In 1809, a Spanish ship carrying Fernando VI’s ambassador, Juan Jabat y Aztal, arrived in the Straits of Gallipoli, beginning years of negotiations in the Ottoman capital over his legitimacy. Fernando VII had already abdicated “voluntarily” and was being held by the French in Bayonne, although he was still recognized as King of Spain by the Council of Castile and by England. The Ottomans had to make a choice. Juan Jabat was allowed to pass from the Straits to Constantinople because “there was no hatred and enmity between the Sublime Porte and the nation (millet) of Spain, and it was not known whether the people on the ship were from the nation (millet) and the republic (cumhur).” However, he was not allowed to stay in the Spanish embassy as the Ottomans did not accept the legitimacy of the abdicated king. This paper examines debates between Ottoman officials, the British and French ambassadors, and Juan Jabat between 1809 and 1814 to argue that the tactical use of concepts such as state (devlet), nation (millet), and republic (cumhur) made and unmade diplomacy. Debates over the legitimacy of the ambassador among representatives of four different powers show how diplomacy had become a network of different states debating issues in a plurilateral fashion. The arguments of the parties involved demonstrate how hierarchies were created and negotiated through arguments of legitimacy that depended on the key concepts of the Age of Revolutions. Diplomacy, in this sense, is already at work before the ambassador is officially received, before a proper ceremony can be held for him and before he can focus on the daily tasks of his post. Using diplomatic documents from the Presidency Ottoman Archives in Istanbul, I employ the tools of conceptual historians to examine how concepts are used politically in diplomatic encounters to create or deny legitimacy, and how the different meanings given to concepts shape diplomacy as a field of negotiation in the specific case of Juan Jabat y Aztal’s embassy.

During the long process of unmaking of the Ottoman Empire, international congresses and conferences shaped the laws on property after empire in the new successor states. One of the important legal mechanisms established in this period were bilateral commissions, each comprising members from the Ottoman Empire and the relevant successor state. The task of such commissions was to negotiate solutions and indemnities for certain legal types of property, but due to many factors, including the lack of guidelines and expectations from their work, it was almost certain that they would not function successfully, let alone resolve any of the extremely complex tasks they faced. In this presentation, I examine the documents of one such mixed commission, established in 1878 to arrange the future of waqf and Ottoman state property in Serbia. I focus on the concept of legal untranslatability (inspired by Cassin 2018 and Salaymeh 2021): the claim that a certain legal term does not have a counterpart in the target legal language. I argue that Serbian commission members claimed untranslatability not only in case of specific Ottoman-context terms, such as waqf, but also with regard to the entire Ottoman culture of property documentation. However, rather than simply a diplomatic strategy created for the needs of the moment, this claim was an outcome of a longer process of social and cultural reorientation in interimperial Serbia. The argument of untranslatability in that sense did not serve (only) the current diplomatic purpose, but it enabled Serbia to position itself in alignment with the European states and their legal usage, against the purported Ottoman legal “backwardness.” The presentation contributes to the view of diplomacy as a field in which uneven discourses of power are negotiated, and which is as such not separable from other political and legal fields of trans- and interimperial negotiation.

The year 1722 was a long one for the decision-makers in Istanbul, as the Ghilzai Afghans overthrew the Safavids after an eight-month siege of Isfahan, and the Russians occupied Darband on the Caspian coast of the Caucasus. By examining the decision-making process of the Sublime Porte and the eventual diplomatic formulations of the decisions taken that year through Ottoman and European sources of the time, this paper argues that the Ottoman sultan’s title of caliph, denoting the supreme political leadership of the global Muslim community, functioned as a subtle and powerful diplomatic tool to support the legitimacy of the Ottoman political positions in the interstate arena. The Porte saw the Afghan and Russian advances as a major threat to its eastern borders, which had been secure since the Treaty of Zuhab (1639) with the Safavids. Thus, the Ottomans had no intention of breaking the peace with the Iranians. However, Shah Sultan Husayn’s vulnerability led the Ottomans to decide on a military incursion into Iranian territory, primarily to safeguard Ottoman domains against the Afghans and the Russians once the Safavid Shah fell. Nevertheless, the Porte also considered the possibility of the Shah’s later return to the throne, and formulated a diplomatic discourse that would not portray the Ottoman Sultan as either a peacebreaker or someone who would exploit the Shah’s weakness for political greed. The formulation was that the Ottomans entered the Iranian provinces as a requirement of the Sultan’s title of caliph to protect the Sunni population living in Iran from the harm of the undisciplined and disorderly Afghan soldiers. In a broader context, the Ottoman resort to the title of caliph in the turbulent year of 1722 reveals two insights: First, beyond its symbolic claims to superiority, the title of caliph functioned as an invaluable practical diplomatic tool, giving its holder a wide margin of political maneuver by protecting the Ottomans from a potential Safavid “misunderstanding” of the Ottoman occupation of Iranian lands. Second, the Ottoman recourse to the title of caliph highlights the need to revise the common scholarly view that the Ottoman sultans did not use their title of caliph for political purposes for almost three centuries between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. In sum, Ottoman policymakers sought to navigate a complex military and political challenge by employing a religio-political diplomatic discourse within an expanded arena of diplomacy, prompted by these “misunderstandings.”

Diplomatic communication utilized language, symbols, and material objects as tools to reveal their policy-making and agendas in transcultural encounters during the early modern era. The research question of this paper is established through two examples from the Habsburg extraordinary ambassador Graf Virmond, delegated to Istanbul after the Treaty of Passarowitz in 1719. First, playing music and displaying the banners during the ambassadorial entrance ceremonies, and second, the seating furniture designated for ambassadors during audience ceremonies. The unifying theme between these seemingly two distinct examples was the conceptual discussion and objections that shaped them, revolving around the "right" claimed by the Habsburg ambassador versus the "favor" shown to him by the Ottomans. Ambassadorial entrance ceremonies represented the highest public visibility of ambassadors, where their relationship to the host empire and their hierarchical position among other diplomats could be observed. While Count Virmond, the Habsburg ambassador, defined the sounding of music and displaying banners as a right, given the confidence derived from the Habsburg victory in the recent Ottoman-Habsburg war, the Ottomans saw this matter just as a preferential treatment, i.e., favor. Similarly, the choice of seating furniture during diplomatic encounters was an essential criterion in defining ambassadors' prestige, status, and honor. According to Ottoman ceremonial regulations and subsequent secondary literature, it was assumed that Muslim diplomats were hosted on sofas while non-Muslim diplomats were seated on stools, following a rule. However, Count Virmond sat on a sofa instead of a stool during his audience at the Topkapi Palace. Just as in the music and banner debate, Count Virmond, asserting his prestige and precedence, presented this situation as a matter of right. In contrast, Ottoman sources recorded this matter again as a favor to the Habsburg ambassador. This paper examines the material cultural hierarchies of playing music and displaying banners during the entrance ceremonies and the seating hierarchy during the audience ceremonies through the concepts of right and preferential treatment. Thus, it will explore how intentional miscommunication in diplomatic communication can be addressed and investigate the purposes and intended meanings they produced for both the Habsburgs and the Ottomans. This study, based on Viennese and Ottoman archival sources, will show that in early modern diplomatic encounters between Ottomans and Habsburgs it was not religious identities but political interests that determined their policies, and it will answer questions about the motives behind such efforts to impede or achieve the formation of diplomatic norms.