Prisoner of the Infidels: The Memoir of an Ottoman Muslim in Seventeenth-Century Europe

By Osman of Timisoara and Giancarlo Casale

Victor Hugo meets Papillon in this effervescent memoir of war, slavery, and self-discovery, told with aplomb and humor in its first English translation.
 
A pioneering work of Ottoman Turkish literature, Prisoner of the Infidels brings the seventeenth-century memoir of Osman Agha of Timişoara—slave, adventurer, and diplomat—into English for the first time. The sweeping story of Osman’s life begins upon his capture and subsequent enslavement during the Ottoman–Habsburg Wars. Adrift in a landscape far from his home and traded from one master to another, Osman tells a tale of indignation and betrayal but also of wonder and resilience, punctuated with queer trysts, back-alley knife fights, and elaborate ruses to regain his freedom.
 
Throughout his adventures, Osman is forced to come to terms with his personhood and sense of belonging: What does it mean to be alone in a foreign realm and treated as subhuman chattel, yet surrounded by those who see him as an object of exotic desire or even genuine affection? Through his eyes, we are treated to an intimate view of seventeenth-century Europe from the singular perspective of an insider/outsider, who by the end his account can no longer reckon the boundary between Islam and Christendom, between the land of his capture and the land of his birth, or even between slavery and redemption.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Sep 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9780520383401

Osman of Timisoara

Giancarlo Casale is Chair of Early Modern Mediterranean History at the European University Institute and Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota.  

Book preview

Prisoner of the Infidels

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Constance and William Withey Endowment Fund in History and Music.

Prisoner of the Infidels

The Memoirs of an Ottoman Muslim in Seventeenth-Century Europe

Osman of Timişoara

Edited, Translated, and Introduced by Giancarlo Casale

UC Logo

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2021 by Giancarlo Casale

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Osman Ağa, active 1671–1725, author. | Casale, Giancarlo, editor, translator, writer of introduction.

Title: Prisoner of the infidels : the memoir of an Ottoman Muslim in seventeenth-century Europe / Osman of Timişoara; edited, translated, and introduced by Giancarlo Casale.

Other titles: Gâvurların esiri. English.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2021] | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020053128 (print) | LCCN 2020053129 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520383395 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520383401 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Osman Ağa, active 1671–1725. | Austro-Turkish War, 1716–1718—Personal narratives, Turkish. | Prisoners of war—Romania—Timiṣoara—Biography. | Prisoners of war—Turkey—Biography.

Classification: LCC DR545 .O8513 2021 (print) | LCC DR545 (ebook) | DDC 943.6/031092 [B]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053128

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053129

Manufactured in the United States of America

25  24  23  22  21

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

For Sinem

A prisoner of this infidel

CONTENTS

List of Maps

Acknowledgments

A Note on Transcription from Ottoman Turkish

A Note on the Translation

Introduction: On Being Osman

1. Surrender

2. Ransom

3. Crime and Punishment

4. Death and Resurrection

5. Respite

6. Bonds of Love

7. To the Capital

8. A Friend in Need

9. An Unexpected Turn of Events

10. Into the Lion’s Den

11. Grifters

12. To the Border

13. The End

Appendix: The Main Characters in Osman’s Narrative

Notes

Index of People

Index of Places

LIST OF MAPS

1. The Ottoman Balkans, 1683–1718

2. Behind Enemy Lines, 1688–1690 (chapters 1–5)

3. To Vienna and Beyond, 1690–1698 (chapters 6–9)

4. Osman in Vienna, 1691–1699 (chapters 7–9)

5. Osman’s Border Run (chapters 10–13)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have worked on this edition of Osman’s memoirs on and off for the better part of ten years. Over that time, Osman and I have become old friends, and I am now left with a bittersweet feeling, knowing that, our work complete, we shall no longer be seeing much of each other. I suppose that is a sign that our time together was well spent.

Besides Osman, there are of course many other friends, colleagues, and relations to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for their help with this little book. In fact, I hesitate to name them all, in part because the longer the list of people one thanks, the greater the risk that someone unjustly left off will take offense (a lesson I memorably learned on my wedding day, some years ago).

So, let me stick to the absolute essentials. Molly Greene, Eric Dursteler, and David Do Paço all read and generously commented on the entire manuscript, sharing helpful advice and saving me from many embarrassing errors (those that remain are of course my own). My stepmother, Patricia Brown, also read an early draft of the translation, providing feedback and encouragement. Later in the writing process, Selim Kuru and Bruce Fudge made important suggestions for the Introduction. Arda Akıncı contributed to the notes. Vuk Uskoković helped with translations of several phrases in Serbo-Croatian. Nazlı Songülen prepared the maps. Peter Dreyer edited the final draft. Lastly, special thanks to my editor at the University of California Press, Eric Schmidt, for the opportunity to introduce Osman to a wider circle of friends.

A NOTE ON TRANSCRIPTION FROM OTTOMAN TURKISH

The transcription of the Ottoman Turkish alphabet is a perpetual problem for scholars, with no single system that is either universally accepted or suitable for all purposes. The present edition uses two different systems, one for the text, and another for the accompanying notes.

In the interest of creating a translation that is as accessible as possible to nonspecialists, I have chosen to avoid diacritical marks or characters from the Turkish alphabet in the main body of Osman’s memoir. Instead, Ottoman Turkish proper names are rendered according to their closest approximation in American English spelling (so: Koja Jafer Pasha; not Koca Caʿfer Pāsha or Koca Cafer Paşa), while place-names are written according to the official spelling of the nation-state where they are located today (a choice discussed in more detail in the Note on the Translation).

By contrast, the scholarly notes that accompany this translation feature a number of direct citations of Osman’s original Ottoman Turkish. Since these will be of interest primarily to specialists, they are rendered in full transliteration. The system employed is the following:

Short vowels are rendered using the modern Turkish alphabet: a, e, ı, i, o, ö, u, ü.

A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION

Alongside an adventurous life as a soldier, captive, and diplomat, Osman of Timişoara was a literary trailblazer. With only a rudimentary formal education, and without any direct cultural models to guide him, Osman composed the first book-length autobiography ever written in Ottoman Turkish, essentially creating a new genre from scratch. The fruit of his labors, Prisoner of the Infidels, is a unique, compelling, and stylistically inventive text that presents the translator with more than its share of linguistic challenges.

First among these is undoubtedly the challenge of reproducing, in English, the effect of Osman’s straightforward and uncannily modern prose style, a quality that immediately strikes anyone reading his text in the original Ottoman Turkish. Generally speaking, the standards of eloquence in early modern Ottoman literature prioritized baroque erudition over clarity, with a heavy emphasis on elaborate metaphors, learned allusions, and the ostentatious use of Arabic and Persian vocabulary. This had the cumulative effect of making literary language starkly different from spoken language, with complex layers of meaning that revealed themselves only gradually and that were fully comprehensible only to a chosen few.

By contrast, Osman’s prose is a model of simplicity and clarity. His sentences are short and straightforward, he revels in vernacular turns of phrase, and he makes prodigious use of first-person speech. Together, these qualities give his writing an unusual level of accessibility and readability—a paradoxically disorienting experience for a reader of the original Ottoman text that can be reproduced only imperfectly in translation. As a gesture in this direction, my own English rendering of Osman’s most colloquial expressions has wavered between direct translation where the meaning is readily apparent and freer translation when the immediacy of his language might otherwise be lost. Typically, instances of the latter are flagged and explained in the accompanying backnotes.

Another, related challenge of translation involves Osman’s frequent use of multiple languages, a stylistic feature that—one is tempted to say intentionally—documents the polyglot environment of Osman’s home region, the Ottoman Balkans, as well as highlighting Osman’s own remarkable dexterity as a linguist. Thus, while Osman writes primarily in Ottoman Turkish, and consistently identifies this as his language, he also displays a comfortable command of a seventeenth-century variant of vernacular Serbo-Croatian (which he calls Serb) and of Romanian (which he calls Vlach). The latter he presumably learned growing up in his native Timişoara, where it was widely spoken, while the former might even be considered his mother tongue, inasmuch as both his parents were originally from what is now Serbia. In addition, Osman prayed in Arabic, knew a smattering of Hungarian, and over the course of his adventures progressively learned more German, eventually to the point of being able to read and write it competently and almost to pass as a native speaker. All of these languages make appearances at various points in the text, particularly when Osman is reporting dialogue, a technique that considerably enhances the immediacy and realism of his account. Occasionally, he even reports a phrase in a foreign tongue without providing a Turkish equivalent, thereby vividly reproducing for the reader his own perplexity or inability to communicate at certain moments. To preserve this effect in English, unfamiliar words and phrases in languages other than Turkish have usually been let stand in the text without English translation, but with clarification in the accompanying note.

Still another, more grammatically subtle aspect of Osman’s fondness for direct speech and stylistic immediacy is that he habitually refers to himself in the first-person plural as we (biz in Turkish). While this usage was not unheard of in early modern Ottoman prose, it was comparatively more common to refer to oneself in the third-person singular, usually together with a creatively self-deprecatory qualifier (e.g., this poor one, or more ostentatiously, something like this miserable slave without existence who rolls his face in the dust). The first-person singular, on the other hand, was considered presumptuous and not normally used in writing except by authorities speaking ex cathedra (especially the sultan). Obviously, none of this translates easily into an English-speaking context, in which the first-person singular is the norm and to speak of oneself in the first-person plural (the royal we) is an indicator of extreme privilege. As a result, in the translation below, Osman always refers to himself as I. The reader should consider, however, that because of Osman’s habitual use of we when relating conversations or narrating events in the original Turkish, it is often unclear whether something is being said or done only by him or collectively by a group. The translation reflects what is sometimes merely my best guess.

Readers should also note that the only surviving manuscript of Osman’s memoir is written as a continuous, uninterrupted text, without breaks or subheadings of any kind. The chapter divisions, chapter titles, and paragraphs that appear in the present translation are therefore all my interpolations, deemed necessary for the sake of readability, but not a feature of Osman’s original work. The same is true of punctuation: prior to the nineteenth century, Ottoman Turkish had no full stops, quotation marks, question marks, or exclamation points, which all must be inserted in an English translation according to the best judgment of the translator.

Place names present another thorny problem, in part because many names have changed over the past three-hundred years and in part because the same place can have multiple names, depending on the language of the speaker—yet another legacy of the multilayered, polyglot history of southeastern Europe. For the sake of consistency, I have used the official place names as established by the nation-state in whose territory the place is located today, rather than trying to approximate the name used by Osman himself. For example, I have normally referred to the capital of Hungary as Budapest, even though Osman uses the more geographically precise term Buda in reference to the walled Ottoman city on the west bank of the Danube—known in German as Ofen. I have, however, made exceptions to this rule in the few instances where a place has a standard English-language name that differs from its local name (e.g., Belgrade rather than Beograd, and Vienna rather than Wien).

Ethnonyms present a similar sort of challenge, since both the Ottoman sultan and the Habsburg monarch ruled multi-ethnic empires, later broken up and replaced by nation-states. As a result, fierce scholarly battles—and, sadly, also flesh-and-blood battles—have been waged over the question of if, when, and under what circumstances modern ethnic identities can be applied in reference to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In fact, for at least some readers, the specific language that Osman employs to describe religious and linguistic affiliation is likely to be one of the more immediately interesting elements of his text. For this reason, I have tried to systematically mark in the notes any instances in which Osman’s use of such terms is ambiguous or worthy of additional interpretation.

One such case that deserves special mention here is the term Nemçe, originally a Slavic term for German speaker (literally meaning mute, in the sense of someone who cannot speak our language) and which I have translated from Osman’s Turkish as Austrian. This is against the better judgment of many respected colleagues, since historians in recent years have become increasingly reluctant to use Austrian in reference to the eighteenth-century Habsburg state. As they rightly point out, this description fits few of the relevant historical actors in a way that would be recognizable today and often implies a national identity that was at the time completely lacking. To give just one concrete illustration of this from Osman’s text, repeated many times over, General Caraffa, the Austrian commander who first captured Osman, was in fact a nobleman from Naples, Italy.

The problem for the translator, however, is that Osman clearly uses Nemçe in a range of ways that elude any direct translation into modern English: sometimes to imply an affiliation with the Habsburg state (or the even more widely dispersed lands of the Holy Roman Empire), sometimes in reference to the territories of Upper or Lower Austria, sometimes to describe a person who speaks German, and sometimes a combination of all three (or a subset thereof). As such, to translate this word as either Habsburg or Austrian, or German depending on context seems an unacceptable distortion of Osman’s actual usage. So, for lack of a better alternative, and with all the necessary caveats, in the present translation I have rendered Nemçe as Austrian, except in the few instances where Osman explicitly refers to language (Nemçe lisānı).

An analogous case involves the terms haiduk (Ottoman haydūt) and hussar (Ottoman ḳaṭana), which in Osman’s text frequently appear paired together. Derived from the Hungarian terms for foot soldier and cavalryman, respectively, Osman sometimes employs these words simply to distinguish between Habsburg irregulars who are either on horseback or on foot. More often, however, he appears to mean something closer to bandits (in the case of haiduks) and highwaymen (in the case of hussars), but with the implication in both cases that the individuals involved are Christian. In still other instances, Osman seems to give an ethnic tinge to these words, haiduk implying Serbian ethnicity and hussar Hungarian ethnicity. But confusingly, he also occasionally uses both words in sequence to describe the same person, suggesting that they are interchangeable. And in at least one instance, he refers to his closest friend in Vienna, a Christian from his hometown of Timişoara, as a haiduk, apparently not without affection. Complicating the picture still further, by the nineteenth century—but perhaps not yet in Osman’s day—the word haiduk gained the meaning of freedom fighter in most languages of the Balkans, and retains it today. Given this enormous semantic complexity, in my translation I have chosen simply to use haiduk and hussar without further elaboration, leaving to the reader the task of sorting out possible shades of meaning.

Finally, a word about the title. Osman gave no title to his memoir, such that his manuscript was first catalogued in the nineteenth century under a literal description of its contents: The Life and Adventures of Osman Agha of Timişoara, written by Himself. This descriptive title also adorned the earliest published edition of the text (in German translation) in 1954, but a new, more colorful title was given to this text when it was republished in 1962: The Prisoner of the Giaours: The Adventurous Fortunes of the Interpreter Osman (Der Gefangen der Giauren: die abenteuerlichen Schicksale des Dolmetschers ‘Osman Ağa aus Temeschwar). Thereafter, in 1971, an abbreviated version of this new title, Prisoner of the Giaours (Turkish Gavurların Esiri), was adopted for the first modern Turkish edition of the text. It has since been used in most subsequent editions in other European languages and is now so widely associated with Osman’s text that it seems impractical, in the present translation, to completely part with established practice. However, it is also true that the word giaour carries in Turkish the unsavory flavor of a racial slur and is nowhere used by Osman himself, whose preferred term is kefere, literally, unbeliever. As such, Prisoner of the Infidels seems closer to the spirit of what Osman might have named his memoir, had he given it a title.

Let me conclude by noting that, while the present edition is the first English translation of Osman’s text, its preparation has benefitted greatly from earlier editions in other languages. In particular, I have used Richard Kreutel’s edition of the original Ottoman Turkish as my main source for translation, comparing it when necessary with a facsimile of the manuscript from the British Museum. In moments of uncertainty, I have also cross-checked my renderings in English with Frédéric Hitzel’s very careful and scholarly French translation. A number of historical notes and philological observations from both Hitzel’s French edition and the modern Turkish edition prepared by Harun Tolasa have also made their way into my apparatus criticus and are indicated where appropriate in my notes. Interested readers can find a more complete account of the rather complicated publication and translation history of Osman’s text at the conclusion of the Introduction, immediately following this translator’s note.

MAP 1. The Ottoman Balkans, 1683–1718.

Introduction

On Being Osman

In 1688, in the tumultuous aftermath of the failed Ottoman siege of Vienna, a Muslim soldier surrendered to the Habsburg army and became a prisoner of war. Young and from a well-connected family, he expected to be quickly ransomed and reunited with his loved ones. Instead, Osman of Timişoara would spend twelve long years in captivity, finally regaining his freedom only after a daring cross-border escape that could easily have cost his life. By that time, although still a comparatively young man, Osman had faced enough adversity to last many lifetimes: torture by a sadistic master, brutal confinement in a dungeon, the hunger and contagion of an army camp in winter, and worse. But Osman persevered, and as the years of his captivity wore on, he managed gradually to improve his condition and even to win the esteem of his captors.

Eventually, Osman became a household servant of one of the highest-ranking noblemen of Habsburg Vienna, a position of relative privilege from which a range of completely unforeseen opportunities were opened to him. Through his master’s patronage, he learned a most unexpected trade, apprenticing with a Parisian chef to become an expert pâtissier. In his master’s service, he traveled throughout the Habsburg realms and well beyond, even to distant lands in Germany and Italy barely known to his Ottoman contemporaries. Thanks to his master’s connections, he also became a man of influence among Vienna’s many Ottoman Muslims, intervening on behalf of some of them both with the authorities and with their captors. And repeatedly, as a charming, exotic man with a mysterious past and experience beyond his years, he tasted the flames of love, dangerously exciting the passions of both women and men with whom he crossed paths.

Remarkably, all of this is recorded by Osman himself in Prisoner of the Infidels, a vivid and unvarnished memoir he composed several decades later, as an older man living in Istanbul. Today, this priceless text survives as the most detailed account of life in early modern Europe from the perspective of an Ottoman captive. Just as important, it also stands as a major literary milestone, the first book-length autobiography ever to be written in the Ottoman Turkish language.

Yet paradoxically, many aspects of Osman and his text remain shrouded in mystery. Beyond what Osman himself reveals in his memoir, surprisingly little has been corroborated about his time as a captive from other sources. And curiously, although Osman is known to have pursued a long and successful career as a diplomat after returning to Ottoman territory, his account seems not to have attracted any significant attention from his contemporaries. Instead, Prisoner of the Infidels was virtually forgotten, only gaining general recognition for its historical and literary importance over the past few decades.

As a result, many questions linger about Osman the author and the text he produced. What inspired him to write, and by whom did he hope to be read? To what extent was he conscious, as he composed the first autobiography ever written in his language, of creating something truly new? Was he inspired, directly or indirectly, by literary models encountered during his long years in Christian Europe? And what kind of reaction to his work did he hope to provoke from his readers? For the moment, these are all questions without definitive answers. But if, as argued by the celebrated memoirist and memoir scholar Jill Ker Conway, every biography is a prisoner of history—a comment perhaps more applicable to Prisoner of the Infidels than to any other memoir—an obvious first step to a deeper understanding of the story of Osman’s life is to describe more fully the time and place in which he lived.¹

GROWING UP IN A SILVER AGE

Osman of Timişoara was a child of the seventeenth century, a period of world history rarely remembered as a happy one. On the contrary, in both Christian Europe and the Ottoman empire, it was a century of political turmoil, sectarian conflict, economic and demographic malaise, and above all, unprecedented military violence.² But in the midst of all this turbulence—and in stark contrast to more recent periods of history—Osman’s home region, the Ottoman Balkans, was an island of comparative tranquility in this wider sea of troubles.³

Admittedly, this would have been hard to predict from the way the century began: with a bloody conflict between the Ottomans and Habsburgs (the so-called Long War) that ravaged the northern Balkans for more than a decade before ending inconclusively in 1606.⁴ But thereafter, for almost seventy-five years, peace, only rarely interrupted, reigned across the long border between Christian and Ottoman Europe.

At first, this was largely the result of both sides being preoccupied with affairs on other fronts: the Habsburgs with the all-consuming brutality of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) and the Ottomans with their own religious conflict (from 1623 to 1639) with Iran’s Safavids, a dynasty professing the rival Shi’ite version of Islam.⁵ Throughout these years of conflict, however, and for many decades after they concluded, peace prevailed along the Ottoman-Habsburg frontier, the two sides preferring to accept each other as neighbors rather than disrupt the status quo. The only real exception was a brief outbreak of hostilities in the early 1660s, resolved quickly with the signing of a twenty-year truce. For the rest, while religious wars and epidemics ravaged the Latin West, and bandits and Safavid armies plagued the Ottoman East, the people of the Balkans lived in a kind of silver age of stability and relative prosperity—indeed, one of the longest periods of uninterrupted peace in the recorded history of this frequently troubled part of the world.⁶

Osman of Timşoara was born toward the tail end of this silver age, probably in 1658 although his exact date of birth is not known with certainty (a problem to which we shall return in the pages below). His native city, Timişoara, today in far western Romania, was at the time a major economic and administrative hub in the vital heart of the Ottoman Balkans, the kind of place to which ambitious, upwardly mobile subjects of the empire would naturally gravitate to seek their fortunes. This profile, in fact, seems to fit both of Osman’s parents: his father, a middle-ranking officer in the Ottoman army, moved to Timişoara from his native Belgrade, while Osman’s mother hailed from a much smaller town about fifty kilometers further up the Danube (also in what is today Serbia). Osman gives few additional details about his family origins and his early childhood, but everything he does reveal suggests that he grew up in comfortable circumstances, although unremarkably so. In short, his family was composed of just the sort of people best positioned to benefit