Abstract
Traveling from London by air, passengers to Istanbul today cross the English Channel, proceed southeasterly above continental Europe before passing over the Sea of Marmara and arrive at Ataturk International Airport approximately four hours later. During this passage across eight nations’ airspace, virtually all transactions are conducted in English and many relax enough to sleep away the journey, ignoring entirely the logistics of flight and weather as well as the curiosities of the countries passing below at 500 miles per hour. A traveler might easily book passage for such a trip one day in advance, choosing from as many as sixteen different departure times and six different carriers. Likewise, thirteen flights from five carriers depart from Istanbul for London in the same twenty-four hour period.
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Notes
Mediterranean histories from Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranea and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II (trans. Sîan Reynolds, New York: Harper & Row, 1972)
to Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea: A Study ofMediterranean History (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000) remind us that the Mediterranean cannot be treated as a unity. The current essay does not attempt to tell the story of the Mediterranean. Instead it offers a historiographic corollary to Harden and Purcell’s call for a treatment of Mediterranean “microecologies.” My treatment of Anglo-Ottoman relations is certainly not offered as an archetypal Mediterranean experience.
While this group is too large to enumerate fully, some of its more important arguments include Emily C. Bartels, “The Double Vision of the East: Imperialist Self-Construction in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Part One,” in Renaissance Drama in an Age of Colonization, ed. Mary Beth Rose (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1992), pp. 1–24;
Ania Loomba, “Shakespeare and Cultural Difference,” in Alternative Shakespeares, vol. 2, ed. Terence Hawkes (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 164–91;
Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
Gerald MacLean, “Ottomanism before Orientalism?” in Travel Knowledge, ed. Ivo Kamps and Jyotsna Singh (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), pp. 85–96;
and Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
Noteworthy in this regard are Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000); Matar’s Islam; and Kamps and Singh’s Travel Knowledge.
The argument for a lack of Ottoman interest in Europe has been made most strenuously by Bernard Lewis, both in his The Muslim Discovery of Europe (New York: Norton, 1982) and Islam and the West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Important challenges to this position may be found in Bernadette Andrea, “Columbus in Istanbul: Ottoman Mappings of the ‘New World.’ ” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 30 (1997): 135–65;
Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press 2003),
and Nabil Matar, In the Lands of the Christians: Arabic Travel Writing in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2003).
For a discussion of the Ottoman archive and translations of early sources, see Suraiya Faroqhi, Approaching Ottoman History: An Introduction to the Sources (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999);
and Ehud Toledano, “What Ottoman History and Ottomanist Historiography Are—Or, Rather, Are Not,” Middle Eastern Studies 38:3 (July 2002): 195–207. In the wake of America’s war on Iraq, the looting of Iraqi libraries housing Ottoman documents has made the work of cataloguing Ottoman materials still more difficult.
Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 34.
George Townsend, ed., The Acts and Monuments by John Foxe, vol. IV (New York: AMS Press, 1965), p. 23 (emphasis mine).
Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, & Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.), p. 15.
Robert Berkhoffer, “The Challenge of Poetics to (Normal) Historical Practice,” in The Postmodern History Reader, ed. Keith Jenkins (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 146.
Fynes Moryson, Shakespeare’s Europe: A Survey of the Condition of Europe at the End of the 16th Century (New York: Benjamin Bloom, 1967), p. 70.
See, Linda T. Darling, Revenue-Raising and Legitimacy: Tax Collection and Finance Administration in the Ottoman Empire, 1560–1660 (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 1997), pp. 8–15.
See, for example, Evliya Çelebi’s descriptions of Albania, Kosovo, Montenegro, and Ohrid in Evliya Çelebi in Albania and Adjacent Regions, trans. and ed. Robert Dankoff and Robert Elsie (Boston: Brill, 2000).
J. Theodore Bent, ed., Early Voyages and Travels in the Levant (London: Works issued by the Hakluyt Society #67) (London, 1893), p. 59.
William Samuel Peachey, A Year in Selaniki’s History: 1593–4, diss. Indiana University, 1984, p. 282
Hans Kellner, “Language and Historical Representation,” in The Postmodern History Reader, ed. Keith Jenkins (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 127.
For Roland Barthes, all histories are purposeful, but some are less “mythological” than others to the extent that they call attention to their own location and process of production. For a fuller discussion, see “The Discourse of History,” trans. Stephen Bann, Comparative Criticism 3 (1981): 7–20.
Colin Imber, “Ideals and Legitimation in early Ottoman History” in Suleyman the Magnificent and His Age, ed. Metin Kunt and Christine Woodhead (New York: Longman, 1995) p. 141.
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© 2007 Goran V. Stanivukovic
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Burton, J. (2007). Emplotting the Early Modern Mediterranean. In: Stanivukovic, G.V. (eds) Remapping the Mediterranean World in Early Modern English Writings. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230601840_2
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