Project description
Decision-making and information networks in the Ottoman Empire
Governments consistently face the challenge of making high-stakes decisions with incomplete data. Understanding how previous civilizations managed these situations can provide a blueprint for today’s leaders. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the ODIN project is using digital tools such as network analysis, GIS mapping, and database visualisation to investigate how the Ottoman Empire gathered, evaluated, and acted upon information during the Russo-Ottoman War (1768-1774). It will reconstruct the information networks that connected officials, diplomats, translators, spies, and local actors. The findings will shed light on how trust, rumours, and political interests shaped imperial decisions, offering a new perspective on Ottoman governance.
Objective
How do governments make decisions when faced with uncertainty, conflicting reports, and unreliable information? Ottoman Decision and Information Networks (ODIN) addresses this enduring question by examining the Russo-Ottoman War of 1768–1774, a conflict that reshaped international politics across Europe and Eurasia. The project shows how one of the world’s great empires coped with rumor, credibility, and limited knowledge at a time when choices could mean survival or collapse.
Unlike European rivals with permanent embassies, the Ottoman Empire relied on overlapping channels—provincial governors, Balkan princes, translators, spies, and foreign envoys. Their reports were incomplete, contested, or manipulated, yet they determined how the Sultan and his ministers understood enemies, subjects, and allies. Decisions thus emerged not from fixed hierarchies but from networks where trust, rumor, and political stakes intersected. ODIN draws on archival sources in Ottoman Turkish, Greek, French, and English, and applies digital tools—network analysis, GIS mapping, and database visualisation—to reconstruct these fragile webs of information. In doing so, it fills a major gap in scholarship, moving beyond Eurocentric narratives and placing the Ottomans at the heart of eighteenth-century debates on intelligence and governance.
ODIN reconstructs networks and shows how information shaped strategy, legitimacy, and imperial identity. It highlights how Muslim and Christian actors, men and women, insiders and outsiders, all played roles in sustaining or undermining the flow of intelligence. Using digital tools to map these networks, the project makes visible the fragile webs of trust and authority that held a vast empire together during crisis. ODIN speaks to more than Ottoman historians. In an era when misinformation and uncertainty again dominate public life, it offers historical perspective on how states manage risk, build legitimacy, and struggle to act on incomplete knowledge.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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700 13 IRAKLEIO
Greece
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