Studying ottoman karamürsel vessels. The sources and the need for a different approach

Abstract

The amount of knowledge we have aboutcaramoussals can be regarded as insufficient, as long as there is no agreement among scholars even on the naval architecture of these sailcrafts. As Ottoman sources have failed to advance research in this field, more attention should be paid to sources from Christian Europe. This paper investigates the existing sources, both Ottoman and Christian, and how historians have approached them so far, in order to assess if there is more to learn from them. Firstly, the paper concludes that there are two assumptions responsible for the inability of scholars to reach consensus: 1) that the term karamürsel is the name given to a single type of vessel; 2) that the available sources reflect contradictory and mutually exclusive information. Secondly, it refutes these presumptions as unfounded, and instead postulates as a methodological premise the following certainty: the information discussed here is complementary in nature, since it complements each other. The main argument employed here is provided by a Florentine manuscript containing drawings of vessels calledcaramussali, which have different characteristics. It can be inferred from this that the term karamürsel was not applied to a single type of vessel, but was used to designate simultaneously different types of vessels. This new approach to sources opens up several research opportunities, which the author insists on at the end of his paper.