From Brandenburg to the Ottomans: Names, Languages, and Identities in Banat at the End of the Middle Ages

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Abstract (may include machine translation)

The present paper intends to question the belief that personal names attested in historical records can serve as a straightforward basis for reconstructing the ethnic / confessional / linguistic identity of their bearers. This uncritical (and demonstrably false) assumption, which often informs a type of historiographic discourse subservient to various nationalist agendas, is instrumental in creating visions of the past purged of inconvenient alterities. I intend to argue that, by construing an element of linguistic communication as an indexed expression of identity viewed from an essentialist perspective, historians who simplistically equate name and identity ignore (on purpose and often with ill intent) the fact that links between language and identity are constructed intersubjectively and context-contingently and emerge in the context of speech communities that, in the past as today, were fluid and negotiable. Furthermore, such simplistic modern interpretations ignore the crucial distinction between assigned and assumed identity. To illustrate these points, I will discuss (top)onomastic material from three districts of north-eastern Banat attested in administrative documents produced throughout the sixteenth century. These include, on one hand, a fiscal conscription of the iobagiones living on the domanin of the castle of Hunyadvár / Hunedoara compiled ca. 1510 for the benefit of its new owner, Margrave George of Brandenburg-Ansbach and, on the other, the relevant sections of fiscal conscriptions (taḥrīr / mufaṣṣal defterleri) produced in 1579 by the Ottoman authorities after the incorporation of the area in the eyalet of Tımışvār / Timișoara. The (top)onomastic data contained in these sources, which overlap to some extent, strongly suggests that the population of the area lived in a multi-ethnic and plurilingual milieu. Reconstructing the ethnic / linguistic identities of the attested individuals should keep into account not just the possibility that they could operate with multiple identities, negotiated and performed depending on the pragmatic and symbolic motivations provided by different contexts, but also the high probability that at least some of these identities could be accidentaly assigned to them by the individuals responsible for the production of the written texts through which the names of people and places in the area have reached us.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationNetworks and Society: A Historical Perspective from Ancient World to the Present
StatePublished - 17 Mar 2022

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