In A Seventeenth-Century Odyssey Gábor Kármán reconstructs the life story of a lesser-known Hungarian orientalist, Jakab Harsányi Nagy. The discussion of his activities as a school teacher in Transylvania, as a diplomat and interpreter at the Sublime Porte, as a secretary of a Moldavian voivode in exile, as well as a court councillor of Friedrich Wilhelm, the Great Elector of Brandenburg not only sheds light upon the extraordinarily versatile career of this individual, but also on the variety of circles in which he lived. Gábor Kármán also gives the first historical analysis of Harsányi’s contribution to Turkish studies, the Colloquia Familiaria Turcico-latina (1672).

Anticorruption in History is a timely and urgent book: corruption is widely seen today as a major problem we face as a global society, undermining trust in government and financial institutions, economic efficiency, the principle of equality before the law and human wellbeing in general. Corruption, in short, is a major hurdle on the "path to Denmark" a feted blueprint for stable and successful statebuilding. The resonance of this view explains why efforts to promote anticorruption policies have proliferated in recent years. But while the subject of corruption and anticorruption has captured the attention of politicians, scholars, NGOs and the global media, scant attention has been paid to the link between corruption and the change of anticorruption policies over time and place, with the attendant diversity in how to define, identify and address corruption. Economists, political scientists and policy-makers in particular have been generally content with tracing the differences between low-corruption and high-corruption countries in the present and enshrining them in all manner of rankings and indices. The long-term trends & social, political, economic, cultural; potentially undergirding the position of various countries plays a very small role. Such a historical approach could help explain major moments of change in the past as well as reasons for the success and failure of specific anticorruption policies and their relation to a country's image (of itself or as construed from outside) as being more or less corrupt. It is precisely this scholarly lacuna that the present volume intends to begin to fill. The book addresses a wide range of historical contexts: Ancient Greece and Rome, Medieval Eurasia, Italy, France, Great Britain and Portugal as well as studies on anticorruption in the Early Modern and Modern era in Romania, the Ottoman Empire, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and the former German Democratic Republic.

European history has rarely met changes as rapid, dense and radical as those that have taken place in the regions of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire over the past hundred years. This cultural area has experienced political conflicts, the setting and dissolution of borders, and the construction of similarities, differences, and ever-new identities. Being tied to text, vocal music genres reflect such changes especially strongly. Operas and operettas, oratorios and cantatas, choir music, folksongs, and pop and rock hits have all helped to establish identities in many ways, connecting people on national, ethnical, local or social levels. The contributions to this volume represent the proceedings of the Annual Congress of the Austrian Society for Musicology (Österreichische Gesellschaft für Musikwissenschaft – ÖGMw) in 2014. They open multiple perspectives on the identity-relevant implications of every kind of vocal music from the last days of the Habsburg Empire to the present day. As such, the book places the extensively discussed concept of Nationalism in music in the wider context of identity building.

The European Tributary States of the Ottoman Empire is the first comprehensive overview of the empire’s relationship to its various European tributaries, Moldavia, Wallachia, Transylvania, Ragusa, the Crimean Khanate and the Cossack Hetmanate. The volume focuses on three fundamental aspects of the empire’s relationship with these polities: the various legal frameworks which determined their positions within the imperial system, the diplomatic contacts through which they sought to influence the imperial center, and the military cooperation between them and the Porte. Bringing together studies by eminent experts and presenting results of several less-known historiographical traditions, this volume contributes significantly to a deeper understanding of Ottoman power at the peripheries of the empire.

In the seventeenth century, previously peaceful relations between the Ottoman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth deteriorated into a series of military confrontations over the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. Although scholars have generally interpreted this rivalry in terms of conflicting geopolitical interests, this state-centred approach ignores one of the most important developments of the period: the devolution of power away from rulers and formal institutions towards political factions. Drawing on Ottoman, Polish and Romanian sources, The Ottomans and Eastern Europe explores the complex interplay between regional politics and the rise of factionalism, focusing on cross-border patronage between Ottoman, Polish-Lithuanian and Moldavian elites. By approaching the history of the region from a factional, rather than state-centred perspective, this book investigates an alternative geography of power, defined by personal interactions that straddled religious, political and social boundaries between the elites. Wasiucionek reveals the way in which these interactions not only shaped the Ottoman-Polish rivalry over Moldavia, but also influenced political culture throughout the region. Published in Association with the British Institute at Ankara.