Changing Subjects, Moving Objects

Front matter

Changing Subjects, Moving Objects

Status, Mobility, and Social Transformation in

Southeastern Europe, 1700-1850

Contents

List oE Maps”. isi de trot e van ais nd An V

Introduction 1: ee epe Rr DRE i dew Stet SO Home or Away: Foreigners and Their Paths Into the SOULCES! Lun seite er epa» ritui Pair e ARN Ie ee e Suditi'and PrOteges: cuoi eco orme nee

PART I Foreigners at the Phanariot Court

Patrons and Clients: Princely Secretaries Between Secretaries and Boyars: Foreigners and Their Reception ....

Pour l'honneur de la nation: From French Linchou to Ottoman; Subjects 4:525 eR act che a a PME RUE

XI XII

XIII

XV

XXII XXIV XXX XXXVIII XXXIX

VIII CONTENTS

PART II Loyalty and Subjecthood in the Eighteenth Century

"The Prince Has Died and at His Mourning We Should Bejoice- sa uentus eto af na aaa Uttar ita es dre MY 69 ‘For Him to be Again Alpha and Omega”: Patronage and Kinship: noue er e tc pe dun 79

Chapter 4: A Wallachian Dignitary at the Crossroads of Empires:

Circulation of Objects, Circulation of People: Ottoman PART III

Seeking a Home: People and Destinies in Southeastern Europe

Chapter 5: Ottomans, Serbs, Bulgarians, Greeks, Wallachians, Moldavians: Subjects, Protégés, and Their Journeys Through the

Empires sise Poutine be dno e Re EE UU Ina eae E S 137 One Individual, Different Subjecthoods: Suditi and Protégés- sienne idees re Des 156

CONTENTS IX

Education: sisri de RR Dee Gers s uv de RV Y 177 Journeys Into the Feminine Universe and the Mysteries of LOVE: csi e a b ALI telae E e aed Stace 187 PART IV

Women, Consumption, and Patronage

Chapter 8: Women and Their Role in a Network: A Wife and Her

Epilogue: Lis tice) EEUU Sm de a 38 es pus 270 References: piro RV RR ER ERR E a BR 282

List of Illustrations Fig. 1. Diploma of social recognition of Ioan Lochmann apothecary from Iasi, 22 May 1835, National Romanian Archives, Iagi. Photograph by Sorin Grigorutá.

Fig. 2. Ida Fieltz (1847-1913) - Filip Lens (Philippe Linche) (1779-1853) — great logothete, 1888, National Museum of Art, Bucharest.

Fig. 3. Anton Chladek (1794-1882) — Ienáchitá Vácárescu, 1852-1858, National Museum of Art, Bucharest.

Fig. 4. Constantin Lecca — Neaga, the wife of Ionagcu cupetu, 1840-1845, Art Museum of Bragov.

Fig. 5. Constantin Lecca — Ionagcu cupetu (merchant), 1840-1845, National Museum of Art, Bucharest.

Fig. 6. Anonymous — Grand ban Grigore Bráncoveanu (1764-1832), 1830-1832, National Museum of Art, Bucharest.

Fig. 7. Pavel Djurkovié (1772-1830) — Portrait of Caragea Voda (Wallachia, 1812— 1818), [1824], National Museum of Art, Bucharest.

Fig. 8. Votive portrait of Grand ban Grigore Băleanu (+ 1842), Church of St. John the Baptist, Báleni village, Dàmbovita county. Photograph by Marius Páduraru.

Fig. 9. Miklós Barabás (1810-1898) - View of Bucharest, 1832, Private Collection. Fig. 10. Niccolo Livaditti — The Alecsandri Family: Vornic Vasile Alecsandri, his wife Elena, his son Iancu, and his daughter Catinca, 1837, National Museum of

Art, Bucharest.

Fig. n. Niccolò Livaditti — The Alecsandri Family: Vornic Vasile Alecsandri and his sons Iancu and Vasile, 1845, Art Museum, Iasi.

List of Maps

Map 1. Map of Eastern Europe cc. 1750. Made by Michal Wasiucionek. Map 2. Travels of Ianache Vácárescu, cc. 1770-1796. Made by Michal Wasiucionek.

Map 3. Travels of Dimitrie Foti Merisescu cc. 1817-1820. Made by Michal Wasiucionek.

Map 4. Map of Eastern Europe cc. 1850. Made by Michal Wasiucionek.

Acknowledgements

This is a book about foreigners and the intelligence by means of which they survived on the roads of empires. In following them, I too have, in a way, been on the road, moving among the European archives and libraries where their traces are gathered. Such a venture would not have been possible without the financial support of a research grant obtained in 2015. The book thus appears under the auspices of the European Research Council Grant Luxury, Fashion and Social Status in Early Modern South-Eastern Europe (LuxFaSS), ERC-2014- CoG no. 646489, hosted by New Europe College, Bucharest, which provided me with the opportunity to carry out research in various archives and libraries. I would like to thank the staff of the Archives Nationales, Paris; the Archives des Affaires Etrangères, Paris; the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris; the Osterreichisches Staatsarchiv, Vienna; the Benaki Museum, Athens; the Gennadius Library, Athens; the Kunstbibliothek of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; and the Romanian National Archives in Bucharest and Iasi. At the same time, in 2015-2016, I enjoyed a scholarship at the Wissenschaftkolleg zu Berlin, and it was there that began to sketch out many of the trajectories in this book. I am grateful to all my colleagues in the 2015-2016 cohort there for an unparalleled intellectual and human experience.

Over the years, I have benefitted from the ideas and the valuable feedback, both criticisms and suggestions, of many friends, colleagues, and teachers. I take this opportunity to express my gratitude to them for their patience, friendship, and tact. I am enormously indebted to Andrei Pippidi, teacher, friend, and mentor. As on every occasion, he has accompanied me in the adventure of my research, reading, criticizing, and offering suggestions, always a valuable partner in discussion with whom I could validate my ideas. My colleagues and collaborators in the ERC project have made up the best possible research team. Michal Wasiucionek, colleague, collaborator, and friend, has been an enthusiastic reader of this book, guiding me in my investigations, correcting Ottoman spelling, completing the names of unknown diplomats, and gently drawing my attention to interpretations of mine that he could not fully agree with. My dear friend and colleague Maria Pakucs provided the moral and intellectual support without which I could not have succeeded in a somewhat difficult period. Giulia Calvi, through her elegance, intelligence, and friendship, was a pillar of inspiration for the whole team. Nicoleta Roman provided unfailing assistance with all the necessary administrative procedures every time my attempts to gain access to a document or an image came up against bureaucratic impediments. Silvia Marton was always by my side, encouraging me with

XIV ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS warmth and sensitivity, and proving an admirable partner in theoretical and conceptual debates.

My warm thanks to my colleagues and friends Lidia Cotovanu, Marian Coman, Ovidiu Cristea and Simeon Cáltia, who offered to help me when I needed guidance, transliteration of certain documents, suggestions, information, or feedback. Ina Chirilă, Petronel Zahariuc, Mihai Mirza, and Sorin Grigoruta willingly helped me by checking my uncertain readings of documents, photographing or seeking in the archives in Iaşi the documents that I needed, and without which I sometimes thought my story could go no further. Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Daniel Schónpflug, and Peter Mackridge read parts of the book or offered me advice and information.

I am grateful also to James Christian Brown, without whom I could not have made this book. Our collaboration has gone beyond mere translation, as he has been an attentive and interested reader, always proposing the appropriate words to make clear the meaning of my text, and drawing my attention at times to errors made in haste.

New Europe College has not only been the host institution of the European project, but also my own academic home for a time. Marina Hasnas, Anca Oroveanu, Alina Hera, Lelia Ciobotariu, and Valentina Sandu-Dediu have been there at my side, with friendship and dedication, both the European project progressed, in excellent conditions, and in the finalization of the manuscript.

The advice and suggestions of the two anonymous readers at Brill who read the book with enthusiasm and attention to detail has helped me enormously in restructuring and improving it. I am grateful also to the series editor, Alex Drace-Francis, with whom I have had countless meetings and discussions regarding the manuscript. His insightful comments and suggestions greatly helped me during the editing processes. I take this opportunity also to express my appreciation of his constant support, offered with generosity and patience, throughout the duration of the European project.

I would also like to thank Diethard Sawicki, who first accepted my book proposal and offered me a contract, and who has been efficient and prompt in handling all matters concerning the book.

I dedicate the book to my daughter, Ilinca, a great lover of stories that carry meaning, who, with humour and sarcasm, teaches me every day not to be ‘a boring mum.

Introduction

During the Russian-Turkish War of 1768-1774, many Wallachian boyars, greater and lesser, chose to leave their homeland (patrie), their belongings, and their estates in order to save their lives. Leaving ephemeral goods behind, the boyars took with them their families and close relatives and such objects that could be fitted into trunks, chests, and carriages. Their destination was Bragov (Kronstadt), over the mountains in Habsburg Transylvania. For these boyars, Ottoman subjects, Bragov was a convenient place of refuge, given its spatial proximity, but the ‘German city’ offered a totally different experience from the Ottoman-Balkan world in which they normally led their lives. Among the refugees were members of the great families of Wallachia: Bráncoveanu, Văcărescu, Bălăceanu, etc.—in fact, the entire political elite of the principality. Exile in Brasov marked many of them with the imprint of a ‘different’ way of life, but it also left the bitter taste of foreignness, of otherness, of the insecurity resulting from unstable times. Here in Bragov, Maria Báláceanu, a member of an important boyar family, decided to adopt a 'German' child, who was 'poor' but of 'known' and properly wedded parents. We do not know what name this ‘German’ child had gone by in Bragov, but to be integrated into the Báláceanu clan in Wallachia he needed a new identity. Maria, his adoptive mother, proceeded to remake this new member so that he could be accepted into the lineage. In a letter of 10 April 1797, she writes:

[A]nd when we were coming again to our homeland [patria noastrá], here in this country, I brought him with me too. And raising him as an adoptive son, I had him christened in our Orthodox faith, in the days of His Holiness the late Metropolitan Grigorie, and after his christening, having made him my adoptive son, I also gave him in marriage, and have myself baptized [i.e. been godmother to] his five children up until now.

To cross political and social borders, the ‘German’ child put on the garb of the Orthodox Petre, his baptismal name. Three decades later, when Maria Báláceanu recalled her Brasov experience, Petre Báláceanu was a grown man with a wife and children, a house and outbuildings in the heart of Bucharest. And yet he still carried with him the memory of 'his homeland' (patria sa) and ‘his kindred’ (neamul sáu). For their part, the Báláceanu kin did not yet consider him one of their own, despite all the efforts of his adoptive mother, who

XVI INTRODUCTION had tried to 'bribe' them, by way of her testament, with various gifts of money or portions of her estate.!

For more than a century, the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia were integrated into the Ottoman Empire through the intermediary of the so-called ‘Phanariot regime’ Lying at the margins of three empires (Ottoman, Russian, and Habsburg), the Principalities often became the theatre of military operations, diplomatic negotiations, and topographic incursions with a view to possible annexation.? Traversed back and forth by diplomats, merchants, scholars, artisans, soldiers, and missionaries, these lands were the crossroads of diplomatic, commercial, and cultural knowledge and information. The Phanariot period, essential for an understanding of later developments in southeastern Europe, was long marginalized in the historiography of the region, and catalogued as a ‘dark age? However, a closer examination of the eighteenth century and the first part of the nineteenth century can help us to understand the role of the Phanariots in the spread of Enlightenment ideas, in the education and reforming of local elites, and in the forging of the modern states of the following century. They reshaped the meaning of the word 'patrie' used by Maria Báláceanu, which changed from a homeland to a national identity.^

For a long time it was supposed that the political elites of the period were immobile, conservative, and reticent towards the Enlightenment. I propose to demonstrate that these elites in fact constituted part of a broader picture, having connections both in the Ottoman world and in the worlds of Vienna, Venice or Saint Petersburg. For example, there were other boyars and dignitaries in exile in Brasov, whom we shall meet in the pages of this book, whose experiences are very useful for an understanding of the way in which people circulated through the empires, changing their identity and allegiance, adapting

1 BAR, Fond Manuscrise, MS 61, ff. 17v—21r. I shall return to this very interesting episode in Part IV chapter 1.

2 Vlad Georgescu, Istoria ideilor politice româneşti (Munich: 1987). See Stefan Lemny, ‘La critique du régime phanariote: clichés mentaux et perspectives historiographiques’ in Alexandru Zub (ed.), Culture and Society: Structures, Interferences, Analogies in the Modern Romanian History (lagi: 1985), 17-30; Nicolae Bánescu, 'Entre Roumains et Grecs: Ce Que Nous Apprend le Passé, Nea IIoAttixá, 2, 9 (1937), 1049-55; Anca Dobre, ‘Points de vue de l'histoire nationale grecque et roumaine sur la question des Phanariotes, in Paschalis Kitromilides and Anna Tabaki (eds.), Relations gréco-romaines. Interculturalité et identité nationale (Athenes: 2004, 189-94); Christina Ion, ‘The Present Creates the Past: The "Phanariots" in the Romanian Text Books during the Second Half of the 19th Century’, Revue d'Etudes sud-est européennes, 33, 1-2 (1995), 41—7; Edhem Eldem, 'Greece and the Greeks in Ottoman History and Turkish Historiography’, Historical Review, 6 (2009), 27-40.

4 Konstantina Zanou, Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean, 1800-1850: Stammering the Nation (Oxford: 2018), 2.

INTRODUCTION XVII to different places, and trying to finding a secure home, even if only a temporary one.

Maria Báláceanu travelled between Vienna and Bucharest for more than half a century (1740-1797), in search of belonging and social recognition, struggling to recover her family wealth, which had been confiscated, first by Constantin Bráncoveanu (1688-1714), and thereafter by various Phanariot rulers, and facing the contempt and hostility of princes and officials because of her family's pro-Austrian orientation. Boyaress, countess, lady-in-waiting to Empress Maria Theresa, Maria Báláceanu felt acutely the lack of a homeland and the ambiguity of a sense of belonging that bound her neither to one environment nor to the other.

In this book I shall explore how people in the past tried to find a home in which to develop their potential, to feel in safety, to have a family, a career, to be accepted by others. How permeable were social and political borders? How did they define and interpret such concepts as ‘home’ and ‘abroad’? Are they stable concepts or do they incorporate a significant doze of vagueness and malleability? Studying the senses of ‘home’ and ‘away’, through the biographies of three nineteenth-century activists, Dominique Reill observes that 'place' is not to be treated as a ‘stable category; but ‘should be read against the modern geographical grain.5 The individuals who feature in this book experience mobility, exile, journeys between empires: if for some, 'abroad' means displacement and precarity, for others, ‘away’ is another place to live, where they may acquire riches or simply knowledge. People circulate with ease between empires, making use of the fluidity of geographical, confessional, and linguistic frontiers, highlighting the slipperiness and the suppleness of these concepts in the days before nation state-building.

In the course of a century and a half, the dynamics of geopolitics evolved, and with them, the people and ideas that modelled the region changed. This book seeks to interrogate the manner in which mobility and social, political, and cultural transformations determined people to position themselves, to conceive where they belonged and how they would be seen, to map their loyalties and to construct social, political, and cultural bridges for living and surviving together. What sort of belonging did these people construct for themselves? Where did their loyalties lie? What was the status of Ottoman subjects in the Principalities? Where did the boundaries of loyalty and subjecthood begin and end?

5 Dominique Kirchner Reill, 'Away or Homeward Bound? The Slippery Case of Mediterranean Place in the Era before Nation-States, in Maurizio Isabella and Konstantina Zanou (eds.), Mediterranean Diasporas: Politics and Ideas in the Long 19th Century (London: 2015), 136.

XVIII INTRODUCTION

I shall try to address these questions by way of a series of microhistories whose characters illustrate experiences, multiple possibilities, and opportunities arising in the course of a lifetime. In my explorations, I have made use of the name as a guiding thread—as defined by Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Poni in their analysis of microhistory—, reconstructing the web of social relations in which each individual was caught. Microhistory has, however, undergone a re-reappraisal in recent decades as an important tool of global history, generating a series of valuable studies." Starting from the information offered by the primary sources about an individual, an object, or a place, historians have proceeded to reconstruct cross-border connections and cultural and confessional processes, connecting regions, people, and contexts.?

Among all the microhistories in this book, four figures for the spectacular quality of their individual trajectories, eluding borders and mixing multiple strategies of integration in different contexts: Frangois-Thomas Linchou, Ianache Vácárescu, Dimitrie Foti Merigescu, and Elena Hartulari. They will be, in fact, the pretext for an analysis of the various facets of being an office-holder (and the wife of an office-holder) in the Ottoman Empire, caught in the Phanariot network. All four were part of a world that was constantly reinventing itself politically, socially, and materially, establishing their social status and identity according to their belonging to spaces, to empires. Studying the lives, networks, and trajectories of these individuals helps us to understand the existence of a cultural and geopolitical space that extended beyond borders, offering people a variety of options and political loyalties.? Moreover, these figures generated a rich documentation, providing us with the necessary sources for such an exploration. Linchou left a vast diplomatic correspondence; Vácárescu

6 Caro Ginzburg, Carlo Poni, 'La micro-histoire, Le Débat, 10, 17 (1981), 135.

7 Francesca Trivellato, ‘Is There a Future for Italian Microhistory in the Age of Global History? California Italian Studies, II, 1 (2011), https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ozg4nghq [accessed 11.08.2021]; Francesca Trivellato, ‘Microstoria/Microhistoire/Microhistory’, French Politics, Culture&Society, 33, 1 (2015), 122-134; John-Paul A. Ghobrial, ‘The Secret Life of Elias of Babylon and the Use of Global Microhistory’, Past and Present, 222 (2014), 51-93; Maxine Berg, 'Sea Otters and Iron: A Global Microhistory of Value and Exchange at Nootka Sound, 1774-1792, Past and Present, 242 (2019), 50-82; Guillaume Calafat, ‘Jurisdictional Pluralism in a Litigios Sea (1590-1630): Hard Cases, Multi-Sited Trials and Legal Enforcement between North Africa and Italy, Past and Present, 242 (2019), 142-178; John-Paul A. Ghobrial, "Moving Stories and What They Tell Us: Early Modern Mobility Between Microhistory and Global History, Past and Present, 242 (2019), 243-280.

8 John-Paul A. Ghobrial, ‘Introduction: Seeing the World like a Microhistorian, Past and Present, 242 (2019), 15-16.

9 Seealso the trans-imperial figures analysed by Zanou, Stammering the Nation. Or Cálin Cotoi, Inventing the Social in Romania, 1848-1914. Networks and Laboratories of Knowledge (Leiden: 2020).

INTRODUCTION XIX wrote a History of the Ottoman Empire, which contains much autobiographical information; Merişescu kept a journal for the years 1814-1818; and Hartulari set down her memoirs for the period 1810-1856. Another common factor that links them concerns their connections to the Phanariot environment in which they were formed and in which they experienced both success and failure: Linchou was secretary to Prince Constantin Racovitá; Vácárescu held important offices under various princes, while also serving as a high Ottoman official in the period 1765-1797; Merişescu occupied minor posts at the Phanariot court; and Iorgu Hartulari was the prototype of the new man' who managed, through his wife Elena (née Plitos), to enjoy all the advantages of a network that he owed to his father-in-law and brothers-in-law, all of them holders of administrative posts and high offices in post-Phanariot Moldavia. They also have in common their mobility, the journeys that they made through the empires in the search of some sort of stability, prosperity, and security. Elena Hartulari herself never went further than Czernowitz (Romanian Cernáuti, today Chernivtsi in Ukraine, at the time the capital of Habsburg Bukovina), though she 'travelled' assiduously through Moldavia in search of a home. Her husband Iorgu, however, went as far as Istanbul,!0 and his journey is recounted in detail and with much emotional involvement in Elena's journal. And these four figures share something else: their obsession with social recognition. All four repeatedly engage in self-definition, expressing their ideas about who they are, what sort of people they are, what place they occupy in their society, and how they should be received by others.

In the middle ground, the various secondary figures and their trajectories back and forward across borders amount to a panoply of microhistories. Thus the book tracks various destinies that contribute to our knowledge of southeastern Europe over the course of a century. Even if its apparent focus is on Moldavia and Wallachia, where the protagonists tried to find a home for themselves, it transgresses the borders of the Principalities as it follows their individual trajectories across empires, passing through Bucharest, Iași, Sibiu, Braşov, Giurgiu (Yergógü), Ruse (Ruscuk), Arbanagi, Nikopol, Edirne, Czernowitz, Vienna, Venice, Trieste, Istanbul, Saint Petersburg, and Paris. Most of my characters speak and write more than two languages: Romanian, Greek, Turkish, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Serbian, French, German, Polish, Yiddish, or Italian. Their multilingualism is reflected in their writings and also in their constant adaptation to the linguistic spaces in which they live and pursue their activity

10 In the sources, the Ottoman city is variously named ‘Constantinople’, ‘Istanbul’, or ‘Tsarigrad’. I have used ‘Constantinople’ or ‘Tsarigrad’ only when citing or referring to these sources.

XX INTRODUCTION for a time. Moreover, their linguistic dynamism can be seen in their constant refashioning of their names according to space, time, and interlocutor. The book is full of characters with such names as Dimitri (Dimitrie, Dimitrios, Dumitrache, Tache, Matache), Iane, (Ianis, Ianache, Ienache, Ienáchitá), Elena (Eleni, Elencu, Elenicu, Ilina, Ilincu, Ilinca), or Manolache (Manolaki, Manuil, Emanoil, Emanuil), often Hellenized under the pressure of the times. Their identification and their introduction into the narrative of the book raise problems that have been observed by Dominique Reill for the Adriatic region.” The names of the Phanariots, for example, are rendered in various spellings according to the sources in which they appear, the languages used, and the education of the author: Ipsilanti/Ypsilanti/Hypsilanti; Sutu/Soutzo/Souzzo/ Soutso; Caragea/Caradge/Karaca. Collective affiliations sometimes give rise to confusion. For example, the Serbs and Bulgarians of Rumelia are often brought together under the same label, given that both spoke Slavic languages. It is thus quite difficult to tell whether Iana from Rumelia is a Bulgarian or a Serbian or whether Iorgu (Iorgache, Iordache, Gheorgache) of Pindus is Greek or Vlach in the absence of factual criteria. Many of the ‘Epirot Greeks' speak Greek or Turkish, but some also speak Romanian. Where possible, I have tried to use the identifying information offered by the actors themselves in the historical sources. In the case of names of places and institutions, I have chosen to use the forms by which they are referred to in the sources, providing where necessary an explanation or a contemporary localization.

The approach adopted in this book has not previously been considered in southeastern Europe historiography."? Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, research in social and political history has flourished. However, themes remain fragmentary and are rarely integrated in and circumscribed by the regional context. National borders have often proved impassable barriers, and figures that are important for an understanding of the social and patronage networks woven between empires have been treated only in terms of their ‘national’ role.!? It is this danger that Suraiya Faroqhi draws attention to when she points out that Romanian scholars have studied the work of Dimitrie Cantemir ‘as a part of

11 Dominique Kirchner Reill, Nationalists Who Feared the Nation: Adriatic Multi-Nationalism in Habsburg Dalmatia, Trieste, and Venice (Stanford, CA: 2012), xv.

13 Diana Mishkova, Beyond Balkanism: The Scholarly Politics of Region Making (London: 2018).

INTRODUCTION XXI their national cultural inheritance,” while neglecting, sometimes quite deliberately, the context in which he lived and pursued his career. For this reason, she emphasizes that: 'research which is limited by national borders has been unhelpful to our understanding of many non-Muslim Ottomans with intellectual interests" 5 In the meantime, Dimitrie Cantemir has been re-evaluated in a new study that follows ‘his European adventure’ step by step,!® but he still awaits the researcher who will examine him from the perspective of a global history. The same cannot be said of Vácárescu, another intellectual, not of the stature of Dimitrie Cantemir but nevertheless of some importance for Ottoman and southeast European historiography. Romanian historiography has dedicated studies, monographs, and articles to Vácárescu, and critical editions of his works have been published. Yet for all that, the author of Istoria prea puternicilor impärati otomani (The history of the most puissant Ottoman emperors) remains an 'illustrious' unknown to international research. As in the case of Dimitrie Cantemir, Romanian historians have not strayed beyond national borders, barely (if at all) following his tracks in his Ottoman adventure. Recent studies have shown the importance of patronage networks for an understanding of the political history of the Ottoman Empire and southeastern Europe." For example, Michal Wasiucionek has shown how 'Moldavian- Wallachian boyars, Ottoman grandees and Polish-Lithuanian magnates increasingly accumulated power and privatized state resources, becoming the effective masters of their political environment.!? Meanwhile, David Do Paco and Florian Kühnel have introduced women and the part they played in the construction and promotion of diplomatic networks, in studies that can help us to understand the active role of women's political networks and

14 Suraiya Faroqhi, Subjects of the Sultan. Culture and Daily Life in the Ottoman Empire (London-NewYork: 2011), 85.

15 Faroqhi, Subjects of the Sultan, 85.

16 Stefan Lemny, Cantemirestii. Aventura europeaná a unei familii princiare din secolul al XVIII-lea (Iasi: 2013).

17 Carter V. Findley, Political culture and the great households’ in Suraiya Faroqhi (ed.), The Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. 3 (Cambridge, 2006), 65-80; Jane Hathaway, The Political of Households in Ottoman Egypt: The Rise of the Qazdaglis (Cambridge: 1997); Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Three Ways to Be Alien: Travails and Encounters in the Early Modern World (Waltham: 2011); Marie-Carmen Smyrnelis, Une société hors de soi: Identités et relations sociales a Smyrne aux XVIII* et XIX* siècles (Paris: 2006); Molly Greene, A Shared World: Christian and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Princeton, NJ: 2000); Radu Päun, Pouvoirs, offices et patronage dans la Principauté de Moldavie au XVII* siècle: l'aristocratie roumaine et la pénétration gréco-levantine, PhD diss., EHESS (Paris: 2003).

18 MichatWasiucionek, The Ottomans and Eastern Europe. Borders and Political Patronage in the Early Modern World (London-New York: 2019), 9.

XXII INTRODUCTION trans-imperial circulation.® Biography has been put to new uses in innovative studies by Konstantina Zanou, Dominique Reill, and Francesca Trivelatto, connecting “humble lives" to the broader picture of global history.20 To reconstitute the trajectories of the actors and their travels through the empires, I have resorted to the outlining of multiple microbiographies, gathering together the threads scattered in various places in different empires, following the trails of the actors in the attempt to assemble as many pieces of a puzzle as possible.

Home or Away: Foreigners and Their Paths Into the Sources

Foreigners, subjects, and protégés are conceptual categories with the help of which I shall attempt to trace the process by which the people of the past defined themselves. Belonging to one category or another determined the place someone occupied in society, their social status, and the manner in which they were seen and judged by others. Such administrative instruments as censuses, fiscal records, and parish registers were relatively late to appear in southeastern Europe. In the case of Moldavia and Wallachia, for example, parish registers were introduced only with the adoption of the Organic Regulations, the organic laws drawn up during the Russian occupation of 1828-1834. Fiscal records were certainly kept, as they were the basis for imposing taxes, but they are preserved only in relatively small numbers and for the later part of the period.?! They appeared when the princes felt a pressing need for resources to cover the tribute owed to the Ottoman Empire and the financing of the administrative apparatus. At these moments, the political authorities engaged both

19 David Do Pago, ‘Women in Diplomacy in Late Eighteenth-Century Istanbul, The Historical Journal (2021), 1-23; Florian Kühnel, “Minister-like cleverness, understanding and influence in affairs”: ambassadresses in everyday business and courtly ceremonies at the turn of the eighteenth century’, in Tracey A. Sowerby and Jan Hennings (eds.), Practices of Diplomacy in the Early Modern World, c. 1410-1800) (London and New York: 2018), 130-146.

20 Zanou, Transnational Patriotism; Reill, Nationalists Who Feared the Nation; Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: the Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Culture Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, CT: 2009).

21 For fiscal conscriptions in the Ottoman Empire, see Bruce Masters, Christians in a changing world, in Suraiya N. Faroghi (ed.), The Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. 3. The Later Ottoman Empire, 1603-1839 (Cambridge: 2006), 272-279; Andreas Tietze, ‘The Balkans and Ottoman Sources — Ottoman Sources and the Balkans’, in Henrik Birnbaum, Speros Vryonis jr. (eds.), Aspects of the Balkans. Continuity and Change (The Hague-Paris: 1972), 285-297. For the documents kept by courts of justice, see Cahit Baltaci, ‘The Importance of the Kadi Register for the Islamic World’, Studies on Turkish Arab Relations, 2, 1987, 165— 170; Yvonne J. Seng, ‘The Şeriye Sicilleri of the Istanbul Müftülügü as a Source for the Study of Everyday Life’, Turkish Studies Association Bulletin, 15/2 (1991), 305-325.

INTRODUCTION XXIII in the reform of the fiscal system and in taking as accurate as possible a census of the population in order to know the value of the resources on which they could rely.22 In view of this, I shall focus my attention on the sources that are preserved in considerable numbers, in order to get a picture of the social, confessional, and cultural make-up of the region. Beyond the process by which each person constructed their identity as an individual, what interests me is the routes they followed in order to rise above their social condition. In this connection, narrative sources complement the fiscal records. They are not as numerous as we might wish, but those that have been preserved prove essential in reconstructing the process of identity-construction. Family archives, testaments, dowry lists, post-mortem inventories (catagrafii), and other property inventories have survived in considerable numbers and have been relatively little used in recent research.