Biography

Hasan Çolak is Associate Professor of Ottoman History at TOBB University of Economics and Technology in Ankara. He received his PhD from the University of Birmingham in 2013 and has had several research and teaching positions in Ankara, Athens, Leiden and Bucharest. He conducts research on the Greek Orthodox community as part of the Ottoman world, with a particular eye to its administrative, commercial, and intellectual aspects. He is the author of The Orthodox Church in the Early Modern Middle East (Turkish Historical Society, 2015) and, with Elif Bayraktar-Tellan, The Orthodox Church as an Ottoman Institution (Isis Press, 2019). He is a 2020 recipient of the Young Scientist Award of the Turkish Academy of Sciences.

Project Summary

This project revisits the intellectual contributions of the Ottomans in the Renaissance. Earlier scholarship that has incorporated non-European spaces into Renaissance studies has often relied on a comparative approach rather than examining synchronic and contextual connections. In doing so, it has tended to highlight difference and contributed to reproducing an orientalist discourse. This project proposes to overcome these problems through a little-explored path; it investigates the connections between Renaissance Italy and the Ottoman Empire through Ottoman Christian students who studied in Italy. In particular, it focuses on the Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem Chrysanthos Notaras (1655/60-1730), who received his education in the Ottoman Empire and the University of Padua (1697-1700). He became one of the most prominent figures in the formation, circulation and institutionalization of knowledge in the Ottoman world and is an indication of the interconnected Ottoman and Italian worlds of learning during the late Renaissance.