The Diplomacy of Small States at the Borderlands of the Ottoman Empire and Christian Europe
What can Ragusa, a Western Christian city state with old republican traditions, possibly have in common with the Eastern Orthodox elective principality of Wallachia and the Muslim hereditary khanate of the Crimea? These political units managed to keep, if not their full sovereignty, at least a relatively high level of autonomy on the frontiers between empires which belonged to different civilizations and international societies. The ERC-funded international research project “The Diplomacy of Small States in Early Modern South-eastern Europe” (CoG 101043451) started last year at the Research Center for the Humanities (Budapest) aims to highlight the common characteristics of Crimea, Moldavia and Wallachia, Ragusa, Transylvania, and Cossack Ukraine in the field of diplomacy, in spite of the apparent differences between them in terms of legal traditions, forms of rulership, political cultures, and political languages. The lecture will present the framework of the planned monograph as well as the first results of the research group.
Gábor Kármán is a research fellow at the Research Center for the Humanities (until recently of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences) Institute of History. He has published widely on the history of Transylvania in various contexts, on seventeenth-century confessional politics, and on the history of Ottoman tributary states. His recent works include A Seventeenth-Century Odyssey in East Central Europe: The Life of Jakab Harsányi Nagy (Brill, 2015) and Confession and Politics in the Principality of Transylvania, 1644–1657 (Göttingen, 2020).