British travellers regarded all inhabitants of the seventeenth-century Ottoman empire as 'slaves of the sultan', yet they also made fine distinctions between them. This book provides the first historical account of how British travellers understood the non-Muslim peoples they encountered in Ottoman lands, and of how they perceived and described them in the mediating shadow of the Turks. In doing so it changes our perceptions of the European encounter with the Ottomans by exploring the complex identities of the subjects of the Ottoman empire in the English imagination, de-centering the image of the 'Terrible Turk' and Islam.…mehr
British travellers regarded all inhabitants of the seventeenth-century Ottoman empire as 'slaves of the sultan', yet they also made fine distinctions between them. This book provides the first historical account of how British travellers understood the non-Muslim peoples they encountered in Ottoman lands, and of how they perceived and described them in the mediating shadow of the Turks. In doing so it changes our perceptions of the European encounter with the Ottomans by exploring the complex identities of the subjects of the Ottoman empire in the English imagination, de-centering the image of the 'Terrible Turk' and Islam.
Eva Johanna Holmberg is an Academy Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy, History and Art Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and a visiting research fellow at the School of History, Queen Mary University of London, UK. Her previous publications include Jews in the Early Modern English Imagination - A Scattered Nation (2012).
Inhaltsangabe
Introduction.- Chapter 1 - Scattered nations: Jews and Greeks.- Chapter 2 - Eastern Christians.- Chapter 3 - Viewing and addressing women.- Chapter 4 - Free Franks and visiting Westerners.- Conclusion.