From a Legal Proof to a Historical Fact: Trajectories of an Ottoman Document in a Franciscan Monastery, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century

Abstract

While scholarship on the Ottoman Empire has explored its rich archives with great enthusiasm, there has been little work on the circulation of documents among the Empire's subjects. This paper explores the archive of a Franciscan monastery in Ottoman Bosnia by following a single document in Ottoman Turkish from its issuance in the mid-sixteenth century to its interpretation within a historical monograph in the early twentieth. I address the ways in which the document circulated beyond the imperial offices and how the Franciscans transformed it through strategies including storing, marking, interpreting, cataloging, and silencing. The paper sheds light on the convergence between the deployment of the Ottoman documents and the rise of the Franciscan authority, indicating how Franciscan usage of the archive produced useful narratives beyond the confines and control of the Empire.