought oil to Europe from India through Suez, which was formally still Ottoman, since 1834, and through the canal later built there, one of the largest infrastructural projects ever, starting in 1869. Only then did the reformer Midhat Pasha, while governor of Baghdad, invite German experts to look for oil in the region. Consequently, a refinery was installed north of Baghdad, but it operated only for a short period of time.22 The costs to develop a modern infrastructure of transportation to the Gulf of Basra or the Mediterranean would have been enormously high, which is why oil extracted there and in the framework of other Ottoman oil-exploitation projects was not yet competitive with oil imported from Russian Baku or Romania or even the U.S. Nevertheless, new exploratory teams were sent to Mosul and Baghdad in 1889 and 1901 and maps of possible sites of oil fields were sketched.23 These reports and more expeditions spread the knowledge of and interest in oil well beyond the Ottoman Empire to British, French and German enterprises.24 In the frameworks of new public discourses coming into existence in the Ottoman Empire, new horizons of territorialization were created: for example, the Ottoman Armenian Calouste Gulbenkian—who would die as the world’s richest man in 195525—published a report about his experience after having traveled to the Caucasus and Baku.26 As a result of this, he was asked by the 22 Vesile Necla Geyikdag˘ı, Foreign Investment in the Ottoman Empire: International Trade and Relations, 1854–1914 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011), 122–123. For a first general overview on the quest for oil, see Stephen Hemsley Longrigg, Oil in the Middle East: Its Discovery and Development (London: Oxford University Press, 1954). 23 For a detailed report on turpentine, petroleum, tar, sulphur and other raw materials found within the Sultan’s possessions in Mosul from 1888 by inspector Mehmed bin Ahmed Arif Bey with a map, see Abdurrahim Fahimi Aydın and Ahmet Zeki I˙zgo¨ er, eds., Osmanlı’da Petrol: Ars¸iv Belgeleri Is¸ığ ında Bir Derleme (Ankara: Ertem Matbaası, 2014), no. 9, 24–35. Another report about possibilities for exploiting oil in the fields of the Sultan in Mosul and Baghdad with the help of a French engineer, Rozo: Aydın and I˙zgo¨ er, Osmanlı’da Petrol, 1899, no. 44, 135–137. A detailed report by the German Paul Großkopf (Groskopf), a mining engineer in the service of the Sultan, about findings in the private possessions of the Sultan around Mosul and Baghdad: Aydın and I˙zgo¨ er, Osmanlı’da Petrol, 1901, no. 48, 148–163, with a map and photographs. 24 Jonathan Conlin, Mr Five Per Cent: The Many Lives of Calouste Gulbenkian, the World’s Richest Man (London: Profile Books, 2019). 25 Necmettin Acar, “Petrolün Stratejik Önemi ve Mezopotamya Petrol Kaynaklarının Paylas¸ımında Calouste Sarkis Gülbenkyan’ın Rolü (1890–1928),” The Journal of Academic Social Science Studies 6, no. 4 (2013); Uğ ur Selçuk Akalın and Suat Tüfekçi, “Türkiye’nin Petrol Politikaları ve Enerji Özelles¸tirmelerine Bir Bakıs¸,” ˙Iktisat Politikası Aras¸tırmaları Dergisi / Journal of Economic Policy Researches 1 (2014). His story has won the attention of a larger public and arouses continuing interest: Ralph Hewins, Mr. Five Percent: The Story of Calouste Gulbenkian (London: Hutchinson, 1957); Conlin, Mr Five Per Cent. 26 Calouste S. Gulbenkian, La Transcaucasie et la péninsule d’Apchéron: Souvenirs de voyage (Paris: Hachette, 1891).

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government in 1891 to advise about the exploitation of the oil of Mesopotamia.27 Oil was found around Erzurum, too, and a first well was dug by a “Russian subject named Garvishov, an Armenian from Tbilisi,” yet the tender for the exploitation on the possessions of the Sultan was given to a German subject.28 Around 1900, oil was discovered in the Van region, too.29 In this region near the Russian Empire, the Ottoman direct entanglement and competition with Russia intensified and the Armenian population inhabiting this area came increasingly to be seen as a danger for the Ottoman state.30 A transimperial and global competition for the flows of oil consolidated exactly in this constellation, structuring condensed imaginations of territories of interest, including Iran.31 Beginning in 1909, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was active in the British sphere of influence in South Persia. Gulbenkian, having been a British citizen since 1902 (while continuing to be an Ottoman citizen and also receiving an Armenian passport in 1919),32 became an Ottoman diplomat after the coup in 1909. In the same year, he helped to establish the Turkish National Bank, located in Istanbul but financed with British capital.33 In 1912 he founded the Turkish Oil Company as an international institution: it was granted the concessions for Mosul.34 This company was 47 percent owned by Anglo-Persian—but with Gulbenkian’s blocking minority of five percent, he was able to stand for Ottoman (or at least his own) interests against the shares of Anglo-Saxon-Petroleum i. e. Royal Dutch Shell (23.7 percent) and Deutsche Bank (23.7 percent).35 The growing group of experts on oil exchanged views and techniques globally and within the region—not least at the International Petroleum Congresses 27 Cf. Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power (New York: Free Press, 2008), 170. 28 In favor of the German subject Charles Raizer, with a map: Aydın and I˙zgo¨ er, Osmanlı’da Petrol, 1898, no. 39, 118–119. 29 A short notice asking about details on the discovery of petroleum gas on the coast of Lake Van: Aydın and I˙zgo¨ er, Osmanlı’da Petrol, 1900, no. 46, 143. 30 I˙lkay Yılmaz. “Anti-Anarchism and Security Perceptions during the Hamidian Era,” Zapruder World: An International Journal for the History of Social Conflict 1 (2014), doi:10.21431/Z33W2Q, accessed July 8, 2019. 31 About a journey by British citizens from Syria via Baghdad to export oil to Iran: Aydın and I˙zgo¨ er, Osmanlı’da Petrol, 1905, no. 73, 222. 32 Acar, “Sarkis Gülbenkyan’ın Rolü,” 10; Conlin, Mr Five Per Cent, 65–66. By the 1920s, he “misplaced” his Ottoman passport, but did not lose his British citizenship (though in 1928 this was being considered at the British Home Office) and did not have a Persian passport: Conlin, Mr Five Per Cent, 174–175. Incorrect in this detail: Hewins, Mr. Five Percent, 219–220. 33 John Burman, “Politics and Profit: The National Bank of Turkey Revisited,” Oriens 37 (2009). In 1919 Gulbenkian was director of the Turkish National Bank: Edward Mead Earle, “The Turkish Petroleum Company: A Study in Oleaginous Diplomacy,” Political Science Quarterly 39 (1924): 268. 34 Conlin, Mr Five Per Cent, 81. 35 Earle, “The Turkish Petroleum Company,” 271.

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organized in Bucharest starting in 1903.36 The intensifying circulation of knowledge furthered new demand for oil and led to the establishment of new enterprises, often close to governments, which then mobilized international flows of money necessary for the infrastructure of exploitation and transport. The more oil became a valued and easily delivered worldwide—and thus cheap— source of energy, the larger the demand for oil grew. Transottoman tensions were exacerbated exactly by the regional and global dynamics of this development.

Infrastructures of Transportations and Flows of Oil Existing infrastructures and their extension were of decisive importance for the portrayed development and the new horizons of calculations. The port cities and their infrastructures, which came into existence or developed after 1775 along the shores of the Black and the Caspian Seas, such as Odessa, Novorossiysk and Baku, were crucial for this. Eyüp Özveren has shown how the Black Sea again turned into a Transottoman hub of economic networks, as it had already done in the early modern period. Yet the Caspian Sea has to be factored into this analysis: Poti and Batumi, although situated on the Black Sea coast, became important ports only after the connection of these two seas by railway. From 1865 to 1872, the railway from Poti to Tbilissi was built by the Russian Government, not least because of Branobel’s interest in putting oil and half-finished products on the global market. The Rothschild brothers financed the route from Tbilissi to Baku, which finally opened in 1883. They were looking for access to cheap oil from Baku for their refinery in Fiume/Rijeka, to compete with American Standard Oil. Thus, their Batumskoe Neftepromyshlennoe i Torgovoye Obshchestvo (BNITO)37 grew into Branobel’s largest competitor. The Mediterranean Sea was thereby connected with the Caspian Sea by the globalized flows of oil, too. Beginning in 1892, BNITO also navigated its ships via Suez to Bangkok, though.38 The new railway from the Black Sea to the Caspian—according to Benjamin Schenk one of the few profitable lines of the Empire39—soon made it necessary to use tank wagons specifically developed for the transport of oil. Yet as these turned out to be too heavy to be carried across the Surami Pass, the logics of infrastructure developed 36 Roman Zaloziecki, “Dritter internationaler Petroleumkongress in Bukarest,” Chemische Revue 12 (1907): 297–298. 37 Bülent Gökay, “History of Oil Development in the Caspian Basin,” in Oil and Geopolitics in the Caspian Sea Region, ed. Michael P. Croissant et al. (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999), 10. 38 Leonardo Maugeri, The Age of Oil: The Mythology, History, and Future of the World’s Most Controversial Resource (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006), 11–12. 39 Frithjof Benjamin Schenk, Russlands Fahrt in die Moderne: Mobilität und sozialer Raum im Eisenbahnzeitalter (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2014).

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new needs: In the years 1886–90, a tunnel four kilometers long was built—the first tunnel of such a length in the whole of the Russian Empire.40 One reason for the government’s willingness to financially support this project was its potential usefulness for military purposes. This stood in contrast to the projected pipeline, for which Mendeleev was pushing the public, after already-built shorter pipelines in Baku had proved to be useful.41 Only after the issue had been publicly debated did the Empire finance a pipeline for kerosene from Baku to Batumi, which was built from 1896 to 1906.42 The pipeline ran along the railway, and pumping stations were fueled with steam and diesel engines; moreover, a telephone cable was installed:43 new transport techniques enhanced the use and installation of new communications techniques. The oil flows now reached Central European markets via ship to Odessa and on rail through Ukraine or via the Danube or via the Mediterranean to the Adriatic ports: “A new star has risen for the trade of Odessa in petroleum, which comes here in cistern steamers from Batum. It goes from Odessa up the Danube and to the Adriatic places [of trade].”44 Other technical innovations developed exactly in this Transottoman transport situation: the first oil tanker, with steam engine, navigated on the Caspian Sea in 1877 for Branobel; it was named Zoroastr, which means Zarathustra, hinting at the Atəs¸gah. As of 1903, tankers with engines fueled by diesel and diesel-electricity with newly developed oil combusting engines were used on the Volga and later on the Danube45—earlier than on the Rhine. The Romanian Petroleum company Steaua Româna˘ had oil depots in Regensburg starting in 1898. In 1903, this company was taken over by Deutsche Bank in order to break the monopoly of Standard Oil in Romania.46 In 1908, Standard Oil tried to open a large depot facility in Salonica, promising to secure access to its large Macedonian hinterland and the Oriental railway. But the now-German-owned competitor Steaua Româna˘ managed to outpace Standard Oil and opened up facilities there in 1910.47 Still, Standard Oil successfully opened a large depot in Smyrna. Branobel, too, 40 V.M., “Suramskii tonnel,” in Enciklopedicheskii slovar Brokgauza i Efrona (1901), 32:93, accessed July 8, 2019, https://runivers.ru/bookreader/book10194/#page/98/mode/1up. 41 John P. McKay, “Baku Oil and Transcaucasian Pipelines, 1883–1891: A Study in Tsarist Economic Policy,” Slavic Review 43, no. 4 (1984): 618. 42 McKay, “Baku Oil,” 622. 43 Airat M. Shammazov, Boris N. Mastobaev, and Anatolii E. Soshchenko, “Truboprovodnyi transport nefti (1860–1917),” Transneft 6 (2000): 33–36. 44 Alexander Dorn, Die Seehäfen des Weltverkehrs (Vienna: Volkswirtschaftlicher Verlag Alexander Dorn, 1891), 176: “Ein neuer Stern ist dem Handel Odessas in Petroleum, das in Cisternendampfern von Batum hieher gelangt, aufgegangen. Es geht von Odessa an der Donau aufwärts und nach den adriatischen Plätzen.” 45 Ingo Heidbrink, “Petroleum Tanker Shipping on German Inland Waterways, 1887–1994,” The Northern Mariner/Le Marin du Nord 11, no. 2 (2001): 59. 46 Heidbrink, “Petroleum Tanker,” 58. 47 Geyikdağ ı, Foreign Investment, 158.

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was active in the Levant with agencies from Tripoli to Jaffa. The oil companies erected depots for local supply wherever possible and feasible, reaching out to and fostering existing regional and local infrastructural centers, particularly railway hubs. Thus, the increasingly global competition was reflected by the infrastructural nodes and hubs of an ever-larger region. In Tsaritsyn, later known as Volgograd or Stalingrad, oil was loaded from ship to railway in an impressive and extremely large facility, developing into a city of its own. Since 1877, locomotives developed here had been driven by steam kettles fired by mazut,48 a low quality, heavy fuel oil. Trains brought oil into depots, from whence it was supplied by tank automobiles to the local distributors and customers in smaller towns. The existing infrastructures of inland navigation were incorporated into the transport of oil, too, such as the system of canals connecting the Baltics via the Neva with the Volga and the Caspian Sea, especially the Mariinsky Water System (Mariinskaia vodnaia Sistema), built around 1800 under the responsibility of Maria Feodorovna, the second wife of Paul I. During the 1890s, an eye of a needle of this system, located deep in the inland, was broadened to enhance the speed of the flows of oil in particular. Oil from Baku now flowed to St. Petersburg (and even to Warsaw, via the Baltic and the Wisła49) on Branobel oil tankers, adorned by names of supreme cultural capital such as Buddha, Mahomet, Moses, Spinoza or Darwin. In addition, other, smaller—but not necessarily less globalized— companies bought tankers to be used on the Volga or the Black Sea. The abovementioned Mantashov owned three steam ships under English and two sailing ships under Ottoman flag in 1878. The officers—as Ottoman authorities observed suspiciously—were “all Greeks (hemen kâffesi Rum’dur).” Mantashov employed Armenian agents for his enterprise in Istanbul, Smyrna und Alexandria, two of whom possessed Russian, and the third Persian citizenship. Mantashov planned to open agencies in Beirut, Salonica, and Alexandretta (I˙skenderun), soon thereafter.50 However, his transports, which went to Salonica 48 Anonymus, “Rohes Petroleum als Brennmaterial für Locomotiven,” Polytechnisches Journal 225 (1877): 131. “Neuerdings treibt Th. Urquhart (Portefeuille economique des Machines, 1885 * S. 24) die Erdölrückstände durch ein einfaches Dampfstrahlgebläse in die Locomotivfeuerung. Derartige Locomotiven sind seit dem J. 1883 auf der Griäsy-Zarizyner Eisenbahn mit russischen Erdölrückständen im Betriebe.” Anonymus, “Über die Verwendung von Erdöl für Dampfkesselfeuerungen,” Polytechnisches Journal 258 (1885): 418–422; Victor Freiherr von Röll, “Heizölfeuerung,” in Enzyklopädie des Eisenbahnwesens, ed. Victor Freiherr von Röll (Berlin: Urban & Schwarzenberg, 1914), 6:151–156; cf. for other techniques and adaptations: Leopold Sussman, Ölfeuerung für Lokomotiven mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Versuche mit Teerölzusatzfeuerung bei den preußischen Staatsbahnen (Berlin: Springer, 1912), 20. 49 L.I. Kashina, ed., Istoriia Mariinskoi vodnoi sistemy: Annotirovannyi ukazatel dokumentov GU ‘Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Vologodskoi oblasti’ (dosovetskii period) (Vologda: VGPU, 2011), 11. 50 Aydın and I˙zgo¨ er, Osmanlı’da Petrol, August 30, 1894, no. 28, 87–88.

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several times, remained ominous to the Ottoman authorities.51 In 1905, weapons were allegedly found on one of his ships.52 The possibility of using the new ways of transportation for government transports of arms and troops, though, was a strategic aim of the Ottoman state. As Dirk van Laak has shown, not only the accomplished projects, but also the failed ones are relevant, such as—to a large degree—the Baghdad railway, imagined also in a Transottoman way as leading from Central Europe via Persia to India. Deutsche Bank was given approval by the Ottoman government in 1904 for the prospective license to explore and exploit oil from Mesopotamia.53 But the granting of this document was made dependent on the project of the railway, which was to be financed by the same bank and which was meant to lead to Mosul. This railway would have extended the Trans-Balkan railway, opened in 1888, and the Anatolian railways. In Anatolia, too, locomotives fired by mazut from Baku were used.54 Moreover, locomotives with mixed firing by oil and consistent fuels, such as coal, as they were developed in Tsaritsyn, were in use there, as photographic evidence shows.55 The project itself was no less important than its representation in German media, securing the Wilhelminian Empire the status of a super power exactly by the means of controlling oil.56 To compete with British infrastructures of exploitation and transport of oil from the Shatt al Arab, under construction since 1908, this project gained in importance. At the same time, the Russian but also French and British project of a Transpersian railway to the Gulf of Persia, conceived as a response to the Baghdad railway, was not at all yet realized.57 Thus, in the context of Transottoman competition the flows of oil were consolidated by new infrastructures. Cheap and accessible oil fed new demands as well as new strategic deliberations on the newly territorialized region, which appeared to be ever more central for global contexts.

51 52 53 54

Ibid., October 28, 1896, no. 33, 106. Ibid., October 15, 1905, no. 70, 215. Earle, “The Turkish Petroleum Company,” 266. August Rohdewald, Tagebuchaufzeichnungen 1866–1945, unpublished typoscript written during the 1930ies and finished before 1946, 214. As Ottoman Quartermaster General and member of the Ottoman Chief of Staff (November 16, 1916 until October 12, 1918), he was responsible for railway affairs. 55 German Baghdad Railway. Photograph taken between 1900 and 1910. G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection at the Library of Congress, accessed July 8, 2019. 56 Dirk van Laak, Über alles in der Welt: Deutscher Imperialismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (München: C.H. Beck, 2005). 57 D.W. Spring, “The Trans-Persian Railway Project and Anglo-Russian Relations, 1909–14,” The Slavonic and East European Review 54 (1976): 1.

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Products, Representation, Consumption, Workers The new infrastructures of transportation and the flows of oil soon made oil products globally available. In the form of detergents, soap, and petroleum jelly for body care, they were sold and used to change everyday life inside homes.58 The growing portfolio of oil products was merchandized e. g. at the All-Russian Exhibition in Moscow in 1882, at the International Hygienical Exhibition in London in 1883, at the World Exhibition in Antwerp in 1885 and at numerous other exhibitions, as were oil ovens, oil burners, and oil engines for factories, ships, and locomotives.59 At an exhibition in Tbilisi, a large panorama rotunda was built for Branobel.60 Applications of oil multiplied after the new diesel combusting engines were produced as franchise by the Engine Building Factory Ludvig Nobel, beginning in 1898.61 However, until the First World War, cheap lamp oil or kerosene remained the most important fuel for street lighting from St. Petersburg to Jerusalem.62 The installation and maintenance of these lighting grids was not an easy task and required the active supervision of municipalities, as a case in Ottoman Manastır/Bitola of 1906 shows, where the municipality (belediye) sued the licensee Tripevelo because the 30 lamps he had promised to deliver in an agreement of 1903 were either defective or missing.63 The expanding networks of lighting quickly became connected to subversive discourses, as caricatures in journals and newspapers may illustrate. But imperial subjects also formulated complaints against environmental pollution or annoyances resulting from the combustion of gas. The sesame oil factory belonging to the Romanian citizen Todori was a cause of unrest in the mahalle in 1913 owing to the stench of his engines—therefore, the municipality (meclis) of Smyrna took measures “for the defense of the general health (sıhhat-i umumiyenin muhafazası).”64 Advertisements fostered gendered practices: with detergents or soaps made of oil, modern women should be able to “wash everything.”65 Modern wealthy men, on the other hand, were advised to use auto-

58 A poster showing the products of Branobel: Matveichuk and Fuks, Tekhnologicheskaia saga, 296. 59 Ibid., 294. 60 Ibid., 248. 61 Arkadii I. Melua, ed., Dokumenty zhizni i deiatelnosti semi Nobel, 1801–1932 (St. Petersburg: Humanistica, 2009), 1:26. 62 Jonathan Coopersmith, The Electrification of Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 44–45. 63 Aydın and I˙zgo¨ er, Osmanlı’da Petrol, August 1, 1906, no. 79, 238. 64 Ibid., February 15, 1913, no. 117, 342. 65 See a commercial poster by Branobel from 1910 with the quoted slogan reproduced here, accessed July 8, 2019, https://humus.livejournal.com/3730042.html.

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mobiles to show themselves off.66 The latter were rarely produced locally67 before the war and were almost exclusively owned in only the richest and most distinguished circles: wealth was performed in the urban public space, e. g. during races, such as those held in Bucharest,68 Zagreb or in Sarajevo, where four French cars, decorated with Bosnian flags, prolonged the route of a race from Paris to Vienna in 1902. They were the first automobiles to be driven in Bosnia, much to the amazement of the locals, as photographs suggest.69 However, the overall situation was fragile: just as in Galicia, in the Donbass, in Łódz´, Odessa, and to some degree in Salonica and Smyrna, enormous social contrasts developed in Baku.70 As happened in other quickly growing industrial boomtowns, up to 70 percent of Baku’s population had migrated there from rural areas, both nearby and farther afield.71 Large numbers of seasonal workers came from Iran.72 Workingmen, who in Baku often used to sleep on planks right at the oil derricks,73 were engaged on very disadvantageous terms. Following violent strikes in 1904, they obtained the first collectively agreed upon labor contracts of the Russian Empire. During the revolution of 1905, hundreds died because of violent clashes between Azeris and Armenians. More than half of the oil production facilities were destroyed during that year.74 The oil industry depended on the military forces of the cornered and ever-more-repressive regime, which was unable to change. Self-confident subalterns, such as the young Iosif Dzhugashvili, denounced this circumstance, using the example of the oil industry and proclaiming revolutionary utopia. It would be very promising to study speech acts of subalterns, focusing on the topic of oil—research that has not yet been conducted.75 However, Eveline Dierauff, for example, studied conflicts between

66 See another commercial poster by Branobel from around 1910 showing racecars, an airplane and a motorship reproduced here, accessed July 8, 2019, https://gkaf.nsu.ru/rh-book/l-kap5/k 05-57.html. 67 The first motorcar produced in Russia shown in a photograph for the Allrussian Exhibition 1896 reproduced in: Matveichuk and Fuks, Tekhnologicheskaia saga, 196. 68 A collage of photographs of participants during a race around Romania, centering Prince George V Bibescu reproduced in: Revista Automobila 26 (1908): 2. 69 Sarajevski list 82, July 11, 1902, quoted according to Slaven Tadic´, “Pojava i dolazak automobila u BiH prema pisanju Sarajevskog lista,” Hrvatski narodni godisˇnjak 58 (2011): 35. 70 Frank, Oil Empire, 110. 71 Frank, Oil Empire, 115. 72 Touraj Atabaki, “Disgruntled Guests: Iranian Subalterns on the Margins of the Tsarist Empire,” in The State and the Subaltern: Modernization, Society and the State in Turkey and Iran, ed. Touraj Atabaki (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 45. 73 Wilmann, Kampf, 202. 74 “Baku,” last modified February 18, 2019, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baku. 75 [Iosif] Stalin, “Neftepromyshlenniki ob ekonomicheskom terrore”, Gudok, Nos. 28, 30, 32, published April 21, May 4 and May 18, 1908, as reproduced in I.V. Stalin, Sochineniia (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo politicheskoi literatury 1946), 2:127. Cf. Jan Kusber and Andreas Frings,

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Muslim and Jewish workers of Branobel in Jaffa, the main port of the Ottoman district of Jerusalem.76 In a larger context, the constitutional revolutions of 1906 and 1908 in Iran and in the Ottoman Empire, especially in Salonica and Constantinople, have to be considered in the framework of events in the Russian Empire, particularly in Baku and Odessa in 1905. Leading advocates of change were escaping harsh repression in Russia, striving to revolutionize Persia and the Ottoman Empire, instead.77

A World War with and for Oil Beginning in 1905, the British Navy fueled destroyers and submarines by oil rather than coal, but the land- and air forces now also used combustion engines. In World War I,78 trucks transported troops and goods, and armored automobiles made warfare more dynamic—private cars were confiscated, as in (all of the?) 31 cars in Serbia alone.79 Aircrafts were fueled by oil and used for exploration and later for attacks, sometimes with automatic weaponry. As early as the First Balkan War in 1912, Bulgaria used airplanes for the first strategic bombardment worldwide of a city—Edirne. War heroes were objects of awe captured in photo ops and were soon used to mobilize the home front, be it the first Afro-Yemeni, i. e. black aviator, or a female passenger in Ottoman airplanes. Warfare itself quickly became increasingly dependent on oil. Germany accommodated a third of its demand for oil by processing coal; the rest was transported via the Danube, which means via Serbia, which had been conquered in 1915, and from Romania, conquered in 1916—both conquests occurred not least for exactly this reason. However, only a short time before the German conquest, British soldiers had destroyed many refineries in Romania.80 German oil drilling troops exploited oil fields near Mosul, but in 1917 these were still 200 kilometers away from the construction site of the Baghdad railway and could be reached only by

76 77 78 79 80

eds., Das Zarenreich, das Jahr 1905 und seine Wirkungen: Bestandsaufnahmen (Berlin: LIT, 2007). Evelin Dierauff, Translating Late Ottoman Modernity in Palestine: Debates on Ethno-Confessional Relations and Identity in the Arab Palestinian Newspaper Filast¯ın (1911–1914) ˙ (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020). Michael A. Reynolds, Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Elke Hartmann’s project within our research program Transottomanica. Timothy C. Winegard, The First World Oil War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016). Cf. interviju sa Bracom Petkovicem “Prvi Automobil u Beogradu,” NIN April 10, 2003, as reproduced online, accessed March 13, 2019, https://de.scribd.com/doc/169488675/Prvi-Au tomobil-u-Beogradu. Winegard, The First World Oil War, 12.

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automobile.81 The small refinery built there could supply gasoline only for local demand. Diesel for the railway and gasoline not least for German military trucks had to be transported from Romania.82 Nevertheless, adversary propaganda still viewed the project as being relevant, as British publications of these years testify. When German submarines attacked allied oil tankers in the Atlantic, British troops conquered Mosul in 1918—irrespective of France’s pretensions to this region. Claims on oil therefore accelerated the de- and reterritorialization of the larger region. After the Russian Caucasus front collapsed in 1917, the Ottoman Islamic Caucasus Army conquered Baku in 1918, more or less openly in competition with German forces. British and local forces proved unable to defend the city.83

Conclusion: Toward a Transottoman History of Oil This chapter aimed at looking at the exploitation, transport, and use of oil from a Transottoman perspective. As it turned out, it was precisely in this context that the development of intense new dynamics occurred that quickly acquired global significance: the local, cross-regional, and global circulation and enhancement of knowledge, practices, and materials, as well as the diminishing costs of the structural accessibility of oil thanks to new infrastructures of transportation were of decisive relevance for this. Baku became the object of envy and a bone of contention for global enterprises as well as for empires and their armies. Transottoman tensions—in the sense of “Tensions of Europe”84—together with economic and military logics drove global attention and the escalation of global warfare into this region. When viewed from a perspective of longue durée, the competition of those empires around the Caspian and Black Seas we are interested in—Russia, the Ottoman Empire, but also Persia and Poland-Lithuania—was acute at least since the conquest of Astrakhan by Muscovy in 1554. In the course of the early modern period, the material exchange of objects consolidated relatively well established regimes of shared values between the aforementioned empires, as can be shown by the Armenian trade with silk and carpets or by the flows of weaponry and kaftans, not only among the elites. Later, the routes used for this trade could, to a certain degree, be re-invented: they crossed the same territories as the flows of 81 82 83 84

Rohdewald, Tagebuchaufzeichnungen, 254. Ibid., 330. Reynolds, Shattering Empires, 219–251; Winegard, The First World Oil War, 178–213. Cf. one of the volumes produced by this network: Arne Kaijser, Erik Van Der Vleuten and Per Hogselius, Europe’s Infrastructure Transition: Economy, War, Nature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2015).

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oil would in a later epoch, and rivers such as the Volga, connecting the Caspian Sea via the Neva with the Baltic Sea, or the Danube opening up a way to Central Europe via the Black Sea, were prone to gain new importance under new circumstances. Before flows of cotton, coal and sugar achieved global relevance after 1750, china, i. e. Chinese porcelain, was of global importance, be it original or the porcelain produced in I˙znik and later in Delft and Meissen following Chinese fashion—while it was also adapted, answering regional demand in the Arabic parts of the Ottoman Empire.85 The already mentioned Gulbenkian family, existing possibly since the fourth century AD, may serve as an example of the ability of old dynasties of merchants to invent themselves anew—while the history of the Nobel family or, even more so, the family of Zeynalabdin Taghiyev, on the other hand, may stand for social mobility. However, the dimension of attained global centrality within large-scale societal dynamics, as has been shown in this article for the cases of Baku, the Black Sea, the Danube, Baghdad, and the whole Transottoman context, was certainly new. To a large degree, the new dynamics were quickly nationalized at the end of World War I, or, in some cases, after World War II, in the form of nation states— Romania, Iraq, Persia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. The region was then contained along the logics of Cold War rivalries. Only after 1950 was the export of Soviet oil of any importance again. In the case of Russia, oil exports directly support their claim to be a world power. But also in today’s Baku, in independent Azerbaijan, skyscrapers, resembling in shape the Atəs¸gah, confirm the intention to show the new self-confidence of a government made rich by oil exports. On a global scale, China and its new Silk Road project are of increasing importance. In the end, this may illustrate once more how old routes or metaphors for transport are prone to be used repeatedly, although by different flows of different materials flowing in different intensities and structuring different networks of actors and knowledge as well as consolidating different but geographically widely shared social practices.

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85 Anne Gerritsen and Stephen McDowall, “Global China: Material Culture and Connections in World History,” Journal of World History 23 (2012): 1.

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Arkadiusz Blaszczyk

From the Forests of Siberia to the Urban Jungle of Istanbul: The Ottoman-Muscovite Fur Exchange in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Introduction In regard to these furs, it is impossible for any one to be clear-sighted and to possess a sound and unerring judgement; for they are like gems, which deceive the most skillful jewelers. Every hour they reflect a different colour. When the sun shines bright, they are as brilliant as diamonds; and this is the favourable moment for the seller: in cloudy weather their colour and beauty are hidden, and, from being extremely valuable, they lower in price, and become very cheap; for a clouded atmosphere is unfavourable to them, but favourable to the buyer, who by choosing such an opportunity shews his skill and experience.1

The words above were penned by Paul of Aleppo (Bulus al-Halabi, 1627–1669), a Melikite archdeacon from Ottoman Syria visiting Moscow in the mid-seventeenth century. His description of how the value of sable fur changes just by the different light falling on it illustrates one aspect that will be focal to us: the transvaluation and transformation of precious furs on their path from the forests of Siberia to the well-protected (or rather “well-connected”) domains of the Ottoman Empire. Although in the example above the furs remain physically the same, their value decreases or increases depending on the circumstances of perspective. Both “spectators,” seller and buyer share one value: they appreciate the shininess of sable, but (skillful) seller and (inexperienced) buyer may differ in their knowledge about it. Thus, somebody with little knowledge about how sable behaves in different light will tend to over- or undervalue it, depending on the amount of sunlight involved. In that light, a person coming from a cultural setting with a low knowledge standard about sable is likely to appreciate sable differently than somebody coming from a knowledgeable cultural background. What is at stake here are different “regimes of value,” a term coined by Arjun Appadurai. Appadurai theorized that there are “a variety of social arenas, within or between 1 Paul of Aleppo, The Travels of Macarius Patriarch of Antioch […], trans. F.C. Belfour, 2 vols. (London: Oriental Translation Fund, 1836), 7.

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cultural units,”2 in which actors exchange things. Exchange is possible if a certain degree of congruence pertaining to the terms of exchange exists between the parties—in other words, if their regimes of value overlap to a certain extent. Depending on the “degree of value coherence” the exchanges can be perceived by the actors involved in various, ambiguous ways. Appadurai focuses on commodity and gift exchange, but there are many more labels, more ways to make sense of such transactions, like tributes, taxes, bribes, interest, etc.3 It is important that the contingency or the ambiguity of the exchange is not an impediment to its success, but rather the opposite seems to be true. Of course, contingency in exchange situations is not restricted to inter-cultural situations, but also to encounters within “intra-cultural” segments of human society, such as professions, class, etc.—a fact that is also detectable in our example above (different professional regimes of value).4 According to Appadurai, in order to be able to move from one regime of value to another, things (even gifts) need to acquire some commodity qualities, and they need to have “commodity candidacy.”5 The more intangible, immobile, “enclaved,” or inalienable things become, the less likely they are to leave their regime of value. This is often due to political deliberations. In order to divert them from their conventionalized paths, one has to engage in what Appadurai calls “tournaments of value.”6 Such tournaments of value can be observed within diplomatic gift exchange. If the access to a certain market is restricted by export policy, protected goods from that polity can be diverted into another economy by oversizing ambassadorial retinues and opening them up to merchants. Disguised as members of the embassy, they would benefit from protected goods being gifted and from trade privileges. As with every tournament, this is a risky game. Of course, the mode of transaction (gift, commodity, tribute, bribe, etc.) is but one of many layers of meaning that may be inscribed into things. Knowledge about its usage, aesthetics, the scarcity of the material it is made of, all of these can be distinct from one regime of value to the other. As soon as a thing passes the “gap” between regimes, it is surrounded by a completely new set of opportunities and dangers. It can be appropriated not only by transvaluation, but by transformation as well. This text aims to analyze various stages on the itinerary of furs 2 Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Production of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 15. 3 Cf. Gadi Algazi, “Introduction: Doing Things with Gifts,” in Negotiating the Gift: Pre-Modern Figurations of Exchange, ed. Gazi Algazi, Valentin Groebner, and Bernhard Jussen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), 19. 4 Appadurai, “Introduction,” 14. 5 Ibid., 14–16. 6 Ibid., 14–29.

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and fur objects from Siberia to the Ottoman Empire. One of its endeavors is to trace how, on the one hand, furs were impacted by the transactions and how, on the other, they themselves impacted the human actors involved—the meanings the actors inscribed into them and the social practices they associated with them, and the wider societal consequences of these practices.

Muscovite Hypertrophy Meets Ottoman Sable Age It is beyond questioning that it is the fur-bearing animals, especially the sable, which were most affected by the Siberian fur trade. A credible estimation states that during most of the seventeenth century between fifty thousand and one hundred thousand sable furs entered the Muscovite treasury per year.7 By the year 1690 depletion had reached places as far in the east as Yakutsk.8 The impact on the animals notwithstanding, there has been much debate on the effect the fur trade had on the course of Russian history. Recently, drawing on the idea of the “hypertrophic” resource-bound state, most prominently represented by late Tsarist historian Pavel Miliukov (1859–1943), Alexander Etkind juxtaposed Early Modern Muscovite fur trade with the contemporary Russian oil and gas business: […] Politically, there is much in common between an economy that relies on the export of fur and an economy that relies on the export of gas. Both economies are victims of the resource curse, the one-sided development of a highly profitable extraction industry that leaves the rest of the economy uncompetitive and undeveloped. In the longue durée of Russian history, taxing the trade in these commodities has become the source of income for the state, organizing their extraction, its preoccupation […]. Very few people take part in business, with the result that the state does not care about the population and the population does not care about the state. […] Processing these commodities is unusually messy. The state’s dependence on them makes the population superfluous. Extracting, storing, and delivering these resources makes security more important than liberty. Reliance on these resources destroys the environment, natural and cultural.9

Here of course, Etkind provokes with simplification. Still, it seems undeniable that the fur trade was one of the driving forces of the Russian expansion into Siberia and helped shape the Russia we know today. For the Muscovites, foreign demand was a crucial part of their regime of value vis-à-vis Siberian furs. The Ottomans on the other side accounted for a considerable part of that foreign demand, for fur played an important role in the Ottoman Empire. There, it was 7 Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 80. 8 Raymond H. Fisher, The Russian Fur Trade, 1550–1700 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1943), 107. 9 Etkind, Internal Colonization, 89–90.

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used extensively for ceremonial and representative purposes: every official appointment was accompanied by the bestowment of honorary robes trimmed with different kinds of fur depending on the appointee’s rank. Fur, though much less prominently than in the case of Muscovy-Russia, also contributed to theories about the nature of the Ottoman state. One manifestation of the Ottoman decline theory was the “Sultanate of Women” postulate (kadınlar saltanatı). Originally a book title, this term was coined by late-Ottoman, early-Republican Turkish historian Ahmet Refik (Altınay, 1881–1937). Together with another term inspired by one of his books, lale devri—“Tulip Age,” it made quite a career in Turkish and Western historiography on the Ottoman Empire.10 He also penned a lesserknown book of similar content called the “Sable Age” (samur devri). This book about the reign of Sultan Ibrahim, much as his other books, draws a picture of baroque decadence and profligacy; it indulges in the description of courtly vanities, of intrigues, the ruler’s incompetence and the bad influence of women in politics. In this way, he became a populist point man of the Ottoman decline theory in the twentieth century. Of course, this narrative draws on older patterns. It was inspired by moralist nasihatnames (mirrors for princes) and chronicles of the seventeenth century, whose simplified idealizations of the past and condemnation of the present were often taken at face value, ignoring the individual interests of the authors and the genre as such.11 In parts drawing verbatim on the chronicle of Naima (d. 1716), he describes Ibrahim’s eccentricities, conjuring sable as an epitome of Ottoman decline.12 Ottoman chronicles suggested that Ibrahim suffered headaches and that he was extraordinarily preoccupied with his virility.13 Thus, Naima, and Refik in his wake, describe Ibrahim as obsessed with ambra and sable. While ambra was to ensure his virility, Naima attributed Ibrahim’s obsession with sable to a voivode’s daughter from Eyüb, who was a gifted storyteller frequently invited to the harem.14 In one of her tales, she told the story of a legendary king whose garments were all sable and who had a palace where all of the cushions and curtains were 10 Cf. Robert Dankoff, trans., The Intimate Life of an Ottoman Statesman, Melek Ahmed Pasha (1588–1662) as Portrayed in Evliya Çelebi’s Book of Travels (New York: State University of New York Press, 1991), 39–40. 11 Cf. Rifa‘at ‘Ali Abou-El-Haj, Formation of the Modern State: The Ottoman Empire, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005), 23–26. 12 Ahmet Refik Altınay, Samur Devri (1640–1648) (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı, 2010), 36–42. 13 In this respect, it is important to know that Ibrahim was a bottleneck of the Ottoman dynasty —by the time he came to power, he was the only male Ottoman left. His older brother Murad IV had killed all of his brothers but Ibrahim and kept the latter in confinement for many years. Today, this is usually used as an explanation for the weak mental state attributed to Ibrahim. Leslie Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 107, 259–260. 14 For Naima’s story, see Mustafa Naima, Ta’rı¯kh-i Na‘ı¯ma¯: Raudat al-Husayn fı¯ khula¯sat ˙ 292–294. ˙ ˙ ¯ mira, 1866–1867), akhba¯r al-kha¯fiqayn, vol. 4 (Constantinople: Matba‘a-i ‘A ˙

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made of sable, and even its floors were covered with it. The sultan supposedly became so obsessed with that story that he wanted to recreate it.15 He levied extraordinary taxes to be paid in sable, confiscated sable furs from merchants, forced all high-ranking states- and clergymen to gift him such and distributed offices only in exchange for bribes paid in sable—for that reason, according to Naima, the price of sable in Istanbul soared tenfold.16 Squeezed into Naima’s narrative about Ibrahim’s sable mania there is a nasihat-section, a mirror of princes, giving advice on questions of trade balance.17 There he wrote that in the books written by the sages of the olden days, padishahs were advised not to drive up prices of foreign products with their own demand, as this would increase the amount of money leaving the country. He warned that in comparison to other products, sable was not exchanged for Ottoman merchandise. By that he implied a negative trade balance: “But these cursed ones coming from the lands of Muscovy don’t spend the money they receive for the sable and other precious furs on commodities of the Islamic [i. e. Ottoman] realms, for all these riches they exchange for Indian products. The Indians do not buy anything from the Ottoman domains and do not need anything, either. […] the world’s riches accumulate in India and, because of the coffee, in Yemen.”18 Without adhering to nor rejecting an Ottoman decline theory, the negative trade balance and the outflow of bullion was a serious problem for the Ottomans, often discussed by economic historians.19 Thus, to ask a provocative question, one might wonder whether it was the Ottomans’ liking for sable that helped Muscovy rise in 15 According to the chronicle of Vecihi, Sultan Ibrahim ordered the former mansion of Ibrahim Pasha, deposed rebel governor of Bagdad, to be furnished with sable and silk as a gift to one of his favorites. Bug˘ra Atsız, Das Osmanische Reich um die Mitte des 17. Jahrhunderts: Nach den Chroniken des Vecihi (1637–1660) und des Mehmed Halifa (1633–1660) (Munich: Trofenik, 1977), 28. Evliya Çelebi also reports on the sable and ambra issue, Evliya Çelebi, Seyahatnamesi, ed. Yücel Dag˘lı, Robert Dankoff, and Seyit Ali Kahraman, vol. 1 (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2006), 105a. 16 Even though Naima’s narrative is heavily dramatized, there is some reason to believe that, as in the case of ambra, the sable might have had some medical purpose. See further below. Baki Tezcan sees in that levy not “the capricious request of a mentally unstable ruler,” but “a tax on the political magnates,” which according to him would fit into a greater pattern of “royal appropriation of resources.” Baki Tezcan, The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 214–215. 17 Although Naima did not write a political or economic treatise per se, his chronicle is preceded by a philosophical introductory remark and interspersed with many sections of political and economic advice. Therefore, Marinos Sariyannis included him in his recent history of Ottoman political thought, albeit Sariyannis does not mention the section discussed here. Marinos Sariyannis, A History of Ottoman Political Thought up to the Early Nineteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 318–320. 18 Naima, Ta’rı¯kh-i Na‘ı¯ma¯, 4:293. 19 S¸evket Pamuk, A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 134.

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power (hypertrophy) while at the same time depleting the Ottoman treasury and detracting from local craftsmanship. One could argue that the specific regime of value adhered to by the Ottoman elites was characterized by an imbalance between the social and representative functions of furs within Ottoman society on the one side, and economic calculation on the other. This might be similar to what Hedda Reindl-Kiel observed for (western/central) European silverwork gifted to the Ottomans: “Although it must have been known in Vienna that silver plates often ended up in the smelter, it seems that one continued to send firstclass products. […] Obviously the imperial self-image in Vienna did not allow for another behavior.”20 Here, to speak with Bourdieu, cultural and economic capital are at odds with each other. By analyzing the regimes of value of fur in Muscovy and the Ottoman Empire as well as the how and how much of the fur exchange within and between them, this study tries to cautiously probe into the probability of that thesis.

Marvel and Bane of Siberia Sable (mustela zibellina, early modern: m. scythica) is a small furbearing animal living in the forest zone of Northeast Eurasia. Sable fur must have been a precious material as early as during the time of the Scythians—as archeologists found coats, composed of sable and other furs, in Scythian kurgans.21 It remained important among the ruling elites of Central Asia and adjacent regions of Northeastern Eurasia. In the Middle Ages, sable was used as a means of payment, for dowries and paying tribute.22 Marco Polo described the tents of Genghis Khan, furnished with lion skins on the outside and sable and ermine skins on the inside. He stated that the Mongols would call sable the “queen of furs.”23 In the Secret History of the Mongols, gifts of sable (a black sable coat and sable swaddling clothes) bear a strong Mauss’ian character—they serve here as a reminder of an old blood oath.24 20 Hedda Reindl-Kiel, “Der Duft der Macht: Osmanen, islamische Tradition, muslimische Mächte und der Westen im Spiegel der diplomatischen Geschenke,” Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 95 (2005): 226. 21 Cf. the UNESCO World Heritage “Treasures of the Pazyryk Culture,” URL https://whc.unesco. org/en/tentativelists/6283/, last accessed Feb. 21, 2021. 22 Cf. Hansgerd Göckenjan and István Zimonyi, eds., Orientalische Berichte über die Völker ˇ ayhani-Tradition (Wiesbaden: HarrasOsteuropas und Zentralasiens im Mittelalter: Die G sowitz, 2001), 177–178 (on dowry). This volume also includes many examples of furs used as a means of payment (e. g. tribute). 23 L.F. Benedetto, trans., The Travels of Marco Polo (London: Routledge, 2014), 143–144. 24 “In return for the sable coat, / I shall unite for you / Your scattered people; / In return for the black sable coat, I shall bring together for you / Your divided people. Let / The place of good

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However, it was not the (semi-)nomadic people of the steppe who provided the fur, but the forest-dwelling people to their north. Subjugated people paid their tribute to the Mongols in furs (yasak). This included the Rus principalities. Janet Martin has demonstrated that Muscovy’s fur trade as well as Muscovite interest in collecting fur taxes themselves evolved in response to Mongol tributary demands.25 Although one should beware of generalization, there are many exchange situations preserved in the sources suggesting that the issue of yasak collection from many native people of Northern Russia and Siberia was a case of low value coherence and high contingency even until the nineteenth century. Previous to the Russian eastward expansion from the late sixteenth century onward, for many native peoples of Russia’s north and of Siberia extensive hunting for fur-bearers was not very common. They even had a rather inalienable disposition toward the furs of certain animals that to some extent obstructed trade and tribute paid in them. The Khanty, descendants of the Yugra, even until our times practice a special “economy of souls.” The carcasses of certain animals require special treatment: their bones and skulls need to be returned to the forest (spirit) to reconstitute life. The sable belongs to this category of animals that require return; most illustrative, though, is the special treatment of the bear: the kill is followed by strategies of diversion—pretending that the bear is a deer or blaming the Russians for the kill because the gun was Russian.26 Strategies of diversion to allow commoditization of furs are also found among the Buryats. Here, at the shores of lake Baikal, as elsewhere in Siberia, systematic hunting for fur-bearers only began with Russian dominance. Among the Buryats, furs of sable as well as those of other mustelids and canids served as spiritual currency to buy good luck for hunts. According to Roberte Hamayon, this spiritual treatment was the template for using fur as currency in the exchange with the Russians. However, there existed a strong taboo about hunting sable. While with other animals the killing could be sanctioned by loudly blaming other people or animals, in the case of sable, the hunt was to be done individually in complete silence

faith be in the heart, just as / That of the kidneys must be in the back!” […] In return for the sable coat, / Even to the complete destruction of the Merkit, / I shall rescue for you your Lady Börte. / In return for the black sable coat, / We shall crush all the Merkit, / We shall cause your wife Börte to return, / Bringing her back to you!” Igor de Rachewiltz, trans., The Secret History of the Mongols: A Mongolian Epic Chronicle of the 13th Century (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 28–29, 32. 25 Janet Martin, Treasure of the Land of Darkness: The Fur Trade and its Significance for Medieval Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 90. 26 Peter Jordan, Material Culture and Sacred Landscape: The Anthropology of the Siberian Khanty (New York: Altamira, 2003), 115. For a more historical dimension of a similar phenomenon, cf. Jean-Paul Roux, La mort chez les peoples altaïques anciens et médiévaux (Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1963), 82–85.

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and secrecy, and the hunter denied killing or even seeing the trace of a sable, which was referred to with a taboo word (translating lit. as “tail”).27 Besides the inability to communicate with each other in a common language, such beliefs might have produced the practice of silent barter. Silent barter is a prime example of divergent regimes of value still being effective. This practice was frequently described in medieval Arabic travel accounts and cosmographies when discussing the “Land of Darkness,” the sub-polar East of Eurasia. Ibn Battuta penned it very illustratively: When the travelers have journeyed for forty days, they make camp near the Land of Darkness. Each of them puts down the merchandise he has brought, then retires to the campground. The next day they return to examine their merchandise and find set down beside it sable, squirrel and ermine pelts. If the owner of the merchandise is satisfied with what has been placed beside his goods, he takes it. If not, he leaves it. The inhabitants of the Land of Darkness might add to the number of pelts they have left, but often take them back, leaving the goods the foreign merchants have displayed. This is how they carry out commercial exchanges. The men who go to this place do not know if those who sell and buy are men or Jinn, for they never glimpse anyone.28

It is intriguing to note that even after the conquest of Siberia, the Muscovites/ Russians used to collect yasak in a barter-like fashion that must have left the natives at least initially clueless about the fact that they were perceived as subjects by the tsar. The Muscovite agents were bringing them axes, knives, tin and copper pots, woolens, flints, tobacco, colorful beads as well as supplies of rye, butter and fish oil. Eventually, the natives also broke their silence, expected the Russians to give feasts on occasion of the exchanges and issued complaints about the poor quality of the items they received. In other instances, they would even beat up the 27 Roberte Hamayon, La chasse à l’âme: Esquisse d’une théorie du chamanisme sibérien (Nanterre: Société d’ethnologie, 1990), 107, 299, 770. 28 Paul Lunde and Caroline Stone, trans., Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travelers in the Far North (London: Penguin, 2012), 196. Another telling example of silent barter can be found in the earliest known Eastern Slavic chronicle, the so-called Primary Chronicle. There, Prince Mstislav (the future Mstislav I of Kiev, 1076–1132) reports a strange story that he learned from a Novgorodian, who sent his servant to the Yugra, one of the fur-providing peoples of the north. This servant encountered strange, unintelligibly speaking people locked in a mountain, who, using a small opening, point “at iron objects, and make gestures as if to ask for them. If given a knife or an axe, they supply furs in return.” Prince Mstislav recognized these people as the “unclean peoples of the race of Japhet,” which were confined by Alexander the Macedon to this mountain behind an indestructible wall of metal. The story’s content and a reference to Methodius of Patara make it obvious that this description was heavily influenced by the late ancient/medieval Alexander epic, which contains the confinement of the people of Gog and Magog behind a wall and Alexander the Great’s journey to the Land of Darkness. Lunde and Stone, Ibn Fadlan, 181; cf. Emeri J. van Donzel and Andrea Barbara Schmidt, Gog and Magog in Early Eastern Christian and Islamic Sources: Sallam’s Quest for Alexander’s Wall (Leiden: Brill, 2009). Medieval Arabic accounts on the Land of Darkness and the trade with its inhabitants were pre-shaped by this epic as well.

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officials, destroy the presents and throw the furs disrespectfully into the dirt.29 As late as in 1766, the Russian Yasak Distribution Commission decreed to give the native nobles gifts worth two percent of the furs’ value.30 Trade with the Chuckchi people was still marked by low convergence even in the nineteenth century: “For many years, [the Chukchi] would have no dealing with [the Russians] except at the end of a spear. They would hang a bundle of furs […] upon a sharp polished blade of a long Chukchi lance, and if a Russian trader chose to take it off and suspend in its place a fair equivalent in the shape of tobacco, well and good, if not, there is no trade.”31 Of course, the Russian side was far from being pacifist; on many occasions they did not restrain themselves from killing, torture and taking hostages (amanat) to secure the natives’ obedience. The Muscovite tsars tried to establish a monopoly on the most precious furs. Besides the yasak, a tithe was levied on all furs sold privately, to be paid in the best furs at hand. Moreover, the tsar reserved to himself the presale right for the best furs on the private market. The tsar’s local administrators, voivodes, and his serving men were not to engage in the trade themselves, but serving men were allowed to hunt and trade on a limited scale after collecting yasak. Licensed hunters were not allowed to enter the hunting grounds of yasak-paying natives. Nevertheless, local administrators found many ways to circumvent these regulations, hunting illegally and swapping the tsar’s good furs for bad ones, extorting more furs than decreed, for example by threatening the lives of the native hostages usually taken by state officials, etc.32

Age of Imperial Factors: the Sixteenth Century Concerning the consumption of furs, Paul of Aleppo noted that even some of the richest fur merchants of Moscow would wear rather modest garments themselves.33 It is obvious that the bulk of the fur was destined for export. J.T. Kotilaine estimated that in the first half of the seventeenth century, Muscovy’s revenues were up to forty percent consisting of customs duties and tavern taxes, while these were “complemented by the nationalization or centralization of trade in a

29 Etkind, Internal Colonization, 73–75; Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonia Empire, 1500–1800 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 62; Fisher, Russian Fur Trade, 58–61. 30 Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier, 63. 31 Etkind, Internal Colonization, 75. 32 Fisher, Russia’s Fur Trade, 48–93; Etkind, Internal Colonization, 75–77. 33 Paul of Aleppo, Travels of Macarius, 2:8.

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number of important commodities.”34 According to different estimations, the Muscovite fur business provided ten to twenty-five percent of the tsardom’s gross income.35 In order to assess any mutual societal impact of the fur trade between Ottomans and Muscovites, one first needs to correlate the numbers. But before that, a few comparisons are necessary to make the historical value of sable more tangible. In 1600, a high-quality sorok (a bundle of forty pelts) of sable in Istanbul was worth as much as one hundred kantar or 5,600 kg of highquality cotton, or as much as twenty-five high-quality vizier-class tents.36 On the Crimea, in the second half of the seventeenth century, one coat-amount of obviously very low-quality sable cost fifty to sixty talers, which was equivalent to twenty-five to thirty rubles (R). For that amount one could buy there a Cossack slave, or alternatively a boza-house, i. e. a millet-beer bar, in the Crimean town of Kuba, while with two of them one could buy three houses in Bahçasaray.37 In Muscovy, over the seventeenth century, the purchasing power of such a sorok was naturally lower, approx. two average-priced barns (ambar).38 Janet Martin estimated that in the sixteenth century, Ottoman imperial factors in Moscow were buying between 200 and 1,000 soroks per mission; that is between 8,000 and 40,000 sables.39 In the sixteenth century, according to Mariia Fekhner, a sorok was worth between 20 and 30 R,40 and according to Raymond Fisher, the overall average price for one sorok in Moscow was 28.7 R in the year 1595.41 Thus, if we assume an average price of 25 R per sorok in the sixteenth century, the factors spent between 5,000 and 25,000 R per mission. Indeed, in the few cases where we have exact data, the amount of money that the merchants took with them ranged between the equivalent of approx. 8,000 and 20,000 R. (between 12,800 and 32,000 pelts).42 Of course, not all of that would have been spent on 34 Jarmo T. Kotilaine, Russia’s Foreign Trade and Economic Expansion in the Seventeenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 8. 35 Etkind, Internal Colonization, 10. 36 Mübahat Kütükog˘lu, ed., “1009 (1600) Tarihli Narh Defterine Göre I˙stanbul‘da Çes¸itli Es¸ya ve Hizmet Fiatları,” Tarih Enstitüsü Dergisi 9 (1978): 30, 43, 61. 37 Ömer Bıyık, Kırım’ın ˙Idarî ve Sosyo-Ekonomik Tarihi (1600–1774) (Istanbul: Ötüken, 2014), 229, 232; Fırat Yas¸a, “67 A 90 Numaralı (Dördüncü Cilt), 1061–1062 Tarihli Kadiasker Defteri’ne Göre Kırım’da Sosyal ve Ekonomik Hayat” (MA thesis, Sakarya University, 2014), 19. 38 Richard Hellie, The Economy and Material Culture of Russia, 1600–1725 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 387. 39 Martin, Treasure of the Land of Darkness, 165. 40 M.V. Fekhner, Torgovlia Russkogo gosudarstva so stranami vostoka (Moscow: Goskultprosvetizdat, 1956), 61. 41 Fisher, Russian Fur Trade, 110. 42 Zygmunt Abrahamowicz, ed., Katalog dokumentów tureckich, vol. 1 (Warsaw: Pan´stwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1959), 186–187, no. 190; 137, no. 137; Martin, Treasure of the Land of Darkness, 165; H. Ahmet Arslantürk and Hacer Topaktas¸, eds., Kanuni Sultan Süleyman Dönemi Osmanlı-Leh ˙Ilis¸kilerine Dair Belgeler (1520–1566) (Istanbul: Okur Kitaplig˘i, 2014), 194–195, no. 83.

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sable furs, but sable surely constituted by far the biggest part of the total sum.43 According to the Englishman Giles Fletcher (1546–1611), who resided in Muscovy from the 1570s until 1590, the revenue in furs taken from yasak for the year 1589 was 19,020 pelts (18,640 sables, 200 martens, 180 black foxes). For the year 1605, Raymond Fisher calculated a yasak-only income of 62,400 pelts worth ca. 45,000 R in Moscow.44 Of course, the yasak constituted only one part of the tsar’s fur income besides tolls and did not account for all the private trade—even so, it demonstrates that the Ottomans were buying between half and twice the annual tribute of all of Muscovy’s native subjects in the Russian north and Siberia.45 This proportion must have been even bigger before Ermak Timofeevich (d. 1585) initiated the Russian conquest of Siberia in 1582. In contrast to that, Muscovy’s major sixteenth century outlets of furs to Western Europe, Narva (1558–1581) and Arkhangelsk, exported rather modest amounts of furs, especially sable.46 In 1587, the English imported only 300 sable furs from Arkhangelsk (together with other lesser furs in equally low quantities), and no sables at all in the following year.47 Of course, the direct Ottoman-Muscovite inter-court trade has to be put into relation with intermediary exchanges as well, such as the transit trade via Poland. However, one look into the data Roman Rybarski collected from Polish customs registers of the sixteenth century shows that the regular Polish transit trade in furs (not benefiting from diplomatic privileges/customs exemptions) was far beneath the Ottoman-Muscovite turnover. In 1578/1579 only four soroks of sable were declared by a Greek in Lviv (Pol. Lwów, Ger. Lemberg), which must be considered a consequence of the ongoing Polish-Muscovite war;48 however, in the 43 Indicative might be the proportional amounts of furs forcefully taken as customs from the imperial factor Andreas Chalkokondyles in 1551. The document speaks of seven tonluk sable, three tonluk squirrel, and two pieces of black fox. A tonluk is the amount of fur needed for a vest (ton/don), which is the equivalent of a sorok in the case of sable. A tonluk of squirrels must contain many more individual furs. Squirrel was worth just a very small fraction of sable’s value. According to M. Fekhner, in the sixteenth century, one thousand squirrel furs were priced at only two and a half rubles. Fekhner, Torgovlia, 61. The two black fox furs were priced one thousand akçe each, which is slightly less than one ruble per fur. Arslantürk and Topaktas¸, Kanuni Sultan Süleyman Dönemi, 194–195, no. 83; Abrahamowicz, Katalog dokumentów, 137, no. 137. 44 Fisher, Russian Fur Trade, 108–111. 45 In the year 1627, merchants exported 72,000–92,000 R worth of furs from Siberia to European Russia, while the sum of yasak and tolls amounted only to a sum of 30,000 R. A few years later, in 1631, we find 115,000–131,000 R in furs shipped west by merchants and 42,000 R in yasak and tolls. Paul Bushkovitch, The Merchants of Moscow, 1580–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 117. 46 Ibid., 43–86. 47 Ibid., 66. 48 Roman Rybarski, Handel i polityka handlowa Polski w XVI stuleciu, vol. 2 (Poznan: Nakł. Towarzystwa Miłos´ników Miasta Poznania 1929), 254.

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years of 1551/1552 in another emporium of Oriental trade, Kamianec-Podilskyi (Pol. Kamieniec Podolski), there were also only four soroks declared, by a Jew this time, although there was no war obstructing the trade routes.49 In 1584, still only 17.5 soroks of sable were declared in Cracow, mostly by local Jewish merchants, traders from Moravia, Germans and one Italian50—the first and the latter are the most likely candidates for trade with the Ottoman Empire. Cracow rather seems to have been a market for large amounts of lesser furs produced in PolandLithuania, and the item with the most volume was furs of edible dormice (popielice)—92,000 skins.51 The latter’s habitat is restricted to Europe west of the Volga. It seems as if the Polish market satisfied the demands of the lower-income populace abroad and at home. Even the Polish king had comparatively moderate demands in sable—an average of six soroks per year.52 Furthermore, the accounting books of Polish-Lithuanian diplomatic exchanges with the Crimea from the second half of the sixteenth century show that the king had problems securing the furs demanded as “gratuities” (Pol. upominki) by the Crimean khan and his retinue. In general, only the khan would receive sable-lined robes; most of the gratuities consisted of fox-fur and edible dormice pelisses, non-fur-lined damask robes and large amounts of woolen cloth.53 In 1583, next to 15,365 ducats in cash, 9,584 ducats of the total budget of 33,875 ducats were spent on so-called London woolen cloth alone (panni lundunensis, cf. sukno lun´skie/Lündisch Tuch, Ottoman Londra/Londrina).54 The number of furs in general and sable in particular was relatively small.55 Three rather valuable soroks of sable (timbra)56 were 49 50 51 52 53

Ibid., 237. Ibid., 195. Ibid. The average of all the thirteen years for which numbers are available. Ibid., 286. Cf. “Regestr Upominkow od Machmeth Gireia Czara Przekopskich Tatar Królewskiej Mosci przez Bielieckiego Posla poslane Anno 1578 w Lwowie die 24 July oddany,” Archiwum Skarbu Koronnego (ASK), tom 13, fol. 90–99, Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych (AGAD), Warsaw, Poland; “Provisio Praecursoris Caesaris Tartarorum Przekopensium,” ASK, tom 14, fol. 42v– 65v, AGAD; “Sumptus in Expeditione Munerium Tartarico Rege. Lublinij Anno 1583 coemptiones […],” ASK, tom 14, fol. 125–139, AGAD; “Doplaczanie Ulaffy poslom Tatarskim w Polanczu mieszkaja˛cym i odprawa ich upominkami zwyklemi tak ma byc uczyniona,” ASK, tom 14, fol. 151–163v, AGAD. The composition of the upominki delivered in 1601 by Ławryn Piaseczyn´ski was nearly identical with that of 1579. Kazimierz Pułaski, ed., “Trzy Poselstwa Ławryna Piaseczyn´skiego do Kazi Gireja, hana Tatarów perekopskich (1601–1603): Szkic historyczny,” Przewodnik Naukowy i Literacki. Dodatek do ‘Gazety Lwowskiej’ 39, no. 10 (1911): 955–959. 54 “Sumptus in Expeditione,” fol. 125v–126, 136v. 55 The final account of the 1601 mission of Ławryn Piaseczyn´ski is indicative. In that year, the total costs were higher, but the relation between the individual kinds of gratuities was similar. From 40,020 ducats only 4,295 were spent on furs. Pułaski, “Trzy Poselstwa,” 960. 56 The term timbra—boards or plates—(Old Russ. cka, Tat./Tük. tahta, Germ. Tafel in the same meaning) was in general used to designate vair (Germ. Feh)—squirrel bellies or backs sewn to

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bought from a Jewish merchant (ab Esdra Judaeo) from Cracow and other Cracow merchants (valued 400, 300 and 200 ducats respectively),57 thirteen sable furs were bought for 90 ducats from a Wilna pellifex called Lorenz, and another twenty (for 71 ducats) were delivered by a certain Krzysztof Otocki, sixteen of which also came from Lithuania.58 The fox furs, among which we find pelles vulpium gallicarum and sueticarum, were supplied by furriers from Lublin and a famous Greek merchant from Lviv, Constantin Corniact (d. 1603).59 The furs ordered by the king were crafted into four sable coats, two marten coats, fortyfive fox coats and twenty-five edible dormice coats.60 One cannot help but notice that especially in the case of sable, the King had to scrape together the furs wherever he could find them. Often, he could not procure the items demanded by the Tatars and was forced to give the equivalent in coins instead. Even if sometimes Polish (Armenian) merchants in search of Siberian furs happened to undertake private, large-scale ventures into Muscovy, like the one mentioned by Martin Gruneweg (1562–1618) in his diary, such enterprises seem to have been rather exceptional, singular events. Thus, even if one takes into account illegal diversions to avoid customs, private Polish transit trade in Siberian furs, as opposed to the transit of Ottoman fur merchants, was rather miniscule in the sixteenth century.61 Between 1522 and 1588, there are approximately twenty-six Ottoman merchant missions on record, which is more or less one every two to three years.62 They were run by imperial factors of various backgrounds, some Muslim, some Greek, often assisted by Armenian merchants. Among them we find prominent members of the Ottoman Greek community like

57 58 59 60 61 62

together into standardized squares. As sable was usually not processed in that way, one can assume that timbra was used here in the sense of sorok. “Sumptus in Expeditione,” fol. 130. Ibid., fol. 133v. Ibid., fol. 131–132. Ibid., fol. 134. Almut Bues, ed., Die Aufzeichnungen des Dominikaners Martin Gruneweg (1562–ca. 1618), vol. 4 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2008), 1567–1572. My own count based on the following sources: Andrzej Dziubin´ski, Na szlakach Orientu: Handel mie˛dzy Polska˛ a Imperium Osman´skim w XVI–XVIII wieku (Wrocław: Leopoldinum, 1998), 89–94; Abrahamowicz, Katalog dokumentów, no. 95, 120, 137, 163, 164, 190; Alexandre Bennigsen and Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay, “Les marchands de la cour ottomane et le commerce des fourrures moscovites dans la seconde moitié du XVIe siècle,” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 11, no. 3 (1970): 363–390; Mihnea Berindei, “Contribution à l’étude du commerce ottoman des fourrures moscovites (La route moldavo-polonaise, 1453–1700),” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 12, no. 4 (1971): 393–409; Hacı Osman Yıldırım, Vahdettin Atik et al., eds., 6 Numaralı Mühimme Defteri (972/1564–1565): Özet-Transkripsiyon ve ˙Indeks, vol. 1 (Ankara: Osmanlı Ars¸ivi Daire Bas¸kanlıg˘ı, 1995), hkm. 318, 530, 1283; Fekhner, Torgovlia; Tom Papademetriou, Render unto the Sultan: Power, Authority, and the Greek Orthodox Church in the Early Ottoman Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 213.

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Andreas Chalkokondyles (active until the early 1550s) and Michael Kantakouzenos (d. 1578). The Muslim hassa tacirs (imperial merchants) on the other hand, like the brothers Mustafa and Mehmed, belonged to or advanced into the prestigious müteferrika corps during their service.63 The average volume of furs bought by these merchants per mission multiplied with the numbers of missions gives a number of approximately 580,000 furs bought for about 460,000 ducats in roughly seventy years. The volume of their trade thus seems considerable in total numbers, but was it really? One could argue that some 25,000 ducats as invested in 1567 in one of the twenty-six missions commissioned by hassa tacir Mustafa Müteferrika, were just a drop in the ocean of approximately eight million ducats of Ottoman annual state revenue in the mid-sixteenth century.64 However, one should keep in mind that Ottoman imperial factors apparently bought the bulk of the sable in specie—which means that, in terms of monetary value, the Ottoman demand for Russian furs exceeded the Russian demand for Ottoman products.65 Furthermore, furs are organic and decay—with consequences for their value, as was observed by Paul of Aleppo: “[F]or a peculiarity of these furs is that they every year diminish in value. In course of time, after having been as black as 63 Kantakouzenos commissioned an Armenian called Andrzej Misir/Andirya. Muslim merchants also employed or cooperated with Armenians. Cf. Bennigsen and Lemercier-Quelquejay, “Les marchands,” 370, 380, 385–386, 388; Yıldırım et al., 6 Numaralı Mühimme Defteri, hkm. 318, hkm. 1283. Among the merchants identified as Greeks we also find one Andrea Sivero (1575–1577) and one Dmitrii Syrenak (1585/1586), cf. Dziubin´ski, Na szlakach Orientu, 93; Fekhner, Torgovlia, 17. 64 Halil I˙nalcık, An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire: 1300–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 78–79; Abrahamowicz, Katalog dokumentów, 186–187, no. 190. 65 Kotilaine, Russia’s Foreign Trade, 442–447; Bennigsen and Lemercier-Quelquejay, “Les marchands,” 369–370. Until the mid-sixteenth century we find Russian sources explicitly saying that the Ottoman factors brought “aspr” (akçe) or ducats (1529: 500,000 akçe, 1542: 600,000 akçe, 1551: 10,000 ducats) with them. Fekhner, Torgovlia, 85. For the second half of the sixteenth century, it is hard to say anything reliable, as the Ottoman documents mention only the sum invested, which is not in every case the actual amount of cash taken to Muscovy. In some cases, merchants were robbed by Cossacks or levied extraordinary customs, which leaves us some clues about the amount of money in their possession. A document from 1553 states that the imperial caravan of Andreas Chalkokondyles, on their way back from Moscow, was forced to pay 12,000 akçe, seven tonluks (amount required for one garment) of sable, three tonluks of squirrel, two tonluks of black fox, and one “piece” of brocade in customs to the voivode of Kiev, Fryderyk Pron´ski. There is some probability that this was the same caravan that had left Istanbul in 1551 with 600,000 akçe. Interestingly, the merchants obviously were not able to sell all their silks in Muscovy and left some (not very big but still considerable) amount of money unspent. Arslantürk and Topaktas¸, Kanuni Sultan Süleyman Dönemi, 194–195, no. 83; Abrahamowicz, Katalog dokumentów, 137, no. 137. In 1567, a caravan of fourteen merchants returning from Muscovy and carrying merchandise worth 25,000 ducats was robbed on their way back by Polish subjects (probably Cossacks), with one merchant being deprived of 400 ducats in cash. Abrahamowicz, Katalog dokumentów, 186– 187, no. 190.

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night, they turn red, which is the worst color they can assume.”66 Therefore, the obvious question is: were the Ottomans, despite the general lack of specie, ready to obliterate much thereof, just for the benefit of the short-lived social capital the furs constituted within Ottoman society? We will return to this question in the last section of this paper. For now, suffice it to say that there were other important channels infusing large amounts of Siberian fur into the Ottoman Empire, like various kinds of tributes or gift exchange. The Moldavian voivodes for example used to send their own merchants to Muscovy in order to acquire the furs they were obliged to give to various Ottoman dignitaries as part of their semi-annual tribute—in comparison though, the sums they spent were far below those of the Ottoman court merchants (e. g. 6000 ducats in 1562).67 But there is one considerable channel of that kind that has been largely neglected in the study of Ottoman-Muscovite fur exchange: the tribute-like Muscovite pominki, “gratuities” (cf. Polish-Lithuanian upominki mentioned above) paid by the tsars to the Crimean khan and his retinue. This flow, however, reached excessive dimensions only in the seventeenth century and therefore will be discussed in the following section.

Age of Gratuities: the Seventeenth Century By the seventeenth century, the age of Ottoman imperial factors had ended. Now, Muscovite missions to Istanbul became much more frequent and the Ottoman fur trade became de facto monopolized by Ottoman Greeks.68 Probably due to the devastations of the Time of Troubles, initially, the volume of fur exchanged via diplomacy was low in comparison to the numbers given for the Ottoman merchants in the sixteenth century. They start with 900 R in 1613, 2,275 R (17 soroks/1,075 R in gifts) in 161569 and continue with 5,880 R in 162270, around 13,000 R in 1630, 17,900 R (for 218 soroks) in 164371 and 16,240 R in 1645 (for 193 sable soroks).72

66 Paul of Aleppo, Travels of Macarius, 2:7. 67 Mihnea Berindei, “Le rôle des fourrures dans les relations commerciales entre la Russie et l’Empire ottoman avant la conquête de la Sibérie,” in Passé turco-tatar, present soviétique: Études offertes à Alexandre Bennigsen, ed. Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay et al. (Paris: Édition Peeters, 1986), 94–87. 68 See further below. 69 The total sum includes 1,000 R in sable for sale and sable worth 200 R as gifts for the Orthodox clergy in the Ottoman Empire. L.V. Zaborovskii, “Ekonomicheskie sviazi Rossii s Balkanami v pervoi polovine XVII v.,” in Sviazi Rossii s narodami Balkanskogo poluostrova (pervaia polovina XVII v.), ed. Boris Floria (Moscow: Nauka, 1990), 183; Ivan Egorovich Zabelin, ed., Dopolneniia k Dvortsovym razriadam […], vol 1. (Moscow, 1882), 42–43.

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Sable Transfer into the Ottoman Empire 20000 18000 16000 14000 12000 10000 8000 6000 4000 2000 0

1613

1615 Sable gi!s/R

1622

1624

1630

Total import via diplomacy

1643

1645

One number only

Graph I

The latter two examples show an average price of 82–84 R per sorok—a rather high average price, which may be related to the increased demand during the reign of Sultan Ibrahim (r. 1640–1648). The average Moscow price during the seventeenth century was 42 R per sorok.73 In 1624, Muscovite envoys brought 1,950 sable pelts (ca. forty-nine soroks) worth 2,667 R and three live sables as gift to the sultan and various Ottoman dignitaries (not counting Orthodox clerical dignitaries) as well as some more soroks for the purpose of ransoming prisoners (230 R) and purchases (500 R)—with an average price of 55 R per sorok.74 The embassy of Andrei Sovin and Mikhail Alfimov in 1630/1631 brought approximately 290 soroks worth approximately 13,000 R.75 The total sum is about seven to eight percent of the total officially registered volume of furs leaving Siberia that year—157,000 to 173,000 R, including furs acquired by private merchants, yasak and tolls.76 The 17,900 R worth of furs Muscovite diplomats brought to the Ottomans Empire in 1643 constitute about twenty-two percent of the Muscovite yasak income of 1640 (81,648 R). It has been suggested that the Ottoman-Mus-

70 The total sum includes sable worth 3,880 R in gifts and 2,000 R for sale. L.V. Zaborovskii, “Ekonomicheskie sviazi Rossii,” 183. 71 Of which 11,090 in gifts. N. N. Oglobin, ed., Obozrenie stolbtsov i knig Sibirskago prikaza (1582–1768), vol. 4 (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1901), 93; L.V. Zaborovskii, “Ekonomicheskie sviazi Rossii,” 183. 72 L.V. Zaborovskii, “Ekonomicheskie sviazi Rossii,” 183. For the 1630 mission, see below. 73 Hellie, Economy and Material Culture, 62. 74 Fisher, Russian Fur Trade, 139. 75 Cf. further below. 76 Bushkovitch, Merchants, 117.

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covite trade in furs declined in the seventeenth century.77 Yet these numbers do not show any decrease in Ottoman demand for fur, but rather an unprecedented boom of the Muscovite fur industry. By two decades after the end of the Time of Troubles, the fur exchange with the Ottomans reached pre-Smuta volumes. What is true, however, is that now the Ottomans were no longer the biggest customers. In 1653, according to Swedish resident in Moscow, Johan de Rodes (d. 1655), Arkhangelsk exported 23,160 whole sable furs and 34,847 sable fragments as well as various other furs (for example 355,950 squirrels and 15,970 foxes) to various Northern and Western European countries.78 Apparently, the stagnation of the Ottoman fur import might be partially explained by the increase of Muscovite pominki sent to the Crimea. While in the fifteenth century the pominki were still very moderate, from the beginning of the sixteenth century, they started to rise, skyrocketing towards the end of the century, all the while with not only value and volume increasing per person, but also the total number of receivers rising. Thus, in 1486 Mengli Geray Khan (d. 1514) received just one sable pelt and one gold piece; the only other person receiving a sable was his brother. Overall, only seventeen persons were receiving gifts, mostly one to two gold pieces. Toward the end of the century, the Lithuanians, with a sudden rise in value and volume, commenced an inflationary gift competition with the tsars over the benevolence of the Crimean Tatars, which would last some two hundred years. In the beginning, the pominki were still more varied, including a larger variety of furs, “fish teeth” (ivory from marine mammals), falcons, armor, silverware, etc., while towards the end of the sixteenth century, sable, marten, and squirrel outcompeted all other gifts.79 In 1593, Gazi II. Geray Khan (1554–1607) and his Tatars received 2,000 R regular pominki and a 15,000 R worth of extraordinary pominki.80 Extraordinary gifts were usually granted on personal request (zapros). Thus, Gazi Geray’s sister Kutlu Sultan, for example, requested from the tsar 300 R plus three sable, marten, and lynx coats 77 Kotilaine, Russia’s Foreign Trade, 444; cf. Bushkovitch, Merchants, 93–94. 78 Kotilaine, Russia’s Foreign Trade, 286. 79 Anna Khoroshkevich, Rus i Krym: Ot soiuza k protivostoianiiu, Konets XV–nachalo XVI vv (Moscow: Editorial URSS, 2001), 240–258. The Lithuanian pominki of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century were equally more diverse (various kinds of silverware, ivory from marine mammals, lots of different cloth, and zoologically very diverse furs/fur coats), and sable soroks/sable coats constituted just a minor part in terms of quantity. Kazimierz Pułaski, ed., Stosunki z Mendli-Girejem – chanem Tatarów perekopskich (1469–1515): Akta i listy (Cracow: G. Gebethner i spółka, 1881), no. 30: 228; M. Dovnar-Zapolskii, ed., Litovskiia upominki tatarskim ordam: Skarbovaia kniga metriki litovskoi 1502–1509 (Simferopol: Tipografiia Spiro, 1898), 56–61. When Muscovy was throwing in increasing numbers of sable after Ermak’s conquest, Poland-Lithuania, for obvious reasons, could not keep up and had to substitute for them, with mixed success. Cf. footnote 53 in this chapter. 80 A. A. Novoselskii, Borba moskovskogo gosudarstva s Tatarami v pervoi polovine XVII veka (Moscow: Akademiia Nauk SSSR), 41.

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respectively for her hajj to the “prophet’s grave.”81 As indicated, the recipients rose in number, too. In 1596, in addition to what I call the Geray triumvirate—i. e. the khan as well as the second and third ranks of the Geray dynasty known as kalga and nureddin—130 persons received a regular gratuity from the tsar, adding up to 4,000 R. From that sum the Crimean nobility and service elites had a share of only 1,500 R.82 Two years later the Geray triumvirate received 1,000 R, exclusively for themselves.83 In 1613, under the freshly appointed Khan Djanibeg Geray (d. 1636), they received a meager 1,000 R for twenty people including the triumvirate, while of these 659 R were given in sable, 129 R in black fox, 79 R in marten and 17 R in squirrel, and 116 R were brought as zapas (reserve) in sable and squirrel. The highest-priced sable was found among the reserve, a pair of five R each pelt. The most valuable among the regularly given soroks was worth eighty rubles, and the soroks with the lowest price were worth only six rubles.84 In 1614 the khan and his retinue received 7,300 R–2,800 R in furs (including a zapas of 520 R) and 4,500 R in coins. The non-Geray elites received no more than 616 R (less than one-fourth) in furs and no coins. Graph II on the following page gives an overview of the pominki delivered since 1614 until 1635. Like 1614 the gratuities of 1631 show the relatively small number bestowed upon the dynastic ranks beneath the triumvirate (493 R) and to the relatively numerous nobles and service elites (1508 R). Both groups, taken together consisting of seventy people, received no more than thirty percent of the pominki’s total value.85 To sum up, probably since Devlet Geray Khan’s (1512–1577) devastation of Muscovy in 1571, the tsars were supposed to pay approximately 2,000 R annually as regular gifts, a figure that doubled during the reign of Gazi Geray Khan in the 1590s to 4,000 R, then doubled again during the reign of Djanibeg Geray Khan, before rising slowly to 12,000 R per year in the 1630s, without taking into account the extraordinary gifts that were usually bestowed in furs and the so called “light” pominki, which were sent once per year (with an average sum of 292 R per year in the first half of the seventeenth century86). Approximately half of the regular amount was paid in furs, of which sables constituted roughly seventy percent by value. Even if there were years missed, the pominki’s share in the fur influx was enormous and at some point, during the 81 N.V. Rozhdestvenskii, ed., “Akty vremeni Lzhedimitriia pervogo (1605–1606 gg),” Chteniia v Obshchestve Istorii i Drevnosti Rossiiskikh 264, no. 1 (1918): 179. 82 Snosheniia Rossii s Krymom, F. 123. Оp. 1. 1596. d. 4. l. 74–83, Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Drevnikh Aktov (RGADA), Moscow, Russia. 83 Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier, 65. 84 A.I. Timofeev, ed., “Prikhodo-raskhodnyia knigi kazennago prikaza,” Russkaia Istoricheskaia Biblioteka 9 (1884): 177–179. 85 Novoselskii, Borba, 190, 251, 437–440. The numbers of 1634 and 1635 exclude additional 1,430 R of extraordinary fur pominki for the triumvirate and 200 R furs in reserve. 86 Ibid., 441.

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Pominki to the Crimean Khanate (R)

25000

5772

2001 2131

1622 Fur (triumvirate)

1628+1629 Fur (others)

1630 Fur total

4132

4604

5500

5105

12035

10000

1614

4658

2800

3416

0

616

3884

10000

10200

15000

5000

9700

20000

1631

1634+1635

Other pominki

Graph II

first quarter of the seventeenth century, it became equal to the Muscovite-Ottoman commercial and non-commercial fur exchange. However, the peculiar Crimean-Muscovite relations not only produced an influx in unprocessed furs, but also in ready-made apparel. Every Crimean Tatar diplomatic mission to Muscovy had at least three occasions for bestowing coats on the envoys and their usually-considerable retinue. First, it was the ceremonial exchange of envoys at the border called razmena (as envoys were always in danger of being kidnapped by either side, this was to provide security), then, later, at the respective welcome and farewell audiences at the tsar’s palace. Novoselskii calculated that the tsar spent an average of 1,500 R on fur garments and fur caps per razmena in the first half of the seventeenth century.87 In 1600, the embassy of Mehmed Çelebi numbered 85 persons, of which sixty were not classified as belonging to either the Geray’s personal envoys or their blizhnye liudi (“close people”)—most probably, they were merchants.88 The embassy of Djan Ahmed in 1606 numbered 145 (or 146) persons on 282 horses, including twenty-seven Armenian and Greek merchants representing various lower strata of the elites. Every one of them received a coat according to his position. The first 87 Novoselskii, Borba, 441. 88 Rozhdestvenskii, “Akty,” 167.

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envoy of the khan, Can Ahmed, received a sable coat on gold brocade worth 50 R and a silver kovsh (a boat-shaped drinking vessel) worth two grivna (0.2 R). The following two envoys were bestowed the same kind of gift, just of lower quality and price. The second envoy of the kalga received a sable coat on red velvet with gold-thread, worth 35 R, and a silver trowel. The next two, the nureddin’s first and second envoys, received a silver trowel each and a gold brocade coat lined with sable and marten fur, respectively (23 and 18 R). The first envoy of the anabiyim, the khan-mother, which in this case was de facto Gazi Geray’s sister, received a marten coat on Aleppo velvet (16 R), her second envoy a marten coat on multicolored Bursa brocade (16 R). The next two envoys of the khan’s first wife acquired again a gold brocade coat on sable (29 and 19 R respectively). The khan’s stepmother’s first envoy received a squirrel-backs coat tailored with azure blue Damascus brocade and silver buttons (10 R), the second one a coat made with yellow Damascus brocade (8 R). The envoys of the khan’s other three wives and the prince Safa Geray received coats of the same kind as the last two. The envoys of Batır Geray Beg (d. 1617), lord of the Crimean Mangits, received an Aleppo velvet coat (14 R) with a silver trowel and a Damascus brocade squirrel-backs coat (10 R). The two envoys of Ahmet Pasha Suleshov (Süles¸og˘lı), the client (amiyat) of the tsar in the Crimea, received a marten coat on gold brocade (16 R) with a silver trowel, and a Damascus brocade coat lined with squirrel-backs (ten Rubles). Gifts of the same kind and price were bestowed on Ahmed Ag˘a, the khan’s vizier. All the middle-ranked aristocrats and servicemen to follow were gifted one of the 10 R Damascus brocade squirrel coats. The envoys of elites ranking beneath the abovementioned received 6 R coats made of squirrel backs and kizilbashkaia kamka, “Persian brocade”. Seven more envoys, including two Armenians, received coats made of squirrel-back and Damascus brocade, worth 5 R each. The listing proceeds with thirty envoys, including five Greek and Armenian merchants, being issued with so-called odnokriatka-coats worth 3 R each. Finally, there were sixty-eight envoys, including eighteen Greeks and Armenians, all ending up with 1.5 R odnokriatkas.89 Furthermore, one should also mention the ransoming of prisoners as a source of Muscovite furs for the Crimeans. In 1614, Ahmet Pasha Suleshov was complaining to the Muscovite envoys about the 6,000 R pominki delivered being less than was requested and threatened: “And just at one exchange at Livny [a southern Muscovite border town] if I take 1,000 prisoners, taking 50 rubles per prisoner I will have 50,000 rubles.”90 By means of example: 8,500 R were sent to

89 Rozhdestvenskii, “Akty,” 163–174. 90 Novoselskii, Borba, 83.

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the diplomatic exchange in 1644 to ransoms slaves, and one year later, 7,337 R were sent.91 A large part of this sum was undoubtedly delivered in furs.

Transforming Furs From Muscovy to the Ottoman domains, the furs underwent a variety of transformations. Paul of Aleppo, who was actively engaged in acquiring furs in Moscow himself, gives detailed information on the way Siberian animals were crafted into costly objects. It all began with the hunt: The most healthy situations are required for the well-being of this animal; for if any of them dwell in places unsuitable to their nature, and they are compelled to drink bad water, they are weak and their fur is short and white. […] The hunters repair to the remotest parts of the wilds, mountains, and forests, where they know that these creatures dwell, attended by dogs trained to this chase. On the path which it takes to go to the water they all station themselves in ambuscade: on return to its abode, they meet it and the dogs run after it, and catch it, as they are taught, by the neck, that its skin may not be injured. If it escapes from the dog and ascends its tree, the hunters are there to encounter it, and shoot it with bows and arrows, the head or point of which latter is of bone, striking it below the neck, to avoid injuring the fur. It falls, and cutting the throat, they skin it with most admirable dexterity.92

As the special care to avoid injuring the fur by using arrowheads made of bone indicates, the hunters had the future transformation of the furs already in mind while hunting.93 In Moscow, the foreign merchants would employ special artisans for artificially “blackening” the pelts by plucking out all the white hairs. Paul of Aleppo described the process of tanning with the example of ermine: “We gave ours to the ermine artificers, to tan and prepare them, for in no other country do they know how to tan them in the way they do here, making them as dry and as soft as silk. They take and soak them in barrels filled up with bran and sea-oil, which they call fish-grease, brought from the ocean. These artificers are paid four dinars a thousand.”94 The process of preparing the sables for transport is also related in detail by Paul. During the last days of his stay he was

91 Ibid., 436. 92 Paul of Aleppo, Travels of Macarius, 2:6–7. 93 Lunde and Stone, Ibn Fadlan, 209–210. This method is very old. As archeological excavations revealed, medieval fur-hunters of the sub-arctic regions would use such special arrows, whose cylindrical heads were made of bone, horn, wood or metal to stun the animal, so they could reach and kill it without harming the fur. 94 Paul Aleppo, Travels of Macarius, 2:280–81.

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standing over the workmen, and sealing the paws of all the furs with the red seal of the Emperor: for every single paw of the sable-skins we impressed with a seal, and wrote inside, on the edges behind each, that they might not be stolen, or clipped, or changed, by taking a good couple of the skins, and putting a bad one on its place. This method of prevention was invented by the Greek merchants having to deal with the Muscovite artists, who for the most part, are very devils in deceit. The soroks, which are delivered to us in packs, we separated; and having written on and sealed each skin, we counted them out to the workmen, to clear away the white hairs with pincers, assisted by their wives, children, and numerous slaves. After this they take and soften them by maceration, and then stretch them, to increase their size in length and breadth. Then they select them, and make them up again into soroks, for each of which they receive a dinar. Afterwards, they collect the soroks by tens, calling every ten a korobka, and valuing each sorok by marking them from one to ten. The first is of the highest; and each successive number is of an inferior price. After this, we packed all the soroks in bags; taking great pains to press them close, according to usual method; first, to preserve from the dust of the roads, which injures them greatly; and secondly, to carry them in as small a compass as possible, and protect them from the heat of the sun.95

The transformation of furs into garments shall be illustrated with the example of the fur coats gifted to members of the Geray dynasty and their envoys in Moscow. In general, fur constituted the bulk of the value in these coats, as is illustrated in the Moscow diplomatic accounting book of 1613/1614. The book gives detailed accounts on the individual cost of items in the production of the coats gifted. A sample of such entries is listed in table I. For example, in June 1614, Khan Djanibek Geray received a fur coat of the nagolnaia-type, i. e., a coat whose outside and inside were covered with fur. Sable accounted for 99.99 percent of the total production costs of approx. 119 R. The khan received several more coats, the value of which ranged from 19 to 42 R (including coats made of marten and fox furs). The prime coats bestowed upon the kalga and the nureddin were similar in construction to those of the khan, albeit cheaper due to using sable of lesser quality (sable worth 80 and 50 R respectively). Because of a lack of other furs (sable and squirrel), a standard coat gifted to the high-ranking female members and princes of the dynasty, as well as high-ranking Crimean aristocrats, was a nagolnaia marten coat worth approx. 15 R. Only Ahmed Pasha Suleshov, the Crimean chargé d’affaires (amiyat) for Muscovy, received a more valuable nagolnaia sable coat worth approx. 27 R. The relatively high value of the coat is not related to Suleshov’s position within the Crimean

95 Ibid., 279–280. The Ottomans already practiced the sealing of domestic furs (lynx) destined for the capital as early as 1576. Mühimme Defteri 34, f. 32, hkm. 63, Bas¸bakanlık Osmanlı Ars¸ivi (BOA), Istanbul, Turkey; Yunus Eren, ed., “34 Numaralı ve H. 986/1578 Tarihli Mühimme Defteri (s. 1–164): I˙nceleme-Metin” (MA thesis, Marmara University Istanbul, 2011), 38.

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nagolnaia 119 R

Djanibek Geray Khan 13 R: marten

E. Buttons Ratio fur per total value

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Table I a) The choice of such a cheap textile can only be explained with the fact that it was completely covered by the fur.

1 R (as per 13 R, 27a, 59 % difference)? 1d

Incl. in C.: leaden, with çaprast (“torocˇki”)

49 R, 33 a 60 %

?

25 a, 5d: silver

close to 100 % 27 R, 23 a, close to 2d 100 %

15 R, 1 a, 2d

119 R, 99.99 % 28 a, 1/8 d

Total Value

?: Bursa crimson 25 a: beaver velvet (barkhat burskoi), green, azure, golden silks 4 R, 2 a, 1d: green 25a: beaver Bursa brocade (kamka) with yellow and red chintamani pattern (“zmeiki i kopyttsa” – snakelets and hooves)

12.5 R (as per difference)? ?

F. Labor

?

2 R, 1 a, 2 d: beaver

7 R, 11 a, 2.5 R: gild0.5 d: beaver ed silver

D. Collar/ Hemline

4 R, 8 a, 2 d: beaver

B. Other furs/ C. Textiles feathers 5 d: 5 arshin calicoa)

Ahmed Pasha Su- nagolnaia 23 R, 15a leshov (amiyat) Envoys Main envoy shuba 23 R: sorok Allash Bogatyr (body) + (Allas¸ Batır) 7 R: 20 pelts (lining and sleeves) Envoy khan’s shuba 8 R: marten; mother downy feathers incl. in C.

High-ranking fe- nagolnaia male relatives and nobles, lowranking princes

A. Sable

Body/Costs

Type

Receiver

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hierarchy, but a compensation for his services to the tsar.96 What is interesting about the coats gifted to the dynasty and the aristocracy directly is that they are all of the nagolnaia-type; the fur contributes to almost one hundred percent of the total production cost. This differs considerably from the coats gifted to Crimean envoys, which were fur inside, silk outside. Thus, Allash Bogatyr (Crim. Tat. Allas¸ Batır), the khan’s envoy, received a sable coat with silver buttons, covered with Bursa crimson velvet brocaded with green, azure, and golden silk, worth approx. 49 R. Although in this case not all cost items are readable, it is safe to say that sixty percent of the overall cost came from the fur. Another, more complete example is that of the garment bestowed on the envoy of the khan’s mother—a marten coat worth approx. 13 R, made with chintamani-patterned Bursa brocade and adorned with leaden buttons.97 Fur constituted fifty-nine percent of the overall costs of the coat—a number very close to the previous one. All these examples overwhelmingly demonstrate the disproportion of value between furs and other materials in producing coats. Of course, Constantinople, too, was a major center of transforming furs into clothing. The Ottoman palace had its own furriers—in a register from 1526, there were twenty-five of them. Among them were Circassians, Georgians, Ruthenians, and people from Tabriz. The palace furriers were headed by the hassa kürkçübas¸ı. All fur artisans and merchants of the capital were under strict control of the Ottoman treasury, which oversaw the palace artisans as well. Thus, the treasury, together with the guilds, strictly supervised fur production in terms of quality, price and licensed artisanship: they set fixed prices, controlled the standard number of furs to be used for predefined garments, acted against the illegal crafting of new garments by joining used furs with new ones, and pursued nonlicensed furriers. They also supervised the import: furs arriving in the capital were not allowed to be sold to foreigners and specified officials were supposed to buy all of them, or, at least, had the right of first refusal.98 While the number of palace tailors was in constant decline, from 478 toward the end of the sixteenth century to 217 toward the end of the seventeenth century, the number of the furriers was not much affected and remained roughly between twenty and thirty during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.99 Furthermore, the furriers 96 Timofeev, “Prikhodo-raskhodnyia knigi kazennago prikaza,” 349–369. Cf. Hellie, Economy and Material Culture, 291. 97 Timofeev, “Prikhodo-raskhodnyia knigi kazennago prikaza,” 151–152. 98 Hülya Tezcan, “Furs and Skins Owned by the Sultans,” in Ottoman Costumes: From Textile to Identity, ed. Suraiya Faroqhi and Christoph K. Neumann (Istanbul: Eren, 2004), 66–72; Bahattin Yaman, “Fit for the Court: Ottoman Royal Costumes and Their Tailors, from the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Century,” Ars Orientalis 42 (2012): 89–101. 99 Yaman, “Fit for the Court,” 96; Zeki Tekin, “Osmanlılarda Kürk Kullanımı,” in Türkler Ansiklopedisi, ed. Kemal Çiçek, Hasan Celal Güzel, and Salim Koca, vol. 10 (Ankara: Yeni Türkiye Yayınları, 2002), 647.

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became increasingly specialized: according to one eighteenth century register, five of the palace furriers specialized in working with sable, nineteen in other furs.100 The same development can be observed with the private furriers. Starting in the seventeenth century, the palace was increasingly reliant on being supplied by the latter, as its own artisans could not provide enough garments. Outside the palace, fifty-seven furrier shops specializing in different furs were listed in an order from 1754. It is not clear, however, whether this number includes all shops in existence. In the mid-seventeenth century, Evliya Çelebi (b. 1611) claimed in typical Evliyan exaggeration that Istanbul had five hundred furrier shops and one thousand furriers. Istanbul’s furriers were centered in the Mahmudpas¸a district: in the Furrier’s Han (Kürkçü Hanı), the Valide-Han, the Sash-makers’ Han (Kus¸akçılar Hanı), the Kilit Han, the Carpet-makers’ Han (Kaliçeciler Hanı), and the Kurs¸unlu Han in Galata. In the mid-sixteenth century, there were Muslim and non-Muslim artisans in the Furrier’s Han. Approximately one century later, Evliya Çelebi found that the furriers of Mahmudpas¸a were generally Greeks (Rum). This is consistent with the changes in the composition of the fur traders. According to another document from 1754, the furriers’ guild had eighty-two members, all of whom were non-Muslims, with only the head of the furriers being Muslim. There are also twenty-eight fur merchants included in the list, three of whom were Muslim and Jewish respectively; the remaining twentytwo were Greeks.101 Ottoman furriers produced a variety of fur-trimmed coats and vests. They had a special technique of sewing furs together (“the Istanbul thread”) and used dyed furs to assemble geometric patterns and designs that were common for Ottoman textiles (like the seal of Solomon, moon and stars, etc.). There were differences from, but also many similarities to Muscovite artisanship.102 For example, the Ottomans had no liking for the nagolnaia type of coats, which was strongly associated with Tatar and Caucasian fashion.103 Those wouldn’t become fash100 Tezcan, “Furs and Skins,” 72. 101 Zeki Tekin, “Osmanlı’da Kürk Ticareti,” in Türkler Ansiklopedisi, ed. Kemal Çiçek, Hasan Celal Güzel, and Salim Koca, vol. 10 (Ankara: Yeni Türkiye Yayınları, 2002), 754–763; Elif Bayraktar-Tellan, “Osmanlı Gayrimüslim Çalıs¸mları Çerçevesinde I˙stanbul Kürkçüleri,” Hacettepe Üniversitesi Türkiyat Aras¸tırmaları Dergisi 27 (2017): 121; Cf. Markus Koller, “The Istanbul Fur Market in the Eighteenth Century,” in Living in the Ottoman Ecumenical Community: Essays in Honour of Suraiya Faroqhi, ed. Markus Koller and Vera Costantini (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 119–120. 102 Tezcan, “Furs and Skins,” 66, 74–75. 103 Unfortunately, there is little information from Crimean Tatar sources on types of coats and furrier-related terms used by the Tatars themselves. Surviving documents indicate that they frequently used “ton”, which may be translated here as sorok (one coat-amount) or (simple) coat. Sables (samur) and martens (susar) could be “tob”, whole, or “bölek”, in parts. “Bellies” (qarın) and backs (sırt) usually referred to squirrels, which were delivered either as ton or tahta—a plate of backs/bellies sewn together. Fox (tilki) and black fox (qara tilki) were often

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ionable until the eighteenth century and even then, people wearing them would become targets of mockery and satire.104 Early modern Muscovite and PolishLithuanian fashion was strongly modeled after Ottoman and Tatar models, often using loanwords to describe certain types of garments. In the accounting books cited above, the coats the Crimean envoys received were usually referred to with the Russian term shuba (probably from Ar. djubba), which is often used in a generic sense as simply meaning “fur coat.”105 My strong guess is that the envoys’ coats resembled the Ottoman ferace-type (Pol. ferezja/Russ. ferjaz’) of floorlength outer coats with wide sleeves and fitted collars.106 According to Russian philologist Aleksandra Superanskaia, the difference between shuba and ferjaz was that the first was collarless107—however, as the above examples show, the coats had collars, which makes them strong ferace candidates. This assumption is strengthened by the fact that the honorary coats the relatives of Siberian khan Kuchum received from the tsar in 1599, after they were taken captive by the tsar’s forces and accepted into his fold, were referred to as feryazi.108 The Crimean envoys’ feraces had buttons as well, which is consistent with the Egyptian-style feraces becoming fashionable in Istanbul in the first half of the seventeenth century.109 If seen from an Ottoman perspective, sleeves on outer-coats are generally a sign of inferior rank. If one looks closely at Ottoman miniatures from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, one will discern that, excluding the padishahs with their fake sleeves, higher ranks of Ottoman society wore either no sleeves at all or only short sleeves attached to their coats. Moreover, the fitting of the sleeves had meaning. Loose, over-long sleeves seem to have implied submission. As Amanda Phillips was able to prove, the one common distinctive feature of Ottoman honorary robes (hil‘ats) were “very long sleeves.”110 By contrast, it seems that Eastern European men had quite a liking for the feracetype with its arm-long sleeves, which in the Ottoman realm became more and

104 105 106 107 108 109 110

crafted into fur caps called bürk—together with a special category of sable called “bürklik samur” (sable for bürks). Cf. various examples in R.R. Abduzhemilev, ed., Dokumenty Krymskogo Khanstva iz sobraniia Khuseina Feizkhanova (Simferopol: OOO Konstanta, 2017). Tezcan, “Furs and Skins,” 64. Brian Cooper, “Dérivés russes de l’arabe Djoubbah,” Revue des études slaves 73, no. 1 (2001): 97–101. Hülya Tezcan, “Ferace,” in Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı ˙Islam Ansiklopedisi, Istanbul: (Istanbul: TDV Islâm Aras¸tımaları Merkezi, 1995), 12: 349–350. A.V. Superanskaia, “Russkie nazvaniia verkhnei odezhdy,” Filologijas Zinatnes 7 (1961): 73; Cf. Hellie, Economy and Material Culture, 361. Evgenii Pchelov, “Simvolika darov seme khana Kuchuma,” Quaestio Rossica 4 (2015): 243. Tezcan, “Ferace,” 349–350. Amanda Phillips, “Ottoman Hil’at: Between Commodity and Charisma,” in Frontiers of the Ottoman Imagination: Studies in Honour of Rhoads Murphey, ed. Marios Hadjanastasis (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 125.

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more associated with women’s wear from the seventeenth century onward.111 Nurhan Atasoy and Lâle Uluç have published several portraits of Polish noblemen wearing fur-lined cloaks resembling feraces.112 The only difference seems to be that the Eastern Europeans preferred the end of their feraces’ sleeves to be fitted. They thus became a hybrid of feraces and Ottoman dolama kaftans, which were typical for the rank-and-file of the janissaries, but in contrast to feraces would not be fur-lined. Illustrative examples of Muscovite long-sleeved coats can be found in two Persian miniatures kept in the Topkapı Palace Museum (H. 2155, fol. 19b, 20a) each showing a Muscovite envoy to Shah Abbas: Grigorii Borisovich Vasilchikov (1588/1589) and Andrei Dmitrevich Zvenigrodskii (1594/1595).113 Both wear fur kalpaks, coats lined with brown fur (i. e. no sable) and long sleeves. Vasilchikov’s sleeves have over-length, which reminds us of a typical hil‘at, while Zvenigrodskij’s sleeves are arm-long like a ferace and fitted at the end like a dolama. Adel Adamova assumed that here “the main task was to portray exactly the likenesses of foreign people and their clothing,”114 which might be considered consistent with the general ethnographic interest at the court of Shah Abbas.115 Nevertheless, I would like to argue that Vasilchikov, who was generally treated less benevolently by Shah Abbas than Zvenigrodskii,116 might have been actually portrayed in a Persian hil‘at, hence the extra-long sleeves. Hil‘ats had to be worn during audiences and were often sold afterwards, as outside of this context there was little practical use for these ceremonial robes with their extra-long sleeves, not to mention the fact that they encapsulated submission to a foreign ruler.117 That Vasilchikov was portrayed in a hil‘at becomes even more likely if one considers that the Muscovite envoys Mikhailo Nikitich Tikhanov and Aleksei Bukharov, after completing their mission to the shah in 1615, were scolded by their superiors in Moscow for having appeared to the audience as requested by

111 Tezcan, “Ferace,” 349–350; Shirine Hamadeh, The City’s Pleasures: Istanbul in the 18th Century (Washington: University of Washington Press, 2008), 284. 112 Nurhan Atasoy and Lâle Uluç, Impressions of Ottoman Culture in Europe, 1453–1699 (Istanbul: Armaggan, 2012), 66, 232–233. 113 Adel T. Adamova, “Persian Portraits of the Russian Ambassadors,” in Safavid Art and Architecture, ed. Sheila R. Canby (London: The British Museum Press, 2002), 49–53. 114 Ibid., 52. 115 Emma Loosley, Messiah and Mahdi: Caucasian Christians and the Construction of Safavid Isfahan (London: East & West Publishing, 2009); Emma Loosley, “Ladies who Lounge: Class, Religion and Social Interaction in Seventeenth-Century Isfahan,” Gender & History 23, no. 3 (2011): 615–629; Sussan Babaie et. al., Slaves of the Shah: New Elites of Safavid Iran (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), 114–138. 116 Adamova, “Persian Portraits,” 51. 117 Phillips, “Ottoman Hil’at.”

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the Safavid ruler in the “shah’s robes.”118 Zvenigrodskii’s ferace-like robe, on the other hand, looks very similar to those worn by Muscovites in the woodcut of Michael Peterle depicting Tsar Ivan IV’s embassy to Emperor Maximilian II in Regensburg at the Reichstag of 1576 (Fig. 1). The difference between the ferace and the hil‘at becomes very clear if one compares this procession with the procession of the furriers’ guild in Istanbul, as depicted in the Surname-i Hümayun of 1582 (TSMK, H. 1344, fol. 147b)—the first three furriers clearly wear hil‘ats as a product to be shown as such to the public, with the sleeves even dragging on the floor. The other furriers, though, exhibiting other products (sable bundles and a stuffed or live sable), wear just their regular sleeveless outer-coats. The Muscovite and Polish-Lithuanian aristocracy obviously shared their liking for ferace-cuts with their Crimean neighbors. In the mid-seventeenth-century so-called Rålamb album, which has been attributed to the Polish renegade, Ottoman courtier and universally skilled artist, Ali Ufki Bey (Wojciech Bobowski), there are two miniatures depicting a Crimean khan, both of which have him wearing a ferace-type of outer-coat with fitted, arm-long sleeves. Only one of them (Fig. 2) is fur-lined, the fur of the coat’s inside clearly being sable as there are repetitive, horizontal stripes of lighter color which clearly are supposed to show reflections of light—that is, the typical radiance of sable fur.119 Almost all other outer-coats with fitted, arm-long sleeves in the Rålamb album are typically furless dolama kaftans of lower and middle Ottoman military ranks.120 As Ottoman miniatures—and in particular the late sixteenth-century S¸ecaatname, the richest Ottoman source of images depicting Crimean khans and Tatars—show the Tatars mostly in battle or mustering scenes, these miniatures almost exclusively portray them in short, light and tightly fitted, coat- and furless battle garments very different from feraces and dolamas. The only distinctive fur element is their kalpak headgear.121 In the few scenes in which they are

118 P.P. Bushev, Istoriia posolstv i diplomaticheskikh otnoshenii Russkogo i Iranskogo gosudarstv v 1613–1621 gg. (po russkim arkhivam) (Moscow: Nauka, 1987), 68. 119 Tadeusz Majda, “The Rålamb Album of Turkish Costumes,” in The Sultans Embassy to Sultan Mehmed IV in 1657–1658 and the Rålamb Paintings, ed. Katrin Ådahl (Istanbul: Swedish Research Institute, 2006), 202–203, 222, 255. 120 One Greek and one Hungarian wear dolama kaftans, too. Outer-coats worn by one Moldavian, one Wallachian and another Greek are sleeveless in correspondence with the general Ottoman fashion. Cf. Majda, “The Rålamb Album”. 121 Âsafî Dal Mehmed Çelebi, S¸ecâ‘atnâme: Özdemirog˘lu Osman Pas¸a’nın S¸ark Serferleri (1578– 1585), ed. Abdülkadir Özcan (Istanbul: Çamlıca, 2007), 125, 151, 275, 423, 426. For examples from other works, see Ganizade Mehmed Nadiri, S¸ehname-i Nadirî, TSMK, H. 1124, fol. 36a and Talikizâde Mehmed ibn Mehmed el-Fenâri, S¸ehname-i Hümayun, Türk ve I˙slam Eserleri Müzesi, no. 1965, fols. 53b–54a; Cf. Hanife Özbek, “Osmanli Minyatürlerinde Ordu Tes¸kilatina Mensup Süvari Birlikleri Tasvirlerinin Teknik Analizi” (MA thesis, Fatih Sultan Meh-

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Fig 1: Muscovite Embassy at the Imperial Diet in Regensburg in 1576, Woodcut by Michael Peterle, Germanisches Nationalmusem HB 24834, photographer: Monika Runge

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Fig 2: Crimean khan, Rålamb album, mid-seventeenth century, Stockholm, Kungliga Biblioteket, Turkiska Klädedragter, Cod. Rål. 8:0 nr 10, p. 116

depicted in more solemn circumstances, they are wearing something that more resembles a fur cloak than a coat, but this impression might just as likely be caused by the perspective of the painter (cf. Istanbul Üniversitesi Kütüphanesi, No. 6043, fol. 217b).122 The scarcity of pictures showing the Crimean elites in ceremonial/representative garments makes the Muscovite accounts of gratuities all the more important. As most of the garments, except for the ones the Tatar envoys received, were not granted during or after audiences with the tsar, but delivered as pominki to the ruling elites of the Crimea, they were lacking the met Vakif Üniversitesi Istanbul, 2015), 143–145, and Emine Fetvacı, Picturing History at the Ottoman Court (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 233. 122 Âsafî Dal Mehmed Çelebi, S¸ecâ‘atnâme, 430, 418. But even at such occasions the Hanzades, the crown princes, were often depicted with sleeveless or short-sleeved outer-coats. Ibid., 483, 489.

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submissive implications of hil‘ats. Therefore, it is highly likely that they were indeed worn by the Crimean Tatar elites and constituted fur-lined feraces with fitted sleeves. All the above-mentioned examples of coats gifted by the tsar to Crimean elites also offer insight into the symbolic language of colors, silks and furs used by Muscovites, Tatars and Ottomans alike, even if these traditions are not completely congruent. In the case of Muscovite gifts to the Crimean Tatars, the hierarchy seems to be: furs before silks; sable, marten, squirrel; gold, red, blue, yellow. Moreover, there is some implicit hierarchy in the silks: gold brocade, gold velvet, Aleppo velvet, Bursa brocade, Damascus Brocade, Persian Brocade. Using the inventory of the gifts to Kuchum Khan’s relatives, Evgenii Pchelov assumes the following hierarchy of colors: gold, white and red, green, blue, which is largely consistent with the Crimean examples.123 Pchelov’s finding that one-colored silks were higher ranked than multicolored could not be corroborated.124 The Ottomans adhered to a strikingly similar hierarchy of furs and colors. According to Hammer, the hierarchy of colors was white, violet, scarlet, dark blue, light blue, azure blue, dark green, light green, yellow-green. White was the color associated with the Islamic religious establishment, the ulema, and red with the grand vizier or the agha of the janissaries.125 The Ottomans had a highly differentiated repertoire of hil‘ats. One way of categorizing them was by the ranks and offices of their receivers, but the existing data is representative only for the eighteenth century and later. Then, the grand mufti would receive a white hil‘at called ferve-i beyza (white fur coat), lined with sable, while the other ranks of the ulema were bestowed garments called muvahhidi (lit. “monotheistic”). The viziers would receive robes of the erkan (lit. “pillars” of state) class. The four highest offices of the sultan’s personal chamber received so-called serhaddis (lit. “frontiersman”). If categorized by their quality and price, they were called hassü’l-hass (the finest of the finest), kus¸aklık (kontos¸, sash), ala (highest) and sade (plain). These last categories seem to pertain more to the quality of the textiles used than to other materials, such as furs.126 Another way of categorizing was by the name of the textiles and cuts. Thus, the sultan and occasionally the voivodes of the Danubian principalities, the Crimean khan and the grand vizier would wear so-called kapaniçes: wide, collarless, floor-length coats lined with fur, with short or no sleeves, and an additional false sleeve

123 124 125 126

Pchelov, “Simvolika darov,” 241–247. Ibid., 243. Berindei, “Contribution à l’étude,” 395nn3, 5 and 396n3. Filiz Karaca, “Kürk,” in Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı ˙Islam Ansiklopedisi (2002), 26:568–570; cf. the various examples in Esad Efendi, Osmanlılarda Töre ve Törenler (Tes¸rifat-ı Kadime), ed. Yavuz Ercan (Istanbul: Kervan Kitapçılık, 1979).

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attached to the back.127 Then follows the seraser, so called after the kind of brocade used to craft them. Last in the row are the already-mentioned feraces, which among the Ottomans were preferably worn by women and men of religion. All the categories worn by high-ranking men of state, probably down to the kus¸aklık-class, could be lined with sable, but there were also plain ones. All lower ranks were lined with lesser furs or not lined at all.128 Black fox was a privilege of the sultan; the only other person who as an exception might wear it was the grand vizier—if the sultan had gifted him such a coat and allowed him to wear it on special occasions.129 The agha of the janissaries could also receive a hil‘at lined with wolf, which is not astonishing in light of the association of soldiers with predators.130 In the same wake, according to eighteenth-century Swedish-Armenian diplomat Ignatius Mouradgea D’Ohsson, high-ranking janissaries would be the only ones with a preference for lynx-lined coats.131 Paul of Aleppo claims that cadis and mullahs had a preference for ermine (for being white).132

Transvaluing Furs in Ottoman Society The multi-layeredness of meanings attributed to furs in the Ottoman Empire is obvious from what has been discussed so far. The social capital of furs constituted within the Ottoman Empire and in exchange with its neighbors is surely the most important aspect, yet there are also other closely related ones worth mentioning. For example, there is the association with the second king of Persian lore, Khusang Shah, who used to be credited with inventing many basic elements of civilization, like making fire and iron. Evliya Çelebi wrote that Khusang Shah was the first to wear animals’ skins, fur-side out, apparently to facilitate hunting (through disguise) and for warmth.133 In Evliya’s times, however, wearing coats fur-side out was associated with the Tatars, and, as I have argued elsewhere, people wearing their coats that way were associated with the unruly behavior of the Tatars—to the degree that people were disguising themselves as Tatars for

127 Berindei, “Contribution à l’étude,” 395; Karaca, “Kürk,” 568–570. 128 Cf. the examples in Esad Efendi, Osmanlılarda Töre. 129 Mouradgea d’Ohsson, Allgemeine Schilderung des Othomanischen Reiches, vol. 2 (Leipzig, 1793), 258–259; cf. Berindei, “Contribution à l’étude,” 395. 130 Berindei, “Contribution à l’étude,” 395n5. 131 Muradgea d’Ohsson, Allgemeine Schilderung, 2:259. 132 Paul of Aleppo, Travels of Macarius, 2:9. 133 Robert Dankoff, “Furs: Luxury or Necessity? The Evidence from Evliya Çelebi’s Seyahatname,” in Yücel Dag˘lı Anısına: ‘gedi Yücel, gitti Yücel, bir nefes gibi…’, ed. Evangelia Balta et al. (Istanbul: Turkuaz Yayınları, 2010), 153–154.

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robberies.134 Thus, the Ottomans associated furs (worn in the proper way) with civilization, hunting and royal power. Muscovite furs, on the other hand, were exotic and familiar to the Ottomans at the same time. The average Ottoman did not know much about its origins. Therefore, although the grandees of the empire lived “skin to skin” with them, sables were exotic enough to include living specimens in the palace bestiaries.135 Even in the early modern period, the Ottomans’ knowledge about Siberia was still filtered by medieval topoi of the Land of Darkness inhabited by animal-like people without language.136 Even a person as informed as Paul of Aleppo could not resist writing about the dog-headed people allegedly still living there.137 Evliya, who describes his journey up the Volga to Saratov, called this land Mujikistan, inhabited by the Mujik tribe.138 In early modern Russian, muzhiki (lit. “little men”) was a term for yasak-paying subjects (and peasants).139 Evliya’s frequent interest in fur during his travels might be one of the reasons he came up with this name. During his stay at the suburb of the Muscovite Caucasian fortress Terek, Evliya saw a live sable for the first time: In this town we saw living black and white sable for the first time. They are a creature like the Anatolian [Rum] weasel. So sympathetic and close an animal it is that the town’s boys make it wander around their shoulders and feed it. The white sable is especially adorable. There are also many ermines, which they feed like cats in the houses. It’s an adorable and sympathetic creature smaller than a cat. […] It is such a cheerful, cordial and jolly animal that if it is hungry, it flip-flops, dances and tumbles playing so many tricks in front of the people that the people marvel with laughter. As soon as they are fed,

134 Arkadiusz Blaszczyk, “Food and the Supernatural: How Shared Perceptions of the Tatars Impacted the Diplomatic Relations between the Ottoman Empire and Poland-Lithuania ´ evapcˇic´i: Foodways in (Post-)Ot(Sixteenth–Seventeenth Centuries),” in From Kebab to C toman Europe, ed. Arkadiusz Blaszczyk and Stefan Rohdewald (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2018), 59; Arkadiusz Blaszczyk, Hansjürgen Bömelburg, and Vadim Popov, “Gewaltgemeinschaften und die Military Revolution im östlichen Europa: Der Einfluss internationaler Konjunkturen und wirtschaftlicher Faktoren auf die Gewaltmärkte der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Gewaltgemeinschaften in der Geschichte: Entstehung, Kohäsionskraft und Zerfall, ed. Winfried Speitkamp (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017), 112–114. 135 Alan Mikhail, The Animal in Ottoman Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 126. Famous is the private bestiary that Habsburg envoy Busbecq maintained in Istanbul for the amusement of his household, which also included some sables. F.H. Blackburne Daniell and Charles Thornton Forster, eds., The Life and Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, vol. 1. (London: Kegan Paul, 1881), 204–206. 136 Joseph Matuz, ed., L’Ouvrage de Seyfi Çelebi: Historien Ottoman du XVIe siècle (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1988), 89. 137 Paul of Aleppo, Travels of Macarius, 1:417–21. 138 Evliya Çelebi, Seyahatnamesi, ed. Yücel Dag˘lı, Robert Dankoff, and Seyit Ali Kahraman, vol. 7 (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2003), for example: 169b, 172a, 173a, 174a–174b, 180a. 139 Cf. the term iasachnye muzhiki. See for example Snoshenia Rossii s Krymom, F. 123 Оp. 1, 1614 d. 4, l. 16, RGADA.

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they become lazy and stop moving, the people do not come close and keep a distance. Even if you hit them with a small twig, they won’t even squeak nor fool around, they would grumble and retreat. They smell like the musk cats of the land of Habesh [Ethiopia] […]140

This is quite a different assessment than found elsewhere—the ermine, for example, was described as a rather aggressive animal by Paul of Aleppo, and the sable was called bold by the late medieval Arabic zoologist ad-Damiri.141 The Ottoman grand vizier Tabanıyassı Mehmed Pasha (1589–1637) showed some special curiosity and interrogated Muscovite envoys twice (1632 and 1634) about the hunting of sea lions, sables and squirrels, about the northern ocean, and the size of Siberia.142 As Evliya’s comparison with the musk cat (civet) indicates, another layer of meaning was associated with health. In his travelogue, Paul of Aleppo writes that the sable’s “natural properties are to strengthen the back, benefit the sight, and fortify the heart.”143 According to the early fifteenth-century Ottoman medical treatise of S¸eyhi, sable was considered warm and dry from the humoral point of view and a combination with silk was considered beneficial in that respect. It was also deemed a good remedy against pertussis.144 The medieval Arabic zoologist ad-Damiri equally states that “its flesh is hot, and the Turks eat it.” More importantly, he also writes that in dream interpretation “it indicates a tyrant—a thief, one who does not mix with anybody.”145 From that perspective, one cannot but assume that Naima’s story about Sultan Ibrahim’s obsession with sable quoted earlier has to be read against the backdrop of this reading—especially in the case of Ibrahim’s “splendid isolation” in the harem during the last years of his reign. Sable and ermine were also thought to chase away fleas.146 Finally, furs were simply needed for warmth, as many parts of the Ottoman Empire had harsh 140 Evliya Çelebi, Seyahatnamesi, 7:167b. 141 Muhammad Ibn-Musa Damiri, Ad-Damîrî’s Hayât Al-Hayawân [A Zoological Lexicon], ˙ trans. A.S.G. Jayakar, vol. 2, part 1 (London: Luzac, 1908),˙ 80–81; Paul of Aleppo, Travels of Macarius, 2:8–9. Paul of Aleppo also writes that ermines were kept as pets. 142 Sagit Faizov and Mikhail Meyer, eds., Pisma perevodchika osmanskikh padishakhov Zulfikara agi tsariam Mikhailu Fedorovichu i Alekseiu Mikhailovichu, 1640–56: Turetskaia diplomatika v kontekste russko-turetskikh vzaimo-otnoshenii (Moscow: Gumanitarii, 2008), 10–11n28. 143 Paul of Aleppo, Travels of Macarius, 2:8. 144 Sadettin Eg˘ri, “Tabip-S¸air S¸eyhî ve Kenzü’l-Menâfi Risâlesi,” Uludag˘ Üniversitesi Fen-Edebiyat Fakültesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi 29, no. 2 (2015): 276. 145 Damiri, Ad-Damîrî’s Hayât Al-Hayawân, 80–81. ˙ 63; Abou-l ˙ 146 Tezcan, “Furs and Skins,” Hasan Ali ben Mohammed et-Tamgrouti, En-nafhat elmiskiya fi-s-sifarat et-Tourkiya: Relation d’une ambassade marocaine en Turquie, 1589– 1591, trans. Henry de Castries (Paris: Paul Geuther, 1929), 59. Tamgrouti believes that one indeed could check the quality of sable with one’s eyes, but, quite amusingly, not by looking at it but by touching the fur with the bare eyeball.

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winters. In the eighteenth century, Ignatius Mouradgea d’Ohsson (1740–1807) wrote: During hard winters all the Big and Rich wear two pelts, some even three, either for pomp or for reasons of health. The houses in these regions are lightly built, almost all rooms have several windows, the nation does not know how to use chimneys and braziers, and several people work at home without fire; pelt is here both necessity and luxury. From this, it is possible to guess, how much pelt is consumed in all of the realm. One does see it coming almost exclusively from Russia, whose trade with this commodity is immeasurable. Every year incredible sums are spent on that, as well as on Indian stuff, and cloth made in Europe […]147

An anonymous Spanish report from the mid-sixteenth century stated that everybody, Christians, Jews and Turks alike, would wear fur in the winter according to his (or her) financial constraints ranging from mole, mouse and rabbit to sable. According D’Ohsson the poorest would wear lamb, sheep, cat and squirrel followed by fox and hare on the middle ground of society, while rich and distinguished people would wear ermine, marten, white fox, white and black Siberian squirrel, as well as sable. D’Ohsson also reports on the seasonal “etiquette” of furs to be respected by the highest men of state. As soon as summer ended, one would wear ermine, and three weeks later, one would go for squirrel and finally switch to sable with the beginning of the winter. With the first days of spring, one would switch to squirrel again and a few days later to ermine. The day of the change was always determined by the sultan. When he decided to switch furs for attending the Friday service in the mosque, a special agent would inform the grand vizier and hence the court about the change. Women stood outside of the fur etiquette and could wear whatever furs their heart desired and their purse allowed for. At least for the eighteenth century, this procedure is also corroborated by Ottoman documents.148 The social capital of furs is best visible in honorary robes. Hil‘ats were bestowed on many occasions all throughout the year. Every appointment was connected with an investiture in the actual sense. Sable was restricted to the grand vizier, the grand mufti, pashas and ulemas of the first three ranks. Twice a year, offices were redistributed en masse, first at the third or fourth day after Eid alFitr, and secondly after Eid al-Adha. At the first occasion this concerned offices under the ranks worthy of sable-lined robes (with one exception: the kehaya bey —i. e. lord steward), while the second one concerned appointments of provincial governors, among which all of the three horse-tail rank (tug˘) would receive sablelined hil‘ats. Some high-ranking offıcials, in their turn, would receive sable-lined kaftans from the newly appointed. Other occasions included various Islamic 147 Muradgea d’Ohsson, Allgemeine Schilderung, 2:259. 148 Tezcan, “Furs and Skins,” 64; Tekin, “Osmanlılarda Kürk Kullanımı,” 644–645.

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religious festivities, the dispatchment and return of the army and the navy, the dispatchment and return of the imperial pilgrim missions (surre-i hümayun) to Mecca and Medina, Novruz festivities, payment days, the birth of princes, imperial circumcisions and marriages.149 At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the imperial treasury would buy approximately 1,500–2,000 hil‘ats per year.150 Even if by far not all of them would be lined with sable, this was much. Each mission, whether Ottoman or Muscovite, would bring around 200–300 soroks with them, equivalent to roughly one hundred to three hundred sable-lined hil‘ats depending on the kind. Furs also had an important social function beyond the palace. Furs in general and hil‘ats in particular formed part of a larger (re-) distributive system of gifts. Ottoman officials as well as, for example, the voivodes of the Danubian principalities, redistributed the hil‘ats to members of their households and retainers in the provinces or the capital, thus creating allegiances and social networks.151 A whole new perspective on how furs acquired new meaning in Ottoman culture opens up if one screens Ottoman culture for signs of what Michael Bakhtin has called carnivalization or the principal of laughter. For Bakhtin, carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed. […] during official feasts; everyone was expected to appear in the full regalia of his calling, rank, and merits and to take the place corresponding to his position. It was a consecration of inequality. On the contrary, all were considered equal during carnival. Here […] a special form of free and familiar contact reigned among people who were usually divided by the barriers of caste, property, profession, and age.152

Even if the Ottomans did not know the term carnival, one still can find forms of the carnivalesque in Ottoman culture—forms of turning the world upside down, or rather wearing the coat fur-side out. A key to understanding this is anthropological research on carnival folklore in rural Bulgaria, Greece and Anatolia in the twentieth century. Nowadays, Bulgaria is most commonly known for the kukeri tradition, masked performances of people wearing goat skins taking place during winter and early spring, which 149 Tekin, “Osmanlılarda Kürk Kullanımı,” 645–646; Berindei, “Contribution à l’étude,” 396; Dziubin´ski, Na szlakach Orientu, 89. 150 Tekin, “Osmanlılarda Kürk Kullanımı,” 646. 151 Michał Wasiucionek, “Conceptualizing Moldavian Ottomanness: Elite Culture and Ottomanization of the Seventeenth-Century Moldavian Boyars,” Medieval and Early Modern Studies for Central and Eastern Europe 8 (2016): 39–78. 152 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 10.

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form part of the wider (trans-)European Wilder Mann tradition. The Bulgarian and Turkish (and Greek) traditions have common “stock characters such as the crossdressed bride, the camel, the doctor, the bear, and the sheep or goat skin covered men.”153 Typical elements are processions and the chasing of fur-clad “wild men” with cow bells, bear dances (the bear being a disguised person), mock attacks and battles with resurrection scenes, etc.154 Interestingly, exactly these elements are found in descriptions and depictions of the imperial processions held in Istanbul on the occasions of princely circumcisions or dynastic weddings (sur-i hümayun). Several social groups and guilds of the various crafts in particular would present their artisanship during these processions. A rather unexpected social group, but one with a very carnivalesque performance, were the “prisoners of war” as described and depicted in the miniatures in the Imperial Celebration Book (Surname-i Hümayun) of 1582 on the occasion of the circumcision of the future Mehmed III (1566–1603). A prisoner of war with his head and one hand cut off was pulled down on a cart full of severed limbs, but to the surprise of the crowd he suddenly resurrected, reassembling all his lost body parts—a trick performed with the help of three other disguised men who had smeared some limbs with blood and disguised others with rugs.155 Many of the carnivalesque, “wild men” elements described above are connected to those crafts related with processing animal skins. The most interesting description is given by Evliya Çelebi of the imperial procession held by Murad IV in 1638 on account of leaving for his Baghdad campaign. The furriers’ procession was split into two groups; the first one is not specified but was probably made up by Muslim furriers, and the second consisted of Greek (Rum) furriers of the Mahmudpas¸a district. The first group was comparatively well-behaved. Accompanied by a military band (mehterhane), they passed by, presenting their craftsmanship on sedan chairs and pack horses, among others sable, marten, squirrel, ermine, duck and swan necks, fox, wolf, white Moscow fox, etc. The Greek furriers, however, performed on an entirely different level: they would wear fur coats fur-side out with high hats made of bearskin and fur pantaloons, some would wear leopard, tiger, lion and wolf skins from head to toe and sable kalpaks, and the spears and javelins they carried and the blankets of their horses would drown in animal skins.156 The following passage is the most telling:

153 Kalina Bakalova, “Kukeri: Ritual Performances in Bulgaria” (PhD diss., University of Georgia, 2009), 101. 154 See the various modern-day examples in Bakalova, “Kukeri”; also cf. the Bulgarian and Greek examples in Charles Fréger, Wilder Mann (Heidelberg: Kehrer, 2012). 155 Nurhan Atasoy, Surname-i Humayun 1582: An Imperial Celebration (Istanbul: Koçbank, 1997), 110. 156 Evliya Çelebi, Seyahatnamesi, 1:193a.

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Another group came, that they made into wild men wrapped in animal skins. God forbid, the gallbladders of the people seeing them burst [of fright]. Each of the wild men were bound with five to six chains, each of them, pulled to and fro by five to six men, attacked the spectators. Among the people, frightened by these grotesque faces, they caused such bedlam that cannot be described. And some making faces like demons and fairies, were walking on their hands, as soon as they returned on their feet, they attacked the people. And they made some look like jinns of such marvelous and strange shapes that the mind of someone who has not seen anything like it before, would fall apart. And then came some hundred men who had slipped into lion, leopard, tiger and bear skins and would walk on all fours fiercely looking at the spectators. Some of them would pull their chains and attack people and the chain-masters would beat them with sticks and contain them. One group of artisans even slipped into bear, pig, wolf, cattle and deer skins, walking in a staggering fashion. A regiment of hunters with as many speckled hounds, greyhounds and kangals fell upon the pigs, bears and wolves from behind, they attacked each other, and staged a hunt. In that fashion they passed by the sultan.157

The degree of wildness was even amplified by the fact that the Sultan ordered his beast masters to accompany the furriers with their chained real leopards, lions, bears, wolves and panthers.158 In 1582, the furriers also staged a bear fight with people disguised as bears.159 This was clearly an allusion to real bear fights, which were usually staged by gypsies during the same processions. On non-carnivalesque occasions wearing coats fur-side out would provoke pejorative mockery and comparisons with such gypsy entertainers, such as in an eighteenth-century poem line: “Drunk, the dog put his coat on fur-side out / turned into a bear, the gypsies made him dance.”160

Until this very day, staged bear fights are a common phenomenon of carnivalesque processions all over Europe, but it seems to be especially widespread in post-Ottoman Europe. In Romania, until the 1940s, bear drivers would go from village to village from spring to autumn—the bear’s dance was considered 157 Ibid. 158 Ibid., 193b; cf. Dankoff, “Furs,” 155–156. In this context it is interesting to note that the palace workshops were located next to the lion house; cf. Sibel Alpaslan Arça, “Macht und Herrschaft am osmanischen Hof: Gewandung bei Trauerfeiern, Thronbesteigungen sowie die Verleihung von Ehrenroben / Power and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Palace: Clothing at Funerals, Accession Ceremonies and the Bestowing of Robes of Honor (Hil’ats),” in Tulpen, Kaftane und Levnî: Höfische Mode und Kostümalben der Osmanen aus dem Topkapı-Palast Istanbul / Tulips, Kaftans and Levnî: Imperial Ottoman Costumes and Albums from Topkapı Palace in Istanbul, ed. Deniz Erduman-Çalıs¸ (München: Hirmer, 2008), 54. 159 Gisela Procházka-Eisl, Das Surname-i Hümayun: Die Wiener Handschrift in Transkription, mit Kommentar und Indices versehen (Istanbul: Isis, 1995), 126. 160 A line of the Ottoman poet Sururi: “Mest olub fervesini tersine giymis¸ti köpek, Ayıya döndü çinganeler oynattılar onu.” Res¸at Ekrem Koçu, Türk Giyim ve Süsleme Sözlüg˘ü (Ankara, 1967). Quoted in Tezcan, “Furs and Skins,” 64.

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auspicious, for it was believed to enhance the harvest and make young girls fertile.161 Another group related to animal skins during such processions were the tulumcılar, which, by the way, together with so called goat-men (keçiler) were part of a kukeri-like performance of the tanners of Nig˘de in twentieth-century Anatolia.162 During the imperial processions the tulumcıs, who were clad in multicolored leather and equipped with tarred and inflated goatskins, were to keep the spectators at bay and amuse them with all kinds of buffooneries.163 Nicholaus von Haunolth described the tulumcıs he had seen during the imperial procession of 1582 as follows: “There are men … cal’d Tooloonies from skins of sheep (cal’d Tooloons) blown up full of wind, and all dawbd with oil and tar, and in leather jackets besmeared in like manner. The Turkes, who are very spruce and chary of their fine garments, run from these people as from the divel…”164

This quote reminds us of the presence of the spectators—many of them were clad in fine fur garments. Thus, the furriers were holding up a mirror to this fine society reminding them with horror and humor what all human beings, regardless of their social standing, really were: nothing but wild (wo)men in disguise—a truely carnivalesque catharsis. Such carnivalesque performances were not only staged during imperial processions. Thanks to Ali Ufki’s/Wojciech Bobowski’s (d. 1675) description of the late seventeenth-century Ottoman court and its inhabitants, we know that on special occasions, like the two bayrams or after a conquest, the pages (içog˘lans) of the Ottoman court received special permission to amuse themselves. Among other things, they would sing, make jokes and play games, roam freely from room to room, consume coffee and opium as well as perform boxing tournaments (tura). Most interesting, however, is that on such occasions they would wear their coats fur-side out and disguise themselves as bears, dogs or whatever animal with which they felt close.165

161 Fréger, Wilder Mann, 254 (Southern Germany), 256 (Romania: Palanca/Baca˘u, Boroaia, Udes¸ti), 260–261 (Italy), 262 (Macedonia: Prilep), 263 (Bulgaria: Banishte, Gabrov dol, Leskovets), 264 (Greece: Monastiraki, and Slovenia: Ptuj), 265 (Spain), 267 (Spain), 269 (France), and the respective photographs in the volume. 162 Metin And, “On the Dramatic Fertility Rituals of Anatolian Turkey,” Asian Folklore Studies 39, no. 2 (1980): 88–89. 163 Robert Eliott Stout, “The Sur-i Hümayun of Murad III: A Study of Ottoman Pageantry and Entertainment” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1966), 86–87. 164 Ibid., 87. 165 Albertus Bobovius (Santuri Ali Ufki Bey), Topkapı Saray’ında Yas¸am, trans. Ali Berktay (Istanbul: Kitapyayınevi, 2012), 108.

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Did the Fur Trade Harm the Ottoman Economy? At the beginning of this paper, I addressed the question of the potentially negative effects of the demand the Ottomans had for fur as addressed by Naima. The arguments for this have already been addressed. Now, after considering the extent and importance of the Ottoman demand for fur, it is time to revise Naima’s point of view. First of all, Muscovite furs in general and sable in particular were only found among a restricted number of the most wealthy and highranking Ottoman elites. The bulk of hil‘ats seem to have been either not fur-lined or crafted with inferior furs of non-Muscovite provenance.166 For such purposes, the Ottomans also had their own internal sources of fur. Like the Muscovites, the Ottomans would collect taxes in furs, albeit much less systematically than the Muscovites did. Thus in 1565/1566, abuses were reported to the capital about tax-collectors in Ottoman Hungary extracting too many fox and wolf pelts from the local population.167 Furthermore, the Ottomans employed hunters to supply them with lynx and leopard from Anatolia (similar to the Muscovite promishlenniki), and private hunters had to pay a special tax. Fur belonged to the category of goods whose export was forbidden, and all furs available in the provinces were to be sent to Istanbul. The Ottomans actively fought against hucksters, called madrabaz, and the outflow of fur, as the prices on the private market and abroad for lynx, marten, fox, and wolf were usually higher than the state-fixed prices in the provincial towns. To prevent misappropriation and meddling during their transportation to the capital, they were stamped and registered in a ledger.168 Another point is that the demand for Muscovite furs, at least in the seventeenth century, was not met by market exchange or money transactions in most cases. As Paul of Aleppo demonstrates, patriarchs and metropolites from the sees in the Ottoman Empire would frequently come to Moscow. They would bring small gifts for the tsar and his family and in return receive gratuities in furs and money worth much more. Taking advantage of that, the clergymen would increase the number of gratuities by pumping up their retinues, taking along their relatives and accepting merchants into them. These merchants would wait for the passage 166 Cf. for example, Esad Efendi, Osmanlılarda Töre, 27, 38–41, 67, 136–142; Berindei, “Contribution à l’étude,” 396. 167 Mühimme Defteri 5, hkm. 1066, BOA; cf. Hacı Osman Yıldırım and Vahdettin Atik, eds., 5 Numaralı Mühimme Defteri (973/1565–1566): Özet ve ˙Indeks (Ankara: Osmanlı Ars¸ivi Daire Bas¸kanlıg˘ı, 1994), 171; Mühimme Defteri 6, hkm. 239, BOA; cf. Yıldırım et al., 6 Numaralı Mühimme Defteri, 152–153. 168 Tezcan, “Furs and Skins,” 65–66; Mühimme Defteri 34, f. 32, hkm. 63, BOA; Eren, “34 Numaralı,” 38; Tekin, “Osmanlı’da Kürk Ticareti,” 754–763.

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of a patriarch or metropolite to Moscow and ask permission to join them. Upon arrival in Muscovy, they would receive a certificate from the prelate confirming their position as a slave or menial of the patriarch/metropolite. Thus, they would not only receive gratuities from the tsar, but also the right to engage in trade. The merchants would pay for this service by ceding the furs the tsar used to bestow on every member of the embassy to the patriarch.169 Even if these merchants brought money to Muscovy to purchase fur, they would economize on other expenses: We found that most of those who come to Moscow in quest of alms, whether Archimandrites or common persons, do not come in the hope merely of what shall be given to them; but they bring money, to make purchases of sables, ermines, and such like, that they may realise a great profit on their sale in Turkey. […] From the time of their admission […], till the moment of their return […], they are at no expense whatever. If they have merchandise with them, they pay no duties, nor hire of horses; and they spend nothing for eating and drinking; for they have a pension, which they receive every month, each according to his rank […].170

Similar practices can be assumed for regular Ottoman and Crimean embassies to Moscow, which occasionally included considerable numbers of Armenian and Greek merchants.171 In light of the rise in price from Moscow to Constantinople, a large part of the money spent on the furs in Constantinople would actually remain in the country.172 Famous is the tsar’s gift and war subsidy to Rudolf II in 1595, consisting of sables worth 45,000 R in Moscow, allegedly sold for the equivalent of 400,000 R in Prague excluding three sables too priceless to be sold—this would mean a price increase of almost 800 percent.173 According to the Istanbul fixed price register (narh defteri) of 1600, the best-quality sable available at the Istanbul market, probably a sorok priced at 80–100 R in Moscow, was worth 100,000 Ottoman akçe, 169 Paul of Aleppo, Travels of Macarius, 1:266–67, 386, 402–404. 170 Ibid., 403–044. 171 In 1606, we find twenty-seven Armenians and Greeks accompanying the mission of Crimean envoy Djan Ahmed, almost all of whom are known by name. As if to show some protest, the Muscovite side treated the merchants as one group, independent of the ranks they represented (except the most high-ranking ones), and was deliberately late with handing out their gratuities. Rozhdestvenskii, Akty, 163–174. In 1614, we find fourteen merchants coming to Moscow with an Ottoman diplomatic mission, five of whom were Armenians including one of them being either Armenian or Greek (conflicting ethnic attributes in both mentions). Zaborovskii, “Ekonomicheskie sviazi Rossii,” 164. 172 A considerable price increase already occurred on the way from Siberia to Moscow. Fisher stipulated that in Moscow the price could increase from one hundred to 500 percent of the value in Siberia. Fisher, Russian Fur Trade, 69; cf. Hellie, Economy and Material Culture, 53– 55. According to Paul of Aleppo, black fox furs doubled in price from Siberia to Moscow (from 150 R to 300 R per pelt). Paul of Aleppo, Travels of Macarius, 2:9. 173 Fisher, Russian Fur Trade, 138.

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roughly 736 R, an increase of approx. 500 to 800 percent.174 Yet in this case, the reason for the huge price increase might be seen in the recent devaluation of the akçe. In Iran of the 1660s, sable fetched 150–160 percent over the Muscovite price.175 Persian portraits and paintings from this and subsequent periods show that sable was indeed considered a fashionable item in late Safavid Isfahan and later, but, compared to the Ottomans, the Safavids used them in more minimalistic and resource-friendly ways: they used whole skins as stoles (cf. Museum of Islamic Art, Doha, PA.2.1997).176 The lesser demand would explain the relatively small price increase, which might have made transit trade via Persia profitable for Ottoman merchants. An anecdote about Shah Abbas illustrates this: Although Shah Abbas I showed interest in obtaining a live sable and a live Siberian squirrel as gifts from the tsar,177 his appreciation of Siberian furs as items of fashion was rather limited. While giving Muscovite envoys a tour through the market of Isfahan in the summer of 1619, he grasped the envoys’ fox fur caps and asked for the prices of fox furs in Moscow, adding that he used to have four black fox furs he had received from the tsar, but he had sold them to the Ottomans because “they do not suit us [here in Iran].”178 Resale in Poland was less profitable but is indicative of the price increase: in the seventeenth century, Lviv merchants used to sell moderate amounts of twenty to thirty soroks in Istanbul. In 1626 a sorok, most probably of medium quality, was priced at 107 talers in Lviv, while in Istanbul it fetched 130 talers, a profit of twenty-one percent.179 When giving furs as gifts, the tsars usually (but not always) overvalued them.180 They seem to have anticipated the price they would fetch at their point of destination. The furs given 174 Kütükog˘lu, “1009 (1600) Tarihli,” 61. 175 Hellie, Economy and Material Culture, 63. 176 The portraits of the seventeenth-century Isfahan school also include Isfahani Armenian women (women with the Armenian chin-veil) wearing such sable stoles. Jennifer Scarce, “Style from Top to Toe: How to Dress in Isfahan,” in Safavid Art and Architecture, ed. Sheila R. Canby (London: The British Museum Press, 2002), 72–76 including Ill. 13.2, 13.3 and 13.5. Such stoles were used as late as in the early Qajar period. Cf. Sussan Babaie, “The Paintings that Turned Persian Art on its Head in the 19th Century,” Apollo: The International Art Magazine (2018), URL: https://www.apollo-magazine.com/how-the-qajar-dynasty-turnedpersian-art-on-its-head/. The fact that one of the earliest Persian portraits showing fur stoles was that of a Caucasian woman might be related to the circumstance that for the Safavids, the Caucasus was an important supplier of slaves AND furs—according to a seventeenth-century Persian chronicle, merchants went to Daghestan “for sable, beautiful horses, slave girls and boys, squirrel, down feathers, sheep, hawks and many other things.” Fazli Beg Khuzani Isfahani, A Chronicle of the Reign of Shah Abbas, ed. Kioumars Ghereghlou, vol. 2 (Exeter: Gibb Memorial Trust, 2015), 530. Evliya Çelebi reports that in the mid-seventeenth century, Muscovite furs were traded for naphtha and salt in Baku. Dankoff, “Furs,” 173. 177 Bushev, Istoriia posolstv, 113. 178 Ibid., 218. 179 Dziubin´ski, Na szlakach Orientu, 152. 180 Hellie, Economy and Material Culture, 65–66.

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as pominki to the Crimean khan Djanibeg Geray and his retinue in 1613 are illustrative in that matter. His brother, the kalga and thus second in the hierarchy of the khanate, received a sorok of 30 R treasury price as a 60 R sorok (100%); the third in the hierarchy, the nureddin, got a sorok of 25 R treasury price for 40 R (60%); the khan-mother a sorok of 23 R treasury price for 25 R (8%); Ahmet Ag˘a a 35 R sorok for 50 (43%); and S¸irin-Beg Murats¸ah a 27 R sorok for 30 R (11%).181 This small, surely unrepresentative sample allows only for an average gift-related inflation rate of approximately 44%. A very similar average rate of price increase (40%) can be found with the sables sold by Muscovite envoys Andrei Sovin and Mikhail Afimov on the Istanbul market during their mission in 1630/1631. This mission shows how much sable a single Muscovite mission would infuse into the Ottoman economy without drawing excessively on the latter’s bullion reserves. The envoys brought with them approximately 290 soroks of sable (around 11,600 pelts), worth ca. 13,000 R (with an average price of 45 R per sorok). Around one hundred soroks worth 5,000 R were bestowed as gifts to the sultan, various Ottoman dignitaries of low and high ranks, the patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, and Jerusalem, and the metropolite of Caffa (with an average price of 50 R per sorok). Seventy-four soroks worth 4,264 R were given as gratuities for gifts that the tsar and his father, Patriarch Filaret, had previously received (with an average price of 58 R per sorok). Thirty-six soroks worth 1,130 R were spent on the embassy’s expenditures and the ransoming of prisoners/slaves (with an average price of 31 R per sorok). Twenty-three soroks worth 600 R (with an average price of 26 R per sorok) were sold in order to acquire cash to donate to various Orthodox monasteries on Ottoman territory. Fifty-three soroks worth 2,000 R were sold for the tsar’s profit (with an average price of 38 R per sorok). Concerning the gifts and gratuities, approximately one half of the amount of soroks consisted of soroks worth less than 50 R, while the soroks of the other half were within a price range between 50 and 200 R, whereas those worth more than 100 R constituted just approximately one-tenth of the overall amount. The price minimum for soroks gifted was 10 R, the maximum 275 R. The latter was the value of the only sorok in the sample worth more than 200 R, which was, of course, bestowed on the sultan. A miniscule amount of 220 R was gifted in other materials than sable—black fox, “fish teeth,” and marten. The numbers above show that the most valuable soroks, next to the sultan’s, were spent on gratuities for gifts given by Ottoman dignitaries and Orthodox clergymen.182

181 Timofeev, “Prikhodo-raskhodnyia knigi kazennago prikaza,” 177–179. 182 L.V. Zaborovskii and N.S. Zakharina, eds., “Iz dokumentov russkikh posolstv v Osmanskuiu imperiiu: Prikhodo-raskhodnye knigi 1630–1631 i 1641–1642 gg.,” in Sviazi Rossii s narodami Balkanskogo poluostrova (pervaia polovina XVII v.), ed. Boris Floria (Moscow: Nauka, 1990), 241–272.

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In any case, only 53 out of 290 soroks were sold for the personal profit of the tsar, and of the talers the envoys received for them, approximately 1190 R were spent on silk.183 Even if the Ottoman silk trade with Persia and India was deficient, the amount of silver diverted from the Ottoman economy through the trade in Siberian fur cannot have been very large in the seventeenth century. Most of the furs were diplomatic gifts, and the remainder were used for alms and ransoming prisoners/freeing slaves—virtually the entire profit acquired by the fur sales stayed in the Ottoman Empire. Another strategy chosen by some merchants of the Ottoman Empire to avoid money transactions was the proactive ransoming of Muscovite prisoners. Therefore, Armenian and Greek merchants used to buy up and bring Muscovite prisoners to Moscow or give loans to the Muscovite envoys for that purpose, for which in Moscow they took interest (kabala) of 50, 100, or 200 percent.184 Another way of avoiding exchanging money was the trade in horses. Muscovite diplomatic reports from 1601 and 1614 show that merchants accompanying Tatar envoys used to buy horses from the Tatars in the steppe, which they took with them to the horse fairs in the Muscovite steppe border towns, such as Livny, one of the towns where the diplomatic exchanges used to take place. There, Tatars and foreign merchants would trade horses for sable with the agents send by the tsar to buy horses for his stables.185 Furs to some degree even offset the lack of bullion in the Ottoman Empire: we know that Muscovite diplomats in Istanbul gave out fur credits with interest rates of approximately fifty percent.186 But the Ottomans did so as well. It is surely no coincidence that in 1661 a one-year interest rate for a debt of 1,605 talers (kurus¸) was defined as “sable rate.” The debtor Patriarch Parthenios IV had to pay an interest worth one high-quality sable of 400 kurus¸ (200 R) to Elhac Mehmed Efendi.187 In 1617/1618 Mahmud, a scribe of the imperial chancellery, reported that he had lent 18,000 akçe and fifty-five martens to a certain Bünyad as well as 9,000 akçe and thirty martens to a certain Erzani in the Sanjak of Karahısar-ı S¸arki, but both failed to pay their debts in either money or furs.188 In her work, Elif Bayraktar-Tellan has assembled many examples of furriers of the Greek community supporting patriarchs, bishops, and monasteries with loans, or acting as patrons of art and education within their communities.189 Therefore, even if the 183 Ibid., 255–256. 184 Zaborovskii, “Ekonomicheskie sviazi Rossii,” 163. 185 Snoshenia Rossii s Krymom, F. 123 Оp. 1, 1614 d. 4, l. 14, RGADA; Snoshenia Rossii s Krymom, F. 123 Оp. 1, 1601 d. 2, l. 79, RGADA. 186 Zaborovskii and Zakharina, “Iz dokumentov,” 254. 187 Bayraktar-Tellan, “Osmanlı Gayrimüslim,” 118. 188 Mühimme Defteri no. 82, hkm. 6 (361), BOA; cf. Murat Sener and Hacı Osman Yıldırım, 82 Numaralı Mühimme Defteri (1026–1027/1617–1618): Özet–Transkripsiyon–I˙ndeks ve Tıpkıbasım (Ankara: Osmanlı Ars¸ivi Daire Bas¸kanlıg˘ı, 2000), 6. 189 Bayraktar-Tellan, “Osmanlı Gayrimüslim,” 115–137.

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fur trade was not necessarily profitable economically for the Ottoman Empire as a whole, there was one group that definitely “transvalued” Muscovite furs to their advantage: in general, “the conquering Balkan Orthodox merchant,” as Traian Stoianovich put it, and in particular—Ottoman Greeks.190 The most prominent and illustrative example is that of Michael Kantakouzenos (d. 1578), nicknamed by the Ottoman Turks “S¸eytanog˘lu” (devil’s son) and by contemporary German scholar Martin Crusius (1526–1607) “god” of the Greeks. Initially, he acquired his riches by farming out the incomes of the salt works and fisheries of Anchialos (Ahyolu, Pomorie) as well as the salt customs of Istanbul. Furthermore, he was in charge of the imperial shipyards of Ahyolu, building mostly galleys for the purpose of the Black Sea trade. He also controlled the salt imports from Moldavia and Wallachia and probably was also involved in the sea-borne salt import from the Crimea, the major provider of salt to the Ottoman capital. According to Crusius, Michael Kantakouzenos supposedly received sixty thousand ducats annually, that is around thirty million akçe, to purchase fur and other valuables in Muscovy, which seems exaggerated. Nevertheless, Kantakouzenos—a protégé of Grand Vizier Mehmed Sokollu Pasha (d. 1579), whom he bribed regularly—grew so rich and influential that he started to meddle in the affairs of deposing and imposing the patriarchs and the Danubian voivodes. For this reason and for his inability to meet his debts to the imperial treasury, he was hanged by imperial order at the door of his lavish palace in Ahyolu.191 According to Ottoman historian Naima, the Imperial Chief Furrier Yanaki threw himself into the sea after he learned that Sultan Ibrahim had the Grand Vizier Salih Pasha (d. 1647) strangled. The latter had distributed furs worth more than fifty thousand kurus¸ as gifts and, being dead, was no longer able to settle this debt.192 The many cases of furriers unable to pay their debts and fleeing from their creditors are illustrative of the entanglements between the early modern Ottoman world of finance and the fur business. For example, there is the case of the furrier Petro who, together with another zimmi, farmed out the villages of Dragantsi and Karnobat in modern-day Bulgaria from Osman, the son of Gevherhan Sultan, daughter of Ahmed I (1590–1617), but the furrier had failed to pay the full sum he owed.193 A certain Jovan, a furrier from Dubrovnik, received a loan of 160,000 akçe from the 190 Traian Stoianovich, “The Conquering Balkan Orthodox Merchant,” The Journal of Economic History 20, no. 2 (1960): 234–313. 191 For the most recent study on Michael Kantakouzenos cf. Papademetriou, Render unto the Sultan, 193–213. Still worth mentioning to this very day is Nicolae Iorga, Byzance après Byzance (Bucharest, 1935), 113–119. 192 Bayraktar-Tellan, “Osmanlı Gayrimüslim,” 118. 193 Mühimme Defteri no. 75, f. 82, hkm. 139, BOA; cf. Selçuk Demir, “75 Numaralı Mühimme Defteri’nin Transkripsiyonu ve Deg˘erlendirilmesi (s. 1–171)” (MA thesis, Atatürk University Erzurum, 2008), 121.

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sixty-sixth division of the janissaries and fled the country.194 Another furrier called Nikola owed 26,000 akçe to another Greek, called Toma, and fled to Wallachia.195 Another Toma (or maybe the same?), Toma (Thomas, Foma) Kantakouzenos, was, according to the findings of Russian historian Boris Floria, a grandson of aforementioned Michael Kantakouzenos, and like him involved in the fur trade with Muscovy. But in comparison to many other merchants, Kantakouzenos, who was in Moscow several times in the 1620s and 1630s and was killed by Cossacks on his last trip (1637), had not only commercial, but also sincere diplomatic ambitions, acting as an agent of Patriarch Kyrill Loukaris (1572–1638) in his plot for an anti-Polish league.196 Each time, he traveled in company with other Greek merchants. L.V. Zaborovskii demonstrated that Kantakouzenos relied on a network of other Greek merchants, some of whom were immediate family members or more distant relatives. They provided valuable experience and information, as must have done, for example, Manulo Mikhrov, who had already been in Moscow two years prior to Toma’s first mission. Serving as a middleman between Muscovite and Ottoman officials, Toma actively guided them for his own profit. In 1627, he vouched in Moscow for one of his companions, Kyrill Nikolaev, calling him a scion of an “ancient family of Caffa, of good people.” In the next year, the Muscovite envoys to Constantinople sold there ten soroks of sable to the aforementioned Kyrill and his son.197 Kantakouzenos also persuaded the Imperial Admiral Hasan Pasha (d. 1631) to commission a crown as a gift for the tsar, which was surely crafted by one of Kantakouzenos’ clients. During his audience with the tsar, however, Kantakouzenos presented the crown, allegedly crafted in the image of the Byzantine emperors’ crowns, as a gift of Sultan Murad.198 This was of course an 194 Mühimme Defteri no. 82, hkm. 274 (96), BOA; cf. Yıldırım et al., 82 Numaralı, 184–185. 195 Mühimme Defteri no. 82, hkm. 14 (353), BOA; cf. Yıldırım et al., 82 Numaralı, 11–12. 196 Cf. Boris Floria, “K istorii ustanovleniia politicheskikh sviazei mezhdu russkim pravitelstvom i vysshim grecheskim dukhovenstvom (na primere Konstantinopolskoi patriarkhii),” in Sviazi Rossii s narodami Balkanskogo poluostrova, ed. Boris Floria (Moscow: Nauka, 1990), 8–41; V.P. Shusharin, “Russkoe gosudarstvo i Transilvanskoe kniazhestvo v pervoi polovine XVII v,” in Sviazi Rossii s narodami Balkanskogo poluostrova, ed. Boris Floria (Moscow: Nauka, 1990), 43–67; Boris Floria, “Foma Kantakuzin i ego rol v razvitii russko-osmanskikh otnoshenii v 20–30-x gg. XVII v,” Rossiia i Khristianskii Vostok 2–3 (2004): 248–287; cf. Gunnar Hering, Ökumenisches Patriarchat und europäische Politik, 1620–1638 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1968), 1620–1638. 197 Zaborovskii, “Ekonomicheskie sviazi Rossii,” 167–168. Manulo Mikhrov and Kyrill Nikolaev must be considered Russian renderings of the original Greek names. 198 On this ominous crown, see Sagit Faizov, “Tsargradskaia korona dlia tsaria Mikhaila Fedorovicha: primecheniia k legende na osnove ofitsialnoi russko-turetskoi perepiski i stateinogo spiska russkikh poslov,” URL: https://sagitfaizov.livejournal.com/1209.html; Faizov and Meyer, Pisma perevodchika, footnotes 27, 30, 84, 85; Floria, “Foma Kantakuzin,” 259–260.

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incredibly presumptuous claim of a potentially explosive nature, and the Muscovites must have been suspicious that the sultan would have never sent such a gift. Even so, Kantakouzenos’ official position as Ottoman envoy forced them to accept the gift, to which Kantakouzenos added a mace as his personal gift. The Muscovites were forced to defuse the situation by overcompensating for the gift with even more valuable gratuities, mostly paid in sable, of course—thus, Kantakouzenos exploited the loopholes of early modern diplomacy to obtain a large amount of sable. For the crown, the Imperial Admiral Hasan Pasha received a gracious gratuity of 3,900 R in sable.199 Kantakouzenos received approximately 4,350 R in gratuities from the tsar, including 2,175 R in gratuities for his gifts.200 Obviously, Kantakouzenos, at least initially, was able to keep his transgression secret from the Ottoman court (except, of course, from the Imperial Admiral Hasan Pasha). Upon his arrival in Constantinople, he even tried to hide the sables he had obtained in Muscovy from the Ottoman customs officers, as was reported by the Muscovite envoys he accompanied.201 About a decade later, the Muscovite interpreter Afanasii Bukalov was instructed to investigate the matter of the crown: “[…] was it the Turkish tsar [sultan] alone who sent the crown to the gosudar [tsar] or was it Foma, who commissioned such a crown to be crafted and sent, lying about it, and for that Foma accepted large gratuities from the tsar. And when the Turkish pashas learnt about it, they were distressed […].”202

As is often the case, the spectacular and tragic examples leave the biggest traces in the sources; however, happy endings are not entirely missing, like that of Manolakis Kastorianos in the seventeenth century.203 On the whole, if there is but one Transottoman effect of Ottoman-Muscovite fur trade, it is the rise of the Greek Orthodox merchant.

Conclusion For an early modern beholder, fur was as bedazzling as Paul of Aleppo described it, and so it was probably also for Mustafa Naima, who deemed sable a perfect target for his critique against Sultan Ibrahim, one that was simultaneously exotic

199 200 201 202

Zaborovskii and Zakhar’ina, “Iz dokumentov,” 246–247. Zaborovskii, “Ekonomicheskie sviazi Rossii,” 168. Ibid., 144. Snoshenia Rossii s Krymom, F. 89 Оp. 1, 1640 d. 1, l. 203, RGADA, qt. in Faizov, “Tsargradskaia korona.” 203 For Manolakis and other similarly influential Ottoman Greek furriers and fur merchants, cf. Bayraktar-Tellan, “Osmanlı Gayrimüslim,” 115–137.

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and known by everyone. Even if the fur trade does not seem to have been the Ottoman’s bane and Russia’s “Wirtschaftswunder,” a close look opens various precious insights into the workings of Transottoman diplomatic and economic exchanges. It shows the various diversions brought to life by the pulls and restrictions of divergent regimes of value, like the pominki in the Crimean case, the patriarchs’ quests for sable alms, the ransoming of prisoners, etc. On the one side, there was the high demand and cultural esteem of the Ottomans for furs, reflected in the hil‘at-ceremony and even more so in its carnivalesque “flipside”; on the other, there were the tsar’s representational needs, with sable being the beacon of Muscovite foreign policy and the Muscovite tendency to hypertrophic protectionism hindering foreign merchants from entering and potentially dominating the market or competing with the tsar. In the end, a certain kind of go-between was best at surviving in the special milieu between these two regimes of value. Ottoman and Orthodox at the same time, Ottoman Greeks became once more conquerors, “conquering Balkan merchants.”

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Alexandr Osipian

Uses of Oriental Rugs in Early Modern Poland-Lithuania: Social Practices and Public Discourses

Introduction Old carpets attract our attention by their enigmatic ornaments as well as by their meandrous biographies. The carpets’ social biographies have knotted the histories of Eastern Europe and the Middle East into a dense network where art is entangled with commerce, consumption, politics, religious (in)differences, sumptuary laws, and moralist and mercantilist writings. When a group of silk rugs weaved with golden and silver threads was presented by Prince Władyslaw Czartoryski (1828–1894) in 1878 at the Paris World Exhibition in the salle Polonaise du Palais du Trocadéro, the fascinated public called them tapis Polonais or Polish carpets. This was due to the existence in eighteenthcentury Poland-Lithuania of silk-weaving manufacture using gold thread, and because nothing quite like these rugs had at the time been found in the Middle East. Furthermore, some of the rugs1 bore the coat-of-arms2—a feature unknown in nineteenth-century oriental carpet-making. Soon it was discovered that the rugs were produced in Persia mostly in the first half of the seventeenth century.3

1 The “Czartoryski carpet”, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, inv. no. 45.106. Sheila R. Canby, “Art of Iran and Central Asia (15th to 19th Centuries),” in Masterpieces from the Department of Islamic Art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ed. Maryam Ekhtiar et al. (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011), 267. 2 Identified as Jastrze˛biec, a coat-of-arms used by Franciszek Myszkowski (1625–1669). Marcin Latka, “Kobierce polskie,” Art in Poland, accessed March 21, 2019, https://artinpoland.weebl y.com/pl/kobierce-polskie. 3 Alois Riegl, Altorientalische Teppiche (Leipzig: T.O. Weigel, 1891), 190–198; Wilhelm von Bode, “Ein altpersischer Teppich im Besitz der Königlichen Museen zu Berlin: Studie zur Geschichte der westasiatischen Knüpfteppiche,” Jahrbuch der Königlich Preussischen Kunstsammlungen 13, no. 1 (1892): 37–38; Idem, Vorderasiatische Knüpfteppiche aus älterer Zeit (Leipzig: Hermann Seemann Nachfolger, 1902), 49, 52–53; J. B., “A Polish Carpet,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 5, no. 7 (1910): 170–171; Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed., s.v. “Carpet. Polish Carpets.”

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Nevertheless, the term Polonaise (die sogenannten Polenteppiche) continues to be used by art historians.4 Despite the popular family legends, tracing the origins of the carpets to the booty taken by their noble ancestors from the defeated Ottomans at the victorious battles of Khotyn in 1621 and Vienna in 1683, most of the carpets were commissioned by Polish kings and aristocrats in the oriental workshops. In the late nineteenth century, after two unsuccessful uprisings, the members of the Polish national movement considered the sixteenth to seventeenth century as the lost golden age of Poland-Lithuania. They commissioned their portraits—including prince Czartoryski himself—as dressed in accordance with Polish early modern fashion. Polish orientalized “Sarmatian” attire, along with oriental carpets and arms, were immortalized in the paintings of Jan Matejko (1838– 1893) and the novels of Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846–1916) and became part of the Polish national myth. When Polish aristocrat Adam Branicki (1892–1947) listed one of those carpets for sale in the summer of 1929, it was Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian (1869–1955), a British oilman and collector of art, who signed a contract to pay 20,000 pounds, or 864,000 zlotys, for the carpet. Because the carpet was preserved in Wilanów palace—a residence of King John III Sobieski (r. 1674–1696), who defeated the Ottoman army at Vienna in 1683—the news of its possible sale provoked a heated discussion in Polish newspapers. Finally, the Polish government decided to buy the carpet from the owner for 866,800 zlotys. By way of comparison, the state budget of 1929 allowed for only 620,000 zlotys for the purchase and conservation of objects of art.5 Thus, the oriental carpets with their cultural biographies rooted in Poland’s “lost golden age” were accorded an important role in Polish national heritage. At the same time, in Transylvania, oriental rugs were attached to the German identity of local Saxons.6 In this field of carpet studies there are much more dangerous traps than in the case of tapis Polonais. Due to the large number of oriental rugs—about 400—that have survived in the Protestant churches of Transylvania, some art historians were misled to consider the Transylvanian case as unique. Moreover, they mistakenly established a direct connection between the Reformation and the spread of the vogue for oriental carpets: “As in most of the Transylvanian churches, during the Reformation the frescoes were white4 Friedrich Spuhler, “Ein neuerworbener ‘Polenteppich’ des Museums für Islamische Kunst,” Berliner Museen: Berichte aus den Staatlichen Museen Preußischer Kulturbesitz 20, no. 1 (1970): 27–33. 5 Piotr Szpanowski, “Zaginiony dywan wilanowski,” Cenne bezcenne utracone 3, no. 52 (2007): 3–6. 6 Emil Schmutzler, Altorientalische Teppiche in Siebenbürgen (Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1933). For more information on this topic, see the contribution by Stephanie Armer, Eva Hanke and Anja Kregeloh in this volume.

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washed or erased and the church must have appeared in the eyes of its recently converted parishioners a large, cold, and empty space, arousing feelings of horror vacui. In this situation, the Oriental rugs, created in a world that was spiritually different from Christianity, found their place in the Reformed churches, which were to become their main custodians.”7 This line of argumentation takes a retrospective approach: the carpets survived in the Protestant churches of Transylvania; therefore, they were donated exclusively to these churches. How did the authors arrive at their incorrect assertion? By referring to the plainness of the Protestant churches’ interiors as compared to those of the Catholics. Because of this, some early modern Catholic polemists compared Protestant churches to mosques. From there follows the next misleading step: The mosques consistently featured prayer rugs, and this model was allegedly adopted by the Protestants of Transylvania. This seemed to be all the more plausible as Transylvania was in the Ottoman sphere of influence. And this misleading thesis on the impact of “Protestant iconoclasm” on the spread of carpets in Transylvania is repeated again and again.8 The fallacy of a retrospective approach becomes evident in a comparative perspective. In reality, the spread of oriental carpets was a much more general trend geographically as well as socially and culturally. It is true that in other countries, few carpets survived, which are now held in museums and private collections. Many of them have very complex biographies—they went from one country to another when they were sold, donated, inherited, given as dowry, and taken as booty before they eventually reached their final (?) destinations. Nevertheless, written and visual sources reveal that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, dozens of oriental carpets belonged to many Catholic and Orthodox churches in Poland-Lithuania. These churches were full of frescoes, icons, statues, bas-reliefs, reliquaries, and crucifixes, according to their doctrines. In Russia—a country not affected by the Reformation at that time, at least in the main Orthodox churches of Moscow—there were gorgeous oriental carpets.9 In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, long before the Reformation, oriental carpets were already to be found in the Catholic churches of Italy and were captured in paintings by numerous contemporary artists.10 7 Stefano Ionescu, “Transylvanian Rugs: The Collection of St. Margaret’s Church in Mediash,” Ghereh: International Carpet and Textile Review 50 (2012): 8. 8 Levent Boz, “Anatolian Carpets in the Saint Margaret’s Church in Medias¸, Transylvania,” Carpet Collector: Carpets and Textiles for Collectors 4 (2015): 82. 9 Elena G. Tsareva, “Vostochnye kovry v russkikh kollektsiiakh i interierakh. Chast I. XV– XVII vv.,” in Radlovskii sbornik: Nauchnye issledovaniia i muzeinye proekty MAE RAN v 2015 g., ed. Iu. K. Chistov (Saint Petersburg: MAE RAN, 2016), 81–89. 10 See, for instance, Donald King and David Sylvester, eds., The Eastern Carpet in the Western World from the 15th to the 17th Century (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1983); John Mills, “Near Eastern Carpets in Italian Paintings,” Oriental Carpet and Textile Studies 2

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In contrast to Western Europe, where oriental carpets—beyond their usage in a church—were mostly perceived as part of the exoticism fashion and were connected in the political realm to the growth of absolutism,11 in the Transottoman sphere, carpets were appropriated and played an important role in shaping pre-modern identities. American social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai proposes to regard luxury goods not so much in contrast to necessities (a contrast filled with problems), but as goods whose principal use is rhetorical and social, goods that are simply incarnated signs. The necessity to which they respond is fundamentally political. Better still, since most luxury goods are used (though in special ways and at special cost), it might make more sense to regard luxury as a special ‘register’ of consumption (by analogy to the linguistic model) than to regard them as a special class of things.12

According to Appadurai, the signs of this register, in relation to commodities, are some or all of the following attributes: (1) restriction, either by price or by law, to elites; (2) complexity of acquisition, which may or may not be a function of real ‘scarcity’; (3) semiotic virtuosity, that is, the capacity to signal fairly complex social messages (as do pepper in cuisine, silk in dress, jewels in adornment, and relics in worship); (4) specialized knowledge as a prerequisite for their ‘appropriate’ consumption, that is regulation by fashion; and (5) a high degree of linkage of their consumption to body, person, and personality.13

This chapter examines the social practices of consumption, appropriation and reinterpretation of oriental rugs and carpets in early modern Poland-Lithuania. In early modern Poland-Lithuania, as well as in the Russian, Persian, and Ottoman Empires, carpets were closely associated with the realms of politics and religion. Nevertheless, the case of early modern Poland-Lithuania is especially intriguing owing to its well-developed culture of public politics and pamphleteering. Therefore, this chapter approaches material evidence mostly through written sources. This chapter starts with a discussion of the fashion dynamics of oriental carpets. It analyzes how exogenous objects and forms were assimilated into (1986): 109–121; Valentina Rocella, “Large-Pattern Holbein Carpets in Italian Paintings,” Oriental Carpet and Textile Studies 6 (2001): 68–73; Rosamond E. Mack, Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300–1600 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), ch. 4: “Carpets”, 73–93; Marco Spallanzani, Oriental Rugs in Renaissance Florence (Florence: S.P.E.S., 2007). 11 Ina Baghdiantz-McCabe, Orientalism in Early Modern France: Eurasian Trade, Exoticism, and the Ancien Régime (Oxford: Berg, 2008), particularly ch. 8: “Domesticating the Exotic: Imports and Imitation,” and ch. 10: “Orientalism, Despotism, and Luxury.” 12 Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Poltics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 38. 13 Ibid.

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political imaginaries. Furthermore, it examines the question of whether carpet production and consumption were affected more by religious politics or by market demands. Thereafter, it highlights how the carpet trade was operated by an Armenian merchant network. It explores the issues of social prestige and hierarchy of carpets through examining the inventories of noblemen and burghers. Finally, it demonstrates the variety of socio-cultural contexts in which oriental carpets were used and how their usage was reflected in public discourses.

Dynamics of Cultural Appropriation: From Conspicuous Consumption to Manufacturing It is unclear who brought carpets into vogue in Poland-Lithuania. One of the earliest instances of evidence of the import of oriental carpets to Poland-Lithuania dates from 1480, when the Armenian merchant Lukasz, among his other goods, declared two carpets to the customs in Lviv.14 However, we do not know who bought or commissioned these carpets. In this particular case, what is most remarkable is the insignificant number of carpets compared to the voluminous items imported in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. On the one hand, it was the Polish nobility, which adopted oriental attire, arms, horses and horse trappings as an expression of its “Sarmatian” political identity.15 The spread of the oriental fashion among the nobility was already reflected in the writings of the Polish intellectuals and Catholic moralists of the 1560s.16 The register of customs duties collected in Lublin in 1565 records among other commodities “Turkish dye-stuff, carpets, Turkish horses.”17 Prob14 Court Records of Lviv, 1480, fond 52 (City Magistrate of Lviv), holding 2, file 222, p. 382, Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine in Lviv, Ukraine. 15 On the making of “Sarmatian” identity, see: Stanisław Cynarski, “The Shape of Sarmatian Ideology in Poland,” Acta Poloniae Historica 19 (1968): 5–17; on the making of “Sarmatian” taste, see: Zdzisław Z˙ygulski, “The Impact of the Orient on the Cultures of Old Poland,” in Land of the Winged Horsemen: Art in Poland 1572–1764, Exhibition Catalogue Walters Art Gallery Baltimore et al., ed. Jan Ostrowski (Alexandria, VA: Art Services International, 1999), 70; Paulina Banas, “Persian Art and the Crafting of Polish Identity,” in The Fascination of Persia: The Persian-European Dialogue in Seventeenth-Century Art and Contemporary Art of Teheran, ed. Axel Langer (Zu¨ rich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2013), 122–123. 16 Grzegorz z Sambora, Cze˛stochowa: Poemat wydany w 1568 r. u Siebeneychera, trans. Wincent Strok (Cracow: Nakł. autora, 1896); Krzysztof Stopka, “Mie˛dzy Samborem a Cze˛stochowa˛: Oratorskie peregrynacje XVI-wiecznego akademika krakowskiego,” Alma Mater: Miesie˛cznik Uniwersytetu Jagiellon´skiego 94 (2007): 28; Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski, O poprawie Rzeczypospolitej, ed. Stanisław Bodniak (1551. Reprint, Warsaw: Pan´stw. Inst. Wydawn., 1953), 197; Łukasz Górnicki, Dworzanin polski (1566. Reprint, Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1954), 161–162. 17 Andrzej Wyczan´ski, ed., Lustracja Wojewodztwa Lubelskiego, 1565 (Wrocław: Zakł. Narod. im. Ossolinskich, 1959), 11.

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ably, oriental carpets caught the nobility’s imagination some time after they were adopted at the royal court. Most likely, the royal court acted as a trendsetter in the case of oriental carpets. In 1553, King Sigismund II August (r. 1548–1572) commissioned 132 oriental carpets to decorate the Wawel royal castle in Cracow in advance of his wedding to Catherine of Habsburg (1533–1572) on July 30, 1553. Polish dignitary Spytek Wawrzyniec Jordan was dispatched to the Ottoman Empire for this purpose. According to the detailed instructions of April 20, 1553, he was to buy carpets designed with flowers and leaves to decorate the tables and walls in the banquet hall as well as the royal chapel.18 Wawrzyniec successfully accomplished his mission, as a contemporary wedding poem witnesses.19 The practice of sending dignitaries to the Ottoman Empire for the purchase of prestigious goods for the royal court was quite common at that time. For instance, in 1583 King Stephen Báthory (r. 1576–1586) sent his sub-equerry Jakub Podlodowski to the Ottoman Empire to acquire oriental horses. On his way back, in the vicinity of Adrianople/Edirne, Podlodowski and his retinue were murdered and the horses stolen.20 Although the Ottoman court declared that irregular Tatars had killed Podlodowski, contemporaries believed that the murder had been ordered by the sultan himself due to deteriorating binational relations.21 Perhaps as a consequence of this infamous incident, in 1585, Stephen Báthory chose the Armenian merchants of Lviv to buy his carpets in the Ottoman Empire. Armenian merchants frequented the Ottoman Empire and were well aware of how to avoid dangerous circumstances on their way. The king allocated 2,000 zlotys for 34 carpets to decorate the Wawel royal castle, more specifically to drape the walls, to cover the tables and benches, and to decorate the coaches. The carpets for the palace had to be of red, yellow, and blue color with floral ornaments, while those for the coaches had to be “beautiful white with red colors, as usually manufactured in Turkey, with birds.”22 In 1601, Sigismund III (r. 1587–1632) sent Armenian merchant Sefer Muratowicz23 to Persia under the pretext of buying a number of Persian rugs, a silk 18 Tadeusz Man´kowski, Sztuka Islamu w Polsce w XVII i XVIII wieku (Cracow: Nakł. Polskiej Akademii Umieje˛tnos´ci, 1935), 21–22. 19 Stanislao Orichovio Roxolano, Panegyricus Nuptiarum Sigismundi Augusti Poloniae Regis: Priore correctior et locupletior (Cracow: Lazarus Andree excudebat, 1605). 20 Małgorzata S´liz˙, “W cieniu wielkiej polityki: Tureckie misje Jakuba Podlodowskiego podkoniuszego Stefana Batorego,” Przegla˛d Orientalistyczny 3–4, no. 247–248 (2013): 139–147. 21 Mikołaj Krzysztof Radziwiłł, Mikołaja Krzysztofa Radziwiłła Peregrynacja do Ziemi S´wie˛tej, 1582–1584, ed. A. Wargocki (1607. Reprint, Wrocław: nakładem Zygmunta Schlettera, 1847), 219–220. 22 Man´kowski, Sztuka Islamu, 22–23. 23 Sefer Muratowicz was an Ottoman subject. In 1597, he visited Lviv and made an agreement with two wealthy Armenian merchants to act as their agent in the Ottoman domains. When

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tent, and a damascene saber. The main yet unofficial purpose of Muratowicz’s mission, however, was to establish friendly relations between Poland and Persia for a possible future anti-Ottoman alliance. Thanks to the interference of Vizier Tahmasp Qoli Beg—an Armenian or Georgian convert to Islam—Muratowicz was received in an audience with Shah Abbas I and successfully completed his diplomatic mission. Muratowicz’s mission resulted in two Persian embassies, which arrived to Poland in 1605 and 1609 with the Shah’s proposal of a multinational anti-Ottoman coalition. When Muratowicz returned to Poland in 1602, Sigismund III awarded him the title of a royal purveyor (servitorum ac negotiatorum) as well as the citizenship of Warsaw.24 In the city of Kashan—while on his road to the Shah’s court—Sefer Muratowicz commissioned six carpets and a tent in the local workshops.25 Some of the carpets, which bore floral designs, were embroidered with the royal coat-of-arms in the central medallion (Fig. 1), while others showed hunting scenes. In 1642, Sigismund III’s daughter Anne Catherine Constance Vasa (1619–1651) married the future Elector Palatine Philipp Wilhelm of Pfalz-Neuburg (1615–1690). She brought a considerable dowry, including several of the carpets imported from Persia by Muratowicz forty years earlier. Later, the Bavarian branch of Wittelsbach house inherited these “Polonaise” carpets, which are currently located in the Residenzmuseum in Munich.26 Armenian merchants also supplied the rulers of Poland-Lithuania’s neighboring countries. In 1649, a lawsuit between two Armenian merchants, Mikołaj Markiewicz of Brody and Warterys Kirkorowicz of Zamos´c´, was carried out. As commercial partners they had stored a collection of silk carpets in the city of Zamos´c´. Mikołaj Markiewicz claimed that George II Rákóczi, Prince of Transylvania (r. 1648–1668), had sent his agent to buy the carpets, while Warterys Kirkorowicz declared that he intended to sell the carpets to Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg and Duke of Prussia (r. 1640–1688).27

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25 26 27

one of them died in 1599, Muratowicz demanded his share and in 1600 applied to the Ottoman sultan’s envoys—whom he joined for a trip—to act on his behalf at the court of Sigismund III. Most probably due to this case, the king turned his attention on Muratowicz and employed him for a very delicate mission. Tadeusz Man´kowski, “Wyprawa po kobierce do Persji w roku 1601,” Rocznik orientalistyczny 17 (1951–1952): 184–211; Maria Szuppe, “Un marchand du roi de Pologne en Perse, 1601– 1602,” Moyen Orient & Océan Indien: Société d’Histoire de l’Orient 3 (1986): 81–110; Michael Połczyn´ski, “The Relacyja of Sefer Muratowicz, 1601–1602: Private Royal Envoy of Sigismund III Vasa to Shah ‘Abbas I,” Turkish Historical Review 5, no. 1 (2014): 59–93. Sefer Muratowicz, Relacya Sefera Muratowicza Obywatela Warszawskiego Od Zygmunta III Krola Polskiego Dla Sprawowania Rzeczy Wysłanego do Persyi w Roku 1602 (Warsaw: w Drukarni J. K. Mci y Rzpltey Mitzlerowskiey, 1777). Tadeusz Man´kowski, “Les tapis de Perse représentant le type dit ‘polonais’,” Bulletin International de l’Académie Polonaise des Sciences et des Lettres 4–6, no. 1–2 (1935): 87. Man´kowski, Sztuka Islamu, 19.

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Fig. 1: So-called “Polish carpet” (“Polenteppich”). Silk, golden thread. Height 243 cm, width 134 cm. Persian carpet, produced in the city of Kashan in 1601. Residenzmuseum, München. Inv. Nr. BSV.WA316. Photograph: Luca Pes.

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The vogue for oriental carpets spread from the royal court to the aristocracy and the clergy. The nobility adopted carpets as part of their “Sarmatian” self-fashioning and lifestyle.28 Moreover, in the socio-political context of Poland-Lithuania, the carpets—along with other “Sarmatian” robes and weapons—were reinterpreted as an expression of the nobility’s anti-absolutist political commitments. Many noblemen were portrayed standing in “Sarmatian” attire with a saber, their hands resting on a table covered with a Persian rug.29 Some Polish magnates founded manufactories in their domains in order to meet the growing demand for oriental products.30 When in the 1580s Jan Zamoyski (1542–1605), Grand Chancellor and Grand Hetman of the Crown, invited settlers to populate his recently founded city of Zamos´c´, he granted a privilege (1585) to the Armenian merchant Murat Jakubowicz to manufacture oriental carpets.31 However, the question of whether Murat Jakubowicz indeed founded the carpet workshop and manufactured any carpets cannot be answered based on the sources that are currently available. Another powerful dignitary, Stanisław Koniecpolski (1591–1646), the Grand Hetman of Poland, established a manufactory producing oriental textiles in his private town of Brody.32 The manufactory continued to produce textiles after his death and was glorified in the posthumous panegyric devoted to the memory of his son Alexander Koniecpolski (1620–1659): “Let’s go to the manufactory in Brody. It is a pleasure to see how silkworms are producing silk there [while] weavers as if in Persia are dyeing the silk textiles in various colors, tapestries, carpets, as well as blankets of Phrygian33 work.”34 The manufactory was managed by the Greek Manuel Korfynsky (of Korfu) who employed Greek, Armenian, and Jewish artisans.35 28 On the ongoing debates on the definition of “Sarmatism,” see: Anke Heynoldt, “Die Bedeutung des Sarmatismus für das Nationsbewusstsein und die Kultur des polnischen Adels zwischen dem 16. und 18. Jahrhundert,” Kultursoziologie 7, no. 1 (1998), 6–57; ead., “Die polnische Kulturgeschichtsschreibung und das Problem Sarmatismus,” Kultursoziologie 8, no. 1 (1999), 29–68; Hans-Jürgen Bömelburg, “Sarmatismus – Zur Begriffsgeschichte und den Chancen und Grenzen als forschungsleitender Begriff,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 57, no. 3 (2009), 402–408. 29 For instance, see: Jan K. Ostrowski and Thomas DaCosta, eds., Art in Poland, 1572–1764: Land of the Winged Horsemen, trans. Krystyna Malcharek. (Alexandria, VA: Art Services International in association with Yale University Press, 1999), 151. 30 Zdzisław Z˙ygulski, Dzieje polskiego rzemiosła artystycznego (Warsaw, 1987), 44. 31 Kazimierz Lepszy, ed., Archiwum Jana Zamoyskiego kanclerza i hetmana wielkiego koronnego, vol. 4, 1585–1588 (Cracow: Polska Akademia Umieje˛tnos´ci, 1948), 407. 32 Brody is a town in the western part of Ukraine. 33 “Phrygian” means “Anatolian” here. Phrygia is an ancient region in central Asia Minor. 34 Stanisław Z˙yznowski, Cursus Gloriae Ill. et Excell. Dni Dni Alexandri in Koniecpole Koniecpolski, Palat sendom. S. R. I. Principis etc. ad posthumam memoriam Panegyrico (Cracow: Chr. Schedel, 1659), D3. 35 Ihor Lylo, Greky na terytorii Ruskoho voievodstva u XV–XVIII st. (Lviv: Lvivskyi Natsionalnyi Universytet, 2019), 216–220.

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Armenians settled in Brody in the late 1630s. On January 11, 1638, Stanisław Koniecpolski granted a privilege to Armenian merchants Mark Serhiowicz, Mikołaj and Zachariasz Markowicz and asked them to invite more merchants and artisans, with their tools, to Brody.36 On July 10, 1650, his son Alexander Koniecpolski ordered Armenian merchant Zachariasz Markowicz to invite more settlers of various nations and faiths to Brody.37 Possibly, Armenian carpetweavers were to be among the invited settlers. There is evidence that some Persian silk carpets were already manufactured in Armenian workshops in Isfahan. When in the 1980s a private owner sent his rug for professional cleaning in London, the name “Yakob” (ՅԱԿՈԲ) and the initials “Y” and “G”, written with Armenian script, appeared on the rug.38 In all likelihood, this carpet was manufactured in Isfahan between 1625 and 1630.39 Because of the Ottoman-Persian wars of 1603–1618 and 1623–1639, Shah Abbas I could move the textile workshops from the threatened Kashan to his capital city of Isfahan. Armenians, whom Shah Abbas I settled in the autonomous suburb of Nor Djugha (New Julfa) in Isfahan 1604–1605, probably adopted the Persian techniques of brocade weaving and design.40 Soon after the diplomatic mission of Sefer Muratowicz, Persian brocaded silk carpets became fashionable in PolandLithuania as well as in Western Europe.41 Finally, Polish dignitaries through their trusted partners—Armenian merchants—invited Armenian weavers to PolandLithuania to meet the increasing market demand there. In the eighteenth century, the production of oriental-style textiles in PolandLithuania boomed.42 In 1758, Prince Michał Kazimierz Radziwiłł (1702–1762) invited the skilled Armenian tailor Jan Madz˙arski (Yovhan Madzhareants) to organize the production of silk sashes, saddlecloths (dywdyki) and tapestries 36 Ivan Sozanskyi, “Z mynuvshchyny m. Brodiv (prychynky do istorii mista v XVII v.),” Zapysky tovarystva imeni Shevchenka 97, no. 5 (1910): 24–25. 37 Sozanskyi, “Z mynuvshchyny,” 25–26. 38 In 2000, the rug was given to the Art Galley of South Australia in Adelaide by its owner, William Bowmore. 39 Marian Wenzel, “Carpet and Wall-painting Design in Persia: An Armenian-inscribed ‘Polonaise’ Carpet,” Apollo NS 128, no. 317 (1988), 4–11. 40 In the Armenian cemetery of Isfahan, there are many seventeenth-century tombstones depicting a female weaver at work. I would like to thank Prof. Levon Chookaszian for providing me with this information. 41 In 1603, a Persian embassy presented the Doge of Venice, Mariano Grimani, with a brocaded silk rug, a coat-of-gold brocade, a velvet with a representation of the Madonna and Child, and other silks. In 1622 and 1636, two other Persian embassies brought rugs to Venice. Richard Ettinghausen, ed., Islamic Art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1972), 257. 42 Beata Biedron´ska-Słotowa, “Kobierce z polskich manufaktur: (Próba podsumowania),” in Tkaniny artystyczne z wieków XVIII i XIX: Materiały sesji naukowej w Zamku Królewskim na Wawelu, Kraków, 21 marca 1991, ed. Magdalena Piwocka (Cracow: Zamek Królewski na Wawelu, 1997), 151–163.

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(makaty) of Persian style in the recently established manufactories (persjarnia) in the cities of Nies´wiez˙ and Slutsk.43 Jan Madz˙arski originated from Istanbul and initially migrated to Stanisławów,44 where he tried to establish his workshop. Radziwiłł appointed Madz˙arski a manager of the Slutsk manufactory.45 Later, from 1776 to 1778, the manufactory was rented by Jan Madz˙arski, and from 1778 to 1807, by his son Leon.46 The Armenian merchant Paschalis (Arutiun) Jakubowicz, originally from the Ottoman city of Tokat, migrated to Poland in the 1760s and opened his oriental shop in Warsaw. In 1773, he was granted citizenship of Warsaw. In the course of the Great, or Four-Year, Sejm (1788–1792), when the “Sarmatian” silk sash became an expression of Polish patriotism, Paschalis Jakubowicz founded two manufactories—in Warsaw and in the nearby village of Lipków—to meet the growing demand.47 In 1790, both Leon Madz˙arski and Paschalis Jakubowicz were ennobled.48 In the eighteenth century, the demand for carpets on the Polish-Lithuanian market was mostly met by domestically produced textiles imitating the oriental patterns.49 For instance, the inventory of Wis´niowiec palace of 1745 mentioned domestically manufactured carpets (Dywan domowej roboty).50 43 Nies´wiez˙ and Slutsk are towns in present-day Belarus. 44 Stanisławów is the historical name of the town Ivano-Frankivsk in present-day Ukraine. 45 Tadeusz Korzon, Wewne˛trzne dzieje Polski za Stanisława Augusta (1764–1794): Badania historyczne ze stanowiska ekonomicznego i administracyjnego (Cracow: L. Zwolin´ski; Warsaw: T. Paprocki, 1897), 2:229. 46 Anatoly P. Gritskevich, “Armianskaia manufaktura v Belorussii v kontse XVIII veka,” Vestnik obshchestvennykh nauk AN Armianskoi SSR 4 (1967): 44–53; Janina Poskrobko-Strzeciwilk, “The 18th-Century Polish Silk Sash and its Oriental Prototypes,” in The Art of the Islamic World and the Artistic Relationships between Poland and Islamic Countries, ed. Beata Biedron´ska-Słota, Magdalena Ginter-Frołow, and Jerzy Malinowski (Cracow: ‘Manggha’ Museum of Japanese Art and Technology; Warsaw: Polish Institute of World Art Studies, 2011), 337–346. 47 Joanna Sławin´ska, “Paschalis (Arutiun) Jakubowicz i trzy pasy kontuszowe w zbiorach Muzeum Uniwersytetu Jagiellon´skiego,” Lehahayer 4 (2017): 82–84; Jadwiga Chruszczyn´ska, “Pasy kontuszowe z pracowni ormian´skich,” in Ars armeniaca: Sztuka ormian´ska ze zbiorów polskich i ukrain´skich. Katalog wystawy, ed. Waldemar Deluga (Zamos´c´: Muzeum Zamojskie, 2010), 100. 48 Gritskevich, Armianskaia, 50; Sławin´ska, Paschalis, 84. 49 Konstancja Ste˛powska, “Polskie dywany wełniane,” Sprawozdania Komisji Historii Sztuki PAU 8 (1912): 352–371; Anna Kwas´nik-Gliwin´ska, “Kobierzec polski z herbem Działyn´skich ze zbiorów Muzeum Narodowego w Kielcach,” Rocznik Muzeum Narodowego w Kielcach 16 (1988): 125–135; Halyna V. Kohut, “Profesiyni maisterni na ‘kylymoviy mapi’ Ukrainy XVII– XVIII st.: Fakty, mify, hipotezy,” Visnyk Lvivskoho universytetu. Seriia: Mystetstvoznavstvo 2 (2002): 132–142; Kohut, “Seriia kylymiv nevidomoii poltavskoii maysterni,” Visnyk Lvivskoho universytetu. Seriia: Mystetstvoznavstvo 3 (2003): 172–179. 50 Inwentarz pos´miertny Michała Serwacego Wis´niowieckiego spisany 11 paz´dziernika 1745 roku, wypis z ksia˛g grodzkich krzemienieckich, 11 October 1745, sygn. MNK 865, s. 3–35, Biblioteka XX. Czartoryskich, Re˛kopisy Muzeum Narodowego w Krakowie, Archiwum Młynowskie.

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Religious (In)sensibility of Carpets Prayer rugs are not universally used by Muslims, nor specifically required in Islam. Nevertheless, they have become a traditional way for many Muslims to ensure the cleanliness of their place of prayer, and to create an isolated space to concentrate in prayer. The religious uses of carpets by Muslims were not unknown to many residents of Poland-Lithuania because of their numerous encounters with Muslim diplomats, merchants, and warriors. The same can be said about many Poles and Ruthenians who spent some time in Ottoman or Tatar domains as prisoners of war. Moreover, in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, there were so-called “Lithuanian Tatars” (Lipka Tatars), settled there in the late fourteenth and early sixteenth centuries, who built their mosques and freely confessed Islam.51 Many members of Polish ambassadorial trains visited the Aya Sofya Mosque (the former Hagia Sophia)—an opportunity frequently granted by the Ottoman authorities to European diplomats. Thus, they knew that the floor in the main Ottoman mosque was covered with carpets. The Ottoman authorities were relatively indifferent to religious sensibility in the case of carpet export. The only known exception is the edict sent to the district of Kütahya52 in 1610, under the rule of Sultan Ahmed I (r. 1603–1617), which stated: We heard that in the Kütahya district the weavers are producing carpets (hali) and prayer rugs (seccade) depicting mihrab, the Kaaba and Islamic calligraphy, and selling them to non-Muslims (kefere). The Sheykh ul-Islam and the mufti prescribe that this is against Islam and forbidden by the Sharia.53

Sultan Ahmed I as a devout Muslim commissioned the eponymous Sultan Ahmed Mosque in Istanbul and ordered the comprehensive renovations of the Kaaba in Mecca. He attempted to enforce conformance to Islamic laws and traditions, restoring the old regulations. Probably, the sultan’s edict had some effect. At least, most of the prayer rugs and single niche rugs preserved in Transylvanian churches and Polish museums depict neither lamp nor Kaaba or Islamic calligraphy. On the other hand, one can suppose that these Islamic symbols were not welcomed by the Christian consumers and, thereby, not woven. In this way, carpets for export were secularized. 51 Jan Tyszkiewicz, Tatarzy na Litwie i w Polsce: Studia z dziejów XIII–XVIII w. (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo PWN, 1989); Henryk Jankowski and Czesław Łapicz, eds. and trans., Klucz do raju: Ksie˛ga Tatarów litewsko-polskich z XVIII wieku (Warsaw: Dialog, 2000). 52 The town of Kütahya is situated in the northwestern part of Asia Minor. 53 Ahmet Refik, Hicri On Birinci Asırda Istanbul Hayatı (1000–1100) (Istanbul: Devlet Matbaası, 1931), 43–44.

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Did contemporaries—and particularly the clergy—see any contradiction in using oriental carpets for Christian churches in the age of Counter-Reformation and confessionalization? Some oriental rugs commissioned by the Catholic hierarchs received a Christian religious meaning. Church hierarchs—many of whom were of noble origin—adopted the vogue to decorate rugs with their coat-of-arms and spread it to the churches. Jan Zamoyski, the Catholic Archbishop of Lviv (1604–1614), commissioned twenty oriental rugs decorated with his coat-of-arms from Istanbul in order to display them in the nave of Lviv Cathedral.54 Alongside him, Catholic Archbishop of Lviv, Jan-Andrzej Próchnicki (1614–1633), also ordered in a certain Ottoman workshop the so-called “rug with birds.” Próchnicki’s coatof-arms with the bishop’s crosier and forked cap was put at the center of the rug as well as the Latin inscription “Ill(ustrissimus) Andreas de Prochnii Arheaep(iscopus) Leopolii” (Fig. 2). Since some characters are rendered facing in the wrong direction, this could be additional evidence that this rug was made by rug-makers unfamiliar with the Latin alphabet. It is remarkable that this rug was commissioned after the sultan’s edict of 1610. Most likely, the craftsmen did not consider it a violation of the Islamic regulations. Seemingly, the market demand was more important than the sultan’s edict. Oriental carpets were adopted to decorate Orthodox churches as well. For instance, the inventories of the Dormition of the Theotokos church patronized by the Orthodox Brotherhood of Lviv specified 14 oriental carpets in 1634 and 26 in 1688.55 The attitude of the Catholic moralists is quite remarkable. When attacking their contemporaries for the extensive consumption of luxury goods, the Catholic pamphleteers never argued that these goods were manufactured in the lands of the infidels. Even when using the Persian, Turkish or Tatar names of commodities, the critics omitted the fact of their most probable production by Muslim artisans. The pamphleteers did not attack the commodities themselves, but their expensive prices. In the same way, they criticized the redundant consumption of luxury goods imported from Christian countries. Only the most ardent of clerical moralists connected their criticism of oriental clothes and scalp-locks to Islam and expressed their fear of a possible change of faith. However, even in this case, oriental carpets, armor, and horses were absent from the black list.56 54 Tomae Pirawski, Relatio status almae archidiocesis Leopoliensis, ed. Korneli J. Heck (Lviv: Sumptibus Societatis Historicae, 1893), 49. 55 A. Krylovskii, ed., “Protokoly Lvovskogo Stavropigialnogo bratstva,” Arkhiv Iugo-Zapadnoi Rossii, izdavaemyi komissiei dlia razbora drevnikh aktov part 1, vol. 12 (1904): 21–22, 46. 56 For instance, in his poem “Censtochova” (1568) Grzegorz of Sambor attacked those Poles following the “Lutheran heresy” and wearing oriental attire: “They are imitating the Saracens by dress, thought, and head.” Quoted from: Stopka, Mie˛dzy Samborem a Cze˛stochowa˛, 28;

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Fig. 2: “Rug with birds.” Wool, knotted. Height 280–283 cm, width 185–189.5 cm. Anatolia (Ushak district), early seventeenth century. Museum of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Antiquities (Medelhavsmuseet) Stockholm, Sweden. Museum Inventory Number: NM 0100/1977. Photograph: Ove Kaneberg.

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Carpet Trade and the Armenian Merchant Network Cultural transfer could not be performed without mediators, since objects—as well as ideas or customs—could not travel by themselves. As Stephen Greenblatt points out, “a specialized group of ‘mobilizers’—agents, go-betweens, translators, or intermediaries—often emerges to facilitate contact, and this group, along with the institutions that they serve, should form a key part of the analysis.”57 The mediators needed to have special skills to exercise their intermediary function. Armenian merchants had these skills as well as the networks of partners/co-believers in many parts of Europe and Asia.58 Moreover, by transporting certain goods, they not only stimulated cultural changes in their host society, but also were equally affected by it as well as by their mobile trans-cultural way of life. The import of oriental carpets to Poland-Lithuania was mainly in the hands of Armenian merchants who were subjects of Poland. Istanbul was the main market of carpet trade in the wider Black Sea region. The scale of this trade reflects the demand for carpets in Polish society. For instance, in 1589, two Armenian merchants of Lviv, Holub and Zachariasz Dawidowicz, while in Istanbul bought on credit from the Ottoman merchant Hussein Czausz carpets in the amount of 773 thalers and issued an ordinary bill (chyrographum) to be paid in two months.59 In 1596, Gabriel Kaprus, a factor of the brothers Grzegorz and Szymon Starowolski (c. 1653) criticized the Polish nobility for “buzzed-head with Tatar-style fuzz”, and for “the new habits, not just foreign, but heathen, Tatar, Muslim.” He blamed those Poles for shifting from “indigenous woolen home-made clothing” to silk and velvet fabrics. Szymon Starowolski, Reformacya Obyczaiów Polskich. Wszytkim Stanom Oyczyzny naszey, teraz´nieyszych czasow zepsowanych barzo potrzebna […] (s.l. s.n., c. 1650–1653), 30, 37. 57 Stephen Greenblatt, “A Mobility Studies Manifesto,” in Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 251. 58 Ina Baghdiantz-McCabe, The Shah’s Silk for Europe’s Silver: The Eurasian Trade of the Julfa Armenians in Safavid Iran and India (1530–1750) (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999); Edmund Herzig, “Venice and the Julfa Armenian Merchants,” in Gli Armeni e Venezia dagli Sceriman a Mechitar: Il momento culminante di una consuetudine millenaria, ed. Boghos L. Zekiyan and Aldo Ferrari (Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere et Arti, 2004), 141–164; Sushil Chaudhury and Kéram Kévonian, eds., Les Arméniens dans le commerce asiatique au début de l’ère moderne / Armenians in Asian Trade in the Early Modern Era (Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2008); Sebouh David Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa, Isfahan, 1605– 1747 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); René Arthur Bekius, “The Armenian Colony in Amsterdam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Armenian Merchants from Julfa before and after the Fall of the Safavid Empire,” in Iran and the World in the Safavid Age, ed. Willem Floor and Edmund Herzig (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), 259–283; Olivier Raveux, “Entre réseau communautaire intercontinental et intégration locale: La colonie marseillaise des marchands arméniens de la Nouvelle-Djoulfa (Ispahan), 1669–1695,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 59, no. 1 (2012), 83–102. 59 Records of Armenian Court in Lviv, 1589, fond 52 (City Magistrate of Lviv), holding 2, file 515, p. 505, Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine in Lviv.

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Zachariasz Iwaszkowicz, all Armenians of Lviv, bought among other goods 46 Persian (Ajam)60 carpets in Istanbul.61 150 carpets for the amount of 775 ducats were sent in 1600 from Istanbul to Lviv for the aforementioned Zachariasz Iwaszkowicz.62 Carpets were also supplied to the Polish market by Armenian merchants who were subjects of Persia and the Ottoman Empire. For instance, in 1656, Iovhannes, an Armenian merchant, traveled from the city of Tokat (in Asia Minor) through Caffa (in the Crimea) to Lviv, where he died in early January 1657. On January 8, 1657 an inventory was drawn up by the Lviv city officials. Among other goods there were specified 152 carpets.63 How was this long-distance trade organized? In the second half of the thirteenth and in the first half of the fourteenth century, a number of Armenian merchants settled in the multiethnic city of Lviv in the territory of the Galicia principality (modern-day Western Ukraine). After the Polish conquest of Galicia in 1349, local German townspeople (cives catholici) became the dominant community. The rights of other urban “nations,” Armenians, Ruthenians, and Jews, were guaranteed and confirmed by the Polish King Casimir III in 1356, when the city was granted judicial autonomy. By the late fourteenth century, an Armenian community was established in the city of Kamyanets-Podilskyi. Armenian merchants were employed as royal interpreters, diplomats, and spies, and were protected by the Polish kings. These merchants frequented the markets of the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Persia and provided the Polish nobility with fashionable oriental luxury goods.64 After the end of the Jagiellonian dynasty in 1572 and following the decline of the king’s power, the trading diasporas, Jews, Armenians, and Scots, gradually established closer ties with aristocrats as their new protectors and business partners. Polish dignitaries invited foreign merchants to their private towns and granted them many priv-

60 The Arabic word ajam was adopted in the Ottoman Empire as acem to define the Persians and residents of Persia. In early modern Polish an adjective Adziamski was used to distinguish more expensive Persian carpets from Turkish (Turecki) ones. At least once, Adziamski was used to define a bridle (Krzysztof Dorohostajski, Hippica to iest o koniach ksie˛gi II (Cracow: Andrzej Piotrkowczyk, 1603), 1). In other cases, the adjective Perski (Persian) was used and the country name in Polish was Persja. In all likelihood, Armenian merchants brought the word Ajam/Adziamski to Poland-Lithuania. 61 Records of Armenian Court in Lviv, 1596, fond 52 (City Magistrate of Lviv), holding 2, file 516, p. 465, Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine in Lviv. 62 Records of Armenian Court in Lviv, 1600, fond 52 (City Magistrate of Lviv), holding 2, file 517, p. 1050, Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine in Lviv. 63 Records of Armenian Court in Lviv, 1657, fond 52 (City Magistrate of Lviv), holding 2, file 546, p. 1354–1356, 1358, Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine in Lviv. 64 Alexandr Osipian, “The Usable Past in the Lemberg’s Armenian Community Struggle for Equal Rights, 1578–1654,” in Memory before Modernity: Practices of Memory in Early Modern Europe, ed. Erika Kuijpers et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 27–43.

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ileges.65 Consequently, by the 1670s, a dozen new Armenian communities existed in their domains. Armenian merchants from the Polish kingdom, organized into well-armed parties or convoys (caravans) regularly traveled as far as to Adrianople/Edirne and Constantinople/Istanbul. The big parties also plied their trade in Ankara, Tokat, Erzerum, Gümüs¸hane, and some individuals even reached Iran’s capital city of Isfahan. In the Ottoman domains as well as in Persia, caravanserais lay along the main trade routes, providing merchants with lodging and food. This infrastructure notwithstanding, travel there was unsafe because of gangs and thieves ambushing the caravans, particularly in the mountains. According to Martin Gruneweg (1562–c.1618), a Danzig-born young German who served as a scribe and secretary for Armenian caravans in 1582–1588, before Armenians set out on their journey, they fasted for a week, confessed and took communion as if preparing for death.66 In the treatises between the Ottoman sultans and the Polish kings there were particular articles protecting the merchants and their property. These treatises also emphasized the particular role and significance of Armenian merchants in the trade between the two states. The capitulations, sent in 1577 by Sultan Murad III to the Polish King Stephen Báthory, read: [W]hen Armenians and other infidel merchants living under the royal hand [i. e., the subjects of the Polish king] want to come to Moldavia and my other well-protected dominions and practice trade, they should not travel through deserted and wild areas or use hidden roads, but they should come by the direct public road which has been customarily traveled by merchants.67

The Ottoman authorities openly required that the merchants use the public roads. Such restrictions ensured that the merchants would not evade the payment of customs duties. Secondly, public roads were safer from robbers, as they were frequently traveled and patrolled.68 65 Andrzej Wyrobisz, “Attitude of the Polish Nobility towards Towns in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century,” Acta Poloniae Historica 48 (1983): 90–91; Mirosława ZakrzewskaDubasowa, “Polityka handlowa Jana Zamoyskiego i jego naste˛pców,” Annales Universitatis Mariae Curie-Skłodowska: Sectio F, Historia 38/39 (1983/1984): 93–114. 66 “Wen die Armenier auff diese reyze wegfertig sein, fasten sie etliche tage, auch eine gantze woche vor dem ausstzuge, beichten, comunitzieren, gleich goltte es ihnen tzum thotte.” Almut Bues, ed., Die Aufzeichnungen des Dominikaners Martin Gruneweg (1562–ca. 1618): Über seine Familie in Danzig, seine Handelsreisen in Osteuropa und sein Klosterleben in Polen, vol. 2 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2008), 687. 67 Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, Ottoman-Polish Diplomatic Relations (15th–18th Century): An Annotated Edition of ‘Ahdnames and Other Documents (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 278. 68 Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, “Polish-Ottoman Trade Routes in the Times of Martin Gruneweg,” in Martin Gruneweg (1562–after 1615): A European Way of Life, ed. Almut Bues (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009), 168.

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Sultans also granted Armenian merchant privileges for free/safe passage (salvum conductum) in the Ottoman domains. These charters were then kept in the Armenian courts in Kamyanets and Lviv. Before a caravan trip to the Ottoman Empire, a senior of the caravan (caravanbashi) elected by the merchants, went to the Armenian city hall (ratusz) and asked for these charters to conduct a safe trip. Then the wójt, the mayor of the autonomous Armenian community in Kamyanets, gave him the so-called “Turkish privileges” on eight sheets in one carrying case. The caravanbashi was obligated to use these privileges to defend his companions during the course of travel and to return them when the journey was finished.69 Martin Gruneweg wrote down in his diary that the Armenian merchants had at their disposal the charters for a free and safe passage granted to them by the Ottoman sultan, the Polish king and the city of their permanent residence/citizenship.70 The caravanbashi’s responsibilities included cases concerned with trade, the inheritance of dead merchants’ property, and some criminal issues. Polish and German merchants who joined the caravan, as well as other travelers, also fell under jurisdiction of the caravanbashi.71 As Poland did not have a permanent representative at the Ottoman court and as Armenian caravans traveled from Poland to Istanbul on a regular basis, the caravanbashi also performed the function of a royal courier. Some Armenian caravanbashis were appointed as royal envoys and even as so-called “little ambassadors.”72 Each caravan consisted of several dozen merchants and servicemen in their disposition; every merchant had his merchandise loaded on several carts. As a rule, merchants recruited coachmen—mostly Poles, residents of suburbs of Lviv and Kamyanets. All of the caravan members were armed with guns and sabers. In order to protect themselves from robbers’ attacks and fiscal abuses by customs 69 These privileges were mentioned in the records of the Armenian court in Kamyanets at least twice—eight charters in 1604, twelve charters in 1615, and five more charters issued to cross the border on the Dniester River. Records of Armenian Court in Kamyanets-Podilskyi, 1604 and 1615, fond 39, holding 1, file 20, fol. 50; file 26, fol. 40, Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine in Kiev. Published in: Oleksandr M. Garkavets, Virmeno-qypchatski rukopysy v Ukraini, Virmenii, Rosii: Katalog (Kiev: Naukova dumka, 1993), 69, 92–93. 70 “Die Armenier haben alletzeitt diesem wege tzugefallen etliche Pasbriewe untter sich, sowol vom Turckischen Keyser als Polnischen Könige oder ihrer Statt.” Bues, Die Aufzeichnungen, 2:686. 71 Alexandr Osipian, “Voting at Home and on the Move: Elections of Mayors and Caravanbashi by Armenian Merchants in Poland and the Ottoman Empire, 1500–1700,” in Cultures of Voting in Pre-modern Europe, ed. Serena Ferente, Lovro Kuncˇevic´, and Miles Pattenden (London: Routledge, 2018), 310–328. 72 Janusz Dorobisz, “Epilog wielkiej legacji Krzysztofa Zbaraskiego do Stambułu – misja Krzysztofa Serebkowicza z 1623 roku,” in Region nadczarnomorski w polityce europejskiej: Przeszłos´c´ – dzien´ dzisiejszy, ed. T. Ciesielski and W. Kusznir (Odessa: Odeskyi Natsionalnyi Universytet imeni I. I. Mechnykova, Istorychnyi Fakultet, 2008), 66–70.

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office holders, caravans also joined Polish embassies going to Constantinople and back. An ordinary embassy consisted of several dozen or even hundreds of people—up to 1,200 in the case of Prince Zbaraski’s embassy in 1622. An embassy was always accompanied by an Ottoman official called a cavus¸. Polish nobleman Erazm Otwinowski recorded a detailed unofficial diary of the embassy led by Andrzej Bzicki in 1557. According to Otwinowski, in the Ottoman domains, Polish nobles provoked a conflict with a Turkish shepherd, which turned into a big fight. The shepherd was killed and several Poles were arrested by the Ottoman judge, the kadi. When crossing a river in the Balkans, the Poles were not cautious enough and a precious javelin belonging to the ambassador was stolen by two Turkish villains. In both cases, Otwinowski describes active armed deeds of brave Armenian merchants73 who were accustomed to such conflicts during their regular shuttle travels between Lviv and Constantinople. Moreover, the Armenian merchants were bearers of indispensable practical experience in how to deal with the Ottoman authorities and the Muslim population, how to arrange travel on different segments of the route, how to travel in the mountains, where to find pasture for horses, and many other issues. The Polish ambassadors lacked this knowledge because for them it was their first and last mission to the sultan’s capital.

Social Prestige and Hierarchy of Carpets The best-standardized information on carpet prices can be found in two regulations passed by the Diet (Sejm) in 1620 and 1633. Due to growing inflation, Polish nobility tried to exercise considerable control over the selling prices while blaming the merchants for making extra profits. Three types of carpets are defined in the regulation of sale prices passed by the Diet in 1620: Ajam, Dywan, and “Turkish.”74

73 Erazm Otwinowski, “Wypisanie drogi tureckiej, gdym tam z posłem wielkim wielmoznym panem Andrzejem Bzickim, kasztelanem chełmskim, od króła Zygmunta Augusta poslanym roku pan´skiego 1557 jez´dzil,” in Podróz˙e i poselstwa polskie do Turcyi a mianowicie; podróz˙ E. Otwinowskiego 1557, Je˛drzeja Taranowskiego komornika j.k.m. 1569, i poselstwo Piotra Zborowskiego 1568, ed. Józef Ignacy Kraszewski (Cracow: Nakł. Wydawnictwa Biblioteki Polskiej, 1860), 33–36. 74 S.N., Volumina Legum 3: Ab Anno 1609. Ad Annum 1640. Acta Reipublicæ Continens (Warsaw: Drukarnia J. K. M. y Rzeczypospolitey, w Collegium Warszawskim Scholarum Piarum, 1735), 180.

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Tab. 1: Types and prices of carpets according to the Diet’s regulation of sale prices in 1620. type of carpet Persian (Adziamski) Dywan (Dywan´ski)

price (zlotys) 20 24

Turkish (Turecki)

12

A Persian (Adziamski) carpet was much more expensive than a “Turkish” one— 20 zlotys compared to 12. Persian carpets were in higher demand by the nobility due to their sophisticated design. According to the poem “Amusements of a Good Husbandman” (1618) by nobleman Stanisław Słupski, contemporary noblemen liked to buy an “Ajam carpet because now no one wants ordinary carpets.”75 Therefore, contemporaries considered “Turkish” carpets “ordinary” ones. While other types of carpets were of more or less standardized size, a Dywan carpet could be of any size. This is evident from the “Register of Turkish goods and their fixed prices”76 (oblata taxae), composed in 1633 by a special commission appointed by the Diet. Tab. 2: Types and prices of carpets (arranged according to price). Based on data from the “Register of Turkish goods and their fixed prices,” 1633. purchase price (thalers) 14.00

sale price (thalers)

the best sort of Malik Pasz carpet77 Dywan carpet, for an ell

12.50

14.00 and 5 grosz

12.00

2.00

2.00 and 20 grosz

1.00

Column-carpet Persian kilim

10.00 9.00

11.00 and 20 grosz 10.00 and 10 grosz

10.00 9.00 and 10 grosz

Turkish ordinary yellow carpet Turkish ordinary carpet

7.00

7.50 and 30 grosz

6.50 and 30 grosz

4.50

5.00 and 5 grosz

type of carpet Khorasan carpet

sale price for carpets of lesser quality

15.50 and 10 grosz

75 Stanisław Słupski and Władysław Stanisław Jez˙owski, Zabawy orackie, 1618, i Władysława Jez˙owskiego Oekonomia, 1638, ed. Józef Tomasz Rostafin´ski (Cracow: Druk. C. K. Uniw. Jagiellon´ski, 1891), 25. 76 Wilhelm Rolny, “Dwie taksy towarów cudzoziemskich z r. 1633,” Archiwum Komisji Prawniczej 5 (1897): 547–574. 77 Other Polish sources recorded the name “Melik basz.”

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Comparative analysis of the property inventories of noblemen and burghers reveal how social prestige was attached to certain types of carpets. Prince Vasyl Kostyantyn Ostrozski, one of the most powerful dignitaries of Poland-Lithuania, may serve as a case in point. According to the posthumous inventory recorded on March 10, 1616 in the castle of Dubno, he possessed 148 carpets.78 Vasyl Kostyantyn Ostrozski was owner of 48 towns, 1,038 villages, and 103 manors.79 One can only imagine how many carpets he had in his other residences. In Dubno castle, the carpets were kept in two chests. In the first chest there were “two carpets woven with gold thread—[a gift] from the voivode of Podolia; and the third—a motley silk carpet. Item, an old carpet woven with gold [thread]. Plus 14 silk carpets of larger size.”80 Therefore, in the first chest there were 18 carpets, while the second contained 130 carpets. Tab. 3: Type and number of carpets in Dubno castle (first chest). type of carpet carpets woven with gold thread, from the voivode of Podolia motley silk carpet

number of carpets 2 1

an old carpet woven with gold silk carpets of larger size

1 14

In the second chest, the carpets were stored in bales according to their type and size. Tab. 4: Type and number of carpets in Dubno castle (second chest). type of carpet Silk carpets of lesser size Large Ajam carpets

number of carpets 38 6

Red Ajam carpets of small size Red Ajam carpets of lesser size

3 15

White Ajam carpets of lesser size White Ajam carpets of larger size

30 13

White carpets of leopard-style Ajam carpets with columns

13 12

78 Jerzy Lubomirski, “Regestra skarbca ksia˛z˙a˛t Ostrogskich w Dubnie spisane w roku 1616,” Sprawozdania Komisji do Badania Historii Sztuki w Polsce 6, no. 2–3 (1900): 212. 79 Tomasz Kempa, Konstanty Wasyl Ostrogski (ok. 1524/1525–1608): Wojewoda kijowski i marszałek Ziemi Wołyn´skiej (Torun´: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, 1997), 239–242. 80 Lubomirski, Regestra, 212.

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The second chest contained less expensive carpets than the first. On the other hand, there were no “ordinary” carpets. Here again, the silk carpets were at the top of the list. However, they were of lesser size than those in the first chest. Therefore, silk carpets were consistently regarded as more expensive and prestigious than those woven of wool. Furthermore, of the 130 carpets there were 79 Ajam (Adziamski) carpets, which in the contemporary Diet’s regulation of 1620 were defined as two times more expensive than “Turkish” ones. Most of these Ajam carpets were described as “red” or “white.” “Red” carpets were recorded first, “white” carpets second; the “red” ones were less numerous than the “white” ones: 18 vs. 43 respectively. Therefore, at that time the “red” carpets were more expensive and fashionable than “white” ones. At the lower register of the list there are two types of carpets: “white carpets of leopard-style” and “Ajam carpets with columns.” Both types were mainly prayer rugs. They were of smaller size and manufactured in large quantities, therefore being less expensive and prestigious. While most of the carpets were “anonymous,” that is, commissioned to or bought from merchants, two carpets—mentioned first in the register of the first chest—had been bestowed upon Prince Ostrozski by the voivode of Podolia. Many years after this endowment, the two carpets were still associated with the donor. Undoubtedly, a powerful dignitary gave the other most prestigious and expensive carpets. Both carpets were “woven with gold thread.” Therefore, it may be possible to define the gift of the voivode of Podolia as “Malik basz” carpets. At this point, we are able to reconstruct the whole hierarchy of the oriental carpets in the inventory of Dubno castle. The most prestigious specimens were silk carpets woven with gold thread and, probably, with an individual design, which made every such carpet a special one and, therefore, an exclusive and welcomed gift. Secondly, there were the silk carpets, followed by wool carpets: red Ajam, white Ajam, white leopard-style, and Ajam with columns. Wealthy merchants were the owners of relatively voluminous collections of carpets. However, there was a significant difference in their attitudes to carpets. While the nobility employed carpets for representative purpose—the carpets in Dubno castle were kept in chests and, probably, used only for special public events—merchants made use of carpets mainly for practical purposes. This is reflected, for example, in the posthumous inventory of Mikołaj Serebkowicz, an Armenian merchant of Lviv, drawn up in 1630.81

81 Records of Armenian Court in Lviv, 1630, fond 52 (City Magistrate of Lviv), holding 2, file 520, p. 1205–1209, Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine in Lviv.

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Tab. 5: Type and number of carpets in the inventory of late Mikołaj Serebkowicz, 1630. type of carpet large new Dywan carpet chamber is draped by eight Dywan carpets, four large and four of smaller size sixteen kilims bigger and smaller carpets were delivered to son-in-law

number of carpets 1 8 16 2

living room is draped with four old used carpets plus one carpet- 4+1 like kilim three carpets in the room and one carpet-like kilim 3+1

The data in the inventory is structured in accordance with Serebkowicz’s house plan. One chamber in Serebkowicz’s house was draped with eight Dywan carpets. Another chamber, his living room, was draped with four carpets (kobiercy) and a kilim. Carpets here are indicated as “used, old.” One more room was draped with three carpets and a kilim. Finally, he had handed over two carpets for temporary use to his son-in-law. Overall, the late Serebkowicz had possessed 18 carpets (9 of them of Dywan type) and 18 kilims. It is not surprising that Serebkowicz had 9 Dywan carpets, as for many years he had carried on commerce in the Ottoman Empire. 24 carpets are specified in the posthumous inventory (drawn-up in 1640) of Christopher Dawidowicz, an Armenian merchant of Lviv.82 Tab. 6: Type, number and price of carpets in the inventory of late Christopher Dawidowicz, 1640. type of carpet used Turkman carpet old Turkman carpet with holes

number of carpets 1 1

price of one carpet 12 zlotys 5 zlotys

moderately used kilims old kilims

3 9

8 zlotys 4 zlotys

old Anguria kilims old Tosia kilims

6 4

4 zlotys 3 zlotys

Here again, carpets were used for practical purposes. The main criterion employed by the city officials in the inventory was the frazzle of carpets, which directly affected their price and salability. All the carpets here were described as “used” (zaz˙ywany) or “old” (stary) and one as “having holes” (dziurawy).

82 Records of Armenian Court in Lviv, 1640, fond 52 (City Magistrate of Lviv), holding 2, file 526, p. 25, Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine in Lviv.

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The posthumous inventory of the burgher’s wife Sofia Afendyk (Sophia Aphendic), written down in Lviv in 1585, specified nine carpets.83 Among these, six carpets were defined as Melikbasz (melikbaszski), two as “Turkish patterned,” and one as “Turkish.” Sofia was the wife of Jani Afendyk (Joannis Aphendic), a Greek merchant who settled in Lviv and carried on commerce in the Ottoman Empire. This could explain why the couple possessed such expensive and prestigious carpets. Tab. 7: Type and number of carpets in the inventory of late Sofia Afendyk, 1585. type of carpet large melikbasz carpets small Turkish

number of carpets 3 1

old Turkish patterned carpets small melikbasz

2 3

Lviv was the largest hub of the trade in oriental carpets in Poland-Lithuania, and local merchants as well as municipal officials operated with many specific designations for carpets when recording the inventories. A comparison of the inventories recorded in Lviv and Poznan´ reveals that municipal officials who were employed for that purpose in Poznan´ had very limited expertise in the classification of carpets. In most cases, they described the carpets in a simple way: in accordance with their salability as “new” or “old”; by their color “red,” “yellow” or “motley.” Only in few inventories, some carpets were defined as “Turkish” or “Ajam.” Oriental carpets in Poznan´ inventories were mentioned first in 1575.84 However, the Poznan´ inventories do not include information on whether the carpets were of silk or wool. Even the most elaborate inventory of the late Wojciech Rochowicz, a municipal scribe of Poznan´ who owned 15 carpets, operates with this simple terminology.85 Tab. 8: Type and number of carpets in the inventory of late Wojciech Rochowicz, 1635. type of carpet red kilim

number of carpets 1

motley kilim old carpets

1 2

83 Ihor M. Lylo, “Do pytannia pro shchodenne zhyttia lvivskikh mishchan XVI st. (za inventarem osobystykh rechei Sofii Afendyk),” Visnyk Lvivskoho universytetu: Seriia istorychna 51 (2015): 641. 84 Stanisław Nawrocki and Jerzy Wisłocki, eds., Inwentarze mieszczan´skie z lat 1528–1635 z ksia˛g miejskich Poznania (Poznan´: Polskie Towarzystwo Historyczne, 1961), 167–168. 85 Ibid., 494, 500.

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(Continued) type of carpet new motley Turkish kilim Turkish carpets

number of carpets 1 5

Ajam red old yellow carpet of smaller size

4 1

Usage of Oriental Rugs and Related Public Discourses Oriental rugs were used in two ways: In some cases, they were employed for practical utilitarian purposes; in others, they were considered symbols of power. As luxury goods, oriental carpets received significant attention in the public discourses of the late sixteenth to seventeenth centuries. The perceptions of carpets varied in accordance with the political preferences of the respective authors. At that period, political life in Poland-Lithuania was dominated by two camps: the royalist/Catholic and the nobility/republican camp. Both camps criticized luxury from a moralist as well as from a mercantilist perspective. However, the representatives of both sides employed these two approaches in different ways. The noble/republican authors usually limited their criticism of luxury to three main concerns: 1) redundant consumption leads to ineffective farm management and debts; 2) misbalance in foreign trade; and 3) the sybaritic noble youth is unable to defend its mother country. At the same time, the royalist/Catholic authors connected their criticism of luxury to the broad spectrum of hot-button issues: Overconsumption causes moral decline and leads to a reduction of royal power, the growth of political anarchy and injustice, fears of social disorder, the Ottoman threat, the spreading of heresies (Reformation) and promotion of foreign merchants by noblemen, as well as economic decline and de-urbanization.86 From the royalist/Catholic perspective, carpets were of particular significance, as they were connected to the idea of a sacred power. Thereby, the royalist/ Catholic authors were particularly sensitive to the use of carpets beyond churches and the king’s court, which was seen as a profanation of supreme power. Oriental carpets appear en masse in Italian and Flemish religious paintings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, where they form the background for 86 Piotr Skarga, Kazania sejmowe (1597. Reprint, Skultuna: Ligatur, 2008), 39, 72, 187–190; Simonis Starovolsci, Polonia sive status Regni Poloniae descriptio (1632. Reprint, Gdan´sk: Tower Press, 2000), 102; Starowolski, Reformacya Obyczaiów Polskich (Cracow: s.n., 1656), 169; Krzysztof Opalinski, Satyry (1650. Reprint, Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolin´skich; Warsaw: De Agostini Polska, 2005), 177–180, 249–264.

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religious scenes. Visually, the carpets serve either to draw attention to an important person or to highlight a location where significant action is taking place. However, more importantly, a carpet separated a saint (or, later, a person in power) from the imperfect terrestrial world. The same idea pertains to the Islamic prayer rug: It serves to separate the worshipper from the unclean terrestrial world in order to be able to concentrate on his prayer, which constitutes a conversation with the supreme absolute. According to some art historians, in Renaissance paintings “the carpet [was] conspicuously placed as holy ground beneath Mary’s feet in her role as Mother Church.”87 In my view, the oriental carpets depicted at the feet of the enthroned Madonna and Child also represented the idea of sacred power attributed to Jesus Christ, the future king of the world. At a later period, with the spread of absolutism in the sixteenth century, the royal courts adopted the idea of oriental carpets as designating the space of power. For instance, at around 1545 in Tudor England, King Henry VIII was depicted as enthroned with an oriental carpet at his feet with his third wife and Prince Edward standing on the same carpet, thereby sharing his power. Another portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger of c. 1537 depicts King Henry VIII standing on an oriental carpet. His son, the young King Edward VI, was portrayed in c. 1547 in the same manner, i. e., standing on an oriental carpet. A Persian carpet made of silk pile and gold and silver threads in a court workshop in Isfahan was acquired by the Danish royal family in the seventeenth century and used for the coronation ceremony as the “coronation carpet.”88 Therefore, a ceremonial carpet defined a sacred space for the monarch. Therefore, by purchasing oriental carpets for the royal palace and chapel, the kings of Poland, the late Jagiellonians (1506–1572), Stephen Báthory, and the Vasa dynasty (1587–1668), acted in accordance with a general trend. On the engravings of the Polish Diet under the reign of Sigismund II August of c. 157089 (Fig. 3) and Sigismund III Vasa of c. 1622 by Giacomo Lauro, the king is depicted as enthroned with an oriental carpet at his feet. In the case of Sigismund II August, it is a large carpet with floral ornaments. The carpet at the feet of Sigismund III Vasa could probably be one woven of silk with golden and silver threads commissioned through Sefer Muratowicz.

87 Lauren Arnold, “The Carpet Index: Rethinking the Oriental Carpet in Early Renaissance Paintings,” The Silk Road 12 (2014): 98–105; Mahnaz Shayestehfar, “A Comparative Study of Persian Rugs of 14th–17th Centuries as Reflected in Italian Paintings,” The International Journal of Humanities 17 (2010): 93–108. 88 Friedrich Spuhler, Preben Mellbye-Hansen, and Majken Thorvildsen, Denmark’s Coronation Carpets, ed. Mogens Bencard (Copenhagen: The Royal Collections, Rosenborg Palace, 1987). 89 Jan Herburt, Statuta y Przywileie Koronne (Cracow: w drukarni Mikołaia Szarffenberga, 1570).

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Fig. 3: Engraving of the Polish Diet under the reign of Sigismund II August c. 1570. Published in: Jan Herburt, Statuta y Przywileie Koronne. Cracow: w drukarni Mikołaia Szarffenberga, 1570.

A throne carpet functioned differently in Poland-Lithuania as compared to the Ottoman Empire. A large carpet was a mandatory attribute in the course of official ceremonies at the Ottoman court. In the depiction of enthronement ceremonies, the Ottoman miniaturists show numerous high-ranking officials waiting in a long line in order to swear allegiance to the new sultan. Usually, only one person is depicted in the middle of a carpet, which spreads below the throne —a military officer or statesman kneeling before the sultan. On the other hand, we see the grand vizier depicted next to the throne and other viziers modestly standing on the flanks or borders of a large carpet. The same composition is repeated in the depiction of a bayram ceremony.90 Therefore, a carpet defines a space of power. The high-rank statesmen get their power from the sultan; therefore, they have their place on a carpet. A kneeling officer or statesman, when stepping on a carpet, gets confirmation of his office under the rule of the new sultan. In comparison, a Polish king was depicted with a small carpet, leaving no space for any other person to stand on. The king was elected by noblemen and his 90 We examined the miniatures published in Zeynep Tarim Ertugˇ, “The Depiction of Ceremonies in Ottoman Miniatures: Historical Record or a Matter of Protocol?” Muqarnas 27 (2010): fig. 4–10, 13.

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power was restricted by agreement—the pacta conventa signed after the election. In this case a carpet emphasizes the superior status of a king who is the only one having his feet on a carpet (Fig. 3). When depicting the reception of a foreign ambassador, the Ottoman miniatures show him as bowing on a medallion carpet. He is the sole person on a carpet (except for two Ottoman guards holding his arms).91 Therefore, the carpet is a space of communication between the sultan and the representative of a foreign ruler. A carpet was important in the reception ceremony of the vassal rulers, too. A miniature depicts Sultan Süleyman I (r. 1520–1566) receiving in his tent the Hungarian Queen Isabella Jagiellon (1519–1559) and the child John Sigismund Zápolya at Buda on August 29, 1541. The Queen is depicted with the child in her arms, standing on the edge of a carpet.92 They are under the protection of the sultan against the Habsburgs. Another miniature shows the meeting of Süleyman I and John Sigismund as Hungarian king (r. 1540–1551 and 1566–1570) in Zemun (Zimony) in 1566 (Fig. 4). It depicts the interior of the sultan’s tent with the bareheaded John Sigismund kneeling in the very center of a medallion carpet. Six bareheaded members of his retinue, four viziers, two guards, and two sword-keepers are depicted standing on the borders of the carpet.93 Another miniature depicts the meeting of Sultan Bayezid II (r. 1481– 1512) with the Crimean khan Mengli Geray (r. 1469–1475 and 1478–1515). As a Genghisid, Mengli Geray Khan has his seat on a banquette on the edge of a carpet while his eldest son, the future khan Mehmed Geray (r. 1515–1523), is standing outside of the carpet.94 Hence, a carpet helped to demonstrate the status of a vassal ruler in the Ottoman imperial hierarchy. 91 Sultan Selim II receives the Safavid ambassador in the palace at Edirne in 1567. 1339, folio 247b, Topkapı Museum, Hazine; Nakkas¸ Osman 922 Nehzetu’l-Ahbar der Sefer-i Sigetvar, 1568, accessed April 11, 2019, http://kilyos.ee.bilkent.edu.tr/~history/Pictures2/ul155.jpg; Ottoman miniature showing a Safavid dignitary before Ottoman sultan Murad III. (Topkapı Museum, photo: Walter Denny), in Kendra Weisbin, “Introduction to the Court Carpets of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires,” accessed March 05, 2019, https://www.khana cademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/west-and-central-asia/a/introduction-to-the-court-c arpets-of-the-ottoman-safavid-and-mughal-empires. 92 The Ottoman Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent receives Queen Isabella and John Sigismund at Buda on 29 August 1541, in Géza Fehér, Török miniatúrák (Budapest: Corvina, 1978), accessed April 11, 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sigismund_Z%C3%A1polya#/ media/File:Suleiman_I,_Isabella_Jagiellon_and_the_child_John_Sigismund_Z%C3%A1pol ya.jpg. 93 Meeting of Süleyman I and John Sigismund in Zimony, 1566, in Géza Fehér, Török miniatúrák, accessed April 11, 2019, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:John_Sigismund _of_Hungary_with_Suleiman_the_Magnificient_in_1556.jpg#/media/File:Meeting_of_I_Sol iman_and_J%C3%A1nos_Zsigmond_in_Zimony,_1566.jpg. 94 Meñli I Giray (midden) met zijn oudste zoon, de latere khan Mehmed I Giray (links) en de Turkse sultan Bayezid II (rechts), accessed April 11, 2019, https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me% C3%B1li_I_Giray#/media/File:Mengli_bayezid.jpg.

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Fig. 4: Meeting of Süleyman I and John Sigismund in Zimony, 1566. https://commons.wikime dia.org/wiki/File:John_Sigismund_of_Hungary_with_Suleiman_the_Magnificient_in_1556.jp g#/media/File:Meeting_of_I_Soliman_and_János_Zsigmond_in_Zimony,_1566.jpg.

At a later period, in Poland-Lithuania, carpets were integrated into secular contexts but always served to represent the idea of luxury, wealth, and status. Firstly, their use was reserved for the most powerful and most wealthy members of the nobility. They used rugs to decorate walls in their houses and palaces or even donated them to churches. Oriental carpets appeared in the portraits of aristocrats, usually as a table cover. Later on, as more people such as gentry and burghers gained sufficient wealth to afford luxury goods, some noblemen commissioned from the oriental artisans the rugs with a nobleman’s coat of arms through Armenian merchants (Fig. 5). Thereby, rugs were transformed into emblematic attributes of noble identity and an aristocratic way of life.

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Fig. 5: Carpet with the coats of arms of Ogon´czyk, Szreniawa, Bogoria, Odrowa˛z˙ commissioned by nobleman Krzysztof Wiesiołowski, Grand Marshall of Lithuania (1635–1637). Wawel Royal Castle, Cracow. AZK PZS AF-III-2696, inw240. Photograph: Łukasz Schuster.

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Extensive consumption of foreign goods—food, wines, clothes, carpets, armory, and jewelry—by the upper classes was seen by contemporary Polish Catholic intellectuals as a sign of moral decline, which was caused not only by the sinful human nature, but also by the foreign merchants’ intervention. In public discourses, oriental carpets were firmly linked to Armenian merchants. As Monophysite Christians, Armenians were considered heretics from both the Catholic and Orthodox clergy’s perspectives. As go-betweens, frequently visiting the Ottoman Empire and Crimean Khanate, Armenian merchants were connected to the fears of an Ottoman threat and sometimes even accused of being the sultan’s infiltrators in Poland-Lithuania.95 From the late sixteenth century onward, the criticism of redundant luxury was frequently connected to the ambiguous and questionable Armenian merchants, thereby increasing the negative perception of luxury goods. Sebastian Petrycy (1554–1626), a professor of medicine at Cracow University, in his anti-Armenian pamphlet (1605), attached to Aristotle’s Politics, accuses Armenian merchants in the following way: “They bring to the Kingdom the redundant extravagancies —cotton handkerchiefs, linen headscarves, and towels—though many could live without them. And Persian rugs are recently brought to Poland by them [Armenians].”96 Petrycy later returns to the issue of Armenians and oriental rugs in a poem published in 1609. In a separate chapter named “Outrageous luxury” (Zbytek nieprzystojny), Petrycy describes Poland as attacked by foreign goods and exotic food. He reserves two lines for Armenian merchants and oriental rugs, mentioning them among other signs of moral decline of contemporary Polish noblemen as opposed to their virtuous ancestors who “never dealt with foreign Armenians for hanging the rugs on the walls.”97 Although the moralizing nobles connected oriental carpets with Armenians, they did not blame the merchants for the moral decline of Polish society as the Catholic camp did. “The Pitiful Lamentation on the Terrific Fire in the Famous City of Jarosław in the Course of the General Fair” (1625) by Wawrzyniec Chlebowski may serve as a case in point. The great fire of 1625 destroyed the town of Jarosław where the multitude of merchants visiting the fair at the time lost their whole stock of merchandise and many even their lives. Chlebowski provided a detailed account of foreign merchants and their commodities. At the very epicenter of fair was the Catholic church, encircled by the expensive merchandise 95 Alexandr Osipian, “Between Mercantilism, Oriental Luxury and the Ottoman Threat: Discourses on the Armenian Diaspora in the Early Modern Kingdom of Poland,” Acta Poloniae Historica 116 (2017): 171–208. 96 Sebastian Petrycy, Polityki Aristotelesowey, to iest rza˛du Rzeczypospolitey z dokładem ksiag osmioro (Cracow: w Drukarni Symona Kempiniego, 1605), cxxxii. 97 Sebastian Petrycy, Horatius Flaccus w trudach wie˛zienia moskiewskiego, ed. Adam Trojak (Cracow: TAiWPN Universitas, 2004), 60.

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of Armenian merchants. The church was destroyed by the fire along with “[n]umerous Armenian vendor kiosks with expensive merchandise, full of silk and Persian carpets.”98 Despite the fierce anti-luxury rhetoric used by Catholic pamphleteers, there were many oriental rugs in the churches. Occasionally, they were commissioned by the clergy, but in most cases they were donated by parishioners. In the churches, particular benches were reserved for a noble donor (ktitor), often decorated with oriental carpets. Sometimes, such carpets were called “benchcarpets” (poławniki).99 These tapestries were usually inherited by a church after a ktitor’s death. In 1622, Prince Krzysztof Zbaraski (1580–1627) was dispatched to Istanbul as the grand ambassador of the Commonwealth. After successful accomplishment of his mission in 1623, the prince returned to his residence in the private town of Konska Wola (Kon´skowola). Undoubtedly, he brought with him oriental goods including carpets. Some of them were used to decorate his personal bench in the church of St. Anna. The property inventory compiled by the priest Stanisław Lisowicz in 1629 mentions a “new precious Persian or Turkish carpet, which was put on the bench for the late Prince. The carpet laid on the bench in the church and in this way became the church’s property. Another carpet—Ajam, outworn; it was also spread out under the Prince’s feet. After the Prince’s death the carpet became the church’s property.”100 In the Polish language, there is the metaphorical expression stana˛´c na ´slubnym kobiercu (literally “to stay on the wedding carpet”), which means “to marry,” “to wed,” “to conjoin in wedlock,” as in the course of the wedding ceremony the young couple stands on a carpet. From the property inventory (drawn up in 1634) of the Dormition of the Theotokos church in Lviv one can learn what happened to carpets after this ceremony: They were donated to the church. In three cases out of six recorded in the inventory, the carpets were donated to the church by the bridegrooms as an offering for wedding ceremonies. One carpet was probably donated in advance—during Lent—by “a future son-in-law.” “Very large white carpets” were donated by the noble widow Anna Boiarskaia “after the death of her husband […] for salvation of her soul,” while in one case the motivation for the donation remained unmentioned. The Dormition of the Theotokos church 98 Wawrzyniec Chlebowski, Lament Załosny Na straszliwy poz˙ar sławnego Miasta Iarosławia: Pod czas Iarmarku Walnego, na Fest Naswie˛tszey Panny Mariey W Niebowzie˛cia, z nieoszacowana˛ szkoda˛ ludzi Kupieckich rozmaitego stanu y wszystkich Obywatelow temecz˙nych, Dnia 24. Sierpnia, Przez Wawrzynca Chlebowskiego smutnym Wierszem opisany (Cracow: Marcin Philipowski drukował […], 1625), 11. 99 Władysław Lozinski, Zycie polskie w dawnych wiekach (wiek XVI–XVIII), 2nd ed. (Lviv: H. Altenberg, 1908), 95. 100 Przemysław Pytlak, Historia i zabytki: Kon´skowola (Kon´skowola: Towarzystwo Ochrony Dziedzictwa Kulturowego Fara Kon´skowolska, 2007), 7, accessed February 23, 2019, http:// www.konskowola.eu/Krzysztof-Zbaraski-Konskowola.pdf.

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was patronized by the Orthodox Brotherhood, which included the Orthodox townsmen and some noblemen. Wealthy Greek merchants were among the most influential members of the Brotherhood and the main donors to the church. Of the six benefactors mentioned in the inventory of 1634, three were Greeks: Konstantyi Madzapeta (Konstant Mezopetha), Manolii Greek, and Feodor Greek.101 They had migrated from the Mediterranean, settled in Lviv and married local Ruthenian women, daughters of the Orthodox townsmen. At least in some cases the donors put their initials on the carpets. For instance, “Mister Prokop Dorofeevicˇ, a burgher of Wilna, when married his bride Miss Sofia Langisz, donated to the church the mektan carpet on the red field with the characters П.Д.”102 These characters were initials of Prokop Dorofeevicˇ (Прокоп Дорофеевич).103 The Orthodox Brotherhoods of Lviv and Wilna (Vilnius) maintained close ties to each other. This might explain why a burgher of Wilna was married in Lviv to the daughter of Greek merchant Gabriel Langisz. According to the property inventory of this same church, drawn up in 1688, the “Persian” carpets were situated at the see, around the altar, and in the sacristy.104 In the late seventeenth century, the painter Łukasz Ziemecki introduced depictions of oriental rugs in the frescoes with biblical scenes in the Piarist monastery in Rzeszów.105 In the scene of the Supper at Emmaus, Jesus Christ is depicted “breaking bread” with his two disciples in Emmaus (Luke 24:30–31), sitting at a table covered with a double niche rug (Fig. 6).106 Another fresco shows the biblical wise men dressed as contemporary Polish noblemen and sitting at the roundtable covered with a similar double niche rug (Fig. 7).107 Carpets were used to drape coaches to make them more comfortable, to protect the passengers from cold weather, and to decorate their interiors. In 1585, 101 Krylovskii, Protokoly, 21. 102 Ibid., 22. 103 Some donor inscriptions are also known from Transylvania, such as “CHATARINA HARTMANN VEREHRET AN DIE GROS KIRCHE 1664,” placed on the back of a “white ground bird” rug, which before 1910 was the property of the Lutheran Church of Sibiu/ Hermannstadt. Now in the Brukenthal National Museum, inv. M 2184 (AD 411). In the Monastery Church of Sighis¸oara there is a “bird” carpet with the following inscription: “TESTAMENTVM LAURENTIUS BOLKESCH AD 1646.” Quoted from: Levent Boz, “White Ground ‘Bird’ Carpets of Selendi and Their Reflections in European Art and Lifestyle,” Universitatea Babes,-Bolyai: Studia et documenta turcologica 3–4 (2016): 185. 104 Krylovskii, Protokoly, 46. 105 Rzeszów is a town in south-eastern Poland. 106 The rug is identified as of “Transylvanian type.” Beata Biedron´ska-Słotowa, “Turkish Carpets in Poland: Their Traditional Meaning and Significance for Polish Art,” in 14th International Congress of Turkish Art Proceedings, ed. Frédéric Hitzel (Paris: College de France, 2013), 177. 107 Beata Biedron´ska Słota, “Kobierce Islamu w polskim malarstwie: Przyczynek do ikonografii tkanin orientalnych,” Rozprawy i Sprawozdania Muzeum Narodowego w Krakowie Seria Nowa 1 (1999): 119–120.

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Fig. 6: A fresco presenting Jesus Christ as “breaking bread” with his two disciples in Emmaus by Łukasz Ziemecki. Piarist monastery in Rzeszów, Poland. Photograph: Jakub Basara.

Fig. 7: A fresco representing the biblical wise men sitting around the roundtable covered with a similar double niche rug. Piarist monastery in Rzeszów, Poland. Photograph: Jakub Basara.

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King Stephen Báthory commissioned a collection of the “Bird” carpets to decorate his coaches (wozi kothcze).108 Armenian merchants used carpets for the same purpose. Martin Gruneweg, a secretary for Armenian caravans in 1580s, wrote in his diary that the Armenian merchants draped their coaches (reidwagen) with rugs (tebichte).109 This habit spread among Polish noblemen. According to the poems of Samuel Twardowski (1640) and the Satyres of Krzysztof Opalin´ski (1650), noblemen usually used coaches draped with carpets for wedding ceremonies.110 Szymon Starowolski (1588–1656), a Polish intellectual and Catholic priest, when attacking contemporary corrupted mores (c. 1653), specified among other luxury goods—by which a swindler tempts a young inexperienced heir— the “old coaches, caroches, carpets, furs, harquebuses.”111 Andrzej Zbylitowski, a courtier from the retinue of Sigismund III, in his poem “Rural life of a nobleman” (1597) attacked his contemporary noblemen for redundant luxury: When you are designing your coaches, And draping them with expensive carpets, You are revealing too much redundant luxury, Which one cannot find in other nations. You are draping your coaches with more splendor than the altars in churches, Turning them into Armenian shops.112

The practice of draping coaches with rugs was so widespread that Szymon Starowolski in his treatise “Reformation of the Corrupted Contemporary Polish Habits” (c. 1653) blamed the nobility in the following words: “now without carriages harnessed with six horses, without elegantly draped coaches, without caroches decorated with silk and silver, we do not like to go not only to a neighbor but even to the army.”113 The “Turkish goods” carried by Polish and Lithuanian cavalrymen on a march included oriental armors, clothes, a harness, and at least one carpet.114 Usually, rugs were mentioned in line with other bedding materials. For instance, the posthumous inventory of cavalryman Ludwik Kureysza drawn up in 1691 108 Man´kowski, Sztuka Islamu, 22–23. 109 Bues, Die Aufzeichnungen, 2:687. 110 Kazimierz Józef Turowski, ed., Poezye Samuela z Skrzypny Twardowskiego (Vilnius: Czas, 1770), 2:124; Krzysztof Opalin´ski, Satyry albo przestrogi do naprawy rza˛du i obyczajów w Polsce nalez˙ace, na pie˛´c ksia˛g rozdzielone (1650. Reprint, Cracow: Universitas, 2004), Chapter “Na zepsowane stanu białogłowskiego obyczaje,” 39–53. 111 Starowolski, Reformacya Obyczaiów, 15. 112 Andrzej Zbylitowski, Z˙ywot szlachcica we wsi, ed. Zygmunt Czartoryiski (1597. Reprint, Poznan´: Zupan´ski, 1853), 11. 113 Starowolski, Reformacya Obyczaiów, 41. 114 Marek Wagner, “Inwentarze ruchomos´ci oficerów wojsk koronnych z drugiej połowy XVII wieku,” Kwartalnik Historii Kultury Materialnej 51, no. 2 (2003): 249–259.

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specified “old red carpet. Pillow […]. Two pillows […].”115 However, in many cases a cavalryman of high rank could possess a good number of carpets. The military judge Jan Franciszek Gosiewski on May 6, 1698 carried with him on a march “an old Persian kilim (20 zlotys), two new carpets (100 zlotys), old used carpet (20 zlotys), old mattress with covering, two pillows, […].”116 These carpets were used to make sleeping and dining on a march more comfortable. Most of them were defined as “old” or “used.” In the next inventory of the same person written five months later, the number of carpets increased threefold. Probably, some of them were taken as booty or inherited from slain companions, since most of these carpets were defined as “old” and “used.”117 Tab. 9: Type and number of carpets in the inventory of military judge Jan Franciszek Gosiewski, September 25, 1698. type of carpet two bales of new carpets not-much-used single carpet

number of carpets 4 1

used carpets old carpet

2 1

long Dywanik to drape a wall pair of red Turkish kilims

1 2

old Persian kilim

1

Carpets were also used in burial ceremonies, particularly under unconventional conditions.118 For instance, Colonel Aleksander Zborowski in his testament of 1637 stipulated that he be buried without any funeral pomp. His body was to be buried not in a coffin, but rolled in a white carpet.119 Wincenty Aleksander Korwin Ga˛siewski, a field-commander-in-chief (hetman polny) of the Grand 115 Andrzej Rachuba, “Poszedł z˙ołnierz na wojne˛… Rejestry ruchomos´ci z˙ołnierzy litewskich z XVII wieku,” in S´wiat pogranicza, ed. Mirosław Nagielski, Andrzej Rachuba, and Sławomir Górzyn´ski (Warsaw: DiG, 2003), 198. 116 Rachuba, Poszedł z˙ołnierz, 194. 117 Rachuba, Poszedł z˙ołnierz, 196–197. 118 Carpets were already used for that purpose in the eleventh- to twelth-century Rus’; the earliest evidence dates from 1015. When Volodymyr, the Grand Prince of Kyiv, died, his body was “rolled in a carpet (ковъръ),” then put on sledges and delivered to the church. Dmitry Abramovich, ed., Zhitiia sviatykh muchenikov Borisa i Gleba i sluzhby im, (Petrograd: Izdanie Otdeleniia russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti, 1916), 29. In 1175, Andrey, prince of Vladimir-Suzdal’, was killed by his courtiers and his body was thrown to the garden. His only faithful servant then rolled the dead body in a carpet (коверъ) and a cloak and brought it to the church. Shakhmatov, Alexei, ed., Polnoe sobranie russkikh letopisei, vol. 2: III (Saint Petersburg: Tipografiia M.A. Aleksandrova, 1908), 591. 119 Władysław Lozinski, Prawem i lewem, obyczaje na Czerwonej Rusi w pierwszej połowie XVII wieku (Lviv: Gubrynowicz i syn, 1931), 1:154.

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Duchy of Lithuania, was shot to death by rioting troops on November 29, 1662. His body was rolled in a carpet until his wife received the news and sent to retrieve his body.120 The most original story of the uses of carpets, however, is connected to the complicated history of Polish-Ottoman relations. When in 1620 the Polish army was defeated by the Ottomans in the battle of Cecora (T ¸ut¸ora) in Moldavia, Prince Samuel Korecki was taken as prisoner-of-war and strangled to death in Yedikule castle in Istanbul on June 27, 1622. Franciscan monks took his body to their monastery in the Istanbul suburb of Galata. When in November 1622 Prince Krzysztof Zbaraski, the grand ambassador of Poland, arrived to Istanbul, he succeeded in freeing many prisoners of war. Among them was Stanisław Koniecpolski, who made efforts to take Korecki’s body back to Poland. “[The body] was put on a wagon and covered over with tents and carpets bought in Istanbul, and on behalf of Polish Armenians it was driven away in their caravan.”121

Conclusion We can distinguish four main chronologically overlapping stages in carpet mobility dynamics between the Middle East and Poland-Lithuania. At the first stage, a growing number of rugs were imported to Poland-Lithuania from the markets of Istanbul and Edirne. This import continued during the next stages, although its golden age lasted from the 1560s to the 1650s. The scale of the carpet import was so significant that in 1620 and 1633 the Diet (Sejm) included Persian and Ottoman carpets in the regulation of sale prices. At the second stage, the particular types of carpets that were fashionable in Poland-Lithuania at the time were commissioned to merchants conducting their trade with the Ottoman Empire. Most likely, some merchants visited particular places in Asia Minor to buy carpets directly from the producers. By the turn of the seventeenth century, Polish consumers were sophisticated enough to commission their favorite types of carpets. The formation of the taste for oriental rugs had been promoted by—among other things—active diplomatic exchange. In the hundred years between 1550 and 1650, forty Polish embassies visited Istanbul. There, during the audience at the sultan’s court as well as while visiting houses of Ottoman dignitaries, the embassy members could observe a hierarchy of carpets. Each ambassadorial train was accompanied by numerous groups of young Polish noblemen going for a shopping tour to the markets of Istanbul. At this stage, the 120 Wespazjan Hieronim Kochowski, Historya panowania Jana Kazimierza, ed. Edward Raczyn´ski (Poznan´: w ksie˛garni Walentego Stefan´skiego, 1840), 2:187. 121 Stanisław Przyłecki and Leon Rzewuski, eds., Pamie˛tniki o Koniecpolskich: Przyczynek do dziejów polskich˙ XVII wieku (Lviv: w druk. K. Pillera, 1842), 176.

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consumers’ demand influenced production—some sorts of carpets, some motifs and colors were in higher demand in Poland-Lithuania than others were. Therefore, producers tried to meet the tastes of the growing Polish market. On the other hand, Ottoman authorities found it necessary to regulate the carpet trade with the infidels. Consequently, many prayer rugs produced for export were woven without recognizable Islamic symbols. In this way, the carpet producers met both the market demand and the state religious regulations. At the third stage, the consumers—kings, noblemen, and bishops—commissioned carpets bearing their coat-of-arms. By the turn of the seventeenth century, the Polish market was oversupplied with oriental carpets to such a degree that the upper classes looked for something more exclusive and personalized in order to demonstrate their superior status through exclusive access to luxury. When woven with a coat-of-arms, the carpets became individualized in accordance with Appadurai’s “attributes” of luxury, “a high degree of linkage of their consumption to body, person, and personality.”122 Nothing of this kind ever happened in Russia, nor in the very countries where carpets were woven—the Ottoman Empire and Persia. The spread of the vogue for carpets bearing a coatof-arms reflects a particular political model in Poland-Lithuania and the “golden liberties” the nobility enjoyed there. At this stage, the merchants had established direct contacts with carpet workshops in the Ottoman Empire as well as in Persia. Finally, carpets were produced in the manufactories established by some dignitaries in their domains. The idea of establishing carpet workshops in Poland-Lithuania was expressed as early as in the late sixteenth century, but it was only successfully realized in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The political and military crisis of 1648–1668 fiercely affected the Polish economy and decreased the nobility’s consumption ability, while the Polish-Ottoman wars of 1672–1676 and 1683–1699 interrupted trade between the two countries. By the turn of the eighteenth century, oriental carpets were so firmly integrated into the nobility’s way of life that it was found reasonable to produce stylized oriental carpets as well as silk sashes and expensive textiles in the “domestic” (domowy) workshops. Some artisans were invited from the Middle East to initiate and manage the production process. Therefore, the vogue for oriental carpets led to the mobility not only of goods, but also of ideas, techniques, and artisans. Moreover, this mobility was not unilateral but bilateral, since Polish consumer taste helped to introduce new elements into oriental carpet weaving.

122 Appadurai, “Introduction,” 38.

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Szuppe, Maria. “Un marchand du roi de Pologne en Perse, 1601–1602.” Moyen Orient & Océan Indien: Société d’Histoire de l’Orient 3 (1986): 81–110. Tsareva, Yelena G. “Vostochnye kovry v russkikh kollektsiiakh i interierakh. Chast I. XV– XVII vv.” In Radlovskii sbornik: Nauchnye issledovaniia i muzeinye proekty MAE RAN v 2015 g., edited by Iu. K. Chistov, 81–89. St. Petersburg: MAE RAN, 2016. Tyszkiewicz, Jan. Tatarzy na Litwie i w Polsce: Studia z dziejów XIII–XVIII w. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo PWN, 1989. von Bode, Wilhelm. “Ein altpersischer Teppich im Besitz der Königlichen Museen zu Berlin: Studie zur Geschichte der westasiatischen Knüpfteppiche.” Jahrbuch der Königlich Preussischen Kunstsammlungen 13, no. 1 (1892): 26–49. –. Vorderasiatische Knüpfteppiche aus älterer Zeit. Leipzig: Hermann Seemann Nachfolger, 1902. Wagner, Marek. “Inwentarze ruchomos´ci oficerów wojsk koronnych z drugiej połowy XVII wieku.” Kwartalnik Historii Kultury Materialnej 51, no. 2 (2003): 249–259. Weisbin, Kendra. Introduction to the Court Carpets of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires. Accessed March 05, 2019. https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-hi story/west-and-central-asia/a/introduction-to-the-court-carpets-of-the-ottoman-safavid -and-mughal-empires. Wenzel, Marian. “Carpet and Wall-Painting Design in Persia: An Armenian-inscribed ‘Polonaise’ Carpet.” Apollo NS 128, no. 317 (1988): 4–11. Wyrobisz, Andrzej. “Attitude of the Polish Nobility towards Towns in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century.” Acta Poloniae Historica 48 (1983): 77–94. Zakrzewska-Dubasowa, Mirosława. “Polityka handlowa Jana Zamoyskiego i jego naste˛pców.” Annales Universitatis Mariae Curie-Skłodowska. Sectio F, Historia 38–39 (1983–1984): 93–114. Z˙ygulski, Zdzisław. Dzieje polskiego rzemiosła artystycznego. Warsaw, 1987. –. “The Impact of the Orient on the Cultures of Old Poland.” In Land of the Winged Horsemen: Art in Poland 1572–1764, Exhibition Catalogue Walters Art Gallery Baltimore et al., edited by Jan Ostrowski, 69–79. Alexandria, VA: Art Services International, 1999.

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Stephanie Armer / Eva Hanke / Anja Kregeloh

Rugs as Transottoman Commodities: The History of a Rug from Us¸ak

Persian and Anatolian rugs were coveted commodities and diplomatic gifts which played a prominent role within the dynamics of mobility between Eastern Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and Persia studied in the Transottomanica priority program. Their presence in paintings by famous Renaissance artists such as Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543), Lorenzo Lotto (1480–1557), Gentile Bellini (c. 1429–1507), and Domenico Ghirlandaio (1448–1494) shaped the gaze of researchers studying rugs and carpets, as evidenced by terms for specific rug types such as “Lotto rugs” and “Holbein rugs” still used to this day. For a long time, this research was largely confined to Europe and North America. By contrast, far less research has been conducted into the trade and use of rugs in Eastern and South Eastern Europe, where large numbers have been preserved in Transylvanian churches. The term “Transylvanian rug,”1 which was coined in the early twentieth century to describe numerous types of rugs preserved in this region, is further proof of the tendency to consider oriental rugs from a European perspective, regardless of their geographical and cultural origin. Nevertheless, rugs have always been a marginal topic in art history, interest in which has largely been confined to dealers and collectors. Accordingly, rugs have barely been addressed by recent, interdisciplinary material culture studies or research into transcultural object biographies,2 even though for centuries they were an especially mobile group of items which transcended both geographical and cultural boundaries and were particularly appreciated by buyers, not least because of their specific materiality. The Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg holds one of the largest collections of Anatolian rugs to be preserved in its entirety on loan from the Protestant Parish Church A. C. in Bistrit,a (Ger.: Bistritz, Hung.: Beszterce), Romania. It was kept in the parish church until the evacuation of the German 1 This term was probably first used in Rudolf Neugebauer and Julius Orendi, Handbuch der orientalischen Teppichkunde (Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1909), xx. 2 See also the remarks in the introduction to this volume.

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speaking population from northern Transylvania in autumn 1944.3 The fiftyfive rugs in total have been studied in detail in the interdisciplinary research project “Early Modern Oriental Trade and Transylvanian-Saxon Identity Building: The Ottoman Rugs of the Protestant Parish Church A. C. in Bistritz/ Bistrit,a (Romania) in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum.” For the first time, this article publishes findings of this project4 by examining the history of a specific rug from the collection from the angle of the mobility underlying the Transottomanica priority program. The Star Ushak (Fig. 1) chosen is particularly suitable for this purpose since its ornamentation is based on the exchange of stylistic elements with Persian centers of rug production. As a result of a “design revolution,” curvilinear floral motifs had partially replaced the geometric patterns previously widespread in both Persian and Turkish art. In the sixteenth century, mainly the rug weaving workshops associated with the Ottoman court in the area around Us¸ak specialized in the new patterns. One of the most characteristic motifs comprised blue eight-lobed stars on a red ground decorated with tendrils. The rug examined in this article is probably the oldest of three small Star Ushaks in the Bistritz collection. A photograph taken in the early twentieth century shows this particularly valuable rug laid over church pews in the choir of the parish church (Fig. 2). How did this rug, which was probably made in or near the west Anatolian town of Us¸ak, arrive in Bistritz and come into the possession of the church? Can the assumptions regarding its production in Us¸ak be substantiated by written records and art historical comparison? Were Anatolian knotted-pile rugs such as the Star Ushak formerly kept in Bistritz church primarily used as prestige objects or did they serve other functions? Do the preserved sources contain indications about how the rugs were perceived? And what can be gleaned about their production and use from the rugs themselves? Today, the original Bistritz rugs are important historical documents. In addition to their significance in terms of art history, their materiality, technique, and signs of ageing provide numerous pointers concerning how they were made and used. The rugs owned by other parishes which remained in Romania and also those kept in museums have been wet-cleaned several times, including recently.5 3 Horst Göbbel, Die Evakuierung der Nordsiebenbürger Sachsen 1944 und ihre Folgen, 1944–2014 (Weil-Drabenderhöhe: HOG Bistritz Nösen, 2014). 4 The findings will be extensively published. 5 Ágnes Ziegler and Hanna Grabner, “Konservatorischer Bericht über das Schadstoffscreening an den osmanischen Teppichen in Siebenbürgen,” in Entwicklungen eines Verfahrens zur Entgiftung und Reinigung der anthropogen geschädigten osmanischen Teppiche aus der Sammlung der Evangelischen Kirche A. B. Rumänien mittels Extraktion von biozidhaltigen Substanzen aus flüssigem Kohlendioxid. Abschlussbericht zum Projekt gefördert von der Deutschen Bundesstiftung Umwelt, AZ 30 311–45, 69–83. Bad Kreuznach, 2016, 70–79. http s://www.dbu.de/projekt_30311/01_db_2409.html. Accessed January 11, 2018. Wet-cleaning is

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Fig. 1: Star Ushak, Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, loan from the Protestant Parish Church A. C. in Bistrit¸a, inv.no. Gew 4927. Photograph: Monika Runge.

an irreversible operation that involves risks, especially for badly aged fibers. Cf. Sheila Landi, The Textile Conservator’s Manual (London: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1985), 30; Ágnes TímárBalázsy and Dinah Eastop, Chemical Principles of Textile Conservation (Oxford: ButterworthHeinemann, 1998), 194–213.

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Fig. 2: The Star Ushak on the pew of Master Anton (1508), photograph probably early twentieth century, Gundelsheim, Siebenbürgisches Archiv, B IV 4, Best. A 229. Bildarchiv des Siebenbürgen-Instituts an der Universität Heidelberg, Gundelsheim/Neckar.

Since the rugs from Bistritz have never been wet-cleaned, restored or altered in any other way since their arrival at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in 1952,6 many traces recording how they were produced, used and repaired are still present and far easier to interpret than on the rugs remaining in Romania, some of which have been substantially altered. The aims of this article are twofold. Firstly, it examines Transottoman interconnections and fields of interaction by exploring the rugs’ methods of production and artistic influences as well as their trade routes and the circumstances in which they were used. The possibilities of an interdisciplinary object study including not only historical but also art historical and art technological methods will then secondly be explored in order to contribute to the current debate regarding the significance and methods of material culture studies. Using the case study of a specific rug allows the potential—yet also the limitations—of such an approach to be demonstrated. 6 Only minor measures have been carried out such as treatment with insecticide and the removal of isolated stains in 1953.

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The Production of Ushak Rugs Us¸ak as a Center of Rug Production Researchers have spent many years trying to attribute specific rug types to known places and regions of production and this work is still ongoing. Rugs produced in the region around Us¸ak until some point in the twentieth century seemed to indicate that traditional local patterns were continued. As a result, the Anatolian rugs and workshop carpets often referred to in the literature as “classical” are frequently said to come from Us¸ak and its surroundings. In addition to Star and Medallion Ushaks, they include Bellini and double-niche rugs as well as so-called Ottoman Court rugs from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. According to previous research, however, this is by no means certain; instead, the rugs are only known to come from somewhere in West Anatolia. For this reason, the term Ushak rugs has caught on for the above-mentioned types without necessarily meaning they were produced there. In older literature, the term often only applies to Star and Medallion Ushaks, showing that Ushak rugs have not been uniformly classified as a group in stylistic terms either.7 Most of the many rugs produced for export to the West between late fifteenth and late sixteenth centuries were likely made in West Anatolia, probably in workshops large and small in various weaving centers.8 Once again, hardly any individual groups or patterns can be assigned to exact locations.9 These rural production areas were very important early on for rug manufacturing in the Ottoman Empire, as shown by correspondence between Carlo de’ Baroncelli, the Florentine consul at Pera from 1472 to 1476, and Lorenzo di Medici (1449–1492), the former announcing the dispatch of a rug from Istanbul in 1473. However, he mentioned that the rug was not of the highest quality since the best workshops were all located in remote regions.10 Us¸ak, whose geographical location in the foothills of the Anatolian plateau prompted specialization in the production of rugs, played an important role among the rural rug-weaving centers of western

7 A recent study on Ushak rugs is Murat Tokat’s thesis on the rugs in the Konya Ethnography Museum (Konya Etnografya Müzesi), but it is limited to an inventory and descriptions of patterns: Murat Tokat, “Konya Etnografya Müzesi’nde Bulunan Us¸ak Halıları” (MA diss., Konya Selçuk Üniversitesi, 2014). 8 Ulrich Schürmann, ed. Islamische Teppiche: The Joseph V. McMullan Collection, New York (Frankfurt am Main: Museum für Kunsthandwerk, 1968), 72. 9 Alberto Boralevi, ed., Geometrie d’Oriente: Stefano Bardini e il tappeto antico/Oriental Geometries: Stefano Bardini and the Antique Carpet (Livorno: Sillabe, 1999), 60–61. 10 Marco Spallanzani, Oriental Rugs in Renaissance Florence (Florence: S.P.E.S., 2007), doc. 80: “Matteo vi manda un tapeto, li mando per tenere su la tavola. Vorrei fussi più bello; siàno dischosto dove si fano […].”

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Anatolia.11 The oldest edited source to mention rugs from Us¸ak and thus document the long tradition of rug production there dates from the late fifteenth century. A register from Caffa in Crimea begun in 1487 and maintained until 1490 lists all those owing unpaid customs duties.12 During this period, two merchants from Us¸ak, Hacı Veli and Ömer, paid duty on 17 and 36 rugs respectively.13 They both reached Caffa together with other merchants on board the ship of Captain Bali, who is thought to have operated a regular service from Istanbul to Caffa via I˙nebolu.14 As well as Hacı Veli and Ömer from Us¸ak, customs duty was paid on rugs from Bursa and Gördes, two rug-weaving centers in West Anatolia. Other rug merchants declared Konya, Ankara and even Caffa itself as the places of origin.15 However, rugs only accounted for a small share of the goods traded. Rugs from Us¸ak are also mentioned in several price indexes (narh defteri), which set maximum prices for common commodities on the market in Istanbul. In 1624, a price was fixed for high-quality rugs from Us¸ak based on their size.16 The price index for 1640 lists a total of eleven rugs from Us¸ak with specific dimensions and patterns.17 Three of them had a red ground, one a medallion in the middle, while the other seven featured both elements (i. e. a red ground and a medallion in the middle). This could be the type of rug known today as the Medallion Ushak.18 With three exceptions, only the price for the highest level of quality was specified for rugs from Us¸ak. One of the main sources concerning rug production in Us¸ak is the famous travelogue by Evliya Çelebi, who visited the town in 1671. He reported that the 11 The climate in the region was continental and very harsh, and the soil in the city’s surroundings was unsuitable for agrarian use. The land was therefore mainly used for sheepfarming. Besides the important raw material wool, large quantities of water—which was needed to wash the carpets—were available. Cf. Donald Quataert, “Machine Breaking and the Changing Carpet Industry of Western Anatolia, 1860–1908,” in Workers, Peasants and Economic Change in the Ottoman Empire, 1730–1914, ed. Donald Quataert (Istanbul: Isis Press, 1993), 118–119. 12 Halil I˙nalcık, Sources and Studies on the Ottoman Black Sea, vol. 1, The Customs Registers of Caffa, 1487–1490 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). 13 Ibid., 63. The type of rug involved is not recorded. 14 Ibid., 114. 15 Ibid., 124. 16 Mübahat Solmaz Kütükog˘lu, “1624 Sikke Tashîhinin Ardından Hazırlanan Narh Defterleri,” Tarih Dergisi / Turkish Journal of History 34 (1984): 156. We are indebted to Arkadiusz Blaszczyk for pointing this out and assisting with the translation. 17 Mübahat Solmaz Kütükog˘lu, Osmanlılarda Narh Müessesesi ve 1640 Tarihli Narh Defteri (Istanbul: Enderun Kitabevi, 1983), 178–179. An English translation of the section on rugs in the 1640 price index is contained in Halil I˙nalcık, “The Yörüks: Their Origins, Expansion and Economic Role / Yörükler: Kökenleri, Yayılmaları ve Ekonomik Rolleri,” CEDRUS: The Journal of MCRI 2 (2014): 490–491. 18 This theory is expressed by Pásztor in: Emese Pásztor, Ottoman Turkish Carpets in the Collection of the Budapest Museum of Applied Arts (Budapest: Museum of Applied Arts, 2007), 83.

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town was very prosperous, despite its relatively small size.19 The majority of the inhabitants (he wrote) were wealthy merchants, who included Armenians and Greeks, but not Jews. Evliya added that the main trade there was the production of rugs of exceptional quality: “Its rugs can be compared to those made at Isfahan of Iran and at Cairo. But Us¸ak rugs are exported to all countries in the world.”20 Evliya described a constant procession of camel caravans delivering wool and dyes to the town and returning bearing finished rugs. They included very expensive rugs that were used in private households as well as in mosques.21 Later on, Evliya described a magnificent rug from Us¸ak which he had discovered in an Armenian monastery in Jerusalem, attesting to the use of Us¸ak rugs in a Christian setting, too. According to Evliya, Us¸ak’s environs were also involved in the rug industry, for in the nearby village of Boyalı22 dye plants (probably madder23) were cultivated, that were needed to color wool red. Although original Star Ushaks have been preserved in Europe and are also to be seen in paintings executed there, the town of Us¸ak is not mentioned in any of the known inventories from the European area24—admittedly, the inventories are usually rather vague regarding the place of origin. Compared to other rug types such as Holbein or Lotto, Star Ushaks are clearly underrepresented in both Central Europe and Transylvania. Including the three examples from the Bistritz collection, a total of just five Star Ushaks owned by Transylvanian churches have survived. An entry in the will of Andreas Teutsch from 1730 indicates that members of the Transylvanian-Saxon upper class also owned Star Ushaks.25 We can only speculate as to the reasons for the relatively scant written and material evidence. Although Evliya mentioned in his description of Us¸ak that the rugs produced there were sold all over the world, certain types of rugs, such as the Star and Medallion Ushaks, may have been principally made for the regional market and only exported on demand. It is also conceivable that the rugs’ size made them unsuitable for covering tables and benches, a use to which rugs were often put in 19 The following information was gleaned from the English translation contained in I˙nalcık, “The Yörüks,” 486. 20 Translation quoted from ibid., 486. 21 The inventory of the Yeni Valide Mosque in Istanbul from 1674 includes a rug from Us¸ak with a medallion border. Kurt Erdmann, “Weniger bekannte Uschak-Muster,” Kunst des Orients 4 (1963): 79. 22 Boya is the Turkish term for “dye,” so the place name could be literally translated as “Dye Village.” This information was kindly provided by Arkadiusz Blaszczyk. 23 This was suggested in Suraiya Faroqhi, Artisans of Empire: Crafts and Craftspeople under the Ottomans (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 93. This dye can be detected in the red parts of the Star Ushak from Bistrit,a examined; cf. the chapter “Materials and Techniques” below. 24 Erdmann also arrives at this conclusion, “Weniger bekannte Uschak-Muster,” 79. 25 The will of the former Comes Saxonum records a carpet “with a green star,” which could have been a Star Ushak. Emil Sigerus, Vom alten Hermannstadt (Hermannstadt: J. Drotleff, 1922), 18–19.

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Europe.26 Ultimately, such considerations remain pure speculation, since there are no known sources concerning the organization of rug production and how it responded to merchants’ and customers’ requests: “for the producers and the organization of their labor, we are completely in the dark.”27

The Ottoman Court and the “Design Revolution” Nazan Ölçer assumes that in the region around Us¸ak, rug production associated with the Ottoman court was well organized in a manner belying its rural setting.28 There are indications of court patronage from the reign of Mehmed II (r. 1444– 1446, 1451–1481) to that of Sultan Ahmed I (r. 1603–1617).29 Written sources indicate that painters at the court also produced templates or “cartoons” for rugs that might have been used for early Ushak rugs.30 It was probably these painters who created the Medallion and Star Ushak motifs, which were very important until well into the seventeenth century. These rugs were often classified as artistically second-rate compared to “Ottoman Court rugs.” Even so, it is possible that they were used after all at the Ottoman court, as shown by a miniature from around 1570 depicting a visit by the Persian ambassador to Sultan Selim II (r. 1566–1574). The pattern on the Medallion Ushak lying in front of the throne resembles the design principles of the Ottoman style.31 It can therefore reasonably be assumed that Ushak rugs were produced at least under the influence of the court.32 In some cases, the large or only the Medallion rugs are even referred

26 Vegh and Layer suggest that the Star Ushaks preserved in Transylvanian collections could have been custom designs for use in churches since they are noticeably smaller than other Star Ushaks. Gyula Végh and Károly Layer, Turkish Rugs in Transylvania, ed. Marino Dall’Oglio and Clara Dall’Oglio (Fishguard: Crosby Press, 1977), cat. no. 8. Alberto Boralevi also associates the low prevalence of Star Ushaks in Transylvania with their size. Alberto Boralevi, “Ushak Rugs,” in Antique Ottoman Rugs in Transylvania, ed. Stefano Ionescu (Rome: Verduci Editore, 2005). 27 Faroqhi, Artisans of Empire, 95. 28 Nazan Ölçer et al., Turkish Carpets from the 13th–18th Centuries: Exhibition Catalogue Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts, Istanbul (Istanbul: Ahmet Ertug˘, 1996), xiii. 29 Walter B. Denny, “The Origin of the Designs of Ottoman Court Carpets,” Hali: The International Magazine of Fine Carpets and Textiles 2 (1979). 30 Gülru Necipog˘lu, “Early Modern Floral: The Agency of Ornament in Ottoman and Safavid Visual Cultures,” in Histories of Ornament: From Global to Local, ed. Gülru Necipog˘lu and Alina Payne (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 143. Cf. also Ölçer et al., Turkish Carpets from the 13th–18th Centuries, xii. 31 Topkapı Palace Museum; cf. Walter B. Denny and Nazan Ölçer, Anatolian Carpets: Masterpieces from the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts (Istanbul: Ertug˘ & Kocabıyık, 1999), 2:37. 32 Julian Raby, “Court and Export: Part 2: The Us¸ak Carpets,” in Oriental Carpet & Textile Studies, 2, Carpets of the Mediterranean Countries, 1400–1600: Based upon the Special Ses-

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to as court rugs.33 In the eighteenth century, too, there were obviously still links to the Ottoman court. Court instructions to weavers in and around Us¸ak from 1726 and 1763 to produce rugs based on templates from Istanbul and to prioritize orders for the court have survived.34 However, exactly what influence the court workshops had on other workshops is debatable.35 The style of the Ottoman court flourished in the third quarter of the fifteenth century. But there are different hypotheses about when it influenced rug production in western Anatolia. According to Erdmann, specialization in large formats with floral patterns based on the court style took place there as early as the late fifteenth century. He assumes that these rugs were produced in older workshops and their technical details resembled other rugs from the region with geometric patterns.36 Walker, however, does not see a development influenced by the court in the workshops of Us¸ak until the third quarter of the sixteenth century.37 Contadini, on the other hand, writes that by the sixteenth century at the latest, the ornamentation of the Middle East had become part of a comparatively international design vocabulary.38 This explains why it is so difficult to examine the origin and spread of individual patterns, let alone date them. The frequent use of dating based on an assumed development from round, flowing forms to more angular, stiff ones and the associated removal from the refined court style is beset by too many unknown factors.39 There may also have been concurrent differences in technical skills between different workshops, and even the preference for geometric ornaments attributable to the textile grid might have continued. Accordingly, precise dating based solely on art historical methods is not possible and must be supplemented by art technological techniques.

33 34 35

36 37 38 39

sions of the 4th International Conference on Oriental Carpets, ed. Robert Pinner and Walter B. Denny (London: Hali Publications, 1986), 185. Schuyler V.R. Cammann, “Symbolic Meanings in Oriental Rug Patterns,” Textile Museum Journal 3, no. 3 (1972): 8; Nurcan Perdahcı, “An Approach to Medallion Ushak Carpets in European Painting,” International Journal of Art and Art History 4, no. 1 (2016): 1. Erdmann, “Weniger bekannte Uschak-Muster,” 79–80. Alberto Boralevi, L’Ushak Castellani-Stroganoff ed altri tappeti ottomani dal XVI al XVIII secolo (Florence: Karta, 1987), 21, 29; Raby, “Court and Export,” 185; Cammann, “Symbolic Meanings in Oriental Rug Patterns,” 8; Perdahcı, “An Approach to Medallion Ushak Carpets in European Painting,” 1. Kurt Erdmann, Der orientalische Knüpfteppich: Versuch einer Darstellung seiner Geschichte (Tübingen: Ernst Wasmuth Verlag, 1955), 50. Daniel Walker, “Turkish Rugs,” The Bulletin of the Saint Louis Art Museum NS 18, no. 4 (1988): no. 5. Anna Contadini, “Threads of Ornament in the Style World of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” in Histories of Ornament: From Global to Local, ed. Gülru Necipog˘lu and Alina Payne (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2016), 291. Raby, “Court and Export,” 178.

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One characteristic feature of these rugs was the remarkable expansion of the repertoire of motifs. Erdmann coined the term “design revolution” to describe a turning point in the late fifteenth century after which, in addition to geometric patterns, curvilinear and floral motifs were used in Iran and Anatolia, especially in the region around Us¸ak.40 This is illustrated by a miniature probably painted around 1467 by the renowned Persian artist Bihzad in the version of the Za˙ farna¯mah (Book of Victory), now in the John Work Garrett Library in Baltimore. It shows Timur granting an audience on his throne outside a tent. While a rug on the left in the background has a geometric pattern, the other two rugs and the canopy behind the tent are decorated with medallions and floral tendrils. Higher knot densities and larger formats allowed the production of motifs that were no longer aligned with the textile grid.41 Given the rapid, radical introduction of new patterns in Anatolia42 and the absence of intermediate stages, they may well have been based on specimens from elsewhere—and comparison with Safavid rugs is fruitful. Erdmann, who considers this period to be a high point in the art of rug-weaving, presumes that in the second and third decades of the sixteenth century, rugs from northwestern Persia, especially from Tabriz, served as templates. They were characterized by a “large medallion structure seemingly limited to the inner field with an infinitely repeating ground pattern of floral or spiral tendrils.”43 This Persian influence is often explained by the conquest of Tabriz in 1514 by Selim I (r. 1512–1520), as a result of which designers and various craftsmen were taken to the Ottoman court. However, this connection cannot be proven, as it is almost impossible to say when the changes to ornamentation began. Indeed, some question whether this really was Persian influence, arguing that this process could have developed separately in the two regions.44 Denny and Ölçer suggest that the design revolution emanated from the center and west of the Islamic world, especially Tabriz and Us¸ak.45 Furthermore, following the conquest of Cairo in 1517, the Ottomans gained power over the foremost rug workshops in the west, which from then on produced rugs for the court. In addition, artists from South Eastern Europe joined the court workshops in Istanbul.46

40 Erdmann, Der orientalische Knüpfteppich, 28–30; cf. also Jon Thompson, Milestones in the History of Carpets (Milan: Moshe Tabibnia, 2006), 90–101. 41 Walter B. Denny, How to Read Islamic Carpets (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2014), 61. Cf. also the chapter “Materials and Techniques” below. 42 Raby, “Court and Export,” 185. 43 Erdmann, Der orientalische Knüpfteppich, 45–49, especially 47. 44 Boralevi, L’Ushak Castellani-Stroganoff, 10. 45 Denny and Ölçer, Anatolian Carpets, 2:38. 46 Necipog˘lu, “Early Modern Floral,” 142.

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The design revolution gave Turkish rugs in particular leaf and floral tendrils, many flowers actually being lotus palmettes that resembled northwest Persian and Caucasian examples, for instance from Khorasan.47 However, in Anatolia the tendrils themselves were often more angular and stylized than on Safavid rugs. Once again, exactly when this development took place is hard to tell. The borders usually contained undulating tendrils and palmettes, with attention being paid to ensuring reconciled corner solutions in the court-style rugs, suggesting a Safavid influence.48 In Anatolian rugs, by contrast, the corners were usually neglected; the side borders met randomly, indicating they were frequently based on templates or “cartoons” which hadn’t been adapted to the rugs’ actual sizes. Noticeable differences in typical ornaments between the Ottoman Empire and the Safavid Empire emerged in the sixteenth century.49 Even so, there were also striking similarities. The split palmette scroll and the Chinese lotus scroll were already in use in both regions in the first half of the thirteenth century. They predominated among Timurid-Turkmen ornaments and can be found in a pattern book from the court of Mehmed II.50 The “oak leaf ornament,” which supplemented the tendrils on Ushak rugs, is in fact a lotus leaf derived from Chinese art. It first appeared in Ottoman art in 1421–1424 at the Green Mausoleum in Bursa, the tiles for which were made by craftsmen from Samarkand.51 In 1931, Riefstahl mentioned a Persian miniature probably painted in Baghdad in 1396 in a manuscript containing three poems from the Khamsah in the version by Khwaju Kerma¯ni (1290–1349?).52 It shows a conversation between Sassanid ruler Khosrow I Anoushirvan (r. 531–579) and his minister Buzurjmihr. Beneath the throne is a long rug with blue, brown, and red filled eight-pointed stars made up of intertwined narrow white ribbons alternating with interlaced knots and rosettes on an orange-red ground. The border consists of an interlace motif on a brown ground and is accompanied by a narrow secondary border with a kind of undulating tendril motif on a green ground. Riefstahl concluded from the resemblance to Star Ushaks that the motifs can be traced back to a Turkmen 47 Nicholas Purdon, Carpet and Textile Patterns (London: Laurence King Publishing, 1996), 20. 48 Anna Beselin, ed., Geknüpfte Kunst: Teppiche des Museums für Islamische Kunst (Munich: Ed. Minerva, 2011), 61. 49 Necipog˘lu, “Early Modern Floral,” 133; Ölçer et al., Turkish Carpets from the 13th–18th Centuries, xv–xvi. 50 Baba Nakkas¸ Album, late fifteenth century, Istanbul University Library, F 1423; Necipog˘lu, “Early Modern Floral,” 135. 51 Thompson, Milestones in the History of Carpets, 92–98; Raby, “Court and Export,” 179; Carlo Maria Suriano, “Oak Leaves and Arabesques: Ushak Large-Medallion Carpets with PseudoKufic Borders,” Hali: The International Magazine of Fine Carpets and Textiles 116 (2001): 106. 52 British Library, MS Add.18113, f 91 r, reproduced in: http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.a spx?ref=add_ms_18113_f091r, accessed February 18, 2019. Cf. Rudolf M. Riefstahl, “Primitive Rugs of the ‘Konya’ Type in the Mosque of Beyshehir,” The Art Bulletin 13, no. 2 (1931): 203–204, fig. 27.

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tradition that existed both in Anatolia and in Khorasan.53 This itself indicates how mobile and widespread patterns were at that time. This exchange took place in the form of designs and drawings from the court as well as through objects and artists themselves.54

The Star Ushak Pattern Although the Bistritz Star Ushak with the inventory number Gew 4927 is relatively small, it features a very elaborate pattern. It has two dark blue eight-lobed stars and a lozenge-shaped medallion in the center, surrounded by lush floral tendrils with palmettes and “oak leaves” in an unusually large number of colors and with detailed interior drawing on a red ground.55 The characteristic infinite repeat of the motif can only be guessed at from the truncated points next to the lozenge medallions. The unusual main border as well as the inner and outer borders consist of a series of S-shaped forms, which on the outer border end in small leaves. The red and white hatched guard stripe is also only found on a few other rugs. The tendrils are dominated by large flowers on stem sections shorter than those found on other Star Ushaks, where the rather angular stems dominate the visual appearance. Research now assumes that early Ushak rugs, especially Star and Medallion Ushaks, were made in the third quarter of the fifteenth century, i. e. prior to the conquest of Tabriz, and are linked to works of art by the Aq Qoyunlu Turkmen. However, stylistic similarities can also be seen with the Ottoman art of Mehmed II’s reign (1451–1481).56 Spuhler suggests that Persian influence was limited to “Ottoman Court rugs” and Medallion Ushaks, while the Star Ushaks adopted the principle of the infinite repeat typical of Anatolian rugs.57 Whether this distinction is so hard and fast, however, is still subject to debate. The infinite repeat is interpreted as representing the infinity of God and the cosmos.58 There is a widespread notion that the star motif was derived as a cosmic symbol from medieval Chinese cloud collars and then arrived in the West as a decoration on

53 Ibid., 207. 54 Necipog˘lu, “Early Modern Floral,” 134. 55 Dimensions: Gew 4927: 277 cm long, 153 cm wide; Gew 4928: 254 cm long, 146 cm wide; Gew 4929: 250 cm long, 107 cm wide. 56 Raby, “Court and Export,” 179; Ölçer et al., Turkish Carpets from the 13th–18th Centuries, XIII. 57 Friedrich Spuhler, Die Orientteppiche im Museum für Islamische Kunst Berlin (Munich: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1987), 23–24. 58 Cammann, “Symbolic Meanings in Oriental Rug Patterns,” 8, 26–27.

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nomadic tents.59 In old Persian illustrations, the eight-lobed star symbolizes the center of the world. The medieval Turkic dynasty of the Ghaznavids used a large column whose cross-section was an eight-lobed star to represent the axis mundi, the connection between heaven and earth, in their capital city Ghazni.60 While the origin of the star motif cannot yet be ascertained with any confidence, the variety of explanations suggests that it spread through various contexts and places of production and use. Although the geographical and temporal development of the star motif can barely be traced by comparison with other rugs, individual similarities between Anatolian and Persian rugs can be found. A sixteenth-century carpet from northwestern Iran preserved in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for instance, has an eight-lobed blue star medallion in the middle (Fig. 3).61 Other yellow lobes are positioned between them, but the basic motif is clearly visible. In the corners of the rug are truncated medallions with cloudy contours, indicating the continuation of the pattern. Both the medallions and the rug ground are decorated with elaborate floral tendrils and palmettes. The borders consist of undulating tendrils with alternate palmettes. Very similar motifs can also be found in simplified form on rugs from East Anatolia from the sixteenth century onwards, such as a medallion rug offered for sale by Eskenazi’s art gallery from Milan at the Textura fair in Maastricht in 1993.62 On it, the typical Anatolian colors of blue and red dominate while the floral tendrils are clearly more angular and less serene. An eight-lobed star very similar to the star motif on Ushak rugs can be seen on a medallion rug woven in the sixteenth century from northwest or central Persia now in the Mobilier National collection in Paris. However, the star is enclosed by a large sixteen-lobed star occupying almost the entire width of the inner field.63 Despite the use of similar motifs to rugs from distant regions, it is astonishing how much the Star Ushaks—which so closely resemble each other—stand out. Hardly any intermediate stages revealing influences or the passing-on of tradi59 Schuyler V.R. Cammann, “The Symbolism of the Cloud Collar Motif,” The Art Bulletin 33, no. 1 (1951); Cammann, “‘Paradox’ in Persian Carpet Patterns,” Hali: The International Magazine of Fine Carpets and Textiles 1, no. 3 (1978): 252; Beselin, Geknüpfte Kunst, 84; P.R.J. Ford, The Persian Carpet Tradition: Six Centuries of Design Evolution (London: Hali Publications, 2019), 35–37. 60 Cammann, “Symbolic Meanings in Oriental Rug Patterns,” 28. 61 New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. no. 64.311; cf. Joseph V. McMullan, Islamic Carpets (New York: Near Eastern Art Research Center, 1965), no. 11. 62 Reproduced in: Hali : The International Magazine of Fine Carpets and Textiles 67 (1993): n.p., dated there to the early sixteenth century. 63 Paris, Mobilier National, inv. no. GOB 1375, reproduced in: Donald King and David Sylvester, The Eastern Carpet in the Western World: From the 15th to the 17th Century (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1983), cat. no. 60.

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Fig. 3: Medallion carpet, North West Iran, sixteenth century, New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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tional patterns can be found. They have a very characteristic pattern and always the same combination of colors, and differ only in terms of detail. This makes the chronological classification of individual Star Ushaks extremely difficult. Differences between individual workshops can therefore normally be surmised from technical details rather than motifs.64 Even considering Persian medallion rugs as a source of inspiration, the sudden emergence of curvilinear forms in Anatolian rug production without any recognizable stages of development cannot be explained by the development of the medium itself, which is why the use of cartoons—freely drawn templates not based on the textile grid—is to be assumed, as is the use of patterns from other genres.65 In the field of architectural ornamentation, comparisons can be drawn with the faience decoration of buildings in Tabriz and Bursa.66 For example, the Blue Mosque in Tabriz, which was commissioned by the Qara¯ Qoyunlu dynasty and completed in 1465, shows medallions structured by arabesques and areas filled with split palmette scrolls. Eight-lobed stars with arabesque structures are to be seen as well as quatrefoils with profiling closely resembling that of Star Ushaks. This important Turkmen building has clear links to Ottoman architecture, for instance the Green Mosque in Bursa, which bears an inscription referring to craftsmen from Tabriz.67 Probably erected between 1414 and 1424, it was influential on early Ottoman architecture. The tiles of the wall covering, probably made in I˙znik, no longer make up a mosaic, but are instead decorated with a drawing using several different colors of glaze on a tile, allowing more detailed ornaments with curved lines. Ceramics from I˙znik became particularly famous in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for decorating surfaces with arabesque tendrils. Medallions filled with arabesques also occur in Ottoman book art.68 The red leather doublure in the cover of a copy of the Niha¯yah by Majd al-Din ibn al-Athir produced around 1465 is decorated with an eight-lobed gilt star in the center and quartered stars in the corners structured by intricate arabesques.69 The illuminations of manuscripts sometimes also have related ornamentation, especially if their pages have a similar structure to rugs with an inner field containing medallions and surrounding borders, as in a magnificent sixteenth64 65 66 67

Cf. also the chapter “Material and Techniques” in this article. Raby, “Court and Export,” 178. Denny and Ölçer, Anatolian Carpets, 2:37. Albert Gabriel, Une Capitale Turque: Brousse, Bursa (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1958), 1:92 mentions an inscription “Œuvre des maîtres de Tabriz” to the right of the mihrab. 68 Denny and Ölçer, Anatolian Carpets, 36–37. 69 Istanbul, Süleymaniye Library, MS. Süleymaniye 1025; cf. Julian Raby and Zeren Tanındı, Turkish Bookbinding in the 15th Century: The Foundation of an Ottoman Court Style, ed. Tim Stanley (London: Azimuth, 1993), cat. no. 12.

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century Quran from Mughal India or Iran, in which the double page with the first sura is decorated especially exquisitely.70 A similar compositional scheme features a small gilded and painted ivory mirror, which was crafted in Iran or Turkey in the sixteenth century.71 Its central medallion and the quartered medallions in the corners are filled with palmettes and split palmette scrolls, as are the spaces in between. The surrounding border also consists of arabesque leaves arranged in an undulating line and tied together at each end. These are just a few examples showing that ornamentation wasn’t limited to one specific genre or material.72 This transmateriality conceals possible precedents and lines of development as well as the different mobility of types of items. It may have been far easier in the sixteenth century for Ottoman arts and crafts without any inscriptions or obvious religious symbols to cross national and cultural borders than, say, Safavid art.73 Given the conditions imposed by the textures and structures of materials for the application of ornamentation, however, it is highly likely that the floral tendrils and profiled medallions originated in drawings which were not dependent on a grid or other surface characteristics. Erdmann’s theory regarding Ushak rugs that “[t]he Ottoman rug rejected with unerring instinct any closer connection to book art. It remains true to the laws of textiles. In this respect it is superior to the Safavid rug”74 clearly cannot be sustained. Of the Anatolian rug types, Medallion and Star Ushaks are among those with the greatest similarity to ornamental architectural decoration and book art. Therefore, they can probably be assumed to have been part of a style that spread internationally and went beyond the design revolution of rugweaving.

Materials and Techniques In addition to pattern comparisons, technical manufacturing characteristics and material properties of rugs can help date and localize rugs, as explained below in more detail. Although the source value of items has been emphasized several times recently during the debate about material culture studies, so far only few 70 Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Orientabteilung, sign. Hs. or. 10450, fol. 1b–2a. Published in: Jens Kröger and Désirée Heiden, Islamische Kunst in Berliner Sammlungen (Berlin: Parthas, 2004), cat. no. 197. 71 Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. no. S 276. Published in: Marthe Bernus-Taylor, ed., Arabesques et jardins de paradis (Paris: Ed. de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1989), cat. no. 18. 72 Contadini, “Threads of Ornament in the Style World of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” 291. 73 Necipog˘lu, “Early Modern Floral,” 151. 74 Erdmann, Der orientalische Knüpfteppich, 47.

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museums have extensively examined their collections of oriental rugs and published detailed art technological information. Three prominent examples are Angela Völker’s catalogue on the holdings of Museum für angewandte Kunst (Museum of Applied Arts) in Vienna,75 the catalogue of the Budapest Iparmu˝vészeti Múzeum (Museum of Applied Arts),76 and Jürg Rageth’s publication on Turkmen rugs,77 in which he combined and assessed research findings from the realms of art history and the natural sciences. One of the methods employed by Rageth was radiocarbon dating, an important scientific tool for dating historical textiles, especially from prehistory and early history, since it can determine the age of items up to 50,000 years old. The snag is that accurate dating is not possible between 1650 and 1950 owing to fluctuating levels of C14 in the atmosphere. Since most of the Anatolian rugs that have been preserved in Transylvania were produced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, accurate findings about them cannot be obtained with radiocarbon dating. Another problem affecting the current state of research is the inconsistent terminology and different classification systems used.78 During the project on the Bistritz rugs, particular attention is therefore being paid to basic research, which is expected to help sharpen the methods and the terminology used as well as to classify and date the rugs more precisely. During the research project, the rugs were chiefly being examined under a microscope in order to find out more about the fibrous materials they contain as well as technical peculiarities. Analysis of the fibers ought to provide indications about the rugs’ origin and age. For this purpose, both reflected light microscopes and transmitted light microscopes are used to reveal differences in the chemical and structural composition of the fibers. Fibrous materials and fiber characteristics such as the spinning direction, surface finish, yarn diameter, and coloring etc. are recorded and compared to reference materials. Moreover, fiber deposits and structural defects can be examined as well as chemical and microbial damage.79 75 Angela Völker, Die orientalischen Knüpfteppiche im MAK, ed. Peter Noever (Vienna: Böhlau, 2001). 76 Ferenc Batári, Ottoman Turkish Carpets: The Collections of the Museum of Applied Arts (Budapest: Museum of Applied Arts, 1994). 77 Jürg Rageth, ed., Turkmen Carpets: A New Perspective. 2 vols. (Basel: Freunde des Orientteppichs, 2016). 78 Marie-Louise Nabholz-Kartaschoff and Gerd Näf, “Zur Technik von Flachgeweben und Knüpfteppichen,” in Sammler zeigen alte Teppiche aus dem Orient im Gewerbemuseum Basel (Basel: Gewerbemuseum, 1980), 14. 79 Annemarie Elisabeth Kramell, “Faser- und Farbstoffanalysen an historischen und prähistorischen Textilien” (Diss., MLU Halle-Wittenberg, 2017), 4; Kerstin Riepenhausen, “Ein Vergleich von farbstoffanalytischen Methoden” (MA diss., TH Köln, 2016), 47; “Kunsttechnologische Untersuchungen,” TH Köln CICS, accessed March 22, 2018, https://www.th-koeln.de/kulturwi ssenschaften/kunsttechnologische-untersuchungen_12519.php.

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The fibers of the Bistritz rugs have been affected by use and ageing in various ways, making fiber analysis difficult, especially in highly degraded materials. Even with relatively well-preserved material, distinction between different (sheep) wool types is rarely clear-cut.80 Primarily, it is possible to differentiate between sheep’s wool, goat’s wool, camel wool, and suchlike. However, even if the breed of sheep could be ascertained, this would not yet allow conclusions to be drawn regarding the place of origin or production. What materials were used mainly depended on imports and availability on the market.81 Further examinations of the textile raw materials and trade in them could shed light on whether certain (sheep) wool types were preferred by individual workshops or particularly fine, high-quality wool was used for certain rugs. In the Bistritz rugs studied so far, the warp,82 weft,83 and pile84 consist exclusively of sheep’s wool. Different qualities were used, which varied depending on the breed of sheep and the part of the body from which the wool originated.85 Even within the same rug, the wool used has been found to vary considerably. In general, however, coarser wool was usually used for the warp and weft than for the pile. In many cases, awn hairs and/or goat hair were worked into the wool used for the warp and weft, and sometimes even for the pile. Two-colored warp threads twisted from a thread of white sheep’s wool and a thread made from black awn hairs or goat hair, which according to current research were used quite frequently in the Bistritz rugs, are mainly attributed in the literature to production by nomads.86 On the other hand, the ornamentation of the Star Ushak suggests urban or organized rural production. According to Sakhai, goat hair or camel wool was mainly used to stabilize the edges of rugs.87 But the use of such two-colored, reinforced warp threads does not 80 Theodore Loske, Methoden der Textilmikroskopie (Stuttgart: Franckh, 1964), 92. 81 Kramell, “Faser- und Farbstoffanalysen,” 4. 82 The warp is defined as all the lengthwise threads intended for a piece of cloth which are arranged under tension on a loom or weaving machine. CIETA, ed., Vokabular der Textiltechniken Deutsch (Lyon: CIETA, 1971), 30. 83 The weft refers to the crosswise threads in a piece of cloth. They are inserted through the shed into the warp to produce the weave. CIETA, Vokabular der Textiltechniken, 51. 84 Pile is the term used to describe the many small threads projecting from a base fabric, e. g. velvet, slubbed material, or carpet tufts. CIETA, Vokabular der Textiltechniken, 18. 85 Ludmilla Kybalová, Orientteppiche (Prague: Artia, 1975), 15; Helmut Ruß, Der Knüpfteppich: Fachkunde für den Teppich-Kaufmann (Herford: Busse, 1983), 10; Reinhard G. Hubel, Ullstein Teppichbuch: Eine Teppichkunde für Käufer und Sammler (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1972), 36. 86 P.R.J. Ford, Der Orientteppich und seine Muster: Die Bestimmung orientalischer Knüpfteppiche anhand ihrer Muster, Symbole und Qualitätsmerkmale (Herford: Busse, 1982), 16; Kybalová, Orientteppiche, 15; Nabholz-Kartaschoff and Näf, “Zur Technik von Flachgeweben und Knüpfteppichen,” 19; Ruß, Der Knüpfteppich, 10. 87 Essie Sakhai, Die Geschichte des Orientteppichs (Erlangen: Karl Müller, 1994), 37.

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seem to have served any particular purpose in the Bistritz rugs. In the case of the Star Ushak Gew 4927, for example, the right-hand selvage was reinforced with two-colored warp threads while the left-hand selvage was not. There are also several two-colored warp threads in the middle of the rug. Why the warp threads were only reinforced in the middle and on one side but not on the other cannot be explained. Dye analysis can be used to study the dyeing materials and methods used in the manufacture of certain textile objects and also to assign textiles to a particular period or production area.88 The dyes and fibrous materials from selected rugs from the Bistritz collection have been analyzed with established microscopic, spectroscopic and chromatographic techniques in connection with Eva Hanke’s planned thesis.89 In this context, fiber samples from the Star Ushak Gew 4927 in the Bistritz collection have already been taken and analyzed by HPLC (highperformance liquid chromatography). First results confirmed literature references and showed that red was produced with madder and blue with indigo or woad. Yellow flavonoids served for dyeing yellow and brown and are found in iron-gall black. Flavonoids and unknown yellow-orange components occur in combination with indigo or woad to obtain greenish and bluish shades. A number of unknown components, that are undetectable or have not yet been assigned to a dye source, may be specific to certain unknown dye plants, regions and dates and require further investigation. As far as white, beige, brown, grey, and black threads are concerned, it can be assumed that the natural pigmentation of the wool was used.90 Microscope examinations have verified that both white, undyed and dark, naturally pigmented as well as black-dyed wool was used in the Star Ushak. The rest of the wool was also dyed, especially for the pile. According to Hubel, warp wool was dyed extremely rarely and weft wool only in certain areas.91 Unfortunately, he does not state where dyed weft threads were used. In the Bistritz rugs, undyed, naturally white weft threads were usually used for rugs with a white ground while weft threads dyed in various shades of red were often employed for red-ground rugs. This served to intensify the white or red impression of the ground as well as to avoid the appearance of the largely homogeneous ground being spoiled by weft of a different color if the pile was too short. It is therefore reasonable to assume that dyeing the weft was not limited to a certain area but depended on the color of the rug itself. In addition, the color intensity of the weft threads often changes within 88 Riepenhausen, “Ein Vergleich von farbstoffanalytischen Methoden,” 9. 89 PhD project by Eva Hanke: “Investigation of Dyes and Fibres on Anatolian Carpets of the Protestant Parish Church A. C. in Bistrit¸a/Romania from the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg/Germany,” University of Amsterdam, supervisor: Maarten van Bommel. 90 Kybalová, Orientteppiche, 15. 91 Hubel, Ullstein Teppichbuch, 36.

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a rug, with different shades of red being identified for red-ground rugs and different shades from white to beige for white-ground rugs. Ionescu and Tuna92 have classified these color changes in connection with selvages and design elements. Using these characteristics, they then attempted to subdivide the rugs into multiple groups and assign them to different weaving centers. Although this is an interesting approach, this systematic classification of rugs proved tricky and assignment to individual weaving centers remained vague and inconclusive. Further investigations would be necessary in order to draw meaningful conclusions and to verify them with corresponding evidence. The different shades of red in the weft yarns of Gew 4927 were very probably caused by different results during dyeing. In fact, the Star Ushak has a wide range of colors from white to various shades of red, yellow, blue, green, violet, turquoise, and black. It was also found that the warp threads in the area of the kilim93 are partly reddish at the lower edge. It can be assumed that the ends of the warp threads were deliberately dyed to produce a rug end with colored fringes.94 Denny assumes that “in some cases the fringes of Lotto carpets exported to Europe may have been dyed red to enhance their marketability.”95 However, this explanation is not convincing for the Star Ushak, because only the lower edge has a colored fringe; the warp threads at the upper edge are not dyed. If this was supposed to be a decorative effect, it would have been more logical to provide both edges with colored fringes, as is the case with the three bird rugs96 from Bistritz with orange warp threads. For a definitive assessment, additional examinations of other rugs from this collection and possibly also other collections are necessary. The rugs were woven on a loom. The design of looms varied depending on whether they were used in nomadic, rural, or organized urban production. The simplest version was an upright rectangular frame. The upper, height-adjustable 92 Stefano Ionescu and Ali Rıza Tuna, “A Structural Study of the ‘Transylvanian’ Group and Its Implications for Attributions to Anatolian Carpet Production Centers,” in Oriental Carpet & Textile Studies, 7: Selected papers from ICOC X, Washington 2003 & ICOC XI, Istanbul 2007: Dedicated to the memory of Robert Hans Pinner (1925–2004), International Conference on Oriental Carpets, ed. Thomas J. Farnham and Daniel Shaffer (Norfolk: International Conference on Oriental Carpets, 2011), 128. 93 Kilim (from Gelim, Kilim = Turkish, Ghelim = Persian) refers to woven stripes at both ends of the carpet. Kurt Zipper, Orientteppiche: Das Lexikon (Braunschweig: Klinkhardt und Biermann, 1970), 50, 52. 94 Charles Grant Ellis, Oriental Carpets in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (London: Herbert Press, 1988), xvii. The colored fringes are easily recognizable in paintings, such as the portraits of a family painted around 1640 by Pieter Danckerts de Rij, which are now in the Muzeum Narodowe w Gdan´sku (National Museum in Gdan´sk). The effect shown in the paintings suggests creative intent in the dyeing of the fringes. 95 Walter B. Denny, The Classical Tradition in Anatolian Carpets (London: Scala, 2002), 85. 96 The rugs with the inventory numbers Gew 4910, Gew 4911 and Gew 4912.

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crossbeam is called the warp beam, the lower one the cloth beam.97 The warp threads were stretched between them. A simple device was used to form a shed. In this way, all the even or odd warp threads could be pulled forward alternately and the weft thread inserted between the warps. Workshops, on the other hand, had heavy, stable looms which allowed larger rug widths with constant warp tension.98 According to Hubel, an “endless warp thread guide” was widely used. The warp thread ran endlessly around the upper and lower crossbeams and was reversed again each time it passed around a crossbar. After finishing the rug, the warp threads were cut on the warp beam and “usually interlaced or knotted.” At the lower edge, the crossbeam was pulled out so that the warp thread loops remained; they were then filled with wefts or twisted by themselves.99 The Star Ushak Gew 4927 seems to be an example of an endless warp, with only occasional knots where the warp threads had probably torn or the end of a thread had been reached. The ends of the warp threads form loops at the lower edge which have twisted. In most of the Bistritz rugs studied so far, the warp threads run continuously and are not knotted. Twisted warp thread loops are always only at the lower end of the rug. Knotted-pile rugs were made using a combination of knotting and weaving. Before starting the first row of knots, several wefts were woven into the warp threads held under tension in a plain weave. The weft threads were positioned so densely that the warp could not be seen. At the upper end, the rug was also completed with a kilim.100 These kilims had one or more colors and primarily served to stabilize the rows of knots. In many Bistritz rugs, as in most other surviving rugs, at best only fragments of kilims have been preserved, making comparison difficult. In the Star Ushak Gew 4927, the kilims are largely still present on the upper and lower ends. Interestingly, the upper kilim has yellowbrown/beige weft threads while the lower one has different shades of green. Perhaps insufficient threads were dyed green, which would explain why a different color had to be used for the upper kilim when the rug was completed. On the other hand, the weaver may have deliberately chosen a different color. Hubel mentioned that the finish at the upper edge is normally different from the lower edge.101 Although he was referring to the fringes, which were knotted, twisted or woven in different ways, the intentionally different design could conceivably also 97 Erdmann, Der orientalische Knüpfteppich, 10; Hubel, Ullstein Teppichbuch, 24–25; Jon Thompson, Orientteppiche: Aus den Zelten, Häusern und Werkstätten Asiens (Herford: Busse, 1990), 53. 98 Hubel, Ullstein Teppichbuch, 24–26. 99 Ibid., 25–26. 100 Beselin, Geknüpfte Kunst, 30; Hubel, Ullstein Teppichbuch, 25–27; Ruß, Der Knüpfteppich, 16. 101 Hubel, Ullstein Teppichbuch, 28.

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have applied to the kilim. In other rugs in the Bistritz collection, the upper end including the kilim also differs from the lower end. On the other hand, there are also rugs in which both kilims have a design which is similar or even the same, with just minimal differences in the width of the differently colored stripes. Different decorations on kilims or fringes could indicate local peculiarities and thus point to places of origin or particular workshops, but there is no suitable material for comparison. After the kilim the first row of knots begins. The weaver “loops the thread around two adjacent warp threads, […] tugs the loop down tightly, and cuts the thread while pulling it down.”102 As a result, the direction of the pile runs towards the lower edge.103 After each row of knots, one or more wefts are woven in and beaten with a comb to compact the fabric. Knotting was mainly carried out using two types of knots which used to be named after regions—however, it is impossible to precisely differentiate between the two distribution areas as they overlap.104 In the past, it was generally assumed that weavers of Turkish origin used the Turkish knot everywhere, while the Persian knot was employed by the Persians and throughout East Asia.105 Nowadays, researchers believe that the terms are misleading and their use was not confined to these areas, so neutral terms such as symmetrical instead of Turkish knots and asymmetrical instead of Persian knots are used. The Bistritz rugs only have symmetrical knots. The fineness of the threads used and the density of the knots vary greatly. The knot density of the Star Ushak Gew 4927 even varies within the rug, which is rather low at between 800 and 1,100 knots per square decimeter,106 but average compared to Ushak rugs from the collection of the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna. In the collector’s literature, knot density is often cited as a quality criterion for rugs. But Beselin expressly contradicts this assumption, arguing that the number of knots “instead indicates the method of production and the possibility of pattern design, color gradients or usage. […] Regarding hand-knotted-pile rugs, it must be assumed that the density of knots may vary even in the case of very high-quality rugs made in professional workshops, and that figures only serve as a guide.”107 Ford also expresses misgivings about the knotting density as a quality characteristic since the fineness of the rug is only one factor in evaluating a rug

102 Ibid., 27. 103 Beselin, Geknüpfte Kunst, 29; Erdmann, Der orientalische Knüpfteppich, 10; NabholzKartaschoff and Näf, “Zur Technik von Flachgeweben und Knüpfteppichen,” 25. 104 Zipper, Orientteppiche, 54. 105 Ford, Der Orientteppich und seine Muster, 17. 106 Hubel, Ullstein Teppichbuch, 33; Ruß, Der Knüpfteppich, 17; Zipper, Orientteppiche, 54–55. 107 Beselin, Geknüpfte Kunst, 31.

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and often not the decisive one.108 Considering all aspects of the rug such as the fineness of the fibers, the variety of colors, and the quality of execution of the motifs, the Star Ushak is without doubt a valuable rug, even if the density of knots alone suggests otherwise. The knot density in the warp direction (40 to 48 knots per decimeter) is about twice as high as in the weft direction (20 to 23 knots per decimeter). The larger number of knots in the warp direction is unusual since the Star Ushak has a depressed warp (Fig. 4),109 which according to Nabholz-Kartaschoff and Näf should allow for a roughly equal number of knots in both the warp and weft direction in order not to distort a design produced according to a “point paper.”110 In the Star Ushak, however, the stars are compressed lengthwise and the borders at the upper and lower edges are considerably narrower than at the side. The relatively high knot density in the warp direction is accounted for by the relatively fine threads used for the knots and also the fact that the weft threads are positioned very closely together. The knot density in the weft direction, on the other hand, is unusually low due to the relatively thick warp threads. The depression of the warp increases “the number of knots in the weft direction”111 and in this case probably prevented the imbalance in knot density between the warp and weft direction from being even greater. It is striking that the pile of the Star Ushak and other Bistritz rugs with depressed warp does not face straight down, but slightly diagonally to the lower left. This is probably due to the layering of the warp pushing the pile in this direction.112 Regrettably, too little is currently known about the depression of the warp threads to be able to assign this technique to a specific region. The selvages of the Star Ushak have their own weft thread ranging in color from greyish-green to brownish-green. To attach the selvage to the rug, the weft threads passing between the rows of knots were hooked into the selvage and then reversed. The weft runs beneath the fourth or fifth warp to the front, over two or three weft threads, and then back again under the fourth or fifth warp. The 108 Ford, Der Orientteppich und seine Muster, 30–31. 109 If the number of knots and thus the knot density in the weft direction is to be increased, the warp threads are kept staggered behind instead of next to each other. For this purpose, the first weft thread, which normally runs around the warp threads in the opposite direction to the second, is passed straight between them. The rug is layered. On the back of the rug, the second bump of each knot appears in a lengthwise groove. The layering can be up to 90°: in this extreme case, the two warp threads of each pair lie one behind the other, and only one bump is visible on the back. The weft density is therefore twice as dense as with unlayered warp. The knotting density in the warp direction remains unaffected by layering and depends on the thickness of the yarn, the thickness and number of weft threads, and the compression brought about by layering. Hubel, Ullstein Teppichbuch, 32; cf. also NabholzKartaschoff and Näf, “Zur Technik von Flachgeweben und Knüpfteppichen,” 21. 110 Ibid., 24; cf. also Hubel, Ullstein Teppichbuch, 32. 111 Hubel, Ullstein Teppichbuch, 32. 112 Nabholz-Kartaschoff and Näf, “Zur Technik von Flachgeweben und Knüpfteppichen,” 25.

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Fig. 4: Star Ushak, detail: depressed warp. Photograph: Eva Hanke.

resulting loops look like a lockstitch seam when arranged in rows (Fig. 5). Another method of joining the selvage to the rug was also used in the Bistritz rugs. In this system, the weft is hooked around the last warp thread of the selvage and directly reversed, with no stitch-like weft visible on the front. Ionescu suggests that the differently produced selvages—in combination with other technological features—can be attributed to different weaving centers, but does not provide concrete evidence of this.113 Even on the basis of other characteristics, the two different selvage solutions discovered in the Bistritz rugs cannot be clearly assigned to a particular weaving workshop or even region. Another feature of interest is the “lazy lines”—diagonal lines in the weaving field. On closer inspection, it can be seen that the weft insertions here reverse in the middle of the weaving field and do not run to the selvage (Fig. 6). A possible explanation for this is that the rug was so wide that the weaver only knotted the area he could reach from his place and then changed position to work on the rest of the row. Alternatively, at least two weavers may have sat next to each other in front of the rug, each weaving up to this point. The different ways in which the lazy lines were made sometimes vary within the same rug and therefore cannot provide any more information about specific places of manufacture.

113 Ionescu and Rıza Tuna, “A Structural Study of the ‘Transylvanian’ Group,” 123.

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Rugs as Transottoman Commodities: The History of a Rug from Us¸ak

Fig. 5: Star Ushak, detail: reversing weft at the selvage. Photograph: Eva Hanke.

Fig. 6: Star Ushak, detail: lazy line. Photograph: Eva Hanke.

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By means of all the above-mentioned technological characteristics combined with the patterns, colors and regional dyeing plants used, rugs can presumably be attributed to different weaving centers. However, further investigations are necessary.114 After completion, the pile was shorn and the rug washed to remove the fiber dust from the shearing. The lower the pile, the clearer the pattern, which often distinguishes more valuable rugs.115 The pile height of the Star Ushak is about two millimeters, or four millimeters including the knot arch, and is therefore relatively short. This suggests that the rug was not from nomadic production and was made for a rather demanding clientele. However, information about early modern workshops is scant, and the technical details and ornamentation provide contradictory indications regarding the rug’s possible production background.

Trade and Distribution of Anatolian Rugs in Transylvania and Bistritz Nowadays, information about what kinds of rug were preferred by what buyers in early modern times can only be partly pieced together. There are no known contemporary pictorial sources from Transylvania to help answer this question. The tradition of portraiture similar to that in Western and Central Europe including the depiction of status symbols does not seem to have existed in Transylvania. Paintings from Italy, England, and the Netherlands attest to the prestige value that Anatolian rugs, especially Ushak rugs, had there. Many Medallion Ushaks appear in paintings; Star Ushaks are much rarer. The painting “Consegna dell’anello al doge” by Paris Bordone (c. 1500–1571), realized between 1534 and 1545, is the oldest known depiction in which a Star Ushak is clearly visible.116 The rug can be seen in the middle draped on the steps in front of the doge’s throne between other rugs, indicating that it is the most prominent rug in the hall. Its function as a status symbol is also demonstrated by the portrait of Ladislaus von Fraunberg, Count of Haag (1505–1566, fig. 7), painted by Hans Mielich (1516– 1573) just a few years later in 1557.117 The full-length portrait as well as the type of clothing and jewelry were reserved exclusively for the high nobility respectively the nobility. The count’s hand is resting on a table covered with a Star Ushak. The rug not only underlines the ornamental effect of the richly decorated picture, but also, together with the glass probably imported from Murano on the table, highlights the count’s worldly wisdom and wealth. 114 115 116 117

See footnote 89. Erdmann, Der Orientalische Knüpfteppich, 10. Venice, Galleria dell’Accademia, inv. no. Cat. 83. Liechtenstein, The Princely Collections, Vaduz-Vienna, inv no. GE 1065.

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Fig. 7: Hans Mielich: Portrait of Ladislaus von Fraunberg, Count of Haag, 1557. Liechtenstein, The Princely Collections, Vaduz-Vienna/SCALA, Florence.

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Turkish rugs already played a significant role at the English court at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Judging by inventories and portraits, King Henry VIII probably owned several hundred Turkish rugs.118 Star Ushaks can also be seen on some English portraits from the early seventeenth century, such as the portrait of Magdalen Poultney, later Lady Aston, attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (1561/62–1636) and his workshop.119 Written sources confirm that Anatolian pile rugs were a sought-after luxury commodity in Transylvania, too. The earliest extant mentions of rugs in inventories and account books date from the second half of the fifteenth century.120 In the following three centuries they became widespread in both private and church ownership. For example, a protocol of estate division drawn up by Albert Huet (1537–1607)—Comes Saxonum and royal judge of Hermannstadt (Rum.: Sibiu, Hung.: Nagyszeben)—from 1607 itemizes an estate which included 34 “thäpig” (rugs), probably at least partly Anatolian knotted-pile rugs.121 One of the biggest rug-owners was Gabriel Bethlen, prince of Transylvania (r. 1613–1629), who kept 75 Persian and 112 Turkish rugs in his own carpet house and another 150 in his residence in Gyulafehérvár (Rum.: Alba Iulia, Ger.: Weißenburg).122 Other rug-owners included well-to-do Transylvanian-Saxon craftsmen such as goldsmith Paulus Schirmer Postumus, who at his death in 1717 left behind 9 oriental rugs, 8 of which probably came from Anatolia.123 In addition, rugs were a popular gift of honor for members of the Transylvanian-Saxon upper class and the county nobility.124 While only few rugs belonging to private individuals have

118 Cf. the inventory excerpt in Hali 3, no. 3 (1981): 181. For example, the portrait in Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery, acc. no. WAG 1350. Cf. also the version in Leicestershire, Collection of the Duke of Rutland, Belvoir Castle. The paintings are variants of the fresco showing various rugs painted by Hans Holbein the Younger in 1537 and destroyed by fire in 1698 in the Palace of Whitehall in London. The sketch for the fresco is preserved in the National Portrait Gallery in London, acc. no. NPG 4027. 119 Painted in London around 1620. Adelaide, Art Gallery of South Australia, acc. no. 0.1366. 120 Andrei Kertesz-Badrus, Türkische Teppiche in Siebenbürgen (Bucharest: Kriterion, 1985), 15. 121 Several textiles designated as “Karpitt” are also listed, including a “turkisch Karpitt,” a Venetian one, and two other “ausländisch karpitt” (foreign carpets). Julius Gross, “Teilungsbrief über den Nachlass Albert Huet’s (sic!), Ausgestellt für Margaretha Wolffin im Jahre 1607,” Korrespondenzblatt des Vereins für siebenbürgische Landeskunde 12 (1889): 115–116. 122 Kertesz-Badrus, Türkische Teppiche in Siebenbürgen, 22. 123 Viorica Guy Marica, Liliana Popa, and Corina Sebis¸an, “Der Teilungsbrief des Goldschmieds Paulus Schirmer,” Forschungen zur Volks- und Landeskunde 40, no. 1–2 (1997): 165; cf. also the evidence in Albert Eichhorn, “Kronstadt und der orientalische Teppich,” Forschungen zur Volks- und Landeskunde 11, no. 1 (1968): 78, note 24. 124 For examples see Kertesz-Badrus, Türkische Teppiche in Siebenbürgen, 22, also Eichhorn, “Kronstadt und der orientalische Teppich,” 76. For comparisons, see also the remarks on Bistritz in the chapter “The Ottoman Court and the Design Revolution.”

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survived in Transylvania, unusually large numbers of those owned by the church have been preserved over the centuries.125 The routes by which such “Turkish goods” (as they are often described in Transylvanian sources126) reached Transylvania are comparatively well documented. The Ottoman conquest of the southern Balkans, which began in the fourteenth century, was an important factor in the development of long-distance trade overland routes for oriental goods. Trade privileges from the second half of the fifteenth century show that trade relations between South Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire intensified after the fall of Constantinople.127 Especially the south Transylvanian cities of Hermannstadt and Kronstadt (Rum.: Bras,ov, Hung.: Brassó) grew into important centers of long-distance trade during the transition from the late Middle Ages to the early modern era. Prominent trade routes connecting the Balkan Peninsula to Central Europe crossed there.128 The southern border of Transylvania became a “gateway for oriental goods coming from the south as well as a transit point for manufactured goods brought from Vienna.”129 Above all Kronstadt, due to its favorable geographical location attracting merchants from Wallachia and Moldavia, evolved into the central hub of trade for oriental goods.130 Thanks to Maria Pakucs-Willcocks’s study of sixteenth-century customs registers from Hermannstadt, there are now sound findings on trade in oriental goods in southern Transylvania. Some of the “Turkish goods” most frequently bought and sold were bogasia (a cotton lining fabric), raw materials for the production of textiles (cotton, mohair, dyes, and mordants), spices, and leather goods.131 Oriental rugs were also an important and above all prestigious commodity, even though their share in the total volume of trade was rather small.132 Sadly, the brief entries in the customs registers do not allow individual rug types or places where they were made to be identified. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Transylvanian Saxons were closely involved in trade with “Turkish goods.” They maintained intensive trade relations with the Danubian Principalities, into which Moldavian and Wallachian 125 Even today, there are still 379 Anatolian church-owned rugs in Transylvania, some of them on display in the churches concerned. Cf. the list in Stefano Ionescu, ed., Antique Ottoman Rugs in Transylvania (Rome: Verduci Editore, 2005), 43. 126 Mária Pakucs-Willcocks, “Transylvania and Its International Trade, 1525–1575,” Annales Universitatis Apulensis: Series Historica 16 (2012): 179. 127 Eichhorn, “Kronstadt und der orientalische Teppich,” 73. 128 Mária Pakucs-Willcocks, Sibiu – Hermannstadt: Oriental Trade in Sixteenth Century Transylvania (Cologne: Böhlau, 2007), 30. 129 Ibid., 15. 130 Ibid., 65–67. 131 Cf. the table in ibid., 75. 132 Pakucs-Willcocks, “Transylvania and Its International Trade,” 179–180.

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merchants imported oriental goods both by ship via the Black Sea or the Lower Danube and on land routes crossing Wallachia. Moldavian and Wallachian traders usually acted as intermediaries who obtained their goods from Ottoman merchants, although the exact trade chains and routes as well as the methods of transport are difficult to ascertain in detail.133 In the sixteenth century, Transylvanian merchants were increasingly ousted by “Greek” traders.134 Note that the term “Greek” often found in sources mainly referred to traders’ range of merchandise rather than their ethnicity. “Greek” meant anyone trading in oriental goods who was “subject to the Ottoman Empire,”135 i. e. who enjoyed the benefits of Ottoman trade privileges. The growing influence of the “Greeks” is well illustrated by Transylvanian legislation, which alternated between restrictive phases and more welcoming periods for foreign merchants.136 The dominant role of the “Greeks” in the long-distance trade in oriental goods was consolidated by the establishment of Greek trading companies in Hermannstadt in 1636 and Kronstadt in 1678. Unlike in long-distance trade, Transylvanian merchants continued to play an important role in domestic trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.137 It is conceivable that rugs were also traded on local markets. Moreover, municipal public servants such as the municipal clerk Georg Dollert from Hermannstadt are known to have sold rugs in their shops. While the establishment of Ottoman suzerainty over Transylvania, which in 1570 constituted as a principality, had a lasting impact on the structure of the merchant class, the general supply of oriental goods in Transylvania remained largely unaffected according to PakucsWillcocks: “Perhaps surprisingly, the customs accounts of Sibiu and Bras,ov contain no evidence suggesting that warfare and political events interfered with the flow of oriental merchandise.”138 Only in individual years, such as 1595, are short-term disruptions to the flow of goods caused by the Long Turkish War (1593–1606) apparent.139

133 Pakucs-Willcocks, Sibiu – Hermannstadt, 114–115. 134 Ibid., 115–124. 135 Mária Pakucs-Willcocks, “Economic Relations between the Ottoman Empire and Transylvania in the Sixteenth Century: Oriental Trade and Merchants,” in Osmanischer Orient und Ostmitteleuropa: Perzeptionen und Interaktionen in den Grenzzonen zwischen dem 16. und 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Robert Born and Andreas Puth (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2014), 222. 136 For more details, cf. Zsolt Trócsányi, “Gesetzgebung der fürstlichen Epoche Siebenbürgens und die Rechtsstellung der Balkangriechen in Siebenbürgen,” Études Balkaniques 1 (1971). 137 Mária Pakucs-Willcocks, “Aspekte der Wirtschafts- und Handelsgeschichte des Hermannstädter Patriziats im 16. Jahrhundert,” Zeitschrift für Siebenbürgische Landeskunde 39 (2016): 64–65. 138 Pakucs-Willcocks, “Economic Relations,” 219. 139 Ibid., 13.

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In contrast to Hermannstadt and Kronstadt, no studies have been carried out into trade in oriental goods in Bistritz. The city’s customs registers are presumed to have been lost,140 posing considerable problems for economic history studies.141 However, it is apparent from records on the total volume of trade in Bistritz and the lease sum of customs revenues in Bistritz in the sixteenth century that the economic status of this north Transylvanian city was overshadowed by Kronstadt and Hermannstadt.142 But although Bistritz was situated away from the main long-distance trade routes,143 it was still involved to a small extent in transit trade between Moldavia and Central Europe. Being an important regional trade hub, the city maintained close trade relations with Moldavia, the main commodities being craft products made by the Bistritz guilds as well as livestock and agricultural products from Moldavia.144 A limited amount of oriental goods was also imported from Moldavia, “but the volume of traffic was rather small here and hence negligible for the aggregate sums of overall Transylvanian trade.”145 Suceava, capital and residence of the Moldavian princes until 1564, on the other side of the Carpathians from where rugs were even traded as far as Kronstadt,146 may well have been an important additional source of rugs for Bistritz. Given the loss of the Bistritz customs registers, the search for written traces of the Star Ushak must be widened to other types of sources. No studies have been 140 This loss has been noted several times in the recent literature, most recently by PakucsWillcocks, Sibiu – Hermannstadt, 71. Regarding the relocation of the old Bistritz city archives and the resulting loss of archive materials, cf. Albert Berger, Urkunden-Regesten aus dem Archiv der Stadt Bistritz in Siebenbürgen 1203–1570, ed. Ernst Wagner (Cologne: Böhlau, 1986), 1:ix–xii. 141 According to Dan and Goldenberg, the role of Bistritz as a trade center is difficult to research because “the sources are incomplete and frequently of a general nature, the customs registers are completely missing,” and therefore “any assessment of the total volume of imports and exports of this Transylvanian center of trade [must be] arbitrary and inaccurate.” Mihai Dan and Samuil Goldenberg, “Der Warenaustausch zwischen Bistritz und den Moldauer Städten und Marktflecken im 16. Jahrhundert,” Forschungen zur Volks- und Landeskunde 10, no. 1 (1967): 26. 142 Pakucs-Willcocks, Sibiu – Hermannstadt, 69–72. 143 Ionescu’s assessment that Bistritz was “at the crossroads of the main trade routes to northern Moldavia, Lvov (Lemberg) in Poland, and Russia,” cannot be confirmed on the basis of the preserved sources. Stefano Ionescu, “The Ottoman Rugs of Bistrit¸a,” Hali: The International Magazine of Fine Carpets and Textiles 160 (2009): 36. Established trade routes connecting the Ottoman Empire to Poland ran east of the Carpathians, one being on the route Istanbul–Edirne–Galat¸i–Ias,i–S´niatyn–Lviv. For more details, cf. Hans-Jürgen Bömelburg and Stefan Rohdewald, “Polen-Litauen als Teil transosmanischer Verflechtungen,” in Transottomanica – Osteuropäisch-osmanisch-persische Mobilitätsdynamiken: Perspektiven und Forschungsstand, ed. Stefan Rohdewald, Stephan Conermann, and Albrecht Fuess (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2019), 173. 144 Dan and Goldenberg, “Warenaustausch.” 145 Pakucs-Willcocks, “Economic Relations,” 213. 146 Cf. the map in Eichhorn, “Kronstadt und der orientalische Teppich,” 75.

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carried out yet into the trade and availability of Anatolian rugs in Bistritz. Since it is known that the city councils of both Hermannstadt and Kronstadt often presented rugs as gifts of honor,147 attention was next turned to Bistritz city council’s account books from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The fragments of account books from the second half of the fifteenth century that have survived make no mention of rugs.148 Fortunately, far more records have survived from the sixteenth century, account books having been preserved for more than half of the years between 1500 and 1550, and for every year from 1557. The first entry mentioning the purchase of a rug dates back to 1525: shortly after St. Bartholomew’s Day—and thus possibly in connection with the Bistritz Fair— a certain Martino Moldauiensi received five guilders “pro tapeta ad consulatum.”149 What kind of rug it was and what it was used for by the city council remain unknown. But since Martino is described as a merchant from Moldavia, a principality that figured prominently in trade in oriental goods in the sixteenth century, it is reasonable to assume that Bistritz city council acquired a knottedpile rug from the Ottoman Empire. After 1525, rug purchases are only documented again over thirty years later when the council acquired a “tapetum novum Cibinii”150 “pro usu civitt(atis) et consistorii”151 in 1557. Later on in the sixteenth century, Bistritz council regularly bought rugs as gifts of honor, purchasing by far the most in 1571 in anticipation of the arrival of Stephen Báthory (1533–1586), who visited Bistritz with his retinue shortly after his election as Voivode of Transylvania (Fig. 8). Taking the presentation of rugs as gifts of honor by Bistritz city council as an indicator of their availability on the urban and regional market, a clear temporal shift emerges compared to south Transylvania, where the city councils of Hermannstadt and Kronstadt had presented considerable numbers of rugs back in the early sixteenth century.152 It clearly took some time before trade routes for oriental rugs could be established to Bistritz. Altogether, the purchase of 91 rugs is documented in the Bistritz account books from the sixteenth century. Un147 Cf. the many examples in Eichhorn’s essay. 148 The account books from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries up to 1520 are available online: http://www.ungarisches-institut.de/forschungen/projekte/laufende-projekte/251-di e-mittelalterlichen-rechnungsb%C3%BCcher-der-stadt-bistritz-in-siebenb%C3%BCrgen-2. html, last accessed on March 7, 2019. The introduction to the online edition also contains a detailed source-critical description and classification of the Bistritz account books, dwelling on which would go beyond the scope of this article. 149 Cluj-Napoca, Serviciul Judet,ean Cluj-Napoca al Arhivelor Nat,ionale, POB IVa no. 19, 146. 150 The source refers to Hermannstadt (Latin = Cibinium). 151 Cluj-Napoca, Serviciul Judet,ean Cluj-Napoca al Arhivelor Nat,ionale, POB IVa no. 24, 60. 152 According to Kertesz-Badrus, Kronstadt city council gave away an average of 10 rugs per year between 1520 and 1550, although much higher figures such as 27 rugs in 1538 are documented. Kertesz-Badrus, Türkische Teppiche in Siebenbürgen, 22; cf. also Eichhorn, “Kronstadt und der orientalische Teppich,” 77–79.

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Fig. 8: Rugs in the Bistritz account books from the sixteenth century.

fortunately, there are almost no details about the appearance or origin of the rugs. Only in one case is Hermannstadt mentioned as the place of purchase, while three other entries cite the names of the merchants from whom the rugs were bought.153 Two entries describe the rugs purchased in terms of their age and size,154 yet omit all details of colors and patterns. Only the intended use of the rugs is documented in more detail, being mentioned in about 90 percent of cases. It transpires that over 10 percent of the rugs were purchased for the council itself (probably to keep them in reserve), while the rest were intended as gifts. More than half the rugs were used as wedding presents, the recipients mostly being from the county nobility.155 Bistritz city council’s account books compiled between 1600 and 1699 mention a total of 171 rugs. A separate account book for gifts of honor presented during visits by the Transylvanian Princes to Bistritz between 1615 and 1668 records additional expenditure on 54 rugs as well as a “Tepig Auffschlager” (carpet demonstrator),156 who performed his duties during the visit of George I Rákóczi (r. 1630–1648) in 1640. With 91 rugs documented in the sixteenth cen153 Petro Myld and Gregorio Schewe are also named in addition to the above-mentioned Martino Moldauiensi. 154 The adjectives “novum” and “magnum” are used. 155 The surnames mentioned include Apafi, Bánffy, Bornemissa, Cereny, Erdely, and Kendy. 156 Cluj-Napoca, Serviciul Judet,ean Cluj-Napoca al Arhivelor Nat,ionale, POB IVc no. 778, 135. Expenditure on such a carpet servant is only mentioned at this point in the account book. Many thanks to András Péter Szabó, Budapest, for providing the transcription of this account book and his assistance with further research.

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tury and 225 in the seventeenth century, Bistritz bought far fewer than Kronstadt, which is estimated to have acquired “well over 1,000” rugs as gifts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.157 Yet, the town still had considerable access to the trade in the coveted textiles. While the separate account book for gifts of honor only contains entries for years when the princes of Transylvania visited Bistritz, the regular municipal account books record the purchase of rugs throughout the seventeenth century. As far as the number of rugs listed per year in the regular account books is concerned, high rug purchases are recorded between 1620 and 1650, followed by a “rug decline” from 1660 until the early 1690s (Fig. 9). Rug purchases only rose again from 1691 onwards after Transylvania’s incorporation into the Habsburg Empire.

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Fig. 9: Rugs in the Bistritz account books from the seventeenth century.

To interpret these findings, more information from the account books needs to be taken into account. About one sixth of the entries contain details about the seller or the place of purchase of rugs. Until the late seventeenth century, only merchants with German names (with one exception) were involved in the rug trade.158 Furthermore, in two cases rugs were “taken from the judge,”159 indicating 157 Eichhorn, “Kronstadt und der orientalische Teppich,” 76. However, Eichhorn, who has dealt closely with Kronstadt’s municipal accounts, does not give exact figures. 158 The following are mentioned in chronological order: Michaeli Krauß (1605), Janos Drek (1615), Andrea Stadlero (1617), Stephan Freitag (1622), Merten Amberg (1628), Johann Preissinger (1629), Mr. Claudius (1635), Mr. Gillig (1639), and Michael Gunesch (1656). 159 “[…] vom Herrn Richter genommen”: Cluj-Napoca, Serviciul Judet,ean Cluj-Napoca al Arhivelor Nat,ionale, POB IVa no. 30, 147, also no. 31, 704.

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that in Bistritz, too, municipal officials were actively involved in the rug trade. Merchants described as “Greeks” first appeared in 1691.160 The place of purchase listed the most often is the annual Bistritz Fair.161 In three cases, merchants also brought rugs to Bistritz outside the fair from Neumarkt am Mieresch (Rum.: Târgu Mures,, Hung.: Marosvásárhely), Klausenburg (Rum.: Cluj-Napoca, Hung.: Kolozsvár), and Kronstadt.162 On two occasions, the council also had rugs bought on its behalf at the annual fairs in Neumarkt and Mediasch (Rum.: Medias¸, Hung.: Medgyes) in preparation for visits by the prince.163 Clearly, there was also a regional market for rugs in north Transylvania which was served until the second half of the seventeenth century by Transylvanian-Saxon merchants who, despite being ousted from long-distance trade, continued to play a prominent role on the domestic market. They took the rugs to the north either from Kronstadt itself or from the large trading centers in south Transylvania via local markets in Klausenburg, Mediasch and Neumarkt am Mieresch on regional trade routes. After 1660, these merchants were evidently unable to serve the market any longer and were finally replaced by “Greek” traders at the end of the century. One possible explanation for the situation in Bistritz is Transylvanian legislation concerning foreign merchants, which was analyzed by Zsolt Trócsány.164 The sharp increase in rug purchases between 1620 and 1650 correlates with a phase of relative openness towards “Greek” trade. Laws passed in 1609 and 1623 guaranteed the “Greeks” free trade and complete freedom of movement within the country. However, these concessions were reduced in 1627 when “Greek” merchants were only permitted to operate as far as certain trading posts in the country’s interior. One of these places was Neumarkt am Mieresch, where two German merchants bought rugs in 1628 and 1639 and took them to Bistritz.165 The issue of foreign merchants’ rights flared up again briefly in 1653, but was soon eclipsed by the military conflicts over the Principality of Transylvania from 1657 160 Apart from the general description “denen Griechen” (the Greeks), Bánogli András is also mentioned as a Greek merchant. Cluj-Napoca, Serviciul Judet,ean Cluj-Napoca al Arhivelor Nat,ionale, POB IVa no. 31, 860, 889. 161 While in four cases the Bistritz Fair is explicitly mentioned as the place of purchase, it can be assumed in eleven other cases that rugs were bought there, too, as the time of acquisition coincides with the Bistritz Fair around St. Bartholomew’s Day—an event which was still described in the nineteenth century as the foremost fair and attended by many foreign merchants. Michael Kroner, Geschichte der Nordsiebenbürger Sachsen: Nösnerland und Reener Ländchen: Geschichte der Siebenbürger Sachsen und ihrer wirtschaftlich-kulturellen Leistungen (Nuremberg: Haus der Heimat, 2009), 194. 162 Cluj-Napoca, Serviciul Judet,ean Cluj-Napoca al Arhivelor Nat,ionale, POB IVa no. 30, 178, 205, 292. 163 Ibid., POB IVa no. 30, 404, 547. 164 Trócsányi, “Gesetzgebung der fürstlichen Epoche Siebenbürgens.” 165 Cluj-Napoca, Serviciul Judet,ean Cluj-Napoca al Arhivelor Nat,ionale, POB IVa no. 30, 178, 404.

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to 1662 and subsequent efforts to rebuild the country sacked by Ottoman and Crimean Tatar troops. During this phase, Transylvanian merchants redoubled their efforts to drive out foreign competitors, and they managed to influence legislation. This “anti-Greek sentiment”166 was reflected in laws adopted in 1670 and 1675, which limited the number of “Greeks” working in Hermannstadt and drove foreigners’ trading posts out of the interior of Transylvania back to the border areas. Even though these restrictions on the “Greeks” could not be enforced in the long run, the “rug decline” in Bistritz can be associated with the restraint placed on their trading activities. Admittedly, when interpreting the graphs (Figs. 8 and 9), the impact of specific political events must not be overlooked either. For example, the increase in rug purchases between 1620 and 1650 is also related to the many visits to Bistritz by the prince of Transylvania and his entourage during this period. The “rug decline,” meanwhile, can be associated with the disputes over the Transylvanian throne, as a result of which Ottoman units also invaded north Transylvania for the first time.167 In January 1661, János Kemény (1607–1662) was elected prince of Transylvania after the resignation of his predecessor Ákos Barcsay (r. 1658– 1660). The Sublime Porte did not recognize Kemény’s nomination and responded to the secession from the Ottoman Empire proclaimed by the Transylvania Diet in April 1661 with a military campaign led by Ali Pasha. In August 1661, the Ottoman and Tatar troops reached Bistritz and severely devastated the region, precipitating economic decline.168 In the following period, Bistritz council presumably had to relinquish costly gifts of honor for financial reasons. Furthermore, the Ottoman Empire’s wars against the Habsburg Empire (1663/64) and Poland (1672–1676) as well as the Great Turkish War (1683–1699) may have additionally disrupted trade routes, causing bottlenecks in the supply of oriental goods. Where the rugs sold in Bistritz were made and how they arrived in Transylvania cannot be reconstructed from the account books. The few surviving descriptions of rugs are mostly very brief. Only 11 percent of the entries in the regular account books from the seventeenth century contain references to the appearance of rugs. They are limited to scant details about the rugs’ color or

166 Trócsányi, “Gesetzgebung der fürstlichen Epoche Siebenbürgens,” 102 (“griechenfeindliche Stimmung”). 167 Cf. for the following regarding Northern Transylvania and Bistrit,a: Kroner, Geschichte der Nordsiebenbürger Sachsen, 55–56, as well as Ernst Wagner, ed., Geschichte der Stadt Bistritz in Siebenbürgen: Von Otto Dahinten (Cologne: Böhlau, 1988), 89–90. Regarding the general development in Transylvania, cf. Konrad Gündisch, Siebenbürgen und die Siebenbürger Sachsen, ed. Wilfried Schlau (Munich: Langen Müller, 1998), 102–104. 168 Wagner, Geschichte der Stadt Bistritz, 90.

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quality169 without mentioning their patterns. In two cases, rugs are also referred to as Persian rugs,170 whereas the term “Turkish” is never used. In the account book for gifts of honor, at least one fifth of the entries contain information on the color or size of the rugs, while two are also classified as “perschianisch” or “persianisch” (Persian).171 The most detailed information contained in the account books concerns the reasons for buying rugs, which are indicated in two thirds of the entries. Just under 36 percent of the rugs were presented as gifts, more than half of them being wedding presents. As in the sixteenth century, the recipients of these gifts mainly came from influential Hungarian noble families.172 Immediately after the change of rule, one of the recipients was the governor of Transylvania, the highest Habsburg official.173 Another third of the rugs were acquired “auf forrath” (in reserve) or “vor Stadt nothdurfft” (to meet the city’s needs). These stockpiling purchases were intended to ensure that there were always enough rugs on hand as potential gifts of honor.174 As the separate account book for gifts of honor shows, during visits by the prince to Bistritz, the recipients of rugs were always secondand third-tier officials. While the prince and his family members were usually presented with items of goldsmithery worth between 50 and 200 guilders, holders of court offices such as the justiciar, the secretary, the equerry, the chamberlain, and the kitchen master received rugs worth between 8 and 20 guilders as gifts of

169 White (6 rugs), “gemein” (common, 5), red (2), black and old (2), “fein” (fine, 1), “schön” (beautiful, 1), “rhotgölben” (red and yellow, 1). The white carpets could be white-ground “bird rugs,” which have also been preserved in the Bistritz rug collection. “Red and yellow” refers to a Lotto rug, of which there are many in the Bistritz collection. 170 Cluj-Napoca, Serviciul Judet,ean Cluj-Napoca al Arhivelor Nat,ionale, POB IVa no. 30, 14; no. 31, 686. 171 Ibid., POB IVc no. 633, 119, 121. Also mentioned are three white carpets, one large white carpet, three red carpets, and three “tappetum optimum” (finest rugs). 172 The names mentioned include Apafi, Béldy, Bethlen, Garay, Ketedy, Mikó, and Toldalagi. Many of these surnames are also found in a list of names of recipients of gifts of honor from Kronstadt city council, cf. Eichhorn, “Kronstadt und der orientalische Teppich,” note 22. Rugs were also given as wedding presents to members of the Transylvanian-Saxon upper class, such as the mayor of Sibiu and the superintendent of the Protestant Church of Transylvania. However, the practice of giving rugs to members of the patriciate in Kronstadt and Hermannstadt when they got married was not customary in Bistritz. Cf. Kertesz-Badrus, Türkische Teppiche in Siebenbürgen, 22. 173 Cluj-Napoca, Serviciul Judet,ean Cluj-Napoca al Arhivelor Nat,ionale, POB IVa no. 31, S. 900 (1693); POB IV a no. 33 (1697), fol. 70r. 174 That rugs were stockpiled for subsequent use as gifts of honor is apparent for example from the following entry dated 1630: “Da wir der fürstin warten haben wir in vorrhatt kauffet täpig” (We bought rugs in reserve as we are expecting the princess). Cluj-Napoca, Serviciul Judet,ean Cluj-Napoca al Arhivelor Nat,ionale, POB IVa no. 30, 220. Cf. also ibid., 547, 570.

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honor,175 matching Zsuzsanna Cziráki’s findings on gifts of honor in Kronstadt in the seventeenth century.176 Although the municipal account books contain important references to the trade in oriental rugs in Bistritz and their importance as gifts of honor, the entries are altogether too brief to trace an individual item like the Star Ushak. To find out more about its origin and its use in the protestant parish church in Bistritz, written parish records need to be consulted.

An Ottoman Rug in a Protestant Church: Function and Perception in an Ecclesiastical Setting An important source regarding the origin and use of the Bistritz rugs is the inventories of movables owned by the parish church. Inventories from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries have been preserved in various archives. Regrettably, the descriptions of rugs in the inventories are also very brief. Information about the origin of the rugs such as “Turkish” or “Persian” as sometimes found in other inventories177 is completely absent. The most detailed inventory is the one from 1742 in which, in addition to details of colors, some entries also contain sketchy information on the rug’s pattern and condition. However, these details do not enable individual rugs from the collection of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum to be reliably matched to inventory entries. It is also unclear whether the rugs were bought by the church or donated to it. Inscriptions on rugs in Bras,ov/Kronstadt and Sighis,oara (Ger.: Schäßburg, Hung.: Segesvár) prove that they were donated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by individual members of the parish or local guilds to the church, where they were used to decorate pews or at funerals.178 But there are no such inscriptions on any Bistritz

175 The recipients include members of the Aradi, Béldy, Bethlen, Gaspar, Gerendy, Mikó, and Pap families. In some cases, only the official positions are mentioned without the names of their holders. 176 Zsuzsanna Cziráki, “Prince Gábor Bethlen’s Vistits to Brassó as Reflected in the Town Account Books,” Hungarian Historical Review 2 (2013). 177 Cf. footnote 170, 171. 178 Cf. the examples in Ionescu, Antique Ottoman Rugs in Transylvania, 208–209, also Evelin Wetter and Ágnes Ziegler, “Osmanische Textilien in der Repräsentationskultur des siebenbürgisch-sächsischen Patriziats,” in Türkenkriege und Adelskultur in Ostmitteleuropa vom 16. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Robert Born and Sabine Jagodzinski (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2014), 273–274. As can be seen from a rug now in Budapest bearing the inscription “Fassbinder Bruderschaft 1801” (Coopers’ Confraternity 1801), the tradition of decorating the guilds’ pews lasted a long time. Pásztor, Ottoman Turkish Carpets, cat. no. 38.

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rugs indicating that it was a donation or the identity of any previous owner;179 nor do the inventories make mention of any previous owners or donors of the rugs. One striking feature in this context is the big difference between the number of rugs listed in the inventories and the current number of rugs. While the earliest inventory from 1581 only mentions “ein zimlicher Teppig und 2 alte Teppige” (a seemly carpet and 2 old rugs),180 the inventory of 1667 already lists 17 rugs.181 Their number continued to rise over the following eighty years, reaching a peak of 25 in 1742.182 In the nineteenth century, the number of rugs decreased to finally 16. Today, however, the Bistritz collection comprises a total of 55 items. The majority of the rugs were almost certainly originally owned by the Bistritz guilds, which used rugs to decorate their church pews. One rug has a fragmented paper label bearing the inscription “Csismenmacher Bruderschaft” (Bootmakers’ Guild).183 Documents preserved from the twentieth century confirm that this former guild owned rugs to decorate their pews.184 Evidently, they were stored together with the rugs owned by the parish, for when the presbytery decided in 1912 to set up a commission to take an inventory of rugs, it stated that “a distinction [was to be drawn] between rugs belonging to the church and those belonging to the guilds.” Yet it was also explicitly emphasized that “even rugs belonging to the guilds may not be sold without the consent of the parish since they have been donated to the church.”185 When northern Transylvania was evacuated in September 1944 and the parishioners took their church treasures with them, previous ownership was probably not important anymore. Since the 179 The articles Gaiu, “Un patrimoniu pierdut” and Ionescu, “The Ottoman Rugs of Bistrit¸a,” 36–37 (citing Gaiu’s article), refer to an inventory from 1928 listing 68 rugs owned by Bistrit,a parish church, including a seventeenth-century rug with a donor’s inscription. The inventory could not be found, despite intensive research in the archives in Bistrit,a, ClujNapoca and Gundelsheim. S. Ionescu recently found out that the inventory from 1928 obviously does not exist. 180 Sibiu, Serviciul Judet,ean Sibiu al Arhivelor Nat,ionale, collection 286: Capitlul evanghelic C.A. Bistrit¸a, no. 713 (one document, unpaged). 181 Ibid., collection 286: Capitlul evanghelic C.A. Bistrit¸a, no. 717 (one document, unpaged). 182 Bistrit,a, Serviciul Judet,ean Bistrit,a al Arhivelor Nat,ionale, collection no. 151: Oficiul parohial evanghelic C.A. Bistrit¸a, I. Patronats-Consistorial und Presbyterial-Akten, no. 2 (multiple documents, unpaged). 183 Rug with inventory number Gew 4939. The letters “C(si)sm(enm)acher (B)ruder(schaf)t” (“Bootmakers’ Guild”) can be made out. 184 In 1916 and 1922, members of the former Bootmakers’ Guild submitted a request to the presbytery for the warden to decorate their pews in the church with their rugs on special occasions. Gundelsheim, Archiv des Siebenbürgen-Instituts, B III 13, vol. 7 (documents not numbered), vol. 19, meeting on December 9, 1922, ref. 293. 185 “[…] ein Unterschied gemacht werden zwischen Teppichen, welche der Kirche und welche den Zünften gehören […] auch die das Eigentum der Zünfte bildenden Teppiche ohne Einwilligung der Kirchengemeinde nicht verkauft werden dürfen, da sie in die Kirche gestiftet worden sind.” Gundelsheim, Archiv des Siebenbürgen-Instituts, B III 13, vol. 18, meeting on December 20, 1912, ref. 352.

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records of the Bistritz guilds have largely been lost,186 it is sadly no longer possible to trace when or how many rugs were given to the church. Apart from the guilds, Bistritz city council undoubtedly also possessed rugs to decorate the council pews in the church. One of the municipal account books contains the following entry for 1619: “Juny 22 für ein Thäppig ihn die Kirche 14 fl.” (June 22: For a rug in the church 14 guilders).187 According to the inventory from 1742, only a small minority of the rugs were permanently used as part of the church furnishings, the others being kept in the sacristy. Moreover, one rug lay in front of the council pew, while other rugs were draped on the pulpit and the clergy pew.188 Whether the Star Ushak was among these rugs is unknown. The photograph taken in the early twentieth century is the first and only pictorial evidence of its use in the church interior (Fig. 2), where it prominently decorated one of the pews in the choir. Apart from photographs, there are no other visual sources confirming the use of rugs in church interiors in East-Central Europe, especially in the preceding centuries. Although funeral portraits from Hungary show the dead being laid out on rugs, a sacred setting is not apparent.189 Moreover, there are no Star Ushaks in paintings of this genre. There is no evidence to support Vegh and Layer’s assumption that the Star-Ushak and similar small rugs preserved in Bras,ov had been explicitly ordered for use in Transylvanian churches.190 In their study of Ottoman textiles in the Black Church in Bras,ov, Evelin Wetter and Ágnes Ziegler state that rugs were used there in the early modern period primarily for certain occasions such as church services or funerals.191 Despite repeated assertions to the contrary in the literature, in neither Kronstadt nor Bistritz did rugs serve as permanent “decorative elements” in the church interiors that had become so austere after the Reformation.192 However, it is known that rugs were used at funerals and weddings in Bistritz in the second half of the eighteenth century. In 1766, a commission made up of representatives of the 186 Berger, Urkunden-Regesten, 1:xviii. 187 Cluj-Napoca, Serviciul Judet,ean Cluj-Napoca al Arhivelor Nat,ionale, POB IVa no. 25, 720. The account books do not contain any other entries of this nature. 188 Bistrit,a, Serviciul Judet,ean Bistrit,a al Arhivelor Nat,ionale, collection no. 151: Oficiul parohial evanghelic C.A. Bistrit¸a, I. Patronats-Consistorial und Presbyterial-Akten, no. 2 (multiple documents, unpaged). 189 For example, the 1648 funerary portrait of Gáspár Illésházy, Budapest, Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum (Hungarian National Museum), történeti fényképtár 33, inv. no. tkcs30, published in: Robert Born, Michał Dziewulski, and Guido Messling, The Sultan’s World: The Ottoman Orient in Renaissance Art (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2015), cat. no. 127. 190 See footnote 26. 191 This is emphasized for Bras,ov in Wetter and Ziegler, “Osmanische Textilien in der Repräsentationskultur,” 275. 192 This claim is contained in Eichhorn, “Kronstadt und der orientalische Teppich,” 83, also Kertesz-Badrus, Türkische Teppiche in Siebenbürgen, 22.

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parish and Bistritz city council drew up a table of fees which also contained terms for the hiring of rugs: “If someone belonging to our church hires rugs for weddings or funerals,”193 in future 14 denar was to be paid per rug by residents of the city, this fee rising to 34 denar for inhabitants of the district. As the church accounts for 1766 and 1771–75 show, although this rule was enforced, only few rugs were hired out. In the 67 income entries in 1775, for example, there are only four instances of revenue recorded from rug hire.194 Whenever rugs were used at funerals, evidently only wealthy citizens could afford the high fees charged for a funeral inside the church. Rugs were available for hire for funerals in Kronstadt, too.195 Privately owned rugs could also be used for funeral ceremonies, but they had to be redeemed afterwards for a previously agreed fee. In such cases, rugs hence served as collateral in case the family of the deceased could not pay the funeral costs. Although the Kronstadt terms from 1789 are much more detailed than those from Bistritz, they were compiled two decades later and only deal with funerals. Presumably, local customs and peculiarities can be assumed to have existed for funeral and wedding ceremonies, as indicated by Johann Seivert’s Nachrichten von Siebenbürgischen Gelehrten of 1785. Seivert wrote that in Hermannstadt, the use of rugs at funerals had “never been customary.”196 Centuries of use left their mark on the Bistritz rugs. Damage indicates that they were sometimes treated carelessly. In the case of the Star Ushak, for example, the selvages and the kilim at the lower edge are very badly worn. In addition, the fabric is heavily soiled and has various stains. Nevertheless, the rug is otherwise in a relatively good condition. In comparison, various Bistritz rugs have stripes about half a meter wide where the pile is badly worn or completely missing. This abrasion may be due to heavy use as pew cushions. In addition, black and brown dyes mostly contain tannin and iron compounds, which can damage or fade the fabric. This often results in faster pile wear and may create a relief effect. Some rugs also have narrow stripes or lines with a severely worn pile, perhaps indicating that the rug was hung over the back or front of a pew. This use is also 193 “Wenn jemand zu unserer Ecclesie gehörig, die Teppig es sey zur hochzeit oder Leichen begängnus ausborget […].” Bistrit,a, Serviciul Judet,ean Bistrit,a al Arhivelor Nat,ionale, collection no. 151: Oficiul parohial evanghelic C.A. Bistrit¸a, I. Patronats-Consistorial und Presbyterial-Akten, no. 6, fol. 29v. 194 Bistrit,a, Serviciul Judet,ean Bistrit,a al Arhivelor Nat,ionale, collection no. 151: Oficiul parohial evanghelic C.A. Bistrit¸a, I. Patronats-Consistorial und Presbyterial-Akten, no. 31 (unpaged). In two cases the carpets were hired out for a funeral, in one for a wedding, while in the fourth case the purpose is not mentioned. 195 Wetter and Ziegler, “Osmanische Textilien in der Repräsentationskultur,” 272–275; cf. also the edition of the “Warnerordnung” (Rules for vergers) in the annex, 278–279. 196 Seivert, Nachrichten von Siebenbürgischen Gelehrten und Ihren Schriften, 175 (information kindly provided by Robert Born).

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indicated by graffiti probably applied by churchgoers during a service. For example, the years 1897, 1898 and 1904 have been written on one rug (Fig. 10).197 Some rugs were cut up, presumably in order to match the dimensions of the pews. Many rugs have other traces of use which are much harder to interpret. Some have numerous flaws, tears and holes. All of them are more or less heavily soiled by use. Apart from loose dust deposits, sand that has penetrated deep into the fiber structure as well as mud stains stuck to the fibers can be found. Many rugs are browned, especially the light areas, or blackened by dirt, making it difficult to distinguish between dark colors. In addition, the colors have suffered due to exposure to light, and are usually clearer on the reverse. In many cases, white and dark stains that cannot be identified can be seen on the rugs, while isolated wax and ink stains indicate their earlier use as tablecloths. In 1912, Bistritz parish adopted the first measures to protect the rugs, some of which were severely damaged, after art history “rediscovered” oriental rugs accompanied by resurgent awareness of the value of the rug collection. Representatives of Bistritz parish decided “not to allow the old rugs to be taken out of the church anymore as they had already suffered greatly from being hired out and treated carelessly.”198 During the First World War, Bistritz parish had its rugs taken to Budapest, where they were safely stored in the Museum of Applied Arts.199 It was not until five years after the end of the war that the rugs were returned to Bistritz. A circular from the General Consistory of the Protestant Church of Transylvania to all parishes reported that “thanks to government action […] all the old rugs owned by our parishes have now been returned” (evidently, rug collections from not just Bistritz but elsewhere had been taken to Budapest). The esteem in which the rugs were held—“the precious heritage

197 Niche rug, Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, loan from the Protestant Parish Church A. C. in Bistrit¸a, inv. no. Gew 4950. 198 “[…] die alten Teppiche aus der Kirche nicht mehr hinauszugeben, da sie durch die leihweise Entfernung und sorglose Behandlung schon stark gelitten haben.” Gundelsheim, Archiv des Siebenbürgen-Instituts, B III 13, vol. 18, meeting on October 11, 1912, Aktenzeichen 277. Furthermore, in 1913 the presbytery decided to insure the carpets and valuable altar cloths against theft. Gundelsheim, Archiv des Siebenbürgen-Instituts, B III 13, vol. 18, October 24, 1913, ref. 219. 199 This can be seen from entries in the presbyterial minutes and a transfer protocol for archival documents from 1920. Gundelsheim, Archiv des Siebenbürgen-Instituts, B III 13, vol. 18, meeting on November 13, 1916, ref. 95, also vol. 9 (unsorted, minutes from 1920). Since the former Bootmakers’ Guild requested that its rugs be laid out on pews in 1922, but the rugs taken to Budapest were only returned in 1923, only some of the rugs—presumably those owned by the church—could have been taken to Hungary during the First World War. For more information see also the publication of the current research project, which will appear in 2022.

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Fig. 10: Niche rug, eighteenth century, graffiti. Loan from the Protestant Parish Church A. C. in Bistrit¸a, inv.no. Gew 4950, Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Photograph: Monika Runge.

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which is of inestimable artistic value”—is plain.200 In order to preserve them for the future, conservation measures were laid down for the first time in the circular, and the parishes had to report to the General Consistory on their implementation. For instance, it was now prohibited to nail the rugs to walls or pews. That this had apparently been common practice before is indicated by the very rusty nails found in a number of the rugs. In some cases, the nails had been removed, leaving small holes at regular intervals along the selvages. Occasionally there are also narrow stripes, usually only a few centimeters wide, where the pile and coloring are still relatively well preserved compared to the rest of the rug. This indicates that a strip of wood or something similar had been attached there for mounting. Some rugs also have remains of sewn-on leather straps, which may have been used to attach them to pews. Once the rugs had been returned from Budapest, the entire rug collection was permanently displayed inside the Bistritz church in connection with the extensive refurbishment of the church starting in 1926.201 The first repairs, such as joining rugs together again that had been cut up, are likely to have been carried out at this time.202 The residents of Bistritz also decided to make their rug collection a central feature of their church much later than in Kronstadt, where rugs had been permanently displayed for the first time back in 1907. When the Transylvanian Saxons became a political and religious minority in Greater Romania after 1918, consciousness of the Lutheran Confession uniting all Transylvanian Saxons gained in significance again, as it had already done under Habsburg rule after 1711. Back in the sixteenth century, during the Reformation in Transylvania, “the ethnic differences had also become confessional,”203 which in a certain sense made the parish churches political places; in fact, they became “a bastion of opposition for the Protestants.”204 The rugs also acquired a new 200 “[…] auf Vermittelung der Regierung […] nun alle alten Teppiche, die im Besitz unserer Kirchengemeinden sich befinden, wieder zurückgeschafft […] das teure Erbe, das von unschätzbarem Kunstwert ist.” The circular was published in: Kirchliche Blätter aus der evangelischen Landeskirche A.B. in Siebenbürgen: Evangelische Wochenschrift für die Glaubensgenossen aller Stände 15 (1923): 479–480. 201 Files documenting renovation have been preserved in: Bistrit,a, Serviciul Judet,ean Bistrit,a al Arhivelor Nat,ionale, collection no. 151: Oficiul parohial evanghelic C.A. Bistrit¸a, II. Consistorial Akten, no. 204. 202 Full details of the traces of use and repairs on the rugs will be included in the project’s final publication. 203 Volker Leppin, “Siebenbürgen: Ein kirchenhistorischer Sonderfall von allgemeiner Bedeutung,” in Konfessionsbildung und Konfessionskultur in Siebenbürgen in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Volker Leppin, and Ulrich A. Wien (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2005), 10. 204 Silvia Popa, “Kronstadt und seine unsichtbare Grenze im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Kronstadt und das Burzenland: Beiträge von Studium Transylvanicum zur Geschichte und Kultur Siebenbürgens, ed. Bernhard Heigl and Thomas S¸indilariu (Bras¸ov: Aldus, 2011), 21, regarding the period under Habsburg rule.

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symbolic meaning: “Even if the rugs are not creations of our arts and crafts, they are nevertheless monuments and testimonies to Saxon trade, which imported many thousands of such products of oriental weaving techniques” wrote Viktor Roth (1874–1936), the town preacher of Hermannstadt, in 1913.205 The rugs were a reminder of the former prosperity of the Transylvanian Saxons and their farreaching trade links as well as the local traditions of the Lutheran church, in which all the ethnic Germans in the country had been united for centuries. The rugs had thus become an important means of Transylvanian-Saxon identity building. From the outset, neither the origin of the rugs nor individual Islamic motifs such as the prayer niche were an obstacle to their use in Christian churches. Entries from two early modern estate inventories from Transylvania, in which three rugs are described “mit rotem Türboden” (with red doorway) and one Persian rug “mit rotem Spiegel” (with red mirror), indicate that the motif of the prayer niche (doorway) was not even recognized by the owners, which is why they named it after an unconnected everyday object.206 There are examples of rugs being used in churches in various regions of Europe. And they were used in churches of all Christian denominations, including—just as in Transylvania— prayer rugs.207 Sometimes they were bought by churches, sometimes they were donated to them, and they were used to decorate the steps of the altar208 or the communion table.209 There are reports from Poland-Lithuania that during wedding ceremonies the bridal couple stood on a rug which, after the wedding, was donated to the church.210 Rugs were also used to decorate church pews, ownership being transferred to the church after the death of the donor. Written instructions have survived regarding the use of certain rugs on feast days at the Santa Maria degli Angeli Church in Florence.211 Rugs were also used at funerals in

205 Viktor Roth, “Ausstellung siebenbürgischer Kirchenteppiche,” Kirchliche Blätter aus der Evangelischen Landeskirche A.B. in den Siebenbürgischen Landesteilen Ungarns (1913): 540. 206 Source citations in Kertesz-Badrus, Türkische Teppiche in Siebenbürgen, 15–16. 207 In 1903, Joseph Kolberg found several oriental rugs owned by the Cathedral of Frauenburg (today Frombork in Poland), including two prayer rugs. Joseph Kolberg, “Alte orientalische Teppiche im Dom zu Frauenburg,” Zeitschrift für christliche Kunst 16 (1903). 208 Kurt Erdmann, Europa und der Orientteppich (Berlin: Kupferberg, 1962), 24, mentions examples at Angers Cathedral in France, St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, and Neustadt Cathedral Parish Church, also in Austria. 209 An inscription preserved on a carpet in the Reformed Hungarian Church in Körösfo˝ states that it was donated in 1754 by Korpos István and his wife for use on the communion table. Cf. Ionescu, Antique Ottoman Rugs in Transylvania, 208. 210 For the examples from Poland-Lithuania, cf. the chapter by Alexandr Osipian in this volume. 211 Spallanzani, Oriental Rugs in Renaissance Florence, doc. 145. The tract dating from 1561 is a copy of an older text lost during a flood in Florence in the mid-sixteenth century.

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Florence, and it was apparently possible to hire rugs for this purpose long ago.212 Responding to the diverse circumstances in which rugs were used, Marco Spallanzani makes a clear assessment of the perception and role of rugs in Italian Renaissance culture in his study Oriental Rugs in Renaissance Florence: “In any event, in homes as in public places, in Florence as in all of Europe, rugs had a purely decorative function. They were not charged with any particular cultural meaning as objects in themselves, such as they might be in Islamic lands.”213 In addition to written sources, preserved original Anatolian woven rugs found in churches also testify to the keen interest of religious institutions in these precious textiles.214 The wings of a triptych attributed to Flemish painter Willem Key (1515/16–1568) bearing portraits of two members of the donor family De Smidt are a remarkable visual source.215 They are both depicted kneeling in front of a prayer stool covered with a rug. Unfortunately, the rug is only partly visible, but judging by the detail shown it is very likely to be a Star Ushak. Of particular interest here is the sacred context, which could indicate the use of rugs on pews in the Netherlands. This use is even more vivid in the portraits of Everard and Wilhelmine Tristram painted by Jacob van Oost the Elder (ca. 1600–1671) in 1646, each shown kneeling in front of a prayer stool covered with a Lotto rug.216 Probably on the basis of paintings, Grote-Hasenbalg stated back in 1922: “From the very beginning, the Ushaks came to Europe in great numbers and were used to decorate churches during important festivities, especially in Italy, Spain and southern Germany.”217 Regrettably, he does not explain how the rugs were used in churches or what types were favored.

212 Ibid., 39. In 1363, for example, the Monastery of Santa Trinità hired a rug from a pharmacist for the funeral of one of its brethren. The use of rugs in funeral ceremonies is also evidenced by a fresco by Filippo Lippi in Prato Cathedral depicting the funeral of St. Stephen. Lippi shows the deceased lying on a rug that completely covers the bier. 213 Ibid., 64. Rosamond Mack draws a similar conclusion: “Specific religious or social meanings that some objects had in their Muslim context were lost as Europeans employed them in their own secular or Christian practices or displayed them as precious works of art.” Rosamond E. Mack, Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300–1600 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 5. 214 A prominent example is the famous animal rug at Museum für Islamische Kunst (Museum of Islamic Art) in Berlin, which was discovered in a church in Italy. Besides Florence and Venice, oriental knotted-pile rugs have also been preserved in churches in for instance Gotland (Sweden) and Sion (Switzerland). Today they are mostly owned by museums. Cf. Spallanzani, Oriental Rugs in Renaissance Florence, 40. 215 Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts, inv. no. 400, 401. 216 Ackland Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Gift of the John Motley Morehead Foundation, 65.4.1. and 2. Reproduced in: Thompson, Milestones in the History of Carpets, 86–87. 217 Werner Grote-Hasenbalg, Der Orientteppich: Seine Geschichte und seine Kultur (Berlin: Scarabäus, 1922), 1:77.

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Conclusion The Star Ushak addressed in this article can be understood as Transottoman in several respects. Its ornamentation shows Persian, Safavid and Turkmen influences, some of which even have East Asian origins, and suggests lively exchange between various rug-weaving centers in and outside the Ottoman Empire. Even if the people involved in the rug trade and their fields of interaction cannot be identified more closely because of the lack of sources, it can be assumed that the merchants taking rugs from far-away places to the Ottoman Empire as well as the designers operating as an equally mobile group of actors in various rug-weaving centers were responsible for the exchange of patterns. The use of floral motifs seen in the Star Ushak is unusual for Anatolian rug production, which was strongly geared towards geometric patterns in the sixteenth century. Apart from the artistic influences already mentioned, this development can hardly be explained without considering the material circumstances. Changes to the production methods—a higher density of knots as well as larger looms and thus larger formats—formed the basis for an ornamentation that departed from the textile grid and enabled the use of graphic patterns, which allowed patterns to be freely designed regardless of the production process or the material. Large quantities of the knotted-pile rugs produced in Anatolia found their way as Transottoman commodities to Europe, where they were used as coveted luxury goods to impressively furnish private houses and churches or as diplomatic gifts. The route by which the Star Ushak came to Bistritz cannot be proven with any certainty as it is not documented in written records. However, preserved sources on trade in oriental goods suggest that “Greek” merchants under Ottoman sovereignty took it by land via Wallachia to Kronstadt or Hermannstadt. There, as the Bistritz account books imply, it was probably bought by TransylvanianSaxon domestic traders, who finally delivered the rug to Bistritz. Interestingly, the Bistritz rug collection itself—the second-largest preserved collection of rugs from Transylvania—to some extent contradict the written findings. Comparing the figures on rug purchases recorded in the Bistritz account books with those from Kronstadt and Hermannstadt, the dominance of the two southern Transylvanian cities in trade with oriental goods is obvious. The assumption occasionally expressed in the literature that Bistritz was located at the crossroads of important long-distance trade routes is not confirmed by written records. We know nothing about the history of the Star Ushak before it was used to decorate the church pew, as recorded in the photograph. There is nothing to suggest that the purchase of the rug was regarded as a conscious affirmation of Ottoman culture or that people were aware of the religious significance of the prayer rugs preserved in large numbers in Transylvania. In the written sources, there are so few references to the origin of the rugs or descriptions of their

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ornamentation that they were probably perceived as everyday objects and not viewed as exotic. They were bought for their prestige value. Gifts of rugs were initially intended to help strengthen the relationship between Bistritz council and the leading aristocratic families of the counties, and thus safeguard the city’s political status. Finally, in the early twentieth century, new meanings were attributed to the rugs. As material culture studies have emphasized, objects possess the specific ability to bridge the gap between past and present through their memorial value.218 In the churches of Transylvania, the prominently hung rugs brought to mind the significant past of the Transylvanian Saxons, who were increasingly threatened by political and cultural marginalization. The rugs can therefore only be regarded to a very limited extent as evidence of cultural exchange between the Ottoman Empire and Transylvania. But while the rug trade promoted contacts between merchants from different ethnic groups and religious denominations, new meanings independent of their culture of origin were ascribed to the rugs. Although there were no limits on the mobility of rugs as commodities, as mobile carriers of meaning in a transcultural sense there certainly were. Methods from historical research and art history have their limitations when it comes to trying to establish when and where rugs were made and what they were used for. But as the example of art technological examination of the Star Ushak shows, each rug is “inscribed” with specific information due to its materiality— fibers, dyes, manufacturing method, traces of use—which can be used to narrow down manufacturing periods and areas if sufficient data is available. Mobility dynamics resulting from the trade in wool and dyes as well as exchange between individual workshops could also be identified in this way. But since research in this field is still in its infancy, the examination of the Star Ushak on the basis of its technological characteristics can for the time being only confirm that it was made in West Anatolia. In this case, the concept of using a selected rug to examine what information can be gleaned about the history or itinerary of an object using various methods cannot be taken any further due to the fragmentary nature of written records, the unreliable state of art history research, and the lack of comparative data concerning art technology, meaning many questions cannot (yet) be answered. Nevertheless, during the research project, gathering information from different disciplines so that new ideas can be fostered by transdisciplinary debate has proved to be a fruitful approach. All in all, a multifaceted picture of the rug under study from the context of its origin to its subsequent use has emerged, even if 218 Hans Peter Hahn and Hadas Weiss, “Introduction: Biographies, Travels and Itineraries of Things,” in Mobility, Meaning and Transformations of Things, ed. Hans Peter Hahn and Hadas Weiss (Oakville: Oxbow, 2013), 8.

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some pieces of the jigsaw are still missing. Apart from the presumed mobility of the object itself, the origin of its pattern has been traced through the transfer of ideas from the Persian Empire. This—together with the diachronic change in attributions of meaning—shows that mobility extends far beyond a geographical dimension.

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Schürmann, Ulrich, ed. Islamische Teppiche: The Joseph V. McMullan Collection, New York. Exhibition catalog. Frankfurt am Main: Museum für Kunsthandwerk, 1968. Seivert, Johann. Nachrichten von Siebenbürgischen Gelehrten und ihren Schriften. Preßburg, 1785. Sigerus, Emil. Vom alten Hermannstadt. Hermannstadt: J. Drotleff, 1922. Spallanzani, Marco. Oriental Rugs in Renaissance Florence. Florence: S.P.E.S., 2007. Spuhler, Friedrich. Die Orientteppiche im Museum für Islamische Kunst Berlin. Munich: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1987. Suriano, Carlo Maria. “Oak Leaves and Arabesques: Ushak Large-Medallion Carpets with Pseudo-Kufic Borders.” Hali: The International Magazine of Fine Carpets and Textiles 116 (2001): 106–115. Thompson, Jon. Milestones in the History of Carpets. Milan: Moshe Tabibnia, 2006. –. Orientteppiche: Aus den Zelten, Häusern und Werkstätten Asiens. Herford: Busse, 1990. Tímár-Balázsy, Ágnes, and Dinah Eastop. Chemical Principles of Textile Conservation. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1998. Tokat, Murat. “Konya Etnografya Müzesi’nde Bulunan Us¸ak Halıları.” Diss., Konya Selçuk Üniversitesi, 2014. Trócsányi, Zsolt. “Gesetzgebung der fürstlichen Epoche Siebenbürgens und die Rechtsstellung der Balkangriechen in Siebenbürgen.” Études Balkaniques 1 (1971): 94–104. Végh, Gyula, and Károly Layer. Turkish Rugs in Transylvania (1925). Edited by Marino Dall’Oglio and Clara Dall’Oglio. Fishguard: Crosby Press, 1977. Völker, Angela. Die orientalischen Knüpfteppiche im MAK. Edited by Peter Noever. Catalogue MAK – Österreichisches Museum für angewandte Kunst. Vienna: Böhlau, 2001. Wagner, Ernst, ed. Geschichte der Stadt Bistritz in Siebenbürgen: Von Otto Dahinten. Cologne: Böhlau, 1988. Walker, Daniel. “Turkish Rugs.” The Bulletin of the Saint Louis Art Museum NS 18, no. 4 (1988): 1–35. Wetter, Evelin, and Ágnes Ziegler. “Osmanische Textilien in der Repräsentationskultur des siebenbürgisch-sächsischen Patriziats.” In Türkenkriege und Adelskultur in Ostmitteleuropa vom 16. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert, edited by Robert Born and Sabine Jagodzinski, 269–285. Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2014. Ziegler, Ágnes, and Hanna Grabner. “Konservatorischer Bericht über das Schadstoffscreening an den osmanischen Teppichen in Siebenbürgen.” In Entwicklungen eines Verfahrens zur Entgiftung und Reinigung der anthropogen geschädigten osmanischen Teppiche aus der Sammlung des Evangelischen Kirche A.B. Rumänien mittels Extraktion von biozidhaltigen Substanzen aus flüssigem Kohlendioxid. Abschlussbericht zum Projekt gefördert von der Deutschen Bundesstiftung Umwelt unter dem AZ 30 311–45, 69–83. Bad Kreuznach, 2016. https://www.dbu.de/projekt_30311/01_db_2409.html. Accessed January 11, 2018. Zipper, Kurt. Orientteppiche: Das Lexikon. Braunschweig: Klinkhardt und Biermann, 1970.

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Mehmet Tepeyurt

Imperial Russia’s Egyptian Endeavors: The Purchase of Amenhotep’s Sphinxes

Eyes to eyes they fix in silence, Full of sacred wrench together; They hear, may be, waves’ sounds Of another river, great and solemn. For them, two children of millennia, The vision of these places is only a dream…1

Introduction: A Nation in the Likeness of the Sphinx? It is no easy task to separate the immaterial from the material because human beings mostly define their immaterial ideals through the material forms, and in this vein, they almost always use artifacts to express their minds. For this very reason, artifacts survive and resist time’s abrasive effects because they appeal to the human perceptions. But their use and value remain disputable as they take new forms of interpretations as the eras change over long periods of time. When an artifact is removed from its original place and time, it is subject to being recontextualized, and it acquires new roles. Under such circumstances, the value of an artifact is determined not by the quality of the material it was made of or by the skill and the creativity of the artist, but by the perception and the motivations of the interested parties who want to get hold of it.2 This chapter will deal with two such artifacts: a pair of ancient Egyptian granite sphinxes bearing the facial characteristics of the pharaoh Amenhotep III 1 Valerii Briusov “The Pillar of Alexandria” (1909); translation in Viktor Solkin, “Sphinxes of St. Petersburg: History of Purchase and General Analysis of the Monuments,” in Sphinxes of St. Petersburg: Sun of Egypt on the Banks of the Neva, ed. Victor V. Solkin (St. Petersburg: Zhurnal Neva, 2005), 198. 2 For greater detail about materiality, see Joanna Sofaer, “Introduction: Materiality and Identity,” in Material Identities, ed. Joanna Sofaer, (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 1–11; Daniel Miller, “Materiality: An Introduction,” in Materiality, ed. Daniel Miller (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 1–50.

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(r. 1391–1353 BCE), one of the longest ruling and most successful rulers of Ancient Egypt, during whose reign Egypt reached its peak as a military power and international actor. The acquisition of his sphinxes by the Russian government in 1830 became a subject of dispute and a matter of prestige for the imperial authorities. They gave a new meaning to these two ancient marvels because of the specific conditions that were shaped by the race among the leading European powers to acquire Egyptian artifacts and create their respective collections. So, the meaning the Russian officials and some Russian artists attributed to these sphinxes derived from their motivations in particular for how those artifacts were to be used and circulated. In Ancient Egypt sphinxes were mostly aligned with the sun god and with the king as a living image. They combined the strength of the most sublime and solemn wild animal, a lion, and the intelligence of a human being. Therefore, they were representative of the transformation of animal power into a divine calm.3 For the literate Russians, Amenhotep’s sphinxes were impeccable beauties, the best of their kind that had survived to that day, and they could be proud of having them in St. Petersburg.4 The Russian writers often used the motif of sphinx when they debated about the nature of Russia and the Russians: “The opinions of Russians themselves on Russia and ‘Russianness’ are strongly related or corresponding to the universal symbolics of Sphinx.” In this context, some of them, particularly Fedor Tiutchev, argue about “the enigma and the inconceivability of Russia.”5 Based on these allegories, Amenhotep’s sphinxes would best fit into Russia as the motif of sphinx because it was portrayed as enigmatic by some like Tiutchev and Dostoevskii. Russian poets Alexander Blok (1880–1921) and Andrei Belyi (1880–1934) also likened Russia to a sphinx. Blok in his Scythians stated, “The sphinx is Russia. Now exulting through her tears.”6 Belyi was more insistent. He traveled to Egypt in 1911 and wrote down his impressions in his letters to Blok, arguing that Egypt was a place of mystical revelation for himself where he stared into the eyes of the Sphinx in Gaza for half an hour, and in his novel Peterburg he likened the contemporary culture of Russia to a sphinx.7 The two original Egyptian Sphinxes bearing the facial characteristics of Amenhotep III on the banks of the Neva River 3 Rainer Stadelmann, “Sphinx,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 3:307–310. 4 I.V. Mokletsova, “Drevnii Egipet v tvorcheskoii biografii A.N. Muraveva,” Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta: Seriia 19: Lingvistika i mezhkulturnaia kommunikatsiia 2 (2015): 94. 5 Marian Broda, “On the Riddle of the ‘Russian Sphinx’,” Journal of Literature and Art Studies 6, no. 7 (2016): 762–763. 6 Anna A. Tavis, Rilke’s Russia: A Cultural Encounter (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994), 106. 7 Helen Whitehouse, “Egypt in the Snow,” in Imhotep Today: Egyptianizing Architecture, ed. Jean-Marcel Humbert and Clifford Price (London: Routledge, 2011).

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in St. Petersburg subtly support their being a description of Russia, if symbols somehow represent the reality. The emergence of Egyptian Studies as a field of research in the professional sense once Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) decoded the Rosetta Stone opened the wide world of Ancient Egypt.8 His achievement was recognized by most of the Russian intellectuals in St. Petersburg,9 and he was elected as an honorary member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in 1827. Among his admirers were leading figures like Mikhail M. Speranskii (1772–1839), Alexei Nikolaevich Olenin (1763–1843), and Gavriil S. Batenkov (1793–1863), the famous Decembrist who also wrote one of the first books about the deciphering of hieroglyphs in the Russian language.10 Russians’ interest in ancient Egyptian artifacts was an expression of their desire to emulate western Europeans who flocked to Egypt after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, seeking the marvels of the ancients or opportunities for plunder. Because the Russian ruling elite and the Russian intelligentsia saw themselves as both part of the West and rivals of the West, they strived not to remain behind their western counterparts. For many centuries, the Russian literary groups had a keen interest in Ancient Egypt, and gradually they gathered information about this culture, which was to become the spiritual basis on which the Russian craze about anything ancient Egypt rose. They were undoubtedly awestruck by the accomplishments of the ancient Egyptians as well. The early Greeks had considered Egypt as the most ancient land of secrets and wisdom that were encrypted in their architecture, hieroglyphs, or monuments, and the modern Europeans inherited this view.11 Some Russian scholars were not ex8 Although the main credit for deciphering hieroglyphs goes to Champollion and the Rosetta Stone, it is also maintained that the Philae Obelisk, on which there existed a bilingual (Greek and hieroglyphs) inscription, contributed to the deciphering of the hieroglyphs in 1822. So, the Rosetta Stone was not the only key to understanding Ancient Egyptians’ texts, and Champollion was not the only key figure to solve the mystery. William Banks, for example, was an English scholar and collector whose efforts to decipher the inscriptions on the Philae Obelisk sparked an interpretive idea that enabled Champollion to decipher hieroglyphs. Jill Kamil, Aswan and Abu Simbel: History and Guide (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1993), 77; Lindsay MacDonald, et. al., “Imaging the Egyptian Obelisk at Kingston Lacy,” EVA ’15: Proceedings of the Conference on Electronic Visualisation and the Arts (Swindon: BCS Learning & Development, 2015), 253. 9 One significant exception was Ivan A. Gulianov (1786–1842), a Russian diplomat, linguist and Egyptologist who opposed Champollion and tried to create his own method of decoding hieroglyphs. A.M. Kulikova, Rossiiskoe vostokovedenie XIX veka v litsakh (St. Petersburg: Peterburgskoe Vostokovedenie, 2001), 40. 10 Alexandre A. Loktionov, “Of Pilgrims and Poets, Prisoners and Politics: The Story of Egyptology in Russia,” Raduga 1 (2004): 68. 11 Kevin M. McGeough, “Imagining Ancient Egypt as the Idealized Self in Eighteenth-Century Europe,” in Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory in a Global Context: From Consumerism to Celebrity Culture, ed. Ileana Popa Baird and Christina Ionescu (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 91.

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empted from this view and, just like their western counterparts, considered Ancient Egypt as a box full of secrets, a home of ancient magical lore, calling it the first cradle of the enlightened human race.12

Early Russian Encounters with Egypt and Its Monuments Yet the Russian people’s interest in Egypt did not start with the outbreak of Egyptomania in the 1820s that engulfed the western world. The first Orthodox people from North Eastern Europe appeared in the region around the end of the eleventh century as monks and pilgrims and were reported in the Nikon Chronicle, compiled in the 1550s.13 Not all of these early travelers were necessarily in the service of the Orthodox Church or one of the Kievan Rus principalities. Some of them were pilgrims or merchants, while some others like Igumen Daniil (late eleventh and early twelfth centuries) were Orthodox Church officials. Although their primary destination was Palestine and the Holy Land and it was also a custom to visit biblical sites in Sinai, only a handful of pilgrims bothered to travel along the Nile valley. These people on their way to Holy Lands mostly visited the Byzantine capital and encountered examples of the ancient Egyptian monuments like the Egyptian Obelisk in the hippodrome, a place of imperial display. Because these first travelers did the pilgrimage to St. Catherine Monastery of Sinai, they paid no attention to the Ancient Egyptian monuments, but only provided the most valuable information for future pilgrims as in the case of monk Agrefenii of Smolensk, who wrote in his notes, “from Jerusalem to Gazah 3 days; from Gazah to Egypt [Cairo] 12 days; from Egypt to Alexandria 6 days.”14 Another monk, Varsonofi, who twice visited Egypt, in 1456 and 1461–62, was apparently the first Russian ever to mention pyramids in his notes, saying, “Here are the granaries of Joseph the Beautiful beyond the river Nile, against the old Egypt [Cairo], Misiura [Egypt in Arabic].”15 After spending six weeks in Cairo, that was his only impression of the pyramids. Varsonofi was followed by a certain merchant called Vasilii, who happened to trade in the region and left behind a short description of Cairo and its surroundings.16 Since Vasilii was a merchant, 12 N.S. Petrovskii, “Istochniki svedenii o Drevnem Egipte v Rossii v XI–XVIII vekakh,” in Ikh velichestva piramidy, ed. Voitekh Zamarovskii (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), 433. 13 Ibid., 421. 14 Ibid., 423. 15 “Tut nakhodiatsiia zhitnitsy Iosifa Prekrasnogo, za rekoiu za Nilom, protiv starogo Egipta – Misiura.” The old Russian word “zhitnitsa” means granary, and Varsanofi was apparently told by the local Greek priests that pyramids were used as Joseph’s granaries. 16 N.I. Prokofev, Kniga khozhenii: Zapiski russkikh puteshestvennikov XI–XV vv. (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1984), 24.

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his itinerary deliberately followed trade routes of Anatolia, Syria and Palestine, avoided religious centers, and focused on the traditional centers of production like Bursa, Antep, Aleppo, and Damascus, and finally he ended up in Cairo. Although he gave a vivid description of the city, including the numbers of the households, streets, mosques, caravanserais, and other features, he never mentioned in his notes the pyramids that lay just outside the city.17 In 1651 Arsenii Sukhanov, another monk, was sent to Egypt by Alexei I (r. 1645–1676) on a diplomatic mission for the inspection of the rites of the Eastern Church. Albeit sketchy, his records left behind more detailed and more correct information about the pyramids and the monuments of Ancient Egypt than those of Varsonofi, saying, “In Egypt, beyond the river Nile, the ancient pillars of the ancient Pharaoh’s tombs were built […] They were, like mountains, raised; they are wide at the bottom and pointed at the top.”18 There are no details and no sketches so far in any of the Russian travelers’ notes, but some hints regarding an ancient great civilization from which no Russian audience back in Russia could get any inspiration at all. However, this situation changed with the arrival of Vasilii Grigorovich-Barskii, (1701–1747) a disappointed man in his home country, in Egypt in 1726, as a fully professional traveler. While traveling he lived off of charity and stayed in public houses.19 Of all those Russian travelers before the 1800s, he was the most competent one. Just like most of his predecessors, he was a monk by education and profession and during his travels, unlike his predecessors, he took lengthy and detailed notes, and he accompanied his story with vivid sketches and drawings of the ancient monuments. As a truly devoted traveler, he spent more than half of his life traveling outside Russia, visiting Central Europe, Italy, Mount Athos, the Greek islands, the Holy Land and finally Egypt. He spent enough time in Syria and Palestine to study ancient and contemporary Greek, philosophy and natural sciences.20 His qualifications in music, architecture and painting, acquired during his studies, made him unique among other Russian travelers. As a polyglot, he was able to communicate with the local people and later recounted their stories. He appears to have been the first Russian traveler who gave a detailed description 17 Anonymous, “Khozhenie Gostia Vasilia 1465–1466 gg.” Pravoslavnyi palestinskii sbornik 6 (1884): 8. 18 “Vo Egipte zhe, za rekoiu Nilom, idezhe stolby drevnie Faraonovy mogily uchineny velikogo diva, iako gory uchineny: snizu shiroki, a sverkhu zaostreny”; see “Puteshestvie po sviatym mestam Arseniia Sukhanova v 1651 godu,” in Skazaniia russkago naroda, ed. I.P. Sakharov (St. Petersburg: 1849), 2:201–203. 19 Anastasia A. Aksenova, “Frantsuzskie i russkie puteshestvenniki v Egipte v kontse XVIII– nachale XIX v.,” Vestnik Rossiiskogo universiteta druzhby narodov: Seriia: Vseobshchaia istoriia 2 (2014): 62. 20 Iu. N. Buzykina, “Vasilii Grigorovich-Barskii: Pervootkryvatel khristianskoi arkhitektury Sirii,” Rossiiskii zhurnal istorii tserkvi 1, no. 2 (2020): 23.

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of the ancient Egyptian monuments, and he spent some time in places like Rosetta, Cairo, Siwa and Alexandria. It was in Alexandria where he made a full description of the obelisks of Thutmose III (r. 1479–1426 BCE), more popularly known as “Cleopatra’s Needles,” now in London and New York, complete with a detailed and legible drawing of the hieroglyphs.21 After his death in 1747, his notes and drawings were presented to the Tsarina Elizaveta Petrovna (r. 1741– 1762) by one of Barskii’s companions. Probably for the first time, a Russian ruler came into visual contact with the ancient Egyptian monuments. Once his work was published for the first time in 1778, it became a great success, and by 1819, it had been published in six editions. The work contained 137 images and sketches made by Grigorovich-Barskii himself, who drew interesting panoramas of Rosetta, Cairo and Alexandria, as well as sights such as “Cleopatra’s Needles” and Pompey’s Pillar.22 It was no coincidence that by the 1780s Russians started to consider Ancient Egypt from an academic perspective more frequently, given the rise of the numbers of educated people and emergence of reading circles in Russia. There was a sharp increase of interest in western scientific achievements and cultural developments, part of which naturally included studies about Ancient Egypt. While newly emerging western studies regarding the ancient world were translated into Russian, the Russian scholars themselves also contributed in this field by publishing their own studies. In 1783, the director of the St. Petersburg Teachers’ Seminary, Ivan Ivanovich Koch (1739–1805), published a book titled The Experience of Interpretation of Hieroglyphs and Inscriptions, which contained a number of assumptions about the nature and characteristics of the Ancient Egyptian language, and in the following year another book titled The Experience of Explaining the Sphinx appeared on the Russian book market, in which Koch attempted to interpret the inscriptions on the sphinxes. Koch’s contemporary Vasilii Grigorevich Poletika (1765–1845), the author of Experience of Reasoning about the Original Affairs of the World, Ancient Egypt, the Assyrians, the Medes and the Persians, published in 1788, wrote about the role of 21 N.P. Barsukov, Stranstvovaniia Vasiliia Grigorovicha-Barskogo po sviatym mestam vostoka s 1723 po 1747 g. (St. Petersburg: Stasjulevicˇ, 1885–1887), 2:162. These two colossal monuments had earlier been transported from Heliopolis to Alexandria upon the orders of Augustus in 12 BCE to embellish the temple of Julius Caesar in front of the Caesarium in Alexandria along the Mediterranean shore. Both of them were about 20 meters tall, weighing approximately 180 tons; their relocation from Heliopolis to Alexandria in the ancient times was a great feat. In the nineteenth century, both obelisks were given as gifts to Britain and to the USA by the Egyptian government. They were transported and raised in London in 1878 and in New York in 1881 respectively. Martina D’Alton, The New York Obelisk, or, How Cleopatra’s Needle Came to New York and What Happened When It Got Here (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993), 7–15. 22 Aksenova, “Frantsuzskie i russkie puteshestvenniki,” 62.

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ancient Egyptian culture, and emphasized that “Ancient Egyptians were an enlightened human race and the first center of civilization.”23 These works brought Russian readers into contact with ancient Egyptian civilization in the same period as Western Europeans, albeit in less detail. Not surprisingly, both Koch and Poletika widely relied on the works of French authors.

Entering the Age of Egyptomania Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 and his dispatch of some 170 scholars (The French Scientific Mission) to study Egypt and its history had a decisive effect on the Russian research of Ancient Egypt. The Scientific Mission in Egypt and later its publication of the Description de l’Égypte in 1809 also triggered an intellectual and artistic explosion that affected the whole western world. For the next 100 years, Egypt witnessed an influx of western scientists, tourists, travelers, and opportunists who sought their fortune in Egypt and accordingly the plunder of the country, from which the Egyptians seemed to gain little benefit. Muhammad Ali, the ruler of Egypt, issued a decree in 1835 after being persuaded by an Armenian Egyptologist, Joseph Hekekyan Bey (1807–1875), and banned the extraction of the stones and other artifacts and the export of the country’s ancient riches. It must be borne in mind that Egypt was ahead of its Ottoman masters in this regard as the Ottoman authorities passed the first law in this context with an effort to regulate the activities of the archaeologists only in 1869, creating the first imperial museum of antiquities.24 Muhammad Ali’s decree stated: “Foreigners are destroying ancient edifices, extracting stones and other worked objects and exporting them to foreign countries. If this continues, it is clear that soon no more ancient monuments will remain in Egypt […] Having considered these facts, the government has judged it appropriate to forbid the export abroad of antiquities found in the ancient edifices of Egypt.”25 With the same decree he also judged it appropriate to designate a place in the capital to keep the artifacts. But it came too little, too late. Muhammad Ali’s decree about the ancient relics should not confuse the reader, given his background as an illiterate self-made man whose political character had been molded in the tumultuous Mamluk politics. He was far from able to understand the elaborateness of the ancient relics, but thanks to his 23 Vasilii Grigorevich Poletika, Opyt rassuzhdeniia o pervonachalnykh delakh mira: O Drevnem Egipte, ob assirianakh, o midianakh i o persakh (Tip. Vilkovskogo i Galchenkova, 1788), 23. 24 Zeynep Çelik, About Antiquities: Politics of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016), 23. 25 Donald Malcolm Reid, Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 21.

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commercial acumen, he was deeply interested in the foreign capital to modernize Egypt at the fastest pace and to obtain international recognition for the modern Egypt he created. Because he was not a legitimate monarch and was not secure in his position as the ruler of Egypt, he felt himself compelled to improve his domains by establishing strong institutions for his government that would resist any potential Ottoman invading forces that could attempt to topple him. To this end, he established a modern army, a centralized bureaucracy that, in the final analysis, created a modern state in a piecemeal manner.26 He was insightful enough to use ancient monuments to attract Western citizens, and he believed they would be more interested in staying in Egypt for a longer period of time thanks to the tourists’ “unfamiliar” hobbies that encompassed their interest in anything ancient. Apart from that, Muhammad Ali saw no use for those items at the time. His relations with Henry Salt (1780–1827) confirm the fact that by granting him firmans (decrees), Ali thought he could please Britain and improve his international position.27 The traffic of the flow of artifacts to the West was effectively controlled by Muhammad Ali’s advisor and the Minister of Finance, Youssef Boghos Bey, who issued firmans in the name of his master that permitted the excavations, and reportedly he was the one who got his share from each artifact exported, approximately one thirtieth of the value of each item.28 So partly due to the corruption of the Egyptian officials, the plunder of Egypt’s ancient riches continued unabated until the foundation of the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo 1857 by August Mariette Pasha, a French scholar and a leading Egyptologist who was elevated to the rank of Pasha by the Egyptian government and made Director of the Egyptian Antiquities Service.29 Mariette’s efforts certainly slowed down the export of ancient artifacts thanks to his vigorous efforts to resist the authorities’ constant requests to present these artifacts to western statesman as diplomatic bribes.30 Having said all of this about the Egyptian authorities’ attitude toward Ancient Egyptian artifacts, it must be added that Muslims, from the time they had conquered Egypt in 642 to the nineteenth 26 Afaf Lutfi Al-Sayyid Marsot, Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 100. 27 Brian M. Fagan, The Rape of the Nile: Tomb Robbers, Tourists, and Archaeologists in Egypt (New York: Scribner, 1975), 252. 28 Jed Z. Buchwald and Diane Greco Josefowicz, The Zodiac of Paris: How an Improbable Controversy Over an Ancient Egyptian Artifact Provoked a Modern Debate between Religion and Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 9; Wolfhardine A. von Minutoli, Recollections of Egypt (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Carey, 1827), 29. 29 Robert Bauval and Ahmed Osman, Breaking the Mirror of Heaven: The Conspiracy to Suppress the Voice of Ancient Egypt (Rochester, VT: Bear & Company, 2012), 98; Donald Malcolm Reid, “Cultural Imperialism and Nationalism: The Struggle to Define and Control the Heritage of Arab Art in Egypt,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 24, no. 1, (1992): 58. 30 Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, Beyond Colonialism and Nationalism in the Maghrib (New York: MacMillan, 2009), 121–122.

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century, did not persistently adopt a hostile attitude toward these artifacts, although there were occasional puritanist eruptions against these pagan monuments, which led to the partial destruction of the artifacts. As for the Russians, they joined this plunder slightly later than the others and entered into a competition with the other western marketeers. The arrival of the first professional Russian archeological teams took place only in the early 1870s, while western archeologists had already made significant progress in unearthing Egypt’s ancient artifacts in the previous years. Therefore, the collection of the Egyptian relics took place largely through volunteers, travelers, or western intermediaries. The Russian ruling elite’s interest, if not the Russian public’s yet, in Egyptianstyle art had already started long before the beginning of the Egyptomania in the 1820s. It was in part influenced by the currents in Western Europe, where with a new spur in globalization in the eighteenth century, encounters with the material culture of ancient Egypt became more common. The monumental aspects of Egyptian art and architecture, their perceived exoticism and permanence, became points of attraction for eighteenth-century designers. In the same vein, “the acquisition, display, and interaction with exotic goods were not just a means of understanding others but a means of self-definition.”31 That must certainly be true with ancient Egypt as it was part of a biblical past and considered as a country of mystery, credited with lore and wisdom by many Europeans.32 The Egyptian style of art was slowly making a place for itself by the beginning of the eighteenth century in Europe, just at a time when Russia, under Peter I, the Great (r. 1682–1725), was opening its doors to western European culture, and this style was particularly evident in Russia’s window on the west, St. Petersburg, and in its nearby surrounding areas. The transformation of Russia into an empire and the construction of St. Petersburg caused a real surge in the development of architecture. The capital and the construction of country residences (Peterhof, Tsarskoe Selo, Pavlovsk, Gatchina) emphasized the strength and greatness of the state. It is in these ensembles, first of all, that the elements that go back to Egyptian architecture appear: pyramids and obelisks.33 Peter the Great commissioned Niccolo Michetti (c. 1675–1758) to build a fountain in his beloved Peterhof in the shape of a pyramid. In fact, he had been impressed by the

31 McGeough, “Imagining Ancient Egypt,” 89–91. 32 Kerry Muhlestein, “European Views of Egyptian Magic and Mystery: A Cultural Context for ‘The Magic Flute’,” Brigham Young University Studies 43, no. 3 (2004): 137, 143. 33 M. Kameneva, G. Lukyanova, D. Tavberidze, “Foreign Relations and Inter-Civilizational Interaction from a Social-Political Perspective: The Case of Russia, Iran and Egypt,” European Research Studies Journal 21, no. 2 (2018): 507.

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fountains of Versailles and wanted a replica of them.34 After Peter the Great, the Russian sovereigns increasingly commissioned works of art in the ancient Egyptian style. In 1771 an obelisk in the Egyptian style, the first of its kind in Russia, by Italian architect Antonio Rinaldi (1710–1794), was erected in Tsarskoe Selo, commemorating General Rumiantsev’s impressive victory over the Turks at the Kagul River in Moldavia in 1770. As the empress Catherine II, the Great (r. 1762–1796) in her correspondence with Voltaire (1694–1778) in a deigning tone states: “The battle of Kagul, where seventeen thousand men fought a hundred and fifty thousand, inspired the erection of an obelisk, with an inscription stating simply the event and the name of the general.”35 In addition to the Kagul Obelisk, to further commemorate Rumiantsev’s victories against Ottoman armies, an obelisk in his name, designed by Italian architect Vincenzo Brenna (1747–1820), was first erected in 1799 on the Champs de Mars, but in 1818 was relocated to Vasilievskii Island.36 The idea had come from Catherine II, but the project was completed under her son Pavel. In addition to these monuments, a small pyramid was again commissioned by Catherine in Tsarskoe Selo as a burial place for her three embalmed Italian greyhounds. It was designed by Scottish architect Charles Cameron (1745–1812) in 1783 in such a way that it recalled Nubian pyramids rather than Egyptian ones.37 After all, it was also a common practice in Ancient Egypt to embalm the pharaoh’s popular pets. Her son Pavel had instructed his personal sculptor, Ivan Prokofiev, to sculpt Egyptian style statues, which now decorate the gardens of his palace.38 While these monuments were built, the first Russian attempts to collect Egyptian artifacts by the Russian volunteers had already started. One of the first serious artifact collectors was a young Livonian German in the Russian service, Otto Friedrich von Richter (1792–1816), who traveled widely in Europe and the 34 Mariya Nashchokina, “Russian Gardens in the 17th and 18th Centuries: The Italian Prototypes,” Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research 324 (2019): 241. 35 A. Lentin, Voltaire and Catherine the Great: Selected Correspondence (Cambridge: Oriental Research Partners, 1974), 117. 36 Anthony Cross, “A Corner of a Foreign Field: The British Embassy in St. Petersburg, 1863– 1918,” The Slavonic and East European Review 88, no. 1–2 (2010): 329. On the (now evident) political connotations of these commissions, see Anna Ananieva: “Denkmal im Garten: Strategien medialer Inszenierung der russisch-osmanischen Kriege im Landschaftspark von Zarskoe Selo,” in Die Türkenkriege des 18. Jahrhunderts: Wahrnehmen – Wissen – Erinnern, ed. Wolfgang Zimmermann and Josef Wolf (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2017), 313–337. 37 Peter Hayden, “The Russian Stowe: Benton Seeley’s Guidebooks as a Source of Catherine the Great’s Park at Tsarskoe Selo,” Garden History 19, no. 1 (1991): 26. 38 For more detailed information about the eighteenth and the early nineteenth century Russian zeal to build monuments in imitation of the ancient Egyptian style, see V.V. Beliakov, Sfinksy nad Nevoi: Egipet v russkoi kulture (Moscow: IV RAN, 2015), 32–41; Helen Whitehouse, “Egypt in the Snow,” 57–73.

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Levant, including Egypt, and even sailed down the Nile to Nubia. His collection of artifacts was sent to his family when he abruptly died in Smyrna. Later on, his collection was donated to the University of Dorpat (today Tartu in Estonia) in the Governorate of Livonia, and during World War I, the collection was transferred to the Museum of Fine Arts in Voronezh.39 There were some other Russians who were keen on creating their own collections of Egyptian artifacts, including a Dutch archaeologist in the Russian service, Ivan P. Blaramberg (1772–1831), a Russian officer in the Russian Navy, Ivan P. Butenеv (1802–1836) and a Georgian traveler named Grigorii Ruadze, who later donated his collection to the Imperial Academy of Sciences in 1821.40 Russia’s first museum dedicated specifically to Egyptian artifacts was founded in St. Petersburg in 1825.41 At the insistence of Alexei N. Olenin, the chairman of the Imperial Academy of Arts from 1817 to 1843, who was also a classical philologist/archaeologist and one of the great patrons of archaeology, the collection of Francesco de Castiglione, which had more than 1200 pieces, was purchased. Castiglione, a certain Milanese, lived in Alexandria and Cairo, where he collected Egyptian artifacts for which he was looking for potential buyers.42 The artifacts he had owned were not of the utmost importance to the western buyers, and the Russian authorities were lured into buying his collection thanks to his connections within Russia. He had busied himself in the archeological excavations in Memphis and Thebes, where he had encountered a number of Russians and had befriended them. After he gathered his collection, he went to St. Petersburg at the end of 1824, and his acquaintances met him at the port. At that point, nobody in the higher echelons of the Russian state was interested in buying the collection. This listlessness was dispelled by one of the most influential pens in the Russian press, Osip Senkovskii (Józef Julian Se˛kowski, 1800– 1858), a Pole by birth. Senkovskii was a specialist in Oriental languages who had versatile interests regarding the Orient and widely traveled in Syria, Palestine, Egypt and Nubia, during which travels he had attempted to obtain the famous Dendera Zodiac, but due to the political strife between Russia and the Ottoman Empire caused by the Greek rebellion, he failed to get it. The much-desired 39 The collection had 132 pieces and included various mummies of children, dogs, and birds, as well as clay and bronze figures, scarabs, amulets, a sarcophagus that belonged to the twenty first dynasty, and limestone steles. See: B.A. Turaev, “Opisanie egipetskikh pamiatnikov v russkikh muzeiakh i sobraniakh,” Zapiski Vostochnogo otdeleniia Rossiiskogo arkheologicheskogo obshchestva 11 (1899): 151; Morris Bierbrier, The Tomb-builders of the Pharaohs (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2003), 128. 40 Loktionov, “Of Pilgrims and Poets,” 68. 41 This Egyptian Museum was located in the eastern wing of Kunstkamera, the first museum in Russia founded by Peter the Great. 42 Anonymous, “Materialy dlia novago ustava Imperatorskoi Akademii Nauk i sostoiashchikh pri nei muzeev,” Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia 125, no. 4 (1865): 158.

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object, in the end, was acquired by a certain Frenchman Claude Lelorrain and taken to Paris.43 Still remembering his failure, Senkovskii wrote an article in Severnaia pchela in which he suggested that “the purchase of the collection and Castiglione be glorified by the authorities.” But his real emphasis in his article was Russia’s urgent need to be on par with their rivals in Western Europe in the field of Egyptology and create its own Egyptologists. The Russians’ zeal to achieve equality with their western counterparts as a manifestation of prestige and adherence to great power status was understandable, and in this context, influential periodicals like Otechestvennie zapiski, Syn otechestva, Biblioteka dlia chteniia and Russkii vestnik had adopted a policy of informing the Russian public about the latest developments taking place in the West regarding archaeological novelties from ancient Egypt.44 Senkovskii’s essay underlines this point: There is no doubt that with the means which Europe has in its hands and with enthusiasm caused by the intriguing news, which has taken possession of all educated minds nowadays, our historical and archeological knowledge has made great and precious achievements. We hope that the number of the Museums of Egyptian Antiquities multiply in Europe and all the Academies and scholars have sufficient materials for current searches that should be carried out on a large scale in all corners of Europe. As for us, Russians, we certainly have been delayed in the field of Sciences to cooperate in reviving and improving European education, but why do we not seek honor and desire distinction in this new field that opens as all of Europe expands its field of knowledge? We must hope that the names of our compatriots are added among the scientists to whom the sciences will be so much obliged.45

Senkovskii’s piece was a reflection of Russia’s zeal to catch up with Western Europe in every field. Although he had just turned twenty-five at the time, he was an accomplished orientalist and famed Egyptologist,46 and his article had the desired effect of attracting the attention of the authorities to the issue. Soon after that, as the correspondence among various agencies in the St. Petersburg bureaucracy reveals, there arose a real interest in buying the collection. The act43 G.V. Nosovskii, Kak bylo na samom dele: Rekonstruktsiia podlinnoi istorii (Moscow: AST, 2014), 121. 44 B.A. Turaev, Russkaia nauka o drevnem vostoke do 1917 (Leningrad: Izdatelstvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1927): 4. 45 Osip Senkovskii, “Egipetskie drevnosti v S. Peterburg,” Severnaia pchela, January 20, 1825, 4. 46 Osip Senkovskii was a sharp critic of Champollion and his deciphering of hieroglyphs, and in his fictional “Scientific Journey to Bear Island” (Uchonoe puteshestvie na Medvezhii ostrov) published in 1833 nearly ten years after Champollion’s deciphering, he calls Champollion a charlatan. However, by that time, Champollion’s achievement was recognized even in Russian circles. See Galina A. Belova, “L’Egyptologie russe avant Golenischeff,” Égypte: Afrique et Orient 4 (1996): 28; I.S. Katsnelson, “Materialy dlia istorii egiptologii v Rossii,” Vestnik drevnei istorii 2 (1947): 221.

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ing Privy Councilor Prince A.N. Golitsyn appealed to the Minister of Public Education A.S. Shishkov with the message that Castiglione requested Tsar Alexander I buy his collection of Egyptian antiquities for 60,000 rubles for the Museum of the Academy of Sciences. The collection was submitted for consideration to the Acting State Councilor Egor (Heinrich Karl Ernst) Köhler (1765– 1838), a German from Saxony who entered Russian service in 1797 and an eminent archaeologist. In his report he stressed that the price for such a collection was very reasonable.47 Hence, the purchase was finalized on March 26, 1825, only two months after Senkovskii’s article appeared in the press and several months before Tsar Alexander’s death in December of the same year.48 His successor, Nicholas I (r. 1825–1855), continued the family tradition to an even greater degree than his predecessors and invested in Egyptian-style art by commissioning the construction of a series of parks and palaces between 1826 and 1832, the most important of which was the Egyptian Bridge over the Fontanka river. Its construction started when Alexander I was still alive, and it was completed in August 1826, embellished with female sphinxes by Russian artists, cast iron obelisks in miniature size, and Egyptian-style ornaments. The sphinxes that decorated the bridge, which collapsed in 1905, were unlike the Egyptian ones. They had female faces, resembling the ancient Greek sphinxes as had been portrayed in Greek mythology. When a new steel bridge was founded in 1955, the sphinxes remained, and to bolster the Egyptian theme, two small cast iron obelisks were added.49 Nicholas I also commissioned the construction of the Egyptian Gate ornamented with hieroglyphs at the entrance of Tsarskoe Selo in 1829, which was inspired by the temple of Khonsun in Luxor, Egypt. Its construction took three years (1827–1830). It was designed by the British architect Adam Menelas, and its construction started only after Nicholas authorized the plans.

Engineering Feats to Boast and a Glorious Hunt for Bargains: The Two Sphinxes of Amenhotep III and Their Acquisition by Imperial Russia As illustrated in the previous section the tsar and his circle had already been, however hazily, familiar with the Egyptian style of art and Egyptian history when they received a letter from their embassy in Constantinople. The letter reported on two remarkable sphinxes recently discovered in Thebes, Egypt by Giovanni 47 M.F. Khartanovich, Letopis’ Kunstkamera, 1714–1836 (St. Petersburg: MAE RAN, 2014), 512. 48 Khartanovich, Letopis’ Kunstkamera, 512. 49 Whitehouse, “Egypt in the Snow,” 66–68.

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d’Athanasi (1798–1854), a Greek Ottoman subject from the Island of Lemnos. He was a self-made man, having had no formal education in archaeology, as was almost the norm at the time. He was an apprentice of Giovanni Battista Belzoni (1778–1823), another ambitious fortune seeker who in his youth worked as a barber and circus strongman. Over the years working in the circus, Belzoni developed skills in using levers, weights, and hydraulics—knowledge that proved to be extremely important in moving colossal monuments. Life has its tricks for interesting men and he, tired of working in the circus, found himself trying to sell a mechanical irrigation device to Muhammad Ali of Egypt. The enterprise failed, but Belzoni’s career as an archaeologist/tomb raider started when Henry Salt hired him thanks to his skills as a self-made engineer and his ability to move colossal units with few tools available in the middle of nowhere, as he proved while moving the colossal seven-and-a-quarter-ton statue of Ramses II using only ropes and palm logs, a feat which Napoleon’s soldiers failed to accomplish when they invaded Egypt.50 After Athanasi parted with Belzoni, he started working in the service of Henry Salt, and this young Greek discovered two granite sphinxes sculpted in the image of Amenhotep III, which were sculpted from the best and hardest stone to resist time and to immortalize his achievements.51 Champollion gives details of the sphinxes, probably from when he saw them in Alexandria, stating: Large-scale excavations, carried out by a Greek named Iani and former agent of Mr. Salt, have uncovered a multitude of column bases, a great number of lion-headed statues in black granite and two magnificent colossal sphinxes and one with a human head, in pink granite, of the finest workmanship, also representing King Amenhotep III. The features of the face of this prince, bearing here, as everywhere else, an imprint of a somewhat Ethiopian physiognomy, are absolutely similar to those that sculptors and painters have given to this same Pharaoh in the paintings of the Memnon stelae.52

50 Brian M. Fagan and Nadia Durrani, A Brief History of Archaeology: Classical Times to the Twenty-First Century (London: Routledge, 2016), 36–38. For further details about this remarkable man, see, Stanley Mayes, The Great Belzoni: The Circus Strongman who Discovered Egypt’s Ancient Treasures (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003). 51 The material that the Sphinxes were carved out of is a specific type of granite called Rose, more popularly known as pink-granite. An abundant amount of potassium feldspar gives pink granite its color. Small specks of milky semi-transparent quartz, dark brown/black amphibole, and opaque white feldspar are all visible to naked eye. Such granites were quarried in abundance in Aswan, where the ancient Egyptians deployed a large military force just to the north of the first cataract as Egypt’s first defense line of against African invaders, an advantage which ensured quarrying this remarkable rock safely. 52 Jean François Champollion, Lettres écrites d’Egypte et de Nubie en 1828 et 1829: Collection complète, accompagnée de trois mémoires inédits et de planches (Paris: Didot, 1833), 311 [author’s translation].

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It was impossible to sell these marvels in the backwaters of Egypt, but buyers could be found in Alexandria. However, their transportation was too costly for d’Athanasi, so the British Consul General in Egypt Henry Salt intervened and arranged their transfer to Alexandria, some 900 kilometers to the north. Unfortunately, d’Athanasi tells nothing about how he discovered these masterpieces in his memoirs or how he moved them. Even when he mentions them, he is sure that what he did was his most important moment when his star glowed, but he missed his chance and failed to give the whole account of his discovery of the sphinxes. He simply used his success to attack and discredit the achievements of his former master Belzoni. Most probably he was trying to prove that he was an even greater archaeologist than the widely respected Belzoni. Interestingly enough, d’Athanasi mainly boasted about his ability to transport much heavier objects in less time (and therefore more cheaply) than his former mentor— definitely a selling point in the business of monumental Egyptian antiques. The two sphinxes which were discovered at the temple of Memnon have been sold to Russia. These colossal pieces are the most magnificent and weighty that have ever been removed to the European continent from Egypt. The head of the younger Memnon, of which Belzoni boasted its enormous size is nothing in comparison with these sphinxes. Mr. Belzoni in the account of his travels boasts of having removed a monolithe weighing twenty or five-and-twenty thousand pounds; but what would he have said if he had seen these two sphinxes, each of which weighs two hundred and fifty thousand pounds, and had he known that the spot on which they stood was farther from the sea than was the head of the younger Memnon? He would have been overwhelmed with astonishment on learning that in less than a month these two sphinxes were removed from the place they were found in, behind the two colossi, to that where I shipped them by the sycamore trees. I took less than three hours to deposit each of them in the vessel. Mr. Belzoni required forty days to remove the head of the younger Memnon from the temple of Kasir Jdiggaggi to the river.53

Henry Salt was very active in the archeological excavations in Egypt and personally sponsored them in Thebes and Abu Simbel. He was keen on collecting artifacts and was in stiff competition with other collectors. At the time, most of the British diplomats were not paid generously, and since they were representing the British crown in the foreign lands, their expenses were high. For the greater part of his term in Egypt, Salt suffered from financial troubles and endeavored to raise extra money by getting commissions from wealthy British businessmen for collecting Egyptian artefacts in their names. It could be a dangerous business because the sector was really competitive, and occasionally it could be life

53 Giovanni d’Athanasi, A Brief Account of the Researches and Discoveries in Upper Egypt Made under the Direction of Henry Salt, ESQ. (London: John Hearne, 1836), 80–81.

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threatening because melees, sometimes armed, were rampant.54 It is by no means a surprise that the British and the French were also rivals in collecting ancient Egyptian artifacts, and Salt’s attempts to sponsor excavations and collect artifacts were hindered in every possible way by the Consul-General of France, Bernardino Drovetti (1776–1852), while the Russian officials were nowhere visible in this competition as might have been assumed from Senkovskii’s above-mentioned essay from 1825.

Fig. 1: Transport of the sphinx. Drawing by Nestor L’Hôte. From Diane Harlé, “Nestor L’Hôte, ‘ami et compagnon de Champollion’ (1804–42),” in Sesto Congresso internazionale di egittologia: Atti, vol. 2, ed. by Jean Leclant (Turin: International Association of Egyptologists, 1993), no. 1, “Un des sphinx de St. Petersbourg, dessin de Nestor L’Hoˆ te.”

Once the sphinxes reached their destination, Salt presented them to international buyers. The French government, upon receiving a report about the necessity to buy the Sphinxes by Champollion, who described them as “the products of the finest craftsmanship,” bid for the purchase. Andrei N. Muravev was at the right place at the right time. He was a typical representative of the Russian imperial system and a member of an influential aristocratic family (in fact, a clan because there were several branches of the family) who since the 1400s had provided the much-needed personnel to run the colossal imperial state apparatus by joining in the ranks of the civil service or the military. The Muravev clan was known as “the hangers and the hanged” as several prominent members who were serving in the imperial army took part in the Decembrist revolt. Andrei Muravev, whose elder brother Aleksandr Muravev was both a highly decorated war hero for his bravery and achievements during the Napoleonic wars and one of the founders of the Decembrist movement, chose, unlike his brother, a different path in his loyalties, and throughout his life he loyally served the tsar and his regime. He was tutored by Semen Raich, a leading Russian scholar who had studied ancient Greek and 54 C.E. Bosworth, “Henry Salt, Consul in Egypt 1816–1827 and Pioneer Egyptologist,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 57, no. 1 (1974): 83; Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850 (New York: Knopf, 2005), 251, 255.

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Latin languages and translated several works into Russian. It is no surprise that young Muravev, also in imitation of his professor, translated the Aeneid into Russian. He joined the army and served during the 1828–1829 Russo-Ottoman war, during which he met and befriended Aleksei Khomiakov, one of the two founders of the Slavophile movement. It must have been Khomiakov who suggested that an already-deeply religious Muravev leave the military service and travel in the Middle East to visit the Holy Lands in search of his Orthodox roots.55 Muravev’s story is one of dynamism and the unending curiosity of a member of a prominent family in the imperial system.56 Empires mostly rise on the efforts of such relatively insignificant but dynamic, talented individuals who have versatile interests and aspirations. Such people are the self-appointed agents of their countries even if they are not paid by their respective governments. They seek new opportunities in the name of their countries, mostly unconsciously, and if they are capable of getting in touch with a strong enough network in their own respective countries, they encourage the formation of lobby groups to inform the public and the authorities about the new avenues and new opportunities in the far regions of the world.57 Their ancestors in spirit were exactly the frontiersmen who jumped into the darkness with an adventurous zeal and softened the ground for future conquest by their states, but once the age of frontiers was over, this dynamism, especially in the Russian case, was diverted to the relatively littleknown regions of the world. Andrei Muravev was definitely not the most important of such people, but he in any case played his role in history. The publication of his travel notes under the title “Journey to the Holy Places in 1830 by a Russian” (Puteshestvie ko Sviatym Mestam Russkim v 1830 Godu) increased public awareness regarding the Middle East and the Holy Land, which resulted in the beginning of official Russian-Jerusalem diplomatic and church relations. Therefore, one scholar speaks of “The era of Muravev in the history of Russia-

55 Andrei N. Muravev, Moi Vospominaniia (Moscow, 1913), 7–8. 56 Here is a brief list of works about A.N. Muravev: P.S. Kazanskii, “Vospominaniie ob Andreе Nikolaeviche Muraveve,” Dushepoleznoe chtenie 3 (1877): 359–389; M.O. Semenov, Vospominaniie ob A.N. Muravеve (Kiev, 1875); S. Sulima, “A.N. Muravеv,” Russkii arkhiv 9 (1876): 353–356; M. Tolstoi, Pamiati Andreia Nikolaevicha Muravеva: Pismo k M.M. Evreinovu (Moscow, 1874); N.N. Lisovoi, “Fenomen A. N. Muraveva i russko-ierusalimskie otnosheniia pervoi poloviny XIX veka,” Pravoslavnyi palestinskii sbornik 103 (2005): 4–20. 57 Just to name a few in this capacity who traveled in the Ottoman Middle East and published their memoirs and travel notes and thereby reached a wider audience: they were orientalists like Osip I. Senkovskii (1800–1858), and Agafangel E. Krymskii (1871–1942), army generals like Mikhail N. Dokhturov (1825–1911) and A.G. Shcherbatov (1850–1915), botanists like Andrei N. Krasnov (1862–1914), writers like Daniil L. Mordovtsev, (1830–1905), engineers like Egor P. Kovalevskii (1809–1868) and M.N. Ermolaev (1865–1916), doctors like Kondratii I. Grum-Grzhimailo (1794–1874) and Artemii A. Rafalovich (1816–1851), and archaeologists like Akim A. Olesnitskii (1842–1907) and Semen S. Abamelek-Lazarev (1857–1916).

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Jerusalem relations.”58 Although in his letters to his brother he disclosed his intention to travel to the Middle East for religious purposes, he went far beyond it and visited different locations along the Nile and inspected archaeological sites. While in Alexandria, he saw one of the sphinxes and immediately sent a letter, with a drawing of it enclosed, to Alexander Ivanovich Ribeaupierre (1781–1865), the Russian ambassador in Istanbul, about the issue and the importance of the purchase of these immortal sphinxes in the name of the Russian Government in February of 1830. Because Egypt was formally part of the Ottoman Empire, the ambassadors were supposed to reside in Constantinople, and in Cairo there were only consular representatives sometimes elected from among the local people.59 Muravev was aware of the correspondence between Jean-François Champollion and the chairman of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, Alexei N. Olenin in the early 1820s and the strong interest in ancient Egypt in the Russian press. As part of this interest, Champollion was even elected an honorary member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, exactly three years before he became a member of the respective French Academy.60 Muravev, au courant with this rising Egyptomania in Russia, inflicted himself with the same zeal, saw the purchase of the sphinxes as a contest with a great power, France, and perceived an opportunity to beautify the imperial capital St. Petersburg as he stated in his letter. With the permission of Your Highness, Please forgive my courage to send this letter to Your Highness, but I know what keen interest Your Highness has relating to everything that serves the splendor and the glory of our fatherland, and for this reason I hasten to report about the discovery of one of the most magnificent monuments of ancient Egypt whose acquisition will, without doubt, also bring great pleasure to her Majesty who is known for her penchant for all that is beautiful and grandiose. I would like to report about the recent discovery of a magnificent granite sphinx covered with hieroglyphs. It was found during the excavations carried out by Mr. Champollion […] and transported to Alexandria by a Greek merchant who intends to sell it together with another sphinx that was also found in the same spot, but it will be delivered (to Alexandria) soon. For these two colossi they demanded a huge sum of one hundred thousand rubles at the beginning but they can likely be acquired for half of that amount. They are perfectly preserved and could decorate one of the squares of St. Petersburg where everything is so 58 Lisovoi, “Fenomen A.N. Muraveva,” 4–20; I.Iu. Smirnova, “Perepiska A.N. Muraveva s rossiiskim genkonsulom v Beirute K.M. Bazili kak istochnik po istorii svyazei Rossii s pravoslavnym vostokom v 1830–1840-e gg.,” Pravoslavnyi palestinskii sbornik 103 (2005): 21–41. 59 One such person was a certain Mustapha Agha Ayat, who was either a Turk or an Ethiopian by birth and was in the service of both Britain and Russia as a consular agent in Luxor. In fact, he was nothing more than a grave-robber turned merchant who was concluding lucrative artifact deals with the foreign visitors. Fagan, The Rape of the Nile, 292. 60 N.S. Petrovskii, Egipetskii iazyk: Vvedenie v ieroglifiku, leksiku i ocherk grammatiki sredneegipetskogo iazyka (Leningrad: Izdatelstvo Leningradskogo universiteta, 1958), 13.

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grandiose. My only fear is that the other government [the French one. Author’s note] would outpace us. If Your Highness, after consulting with the government of His Majesty, decides to conclude the purchase, Mr. Rozetti, one of the most respected merchants of Alexandria, could be referred to. He is willing to take the trouble on himself to conclude the deal.61

Ribeaupierre, sensing a good deal, in turn transmitted the letter to the tsar, informing him about the opportunity. Nicholas was an amateur artist mostly painting about themes relating to military life and an avid supporter of the conservative arts, known for commissioning artists handsomely, and he also worked very closely with Olenin on his archaeological projects.62 This support did not necessarily mean an unbounded love of art, as he ordered the auto-da-fé of the Polish canvases seized after the suppression of the November uprising in 1831, and he did not tolerate any theme in the arts that reminded him of revolution.63 Probably, he was to a degree informed about the mythology of the ancient Egyptians as he received a classical education, elements of which included ancient civilizations. He must have attributed several, sometimes contradictory, roles to sphinxes like their being representatives of a king, being images of the gods, watchers of temples and palaces, or being symbols of wisdom, strength and understanding.64 In all four cases, what the Sphinxes represented suited Nicholas well. Upon accession to the throne, he had vigorously begun his royal duties. Although his lifelong obsession was the army and military parades, always desiring to live like a soldier, he was well aware of the fact that the state could not be run simply by martial measures. As a fledgling tsar, he was faced with an attempt against his and his royal household’s life by the Decembrists, who had been influenced by enlightenment ideals. After he had quickly and mercilessly crushed the coup he, as a conscientious ruler strongly believing in the notion that a tsar had the divine task of being the protective and autocratic father of the Russian people, as in the words of the court’s official historian Karamzin, “The history of the people belongs to the Tsar (Istoriia naroda prinadlezhit Tsariu),”65 embarked

61 I.V. Mokletsova, “Khudozhestvennoe tvorchestvo, publitsisticheskaia i prosvetitelskaia deiatelnost A.N. Muraveva v kontekste russkoi literatury i kultury XIX veka,” (PhD diss., Moskovskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet, 2013), 285 [author’s translation]. 62 Cynthia Hyla Whittaker, ed. Visualizing Russia Fedor Solntsev and Crafting a National Past (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 5. 63 G. Vilinbakhov, “The Hermitage ‘… Diverse and Vast …’,” Museum International 55, no. 1 (2003): 12. 64 T. Reik, “Oedipus and the Sphinx,” British Journal of Medical Psychology 1, no. 2 (1921): 181– 194. 65 Nikolai M. Karamzin, Istoriia gosudarstva Rossiiskogo, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1818). It would have been more fitting if Karamzin had dedicated his magnum opus to solid Nicholas rather

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upon a policy of erasing the memory of the revolt. He sought to reinvigorate the imperial ideology through which he attempted to make royal authority indispensable in the eyes of the Russian ruling classes, a part of whom had been influenced by the ideals of enlightenment and therefore had taken part in the Decembrist revolt. Nicholas personally took part in the interrogations of the rebels and reached the conclusion that the dissemination of such dangerous ideas was the result of Alexander I’s liberal policies, and he came to believe that providence had destined him to be the autocrat of Russia.66 As a result, Nicholas engaged with the issue of reinvigorating the monarchical idea in earnest, and in this capacity in February 1829 he signed just a sentencelong imperial decree, which placed the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts (previously part of the Ministry of Education) under the Court Ministry (pod osobym Nashem pokrovitelstvom) without ever mentioning the reason for doing so.67 Arguably, he sought to use the arts as one of the ways to erase the negative repercussions of the Decembrist movement. The Imperial Academy of Fine Arts was founded by Empress Elizaveta Petrovna in 1757. This act was mainly oriented toward France. There, under Louis XIV, the Academy became an important institution representing the state, a model that was then followed by a number of academies founded in Western and Southern Europe. Elizaveta, as well, had been advised by Ivan Shuvalov (1727–1797), the Maecenas of the Russian Enlightenment, above all a protégé of the empress, about the necessity of such an institution in Russia. Catherine II subsequently took the task of issuing its charter in 1764. Nicholas was in fact reverting back to the earlier practice by placing the academy under his own jurisdiction just when his grandmother Catherine II had placed the institution under her own supervision.68 However, there is strong evidence that Nicholas was dissatisfied with the performance of the Academy of the Fine Arts and after a failed exhibition of 1830, he quickly dismissed a number of its members. As Olenin reported, “The busts of His Majesty and especially the one of the Empress were made very badly […] Professor Pimenov was completely

than stolid Alexander I, who at times supported conflicting ideological views, switching from liberalism to mysticism tinctured by authoritarianism. 66 T.A. Kapustina, “Nicholas I,” Russian Studies in History 34, no. 3 (1995): 17. 67 Polnoe sobranie zakonov, Collection 2, Volume 4, Decree no. 2668. “Imperatorskoi akademii khudozhestv, kotoraia po darovannoi ei v 1764 godu privilegii dolzhna sostoiat pod osobym Nashem pokrovitelstvom, Povelevaem otnyne vpred byt pod glavnym nachalstvom Ministra imperatorskogo dvora.” 68 Irina Tatarinova, “The Pedagogic Power of the Master: The Studio System at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg,” The Slavonic and East European Review 83, no. 3 (2005): 479.

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removed from service.”69 Any matter related to the empress would naturally affect the decisions of the emperor, but another incident, the July Revolution in France in 1830, which he described as “a hideous example and noxious for any order,”70 alarmed the autocrat, an incident that in fact allowed the Russians to acquire the much-desired sphinxes. Nicholas, a die-hard legitimist and defender of order and stability sought these notions in historic symbols and the arts. Nicholas’ reign went together with the period of Biedermeier (1815–1848), a conservative neo-classical movement in the artistic styles, of which the martial tsar took full benefit.71 It is argued that his education was neglected since his elder brother Alexander was actually prepared for the throne by his grandmother Catherine II. Almost 20 years younger than Alexander, he was the ninth child and the third son of Paul I Petrovich and Maria Feodorovna and was never meant to rule. Accordingly, he received an education to be a soldier rather than an enlightened autocrat. On the other hand, as new documents regarding Nicholas’ life have revealed, the argument about his under-education is slightly disputable. He had an art-loving mother, Maria Fedorovna, who had her own peculiar passion for arts and certain artistic talents, which might have played a role in Nicholas’ keen interest in the arts.72 At least he had learned the pillars and the dynamics of the Russian political system in his youth well and was determined to reinforce these dynamics to defend the royal government and was ready, however retroactively, to transform the Russian gentry that provided personnel to the Russian state and who made the continuation of the royal regime possible. While Ribeaupierre’s letter was on its way to Nicholas, he was, unfortunately for the Russians, not in St. Petersburg but in Prussia, so the much-needed time was squandered and the French government bought the sphinxes for 100,000 Francs. Fortunately for the Russians, the French Revolution of July 1830 toppled the Bourbon dynasty, this time permanently, and the Russians did not waste this second chance. Nicholas authorized the purchase of the marvels, which would 69 L.V. Vyskochkov and A.A. Shelaeva, “‘Iziashchnye khudozhestva dostoiny monarshego pokrovitelstva…’ Imperator Nikolai I i russkie khudozhniki,” Iaroslavskiy pedagogicheskiy vestnik 3 (2016): 289. 70 Nikolai Shilder, Imperator Nikolai Pervyi: Ego zhizn i tsarstvovanie (St. Petersburg, 1903), 2:300. 71 For the impact of the Biedermeier period in Russia, see P.Ia. Chaadaev, Filosoficheskie pisma: Pismo vtoroe (Moscow, 1989); A.V. Mikhailov, D.R. Petrov, and S.Iu. Khurumov, Obratnyi perevod: Russkaia i zapadno-evropeiskaia kultura: Problemy vzaimosviazei (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kultury, 2000); S.S. Labanov, “Idei zodchestva v russkoi mysli nachala XIX Veka,” Stroitelstvo: Nauka i Obrazovanie 3 (2014); Tatiana Vitalievna Sidorova, “Biedermaier i russkaia zhivopis pervoi poloviny XIX veka” (PhD diss., Moskovskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet, 2011). 72 Rosalind P. Blakesley, “Sculpting in Tiaras: Grand Duchess Maria Fedorovna as a Producer and Consumer of the Arts,” in Women and Material Culture, 1660–1830, ed. Jennie Batchelor (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 71–85.

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cost the Russians much less than had an earlier project by Russian sculptor Peter Clodt von Jürgensburg (1805–1867). Clodt was the tsar’s favorite sculptor and was treated accordingly. He had proposed to place his “The Horse Tamers” on the banks of the Neva just opposite the Academy of Fine Arts, but the project was too costly (approximately 425 thousand rubles) for the Russian Minister of Finances Egor F. Kankrin (1774–1845). He was known for his notoriously pinchpenny handling of Russian finances, and not surprisingly, as in all projects which he regarded as extravagant, he dragged his feet to set aside the required money, while the granite pedestals for Clodt’s project had already been designed by the court architect Konstantin Andreevich Ton (1794–1881). However, once the purchase of the sphinxes was finalized, Ton, a subtle diplomat who rightly understood the tsar’s desire to embellish St. Petersburg with monuments, modified his plans for the pedestal specifically designed for Clodt’s project.73 For Ton, it was the architect’s duty to build rightly whatever his patron demanded. There was no reason to be imaginative while earlier examples existed. So his real emphasis was to revive classicism, which attracted Nicholas particularly, who in gratitude ennobled Ton in 1844 for his services.74 The money for the sphinxes came from another source. The Ottomans were notorious for failing to pay their debts, mainly because of their everlasting financial insolvency. The Russians failed to get the whole unrealistically-determined 10 million ducats that they had demanded as an indemnity from the Ottomans because of their rapacious appetite to weaken their long-time enemy. So, Ribeaupierre found an alternative way to get at least a pinch of the indemnity from the Ottomans, and the money for the sphinxes, 60 thousand francs, was provided by the Ottoman government.75 Having done this, Ribeaupierre, long after the death of Nicholas, boasted in his memoirs that the success belonged to his own person, stating that the “Sphinxes decorating the pier in front of the Academy of Arts, are my children.” He never mentioned the letter of Muravev and maintained that thanks to his efforts, the sphinxes were acquired.76 Once the deal was concluded, the sphinxes were about to be loaded. Each sphinx was more than 23 tons, 5.24 meters long and 4.50 meters high, and their loading on the ship required careful planning and reliable cranes. Unfortunately, none were available, and while lowering one of the sphinxes onto the deck, the 73 Clodt’s horse tamers were finally commissioned and completed only after the death of Kankrin in 1845. Today they decorate both entrances of the Anichkov Bridge on Fontanka River, the left branch of the Neva. 74 Konstantin Akinsha and Grigorij Kozlov, The Holy Place: Architecture, Ideology, and History in Russia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 50. 75 A. A. Vasilchikov, “Zapiski grafa Aleksandra Ivanovicha Ribopera,” Russkiy arkhiv 2, no. 5 (1877): 34. 76 Ibid.

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crane cracked down and the sphinx fell. A small segment of the sphinx was fractured, and as Champollion stated in his report weeks before the incident, these sphinxes had been “undoubtedly, the most untouched monument from all similar existing ones today.”77 One of them was badly touched now.

Fig. 2: Damaged Sphinx. Photograph: Robert Born 2019. Unfortunately, the fragmented chips are lost to this day, although they had been brought to St. Petersburg with the same ship that carried the sphinxes to St. Petersburg.

The sphinxes reached St. Petersburg after a yearlong journey through the Mediterranean and the Strait of Gibraltar on a Greek ship, Buena Speranza, rented for 28 thousand rubles. After spending the winter in one of the ports in Holland, she finally arrived at the mouth of the Neva in May 1832. Because the granite pier where the Sphinxes were to be placed was not yet completed and there were no pedestals, they were temporarily kept in the yard of the Academy of the Fine Arts building. Only in April 1834 were they raised on high pedestals made of famous Finnish Rapakivi granite, on which they stand today. The relocation of these colossal statues could be considered as competition to the nearly simultaneous relocations of the obelisks to the capitals in Western 77 Solkin, “Sphinxes of St. Petersburg,” 199.

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Europe like London and Paris and also to New York. It is definitely a great success for d’Athanasi, who had only few means like palm logs, ropes and no fewer than 50 workers. They pulled the Sphinxes on wooden rollers by ropes several miles to one of the banks of the Nile as is seen in a sketch by the French artist Nestor L’Hôte (1804–1842), who happened to be at the site when the sphinxes were excavated and transferred.78 It is clear that d’Athanasi was good at copying his former master Belzoni, who had moved the 7.25-ton head of younger Memnon. Belzoni, unlike d’Athanasi, gives a lot more technical details about his engineering feats as he described how he moved the head of younger Memnon: By means of four levers I raised the bust, so as to leave a vacancy under it, to introduce the car; and, after it was slowly lodged on this, I had the car raised in the front, with the bust on it, so as to get one of the rollers underneath. I then had the same operation performed at the back, and the colossus was ready to be pulled up. I caused it to be well secured on the car, and the ropes so placed that the power might be divided. I stationed men with levers at each side of the car, to assist occasionally, if the colossus should be inclined to turn to either side. In this manner I kept it safe from falling. Lastly, I placed men in the front, distributing them equally at the four ropes, while others were ready to change the rollers alternately. Thus I succeeded in getting it removed the distance of several yards from its original place.79

As for the Russians, placing the 23-ton Sphinxes on their final resting place was definitely a success, but they had experience with moving far greater weights over distances. The boulder on which French sculptor Étienne Maurice Falconet’s equestrian monument to Peter I (The Bronze Horseman) stands is a single granite block found 20 kilometers from St. Petersburg in 1768, and it was approximately 1200 metric tons. The colossal granite monolith was moved 45 meters per day, with the help of 16 lifting machines and rails and copper balls, to the bank of the Neva, and then loaded on a large enough barge, steadied by two Cutters of the Imperial Navy, to be transferred to St. Petersburg.80

78 Diane Harle, “Nestor L’Hôte, ‘ami et compagnon de Champollion’, (1804–42),” in Sesto Congresso internazionale di egittologia: Atti, ed. Jean Leclant, vol. 2 (Turin: International Association of Egyptologists, 1993), 173. Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” in The Making of the American Essay, ed. John D’Agata (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2016), 177–178. 79 Giovanni Belzoni, Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries within the Pyramids, Temples, Tombs, and Excavations in Egypt and Nubia (London: John Murray, 1820), 44. 80 Alexander M. Schenker, The Bronze Horseman: Falconet’s Monument to Peter the Great (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 135–152.

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Conclusion: Joining the European Imperial Cityscape of Egyptian Monuments The Sphinxes, carved out of the rarest, the most beautiful and the most exquisite granite, fit perfectly into the image of the imperial capital, the most granite city in Russia. There are several other androsphinxes of Amenhotep III in other cities like Cairo, New York, Zagreb, etc., but the sphinxes in St. Petersburg exceed all the others in size, in quality and in craftsmanship.81 St. Petersburg, unlike the former capital of Moscow, had gained an international façade, and just like many other European capitals, it needed a grandiose Egyptian artifact that would decorate the city. Olenin in his report to the emperor autocrat underscored this detail, maintaining that these sphinxes would make their contribution to the greatness of Russia and that he prayed that these marvels would decorate the imperial capital for the next 55 centuries.82 It seems that for the authorities, their acquisition was a matter of prestige, a glorious act in the name of Russia and a message that Russia was an active member of the international community in acquiring artifacts and creating her own collections as in other fields. Also, to buy an authentic Egyptian obelisk and place it in one of the squares of the capital seemed beyond possibility, so the best alternative to an obelisk would be the sphinxes of Amenhotep, the symbols of power, eternity, wisdom—and in how many ways could an obelisk emulate a sphinx of the most perfect posture? The Russian language has two verbs relating to education: one is obrazovanie, which simply means the transmission of knowledge, while the other one is vospitanie, meaning the molding of the character in a new way either retroactively or progressively. Richard Pipes shows that the Imperial Russian rulers never chose vospitanie.83 Considering the Russian common people, he was right; also, the Russian tsars lacked the means and material facilities to embrace this line to mold the character of all of their subjects. On the other hand, bearing in mind the reforms of Peter the Great, the tsars and tsarinas had chosen progressively to transform the Russian gentry, intending to give its members a new identity, and to a great degree the Russian royal authority was successful in transforming the Russian gentry in many respects, so much so that, parts of which being too Europeanized, some demanded a more progressive political regime as Decembrists attempted to topple autocracy. Nicholas I, the archconservative, chose to mold (vospitat) the Russian elite by reversing time and by imposing on them conservative ideas and a conservative 81 Solkin, “Sphinxes of St. Petersburg,” 203. 82 A.N. Olenin, Otchet prezidenta Imperatorskoi akademii khudozhestv s 1817 po 1834 god (St. Petersburg, 1834), 16. 83 Richard Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime (New York: Knopf, 1993), 314.

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worldview based on the inviolability of the royal family. Nicholas I vigorously worked and assigned fine arts a special role to reinvigorate autocracy. The Academy of Arts was entrusted with control over the artistic life of the country, which could be deemed an ideological counteroffensive under the slogan “autocracy, Orthodoxy, nationality.” He personally evaluated the works of painting and sculpture and himself approved architectural projects, commissioned monuments imitating ancient architectural models, and purchased authentic sphinxes for esthetic purposes, subordinating them to the main goal: the transformation of St. Petersburg into a citadel of autocracy, and he personally chose the location for the sphinxes to be placed: one of the most frequented streets in St. Petersburg visible to everyone, local or foreign. Surely the great flooding of 1824, which claimed the lives of at least 700 people, was a serious blow to the imperial regime’s mighty image. Life in the capital returned to normal only after several years, and to bring the unruly Neva under control through a series of moderate flood control systems with the construction of piers and embankments by piling up granite on both of its banks became a matter of prestige for the Russian imperial authorities.84 Also, to decorate it with model buildings, bridges, and pieces of art was the expression of the Russian imperial vision to create a habitable haven in the middle of an inhabitable environment.85 Two granite Amenhoteps are definitely the most precious pieces of art along the whole Neva on both banks. Their placement on the pier just opposite the building of the Russian Academy of Fine Arts is the peak of the Russian Egyptomania. They were thought to be the items to beautify the city. The Russians who took part in the purchase of the sphinxes had every reason to pride themselves about their success. The proportionality of the parts was impeccable. Their polish was still not worn away even after 3,200 years. They were decorated with double crowns, a feature few sphinxes have. As one Russian scholar elegantly put it in 1949: “Such sphinxes depicting Amenhotep III, which were skillfully sculpted, with a double crown, with such an abundance of epigraphic material and so well preserved, have not yet been found, except for ours. This gives us the right to speak of them as unique works of ancient Egyptian art.”86 It might seem to be a paradox, but with the placement of the sphinxes in their final location, the heat of this fashion died out. The tsar’s new chairman of the Ministry of Education (Ministerstvo Narodnogo Prosveshcheniia, literally the Ministry of Enlightenment) was the ultraconservative Sergei Uvarov (1786– 84 R.A. Nezhikhovskii, Reka Neva i Nevskaya guba (Leningrad: Gidrometeoizdat, 1981), 43. 85 Randall Dills, “Cracks in the Granite: Paternal Care, the Imperial Façade, and the Limits of Authority in the 1824 St. Petersburg Flood,” Journal of Urban History 40, no. 3 (2014): 489– 482. 86 E.V. Cherezov, “Nadpisi na leningradskikh sfinksakh,” Vestnik Drevnii Istorii 27, no. 1 (1949): 92.

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1855), an experienced and effective bureaucrat and also a productive ideologist who played a key role in the formulation and the implementation of Russian nationalism during Nicholas’ reign.87 He had started his job in the same year as that when the Buena Speranza anchored across the Academy of Fine Arts building in 1832, and he had other designs to tame independent spirits and wipe the revolutionary ideas from the face of Russia and preferred to rely on the identity of Russianness and orthodoxy. Shortly after 1834, the craze for Egypt subsided in favor of a more sensible and more scientific interest in Ancient Egypt, and while the Russian public to a great degree lost its interest in Ancient Egypt, a new group of Russian scholars started to emerge who slowly elevated Russia to one of the leading countries within the small circle of ancient Egyptian studies by the end of the century. When people gazed at these sphinxes, they all perceived different things. For the French statesmen, they were simply exotica, artifacts that were unusual and exciting since they had been inherited from a distant culture about which still little was known. But for the Russian statesmen, they were much more than items of exotica. They were not only the items to beautify St. Petersburg, but also items to be grabbed from the grip of their competitors whom the Russian elite looked at with envious eyes as France was considered the center of European civilization, an intellectual, artistic cultural magnet and a model country for all of Europe. So, to beat the French buyers in the acquisition of these sphinxes meant a glorious act for the Russian authorities, and these Egyptian marvels were no more relics from the past, but representative of Russia’s success against a leading European power in acquiring them. These sphinxes were also symbols of power and authority, bearing the face of one of the most successful military and political leaders of Ancient Egypt. However, when the two Russian revolutions broke out, most of the symbols of the past were destroyed, while these two ancient Egyptian sphinxes were left untouched. After all, revolutionaries did not deem these artifacts a symbol of the autocratic power of Nicholas I.

87 Alexei Miller, The Romanov Empire and Nationalism (Budapest: CEU press, 2006), 139.

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Bibliography Primary Sources Anonymous. “Khozhenie Gostia Vasilia 1465–1466 gg.” Pravoslavnyi palestinskii sbornik 6 (1884). Anonymous. “Materialy dlia novago ustava Imperatorskoi akademii nauk i sostoiashchikh pri nei muzeev.” Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia 125, no. 4 (1865): 95– 281. Barsukov, N.P. Stranstvovaniia Vasiliia Grigorovicha-Barskogo po sviatym mestam vostoka s 1723 po 1747 g. St. Petersburg: Stasjulevicˇ, 1885–1887. Belzoni, Giovanni. Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries within the Pyramids, Temples, Tombs, and Excavations in Egypt and Nubia. London: John Murray, 1820. Champollion, Jean François. Lettres écrites d’Egypte et de Nubie en 1828 et 1829: Collection complète, accompagnée de trois mémoires inédits et de planches. Paris: Didot, 1833. D’Athanasi, Giovanni. A Brief Account of the Researches and Discoveries in Upper Egypt Made under the Direction of Henry Salt, ESQ. London: John Hearne, 1836. Kazanskii, P.S. “Vospominaniie ob Andree Nikolaeviche Muraveve.” Dushepoleznoe chtenie 3 (1877): 359–389. Lentin, A., transl. and ed. Voltaire and Catherine the Great: Selected Correspondence. Cambridge: Oriental Research Partners, 1974. Minutoli, Wolfhardine A. von. Recollections of Egypt. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Carey 1827. Muravev, Andrei N. Moi Vospominaniia, Moscow, 1913. Olenin, A.N. Otchet prezidenta Imperatorskoi akademii khudozhestv s 1817 po 1834 god. St. Petersburg, 1834. Polnoe sobranie zakonov. Collection 2, volume 4, decree no. 2668. Sakharov, I.P., ed. Skazaniia russkago naroda. St. Petersburg, 1849. Semenov, M.O. Vospominaniie ob A.N. Muraveve. Kiev, 1875. Senkovskii, Osip. “Egipetskie drevnosti v S. Peterburg.” Severnaia pchela, January 20, 1825. Sulima, S. “A.N. Muravev.” Russkii arkhiv 2 (1876): 353–356. Tolstoi, M. Pamiati Andreia Nikolaevicha Muraveva: Pismo k M M. Evreinovu. Moscow, 1874. Vasilchikov, A. A. “Zapiski grafa Aleksandra Ivanovicha Ribopera.” Russkii Arkhiv 2, no. 5 (1877): 35.

Research literature Ahmida, Ali Abdullatif. Beyond Colonialism and Nationalism in the Maghrib. New York: MacMillan, 2009. Akinsha, Konstantin, and Grigorij Kozlov. The Holy Place: Architecture, Ideology, and History in Russia. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

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Aksenova, Anastasia A. “Frantsuzskie i russkie puteshestvenniki v Egipte v kontse XVIIInachale XIX v.” Vestnik Rossiiskogo universiteta druzhby narodov: Seriia: Vseobshchaia istoriia 2 (2014): 58–64. Ananieva, Anna. “Denkmal im Garten: Strategien medialer Inszenierung der russischosmanischen Kriege im Landschaftspark von Zarskoe Selo.” In Die Türkenkriege des 18. Jahrhunderts: Wahrnehmen – Wissen – Erinnern, edited by Wolfgang Zimmermann, and Josef Wolf, 313–337. Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2017. Antsiferov, Nikolai. Dusha Peterburga. Moscow: BMM, 2014. Bauval, Robert, and Ahmed Osman. Breaking the Mirror of Heaven: The Conspiracy to Suppress the Voice of Ancient Egypt. Rochester, VT: Bear & Company, 2012. Beliakov, V.V. Sfinksy nad Nevoi: Egipet v russkoi kulture. Moscow: IV RAN, 2015. Belova, Galina A. “L’Egyptologie russe avant Golenischeff.” Égypte: Afrique et Orient 4 (1996): 26–29. Bierbrier, Morris. The Tomb-Builders of the Pharaohs. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2003. Blakesley, Rosalind P. “Sculpting in Tiaras: Grand Duchess Maria Fedorovna as a Producer and Consumer of the Arts.” In Women and Material Culture, 1660–1830, edited by Jennie Batchelor, 71–85. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Bosworth, C.E. “Henry Salt, Consul in Egypt 1816–1827 and Pioneer Egyptologist.” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 57, no. 1 (1974): 69–91. Buchwald, Jed Z., and Diane Greco Josefowicz. The Zodiac of Paris: How an Improbable Controversy over an Ancient Egyptian Artifact Provoked a Modern Debate between Religion and Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Buzykina, Iu.N. “Vasilii Grigorovich-Barskii: Pervootkryvatel khristianskoi arkhitektury Sirii.” Rossiiskii Zhurnal istorii tserkvi 1, no.2 (2020): 22–34. Çelik, Zeynep. About Antiquities: Politics of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. Chaadaev, P.Ia. Filosoficheskie pisma: Pismo vtoroe. Moscow, 1989. Cherezov, E.V. “Nadpisi na leningradskikh sfinksakh.” Vestnik drevnii istorii 27, no. 1 (1949): 92–100. Cross, Anthony. “A Corner of a Foreign Field: The British Embassy in St. Petersburg, 1863– 1918.” The Slavonic and East European Review 88, no. 1–2, (2010): 328–358. D’Alton, Martina. The New York Obelisk, or, How Cleopatra’s Needle Came to New York and What Happened When It Got Here. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993. Dills, Randall. “Cracks in the Granite: Paternal Care, the Imperial Façade, and the Limits of Authority in the 1824 St. Petersburg Flood.” Journal of Urban History 40, no. 3 (2014): 479–496. Fagan, Brian M., and Nadia Durrani. A Brief History of Archaeology: Classical Times to the Twenty-First Century. London: Routledge, 2016. Fagan, Brian M. The Rape of the Nile: Tomb Robbers, Tourists, and Archaeologists in Egypt. New York: Scribner, 1975. Harlé, Diane. “Nestor L’Hôte, ‘ami et compagnon de Champollion’ (1804–42).” In Sesto Congresso internazionale di egittologia: Atti, ed. by Jean Leclant, 167–175. Vol. 2. Turin: International Association of Egyptologists, 1993. Hayden, Peter. “The Russian Stowe: Benton Seeley’s Guidebooks as a Source of Catherine the Great’s Park at Tsarskoe Selo.” Garden History 19, no. 1 (1991): 21–27.

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Jasanoff, Maya. Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850. New York: Knopf, 2005. Kameneva, M., G. Lukianova, and D. Tavberidze. “Foreign Relations and Inter-Civilizational Interaction from a Social-Political Perspective: The Case of Russia, Iran and Egypt.” European Research Studies Journal 21, no. 2 (2018): 499–513. Kamil, Jill. Aswan and Abu Simbel: History and Guide. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1993. Kapustina, Tat’iana A. “Nicholas I.” Russian Studies in History 34, no. 3 (1995): 7–38. Karamzin, Nikolai M. Istoriia gosudarstva Rossiiskogo. Vol. 1. St. Petersburg, 1818. Katsnelson, I. S. “Materialy dlia istorii egiptologii v Rossii.” Vestnik drevnei istorii 2 (1947): 207–231. Khartanovich, M.F. Letopis Kunstkamera, 1714–1836. St. Petersburg: MAE RAN, 2014. Kulikova, A.M. Rossiiskoe vostokovedenie XIX veka v litsakh. St. Petersburg: Peterburgskoe Vostokovedenie, 2001. Labanov, S.S. “Idei zodchestva v russkoi mysli nachala XIX Veka.” Stroitelstvo: Nauka i obrazovanie 3 (2014). Lisovoi, N.N. “Fenomen A. N. Muravеva i russko-ierusalimskie otnosheniia pervoi poloviny XIX veka.” Pravoslavnyi palestinskii sbornik 103 (2005): 4–20. Loktionov, Alexandre A. “Of Pilgrims and Poets, Prisoners and Politics: The Story of Egyptology in Russia.” Raduga 1 (2004): 68–73. MacDonald, Lindsay, et. al. “Imaging the Egyptian Obelisk at Kingston Lacy.” In EVA ’15: Proceedings of the Conference on Electronic Visualisation and the Arts, 252–260. Swindon: BCS Learning & Development, 2015. Marsot, Afaf Lutfi Al-Sayyid. Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Mayes, Stanley. The Great Belzoni: The Circus Strongman who Discovered Egypt’s Ancient Treasures. London: I.B. Tauris, 2003. McGeough, Kevin M. “Imagining Ancient Egypt as the Idealized Self in Eighteenth-Century Europe.” In Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory in a Global Context: From Consumerism to Celebrity Culture, edited by Ileana Popa Baird and Christina Ionescu, 89–110. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Mikhailov, A.V., D.R. Petrov and S. Iu. Khurumov. Obratnyi perevod: Russkaia i zapadnoevropeiskaia kultura: Problemy vzaimosviazei. Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kultury, 2000. Miller, Alexei. The Romanov Empire and Nationalism. Budapest: CEU press, 2006. Miller, Daniel. “Materiality: An Introduction.” In Materiality, edited by Daniel Miller, 1–50. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. –. Stuff. Malden: Polity Press, 2010. Mokletsova, I.V. “Drevnii Egipet v tvorcheskoii biografii A.N. Muraveva.” Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta: Seriia 19: Lingvistika i mezhkulturnaya kommunikatsiia 2 (2015): 88–97. –. “Khudozhestvennoe tvorchestvo, publitsisticheskaia i prosvetitelskaia deiatelnost A.N. Muraveva v kontekste russkoi literatury i kultury XIX veka.” PhD diss., Moskovskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet, 2013. Muhlestein, Kerry. “European Views of Egyptian Magic and Mystery: A Cultural Context for ‘The Magic Flute’.” Brigham Young University Studies 43, no. 3 (2004): 137–148.

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–. Russkaia nauka o drevnem vostoke do 1917. Leningrad: Izdatelstvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1927. Vilinbakhov, G. “The Hermitage ‘…Diverse and Vast …’.” Museum International 55, no. 1 (2003): 12–19. Vyskochkov, L.V., and A. A. Shelaeva. “‘Iziashchnye khudozhestva dostoiny monarshego pokrovitelstva…’: Imperator Nikolai I i russkie khudozhniki.” Iaroslavskii pedagogicheskii vestnik 3 (2016): 285–295. Whitehouse, Helen. “Egypt in the Snow.” In Imhotep Today: Egyptianizing Architecture, edited by Jean-Marcel Humbert and Clifford Price, 57–73. London: Routledge, 2011. Whittaker, Cynthia Hyla. ed. Visualizing Russia Fedor Solntsev and Crafting a National Past. Leiden: Brill, 2010.

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Conclusion: A Transottoman Lens on Object Mobilities in a longue durée

This volume reflects the wide disciplinary range of projects participating in the Object Mobility Working Group of the Transottomanica research program. The cooperation was particularly marked by the exchange between historical and arthistorical questions. The project on Anatolian carpets in Transylvania with three researchers with an art-historical, historical and art-technological background was put into a larger framework by a project on the Armenian carpet trade from Persia to Poland-Lithuania. In addition to a contribution on routes and infrastructures in the Ottoman Black Sea region in the nineteenth century, articles on raw materials (the coffee trade in sixteenth-century Egypt, metals in the Middle East in the fifteenth century, oil in the Black and Caspian Seas region in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), luxury goods (the Russian-Ottoman fur trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) and art objects (Egyptian antiquities in the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century) are represented in the book. The contributions of this volume focus on the material side of mobility by addressing the underlying infrastructures as well as the resources and the commodities themselves. This reflects a conceptual framework that resulted from the discussion and combination of several approaches such as materiality, material culture, consumer history, and actor-network theory (ANT, which was interesting for its inclusion of material objects among historical actors). Moreover, all contributions have included the change in the meaning of objects in their inquiry. As one of its main results, the volume demonstrates that the negotiation of meaning is based on mobility and is reflected both in the value of objects and in different types of use. In the following, some aspects of this result will be reconsidered briefly. The social meaning of objects can count as a core aspect of the consolidation of societal relations in general, as a more detailed examination of “clothing,” i. e. social practices of clothing and cloth production can show: objects such as textiles and clothes let the actors emerge and link the small but far-reaching merchant networks to larger and more localized consumer groups in the Trans-

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ottoman context, be it court cultures,1 urban elites or other social groups, such as (trans)regional clergy of all religions or the military. Seen from our meta-perspective, these social practices consolidated a Transottoman society, defined even in its non-moving parts by the impact of general mobility dynamics in our focus regions. Our volume tries to gather insight on such Transottoman social procedures from a very focused angle, directly zooming in on the objects and their impact. Reflecting namely ANT, infrastructure networks and routes were included in the approach to material mobilities: The routes that crossed and constituted the Black Sea region had established multiple connections between the coasts, their immediate hinterlands and, seen from a larger distance, faraway regions such as the Middle East, Northern Europe or Iran since ancient times, but did so with a renewed intensity during the Early Modern period, changing and developing steadily at least until the First World War. Objects were a constituent part of routes defined as durable networks. The incorporation of the whole Black Sea into the Ottoman Empire from the end of the fifteenth century rearranged many routes and stabilized them until the end of the eighteenth century. Then, due to the Russian expansion, but also because of the technological development of the nineteenth century, older Transottoman routes were changed into such that connected the region anew and even more so than earlier to the intensifying flows of globalizing trade and long-distance traffic. Nevertheless, with the political bipartition of the Black Sea, Florian Riedler’s chapter traces the slow erosion of the vision of one region, in contrast to the argumentation of Özveren, who distinguishes the emergence of a Black Sea region only after the end of the eighteenth century with the opening of the Black Sea as a transit route via Constantinople for Russian and international shipping.2 Actually, the routes used for the Early Modern trade were, to a certain degree, re-invented in the nineteenth century: in the seventeenth century they crossed the same territories as the flows of e. g. oil would do in a later epoch. Rivers such as the Volga, connecting the Caspian Sea via the Neva with the Baltic Sea via land since the Varangians and directly as a waterway via a canal system since 1800, or the Danube opening up a way to Central Europe via the Black Sea used to some degree since the Romans,3 were prone to gain new importance under new circumstances.

1 Albrecht Fuess and Jan-Peter Hartung, eds., Court Cultures in the Muslim World, 7th–19th Centuries (London: Routledge, 2011). 2 Y. Eyüp Özveren, “A Framework for the Study of the Black Sea World, 1789–1915,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 20, no. 1 (1997): 77–113. 3 Brian Campbell, Rivers and the Power of Ancient Rome (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 291–299.

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Albrecht Fuess shows how the Ottoman Empire’s power excelled during the sixteenth century among its neighboring peers situated within our geographical focus, not least because of a combination of geographic and demographic factors and the availability of all resources needed for the successful maintenance and expansion of an empire. One of the key instruments for Ottoman expansion was the development of a transport fleet. Not least in consequence of the help provided by the fleet, the Early Modern Ottoman Empire was able to expand from Southern Europe and Anatolia to the Middle East and the Northern Black Sea Coast: Transimperial or “Transottoman tensions”—in the sense of “Tensions of Europe,”4 assigning transnational infrastructural developments a socially and spatially constitutive agency—driven by economic and military logics gave transcontinental importance to exactly the empires in our focus. These “Transottoman tensions” were relevant for all involved mobility dynamics in our focus for a very long time. The example of oil can show how they were revived during the late nineteenth century, when the interest in petroleum helped to cause the escalation of global warfare right in the center of our focus area: Russian Baku, Iran and the Ottoman Middle East. These tensions gave our focus region global centrality, as has been shown in the chapter by Stefan Rohdewald for the cases of Baku, the Black Sea, the Danube and Baghdad. On this quite abstract level, and mutatis mutandis, we can see today’s Russian-Near Eastern entanglements or the competition between Turkey, Iran and the US from within the same globalized Transottoman prism. All contributions to this book underline that looking through a Transottoman lens at the subjects of the investigation and the state of research, which is often still restricted to national or bilateral relations, quickly leads to Transottoman results: where in the past dichotomies were seen and argued, the Transottoman approach discovers heterogeneity on all sides involved, and therefore complex entanglements across any borders were the norm. In consequence, practices even of a conflict-like nature are recognizable from an overarching perspective as interaction among actors, which were based on a common repertoire of frameworks and language fields or “regimes of value.”5 This was demonstrated, for example, by the analysis of carpets, their distribution and reception throughout the Transottoman focus area. Carpets were transformed by the transport or mobility of knowledge about their production and use in different areas by different actors within our focus area and beyond: While Persian and Anatolian carpets were also common in Moscow and Russia, their distribution there did not 4 Tensions of Europe. Research Network on History, Technology and Europe, accessed November 25, 2020, https://www.tensionsofeurope.eu/network/. 5 Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

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lead to as strong a new discursive and social prestige as was the case in PolandLithuania. There they played a central role in the adaption of fashion and luxury from the East in the context of the imagination of a “Sarmatic,” own, and not foreign or exotic material culture especially of the nobility and the royal court. “Polish carpets” as an invention of the nineteenth century stand as terminus technicus for silk carpets, mostly produced in Persia, often on behalf of Polish buyers or Armenian merchants, with coats of arms already adapted to meet the demand, which were then spread beyond Poland, to Western Europe, among other places. In the chosen Transottoman focus, we observed a condensation of the transport of carpets and especially in the negotiation of reinterpretations of their functional, practical, social and discursive power. Manufactured in Persia and the Ottoman Empire, also as prayer rugs, they were given a different meaning and function in Poland-Lithuania or in the Ottoman tributary state of Transylvania: there the objects were known as “our carpets” in the early twentieth century and were never seen as anything foreign, either, but even and especially by the Transylvanian Saxons as something “of our own”—this result is likely to be different compared to the analysis of their distribution in areas beyond our focus. Through the example of carpet trading and the neat distinction of four phases in his contribution, Alexandr Osipian was able to consolidate a transcontinental view within our Transottoman focus on large and long-term networks. Their basis was their shared or negotiated value regimes concerning objects highly appreciated in Persia as well as in the Ottoman Empire, including its European parts, namely Transylvania (Armer, Hanke, Kregeloh), and especially in PolandLithuania. The several steps of appropriation distinguished by Osipian are actually the same as with china, silk and oriental carpets and cotton “Indiennes” in our Transottoman focus. Moreover, these steps of appropriation can also be observed in Europe’s relationship to Asia as a whole, reaching from Venice and the Netherlands to India and China. There are many examples that can confirm this observation, especially those objects made in the Eastern fashion in Europe. For example, in 1777 the Polish King and Lithuanian Grand Duke Stanislaus II August Poniatowski gave Sultan Abdulhamid I a porcelain dish fashioned in Japanese Imari style, produced in Warsaw, with a dedicational inscription from the Polish king to the sultan in Ottoman language.6 It was probably not his aim to enforce an imagined cultural divide between “East” and “West,” but to perform something commonly valued between the empires and among their elites. Long distance mobility of objects and even their large scale appropriation, though, of 6 Jan K. Ostrowski, ed., The Land of the Winged Horsemen: Art in Poland, 1572–1764, Exhibition Catalogue Walters Art Gallery Baltimore et al. (Alexandria, VA: Art Services International, 1999), 348.

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course did not necessarily mean in all cases or even a majority of cases their involvement in a coherent societal integration of the consumers in a larger, Transottoman context of meaning, even less so if sources about such contexts do not exist or are missing, as in the Transylvanian case discussed in this volume. Thus, all in all, the mobility lens has enabled the analysis of several dimensions of mobility and transport as well as changes in meaning and function that are recognizable in time and space, without having to assume a direct spatial path of the flow of goods. Arkadiusz Blaszczyk’s chapter confirms this with the example of the use and circulation of furs as raw materials and in processed form. While research usually only focuses on the “flow” of furs from Russia to the Ottoman Empire, the question of how the raw material was picked up, used, processed and resold in the destinations, as well as the feedback resulting from it in the original area (Siberia) remains hidden: we needed the Transottoman lens to become aware of these feedback effects, and also to consider the use of furs from the Ottoman Empire (leopards) and their appropriation in Poland-Lithuania in order to analyze them within the same context. The partner ERC consolidator project Luxury and Fashion (New Europe College, Bucharest) has come up with similar results concerning the “Ottomanization” of the local style as a result—which in the geographical expansion also applies in part to Moscow when it comes e. g. to brocade garments or the spread of textiles for the orthodox clergy.7 However, the style of the nagol’naia fur coats, which was common in Russia and the Caucasus region, cannot simply be described as Transottoman, as the style was not accepted within the Ottoman Empire for a long time. Even the supposedly Mongolian hanging seals on Crimean Tatar documents (baysa) can actually be deconstructed as an appropriation of Moscovite models, which were imposed on the Crimean Khanate by Moscow as part of a “tournament of value” (Appadurai). The same applies to the “flows” of metallic raw materials to the sometimes different but always compatible local and long-distance appreciation regimes of precious metals such as gold and silver in the competition of Iranian and Ottoman imperial needs. It has already been stated for the silk trade that until 1800 the value generated by the transcontinental, land-based trade from Asia to Europe was relevant even in comparison to the financial importance of the Western European networks stretching to Asia and that it was in the hands of the indigenous players of our Transottoman focus: only after 1800 did European trade

7 Gülru Necipog˘lu and Alina Payne, eds., Histories of Ornament: From Global to Local (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 153; Nikolaos Vryzidis, “Persian Textiles in the Ottoman Empire: Evidence from Greek Sacristies,” Iran: Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies 56, no. 2 (2018): 231.

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networks gain in importance from the coasts and European hegemony begin.8 All the more evident is the global relevance of the central functions the crude oil market played in the Transottoman focus: From the end of the nineteenth century, Baku on the Caspian Sea became a center of global oil production, with new dynamics of transport in the form of canals, railways and what was then the world’s longest pipeline in existence from the Caspian to the Black Sea. The world’s first oil tanker was used on the Caspian Sea and the Volga. Also and especially from an infrastructural perspective, a condensation of routes, paths, then port cities, canals, competing railway line projects etc. is to be noted precisely through and especially in our Transottoman focus area because of the long-distance and local trade. Thanks to the Transottoman lens’s sensitivity to long-term changes, shifts in some transport routes can therefore be stressed and at the same time their replacement or supplementation by new infrastructures can be contextualized within a larger setting of old, indirectly renewed routes (Via Militaris, Silk Road Route through the Transcaucasus from the Caspian to the Black Sea). The concrete use of a “Transottoman view” thus appears to be extremely productive. The regions in focus can be described as different and yet in common with each other, albeit not simply as influenced by Persia (Persianate), and also not just as a “post-Byzantine Commonwealth,” just as only the assumption of “Ottomanization” falls short: the multi-persperspectival view—we call it “Transottoman”—seems to be suitable for exploring large-scale contexts and negotiations of connotation of the material culture or mobile objects in our area of focus. Yet, there remains the concern to take even greater account of Persian or Persian-influenced contexts in the overarching Transottoman context with regard to the Caucasus and Russia, but also Poland-Lithuania and all parts of the Ottoman Empire. Examples of material culture could sharpen our Transottoman lens: the focus on the reception and transformation of Persian or Ottomanized Persian objects, for example in European parts of the Ottoman Empire and in Poland-Lithuania, can lead to further insights throughout the Transottoman context if we connect these phenomena with feedback effects of such object mobilities in Persia. Very old objects could—by their mobility—be involved in the production of new meaning, too, as Mehmet Tepeyurt shows with the Egyptian Sphinxes in St. Petersburg. Yet, if this meaning was not least leading to foster imperial greatness in a transregional or universal setting, it was not totally different from but rather quite similar to the function these monuments supposedly had in ancient Egypt. Their translation to the North Eastern shores of the Baltics was, 8 Rudolph Matthee, The Politics of Trade in Safavid Iran: Silk for Silver, 1600–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

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without overinterpretation, not least to give the new, “European” capital of the Empire a central position with the help of cultural artifacts convertible in a global scale. Seen from a Transottoman angle, the Egyptian link was enforced here to foster the performance of imperial centrality concerning the Transottoman area, in competition with the Ottoman Empire and Persia, not less than to the rest of the world’s great powers. The volume and this conclusion have focused on the changing meaning of objects from the Early Modern period to the turn of the twentieth century. Yet, it can certainly be stated that it was not only in these periods that flows of commodities within and across the Transottoman geographical area were intense and global. Since Antiquity, Indian and even Chinese goods were shipped to the Roman Near East, including Egypt,9 and during the High and Late Middle Ages, Chinese silk and its appropriation along the routes to the Near East and Europe were of global importance. Somewhat later this story was repeated with porcelain, be it the original or the pieces produced in I˙znik and since the seventeenth century in Delft, and later in Meissen, following the Chinese fashion. Even as china was also adapted, answering regional demand in the Arabic parts of the Ottoman Empire, and despite these important local renegotiations, one should not because of this totally dismiss10 the larger picture11: on a very abstract level, one can without doubt distinguish quite clearly a global network and at least a minimally shared material and social value in porcelain across the continents— and especially via our Transottoman focus—over a very long time period. Thus, Transottoman object mobilities were always occurring not only within our focus regions, but have to be seen and contextualized in an even much larger spatial setting, still giving our Transottoman lens an even more important function: The regions in our focus have always been the interlocution or hinge between Africa, Asia and Europe, especially of Egypt, Asia and Europe and even more concretely the “Indian Ocean World” and Europe: Among the main characteristics of our Transottoman focus region, thus, was exactly its central function in the multiple and, in this focus, locally, spatially condensed linkages of the most important routes from China, South Asia and India as well as Eastern and Southern Africa to the Near East and further to the Mediterranean and the rest of Europe, not least via Central Asia and Eastern Europe, and especially via 9 Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 14–17. 10 Stacey Pierson, “The Movement of Chinese Ceramics: Appropriation in Global History,” Journal of World History 23, no. 1 (2012): 9–39; Anne Gerritsen and Stephen McDowall, “Global China: Material Culture and Connections in World History,” Journal of World History 23, no. 1 (2012): 3–8. 11 Hans Theunissen, “Dutch Tiles in 18th Century Ottoman Baroque-Rococo Interiors: Hünkâr Sofası and Hünkâr Hamamı,” Sanat Tarihi Dergisi 18, no. 2 (2009): 71–135.

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the Ottoman Empire. These aspects are obviously not central in volumes interested in other spatial frames, e. g., in volumes on European infrastructural networks our focus region is only mentioned in passing,12 whereas in globalized volumes it is not considered, either.13 Nevertheless, these transcontinental linkages, which condense exactly in our Transottoman focus, play center stage in a very large, quite global setting, connecting Transottoman society to neighbors and partners.

Bibliography Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Campbell, Brian. Rivers and the Power of Ancient Rome. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Diogo, Maria Paula, and Dirk van Laak. Europeans Globalizing: Mapping, Exploiting, Exchanging. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Frankopan, Peter. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Fuess, Albrecht, and Jan-Peter Hartung, ed. Court Cultures in the Muslim World, 7th–19th Centuries. London: Routledge, 2011. Gerritsen, Anne, and Stephen McDowall. “Global China: Material Culture and Connections in World History.” Journal of World History 23, no. 1 (2012): 3–8. Högselius, Per, Arne Kaijser, and Erik van der Vleuten. Europe’s Infrastructure Transition: Economy, War, Nature. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Ostrowski, Jan K., ed. The Land of the Winged Horsemen: Art in Poland, 1572–1764. Exhibition Catalogue Walters Art Gallery Baltimore et al. Alexandria, VA: Art Services International 1999. Matthee, Rudolph. The Politics of Trade in Safavid Iran: Silk for Silver, 1600–1730. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Necipog˘lu, Gülru, and Alina Payne, eds. Histories of Ornament: From Global to Local. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. Özveren, Y. Eyüp. “A Framework for the Study of the Black Sea World, 1789–1915.” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 20, no. 1 (1997): 77–113. Pierson, Stacey. “The Movement of Chinese Ceramics: Appropriation in Global History.” Journal of World History 23, no. 1 (2012): 9–39. Theunissen, Hans. “Dutch Tiles in 18th Century Ottoman Baroque-Rococo Interiors: Hünkâr Sofası and Hünkâr Hamamı.” Sanat Tarihi Dergisi 18, no. 2 (2009): 71–135. Vryzidis, Nikolaos. “Persian Textiles in the Ottoman Empire: Evidence from Greek Sacristies.” Iran: Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies 56, no. 2 (2018): 228–236.

12 Per Högselius, Arne Kaijser, and Erik van der Vleuten, Europe’s Infrastructure Transition: Economy, War, Nature (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 13 Maria Paula Diogo and Dirk van Laak, Europeans Globalizing: Mapping, Exploiting, Exchanging (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

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List of Contributors

Stephanie Armer is a historian and museologist specialized on the history of confessionalization in early modern Europe. Her research includes the transcultural use and usage of material objects like Anatolian carpets in a Transottoman context. She works as managing director of the Jura-Museum in Eichstätt, Germany. Arkadiusz Blaszczyk (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1609-3873) is a historian focusing his research on the Crimea and the Eastern Balkans under Ottoman rule as well as the Polish(-Lithuanian) and Russian experience with the steppe and its peoples (and vice versa). His interests include the history of violence and emotions, trade and diplomacy, as well as food and material culture with an emphasis on the early modern period. Currently he is research assistant at the Department of Eastern European History of the University of Giessen. Robert Born (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3491-8680) is an art historian specialized on the transcultural exchanges between East Central Europe and the Orient. 2014–2015 Curator (together with Guido Messling, Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien and Michał Dziewulski, Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie) of the Exhibition “The Sultan’s World – The Ottoman Orient in Renaissance Art,” on display in Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts and Kraków, Muzeum Narodowe. 2018–2021 research fellow in the Transottomanica Priority Programme. Currently he is a research fellow at the Federal Institute for Culture and History of the Germans in Eastern Europe in Oldenburg. Albrecht Fuess studied History and Islamic Studies at the University of Cologne and Cairo University. Since 2010 he is a Professor of Islamic Studies at the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies (CNMS) at the Philipps-University Marburg. His main research interest are the History of the Near and Middle East from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries and the contemporary Muslim presence in Europe. He is part of the coordination team of Transottomanica.

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Eva Hanke is a textile conservator. From 2017 to 2020 she collaborated in the framework of the priority program Transottomanica in the project “Early Modern Oriental Trade and Transylvanian-Saxon Identity Building: The Ottoman Rugs of the Protestant Parish Church A. C. Bistritz/Bistrit,a (Romania) in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum.” Anja Kregeloh is an art historian specialized on textile art, arts and crafts, contemporary sculpture and design. She led the research project “Early Modern Oriental Trade and Transylvanian-Saxon Identity Building: The Ottoman Rugs of the Protestant Parish Church A. C. Bistritz/Bistrit,a (Romania) in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum.” She is currently working in a research project on eighteenth-century silk for the Deutsches Textilmuseum in Krefeld. Alexandr Osipian (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4243-2939) is a historian specialized in the cultural transfer between the Middle East and Eastern Europe. His research focuses on early modern long-distance trade operated by Armenian merchant networks, and on the formal and informal conditions of trade in the region. He is a Research Fellow at the Free University of Berlin. Anthony T. Quickel (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5468-049X) is a historian specialized in Medieval Egypt and Mamluk Studies. Currently he is a research fellow at the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies (CNMS) at the University of Marburg and project coordinator of the EGYLandscape Project. Florian Riedler (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4908-3727) is a historian specialized in the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire. His research focuses on Ottoman urban history of Istanbul and Ottoman Balkan cities and on the history of infrastructure in Southeast Europe. He is scientific coordinator of the priority program Transottomanica at the Department for East and Southeast European History of the University of Leipzig. Stefan Rohdewald (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8318-9686) is professor for East and Southeast European History at the University of Leipzig. He is one of the coordinators and the chairman of the priority program Transottomanica. Mehmet Tepeyurt is a historian specialized in Russian history. He was a research fellow at the department of East European History at the University of Giessen.

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Index

Abbas I (shah of Safavid Iran) 145, 160, 179, 182 ‘Abd al-Ghaffa¯r 86 Abu¯ al-Tayyib al-Ghazzi 84 ˙ actor-network theory (ANT) 10–12, 29, 62, 305f. Adrianople see Edirne Aegean 30, 48, 65 Agrefenii of Smolensk (c. 1370) 276 Ahmed I (Ottoman sultan, r. 1603–1617) 163, 184 Ahmet Pasha Suleshov (Süles¸og˘lı) 138 Ahmet Refik (Altınay) 122 Ahyolu see Pomorie airplanes 111f., 122 Akkerman see Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi Alba Iulia (Germ. Weißenburg; Hung. Gyulafehérvár) 246 Alborz 66 Aleppo 78, 87, 90, 119, 127, 132, 138f., 149– 152, 158, 165, 277 Alexander I (Tsar of Russia, r. 1801–1825) 285, 292f. Alexandretta see I˙skenderun Alexandria 71f., 75, 89, 92f., 161, 276, 278, 283, 286f., 290f. Alexei I (Tsar of Russia, r. 1645–1676) 277 Ali Ufki Bey (Wojciech Bobowski, 1610– 1675) 146 Alfimov, Mikhail 134 Allash Bogatyr (Crim. Tat. Allas¸ Batır, envoy) 141f. amanat 127 Amasra (Amastris) 33

ambra 122f. Amenhotep III (r. 1391–1353 BCE) 273f., 285f., 297f. American Standard Oil 106 amiyat (office of the Crimean Khanate) 138, 140f. Amur Darya 32 anabiyim (title of the Crimean khan’s mother) 138 Anapa 38 Anatolia 10, 15, 21, 27, 30f., 33–35, 39f., 47, 49, 54f., 64–66, 68, 77, 79f., 109, 151, 154, 157f., 219f., 223f., 227–231, 233– 235, 244, 246, 250, 264–266, 277, 305, 307 Anchialos see Pomorie Anglo-Persian Oil Company 105 Ankara 189, 224 Anne Catherine Constance Vasa (Polish princess, 1619–1651) 179 Antep 277 Anthoine de Saint-Joseph, Antoine-Ignace (1749–1826) 42 Appadurai, Arjun (*1949) 13, 62, 100, 119, 120, 176, 210, 309 Aq Qoyunlu 230 Aras 39 Arkhangelsk 129, 135 Armenians 19, 36–38, 42, 44, 47, 51, 103– 105, 108, 111, 131f., 137f., 150, 159f., 162, 177–179, 181–183, 187–191, 194f., 201, 203f., 207, 209, 225, 279, 305, 308 armor 135, 185, 203, 207 artifacts 12, 61–63, 273–275, 279–283, 287f., 297, 299, 311

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Astrakhan 35, 38, 46, 77, 113 D’Athanasi, Giovanni (Greek: Giannis/ Yannis Athanasiou, 1798–1854) 285– 287, 296 August Mariette Pasha (François Auguste Ferdinand Mariette, 1821–1881) 280 automobiles 108, 111–113 Aytos 36f. Ayyubids 70 Azak see Azov Azerbaijan 39, 66, 114 Azov (Turk. Azak, Tana, Tanais) 30, 32f., 35, 37f., 41 Baghdad 32, 104, 109, 112, 114, 155, 229, 307 Baghdad railway 109, 112 Bahçasaray 128 Baikal 125 Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich (1895– 1975) 154 Baku 21, 48, 99, 101–104, 106–109, 111– 114, 307, 310 Balchik 46 Balkans 15, 49–51, 65, 68f., 72, 74, 77f., 92, 94, 191, 247 Baltic Sea 18, 31, 42, 108, 114, 306, 310 Bangkok 106 Barbaros Hayreddin Pasha (Ottoman Imperial Admiral, d. 1546) 87 Barcsay, Ákos (Prince of Transylvania, r. 1658–1660) 254 Batenkov, Gavriil S. (1793–1863) 275 Báthory, Stephen (Pol. Stefan Batory; Hung. István Báthory; Lit. Steponas Batoras: Prince of Transylvania, King of Poland, Grand Duke of Lithuania, 1533–1586) 178, 189, 198 Batumi (Batum) 38, 47f., 53, 106f. Batır Geray Beg (Lord of Crimean Mangits) 138 Bayazıd see Dog˘ubayazıt Bayezid II (Ottoman sultan, r. 1481–1512) 64, 200 beast masters 156 Beirut 77, 79, 108

Bellini, Gentile (ca. 1429–1507) 219, 223 Belyi, Andrei (1880–1934) 226, 274 Belzoni, Giovanni Battista (1778–1823) 286f., 296 Beszterce see Bistrit,a Bethlen, Gabriel (Hung. Bethlen, Gábor, Prince of Transylvania, r. 1613–1629) 246 Bihzad 228 Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi (Tyras; Maurocastro; Turk. Akkerman; Rum. Cetatea Alba˘) 30, 33, 36f. Bilohirsk (Karasubazar) 44 Bistrit,a (Germ. Bistritz; Hung: Beszterce) 21, 219f., 222, 225, 230, 235–242, 244, 249–260, 262, 265f. Bitola (Manastır) 110 Black Sea 18, 20f., 27–36, 38–51, 53–56, 65, 77, 99, 100, 106, 108, 113f., 163, 187, 224, 248, 305–307, 310 Blaramberg, Ivan P. (1772–1831) 283 blizhnye liudi 137 Blok, Alexander (1880–1921) 274 BNITO 106 boats see ships Boghos Bey Youssef (1775–1844) 280 book art 233f. Bosphorus 27, 30f., 35, 42, 55 Bra˘ila 42 Bra˘tianu, Gheorghe Ion (1898–1953) 18, 33 Branicki, Adam (1892–1947) 174 Branobel 99, 103, 106–108, 110, 112 Bras¸ov (Germ. Kronstadt; Hung. Brassó) 26, 247–250, 252f., 256, 258f., 262, 265 Braudel, Fernand Paul (1902–1985) 11, 31 Brenna, Vincenzo (1747–1820) 282 bridges 35, 37, 48, 52, 53, 285, 294, 298 Briusov, Valerii 273 brocade 132, 138, 141f., 149f., 182, 309 Brody 179, 181f. bronze 30, 62, 75f., 296 Bucak 33 Bucharest (Rum. Bucures¸ti) 48, 101, 106, 111, 309 Budapest 45, 235, 260, 262

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Bug 30 Bukalov, Afanasii Ivanovich (1859–1907) 165 Bukharov, Aleksei (envoy) 145 bullion 61, 63, 69f., 73–76, 123, 161f. Busbecq, Ogier Ghislain de (Imperial ambassador, 1522–1592) 151 Burgas 36, 46, 48, 50f. Bursa 39, 138, 141f., 149, 224, 229, 233, 277 – Green Mosque 233 Buryats 125 Butenеv, Ivan P. (1802–1836) 283 Byzantines, Byzantium 19, 30–33, 35, 164 Caffa see Feodosija Cairo 20, 71f., 74, 80, 83–86, 88, 90–95, 225, 228, 276, 277f., 280, 283, 290, 297 – Museum of Egyptian Antiquities 280 camels 28, 38, 40, 49, 53f., 56, 71, 155, 225, 236 Cameron, Charles (1745–1812) 282 cannons 35, 75–78 caravans 18, 36–40, 44, 49, 55, 67, 69, 89, 132, 189–191, 207, 209, 225, 277 caravanserais 35, 37, 39, 40, 189, 277 carnival 154–156 carpets see rugs Caspian 21, 32, 38f., 42, 46, 48, 53, 66, 99, 100, 102, 106–108, 113f., 305f., 310 Castiglione, Francesco de 283–285 Catherine II, the Great (Russian Empress, r. 1762–1796) 282, 292f. Catherine of Habsburg (1533–1572) 178 Caucasus 15, 19, 39, 46, 48, 53, 102, 104, 113, 309, 310 – Darial gorge 53 Champollion, Jean-François (1790–1832) 275, 286, 288, 290, 295 Chersonesus 30 Chilia (Turk. Kili, Kilia) 30 China 15, 32, 34, 78, 114, 308, 311 china (porcelain) 114, 308, 311 chintamani pattern 141f. Chios 43 Chuckchi 127 Circassia, Circassians 16, 49, 53, 142

clergy 123, 132, 158, 161, 181, 185, 203f., 258, 306, 309 climate 29, 65f., 68 Clodt von Ju¨ rgensburg, Peter (1805–1867) 294 Cluj-Napoca (Germ. Klausenburg; Hung. Kolozsvár) 253 coaches 28, 37, 47, 49–53, 55, 178, 190, 205, 207 coal 27, 47, 78, 100f., 109, 112, 114, 179 coats 21, 124f., 128, 131, 135, 137f., 140, 142–146, 148–150, 154–157, 182, 202, 308f. – odnokriatka 138 – nagolnaia 140–143 – ferace (feryazi) 144–146, 149f. – dolama 145f. coffee 11, 20f., 83–95, 123, 157, 305 coins 14, 63, 72–75, 131, 136 – akçe 74, 159f., 162–164 – ashrafi 71, 73 – dinar 71–73, 78, 91, 122f., 135f., 139f., 187 – dirham 71, 73, 75 – shahi 75 – sultani 72 – tala 73 Comes Saxonum 276 commodities 13, 21, 61–63, 83–86, 88–95, 99f., 120f., 123, 128, 153, 176f., 185, 203, 219, 224, 246f., 249, 265f., 305 conservation 174, 262 Constant,a (Turk. Köstence) 36, 47 copper 63, 70, 74–79, 126, 296 Corniact, Constantin (Greek merchant) 131 Cossacks 34f., 38, 128, 164 cotton 30, 94, 100, 114, 128, 203, 247, 308 Counter-Reformation 185 Cracow (Pol. Kraków) 101, 130f., 178, 203 Crimea 18, 30, 33f., 37f., 41, 44, 47, 224 Crimean Khan 130, 146, 148f., 161, 200 Crimean Khanate 18, 137, 203, 309 customs 76, 88f., 127, 129, 131f., 163, 165, 177, 187, 189f., 224, 247–249, 259 Cyprus 71

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Damascus 138, 149, 277 damask 130 Damietta 89, 92 Damiri, Muhammad ad- 152 Daniil (Igumen) 276 Danube 30f., 33f., 36f., 39f., 42, 44–48, 50f., 65, 107, 112, 114, 248, 306f. – delta 30f., 38, 42, 44f., 48, 51, 67 Danzig see Gdan´sk Dead Sea 68 Decembrists 291 Delft 114, 311 Dendera Zodiac 283 Derbend 38 design revolution 220, 226, 228f., 234 Desna 51 Deutsche Bank 105, 107, 109 Djan Ahmed (envoy) 137, 159 Dnieper 30–33, 36 Dobrich (Turk. Pazarcık; Rum. Dobrici or Bazargic) 37 Dobruja (Rum. Dobrogea; Bulg. Dobrudzˇa; Turk. Dobruca) 41 doge 182, 244 Dog˘ubayazıt 39 Don 30–33, 35, 37f. Dorpat see Tartu Dragantsi 163 Drovetti, Bernardino (1776–1852) 288 Dubno 193f. dyes 177, 225, 237, 247, 259, 266 Dzhugashvili, Iosif (Stalin, Josif Vissarionovich, 1878–1953) 111 economy of souls 125 Edirne (Adrianople) 37, 40, 48, 50, 78, 112, 178, 189, 200, 209, 249 Edward VI (King of England, r. 1547– 1553) 198 Egypt 16, 20f., 32, 67–71, 74, 77, 79, 83f., 87–95, 274–287, 290, 299, 305, 310f. Eid al-Adha, Eid al-Fitr 153 Elizaveta Petrovna (Empress of Russia, r. 1741–1762) 278, 292 envoys 13, 76, 134, 137f., 140–142, 144f., 148, 151f., 159–162, 164f., 179, 190

Ermak Timofeevich (d. 1585) 129, 135 Erzurum 39f., 55, 105 Ethiopia 83f., 152, 286, 290 Euphrates 47, 68 Evliya Çelebi (1611–ca. 1685) 28, 35–41, 46, 51, 53, 56, 123, 143, 150–152, 155, 160, 224f. experts 16, 21, 46, 80, 101–105, 196 Fas¸ see Poti and Rioni Feodosija (Caffa; Turk. Kefe; Gr. Theodosia) 30, 32, 34, 37, 161, 164, 188, 224 Fez 91 feathers 141, 160 Filaret, Patriarch of Moscow (1553–1633) 161 firearms 69, 75, 77f. fish 31, 34, 37, 101, 126, 139, 163 fish teeth see ivory Fiume see Rijeka flavonoids 237 Fletcher, Giles (envoy) 129 Fontanka 285, 294 France 34, 41f., 44–47, 50, 89, 104, 109, 113, 157, 279f., 284, 288, 290f., 292f., 299 Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg and Duke of Prussia (r. 1640–1688) 179 funerals 208, 256, 258f., 263f. fur 11, 14, 21, 32, 119, 121f., 124–131, 133, 135–146, 148–160, 162–166, 305, 309 – black fox 129, 132, 136, 143, 150, 159– 161 – edible dormice 130f. – ermine 124, 126, 139, 150, 152f., 155 – fox 130f., 140, 143, 153, 155, 158, 160 – leopard 155f., 158, 309 – lynx 135, 140, 150, 158 – marten 129, 131, 135f., 138, 140–143, 149, 153, 155, 158, 161f. – sable 119, 121–126, 128–136, 138, 140– 146, 149–155, 158–162, 164–166 – squirrel 126, 129–130, 132, 135f., 138, 140, 149, 153, 155, 160 – wolf 150, 155f., 158 Galat,i

42, 44–46, 48, 249

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Galicia 99, 101f., 111, 188 Gatchina 281 Gaza 80, 274, 276 Gdan´sk (Germ. Danzig) 36, 189 General Russian Oil Association 103 Genghis Khan (r. 1206–1227) 32, 124 Genoa (Ital. Genova) 30 Georgia, Georgians 16, 31, 34f., 49, 53, 142, 179, 283 Geray (ruling dynasty of Crimean Khanate) 135–138, 140 – Devlet I (Crimean Khan, r. 1551–1577) 136 – Djanibeg (Crimean Khan) 136, 140f., 161 – Mehmed I (Crimean Khan) 200 – Mengli (Crimean Khan) 135, 200 – Safa 138 Germans, Germany 10, 31, 62, 104f., 107, 109, 112f., 130, 157, 163, 174, 188–190, 219, 252, 253, 263f., 282, 285 Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nuremberg 21, 219–222, 237, 256, 260f. Gevherhan Sultan (Ottoman princess) 163 Ghaznavids 231 Ghirlandaio, Domenico (1448–1494) 219 ghulam 19 gifts 9, 13f., 17, 21, 120, 123f., 127, 133– 136, 138, 140, 142, 149f., 154, 158–165, 193f., 219, 246, 250–252, 254–256, 265f., 278 Giurgiu 48 glass 70, 244 gold 62–64, 70–76, 91, 135, 138, 149, 173, 180, 182, 193f., 198, 309 Golden Horde 32 Gördes 224 grain 31, 34, 42f., 46, 50, 52, 89 Greeks 30f., 42, 44, 108, 129, 131–133, 137f., 140, 143, 146, 155, 159, 162–166, 181, 196, 205, 225, 248, 253f., 265, 275– 277, 283, 285f., 288, 290, 295 Grigorovich-Barskii, Vasilii (1701–1747) 277f. Gruneweg, Martin (1562–c. 1618) 28, 36f., 40, 44, 49, 51, 56, 131, 189f., 207

guilds 92, 142f., 146, 155, 249, 256–258, 260 Gulbenkian, Calouste Sarkis (1869–1955) 104f., 114, 174 Gulf of Basra 104 Gümüs¸hane 189 gypsies 156 Gyulafehérvár see Alba Iulia Habsburgs 16, 100, 178, 200, 252, 254f., 262 Halycˇ (Pol. Halicz) 31 Hasan Pasha (Ottoman Imperial Admiral) 164f. hasene (coin) 72 hassa kürkçübas¸ı (Imperial Chief Furrier) 142, 163 – Kastorianos, Manolakis 165 – Yanaki 163 hassa tacir (Imperial Factor) 132 – Chalkokondyles, Andreas 129, 132 – Kantakouzenos, Michael (d. 1578) 132, 163f. – Mustafa Müteferrika 132 Henry VIII (King of England, r. 1509– 1547) 198, 246 Hermannstadt see Sibiu Hijaz 68, 83, 85–88 hil’at 144–146, 149f., 153f., 158, 166 Holbein, Hans the Younger (c. 1497–1543) 198, 220, 246 Hommaire de Hell, Xavier (1812–1848) 28, 45–47, 50f., 56 Homs 90 horses 28, 35, 37, 41, 47, 49, 53, 56, 137, 155, 159f., 162, 177f., 185, 191, 207 Hotin see Khotyn Huet, Albert (Comes Saxonum, 1537– 1607) 246 Hungary 16, 31, 64, 72, 74, 158, 200, 258, 260 Ias¸i 37, 46, 48, 249 Ibn al-‘Ima¯d al-Hanba¯lı¯ 84 ˙ Ibn Battu¯ta (1304–1368/1369) ˙˙ ˙

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77, 126

320

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Ibrahim (Ottoman sultan, r. 1640–1648) 122f., 134, 152, 163, 165 içog˘lans 157 Ilkhanids 32, 37, 64, 73 India 12, 16, 32, 34, 37, 42, 73f., 78, 83, 91, 104, 109, 123, 153, 162, 234, 308, 311 indigo 237 I˙nebolu 47, 55, 224 infrastructures 9, 11f., 14, 20f., 27–29, 32, 34–37, 39f., 42, 45f., 50, 52f., 56, 69, 79, 84, 99f., 104, 106, 108–110, 113, 189, 305f., 310 Iran 39, 47, 55, 66f., 69, 72f., 75, 77, 80, 105, 111f., 160, 189, 225, 228, 231f., 234, 306f., 309 Iraq 15, 19, 66, 68, 114 iron 62f., 76–79, 126, 150, 285 Iron Gate 31, 44f. iron-gall 237 Isabella Jagiellon (Hung. Izabella királyné; Pol. Izabela Jagiellonka, Queen consort of Hungary, 1519–1559) 200 Isaccea (Turk. I˙sakça) 30, 36f. I˙skenderun (Alexandretta) 108 Isfahan 19, 38, 47, 56, 66, 160, 182, 189, 198, 225 Ismail (Persian shah) 66, 73 Ismail (city) see Izmail Istanbul (Constantinople) 18, 21, 27, 34– 42, 44–51, 53, 55, 86f., 92–94, 105, 108, 119, 123, 128, 132f., 143f., 146, 151, 155, 158–163, 183–185, 187–190, 204, 209, 223–225, 227f., 249, 290 – Aya Sofya (Hagia Sophia) 184 – Eyüb (district of Istanbul) 122 – Galata (district of Istanbul) 34, 143, 209 – Hippodrome 276 – Mahmudpas¸a (district of Istanbul) 143, 155 – Pera (district of Istanbul) 223 – Topkapı Palace 145 Italy 18, 34, 157, 175, 244, 264, 277 Ivan IV, the Terrible (Ivan Grozny, Grand Prince of Moscow, 1533–1547, Tsar of Russia, 1547–1584) 146

ivory 135, 234 Izmail (Ismail) 37, 46 Izmir (Smyrna) 39, 93, 107f., 110f., 283 I˙znik 114, 233, 311 Jabal Ans˙a¯rı¯ya 68 Jaffa 108, 112 Jagiellonians 188, 198 al-Jazı¯rı¯ 84–86 John III Sobieski (Pol. Jan III Sobieski; Lit. Jonas III Sobieskis, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, r. 1674– 1696) 174 janissaries 88–90, 92, 145, 149f., 164 Jarosław 203 jelly 110 Jerusalem 110, 112, 161, 225, 276, 289f. jewelry 63, 119, 176, 203, 244 Jews 42, 89, 103, 112, 130f., 143, 153, 181, 188, 225 Jibrı¯l ibn Nu¯h 70 Jordan 67f. Joseph Hekekyan Bey (1807–1875) 279 Julfa 19 Kagul (Rum. Cahul, river in Moldavia) 282 kalga (rank of Crimean dynasty) 136, 138, 140, 161 kalpak 145f., 155 Kamyanets-Podilskyi (Pol. Kamieniec Podolski) 130, 188, 190 Kantakouzenos, Toma (Thomas, Foma) (envoy) 164f. Karahısar-ı S¸arki (S¸ebinkarahisar) 162 Karasubazar see Bilohirsk Karnobat 163 Kars 39 Kashan 179f., 182 Kâtib Çelebi (1609–1657) 86 Kazan 38 Kefe see Feodosija Kemény, János (Prince of Transylvania, r. 1661–1662) 254 Kerch 47, 53 Khanty 125 Kharkiv 48

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Kherson 42, 44 Khomiakov, Aleksei (1804–1860) 289 Khorasan 72, 192, 229f. Khotyn (Pol. Chocim; Rum. and Turk. Hotin) 37, 174 Khu¯zista¯n 66 Khusang Shah 150 Khwaju Kerma¯ni 229 Kiev (Kyiv) 30, 48, 51, 126, 132 Kievan Rus 32, 276 Kilia see Chilia Kırkkilise (Kırklareli) 51 Klausenburg see Cluj-Napoca Kleemann, Nikolaus 28, 44, 49, 56 Koch, Ivan Ivanovich (1739–1805) 278f. Köhler, Egor (Heinrich Karl Ernst, 1765– 1838) 285 Kolozsvár see Cluj-Napoca Koniecpolski, Alexander (1620–1659) 181f. Koniecpolski, Stanisław (1591–1646) 181f., 209 Kon´ska Wola 204 Konya 224 Köstence see Constant,a Kremenchuk 48 Kronstadt see Bras¸ov Kuchum Khan (Sibir khanate) 144, 149 kukeri 154, 157 Kurdistan 16 kurgans 124 Kütahya 184 Kyrill (Kyrillos) Loukaris (Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, 1572– 1638) 164 lale devri (Tulip Age) 122 Land of Darkness 126, 151 Latour, Bruno (*1947) 62 lead 63, 77–79 leather 36, 61, 157, 233, 247, 262 Lebanon 68 Lemberg see Lviv Leontes 67f. Lipka Tatars 184 Lipków 183

Livny (Russia) 138, 162 Livonia 283 Łódz´ 103, 111 London 110, 182, 246, 278, 296 London woolen cloth (Londra/Londrina) 130 looms 236, 238f., 265 Lublin 131, 177 Luxor 285, 290 luxury goods 11, 13, 17, 32, 36, 61, 176, 185, 188, 197, 201, 203, 207, 265, 305 Lviv (Germ. Lemberg; Pol. Lwów) 31, 37, 40, 101, 129, 131, 160, 177f., 185, 187f., 190f., 194–196, 204f., 249 Macedonia 78, 93, 107 madder 225, 237 Madonna 182, 198 madrabaz (huckster) 158 Maghrib 90–93 Mamluk Empire 16, 20, 32, 64f., 67f., 70– 80, 83 Manastır see Bitola Marco Polo (1254–1324) 124 Maria Feodorovna (Sophie Dorothea of Württemberg, Empress consort of Russia, 1759–1828) 108, 293 Mariinsky Water System 108 Marmara Sea 30, 33 Marosvásárhely see Târgu Mures¸ Martin Crusius (Martin Krauß, 1526– 1607) 163 Matejko, Jan (1838–1893) 174 material turn 10, 22, 62 Maurocastro see Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi Mauss, Marcel (1972–1950) 13, 124 Maximilian II (Holy Roman Emperor, r. 1562–1576) 146 Mecca 68, 71, 86, 89, 91, 154, 184 – Kaaba 184 Medias, (Germ: Mediasch; Hung: Medgyes) 253 Medici, Lorenzo di (il Magnifico, 1449– 1492) 223 Medina 68, 91, 154

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Mehmed II (Ottoman sultan, r. 1444–1446, 1451–1481) 64, 226, 229f. Mehmed III (Ottoman sultan, r. 1595– 1603) 155 Mehmed Çelebi (envoy) 137 Mehmed Sokollu Pasha (Ottoman grand vizier, c. 1505–1579) 163 mehterhane 155 Meissen 114, 311 Melos 78 Memphis 283 Mendeleev, Dimitrii Ivanovich (1834– 1907) 102, 107 menzil 35, 37, 55 merchants 20, 27–30, 32, 34, 40, 42, 44, 54, 56, 72, 76, 84f., 88–94, 104, 114, 120, 123, 126–134, 137, 139, 142f., 158–160, 162f., 166, 184, 187, 190, 203, 209f., 224, 226, 251, 265f., 276 – Armenian 19, 36–38, 44, 47, 51, 131, 138, 159, 162, 177–179, 181–183, 187– 191, 194–196, 201, 203f., 207, 225, 308 – Greek 42, 44, 132, 137, 140, 143, 159, 162, 164f., 166, 196, 205, 225, 248, 253, 265, 290f., 305 – Moldavian and Wallachian 247f., 250 – Transylvanian 248, 253f. metal 11, 20, 49, 61–64, 67, 69, 73f., 76f., 79f., 126, 139, 305, 309 Michetti, Niccolo (c. 1675–1758) 281 Midhat Pasha (Ahmed S¸efik Midhat, Ottoman statesman, 1822–1884) 104 Miliukov, Pavel (1859–1943) 121 mines 69–74, 76f., 79 miniatures 144–146, 155, 199f., 226, 228f. Moldavia (Rum. Moldova; T,ara Moldovei; Turk Bog˘dan) 16f., 31, 36f., 40, 42, 46, 78, 133, 163, 189, 209, 247–250, 282 Mongols 12, 35, 124f., 309 monks 40, 209, 276f. Moravia 130 mordants 247 Moscow 35, 48, 51, 99, 110, 127–129, 132, 134f., 139f., 145, 155, 158–160, 162, 164, 175, 297, 307, 309 Mosul 104f., 109, 112f.

Mount Athos 277 Muhammad Ali Pasha (Viceroy of Egypt, 1770–1849) 279f., 286 Munich (Germ. München) 179 Murad III (Ottoman sultan, r. 1574–1595) 189, 200 Murad IV (Ottoman sultan, r. 1623–1640) 122, 155, 164 Murats¸ah (Lord of the Crimean S¸irin) 161 Muratowicz, Sefer 178f., 182, 198 Muravev, Andrei N. 288–290, 294 Muscovy 15, 113, 122–125, 127–129, 131– 133, 135–137, 139f., 159, 163–165 Mykolaiv (Russ. Nikolayev) 48 Nagyszeben see Sibiu Naima (d. 1716) 122f., 152, 158, 163, 165 Nakhichevan 42 Napoleonic wars 42, 51, 275, 288 narh defteri (register of fixed prices) 159, 224 Narva 129 nasihatname (mirror for princes) 122 Neumarkt am Mieresch see Târgu Mures¸ Neva 108, 114, 274, 294–296, 298, 306 New Julfa (Nor Djugha) 38, 47, 182 New Russia 42, 46, 51f., 99 New York 27, 278, 296f. Nicholas I (Tsar of Russia, r. 1825–1855) 285, 291–294, 297–299 Nicholaus von Haunolth (Nikolaus Haunold, 1556–1622) 157 Nies´wiez˙ 183 Nikolayev see Mykolaiv Nikon Chronicle 276 Nile 67f., 88f., 92f., 276f., 283, 290, 296 Nobel family 99, 102f., 110, 114 Novorossiysk 106 Nubia 282f. nureddin (rank of Geray dynasty) 136, 138, 140, 161 obelisk 275f., 278, 281f., 285, 295, 297 object itineraries 14f. Ochakiv (Turk. Özi) 30, 33, 36f. Odessa 27, 42f., 45–49, 51, 106f., 111f.

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d’Ohsson, Ignatius Mouradgea (1740– 1807) 150, 153 oil 11, 14, 21, 48, 99–114, 121, 126, 139, 157, 305–307, 310 – diesel 107, 110, 113 – kerosene 101, 107, 110 – mazut 108f. – petroleum 14, 21, 99, 101, 103–105, 107, 110, 307 oil tankers 107f., 113, 310 Olbia 30 Olenin, Alexei Nikolaevich (1763–1843) 275, 283, 290–292, 297 oriental goods 31f., 36, 72, 204, 247–250, 254, 265 Orontes 67 Ostrozski, Vasyl Kostyantyn 193f. Ottoman decline theory 122f. Ottoman Empire 9, 13, 15–18, 21, 29, 31, 34f., 38f., 42, 45–49, 53, 56, 64f., 67f., 72, 74–76, 78f., 84, 90, 92–95, 100, 103–105, 109, 112–114, 119, 121f., 124, 130, 133f., 150–152, 158, 162f., 176, 178, 188, 190, 195f., 199, 203, 209f., 219, 223, 229, 247– 250, 254, 265f., 283, 290, 306–312 Otwinowski, Erazm (1529–1614) 191 Özi see Ochakiv Pale of Settlement 103 Palestine 103, 276f., 283 Parthenios IV (Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople for five periods: from 1657 to 1662) 162 patriarchs 158f., 161–163, 166 Paul I Petrovich (Tsar of Russia, r. 1796– 1801) 108, 293 Paul of Aleppo (Bulus al-Halabi, 1627– 1669) 119, 127, 132, 139f., 150–152, 158f., 165 Pavlovsk 281 Pazarcık see Dobrich Peçevi (Ibrahim, d. 1640) 87 Persia 9, 15–17, 21, 29, 32, 35, 37–39, 54f., 76f., 100, 102f., 105, 109, 112–114, 160, 162, 173, 176, 178f., 181f., 188f., 210

Persian Gulf 55, 66, 219f., 228f., 231, 267, 305, 308, 310f. Pest 94 Peter the Great (Tsar of Russia, r. 1682– 1725) 41, 281f., 283, 296f. Peterhof 281 pets 152, 282 pilgrimage, pilgrims 38, 68, 71, 89f., 154, 276 pipelines 12, 99, 107, 310 Pleven (Turk. Plevna) 50 Podolia 193f. Poland-Lithuania 9, 15–17, 21, 33, 35f., 76, 113, 130, 135, 173–177, 179, 181f., 184, 187f., 193, 196f., 199, 201, 203, 209f., 263, 305, 308–310 Poletika, Vasilii Grigorevich (1765–1845) 278f. pollution 110 pominki see upominki Pomorie (Anchialos, Ahyolu) 163 Portuguese 12, 71, 77f., 83 Poti (Turk. Fas¸) 27, 34, 35, 38, 42, 47f., 53f., 106 Poznan´ (Germ. Posen) 196 Prague (Praha) 159 Prokofiev, Ivan (1758–1828) 282 promishlenniki 158 Protestant churches 174f., 256, 262 Provadia 36f. Prut 37, 48 pyramids 276f., 281f. Qara¯ Qoyunlu 233 quarantine 41, 45f., 51 Quran 234 Radziwiłł, Michał Kazimierz (Lit. Radvila, Mykolas Kazimieras, 1625–1680) 182f. railways 12, 27, 47f., 53, 55, 100, 106–109, 112f., 310 Rákóczi, George I (Hung. I. Rákóczi György, Prince of Transylvania, r. 1630– 1648) 251

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Rákóczi, George II (Hung. II Rákóczi György, Prince of Transylvania, r. 1642– 1660) 179 Ramadan (beylik) 65 Rashı¯d (Rosetta) 89, 92f., 278 razmena 137 Red Sea 19, 67, 69, 77, 83f., 87–93 Reformation 174f., 197, 258, 262 Regensburg 107 – Reichstag (Imperial Diet) of 1576 146f. regimes of value 13, 100, 119–121, 124, 126, 166, 307 Rhine 107 Ribeaupierre, Alexander Ivanovich (1781– 1865) 290f., 293f. Richter, Otto Friedrich von (1792–1816) 282 Right Corridor (sag˘ kol) 36, 48 Rijeka (Ital. and Hung: Fiume) 106 Rinaldi, Antonio (1710–1794) 282 Rioni (Turk. Fas¸) 31, 39 roads 12, 31, 35, 37–39, 46–48, 50–53, 55, 67, 80, 140, 189 – macadamized 51 robbers see thieves Rodes, Johan de (Swedish resident in Moscow, d. 1655) 135 Romania 21, 101, 104, 107, 112–114, 156, 219f., 222, 262 Romans 12, 30f., 35, 306, 311 Rosetta see Rashı¯d Rosetta Stone 275 Rostov-on-Don 42, 48 Rothschild 103, 106 Royal Dutch 103, 105 Ruadze, Grigorii 283 Rudolf II (Holy Roman Emperor, r. 1576– 1612) 159 rugs 9, 11, 14, 17, 21, 113, 155, 173–188, 191–210, 219–267, 306–308 – bird rugs 185f., 205, 207, 238, 255 – court rugs 198–200, 223, 226f., 230 – double-niche rugs 205f., 223 – Lotto 220, 225, 238, 255, 264 – Medallion Ushak 200, 223–228, 230, 232, 244

– on benches resp. on pews 178, 204, 220, 222, 225, 256–260, 262–265 – Persian rugs 178, 180f., 188, 191–194, 196–198, 203–205, 231, 255, 263, 307 – prayer rugs 175, 184, 194, 198, 210, 263, 265, 308 – Star Ushak 220–222, 225f., 229–231, 233f., 236–244, 246, 249, 256, 258f., 264– 266 – weavers 143, 182, 184, 227, 239f., 242 – wedding rugs 204, 207, 258f., 263 Rumeli 35, 50 Rumiantsev, Piotr Alexanrovic (1725– 1796) 282 Rus principalities 32, 125, 208, 276 Ruse (Turk. Rusçuk) 44, 47f., 50 Russia 9, 15, 18, 21f., 29, 34–39, 41f., 44– 46, 48f., 51–53, 55, 76, 99f., 102–114, 121f., 125–127, 129, 132, 151, 153, 166, 175f., 210, 249, 273–279, 281–285, 287– 294, 296–299, 305–307, 309f. Ruthenians 142, 184, 188, 205 Rzeszów 205f. Sable Age (samur devri) 121f. Safavids 9, 12, 15–17, 19f., 33, 38f., 64–68, 70, 72f., 75–77, 79f., 146, 160, 188, 200, 228f., 234, 265 sailing ships 43, 45, 47, 49, 108 Salih Pasha (Ottoman grand vizier) 163 Salonica (Thessaloniki; Turk: Selânik) 94, 107f., 111f. salt 160, 163 Salt, Henry (1780–1827) 280, 286–288 saltpeter 78f. Samarkand 229 Samsun 47, 55 Sarai (capital of the Golden Horde) 32 Sarajevo 94, 111 Saratov 151 Sarmatism 17, 181 Schäßburg see Sighis¸oara Schirmer, Paulus Postumus (1661–1717) 246 Scythians 124, 274 Secret History of the Mongols 124

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Selim I (Ottoman sultan, r. 1512–1520) 228 Selim II (Ottoman sultan, r. 1566–1574) 200, 226 Seljuks 30, 35 Senkovskii, Osip (Józef Julian Se˛kowski, 1800–1858) 285–285, 288 Sevastopol 48 S¸eyhi (poet, d. after 1429) 152 Shatt al Arab 109 ships 12, 29, 31, 34, 37f., 40f., 42–47, 49, 56, 80, 89, 92f., 106–110, 224, 248, 294f. Shuvalov, Ivan (1727–1797) 292 Siberia 21, 120f., 124–126, 129, 134, 151f., 159, 309 Sibiu (Germ. Hermannstadt; Hung. Nagyszeben) 36, 205, 246–251, 254f., 259, 263, 265 Sienkiewicz, Henryk (1846–1916) 174 Sighis¸oara (Germ. Schäßburg, Hung. Segesvár) 205, 256 Sigismund II August (Pol. Zygmunt II. August; Lith. Zˇygimantas Augustas, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, r. 1530–1572) 178, 198f. Sigismund III Vasa (Pol. Zygmunt III.Waza; Lith. Zˇygimantas Vaza, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, r. 1587–1632) 178f., 198, 207 silent barter 126 Silistra (Turk. Silistre) 78 silk 9, 30–32, 37–39, 47, 54, 73, 113, 123, 132, 139, 141f., 149, 152, 162, 173, 176, 178–183, 187, 193f., 196, 198, 204, 207, 210, 308 Silk Road 32f., 114, 310f. silver 13, 70, 73–76, 162, 173, 198, 207, 309 – silver coins 63, 72–75 – silverware, silverwork 13, 124, 135, 138, 141f. Sinai 67, 69, 276 – St. Catherine Monastery 276 Sinop (Gr. Sinope) 30, 33f., 47, 55 Siwa 278 slaves 30, 32, 34, 49, 128, 139f., 159–162 Slutsk 183

Smyrna see Izmir soap 110 Sofia 50 Sohumkale see Sukhumi Soldaia see Sudak sorok, tonluk 128–136, 140f., 143, 154, 159–162, 164 Sovin, Andrei 134, 161 specie 132f. Speranskii, Mikhail M. (1772–1839) 275 spices 12, 31, 36, 73, 75, 83f., 87, 92, 94, 247 St. Petersburg 42, 51, 103, 108, 110, 274f., 278, 281, 283f., 290, 293–299, 310 – Imperial Academy of Fine Arts 290, 292, 294, 298f. – Imperial Academy of Sciences 102, 275, 283, 290 – Museum of the Imperial Academy of Sciences 285 Stalingrad see Volgograd Stanislawów (Ivano-Frankivsk) 183 steamships 27, 43f., 48, 54 – Erste Donau-Dampfschiffahrts-Gesellschaft 44 Steaua Româna˘ 107 steppe 16, 30, 32, 38, 42, 68, 125, 162 Suceava 249 Sudak 30 Suez 27, 92f., 104, 106 Sufis 84–86 Sukhanov, Arsenii 277 Sukhumi (Turk. Sohumkale) 38 Su¨ leyman I (Ottoman sultan, r. 1520– 1566) 76, 200f. sulfur 78f., 104 Sulina 46 Sultanate of Women (kadınlar saltanatı) 122 Surami Pass 106 sur-i hümayun 155 Surname-i Hümayun 146, 155 surre-i hümayun 154 Syria 16, 32, 67f., 77–80, 90–93, 119, 277, 283

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Tabanıyassı Mehmed Pasha (Ottoman grand vizier) 152 taboo 125f. Tabriz 32, 39f., 47, 54, 142, 228, 230, 233 – Blue Mosque 233 Taganrog 42, 48 Taghiyev, Zeynalabdin (1821–1924) 103, 114 Tahmasp Qoli Beg 179 tailors 142, 182 Tana, Tanais see Azov tanning, tanners 139, 157 Târgu Mures¸ (Hung. Marosvásárhely; Germ. Neumarkt am Mieresch) 253 Tartu (Ger. Dorpat) 283 Taurus 66 Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste (1605–1689) 28, 37, 39f., 49, 56 tax-farms 88f. Tbilissi (Tiflis) 39, 48, 53f., 106 Teheran 47 telephone 107 Terek 151 Thebes 283, 285, 287 Theodosia see Feodosija thieves 39, 151f., 189f., 290 Tiflis see Tblissi Tikhanov, Mikhailo Nikitich (Muscovite envoy) 145 tiles 229, 233 Timbuktu 91 Time of Troubles 133, 135 Timur 228 tin 63, 76f., 79, 126 Tiutchev, Fedor (1803–1873) 274 Tokat 183, 188f. Ton, Konstantin Andreevich (1794–1881) 294 tourists 279f. tournaments of value 120, 309 Trabzon (Gr. Trapezos) 28, 30, 32f., 35, 37, 39f., 40, 49, 53–55, 77 trade balance 74, 123 Transottoman, Transottomanica 9, 12, 15f., 28f., 41, 55f., 61, 84, 90, 100f., 103,

106f., 109, 113f., 165f., 176, 219f., 222, 265, 305–312 Transpersian railway 109 transport, transportation 9, 11f., 20f., 27– 29, 32, 34f., 37f., 40, 42–52, 54, 56, 61, 63, 65, 67, 69, 74, 77, 79f., 89, 100, 102, 104, 106–110, 113f., 139, 158, 248, 287f., 307– 310 Transylvania (Rum. Ardeal /Transilvania; Hung. Erdély; Germ. Siebenbürgen; Turk. Erdel) 10, 16f., 21, 31, 36, 174f., 179, 205, 220, 225f., 235, 244, 246–248, 250, 252–255, 257, 260, 262f., 265f., 305, 308 Transylvanian Saxons 21, 247, 262f., 266, 308 Trapezos see Trabzon tribute 71, 120, 124f., 129, 133 Tripoli 108 Tsaritsyn see Volgograd Tsarskoe Selo 281f., 285 tug˘ 153 Tulcea (turk. Tulça) 27, 36 Tulumcı 157 tura 157 Turkish Oil Company 105 Turkmen 195, 229f., 233, 235, 265 Tyras see Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi upominki 130, 133, 135–138, 148, 161, 166 Us¸ak (city) 223–228 Uvarov, Sergei 298f. Varangian 31f., 306 Varna 36, 46–48, 50, 53 Varsonofi 276f. Vasa dynasty 179, 198 Vasilievskii Island 282 Vasilchikov, Grigorii Borisovich (envoy, d. 1598/1599) 145 velvet 138, 141f., 149, 182, 187, 236 Venice (Venezia) 30, 72, 75f., 182, 264, 308 Versailles 282 Vicina see Isaccea Vienna (Germ. Wien) 44, 49, 101, 111, 124, 174, 235, 240, 247, 263

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Vilnius (Germ. Wilna) 131, 205 Vladikavkaz 48 Volga 32, 38, 42, 107f., 114, 130, 151, 306, 310 Volgograd (Stalingrad; Tsaritsyn) 108f. Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694– 1778) 282 Voronezh 283 wagons 37f., 44, 49, 51, 106, 209 Wallachia (Rum. Valahia / T¸ara Româneasca˘; Turk. Eflak) 16f., 31, 36, 42, 65, 99, 101f., 163f., 247f., 265 Warsaw (Warszawa) 108, 179, 183, 308 weapons 17, 36, 62f., 109, 112f., 181 Weißenburg see Alba Iulia West Africa 71 Wilder Mann 155 Wilna see Vilnius wine 42, 203 woad 237 wood 40, 64, 139, 262 wool 126, 130, 187, 194, 196, 224f., 236f., 266 – mohair 247

Yakutsk 121 yam 35 Yambol (Turk. Yanbolu) 48 yasak 125–127, 129, 134, 151 Yemen 20, 83–90, 92f., 95, 123 Yerevan 39 Yugra 125f. Za¯yanda-ru¯d 66 Zagreb 111, 297 Zagros 66f. Zamos´c´ 179, 181 Zamoyski, Jan (1542–1605) 181, 185 Zápolya, John Sigismund (Hung. Szapolyai János Zsigmond; King of Hungary as John II 1540–1551) 200 Zbaraski, Krzysztof (1580–1627) 191, 204, 209 Zemun (Hung. Zimony) 200 Zglenicki, Witold (1850–1904) 103 Zimony see Zemun Zvenigrodskii, Andrei Dmitrevich (envoy, d. after 1597) 145f.

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