Ottoman History Podcast - Mementos from Habsburg Life in Ottoman Istanbul

Episode Date: July 5, 2020

Episode 465 with Robyn Dora Radway hosted by Emily Neumeier What was it like to be a foreigner living in Ottoman Istanbul? In this episode, our guest Robyn Dora Radway answers this question by providing an in-depth look at an unusual type of document: alba amicorum, or friendship albums, which were essentially the social media of the sixteenth century. Produced in the Habsburg embassy (aka the “German House"), these albums functioned like yearbooks in that the owners residing in the embassy would strive to collect all manner of mementos from their time abroad, including signatures, poems, short anecdotes, and even drawings and paintings. At the German House, men from all walks of life would end up assembling their own album amicorum, from the Habsburg ambassador to the cook (who was quite popular and had the largest album by far). We discuss how these albums can thus serve as a valuable resource for historians, as they offer a full picture of the social makeup of these kinds of diplomatic spaces—information that does not often turn up in more traditional archives. « Click for More »

🎵 Hello, and welcome to the Autumn History Podcast. I'm Emily Neumeier. In this episode, I'm speaking with Dr. Robin Dora Radway, who is a professor of history at Central European University. We sit down to talk about her current research about Habsburg friendship albums, Album Amikorum, and the important role they played in the diplomatic circles of Ottoman Istanbul. And what they have are basically Facebook for the early modern period. As we discuss, these works are significant in that they are some of the earliest examples of what are known as costume images from the early modern world. I mean, these are the earliest albums of this type, and in that sense, what's interesting about them is that it's early on in the history of costume albums. I mean, the first ones are really developed in the mid-16th century. The earliest of these paper collections are also mid-16th century, and the earliest examples of Alba Amicorum's, these signatures, are also in the mid-16th century.

So this is really sort of three genres that are coming into their own at this time. All this and more, coming up. I know that you're here at Central European University. You're teaching Habsburg history. You're a historian of the Habsburg Empire. But your current research brings you to Istanbul. Yes, it does. So I was trained as both a sort of Central Europeanist

or an early modern Europeanist and also trained in Ottoman history a bit. And so my current research, and also my previous research as well, have always brought me to Istanbul. I've been more interested in the border necessarily than Istanbul itself, but these objects that I'm currently working on are very much bringing the world of the Habsburgs into the Ottoman Empire. You're not working on Istanbul in general.

Your research has taken you to a very specific place in Istanbul. Where is that? So this is a building that's across the street from the Grand Market, so from the Kapılıç Arşı. And it's also across the street from the Cembeletash, so the burnt column, and it is a two-story structure where the Habsburg ambassadors and really anyone coming from lands ruled by the Habsburgs would live when they were in Istanbul in the second half of the 16th century through the 17th century, sort of mid-17th century.

And did they have a specific name for this house? The people coming from Habsburg territory themselves often referred to it as their inn. It was called the German house as well. So, the Ottomans referred to it as the Nemtjehane, also as the Elchehane, so as the house of the ambassador. It was about one kilometer away from the Topkapı Palace itself, and that made it a sort of very interesting place, because unlike the other ambassadors who lived in Galata, this is very close to the heart of central administration in the Ottoman Empire. And so what they would do is from their windows, which looked out onto what is today Divanyolu Caddesi, they would see the processions of the Sultan

as he went to Friday prayers at the mosque, at Sultan Suleyman's mosque, for example, or going to the old palace from the Topkapı. There would also be people coming from the Balkan hinterlands and making their way past, often with groups of captives. And so they would show them off as they walked by the house. And this was very important because the people living in this house would look down onto the street and see these movements. It's interesting because you mentioned sort of them having the ability to look out onto

the street, but also is there a sense of the location of this place that they're also being contained and under surveillance? Yes, absolutely. So they were assigned to have two janissaries standing outside the house at all times. Nobody could leave the house according to sort of complaints, regular complaints by the people living there. They couldn't actually leave the house at all times. Nobody could leave the house according to sort of complaints, regular complaints by the people living there. They couldn't actually leave the house without a janissary guard with them. And occasionally they would get their windows boarded up. So you do have descriptions of the ambassadors complaining that when the situation between the two empires became more complicated. You'd also occasionally get them under house arrest, which would mean that they were not allowed to leave at all. This happened in the 1550s,

and then it happened in the 1590s, right before the outbreak of the Long Turkish War. But I mean, there are moments there where they can actually move out and around the city quite a bit with their janissary guards. They go on field trips to the Black Sea, they describe sort of taking trips over to Galata where they had a lot more sort of opportunities to move around because this was a Christian space in a lot of areas. But definitely within Constantinople itself, sort of old Constantinople, it was a very interesting interaction with their environment. Do you have a sense of how big this house was and how many people were living in it at any given time? So the house could accommodate up to around 100 people, but that would be a very tight squeeze.

This would happen often if there were two, because the ambassadors would overlap often for at least a couple of months, sometimes as much as a year and a half. And so it had quite a few rooms. I think it was around sort of over 45 rooms. And on the upper story is only where they would live. And it could be up to two people, sometimes even three people per room. And they were quite small. The rooms then looked out onto the courtyard, but also had a window outwards onto the street below. And quite a few people would live in there. So there were certain rooms that were reserved for the ambassador. There was a room for the artist. There was a room for the barber. There was a room for the chaplain, so the priest. And a few others had their own individual rooms where they could also practice their trades, whatever that was.

But a lot of the noblemen who would just come through on their way to a pilgrimage, for example, they would often double up in a room. It's a very interesting space where you have individuals coming from all over lands that are ruled by the Habsburgs. And they're coming to this house and this is where they are able to stay and it's a caravanserai so I mean it's a place where you would regularly have people coming through. So you mentioned cooks and an artist and a clergyman are these are these all all the even like the sort of service workers were they also all foreigners were they brought

from the Habsburg Empire? Or were there locals working inside as well? So occasionally you would get a local working there, but there was usually as a translator. But for the most part, the individuals are coming from all over Habsburg territory instead. And that includes individuals like the cook, for whom it's a very interesting space because they're not sort of immediate members of Habsburg lands

in the sense that they are not noblemen. And they don't usually have this strong connection in sort of their daily lives to what it means to be a Habsburg subject, if we can even call it that. But in this moment, when they're all mixing in this house and getting to know each other, then you really see that come out in the types of objects that are circulating in this house

what are some of the objects that are coming out of the house that this kind of material culture that's drawn you to this project yeah so i started this project initially looking at costume albums because there are quite a few costume albums that traditionally are associated with a few of the ambassadors. And they're very important for the future of costume albums. So these are 16th century albums that then get copied quite a bit. They get made into prints and then spread widely and make a huge impact on 17th, 18th and 19th century costume album images. And so initially I was looking at the ones that were owned by the ambassadors, but I quickly realized as I was looking at some of these albums and tracing other sort of footnotes

that I found them, these images wound up in other collections. And these collections are actually sort of friendship albums. They're called Alba Amicorum or Stammbücher in German. And what they have are basically Facebook for the early modern period. So you have a book that you would carry around with you and you would have your friends sign it. Often this was used when you go to the university. So this was a type of object that was really sort of grounded in a university setting initially in the 1530s, 1540s. And it quickly became something you would take on trips with you. So you could sort of have people that you've met along the way sign this album and you could look back on it and see what you've done and show your

friends what you've done. And what turns out is that there's actually a lot of these albums from the German house. So a lot of men would bring these with them. And I have about 25 to 30 of these albums that were in the German house. And many of them include costume album images of the types that end up in these more high quality costume album books that are made supposedly for the ambassadors. Do you get the sense that in terms of the costume album images that people are not only purchasing them, but they're also trading them amongst themselves as kind of like a friendly exchange of objects. I don't know about you, but when I was a kid at school, our big thing was trading stickers. You know, if you really wanted this one sticker,

you'd be haggling and negotiating over this deal for weeks at a time. Absolutely. Absolutely, absolutely. I think that's a key element of this because it's not as though everyone has a full set of these images. It depended on the individual. Also, the quality of each image is very different. So sometimes you have individuals who will, for example, The Cook has the largest album.

The Cook's album is a very interesting one he has over 60 images in it including several copies of an image within the album so it's often what seems to happen is that you have amateur artists copying the works of real sort of trained professional artists living in the house and copying them into their albums. You also have unfinished images, which might have been lying around and then somebody decided to take that and incorporate it into their album. So you have a set of unfinished images

in an album in Copenhagen, for example, that are very interesting because they're connected to these much more complete finished albums that were made for ambassadors. I think not everybody who's listening might be familiar with the genre of costume albums. Could you give a more general idea of what those are? Yeah. So, costume albums are sort of a group of images that are collected together that portray individuals in a way that shows off their the clothing that they are wearing. What this allows the viewer to do often is to page through

a book and see a series of locations or a series of types of idealized types of individuals, often with the names of the location where they come from below, and sort of travel in their armchair where they're sitting at home, and experience that sort of exotic encounter with something foreign. There's a lot of discussion of what these costume albums were about, and why they were made, and in this case it's interesting to see where and how people would interact with this and use this i mean for some of the ambassadors like

david ungnad and an album was very important for understanding the people you interact with and encounter so that you can then pass this information on to the next ambassador. So he collected an album where he had a lot of very detailed notes about what he wanted the future ambassadors to know about every situation that they might encounter. So this was a practical guide as well for certain individuals. you've brought some images for us to look at and And there's two that you're really excited about. So let's look at those. So yeah, these two images come from an album in Linz. And it's an album that was owned by Helmhard Haydn von Dorf.

He was working for the resident ambassador, Joachim von Zinzendorf and he was in Constantinople between 1578 and 1581 and during this time he had a lot of individuals who came through the house sign his album and he also has seven coats of arms which is another very common component of this type of album and what's more most exciting he has seven very interesting images as well so seven images including several costume album like images however they're they're a little bit different so some of them are sort of a very classic costume album image and then some are more related to the signature above it so for example there's this wonderful image of a man in a white turban in a black coat holding up a glass of what must be wine and he signs above This is actually Ali Bey.

And he is the house translator. So he is the dragoman for the house. This is from 1581. So this is his first year as the dragoman. And he goes on to have quite an illustrious career. But he signs in German. And he signs it as the ambassador or as the ambassador's translator and it's on the 9th of May in 1581 so shortly after he's been made the translator. So who's done the drawing? Is this a self-portrait? Well this is a a great question. I mean, we don't know.

It's probably not a self-portrait. That's very unlikely. You wouldn't have self-portraiture at this time by these types of individuals within the Ottoman Empire. It can very well be a portrait made by a local artist, though. We know that Sindsendorf, the ambassador, was collecting

an album for himself as well and there were a lot of images circulating at the time in the house and so there's a good chance that this might actually be a portrait of Ali Bey. I see, so the other possibility here is that it could be a more generic costume album image that's you know that are kind of circulating around and then this was pulled and said this kind of looks like you exactly exactly sign it yeah that's the other possibility that's the other possibility so i mean there's other images in this album for example that are more of the traditional type of costume image so this is a on one page it's a combination of this kind of friendship album collection of signatures and a costume album

yes and it's also a paper collection as well so this is this album has in the album but this is this is one of these decorated papers as well this is a a fairly plain one. It's a monochrome paper, so it's a yellow color. I don't think this one has any sprinkles on the other side, but often they'll be monochrome with a sprinkle, sort of sprinkled gold or silver on the other side. But this is also a decorated paper album as well. So in some ways, these albums are kind of like scrapbooks where people are kind of collecting various real pieces of art

in terms of these sort of portable pieces of art, like paper, but also memories, images, signatures. It's kind of a melange. Yeah, there's a few of them that even include travel narratives by the person who owns it this isn't as common but occasionally you do get that you also get sort of poetry written by the person who owns it occasionally there's a great example of this in the getty collection so they bought they bought this not so long ago. It's a wonderful album owned by Johann Joachim Prach von Asch, and he has a lot of sort of little poetry that he writes into the decorated spaces on the folios, so

into the designs on the image itself. He will write a little bit of notes to himself or sort of funny things that he thinks of. There's one page where it's a marbled folio, but in one of the lines, he writes out that he hopes that the woman's mother that he's writing to will become his mother-in-law. Oh. Yes. They were thinking about women a lot when they were there okay yeah i mean this is something we can we can discuss um so women were not in the house i mean this was a male space this was a hundred percent male space it was were these rules imposed by the habsburgs or by the ottomans or

both i would assume it's sort of, it's common sense. So in the 16th century, at least, they're not bringing anyone with them and any females with them. And in fact, I mean, most of the ambassadors are not married when they leave for this trip. So it's a house full of young bachelors.

Yeah, which means, you know, that they have interesting fantasies about the local women. They are, you know that they have interesting um fantasies about the local women and they are you know doing everything in their power to see one this is sort of they they constantly write about trying to look over the hedges and see a woman i mean one of the earliest images from the house is um by a wonderful, and it's over the rooftops of... Oh, he's famous. Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, this is the artist who does the famous panorama of Istanbul. Exactly. But he also has another image. So he also lives in this house, and he has another image from one of the windows when they were locked into the house.

So this was when they were under house arrest. And it's from one of the windows looking over the houses next door and of course he looks right into a window where there's a pair of lovers um going at it essentially and this is in one of his images so it's constantly on their mind that there there are no women around them i'm just curious is it is it terribly difficult to read this this text i mean i'm just looking at is it terribly difficult to read this text? I mean, I'm just looking at, I don't read German, but this just looks... It's not easy. It's not

easy. I sympathize. Yeah, I mean, it's not as bad as Ottoman, but it's not easy. So, I was lucky enough to have been instructed in paleography at Princeton by Yair Minsker. And he started me on this path. And then you really have to develop a sense for the time period. And what's difficult about these is that they all, everyone has different handwriting. And if you have 150, 300 signatures in an album, it's going to be tough.

But there's a lot of people working on these types of albums. And so you've got a lot of help out there, which is really great. So you said you're looking at 25 albums. Is that right? It's 25 of them that have signatures. There's about 30 others that have images which are not signatures. And then there's another set of about 40 albums that are just the paper or sort of paper

and non-Ottoman paper. So I imagine that if you have a series of albums that are roughly coming or being generated from the same place at the same time and the idea is that they're going to be signing each other's books, is that you can start to, that the same signatures, you'll start to see sort of a cross-referencing among the albums.

Absolutely. Is that happening? Yes, definitely. So what I've been working through is that you've got, with these signatures in these albums, you have certain individuals who become very prominent once you start looking through these albums and organizing the signatures into charts and graphs. And so I've actually been working together with some network scientists here at Central European

University in order to try to understand and visualize this in a meaningful way and get a sense of who were these individuals that were signing the most albums can we find some patterns about the way people signed and often we find that these signatures took place either at the beginning when they first arrived and they were first getting to know each other but most often at the end of a trip so when they were saying goodbye and other times are sort of big parties at the end of a trip, so when they were saying goodbye. Other times are sort of big parties at the house, when they would all be together sitting around a table, when somebody special came to visit from another embassy,

so that often happens that somebody would come over from Galata and then they would have a big dinner party. Also outings, if they went to the Black Sea, they would sometimes take their books along with them and sign them there and then write that they were signing it there and then draw a little picture of something they saw along the way. But so in terms of this network science side of things, what's really interesting is that you can then see who are the individuals that are most active at a certain time and then is that reflective of their situation within the house or their their role within the house and often it can be tied to it and often it can't the cook for example has a huge collection of signatures um which sort of makes sense. He's the most popular.

I mean, it makes sense. If you're going to be going down to the kitchens to hang out with the cook or you get hungry, then you'll get to know the cook. So people know him and therefore he gets a lot of signatures. What's fascinating, of course, is that the cook himself doesn't sign any albums. So nobody asks the cook to sign his album. So nobody asks the cook to sign his album. I mean, I guess, is there a question of,

is there any kind of possibility that he would be illiterate, like he wouldn't be able to write? No, I think that's... I mean, if he has a book that people are signing, he clearly can read. I mean, he's also the main cook, so he's the head cook, which means that he's also got to work with recipes um there's a good chance he could read and then he i mean he eventually goes on to a rather illustrious career afterwards as well um where he's no longer just a cook right so a cook isn't just a cook i guess yeah um for the most part there were sort of, you know, stable boys that couldn't read and write, I think, in the house,

and you don't usually get their signatures, although we do have, you know, one man who signs just boy, garçon, in French, and this appears occasionally in albums. How we would ever be able to connect them to individuals is, it's not really possible. So there's never any kind of attempt to find a way to have illiterate people sign or participate somehow in the book? I don't know, like a thumbprint or some kind of mark, but not writing per se. Sometimes you get individuals who will sign

for multiple people. That does happen. Or you have somebody who signs for someone else. So it says, I had this signed for me. So the grammatical structure of the sentence makes it clear that they did not sign themselves. They had somebody write it

for them. So this does occasionally happen. And this happens in the broader context of these types of albums as well. So you do see this. did not sign themselves they had somebody write it for them so this does occasionally happen and this happens in the broader context of these types of albums as well so you do see this i know you're in the middle of of working on this uh this sort of digital model i know you're in the middle of really working through this data but are there any preliminary results that you found surprising? Yeah, so one of them would be that the people with the highest betweenness centrality, and betweenness centrality means really that they, a lot of the lines cross through them, so that they've signed albums that other people have signed, and they become a sort of central hub in a network graph. And what I found very interesting and makes a lot

of sense in hindsight is that most of these men with the biggest centrality or the greatest in between the centrality are the ones who were in charge of practical tasks within the embassy that were very important like writing the um right like writing the the cipher for the reports that would go back to to be sent back to vienna and to prague so so the scribes were very important in this respect a lot of the ambassadors were asked very frequently to sign albums as well. So the ambassadors themselves did not own albums that people signed. They did not collect signatures. So there's definitely also, as you sort of go along with this type of network analysis, you realize that there are certain types of albums that are owned by different types of people.

that there are certain types of albums that are owned by different types of people. And this is very clear when you start sort of examining this in a network graph way so that ambassadors, they only collect costume books. For them, it's sort of a social prestige that they don't need, right?

So this object, a book full of signatures of people they've met is something that you, yeah, a book full of signatures of people they've met of people they've met is something that you yeah a book full of signatures of people you've met is something that you don't necessarily need as an ambassador but it's something you may want to use to help heighten your sense of importance when you go back home to show people what you've done and who you've met whereas the ambassador already know i mean it's fairly obvious that he is important figure in this space i'm trying to think of a good analogy

a good contemporary analogy of this i feel like i don't know i mean it's it's sort of a yearbook perhaps um there's there's poesiebücher that people use actually in Germany and in Austria and even, I mean, around Europe until very recently. So every time I talk about this, there's always somebody who says, I have a book like that at home. So they definitely continued until the 20th century and really then were replaced by social media. So fewer and fewer people make these kinds of books today um well i suppose if

you're an ambassador today or if you're a diplomat i mean it's it's if it's your job to really travel around the world and meet people that you wouldn't necessarily have like a personal facebook account like yeah look at this place i just went you know but you might keep it for yourself though in your phone and take photographs yeah but if you're someone who doesn't travel a lot and this is sort of a once in a lifetime opportunity that you're more likely to more assiduously document it and keep track of it so you can look back on on your trip absolutely there is a lot of research on diplomatic history and examining the role of diplomats and foreigners in the in the ottoman empire and especially in istanbul at the court in in these kinds of studies i suppose more traditional sources you would look at are official diplomatic correspondence, things like archival

records, things like that. Do these albums offer a different point of view? Absolutely. One of the big elements of these albums that we would not be able to know about in the regular sources on embassies is just the sheer volume of people that are in this house so for the albums of this time period so between the 1560s to 1568 is the first signature and 1593 is the last signature in this period that i'm studying and you have 500 individuals signing these albums. Of those, probably about 400 of them were living in the house. And if you look at the official documentation, you don't see these 400 people. Often this is the only proof that they lived in this house for any period of time. And so that really changes the way we think about what an embassy is, who's living in this building, how does it

function, and how can we see this space as also a sort of extraterritorial space of the Habsburgs in some way, right? And you really get a better sense of what it meant to be part of this representation of Habsburg power there, or Habsburg diplomatic space that is not populated by diplomats exclusively. So it kind of gives a more textured, a fuller picture of the strata of this. textured full a fuller picture of the strata of this it's really a community yeah and that's really you know confined by the walls of of this house yeah absolutely and you don't see these individuals in the documentation of the embassy that's in vienna so in the archival materials you're not going to find most of these individuals. You will find the ambassador, of course, you'll find the scribes, you'll find the messengers often.

If something goes wrong, then you'll find some more names about something that happened. There's also, of course, travel logs, and those will list some individuals as well. But even there, it's only perhaps one-tenth of the individuals that are in the house and you don't realize that until you have these types of albums with these signatures how big are these albums are they all of a rather uniform size or do they vary so they're all about a little larger than the size of a hand you'd need to be able to take them around with you so it says something you tuck into your pocket it It is, for the most part, they're ones you can tuck into your pocket,

for the ones that have signatures. There's even smaller ones as well that are sort of just a couple of inches. And there are also much larger ones, and those would be for the ambassadors. So the smaller ones are, the larger ones are going to be the costume books that are finished hard copies for ambassadors um but the smaller ones are

sort of no larger than your hand yeah now i know uh you've been really looking at this uh more from the hapsburg point of view and and you were explaining that especially these costume albums and friendship albums are part of Habsburg visual material culture. I mean, this is not an unusual thing, and it's sort of brought to Istanbul. But as far as you know, are there parallel efforts for producing albums in the Ottoman court? Well, it's an interesting question. So in the 17th century, it really picks up, and there is a very large production of Ottoman-made costume albums

for an Ottoman audience. This is something that in the 16th century is not the case. There are one or two examples of albums that can be dated in the 16th century is not the case. There are one or two examples of albums that can be dated to the 16th century that do have Ottoman artists working in them. And whether it's collected for an Ottoman patron is a very difficult distinction to make. Most of them are not in Istanbul,

so there's a good chance that they were actually made also on the orders of somebody else. But they're complicated objects, so they're full of a lot of layers of problems, these other albums from the 16th century. In the 17th century, it becomes a very different world of these albums really sort of becoming widely popular in culture. There's also a French album that,

so the Ottomans or the Habsburgs are not the only ones interested in this sort of world. There's a very, very interesting French album that combines very highly finished um costume images together with these marbled papers and that one is also along these same lines but it's also a bit later so one thing that uh one of the big aspects the of this research is that these albums how early they are yeah absolutely i mean these are the earliest albums of this type and in that sense uh what's

what's interesting about them is that it's early on in the history of costume albums. I mean, the first ones are really developed in the mid-16th century. The earliest of these paper collections are also mid-16th century, and the earliest examples of Alba Amicorum's, these signatures are also in the mid-16th century. So this is really sort of three genres that are coming into their own at this time. Well, thank you so much for this fascinating look at very interesting objects, just as they're in this early laboratory for experiments with friendship albums and costume albums and paper albums. It's very interesting. So thank you. Thank you very much for the opportunity. So I'll remind our listeners that if they want to see the images

and more information about the topic that we discussed today, they can go to the website. That's autumnhistorypodcast.com. That's it for now. And until next time, take care. Thank you.