Please join us for our upcoming seminar on: "A Case of Go-betweens and Cultural Brokers: Cypriot and European/Anatolian Mamlūks and their Role in Interactions between the Mamluk Sultanate and Cyprus" by Dr. Koby Yosef (Bar-Ilan University).
Monday, March 15, 2021, from 17:30 to 19:00 (Israel time) via zoom.
To receive the Zoom link, please subscribe by contacting Alon Ben Yehuda on alon.ben-yehuda@mail.huji.ac.il.
ABSTRACT
Ottomanists have recently started paying increasing attention to slaves of Christian-European origin in the service of the Ottomans ("renegades"). They established that European "renegades" did not sever ties with their past, but rather continued to interact with their families and Christian-European states. In fact, the Ottomans appreciated European "renegades" precisely for their military/naval, cultural, and linguistic skills acquired before their conversion, as many of them functioned as sailors, shipwrights, translators, diplomats, and intelligence agents. Thus, they were embedded in trans-imperial networks and regularly "mobilized their roots", in their capacity as military men in border provinces and raiding vessels, diplomats, and spies. These "trans-imperial subjects" or "Mediterranean go-betweens" who crossed frontiers and the Mediterranean "contact zone" were "cultural brokers" exemplifying the "well-connectedness" of the Ottoman Empire and Christian Europe.
It seems that a similar phenomenon existed already during the Mamluk Sultanate. As a case study, the talk will focus on Cypriot and European/Anatolian mamlūks' involvement in interactions between the Mamluk Sultanate and Cyprus, mainly during the late eighth/fourteenth and ninth/fifteenth centuries. Previous studies have shown that the movement of people between the Sultanate and Cyprus was routine, including mamlūks who settled in Cyprus after participating in military expeditions, some of them supposedly converted to Christianity but eventually returned to Egypt. Other studies discussed Mamluk naval campaigns, most of them against Cyprus, and mentioned in passing few mamlūks whose names appear in the context of fleet-building projects. Other studies discussing Mamluk military expeditions to Cyprus mentioned several names of Mamluk commanders. Other studies discussed the identity and origins of envoys sent to Cyprus from the Mamluk Sultanate. However, while the role played by European/Anatolian (or Cypriote) mamlūks in Mamluk-Cypriot interactions is on rare occasions assumed, it is in great part undocumented.
Based on Mamluk and European sources, and on information deduced from the names of mamlūks involved in military/naval and diplomatic interactions with Cyprus, I will suggest that almost all envoys, dragomans, and shipwrights, and many commanders were Europeans/Anatolians, and that Cypriot and European/Anatolian mamlūks seem to have been often stationed in frontier towns/ports, and participated in military expeditions to Cyprus. Some settled there and others moved back and forth from Cyprus to the Mamluk Sultanate. In addition, there is also evidence that European/Anatolian, and more specifically, Cypriote mamlūks were involved in the transfer of European military technology and artisanary skills to the Mamluk Sultanate.
Koby Yosef (Ph.D. Tel Aviv University, 2011) is a lecturer in the department of Arabic at the Bar-Ilan University. His research interests include history and historiography of the Mamluk Sultanate. Currently, he is working on a monograph on the transformation of the family of mamlūk amirs and sultans during the Mamluk Sultanate. He is also working on a project funded by an ISF grant titled "Mamlūks of Christian Origin in the Mamluk Sultanate (1250-1517)." He published several articles on social ties of mamlūks and on ethnic identities during the Mamluk Sultanate, among them most recently “Usages of Kinship Terminology during the Mamluk Sultanate and the Notion of the ‘Mamlūk Family’,ˮ in Y. Ben-Bassat (ed.), Developing Perspectives in Mamluk History: Essays in Honor of Amalia Levanoni, Leiden 2017, 16-75; “Cross-boundary Hatred: (Changing) Attitudes towards Mongol and ‘Christian’ Mamlūks in the Mamluk Sultanate,ˮ in R. Amitai and S. Conermann (eds.), The Mamluk Sultanate from the Perspective of Regional and World History: Economic, Social and Cultural Development in an Era of Increasing International Interaction and Competition, Goettingen and Bonn 2019, 149-214; and "Mamlūks of Jewish Origin in the Mamluk Sultanate," in MSR 22 (2019), 49-95.