Ottoman History Podcast - Dragomans and the Routes of Orientalism

Episode Date: March 30, 2018

Episode 354 with Natalie Rothman hosted by Nir Shafir and Aslihan Gürbüzel Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud Dragomans are often known as diplomatic translators, but their responsibilities and roles went much further than being mere interpreters. In this podcast, we speak with Natalie Rothman about how dragomans negotiated both linguistic space and social space across the Eastern Mediterranean. Focusing specifically on the case of Venetian dragomans, we discuss their training and how they managed to become brokers of knowledge and connections between the Ottoman Empire and myriad publics in Venice and beyond. In the second half of the podcast, we delve a bit deeper and examine how dragomans came to contribute to the budding world of Orientalist knowledge among seventeenth-century European scholars. « Click for More »

Hello, and welcome to the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Nir Shafir. I'm Aslihan Gürbüzal. And today we are speaking with Natalie Rothman. Natalie is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto. Welcome to the podcast. Hi, thanks for having me. What we're going to be speaking about today is dragomans. And Natalie is the perfect person to speak about this because she has written extensively on the topic.

She had a book come out a few years ago, Broken Empire, and she's continuing to work on this and is preparing future research on the topic. And dragomans, as our listeners might know, were essentially men that interpreted and negotiated between the Ottomans and other Mediterranean powers in the region in the early modern period. And so what we're going to be talking about today is how they mediated imperial relations, but also constructed a lot of European knowledge about the Orient, about the Ottoman Empire. So let's start with maybe the most basic question here,

kind of who are the dragomans? I think one of the things that you've mentioned so much is that these aren't just interpreters. They actually conduct a whole variety of different roles. So what were they actually up to? What tasks did they do? Absolutely, and I think we often think of them as diplomatic interpreters or, in the Ottoman courtly case,

people who interpreted between official dom and various populations, whether in court or in other more commercial settings. But one of the things that is very interesting about Dragomans is that they were also heavily literate and involved in the production of texts and in some cases also visual imagery about the Ottoman Empire and sometimes about Islam and other dimensions of the local societies and cultures in which they operated. So they're not only translating, but they're also collecting information.

They're collecting information. And when we say that they're translating, so at least in translation studies, there is a very sharp distinction between interpreting and translation with the assumption that interpreting is a largely oral activity right and when we say diplomatic interpreters you know the image at least that i had in my head growing up maybe that kind of ages me is that um or dates me is uh kind of a soviet interpreter whispering in the ear of a diplomat um in a kind of world summit with with the u.s ambassador right so kind of piece on behind in a kind of world summit with the U.S. ambassador. Right, the earpiece on behind.

Right, so kind of someone who's in the shadows, who's not supposed to be very visible. There is a whole scholarship in translation studies about the invisibility of the translator. What the dragomans are doing is anything but in the sense, first of all, that they're not just repeating the words of others, but actually generating their own knowledge. In the Ottoman case, they're often involved in negotiations solo. So when they're the dragoman of X embassy, they often would go themselves to conduct business or negotiations with their Ottoman counterpart, with the ambassador nowhere in sight,

and then report back. So there is both a temporal dimension to this interaction and their own kind of own agency, if you will, in defining the parameters of the interaction. And then there is a very strong textual written dimension to the work as well. They're translating official records between Ottoman Turkish and a variety of languages mostly Italian interestingly enough even when they're working for non-Italianate consulates as well as into other languages

and they're producing their own writings which again is a very interesting dimension of the work that hasn't hardly been studied. So I mean who are they are they people in locals in the Ottoman Empire take up this position or are they know, are they coming from Venice or parts of the Italian peninsula? Where do these dragomans emerge from? So the simple answer is both. They're both people who were born and raised in Istanbul. And to a decreasing extent, people moving to Istanbul specifically to become dragomans, moving to Istanbul specifically to become dragomans, whether from Italian metropoles like Venice,

or from the borderlands between the Venetian and Ottoman states in what today we would call the Balkans, Dalmatia in particular. But I think a more interesting answer to that is that who are the dragomans, I think goes to the heart of the question of who are Ottomans, in the sense that their processes of socialization of becoming dragomans mimic and to some extent partake in an Ottoman understanding of who can become part of the courtly elite. Yes, many of them experience some kind of mobility in order to become dragomans, particularly in the earlier centuries, moving from and elsewhere, but they also undergo a very robust process of reshaping of who they are in order to do the job. We often assume that if they were, and here I'm speaking primarily to the Venetian ones because they are both the most, the largest,

the most influential cadre of dragomans in terms of providing the template for other embassies and the ones that I've studied most systematically through archival research, we often think of them as descendants of Italianate settlers in the wake of the Fourth Crusade. So whether Genoese or Venetians who were sitting in Galata in the suburb of what was then Constantinople for many centuries, and then with the Ottoman takeover,

kind of refashioning themselves and ultimately become kind of the core of this Dragoman group. And to some extent that is correct. Some of the leading families that kind of kept contributing Dragomans to Venice generation after generation were descendants of these Genoese and Venetian settlers. But what's remarkable, I think, is that by the 16th and 17th centuries, by and large, these families have been absorbed into a Hellenic or post-Hellenic milieu. Their children grow up

learning primarily Greek at home. That's the language that they speak with their families. And so they have to be re-Italianized before they can even learn Ottoman in order to be able to interact with their Venetian masters. They're certainly not in any evident way part of a Venetian kind of world. They're much more part of an Ottoman space in which there is both mobility between the islands and the big cities, where Greek is a language of scholarship and higher learning, where there is mobility kind of built into the life trajectories of a lot of members of the elite.

And in that sense, I think part of what I'm trying to show in my research is that these are not European, quote unquote, transplants in a foreign world, the way they've been recuperated into a lot of the nationalist narratives of the Balkans in the late 18th and 19th century as these heroes that come to the dangerous world of the Ottomans to help Europeans in kind of checking the Ottoman expansion, but rather they're very much part of an Ottoman elite world in terms of their social relations, in terms of their kinship relations, in terms of their professional trajectories. They're very much part of that world. So from what you've just said, it sounds like kinship and education are the two parameters that make a dragoman. Can you give us an example of a figure or a family just to have a clear image

of who these people are in a social sense. Absolutely, and I think you're absolutely right that these are both very important and closely interconnected dimensions of what makes a dragoman a dragoman. In terms of kinship, this is an incredibly endogamic, that is, inward-marrying group of people. I mentioned earlier that some dragomans are locally born in Istanbul, or rather in Pera and Galata, starting in the 16th century, and sisters and nieces are often the vehicle through which these families

all become heavily interconnected and multiply so. So that's absolutely one aspect of this. In order to give you a specific example, I would have to go back to these very elaborate kinship trees that I've reconstructed to tell you exactly who's who. But there are certain families, about a dozen of them, that each and every generation from the late 16th or early 17th century all the way throughout the 17th century produced one and often multiple dragomans for the Venetians. dragomans for the Venetians. And then their brothers or their sons-in-law would often also furnish dragomans or become dragomans for the French, for the English, for the Dutch, for the Russians, for the Ragoussins. The list goes on and on for the Habsburgs when they do

finally establish an embassy, their permanent embassy. So in that sense, their kinship both brings the dragomans together as a caste, but it also creates kinship across embassy lines and completely muddles the water as to who has allegiance to whom. Right, who's working for whom. Because the dinner table is where all this information gets circulated very far and wide. And we haven't even talked about their extensive connections to the court, to the Ottoman court itself. So maybe we should move on to there because this is, you know, we just talked about kinship. But then the other side of Asa's question was education. So if they're growing up speaking Greek amongst themselves, how are they figuring out Turkish?

Why don't the ambassadors and these foreign powers, resident ambassadors in Istanbul know Turkish themselves? How do they set up these ties to the Ottoman court then? The question of languages is fraught. I would say the one way of answering this is kind of the Bernard Lewis answer. Oh, they weren't interested. They weren't curious. But I think a more interesting answer is, well, what opportunities were there to learn Ottoman Turkish anywhere outside the Ottoman Empire in the 17th century?

And the answer is very few and far between. And in fact, Dragoman's, as I show in the book I'm working on right now, play a decisive role in making that a possibility later on. If you look at the centers of Ottomanist knowledge production outside the empire, starting from the 1670s or so first and foremost Vienna and then Paris in both contexts it is dragomans who play a decisive role in establishing the institutional structures for that to be the case but in terms of how dragomans learn the language it's very much in keeping with early modern practices of knowledge transfer. It's largely through apprenticeship and shadowing more experienced dragomans.

So they join embassies usually as young men, sometimes even older children, as early as eight or nine years old. I'm speaking about the Venetian case now, which is somewhat different than others, but again, a template for a lot of what unfolds later on. And then they start out learning Ottoman Turkish in situ with a hoja, with a master who comes to the house daily to teach them. There are a lot of very amusing anecdotes about the utter failure of the system to some extent, and repeated complaints about the hoja either being too drunk or not knowing enough Greek or Italian to interact with the children, etc., etc. But somehow they do manage to pick up the language. And I think mostly because they actually follow other dragomans around and pick

it up through some form of immersion, which we would now call immersion. And that system proves incredibly successful. We know that some dragomans were so fluent that they actually gained the respect of the scholars at court who saw them as their kind of true intellectual interlocutors. So in that sense, they do manage to achieve a certain level of fluency. But I think what's most important to understand about dragomans, and this goes back to the earlier question of what are dragomans, is that linguistic facility is really not the be-all and end-all of a successful dragoman, and that cultural competence and a sense of social fluency in the protocols of courtly society is of paramount importance. We have

records suggesting that people were kept on the Venetian payroll as dragomans with very, very limited Ottoman Turkish, simply because they were too valuable in terms of the knowledge they had, the diplomatic secrets that they kept, that would have been too dangerous to let them go. They would immediately be picked up by the British or the French. In that sense, dragomans are not just linguistic intermediaries, they're not just translators. I would argue that all translators are not just translators, but certainly in the case of dragomans, what's most important is that they know how to carry themselves in court, that

they know how to approach Ottoman officialdom with the right amount of respect and using the cultural codes that would convey that respect in order to be able to get things done, basically. Something that Venetian and other ambassadors arriving for limited periods of time were completely clueless about. They could not properly commensurate diplomatic protocols, to use Subramanyam's very helpful framework for a moment. They didn't know

how to do things in the Ottoman context that would translate properly to how diplomacy is done in their own courts. And therefore, they needed dragomans in order to do this mediation for them, and on occasion also to emphasize the difference for their own gain. So it served everyone's interest to claim that the Ottomans were somehow culturally impenetrable, very different, requiring this extra level of translation. This worked well for the Dragomans, this worked well for the foreign ambassadors who were not tasked with picking up a language in situ. So I mean, this is one of the things I enjoy the most about your research is that you emphasize how the Dragomans

kind of created the sense of exoticism about the Ottomans, built up this world that seems unapproachable to further their own position in it. Absolutely, yeah. And I think we see this also in the kinds of textual production that begins to pick up

in the second half of the 17th century and continues in full force in the early 18th. If we think of the most canonical example of Antoine Galland and the Thousand and One Nights, that's perhaps a beautiful example in that Galland, who himself arrived in Istanbul initially in the early early 1670, I believe, as an apprentice dragoman for the French legation, makes his career of producing these tales, which we now know were in part in close collaboration with a Damascene young scholar who arrived in Paris and was telling him some of these stories. But many of the stories he was able to pick up through manuscripts that are part of the very thriving literary culture of Istanbul, where he gains access to these kinds of materials, whether in Arabic or in Persian or in Ottoman Turkish.

But the important point there is that dragomans, precisely because they are the ones with both linguistic access and social access to elite circles in Istanbul, refract the knowledge that is produced in Istanbul and convey it to European reading publics, but they do it in a way that to some extent already mirrors the priorities and the cultural preferences and the tastes of the Ottoman elite. They don't just do it single-handedly, and they certainly don't do this the way kind of a watered-down version of Said would have it, as kind of hapless European metropolitans who stumble upon a very foreign Orient. They do it as full participants in the culture who are selectively choosing what to convey to the reading publics in europe but they do this

already being shaped by ottoman elite culture Welcome back to the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Niosha Fir. I'm speaking with Natalie Rothman. And I'm with Aslihan Gurbizad. We're speaking about dragomans. So Natalie, the way you frame and you narrate the story of dragomans is really interesting. Because you show how their profession is connected to the emergence of oriental studies in the West. to the emergence of Oriental studies in the West. And the way you show it is,

you show that the origins of Orientalism is a story that we could actually start in Istanbul as opposed to the usual Western Europe focus. Would you like to elaborate a bit more on that special shift in your work? Sure, I don't know that I would necessarily say the start of Orientalism. I think as historians, we're always a bit apprehensive about pinpointing something to a starting point. And I certainly wouldn't claim that the entire edifice of Orientalist scholarship

starts in Istanbul or even is centered on Istanbul. But certainly part of what's coming out of my research on Dragomans and the production of knowledge is that they play a very decisive role in not just producing positive knowledge, so not just the kinds, sorry, not just translating texts or creating linguistic knowledge, but their choices of specific genres on which to focus, I would argue, has to do both with how they understand their own positionality in relation to this diplomatic world, so a massive preference for certain linguistic as well as literary and historical genres to the neglect of many other kinds of knowledge that don't get represented as much.

So partly it's because of the diplomatic nexus in which they operate and the kinds of interests that their masters are showing in specific kinds of texts, and partly precisely because they're products of elite Ottoman culture. So tarikh is seen as kind of the epitome of certain kinds of knowledge about who the Ottomans are, where they're coming from, poetry hardly ever gets translated, even though we know now that poetry

was such a significant aspect of courtly culture. And that, I think, also has to do with the languages in which poetry was produced, the kind of linguistic competence or limitations that these dragomans had, etc., etc. So for me, it's interesting to think about Istanbul as a place where certain kinds of knowledge get produced, get circulated in very effective ways through the diplomatic dispatches and reports, as well as the independent work that dragomans do and increasingly do as attached to this phenomenon of the sojourning scholar-bibliographer with contacts to diplomatic circles.

So I'm thinking here of Marsili and others who travel, Pietro della Valle for sure, people who travel to Istanbul as affluent gentlemen, spend time living in an embassy or a consulate, often the Venetian consulate specifically, live there for quite some time. But when we start looking at their diaries, we realize that they often worked very closely with embassy dragomans in order to mediate

the world around them to them. And then the question becomes, so what role do embassy dragomans in order to mediate the world around them to them. And then the question becomes, so what role do these dragomans play in the selection of texts that these individuals acquired, in the choices of which texts to translate, of how these texts are translated, what kind of implicit knowledge is left in the translation such that it is presumed to be accessible to the readership in another language and what kinds of knowledge needs constant glossing and what kind of glossing actually goes on. So that's an aspect of my project that I'm very, very committed to. And methodologically, it poses a lot of challenges to develop a framework in which I can look at different translations and say, when a certain dragoman translates, they take for granted that the readers need a gloss for terms like vizier or...

So can you give us an example, maybe like a specific example of one of these texts or moments of multi-sided interpretation that's going on here? or moments of multi-sided interpretation that's going on here? Absolutely. So one of the chapters in this book that I'm completing, The Dragoman Renaissance, looks at three different translations by Venetian dragomans of Ottoman texts into Italian and shows how there is a kind of chronological arc to their translation strategies

and how the translations produced by Salvago, this is Giovanni batista salvago writing in 1622 so shortly after the regicide of osman ii and he's he's writing a text that does not claim to be a translation even though from all i can gather it is if not a direct translation of two heat is actually um very much an elaboration of the same perspective that Baqi Tezcan among others has written extensively about of a certain kind of the Jani series version of the regicide and and what's fascinating about the text is that it unabashedly just adopts that same

perspective and relates it to a European readership that wouldn't know the first thing about these events and just makes it so as a kind of positive knowledge of this is what the regicide was all about. And it uses a lot of linguistic strategies in order to take the Janissaries' perspective and make it the reader's own. So it becomes kind of a voicing mechanism through which the Janissaries perspective and make it the reader's own. So it becomes kind of a voicing mechanism through which the Janissaries become familiar, become understandable, become relatable.

When we look at later translations of Ottoman chronicles, we have the example of Tommaso Tarsia writing, translating Vegehi's Tariq in 1684, so about two decades after the text itself was completed and after Vegehi died, we notice slight interventions, but I would argue quite significant ones in terms of how there is constant glossing happening in the texts that are made more explicit. So if in Salvago's case,

he would just use narrative forms to make culturally specific information commensurate with Italian terminology. So he would avoid using too many foreignisms. In Tarsia's case, we begin to notice more and more of these foreignisms, which are then explicitly glossed in the text in the form of meaning or that is. So there is a clear break, and the translator kind of inserting himself to say, and now I'm going to give you the gloss. So it seems like these people are not only, you know, they're doing a lot of translation work of these chronicles, but they're also giving a

lot of glosses or explaining aspects of Ottoman society. How does this build into, you know, a question of oriental, of knowledge about the Orient, about a sort of proto-orientalism that's developing in this place, and how you mentioned, for example, that some of these texts and these dragomans become kind of central to the task of teaching Turkish and creating a knowledge of Turkology, in a sense, in Austria and other places. Right. So I think the answer is twofold. One is that these texts do become the available kind of lenses through which Europeans who do not know Ottoman Turkish can gain positive knowledge about the Ottoman world. I mentioned earlier these sojourning visitors who work with dragomans and their texts of course circulate far and wide and become very important. We also have the example of people in diplomatic service who themselves then become

authors. So Paul Rico is the most obvious example, who was, of course, the English agent in Izmir for many years, and his writings about the Ottomans clearly reflect that familiarity with a mercantile milieu of a secondary commercial port. But the other dimension beyond the textual production per se is linguistics and knowledge of the Ottoman language, where we begin to see centers that are being established to train dragomans in places like Vienna and Paris, building on the personnel of retired dragomans in places like vienna and paris building on the personnel of retired dragomans essentially building on dictionaries and grammars that are produced either by dragomans themselves or explicitly for the purpose of training dragoman the dragoman core and those become the the real the real nucleus for what later on becomes the orientental Academy in Vienna, as well as what nowadays

is INALCO, the institute in Paris that teaches foreign languages, but that is the direct descendant of the Collège Louis Legrand, which was the institute for training dragomans and later on becomes a kind of an Oriental Academy. So there is a genealogy to foreign language training and specifically to what we now call oriental languages ottoman turkish persian and arabic that goes back to these institutions now obviously there are other genealogies and it's very important for me not to claim that the dragons are the be all and all of oriental For me, what's fascinating about this is the way that Ottoman Turkish makes it into this kind of holy trinity

of the learned languages of Islam alongside Arabic and Persian, even though I would argue, and I think others would argue, it is only in Ottoman eyes that Ottoman Turkish is on the same footing with Persian and Arabic. If you look at Islamic scholarship

in other parts of the Islamic world, certainly in South Asia or in Southeast Asia, then Ottoman Turkish becomes just one among regional languages. It is because of the political significance of the Ottomans as mediated, I would argue, through dragomans and their institutional infrastructure, that Ottoman becomes of such import. And precisely because there is no older tradition of religious polemics and biblical exegesis and study the way you have it for Arabic and to a certain extent for Persian, that Ottoman gets included in this canon. And it is because of its institutional kind of grounding in these settings that become so central for language instruction that Ottoman makes it to this kind of...

So what you're saying is that normally Orientalists in like early modern Europe would be interested in Arabic or Hebrew because these are ultimately languages that go back to the Bible or some sort of biblical world that they can then access this history from. Whereas Ottoman Turkish would normally not be thought of as one of the major languages of Islam because it doesn't have any of these auxiliary sciences that make a language truly important in the eyes of Muslims, often Muslim scholars. And you're saying that because these scholars, these dragomans are building up Turkish as a language of diplomacy in history and in information that it becomes seen as one of the central languages of Islam. Yeah, so I would say that it is because of their positionality

as intermediaries between European scholarly elites and their Ottoman counterparts that this happens. So it's not that Dragoman single-handedly produced this dynamic, but rather because there is, in Europe, there are no competing institutional frameworks through which Ottoman can be studied. And because the Dragomans are so central and so connected to the Ottomans and in some ways shaped by the same cultural perspectives that make them take for granted that Ottoman is an important language. And because of all the political and

diplomatic interests that make relations with the Ottomans so essential, especially for the Habsburgs in the 18th century with the border becoming such a contested space, certainly for France and its complex

but very tight connections to the Ottomans in terms of commercial interests, that this becomes an imperative to ensure that there is a group of people who command the language. Dragomans really fill that gap institutionally and play a very important role in the specific kinds of Ottoman that is being taught.

So one of the questions that rarely gets asked by linguists, but I think is of paramount importance, is why is it that Ottoman Turkish becomes a variety of Turkish that Europeans learn? It is spoken by a very, very tiny fraction of the populace. And yet it becomes the defining variety, the defining dialect of Turkish for Europeans for many, many generations to come. It's not terribly surprising. You mean versus like Chagatay or do you mean like more local or even or even western western uh turkey i mean there are there are many spoken

varieties that we know coexisted with ottoman at the time in antalya in in the balkans those rarely make it into the textual production of authoritative language linguistic materials. So dictionaries, grammars, phrasebooks, all these materials that Dragomans and others are so keen to produce in the 17th century often would both make explicit in their prefaces and in terms of their vocabulary that gets represented and the phonology that gets represented, it is Ottoman Turkish as spoken in Istanbul by a very rarefied group of people that gets picked up and represented

as this is the Turkish language. Of course, now it's hard for us to even remember that there were other possibilities, but that becomes part of the kind of institutional and cultural edifice on which Ottoman studies and Turkology get built in Paris and Vienna, among other places. So it's really interesting that for Dragomans you use this notion of go-between and not only diplomatic but also cultural and intellectual go-betweens. What I'm wondering is, in the same way as Dragomans helped shape knowledge about Ottoman Turkey in the West, can we talk about to recognize that indeed dragomans were an important link, perhaps not an exclusive link, but one important link, particularly in terms of matters

scientific, making sure that knowledge did circulate between different sites of cultural production. I'm deliberately trying to avoid this dichotomy of Europe and Ottomans, because I think many of the Ottoman elites in the 17th and 18th century still very much understood themselves as plugged into wider circuits. And if you think about the dragomans at court, specifically working for the Ottoman court, we know that many of them spent time in Italy learning, studying at universities, or had diplomatic missions to parts of the world that today we would no doubt consider to be Europe, and were at the time part of the wider kind of Ottoman sphere of influence. I think, yes, dragomans are very important to these processes. They're not exclusively responsible for these circulations, but they do play a role. And I think there is room for more scholarship on that, for sure.

I mean, so much, I think, of what your research does here is that it challenges this kind of earlier vision we have of Orientalism as just a variety of representations that were constructed by Europeans without any knowledge of the Orient itself, and that the Orient is ultimately inaccessible. But what you're really doing is kind of building, along with quite a few other people, like, you know, Jean-Paul Gobrial or Alex Pivilakwa, that a lot of this knowledge from the Ottoman Empire or other parts of the Mediterranean was making its way over to Europe, that there was some sort of transfer of positive knowledge, and done through these kind of important intermediaries, whether dragomans or other forms of translators. Absolutely, and I would be the first one to concede that my work would not be possible without the work of John Paul and Alex and others who are partaking in this, I think, reframing of the question of Orientalism to some extent.

My only caveat would be that I think to gloss the Ottomans as the Orient is again problematic doubly both because the Ottomans didn't necessarily think of themselves as the Orient and because the Orient is a construct of 19th century scholarship and I think the chronologies of how this knowledge develops and what institutional frameworks evolve is crucial. I don't want to collapse all of it and say, oh, it was just pure Orientalism in the 17th century, but rather think about the genealogies of

how this emerges and what role Ottoman elites themselves in a variety of capacities play in this process. Well, thank you, Natalie, for this wonderful conversation. You know, unfortunately, there's so much more we could talk about. There's quite a few chapters in the book that you're working on that seemed ripe for conversation, and I urge our readers and listeners to go check out Natalie's book when it comes out and to look at her other published work. So thank you again, Natalie, for coming on the podcast.

Thank you for having me. This was fun. And to our listeners, if you want to find out more, check out our website. There'll be a short bibliography. And you can also go to our Facebook group. You can find all sorts of comments and pictures and other things we post related to the Ottoman Empire, the broader Middle East, Islamic world, anything interesting historically, we put it up there. And until the next episode thank you