Venetian Vagabonds And Furious Frenchmen: Nationalist And Cosmopolitan Impulses Among Europeans In Galata

Abstract

In the eighteenth century the embassies and trading houses of France, England, Venice, and other European powers shared space on the steep hills of Galata and Pera, separated only by the waters of the Golden Horn from Istanbul, capital of the Ottoman Empire. Drawn together by its location deep within Islamic lands, this mixed community of western Christians, living side by side with Muslim, Jewish, and Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire, might seem to be the perfec testing ground for the birth of an international, cosmopolitan society. Instead it was a fractious community, where conflict often occurred between individuals from different nations.