CHAPTER 10

BREACHES IN THE CONFLICT

THE IDEOLOGIES WERE ANTAGONISTIC and irreconcilable on both sides. Had it been only the voice of ideology that had spoken during the modern period, the two camps would have remained at a standoff, each on its own side of the border. They would have fallen back into their respective certainties, and the relations between the two would have consisted solely of conflict. Even today, that is how relations between the Turks and Europe are frequently represented. But a study of the facts shows that many dissonant voices could be heard during that time. For both parties or for only one of them, these were the voices of political realism, commercial pragmatism, the appeal of exoticism, technological imitation, Orientalist scholarship, and philosophical speculation. Each of these voices was very different in nature and they should not be confused. Their consequences on the dominant ideology were uneven in their gravity. Some voices did no harm to the ideology because they merely bracketed it temporarily, without destroying it in any way: the ideology remained in the background but was never far off. That would explain, for example, the fluctuations of the most Christian king in his alliance—though very far-reaching—with the Turk, and the fact that the king could be his ally and at the same time loudly rejoice on the occasion of his defeats. It would also explain the intensity of the resentment by the merchant of Marseilles, rankled by the presumptuousness of the customs officer of Smyrna or Aleppo. Other voices were in principle more serious blows to ideology, but their effect remained limited, since only a few people heard them.

THE APORIAS OF ARMED STRUGGLE

The war took various forms. The Ottomans sometimes experienced delays and defeats during their conquests. And their adversaries sometimes took the initiative. Nevertheless, the Ottomans, whatever the ideological and material motivations for their behavior—the lure of booty, hunger for new lands to distribute to dignitaries and warriors—were on the offensive in Europe (and elsewhere), and the Europeans were in a defensive position. Again in the summer of 1577, the major military conference in Vienna, headquarters for the Consilium Bellicum, in addressing the strategy to adopt toward the Turks, decided to give up the offensive and opted for the best organized defensive strategy possible. On the Ottoman side, however, the objective of complete conquest was not of long duration. A border was established between the Turks and Christendom that split Europe in two. The sultan had to convert to the reality principle, which made him aware of the de facto limits of his capacity for action and led him, in practice if not at the ideological level, to maintain other than belligerent relations with his European protagonists, to integrate into the European order instead of annihilating it.

The myth of Ottoman invincibility and indefinite expansion hit several snags, even when the supremacy of the Sultan of Sultans was still intact. Political momentum and even, to a certain point, the direction of military operations in the empire were concentrated in the capital, and the principal land and naval forces were based within a limited zone, the itch il (interior of the country), the heart of the empire. As a result, expeditions were still rigorously seasonal in nature; distances became a major challenge, which had to be faced under the technical conditions prevailing at the time, whether of transportation or communications. Furthermore, difficulties attributable to the climate or terrain aggravated these conditions. It is striking to observe, in the narratives of the Hungarian campaigns, the degree to which torrential rains, floods, the cold, and scarcity slowed the advance of the troops, whatever the rather remarkable merits of Ottoman logistics and supply systems. On the Iranian front, the heat and the dry climate, along with the laborious crossing of dizzying mountain heights, broke down the troops’ resistance. These factors determined the “range of operation” of the Ottoman forces and marked their limits. Several defeats resulted more from these structural factors than from the adversary’s efforts. The enemy, having well understood the Ottoman conqueror’s “Achilles’ heel,” systematically concealed itself, and, when necessary, adopted a scorched-earth tactic: at the unsuccessful siege of Vienna in 1529; at the semidefeat in the taking of Nice and at the conquest of Corsica by Franco-Ottoman fleets under the leadership of Barbarossa and his immediate successors; and at the fiasco of the Astrakhan campaign on the Volga in 1569. (Let us also note, outside Europe, Selim I’s and Sleyman the Magnificent’s failure to conquer the Iranian plateau.) It was that same handicap that hampered political, military, and economic control of the empire on its peripheries and forced it to be satisfied with compromise solutions, leaving a more or less extensive degree of autonomy to vast border areas.

“General Frost,” and natural obstacles in general, were not the only impediments to the Turkish advance, since the Turks certainly did not always face a void. A not inconsiderable enemy, capable of resistance and even of counteroffensives, sometimes stood in the way of their plans and gave them trouble. Did not Sleyman the Magnificent himself—at a time when the empire was supposedly at its apogee—experience moments of extreme irritation and a certain anxiety, even during a campaign as profitable all in all as the conquest of the Banat of Temesvár in the spring and summer of 1552? He expressed his discontent in an order to Mehmed Pasha, sanjakbey of Bosnia, on May 24, 1552:

Over the course of time, the gzi of the governorate of Bosnia became accustomed to raiding and ravaging the country of the debauched miscreants. They carried out conquests and exploits in great number. They launched incursions and raids of plunder. In short, they were accustomed to imposing defeats of all kinds on the vile miscreants. Why, therefore, do these miscreants now take the license to act and subject the land of Islam [vilyet-i islmiyye seirdb] to incursions, and bring harm and destruction of that order to the subjects living in my well-guarded countries [memlik-i mahrusen re’yssina]? How is it, then, that measures are not taken to ensure a better defense?¹

Two weeks later, in June 1552, the sultan exhorted the same sanjakbey “not to be negligent or fooled by the ruses and snares of the debauched miscreants, but always to display courage and valor in guarding and protecting the borders.”² That edginess only became more pronounced when the military situation began to deteriorate further. If we are to believe a letter published in Paris in 1572, the disaster of Lepanto sowed panic in Istanbul. Selim II is reported to have had his treasury moved to Bursa, along with “the women and young male children in the seraglio.” He and his Janissaries took refuge in Edirne while the defenses of Istanbul were being reinforced. The Muslim population fled the capital as well, leaving it populated only by Greeks and “Frankish Christians.”³ The Ottoman sources, by contrast, insist on the rapid reconstruction of the fleet, thanks to the sangfroid and energy of Grand Vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha.

In the counterattacks to the Ottoman advance, it is not always easy to distinguish between verdicts regarding their “range of operation,” which imposed limits on them at a given moment, and the skill of an adversary who learned by experience, who became better organized, more modernized, and stronger. It is likely that, most often, the Ottomans were the victims of both. In any case, their rule was to absorb the blow in silence. They never openly recognized their failures, nor did they admit on principle the existence of their borders. In the official discourse, the pdishh was “always victorious” (muzaffer d’im), and the enemy remained a contemptible miscreant, “destined for subjugation.”

THE MESSAGE OF THE PROPHECIES

If doubts arose, therefore, they did so indirectly, between the lines of the official discourse or in the implicit language of the documentation.

An indirect expression of worry, or of a sense of weakness and vulnerability on the part of the Turks, can be discerned in the prophecies—or “pseudo-prophecies,” as Jean Deny calls them—that circulated about them.⁴ Of course, not all the prophecies had the same status, nor do they all allow for the same interpretations. Some in fact came not from the Turks themselves but from their Christian subjects. The Capuchin Michel Febvre, for example, in his Present State of Turkey (1675), takes note of prophecies in effect in “most of the sects” (that is, in the Christian faiths present in the Ottoman Empire), claiming that the king of France would one day be victorious over Turkey. The same author mentions in another work, Theater of Turkey (1682), a prophecy that the Armenians attributed to their fifth-century patriarch, Saint Nerses, “which gives them hope that they will some day be delivered from the tyranny of the Turks.” Such prophecies express the hopes of subject populations and, since there is no evidence they had any effect on the masters’ morale, say nothing about the Turks. In this context, the only prophecies that matter are those that the Turks themselves believed in. We must also be cautious, since the case of the vaticinium infidelium reported by Brother Bartholomaeus Georgievicz has shown that a prophecy that inverted the myth of the Red Apple could be falsely attributed to the Turks. Nevertheless, these false attributions did not come from nowhere. They only manipulated and distorted predictions that, elaborated on the basis of ancient eschatological and apocalyptic traditions, Byzantine or Muslim, existed among the Ottomans and fostered doubt and anxiety about their own future. In one of these currents of negative predictions, a people called the “Ban l-Asfar” or “Beni Asfar” (literally, the “sons of blonds” or “sons of redheads”) were destined to conquer the Ottomans and put an end to their domination. In the medieval Arabic texts, the name “Ban l-Asfar” originally designated the Greeks and Romans. In other contexts, it also applied to the native populations of Spain and to Europeans in general. Several genealogists present the eponymous ancestor, Asfar, as the grandson of Esau and the father of Rumil, himself an ancestor of the Rm, that is, the Romans and Byzantines. An eschatological Hadith (reported in Ahmed ibn Hanbal’s Musnad in the ninth century) presents the breaking of a nine-month truce between the Beni Asfar and the Muslims, followed by the conquest of Constantinople, as one of the six signs announcing the end of time. These Beni Asfar also appear outside a prophetic context in several works of Ottoman literature.⁵ The same peoples make a spectacular reappearance in an anecdote Guillaume Postel reports about his journey to Istanbul in the retinue of the first permanent ambassador of France, Jean de la Forêt, in 1535. Postel deserves to be cited at length:

The Turks have a special authority nearly equal to their Qur’an, a book of prophecies where it is expressly written that a prince and a people of yellow color shall destroy the Turks and all the other Ishmaelites and Muhammadites, who are commonly called Muhammadans. An indubitable testimony can be given of this, even though the Turks conceal said prophecy from strangers as much as possible.

It so happened that, having been sent as ambassador to the Great Turk, Mr. Jean de la Forêt Auvergnat, and with him Postel, writer of the present work, who is a trustworthy witness of what he will write here—It so happened, I say, that one of the pashas, governor of Constantinople, unrestrained at the first audience granted to Ambassador de la Forêt, during the absence of the Great Sultan (on a campaign against the Sophy of Persia), instead of flattering and receiving said ambassador in a friendly way, told him that he was a spy and a traitor who had come there not for the good but as an explorer of the kingdom. And to prove that it was so, he drew from his bosom said secret book of prophecies, as if the ambassador, who was Christian, believed in them as much as he, a Turk. And he started to say, in the presence of the other pashas and governors, that he was absolutely certain that Ibn Saphra, that is, the Son of the Yellow Man, was truly the Son of the yellow fleur-de-lis on the standard or shield of France…. When the poor ambassador, partly at a loss and astonished, seeing that it would be no use for him to deny the fact, asked to hear the words of said prophecy at greater length, the pasha explained that the Saphra had weapons that were yellow in color. Then the ambassador, knowing how ignorant the Turks were of cosmography and even more of foreign customs, told them: “Certainly your prophecy is true, but it is not the king of France who is the Ben Saphra, it is the principal people of Emperor Charles, who are the Germans, whose lansquenets all have yellow-colored breeches. And they are the enemies of your king as much as of ours.” … And so the pasha, paying the price for his ignorance, and seeing that the ambassador spoke so much ill of the greatest enemy they had, calmed down and received us as the friend of the Great Sultan.⁶

The identity of the Bani Asfar—a shape-shifter, as suggested by this anecdote—varied among the Ottomans as a function of their situation. It was finally attributed to the Russians, the tsar being designated at the time as al-malik al-asfar: the “yellow king.” In that prediction and in other similar ones, which echoed very ancient themes, there was a moral lesson to be drawn about the transitory nature of power and glory, as well as an expression of humanity’s existential anguish and fundamental pessimism. But beyond that general significance, the prophecy, applied to the political and military context of the time, was the expression of and the spur for an anxiety, an edginess, a lack of self-confidence. The obsession with the spy, “explorer of the kingdom,” and the mistrust of strangers are obvious symptoms of that. The Ottomans are generally represented as sure of themselves, of their superiority, and of their invincibility, and as a result as having nothing but contempt for their adversaries, “destined for subjugation,” which in essence takes at face value what the official rhetoric proclaimed. But the pessimism of the prophecies allows us to hear a different tune.

THE SPACE OF DIPLOMACY

Diplomatic relations with the Christian countries had been natural and vital at the regional level in the early days of the Ottoman state, when Byzantium, Venice, and Genoa still played a decisive role in its rise. Recall in particular the appeals for aid by Byzantine factions and the Ottoman hostages held in Byzantium. These relations continued when the beylik became an empire without peer, in possession of Constantinople. Even then, in fact, though complete conquest was impossible, though the infidel adversaries were in reality worrisome, and though, to believe the prophecies, total revenge on their part was under way, diplomatic avenues remained an indispensable recourse. But such avenues, despite what historians of international relations have often written, were in no way incompatible with Muslim law, which the empire aspired to observe scrupulously. In that case, the Hanafite version of the law was at issue: though not the only version accepted in the empire, it was that of the rulers. For the question of relations with the infidel states, it was therefore necessary to consult the precepts of the doctors who had founded that school in the classical age, primarily Ab Ysuf (eighth century), Shaybni (eighth century), and Sarakhsi, and of those jurists during the Ottoman period who expressly placed themselves within that tradition, such as Molla Husrev (d. 1480) and Ibrhm al-Halab (sixteenth century). These authors and others after them enumerated and analyzed the various sorts of treaties that, following the example of the Prophet and his companions, it was lawful to conclude with the infidels (in this case, those populating Europe). It is clear both that the Ottomans were anxious to be faithful to those laws and that they adapted them for their own use. The first type of treaty was the dhimma contract, which granted the status of dhimmi to infidels who, after three notices (da’wa, da’vet), agreed to recognize the political domination of the Muslim conqueror, while at the same time keeping their own religion. These sorts of treaties (sometimes called ahd al-dhimm or akd-i zimmet) were perpetual. The Ottoman applications of them (for example, in the case of Galata in 1454 or Rhodes in 1521) show that such treaties could be the object of negotiations and could entail, in addition to the canonical status of dhimmi, certain privileges and exemptions specific to a particular city or region. That was the system of “Ottoman” Europe. It is now necessary to consider the types of treaties concluded with the European states that remained in the “territory of war,” treaties that established other than belligerent relations with them.

That second possibility proceeded from a certain elaboration of Islamic law in contact with historical realities. Observing that the general expansion of the dr al-islm was encountering practical obstacles and hence delays, and that, though it certainly remained the only horizon possible, it was not an immediately accessible aim, jurists of the classical age agreed to suspend jihad and make truces with the infidel adversary. What was essential was the fundamentally provisional nature of these truces and of the coexistence they established, since it safeguarded the final objective of universal Muslim domination. Various terms were used to designate that type of truce: sulh seems to have been the most common during the Ottoman period, but there was also hudna, muvda‘a, and mu‘hada. Shaybni and Sarakhsi were careful to distinguish them from true peace accords, for which they reserved the name muslama or muslaha.

Once the principle of time limits was set forth, the ancient authors displayed great flexibility in determining the duration of truces. Kalkashandi (1355–1418), illustrious secretary of the Mamluk chancery belonging to the Shafite school, cites a limit of four months, which could be extended to a year, if the Muslims were in a position of strength. If, on the contrary, they were in a position of weakness, the timeframe of the truce could be extended to ten years, renewable if necessary, to allow them to recover their strength. These arrangements could be accompanied by payments of money, but the terms kharj or jizya tended to be avoided, because of their symbolism. More innocuous terms were used, ranging from the notion of a “ransom” paid to avoid being attacked (fed’) to that of a “gift” (armaan, pishkesh, hedy), “contribution” (vergi, kesim), or “custom” (‘det). Ab Ysuf even conceded that, when necessary, these sums could be paid by the Muslim party. The governing factor was the “utility” (maslaha) for the Muslim community (‘umma), which resulted in an extreme pragmatism.

That explains why the peace treaties that the Ottomans concluded with the Christians from the “lands of war” were always for a limited duration. The Ottomans thereby marked their fidelity to the old Islamic principle of hudna. At the same time, however, the duration granted became longer and longer over time. That had to do with the transformation in power relations, which placed the Ottomans in a position of weakness relative to their partners and more vulnerable to their demands. Nevertheless, with the appearance of these constraints, the manipulation of time limits came to serve as a diplomatic instrument in the hands of the sultans, a way for them to woo certain Christian states, to favor them over others, and to demonstrate thereby (as by other means) their insertion within the European game of diplomacy.

The treaty that Bayezid II concluded in 1482 with the Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes, Pierre d’Aubusson, was an exception during the period and a prefiguration of what would occur in the following century, since it was already a lifelong treaty (it was to end only with the death of one of the parties to the contract). Until the victory of Mohács (1421–1528), there were sixteen Ottoman treaties with Hungary, whose periods of validity were, depending on the case, four months, or one, two, three, five, seven, or ten years. Between 1444 and 1533, there were twelve treaties between Poland and the Ottoman Empire. Their duration could be for one, two, three, or five years. But when the treaty was renewed in 1533, Sleyman the Magnificent accomplished a diplomatic coup by granting his old partner, King Sigismund the Elder, a lifelong treaty. He would do the same twenty years later with Sigismund’s son Sigismund Augustus, who ascended the throne in 1548. Through that very liberal application of the principle of sulh, Sleyman demonstrated his attachment to a sort of Ottoman-Polish axis against the Habsburgs. Polish diplomacy, for its part, made use of that favorable context in 1546 to fend off the looming threat of Sleyman’s death, which seemed imminent at the time, by seeking in advance guarantees from his son and sole heir, the future Selim II. A treaty was in fact granted on October 17–26, 1564, by the man who was as yet only the imperial prince, entrusted with the governance of Ktahya. It survives in Latin translation.⁷ From then on, all Polish-Ottoman treaties would be lifelong, four in the sixteenth century and ten in the seventeenth.

The period of validity for the treaties with the Habsburgs, the Ottomans’ chief adversaries until the eighteenth century, reflected the situation proper to the Ottoman Empire and the evolution in power relations. Ten treaties have been identified for the sixteenth century. The first was concluded for five years in 1547. The others stipulated a duration of eight years but generally did not hold. The 1606 Treaty of Zsitvatorok marked a turning point, in this respect and others, in relations between the two states: it was concluded for twenty years. The following treaties would have the same duration, until the Treaty of Karlowitz, concluded in 1699 for twenty-five years, and that of Passarowitz, concluded in 1718 for twenty-four years. The Treaty of Belgrade in 1739 also had a limited period of validity, though for twenty-seven years. In the meantime, however, a new Ottoman-Habsburg treaty came into being in 1747, which for the first time was conceived as a perpetual treaty. The last connection to the Islamic principle of sulh was thereby broken, with the forced Westernization of Ottoman diplomacy finally prevailing over the last marks of fidelity to Islamic law.

The series of treaties with Russia is also instructive: it began late (though Ottoman-Russian relations went back much further), with the Treaty of Bahchesaray of 1681, which was concluded for twenty years. Stipulated for two years in 1699, the Treaty of Karlowitz with Russia was replaced in 1700 by a new treaty with a duration of thirty years. After Peter the Great broke it off with a new war, the treaties of Pruth (1711) and then of Adrianople (1713) replaced it. The latter of these was concluded for twenty-five years. With the Treaty of Belgrade of September 18, 1739, the Ottoman-Russian treaties became virtually perpetual.

Nevertheless, treaties of that sort, legitimate from the Islamic point of view so long as they were limited in time, suspended war only temporarily, by provisionally establishing peace. As such, they were not sufficient for governing all the kinds of relations the Ottomans maintained with the various European states. In fact, despite what is suggested by some studies (very useful in general but on this point too closely beholden to fiqh works), these relations cannot be reduced to the alternation between war and peace.⁸ Some states in modern Europe never actually submitted to the Ottoman Empire and could therefore not be seriously considered tributaries of it (whatever the excesses of Ottoman rhetoric in that regard). They were also not actually at war with the Turks: either they were no longer so at a given moment or they never had been—though they might always be considered virtually at war, given that they were infidel states and were part of the dr al-harb. These same states maintained relations of a different kind with the sultan: relations of alliance, more or less explicit and thoroughgoing.

IMPIUM FOEDUS

As felonious and even scandalous as they appeared from the religious standpoint, these relations were part of the geopolitical realities of Europe, once the Turks were present on that continent and the European states were too divided to truly form a front against that “common enemy.” On the contrary, each would be tempted to use the redoubtable wild card of Ottoman support, or the mere threat of that support, against its rival. The first examples were as old as the Ottoman state itself, dating back to the fourteenth century. In the fifteenth century, when Mehmed II had just conquered Constantinople and was said to have designs on southern Italy, the flattery he received from Venice, Naples, and Florence (not to mention Malatesta, lord of Rimini, who asked only to “collaborate”), with medals struck in his honor, for example, says a great deal about the ulterior motives on both sides. The most emblematic case no doubt remains that of France, whose successive sovereigns, beginning with the rapprochement between Francis I and Süleyman the Magnificent, pledged far-reaching collaboration with the Turks against their chief enemy, the Habsburgs (ranging from coordination in their respective undertakings to joint campaigns, at least in the naval realm). The instructions that Chancellor Duprat drew up in 1534 for Jean de La Forêt, Francis I’s first permanent ambassador to Constantinople, are ample evidence of the degree of military and political cooperation proposed to the sultan. Furthermore, in the late sixteenth century there would be a convergence of interests between the France of Henry IV—but also the “northern states,” England and the Netherlands—and the Ottoman Empire against a common adversary, the “Catholic king” Philip II of Spain. Against that adversary, Henry IV not only renewed the old alliance with the Ottoman sultan but also bargained on several occasions with the Moriscos of Spain rebelling against Philip II, which would lead to the torture and execution of one of his agents in 1605.⁹ In fact, the same people who most vigorously condemned the collusion of certain Christian states such as France with the infidel did not forgo, once they were at war with the Turk, making contact with his enemy to the east, the shah of Persia. Venice did so during its war with Bayezid II (1499–1502), arguing, to redeem themselves, that because of his Shiism, Shah Esm‘l was close to Christianity and not really Muslim. Charles V, whose propaganda at times went so far as to spread the rumor that Francis I, the Turk’s ally, had become Muslim, did not neglect to send emissaries to the shah in turn. Another, more forgotten example of these alliances, unnatural at least from a religious point of view, is that of the grand dukes of Tuscany, Ferdinand I and then Cosmo II, with the Druze emir of Lebanon, Man’olu Fakhr al-Dn, in revolt against his Ottoman suzerain. In 1613, the rebel emir went to Tuscany to rally support.¹⁰ His rebellion lasted until 1635 and ended with his execution. The Ottoman sultan, for his part, could not fail to profit from these rapprochements with some on the European chessboard, whose complexity and divisions he always found a matter for astonishment. The immediately positive and remarkably warm reaction of Sleyman to Francis I’s appeal for aid after the disaster of Pavia in 1525 is eloquent in that regard. The Great Sultan was himself a player in a rear alliance against the Habsburgs, whom he in no way underestimated. Furthermore, France offered him those naval bases in the western Mediterranean, such as Toulon, necessary for fighting against Spain and for gaining a foothold in the Maghreb. From the start, the king of France placed him in the position of protector, which could only suit Sleyman. He even underscored it by using a marked paternalistic tone in his correspondence with the king. That position preserved the principle of the supremacy of Islam.

Yet all these objective solidarities and more explicit agreements, duly prized by both parties, could not be formalized. The fiqh, though it stipulated peace with the infidel under certain conditions, opposed any idea of an alliance. In fact, the church’s canon law equally rejected that eventuality. The impium foedus, or pact with the infidel, had been formally condemned since the ninth century. These legal particulars explain why both sides avoided applying to their relations terms that referred too precisely to the notion of alliance or, to adopt the terms of the time, “confederation” or “league.” Among the Ottomans, the corresponding terms, ittifak and ittihd, were set aside. Both parties placed themselves by preference on a different register, that of feelings, devoid this time of any legal implications. The king of France thus evoked friendship, good terms, entente, the loyal affection that bound him to the sultan, adopting terminology that the sultan had been the first to use. He deployed the whole range of words for entente and affection: dostluk, musft, mslaha, barishlik, mu‘hede. At the same time, in that onslaught of kindness and even affection, the sultan never failed to point out the difference in position between himself and his interlocutor “of the religion of Jesus,” the king of France, for example. The king was only the obligee of the sultan, to whom he was supposed to pledge feelings of devotion and loyalty, expressed in terms such as ihtiss, sadqat, and istiqmet. The sultan, for his part, offered him aid and assistance (mu‘venet, muzheret) and lavished his favors and benefits on him.

ON THE PROPER USE OF CAPITULATIONS

In that situation, where de facto alliances, active and if necessary long-lasting, could not receive any legal sanction, another type of treaty—at least during a first long phase, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century—played that role, though with something of a time lag. These were treaties well known in Western parlance by the name “capitulations.” Westerners borrowed that Latin term (capitulatio, capitularium) from the medieval chanceries, applying it, because of the organization of these documents into short chapters (capitulum; pl., capitula), to what the Ottomans designated more broadly as ‘ahdnme (literally, written pledges by the sovereign). The principal aim of these capitulations was to define and ensure the guarantees and immunities granted to foreigners—merchants in particular—living in the Ottoman Empire. By providing indispensable legal guarantees, they thus made Western commerce possible within the Ottoman Empire. Each of the parties desired and had an interest in that commerce. It was in that sense that the capitulations prior to the nineteenth century were essential to the “commerce of the Levant” and not, as is generally claimed, because they were supposedly trade treaties in the strict sense. Furthermore, as of the seventeenth century, the kings of France took care to have chapters inserted that guaranteed not only the rights of their merchants but also those of Catholic religious serving as missionaries or parish priests in Jerusalem, Istanbul, and more generally, in all the sultan’s possessions. In promulgating the capitulations, the Ottomans were merely following practices that had already been current among their former masters, whether Christian or Muslim, in the zones they had seized (Byzantines, Seljuks, Mamluks, Turkoman beys). Not all of them had their source in Muslim law—far from it—but in spite of everything, these sorts of treaties still had a foundation in the Islamic legal principle of amn.

In its dual meaning, pardon and favor on one hand, safe-conduct on the other (to offer safe-conduct is to grant favor), the concept of amn applied to different situations. First, it applied to the infidel who, for one reason or another, had brought the reproaches of the sultan on himself, but whom the sultan agreed to pardon. That was the case, for example, of the Genoese of Galata who provided aid to the besieged in Constantinople, despite their previous pledge of neutrality toward Mehmed II, and to whom the conqueror nevertheless granted a treaty, an accord of domination/protection (an ‘ahd-i-dhimmet). Second, it could apply to the harb infidel residing in Muslim territory and, as such, liable to be killed or enslaved by the first Muslim to happen by. The harb infidel was now accepted—provisionally at least—not only in his own territory, which he was temporarily allowed to hold in his possession, as during a state of truce, but also in Muslim territory. That principle of safe-conduct granted to the stranger was a legacy of the tribal rules of pre-Islamic Arabia. (The corresponding term in the Qur’an [9:6], is jiwr.) Islam then borrowed it on behalf of the harb infidels especially. In principle, any Muslim could grant amn, but in practice it was the act of the local authority and by preference of the sultan himself. The harb who was the beneficiary of amn became a musta’min. As such, he was untouchable for a limited span of time. The Hanafites set the duration for a maximum of one year; the Shafites, less liberal, for four months. The Ottomans did not depart from that practice: they provided safe-conduct (called yol hükmi or yol tezkeresi) to foreign Christians entering their territories and, in fact, to foreign Muslims and to Christian or Muslim subjects moving about within the empire. Ottoman and Western sources attest to them many times, but they also give a particular extension to the principle of amn, making it the legal principle at the foundation of the capitulations granted to certain Christian states. Yet these guarantees, instead of being the object of an individual concession granted on a case-by-case basis, as in the previous “letters of amn,” were the consequence of an all-encompassing concession that the sultan granted to one of his Christian partners. Hence the concession was no longer granted at the individual level but at the state level. The sultan swore an oath to respect it, and it was valid for the entire length of his reign, provided there was no infringement on the part of the prince beneficiary. It had to be renewed upon the accession of his successor. The “great capitulation” granted to France through the marquess of Villeneuve, ambassador to Constantinople in 1740, was the first to be valid in perpetuity. After the late seventeenth century, the states benefiting from capitulations began to multiply: by the late eighteenth century, Austria, Sweden, Sicily, Denmark, the Hanseatic cities (1747), Prussia, Spain, and Russia were provided with them. These were now commercial advantages for the most part, granted, willingly or not, by a weakened Ottoman Empire. But before that, the capitulations had been granted by the sultan’s express will, with entirely different intentions and to a smaller number: in a first wave, to Genoa, Venice, Florence, Dubrovnik, and Poland, and, in a second, to France, England, and the Netherlands, all states that had not only commercial but also political common interests with the sultan.

Despite what has long been claimed, these were far from mere trade treaties, and in fact were not so in the strict sense. Rather, they were vested with strong political significance. They conferred on the alliance the only legal recognition it could obtain, even though that recognition came with a time lag with respect to its object. The commercial guarantees granted by the sultan recognized and awarded political entente. They were the only acceptable expression of it. The preambles to the successive versions of capitulations clearly proclaim as much. The renewal of 1740, so favorable to France, followed directly on the great services France had rendered to the Porte during the marquess of Villeneuve’s mediation in the peace of Belgrade. By contrast, should political relations deteriorate, the renewal of the capitulations (which were necessary so long as they were bound to the current reign) became problematic. The French ambassadors to the Porte had that bitter experience for a good part of the seventeenth century, throughout the period 1610–1673.

Because of the objects they dealt with, and because they were only an elaboration of the legitimate principle of amn, the capitulations, unlike alliance treaties proper, were not problematic in principle, either to the Christian or to the Muslim party. That did not exempt the sultan who issued them, however, from submitting the text for the approval of the shaykh al-islm, who could always raise objections to particular points. If we are to believe the emissary Claude du Bourg, that is what happened when he negotiated the first French capitulations with Grand Vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha in 1569. The mufti had found fault with something in an article (the seventeenth) that, in the event of the repression of Barbary corsairs, could have led the sultan to ally himself with the French infidel against other Muslims. Du Bourg prided himself on having on that occasion prevailed “with very great difficulty against the opinion of the mufti.”¹¹ In any case, since capitulations were possible and alliance treaties were not, one of the functions of capitulations was to be a symbolic substitute for treaties, to the satisfaction of both parties.

There came a moment, however, when the agents of diplomatic life were no longer satisfied with symbolic substitutes, especially since, once the sultans began to increase the number of capitulations, these lost their initial significance, ceasing to go hand in hand with a political alliance. Such was the case for Frederick II, king of Prussia, in the 1760s, as Selâhattin Tansel and Kemal Beydilli have shown.¹² Frederick, very isolated at the time in his antagonism with Austria and Russia, sought the support of the Ottoman Empire. No doubt he was demanding capitulations for Prussia like those the other countries had obtained. But he would not be satisfied with that: he wanted a formal defensive alliance. The Ottoman rulers, though interested in his advances, hesitated to commit themselves, for fear of alienating Russia in particular. They temporized by soliciting advice beforehand from the grand ulemas of the empire. They met twice in “consultative assemblies” (meshveret mejlisi), where they exchanged legal opinions in favor of or opposed to the alliance. In actuality, the king of Prussia had asked for nothing more than what had been actively practiced vis-à-vis the king of France more than two hundred years earlier. But, in wanting to formalize the alliance (which the kings of France had never sought to do), he placed the problem in an entirely new light. A first meeting, which had dwelt especially on the political advantages of the alliance with Prussia, relegating the legal aspects to the background, reached a positive conclusion: “no obstacle or objection, either from the standpoint of the Law or from that of reason” (sher’an ve aqlan hich bir hijnet ve mahzr). By contrast, a second meeting, run by a new shaykh al-islm, who, unlike his predecessor, was hostile to the alliance from the outset, gave much more weight to the legal obstacles. An archival document, reproduced at length in Beydilli’s book,¹³ sums up the various opinions (gör) expressed at the time. It is clear how distressed the participants were to find no analyses in the classical works of jurisprudence corresponding precisely to the situation about which they were being questioned. Some deflected the question to inquire whether it was permitted to make peace with the infidel. Thereby falling back on one of the most classic questions, they merely repeated the responses of the great Hanafite doctors, those I have summarized earlier. Others, anxious to confine themselves more closely to the precise question raised, sought a model in a different context, but one already treated by the jurisconsuls, that of Muslims placed under Christian domination and compelled to fight with their master against another Christian people. (That situation was possible, for example, in the Andalusia of the reconquista). That model raised a question similar to what they were being asked to resolve: Could Muslims join with infidels to fight against other infidels? The conclusion of that second assembly was negative. Given the opposition of the ulemas, decisive in Sultan Mustafa III’s view, and in face of the accumulation of strictly political difficulties, the Porte denied Frederick II’s request for an alliance. It simply took more customary measures, granting to Prussia what it had granted to a growing number of countries for centuries: capitulations. At most, an eighth article was appended to the seven articles of the treaty, one that held out a promise for the future, by stipulating that other articles beneficial to the two parties could be added later. It was not until 1790 that a first Ottoman-Prussian alliance treaty was concluded. What had still seemed impossible thirty years earlier was thereby realized.

Although I have distinguished among various sorts of accords concluded between the Porte and the Christian countries, corresponding to different situations, some documents were hybrids. For example, though the treaties with France were pure capitulations, since that country had never been officially at war with the Ottoman Empire (it would be for the first time in 1798, as a result of the Egyptian expedition), the case of Venice was more complicated. Some of the capitulations granted to the republic were pure, issued because of a change of reign, while others (the capitulation of 1540, for example) put an end to a conflict. They were thus peace treaties entailing the surrender of territories but also capitulations reiterating the different articles that defined the situation of the Venetians and their representatives in the Ottoman Empire, as well as the conditions for trade, which was to resume in earnest. The same was true for the treaty of 1494 between the Ottoman Empire and Poland. Like the previous treaties between the two countries, it renewed the truce; but since, for the first time, it also introduced a few articles concerning trade and merchants, it can be considered the first Polish capitulation.¹⁴ The treaties with Dubrovnik represent another sort of hybrid. Like the ahd-i zimmet, they gave the merchant republic the status of a tributary; but they also granted the Ragusans doing trade in the empire a series of guarantees and privileges.¹⁵

PERA, A DIPLOMATIC MICROCOSM

The Ottomans were an integral part of European diplomacy, which—as reasons of state required—in no way ended at the Islamic-Christian border. In reality, that border was constantly being crossed in both directions, with the requisite safe-conduct, by diplomats of all kinds, whether discreet emissaries or ambassadors sounding drums and trumpets, bearing messages, the texts of treaties, and, when necessary, rich presents. Historians who claim that the Ottomans were fundamentally resistant to the very notion of diplomacy have pointed out, as a major argument in support of their thesis, that the sultan had no ambassadors in European capitals. A distinction is necessary here, however. It is true that the Ottomans did not adapt to what was a new practice of European diplomacy, which appeared in Italy in the fifteenth century and took root only gradually and not without resistance in the rest of Europe: namely, permanent embassies in foreign capitals entrusted to ambassadors who would live there for several years. The Ottomans converted to that practice only belatedly; their first experiments did not take place before 1793. At the time, these clearly corresponded to a desire on Sultan Selim III’s part to fall in line with Western practices. A long-lasting Ottoman “megalomania” no doubt explains that long delay as much as “Muslim prejudices.” In fact, though their phenomenal ascent did not turn the Ottomans away from diplomacy, they sought to reconcile it with the somewhat contradictory concern to always assert their superiority over their partner. Hence, from the early sixteenth century on, they disclaimed official documents that had been written in foreign languages, a common practice until that time; and above all, their treaties always took a unilateral form. It appeared as if the treaties were the result of the sultan’s will alone, even though the text had been negotiated beforehand every step of the way and would, at the end of the process, be ratified by both parties. The Ottoman-Venetian treaty of 1540, both peace treaty and capitulation, was thus issued only in the sultan’s name on October 2, 1540. The text includes his oath swearing to respect it. Let us not be fooled by appearances, however: several Venetian emissaries in succession had been conducting talks in Constantinople since the spring of 1539. In addition, once the accord had been realized, the text established by the Ottoman chancery was sent to Venice, accompanied by an Italian translation, on October 8, 1540. The doge in turn swore an oath to respect that text during a ceremony in Venice on April 30, 1541, in the presence of thirty Venetian patricians and the sultan’s representative, his ambassador, the interpreter Yunus Bey. Afterward, a version of the treaty was sent back to the sultan, sealed with the golden bull of the republic. In a letter of 1542 to the doge, the sultan made reference to that ceremony. He recalled the doge’s oath, not considering it superfluous in any way, as complete unilateralism would have done.¹⁶ In addition, that same treaty left a few questions hanging that would later be resolved by bipartite commissions.

The Ottomans, though refraining from establishing permanent embassies themselves, at the same time accepted—despite their acute “spy fever”—the presence in their capital of a number of resident ambassadors, representatives of their principal European partners. The first was the bailo of Venice in 1454. The French ambassador came in 1535 and was followed, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, by English (1583) and Dutch (1612) colleagues. The ambassador of France, Harley de Sancy, wrote at the time to the lord of Villeroy: “Although the vanity of that Porte is great and though they desire glory, to see here several ambassadors of great kings …”¹⁷

As for the Russian ambassador, destined to play such a large role on the Bosphorus in the nineteenth century, he made his appearance only in the eighteenth century, along with several other ambassadors, such as those of Sweden and Poland. A Polish embassy was stipulated in the treaty of 1621, but the implementation of that clause was delayed.

In addition, the Ottoman capital constantly welcomed special envoys, which these same countries and others continued jointly to dispatch.

For their part, the Ottomans sent, if not permanent ambassadors, then at least emissaries. Border countries such as Austria, Poland, and Venice were accustomed to welcoming these envoys in nome del gran signore, accompanied by a retinue, which became more numerous and more spectacular over time. They did everything they could to honor them and not to incur the risk of displeasing their master, “a worrisome and dangerous neighbor,” as Sigismund of Poland called him. Ottoman missions to the more remote countries such as France, the Netherlands, or England were rarer, but the sultan did not hesitate to instigate them whenever the situation required. First welcomed discreetly, these Ottoman envoys were later received with great ceremony, when French sovereigns such as Henry III and Louis XIV came to understand that displaying their pomp before the eyes of the “exotic” ambassadors was the best way to spread the word about their power and glory to the most remote regions of the planet.

By the seventeenth century, European ambassadors no longer resided in Istanbul itself but had settled on the other side of the Golden Horn, in the old Genoese city of Galata and in the “Vineyards of Pera.” Little by little, along the “main street of Pera,” the palaces of the different embassies rose up, accompanied by the corresponding houses of worship. That cosmopolitan neighborhood, occupied by “Frankish” dealers and wealthy dhimmis, became one of the centers of European diplomacy: not only where ambassadors defended the political and commercial interests of their respective countries before the sultan’s ministers, but also, more generally, where the European balance of power was played out. The first task at hand was to thwart those attempting to shatter that balance to their own advantage, by securing the support of the Turk, whether he took action or whether the threat remained implicit. That was the situation, depending on the period, of Venice against Genoa, of Dubrovnik against Venice, of France against the Habsburgs—under Francis I as well as Henry IV and Louis XIV—of Sweden against Russia, of Prussia against Austria, and so on. In a second phase, when the Turk had become weaker, the matter at hand for some was to prevent their rivals from taking advantage of that weakness to seize his spoils. They then intervened to mitigate unfavorable treaties imposed on the sultan, who became accustomed to that procedure, which he designated by the term tavassut. England and the United Provinces mediated negotiations for the Treaty of Karlowitz. In doing so, the two merchant powers, united under a single ruler, William of Orange, cut the ground from under the feet of French diplomacy. A few years earlier, at the height of the war in 1685, an emissary of Grand Vizier Hasan Efendi approached Guilleragues, ambassador of France, a traditionally friendly country, to find out whether it would be well disposed toward offering its mediation between the Ottoman Empire and its three adversaries: the emperor, Poland, and Venice. That scenario played out a few decades later, when the mediation of a later ambassador, the marquess of Villeneuve, allowed the sultan to recover Belgrade and northern Serbia during the peace of Belgrade concluded with the emperor in 1740.

Pera was therefore a microcosm where the different factions of Christendom came together and fell apart in infidel territory: each kept an eye on the other, plumbed its secrets by procuring through bribes copies of orders or secret correspondence. The enemy’s intrigues were thwarted by every means possible. International tensions grew, and diplomats from all the European countries flocked to the Bosphorus. Ambassador Guilleragues took note of the situation in 1682, pointing out its disadvantages: “That multitude of eager ministers attests to an alarm from which the Porte will benefit and to a passion for peace that will make it difficult.”¹⁸ Pera was also an international showcase where everyone measured his prestige by the honors that the Great Sultan and his representatives bestowed and by the priorities in force on the Bosphorus. The ambassadors of France, duly chastised in instructions from their kings, were intractable on that point, and the anecdotes on the subject are legion. These ambassadors demanded precedence over all the other representatives of Christendom, beginning with those of the emperor and the king of Spain, and insisted that their privilege be inscribed in the capitulations and exequatur of the consuls of France. In the French capitulations of 1604, the reigning sultan, Ahmed I, ratifying the occasional guarantees of his predecessors, wrote as follows:

And insofar as this emperor of France is, of all Christian kings and princes, the most noble and of the highest family and the most perfect friend that our ancestors acquired among said kings and princes of the faith of Jesus … in consideration of which, we desire and command that his ambassadors who reside at our blessed Porte shall have precedence over the ambassador of Spain and over all other kings and princes, whether in our public divan or in all the other places they may meet.¹⁹

Ambassador Guilleragues thus found in his instructions a reminder about “the priority that is generally due to France over the other crowns, but which is recognized, more than in any other place, so particularly at the Porte.” That special recognition had to do with the fact that the habitual priority of the emperor was “dubious” in Constantinople, where the imperial ambassador was recognized only as a “minister of the king of Hungary.”²⁰ The right to protection of the Catholic clergy officiating over the holy sites of Istanbul and in the rest of the Ottoman Empire, first granted to the ambassadors of France in the capitulations of 1604 and 1673, was a result of the good political relations between the two countries, and was also a way for royal propaganda to undo the damage of the violent criticisms roused, both within and without, by these same relations in the rest of Christendom. The royal instructions given to the marquess of Nointel in 1670, before his departure for Constantinople, recall with some exaggeration: “This lord ambassador must know that the chief reason for the good terms that the kings who were His Majesty’s predecessors wished to establish among themselves and with the Porte of the Ottoman emperors was the piety and zeal they had for the advantages of the Catholic religion, which a great number of people profess in the Turkish empire, and also to preserve for all Christians in general free access to the holy sites.”

In short, these concessions on the sultan’s part were a matter of international prestige for the French monarchy and also one of the things at stake in the rivalry with the Habsburgs. They opened the way for the Russians, who in the eighteenth century styled themselves the protectors of the Orthodox Christians in the empire. The entire paradox of the situation lay in the fact that Christendom thereby made the infidel sovereign the fulcrum in its balance of power and the arbiter of its status. Regarding the sumptuous retinue of Ambassador d’Aramon, who was allowed to accompany Süleyman to Persia in the 1548–1549 campaign, Brantôme wrote: “What glory for his ambassador and for his French nation to have such standing with the greatest monarch in the world.”²¹

A posting to Constantinople, though it varied in its importance depending on the international historical situation, remained one of the most prestigious in a diplomat’s career, in France and in the other European countries represented. In that respect, it was one of the most enviable for the various officers, nobles, and prelates who pursued that career, with, it must be said, greater or lesser aptitude for the work and uneven success. The mission was one of the most dangerous as well, by virtue of its remoteness and the resulting difficulties in communication, the health risks (epidemics of plague especially), and the differences in customs and mores. “I am here among barbarians, without any civil conversation,” lamented Ambassador François de Noailles in a dispatch of 1572.²² Some twenty years earlier, the irascible Jean de la Vigne, Henry II’s ambassador to Süleyman, had complained about having to tolerate the pashas’ insolence: “It is shameful for the king and his subjects to endure such vileness from these barbarous dogs,” he wrote to his colleague in Venice, the bishop of Lodève.²³ But there was something even more distressing than the blows to one’s ego, which was especially sensitive because the attacks came from “barbarians” and “infidels.” The chief peril was that the Ottomans, though not alone in this in Europe, were also not the least likely to take liberties with the status of diplomatic immunity being set in place at that time (and not without difficulty). When they went to war with a country, they immediately threw its ambassador (and its nationals in general) in prison or at least put them under house arrest. The slightest incident could earn an ambassador snubs and mistreatment, even the worst uncertainties (which the Ottomans skillfully dispensed drop by drop) about his ultimate fate. Did not Veltwyck, Ferdinand of Habsburg’s envoy to Istanbul in 1544, claim that Aramon, Francis I’s representative in the same capital, found himself “in such a bad way” following the Treaty of Crépy-en-Laonnois, by which his master again betrayed the Turk, that “many times there was talk of impaling him”?²⁴ Harlay de Sancy, ambassador of France, was imprisoned for a few days in 1617. More precisely, he was detained at the residence of the chavush bashi after Prince Korecki’s prison escape, in which the ambassador was suspected to have played a role.²⁵ In 1682, after the bombing of Chios by the squadron under Duquesne’s command, another ambassador of France, Guilleragues, feared “some intrigue” on the part of his Turkish hosts. Appearing at the grand vizier’s audience, he was the object of breathless curiosity from all present and recounted: “I prepared myself somewhat to beat off the first violence.”²⁶ There was in these crises, however, a certain amount of gesturing, and no Christian ambassador was ever put to death (though that was not the case for Muslim ambassadors or mere embassy secretaries or interpreters).

THE LIMITS OF TURKISH INTEGRATION

As essential as the role of the Ottomans was in European diplomacy, that role was no more official in Christendom than were the alliances with the sultan. To recognize it formally would have been to accept and thereby legitimate it. But though it was impossible to disregard that ponderous Ottoman presence in Europe, and though it was even desirable to take full advantage of it, it remained an anomaly, an evil to be endured and not accepted. Charles IX’s father and grandfather were Sleyman the Magnificent’s greatest allies, and Charles himself corresponded amicably with him, but that in no way prevented him from publicly rejoicing at Sleyman’s downfall at the siege of Malta. In a published letter to the duke of Nemours, governor of Lyons, Charles IX commanded him to announce the news everywhere by town crier and to order a procession from the Cathedral of Saint John to the Church of Saint Nizier. There, thanksgiving was to take place, “and in the evening, a bonfire will be built, as it is the custom to do on such good occasions.”²⁷ The agreements that Christian states were led to reach with the infidel occupied a gray zone, between bald fact and law. They could not be theorized. Instructive in this regard are the different euphemisms by which the king of France designated the sultan in the instructions to his ambassadors in Constantinople. The Grand Seigneur, emperor of the Turks, His Highness, the Ottoman Emperor: these were all ways of characterizing him like any other emperor, circumventing the religious obstacle that in principle ought to have barred any relationship. In 1672, when Arnauld de Pomponne, Louis XIV’s minister of foreign affairs, declared, regarding plans for holy war, that “they have gone out of fashion since Saint Louis,”²⁸ there was a great deal of realism in his remarks, and not necessarily religious relativism or skepticism of any kind.

Only a few anticonformists lifted the taboo. But—out of scruple or caution?—they did so only partly, and often changed their minds after the fact. Boldly setting forth things as they were, Jean-Baptiste Robinet wrote in his Dictionnaire universel (1778): “The Catholic priests band together every day with the same heretics against whom they once crusaded, and the Christian states have no difficulty allying themselves with the Turk.” Emeric Crucé raised the question directly of the Turks’ integration into the European system. In The New Cyneas, published in 1623, he imagines an assembly gathering in Venice, “where all the sovereigns would have their ambassadors in perpetuity, so that the disputes that may arise could be cleared up [there].” He makes a place for the sultan and his representative, and not an insubstantial one: in the hierarchical order, the sultan would come immediately after the pope and before the Germanic emperor. Twenty years later, however, that same Crucé set aside his boldness and championed traditional conflict. In the early eighteenth century, the abbot of Saint-Pierre took a direction similar to that of the early Crucé. In his Plan to Establish Perpetual Peace in Europe, he came up with a blueprint for a “society” where all the sovereigns of Christendom would be permanently represented, “to settle without war, by a three-quarters majority, their disputes to come and the conditions for trade.” The abbot did not go so far as to integrate the Turks fully. He judged that “it would hardly be proper to give them votes in the congress.” At the very most, he consented to make a concession to them: “In order to maintain peace and commerce with them, and to avoid having to stand armed against them,” the Union “could make a treaty with them … and grant them a resident in the city of peace.” From such an association agreement, even limited in scope, an advantage could be had regarding the primordial objective, the cause of Christianity: “The Church would gain thereby inasmuch as, the more enlightenment the Muhammadans have, the less attached they would be to their dogmas and the better disposed to sense the beauty and perfection of the Christian religion.” That openness, despite being very cautious, was abandoned some years later when Saint-Pierre, at the end of a new work dedicated to the regent, now proposed in bald terms to “drive the Turk out of Europe and even Asia and Africa.”²⁹

Let us recall that it was not until 1856, on the occasion of the Congress of Paris, that the Turks were recognized as full-fledged members of the “European concert.” After centuries of de facto participation, they thus achieved a de jure role. And in fact, does not that concession say more about the bitter rivalry among the Europeans at the time than about a real shift in thinking?

COMMERCE IN THE LEVANT

There was another realm where the weight of reality led Christians and Muslims to set aside the ideology of conflict and to peacefully cross the land and sea borders separating the two worlds: the realm of commerce. Even in the Middle Ages, the attractiveness of precious commodities from the Middle and Far East—pepper, spices, silk—and the enormous profits anticipated from such trafficking (Venice’s fortune rested in large part on that foundation) had always prevailed over the disadvantage of having to load the supplies in Beirut or Alexandria, that is, in Muslim territory. The fact that the hub for trade among the three continents was in the Muslim world was not enough to dissuade enterprising souls from taking part in that commerce. As for the Muslims, they did not discriminate in such matters, beyond setting higher customs duties for the harb. The interested parties concluded trade treaties establishing the rules of the game and offering foreigners the security necessary. For both sides, relations of that kind appeared much more innocuous than political and military accords and therefore did not require the same kind of dissimulation from those who engaged in them. The only touchy point had to do with trade in strategic items (weapons but also raw materials), precisely because they were the equivalent of the kind of accords that were condemned. That is, they contravened the compulsory solidarity within each of the camps. Condemnations by the popes and councils, for example, targeted only trafficking of that kind, and with dubious success.

The framework remained by and large the same in the Ottoman period. The Ottomans, heirs to the Ayyubids, the Mamluks, the Seljuks of Rm, and the Byzantines in the eastern Mediterranean, had the same attitude as the other Anatolian beylik (before they were absorbed into the Ottoman Empire) toward the Frankish merchants. The Ottomans granted them capitulations in turn, and these types of treaties would multiply, would be renewed and expanded, throughout the modern period. At the same time, those exports that risked weakening the country and strengthening the infidels, in open or potential war with the sultan, were condemned by the population and controlled by the authorities: they were prohibited without special permits. Wheat was foremost among these “sensitive” articles. In times of scarcity, the people saw the ban on exports as a religious obligation on the sovereign’s part. Pragmatism was eclipsed and the ideology of conflict returned to the foreground. The bailo of Venice observed in a dispatch of November 1551: “All these ships that have loaded up in the canal [the Sea of Marmara] before everyone’s eyes have led to protests from the people, who go about yelling that wheat was allowed to be loaded in front of the emperor’s very throne, something that has never been done and which the Law and Commandment of the Prophet condemn.” The same discourse still existed in the early eighteenth century, as attested by a French report: “The Turks, who find in the Qur’an everything they choose to look for there, … claim that their law does not in any manner allow granting to the Christians the transfer of wheat outside their states.”³⁰

The exportation of weapons and horses was also prohibited, as was that of various raw materials used in military and naval equipment: cotton, raw wool, hides, and metals such as iron, lead, gold, and silver. These prohibitions were not absolute, however: the Ottomans issued export permits, and a well-placed bribe could always facilitate their acquisition. The highest dignitaries were not above taking part in that trafficking for their own benefit. In addition, smuggling by sea continued apace. The Ottomans would play up the divisions within Christendom to obtain from the Protestant states the strategic articles that the Catholic states refused them: lead, tin, cannonballs, gunpowder. Writing to the king, Henry III’s ambassador in Constantinople explained William Harborne’s success in establishing cordial relations between the sultan and Queen Elizabeth, not without virtuous indignation: “What gave the Englishman the most favor vis-à-vis these people [the Ottoman rulers] is that he brought a great quantity of steel and broken pieces of images in bronze and brass for casting artillery, and secretly made a promise to bring more in the future, which is odious and pernicious smuggling for all Christendom.”³¹

Although, in principle, trade was not supposed to strengthen the partner when he was becoming—or becoming again—an adversary, and though more or less solid limits were established to that end, both sides were perfectly aware of the advantages of commerce. So long as such trade was in surplus goods, it was seen on the Christian side as a factor of public and private enrichment, as the theory of mercantilism would posit. According to a formulation of the municipal magistrates and deputies of commerce in Marseilles in 1679, trade in the Levant was to be “the source of public abundance and individual wealth.”³² But the Ottoman side valued it as well, primarily from a fiscal standpoint, that is, for the customs duties and many other taxes that could be expected from it. In addition, commerce brought into the empire articles and goods they lacked but that were nevertheless an integral part of the luxury of the imperial court and the great houses. Also, certain imports, which by their very nature called for special arrangements, were indispensable for the sultan’s armies. Finally, it was not unusual for high dignitaries to become “entrepreneurs” and to draw enormous profits from commercial speculation. The Ottomans therefore thought well of trade (which explains why, under certain circumstances, they united with the Venetians to battle both the Uskoks and the Muslim pirates, and with the French in efforts to neutralize the Barbary corsairs and the Maltese). It is true, however, that Ottoman power did not take measures to support, stimulate, and organize its merchants, as the mercantilist states of the same period did for the benefit of theirs.

In fact, there was always an obvious dissymmetry between the European merchants, who went to the Ottoman Empire in increasing numbers and founded multiple colonies there, and the sultan’s subjects (Muslim or not), coming to trade in Christian Europe. These traders existed, however, which is sufficient to refute the idea some have advanced that Islam was an invincible obstacle to traveling to infidel territory. But it is true that their destinations were limited. Venice and its satellites particularly attracted them. They regularly visited the ports close to the Venetian Adriatic: Cattaro, Zara, Sabanico (Šibenik), Spalato (Split). The local authorities, fearing espionage or the intermingling of people of different religions, strove to cut these foreigners off from the rest of the population: the city of Zara was thus gradually prohibited to Ottoman traders over the course of the sixteenth century. The authorities relegated the merchants to a place called San Marco, established as their lodgings and for their trading activities. Similarly, in 1622 the conte of Sebenico recommended that a special building, a seraglio, be constructed on the outskirts of the city, to assemble all the sultan’s subjects present there.³³ Venice itself received the sultan’s subjects, Jews and Christians as well as Muslims. These Muslims were from Anatolia, especially Bursa or, after the opening of the commercial port of Spalato in 1589, Bosnia and Albania. Unlike the Christians and Jews, the Muslims did not settle permanently on the lagoon, and their dispersal throughout the city worried the authorities. All sorts of misdeeds were attributed to them. They themselves complained of being the victims of assaults. The authorities therefore undertook to assemble and isolate them. After several fruitless attempts, they established the fondaco dei Turchi in 1621, in the former palace of the dukes of Ferrara on the Grand Canal. The building was renovated to suit its new purpose. There were only two doors: one on the Grand Canal and the other on the land side. The windows were reduced in number and covered with wire mesh. One regulation enacted says a great deal about the bias against the Turkish guests: neither women nor young men nor weapons were to go into the building, which was to be locked up tight at nightfall. That did not definitively solve the problem, however, and the authorities continued to denounce the dispersal of the Turks and its dangers. At the same time, they readily recognized, like the Senate in 1637, that “we are beholden to the Turks trading here for every comfort” and that it was necessary to make an effort to attract them and their valuable merchandise.³⁴

Poland (especially the Galician city of Lvów) and Moscow, frequently paired in fact, were also Christian destinations for Ottoman merchants of all faiths, including Muslims. At issue in these regions was primarily “supply” trade, since the merchants, some of whom assumed an official status (these were the hssa tajiri dispatched by the sultan), sought luxury articles, of which the palace was the foremost consumer: precious furs above all, as well as gerfalcons for hunting, narwhal teeth, amber, and other items.

THE RIVALRY AMONG NATIONS

As for European commerce in the Ottoman Levant, though it had existed continuously since the medieval period, it underwent notable transformations and developments in the modern period, and in the first place, as to its agents. That trade had always been the business of Mediterranean merchants, primarily Venetians and Genoese, and this remained true under the early Ottomans. The Genoese initially obtained capitulations from them in 1352 (renewed in 1387) and the Venetians, between 1384 and 1387. But Genoa was rapidly eclipsed, its colonial settlements hard-hit by Mehmed II’s conquests. Later, in 1566, the loss of Chios dealt a death blow to that “Genoese Romania.” Venice held on for a much longer time (its capitulations were renewed twenty times between 1403 and 1641), even though the Ottomans placed them in competition with Florence and Pisa in the second half of the fifteenth century by granting capitulations to Tuscany in 1460, 1463, and 1483. Then the Most Serene Republic had to yield more and more place to the newcomers. First it was the Marseillais who tried their luck. In 1528, at the request of the joint consul in Alexandria for the Marseillais and the Catalans, Sleyman the Magnificent renewed on their behalf the commercial privilege that the Mamluk sultan Qansawh al-Ghawri had granted them on August 23, 1507. But it should not be claimed, as is still often done, that these same French benefited from the capitulations concluded between Francis I and Sleyman the Magnificent in 1536. There is no doubt whatever that the sultan did not ratify these capitulations, which as a result were never in force. It is true, however, that the French merchants benefited from the alliance that the sultan established with France, since that alliance was necessarily accompanied by special protection. In a letter to Francis I in February 1545, Sleyman the Magnificent writes:

The lieutenant of that ambassador [Captain Polin, assistant to Ambassador Gabriel d’Aramon, who was away from Istanbul at the time] has also indicated that it was your wish that the merchants and traders in your country might continue to come and go in my well-guarded countries, as they have done up to the present. And, in conformity with the affection and friendship that have existed between us in the past and up to this time, inasmuch as your merchants have been in the habit of coming and going in my well-guarded countries, henceforth as well no one shall oppress them or further mistreat them. On the contrary, in accordance with friendship, they must be able to come and go and practice their trade in all safety and security. To respond to your wishes on that subject, sacred orders have been drawn up for the beylerbey of Egypt and Syria, as well as for all the beys and qadis of my well-guarded countries, so that none of the merchants coming from your country will be oppressed or mistreated in their comings and goings on land and sea.³⁵

As a result, the French obtained their first valid capitulations only in 1569, following negotiations between Claude du Bourg, emissary of Charles IX, and Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, grand vizier to Selim II. The kings of France were therefore not the first “Christian princes” to obtain capitulations from the Porte, despite what royal propaganda would claim.³⁶ They had long been preceded not only by the Italian states mentioned earlier but also by Poland, which obtained, along with peace, initial guarantees for its residents in 1494. (The Polish capitulations would be renewed in 1553, 1577, and 1607.)

In 1570–1573, French trade no doubt benefited more from the troubles in Venice, at war with the sultan at the time, than from the strengthening of its legal foundations. But it was not long before the French encountered rivals of their own, whose advent on the scene would mark the entry of northwestern Europe to the Levant.

At first, the English presence was extremely modest. A first mention is made of an English merchant by the name of Jenkinson in Aleppo in 1553. But the ambitions of the English, who had no intention of continuing to travel to Venice to acquire Eastern goods, grew stronger in 1580. At that date, William Harborne, factor and emissary of two English traders (Edward Osborne and Richard Stapper), having arrived in Istanbul two years earlier, obtained capitulations similar to those of the French, who were greatly displeased thereby. But an incident at sea, the attack of two Greek ships by an English corsair, prevented their ratification. Returning to the Ottoman capital as first ambassador of England in 1583, Harborne made amends for his previous failure, this time obtaining ratified capitulations.³⁷ France consoled itself as it could by including in its own capitulations a so-called droit de pavillon, by which all countries wishing to navigate in Ottoman waters had to do so under the French flag, with the exception, however, of Venice and England. That droit de pavillon rapidly became the object of a bitter rivalry between France and England.

In 1581, the English created a Turkey Company, and in 1583 a Venice Company. The two merged in 1592, taking the name Levant Company, which, after a few vicissitudes, received a perpetual charter from King James I in 1605. In the meantime, in 1601, the English had obtained from the Turks what the French would not obtain until 1673: the reduction of their harb customs duties from 5 to 3 percent.

The Netherlands, the other great sea power of the time, tried their luck in turn. In 1612, they sent a special ambassador to Istanbul, Cornelius Haga. As the representative of a nation that had fought so long and so hard against the Catholic Spanish monarchy, he received the best of welcomes at the Porte, and, despite the intrigues of the ambassadors of Venice, France, and England, who conspired against him, he also obtained capitulations and made his special embassy a permanent one. Just as Pera represented a capsule version of the political rivalries of the European states, the Ottoman ports became arenas for their commercial competition.

The Venetians and, to a lesser extent, the French, lost their standing in favor of the newcomers from the north. In the late 1660s, the volume of English commerce, which had managed to reduce its trade deficit by vigorously expanding its sales of cloth to the Levant, reached its peak, surpassing 400,000 pounds sterling. In the 1680s, the English and Dutch controlled, respectively, 43 and 38 percent of European trade in the Levant, whereas the French share represented only 16 percent and the Venetian share had fallen to 3 percent.³⁸ In general, French commerce in the Levant, promising in the sixteenth century, experienced hard times for the greater part of the seventeenth century. Not only a victim of its new competitors, it was also affected by the political troubles of the kingdom, the poor organization and internal dissensions of the French colonies in the Levant. In 1669, Minister Hugues de Lionne interpreted that slump in a rather unfair manner in the instructions drawn up for Ambassador Denis de La Haye-Ventelet. In it, he reproached the previous French authorities for having been unable to take sufficient advantage of the opportunities offered by the political alliance at the economic level, “our kings giving,” according to him, “no application to commerce, and their council not realizing how advantageous it would be to the kingdom to reserve that commerce, which was so great and so considerable, for the French alone.”³⁹

THE PREEMINENCE OF FRANCE IN THE LEVANT

From the late seventeenth century on, the position of French commerce benefited from several favorable factors: Colbert’s energetic measures, mercantilist in their inspiration, which established the monopoly of Marseilles through the charter of freedom granted to that city in 1669. By the order of 1681, they also assured control of the state over the institution of the consul. Similarly, an order of 1685 made residence in the Levant subject to a permit issued by the Marseilles chamber of commerce. In addition, the French took a lesson from the English, surpassing them on their own turf. Thanks to the dynamism of the Languedoc wool industry, duly overseen by detailed regulations, they were able to put high-quality products on the Ottoman market, particularly “London seconds” (londrins seconds), which would be a great success with the local elites. Finally, a little later, with the “major capitulations of 1740,” the French had at their disposal a legal instrument more complete and precise than all the previous capitulations, which assured them all the protections desirable. They also had another advantage, namely, the retreat of the English and the Dutch, who in the eighteenth century were looking toward new horizons, more promising in their view: America and Asia. The English, however, would return in force to the Levant in the nineteenth century. The French continued to wager heavily on the Levant, which did not prevent them from taking an interest in turn, with some delay, in the new markets of the Americas, Asia, and Africa. The proportion of Marseilles trade in the Levant, which was 40 percent in the late seventeenth century, would be only 25 percent by the end of the eighteenth. In any event, from the 1720s until the late eighteenth century, European commerce in the Levant was dominated by the French. Near the middle of the eighteenth century, France represented more than 65 percent of that commerce, the English 15 percent, the Dutch 3 percent, and the Venetians 16 percent.⁴⁰

NEW TRENDS IN COMMERCE IN THE LEVANT

That French preeminence went hand in hand with a diversification of trade and a change in its nature, compared to what it had been in the Middle Ages and during the first part of the Ottoman period. Until that time, trade in the Levant had been a transit commerce, the Middle Eastern ports such as Alexandria and Beirut serving as stopover points for articles from much farther away, India and the Far East. The Portuguese’s discovery of the ocean route for a time eliminated that traffic, which was partly reestablished later in the sixteenth century, only to disappear—or nearly so—in the seventeenth century. Other transit articles replaced the pepper and spices of earlier times: Yemeni coffee, beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, and Persian silk, transported to Syria by Armenian caravans. For the most part, that was the pattern of English trade in the Levant: Persian silk for English cloth. And the disaffection of the English with the Levant led them to prefer Indian and Italian silk.

The French, by contrast, placed the emphasis on “local” products, that is, on everything they could extract from Anatolia and Rumelia proper. That new orientation was accompanied by a proliferation of settlements. In addition to the old Middle Eastern ports, there was Alexandretta (Iskenderun) and Sidon (Saïda), as well as the large and small outlets for these local products. Smyrna (Izmir), on the Aegean side of Anatolia, having evolved from a modest harbor in the sixteenth century, gradually became the chief commercial center in the Levant, a large cosmopolitan city where the “Franks” felt more at home than in any other Ottoman port. Salonika, though it did not equal Smyrna, played a similar role in eastern Europe. And Istanbul, an unequaled center for consumption, also became a site of international commerce. The French and other “Franks” also frequented other, more modest places on land or sea: Canea, Adrianople (Edirne), Bursa, Angora (Ankara), Satalia (Antalya), as well as the ports of Morea (Patras) and those of the islands of the Archipelago.

The Marseillais came in search of raw materials for their industries. Cotton, from western Anatolia and Macedonia, held the foremost place and experienced a boom during the eighteenth century, increasing from about 860 metric tons annually in the early part of the century to 4,400 metric tons a year for the period 1786–1789, with raw cotton now far surpassing spun. But the extremely silky hair of the Angora goat was also much sought-after, as was horse and camel hair, and “local” silk from the region of Bursa, Peloponnesus, and Cyprus. Hides also played a large role, at least in the first half of the century. Usually imported raw and salted, they were tanned in the Marseilles region. Plant or mineral raw materials, indispensable for tanning and dyeing operations, were also in demand; alum, valonia, gallnuts, saffron, madderwort. The soap factories of Marseilles required imports of oil, as well as rocket and glass-wort ash, barilla, saltwort, and potash. The importation of raisins and other dried fruits was also characteristic of that commerce.

The Marseillais traders strove to offset these imports by actively developing exports fed by the Languedoc wool industry. To this they added another category of exports, a further innovation in the structure of trade in the Levant—paradoxically so, since it reversed the former flow of exchanges. They took to the Levant what their predecessors had gone there to seek: sugar, now from the West Indies and Brazil; coffee from the Americas, a less expensive substitute for mocha; indigo from Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), which arrived in Marseilles via Nantes or Bordeaux; cochineal from Mexico, which Marseilles received from Qadiz before reexporting it to the Levant, where it replaced the old Eastern red dyes. Despite that dynamism, French imports from the Levant surpassed exports. It has been demonstrated, however, that there was no trade deficit: “Marseilles became richer by buying more than it sold.” In fact, the trade imbalance was offset by “invisible” receipts from offshore maritime transport along the Ottoman coasts (the “caravan,” which become a French monopoly) and from “banking commerce” (speculation on currencies and the negotiation of bills of exchange).⁴¹ An expression used by Ambassador Choiseul-Gouffier in a 1788 dispatch to his minister reflects the place that Levantine commerce held in the French economy: “Although the Turks are the most inconvenient of allies …, they must also be considered one of the richest colonies of France.”⁴²

THE RESISTANCE OF THE OTTOMAN ECONOMY

That startling expression must not be taken literally, however. It is obviously not possible to speak of a colony in the strict sense, or even, despite the claims of a major historiographical current in recent decades, of a “dominated” economy. A major argument in support of that view points out that the Europeans imported raw materials and exported manufactured goods to the Ottoman Empire. In the period under consideration, European commerce naturally had various repercussions on the Ottoman economy and society, but its importance must be relativized in terms of the other sectors of Ottoman trade—key to be sure, though largely unknown—both internal trade and trade with the East. The proportion of Western trade in Ottoman commerce must have been at most between 5 and 10 percent of the whole.⁴³ In addition, the activities of the Frankish traders were carefully kept in check, both by the authorities (“The Turks are the most inconvenient of allies …”) and by their partners and local competitors: local brokers and merchants, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and also Muslims. Finally, European industries were not yet able to strike a fatal blow to local artisanship, which remained vigorous, even though it was deeply affected by the rise in the price of raw materials occasioned by European purchases. In short, we must not commit the sin of anachronism and apply to this period the upheavals to come in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

It would also be easy to imagine that these Ottoman ports were a place where Franks residing for a long period of time, sometimes even establishing local roots, could meet and even grow close to Muslims. But in reality that was hardly the case, since these Franks (like the Turks of Venice) lived isolated from the rest of the population, in restricted neighborhoods or even special buildings, the funduq. They were therefore separated and protected by walls, just as they were, at another level, by the articles of their capitulations. These organized them into autonomous communities with their own institutions, under the authority of their own consuls, their religious freedom guaranteed by their status as musta’min. When young people married there—which the authorities on both sides proscribed (leaving aside their parents’ wrath)—they of course did so only with local Christian women, Greek, Armenian, or Levantine (that is, European emigrants). In addition, business was almost never conducted directly with the producers but only through brokers and retailers, who were usually “minorities” as well. These same residents had neither permission nor even the temptation to venture outside the large ports to the interior of the country. A few French experiments in Bursa, Ankara, and Kirkagatch, the center of Anatolian cotton production, remained short-lived exceptions. The local intermediaries did their utmost to maintain the status quo that made them indispensable. Not only were contacts with the subjects of the Great Sultan nonexistent or limited, they were also governed by the tensions and disputes produced by often-conflicting economic interests. If there was one Ottoman institution with which the traders were well acquainted, apart from customs, it was the qadi’s tribunal. In short, let us not harbor too many illusions about the role of Levantine ports in promoting knowledge of the other and in teaching mutual tolerance.

THE “NEW TRAVELERS”

The wall of antagonism and ignorance, however, was seriously breached in other ways during the modern period. That was the work of three categories of sappers, distinct in their appearance and objectives, who nevertheless influenced one another.

Let us begin with the travelers. Travel narratives multiplied and, when they were published, were often a great commercial success. The Ottoman Empire or, as it was commonly called, Turkey, was not the only desirable destination. (Persia, India, China, and the New World also fascinated visitors.) But in France at least, it occupied the foremost place: between 1480 and 1609 there were twice as many books printed on the countries of the Turkish empire, on the wars against the Turks, or on the “mores and manners of the Turks” than on North and South America, a world that had only recently been discovered.⁴⁴ Persia, with which Europe, and especially France, had only limited relations, was thoroughly treated in the seventeenth century, thanks to such best-sellers as the remarkable accounts of two Huguenots, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1630–1633) and Jean Chardin (1664–1670). That explains why, in the early part of the following century, in 1721, Montesquieu preferred that Persians and Turks serve as his “new eye” in his famous Lettres persanes.

Apart from the fact that they copied one another, travel narratives were of uneven quality. In the late fifteenth century and even after, there were still travelers who, in the tradition of the old anti-Muslim satires, found on their journeys only confirmation of their original prejudices. That was the case, for example, of a monk by the name of Nicole le Huen. Even in 1487, relating his journey to the Holy Land, he simply reiterated the vituperations against Islam of the fifteenth-century German pilgrim Bernhard von Breydenbach and of the thirteenth-century encyclopedist Vincent of Beauvais. He terms Muhammad a “stinking pig who calls himself a prophet” and all Muslims, whom he still refers to as “Saracens,” “totally brutish, carnal, and bestial men.”⁴⁵ Many narratives by missionaries during the classical period were of the same ilk, though in the best cases they offered a little useful information. For instance, in 1620 Father Boucher, an Observant Franciscan, could not recall without horror his visit to the Holy Sepulchre, “profaned by the reckless fondling of those despicable monsters”: “O Great God.” he wrote, “when I think of it and remember what I saw there, my hair once more stands on end, the sweat breaks out on my forehead, my blood runs cold, my mind goes blank, and I am struck dumb.” His condemnation of the prophet of Islam is absolute: “Muhammad, monster of nature, plague of the earth, aborted runt of hell, scorn of heaven, ruin of men, horror of angels, cesspool of vice,” and so on.⁴⁶

But elsewhere, travelers of a different sort appeared in the fifteenth century and subsequently multiplied. They were observant and sought out information, anxious to give their readers a faithful—we would say objective—and serene picture of the realities they discovered. These travelers, like Postel, in turn asked readers to “strip away all preconceptions.”⁴⁷ That did not rule out criticisms and reproaches when necessary, but without any systematic assumptions. Whether they evoked Islam in general, its prophet, its beliefs, and its rites, or the institutions and mores of the Turks, all these authors set aside exclusionary biases and the traditional sarcasm, in the aim of accuracy and precision. They then made this discovery, astounding when you think about it: not everything that comes from the other, from an other “outside our faith,”⁴⁸ is necessarily bad, and may even conform better to the good than what is found in Christendom. The other, far from being excluded from humanity by virtue of his alterity, may provide a more perfect embodiment of it. Such, for example, was the view expressed by Nicolas de Nicolay in the dedication of his book: he wanted to free himself from “that arrogant presumption usurped by the Greeks and Romans, to consider and call another man, or another nation, more barbarous than oneself or one’s own. Better to reckon like the old man Terence, who said: ‘Being a man, I believe that nothing human is alien to me.’ ”⁴⁹ Some of these works that called into question the prevailing opinions were published fairly quickly and could thus exert an influence on contemporaries, though only to small groups. Many others remained in manuscript form—and hence reached even fewer people—until the time, more or less recent, when scholars rediscovered them. Such works could hardly have had notable effects on their contemporaries, but they do bear witness to what their authors’ state of mind must have been.

In retrospect, the first seems to have been Bertrandon de la Broquière, whose Journeys beyond the Sea, completed in 1432–1433 but not published until the late nineteenth century, attests to a remarkable open-mindedness. The next chronologically was Arnold von Harff, a young gentleman from the duchy of Juliers and Gueldre, who completed his pilgrimage in 1496–1499.⁵⁰ It too was not published until the nineteenth century. Their many successors came from various backgrounds, which is not inconsequential to the nature of their curiosity and therefore to the subjects they privilege. A few, enjoying a certain level of comfort, traveled for pleasure, but most did so for professional reasons. They were missionaries, diplomats, merchants, artisans, soldiers and sailors, literati, doctors, botanists, and so on. Also related to these texts are memoirs of captivity at the hands of the infidels (Schiltsberger, Angiolello, Menavino, Konstantin Mihailovi of Ostrovia, George of Hungary) and accounts of embassies. Other writers, taking advantage of the craze, were not travelers in the strict sense but made use of the information provided by true travelers to compile historical and geographical works, some of which were also a success. The majority of these introductions to the East came from the various Italian states, especially Venice. The Venetians, for whom commercial relations—relations in good standing therefore—with the East were vital, could not simply repeat the same libelous fantasies knocked out by authors of the Turcica in central Europe. People needed to know as accurately as possible where they stood with these indispensable partners. It is therefore not surprising that the first solid and truly enlightening writings on the origins and history of the Turks had their beginnings on the lagoon. In the early sixteenth century, Donato da Lezze (related to the Zens, one of the patrician families very involved in relations with the East) wrote A History of the Turks in Italian, covering the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Turks also appear in the writings of Marc’Antonio Sabellico, historiographer of the Most Serene Republic, and in the treatise of Giovanni Battista Egnazio, composed in Latin in 1516 under the title On the Caesars. Andrea Cambini’s Origin of the Turks and of the Ottoman Empire was reissued several times between 1528 and 1541. Paolo Giovio’s Commentaries on Turkish Affairs appeared in 1531 and would influence a number of other European authors. It was followed by Benedetto Ramberti’s Turkish Matters, and above all by Francesco Sansovino’s imposing History of the Origins of the Empire of the Turks. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Germanic informants were the second most numerous. In that world directly exposed to the Turkish peril, it took longer to achieve a serene perspective on the adversary. Among the remarkable authors from that region, let us mention, by way of example, Hans Dernschwam, who went to Istanbul and Anatolia in 1553–1555,⁵¹ and Stephan Gerlach, whose journal covering the years 1573–1578 was published in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1674. Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq’s Turkish Letters is a special case: the author, ambassador to Constantinople of Ferdinand of Habsburg—Charles V’s brother, whom Ferdinand would succeed as emperor of the Holy Roman Empire—was a Fleming who wrote in Latin. The work is a literary gem, studded with penetrating analyses, which, in its many editions, would significantly influence the view of the Turks in Europe.⁵² During that same period, the French placed third in the number of accounts published. Then came the English, who would become numerous in the late sixteenth century, after William Harborne’s embassy. Let us also mention the travel narratives of John Sanderson (1585–1588, 1592–1598, 1599–1602), which were not published until 1931,⁵³ and the 1585 text of Henry Austell, which was printed in London in 1599. Coming in fifth were travelers from Spain.

Let us reiterate the view of Frédéric Tinguely, for whom “the considerable volume of Italian and German accounts cannot conceal a sort of central kernel, toward which different trends converge and which unites the texts of seven French travelers.”⁵⁴ He cites Pierre Belon (1547–1549), Jean Chesneau (1547–1552, 1553–1555), Jacques Gassot (1547–1549), Pierre Gilles (1547?–1552, 1553–1555), and Nicolas de Nicolay (1551–1552). Nicolay’s work appeared in 1568, accompanied by engravings depicting the costumes of the different nations of the empire and those of the principal agents of the state. Tinguely’s list continues with Guillaume Postel, who took two trips to Turkey (1535–1537, 1549–1550) and was also an astounding scholar. It ends with André Thévet (1549–1552): the first edition of his Cosmography of the Levant dates to 1554. What all these authors have in common is that they are associated in some way with the embassy to Constantinople of Gabriel d’Aramon (1546–1553). That brilliant embassy, the apogee of Frankish-Ottoman rapprochement, had as its complement a remarkable cultural dimension.

An inventory of travel narratives from the first half of the seventeenth century also finds Italy in the first position, but France comes in second this time, far ahead of Germany, England, Spain, or Poland.⁵⁵ Among the important seventeenth-century witnesses, let us cite the Roman Pietro della Valle, who traveled around the Ottoman Empire, in Persia, and in India, between 1614 and 1626; the Englishman Thomas Roe, who, after being ambassador to the Grand Mogul, was ambassador to Constantinople from 1621 to 1628; and the Frenchman Jean Thévenot, who passed through the Ottoman Empire as well as Ethiopia between 1655 and 1658 and gave a remarkably disinterested description of the rites of Sunni Islam in his Account of a Journey to the Levant, published in 1664. In the late seventeenth century, Paul Ricaut’s Present State of the Ottoman Empire was particularly influential.⁵⁶

The Enlightenment also had a number of perspicacious and insightful travelers, of whom we may cite, without being exhaustive in any way, James Bruce, Carsten Niebuhr, Henry Maundrell, Richard Pococke, Jean de La Roque, Claude-Étienne Savary, and Thomas Shaw. Lady Mary Montagu was a special case: the wife of an English ambassador to Constantinople in the early part of the century, she provided access, through the letters to her friends, to a mysterious world inhabited by myths and fantasies: the world of the Oriental woman. With a certain propensity for paradox, she painted that world in terms of simplicity, humanity, and freedom.

THE OTHER AS MODEL

Of the insights of all kinds provided by these travelers, the one with the greatest intellectual import was the recognition of positive qualities in the Turks, even a certain moral superiority, since it called into question the most established certainties, less about the perfection of Christians than about the necessarily deep-seated and generalized depravity of the infidels.

The authors recognized the Turks’ military qualities—the least they could do—but in this instance these lay less in their physical strength or technology than in certain virtues, which the writers thereby indicate were desperately lacking in their Christian adversaries. And these qualities—order, discipline, sobriety, modesty, silence—played no negligible role in Ottoman military successes. “All this shows you,” notes Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, “with what patience, sobriety, and economy the Turks struggle against the difficulties which beset them, and wait for better times.”⁵⁷ The visit he had the opportunity to make to a Turkish camp similarly inspired his admiration:

The first thing that I noticed was that the soldiers of each unit were strictly confined to their own quarters. Any one who knows the conditions which obtain in our own camps will find difficulty in believing it, but the fact remains that everywhere there was complete silence and tranquility, and an entire absence of quarrelling and acts of violence of any kind, and not even any shouting or merrymaking due to high spirits or drunkenness. Moreover, there was the utmost cleanliness…. Moreover, you never see any drinking or revelry or any kind of gambling, which is such a serious vice amongst our soldiers.⁵⁸

The same admiration and the same comparison at the expense of the Christian armies are found in a number of other travelers: “There is no city more orderly than that camp,” wrote Louis Deshayes, baron of Courmenin, in 1621. And during that troubled time, he still retained his predecessors’ regard for the discipline of the Janissaries: “There is an admirable orderliness among them, which I wish could be established in our own infantry.”⁵⁹ In fact, the orderliness lauded by Deshayes was not only true of the army but also existed throughout that empire. He declared that “there is no monarchy where there is greater order, or where all things are better regulated than among them.”⁶⁰ As a happy consequence of military discipline, the soldiers, as several authors pointed out, behaved “properly” toward civilians. Gassot, who had accompanied Sleyman’s army to Persia in 1548, agreed: “I cannot omit to tell you of the greatest obedience they show the Great Sultan, by not stealing things around the villages, by not taking anything at all without paying, and they are very conscientious about it.”⁶¹

Another oft-cited example of Ottoman military discipline came from foreign ambassadors received at the Palace of Topkapi. They note the spectacle of troops, as they were welcomed by the grand vizier and then allowed to kiss the sultan’s hand. Busbecq went into raptures at the sight of “the silence and good discipline … [with] none of the cries and murmurs which usually proceed from a motley concourse.”⁶² The same was true for a Provençal (and Protestant) young gentleman allowed into the retinue of Ambassador François de Noailles, bishop of Dax:

[We looked] with great pleasure and greater admiration at that frightening number of Janissaries and other soldiers standing along the wall of the yard, hands joined behind them like monks, in such silence that it seemed to us we were seeing not men but statues. And they remained motionless in that way for more than seven hours, without one of them ever making a gesture to speak or move. Of course, it is almost impossible to conceive of that discipline and obedience if one has not seen it.⁶³

Another recurrent theme among travelers aspiring to be truthful was praise of the judiciary system, all the easier to make in that the link between that justice and the law of Islam was left aside. That enthusiasm casts into sharp relief the flaws in that realm in the authors’ countries of origin. The foremost quality of that justice was to be swift (though some did acknowledge that such swiftness could also have its disadvantages). As Stochove, among so many others, observed in the mid-seventeenth century: “Furthermore, there is nowhere in the world where justice, both criminal and civil, is administered with such promptness, since the biggest trials last only three or four days.”⁶⁴ That speed made justice much less onerous, as Du Loir, another traveler of that time, pointed out, not sparing the irony: “For myself, I wish that those who have a court case in France had a right of committimus to convene their trials in that Chamber. They would fare better to make the journey to Constantinople than to go back and forth to the courtroom, and their cases would be more promptly expedited at less cost.”⁶⁵ The same author also points out the equality of all before the qadi, and more particularly, of all faiths: “There the Christian and Jew as well as the Turk is heard equally, for the smallest subject of complaint, without the necessity of an advocate’s eloquence to defend the truth.”⁶⁶

Another pillar of the Ottoman system, meritocracy—as opposed to nobility of birth—is also praised by several fifteenth- and sixteenth-century authors, such as Spandugino, Busbecq, Postel, and Pierre Belon du Mans, who writes: “Nobility in the Turk’s country is not like that in the countries of Christians, who inherit it from father to son. But the Turk who will hold the highest position vis-à-vis the Great Sultan is the one who does not know whence he comes or who his father and mother are; and anyone who is paid a salary by the Turk regards himself as a gentleman just as surely as the Great Turk himself.”⁶⁷

By relativizing notions in that way, Belon du Mans “deconstructs” the traditional discourse on slavery among the Turks. He adds in fact: “The greatest honor and good that a man in Turkey can have is to admit he is the Turk’s slave, as in our country we say that we are the servant of some prince.”⁶⁸ Another writer, Petremol, actually somewhat isolated in his interpretation, proposes a “rereading” of the “avarice” usually attributed to the Turks: “They do not value presents so much in terms of the need they have for them, or in terms of the greatness of the present, but rather as a sign of friendship, such that they delight as much or more in giving and presenting them as in receiving them.”⁶⁹

Travelers not only corrected on occasion the misunderstandings about the Turks, they also sometimes took a diametrically opposed view regarding several common allegations that were an integral part of the culture of antagonism. They invited accusers to examine their own consciences. The Turks were said to be barbaric and crude, but several travelers instead emphasized the cleanliness of their streets, their bodies, and their clothing, which Christendom, including great lords, could advantageously take as a model, and which made the Turks the true heirs to the Greeks and Romans. Postel expresses this in his own way: “I want the same availability of baths for the great personages and great cities of Christendom, as a very healthy thing, which has been the occasion to urge here what I wanted to write at greater length: for the great good that comes of it, and whereby the ancients, knowing this, avoided most of their illnesses.”⁷⁰

Cleanliness went hand in hand with decency in dress, a modesty that seemed far removed from the lewdness and debauchery ordinarily attributed to the Turks. Here again, the fault and the lesson to be learned were not on the side people thought. In Turkey, it was possible to assess what was shocking (and unflattering as well) about certain types of clothing that seemed natural in the West. Busbecq notes: “Our mode of dress seemed as strange to them as theirs appeared extraordinary to us. They all wear long garments down to their heels, which seems more decent, and their cut is much more becoming to them. By contrast, we wear them so short that, against propriety, it is easy to see the form and shape of the parts that nature wants to be covered, and to make men appear small.”⁷¹ Geuffroy had already noted the Turks’ disapproval of the “codpiece on breeches, which displeases them greatly and seems very indecent to them.”⁷²

Just as several travelers point to the exceptional character of polygamy—reserved for the sultan and the very wealthy—which had so roused the Western imagination, they also call into question that other fantasy: the lasciviousness of the women. Postel, for example, ironically sums up the matter: “And of course, a recitation of the purity, simplicity, and decency that appears in the ladies from those parts, would, it seems to me, be a very odious thing to make many Christian ladies hear.”⁷³

It was commonly said that the Turks were incapable of “decency,” used in a much broader sense, but several travelers dispute the validity of that reputation. According to Postel, it could be attributed solely to the testimony of peoples who had to suffer at the hands of some Turks but was not justified in general, if, in judging the matter, you were to “set aside all preconceptions like a good judge.”⁷⁴ That was also the conclusion reached by Du Loir, who does not hesitate to reverse the usual scale of values by placing the decency of the Turks above that of the Greeks, those other Christians (schismatics to be sure):

Naturally they are good, and it must not be said that the climate makes them so, since the Greeks were born in the same country, with such different propensities that they retained only the bad qualities of their ancestors: namely, deviousness, perfidy, and vanity. The Turks, by contrast, profess sincerity and especially modesty, with the exception of the courtiers, almost all of whom everywhere are slaves of ambition and avarice. Simplicity and ingenuousness reign among them with unparalleled freedom.⁷⁵

The most astonishing thing is that they do not reserve their decency for their coreligionists alone: “It is worth remembering,” exclaims Jean Chesneau, “with what loyalty the Turks behave toward the Christians, which the Christians do not do even among themselves.”⁷⁶

These few examples show the extent to which travelers, in light of an experience whose veracity they loudly proclaim, could attest to a new perception and could voice a discourse countering the age-old prejudices. Of course, they do not go so far as to praise Islam, but they are at least capable of lauding Muslims and their works. The authors thus potentially open a breach in the culture of conflict.

EVLIYA ÇELEBI AMONG THE FRANKS

Nothing equivalent was to be found on the other side. The dissymmetry we observed regarding merchants⁷⁷ was even sharper among travelers and can be attributed to the same deep-seated causes, whatever the analysis one might give (which is not our objective here). For the period concerned, only a very limited number of Muslim travel narratives to the countries of the “Franks” have survived, and they provide their potential readers or listeners with only meager information about the realities in these countries. That is true even of the most famous of the Ottoman travelogues, written by Evliya Çelebi in the second half of the seventeenth century. Evliya traveled primarily within the borders of the Ottoman Empire and, when he happened to venture beyond them—or when he claimed to have done so, since it is doubtful he personally went to all the foreign countries he talks about—the particulars he gives are so vague and fanciful that it is difficult to identify the sites in question. Several of the places he speaks of remain indecipherable enigmas for the modern commentator. What, for example, could correspond to the city of Karish, which he presents as one of the most important in Holland? It is particularly surprising that he does not give more precise and reliable notions about that country, since he had no lack of opportunities to meet nationals from the Netherlands in several Ottoman cities.⁷⁸ But precisely, is the aim of his narration to inform? Is it not rather to captivate and entertain? His description of Vienna is a case apart. We now know that, contrary to what used to be thought, it is very likely that he actually went to that city in 1665, in the retinue of the Ottoman ambassador, Kara Mehmed.⁷⁹ A number of indications he provides are accurate and attest to a thorough knowledge of the city and its inhabitants. His evocation of Saint Stephen’s Cathedral, for example, is germane on several points, though on others, it is perfectly capricious. His recognition of the infidel’s superiority in certain matters is telling: he vaunts the care taken in properly preserving the works in the cathedral’s library and notes in passing the presence of Mercator and Hondius’s Atlas minor and of Ortelius’s Geography. Conversely, he condemns the disastrous neglect from which the most prestigious libraries of Islam suffered. In other words, for him, as often for his Western counterparts, praise of the other is a more or less explicit criticism of his own people, an exhortation to reform.⁸⁰

THE BIRTH OF ORIENTALISM

To return to the Europeans: another category of go-betweens with the Muslim world stands apart from the travelers we have spoken of at some length, first, by their object but above all by their approach. These go-betweens were primarily concerned with the fundaments of Islamic culture in general, the Arabic language, and the scriptural sources of Islam, beginning with the Qur’an. Some were also travelers, but many were bookworms who had never gone to the countries where the manuscripts they relied on originated. These were the first Orientalists, who began to appear in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, though the term did not emerge until the very end of the period, in English in 1779 and in French in 1799. The word orientalisme did not even enter the dictionary of the Académie Française until 1838.⁸¹ The Orientalists’ primary intention was neither pro-Islam nor disinterested. At least at the beginning, their aims were apologetics and proselytism. In the tradition of Peter the Venerable and his team of Qur’anic translators in the twelfth century, they wanted to know Islam better in order to better combat it and to better curtail it by promoting the conversion of its followers. They wanted to learn the Arabic language, as well as Hebrew, Aramaic, and Syriac, for the purpose of biblical exegesis. They also needed to translate the holy scriptures into Arabic, for the sake of Muslims and, in the first place, of the Eastern Christians, whose state of ignorance they universally deplored. All the same, whatever their objective, knowledge emerged the winner and, having once been a means, tended to became an end in itself.

In the first half of the fifteenth century, John of Segovia (d. 1458), a cardinal in partibus who had retired to Savoy, produced (with collaborators) a trilingual Qur’an in Arabic, Castilian, and Latin, the text of which has been lost. In the same century, only Italy, particularly Florence, was a living center for the study of Eastern as well as ancient languages. Italy was the birthplace of the man who apparently launched the first Arabic studies in France, the Dominican Agostino Giustiniani (1470–1536). In 1516, he published in Genoa a psalter in seven versions, including one in Arabic, before being summoned to Paris. In the France of his time, knowledge of Arabic was becoming a component of a humanist education. In his famous letter to his son Pantagruel, Gargantua recommends, among other things, that he learn the “Arabicque” language. In 1539, Guillaume Postel received the title of royal lector of “Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic letters” at the Collège Royal (the future Collège de France), which had been founded a few years earlier. His contribution to Arabic philology is an important aspect of his vast and diverse body of writings. He published an Arabic alphabet within the context of a work devoted to the alphabets of twelve languages, and, for the first time in the West, an Arabic grammar (Grammatica arabica). In 1543, he provided a new translation of the Fatiha, the first sura of the Qur’an. He also worked on the Syriac version of the Gospels and probably also on an Arabic version. Simultaneously, he pursued his knowledge of Islam and of Judaism, with the objective proper to him: to lay a new foundation for Christianity in light of the other two forms of monotheism, in order to make it the universal religion and the basis of concord among all peoples. Whatever might be said about that idealism, that mysticism even, which often had disconcerting aspects, he attests particularly to a knowledge of Islam that is altogether impressive, in such works as Quattuor librorum de orbis terrae concordia: On the Republic of the Turks and, When the Occasion Arises, on the Mores and Laws of All the Muhammadans, which appeared in French, this time in Poitiers, in 1560. He would revise that work in 1575 under the title On Eastern Histories and Primarily on the Turks or Turkites Both Scythian and Tartaresque. In it he included a dictionary of “the most common” Turkish words.

Postel’s Arabic teachings were perpetuated by the most famous of his students, François Juste Scaliger (d. 1609), who was appointed to the Arabic chair at Leiden University in 1593. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, Arabic studies were represented in Italy (where Ferdinando de’ Medici, cardinal and grand duke of Tuscany, set up an Arabic-character printing press in 1586), and in France, Germany, and the Netherlands. The indispensable work tools—grammars, dictionaries, editions of texts—began to appear. The role of the Netherlands, the sanctuary of Protestant culture, was preponderant at the time, with scholars such as F. Ravlenghien, or Raphelengus (1539–1597), who taught Arabic in Leiden in about 1593; and Thomas van Erpe, or Erpenius (1584–1624), and his student Jacob Golius (1596–1667). Over the course of the seventeenth century, that first Orientalist Europe expanded further: in 1627, Pope Urban VIII created the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda in Rome, which was an important center of learning on the fringes of missionary activity; and in 1638, Richard Pococke was the first to occupy a chair in Arabic at Oxford.

Along with knowledge of the Arabic language, promoted by Christian Arabs’ stays in Europe, knowledge of Islam and of Arab history developed greatly, though within limited circles (academic or not), throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. That movement preceded, then went hand in hand with, the Aufklärung, or Enlightenment.

A first translation of the Qur’an into a European language—Italian, as it happened—was printed in Venice in 1547. The translator was Andrea Arrivabene, who based himself on the medieval Latin version of Robert of Ketton, greatly abridged and reworked. Shortly before, in 1530, the Qur’an had been printed in Arabic in the same city, but all the copies were burned on the order of Pope Paul III.⁸²

In 1647, André du Ryer, former consul of France in Egypt, provided a first French translation of the Qur’an, L’Alcoran de Mahomet, which came out in a second edition in 1649. Somewhat skewed by the constant use of Christian terminology, it was nevertheless closer to the Arabic text than the Latin translations of the Middle Ages. The next French translation, by Claude Savary in 1783, was already much more satisfactory. In the meantime, in 1734 George Sale, an Arabist and lawyer, published a remarkable English translation of the Qur’an, accompanied by a high-quality “preliminary discourse” with sober and well-informed notes.

In 1691 and 1698, two volumes of the monumental opus of Ludovico Marracci, a priest from Lucca, were published in succession in Padua. They included a complete and excellent translation of the Qur’an into Latin as well as a refutation of Islam, in a new tone free of all aggressiveness. A collection of valuable historical works followed. In 1697, Barthélemy d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque Orientale, an overview of Muslim history with a telling subtitle—Universal Dictionary Generally Containing Everything Having to Do with Knowledge of the Peoples of the East—appeared posthumously, courtesy of Antoine Galland. In his substantial preface, Galland laid the foundations for the study of Eastern peoples and civilizations. In 1684, Richard Simon (1638–1712), in his Critical History of the Customs of the Nations of the Levant, gave a rigorous and objective description of the beliefs and rites of Islam, basing himself on the work of a Muslim theologian. Some twenty years later, the Dutch Arabist Adriaan Relan took up the question with greater proficiency, basing himself solely on Muslim sources, in his De religione mahommedica (Utrecht, 1705). Departing from the traditional invectives, other works reconsidered the personality and career of the Prophet: such was the case for the biography Pierre Bayle provided in his Critical Dictionary (1st ed., 1697), which he reworked in later editions to reflect the advance of knowledge. At the same time, Bayle presents Islam as a tolerant religion, rational and reasonable, humane and civilizing—all themes that would foster the philosophy of the Enlightenment and its battle against the Catholic church. In 1720, an anonymous pamphlet appeared in England with a title that announced its tone: Mahomet No Impostor! Another positive and even apologetic biography of the Prophet was written by a freethinker, Henri de Boulainvilliers (1658–1722). Left unfinished by its author, it would be completed by a friend and published posthumously in London in 1730.⁸³ At the same time in Germany, Johann Jakob Reiske (1716–1774) displayed incomparable erudition in Arab literature and history and did not conceal his admiration for Islam, meeting with incomprehension and attacks by those around him. The Oxford Arabist Simon Ockley (1678–1720) also made the shift from scholarship to admiration in a history of the Saracens published in 1708.

DRAGOMANS AND ERUDITE DIPLOMATS

Among the initiators of that discovery of Arab Islamic culture, a place must be made for those professionals employed in the European embassies and consulates established in the Muslim world, especially in the capital and the ports of the Ottoman Empire: the dragomans. Necessarily possessing more or less extensive training in the three languages of the Islamic East—Arabic, Turkish, and Persian—they pursued practical activities for the most part, as translators and interpreters. Some of them, however, proved to be more interested in erudition and embarked on scholarly works. A precursor on that path was the interpreter from Lorraine in the service of Poland, François Mesgnien-Meninski, who in 1680 published an imposing Thesaurus Linguarum Orientalium, Turcicae, Arabicae, Persicae in Vienna. One undertaking destined for enormous success was the translation, between 1704 and 1717, of the Thousand and One Nights, by Antoine Galland (1646–1715), who, among other works, also left behind a translation of the Qur’an that has never been published. Galland was not a dragoman in the strict sense, but, attached to the embassy of the marquess of Nointel, he was a great traveler as well as a remarkable scholar. By contrast, Jean-François Pétis de la Croix, a genuine interpreter and the son of an interpreter, published a translation of the Thousand and One Days in 1732. At the end of the period, the most prolix representative of these dragomans by training, who played a great role in initiating his readers into the history of Islam, was the Austrian Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall. A student at the Oriental Academy in Vienna, author of a monumental history of the Ottoman Empire and of many other works dealing with the present as well as the past, he was also the founder of the first Orientalist review, the Fundgruben des Orients (1809–1818), precursor to other organs of the press that appeared in the various European capitals during the nineteenth century.

Compared to the Orientalists from other backgrounds, the dragomans and embassy secretaries were less likely to confine themselves to the fundamental texts of Islam and its early days. Their curiosity was more wide-ranging, in terms of the languages considered, the literary genres, and the periods concerned, including the most contemporary. They were impelled by the spirit of the eighteenth century generally, which, in its realism and optimistic and positivist approach, could not be satisfied with a totally disincarnated erudition, which in fact lost ground in the second half of that century. But in any case, the dragomans were predisposed to be open to the concrete and contemporary, by virtue of their professional practice and the circumstances of their training. Former students at the École des Jeunes de Langues, during their studies they had been induced to translate, as exercises, the various manuscripts collected in the royal libraries of their different countries. Such was the case for the French jeunes de langues in the period 1730–1750. The works they produced under these conditions, at the instigation of Ambassador Villeneuve, are the source of the translations of Eastern manuscripts housed at the Bibliothèque de France, a collection that remains in large part unpublished.⁸⁴ Since the requirements of their practical training led them quite naturally to focus on the Ottoman Turk, they brought to light a few works by a people that was truly the last from whom the West expected to find a literature of quality. La Haye, ambassador to Constantinople, dispelled all illusions in that regard, when he wrote in a dispatch to Mazarin on April 23, 1644: “As for Turkish and Persian books, I believe I am obliged to alert Your Eminence that there is nothing in those two languages but bad romances and fabulous stories, or commentaries on the Qur’an, worse than any kind of romance and fable, and which these people judge much greater than their worth.”⁸⁵ A true connoisseur like Galland, a discerning and regular customer of the booksellers in Istanbul, reacted passionately against such an opinion. He administered the following lesson in 1697 in his preface to Herbelot’s Bibliothèque: “We show some favor toward the Arabs, and they appear to have cultivated the sciences with great diligence. We attribute politeness to the Persians, and we do them justice. But the Turks, by virtue of their name alone, are so disparaged that ordinarily it is enough to name them to signify a barbarous, crude nation in complete ignorance.” But that is an injustice dictated by ignorance and prejudice, for in reality the Turks “are in no way inferior to the Arabs or to the Persians in the sciences and belles lettres common to these three nations, and which they have cultivated almost from the beginning of their empire.”

In the Turkish and Persian disciplines, the first works—dictionaries or conversation manuals—were for the most part practical in their objectives, though that did not exclude a scientific aspect to some of them. Such was the case for the work of Cosimo of Carbognano, dragoman of the Naples embassy in Constantinople, who published in Latin the Principles of Turkish Grammar for the Use of Apostolic Missionaries in Constantinople (Rome, 1794). Yet it was difficult for Galland’s lessons on the plurality of the literatures of Islam to be heard, and the hierarchy he evoked continued to dominate Orientalism for a long time. This was still an embryonic discipline: Sylvestre de Sacy, professor at the École des Langues Orientales—created by the Convention in 1795—would finally fix its rules and methods for all of Europe in the early nineteenth century. For the moment, it had a tendency to confine itself to a philological approach to the founding texts and was therefore far removed from the living realities of Islam at the time.

PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTION

Finally, it fell to a third category of actors to fully learn the lessons to be drawn from the empirical information that the observations of travelers and the discoveries of scholars provided. These were the philosophers. It was incumbent upon them to extract the meaning and import of these observations, to which travelers and scholars generally limited themselves. They then integrated them into more far-reaching reflections on Islam, Christianity, and religion generally; on the nature of political regimes and societies; and ultimately, on the human condition.

Well before the Enlightenment systematically called all the cultures known outside Christianity to serve as witnesses in its indictment against the established order, the political philosophy of the Renaissance sought to theorize the Ottoman case. It was a burning question at the time. In The Prince (1513), therefore, Machiavelli contrasted the Turkish and French regimes, noting: “The entire monarchy of the Great Turk is governed by a single master, the others are his servants…. The king of France, conversely, lives among a multitude of great lords of a very ancient lineage, recognized and beloved by their own subjects. Each has his hereditary privileges, which the king cannot touch without peril.” On such premises, philosophers elaborated the conception of the Ottoman government as a tyranny, a view destined for great success at every level of discourse relating to the Turks. That tyranny was linked, implicitly or explicitly, to Islam. From 1630 on, the term “Oriental despotism” was in use. Nevertheless, an opposing theory appeared in the late sixteenth century in the writings of the jurisconsul Jean Bodin. The powerful author of The Historical Method (1566), The Six Books of the Republic (1576), and the Colloquium heptaplomores (Colloquium of the Seven Scholars; 1593?), which remained in manuscript form, he did not conceal his admiration for the political acumen of the Ottomans, whom he saw as the worthy successors of the Romans. He undertook to justify, in terms of political “engineering,” their most violently denounced institutions, such as the perpetration of fratricide in the imperial family and the forced conscription of Christian boys. He even gave a legal justification for the latter practice, the devshirme, and for the sultan’s ownership of all arable land, basing himself on the right of conquest. In addition, borrowing Aristotelean categories, he identified the Ottomans not as a tyranny, as in the generally held view, but as belonging in an intermediate category between tyranny and monarchy, to which he gave the name “seigneurial monarchy.” Under such a system, “the prince is made lord of goods and persons by right of arms and the rules of war, governing his subjects as the family patriarch does his slaves.”⁸⁶

These distinctions, which also entailed a rehabilitation, no longer made sense to Montesquieu. In view of an Ottoman regime whose image had in the meantime continued to deteriorate, he revived and legitimated the theory of tyranny, which became that of despotism. Although The Persian Letters possessed an exotic charm and, in any case, took as its true subject not Islam but French society, unmasked by a withering gaze, Islam truly was condemned in The Spirit of Laws. Islam, by its fatalism and the passivity that resulted, catered to despotism. Montesquieu imposed that idea for a long time, and the scholarly and penetrating critique that Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil Duperron made of it in his Oriental Legislation in 1778 was not enough to topple a view that would continue to be taken as self-evident in the following century.

Voltaire, as has often been pointed out, was more changeable and ambivalent about Islam. He provides a very negative image of it in his tragedy with a revealing title: Muhammad and Fanaticism (1742). There the Prophet is portrayed as a rogue and a cruel manipulator, an “armed Tartuffe.” But in that play, which was quickly banned, was Islam the author’s true target? Napoleon gave the response in a famous remark: “He attacks Jesus Christ in Muhammad.” Voltaire evolved on the subject, however, as attested by several favorable estimations in his tales, especially Candide, and above all, in Essay on the Mores and Spirit of Nations (1756) and the Philosophical Dictionary (1764). A reader of Herbelot, Boulainvilliers, and Georges Sale, Voltaire understood Islam as a kind of deism, close to his own convictions, and he praised its spirit of moderation and tolerance. That more appealing image had infinitely less impact on public opinion than his Muhammad. In any event, it was intended primarily as an implicit denunciation of l’infâme, that is, clerical Christianity.

The image of Islam was more clearly positive in Rousseau, whatever the role played by his oft-cited familial bond with the Muslim world: the father of the “citizen of Geneva” was in fact a “clockmaker of the seraglio” in Constantinople, while his uncle practiced the same trade in Isfahan. In Émile (1762), Rousseau holds up the Turks, “generally more humane, more hospitable than we are,” as an example for his pupil. In the Social Contract (1752), he praises the Prophet for the close bond he established between politics and religion.

Like Boulainvilliers, Rousseau admired Muhammad as a great lawmaker of lasting accomplishments. All in all, it is clear that the assessment is mixed. Although the Enlightenment broke away from the traditional culture of conflict, with a calmer and better-informed view of Islam, that view was far from uniformly positive, especially with regard to the sociopolitical effects of the Prophet’s teachings. But the newest and most important contribution probably lay not in that realm but in the promotion of religious tolerance as a preeminent philosophical value. The underlying intentions had to do first and above all with Christendom itself, implying no judgment whatever of Islam or of any other religion at issue. The precursor in this matter was John Locke in his Essay concerning Toleration (1667), then in his Letters concerning Toleration, composed in Latin in Amsterdam in 1685–1686. Locke first set his sights on the politico-religious divisions of England and Europe. He utters this significant statement: “Neither Pagan nor Mahometan, nor Jew, ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the commonwealth because of his religion.”⁸⁷ He had two major successors in the eighteenth century: Voltaire, and then, at the end of the century, the great figure of the Aufklärung, Lessing, author of Nathan the Wise (1779), Education of the Human Race, and the Masonic Dialogues.

For its champions, tolerance undoubtedly went hand in hand with a dose of skepticism and thus bore the mark of a certain de-Christianization. But others went even further. Another, more radical facet of the “crisis of conscience”—namely, atheism or the freethinking current—also targeted Christianity in particular but was obviously not inconsequential for an understanding of Islam as well. In fact, Islam provided a privileged opportunity for religious comparatism, which had the effect of relativizing Christianity by demonstrating that it obeyed the same historical and sociological laws as any other religion. Such was the—sulfurous—message of the pioneering work of Henry Stubbe (d. 1676), The Rise and Progress of Mahometanism, which circulated only in manuscript form but would be recopied until 1718.⁸⁸ That religious comparatism developed further in the eighteenth century, especially in Pastoret’s Zoroaster, Confucius, and Muhammad, Compared as Sectarians, Lawmakers, and Moralists (1797). A charade by Anacharsis Cloots took to an extreme the relativization that results from comparatism. Responding to a book by the theologian Bergier, titled The Certainty of the Proofs of Christianity (1773), he parodied it point for point in The Certainty of the Proofs of Muhammadism, which he attributed to a certain Ali-Gier-Ber, alfaqui.⁸⁹

TURQUERIES AND “FRANKISH FASHIONS”

What stood to be learned from foreign peoples with different mores and customs, and especially, from the Muslims, primarily the Persians and Turks, did not simply feed reflection. It sparked the imaginations of an undoubtedly wider audience. The fact that these peoples, especially the Turks, were generally as rejected at the religious level as they were feared in the field of arms, did not keep them from also eliciting insatiable curiosity and constant fascination. The number of travel narratives and, in several cases, their enormous success, attest to that, as does the favor enjoyed by certain translations, such as Galland’s Thousand and One Nights. The appeal of all the figurative representations is evidence as well. These could be illustrations of certain travel narratives, such as that of Nicolas de Nicolay, or manuscript or printed collections of images. They might depict scenes from Turkish life or the different costumes of officeholders in the states, nations, and trades of the empire, as did the collection published by Charles de Ferriol (1637–1722), ambassador to Constantinople. The Oriental pictures of first-rate painters such as the Swiss Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702–1789) and two Frenchmen, Jean-Baptiste Vanmour (1671–1731) and Corneille le Bruyn (1652–1711), fed the same craze. Although Europeans in the modern age no longer sought science in the Islamic East, as they had in the Middle Ages, they at least found it a source of inspiration (as they did India, China, and America).

What was happening on the other side during this time? Scientific and especially technical knowledge, now coming from the West, had no difficulty making inroads in the East during the early days of the Ottoman Empire. That was spectacularly true of artillery and firearms in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and “renegades” going to seek refuge or their fortune with the Great Turk were key actors in these transfers. Busbecq notes in retrospect the Ottomans’ capacity for adaptation, in a famous passage from the third of his Turkish Letters:

For no nation has shown less reluctance to adopt the useful inventions of others; for example, they have appropriated to their own use large and small cannons and many other of our discoveries. They have, however, never been able to bring themselves to print books and set up public clocks. They hold that their scriptures, that is, their sacred books, would no longer be scriptures if they were printed; and if they established public clocks, they think that the authority of their muezzins and their ancient rites would suffer diminution. In other matters they pay great respect to the time-honoured customs of foreign nations, even to the detriment of their own religious scruples. This, however, is only true of the lower classes.⁹⁰

Similarly, the artistic blossoming of the Italian cinquecento did not fail to have an impact in the Ottoman Empire. Mehmed II, “prince of the Renaissance” in some respects, requested a painter from Venice and had his portrait drawn by Gentile Bellini. Subsequently, the empire, steeped in its superiority and grown rigid by an increasingly prominent religious conformism, further closed itself off from European influences. That did not prevent the formation of small Istanbul circles, bringing together a few individuals present in the capital—foreigners or subjects of the sultan, Muslims or not—who were curious about science and who exchanged their information about the latest discoveries. A circle of that type formed around the geographer Ktib Çelebi.⁹¹ But such phenomena remained rare and discreet. Later, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, military defeats persuaded a few Ottoman rulers to once again open themselves to the technical progress of the infidels in well-defined areas: tactics, artillery, shipbuilding, and fortifications. “Volunteers” from allied powers, such as Bonneval Pasha, who became the chief of gunners (humbaraji bashi), or the Baron de Tott, who fortified the Dardanelles, were recruited to that end. In the early eighteenth century, under Ahmed III’s reign, the aestheticizing and Epicurean climate of the “Tulip period” ensured a great success to the revelations that Yirmisekiz Çelebi Mehmed Efendi made about his embassy to France in 1721, both in his embassy report and in the unending torrent of words he uttered upon his return. At their country houses, the sultan and his entourage rushed to imitate in their fashion what the ambassador had taught them about the wonders of Versailles, Fontainebleau, and the many other palaces and gardens he had visited. Until the reactionary and puritan insurrection of 1730, there was thus a period of “Frankish fashions” on the Bosphorus. Brief as it was, it prefigured, in a light-hearted register, the Westernization of the nineteenth century. For the short time it lasted, it was a kind of counterpoint to the “Turqueries” of the same period in western Europe.

The term “Turqueries” has been used to refer to European works of all kinds that were closely or remotely inspired by Turkey. They are generally associated with the open-mindedness and taste for exoticism of the eighteenth century, as well as with the weakening during the same period of an empire that had supposedly ceased to inspire fear. In reality, though it is very true that these works changed in tenor over time, they began to appear much earlier and thus corresponded to a more deeply rooted tendency that transcended the historical context. In 1468, members of the court of Burgundy—where fourteen years earlier, during the Oath of the Pheasant, knights had pledged to go on Crusade against Mehmed II—donned sumptuous Turkish costumes on the occasion of the marriage in Brugge between Charles the Bold and Margaret of York. Olivier de la Marche left behind a description of the scene: “The first to arrive in the arena was Sir Jehan de Chassa, lord of Monnet, served by four gentlemen dressed in very rich robes in the Turkish mode … and there was a horse caparisoned with crimson velvet, embroidered with golden clouds, on which horse sat a maiden dressed in striped green silk cloth, with a large gold chain around her neck, dressed in the manner of Turkey.”⁹² These costumed interludes, in the tradition of the “medieval mummeries,” would enjoy a long vogue in European princely celebrations. Sometimes, alongside the fascination they conveyed was an allegorical intention. In Lyons in 1501, during the betrothal of Claude of France to the young Charles of Ghent—the future Charles V—a “mummer” disguised as a Turk interrupted the ballet of the Christian powers and, out of spite, threw his bow at them.⁹³ In 1541, at the wedding of Jeanne d’Albret in Châtellerault, Francis I appeared, perhaps in a Turkish mask, among the dancers “who were dressed in the mode of the Turks in clothing of fine gold brocade.”⁹⁴ A similar spectacle, which included an implicit and euphemistic homage to the power and pomp of Süleyman the Magnificent’s Turkey, took place, notably, in 1548, during the wedding of Henry Balafré (“the Scarred”), duke of Aumale, to Anne d’Este.⁹⁵ Nor were such masquerades rejected by Louis XIV. At the Carrousel of 1662, the king, along with the prince of Condé and several other lords of the court, appeared dressed as Turks. At about the same time, M. de la Boullaye le Gouz, author of a travel book about Persia and the Indies, enjoyed real success in the Parisian salons by appearing there in “Levantine costume.”⁹⁶

A little later, it became the fashion to be painted as a sultan or sultaness. That was the case for Mme du Barry, among many others. As for writers, they went looking for images of luxury and refinement, and not only among the Turks. The conventional Orient where they set their romances or tragedies provided a more varied palette of emotions and sensations. The Orientalist novels of Madeleine de Scudéry, Ibrahim, or the Illustrious Bassa and Almahide, or the Slave Queen, immersed the historical dramas in a sentimentality imbued with the supernatural. Theater too seized on those events of Islamic history that contained the most pathos. Turkey was not the only source. Inspired by Guillen de Castro’s Youthful Deeds of Rodrigo, the Cid, in 1636 Corneille gave the Moors of Spain, portrayed as loyal and magnanimous, a dazzling role in Le Cid. In 1587, Timur had inspired Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, and that terrible conqueror could be found again in 1658, in Jean Magnon’s The Great Tamerlane and Bajazet. But from the Renaissance on, the most spectacular episodes of Ottoman political history turned out to be particularly productive in that Oriental gallery. They were echoed in many tragedies, where in reality the dual aim of giving the audience a fright and of making more or less veiled allusions to domestic current events prevailed by far over historical accuracy or local color. The execution of Mustafa by his father, Sleyman the Magnificent, and the intrigues of Roxelana to that end—an event that the correspondence of the ambassadors in Constantinople had widely disseminated—were the source for a series of plays: Gabriel Bounin’s The Sultaness (1561), written eight years after the deed; the Florentine Prospero Bonarelli’s Il Solimano (1619); Jean Mairet’s The Great Last Sleyman, or the Death of Mustapha (1630); Desmarres’s Roxelana (1643); and Abbot Gaspard Abeille’s Sleyman (1680). The execution of Ibrahim, Sleyman’s grand vizier and favorite, was portrayed not only in Mlle de Scudery’s novel but in three plays that appeared in quick succession: Mainfray’s Woman of Rhodes (1621), Scudéry’s Ibrahim (1643), and Desfontaine’s Perside (1644). Yet another play, Jacquelin’s Sleyman (1653), dealt with the rivalry for succession between the old sultan’s two sons, Selim and Bayezid.

These works and others have now been entirely forgotten. But that is not true for the one that infinitely surpassed them all in style and dramaturgy, Racine’s Bajazet (1672). The author was inspired for that play by an event that he himself noted was especially moving because it was contemporary. Bajazet is about the murder in 1635 of Murad IV’s younger brother, Bayezid, on the sultan’s order. That political crime, conforming to the “law of fratricide,” was divulged in the dispatches of Harlay de Césy, ambassador to Constantinople. The play also stood apart from the other Oriental pieces by virtue of its meticulous documentation, which Racine set forth in his preface. That did not spare him the criticism of Corneille and others, who reproached him for showing characters onstage who were Turkish only in their costumes. Racine vigorously defended himself in his later prefaces, where he claimed, “I was intent on expressing in my tragedy what we know of the mores and maxims of the Turks.” Furthermore, he preceded his text with this introductory note of great suggestive power: “The setting is Constantinople, in other words, Byzantium, in the seraglio of the Great Sultan.” That famous tragedy contributed toward fixing in the public’s imagination the notion of seraglio, a sensual and cruel world, the place of all pleasures and all crimes. In a much less circumspect manner, Michel Baudier had already laid the foundations for that fantasy in his General History of the Seraglio of the Court of the Great Sultan (1642). Many others would embroider on the theme.

The case of The Bourgeois Gentleman (1670), or more precisely, of the Orientalist finale of Molière and Lulli’s comedy-ballet by that name, is entirely different. The Chevalier d’Arvieux reports in his memoirs that King Louis XIV, appealing to his personal experience of matters Turkish, had asked d’Arvieux to get in touch with the authors, so as to mount a spectacle that would parody the costumes and manners of the Turkish ambassador, Süleyman Aga Müteferrika, and his retinue. He thus took his revenge on a personage whose lack of tact during the formal audience that Louis XIV had granted him shortly before at the Château of Saint-Germain had irritated the king. The scene with the Grand Mamamouchi is distinguished both by a certain linguistic competence, unusual in the repertoire (the use of terms borrowed from Arabic, Turkish, and the lingua franca), and by its powerfully comic irony.

That buffoonery, still unusual in the seventeenth century, became one of the aspects of Turqueries in the eighteenth century. Mozart immediately comes to mind: Osmin in the Abduction from the Seraglio; the two gallants disguised as “Albanians” to test their fiancées in Cosi fan tutte; and the bounding, mocking rhythm of the Turkish March. The same spirit can be found in Rossini’s The Italian Girl in Algiers. From another angle, the hero of the Turqueries can be seen as tender and good-hearted, a sensitive soul under his high turban and behind his long mustaches. He is “the Turk in love” painted by Lancret and mass-reproduced in countless curios. Or he is the “generous Turk” of the pantomime opening act of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Gallant Indies (1535): he grants freedom to his slave Émilie, with whom he is in love, and to Valère, her lover, whom a storm on the Barbary Coast had delivered to him. People took to imitating that kind character’s art of living, building charming kiosks in the parks and drinking coffee, as Mme du Barry is doing in her “Turkish portrait,” by preference from a precious porcelain cup. How did they arrive at that point? How did the “terrible Turk” turn into the “generous Turk”? The fading of Türkenfurcht, made possible by the Ottoman defeats, certainly played some role, as did the reassessment of the Turks and of Islam by certain travelers and philosophers. But it was a fragile achievement, which differences in the political and economic interests of Islam and Christendom could easily sweep away. Then all the themes of the ideologies of antagonism, all the demons of fanaticism and rejection of the other, would surface again and take on more force than ever.