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A person employed by the diplomatic missions and consulates in the Ottoman Empire as an interpreter, information gatherer and – above all – intermediary with the various central departments (the Porte) and provincial agencies of the sultan\'s government. Often spelled ‘druggerman’ in the earlier years after these missions began to appear in the sixteenth century, the word is a corruption of the Ottoman tercüman, meaning translator or interpreter. Since so few ambassadors or their secretaries spoke Ottoman Turkish and so few of the sultan\'s officials initially spoke Italian (the Venetian-driven language of commerce in the Levant) or even French, the embassies found their dragomans, who were generally Italian, Greek or Armenian ‘Levantines’, indispensable. However, the temptations to sell information to the highest bidder and their vulnerability to pressure from the Porte (until the nineteenth century they were nearly all subjects or, rather, slaves of the sultan) were so great that they were generally regarded as untrustworthy and insufficiently forceful in presenting an ambassador\'s view. Various attempts were made to replace the native dragomans with young men sent out from home to learn the language, among them the jeunes de langues launched into the East by Louis XIV in 1669 and the handful of oriental secretaries and attachés whom Britain began to despatch in the second decade of the nineteenth century. However, few of these experiments were very successful, and the embassies usually had as many native dragomans as they could afford. They were typically styled ‘First (or Chief) Dragoman’, ‘Second Dragoman’, and so on. However, the great growth in the facility of Turkish officials with the French language in the course of the nineteenth century and the introduction in Britain\'s case of the Levant Consular Service in 1877 (the first members of which, though British, were called ‘student dragomans’) were among the factors which spelled the end of the native dragomans. The title lapsed altogether after the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 finally ended capitulations in the metropolitan remains of the Ottoman Empire (i.e. Turkey), in the administration and defence of which the dragomans had been so closely associated. See also drogmanat; oriental secretary. |
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