Texte abrégé de: Habilitationsschrift--Philosophische Fakultät--Universität München, 1990. Titre de soutenance : Italien als Schachbrett der Diplomatie. Die Rolle Italiens in der Auseinandersetzungen zwischen Kaiser Karl IV. und den Päpsten. / Bibliogr. p. 216-230. Index.

Texte remanié de: Diss.--Fachbereich Geschichtswissenschaft--Universität Mainz, 1995. / Bibliogr. p. 452-480.

Texte remanié de: Habilitationsleistung--Fachbereich Geschichtswissenschaften--Berlin--Freie Universität, Wintersemester 1996/97. / Bibliogr. p. 377-416. Index.

Proefschrift--Rechtsgeleerdheid--Katholieke Universiteit te Nijmegen, 1988. / La couv. porte comme titre: Viglius von Aytta und seine Notizen... Contient une collection de regestes dans laquelle tous les procès-verbaux enregistrés par Viglius sont résumés suivant un schéma fixe. Bibliogr. p. 297-305. Index.

Diss.--Fakultät für Geschichtswissenschaften--Bochum--Ruhr-Universität, 1987.

Texte remanié de: Diss.--Philosophische Fakultät--Universität Göttingen, 1996. / Résumé en Anglais. Bibliogr. p. 506-553 p. Index.

Texte remanié de: Ph.D. th.--London, 1983. Titre de soutenance : The politics of military politics : political aspects of civil-military relations in the Ottoman empire, with special reference to the 'Young Turk' era. / Bibliogr. p. 445-472. Index.

Texte remanié de: Diss.--Universität Göttingen, 1985. / Bibliogr. p. 15-25. Index.

A la fin de la Renaissance l'Empire ottoman est bien connu du public européen. Tout au long du XVIe siècle, récits de voyages, de captifs, ouvrages de mœurs, ouvrages cosmographiques dessinent une certaine image du « Turc » et de la partie du monde sur laquelle il a établi son pouvoir. Objet de fascination et de profonde inquiétude, l'Empire des sultans intéresse l’Europe chrétienne en proie à des guerres intestines. Les voyageurs qui entreprennent le voyage ou qui commencent à rédiger un récit de leur expérience à partir des années 1570 le font donc avec, à l'esprit, le parcours des auteurs qui les ont précédés. Ils doivent faire avec l’image de l’Autre qui s’est progressivement imposée. La pression évidente que la bibliothèque exerce sur le texte viatique pousse les rédacteurs à chercher de nouvelles modalités d’expression. Ils posent à neuf la dialectique constamment maintenue par la prose viatique tout au long du XVIe siècle entre le récit de l’expérience et l’utilisation des ressources livresques. Parmi ces voyageurs-auteurs une nouvelle classe paraît se distinguer. Elle cherche à se démarquer des voyageurs antérieurs et des contemporains en accordant plus de place à l'expression personnelle au sein des récits. Cette classe nous l'avons circonscrite à celle des gentilshommes qui trouvent, dans le cadre d'échanges de plus en plus fréquents avec le Levant, qu'il s'agisse d’échanges diplomatiques ou commerciaux, de nouveaux terrains pour s’affirmer. Tout en tenant à ne pas se présenter comme des savants, les gentilshommes s’attachent à mettre en évidence leur appartenance de classe et cela passe, en partie, par l’affirmation de leur présence dans le texte, qui semble plus manifeste que dans les ouvrages antérieurs. L’ego du voyageur du début de l’époque moderne n’est en rien égotiste. Mais l’évocation plus précise de l’expérience personnelle marque une évolution non négligeable de la prose viatique. D’autant que celle-ci nous invite à penser qu’elle est le corollaire d’un changement progressif des rapports que l’Occident entretient avec l’Orient. / At the end of the Renaissance, the Ottoman Empire is by the European public well known. All the XVIth century long, travel writings, captives’ stories, customs books, cosmographies draw a certain image of the « Turc » and of the world’s part he rules over. Object of fascination and of deep concern, sultans’ Empire interests christian Europe while this area is in the grip of internecine conflicts. The travelers who choose to travel or who begin to write their story do so with, in their mind, the works of those who went to the Orient before them. They have to do with the image of the Other that was mainly accepted in these period. The library exerces a pressure who encourages the writers to search other ways of telling their proper experience. They search new modes of expression. Doing so they renew the dialectic of experience and books resources. Among these travelers-writers we noted that a group differs from others in his practice of writing. This class of travelers, which we identify as the aristocracy, find new grounds to affirm herself on the road of the Orient, in a period during which diplomatic and trade exchanges between Europe and the Levant grew significantly. While trying not to present themselves as scholars, they want to highlight their class membership. To do so, they put forward their own experience of travel, their personnality. They assert themselves in the text, and their presence seems to be more significant than in former texts concerning the Levant. The traveler’s ego, in the early modern period, is not egotist. The growth of evocation of the personal experience in the text seems however to mark a significant evolution in travel writing. Moreover, it invites us to think that it goes with progressiv changes in the relations between the Occident and the Orient.

This thesis approaches two perennial and interrelated problems in the historiography of China - the question of the openness or self-isolation of (Ming) Chinese society, as well as the nature and extent of the Mongol legacy in the (early) Ming - from a new angle. In spite of a growing body of scholarship on political, military, and institutional aspects of the transition from 'foreign' Mongol Yuan (1271-1368) to 'native' Ming (1368-1644) rule, there is one aspect that has received little attention so far: language, or rather languages in the plural, and translation between them. By bringing the various multilingual dimensions of the early Ming to the foreground of analysis and studying them against the backdrop of the Mongol legacy, this thesis covers new ground. While recognising that not all activities with which it is concerned would have been seen as connected by early Ming actors, this thesis argues that they do collectively constitute a realm of action with a common purpose, which we can comprehend as 'language policy.' This perspective is significant, because Yuan continuities on macro levels (administrative, institutional, political) can only be truly grasped through a systematic investigation of micro levels, such as language. To achieve these aims, the thesis blends concepts and methods from history, sinological philology, and Linguistic Landscape Studies (LLS). My argument is threefold. First, the Mongol heritage was not just perceptible in institutions and newly absorbed territory but also on the level of language. Second, the early Ming, far from being 'fiercely anti-Mongol' (as one authority recently put it), consciously attempted to imitate and surpass the Yuan, and multilingualism - for both communicative and emblematic reasons - played an important part in this endeavour. Third, and most importantly, the year 1368 marked neither a 'revolutionary' rupture nor a 'business as usual' continuation of Mongol legacies. Rather, the new dynasty attempted to strike a difficult balance, in which language and translation policies were instrumental in harmonising the needs for both continuity with and a break from the past. The Ming continued Yuan traditions such as the production of multilingual steles and edicts to symbolise and enforce their universal imperial claim, while Chinese was (not de jure, but de facto) reinstituted as the major imperial language, as opposed to one imperial language among many, as in Mongol times. The very notion of universal empire, continued from Yuan to Ming, would beat odds with monolingualism, and consequently, the Ming could not have been monolingual, even if they had so desired. While the distinction between 'multilingual foreign' dynasties (Yuan, Qing) and 'monolingual Chinese' ones (Ming) is not outright wrong, it does need considerable refinement, in order to understand the Ming's place in the larger Yuan-Ming-Qing transition. 'Translation of empire' has a double meaning in this thesis. First, it is meant literally in the sense of language mediation: textual legacies of the Yuan were translated from languages such as Mongolian or Persian into Chinese, while the new empire translated its claim to power into other languages. Second, it is a metaphor alluding to the political concept of translatio imperii, known from Western Eurasian history and comparable to the Chinese 'dynastic cycle' narrative: fundamentally the idea of cultural mobility, with knowledge and power moving from empire to empire. How did the Yuan-Ming transition work as a translatio imperii in both senses of the word and what can we conclude from it regarding the nature of the early Ming?