About: | Tijana Krstić |
Position: | Board of Directors |
Nodes: |
The focus is on the political imagination and religious politics among early modern south Slavs living in the Ottoman Empire. Historiography has shown little interest in Ottoman non-Muslim subjects’ political imagination prior to the nineteenth century. In the histories of the Ottoman Empire, non-Muslims generally figure prominently in the discussions of the empire’s early expansion that entailed subjugation of various medieval Christian polities in the Balkans and Anatolia in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and in the onset of the empire’s dissolution, triggered by the first “national” uprisings in the early nineteenth century that were often articulated in terms of “revival” of medieval territorial and sovereign claims. The era encompassing the 16th and 18th centuries is generally portrayed as one of non-Muslims’ peaceful integration into the commercial and administrative life of the empire—the empire which non-Muslims have allegedly learned to accept as a fact that cannot be challenged. However, if we think of the empire not as a “thing” but a “situation” and a claim that was constantly locally re-evaluated, with terms of inclusion or exclusion into various categories of belonging constantly renegotiated, how did this affect Ottoman subjects’ political imagination? What other concepts and cartographies of rule emerged in the 16th and 17th centuries to reimagine Ottoman imperial claim and the space they ruled in Europe? What was the role and meaning of language, territory, religion, and confession in this political imagination? This case study seeks to bring together people working on religious and cultural history of Southeast Europe, Slavic linguistics and book history, Global Catholicism, Eastern Christian Studies, Ottoman Studies, Habsburg Studies, as well as histories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Russian Empire to understand various imperial traditions and mythologies as well as confessional and political agendas that informed political imaginations of Ottoman Slavs well before the age of national revolutions in the 19th century.
Building on the completed ERC CoG OTTOCONFESSION, this case study explores how the conditions for belief and practice changed across early modern Eurasia with the rise of early modern empires, focusing on the Ottoman case, but adopting a comparative and entangled approach looking towards other contemporary Eurasian polities (in particular Safavid, Venetian, and Russian empires and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but also Mughal India). The underlying premise is that the Reformation and its fallout were a local manifestation of a more global trend that made the search for norms of creed and ritual important to (political) community- and authority-building in early modern polities across Eurasia. By looking at a variety of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire and their connections to their coreligionists beyond Ottoman boundaries, this research explores the extent to which the confessions and their agents divided themselves from each other and profiled themselves in competitive constellations, how they interacted and influenced each other, and built up standards to which others had to respond. The main interest is in inter-confessional comparisons, competition, dialogue, mimicry, borrowings and adaptations as they manifested themselves in the early modern Eurasian context. This research historicizes the development of ethnic, confessional, and imperial narratives and identities, undermining both their teleological claims and pretentions of timelessness and stability. It also goes beyond the recent imperial turn that has promoted the narrative of tolerant empires, and seeks to better understand the nature of religious politics not only between state authorities and their subjects, but among the subjects themselves.