JaNet

The project “JaNet: Janissaries in Ottoman Port-Cities: Muslim Financial and Political Networks in the Early Modern Mediterranean,” funded by the European Research Council under the program Starting Grant 2019, aspires to create an innovative entanglement of military, social, political, and economic history which has the potential to change our current perception of the early modern Mediterranean and the role of Islam in it. JaNet investigates the economic and sociopolitical role of the Janissaries in the 18th and early 19th centuries through their examination as a complex of interconnected networks in the Mediterranean. By studying the Janissary corps, the project brings forward a radically new historical analysis concerning, on the one hand, the role of Muslims in the Ottoman and wider Mediterranean commercial economy – a role largely ignored by the bibliography – and, on the other, the processes that led to the creation of diasporas and the dissemination of people and ideas among various Muslim communities in the area.

JaNet’s research team consists of Yannis Spyropoulos (Institute for Mediterranean Studies/FORTH, Rethymno, Greece), as Principal Investigator, Abdulmennan Mehmet Altıntaş (Institute for Mediterranean Studies/FORTH, Rethymno, Greece), Yahya Araz (Dokuz Eylül University, Izmir, Turkey), İrfan Kokdaş (Kâtip Çelebi University, Izmir, Turkey), Demetris Papastamatiou (Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece), Mehmet Mert Sunar (Medeniyet University, Istanbul, Turkey), Anna Sydorenko, (Institute for Mediterranean Studies/FORTH, Rethymno, Greece), Aysel Yıldız (Institute for Mediterranean Studies/FORTH, Rethymno, Greece), as well as PhD candidates, MA students and technical staff. The project’s Advisory Committee consists of Antonis Anastasopoulos (University of Crete/FORTH, Rethymno, Greece), Virginia Aksan (McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada), Linda Darling (University of Arizona, Tucson, United States), Jane Hathaway (Ohio State University, Columbus, United States), and Baki Tezcan (University of California, Davis, United States). JaNet is hosted at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies of the Foundation of Research and Technology – Hellas (IMS/FORTH), situated in Rethymno, Greece, with the collaboration of Istanbul Medeniyet University and Izmir Kâtip Çelebi University (Beneficiary Institutions).