Thesis title: The Garibaldi Squad: Hungarian and Polish Converts in Constantinople (1849-1861)
Hungary’s plea for freedom was suppressed by military efforts of Tsarist Russia and the House of Austria in 1849, after which thousands of Hungarian, Polish, and Italian revolutionaries sought asylum in the Ottoman Empire. Since their arrival aroused vehement protests from Austria and Russia, the Sublime Porte induced the refugees to adopt the creed of Islam to alleviate diplomatic pressures. While some refugees, led by General Józef Bem, voluntarily converted to Islam, others, mostly the upper echelon of the movement, particularly Lajos Kossuth, bitterly declined the offer. Although the divergence within the émigrés would continue in the years to come, studies under the spell of state-centric great man narratives prefer giving voice to the leaders, little is known about the rest, such as the Muslim converts, despite their vast number. This selective depiction, however, eliminates contingent discursive variations while silencing the opponents. Worse still, convert presence in the nationalist narratives is stuck with the fruitless discussion of whether they sincerely converted in such a way to disregard possible transformations in their identities in time, whereby scholars equally push the converts into predetermined identity categories to consolidate self-fulfilling national narratives. Indeed, the refugees could never know that their immediate decision to convert would grow into a distinctive revolutionary culture with accumulated knowledge, skills, and experience on Ottoman soil to be transposed to the next generation of revolutionaries no later than the 1860s through informal networks partly embedded in formal structures. As language is the central vehicle of transmission of memory through generations, analyzing the political testimonies of the converts provides a glimpse into a quite heterodox transnational identity converging with wider regions yet diverging from particular genres. As a source of self-narration, the testimonies under oath of a young Austrian deserter of Hungarian origin who converted to Islam embody the traces of how the converts gradually developed a new patriotic discourse running against the mainstream Hungarian nationalist teleology upon adopting Islam, an unacceptable identity feature for the Pantheon of the Magyar nation. Jusztinián Károly took asylum in the Ottoman governor’s office around Bulgaria while escaping from Austrian agents in the spring of 1861 and confessed at the end of his investigation to being a member of a revolutionary committee, Garibaldi's Sword of Glory (Garibaldi'nin Şan Kılıncı), whose higher-ups were mainly composed of the Islamized Hungarian and Polish émigrés in Constantinople in close interactions with certain revolutionary groups in the Italian peninsula as Il Risorgimento was in the making. This micro-narrative hints at an alternative route and network for Italian revolutionaries to supply information, volunteers, and arms to the patriotic wars via the Mediterranean port cities, where Constantinople emerged as a regional base that connected wider geo-cultural regions, Hungary, Italy, and Türkiye in this context. Yet this route was not merely a passageway, the converts brought their ideological differences along with their changing identities since their identity was not fixed, which was rather the result of a negotiation process, according to the observations based on the methodological premises of the interpretative variant of the historical sociology. In that regard, their story simultaneously unearths an alternative political imagination of Hungarian (and Polish, to some extent) patriotism against the corresponding elites. More precisely, the converts formulated a counter-hegemony against the sheer Catholicism defended by Napoléon III, Emperor of the French, along with his allies Count Cavour, the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Sardinia, and Lajos Kossuth, the best-known Hungarian leader in exile, while aligning themselves with Garibaldini, whose ties with Sardinia were loosening, and adjusting their aims to the interests of the Porte, along with the more embracing political culture of the reform period of the empire, Ottomanism.