How and why did some European Christians become part of the Ottoman Empire’s elites? What were the consequences? How and why did some of them leave the Ottoman fold again? And how were such individuals perceived? These are the main questions addressed by Becoming Ottoman. The volume engages closely with recent research on conversion to Islam in the Ottoman Empire, but the editors rightly advocate treating religious conversion as part of a broader process of “acculturation into … [the] urban-based (mostly Istanbulite) Muslim Rumi elite” (7). This broader concept of Ottomanization and its corollary de-Ottomanization is helpful because they facilitate overcoming periodical compartmentalization. Consequently, the book’s eleven chapters are evenly divided between the early modern period (part I) and the “long” nineteenth century (part II). Although the latter timespan is shorter, the disproportionate space devoted to it is an attempt to redress what the editors describe as an imbalance in existing scholarship. The eleven contributions are arranged roughly chronologically and fall into two broad categories: surveys (Radway, Szabados, Thót, and Köse) and individual case studies (Obaldía, Kaim, Güney, Kučera, Zlatanov, Völker, and Alıcı). Almost all individuals examined either hailed from or otherwise had close ties to Central Europe.
The volume opens with Radways’s useful survey of those who became Ottomans in the context of the Habsburg-Ottoman frontier during the sixteenth century. Her conclusion that such converts were embedded in “many-layered local and regional networks” (34) that cut across imperial borders is also supported by the following chapters. Throughout the early modern period, German-speaking ‘renegades’ provided intelligence for Vienna (Szabados, see also János Szabados, Die Karriere des deutschen Renegaten Hans Caspar in Ofen (1627–1660) im politischen und kulturellen Kontext [Vienna, 2023]). The Polish convert Albert Bobowski/Ali Ufkî worked as an interpreter and a language teacher and at least entertained the possibility of leaving Ottoman employment, while Dimitrie Cantemir, as a vassal prince one of the rare non-Muslim Ottomans before the Tanzimat period, eventually did leave the Ottoman Empire for Russia (Kaim).
Radway’s conclusion also fits the later period. Michał Czajkowski/Mehmed Sadık Paşa, for example, switched allegiance (and religion) twice, first from Catholicism in the service of Polish royalists to Islam and employment by the Ottoman state and finally to Orthodox Christianity and Russia. As Zlatanov shows, Czajkowski himself emphasized that these steps were consistent with his political goals and should therefore be seen as pragmatic attempts to “adapt … to the local and geopolitical situation, using the existing ‘spaces’” (174). A similar view emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century of those Hungarian revolutionaries who were forced to flee to the Ottoman Empire and embraced Islam to avoid extradition to Austria-Hungary as well as to continue their military careers, even if their decision was initially very controversial (Tóth). Similar complexities are evident in the case of Andreas David Mordtmann, who entered Ottoman state service in 1860 as a foreign expert without embracing Islam. Throughout his life, Völker concludes, Mordtmann kept “a very particular and complex intellectual in-between position rather than changing his loyalties” (216–17). Since his Ottoman subjecthood was tied to his appointment, he was able to acquire citizenship in the German Empire after his dismissal in 1871.
One important observation to take away from this collection, then, is that religious affiliations and political loyalties in the “long” nineteenth century were no less fluid, ambiguous, and multilayered than they were in the early modern period. Indeed, as the editors point out in the introduction, “the protagonists presented here rarely allow themselves to be pigeonholed into the rigid framework of one political, social, cultural or religious identity” (14). The changes in the geopolitical situation as well as the attitudes toward religion meant that the options at the disposal of those who became—or chose to no longer be—Ottomans were more varied in the later period. On the other hand, religious difference clearly remained important and emotionally charged for many, as Köse (the only one to discuss female converts) and Alıcı (who examines the “Protestant Turk” Muḥammad Şükrī Efendi/Johannes Avetaranian) show.
In all contributions, readers will find much detail about individual actors. It is particularly commendable that Obaldía has included an edition and translation of the hüccet which is the main source for her study of the Dominican friar Urbano Pinginella/Mehmed Ağa who embraced Islam in Galata in 1667. Finally, Kučera’s fascinating in-depth analysis of Václav Budovec of Budov’s Antialkorán (printed 1614) deserves special mention. This polemical treatise contains valuable details about many of the “renegades” that Budovec conversed with in Istanbul in 1577–81. Apparently tempted to convert himself, he wrote the Antialkorán to “unmask” Islam as a temptation of the devil. In doing so, one might add, Budovec echoed contemporary interpretations of Islam propagated, for example, in Lutheran sermons on the “Turks” (Türkenpredigten).
Given that the editors make a strong argument in favor of “approaching the issue of ‘becoming Ottoman’ diachronically,” one would have hoped that the individual chapters engaged more with this perspective. This is not to say that they are only loosely connected. Dedication to the central themes of the volume is strong and Völker does a particularly good job of linking several contributions in his own chapter. Still, much of the diachronic comparison is left to the reader. It is one of the strengths of this volume, though, that it significantly facilitates making them in the first place. Whether one reads the book cover to cover or only selected chapters, Becoming Ottoman adds further nuance to recent scholarship on the complexity of acculturation to the Ottoman elite. For those interested in this subject, this collection is essential reading.
