Mapping Ottoman Epirus
Mapping Ottoman Epirus seeks to better understand how the Ottoman Empire operated through big data, spatial and network analysis, visualization, and other digital methods.
MapOE's primary focus is Epirus - today Western Greece and Southern Albania - in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as an exemplary microcosm of the Ottoman World. Epirus was a strategic junction on the Adriatic coasts, connecting Europe and the Ottoman lands. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, known as the age of revolutions, the Ottoman Empire experienced radical political, economic, and infrastructural transformations. As a result, Epirus became one of the most vivid regional economies and power-centers within the Ottoman Empire and the Adriatic world, from the 1790s to the 1820s.
During this period, a regional magnate, Ali Pasha of Ioannina (1740-1822) and a group of managerial, martial, commercial, scribal and religious personages organized around him built a regional order in Epirus. Gradually, the Ali Pasha order expanded towards Albania in the North, towards Thessaly in the West, and towards Central Greece and Peloponnese in the South. This expanded autonomous regional order functioned within, but also in parallel to, the Ottoman Imperial regime.
Mapping Ottoman Epirus is affiliated with the Ottoman and Middle Eastern DH Lab.
