Zur Legitimation der römisch-deutschen Kaiser zählte die Krönung in Rom durch den Papst, sowie die sakrale Funktion als Schutzherr der Christenheit, wie sie vordem auch die römischen Kaiser ausübten.
Als Schützer und Mehrer des islamischen Glaubens konnte der muslimische Sultan kaum sakrale christliche Funktionen übernehmen und "Kaiser der Rhomäer" - falls er sich wirklich so nannte - war er höchstens von eigenen Gnaden - vom "letzten Trojaner" ganz zu schweigen.
Ach Dieter, eigentlich hatten wir das alles ja schon einmal, aber mal ein Experiment für dich, auch wenn es dir sehr schwer fallen dürfte
: Nehme doch ein einziges mal zur Abwechslung eine osmanozentrische Position ein, um einen neuen Blickwinkel zu erfahren. Also nicht Paris, sondern Istanbul als Mittelpunkt der Welt. (Nähereres unten im Zitat)
Erstens waren die römischen Kaiser nicht immer Christen, zweitens waren auch die osmanischen Sultane die Schutzherren auch der "Christenheit", und zwar diesmal nicht nur der katholischen Variante, sondern aller, egal ob Monophysiten, Kopten, Protestanten, etc. Sie nahmen dann ja auch etliche Flüchtlinge (z.B. Protestanten) aus dem Machtbereich des anderen Kaisers und "Schutzherren der Christenheit" auf. Aber nicht nur das: Sie nahmen auch Flüchtlinge anderer Religionen auf, die bekannteste Episode waren die Juden Spaniens. Natürlich blieb seine Priorität als Schützer des Islams bestehen, aber eben nicht nur.
Wusstest du, dass noch 1798 der Patriarch von Jerusalem Anthimos die Christen vor einer Herausforderung der bestehenden Ordnung gewarnt hatte? Gott habe das Osmanische Reich geschaffen, um die Orthodoxie vor der Beschmutzung durch die Katholiken zu bewahren. (K. Kreiser: Der Osmanische Staat. S. 36.)
Die osmanische Herrschaft unter Süleyman I. (16. Jh.) über Griechenland führte sogar zwar nicht zu einem "Goldenen Zeitalter", aber immerhin zu einem "Silbernen". (
Der osmanische Staat 1300-1922: 1300 ... - Google Buchsuche )
Warum du nun zum zweiten Mal die (Selbst-)Bezeichnung Sultan Mehmet II. als Kaiser in Zweifel ziehst, verstehe ich nicht. Du hast doch auch diesen Thread hier ständig gelesen? Ich erzähle hier schon keinen Schmarrn. :S Aber wenn du willst, kannste es hier nochmals mit deinen eigenen Augen bestätigt finden, sogar ohne Fernleihe:
Medieval Islamic Civilization: An ... - Google Buchsuche
The Turks in World History - Google Buchsuche
Im folgendem Buch schreibt der Autor gar, dass 1922 der letzte osmanische römische Kaiser (meine Bemerkung: durch Heirat mit byzantinischen Prinzessinnen sogar per durchgehender Blutlinie) Istanbul mit einem britischen Kriegschiff ins Exil verließ:
The Ottoman State and Its Place in ... - Google Buchsuche
Falls du nun denkst, Kemal Karpat ist einer der türkischen Nationalisten, die es auch unter den türk. Historikern immer noch gibt, so lass dir versichern, dass dieser international hoch angesehen wird. Solche Nationalisten zitiere ich nämlich nicht.
Ich möchte dieses nun auch nicht überbewerten, die Sultane hatten was anderes zu tun, als ständig mit diesem Titel auf der Stirn rumzulaufen, war aber zumindest bis 1609 eine Klippe im diplomatischen Verkehr zwischen Ost und West.
Ich möchte auch gar nicht das Erbe der römischen Kaiserkrone durch die "Germanen" negieren.
Ich möchte nur den hier im Thread schon gemachten Konsens, dass es je nach Ebene mehrere Erben in unterschiedlicher Intensität gibt nicht auf einmal in Frage gestellt wird - mit den gleichen Argumenten wie zuvor.
Hier noch die Betrachtung des Gedankens des Erben Roms durch zwei Standardwerke der Osmanistik, nähere Angaben der beiden Bücher siehe Lit.-Tipps hier im Subforum Osm. Reich.:
Quataert, S. 4
"Indeed, Sultan Mehmet II, the conqueror of Constantinople,
explicitly laid down the claim that he was a
caesar, a latter-day
emperor, and his sixteenth-century successor, S¨uleyman the Magnificent,
sought Rome as the capstone of his career. Moreover, the Ottoman rulers,
having conquered the second Rome, for the next four hundred-plus years
honored its Roman founder in the name of the capital city. Until the
end of the empire, the city’s name – the city of Constantine – Konstantiniyye/
Constantinople – remained in the Ottomans’ official correspondence,
their coins, and on their postage stamps, after these came into use
in the nineteenth century. In some respects, the Ottomans followed certain
Byzantine administrative models. Like the Byzantines, the Ottomans
practiced a kind of caesaro-papism, the system in which the state controlled
the clergy."
Danach kommen im Text einige byzantinische Kontinuitäten, aber die hatten wir hier schon im Thread.
Goffman, S. 107 ff.:
"He [Sultan Süleyman] sought consciously and deliberately to vie with
the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope as imperial successor to the
Roman Empire as well as to link himself with the civilizations of Greece,
Persia, and Arabia.
S¨uleyman inherited these ambitions from his predecessors, most notably
from his great-grandfather Mehmed II, who with the conquest of
Constantinople in 1453 had
proclaimed himself heir to the Romans, [...]
One manner in which
he [Sultan Süleyman] competed with European rulers, for example, was by adapting the
crown and sceptre – regalia associated with Roman and Catholic imperial
traditions but symbols of authority that resonated not at all in the
Middle East or Central Asia. Indeed, during the same military campaign
into the Balkans in the early 1530s, S¨uleyman showed off a
magnificent
crown – designed and assembled by Venetian artisans – that markedly
united motifs from the
coronation crowns of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and the Pope Clement VII. Woodcut images of Charles V’s
coronation ceremony in 1529 were circulated throughout Europe, and
no Western observer could have missed the Ottoman sultan’s challenge
to the emperor’s universalist claims in this choice of headgear. Whereas, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Ottomans had
borrowed some of the structures of the European state, under S¨uleyman
they seem to have challenged the Catholic version of European history
itself – to reimagine it as a vision that harkened back to the pre-Christian
past and to fashion the Ottoman Empire rather than the papacy or the
Holy Roman Empire as the
rightful successor to Greek and Roman
civilizations. Even though this attempt to refashion European history
failed, the construct itself was not all that farfetched. Geographically it
certainly made sense, and even historically
what gave Germanic barbarians
(whom Charles V represented) any more right to carry the banner
of Rome than Turkic ones? Even ideologically, the Ottomans’ case was
strong: whereas Christianity claimed to have supplanted Judaism, followers
of Islam insisted that it was the only pure monotheism, that it
represented the Abrahamic faith, and that both Judaism and Christianity
were merely badly corrupted versions of Islam. Under S¨uleyman, then,
Ottoman authorities proposed to reinvent a Europe in the empire’s own
image, even as Protestantism was forcing western Europe to reinvent
itself."
Nun zum Gedankenexperiment, weg von der eurozentrischen Perspektive, weg von der herkömmlichen historiographischen Betrachtungsweise des Osm. Reiches:
Goffman, S. 4 ff.
Vorgeplänkel:
"The existence of such Eurocentric mythologizing in scholarship is
almost axiomatic.
5 Particularly in the last four centuries – the conventionally
labeled ages of European exploration, European expansion,
European imperialism, and European retreat – especially western Europe
has imagined itself politically, philosophically, and geographically at thecenter of the world. Europeans and neo-Europeans in America and elsewhere
have routinely judged art, literature, religion, statecraft, and technology
according to their own authorities and criteria.6 It remains to
this day a common conviction that few have measured up to these standards
– certainly not the Ottomans with their menacing and seemingly
“demonic religion” and “savage nomadic ways.” The academy no less
than governments and the press has reflected this condescension, a coalition
of points of view that has led to an almost irresistible temptation
to view the globe “downward” from Paris and London or more recently
Washington and New York. In this schema the Ottoman Empire joins the
ranks of the “others” – exotic, inexplicable, unchanging, and acted upon
by the powers of ruling authorities in Europe.
Such an attitude has been aptly designated as “orientalist” and has predisposed
some historians to consider not only the Ottoman Empire but
also other societies and ideas deemed “non-western” as peripheral to the
concert of European states and their cultural satellites. In the Ottoman
case as in others, scholars have tended to
emphasize those aspects of society
that are
distinct from Europe. They have stressed that the Ottomans’
ethnicity, language, religion, and even organizational aptitude differed
from the European standard. All too often, implicit in this fixation on
divergence is an assumption of inferiority, of uncivilized savagery (such
as the conventional if hackneyed argument that plunder was the exclusive
stimulus for Ottoman empire-building). As [Edward] Said has pointed out:
“Not for nothing did Islam come to symbolize terror, devastation, the
demonic, hordes of hated barbarians. For Europe, Islam was a lasting
trauma.” He perhaps too categorically specifies that “until the end of the
seventeenth century the ‘Ottoman peril’ lurked alongside Europe to represent
for the whole of Christian civilization a constant danger, and in
time European civilization incorporated that period and its lore, its great
events, figures, virtues, and vices, as something woven into the fabric of
life.” This author further argues that “like Walter Scott’s Saracens, the
European representation of the Muslim, Ottoman, or Arab was always
a way of controlling the redoubtable Orient, and to a certain extent the
same is true of the methods of contemporary learned Orientalists.”7
Certainly, as Said contends, many within European society grew to
dread the Ottoman giant to its east. Nevertheless, this attitude was not
fixed; nor did it ever become nearly as hegemonic as he suggests.8
Not only must one generally differentiate the attitudes of northern from
Mediterranean Europe, but those western Europeans who experienced
the Ottoman Empire first-hand often regarded it with respect, albeit
with some apprehension. Furthermore, political philosophers who read
these travelers’ thoughtful texts, such as Guillaume Postel and Jean
Bodin, helped nourish an esteem for many Ottoman institutions through
their own writings. Nevertheless, the proclivity of historians to envisage
the Empire as ignoble and antithetical to “refined” Western standards
undoubtedly has obscured the nuances of Ottoman civilization as well
as the many common elements between it and the rest of Europe.
Europe viewed from afar [Europa mal von Istanbul aus gesehen]
We are not compelled to view the world from such a western-European
perspective. The physical world has neither apex nor nadir, and it makes
just as much geographic sense, to take an equally arbitrary case, to study
the Far West (western Europe) from the viewpoint of the Near West
(the Ottoman Empire) as it does to foreground the successor states of
Christendom.
If we imagine Istanbul rather than Paris at the middle of
the world, Ottoman relations with the rest of Europe assume a startling
character.
Historians customarily describe theTurkoman incursions into Anatolia
and the Balkans as barbarian plunderings; however, one can just as easily
imagine them as the foundation for a new and liberating empire. The
fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans is typically portrayed as a catastrophe
for western civilization; however, one might as readily see in the
change of regime the rebirth of a splendid city long severed from its
life-giving hinterlands.9 The Ottoman conquest of the Balkans is often
imagined as a suspension of that region’s history, the immobilization of
a society imprisoned for several centuries in the “yoke” [Türken"joch"] of an exogenous
and ungodly conqueror. With a change of perspective, however,
one might regard the societal commingling and cultural blending that
accompanied the infusion of Ottoman civilization into Europe as an explosion
of vigor and creativity.
The Ottoman Empire conventionally has
been seen as a persecutor of Christians, but one might judge it instead
a haven for runaways from a fiercely intolerant Christian Europe. After all,
whereas in the Ottoman world there were thousands of renegades from
Christendom, one almost never discovers in Christian Europe converts
from Islam.10
Such an Ottomancentric perspective would reveal a relationship in
which the ideological walls that seemed to divide Christian Europe from
the Ottoman Empire instead become the framework to a rich and intricate
representation. This is not to deny that a chasm existed at the
ideological level; at least at the societal level, there never has been an
enduring rapprochement between the Christian and Islamic worldviews.
Nevertheless, a host of common interests always counterbalanced this
doctrinal abyss.
5 On which see Thierry Hentsch, Imagining the Middle East, trans. Fred A. Reed (Montreal,
1992), pp. 1–48 and passim. The very idea of Eurocentrism also may be anachronistic
for the early modern era, since Europe is a cultural and secular rather than a geographic
notion and neither Christian nor Muslim imagined a “European” culture before the
eighteenth century (see M. E. Yapp, “Europe in the Turkish mirror,” Past and Present
137[1992]: 134–55). There is, of course, a strong tendency to associate Europe with
Christianity.
"
Nochmals zur Verdeutlichung: Ich bin keineswegs der Meinung, die Osmanen wären nun die einzig "legitimen" Erben des Römischen / Byzantinischen Reiches, egal ob sie die Blutlinie durch die byzant. Prinzessinnen nun fortführten oder nicht, egal, ob sie sich nun selber als Kayser-i Rum nannten, oder in der Diplomatie auch so bezeichnet wurden, usw. Sie waren in einigen Bereichen Nachfolger, in anderen nicht, so wie andere Reiche auch, die einen Anspruch stellten. Es gab mehrere Erben. Mal mehr, mal minder. Aber das haten wir ja schon alles... :still: