The Ottoman Grand Vizierate 1560s to 1760s (GraViz)

GraViz is a three-year project funded by the FWF (P 36216), developed to explore the Ottoman office of the grand vizier and its institutional evolution during the early modern period, roughly from the 1560s to 1760s, with a special focus on the office’s role in handling European diplomacy. Focusing on the tenures of six grand viziers, Sokollu Mehmed Pasha (1565-1579), Köprülü Mehmed Pasha (1656-1661), Köprülü Ahmed Pasha (1661-1676), Kara Mustafa Pasha (1676-1683), Nevşehirli (Damad) Ibrahim Pasha (1718-1730), and Koca Ragıb Pasha (1757-1763), GraViz will primarily explore the importance and centrality of the office of the grand vizier in maintaining diplomatic relations. Using the documentary evidence of the grand vizierial diplomatic correspondence with the Habsburg court, which is preserved in the archives in Istanbul and Vienna in original and copied forms, we will particularly examine the transformations in the office’s handling of diplomatic communication from the 1550s to 1760s. Can we trace in the textual evidence of international correspondence the changes that the office of the grand vizier and the Habsburg-Ottoman relations underwent from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century? Would a comparative dissection of the language, jargon, vocabulary, and other stylistic elements in the grand vizierial correspondence with the Viennese court from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries unveil new insights into the modifications the empire and the grand vizierate went through? GraViz will seek answers to the above questions through rigorous scrutiny, digital transcription and translation into English, and annotation of the grand vizierial correspondence.
 
The principal coordinator of the GraViz project is Dr. Yasir Yılmaz. The members of the project are Nilab Saeedi and Michael Vogelsberger. The GraViz project is a sister project of the QhoD project. All digital editions of the GraViz project will be published open access on the QhoD webpage. GraViz is funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).