12 | Living in the Ottoman Realm
by societal and political forces to impose a specific type of social and political or-
der on Ottoman society as a reaction to several major political events and popu-
lar movements that include Janissary revolts, the Islamic puritanical movement,
the Kadizadelis, and the Jewish messianic movement of Sabbatai Zevi. These
events reflected and caused great social and political upheaval in the empire and
resulted in attempts to control sexuality and political power within the harem
and along religious communal lines.
In chapter 15 Julia Landweber focuses on the story of Bonneval, a French
nobleman. In the eighteenth century, Bonneval immigrated to the Ottoman Em-
pire and “turned Turk,” in the European parlance of the time, by converting to
Islam, assuming an important military advisory role to the sultan, and becoming
an infamous Ottoman celebrity in French intellectual circles. While his outside
appearance and public actions projected the assumption and adoption of an elite
Ottoman identity, his private life and writings reveal that he remained culturally
French. This chapter teases out this story of the construction of these coinciding
conflicting identities in the eighteenth-century Mediterranean world.
In chapter 16 Jane Hathaway investigates the forced assimilation of African
outsiders into Ottoman elite circles. The chapter deals with the inception, ascen-
dancy, and transformation of the office of the chief black eunuch in the Ottoman
Empire (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries) and how these individuals were both
Ottoman insiders and outsiders. The chief harem eunuch’s ascendancy coincided
with the era of crisis and change in the Ottoman Empire, during which crown
princes no longer learned statecraft by governing provinces, and the practice had
been abandoned whereby a new sultan sought to prevent rebellion by executing
his brothers. In these changed circumstances, future sultans were raised within
the harem, where the major influences on their formation were their mothers
and the chief harem eunuch, who wielded great influence over these future sul-
tans. Thus, the chief eunuch was a court insider with an enormous stake in the
continuation of the Ottoman palace system. At the same time, however, most
harem eunuchs came to the palace from East Africa and were enslaved, con-
verted to Islam, and castrated. Their African origins and their emasculation
combined to render them the “other,” even within a court populated with slaves
and servants of a wide array of ethnolinguistic and geographical origins. This
chapter explores how a chief harem eunuch’s Africanness, in conjunction with
his unparalleled intimacy with the imperial family, shaped his identity.
In chapter 17 Antonis Hadjikyriacou examines the construction and projec-
tion of non-Muslim institutional identity in Ottoman Cyprus during the eigh-
teenth century by investigating the rise and fall of Dragoman Hadjiyorgakis. The
different projections of institutional identity by Dragoman Hadjiyorgakis illus-
trate that there was nothing predetermined about the leadership of the commu-
nity, that religion was not the sole marker of political identity, and that the path