When in 1480 Mehmed II launched the Otranto campaign, did he really intend to rule over a continent that he perceived as Europe? Or, when the Ottoman armies were at the gate of Vienna, did the Sultan, and his statesmen, believe that they were at the threshold of a territorial entity called Europe? The categories such as Europe and Europeans rather correspond to a non-Ottoman vocabulary that was foreign to the cultural and the cartographic mappings of the early modern Ottomans. Yet, the Ottomans did possess certain geographical and cultural concepts that roughly corresponded to what we today call Europe. In this talk, I will argue that the construction of this vocabulary was interwoven with certain legal-conceptual categorizations that served to create early modern territorial political entities. More specifically, the Ottomans viewed the geographical region sprawling beyond its Western borders as a non-Muslim “religious community” that needed to be annexed into their own “political community” which, theoretically, transcended the religious difference in the Ottoman legal vocabulary. While tracing the trajectories of Ottoman perceptions of Europe, in this talk, I will also dismantle the early modern forms of state-building and art of governing in the Ottoman context.
Email: Yavuz.Aykan@univ-paris1.fr