Gabor Karman – författare

This volume is a survey of the changing role the confessional element played in that country''s foreign policy. Though its rulers consistently supported the Protestant cause during the Thirty Years'' War, this East Central European principality has traditionally been understood as a counterexample to the confessionalisation thesis. Here, the evolution of the foreign policy of Princes György Rákóczi I and György Rákóczi II is presented alongside the argumentation they used to justify their political action before and after the Peace of Westphalia. This dual focus makes it possible to identify the changes in the function of confessional cooperation in the princes'' policies, as it lost its primary position and was transformed from an end in itself into a complementary means of justification. Kármán charts Transylvania''s foreign policy by examining its princes'' interactions with three main sets of contacts: leaders in the Kingdom of Hungary, protagonists of the ongoing crisis in Poland-Lithuania, and members of Western European Protestant networks. Based on a large number of published and archival sources, the author offers a novel interpretation of mid-seventeenth-century Transylvanian foreign policy and its intellectual background.

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 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).