British Encounters with Ottoman Minorities in the Early Seventeenth Century ‘Slaves’ of the Sultan

Author / Creator

Holmberg, Eva Johanna, author

Available as

Online

Summary

British travellers regarded all inhabitants of the seventeenth-century Ottoman empire as ‘slaves of the sultan’, yet they also made fine distinctions between them. This book provides the first comp...

British travellers regarded all inhabitants of the seventeenth-century Ottoman empire as ‘slaves of the sultan’, yet they also made fine distinctions between them. This book provides the first comprehensive cultural historical account of how British travellers understood the non-Muslim minority peoples they encountered in the Ottoman empire, and of how they perceived and described them in the mediating shadow of the Turks. In doing so it seeks to change our perceptions of the British encounter with the Ottomans by exploring the entangled identities of the Ottoman subjects in the English imagination, de-centering the image of the ‘Terrible Turk’ and Islam.

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