ŞARL CÜSTİNYANİ: OSMANLI TOPRAKLARINDA CASUSLUK YAPAN BİR MACAR MÜHTEDİSİNİN HATIRALARI

Thanks to some interrogation protocols located in the Ottoman Archives of the Prime Ministry (BOA), we have the opportunity to reconstruct the adventures of a young lieutenant of Hungarian origin who deserted from the Habsburg army. Subsequent to a series of travels around the Italian peninsula, Charles Justinian ended up in Istanbul where he would finally take the name Hüseyin by conversion. Later in the spring of 1861, while on his way to Belgrade for undercover work, he took refuge in the Ottoman governor’s office in Ruse by running away from the Austrian officials trying to capture him. It is safe to say that this historical narrative, which brings together a wide range of geo-cultural domains such as Central Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Near East, allows us to reconsider some phenomena of the nineteenth century apart from the Eurocentric understanding. To illustrate, this story provides striking leads about the transnational contacts of the exile community established in Istanbul by the Hungarian, Polish and Italian revolutionaries who took refuge in the Ottoman Empire as a result of the 1848 revolutions that shook Europe. In short, with reference to a narrative centered around a Hungarian revolutionary this study aims to show that informal networks of the liberal-revolutionary societies of the nineteenth century, which had a crucial place in the formation of today's Europe, also comprise the Ottoman territories, therefore, the memory of non-Western societies cannot be disregarded in the modern European historiography. The potential for the Ottoman archival documents in this sense will be specifically emphasized.