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Commentary: The Ottoman Menace in Post-Habsburg Historiography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 April 2009

Maria Todorova
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Extract

Threevery fine papers deal with the Ottoman menace as metaphor in what we now designate as the post-Habsburg period, that discreet time span between the closing decades of the nineteenth century and World War II, with some forays into the contemporary period. In all three papers, the Ottoman (or the Turk, as was the current usage) served as a foil for contemporary grievances. It is not really the “Ottoman menace” they are dealing with, but, accordingly, the communist, socialist, working-class, Jewish, Serbian, or other “menaces” that are additionally demonized by introducing the analogy to a well-known and popular symbol. In the apt observation of the Austrian playwright J. P. Ostland, quoted by Maureen Healy, this was the present packaged as the past. It needs to be stressed that even the phrase “Ottoman menace” is a neologism form the post-World War II period, when scholarly works insisted correctly on a distinction between “Ottoman” as an imperial designator and “Turk” as an ethnic and later a national one. Although this distinction is justified for analytical purposes, it introduces a tinge of anachronism that belies one of the primary goals of history writing.

Type
Forum: The Ottoman Menace
Information
Austrian History Yearbook , Volume 40 , April 2009 , pp. 141 - 147
Copyright
Copyright © Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota 2009

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References

1 Kostovicova, Denisa, “The Portrayal of the Yoke: The Ottomans and Their Rule in the Post-1990 Albanian-Language History Textbooks,” Internationale Schulbuchforschung 24, no. 3 (2002): 257–78Google Scholar; Liakova, Marina, “Das Bild des Osmanischen Reiches und der Türken (1396–1878) in ausgewählten Schulbüchern für Geschichte,” Internationale Schulbuchforschung 23, no. 2 (2001): 243–58Google Scholar; Koullapis, Loris, “The Presentation of the Period 1071–1923 in Greek and Turkish Textbooks between 1950–2000,” Internationale Schulbuchforschung 24, no. 3 (2002): 279–304Google Scholar; “Die Osmanenzeit in der Bulgarischen Geschichtsschreibung seit der Unabhängigkeit,” Die Staaten Südosteuropas und die Osmanen, ed. Hans Georg Majer (Munich, 1989), 127–61; Adanir, Fikret, “Balkan Historiography Related to the Ottoman Empire since 1945,” in Karpat, Kemal, ed., Ottoman Past and Today's Turkey (Leiden, 2000), 236–52Google Scholar.

2 Hence, in a rare case of ever using the phrase, we read in a French textbook published in 1965 that “jusqu'au XVIIe siècle, la menace turque n'est pas un vain mot,” implying that after the seventeenth century, it did become an empty word (Aubert, André, Labal, Paul, Durif, François, and Lohrer, Robert, Histoire. Le monde de 1328 à 1715 [Paris, 1965], 37Google Scholar).

3 Ride, pony, ride! The Turk is never far away! This is reminiscent of a story reported in the Guardian by an Iraqi journalist who overheard a mother in the streets of Baghdad reprimanding her naughty son: “Hush, or I'll tell Democracy!”

4 Alpargu, Mehmet and Öztürk, Ilyas, “Zur zweiten Belagerung Wiens in österreichischen und türkischen Geschichstsschulbüchern,” Internationale Schulbuchforschung 24, no. 3 (2002):306Google Scholar. Some Turkish textbooks even forwarded the thesis that the French provoked Kara Mustafa to lay siege on Vienna (Mumcu, Ahmet, Liseler için tarih [Istanbul, 1999], 130Google Scholar, quoted in Alpargu and Öztürk, op. cit., 311).

5 Chronik des Constanzer Concils, Michael Richard Buck, ed. (Hildesheim-New York, 1971).

6 Petkov, Kiril, Infidels, Turks, and Women: The South Slavs in the German Mind, ca. 1400–1600 (Frankfurt, 1997), 55–61Google Scholar.

7 Ibid., 58–59. For the most detailed and authoritative account, see Fine, John Jr., The Early Medieval Balkans, as well as his The Late Medieval Balkans (Ann Arbor, 1983 and 1987, respectively)Google Scholar.

8 Kiril Petkov, Infidels, Turks, and Women, 207.

9 Ibid., 221–22.

10 Malet, Albert, Le moyen age et le commencement des temps moderns (Paris, 1920), 347–57Google Scholar.