Ottoman Mobility and Habsburg–Ottoman Contacts across the Mediterranean and Beyond (1772–1826)

This book offers a new history of Ottoman mobility and Habsburg–Ottoman interaction in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Drawing on three previously underutilized Habsburg registers compiled between 1823 and 1825, alongside Ottoman, Austrian, Italian, and European archival sources, it reconstructs the movement of people, goods, and commercial practices across the Balkans, the Adriatic, and Central Europe. Drawing on entangled history and mobility studies, the book approaches the Habsburg–Ottoman frontier not as a fixed boundary but as a regulated zone of circulation. Quarantine, passports, customs, registration, postal routes, and commercial institutions both constrained and facilitated mobility, showing how imperial borders reorganized rather than simply restricted the movement of people, goods, and information. Particular attention is given to Muslim Ottoman subjects, whose presence remains underrepresented in studies of Ottoman Europe, alongside Greek, Jewish, Armenian, Catholic, and other communities. Rather than treating these groups solely through separate diaspora histories, the book traces their overlapping commercial and urban networks and the interactions generated by trade, travel, residence, and administrative encounters. The book further reconsiders the geography of Ottoman–European commerce through an interconnected network linking Trieste, Vienna, Leipzig, Genoa, Venice, Ancona, Dubrovnik, Livorno, Belgrade, Zemun, Izmir, and Istanbul. Trieste emerges as a crucial maritime, commercial, administrative, and transit hub connecting Ottoman mobility with Habsburg and wider European networks. By combining quantitative analysis of mobility registers with qualitative archival research, the book places mobility, urban networks, and regulated circulation at the center of Ottoman–European history, offering a transimperial perspective on the connections linking the Ottoman and Habsburg worlds.