This conference examined the Ottoman frontier under four main headings: the fluid frontier, the fixed frontier, the commercial frontier and the cultural frontier.

17-20 March 1999

The Fluid Frontier

  • Chair: Colin Heywood (SOAS)
  • Colin Imber (Manchester), The vocabulary of frontiers
  • Keith Hopwood (Lampeter), The wild west: the frontier with Byzantium in the 12th and early 13th centuries
  • Charles Melville (Cambridge), The western border of Mongol Anatolia
  • Nicolas Vatin (CNRS, Paris), Un exemple de relations frontalières: l’Empire ottoman et l’Ordre de Saint-Jean-de-Jérusalem à Rhodes entre 1480 et 1522.

The Cultural Frontier

  • Chair: Albert Lavigne (Ambassade de France)
  • Dina Rhiz Khoury (Washington, DC), Between Ottomans, Wahhabis and Safavids/Qajars: frontier intellectuals in Iraqi cities.
  • Kate Bennison (Cambridge), The impact of the Ottoman circle of equity upon the Sharifian Sultanate of Morocco.
  • Amy Singer (Tel Aviv), Ottoman Jerusalem: an urban frontier.

The Commercial Frontier

  • Chair: Kate Fleet (Cambridge)
  • Molly Greene (Princeton), Redrawing religious boundaries in Mediterranean commerce.
  • Elena Frangakis-Syrett (CUNY), Merchants or agents: Europeans and Ottomans in the Levant in the 18th century.
  • Eugene Rogan (Oxford), Nablusi merchants at the Transjordan frontier.
  • Svetla Ianeva (Sofia), Des voies de la transmission de nouveau savoir-faire artisanal à travers les frontières ottomanes au XIXe siècle (avec une référence spéciale à la partie centrale des Balkans).

The Fixed Frontier

  • Chairs: Rossitsa Gradeva (Sofia), Gábor Ágoston (Washington, DC), Molly Greene (Princeton), Colin Heywood (SOAS, London)
  • Gábor Ágoston (Washington, DC), The Habsburg-Ottoman frontier in Hungary. 
  • Jan Schmidt (Leiden), The Bosnian border in Napoleonic times.
  • Rossitsa Gradeva (Sofia), Osman Pazvantoglu’s Christian associates and subjects.
  • Svetlana Ivanova (Sofia), The Vidin Varosh and kanun-i serhad.
  • Victor Ostapchuk (Kiev), Viewing the Ottoman Black Sea frontier: the Ottoman and modern perspectives.
  • Antonis Anastasopoulos (Crete), Kaza borders as limits of authority and responsibility in 18th century Ottoman practice.
  • Eugenia Kermeli (Bilkent, Ankara), Some questions on the land system introduced in Crete by the Ottomans.
  • Salih Özbaran (Cambrige), Ottoman military and fiscal organization on the southern frontier: two mevacib registers of Basra province in the 16th century.
  • Rhoads Murphey (Birmingham), 17th-century internal Ottoman boundaries.
  • Daniel Panzac (Aix-en-Provence), Le cordon sanitaire: une matérialisation des frontières ottomanes aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles.