Diplo - Wissen : Habsburg Information Empire in the Sublime Porte and Asymmetrical Flow of Information from Constantinople to Vienna

Motivated by the existential threat of Ottoman expansion, Vienna required a constant flow of information from Constantinople as early as the first half of the sixteenth century. Following the establishment of a resident embassy in the Ottoman capital in 1547, Vienna soon built a dense network of diplomats, Sprachknaben, and other agents, enabling the Habsburg monarchy to develop a sustained system of information production on the Ottoman Empire. By the early eighteenth century, the original urge to achieve, through diplomacy, a near certainty about prospective political or military developments in the Ottoman Empire evolved into a full-fledged knowledge ecosystem, which I term the “Habsburg diplo-Wissen regime.” As this article demonstrates through three case studies of record-keeping and archival preservation from 1682, 1699–1700, and 1719–20, the distinctive quality of this diplo-Wissen regime lay in an asymmetrical flow of information from Constantinople to Vienna, which remained unmatched on the Ottoman side until the early nineteenth century.