17th through 18th Centuries | 169subjects fled the empire, seeking to improve their situations, while others sought
to strengthen their ties to the imperial center. Still others lamented the passing of
better days gone by and bitterly complained of their loss of influence and stature.
Chapter 12 focuses on advice literature from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
Ottoman bureaucrats and historians, such as Mustafa Ali. Their writings reveal
important insights into the characteristics of an ideal Ottoman bureaucrat that
reflect the upheaval of their times. Chapter 13 investigates the issues of religious
conversion, agency, gender, marriage, and Ottoman subjecthood from a Venetian
perspective during the seventeenth century through the story of an Ottoman
Muslim widow and her three daughters who seek asylum in Venice, renounce
their Ottoman identities, and convert to Christianity to flee one daughter’s un-
happy marriage to a local Ottoman official. Chapter 14 looks at the tensions in
court politics, interfaith sexual relations, gender roles, political and sexual vio-
lence, and messianic and religious fundamentalist movements in Ottoman Istan-
bul during the seventeenth century. Chapter 15 investigates issues similar to those
of chapter 13, but from the opposite perspective: through the story of Bonneval,
a French nobleman who in the eighteenth century immigrated to the Ottoman
Empire and “turned Turk” by converting to Islam and becoming an infamous
Ottoman celebrity in French intellectual circles. Chapter 16 deals with the in-
ception and transformation of the office of the chief black eunuch in the Otto-
man Empire (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries) and how those holding this office
were both Ottoman insiders and outsiders: an insider inasmuch as he possessed
access to the highest levels of the Ottoman administrative power and an out-
sider because of his East African origins and his emasculation. Finally, chapter
17 examines the construction and projection of Christian Orthodox identity in
Ottoman Cyprus during the eighteenth century by investigating the rise and fall
of Dragoman Hadjiyorgakis and how his manipulations of official titles shaped
non-Muslim corporate identity within the Ottoman state system.
Note
. Tezcan, The Second Ottoman Empire.