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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 March 2021
The present short study publishes five hitherto unknown letters written by the Ottoman historian Paul Wittek (1894–1978) to the American Middle Eastern historian Sydney Nettleton Fisher (1906–87). Fisher was a graduate student of Wittek for a few months in 1938; the letters were written during two short periods (1938–9 and 1946–9), when Wittek was attached firstly to the Institut de Philologie et d'Histoire Orientales et Slaves at the Université Libre, Brussels, and secondly, from 1948 onwards, to the University of London. In the intervening years (1940–6), Wittek was a political refugee twice over in England. The letters manifest the development of a close friendship between Wittek and Fisher who, as two supplementary letters written to him by the British Arabist and Islamic scholar H. A. R. Gibb show, was also active during the war years in attempting—unsuccesfully—to facilitate Wittek's acceptance in the U.S.A. as a political refugee.
1 Binbaş, İlker Evrim, ‘Paul Wittek: A Man in Dark Times’, preface to Wittek, Paul, The Rise of the Ottoman Empire. Studies in the history of Turkey, thirteenth-fifteenth centuries, (ed.) Heywood, Colin (London, 2012), p. xvGoogle Scholar.
2 Ibid., p. xvi, n. 30, citing Heywood, ‘Spectrality, “Presence” and the Ottoman Past: Paul Wittek's Rûmtürkische Studien and other Ghosts in the Machine’, Osmanlı’nın İzinde: Prof. Dr. Mehmet İpşirli Armağanı, (ed.) Feridun M. Emecen et al., 2 vols. (Istanbul, 2013), vol. II, pp. 57–78.
3 See, in particular, my own contributions to aspects of the subject: (a) ‘“Boundless Dreams of the Levant”: Paul Wittek, the George-Kreis, and the Writing of Ottoman History’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 121, 1 (1989), pp. 32–50 [completed 1984]; (b) ‘Wittek and the Austrian tradition’, JRAS 2nd Series, 1988, pp. 7–25; (c) ‘A Subterranean History: Paul Wittek (1894–1978) and the Early Ottoman State’, Die Welt des Islams xxxviii (1998), pp. 386–405; (d) ‘Pioneers in Medieval Middle Eastern Studies: Paul Wittek (1894–1978)’, Al-Usûr al-Wusta: The Bulletin of Middle East Medievalists xvii, 2 (Oct. 2005), pp 36–40. Items (a) – (c) reprinted in Writing Ottoman History: Documents and interpretations (Aldershot, 2002); item (d) reprinted in Ottomanica and Meta-Ottomanica: Studies in and around Ottoman History, 13th – 18th centuries (Istanbul, 2013), pp. 9–18. See also, for some pertinent observations, Lindner, Rudi Paul, ‘Wittek and Köprülü’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 26, 1–2 (Jan.-April 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar [= The Mongols and Post-Mongol Asia: Studies in Honour of David O. Morgan], pp. 333–340, and cf. for a broader overview of certain aspects of the ‘hidden’ Wittek, Sabine Mangold-Will and Korinna Schönharl, ‘Orientfaszination im George-Kreis’, in “Kreis auf Kreisen”: Der George-Kreis im Kontext deutscher und europäischer Gemeinschaftbildung, (eds.) Bruno Pieger and Bertram Schefold (Hildesheim, 2016), pp. 591–609.
4 For the details, see Heywood, ‘Wittek and the Austrian Tradition’, p. 11. By the end of 1938, following the Anschluss, or absorption of the Austrian state into the Third Reich, Wittek had become stateless, and his students—with the exception of one, Suzanne de Jongh, who became his second wife—had “deserted” him (See Letter 2, below).
5 All the hitherto unpublished Wittek documents published or referred to below are in the possession of the present author. I am grateful to Professor Alan Fisher for his permission to make use of them.
6 One word cancelled and illegible.
7 Arthur Salz (Staab, Bohemia,1881 – Worthington, Ohio, 1963), political economist and an early member of the George-Kreis. His wife, Sophie ‘Soscha’ Salz, was a sister of the historian Ernst Kantorowicz. Salz taught at Heidelberg Unversity until 1933, then emigrated to the United States, where he pursued a career at Ohio State University until his retirement. In the First World War Salz had served as a German officer in Turkey, where he encountered Wittek, then a young Austrian artillery officer, described by Salz as “poet, historian, George-connoisseur and -devotee. He ennobles our army”. Salz subsequently served on the staff of the Young Turk leader and army commander Djemal (Cemal) Pasha and was complicit in Djemal Pasha's post-war activities in Germany. On Arthur Salz, see Lothar Helbing and Claus Victor Bock, Stefan George: Dokumente seiner Wirkung (Amsterdam, 1974), pp. 214–220, and on Salz and Wittek, see Heywood, ‘“Boundless dreams of the Levant”’, pp. 35–39. I have not so far been able to discover how well, if at all, Sydney Fisher knew Salz as a colleague at OSU: Salz was in a different department and there was a quarter of a century difference between them in age.
8 One word inserted above the line.
9 Mortimer Graves was an administrative secretary at the American Council of Learned Societies, headquartered in Washington, D.C. (see below).
10 Edgar J. Fisher to Sydney N. Fisher, New York, 6 January 1941. One page, typescript, signed.
11 Wittek had been temporarily interned by the British authorities in the Isle of Man. The exact chronology of his detention and eventual release remains unclear: by February 1941 he was already busy collecting Turkish material in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and elsewhere for an entirely new field of study, the earliest Anglo-Ottoman diplomatic relations. For details, see Heywood, ‘Spectrality, “Presence” and the Ottoman past’, p. 65, n. 29, and n. 20 below.
12 H. A. R. Gibb to Fisher, Oxford, 2 August 1940. One page, holograph and signed.
13 H. A. R. Gibb to the same, Oxford, 12 May 1941. Two pages, holograph and signed.
14 Gibb added a touching final paragraph to his letter: “My son and I have pleasant memories of the family as we knew them in their apartment, and my thoughts and prayers are often with those who had to stay behind”.
15 ‘Civil Strife in the Ottoman Empire, 1481–1503’, Journal of Modern History xiii (1941), pp. 449–466.
16 “I have not been a subscriber to the Journal of Modern History for several years, and in consequence I missed the article. I shall read it with the greatest interest.” Mortimer Graves to Sydney N. Fisher, Washington, D.C., 13 January 1942. One page, typescript, signed.
17 Ibid.
18 Henri Grégoire (1881–1964), ‘grande studioso e dispotico organizzatore de studi’, eminent and prolific Byzantine scholar, the effective founder of modern Byzantine studies in Belgium, founder (1924) and editor of (inter alia) the leading Byzantine journal Byzantion. For much of his career he presided over the Institut de Philologie et d'Histoire Orientale et Slave at the Université Libre in Brussels, where in 1934 he gave hospitality and refuge to Wittek after the latter's departure from the German Archaeological Institute at Ankara. Ihor Ševčenko (in his appreciative essay ‘Henri Grégoire’, Harvard Ukrainian Studies XV, 1–2 (June 1991), p. 242) observed that Grégoire “had an uncanny talent … for helping people”, adding “[l]et the Nazis and pre-World war II history make homeless men of the calibre of Ernst Stein, Ernst Honigmann, and Paul Wittek, and Grégoire would give them shelter in his Salle byzantine”. See also André Grabar, ‘Éloge funèbre de M. Henri Grégoire’, Comptes rendus des séances de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 108e année, 2 (1964), pp. 288–291.
19 I.e., in the U.S., more specifically in New York, where Grégoire's institute and the editorial offices of Byzantion were based for the duration of the war and for a few years afterwards.
20 Jacques Pirenne (1891–1972), Belgian historian, jurisconsult and Egyptologist, author of a seven-volume study of Les Grands courants de l'histoire universelle (Neuchatel, 1947–56); he was a son of the leading Belgian historian and medievalist Henri Pirenne (1862–1935). See my ‘Introduction: A Critical Essay’ to the 2012 reissue of Wittek's Rise of the Ottoman Empire, pp. 18–20, for a discussion of whether, and to what extent, Wittek was influenced by Henri Pirenne – in Wittek's 1938 article ‘Le Sultan de Rûm’, published in Grégoire's Bulletin de l'Institut de Philologie et d'Histoire Orientales et Slaves VI, pp. 361–90 (English translation in Rise of the Ottoman Empire, pp. 73–96) he cites (p. 1, n. 1), p. 1, n. 1 of Pirenne's posthumous Mahomet et Charlemagne (1937), for Pirenne's definition of the Romania of Late Antiquity. Was this no more than a coincidence—or a silent act of homage?
21 Suzanne de Jonghe, Wittek's second wife. Printed marriage announcement, 15 June 1938 (Heywood collection).
22 See above, n. 11.
23 Turkish Reader, with Vocabulary (London, 1945).
24 ‘The Turkish Documents in Hakluyt's “Voyages”’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research XIX, 57 (1941–2; issued Jan. 1944), pp. 121–139. Wittek noted modestly (p. 121, n. 1) of this pioneering article, “The British Museum and Public Record Office MSS. being at present inaccessible, some questions of detail have had to be left open”.
25 One word inserted above the line with slash.
26 This address, which was convenient for the Northern Line, was where Wittek lived during his first years in London. The Northern Line would have brought him to Goodge Street station, situated close to SOAS. He later moved further out, to an address in Eastcote, near Pinner, Middx., served by the Metropolitan Line, which would have brought him to Euston Square station, a slightly longer walk to SOAS.
27 The move of the other members of Wittek's family to London never took place; they remained in Brussels.
28 ‘Notes sur la tughra ottomane’, I, Byzantion xviii (1948), pp. 311–334. Part II appeared in Byzantion xx (1950), pp. 267–293.
29 La Monte's ‘History of the Crusades’ refers to what became the multi-volume Pennsylvania History of the Crusades, which at this point in 1948 was still at a stage of advanced preparation. John L. Lamonte (1902–49) was a prolific and highly respected American historian of the Crusades, deeply involved as lead editor in the planning of the Pennsylvania History. La Monte died, suddenly and prematurely, in October 1949. The first (1955) and subsequent volumes of the Pennsylvania History of the Crusades appeared under the general editorship of Kenneth M. Setton. For an appreciation of John L. La Monte, see Setton's ‘Foreword’ to volume I of the series, p. xvii. Wittek's planned contribution presumably had been intended for volume III, The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries. This was finally published in 1975, after an interval of almost thirty years (ed. Harry W. Hazard, Madison, University of Wisconsin), but Wittek's contribution did not appear. Was it never written, or was it rejected?—another mystery comparable to that surrounding Wittek's lost Rum-türkische Studien. Incomprehensibly there is no chapter in volume III on the fourteenth and fifteenth-century Ottoman state—which should have dealt with, e.g., the Crusades of Nicopolis and Varna, but the editor of volume III managed to find space in the volume for two chapters on Rhodes, two on the Morea and two on Cyprus.
30 Fisher's monograph appeared late in 1948 or at the beginning of 1949. See Letter 5, below (written in Feb. 1949), in which Wittek enthusiastically acknowledges its receipt.
31 Two words ‘studied’ and ‘with’ are inserted above the line.
32 Lewis V. Thomas (1914–65) also died before his time. His A Study of Na‘imâ was edited by Norman Itzkowitz from the author's PhD thesis, Brussels, 1949, and published posthumously (New York, 1972).
33 One word inserted above the line with slash.
34 See above, n. 17.
35 Wittek, P. and Lemerle, P., ‘Recherches sur l'histoire et le statut des monastères athonites sous la domination turque. I : Trois documents du monastère de Kutlumus’, Archives d'Histoire du Droit Oriental III (Bruxelles, 1948), pp. 411–472Google Scholar.
36 Wittek had already employed the expression ‘dear friend’ in the subscription to Letter 4.
37 Wittek, ‘The taking of Aydos Castle: A Ghazi legend and its transformation’, Arabic and Islamic Studies in honor of Hamilton A. R. Gibb, (ed.) G. Makdisi, (Leiden, 1965, pp. 662–672; Binbaş, ‘A Man in Dark Times’, pp. xi-xii.
38 Wittek, The Taking of Aydos Castle’, p. 672. Gibb, as I first pointed out many years ago, had played a major role in securing Wittek as the University of London Special University Lecturer in 1936–7, from which a path led, with many detours and false turnings, to Wittek's appointment in 1948 to the London Chair of Turkish (Binbaş, ‘A Man in Dark Times’, pp. xiii, xvi; cf. my earlier studies cited there in footnotes 16 and 30). As the letters from Gibb to Sydney Fisher, cited above, clearly demonstrate, Gibb was also active in the midst of war duties in Wittek's cause.