Lena Sadovski (Austrian Academy of Sciences) will give a talk on her recent research:

How to get Married Correctly. Inter-Religious Marriages among Bulgarian Catholics between Social Customs, Doctrinal Requirements and Political Pressure (17th-18th Centuries)

17 April 2026, Friday, at 17:00

Abstract: In my talk I will address the Catholic minority in Ottoman Bulgaria in the 17th and 18th century by focussing on a crucial element of social and personal life: weddings and marriages. Far from being just a personal choice of two people living together and founding a family, marriages structured societies. Weddings, in turn, were important social events that could also turn controversial in a religious and political sense – especially in a multi-confessional and multi-religious society such as the Bulgarian one in the early modern period. As a religious minority, the Bulgarian Catholic were pinned between a majority Orthodox Christian population and the ruling Muslim Ottomans. Based on a wide array of archival documents, I will show how marriages and weddings were organized in this setting, in how far religiously mixed marriages were possible, how the Catholic missionaries attempted to enforce ‘correct’ Catholic practices by implementing the Tridentine Reforms – and how they failed –, and which role the secular administration and the Ottoman courts played for Catholics when getting married. Next to clandestine marriages, divorce, polygamy, and adultery, we will thus see how Catholic and Orthodox spouses could get married in front of the Ottoman kadi or hodja, and what the reaction of the Roman Catholic Church was to such ‘un-Catholic’ behaviour.

Moderated by: Zozan Tarhan