|
Title
|
|
|
|
'Me among the Turks?': Western commanders in the Late Ottoman Army and their self-narratives
| |
|
Author
|
|
|
|
| |
|
Abstract
|
|
|
|
| Throughout the nineteenth century several Western officers joined the Ottoman Army. Not a few adopted Ottoman citizenship, commanded troops, fought in major wars, and rose to the highest echelons of the military. For these men the Ottoman Empire represented a formidable military power, notwithstanding contemporary discourses about its supposed decline. Asking what prompted these military men to emigrate, this article elucidates how they reconciled, for themselves, some of the putative contradictions of their positions as (former) Christian men in the military body of an Empire that drew on Islam as its main source of legitimacy. How did they try to make sense of what they were doing and how did they later remember and represent their Ottoman travails to those they left behind? This article answers these questions through a close reading of the career and memoirs of the Belgian baron Charles de Schwartzenberg a.k.a. Emin Pasha (d. 1878), who was employed in the Ottoman Army for nearly two decades, fighting in the Crimean War before serving in Syria. Typical for the mercenary-like European officers who chose to venture abroad, his biography illuminates the kind of mobility that was possible in, and integral to, the late Ottoman military structure. |
| |
|
Language
|
|
|
|
English
| |
|
Source (journal)
|
|
|
|
European review of history. - Abingdon
| |
|
Publication
|
|
|
|
Abingdon
:
2020
| |
|
ISSN
|
|
|
|
1350-7486
| |
|
DOI
|
|
|
|
10.1080/13507486.2019.1709418
| |
|
Volume/pages
|
|
|
|
27
:1-2
(2020)
, p. 88-110
| |
|
ISI
|
|
|
|
000518235900006
| |
|
Full text (Publisher's DOI)
|
|
|
|
| |
|
Full text (publisher's version - intranet only)
|
|
|
|
| |
|