The Manases: an influential Catholic Armenian family in the service of the Ottoman court in the 18th and 19th centuries

This dissertation aims to explore the lives, activities, experiences, and the social impact of the members of the virtually unstudied Manas family who operated in the fields of art, diplomacy, and finance, and to analyze the ramifications of the family’s controversial Catholic identity in the 18th-and 19th-century Ottoman context, by tracking the individual stories of the Manases as social and cultural actors, and knitting them together with the lived realities of other members in order to situate them both individually and cumulatively into the social and political matrices of the period. In order to decipher the motivations and aspirations of the individual Manases, the current study will use the family as a nexus through which to discern the Manases’ engagement with the society and the state. The multiple social, religious, and vocational layers in which this family existed, as Armenian by ethnicity, Catholic by denomination, and court artisan, diplomat, and banker by profession will be used to reflect on the travails of the Manases, as well as their comfort and success.
This study has been able to fill in many of the extensive lacunae in the narratives of the Manas family members as well as rectify misconstrued facts about their lives and careers through rigorous archival research, enabling a firm scaffolding to stand on while tackling the family in a much more nuanced and profound manner. It places the Manas family within the context of a multivalent and porous society as opposed to one with impermeable barriers between its various communities, thereby understanding its members as part and parcel of Ottoman existence and history in contrast to dichotomizing frameworks that sever Armenian reality from its historical context. Through this approach it restores the historicity of the Manases as Ottoman actors, who were not extraneous to the axes of social and political change, but were participants in the processes of negotiation with the state alongside other Ottomans of various ethnic, social, and religious backgrounds to effectuate change.
The dearth of insightful scholarship on the family in contexts where they have so far been discussed will be addressed in the first part of this dissertation. Chapters One and Two dealing with the family members’ activities pertaining to imperial identity construction, through sultanic portraiture and diplomacy, respectively, aim to correct the historical record and offer further insights through the greater contextualization and analytical synthesis of the already available data with the vast body of newly introduced documents. The latter two chapters, which are centered around the Catholic identity of the Manases and the discussion of banking, prestige, and wealth in relation to the family, draw on a range of hitherto unstudied archival sources. These chapters considerably develop the extant scholarship, breaking ground to establish new frameworks for discussing the Manases.

Keywords: Ottoman imperial portraiture
Armenian
catholic armenian
Manas
Ottoman
Armenian bankers
Advisor: Van Lint, T
Mignon, L