Oriental Europe? The Black Sea Region in the Early Modern Period [2900-MK1-OEBS-KL] Semestr letni 2026/27
Wykład, grupa nr 1

• King, Charles, The Black Sea: A History. Oxford: OUP, 2004.

• Kármán, Gabor and Lovro Kunčević (eds.), The European Tributary States of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Leiden/Boston 2013.

• Kármán, Gabor (ed.), Tributaries and Peripheries of the Ottoman Empire. Leiden/Boston 2020.

• Królikowska-Jedlińska, Natalia, Law and Division of Power in the Crimean Khanate with Special Reference to the Reign of Murad Giray (1678-1683). Leiden/Boston 2019.

• Matthee, Rudi, Persia in Crisis. Safavid Decline and the Fall of Isfahan. London/NY 2012.

• Wasiucionek, Michał, The Ottomans and Eastern Europe: Borders and Political Patronage in the Early Modern World, London/NY 2019.

• Yaşar, Murat, The North Caucasus borderland. Between Muscovy and the Ottoman Empire, 1555-1605. Edinburgh 2022.

List of topics:

• General overview of political interactions in the region (major powers: Ottoman Empire, Russian Empire, Poland-Lithuania, Sweden , minor players: Circassian chieftainships, Zaporozhian and Don Cossacks, Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Nogai, Hungarians, Moldavians and Wallachians), other European actors);

• Human landscape of the Black Sea highlighening the ethnic and religious diversity;

• Networks connecting elite members of various state affiliations; cross-border patronage systems;

• Diverging „contact zones” between the inhabitants of the region; the role of different groups of intermediaries;

• Multilinguistic character of the local chancelleries;

• Porous borderlands in the Northern Black Sea region;

• Slavery as a global and regional phenomenon.

• The status on nobility in various Black Sea state as a regional phenomenon.

The lecture chronological scope is the Early Modern Period (15th-18th centuries).

The course will be conducted in the form of a lecture, with elements of discussion and analysis of short excerpts from source texts.

The final grade is determined on the basis of a written assessment conducted at the end of the lecture course. Students are required to provide written answers, of no more than 1,000 words each, to two questions selected by the lecturer.

The two questions are chosen from a list of no more than 16 questions provided to students during the first class of the semester. The questions correspond directly to the topics covered during the lectures. If, for any reason, a particular topic is not covered during the semester, the corresponding question will be removed from the list and will not be included in the final assessment.

This lecture explores the Early Modern history of the Black Sea as a “historical meso-region,” following scholars like Braudel, Stoianovich, and Özveren.