Klaus Müller once observed on Habsburg diplomacy in the Ottoman Empire that “in no other country did Vienna establish such an extensive espionage network so early, and nowhere else did it ensure such a continuous diplomatic presence as in Constantinople.”Footnote 1 The creation of this network became an existential necessity for the Habsburgs by the 1520s, as the Ottoman Empire’s military advance brought the frontier to within about 140 kilometers of Vienna. The Habsburg permanent embassy in Constantinople was opened in 1547. The Aulic War Council (Hofkriegsrat) was founded in 1556 to coordinate and supervise Ottoman diplomacy and the defense of the Military Frontier (Militärgrenze).Footnote 2 The geostrategic pressures that required this alertness continued until at least 1683. Only in 1753, the Aulic War Council passed its Ottoman-related tasks to the newly created State Chancery (Staatskanzlei), a change enabled by the recession of the Ottoman border to northern Serbia.Footnote 3 Yet, this administrative modification did not mean the waning of Habsburg interests in the Ottoman world, nor did it entail a contraction of the Habsburg information network. Even after the treaties of Carlowitz (1699) and Passarowitz (1718), Habsburg diplomatic and intelligence activity in the Ottoman lands continued to expand. By the mid-eighteenth century, the hyperactive information and intelligence-gathering networks of Vienna, already in operation for two centuries, had metamorphosed into a knowledge (Wissen) regime that produced information on virtually every aspect of the Ottoman world.
Based on three comparative case studies of early modern Habsburg-Ottoman diplomatic encounters, I argue in this article that the Habsburg information apparatus in the Ottoman Empire, founded in the mid-1500s to gather political intelligence, had developed two distinctive features by the mid-1700s. First, it had matured into a sophisticated, institutionalized, information-gathering regime that I term the “Habsburg diplo-Wissen regime.” Second, the flow of information from Constantinople to Vienna via the Habsburg diplo-Wissen regime remained unmatched on the Ottoman side in continuity and consistency until the end of the eighteenth century, resulting in what I refer to as “asymmetrical flow of information.” This article substantiates these claims through a close analysis of archival material from three selected early modern diplomatic processes: The negotiations in Constantinople in the summer of 1682 before the second Ottoman siege of Vienna; the grand embassy exchange between the two capitals following the signing of the Treaty of Carlowitz (1699); and another grand embassy exchange between the two states following the signing of the Treaty of Passarowitz (1718). I will illustrate through a detailed study of the archival evidence concerning these missions from Istanbul, Vienna, and two noble family archives in Europe that there was a remarkable discrepancy between the consistency, continuity, and breadth of Habsburg and Ottoman record-keeping, information-gathering, and archival preservation capabilities. The article then concludes by using its archival research to posit insights about the broader historical implications of this archival asymmetry, which should serve a better understanding of the comparative histories of Habsburg and Ottoman diplomatic practices.
Habsburg Diplo-Wissen
The capture of Constantinople by Ottoman forces in 1453 led to an outburst of information gathering in Europe on Turks and the Ottoman Empire.Footnote 4 Following the Ottoman capture of Buda in 1526, the Ottoman expansion turned into an existential threat to Vienna and required regular information flow from the Ottoman court. Accordingly, the main task of the Habsburg resident embassy that was established in Constantinople in 1547 was to acquire reliable intelligence and produce actionable information for defensive purposes.Footnote 5 In the post-1699 era, now operating with an added sense of geopolitical security, Vienna continued to employ in Ottoman diplomacy its existing structured hierarchy of agents, including grand ambassadors, internuncios, resident ambassadors, and language boys known as Sprachknaben, to attain, curate, organize, and transfer knowledge from the Ottoman world to Vienna. Reports were systematically compiled, archived, and cross-referenced by every subsequent generation.Footnote 6 Ultimately, the original urge to achieve via diplomacy a near certainty about what might happen next in the political or military domain in the Ottoman Empire evolved by the early eighteenth century into a full-fledged knowledge ecosystem that was not just capable of anticipating what could happen in the Ottoman Empire; this coordinated information-gathering regime could decode and interpret the institutional, social, and cultural dynamics of why things in the Ottoman world were the way they were.
Diplo-Wissen, or diplo-knowledge, is the term I use to describe this Habsburg machinery that enabled the extensive and regular accumulation of information and knowledge about the Ottoman Empire. While diplo refers to diplomacy as the main activity through and for which information was collected, structured, and preserved, the German Wissen highlights the broad spectrum of (political, linguistic, ethnographic, cartographic, historical, and visual) knowledge that was recorded, structured, categorized, and archived primarily through diplomatic means under the supervision of a mainly German-speaking court.Footnote 7 Diplo-Wissen may refer to any early modern diplomatic activity that aimed to collect information, but I use diplo-Wissen specifically for the Habsburg-Ottoman diplomatic context, to denote the multifaceted mechanisms, including not only Informationsgewinnung or Informationsbeschaffung but also Wissensproduktion, Wissenswandel, Wissenszirkulation, and Wissensdiffusion, through which the Habsburg monarchy acquired knowledge about the Ottoman Empire from the early sixteenth century onwards, generating both retrospective interpretive analysis and forward-looking projections about the Ottoman world for and beyond the diplomatic domain.Footnote 8 Thus, diplo-Wissen was the combination of a heterogeneous repertoire of both conventional and irregular diplomatic practices that mobilized diplomatic and non-diplomatic actors to acquire, analyze, and study information.
Habsburg diplo-Wissen gradually developed into a systematic regime of knowledge production: it amassed archival collections and libraries and trained scientific experts in oriental languages, culture, and history, though orientalism, or the study of the east, was but one element of a broader informational apparatus. Central to this regime was the routine archival preservation of information gathered via the diplomatic machinery, an area Vienna excelled in, as observed by historian Randolph Head in his comparative work on early modern archive-building in Western Europe: “Despite its shortcomings, the document production and management regime of the Austrian Habsburgs was by 1520 one of the most systematic in Europe.”Footnote 9 (I discuss Vienna’s Ottoman-related collections in detail below.) One further component of this diplo-Wissen regime was cartography, which began as a defensive propaganda tool to increase awareness in Western Europe about the Ottoman expansion, as a recent volume has lucidly illustrated.Footnote 10 Yet, it soon became a diplomatic instrument: successive Habsburg embassies, including the two examined in this article, produced detailed maps of the Ottoman lands. Finally, the creation of libraries which housed diligently collected Turkish as well as Persian, Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, and Armenian manuscripts was also essential to Habsburg diplo-Wissen, most remarkably exemplified in humanist scholar Sebastian Tengnagel’s initiatives and career.Footnote 11
Arguably, the most important pillar of the Habsburg diplo-Wissen regime was the centuries-long tradition of systematic Turkish language study, a decisive factor that set Habsburg and Ottoman diplomatic knowledge economies apart in terms of scope, consistency, and efficiency. An eighteenth-century Turkish dictionary captured this Habsburg pragmatism in a pithy couplet: “Ein Glück für jeden fremden Mann/Der selbst mit Türken sprechen kann” [A blessing for every foreign man/who can speak with Turks on his own] (see Figure 1). In Vienna, there was a position for a Turkish interpreter (Tulmatsch; Dolmetscher in modern German) inside the court as early as 1541 and one could be found in that office until the late nineteenth century.Footnote 12 As early as the 1560s, Habsburg diplomats in the Ottoman capital began recommending that Vienna should send young pupils to the Ottoman capital to study and learn the language and culture of the land.Footnote 13 The first Sprachknabe, Peter Wolzogen, arrived in Constantinople in 1578.Footnote 14 The Habsburg term Sprachknabe might have been just the German rendering of Italian giovanni di lingua, because Venice, which had a commercial foothold in the Ottoman capital and the entire eastern Mediterranean since the Byzantine times, faced the necessity of learning and speaking Turkish before everybody else.Footnote 15 Nonetheless, the matter posed an urgency for the Habsburg monarchy due to the shared border with the Ottomans for centuries. This geopolitical condition was the driving force behind Habsburg diplomatic hyper-vigilance and the creation of the Habsburg diplo-Wissen regime.
First page of a late eighteenth-century Turkish dictionary. “Ein Glück für jeden fremden Mann/Der selbst mit Türken sprechen kann.” [A blessing for every foreign man/Who speaks with Turks on his own.] Ján Matej [Johann Mathias] Korabinský, Versuch eines kleinen Türkischen Wörterbuchs, Pressburg: 1788. Image: Moravian Land Archive, Brno.
In 1674, Johannes Podesta received permission to teach oriental languages at the University of Vienna, where Turkish, or Turkologie, would be “almost continuously represented” from the seventeenth century to this day.Footnote 16 It was certainly not a coincidence that Franz von Mesgnien-Meninski’s magnum opus, Thesaurus Linguarum Orientalium, one of the finest achievements of European oriental scholarship, was published in Vienna in 1680.Footnote 17 One of the oldest and most continuous language learning institutions in Europe, the Orientalische Akademie, which was founded in 1753/54 as k. k. Akademie der morgenländischen Sprachen and which is the origin of today’s Diplomatische Akademie in Vienna, was also a product of Habsburg diplo-Wissen regime.Footnote 18 Sprachknaben were the products of this centuries-old tradition who, as pivotal operatives of the Habsburg information empire, penetrated the peculiarities of the Ottoman world, court, and its people. A prominent product of the Sprachknabe tradition was the Austrian orientalist and Ottomanist, Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (d. 1856). Hammer was originally trained as a language boy for diplomatic service, but his scholarly reputation would make him, in the last phase of his career in 1847, the founding president of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He was certainly a curious intellectual, yet he was also the most brilliant representative and climax of the Habsburg diplo-Wissen tradition of studying the Ottoman world. While Hammer’s many passages in his multi-volume history of the Ottoman Empire may today be dismissed as biased, his work remains to this day a widely cited source; what he achieved was a skillful conversion of diplo-Wissen tradition into widely accessible knowledge, using an impressive array of Turkish, Persian, and Arabic manuscripts, alongside sources in numerous European languages.Footnote 19
Archival Asymmetry
Had the Ottoman Empire produced its counterpart to Hammer-Purgstall, that historian would have authored in the early nineteenth century a multi-volume history of the Habsburg monarchy, drawing on primary sources in German, Hungarian, Latin, and Italian, as well as a range of Slavic and other European languages. This did not happen. An important explanation for the discrepancy between Habsburg and Ottoman scholarly production was the asymmetrical character of information flow from the Ottoman capital to Vienna that existed for centuries. The continuity, consistency, volume, and comprehensiveness of information traveling in the opposite direction, from the Habsburg capital to Constantinople, were significantly limited until the nineteenth century. Archival evidence leaves little doubt that, at any given time, the Viennese diplo-Wissen regime had a fairly reliable understanding of the major actors inside the Ottoman court, from high-ranking officials to rank-and-file officers. A striking example can be found in a manual prepared around the 1740s. This manual details the duties and spheres of activity of everyone from the grand vizier to the lowest-ranking official, the breadth and accuracy of which would never be matched on the Ottoman side.Footnote 20
Habsburg skill in collecting, recording, and preserving information about the Ottoman world should not be mistaken for evidence of complete Ottoman negligence in diplomatic intelligence. A large body of research on pre-Ottoman and Ottoman-era archives across the Middle East, which I cannot fully discuss and quote here due to thematic and space restrictions, confirms the Ottomans’ success and efficiency in creating and preserving written records and registers, in much greater volumes than earlier Islamic political entities.Footnote 21 In the diplomatic domain, Ottoman court elites and frontier administrators deployed a wide repertoire of informants—prisoners of war, Christian renegades and Muslim converts, local agents, and vassal polities—whose reports furnished Ottoman diplomatic knowledge of Europe.Footnote 22 A recent collection of 138 selected intelligence documents from across Ottoman centuries, published by the Directorate of Turkish Archives, point to the general success of these methods.Footnote 23
Yet, I argue in this article that, despite the Ottomans’ relative success among Islamic states in building archives and preserving written records, there was a striking discrepancy between the Habsburg and Ottoman archival evidence in the diplomatic arena: From the early sixteenth century onward, the Habsburg diplo-Wissen regime did not merely report news to Vienna; it categorized, systematically preserved, studied, and built an ecosystem of expertise based on the constantly flowing information. The Ottoman diplomatic initiatives, which relied on irregular missions often referred to as “ad hoc,” did not show a similar degree of attention to recording diplomatic information on paper and preserving it in an organized manner until the nineteenth century.Footnote 24 The common scholarly tendency, echoed by both anonymous reviewers of this article, is to explain this relative thinness of Ottoman diplomatic archives by pointing to the security-driven predominance of oral communication in Ottoman tradition. On this theme, I take the French Ottomanist Nicolas Vatin’s position: Although the use of oral messages in Ottoman diplomacy was “far from negligible,” its role “should not be exaggerated.”Footnote 25 Differing geopolitical conditions might have shaped the asymmetry: while the Ottoman presence in Hungary was an immediate threat to Vienna, the Ottoman capital enjoyed, until the early nineteenth century, greater strategic insulation, and sustained foreign threats to imperial integrity were less acute than those confronting the Habsburg monarchy. Nonetheless, the intensity of the Habsburg diplo-Wissen regime kept growing even after the initial existential threat disappeared for Vienna.
I believe that major factors behind the information asymmetry stemmed from the lack of intensive language learning on the Ottoman side and the absence of Ottoman resident embassies in European capitals until the 1790s. The Ottoman court’s association of resident embassies with acknowledging a foreign court’s superiority, as often implied in scholarship, may have discouraged their establishment.Footnote 26 While the first Ottoman resident ambassador to Vienna was appointed in 1795, a translation office (Tercüme Odası) for diplomatic service was founded only in 1821, even though the Ottomans continuously distrusted the Greek interpreters hired for service in court since the seventeenth century.Footnote 27 Moreover, these developments could not immediately translate into diplomatic efficacy; one should not forget that the Habsburg diplo-Wissen regime was the fruit of centuries-long sustained engagement with the Ottoman world.Footnote 28 Indeed, the asymmetry was primarily a natural product of Habsburg resident embassies which, starting from the mid-sixteenth century, institutionalized routines that also extraordinary missions, grand embassies, and peace delegations employed and reproduced in the ensuing decades and centuries. What often remains missing in scholarship is an archive-based comparative analysis of the practical consequences of these intentional choices.
Early modern Habsburg diplomats already recognized the cumulative value of the correspondence now preserved in Vienna at the Haus-, Hof-, und Staatsarchiv (HHStA), under Turcica (Türkei) series. Envoys to the Ottoman court were expected to acquire practical knowledge of Ottoman geography, culture, and social conduct. With no formal training or schooling, eligibility depended largely on prior experience, but ambassadors also prepared by reading earlier reports. In 1629, the designated envoy Johann Ludwig Kuefstein, for example, requested access to previous correspondence.Footnote 29 Beyond texts, diplomats and scholars could consult rich visual materials from the Ottoman world, including “alba amicorum,” which Robyn Radway has called early modern Europe’s “preferred social media platform.”Footnote 30 Such rapid growth of Habsburg textual and visual record on the Ottoman Empire reflected a broader European shift toward note-taking and archive-building.Footnote 31
Originating in the Aulic War Council’s records, the Turcica reflects the Habsburg commitment to systematic record-keeping since the early sixteenth century.Footnote 32 Its first segment, filed under “Diplomatie und Außenpolitik vor 1848,” covers Ottoman affairs from 1521 to 1848. It contains materials in German, Latin, Italian, and French (and occasionally other European languages), as well as originals or translations of some Ottoman Turkish documents. Some numerical info is required to indicate scale: Up to 1848, the Türkei series comprised 736 Kartons, organized into nine Roman-numeral subseries (Türkei I, Türkei II, etc.), each Karton typically holding 200–300 folios arranged chronologically. For the post-1848 Ministerium des Äußern, there are 467 Kartons. Together, these nearly 1,200 Kartons consist largely of correspondence from the Austrian resident embassy in Constantinople. After the Treaty of Passarowitz (1718), Vienna also established consulates across the Ottoman Empire, expanding sharply in the nineteenth century, including Aleppo, Chania, Adrianople, Izmir, Jerusalem, and Constantinople, too.Footnote 33 The HHStA alone holds nearly 2,000 Kartons for the consulate in Constantinople.
At the HHStA, Ottoman-language holdings begin with the Türkische Urkunden und Staatsschreiben, recently recatalogued as scrolls (Rollen) and non-scroll (nicht gerollte) items. The online index of these Ottoman documents lists roughly 1,500 original documents issued by Ottoman authorities, from the sultan down to border officials. Since additional Ottoman documents also appear scattered across the Turcica series, the total number of Ottoman items at the HHStA likely runs into the thousands. Next, there is the manuscript library of the Konsularakademie (successor to the Oriental Academy), catalogued as Orientalische Handschriften der Konsularakademie, which contains 577 manuscripts in Ottoman, Persian, and Arabic, spanning fields from diplomacy to medicine and literature. These numbers are gathered from the archival index of the HHStA, which is accessible online.Footnote 34
No precise folio count for Habsburg-Ottoman relations in Vienna is possible, not least because relevant materials extend far beyond the Turcica series in Vienna: the Ungarische Akten (435 Kartons, largely early modern) at the HHStA, the Hofkriegsrat protocols at the Kriegsarchiv, substantial manuscript holdings in the Austrian National Library, dozens of travelogues written during the early modern period by diplomats and travelers, as well as the archives of the former monarchical estates and many noble families, members of which served in the Ottoman Empire as diplomats. To this must be added Vienna’s substantial map collections of the Ottoman borderlands and the empire itself from the early modern era. In the end, we may comfortably assume that an estimated four to five million folios directly bearing on Habsburg-Ottoman encounters are found in Vienna, and the real figure is probably much higher, when collections across the former monarchical lands are considered.
Against this, the surviving Habsburg-related diplomatic record in Istanbul appears markedly smaller. The key Ottoman archival corpus is the Düvel-i Ecnebiye Defterleri (Registers of Foreign States), which include fourteen Austria-related registers (in three groups) totaling about 3,000 pages. Keyword searches in the online database for Nemçe (the Ottoman appellation used concurrently for Austria and the Holy Roman Empire until the nineteenth centuryFootnote 35), Avusturya, Viyana, Beç, Roma imparatoru return 91,347 entries, but this includes recurrent items and reflects the limits of older printed indexes; manual work with handwritten finding aids can still be indispensable, and registers may occasionally contain more than any single keyword suggests.Footnote 36
The rich Ottoman manuscript collections of the Süleymaniye Library do little to offset the comparative thinness of Ottoman archival holdings on the Habsburg world. A keyword search for Nemçe across 640,113 online catalogue titles yields only thirty-three results. Only a few of these are original works, a scarcity that contrasts sharply with the volume of Habsburg documentation. The most pertinent Ottoman manuscripts, such as the seventeenth-century scholar Kâtib Çelebi’s (d. 1657) Ottoman rendering of Johann Carion’s Chronica, or Osman of Temeşvar’s (d. 1735) Tārīḫ-i Nemçe (History of Nemçe), written by a captive-turned-diplomat, belong to a strikingly small corpus of early modern Ottoman works devoted to the Habsburg monarchy and German-speaking Europe.Footnote 37 Perhaps, the most puzzling asymmetry is the near total absence in Ottoman repositories of original incoming letters from Vienna (and, more broadly, from European courts) for the early modern period. While translations of incoming letters addressed to sultans and grand viziers were copied into the Nâme-i Hümâyun Defterleri, the earliest entries date to 1687. We know that Habsburg agents had traveled freely to the Ottoman capital for centuries, as per the convention agreed between the two states in 1568, at times of friendship or during instances of hostilities (dostlıḳ zemānında ve ʽadāvet āvānında), a condition that both parties have respected for the next 350 years.Footnote 38 Strikingly, while thousands of drafts and copies in German and Latin survive in Vienna for letters addressed to the Ottoman court, not even a single original early modern letter delivered to Constantinople is preserved in the Ottoman archives; this reflects not diplomatic silence but a problem of archival practice. I will return to the broader implications of this imbalance in documentation and preservation in the conclusion.
Ultimately, as in Vienna, it is not possible to provide precise figures for sources related to Habsburg-Ottoman diplomatic encounters in the Ottoman archives. However, a comparison between the scale and volume of archival holdings in Vienna and across the broader Habsburg territories, on the one hand, and those preserved in Ottoman repositories, on the other, reveals a striking asymmetry in information flow, documentation practices, and archival preservation. For now, I would like to note that a reasonable working estimate is a surviving-record ratio of roughly 1:40 in favor of Habsburg archives, perhaps 1:50 in some domains. However, this should be understood as an informed approximation, not a precise count.
Three Archival Case Studies
Peace Talks in Constantinople, Summer 1682
Alberto/Albrecht Caprara arrived in Constantinople in April 1682 as Extraordinari-Gesandter und Bevollmächtigter/Internuntius with an entourage of eighty people. An important member of the delegation was Johannes Benaglia, his secretary, who attended meetings in the Ottoman capital alongside Caprara and the resident ambassador, Georg Christoph von Kunitz. Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha commissioned the task of negotiations to his chief of scribes (Reisülküttab), Telhisîzâde Mustafa Efendi, and the Janissary Agha Bekri Mustafa, who were accompanied by the chief interpreter of the Ottoman court, Alexandros Mavrocordatos. The parties held two private meetings in the Ottoman capital in late June and early July 1682, while a third meeting took place between Kara Mustafa and Caprara in December in Adrianople/Edirne.
For the Habsburgs, who diligently tried to forestall a conflict with the Ottomans, victory in 1683 marked the beginning of an urban development boom in Vienna and, together with victories at other fronts, the creation of what the historian Charles Ingrao has dubbed the “second Habsburg empire.”Footnote 39 Meanwhile, generations of Ottomans, including the authors of the Tanzimat Decree in 1839, have seen the debacle in 1683 as the point where things began to go wrong.Footnote 40 Therefore, the coming of siege in 1683, how the grand vizier made up his mind, and how he made the eventual decision to attack Vienna are important questions. On this matter, the Ottoman archives are frustratingly silent. We cannot tell if there was any written correspondence within the ranks of the government, be they in preparation for the talks, during them, or at the end. There exist no deliberations recorded by the chief of scribes or the janissary agha, no instructions presented to them by the grand vizier, and no summaries or opinions delivered to the grand vizier at the end of the two meetings in June and July 1683. There are no papers or any kind of documents we may treat as diplomatic authorization, permission, assignment, or missive. Their absence does not mean that such papers did not exist, but the absolute silence of the archives raises questions about the reasons for it. Was it the secrecy of the grand vizier who may have intentionally destroyed written evidence, or was it a general disregard for preserving written documents? The trajectory of Kara Mustafa’s policies in the office of the grand vizier contains many indications that he was premeditating an assault on the Habsburgs, and therefore, secrecy might have led to the intentional removal of evidence, as he likely sought to avoid prematurely disclosing his plans or his deliberate pursuit of war.
The absence is all the more significant given that the Ottoman court had established better norms of documentation in other areas of government. Meryem Kaçan Erdoğan’s dissertation on the logistics, organization, and expenditures of the Vienna campaign in 1683 compellingly demonstrates the Ottoman court’s often noted diligence with documenting financial matters (which also applies to the next two cases).Footnote 41 Or, following the grand vizier’s strangulation in Belgrade, a detailed list of his confiscated cash, belongings, jewelry, and other valuable household items (muḫallefāt) was prepared when those were delivered to the state treasury.Footnote 42 Concerning the Caprara mission, one may find contemporary records about the organization of his journey through the Ottoman lands in 1682.Footnote 43 Yet, given the lack of surviving records about the actual talks, contemporary eyewitness narratives have become crucial sources for historiography. Several chroniclers witnessed Kara Mustafa’s regime, including Silahdar Mehmed (d. ca. 1724–26), Hüseyin Hezarfen (d. 1691), Raşid Mehmed (d. 1735), Ösekli Şeyhi Efendi (d. ca. late 1680s), and Üsküdârî Abdullah Efendi (d. ca. 1701–2). The accounts of these chroniclers provide us with alternative perspectives about the times of Kara Mustafa and the coming of the siege of Vienna. What they are all unanimous about is the main responsibility of the grand vizier, yet though we treat Ottoman chronicles as contemporary sources, the majority of what they recorded was hearsay and rumors; they frequently copied from each other, and therefore, they do not always help us debunk what happened behind the scenes.Footnote 44
We solve the mystery of the second Ottoman siege of Vienna and the decision-making inside the Ottoman court only with the help of the letters, reports, protocols, and minutes written during 1682 by the resident ambassador Kunitz, Internuntius Caprara, and his secretary Benaglia. In addition, a travelogue published by Benaglia depicts the general atmosphere during the Austrian delegation’s mission. Thanks to the Habsburg correspondence, we learn that the Ottoman border control officials deployed along the border (çavuş in Turkish; spelled Tschiaus/Tausch/Chiaus in Habsburg letters) began intentionally stalling Austrian agents as early as January 1682. In a letter dated 3 January 1682, Kunitz reported that the courier Adam Schönberg was temporarily detained at the border; he suspected that the Ottomans aimed to delay correspondence between the Hofburg and the diplomats in Constantinople.Footnote 45 In the same letter, Kunitz also reported that at the last meeting with the chief of scribes, Telhisîzâde Mustafa, he was told that the Pasha of Buda had informed the Porte regarding Caprara’s planned journey and that they had nothing to talk about with Kunitz until the envoy arrived.Footnote 46 Thus, we learn that once Kara Mustafa and his team learned about Caprara’s forthcoming departure, they began to temporize with Kunitz, knowing that this would have meant a months-long delay in the talks. Ottoman sources very rarely report such quotidian minutiae of diplomatic contacts. In the summer and fall of 1682, the three Habsburg agents diligently reported what they faced at the Porte: As soon as Caprara delegation arrived in the capital, they realized that Kara Mustafa resolutely wanted war, he was the “absolute arbiter” over everything, and those who are inclined toward peace have no impact on him; he kept everything secret and no one dared to speak up against him.Footnote 47 Even the Habsburg offer to abdicate more than seventy villages along the border to the Ottomans, which we learn about only via Habsburg records, did not convince the grand vizier. The meetings held between the Habsburg delegation and the grand vizier’s agents were fruitless. The delegation reported everything to Vienna, the gist of which was that Kara Mustafa was simply stalling and had no intentions of renewing peace.Footnote 48 Following the second meeting, Kara Mustafa Pasha did not allow the delegation to dispatch an agent to Vienna, arguing that it was useless.
Another significant source that narrates the mission in 1682–83 is the secretary Benaglia’s travelogue.Footnote 49 According to Benaglia, Caprara did everything in his power to convince the grand vizier and his men to prolong peace. He elegantly teased the grand vizier during the meal inside the imperial council room as they were speaking about the fruits and plants of Hungary, saying: “They are nevertheless of a harmful nature, for whoever were to enjoy them excessively would contract an incurable illness.”Footnote 50 The discussions with the Ottoman agents were not very friendly, despite Vienna’s willingness to sign a peace with the Porte, but Caprara never lost his temper or composure, always responding calmly. As both sides accused each other of violating the articles of the existing peace, the Ottomans began bragging about the size and strength of their army. Ultimately, Caprara responded that as long as the Ottomans wanted to negotiate an actual settlement, several proposals and concessions could be made by the Habsburg court, but if the Ottomans wanted just to threaten as they had been doing since the beginning of the talks, then Vienna would not give away even a tree, because the kaiser also had the responsibility of protecting his subjects. All these exchanges then supposedly ended with the statement of Caprara that “God the Lord would settle the matter with justice” (Gott der Herr selbsten mit Gerechtigkeit die Sach entscheiden würde).Footnote 51 Soon, the congregations at the mosques of Constantinople were praying for victory. Such passages formed the teleological subtext of Benaglia’s travelogue, suggesting to readers that divine providence favored the Habsburgs from the beginning. Yet, these qualities of the travelogue did not diminish the factual and descriptive importance of the text, the majority of which consisted of observations about the Ottoman world, its people, their daily lives, customs, and social and religious practices.
Grand Embassy Exchange, 1699–1700
At each major early modern treaty between Vienna and Constantinople, both courts agreed to exchange grand ambassadors, the highest-ranking diplomatic agents, superior to resident ambassadors and the Internuntius/orta elçi. The host state financed the visiting grand embassy for the duration of its stay. Article 16 of the Treaty of Carlowitz formalized this practice: “For the consolidation and stability of this agreement, peace, friendship, and affection between the two sides, grand ambassadors from both sides shall be appointed and dispatched. Upon their arrival, they shall be honored, welcomed, accompanied, and eventually seen off with the customary ceremonial exchange by both sides.”Footnote 52 The grand ambassador from the Ottoman side was İbrahim Paşa, a former palace gatekeeper and, after the signing of the treaty, border demarcation commissioner. The Aulic War Council, meanwhile, appointed Graf Wolfgang IV zu Oettingen-Wallerstein, the Habsburg plenipotentiary at Carlowitz.Footnote 53
On the Habsburg side, Oettingen-Wallerstein’s embassy is exceptionally well documented in the HHStA and the Oettingen-Wallerstein family archive at Harburg.Footnote 54 These holdings allow a near-complete reconstruction of the mission, from his departure from Vienna (20 October 1699) to his return (29 January 1701), and enable analysis of Vienna’s objectives, the mission’s daily course, and its outcomes. The HHStA alone preserves six Kartons in the Türkei I series with dense Viennese and international correspondence (1699–1701).Footnote 55 During the embassy, Oettingen-Wallerstein sent fifty letters (Relation) to the imperial court in thirty-seven separate dispatches. Ranging from 1 to 30 pages, they amount to 517 pages, or approximately 250 folios, and report in detail the logistics of travel, negotiations, protocol, and ceremony, dealings with other diplomats, gift exchange, finances, and the condition of prisoners of war.
Oettingen-Wallerstein’s papers illuminate the captive and prisoner question in ways Ottoman diplomatic sources do not. Article 12 of the Treaty of Carlowitz set terms for addressing prisoners; accordingly, Oettingen’s flotilla included two boats of Ottoman captives, later sent to Osijek for security reasons.Footnote 56 After he arrived in Constantinople, large numbers of runaway captives sought refuge in his residence, triggering repeated disputes. In a letter from 23 February 1700, the grand ambassador reported that hundreds were seeking protection by him, including 130 Wallachians.Footnote 57 Their owners claimed that this violated the peace. Oettingen, supported by Trinitarian fathers in his mission, requested urgent instructions from Vienna. By March, the situation eased to about 230 people sheltered at his residence, but release funds were insufficient: freeing all would have required at least 60,000 Reichsthaler.Footnote 58 By the end of the mission, Oettingen-Wallerstein freed roughly 900–1,000 captives.Footnote 59 The issue continued to generate friction through the border exchange on the return journey, when İbrahim Paşa claimed that Ottoman prisoners due for release were being held arbitrarily on the pretext that they were Christians. The Ottoman grand ambassador delayed his move to the exchange point for days, to the Habsburg side’s frustration, and there were major disputes between the two parties before the border exchange.Footnote 60 No Ottoman mission report from the exchange survived in the Ottoman archives, and one finds no indication of such friction in the Ottoman records.
A key Habsburg document is Oettingen-Wallerstein’s Instruktion of 24 September 1699, which defined the embassy’s objectives and agenda. Like other Viennese Instruktionen, it condenses the symbolic, cultural, and political aims of the Habsburg mission. It prescribes etiquette and procedure, including gift-giving, border exchange protocols, and conduct in audiences with the grand vizier and the sultan, while prioritizing substantive goals: prisoner exchange, protection of Catholics in the Ottoman Empire, and the grant of trade and commerce privileges. It also flags an immediate concern: Vienna sought to curb Imre Thököly’s mobility and political reach. Proclaimed “king of Hungary” by Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Paşa on the eve of the failed siege of Vienna, Thököly fled into the Ottoman Empire after the Habsburg advance into Hungary. Still a resident on Ottoman territory, he remained a focal point of Oettingen-Wallerstein’s mission, who aimed to restrict his movements, diminish his influence, and, if possible, secure his surrender.Footnote 61 Although the embassy had departed with an Instruktion, Vienna continued to guide the missions through ongoing directives once Oettingen reached Constantinople. Between 27 October 1699 and 27 August 1700, the court sent twelve Reskripte, formal, sealed chancery instruments signed by the emperor, addressing current issues as they arose.Footnote 62 Furthermore, in this case, the emperor and the grand ambassador exchanged eleven private letters.Footnote 63 Oettingen’s papers also included an entourage list and a register of released captives, offering rare glimpses into the identities of otherwise untraceable early modern individuals. Taken together, these carefully drafted records illuminate the mechanics of early modern diplomacy.
From the early eighteenth century onward, Habsburg diplomatic encounters generated a rapidly expanding body of printed documentation. For Oettingen’s embassy, these prints reveal details that are hard to recover from Ottoman materials. The most important from 1699 to 1700 is the travelogue of Simpert Niggl, the Abbot of Neresheim.Footnote 64 As prelate in Oettingen’s entourage, he narrated the mission from Vienna to Constantinople and vividly described roads, towns, people, and landmarks. His descriptive mode recalls Benaglia’s 1682 account, but Niggl writes in a noticeably more confident, post-Carlowitz atmosphere marked by Habsburg territorial gains. Equally significant is an anonymous compilation printed by Johann Baptist Schönwetter, which reproduced treaties, gift lists, and ceremonial descriptions of departures and arrivals in Vienna and Constantinople, and concluded with several settlements negotiated with the Ottoman court.Footnote 65 For İbrahim Paşa’s Vienna mission, the volume’s list of entourage members at the farewell audience with Aulic War Council President, Graf von Starhemberg, also identifies Ottoman individuals otherwise invisible in Ottoman sources. The book’s engravings visualize scenes of amicable exchange, and two route maps mark stages and rest stations. Even with limited topographical precision, such maps served as practical guides for travel and as logistical intelligence for future campaigns; a revised version would follow about two decades later.Footnote 66
An invaluable source for the study of the Oettingen mission is the Fürstlich Oettingen-Wallersteinsches Archiv Harburg (FÖWAH). Containing material seldom preserved in the Ottoman archival tradition, it exemplifies Habsburg diplo-Wissen and, more pointedly, the archival asymmetry: although preserved by Habsburg actors, many items are of Ottoman provenance and capture otherwise inaccessible private dimensions of diplomacy. While the HHStA preserves Oettingen-Wallerstein’s official correspondence with the Hofburg, the Harburg family archive holds fifty-one Ottoman Turkish documents,Footnote 67 largely duplicate letters of protection and safe conduct for merchants issued, signed, and sealed by the judge (kadı) of Edirne.Footnote 68 One plausible explanation is that the ambassador commissioned multiple copies, possibly for resale to merchants.
However, the most significant items include several private letters, a handful of provisioning records issued to the Habsburg delegation during their stay in Ottoman territory, a unique document reflecting the negotiation process and the rationale of both sides on various contemporary issues, a list of Muslim prisoners, including women, held in Habsburg fortresses, and the original copies of two sultanic charters (berats).Footnote 69 The private letters include one written by the Ottoman Chief of Scribes (and future grand vizier) Rami Mehmed Efendi, informing Oettingen-Wallerstein about the recovery and departure of the latter’s son, who was forced to stay in Constantinople due to his ailment when the Austrian delegation left the city.Footnote 70 Another rare example of an Ottoman private letter was written by Mehmed, a janissary scribe situated at Belgrade, who addressed Oettingen-Wallerstein in an extremely friendly manner, in the weeks following the latter’s crossing of the border on his way back to Vienna. In an anecdote illustrative of Habsburg diplo-Wissen regime’s efficiency in producing knowledge, Mehmed requested that Oettingen-Wallerstein send him what were likely political maps (…vilāyet taṣvīri ḳarṭa…), remarking that although such maps were available in “İstanbul,” they were not of good quality. Sending of the maps would make Mehmed immensely happy, which he would keep as a souvenir from an old friend (…dünyālar ḳadar ḥaẓẓiderüz ve bu yādigārıñuz bizde bulunsun…). In this rare letter, Mehmed addressed the grand ambassador as “my true and long-standing friend, my companion” (…benim ḥaḳīḳatlü ḳadīmī dostum yol yoldaşım…) and ended the letter with another individual note, examples of which are rare to be found in Ottoman diplomatic records for rank-and-file officers such as Mehmed: “We also send our greetings to our friends in your service. Do not let us fade from your memory” (Sizüñ ḫidmetiñüzde olan dostlarımuza daḫı selāmlar iderüz bizi unutmayasuz).Footnote 71 These are illustrative lines, demonstrating the close relationship and friendship built between Habsburg and Ottoman agents of all ranks during their months-long companionship, even in the immediate aftermath of one of the longest wars between the two empires.Footnote 72 In addition to these private contacts, one should note the presence of two original sultanic charters, which, in addition to their textual importance, are also materially significant archival artifacts. One of the charters granted freedom of trade to the subjects of the Holy Roman Emperor in the territories of the Ottoman Empire, while the other granted freedom of worship, property rights, and freedom of movement to the Catholics who were Ottoman subjects.Footnote 73 While the Harburg collections illustrate the significance of noble family archives in studies of Habsburg-Ottoman diplomacy, in accordance with established practice, Oettingen should have delivered the sultanic charters to Vienna, where they were essential for the chancery’s future references. Their presence in the archives of an early modern noble family raises the question of how many such documents may have been kept in private holdings across Europe.
Another noble repository with material from Oettingen-Wallerstein’s mission is the Landesarchiv Schleswig-Holstein. Habsburg embassies to Constantinople included many nobles, some seeking experience or adventure, others training for diplomatic careers. Among Oettingen’s entourage was Prince Adolf August of Schleswig-Holstein, who wrote during his journey regularly to his father, Johann Adolf von Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Plön. These letters, penned by a very young prince, are largely routine and descriptive, with little analysis.Footnote 74 Both father and son died in 1704, ending any prospective career. Even so, the survival of such documents matters: private correspondence of Habsburg embassy members could circulate from Constantinople to Plön, be read within a noble household, and enter family archives, which represents another instructive trace of diplo-Wissen in operation.
In contrast to the richly documented Habsburg perspective on the grand embassy exchange of 1699–1700, the Ottoman archives offer only limited evidence. What survives in the Ottoman record is largely administrative in nature, with the majority of documents reflecting the organizational aspects of diplomacy. Materials that shed light on internal decision-making processes are notably scarce, while nothing provides us with even an outline of Ibrahim Pasha’s mission. The most important collections on the Ottoman side are the Registers of Imperial Council (mühimmes), Registers of Sultanic Letters (nâme-i hümâyun defterleri), and the records concerning Austria under the Registers of Foreign States (düvel-i ecnebiye defterleri). There are also numerous individual records scattered across a wide variety of collections, arbitrarily created by former generations of archivists without much attention to provenance.
Financial administration is the best-documented domain. Since each court traditionally funded visiting grand embassies, Ottoman authorities kept extensive fiscal records for the 1699–1700 exchange, detailing provisioning, transport, and accommodation for the Habsburg delegation. Oettingen-Wallerstein’s reports repeatedly confirm the adequacy of supplies and hospitality.
For İbrahim Paşa’s Vienna mission, the largest expenses were gifts for the emperor and leading statesmen, which were meticulously itemized. Registers also listed goods, horses, and tents held in his custody, the guards accompanying him, and the gift convoy.Footnote 75 Gift costs came from the palace treasury, while most logistical provisions, including grain, flour, meat, and firewood, were imposed on sanjaks and settlements along the route and offset against tax obligations, a system that sometimes provoked local complaints.Footnote 76 For the incoming Habsburg embassy, imperial council registers contain repeated orders to provincial officials along the Constantinople-Belgrade corridor to provide safe conduct, including directives to Belgrade and administrators in Niš, Peja, Vlorë, Prizren, Kruševac, and Nikopol.Footnote 77 Wallachia contributed to the costs by sending a cavalry unit.Footnote 78 As the mission ended, slave convoys moving toward Belgrade prompted renewed security orders. The treasury covered escort guards and ceremonial gifts for the Habsburg grand ambassador.Footnote 79 In Constantinople, housing 279 delegates required renting and repairing multiple private houses in Galata; owners later petitioned for compensation. Ceremonies and visitations required frequent boat crossings of the Golden Horn, also paid for by the palace.Footnote 80 Oettingen noted that private crossings were expensive, about 150 Reichsthaler per round trip, and therefore negotiated with the Polish ambassador to share horses rather than ship their own across.Footnote 81
The Ottoman financial records discussed above primarily offer numerical data with little contextual information. For historical context, the most valuable sources in the Ottoman archives are Register of Sultanic Letters no. 5 and the Register of Austrian (or Foreign) Affairs no. 57.Footnote 82 Together, the two registers contain thirty-three unique entries, ten of which are letters exchanged between statesmen, including Sultan Mustafa II (r. 1695–1703), Emperor Leopold I (r. 1658–1705), Grand Vizier Amcazade Köprülü Hüseyin Pasha (in office 1697–1702), and President of the Aulic War Council Count Rüdiger von Starhemberg (in office 1691–1701). These letters primarily express mutual goodwill and reaffirm commitments to friendly relations.Footnote 83 For deeper context and insight into the actual diplomatic matters discussed, the Austrian section of the Registers of Foreign States is significantly more informative. In register no. 57, there are twenty-three entries dating from the period of Oettingen’s stay in Constantinople. These entries are copies of directives issued by the imperial council, principally in response to an earlier petition submitted by Austrians and dispatched to relevant administrative authorities as needed. Some of the thematic highlights are trade matters, release of slaves in return for a reasonable manumission fee, appointment of Austrian interpreters across the Ottoman Empire, protection of Catholics, wine purchase and consumption permission for the Austrian embassy, and safe conduct orders for nobles traveling across the empire. Most entries in these registers should be read in tandem with the correspondence exchanged between Oettingen-Wallerstein and the Viennese court.
Grand Embassy Exchange, 1719–1720
The Habsburg grand ambassador in 1719–20 was Damien Hugo von Virmont (d. 1722), the Habsburg plenipotentiary during the Passarowitz talks. He traveled to the Ottoman capital with his private secretary, Cornelius von den Driesch (d. 1758). The embassy exchange occurred on 15 June 1719 at a location between today’s Ražanj and Paraćin in Serbia.
A remarkable archival preservation attempt on the Habsburg side occurred on this occasion. The ceremony was visually represented through a series of eighteen copperplate prints in what amounts to an early modern diplomatic album, prepared by Johann Conrad Weiss, an engineer lieutenant deployed at the fortress of Belgrade, and several collaborators.Footnote 84 Next to each image in the album, a short description of the scene was added. As Laila Dandachi’s research has shown, the album was very popular in Europe; a copy can be found today in the John Hay Library of Brown University in Rhode Island. The album book carefully depicted each step of the ceremony and left behind a very significant visual source that considerably improves our understanding of the symbolism attributed to such early modern rituals by Vienna and Constantinople. From the beginning to the end, each step of the ceremony was a sightworthy spectacle. Colors, uniforms, costumes, the ceremonial order, and everything else visualized in the images served future readers as a diplomatic guidebook and a historical source illuminating many dimensions of diplomacy that are difficult to envisage for later generations.
The Instruktion that was prepared for Virmont before his departure was fifty-six pages (twenty-six folios) long and provides us with many insights. We learn from this Instruktion, for instance, that despite the military victories of the last thirty-five years, Vienna was still not convinced that the Sublime Porte treated Austria as a diplomatic peer; “bringing parity to everything between the two empires” (…alles zwischen beeden reichen in eine paritet zu bringen…) was one of Virmont’s tasks.Footnote 85 One of Vienna’s expectations as a sign of parity was the delivery of a separate letter addressed by the grand vizier to the Aulic War Council President, Prince Eugene. In a passage where the secretary Driesch discussed the matter, he remarked that without an imperial letter directly addressed to the grand vizier, a foreign diplomat would not have been able to negotiate any matters in the Ottoman court. However, grand viziers had never dispatched a letter addressed to Eugene. The secretary noted that the Ottomans avoided addressing Eugene due to their arrogance, alluding to the prince’s multiple victories against the Ottoman armies. It appears that Eugene had personalized the matter. Driesch noted that this issue had caused many long discussions in Vienna and that Eugene insisted on receiving a letter addressed to him from the grand vizier. At the embassy exchange near Belgrade, Virmont inquired three times(!) from the Ottoman ambassador if he had a letter from the grand vizier addressed to Eugene. This time, the Ottoman mission had a letter addressed to Eugene, so the issue was resolved.Footnote 86 The anecdote is but one tiny detail that we find in Driesch’s travelogue. At 500 pages and approximately 200,000 words, Driesch penned one of the longest Austrian travelogues that chronicled an early modern mission to the Ottoman Empire. In addition to anecdotes like the one above, he provided much factual information, wrapped in analytical and subjective observations about the Ottoman world.
Among the many outstanding passages are Driesch’s account of Virmont’s exchange with the steward of Yirmisekiz Mehmed Çelebi, a prominent contemporary well-known to Ottomanists, who sent his greetings to Virmont. The two men knew each other from the peace talks at Passarowitz. After Virmont arrived in Constantinople, the steward delivered melons, grapes, pears, crayfish, and fish as gifts from Mehmed’s private garden and pond. Driesch noted the following:
The Ambassador also asked his own steward to convey to Mehmed Ağa, knowing that [Mehmed] was a thick and stout man who took much care for his stomach, that, as a gesture, if [Mehmed] agrees, [Virmont] would gladly serve him with chocolate after the thirty days of [Ramadan] fasting had been completed, since, as a great lover of a strict and temperate life, [Mehmed] might be in great need of it after such a long fast.Footnote 87
Driesch later described Yirmisekiz Mehmed Çelebi as “a distinguished, modest, friendly, gracious, and handsome man, held in high esteem among his own people for his knowledge of the law and other matters,” adding that “his pleasing manners and innate gentleness gave him an appearance of almost perpetual smiling.”Footnote 88 These passages vividly illustrate the personal closeness that could develop between Ottoman and Habsburg diplomatic actors. At times, such familiarity even gave way to camaraderie over shared glasses of rakı. On one occasion, Virmont and his closest associates spent the night at the home of a chief gatekeeper from the palace, also named Mehmed. Driesch recounts what unfolded later that evening, after all the Turkish guests of honor had departed:
Once we became better acquainted by spending a longer time together, it turned out that this kapıcıbaşı [gatekeeper] not only brought as much wine into his house as we wished, but, when alone with us, emptied the largest goblets himself and drank them down to the dregs. He was, moreover, such a great lover of brandy, which they call rakı, and we Rossoli, that one could never give him enough of it: four bottles filled to the brim, and of more than ordinary size, were to him but a single draught, which he poured into himself like water.Footnote 89
Meetings and ceremonies were thus recorded with vivid details and anecdotes. Lengthy passages explained the cultural significance and meanings of local manners, customs, and traditions. All rumors and hearsay likewise went into writing. Driesch was often biased against a culture he had little familiarity with; he generalized too easily and judged too quickly. Yet, in the end, as a collection of information, insights, and an eyewitness account, his travelogue was an incredibly valuable database that could be employed retrospectively and prospectively.
The next important source was grand ambassador Virmont’s official correspondence. Between his departure from Vienna in May 1719 and his re-entry to the city in July 1720, he penned fifty-four letters, ranging between one and more than thirty pages. Among them, there were many encrypted documents (examples of which can be found in earlier periodsFootnote 90), which indicates that steps were taken to ensure secure communication.Footnote 91 Many topics were covered in the letters: ceremonies and audiences; political negotiations; financial matters; initiatives and affairs of other European embassies; problems of merchants regarding travel, security, border crossing, and payment of customs fees; appointment of dragomans to Ottoman towns; affairs of Catholics and their protection; and inner mechanics of the Ottoman court. Virmont often attached a copy of a treaty the Ottomans signed with another state or an order issued by the Ottoman court to be sent to the provinces and dispatched them to Vienna, along with German, Latin, or Italian translations.
Numerous additional textual and visual artifacts preserved in Habsburg archives and museums document this diplomatic mission. Among the most notable is a detailed report by Captain Engineer Otto Friedrich von Oebschelwitz, who participated in the mission as an agent of Prince Eugene. Oebschelwitz was tasked with documenting both his journey and the general condition of roads within the Ottoman Empire. Throughout his account, Oebschelwitz presented arguments concerning optimal military strategies for occupying the territories he passed through. He even assessed the possibility of advancing as far as the Ottoman capital in a future campaign. “If one faces or is compelled to wage war in these lands,” he wrote, Vidin and Niš should be the primary targets, as their capture would effectively isolate Bosnia. However, because Albania and Greece lay to the right (south) of the main route toward Constantinople, a direct march on the capital was ill-advised; these regions could pose a threat of counterattack. Nonetheless, he argued, if the strategic mountain passes leading into those areas could be secured, and if control were established over the territories between the Danube and the Dniester as well as the rivers flowing into the former, it would then be possible to advance toward Adrianople, the Dardanelles, and ultimately Constantinople through a coordinated land offensive (by Austria) and a naval campaign (by allied forces). Crucial to the success of such a campaign would be ensuring the support of the Christian populations living in these regions.Footnote 92 This report demonstrates that after capturing Belgrade, Prince Eugene likely began to fancy an attack on Constantinople. The possibility that this was his idea is reinforced by the simultaneous preparation of an updated map of the entire route from Jagodina to Constantinople by Oebschelwitz, detailing all the major stops and their geographical features.Footnote 93
Not only do such visualizations not exist on the Ottoman side until the nineteenth century, but even surviving textual documentation for both inbound and outbound diplomatic missions is again sparse. Among the few rare treasures of diplomatic history from this period is a protocol register that recorded the ceremonies attended by Virmont during his stay in the Ottoman capital. Its compilation was most likely prompted by Grand Vizier Nevşehirli Ibrahim Pasha’s efforts to reform existing diplomatic procedures and to implement more systematic record-keeping in the diplomatic arena, exemplified in the unprecedented production of five travelogues during his tenure. During Virmont’s sojourn in Constantinople, a protocol officer named Selman Efendi kept the records. The register offers a rare glimpse into diplomatic customs of the period from the Ottoman perspective, Virmont’s audiences with Ottoman officials, the network he cultivated at the Porte, and the sequence of celebrations and banquets arranged in his honor. Any reader of Selman Efendi’s entries will see that, up to this point in relations between the two states, no Habsburg grand ambassador of the early modern era had been received with such lavish courtesy by the Ottoman court. That judgment is echoed by many other testimonies, among them the grand vizier’s own letter to the Ottoman ambassador in Vienna, remarks by Driesch, and Prince Eugene’s notes on Virmont’s first two dispatches to Vienna from August and September 1719.Footnote 94 Selman Efendi’s protocol leaves little doubt that Virmont departed the Ottoman capital as one of the most satisfied Habsburg diplomats of the early modern era. In one of the many farewell feasts he attended, disguised as an audience with the chief treasurer, El-hac Mustafa Efendi, Virmont secured a lasting place in the annals of Ottoman-Habsburg diplomacy, as the Habsburg grand ambassador who danced in ConstantinopleFootnote 95:
When, at the end of the performance, a little girl danced among the singers, the ambassador, carried away by the excitement of the moment, took one of the tambourines in his hand and tapped out the rhythm as it should be done. The little girl danced in this manner with the ambassador for a while, upon which the ambassador, out of his enjoyment of the moment, gave a gold coin to the girl.Footnote 96
Although Selman Efendi’s protocol register is a rare treasure for historians of Habsburg-Ottoman diplomacy, the Ottoman archival record does not permit a full reconstruction of the journey and activities of the Ottoman grand ambassador Dayezade Ibrahim Pasha (d. 1721) in Vienna. As with the preceding Carlowitz mission, the surviving evidence consists mainly of a handful of entries in the registers of sultanic correspondence, which preserve exchanges between the leading figures of the time: Charles VI (r. 1721–40), Ahmed III (r. 1703–30), Grand Vizier Nevşehirli Ibrahim Pasha (in office 1718–30), and the President of the Aulic War Council, Prince Eugene of Savoy (in office 1703–36).Footnote 97 As with the earlier embassy exchange, the Ottoman archives preserve some financial records that illuminate the logistical preparations for both delegations. Among the more striking items is an order for the procurement of covers for the carts transporting two gift lions to Vienna.Footnote 98 Equally notable is a decree in the imperial council registers, instructing the Governor of Rumelia, Abdullah Pasha, to hasten to the frontier to oversee the embassy exchange, because the pasha who was already stationed there was deemed unfit to represent the splendor of the Sublime State.Footnote 99
It is thanks to Habsburg record-keeping and archival preservation that we can gain a fuller picture of the Ottoman mission to Vienna. Information about the members of the Ottoman delegation who attended the welcome and farewell audiences with Charles VI, and about the speeches delivered by Ibrahim Pasha on both occasions, comes to us only through Ottoman documents preserved in the Turcica series. Similarly, an Ottoman report concerning preparations and negotiations for the border exchange has survived in the Habsburg archives.Footnote 100 Yet another significant Ottoman document is a rare letter comparable to a Habsburg Instruktion, written by Grand Vizier Nevşehirli Ibrahim Paşa and addressed to the ambassador Ibrahim Pasha. A copy of the letter survived only at the HHStA under Turkische Urkunden, which is but one example of the efficiency of Habsburg intelligence.
Most significant of all, an exemplar of one of the earliest Ottoman diplomatic travelogues from the early modern period was also preserved in the Austrian National Library. This Vienna copy was composed in 1726, five years after the grand ambassador’s death. Earlier scholarship attributed the authorship to an unidentified member of the grand ambassador’s entourage. The Austrian orientalist Friedrich von Kraelitz-Greifenhorst, who published an annotated translation, argued that the plain style of the prose (“fast vulgär, mit einer oft naiven Ausdrucksweise”) pointed to an author of modest background, possibly even a low-ranking janissary officer.Footnote 101 However, the work was most likely written by Nahifi Süleyman Efendi (d. 1738), an Ottoman poet known for his poetic translation of Rumi’s Mesnevi into Turkish. With prior experience as a scribe, Nahifi probably accompanied the mission to Vienna in the role of legation secretary (divan kâtibi). The travelogue has long been published within his collected works in a relatively unnoticed work which presented no contextual information about the manuscript.Footnote 102 Whether an accomplished poet would choose to write in such a deliberately simple language and tone remains uncertain, but it is reasonable to assume that Nahifi either authored the text himself or oversaw its composition. And, while being one of the earliest examples of Ottoman diplomatic travelogues, the account leaves much to be desired: At 4,000 words, it was fifty times shorter than the Austrian secretary Driesch’s text. It is written in a very descriptive tone; there are no analytical passages about the Habsburg monarchy, its government, court, culture, or customs. It contained several nostalgic and factually questionable vignettes about Ottoman heroism against the Habsburgs in the past, which probably reflects the Ottoman search for solace in past achievements against Vienna. There was no information about the actual condition of the Habsburg government, and there were no deliberations about the future of relations with the Viennese court.Footnote 103
Finally, Wienerisches Diarium provides us with a rare glimpse into an Ottoman grand embassy in Europe. For instance, we learn about the cases of Ottoman converts to Christianity. According to the issue of 20 July 1720, several members of Ibrahim Pasha’s retinue had remained in Vienna and undergone baptism. The occupations, original and baptismal names, and the ages of four men were mentioned: The large timpani player Ibrahim/Carl Joseph Gerhard (20) and the small timpani player Süleyman/Carl Michael (19), both of whom were born in Constantinople; the two others were Arabs, an unnamed efendi/Carl Rudolph Anton (24) and Süleyman/Peter Carl (18), a horse groom.Footnote 104 Wienerisches Diarium published seventy-five such news articles reporting the day-to-day activities of the embassy in Vienna, which Nahifi’s travelogue largely omitted.
Conclusion: Diplo-Wissen and Information Asymmetry
A key take-away from the above analysis is that a full picture of Habsburg-Ottoman diplomacy can only be achieved by meshing the archival evidence, predominantly in German and Ottoman Turkish; any linguistically one-sided examination of Habsburg-Ottoman diplomacy will remain incomplete. Only through such comparative examination can one explore the broader historical significance of the exchanges between Vienna and Constantinople. As the three case studies show, the available material in the Ottoman archives concerning Habsburg-Ottoman diplomacy is limited in size, scope, and quantity compared to what is preserved in the Viennese collections, which was gathered by the Habsburg diplo-Wissen regime. The phenomenon has been observed by scholars studying Ottoman-Venetian, Ottoman-French, or Ottoman-British exchanges, as well as other scholars working on Ottoman-Habsburg diplomacy.Footnote 105 What does this finding mean for Ottoman and Ottoman-Habsburg diplomatic history, given that Ottomanists have repeatedly highlighted that “recording and archiving were among the pillars of the Ottoman state”?Footnote 106
In diplomatic context, the question of documentary evidence and archives is not solely one of existence but also of the volume, breadth, continuity, consistency, and long-term preservation of the collected information. While natural disasters, earthquakes, fires, or episodes of unrest certainly played a role in archival losses, they alone cannot fully account for the relative scarcity of surviving material. Comparable disruptions also occurred in European history. As my case studies have shown, the evidence points above all to what Harun Küçük recently dubbed “a net knowledge gap” within a scientific historical framework.Footnote 107 I argue the same for the diplomatic domain: There was an obvious divergence between the consistency of reporting, record-keeping, and archival preservation in Vienna and Constantinople before the 1790s.Footnote 108 Ottoman observers complained about the condition of archives as late as the nineteenth century, and there is no reason to set them aside as irrelevant.Footnote 109 Diplomacy, just as science, was always an international phenomenon, and it can be measured only via a comparative methodology that focuses on the “outcome”: the written word on paper, its delivery to the home court, cautious study, and preservation in the archive.Footnote 110 The end effect of building carefully managed archives cannot be underestimated, as recent research in this area has shown.Footnote 111
To avoid such criticism, studies on Ottoman-Habsburg (and more broadly Ottoman-European) diplomatic encounters in the era of the New Diplomatic History have persistently highlighted the peculiar in diplomacy.Footnote 112 For decades, “ad hoc” has been an ever-present, overused stock phrase in scholarship to describe Ottoman diplomacy, a cliché that obscures more than it clarifies. Scholarship has repeatedly foregrounded the entangled and interconnected, along with the mediators, brokers, and go-betweens in Ottoman-European diplomatic processes, framing them as the great equalizers of diplomatic encounters, though “more often asserted than demonstrated,” as remarked by John-Paul A. Ghobrial.Footnote 113 Lately, cross-confessional, transcultural, transimperial, vernacular, and multilingual diplomacy has been put to the forefront of analyses.Footnote 114 Such actors, practices, and processes undoubtedly remained constants of early modern diplomacy. Emphasizing them has inspired new lines of inquiry and enabled fresh perspectives on Ottoman-European diplomatic contacts.
However, most early modern Ottoman diplomatic practices were sporadic and fragmentary, providing Constantinople only with a piecemeal flow of information. They certainly demonstrated, on the Ottoman side, an extraordinary capacity to improvise and acclimate to challenges in the diplomatic environment, whether in governmental centers, in the borderlands, or in any plausible setting for diplomatic encounter. Yet, time- and place-bound “ad hoc” diplomatic initiatives could never supplant the information-gathering capacity of regular embassies, which employed instruments that were continuous and consistent: regular dispatch of diplomatic letters and reports (Briefe & Berichte); training of loyal and trustable language experts (Sprachknaben); travelogue writing by diplomatic secretaries (Reiseberichte); visual depictions of diplomatic ceremonies as well as local people and customs; creation of geographical and topographical maps; building of extensive intelligence webs that included local actors which were then inherited by the next generation of diplomats; and, most importantly, careful preservation of the note and record on paper in archives, regardless of provenance. These were but some of the channels of asymmetrical information flow that enabled Vienna to build an information empire in the Ottoman world.
A recent “bus stop/passenger” allegory (apparently also used for the late adoption of the printing press by Ottoman Muslims) likens the absence of Ottoman resident embassies abroad to a lack of “passengers” at a bus stop, that is, the lack of demand for the “bus.” The proposed idea is that if no “passenger” came and waited at that stop, this meant that no one needed the “bus.”Footnote 115 In other words, the Ottomans themselves were simply not interested in establishing resident embassies, and therefore, there is not much to be gained from questioning their absence. I argue that when writing about early modern Ottoman diplomacy, record-keeping, information-gathering, and archival practice, we should not treat the empire as if it operated outside the international system, as though it neither struggled to shape that system nor was shaped by it. Ottoman diplomatic practices, unlike an Anatolian musical instrument or a Muslim religious holiday, should not and cannot be treated as self-contained local crafts or a creed system; diplomacy, by its very nature, evolved through sustained interaction with external rivals, partners, and information regimes. It is analytically untenable to treat Ottoman diplomatic needs as purely domestic or to presume that informational asymmetries about rivals’ languages, institutions, and intentions were inconsequential. The Habsburg diplo-Wissen regime offered a qualitatively different infrastructure for reproducing, standardizing, and circulating information compared to oral transmission or irregular missions. Habsburgs and other European courts and bureaucracies exploited these gains. I believe that diplomatic historians should be careful not to assume that Ottoman statesmen had no comparable need for speed, scale, and durable preservation of knowledge under conditions of sustained interstate competition. Therefore, the “bus stop/passenger” allegory does not provide a better understanding of Ottoman diplomacy when international competitors were demonstrably generating strategic advantage through institutionalized diplomatic presence, routine reporting, and careful scholarly analysis of a rival state.
Habsburg diplo-Wissen gave Vienna an edge in information management, institutional continuity, and expertise formation with a long afterlife even centuries later. Ottoman deficits in analogous domains, therefore, require critical analysis, certainly not as a moral indictment, but as the minimal basis for scholarly explanation and for learning to what outcomes such asymmetries could lead.
Acknowledgments
This article would not have been possible without the collective research and editorial efforts of my colleagues in the QhoD project at the Institute for Habsburg and Balkan Studies of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, led by its Principal Investigator, Arno Strohmeyer. I owe particular thanks to Laila Dandachi, Dimitra Grigoriou, Stephan Kurz, and Manuela Mayer for their work. I am also grateful to Eyüp Ersoy of King’s College London for the stimulating exchanges that helped shape the article in its early stages. Last, but not least, I wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers whose careful reading of the first draft and perceptive criticisms helped me strengthen the final version. With promises of continuing to write more on Habsburg-Ottoman relations, I dedicate this article to my PhD adviser, Charles “Charlie” Ingrao, editor of the Austrian History Yearbook from 1997 through 2006.
