Ottoman-Habsburg relations Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

This course will examine the early modern Mediterranean as a contact zone, “where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power”. The Mare Nostrum in the early modern era was, although still a contested “frontier” between Islam and Christianity, also a “borderland”, a highway of transport, trade and cultural exchange, where different societies met and overlapped. With its focus on the “contact zone”, the course concentrates on people who crossed the frontiers of the early modern Mediterranean and facilitated the contact by getting in touch with different civilizations and diverse cultures. Agents of civilizational contact, i.e. spies, merchants, sailors, renegades, soldiers, corsairs, slaves, ambassadors, etc. are at the center of this course. Around their stories, several thematical issues of early modern Mediterranean history will be discussed: Conversion, flow of information, long-distance trade networks, intra-communal relations, extraterritoriality, religious tolerance, migration, resident diplomacy, transformation of identity, articulation of difference, technological transfer, cultural values, patronage, etc.
These agents unintentionally undertook the hard task of harmonizing the cultures and unifying the economies and societies of the early modern Mediterranean. They were the means by which ideas were diffused, goods and cash transferred, technologies spread, information gathered and political agreements made. Their stories gave rise to the criticism, prevalent among the historians of the Early Modern Mediterranean, of the Orientalist disposition to consider “East” and “West”, “Islam” and Christianity” as trans-historical self-contained binaries and to depict an irredeemable hostility between different civilizations of exclusivist nature. By concentrating on this specific group of people on the margins of civilizations, the course discusses the extent to which the undisputed geographical/climatological unity of the Mediterranean resulted in its unity as a historical entity, i.e. socio-economically and culturally. It seeks an answer to the question to what extent relations between different societies and cultures were shaped by the geographical unity the sea imposed upon its peoples.
Other historical trends come into focus inevitably; the lives on the Mediterranean were affected by political struggles as well as economic and social opportunities provided by the resources of not only the landlocked Mare Nostrum, but also the ambiguously defined geographical space called the “Greater Mediterranean”. Therefore, it also becomes imperative to discuss the structural changes that the Mediterranean experienced. The effects of the rapid technological changes in the warfare, imperial rivalries that dominated the sea, inflationary pressures in the world economy, population pressure, and finally the slowly changing climate on the “collective destinies” of the people inhabiting the Mediterranean were explained briefly in order to give relevant historical context.