In this ambitious and erudite monograph, cultural historian E. Natalie Rothman examines the role of dragomans, “diplomatic translator-interpreters” (1), in shaping Renaissance diplomacy and in producing and disseminating knowledge about the Ottoman empire, specifically, “elite Ottoman perspectives on politics, language, and society” (3). Rothman's dragomans belonged to a distinct professional group of Istanbul whose members sometimes descended from dragoman dynasties. A product of Mediterranean statecraft since antiquity, dragomans in the Ottoman context served as intermediaries between the sultan and his subjects as well as foreign rulers, “ritual figurations of sovereignty itself” (5) and “embod[iments of] Ottoman alterity” (6) to their foreign employers.
Rothman's methodology is interdisciplinary and much of the research is based on digitized collections and materials housed in archival repositories and libraries in multiple countries. Sensitive to the challenges of translation in a work of this kind, Rothman helpfully provides transcriptions or transliterations of translated passages in the notes, which are both generous and helpful. The same can be said of the bibliography and index. Of the book's seven chapters, parts of six of them have been previously published in earlier forms, but there is great value in bringing the parts together within the covers of a single volume.
Rothman shows that in order to make sense of Ottoman politics, society, and culture, early modern European diplomats had to rely extensively on local intermediaries, of whom dragomans constituted the largest and most politically connected group. Her point is that not only has the scholarship on Ottoman-European diplomacy neglected this important dimension of early modern Turcica, it has also obscured dragomans’ role as independent diplomats and shapers of discourse concerning matters Ottoman.
As the book's title suggests, Rothman also aims to contribute to knowledge about Orientalism. She does this in part by emphasizing the dialogic condition of Orientalism's emergence and the need to understand the categories of “Europe” and “the East” relationally. While acknowledging the importance of Enlightenment thinking and European metropolitan milieus in shaping Orientalism, Rothman discerns some of its most distinctive features in an earlier period—in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—and in a different context—the diplomatic milieu of Istanbul. She borrows William Hanks's idea of commensuration to explain how complex processes of semiosis, communication, and knowledge production resulted in the creation of “the Orient” as “a coherent and cohesive subject” (11). Rothman powerfully demonstrates both that and how trans-imperial dragomans played key roles in these processes.
The book uses the biographies and semiotic practices of Istanbulite dragomans to explain the production of early modern Ottomanist knowledge. Chapters address dragomans’ recruitment, training, and employment in the bailate, the Venetian consulate in Istanbul (Ch. 1); diplomatic gift-giving, “kinshipping,” and the role of dragomanate women therein (Ch. 2); dragomans’ textual and visual self-inscription (Chs. 3 and 4); the institutionalization of Ottoman language studies in Europe (Ch. 5); dragomans’ translation practices, including intertextuality (Ch. 6); and the role of dragomans in producing and circulating Ottomanist knowledge in ways that connected the early Republic of Letters to the Porte (Ch. 7). The book's epilogue considers dragomans’ role in institutionalizing Ottoman studies in European capitals, where they served as interpreters and translators, Ottoman manuscript commissioning agents and catalogers, and builders of academies for Oriental languages.
Rothman uses a rich array of sources to substantiate the book's claims. A few examples will have to suffice. Rothman uses a miniature painting of the Venetian consulate in Istanbul ca. 1660 to show how the Istanbul dragomanate was a space of “transformative socialization for future dragomans,” whose “Venetocentric, circum-Mediterranean, and Ottomancentric practices for mediating language and power” produced knowledge about Ottoman empire for European audiences (21). She deploys Venetian Senate records to underscore the centrality of gift-giving and kinshipping, exchanging and relating, in dragomans’ trans-imperial embeddedness, “a constitutive and enduring prerequisite of [their] successful diplomacy at the Porte” (79). She uses four Venetian dragomans’ reports (relazioni, “dragomans’ most impactful writings, and certainly the most circulated” [83]) to show how dragomans mediated between Venice's political class, on the one hand, and Ottoman society and culture, on the other, and thereby contributed to both the development of early modern Mediterranean diplomacy and the production of formative and enduring knowledge about the Ottoman and the Safavid worlds (112). Rothman also uses textual-cum-visual artifacts to foreground “practices of cultural mediation, commensuration, and boundary-making” in early modern Venetian-Ottoman relations (139).
None of the figures referred to in the text appears in its print version. Having to move from book to website, however, is a minor inconvenience that in any case introduces the reader to the Dragoman Renaissance Research Platform of the University of Toronto Scarborough. Most important, the figures are richly incorporated into the analysis. The care with which the author attends to every text and image discussed, every turn of phrase on the page, and analysis and explanation makes the book both intellectually edifying and a pleasure to read.
