CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2015
| Author | Giammanco, Amanda Danielle |
|---|---|
| Title | (SELF) FASHIONING OF AN OTTOMAN CHRISTIAN PRINCE: JACHIA IBN MEHMED IN CONFESSIONAL DIPLOMACY OF THE EARLY SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY |
| Summary | In the summer of 1631, while Franciscan friar Rafael Levaković was in Rome, he met and wrote the first biography of a venturesome man named Jachia who claimed to be the second son of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed III (1595-1603), and a direct descendent of the Byzantine Komnenos family of Trebizond. This thesis explores the story of Jachia’s quest to claim his “birthright” of becoming the Ottoman ruler but as a Christian loyal to the pope who would free the faithful of “European Turkey” of their “yoke” and mend the schism between eastern and western Christianity. The thesis studies him, his affiliates and impressarios, and various Christian princes who pledged to help him against the backdrop of the seventeenth-century politics of confessional polarization and dreams of expelling the “Turk” out of Europe. While Jachia has remained a curious footnote within Ottoman and European diplomatic scholarship, his original biography and surviving documents about his life and quest illuminate the various self-fashioning and mythologizing tactics that he was engaged in or was subject to. In tracing the transformation of Jachia’s identity through his participation in cross-confessional and trans-imperial diplomacy, this work attempts to distinguish Jachia’s own agenda from the agenda of those who sought to mold him into a protagonist of their own religious or political programs. |
| Supervisor | Tijana Krstić |
| Department | Medieval Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2015/giammanco_amanda.pdf |
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