The Dragoman Renaissance: Diplomatic Interpreters and the Routes of Orientalism.

• Author: Hamilton, Alastair

The Dragoman Renaissance: Diplomatic Interpreters and the Routes of Orientalism. By E. NATALIE ROTHMAN. Ithaca, NY: CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2021. Pp. xxiii + 419. $24.95. Open access.

When the Italian traveler Cornelio Magni called on Panaiotis Nikousios in Edirne in 1671, he found him reclining on a carpet in a magnificent pavilion, engrossed in a copy of Aristotle's Ethics. Never before had Magni met a man whose conversation was so delightful and who was so well informed, not only about world politics, but about every aspect of culture and science. Panaiotis was the Grand Dragoman or interpreter to the sultan, a new post especially created for him. Through him all questions by foreign emissaries were addressed to the sultan, and through him they received his answers. He was as close as they could ever hope to get to the center of power. In the world of Ottoman interpreters Panaiotis was indeed exceptional. Corresponding with some of the greatest scholars in Europe and renowned as a physician, he owned a library that was the envy of the statesman and bibliophile Jean-Baptiste Colbert in Paris. But he was also representative of a class, not to say of an aristocracy, whose members, mainly of Italian or Greek descent and frequently related to one another, played a leading role in the European consulates and embassies of the Ottoman empire. Formidable linguists, they had many functions, serving as diplomatic emissaries and negotiators, commercial agents, manuscript collectors, and guides to pilgrims and foreign visitors, and producing reports providing the European powers with information about Ottoman politics and society. They were defined as the "soul" of an embassy, and the Comte de Saint-Priest, who acted as French ambassador to the Porte for over twenty years in the late eighteenth century, said that the ambassador "is, and can only be, the first secretary of the first dragoman."

It is the interpreters in the service of Venice who are the subject of part of The Dragoman Renaissance. In contrast to the dragomans of other embassies, often members of the Armenian or Greek Orthodox communities, the Venetian interpreters were chiefly Roman Catholics from Pera. A few were Venetians, but these decreased appreciably in the course of the seventeenth century. One of the most important aspects of the Ottoman interpreters was the degree of their loyalty to their employers. Could they be trusted as the repositories of diplomatic secrets? Their...