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Disciplining Language Dragomans and Oriental Philology Chapter 5 Disciplining Language Dragomans and Oriental Philology What is the use of the Turkish language? Reply: Very little indeed in Theology and Sacred Philology. Unremarkable in Politics. [But] frequent in our dealings with the Ottoman Porte; there the Turkish language matters. —August Pfeiffer1 It is a striking phenomenon that at a time of manifold state connections with the Ottoman Empire, as established already in the fifteenth century by various Western powers, above all by the Venetians, especially in the numerous negotiations of the lagoon city [Venice], France and Austria with the Porte on the affairs of the Venetian War, peace, and commerce, no greater engagement with the Turkish language could be effected beyond these purely practical purposes. —Franz Babinger2 ranz Babinger, arguably the most influential historian of the Ottoman Empire of his generation, was quite perceptive in contrast- F ing early modern Europeans’ widespread ignorance of the Ottoman language with their intense diplomatic engagements with the Ottomans. What is especially telling about Babinger’s formulation, however, might be its passive construction: while “states” are busy “connecting,” “nego- tiating,” and “establishing” diplomatic relations, no one in particular is responsible for “engagement with the Turkish language” (or lack thereof, as the case may be). This agentless absence highlights widespread and enduring European ignorance of Ottoman literature and high culture more 140 Disciplining Language 141 generally. It also points to invisible technicians—chiefly dragomans— whose philological, linguistic, and translation efforts have received far less recognition than those of university-based Oriental philologists and their modern hagiographers and disciplinary heirs, the Orientalists. This and the next two chapters consider how dragomans’ linguistic and translational works served as key sites for the articulation of Ottomanist knowledge in a broader early modern emergent Republic of Letters. as he was preparing to embark on his mission to Istanbul in 1680, the incoming bailo Giovanni Battista Donà decided to learn Turkish. Tellingly, no other bailo since 1544 had taken the trouble to do so.3 To this end, Donà recruited the services of an Armenian Dominican missionary, Giovanni Agop (Yovhannes Konstandnupōlsecʹi), who at the time was assisting Donà’s brother, Andrea, in catechizing Turkish-speaking neophytes at the Pia Casa dei Catecumeni.4 Agop, who was born in Istanbul in 1635, had spent time at the college of the Propaganda Fide in Rome and at the Jesuit college in Lyon, then in Livorno (where he helped establish the Armenian press and served as its censor) and in Marseille. In 1685, he published an Italian-language Ottoman grammar and phrase book, judged by a modern scholar to be among the best of its time, and a testament to its author’s deep knowledge of the language.5 Three years later, when Donà sought to publish a compilation of Ottoman proverbs with Italian and Latin trans- lations and an annotated bibliography of Ottoman science—the fruits of his apprentice dragomans’ labor—he turned to Agop for help in copy ed- iting the manuscripts and in securing a suitable typeface. The resulting two publications, Raccolta curiosissima d’adaggi turcheschi and Della letteratura de’ Turchi, made a major impression throughout Europe. They immediately spawned several other publications by members of the same circle of Armenian Catholic scholars in Padua, where Agop had relocated in the meantime to take up a position in a seminary, whose superintendent for Oriental languages was another prelate of Ottoman provenance, the Diyarbakır-born Syriac turned Catholic Timoteo Agnellini (Humaylī Ibn Da’fī Karnūsh).6 This vignette takes us back to the question posed at the book’s outset: how did Istanbul-based dragomans, through their extensive trans-imperial networking practices, mediate decidedly Ottoman epistemologies of trans- lation and re-appropriation to an emergent field of knowledge eventually known as Orientalism? Previous chapters underscored the centrality of 142 Chapter 5 dragomans to the diplomatic institutions through which knowledge about the Ottomans circulated from Istanbul to other sites of intellectual produc- tion, and the impact that these diplomatic channels of mediation themselves had on the ultimate shape of the knowledge thus generated. It is now time to explore the role of the dragomanate in the very introduction of the Otto- man Turkish language into an emergent Orientalist curriculum, and its can- onization as one of the three “learned languages of Islam” (elsene i-selase).7 Dragomans and the Routes of Ottoman Studies Viewed as scriptural languages or auxiliary tools for biblical, philologi- cal, or scientific study, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic received significant attention from scholiasts at least from the twelfth century onward.8 These languages were joined, by the seventeenth century, by the languages of South and East Asia, which were studied as the vehicle of intense Cath- olic missionizing efforts, and thus of interest to the Propaganda Fide and its printing press.9 Unlike all these languages, Turkish was little known and rarely studied in early modern Europe. One scholar has recently esti- mated that “around 1700 there were more Protestant academics with some knowledge of Ge’ez . than Persian or Turkish.”10 European ignorance of Turkish at the turn of the eighteenth century was still so profound that even a scholar who was soon to compose a grammar for its study could argue in 1692 that “Turkish related to Arabic as French did to Latin.” The author of this puzzling pronouncement, Johann David Schieferdecker, was not alone.11 Widespread European obliviousness to Turkish was symptomatic of the broader neglect of Ottoman studies in institutionalized programs of instruction, teachers, and pedagogical materials. As Noel Malcolm notes, “for most Oriental scholars in Western Europe [. .] Turkish was a worka- day tongue which they might pick up if they spent some time in Istanbul or Anatolia, but it would hardly feature—excepting the occasional attention paid to some of the Ottoman chronicles—in their scholarly activities.”12 This neglect is crucial to the story of how and why Ottoman Turkish—and the world of Ottoman letters, history, and politics embedded in it—did, belatedly, enter the Orientalist canon. One reason for dragomans’ central- ity to the constitution of Ottoman studies is precisely the neglect of the Ottoman Turkish language by more established scholars in European uni- versities. A prevailing—and enduring—understanding of the Ottomans as the destroyers rather than the cultivators of classical tradition (with the Disciplining Language 143 demise of Byzantium in 1453 as a watershed moment) further disincentiv- ized humanistically inclined scholars to take up the Ottoman language as a serious pursuit. The glaring absence of Ottoman language and letters from early modern university curricula is significant precisely because the historiography of Orientalism has traced its genealogy primarily (and sometimes exclusively) within the metropolitan academy and among metropolitan scholars. Yet the epistemologies, methodologies, and circuits of knowledge that eventually constituted “Ottoman” as a proper object of study beyond the Ottoman Em- pire—indeed as a central facet of Orientalism—often circumvented those very institutionalized domains in a kind of early modern alt-academy: contract based, short-term, precarious, and poorly recognized.13 And par- amount in Ottoman’s alt-academy circuits of knowledge were dragomans. Attending to dragomans’ efforts as students of the Ottoman language re- veals a longer and spatially more diffuse genealogy of Orientalism, one that extends back to the sixteenth century and involves Istanbul (and the Ottoman eastern Mediterranean more broadly) as a vital node. As Daniel Stolzenberg recently argued, being an Orientalist in early modern Europe implied, first and foremost, knowledge of “Oriental lan- guages” as the foundation for any claim of expertise. This held true for both Catholics and Protestants. Based on a representative sample of Latin works on “Oriental languages” published between 1450 and 1750 as cataloged in WorldCat, Stolzenberg suggests a modest beginning in the 1590s and an unmistakable rise in the printing of books on the subject in the 1620s, with a sustained interest throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth cen- turies.14 Even though this is precisely the heyday of the dragoman renais- sance, as defined in this book, the relative neglect of Ottoman Turkish in the corpus of academic Orientalism is unmistakable. For example, among twenty-eight Latin titles that enumerate as their subject several “Oriental languages,” only six list Turkish, as compared to twenty-three that mention Arabic, and twenty-two each that mention Hebrew, Chaldean,15 and Syriac. This disparity in printed matter is paralleled by the relative prevalence of university chairs for different languages: chairs for Arabic had been es- tablished in Paris, Leiden, Cambridge, and Oxford as early as 1538, 1613, 1633, and 1636, respectively.16 Dozens of more generic chairs for “Orien- tal languages” were established all across Protestant Europe in the seven- teenth century, almost always meaning Hebrew and Syriac.17 In contrast, notwithstanding precocious efforts to establish chairs for Turkish in France 144 Chapter 5 (at the Collège Royal in Paris in 1750 and again in 1773) and in Russia (at the University
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