The general background of the study

Five fundamental developments shaped the history of Europe on the verge of the early modern period: the advent of nation states, the inclusion of overseas territories, the formation of competing religious creeds, the further advance and specialization of scientific disciplines and the development of plurilingual elites within a new, multilingual Europe. The processes were inextricably interwoven. Though Latin continued until the eighteenth century and beyond as the idiom of the scientific and educated world, and, of course, as the idiom of the Catholic part of Christianity, its status as an international language gradually dwindled. It was questioned by politicians, philosophers, but also by the newly established Protestant churches, as it had been questioned before, along the eastern European and Byzantine fringe, and along the western borders of the Ottoman Empire, giving rise, ever since the thirteenth century, to linguistic alternatives and to a new profession in the context of trade and missionary work: the profession of cultural mediator. The central European terms for these interpreters and translators, Tolk, Tulmatsch (Dolmetscher in modern German) or Dragoman are not of Latin origin, as they are in the western European languages, but of Slavonic, Hungarian and Turkish descent: The middle High German tolmetsche or tulmetsche is a loanword from the Ottoman Turkish tolmaç.