by DAVID CHAFFETZ
As a counterpoint to the rich literature of Europeans discovering Asia, readers have access to many accounts by Asians about Europe. These writings hold up a mirror in front of their authors, who, unconsciously, reveal much about their own societies. Mehmed Effendi, the first Turkish ambassador to the court of Louis XV wrote in his Paradise of the Infidels that France was ruled by women, revealing an Ottoman anxiety about the power of the harem. In The Narrative of the Residence of the Persian Princes, visitors from Iran remarked on the sobriety of Britain’s King William IV, compared to the glamor of the Peacock Throne. The Qajar princes wondered how long Iran could maintain its great power status vis-a-vis William’s nation of parsimonious shop keepers.
These works can be more profitably studied to learn about the cultural and political preoccupations of the writers rather than about their subjects. Prisoner of the Infidels, the memoirs of Osman A?a of Timi?oara (active 1671-1725), is one of the most famous of these “return visits”. While Osman’s story is more exciting than most, strangely, it offers little insight into 17th-century Ottoman thinking.
Osman falls prisoner to Austrian armies advancing after the Ottoman debacle at the 1683 Siege of Vienna. The teenager, from a military-landlord family in the ethnically mixed region of Banat (now in Romania), possesses great physical and psychological resilience. This saves his life on many occasions. Armies in this era treat not only their captives but even their own ranks with terrifying brutality. At one point Osman is left to die on a heap of manure. Meanwhile his guards abandon their own dysentery-sickened comrade in a shallow grave, from which he later escapes, only to be rewarded with prison. Many of Osman’s misadventures recall the most chilling chapters of Primo Levi’s If this is a Man. Osman’s attempts to escape across the border back into Ottoman lands remind one of the often fatal efforts of refugees to cross into Europe, where they are cheated by people smugglers, robbed, murdered or drowned in flimsy boats.
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