Abstrakt: |
With the passing away of Baron Peter Philipp Herbert von Rathkeal, imperial internuncio to the Porte, on February 23th, 1802 at Istanbul, the State Chancellory in Vienna was obliged to find an as clever as gifted successor. The decision to be taken was far more important to the Habsburg Monarchy, due to the rivalry with Tsarist Russia on the supremacy in South-Eastern Europe, still under Ottoman rule. On March 28th, 1802 Ignaz von Stürmer, a former scholar of the Vienna Academy for Oriental Languages and an outstanding connoisseur of the Turkish language and society since the time he served at the Imperial Embassy in Istanbul as translator, was appointed as successor to Herbert von Rathkeal. Stürmer and his suite (among others the future well nown orientalist Joseph von Hammer) started the journey to Istanbul only on August 12th, 1802. After crossing Timişoara, Sibiu and Braşov, the new internuncio and his crew arrived on September 2d, 1802 to the border of Walachia. Due to an extensive report of Joseph von Hammer (published in the Appendix, as well as other documents related to this voyage), we are able to retrace Stürmer's reception in Bucharest at a time that the reigning Prince of Wallachia was just deposed by the Porte. It is to be pointed out, that in consequence of the Austrian-Russian rivalry on South-Eastern Europe, the new imperial internuncio insisted several times that the same reception-parade is to be respected for him as in the case of the Russian ambassadors to the Porte passing through the capital-city of Walachia on their way to Istanbul. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |