The author of this book has set herself the goal of providing a better understanding of the impact of Ottoman-European contacts by focusing on the numerous and diverse intersections generated by the perception of Ottomans in seventeenth-century German-speaking Europe. From the outset, there is a tension between, on the one hand, a growing interest in this other that seems so close and with whom forms of coexistence developed, and, on the other hand, the violence of the contacts, an ambivalence that is well highlighted in recent works.
In what way does the abundant literary production devoted to the Turks in seventeenth-century Europe go beyond the now well-known theme of the so-called Turkish danger? Scholars are faced with such an abundance of writings on the Turks and their empire, whose genres and media are so diverse, that a choice is necessary. The author has chosen to focus on the publications between 1663 and 1688 of three prolific German-speaking authors, often quoted but little studied as journalists and writers on the Ottoman Empire. The first is the Nuremberg-based Erasmus Francisci (1626–94). Next is the author and journalist Eberhard Werner Happel (1647–90), established in Hamburg. The third is the writer Daniel Speer (1636–1707) from Silesia. All three are known for their writing on a variety of subjects and for their activity in several genres, ranging from music composition and newspapers to fiction and travelogues.
A first major contribution of the book is that it brings to light the close intertwining of emerging journalism and fiction. In writing about the Ottomans, the authors studied here draw on the growing flow of news from the border with the Ottoman Empire. A close reading of their works allows us to go further: they operate a mise en abyme of the nascent journalism. Indeed, the protagonists sometimes explicitly quote the newspapers from which they derive their knowledge of the Ottoman Empire, a process that illustrates how journalism as a field gradually becomes autonomous from the literary fictional sphere.
Another important aspect of the study is that it highlights the way in which the representation of the Ottomans holds up a mirror to the societies of the Holy Roman Empire, allowing them to reflect on space and time: for example, the recurrent reminiscence of the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent and the first siege of Vienna, in 1529, gives rise to ambiguous reflections on political power, and to the valorization of the Germanic imperial figure in the wake of the second siege of Vienna in 1683. It would have been interesting, in order to draw all the lessons from this decentered approach, to highlight more clearly the links between the works studied—which is done, to a lesser extent, for Happel and Speer—but also to integrate them into a wider questioning, on a European scale, on the Turqueries, for example, or on the impact of war on the production and dissemination of information. This book also claims that an Ottoman Eurasia was produced in seventeenth-century German-language writing. Places of memory appear—to use the expression coined by Pierre Nora—both symbolic and physical, real and fantasized: Vienna under siege (twice, in 1529 and 1683), Hungary to be reconquered, multi-confessional Transylvania, the Castle of the Seven Towers.
It is therefore a very rich work, close to the texts studied, and which will be of great service to those interested in the links between empires that literature can forge: here the author explicitly takes up the reading grid of inter-imperiality forged by Laura Doyle. Moreover, the book aims to be a contribution to connected history, without, though, making explicit the theoretical underpinnings of this approach. It is also regrettable that the heuristic potential of travel narrative for historical analysis, which is necessarily different from literary interpretation, is not examined more closely. It would have been interesting to discuss this aspect because during the epoch under consideration the travel narrative was gaining authority in the field of knowledge construction, without the European distrust of noncompulsory forms of peregrination being entirely dispelled. In the same vein, it is regrettable that primary sources are not separated from secondary literature in the bibliography.
Despite these criticisms, this book shows how the literary production of the seventeenth century turned the Ottoman Empire from a periphery into a centrality for the readers of the Holy Roman Empire. Thus, it invites us to reassess the impact of these writings on the worldview of German-speaking and, more broadly, European authors and readers.
