You Say ‘Classical,’ I Say ‘Imperial,’ Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off: Empire, Individual, and Encounter in Travel Narratives of the Ottoman Empire

Abstract

The literature of “encounter” has enriched our sense of who the Ottomans were and how they were described by their various others. And although the notion of encounter comprises interaction at the levels of group, commune, state, and empire, it is most expressive when it presumes the individual – a person for whom these larger entities are made manifest in the figures of individual personalities. This paper thus takes as its subject the “telling” of individuals in Ottoman space by individuals coming from the spaces of the European Christian kings. I hope, thereby, to comment on how the Ottoman individual was “told” in the context of imperial competition and conversation, and to draw that individual off the page through compiling a set of descriptors by which he or she was made “real” for the teller’s audience. I address the idea of encounter and the (possible) transformation of that idea as it relates to ‘European’ encounters with the Ottoman citizen individual, using as examples three late sixteenth and two eighteenth century travelers. Finally, I want to comment briefly on periodization, the ways in which the eighteenth century may or may not be detached from the preceding era when it comes to the genre(s) of encounter.