The Sultan’s Renegades

In recent decades, much progress has been made in incorporating the Ottoman Empire into a wider early modern Mediterranean cultural complex. In such integration, the figure of the imperial go-between or cultural broker has assumed pride of place for his or her ability to nuance from the margins the binary political, religious and cultural categories that traditionally cast the Ottoman Empire as Europe’s most proximate Other. In this vein, Tobias Graf’s focus on the renegade—Christian European converts to Islam who served the sultan as soldier-statesmen and palace functionaries—both underscores the extraordinariness of these go-betweens and refocuses their study by arguing for the very ordinariness of their experiences within the Ottoman military-administrative class. Although they hailed from outside the Ottoman Empire, these renegades fitted seamlessly into the Ottoman military-administrative class. This is because the development, structure and characteristics of this class in the late sixteenth century (ch. 1) already accommodated, indeed was substantially predicated upon, the periodic seizure of Christian male youths from the Balkans (devşirme), their conversion to Islam and their training within the palace and other elite households in preparation for leadership positions within the empire. Renegades, especially those who joined the palace-trained devşirme cohorts, found productive avenues for progress and promotion within this system of service and frequently capitalised upon their special skills or knowledge, whether maritime, linguistic or diplomatic (ch. 4). Crucially, Graf also points to renegades’ own cultivation of, and reliance upon, Ottoman political and social networks of ethnic solidarity (Italian or German) that in many ways mirror what Ottomanists have long observed with respect to devşirme networks of Albanian, Bosnian and later Circassian soldier-statesmen

Ancient history · Archaeology · Elite · Empire · Islam · Parliament · Political science · Politics · Pride · Sociology · Solidarity · Classics · History · Law · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity