Ottoman History Podcast - Osman of Timisoara: Prisoner of the Infidels

Episode Date: November 18, 2021

with Giancarlo Casale hosted by Brittany White | Osman of Timișoara was a Muslim subject of the Ottoman Empire born during the late 17th century in modern-day Romania. As a young man serving in the Ottoman military, he was captured by the Habsburg army. He would spend more than a decade as a captive in Austria. Many people of his time had similar stories. What made Osman special was that he left behind a rare autobiographical account of his experiences and exploits. In our conversation with Giancarlo Casale about his translation of Osman’s memoir entitled Prisoner of the Infidels, we’ll explore the similarities among experiences of enslavement in the Ottoman and Habsburg lands and learn how Osman positioned himself as a linguistic and later diplomatic go-between. And through the life of Osman, his account of his own efforts to return to the Ottoman Empire, and the momentous events he witnessed, we will reflect on his autobiography as a work of literature and the messages contained within it. « Click for More »

This is the Ottoman History Podcast, and I'm Brittany White. There's a whole subfield of history basically devoted to the subject of the 17th century being a really unpleasant time to be alive. There's this big historiography about the general crisis of the 17th century, which is really trying to quantify all of the ways in which it was a particularly difficult time to live. But ironically, that was not the case for the Balkans, the Ottoman Balkans. When you think about the Balkans, it's a place that has a very turbulent history, generally speaking. But the 17th century was, for the Balkans, it's a place that has a very turbulent history, generally speaking.

But the 17th century was, for the most part, quite a peaceful and prosperous time. So when Osman was born and when he was a young child, he was kind of living in a silver age for the Ottoman Balkans. But that all came suddenly and crushingly to an end in 1683, which is, of course, the year that the Ottoman siege of Vienna and then the beginning of the Great War with the Holy Alliance began. Osman of Timisoara was a Muslim subject of the Ottoman Empire born during the late 17th century. When he was still a kid, the Ottoman Empire was

defeated at the momentous 1683 siege of Vienna, hundreds of miles from his hometown in modern-day Romania. His life would take a sudden turn when a few years later, as a young man serving in the Ottoman military, he was captured by the Habsburg army and he would spend more than a decade as a captive in Austria. Many people of his time had similar stories, but what made Ousmane special was that he left behind a rare autobiographical account of his experiences and exploits. It's an engrossing read with many evocative anecdotes and plot twists, beautifully translated into English for the first time

by our guest Giancarlo Casale. In our conversation about that translation, entitled Prisoner of the Infidels, we'll explore the similarities among experiences of enslavement in the Ottoman and Habsburg lands and learn how Osman positioned himself as a linguistic and later diplomatic go-between. And through the life of Osman, his account of his own efforts to return to the Ottoman Empire and the momentous events he witnessed will reflect on his autobiography as a work of literature and the messages contained within it. Stay tuned. So he was a soldier, but possibly a very young soldier. There actually is some question about exactly how old he was, because he's contradictory about that in his own account. But most of the time, he says that he was only about 17 or 18 years old when he was captured.

And it was not a particularly important battle in which he was captured. It was three or four years into the war with the Habsburgs. He was taken capture in the siege of a small city known as Lipova, which wasn't very far from his hometown. And the first few years after that turn out to be pretty dark. So when you're reading the narrative, the first few chapters are kind of hard reading. He's tortured several times. He is thrown into multiple dungeons. He's actually given a chance to buy his freedom, which he does. And then his owner steals his ransom payment from him and keeps him in slavery, tries to

sell him to somebody else. He almost freezes to death. He's actually left for dead on a pile of manure. It's really rough going during the first, let's say, four chapters of the 13 chapters of the book. And then things really change. Eventually what happens is that he becomes the servant of one of the most powerful aristocratic families in Habsburg, Vienna.

And he establishes a very good rapport with his master and his master's wife. And he ends up becoming a relatively important person with standing. And he has a lot of really unexpected experiences as a result of this. And then his struggles are of a very different kind. He's not struggling to survive anymore, but he's really struggling with his own sense of himself because he has this opportunity, actually many different opportunities, if he will only agree to become a Christian and to, in consequence, never ever return to his home, the world is his oyster. It's a different kind of a struggle where he's wrestling with this

possibility of giving up the chance of ever returning home or giving up the chance of having a decent life for himself in order to maintain this dream of eventually being free. One of my favorite parts of the book, but also I was like, oh, Osman, why did you do that? He's on his way to pay his captivity. And I think he comes across Hungarian bandits and the folks that he's traveling with are like, go see if they have food or go see what they're about. And he comes upon them by the riverbank and they say, you know, what is your business here essentially? And he goes, oh yeah, just me and a couple of people traveling with ransom money.

And it's like, why would you do that? That's like interfacing with bandits 101. Don't tell them that you have bags full of money. And it's like, why would you do that? That's like interfacing with bandits 101. Don't tell them that you have bags full of money. There are several parts in his autobiography where he's so trusting in people. And it's almost like, oh, Osman, they're going to exploit you. And that's one of the things that I honestly like about him. I don't know if I would be as brave as to put so much trust in strangers and humanity, but yeah. You're exactly right that there's a very deeply human quality in the way that he tells stories. He has a lot of villains in his stories, to be sure. But all of the people are very complicated.

And there's always this sense that he sees everybody basically as someone like him that he wants to be able to trust. And that even if he can't trust them or they betray him, there's always a chance of negotiating with them. I mean, that's also that's what happens with the Hungarians, right? He actually ends up, they've stripped him, tied him up, and they're about to cut off his head and he and he decides that he's gonna have a negotiation with them and it ends up he survives obviously because then he ends ends up writing the book i don't want to spoil that part of the story but it it ends up i mean that's also one of the most exciting sort of from the pure level of narration you can see the the Netflix episode where he's captured with the Hungarians.

It's basically already written. He's a very talented storyteller in that sense. He is. There's so many points where you're like, is he going to make it out? Is he not going to make it out? And he kind of leaves you on the edge of your seat. But even as he's a captive, you've kind of alluded to it. In his latter years as a captive,

he seems to have a relatively fair amount of freedom of movement. He makes money. He wields influence in some of the houses in which he's serving. He goes to taverns. He has a little bit of a social life. The fact is that Habsburg slavery or really sort of slavery and captivity in early modern Europe is very under-researched. And we really don't know nearly as much about it as we should. We know comparatively much more about the Ottoman Empire and, for example, the New World, the United States, Latin America. So one of the surprising things from Osman's account is that, you know, if you compare those two models, account is that, you know, if you compare those two models, the sort of US model and then the Ottoman model, the US model is a much more harsh system in the sense that there's a very clear distinction between slaved and unslaved. That's a racial distinction and it's not supposed to

be transgressed. Whereas in the Ottoman case, slavery, I mean, it can be just as brutal, of course, but it also is a mechanism for social advancement. In other words, all of the members of the Ottoman military elite in the 16th and 17th century, not all, but almost all of them are people who were originally slaves. And it's kind of necessary to start out as a slave in order to become Grand Vizier, for instance. It's a completely different system. So it's very curious and surprising that Osman gives us the idea that the Habsburg system is maybe interested in emulating the Ottoman system in the sense that his masters in Vienna, they very clearly like him.

They want to become his patron. And they keep sort of saying, oh, if you just become Christian, you know, you can advance up the ranks. We can get you a good job here in Vienna. You'll have so many opportunities. I mean, that's something that I don't think I knew before I really started reading this text and looking into the circumstances. And it gives us a sense that there are a lot of other ways in which this is true as well, that the Habsburg system, because the Ottomans are right next door, because they're sort of the main rivals in all kinds of instances, they actually end up trying to emulate the Ottomans.

They're like keeping up with the Ottomans. Yeah, exactly. Did you come across any narratives of Habsburg captives behind Ottoman enemy lines? You know, there literally are thousands of accounts of Europeans, not only Habsburgs, but people from all over Western Europe in the 16th and 17th and 18th centuries who end up traveling to the empire, sometimes as captives, sometimes as prisoners of war, but also sometimes as diplomats or merchants who end up writing about their experience. And there's a lot of curiosity about what Europe would look like from the perspective of Ottoman captives or slaves or travelers or ambassadors who are doing the same thing in reverse. But there are very few such accounts. In fact, almost none. I mean, it's such a problem

that if you read a book like, for example, Daniel Goffman's The Ottomans in Early Modern Europe, which is a very good book and which is really making a strong and convincing case that you can't really understand Ottoman history or early modern European history except together. He actually has these little vignettes in between each substantive chapter, which are an Ottoman messenger, a chavush, who's traveling to different places in Europe and describing them, but they're made up. Oh, wow. I mean, he says that he's doing this, but it's precisely because exactly that kind of source, which we expect should be there,

which sort of it's necessary for us to feel like we really are getting a true grasp on the lived historical reality of the people at the time. It's just most of the time not there. Osman remained a captive in Habsburg territory throughout more than a decade of conflict with the Ottomans. But the Treaty of Karlowitz, which ended the war and centuries of Ottoman expansion in Europe,

offered a new opportunity for Osman to return home. Yet his prior travails had taught Osman to be wary of such opportunities, making his plan for return considerably more complicated. Yeah, so that last part of the book is just dripping with ambiguity and undertones of transgression because this guy has spent the entire time refusing to become assimilated, refusing to give up his religion. He still managed to develop this very, very positive relationship with his owner to the extent that when it's time for him to be freed,

he doesn't think that they will let him go because they like him so much. It's a little bit like the end of Where the Wild Things Are, where Max decides he's going to go and they say, we'll eat you up, we love you so. Exactly. So in order to escape, he decides that he has to pretend to be a christian and to dress finally as a german and to make up this whole story about himself as somebody who's decided to stay in the hapsburg realms and to live there for the rest of his life and he forges a document

from his master explaining all of this and uh and he actually has a whole party of other Ottoman slaves that are doing the same thing. This is just a side note, but one of the really interesting things about Osman's story is that he has a lot of very rich female characters. Yes. And there's one that is a part of his escape expedition

who has had kind of the same experiences as him, who has sort of made her way all across Europe and ends up getting shot in the head and surviving from the bullet wound and then escaping from her master and then ends up working in the same household as Osman from the same town as Osman. And they decide to escape together, told as Osman from the same town as Osman, and they decide to escape together, along with two or three other people. They all dress up as Germans. They all have the story that they are emancipated captives and that they have decided to settle permanently in the Habsburg realms. And then they make their way as close as they can get to the border. And then the final escape attempt. I don't want to spoil the surprise, but I mean, when he eventually does get across the border, it turns out that the border that

he imagines is his destination. If he can just get across the border, he'll be safe. And it is not the case. The border is an illusion. And the idea that once he's back in Ottoman territory, he's back home, and he's back in safety is an illusion. And that's one of the things that really makes you think this is such a profound intervention that Osman is trying to make through the telling of his life story. It's not just a factual account. It's actually something much more than that about who am I? How can any of us know who we are? Is it ever possible to come home after this kind of an experience and so forth? There's a part right before he escapes and he's dreaming. You can tell he's tortured about, a little bit tortured about his decision to escape his owners. Basically,

he's leaving and he sees the lady of the house. And she says something like, it's okay, like, we're okay. And I thought that was, like you said, it's not just a factual account of I was captive. And he's telling a story. And you can see that he has a couple of dream sequences towards the end that he tells the reader. And I just, I always wonder, I mean, this was the first Ottoman autobiography. And if he was aware of that, what his choice was to put in a dream sequence. Yeah, well, I think that's one of the places where he is really combining different kinds of writing in a interesting way, in the sense that there wasn't much of a model of autobiographic. There are certainly passages that are very autobiographical in Ottoman literature, but the idea of writing a book-length

story of one's own life is something that he's really sort of presenting for the first time. On the other hand, dream sequences are a very typical way revealing one's inner self. But not only that, they're also a very typical way of revealing one's self annihilation in the face of the divine mysteries, one's complete devotion to a sovereign. There are all kinds of ways that sort of established ways of invoking a dream sequence in Ottoman literature. And so you're exactly right that he has this autobiographical form that probably he had been exposed to when he was in Austria. He learns to read German fluently, and he clearly was, you know, probably reading this

kind of literature in a way that made him think that it would have been possible for him to write something like this. But at the same time, he's recombining it with these other kinds of forms. And so that moment where he is dreaming of being hounded by dogs and scampering up the mountain of Karlowitz the night before the most dangerous part of his escape. And then at the top of the hill, he sees his owner in her palace and says, you know, oh, how nice to see you. And then he wakes up and he knows that he's safe because she's still watching over him and she's forgiven him for abandoning her.

There's so much in there in terms of the literary expression, in terms of the themes that he's addressing, in terms of the actual narrative structure of the book, and so much more. And it's also funny that you say it's a part of Ottoman literary tradition, because if anybody watches Turkish television shows or television dramas, there's always a dream sequence, always. And it's always long and dramatic and drawn out. And it's supposed to reveal something about whoever the dreamer is. That's an interesting connection. Absolutely. So Osman returns home. And as you say, it's not what he thinks it's going to be. But he without giving away too much, he still doesn't live a quiet life.

He doesn't just settle down and go quietly into the night. His life continues to take interesting turns. So tell us a little bit about his life post-captivity. So at first, he manages to go back to his hometown. And he uses the fact that he has this experience of having lived among the Habsburgs and learned to speak German fluently to build a new career for himself. He becomes a local diplomat responsible for cross-border negotiations

with the Habsburg authorities on the other side. And in fact, the only really heartfelt moment of reunion at the end of the book isn't when he comes home and meets his relatives. They're basically all dead. He finds that almost all of his relatives have died in the war. He doesn't find any of his friends there anymore. He gets tricked and cheated by a lot of the people that are welcoming him back. But he's sent across the border once again. And he sees the very same Habsburg general that was hunting him when he was trying to escape. And he's so happy to see him. He says,

oh, Osman, you look so great with your beard. He grabs his hand and he won't let it go. He gives him sweets and he tells everybody to treat him as a special guest. And he says, now I know we're going to be able to work something out because my old friend is here. And this is somebody that I trust and I can deal with. So that's phase one. Then, despite all of his best efforts, the war breaks out again. And that's just a complete tragedy. First, his own hometown is captured this time.

And then his new family that he's been able to build, almost all of them are killed in the tragic siege of Belgrade. So when he's writing, he is in Istanbul after this. And at this point, it's very ironic that he's writing about his escape from the Habsburgs. But at this point, his own home is on the other side of the border. And the most surprising thing for me as I was researching the book is that we know from some recent discoveries in the Viennese archives that after he wrote this this, he actually went back as a translator for the first Ottoman permanent consul in Vienna. He voluntarily went back to live in Vienna after writing this book about his escape from 12 years of captivity in Habsburg territory. So it's just

such a complicated end to his story. Yeah. You mentioned that his second family passes away. In the beginning of the book, he shortly goes over his childhood years and his parents also pass away in quick succession. And I find it interesting that he experiences all this death in his life, his parents, his siblings, his second wife, some of his children. And he kind of just glazes over it. He doesn't like to talk about his family. And I think there is probably some cultural patterns that he's conforming to there. He talks about, as I mentioned before, he talks about a lot of women. Some of them are his adversaries, some of them are his companions, some of them are his patrons, but he doesn't ever really tell us anything about his sisters, about his mother,

about his wives, about his daughters. That's kind of off limits. And I think there he's conforming to certain kinds of expectations of propriety in the 18th century Ottoman Empire. You know, you didn't really talk publicly or put in writing any kind of details about your own personal family life. And speaking about propriety, he has a couple of instances of near sexual encounters. It's rather ambiguous. Do you think that he's telling the truth in the account of some of those encounters? There are several different successive episodes in which he presents himself as being pursued and ends up finding himself just at the very brink of going all the way, shall we say? And then pulls back.

He says, no, I can't do this. I'm so pious. I can't do it. And that's with both men and women. There are different kind of parallel scenes where this happens with a boy and a girl. And then in another instance, a whole town of girls.

Yeah. So can we believe him? So I think that that you know obviously he didn't spend 12 years as a celibate right man in his 20s and i don't think and he doesn't ever he doesn't ever actually say that he does but those episodes all happen in a very specific point in in his story which is exactly the point of transition between the first phase where he's being tortured and brutalized in various ways and just trying to survive and then the second phase where he is being tempted by the the possibilities if he would just give in to not ever returning home. And I think that's sort of the way that I would understand those episodes, is he's telling us those particular episodes,

which we'll never know if they were actually true or not. But certainly, it has a ring of truth about it in the sense that I don't know why he would tell those specific stories if there wasn't something unusual about them that he wanted us to know. But I them that he that he wanted us to know but i think that's what he wants us to know is that that in that moment of his story he's so deeply troubled by this choice that he has to make so at the end of the text, Osman is reflecting on his life, all of his adventures, and he writes this line that says,

I was soon to face the destiny as the kings of old recorded in the history books who in their time say, the world is mine, but then vanish without a trace. And it's at the very end of the book. And I found that line so haunting because after Osman's life ended and he recorded his life story,

you say in the introduction that it's likely that none of his contemporaries actually read the account of his life, his memoir. And it kind of just disappears until it's rediscovered hundreds of years later. It vanishes the same way he says it will. hundreds of years later, it vanishes the same way he says it will. There is a very established literary convention that he is invoking of the traveler who sees ruins on the highway and says, who knows who it could have been who built these magnificent temples. Now they're just lying in waste, being covered by the sand. You find that in many, many, many different places. In this case, though, that's coupled with the fact

that he's writing this extremely detailed account of himself desperately trying to find some way to preserve his life story and give it meaning in a way that other people will be able to access. And then, as far as we know, nobody ever read it. And it's not a pharaoh or a king of old who's building a gigantic monument. It's just a regular person who didn't even have a particularly advanced education who is writing this story, which is then not really discovered until hundreds of years later. That turns out not to be that unusual. In fact, almost, I would say, all the greatest hits of travel literature, not just in Ottoman, but in Islamic history, have similar stories.

Ibn Battuta, sort of the Muslim Marco Polo, as he's sometimes known, wasn't really known until the 19th century when his text was sort of rediscovered by French Orientalists and published. Evliya Celebi, amazing source, 10 volumes, unbelievable traveler who visited every place in the Ottoman Empire and described ethnographic details and his own personal

interactions and all kinds of other things just existed in a single manuscript copy until the 19th century when when it was kind of rediscovered wow so this this too is something you know this troubles me a lot that i think this is such an interesting text but clearly my opinion was not shared by that many by that many people generations and generations of generations of people. So why is that? I mean, in some ways, it's an even more important thing to understand than the story of Osman's life is, what is it about this historical context that's different from my own that makes something like this

apparently not compelling in the same way? I don't know how to answer that question. That's interesting. I think about that, like hundreds of years pass and nobody cares and somehow this text calls to you. So you characterize this as a major work of literature. It's arguably the first autobiography ever written in Ottoman Turkish. This is the first English translation. So exactly how does Osman's memoir differ from other works of Ottoman literature at the time with autobiographical aspects to them? Yeah, I don't know completely how to account for this. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, you have this explosion of innovative autobiographical writing. Comes out of nowhere.

I think it has to be in some level a product of Osman having read some things in German that inspired him. But that doesn't tell us everything because there were many people like him. There were thousands of Ottoman captives who spent many years in various European countries, and they became quite fluent in European languages and exposed to European literary forms. But none of them did what Osman did. None of them came back and wrote an account of their experiences the way he did. So that in and of itself doesn't actually explain. It's probably part of the story, but it doesn't really explain how he could write something

like this. something like this. There is, of course, also a context of new experimental forms of expression of, we call them ego documents, of autobiographical forms of expression in the 18th century, the early 18th century Ottoman Empire. You know, one obvious example of a similar kind of development is there are these Ottoman ambassador reports. In the 1720s, all of a sudden, certainly there were all kinds of Ottoman ambassadors visiting all kinds of places before the 1720s, but they didn't come back and sit down and write a detailed account of what they saw and did while they were away. Or if they did, we don't have them. But then all of a sudden in the 1520s, they start doing it systematically. There's a famous account about an ambassador goes to Paris, and then there's another one about an ambassador goes to Russia,

and there's another one about an ambassador that goes to Iran. And those all happen really just in the same two or three years that Osman is eventually sitting down and writing his autobiography. OK, so there might be some instrumental aspect to what he's doing is that he he's not connected in the same way that those people are. And he doesn't have the same kind of a stature to be a full fledged ambassador as those people. But maybe his idea is that he can use his own accidental life experience and put it in a particular way that will be in somehow analogous to those reports that those ambassadors are filing about their experiences while they are abroad. There's no indication that Osman was writing this for a specific audience, whether it be his remaining child or children or anyone else, right? No, he doesn't dedicate it to anybody specifically.

We don't know if it was commissioned or if he wrote it in the hope that somebody would accept it as a gift. We don't know any of that. But he also wrote other things in his lifetime. For example, he wrote a history of the Holy Roman Empire. Have you read those accounts? And if so, did you find that they differ in narrative style or tone? I mean, I have looked at them. I haven't given them the full attention that they deserve.

And I hope that somebody does. In fact, they're quite different. One of them is really a bit like a professional dossier. It's sort of the letters that he translated and wrote in his capacity as a diplomat and a member of the Border Commission in the early part of the 18th century. The work that you just mentioned, this history of the Holy Roman Empire, is in its own way, it's just as original as the autobiography. There isn't any established genre in Ottoman Turkish writing a history of a foreign state using sources from that place because he's basing his account on books in German about the history of the Holy Roman Empire. To really understand that and what he's doing with it, one would need to get all of the Holy Roman Empire. To really understand that and what he's doing with it, one would need to get all of the original sources and then sort of

systematically look through which parts are original content, which parts are translations, when he does do translations, you know, what does he do with the translations and what is he leaving out. Sounds like ten years worth of research. Well that's part of it and also it would require learning, like knowing German much better than I do. Let's put it that way. Right. I'll leave that to somebody else. Leave that to the experts.

Translating someone's life story, someone's memoir seems like a very intimate endeavor. Do you feel like you got to know Osman? Do you like Osman? Yeah, I like him. I like him quite a bit. I miss him now that the translation is over and I don't spend time with him as I used to. Yes, now that's not necessarily all good.

Yes. Now, that's not necessarily all good. Right. Certainly, it's the case that if you like somebody too much, then you find yourself cutting corners for them. And that's not necessarily a good thing as a scholar or as a translator. You know, for example, there's this scene. You mentioned the scene where he kind of ingenuously trusts the hungarian the murderous hungarian bandits uh for me the scene where he really disappoints me is where his there's a girl that he works with who is raped by their boss okay and and he instrumentalizes that. He basically uses it to blackmail his boss into helping him escape. Yes.

And he tells it completely openly. He's very matter of fact. Yeah, in a way that doesn't really make it seem like he is conflicted about it, as I would have expected and hoped that he would be. So there is a point where I really feel like he let me down yeah but that's my problem you know if he let me down that's a sign of how emotionally invested I am and and so I have to make sure that I don't let that interfere with the way I translate the the text um yeah I felt the same way during that part. It's like he talked all this stuff about

propriety and sexual chastity and this girl gets raped and you can tell he just, oh, I'll just use this to curry favor, to get a favor out of somebody from the house. Yeah. But you're right in terms of getting emotionally invested in somebody or translating from a scholarly point of view. You kind of just have to stick to the translating and to the facts. And speaking of translating, what were some of the unique challenges of translating this particular text? I know in the beginning, one of my favorite facts was that the original text is continuous. There's no punctuation it's just yeah no chapter headings no paragraphs no sentences no punctuation it's yeah yeah it's

exhausting so there this was a this was a challenge and this was actually also a choice that I made when I was translating the this is a text that has been translated many times, never in English, but many times in many different languages. German originally, and then many times in Turkish, and then in French,

and more recently in Croatian, and Romanian, and Czech, and Hungarian. So I suspect, I don't know this for sure, but I suspect there isn't any other text that has been translated from Ottoman Turkish into that many languages.

Wow. Now, obviously, I can't read all of those languages, but the ones that I can read, I have to say that the translations are extremely stiff. Okay. Okay. They're very literal translations. They're very literal translations, even to the point of translating it as it is a continuous text with no chapters or anything like that. The problem with that is that when you read a translation that's done very stiffly in that way, the voice disappears. And it invites you to read it as a source, which contains information that you can extract. But it doesn't invite you to read it as a literary intervention that has a clear

intellectual project behind it. And for me, it's very, very clear that Osman is trying to say something with his book. He's not just conveying information. And when you read it in Ottoman Turkish, you know, what really strikes you is not how stiff it is, but it's exactly the opposite. It's how much more direct and colloquial and comfortable and intimate it is than what you would normally find when you're reading Ottoman literature from the 18th century. So that for me was the thing that I really had to convey. And I'm sure some people will be upset and they'll say Qasali took too many liberties with the text and it's not faithful to the original as it should be. This is an endless problem with translation.

Now, are you a writer outside of scholarly writing? Do you do any creative writing or anything like that that would have helped you get the voice or get a feel for Osman's voice or the narrative style or tone or mood? A little bit, a little bit. But I also am very, very committed to the idea that history writing is also literature,

that it should be crafted in a way that is attentive to the experience of reading. It isn't just exactly the same way as I translated Osman's text. My own history writing, I don't want it to be just about conveying information. I want it to also be a narrative, a pleasure to read as a narrative experience. And so that's something I always try to practice in my own writing as well. Well, you did a very great job. I read it completely in two hours on the Amtrak. Wow. And I couldn't put it down. It was really well done. Thank you so much. Yeah. So how do you think that this text in particular will help scholars better understand 17th century Ottoman society? And what are the promises and perils of using this type of text as a source of history? You know, there's this whole universe of courses and syllabi, workshops, conferences, books about European representations of the other,

European captivity narratives, European travel accounts. And because of the things that I do work on as a historian, I'm very frequently approached by people that are doing that kind of work. And what they want is something to make their material more balanced. They want to be able to not only talk about European representations of the other, or European experiences of travel outside of the West, they want to be able to also have the other side of the story. So on the one hand, this is exactly that. It is exactly the other Ottoman version of that kind of literary discourse. But it's also almost the only one. So on one hand, I wanted to do the translation so that people would be able to use it for exactly this purpose. But I also didn't want to make it too easy for people.

I mean, I really did want to emphasize in the introduction that this isn't just the kind of thing that's sitting around in hundreds of different versions. And all we have to do is translate them. And then we will have solved the problem by making things completely balanced. It isn't so easy, unfortunately. And so that actually demands that we start asking other more difficult questions about, why do we insist on these kinds of sources as the only way to be able to really understand history, for example? My last question is, is there anything I haven't asked? That's a very interesting question. We are discouraged actively from doing translations as historians.

Many people told me, don't do this, don't do this. If you want to write about Osman why don't you just paraphrase what he says break it up into a bunch of chapters paraphrase what he says find some other documents that give it context and then you can present it as

your own work, it will count as a monograph and you'll get promoted, but if you do this everybody will say that you're not doing any original research. And Casali's, you know, he's lost his way. He's gone down the dark path of translation. Yes. And, man, I, that's another, in some ways,

it's another version of the same problem we were just talking about, about expectations. Because those expectations are based on a particular understanding of several different things that are completely Eurocentric. First of all, they're based on the expectation of what exactly a foreign language is and how directly the content can be translated. That's number one. So if Osman was writing his memoir in French in the 1950s and it was published, I can imagine that there would still be a lot of interpretive work involved in doing

something like that, but it's a completely different order of magnitude, really. So that's one. The other thing is that there was no printing in the Ottoman Empire until the 19th century. So that means texts are not accessible. So you have this combination of texts being extremely difficult to read. They have never appeared in print. And what that means is every time we want to do some original research, we have to start from scratch. We don't have 500 years of scholarship that Europeanists just have ready and waiting for them to do research with. And so if we have the same expectations about what research needs to entail, so doing a translation is not actually creative work and it shouldn't count for anything and people should be discouraged from doing it,

we'll never get out of that problem. It will always be exactly the same. So I'm glad you asked me that question so that I have a chance to say this, because it is something that this experience has shown me more clearly than I was even aware of beforehand, is this basic problem of historians' troubled relationship with translations, sort of disciplinary structures that are in place to discourage them, and how particularly for people that work in fields of non-modern, non-Western history, how constraining that can be. Well, you heard it here first, people. Get to translating.

Start with Osman's history of the Holy Roman Empire. There you go. There you go. There you go. Yes. Hallelujah. All right. Thank you so much, Giancarlo. Thank you, Brittany.

That concludes our interview with Giancarlo Casale about Prisoner of the Infidels, the memoir of an Ottoman Muslim in 17th century Europe, just released with the University of California Press. If you're looking to learn more about Osman and his story, visit our website, ottomanhistorypodcast.com, where you'll find a quick link to the book as well as other resources in this interview's bibliography. You'll also find tons of other episodes on the early modern Ottoman Empire in a global context. That's all for now. I'm Brittany White. Take care. Thank you.