Osman of Timisoara: Prisoner of the Infidels

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 RSS Feed

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.

Contributor Bios

	Giancarlo Casale is Professor of Early Modern Mediterranean History at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, as well as a permanent member of the history faculty at the University of Minnesota.
	Brittany White is a graduate student in the Department of History at the University of Virginia. Broadly, she is interested in the African Diaspora in former Ottoman territories.

Credits

Episode No. 514
Release Date: 18 November 2021
Recording Location: Minneapolis, MN / Charlottesville, VA
Sound production by Chris Gratien

Music: Aitua; A.A. Aalto; Chad Crouch
Bibliography courtesy of Giancarlo Casale

Further Listening

	Leslie Peirce	340 12/12/17	Hürrem Sultan or Roxelana, Empress of the East
	Gábor Ágoston	276 10/27/16	War, Environment, and the Ottoman-Habsburg Frontier
	Emrah Safa Gürkan, Joshua White, Daniel Hershenzon	446 1/28/20	The Mediterranean in the Age of Global Piracy
	Will Smiley	420 7/31/19	Captivity and Ransom in Ottoman Law
	Emrah Safa Gürkan	334 9/25/17	Spies of the Sultan

Select Bibliography

Gabor Agoston, The Last Muslim Conquest: the Ottoman Empire and its Wars in Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021) 

Robert Dankoff & Sooyong Kim (eds), An Ottoman Traveller: Selections from the Book of Travels of Evliya Çelebi (London: Eland Publishing, 2011). 

Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 

Wolfgang Kaiser, Le commerce des captifs: Les intermédiaires dans l’échange et le rachat des prisonniers en Méditerranée, XVe-XVIIe siècles (Rome: EFR, 2008). 

Hakan Karateke & Helga Anetshofer, The Ottoman World: A Cultural History Reader, 1450-1700 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021)

David Do Paço, L’Orient à Vienne au dix-huitième siècle (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2015). 

Natalie Rothman, Dragoman Renaissance: Diplomatic Interpreters and the Routes of Orientalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021)