As a counterpoint to the rich literature of Europeans discovering Asia, readers have access to many accounts by Asians about Europe. These writings hold up a mirror in front of their authors, who, unconsciously, reveal much about their own societies. Mehmed Effendi, the first Turkish ambassador to the court of Louis XV wrote in his Paradise of the Infidels that France was ruled by women, revealing an Ottoman anxiety about the power of the harem. In The Narrative of the Residence of the Persian Princes, visitors from Iran remarked on the sobriety of Britain’s King William IV, compared to the glamor of the Peacock Throne. The Qajar princes wondered how long Iran could maintain its great power status vis-a-vis William’s nation of parsimonious shop keepers.
These works can be more profitably studied to learn about the cultural and political preoccupations of the writers rather than about their subjects. Prisoner of the Infidels, the memoirs of Osman Ağa of Timişoara (active 1671-1725), is one of the most famous of these “return visits”. While Osman’s story is more exciting than most, strangely, it offers little insight into 17th-century Ottoman thinking.

Osman falls prisoner to Austrian armies advancing after the Ottoman debacle at the 1683 Siege of Vienna. The teenager, from a military-landlord family in the ethnically mixed region of Banat (now in Romania), possesses great physical and psychological resilience. This saves his life on many occasions. Armies in this era treat not only their captives but even their own ranks with terrifying brutality. At one point Osman is left to die on a heap of manure. Meanwhile his guards abandon their own dysentery-sickened comrade in a shallow grave, from which he later escapes, only to be rewarded with prison. Many of Osman’s misadventures recall the most chilling chapters of Primo Levi’s If this is a Man. Osman’s attempts to escape across the border back into Ottoman lands remind one of the often fatal efforts of refugees to cross into Europe, where they are cheated by people smugglers, robbed, murdered or drowned in flimsy boats.
But Osman also recalls many episodes straight out of Opera Buffa or Barry Lyndon. Young girls and a boy assault his chastity. Comrades drag him into bar brawls in Vienna’s seedy nightlife. Although he eschews pork, his capacity for wine drinking leaves him swimming in the Danube canal. A duchess trains him to be a pastry cook. He struggles to carry the sedan chair of an obese Hofkriegsrat councilor. Providential coincidences abound. Brigands who plunder Osman are later identified, and punished with hanging. Actually, this happens twice in 12 years, which strains credulity.
The piling up of details, remembered decades later, is worthy of an accomplished novelist. In fact, so entertaining is the picaresque narrative of this book, without the evidence of the actual manuscript in the British museum one could be forgiven for thinking Osman is a simply modern pseudonym. Is Osman really a 17th-century Ottoman?—yes, but not as we know it.
Osman does not hail from one of the great Ottoman cities like Adrianople, Salonika or Istanbul. Except for his aversion to pork, Osman resembles his Balkan neighbors. In addition to Ottoman Turkish, Osman speaks Vlach (Romanian) and Serb fluently. He learns a smattering of Hungarian, much of it rude, but then masters German, both formal and informal. His own writing is free of those flourishes of Persian rhetoric that characterize Ottoman prose. As the son of an officer and landlord, he has more in common with his Austrian masters than the Serb and Hungarian villagers through whose lands he flees. This enables him to rise in the graces of the Habsburg court nobility. His masters plead for him to be baptized so they can promote him even further. Sometimes he reminds of us Mozart’s Figaro. But it is really so surprising to see Osman so deeply acculturated that he does not strike us as Ottoman? He is not a silk-caftaned courtier of the Sublime Porte, but a European Muslim. His book speaks to an Islam acculturated by centuries of coexistence.
Osman Ağa wrote his memoirs while working as a high-ranking dragoman and collaborating with some of his former Austrian masters to resolve border disputes. His manuscript was not copied, and appears to have had no echo in later Ottoman studies about Europe. German scholars purchased the autograph manuscript and later donated it to the British Library. A German translation appeared in 1954, a French version in 1998. Serbs, Croats and Hungarians can read editions translated from the German. The English version of Osman’s life comes late to the party. Translator Giancarlo Casale’s version has the merit of extensive notes, especially around Osman’s polyglot use of Balkan languages. Casale also tracks down the many historically important characters with whom Osman, Forest Gump-like, comes briefly in contact. Readers will enjoy the combination of Casale’s erudition and Osman Ağa’s straightforward but exciting story.
You must be logged in to post a comment.