The Diplomatic Persona in Political Ritual

Project 2a: Ottoman diplomatic accounts

Researcher: Abdullah Güllüoglu M.A.

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Barbara Kellner-Heinkele

Project 2b: Western European diplomatic accounts

Researcher: Dr. Christine Vogel

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Burschel

Abstract

Starting from the hypothesis that self narratives written by diplomats are especially suited to revealing tensions between the actions of the individual and the cultural models of such actions, and consequently to determining the productive extent to which the authors select their own person as their central theme, the initial phase of the project examines reports written by Habsburg and French envoys dispatched to the Ottoman Empire in the 16th and 17th centuries. Reports drawn up by envoys from other European states are also included in the study, at least on a case-by-case basis. In this conjunction, attention focuses on the issue of what significance the ambivalence between the perception of the other and the individual’s perception of self has in rituals of political rapprochement, meetings and negotiation for the genesis and manifestation of personal concepts presented by diplomats in the early modern era. As there is much to suggest that the ritualised practice of diplomatic communications significantly furthered this ambivalence under reciprocal conditions of remote cultural experience, the project aims to present examples of self-determination which make it possible to reconstruct relationship-oriented personal concepts where externally and internally guided components constrain each other in a particular manner. Against this backdrop, the project moreover promises to make a constitutive contribution to the research of rituals which to date have played very much a secondary role in the field of diplomatic writings.

The second phase of the project will focus on reports drawn up by Ottoman envoys dating back to the 17th century. While these reports have attracted scant academic attention to date, samples selected at random leave no doubt that these too enable the reconstruction of personal concepts whose specific profiles derive from the ambivalence between other-perception and self-perception in political ritual – which for its part opens up those comparative perspectives that characterise the overall project.

PD Dr. Peter Burschel