This work was supported by the strategic grant POSDRU/89/1.5/S/62259, Project ‘Applied social, human and political sciences. My special thanks for the English translation of this study are addressed to Angela Jianu. The present analysis looks at the narratives presented by the claimants as well as at the dossiers built during court hearings in order to identify the arguments invoked for or against separation and divorce.1 1. On the other hand, it also manifested its reserve in some divorce cases.
In spite of the frequently reiterated claim that the wedding is an inviolable sacrament, in practice the Church, which had jurisdiction over family conflicts, allowed a growing number of couples to embark upon the arduous road to separation.
discord, divorce is the one which best reflects what was at stake both for the social agents and for the Church. In the absence of parish registers and of narratives of the self or other literary documents from the period, the judicial archives maintained by the ecclesiastical courts remain a unique source for the study of domestic conflict in the period. The present study explores the importance of judicial archives for the study of the family in the eighteenth century. In doing so, it also rewrites the place of the Mavrocordatos family in the story of the Enlightenment in the Ottoman Empire. Through an analysis of the text - which includes reestablishing its authorship and date of composition - the article examines the Phanariots’ liminal position in Ottoman governance, especially in the newly ascendant imperial bureaucracy, through the prism of language. The dialogues did not aim to teach the formal grammar of Turkish but to demonstrate the power of speech by familiarizing the reader with the eloquent and witty repartee of Ottoman bureaucrats. Why were they the rare exception and what does their story reveal about the ways in which power and language were intertwined in the early modern Ottoman Empire? The implicit power relations embedded in the Turkish language are rendered visible in a unique text written in 1731 in which Constantine Mavrocordatos, a Phanariot prince, attempted to school his younger brother in Turkish through a series of twelve, play-like dialogues.
The Phanariots - Grecophone Christian elites who ruled the Danubian principalities in the eighteenth century - were the only non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire who claimed power by virtue of their command of the Turkish language.
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