Osman Of Timisoara - Prisoner of the Infidels: The Memoir of an Ottoman Muslim in Seventeenth-Century Europe

Prisoner of the Infidels

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Constance and William Withey Endowment Fund in History and Music.

The Memoirs of an Ottoman Muslim in Seventeenth-Century Europe

Osman of Timioara

Edited, Translated, and Introduced by Giancarlo Casale

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

2021 by Giancarlo Casale

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Osman Aa, active 16711725, author. | Casale, Giancarlo, editor, translator, writer of introduction.

Title: Prisoner of the infidels : the memoir of an Ottoman Muslim in seventeenth-century Europe / Osman of Timioara; edited, translated, and introduced by Giancarlo Casale.

Other titles: Gvurlarn esiri. English.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2021] | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020053128 (print) | LCCN 2020053129 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520383395 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520383401 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Osman Aa, active 16711725. | Austro-Turkish War, 17161718Personal narratives, Turkish. | Prisoners of warRomaniaTimioaraBiography. | Prisoners of warTurkeyBiography.

Classification: LCC DR545 .O8513 2021 (print) | LCC DR545 (ebook) | DDC 943.6/031092 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053128

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053129

Manufactured in the United States of America

25 24 23 22 21

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Sinem

A prisoner of this infidel

1. Surrender

2. Ransom

3. Crime and Punishment

4. Death and Resurrection

5. Respite

6. Bonds of Love

7. To the Capital

8. A Friend in Need

9. An Unexpected Turn of Events

10. Into the Lions Den

11. Grifters

12. To the Border

13. The End

1. The Ottoman Balkans, 16831718

2. Behind Enemy Lines, 16881690 (chapters 15)

3. To Vienna and Beyond, 16901698 (chapters 69)

4. Osman in Vienna, 16911699 (chapters 79)

5. Osmans Border Run (chapters 1013)

I have worked on this edition of Osmans memoirs on and off for the better part of ten years. Over that time, Osman and I have become old friends, and I am now left with a bittersweet feeling, knowing that, our work complete, we shall no longer be seeing much of each other. I suppose that is a sign that our time together was well spent.

Besides Osman, there are of course many other friends, colleagues, and relations to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for their help with this little book. In fact, I hesitate to name them all, in part because the longer the list of people one thanks, the greater the risk that someone unjustly left off will take offense (a lesson I memorably learned on my wedding day, some years ago).

So, let me stick to the absolute essentials. Molly Greene, Eric Dursteler, and David Do Pao all read and generously commented on the entire manuscript, sharing helpful advice and saving me from many embarrassing errors (those that remain are of course my own). My stepmother, Patricia Brown, also read an early draft of the translation, providing feedback and encouragement. Later in the writing process, Selim Kuru and Bruce Fudge made important suggestions for the Introduction. Arda Aknc contributed to the notes. Vuk Uskokovi helped with translations of several phrases in Serbo-Croatian. Nazl Songlen prepared the maps. Peter Dreyer edited the final draft. Lastly, special thanks to my editor at the University of California Press, Eric Schmidt, for the opportunity to introduce Osman to a wider circle of friends.

The transcription of the Ottoman Turkish alphabet is a perpetual problem for scholars, with no single system that is either universally accepted or suitable for all purposes. The present edition uses two different systems, one for the text, and another for the accompanying notes.

In the interest of creating a translation that is as accessible as possible to nonspecialists, I have chosen to avoid diacritical marks or characters from the Turkish alphabet in the main body of Osmans memoir. Instead, Ottoman Turkish proper names are rendered according to their closest approximation in American English spelling (so: Koja Jafer Pasha; not Koca Cafer Psha or Koca Cafer Paa), while place-names are written according to the official spelling of the nation-state where they are located today (a choice discussed in more detail in the Note on the Translation).

By contrast, the scholarly notes that accompany this translation feature a number of direct citations of Osmans original Ottoman Turkish. Since these will be of interest primarily to specialists, they are rendered in full transliteration. The system employed is the following:

Short vowels are rendered using the modern Turkish alphabet: a, e, , i, o, , u, .

Alongside an adventurous life as a soldier, captive, and diplomat, Osman of Timioara was a literary trailblazer. With only a rudimentary formal education, and without any direct cultural models to guide him, Osman composed the first book-length autobiography ever written in Ottoman Turkish, essentially creating a new genre from scratch. The fruit of his labors, Prisoner of the Infidels, is a unique, compelling, and stylistically inventive text that presents the translator with more than its share of linguistic challenges.

First among these is undoubtedly the challenge of reproducing, in English, the effect of Osmans straightforward and uncannily modern prose style, a quality that immediately strikes anyone reading his text in the original Ottoman Turkish. Generally speaking, the standards of eloquence in early modern Ottoman literature prioritized baroque erudition over clarity, with a heavy emphasis on elaborate metaphors, learned allusions, and the ostentatious use of Arabic and Persian vocabulary. This had the cumulative effect of making literary language starkly different from spoken language, with complex layers of meaning that revealed themselves only gradually and that were fully comprehensible only to a chosen few.

By contrast, Osmans prose is a model of simplicity and clarity. His sentences are short and straightforward, he revels in vernacular turns of phrase, and he makes prodigious use of first-person speech. Together, these qualities give his writing an unusual level of accessibility and readabilitya paradoxically disorienting experience for a reader of the original Ottoman text that can be reproduced only imperfectly in translation. As a gesture in this direction, my own English rendering of Osmans most colloquial expressions has wavered between direct translation where the meaning is readily apparent and freer translation when the immediacy of his language might otherwise be lost. Typically, instances of the latter are flagged and explained in the accompanying backnotes.

Another, related challenge of translation involves Osmans frequent use of multiple languages, a stylistic feature thatone is tempted to say intentionallydocuments the polyglot environment of Osmans home region, the Ottoman Balkans, as well as highlighting Osmans own remarkable dexterity as a linguist. Thus, while Osman writes primarily in Ottoman Turkish, and consistently identifies this as his language, he also displays a comfortable command of a seventeenth-century variant of vernacular Serbo-Croatian (which he calls Serb) and of Romanian (which he calls Vlach). The latter he presumably learned growing up in his native Timioara, where it was widely spoken, while the former might even be considered his mother tongue, inasmuch as both his parents were originally from what is now Serbia. In addition, Osman prayed in Arabic, knew a smattering of Hungarian, and over the course of his adventures progressively learned more German, eventually to the point of being able to read and write it competently and almost to pass as a native speaker. All of these languages make appearances at various points in the text, particularly when Osman is reporting dialogue, a technique that considerably enhances the immediacy and realism of his account. Occasionally, he even reports a phrase in a foreign tongue without providing a Turkish equivalent, thereby vividly reproducing for the reader his own perplexity or inability to communicate at certain moments. To preserve this effect in English, unfamiliar words and phrases in languages other than Turkish have usually been let stand in the text without English translation, but with clarification in the accompanying note.