Ottoman History Podcast - The Ragusa Road and the Ottoman Balkans

Episode Date: October 11, 2023

Jesse Howell hosted by Sam Dolbee | In this episode, Jesse Howell discusses the history of the early modern caravan route between Ragusa (modern-day Dubrovnik) and Istanbul. In attending to the long-distance connections between the early modern Ottoman state and the Mediterranean world, he reveals the multi-ethnic communities that came together on the caravan route, the ways that Ottoman state established infrastructure to support mobility and circulation along these pathways, and the material afterlives of these layers of history in very different historical eras. We also talk about the challenge of not getting the information we want from sources, and how to grapple with that absence. In Jesse’s case, that struggle has included riding along a portion of the road on a bicycle, a trip that was chronicled in an earlier episode. « Click for More »

I'm thinking about some of the aspects of some travel reports that I read and being so frustrated. Tell me about the big picture. What's going on? What is it like being an Italian Catholic in the land of the Ottomans? How do you communicate? I want to know these big questions. And they're like, Giovanni was frustrated because there was no wine and eggs cost this many aspers in this village. It's the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Sam Dolby. And that voice you just heard expressing frustration with Giovanni is Jesse Howell. I'm Jesse Howell. I'm a historian of the Ottoman Empire, and my research focus has been on caravan routes and caravan travel in the Ottoman Balkans. I work at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University,

where I'm the coordinator for the PhD and master's programs. And before I was a historian of the Ottoman Empire, I was a professional dance theater performer in California and Germany. In this episode, we don't discuss dance, but we do talk a lot about movement as it relates to Jesse's research on the early modern Ottoman caravan road between Istanbul and Dubrovnik in present-day Croatia. We touch on some of the challenges of the sources, Jesse's creative solution to feeling distant from everyday life on those caravan roads, and the layers of history and geography he encountered as a result. Also,

spoiler alert, the solution involved riding a bike with me over a small portion of the road in summer 2022, which you can hear more about in a separate Ottoman History Podcast episode. Early modern caravans, bikes, and what the sources don't tell us, but we want to know in a minute when our program continues. Yeah, I tried to write a cultural and social history of a caravan road that went from Dubrovnik, also known as Ragusa, in what's now southern Croatia on the Adriatic Sea, across southeastern Europe, the Balkans, Rumelia, to Istanbul. Due to its current remoteness, surprisingly, this was a pretty major overland trade route for a number of centuries, particularly from the late 1400s into the mid-1600s. A lot of the reason for extending

into the 17th century is to make use of the only Ottoman travel writer who describes the region in any great detail, which is, of course, Evliya Celebi. In 1667, there is a pretty massive and devastating earthquake that really wipes out Dubrovnik. And around that time, it's the end of the war in Crete with Venice, and relations stay relatively good between Venice and the Ottomans. And at that point, Venice has developed its own overland, much threatened overland trade route through the port of Split, which it develops based on a proposal from a Jewish merchant who was active. So the 1660s are kind of the end of this really privileged, really productive relationship between the Ottomans and Dubrovnik and the caravan road.

You could still travel on it, it still existed, but it became more of a regional and then kind of local access for trade. In a way, kind of reverting back to what it had been for many, many years before this efflorescence between the Ottomans and Dubrovnik. And why was it so busy? It was busy because it was useful. Dubrovnik was a really nice port, and it was a really good midpoint on the Adriatic. It was relatively easy to sail up and down the northern Adriatic. There were lots of sheltered border islands. And then once you got south, things became a little bit dicier. So Dubrovnik was a great port. It was close to a lot of the Italian trading cities. The merchants and politicians of Dubrovnik were very energetically connected to the Bosnian neighbors, Bosnian Herzegovinian neighbors, and essentially all of the interior inland space of the western Ottoman provinces, so Rumelia.

So with that energy, plus coupled with Ottoman building and infrastructure development, which really boomed in the 16th century, in the 1500s, along the particular axis of this route, made it a very stable and secure way for merchants and diplomats to make their way between the sort of central western Mediterranean and the Ottoman centers of power. So through the mountains of the western Balkans into the larger cities like Sofia, Plovdiv, Edirne, and eventually Istanbul. Dubrovnik, Ragusa, this is not part of the Ottoman Empire, and yet there are still these intense connections between territory under Ottoman control and Ragusa.

Could you give us a sense of when the Ottomans are under control of what, and how far that goes? So in the 1400s, the Ottomans are gradually establishing more and more direct control over almost the entirety of the Balkan Peninsula. Around 1430, it looks like we have the first documents that show Dubrovnik sending tribute to the Ottoman Sultan, Murad II. And from that stage further, the Republic of Dubrovnik, or Republic of Ragusa, entered into this tributary state relationship. And it wasn't unique. States in Wallachia, Transylvania, similarly exchanged tribute for, and certain other types of value, information, economic advantages, for relative autonomy at home. One of the things that's interesting about Dubrovnik or Ragusa is they had the highest levels of autonomy locally within

their really small territory inland, which was completely surrounded by the Ottomans on all sides on the land. They did what they wanted. Their officials were not imposed by the regional Ottoman powers, which would be the Bay of Bosnia or the Sanjak Bay of Herzegovina, which were the closest major territorial units. In exchange, the Ottomans actually gave the merchants of Dubrovnik, very favorable customs rates. They paid less customs than even Muslim merchants, even Ottoman Muslim merchants paid more than these Dubrovnikers. And what was the logic behind that? The logic is frustratingly not spelled out, but the argument, based on a ton of consistent circumstantial evidence, is that Dubrovnik was a very,

very helpful counterpoint. It was a very pragmatic cohabitation. Dubrovnik provided a lot of value to the Ottomans. It definitely punched above its weight for such a tiny place. One thing was, during the periods of warfare with Venice, which was the major power in the Adriatic, Ottoman goods, it was mostly exports, could flow through the port of Dubrovnik out into the Western Christian Mediterranean, unobstructed at a high volume. Not as high a volume as Venice, but still very high volume. And what kinds of goods are we talking about? A lot of forest products, pitch, timber, burrs, agricultural production, export of grain, so less manufactured

goods, more kind of raw materials from the area. Dubrovnik also controlled very valuable salt manufacturing, collecting areas, which were extremely valuable. And those privileges were coveted by Venice, and Dubrovnik was typically protected by the Ottomans against Venice because of its value. So it's interesting to see this enduring relationship. It seems very mutually beneficial. The other thing that Dubrovnik had to offer was information. So Dubrovnik merchants were across the Ottoman Empire, but they were also across the Western Mediterranean as far as the Spanish empires across the Italian peninsula. So they very much valued gathering information. They were quite adept at it. And there's a ton

of documentation in the Dubrovnik State Archives, where I worked for some time, that show the emphasis on collecting political information, aka, you know, intelligence gathering, and that could be deployed when negotiating. If the Ottomans were angry with them for something, they might reveal something that was happening in the Habsburg world or the Venetian world or the kingdom of Spain to sort of underline their value to the Ottomans' geostrategic ambitions. All of this is hard to pin down because it's never articulated. It's more of a practice. It's more of these ongoing patterns. Some of the elements that are really well spelled out in the documents are the emphasis on the Dubrovnik tribute ambassadors. So every year, two nobles

would be sent to Istanbul with 12,500 pieces of gold. Actually, they'd send them with 10,000 pieces of gold, and they would engage in currency speculation along the way because of their amazing intelligence gathering. They knew which currencies were more valuable, so they would turn the 10,000 into 12,000 and plus to cover their own expenses. That would be delivered to the sultan. Very little of these pages and pages of documents of information that was given to the ambassadors says anything about the journey, which was very frustrating for me, because I didn't want to write a diplomatic history. I wanted to write about the road itself, the space in between the poles of Dubrovnik and Istanbul. But it does give you an

insight into what the political priorities were, and kind of the modus operandi of this very small republic. Which gifts to give to which officials, how many, which specific colors of textiles to give to the wife of which vizier at which time, making sure that this person, that there was a direct audience, that it wasn't given to a lesser official, and when before the particular grand vizier or sultan, which demands to make, and the constant fear of the yasak, the embargo, the trade embargo, the yasako, as it's written in this sort of Italianized Turkish Ottoman word. This was the absolute fear, because it would stop the Dubrovnik merchants from exporting products of the Ottoman Empire to the west. And as this

intermediary port city, trading city, this would have been catastrophic. And there were indeed times when the yasak, the yasako, was imposed. We have documents from, well, the 16th or 17th century that lists thousands and thousands of, say, bales of sheepskin, for example, one of the products that was exported, collecting in hans and warehouses and places on the road, like Novi Pazar was a big point of exchange. And they'd sit there and they'd rot. And so this was the investment that these merchants had huge sums invested in, and they would be destroyed unless this embargo was lifted.

And it was off. So this is often a negotiating tactic to extract more value and more gifts from these merchants who are known to be very canny and would cry. They were famous for their theatrics. We have descriptions of Azir saying like, I don't want to see any more of your tears, just basically show me the money and we can talk about the embargo. Show me the properly colored textile. Show me the scarlatti and the damask velvets. Okay, so we have information flowing, we have commodities flowing, but you said earlier that one of the challenges of the dissertation was getting a sense of what does the actual road look like? So what do we know about that route? How long did it take? What kinds of

things were the Ottomans building to facilitate all these different kinds of mobility? It took two months. The road itself was about 1400 kilometers. The road network, as far as I can understand from studying Ottoman and Dubrovnik documentation and a lot of Italian and Western European travel literature, travel diaries, is that the road is best thought documentation and a lot of Italian and Western European travel literature, travel diaries, is that the road is best thought of as a series of stopping places. It's not this kind of classical, majestic, Roman, nature-defying, straight, paved, angled entity. It's more flexible than that. So it was built around animal-powered caravans and merchants with bulky merchandise that they needed to move.

The route is better understood as almost like a series of stopping places, which are called menzils. Menzil means both stopping place and also the sort of daily journey. So there were several dozen, depending on how you count or how quickly, you know, how good the conditions are. If it's midwinter or midsummer, you have, you know, how good the conditions are. If it's midwinter or midsummer, you have to move more slowly because of the extreme temperatures. In this Ottoman infrastructure of these menzils, one of the most spectacular and visible elements

is bridges. Beautiful Ottoman bridges. There's the one in Visegrad that was written about by Ivo Andrić. There's the one in Mostar. Basically two types. There's a single archetype and the multi-archetype. But there are also so many different specific and repeating forms. You have Ottoman mosques, but you also have what I just mentioned, hans or caravanserais, which are specifically walled enclosures where merchants, their animals, and their goods can safely spend a certain amount of time. A lot of these towns, it wasn't just for traders, but it seems that the Ottoman founders

of these towns were interested in building settlements that would be stable. So they might also invest through vakif, which is a kind of pious endowment, in schools, in baths, in commercial spaces that could generate revenue. And all these things could also, of course, generate stable employment. So it was almost like these little Ottoman colonies within Ottoman space built at strategic points. Pochetteli is a kind of perfect example on the Neretva River, on the road to Mostar, where you have every type of the Ottoman endowed structures that fostered both travel, safety, and security, economic activity, but also stable, settled populations that would look after travelers and local inhabitants in strategic locations. It's a lot like beads on a string in a way that you would think about just moving from point to point, each day's journey leading you slightly further. But it wasn't just necessarily a race to get from metropole in the west to metropole in the east. There's a lot of trade activity, diplomatic activity happening in the places in between and a lot of opportunities for encounter as well.

And it's horses, not camels. It's horses. It's horses. Small, tough, they're called Bosnian horses. I've, I looked for camels. I don't find a lot of camels. I looked for mules. Fernand Braudel writes about the triumph of the mule in the 16th century, and I found this very exciting, and I was very motivated to find evidence of mules, because it's Brodel, and he's so convincing, but I didn't. I found very few mules. This work is, I can't say that I have definitive pictures, because a lot of the sources are only illuminating certain elements, and sometimes they're contradictory. But I'm pretty confident about horses. There are wagons in some places, particularly on the eastern side,

when you're going down, say, the Maritsa River Valley through what's now Bulgaria. You've got more wagons and wheeled vehicles. Wagons are useful in kind of local circumstances. But one of the things that we discovered from cycling is the difficulty. And we were on roads that were graded by modern equipment. It's challenging topography. Wagons were not particularly useful due to how mountainous and tough the territory is.

They're only useful in very limited sections. And most caravans did not use them extensively. There's one example. Some Venetian travelers try to take an alternative route from an Albanian port, and this very senior, noble diplomat hires some local people to carry him in a litter, and this fails dramatically and immediately in the mountains the he's there's there's no way to for him to be carried across the the mountains of southeastern europe and he has to do it on horseback but he doesn't accidentally fall off the mountain right

it's a gentle landing i think it's a landing. The litter is abandoned and the mission continues. One of the things that's so striking about the caravans is that there is no such thing as a sectarian caravan. So most of the documentation that we have from Italian sources, which gives the richest detail because they're reporting back, the Venetians are particularly interested in overland travel and the mechanics of it because they're very good at maritime travel. They're concerned by the threat that this overland travel poses, so we get a lot of detail from them. Almost inevitably, you would have this variation on the

combination where, say, a Western European diplomatic or commercial traveler comes to Dubrovnik, meets a local, probably Catholic ostensibly, merchant. That merchant would connect with their contacts, who are usually referred to as vloks, which is a confusing term that can be an ethnic term, but often just means a person who deals with animals. The vloks would provide the horses that would power the caravan. For security, would provide the horses that would power the caravan. For security, Janissary guards would be hired by this Catholic Dubrovnik caravan merchant, and then the territory that would be crossed, so you have this multi-ethnic, multi-confessional group where you've got Catholics, you've got Muslims, perhaps converts, and then you're crossing the space where much of the population

practices some version of Orthodox Christianity. There's also a lot of interaction. A lot of Jewish merchants are active in all of these Ottoman trading cities across southeastern Europe as well. So you have multiple faiths, you have multiple sectarian identities, all of whom I don't want to give this kind of dreamy world where everyone gets along, begin this globalized, mutually beneficial economic world. But ultimately, fundamentally, this was based on cooperation between people with different, what we would consider distinct ethnic sectarian identities today, especially in the Balkans. So One of the many things that I find endlessly fascinating about this road network and its success during the period that I write about is the fact that it is not the easy way to go.

Horton and Purcell write about how social features can transcend topographical ones in patterns of movement, and I found that to be a very precise and very useful point of departure for thinking about this. There was a certain amount of energy expended on the Ottoman side and on the Dubrovnik side and on the international trade side that allowed this particular trade route to really flourish for a couple of centuries, particular trade route to really flourish for a couple of centuries, despite the very real topographical obstacles in its way. If you look on the map, and if you look like the Romans, you would see the Via Egnatia. There's a much easier way. It's quite a bit shorter. There's a great harbor in Durres, Albania, was Durazzo. All of this land was controlled by the Ottomans

during this entire time period. And yet, it's never developed to the same extent that the Ragusa Road was, or that the Split Road, which later played a hand in the development of Sarajevo, that's another story, was. So I feel like this is a real case study that shows that it isn't just about cost path analysis. It's not about the fewest number of days between one place and another. But yeah, you can transcend geography. It isn't just destiny. One of the things that was so striking for me was just the intense geological formations,

the sense of layers that you get from the rivers, from the caves, from the rocks that we rode through. How did that appear to you as you were doing the research? How has your thinking about that developed over time? The geography was something that came to me that appeared later. And when it appeared, it appeared very strongly and very strikingly and lasting. When I came to the subject, I was very excited about this much bigger kind of east-west cultural connection. Istanbul and Venice, look at these, and Kona, look at these amazing networks, these Mediterranean networks from this big Mediterranean city to that big Mediterranean city. And as I was reading about these processes with a lot of excitement and a lot of admiration from particularly in the early 2000s and 1990s, there's a ton of really wonderful work done by Mediterranean-oriented scholars in the Ottoman world and other specialties. But what I found in the Ottoman side, there was a lot of gaps in the

in-between spaces. And I didn't really know, and I still don't know how to resolve that, because as a historian, the documents are in the poles. They're in the metropoles, the metropolitan archives. They're in Istanbul, they're in Venice, they're in Dubrovnik. I tried, you know, as much as I could to find ways to fill that in locally, but either I wasn't creative enough or it was just those centers of gravity are so potent. They pull you into the ends on the water, on the sea. And it felt like this is a story about overland travel. So the land itself was really crucial. So there's been a lot in the Yugoslav era and before, there's a lot of really good geographical writing on the mountains of

southeastern Europe. McNeill, of course, includes, I think, the Pindus Mountains, if I'm not mistaken, as one of his case studies for what are Mediterranean mountains and how do mountains in the Mediterranean inform and define one another. So I knew that I needed to understand the land better. I knew that this road existed and I knew that I needed to see it. I needed to try my best to travel it. And I've done so in many fits and starts and sections, local buses, a very memorable motorcycle ride from Dubrovnik to Gorazde, which is in Bosnia, and then back through Montenegro. Rented a car and drove around to see the sights, Rented a car and drove around to see the sights, but also to see the landscape and to try to feel what it's like to travel around in this particular part of the world.

But always wanting to be closer to the land and closer to the experience of these early modern travelers who were on horseback. So the bicycle became more and more evident as kind of the best, closest, realistic option for getting into the space and understanding these menzils and what does it mean to travel from point to point to say, you know, these seem like such trivial distances in this age of cars and technology, but to understand what it actually means to sit in a bicycle and travel over, up and over these mountains. And maybe you ate something the night before and maybe the temperatures are not what you expect. You know, 35 miles is not the same here as it is, as it might be in other parts of the world.

And feeling that the intimacy of that relationship between each curve in the road and each crest of a ridge and seeing the different climates and the different ecosystems that you encounter so quickly, as well as just this overwhelming feeling of stone, of limestone, everywhere, on the surface, its walls. It's what the Ottoman buildings are made of. It's what the local continuing buildings are made of. It's what the bridges are are made of. It's what the local continuing buildings are made of. It's what the bridges are made out of. It's what the mountains, it's exposed in the mountains. And you really capture something about the layered quality.

There are a lot of really stunning sections where you see the striations of the limestone as it's been impacted by over a huge amount of time, and you see these ruptures, and in some sections it almost seems like a fingerprint. It's these parallel lines that reach up and make some kind of, not a spiral, but loops. And seeing that layered quality, these invisible dynamics having an impact on the landscape and then also thinking about the layers of history that simultaneously existed or exist on top of those layers felt like and does feel like a very potent image that's specific to this region it isn't something that I've necessarily encountered in other parts of the world.

So on the surface of all these geographical layers, there are these layers of memory. There are elements from the fortresses that belonged to the Herzog of HUM, the Herzog of Indian powers before the Ottomans. There are many Ottoman features on the surface. And one thing that the Yugoslavs really prioritized, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, was monumental memorial architecture. So spomeniks means monuments. And many of these features, which don't typically take the form that we associate in Europe or the United States of kind of war

memorials with an archway or a tower or a monolith. They're very creative and very modernist and have a kind of futuristic element to them, typically made out of relatively humble materials, concrete, some stone. And we find these, I find these, we've saw these, all over the western Balkans, and many of them are found in quite remote areas where they're far from cities. Probably one of the most well-known instances is in Sutyeska National Park, which was a crucial battle when the Axis powers sent 120,000 soldiers up into the mountains to try to crush the partisan resistance and kill Tito, and failed due to a very resourceful and mind-boggling retreat. So that battle, Battle of Sutjeska, is memorialized by a huge complex in what's called the Valley of Heroes.

And it turns out that valley was also transected, it happens, by the caravan road. So you have these unexpected meeting points between these different layers of history, and then you have the way that history is visible on the surface that's very, very striking. So you may have an Ottoman monument near a Yugoslav monument. So these two obsolete empires leave their traces just right there for passers-by. And this is a habit that we really notice is very striking, even in the kind of small, out-of-the-way places. There are a lot of monuments to fallen soldiers, stone grave markers, but not necessarily in grave sites, but in the place, one assumes the place where the person died. One or two markers on the side of the road, often with flags,

often well tended with flowers, typically in cut granite, nicely polished. So something about this continuing practice of memorialization of the past is very striking. And to see the interplay between these things continuing to happen in this nation-state, this very rigidly divided, ethnically divided, post-Yugoslav nation-state, on top of the space that, whether in the Yugoslav era or the Austro-Hungarian era or the Ottoman era was always understood as a much more flexible and less internally divided space. It was not organized and controlled. Its politics were not about ethnic division. It's unclear to me how exactly all of those elements inform one another? Are they just happenstance? But somehow being in the space, experiencing the landscape and the historical memory

and the historical record that's visible on the surface, cumulatively was very, very impactful to me and very much stays with me in a different way than other parts of the Ottoman Empire or the post-Ottoman space that I've been able to travel in. The bike as method. The bike as method. Each pedal stroke is a new opportunity. It's an intimate, embodied way to experience something that can feel very abstract, can feel like you can't really leap ahead in the way when you're looking at a map or when you're looking at documents. It's very easy to jump over spaces, you know, focus, Dubrovnik,

what's the next, Sarajevo. I mean, Sarajevo on a bike is that's that's many days on a map it's like your your aisle just jumps in a millisecond um when you're thinking about Ottoman power Yugoslavia or the breakup of Yugoslavia the U.S. role in the lasting divisions that emerged in the aftermath of Yugoslavia. The bike, like, it doesn't really let you take those kinds of shortcuts. You have to see all of the transitions. And sometimes it's frustrating because it takes so long. And the crickets are so loud and it's so hot.

And it feels unnecessary. It feels almost gratuitous. But I think it's really hard. I don't know how you feel about this question, but one of the greatest challenges for me as a historian is developing a real sense of empathy with the past. It's very hard for me to get out of the modes of life for long enough to have any kind of real sense besides just like wow it must have been

hard back then obviously riding a fancy bike and getting to stop in like places with refrigerated drinks is not the same as a 16th century caravan but it's the closest thing that I could think of. And I feel like it does. I feel like the way that it's that journey stays in my body and those memories and images are imprinted on me feels meaningful in a way that's hard to describe in words. Yeah. I think the closest that I can come up with to talk about that bodily aspect is when I was briefly doing some research into food history. And I was just going through all of these old cookbooks from early 20th century, late 20th century. How many different recipes for muhammara was I seeing?

And I guess what felt different to me about it was that, oh, this is something I've done. Oh, that's how they want me to chop the walnuts or, you know, that I'm just putting in a food processor or something. But that's the thing that I can think of that had that kind of direct bodily aspect. And definitely, you know, riding a bike had that feel too, even with all of those caveats that you added there. You know, the refrigerator, the air conditioning. And thinking about some of the aspects of some travel reports that I read, and being so frustrated with these, like, tell me about the big picture. What's going on?

What is it like being an Italian Catholic in the land of the Ottomans? How do you communicate? I want to know these big questions. And they're like, Giovanni was frustrated because there was no wine and eggs cost this many aspers in this village. Like this kind of like detail of trivia and pointless, like you're my guide, you're my witness, you're my only window into this world, and you're describing it, and you're missing the point. So being on the road makes me feel much more compassionate to those travelers and to what was actually,

what it's like when you're in a foreign space and how you do focus on these kinds of very minor things. And then certain details really jump out. Travelers describe, I think it might be in one of the caravanserais near Istanbul, either Kucukçekmekçe or Büyükçekmekçe. One of those. In any case, when they arrive, they're greeted by the employees of the caravanserai, give them a piece of bread with fresh honey on it and fresh water to refresh

them after their journey. And that stood out to me before, but now when I think about it, what that taste would be like, that sweetness on your tongue after many, many hours and many weeks or months on the road, how meaningful that would be and how that memory would stick with you and stand out, even though it's such a kind of nothing little moment otherwise. I feel like it's a slow, everything about being a historian is slow and humbling. But this one, this kind of compassion for the subjects. Yeah, the more time I spend in this embodied type of experience,

rather than trying to impose the, the, the, like my grand research questions and ambitions onto, onto what's available, the more, um, the more I appreciate what they, what they do say, even when they repeat themselves or steal or plagiarize, you know, other earlier travel reports from the same stuff. What's the magical document that you want to find that will answer all the questions? Because that's the other thing I'm struck by is you frame this in terms of lack. And I understand intensely because there's always more we want to know. But also, I'm just so floored by how much you know about all of these architectural elements. You had to do all these creative things to grapple with the thing that you wanted that wasn't there. There's a really beautiful section that I write

about where some Italians, I think it's in the mid-late 1500s, they're in the mountains. They are somewhere near what's now the border between Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montenegro. And it's cold and it's rainy. They encounter a person who they refer to as a voivode. They don't give his name. And there's a little bit of trepidation initially because this is some kind of official. They've probably been warned about the very real issue of banditry. They're far from any major settlements.

They're out of their element up in the mountains. And the voivode is very gallant. And he actually forces his men, his followers, to vacate the part of the caravanserai that has a good functional roof and lets these, I think, Venetian travelers take those quarters for themselves. And I don't know where they go. And then it's over. So it's just this little flash. It's this flash of interaction. I don't know. Probably this is a secretary writing in the name of an ambassador, first of all. So there's already a sort of split in terms of the narrative

integrity or coherence or whatever. So this person writing possibly for another person, relaying in first person saying, this has happened and we did this and we had this conversation. I don't know how they're speaking and I don't know how they're communicating. The person writing, there's no chance that they know the local language and they don't know Turkish. They don't know Ottoman Turkish. They don't that they know the local language, and they don't know Turkish, they don't know Ottoman Turkish, they don't have any of the local languages. Maybe the person that they're encountering does. Probably not, but possibly. More likely that there's a dragoman, who, again, not introduced, not part of the story, but there, present in the story. These kinds of forms of unexpected encounter and communication, maybe tension, resolution, that's the kind of stuff that I feel is like the soul of the road.

If I could write about a road having a soul, it would be made up of these types of interactions. So I have flashes. I mean, it sounds to me like it's still framed as an absence, right? It's just a flash, but we don't know the language that was being spoken or what. And I mean, maybe, you know, the absence of evidence here is actually evidence of something, which is that like, it wasn't that big of a deal. Which is not to say that it's unimportant. It's to say that exactly what you've been describing, this intense kind of infrastructural, commercial integration,

a part of that is being able to figure out moments of connection or hospitality or generosity or annoyance like this. Whether it's Giovanni being pissed that the wine costs so much or there aren't eggs or it's this case of space being made at the Han in the comfortable place. I think I'm just greedy.

I want more. I want more. And then seeing these flashes, when you see that there's that thing that you want and you see that and you're like, well, you could do it if you would only do it so i'd you know shake my fist at the uh

at the manuscript or or the the travel diary or whatever it is um no i'm just i'm just so hungry to still after a long time working on this material. Because, yeah, ultimately what I hope is that the dissertation, this project, has some value in terms of articulating all of the different spheres and different actors that have to kind of come together and work in these different roles over a long period of time to make this whole root process happen. So on an abstract level, I feel fairly comfortable that I have an understanding of how that all works. And that's complex, and I'm excited to

have more of an understanding of that. But in terms of this space as a human space, terms of this space as a human space it feels very very shadowy um it feels like very elusive and it's very tempting then in that lack of more information to then insert my own kind of assumptions or narratives and i'm and i'm very leery of doing that, either over-idealizing something or reverting to certain expectations of how people would meet themselves and communicate these kinds of really simple questions. Then we have someone like Evliya who gives us such a rich picture, such an astonishing level of detail, but it's so idiosyncratic, and it's very hard to extrapolate from that. I mean, this is a unique character in kind of world literature, and it's one, and it's one voice. So, an invaluable one, but one that we perhaps ask too much of and demand too much of to force us to reveal these mysteries.

Why won't you speak? How are you addressing that to him? I think it's the artist talking to his or her artwork that's so realistic that just, you know, everything is right there, but still silent. Are we still recording? Thank you, Sam Dolby, for the wonderful questions and the great conversation and the great companionship on our trip, our trip on the Chiro Trail.

Thanks, Jesse. As I mentioned, you can listen to an episode detailing the trip Jesse and I took on bikes along the old Ottoman caravan route and how the path intersected with other layers of the Austro-Hungarian and Yugoslav past. You can find a link to that, as well as more information, including a bibliography and photographs, on our website, ottomanhistorypodcast.com. That's it for this episode. Until next time, take care. Thank you.