Abstract
In The Dragoman Renaissance: Diplomatic Interpreters and the Routes of Orientalism, E. Nathalie Rothman invites the reader to journey alongside dragomans through the geographical, political, social, and linguistic landscapes of these interlocutors of the Ottoman Empire. In this “shadowing” exercise, the reader quickly learns that dragomans engaged in much more than serving as “ventriloquists,” or linguistic mediators, between the Sultan and foreign dignitaries in the Divan at La Porte, which was their primary meeting place in the 16th and 17th centuries, between the cities of Venice and Istanbul. Rothman uncovers the story of what the dragomans’ renaissance means, drawing, mostly, on a series of albums compiled by Cristoforo Mamuca della Torre (1681–1760), “a scion of a long and distinguished dragoman dynasty” (p. 3).
These series of pictographic “albums,” created to secure patronage and social mobility, left a trace of the multifaceted roles that dragomans played within the imperial confines. In her book, the author unveils how dragomans contributed to the “production and circulation” of Ottoman and Muslim historical and cultural knowledge to European publics through translations, interpretations, the development of translation techniques, and as book acquisitions consultants, to mention just a few. The historical impact of dragomans was palpable. As they negotiated independently, and mediated linguistically, they facilitated, according to Rothman, the recognition of Ottoman Turkish as a dominant language and of Turkish culture in ways that significantly influenced European elites. In so doing, Rothman illustrates how the multidirectional “journeys” of dragomans from Istanbul outwards expanded the academic and cultural development of Orientalism. She joins other scholars, for instance, Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, Talal Asad, and Daniel Goffman (pp. 12–14), who argue that the “Orient” shaped other cultures and societies, rather than limiting this framework to a monodirectional impact of Europe on the “Orient.”
The historical teachings of this book include a link to the images that help the reader enter into the dragoman imaginary and to witness the process of Rothman’s archival analysis of the archival-primary sources: https://drrp.digital.utsc.utoronto.ca/61220/utsc76547. In addition, the book may be downloaded through a Creative Commons licence at: https://drrp.digital.utsc.utoronto.ca/. The digital resources include an extensive list of additional archival sources that undergird her scholarly contributions with the added bonus of an interview with the author about her research leading to this book. The interdisciplinary nature of The Dragoman Renaissance makes the book and resources suitable for a wide range of course curricula, student populations, and readership interested in matters relating to imperial power, early modern cultural exchanges, translation and interpreting studies, as well as histories of Türkiye, Africa, Europe, art, and language. Furthermore, Rothman’s study and resources offer a methodological approach and mapping for those researching at the intersection of history, interpreters, translators, and society. In this book review, I will highlight a few of the many findings of Rothman’s research that contribute to history in general, and, more specifically, to the history of interpreting and translation.
As Rothman points out, the dragoman recruitment and training process evolved from the devshirme of the 15th century via the child levy of non-Muslim communities, elite members “volunteering” their children to dragoman apprenticeship in the 16th century in the hope of securing a higher-social status, to the kinship of the intermarriages of the Istanbul-based dragomans—the largest cadre—that developed an apprenticeship based on immersion training in the “bailate” during the 17th century. The recruitment process for drago-men served a broader strategy and offered greater opportunities for dragomans and their families. The high numbers of dragomans in Galata-Pera coincided with the city hosting the largest number of foreign embassies in the late 16th century. In this context, these “interpreters” represented the many ethnic communities inside and outside the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire, serving to strengthen their “dragomanate” as well as trans-imperial Turkish relational ties. The dragomans’ linguistic exchanges exposed them to information that benefitted their families’ economic growth, positionality, and business ventures. Generally speaking, they were recruited from the Catholic faith, a strategy believed to promote greater fidelity to the empire. Multifaith recruitment aimed to appease certain ethnic groups, as well as secure cultural capital and imperial stability. Nonetheless, the dragomans’ strategies evolved in response to the vulnerability they experienced due to political shifts and expectations from their superiors. As they navigated these tensions relative to their self-interests, some of them met an untimely death by execution or were barred from service once perceived as “spying” or engaging in “disloyal” activities.
As dragomans secured their status, which passed from one generation to the next, their interpretation and mediation skills developed as a result of their training at the “bailate,” audiences before Sultans, exchanges in embassies and consulates, decision-making power at la Porte, and leading private meetings with diplomats. Such access shaped their positionality, allowing them to attain elite leverage across imperial lands in the performance of their job in the hope of transferring the same to their descendants. The century-long endogamy was all possible thanks to sustained “kinship” and the creation of “networks” in dragoman-producing households. Rothman’s commitment to avoid a binary-based archival analysis that focuses on either the “center” or the “periphery” (p. 10) is masterfully exemplified in the stories she narrates about the Cristoforo Mamuca della Torre, the Borisi-Brutti-Tarsia, and the Borisi-Scoccardi-Mascellini dynastic households that prevailed through centuries. The latter, in a 100-year span, “produced five generations of dragomans in Venetian service” (p. 52). In fostering these types of alliances, the dragomans transformed themselves into “a unified and socially mobile group regardless of their diverse origins” (p. 53).
Within these households, women assumed a pivotal role by managing the family’s financial capital and legal stability (e.g., filing lawsuits) to safeguard their wealth and maintain “endogamous dragoman dynasties” (p. 69). They also strategically married men who could ensure their social status and a prosperous future for their children, becoming wives of highly regarded professionals, such as dragomans or physicians. In turn, aspiring drago-men sought to marry local or foreign women, who were daughters of these prominent households, to ensure their futures. At their often luxurious weddings, they were the recipients of imperial gifts, in recognition of their status and as a reminder of their expected loyalty. Upon the untimely death of their husbands, drago-wives requested audiences before the Sultan for special favours, including securing their pension. However, their prestigious role as drago-wives was curtailed by judicial limitations. As Rothman discovered, the “1719 Venetian Senate even passed a decree prohibiting dragomans from contracting marriages in Ottoman lands without the express permission of the bailo” (p. 55).
Despite their societal standing, dragomans often complained about “abject poverty” that hampered their ability to purchase the expected professional attire to conduct their business, examples of which can be viewed in the web resources. However, baptismal records in the Santa Maria Draperis parish records, investigated by the author, revealed the presence of enslaved “members” in the dragoman’s household. Dragoman-elite members from the same household appeared as godparents in the baptismal event. In her analysis of these records, Rothman does not exclude the possibility of “sexual slavery” as part of the reality of enslaved women in these households, especially in those instances where the father’s name was recorded as “not declared.” In addition to generational kinships and alliances, the godfathering and godmothering of enslaved people were part of the dragoman’s household structure that enabled dragomans to thrive in the imperial-colonising context. Rothman’s analysis of the drago-men, the drago-wives, and their drago-enslaved households brings to the forefront the intricacies and complexities from the centre to the periphery, and back again.
As demonstrated by the author, dragomans relied on the art of “networking” to survive, to thrive, and to marry within the imperial context, which led to the establishment of the “dragomanate.” These linguistic mediators became gatekeepers by building a dam-like structure that positioned them between different social, political, and cultural contexts. This permeable barrier privileged them as guardians, not only of the diplomatic milieu, but of language access and development. Their pivotal role in the development of the Ottoman language is a key contribution of this text. Rothman situates their contribution of “metalinguistic texts” relative to the lack of formal studies of the Ottoman language in both Europe and the “Oriental” universities at the time. This lack of interest exhibited by the higher-education circle of the time created a fertile ground for dragomans to develop Ottoman language education. The author notes that it was a dragoman, Dennis Dominique Cardone, who became the first chair for the Ottoman language during the 18th century. A high-register language and one that was extremely difficult to speak fluently, Ottoman Turkish was restricted to the exclusive use of the upper-tier spaces of the Ottoman empire. During the 16th and 17th centuries, there was a lack of availability of tutors and authoritative resources, such as dictionaries and grammars, for the acquisition of the Ottoman language. Rothman pivots the study of Orientalism outside of the academy, highlighting dragoman’s production of metalinguistic texts that were in “short supply,” such as “linguistic treatises, grammars, dictionaries, vocabularies, glossaries, and phrase books” for the use of non-Ottoman audiences (p. 148). This, Rothman argues, was the genesis of Ottoman Studies.
Due to their stamina and discipline in learning imperial language(s) and interest in composing meta texts, dragomans contributed to the promotion of Turkish as one of the “learned languages of Islam,” and became vehicles of multidirectional Orientalism (p. 142). Through this book, we learn how language identity and development represent a crucial component of building and maintaining empires. Dragomans acted as conscious mediators of this process, imparting their ideology based on a sociological analysis of language, and collaborating in their creation and prevalence. Despite the prominence of Ottoman Turkish as a lingua franca of the Ottoman Empire, the empire did allow for people of other ethnicities to develop and maintain their own languages, such as Arabic, Italian, and Persian, as a cohesive measure. In addition, linguistic traits of these languages remained embedded within the Ottoman–Turkish vocabulary. These linguistic mediators did not act solo. Either jointly or via a linguistic relay with missionaries, scholars, and lay sojourners, they co-authored metalinguistic sources that have survived to this day, according to Rothman. And yet, through their preference for urban culture and a merchant-rich context from which they drew their language categories and understanding, the dragomans’ work stood in sharp contrast to that of theologians who “placed greater emphasis on the intricacies of Ottoman religious life” (p. 161).
Rothman provides extensive archival examples of the above. A key contribution by a dragoman to the metalinguistic corpus was the 1533 manuscript by Filippo Argenti, Regola del parlare turcho, “a first grammar of Ottoman ever to appear in Europe,” not by a Turk, but by a European living in Istanbul. In the early 17th century, Francesco Maria Maggio authored a grammar resource as a linguistic relay from two other previous Turkish grammars, originally gifted by fellow missionaries. These written (some printed) sources, in a multiplicity of language pairs, served to generate further manuscripts that spread through the various institutions in Europe and were accessed by dragomans for their future instruction. Franciscus Meninski (1620–1698), who studied with a Jesuit priest based in Rome, authored trilingual sources which were “highly influential” and “remained virtually unsurpassed until the nineteenth century” (p. 155). Furthermore, dragomans were responsible for developing a Latinized script and a transliteration approach to the Ottoman Turkish language applied for centuries.
Rothman convincingly demonstrates the argument suggested in her title, The Dragoman Renaissance: Diplomatic Interpreters and the Routes of Orientalism. It was during the stretch of the Ottoman Empire—between the 16th and early 18th centuries—that dragomans reached their professional and influential peak, while simultaneously facilitating the empire’s sustainability as they transported culture and knowledge via their sojourneying, translations, interpretations, negotiations, and written manuscripts.
I would note, however, that the existence and influence of dragomans was not limited to eastward of the Atlantic. In my forthcoming book (Zaragoza-De León, 2025) centred in the Amistad Case, my research unveils how the early USA republic, having learned of the crucial importance of dragomans for imperial development and survival of the Ottoman Empire, established a language section within the then Department of State in 1789, enabling the deployment of ‘dragomans’—as they are referred to in the archival materials—to Constantinople, La Porte, and elsewhere. Like their Ottoman counterparts, US dragomans engaged in much more than ventriloquism, adding English to the language-pair mix as a medium for importing and exporting cultural knowledge and to defend imperial quests. I thank Rothman for enabling me to draw this connection. This book suggests many future areas of research, including comparisons of the Ottoman and USA imperial dragomans and their role in the geo-political expansion of the early US Republic, and even today.
