Christendom had defined itself for centuries in opposition to the belief-communities to its east and south. Both Byzantium and the West could claim to be the heirs of Christendom and its protectors against Islam. But after the schism between eastern and western Christianity in the eleventh century there followed centuries of estrangement and antagonism between Byzantium and the West. Western Christendom’s crusading project served to weaken rather than strengthen the Byzantine empire, which was further undermined in the fifteenth century by the emergence of independent Slavic kingdoms, which looked to the West, as well as Ottoman settlements and pressure from the East. The fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 marked the end of Byzantium, an empire whose durability had served as a bulwark in the Mediterranean and the Balkans against the rise of Islam.
With Byzantium’s collapse, the West became the sole protector of Christendom against Islam. The Christian reconquest of the Spanish peninsula was complete by the end of the fifteenth century, leading Spain and Portugal to confront Islam directly in North Africa. They erected fortified bastions along the North African coast, while avoiding trying to conquer the mountainous and Islamized Maghreb. In the East, Christendom now faced the powerful Muslim Ottoman empire, rising from the ashes of Byzantium in the eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans. That reawakened Christendom’s crusading instincts. Yet the objective of the Crusades – the recovery of the Holy Land – had been clearly defined, whereas resisting the Ottoman empire was not. And as Christendom’s divisions deepened in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, so its response to the Ottoman threat became more incoherent. The Ottomans proved adept at exploiting those divisions. As the distance between crusading fantasies and pragmatic political, strategic and commercial realities grew wider, so the notion of Crusade itself fragmented and waned, and with it the idea of Christendom which had given it coherence in the first place.
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM IN AN AGE OF RELIGIOUS CONTENTION
By 1550, the threat to Christendom from the Ottomans was real, their advance into European lands inexorable. With energy and creativity they cemented their hold on the Hungarian plain around military and governing centres (sanjaklar), which they established to control the Danube and its associated watercourses. The capture of Belgrade in 1521 was followed by the collapse of Hungary in 1526. Buda was pillaged by the Turks in 1526, besieged in 1529 and then finally occupied permanently in 1541. Esztergom was besieged six times before it finally fell to the Ottomans in 1543, to become the front-line fortress and frontier sanjak. Meanwhile, Temesvár was conquered in 1552, thereby broadening and consolidating the Ottoman footprint north of the Balkans. The Turks adapted to local customs as the price for cementing their hegemony. The post-conquest cadastral surveys in central Hungary allocated local resources to support material infrastructure locally in order to make good their claims that they were not a predatory regime. There were tax exemptions and compensation for civilian populations most affected by Ottoman garrisons, paid for from central funds or transfers from the Egyptian treasury.
Moldavia, Wallachia and Transylvania were unstable, porous, multi-cultural and religiously diverse overlordships where the success of those in authority depended on how they brokered their acceptance with the various local groups, and played off their neighbours against one another. The Ottomans understood how to exploit local grievances and disputes to keep local rulers loyal to them. They embraced Wallachia as a quasi-independent protectorate. It was occupied by garrisons but never subjected to a cadastral survey, nor was its land granted out as prebends (timar) to reward Ottoman cavalry (sipahis) or serving officers in the imperial army (janissaries). That served as the pattern for Moldavia as well, where a failed attempt by local nobles to recover their independence from Ottoman rule in 1538 signalled its more permanent absorption into Ottoman overlordship.
Transylvania was more complex. It was the densely wooded region to the east of Hungary, whose scattered population was divided into Hungarian (Magyar) nobles and peasants to the west, Turkish peasants and Slavs to the east, Lutheran German immigrants in small towns, and self-governing communities of Szekler forest folk. The princes (voivodes) of Transylvania could not hope to defend their lands against an outright attack by any of their larger neighbours (Poles, Habsburgs, Turks). Their countrymen could raise cavalry on a voluntary basis, but only for the summer months. They needed a protector. But opinions were divided in Transylvania as to where that protection should come from. Around 1550, some (especially in western Transylvania) looked to the Habsburg archduke, and later emperor, Ferdinand I. Others supported John Sigismund Zápolya, a remnant of the Jagiellon dynasty through his mother. He was twice elected king of Hungary (1540–51 and 1556–71), mainly thanks to the protection of the Ottomans.
Rivalry between John Sigismund and Ferdinand was also fomented by religious differences. Transylvania had become a haven for Reformed Protestant proselytizing and, in due course, for Unitarians. The beliefs of the latter seemed to offer the possibilities of syncretism between Christianity and Islam. That appealed to many groups in eastern Transylvania, especially the Szeklers, for whom Islam was a close and not-so-feared neighbour. The Ottomans played on those differences to establish their hegemony while allowing the local Diet to elect its own princes and exacting no hostages or tribute. In Transylvania, a neo-Calvinist prince ruled with Ottoman blessing. Under Turkish aegis, Latin-rite Christians, Calvinists, Lutherans and Unitarians had a recognized place in Transylvanian life, while Orthodox Christians were tolerated. As with the frontiers between Protestant and Catholic Christianity, so those between Christianity and Islam were nowhere as neat as the proponents of Crusade and Holy War on either side would have liked them to be.
The Ottoman empire was (somewhat like the pre-Christian Roman empire) an amalgam of cultures and traditions which its expansion fostered. Islam provided its foundational legitimacy. The sultans conceived of themselves and their social order as Muslim and their state as an Islamic one. Yet, by 1550 the empire spread over three continents and embraced 15 million people. The Ottomans learned how to match the protection of the House of Islam with the practicalities of ruling diverse peoples. Ottoman religious and military élites maintained the primacy of Islamic law but were flexible about how they did so. The interpreters of Islamic law (müftis) presided over mosques and religious schools (medresses). They were independent of the regime and could be the focus of opposition to it. But they were trained in the Sunni Hanafi school of Islamic law, which offered justifications for religious syncretism in terms of the eventual conversion of those who were not originally of the faith. By contrast, those who administered the Islamic law locally (kadis) were appointed by the state, priest-magistrates who drew upon Sultanic law as well as local customs and traditions, while seeking to interpret them within the framework of their understanding of Islamic law (the Shariah). At the same time, Armenian, Greek Orthodox and Jewish communities all had their own courts within the empire, and judged people in accordance with their own laws. Genoese, Venetian (and then, later, French, English and Dutch) residents were also allowed their own courts in the trading centres of the empire. Even within the House of Islam, the Ottomans accorded space and legitimacy to the dervish orders. Christians, Jews and Armenians of talent found their way into Ottoman military and administrative élites.
While religious dissent had initially encouraged Christendom to define itself as a belief-community through the exclusion of those who did not subscribe to its beliefs, the Ottoman empire was able to expand in the same period on a basis of qualified inclusion. So although European lands had few Muslims in their midst the Ottoman empire embraced a mixture of Christians of different traditions. The majority of its Balkan subjects were (with the exception of some parts of Albania and Bosnia) Christians. There were minority Christian populations in Anatolia and concentrations of Christians in Middle Eastern mountain regions which had traditionally served as refuges (Mount Lebanon, Sasun and the Tur Abdin). Many Christians in the Ottoman empire acknowledged their allegiance to either the Greek Orthodox patriarch, or the Apostolic Armenian patriarch, both located in the Ottoman capital. Both Church hierarchies were recognized by the Ottoman bureaucracy. But there were many Christians in the Asian and African provinces of the Ottoman empire who were neither Orthodox nor Armenian – Copts, Jacobites, Maronites and Nestorians.
From the later sixteenth century onwards, the globalizing Christian ambitions of Catholic Christianity sponsored attempts by European missionaries to make common cause with these Asian and African Christians and to wean the Orthodox and Armenian faithful to the Latin cause. Their objective was to form a ‘Uniate’ Church (that is, one in communion in Rome) as had occurred in the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands among the Orthodox faithful after 1595. In the Ottoman empire, however, such efforts backfired – not least because Ottoman officials, reluctant to intervene in what they regarded as Christian quarrels of no concern to them, endorsed the rival authorities of the two patriarchies. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the contentions over religion in Constantinople were focused around protecting Catholic missionaries (attempts led by the French monarchy) from hostility originating, in most part, not from Muslims but from the Orthodox and Apostolic Armenian patriarchs.
Western Christendom’s ideologues talked up the need to respond to the Ottoman threat with a Crusade against the Infidel, ignoring the reality that the Ottoman empire was a pluralist entity in which Christianity had an acknowledged place. In a parallel fashion, Islamic religious leaders periodically proclaimed the need for a Holy War (ghâzá), while Ottoman rulers simultaneously sought to retain the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional basis of the empire. Like Christian princes in the West, however, the sultans had to respond to the popular expectations for spiritual renewal in their midst as well as pressures for a greater degree of religious orthodoxy and state-sponsored confessional identity. In both Christian Europe and Ottoman Islam there were mutual and contradictory pressures – some for confrontation and others for coexistence. The resulting ambivalence explains the ebb and flow in the relationships between Europe and the Porte: mutual tensions, followed by renewed and contingent accommodation.
Ottoman expansion in the Mediterranean constituted a particular focus for Christendom’s fears. That was where it was most readily understood within an eschatological context. The prophecies of Joachim of Fiore from the years of Christendom’s crusading fervour taught that the Turks were a manifestation of the Antichrist whose final overthrow would signal the End Time. They were joined by other prophetic proclamations with their origins in the last years of Byzantium. In Venice, Florence and elsewhere in Italy, such writings were more widely diffused in print, and given credence in the years of heightened tension from the Turkish menace. As the Ottoman siege of Cyprus unfolded in 1570 so the Brescian alchemist Giovanni Battista Nazari published one of several works to appear from Venetian presses that year predicting that the Venetian Lion, the Imperial Eagle and the Papal Lamb would together slaughter the Turkish Dragon. Equivalent prophecies circulated in the Muslim Mediterranean world as it approached its own millennium (1591–2 in the Christian calendar). One of the most widely distributed predictions within Christendom (appearing in twenty-three printed editions in the years from 1552 to 1600) was that the Ottomans would capture ‘the red apple’, interpreted in the West as the city of Rome.
The Mediterranean was the heart of an economic world straddling continents and civilizations. Its urban centres and hinterlands were linked by patterns of exchange which were both collaborative and competitive. What went on at one end of the Mediterranean was rapidly known, talked about and emulated at the other. Intermediary groups (Armenians, Jews, Moriscos, Christians who had converted to Islam either voluntarily or by coercion and others) served as conduits of information across religious and cultural divides. Venice, Europe’s great entrepôt with the East, had a guild of official translators (dragomen) who acted as intermediaries with the Ottoman empire. These intermediaries relayed Christian and Muslim prophetic voices in the Mediterranean echo-chamber, each urging on the anxieties of the other. One sign of the waning of Crusade was the decreasing economic and cultural influence of the intermediary Mediterranean trading diasporas in the seventeenth century, and the shift in the centre of gravity of Europe’s eschatological and millennial speculation. By the 1620s it had moved away from the Mediterranean and the fear of the Turk, to be relocated in the hands of Protestant interpreters in the upheavals of central Europe.
The Ottoman military conquest of Syria and Mamluk Egypt in 1517 was followed by the acknowledgement of Ottoman suzerainty by the Arab advocates of Holy War in the Maghreb and the corsair states along the North African coast. The latter’s licensed depredations on Christian shipping were the way whereby the Ottomans sustained their overlordship along the shoreline of the southern Mediterranean at little cost to local populations. They also acquired a naval competence with which to challenge successfully the combined maritime strength of Venice and the Habsburgs in the second Ottoman-Venetian War (1537–9). As a result, the Ottomans established their pre-eminence in the Aegean and over the majority of the eastern Adriatic coast. Just as the Ottomans exploited local frustrations against the incompetent Mamluks, so they were adept at fomenting Greek Orthodox resentments of their Latin Catholic overlords in the Aegean islands to establish their hegemony. By 1550, Ottoman naval forces were never more than a day or so away from a port and supplies for their galleys in the eastern Mediterranean. That gave them a considerable advantage over the navies of Christendom when the latter ventured on long-range expeditions east of Malta.
The Ottomans were well informed about the religion and politics of Christendom, thanks to the Jews, converted Moriscos and Christians in their service. The Muslim empire’s westward expansion depended on exploiting Christian divisions and rivalries. By 1550, however, it was reaching the strategic limits dictated by the geography of its land supply-lines. Ottoman military maps tell the story of how important these were, as do their ambitious projects to link the Don and Volga rivers (first conceived in 1563), to build a Suez canal (1568) and another linking the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara through the Sakarya river (begun in 1591). No amount of local outsourcing to supply the strategically placed outpost garrisons could replace the need to march men and equipment to the campaign front line. Equally, the materials and crews to man their Mediterranean fleets were not summoned out of thin air. They required logistic planning and forethought. Even more important in limiting Ottoman expansion to the west was the reality that the further they penetrated into the core of European land-space the more they encountered peoples who were acculturated not to accept Muslim rule and prepared to resist it.
Nor was the Islamic world itself immune to religious division. Developments here, as in other aspects of the Middle East, bear comparison with those in the West. In 1501, the Grand Master of the Safaviyeh Order, a Sufi group of mystics from what is now northwest Iran, proclaimed himself Shah (‘king’) Ismail in Azerbaijan and Iran and established his capital in Tabriz. Claiming to be the direct male descendant of the cousin of the Prophet Muhammad, he succeeded in imposing Shi’ism as the religion of what coalesced under his authority and that of his successors as the Persian Safavid empire. Thousands of Shi’a adherents (fundamentally divergent from Sunni Islam) were massacred by the Ottomans in Asia Minor in an effort to repress the heresy in the first half of the sixteenth century, while the supporters of Ismail desecrated Sunni graves and sought to advance Shi’ism by military means, regarding the shah as both a religious leader and a military chieftain.
The periodic wars that broke out between the Ottomans and Safavid Persia in the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries took resources and focus away from Ottoman expansion to the west, which in turn further opened the door to a coexistence with Europe. With the Portuguese (and later the Dutch) holding sway in the Indian Ocean and hovering at the entrance to the Red Sea, the possibility that Europe would make common cause with the Safavid rulers of Persia was a constant preoccupation in Constantinople. Further Islamic dissent also appeared in the sixteenth century from the Saadi, an Arab dynasty located in southern Morocco, whose members claimed to be (like the Safavid) directly descended from the Prophet’s family. At the Ottoman Porte, as in the capitals of Europe, the relationships between East and West came to be seen in terms of global strategic imperatives rather than a Crusade.
PEACE IN CHRISTENDOM: WAR AGAINST THE TURKS
The antagonism in Christendom towards the Ottomans was fundamental, the evidence for it pervasive. Yet beyond the calls to mobilize resources and efforts to defend a common faith lay debates in and around the councils of Christian princes about the best strategies and military techniques to deploy, and fundamental disagreements about whether what was needed was the defence of what remained in Christian hands (and in which regions to concentrate) or the recovery of what had been lost. Those divergences were occluded in the rhetoric of the double goal to bring peace to Christendom in order to confront the Muslim foe. The moral authority of the papacy and (to a lesser extent) the emperor were both implicated in the quest for that mostly illusory twin objective. Partly as a result of papal insistence, the diplomatic correspondence and international negotiations echoed to the importance of achieving a peace in Christendom in order to unite against the ‘common enemy’. Sent by Pope Julius III to negotiate an accord between the French king, Henry II, and Emperor Charles in 1554, Cardinal Pole wrote a discourse that was a classic statement about how true peace between Christian princes was a gift from God. That gift was the more to be sought after, said Pole, because ‘truly nothing but your dissensions and wars’ was to blame for the Ottoman capture of Belgrade or the fall of Rhodes. The papal dream of a united Christendom as the necessary precondition for a war against the Turk remained on the agenda throughout the sixteenth century since it was one to which Protestant and Catholic Christian princes jointly subscribed, even though little else united them.
That papal dream was still active at the end of the sixteenth century as the ‘Long War’ against the Ottomans in Hungary showed no signs of reaching a successful conclusion for the emperor’s forces. That conflict underlined Pope Clement VIII’s efforts to reconcile the French king, Henry IV, with Philip II, culminating at the Peace of Vervins (1598). The Cardinal-Nephew Pietro Aldobrandini wrote in October 1596: ‘These peace talks are of infinite importance to His Holiness because he sees in them a service to God and Christendom, and the true means of exterminating heresies and subjugating the Turk.’ That was the last moment in Europe’s major diplomatic encounters when the rhetoric of peace in Christendom in order to unite against the Ottomans played a significant role. Protestant powers in northern Europe ceased to take it seriously. The international diplomatic role of the papacy retreated. In the initial stages of the Westphalian negotiations in 1645–6, the papal nuncio Fabio Chigi corralled the delegates from the Catholic powers in Münster to arrive at a common peace in order to resist the Ottoman offensive in the Aegean, begun with the siege of Crete in 1645. His Venetian counterpart, the experienced diplomat Alvise Contarini, tried to do the same among Protestant delegates at Osnabrück, even exaggerating the dangers for the sake of the audience. Like Contarini, however, Chigi was dismayed by the results, confiding to the nuncio in Venice that evoking the Turkish threat worked ‘the opposite of what he had expected’. Delegates, he said, ‘hear the Turk spoken of as though it was merely a name, a creation of the mind, an unarmed phantasmagoria’. By the time the negotiations neared completion, the papacy had to make a choice between not sacrificing Catholic gains in Germany during the Counter-Reformation, and supporting peace in order to pursue the Turkish threat. It chose the former.
There was one occasion when the papal dream came close to being realized. In May 1571, negotiations for a Holy League were concluded in Rome on the initiative of Pope Pius V. The agreement was signed by a majority of the Catholic maritime states in the Mediterranean (the Papal States, Spain, Venice, Genoa, Tuscany, Savoy, Parma, Urbino and Malta). Their maritime assets combined to make up the League forces placed under the overall command of Don John of Austria. Twenty-six years old, the illegitimate son of Emperor Charles V, and brought up almost as a brother to Philip II, he completed the repression of the Morisco rebellion in southern Spain before joining the fleet at Genoa in August. His flotilla then made for Messina, where other League ships assembled in September. On the 17th, Don John stepped ashore and made his way through a ceremonial parade of Spanish troops, arranged the length of the harbour, to attend Mass in the cathedral. In the bay were 208 galleys, six galleasses and a further sixty-six frigates. From one of the ships, Pope Pius V blessed the armada and presented it with the League’s crusading banner. The expeditionary force was crewed by 44,000 sailors and oarsmen. Its ships were armed with 1,800 guns and carried 28,000 soldiers. It was the largest naval force mounted by Christendom, and the largest ever deployed against Islam.
The Ottoman fleet had already left port in June 1571. It was composed of over 250 ships, crewed by 50,000 sailors and oarsmen, and carried 31,000 soldiers. Its first objective was an assault on the strategically important and rich Venetian colony on the island of Crete. Always vulnerable because of underlying Greek dislike of Venetian rule, it was additionally weakened by the Ottoman capture of Cyprus the year before. Although the island’s principal fortress held out, the island was ransacked before the Ottomans besieged Kotor on the coast of Montenegro, the fortress capital of the Venetian colony of Albania. The Ottomans were alert to the rumours of Orthodox Christian unrest in their Dalmatian sanjaks of Delvine, Avlonya, Ohrid and Elbasan. Open revolt had just broken out in the southern Peloponnese (the Morea), and Ottoman intelligence knew that its leaders had sent emissaries to Philip II and the Venetian Senate. The Ottoman amphibious force moved to suppress the rebellion in August before mounting an assault on Corfu, the Greek island at the entrance to the Adriatic.
Seeking the Ottoman navy, Don John’s fleet engaged with it in the Gulf of Lepanto, which was where the Ottoman fleet had their arsenal, on 7 October. The Turkish commander, Müezzinzade Ali Pasha, a senior figure in Ottoman councils and favourite of Sultan Selim II, promised liberty to his Christian galley-slaves if he won the day. John of Austria simply told the crew of his flagship: ‘There is no paradise for cowards.’ The battle was bloody and decisive. By four o’clock in the afternoon it was over; 7,000 or more League sailors and soldiers had perished, along with at least seventeen ships. Ottoman losses were overwhelming: 20,000 dead, wounded or captured, fifty ships sunk and a further 137 captured along with the mainly Christian slave crews. Ali Pasha himself was captured and decapitated, his head displayed on a pike above the mast of Don John’s flagship. Janissaries continued fighting, even after the battle had been lost. When ammunition ran out they threw oranges and lemons at the enemy.
The significance of the Holy League and of the battle of Lepanto did not lie in the destruction of the Ottoman navy or a decisive shift of strategic power. The ships were quickly replaced. When Grand Vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, the brilliant Bosnian janissary-trained administrator, was asked the following year about the losses at Lepanto, he replied: ‘The Ottoman state is so powerful that, if an order was issued to cast anchors from silver, to make rigging from silk and to cut sails from satin, it could be carried out for the entire fleet.’ Replacing the trained crews turned out, in fact, to be the harder task. The League failed to follow up their naval victory, never contemplating the recapture of the island of Chios (which the Ottomans had captured from the Genoese in 1566) or Cyprus (taken by the Ottomans after the long siege of Famagusta in 1571).
The League was disbanded in 1573. The Venetians made independent overtures to the Porte to safeguard their commercial Levantine interests, leaving Spain (now embroiled in a major war in the Netherlands) to summon alone what resources it could to defend its position on the North African coast. In touch with the Dutch rebels, the Ottomans mounted a successful attack on Tunis in 1574 with a naval force larger than either of those which fought at Lepanto. That gave them a secure base from which to invade Morocco in 1576 and unseat its dissident sultan, Abu Abdallah Muhammad II Saadi, and replace him with his compliant uncle and rival, Abu Marwan Abd al-Malik I Saadi. The Ottomans thus reminded Christendom that they could still bring war close to Europe’s heartlands. Abu Abdallah fled to Portugal and sought to engage King Sebastian in his restoration. Although he failed to interest Philip II in the project, Sebastian launched an expedition to Morocco which had all the hallmarks of a Crusade. His expeditionary force of 17,000 troops joined the 6,000 Moorish soldiers of Abu Abdallah, but they were overwhelmed at the battle of Alcácer-Quibir (‘Battle of the Three Kings’) on 4 August 1578. Sebastian was last spotted, Don Quixote-like, leading the Portuguese nobility into Ottoman lines of fire.
Alcácer-Quibir was a humiliation to be forgotten. Lepanto, by contrast, was turned into a fairy-story, complete with a handsome prince (Don John), wicked ogres (the Turks), a prize to be rescued (Christendom) and a fortuitously successful outcome. The naval battle’s significance was that it was commemorated in a surfeit of celebration. Don John became a crusading icon. Rome treated the commander of its galleys, Marc’Antonio Colonna, to a hero’s welcome. Sculpted bronze medals were distributed from the papal mint in memory of the victory, while Giorgio Vasari was commissioned by the papacy to undertake a fresco cycle for the Sala Regia (where it accompanied a painting to celebrate the massacre of St Bartholomew). In Venice, the captain-general of the Venetian galleys, Sebastiano Venier, was apotheosized in a painting by Tintoretto in which he was depicted standing on the deck of his flagship while the battle raged, assisted by a heavenly host. His renown secured him the election as the Republic’s Doge at the age of eighty.
The legend of Lepanto reassured those in Christendom who had come to believe that their internal divisions were so great that the Turk could never be defeated. Yet the reality was more sobering. Even after the League had been signed, there were anxieties that Venice was negotiating a separate agreement with the Porte to safeguard its maritime empire. Persistent disagreements over the command of the forces as well as their eventual objective had delayed the departure of the fleet. Key players in Christendom had stood aside from the League. Europe’s Protestants ostentatiously ignored it. King Charles IX of France preferred to hang on to the Capitulations of 1569, privileges offered to the French on the eve of the Ottoman Cyprus campaign in order to foster disunity among Europe’s princes. Emperor Maximilian, too, rejected the League in favour of an Ottoman-imperial accord which had been negotiated in 1568. Portugal pleaded its commitments in Morocco and the Red Sea.
By the end of the sixteenth century, the balance of forces in the Mediterranean reached an unstable equilibrium. In Hungary and the Balkans, a similar unsteady balance rested on the border defences in the Danubian marches and the relationships between the Ottomans and their Balkan and European protectorates. The Ottomans inherited fortresses hitherto in Hungarian Christian hands – those along the Danube and across to Lake Balaton in Transdanubia as well as those in the Novigrad Mountains and all the major castles along the river Tisza and its tributaries: some 130 installations which they garrisoned by 18,000 soldiers and 7,000 cavalry. The Austrian Habsburgs, confronted with their own weakness and the vulnerability of that part of Hungary remaining in their hands, chose appeasement as the only option, accepting in 1568 a truce which included annual payments of tribute to Constantinople. Gradually thereafter, the Habsburgs assembled their own defensive crescent along the 600-mile frontier from the Adriatic to northern Hungary, guarding it with over 20,000 soldiers. In 1590, they negotiated, albeit on disadvantageous terms, an eight-year extension of the truce. But conflict along this armed border escalated into a war that began in 1591 (as the Habsburgs saw it) and 1593 (as the Ottomans thought) and dragged through into the next decade, being concluded only by the Treaty of Zsitvatorok in 1606. Contemporary observers in Christian Europe were convinced that the Ottomans took advantage of the lull in the conflict with Persia in order to challenge the new Habsburg strategic fortifications.
Pope Clement VIII, following in the footsteps of Pius V, tried to turn the Hungarian conflict into an opportunity to unite Christendom under papal initiative. This time, however, Protestants were not even solicited to join in, so deep-rooted had become Europe’s religious fracture. Instead the ‘Long War’ became the moment when the revived forces of a globalizing Catholic Christianity were brought into play. Venice, Savoy, Ferrara, Mantua, Parma and Urbino, Genoa and Lucca were all approached to support what the emperor declared to be a Crusade. Princes and their spouses found themselves the object of solicitous letters from the Holy See. To the east, the pope sought a commitment from the king of Poland and, beyond Europe, he dreamed of a grand alliance with the Cossacks, the grand duke of Muscovy and Shah Abbas I of Persia. An embassy from the latter was received in Rome with suitable ceremony in 1601. International subsidies were raised, and money transhipped through financiers and intermediaries largely outside Habsburg direct control. Yet the results in material terms were disappointing. The papacy despatched three forces under Francesco Aldobrandini and additional subsidies, but Spain proved a reluctant backer, at least until after 1598. The fleets of Naples and Sicily, on which Pope Clement had relied to launch diversionary sorties in the Mediterranean, limited themselves to cautious sallies, save for one ambitious raid on Patras in 1595. Henry IV of France was as generous in his support for the principle of intervention as he was hard-headed and reluctant to deliver anything material. The Habsburgs managed to finance their war-effort only thanks to a generous reading of an agreement at the 1570 Diet of Speyer to the effect that imperial territories were obliged to provide quarter and subsistence for an army engaged in the common defence of the empire.
In the end, the outcome of the ‘Long War’ turned not on the lack of unity in Christendom but on the behaviour of the Ottoman client-states. The military hostilities in central Hungary destabilized the loyalties which the Turks had developed among the competing dynasties in Moldavia, Wallachia and Transylvania. These regions were as seriously affected by the climatic irregularities of the 1590s as the rest of the European landmass. In addition, the greater demands for raw materials, foodstuffs and subsidies to support the Ottoman forces in Hungary sharpened resentments towards their overlords. An important contingent of the armies fighting for the Ottomans in Hungary came from the Crimean Tatars (they furnished over 50,000 troops in 1595 and succeeding years). Each year, the sultan despatched ‘boot money’ to the Crimea in order to enlist their support. Once it was received, the Tatar host set forth along one of several routes, one of which took them across Transylvania, and another through Moldavia and Wallachia, and then up the right bank of the Danube. The Tatar reputation for laying waste the lands through which they passed, stealing animals and capturing peasants to sell as slaves was amply deserved.
With Ottoman attempts to limit depredations bearing little fruit, local opportunists offered to protect local people from Tatar predators and seized the moment to lead revolts against their Ottoman overlords. Leaders, looking for support from the Habsburgs, the Ottomans and Poland came and went in rapid succession. Aaron Emanoil (‘Aaron the Tyrant’) in Moldavia was twice prince before he was captured in Transylvania and imprisoned by Sigismund Báthory. Michael Viteazul (‘Michael the Brave’) became prince in Wallachia with Ottoman support in 1593 but, even as the Long War began in Hungary in earnest, Pope Clement VIII tempted him into an alliance with neighbouring upstart princes. He was variously prince of Wallachia, Transylvania and Moldavia (and, for a brief period, of all three at once) until he was assassinated on the orders of the Habsburg imperial commander, Giorgio Basta, in 1601. Sigismund Báthory held on in Transylvania, partly because of his dynastic connections with Poland, but also thanks to a 40,000-strong army, led by a Hungarian Calvinist nobleman, István Bocskai. But, with Ottoman military pressure too great for him, Sigismund eventually resigned in October 1598 in favour of one of his Polish cousins, leaving the region in turmoil.
Giorgio Basta attempted to reimpose Catholicism by force in Transylvania after 1599, following the initiative set by Archduke Ferdinand in Styria. His effort was thwarted, however, by an uprising, organized by Bocskai with covert Ottoman support. Bocskai’s army went on to defeat the Habsburg forces in two crucial battles (Álmosd and Bihardiószeg). In 1605, Bocskai was elected prince of Hungary and Transylvania at the Diet of Szerencs. The Long Turkish War drew to a negotiated conclusion in 1606 with the Ottomans having little but modest fortress gains on the Hungarian plain to show for their efforts, but with much more to be hoped for from the Transylvanian insurrection against the Habsburgs. Sultan Ahmed I despatched a crown to Bocskai, offering him the kingship of Transylvania in return for nominal vassalage to the Turkish Porte. Bocskai prudently refused the offer in favour of a deal with the Habsburg Archduke Matthias, who was compelled to recognize the authority of a Calvinist prince in Ottoman Hungary and Transylvania.
French diplomats and royal publicists were the first to find the arguments which would become widely accepted to justify alliances with the Infidel. When the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius came to publish his Law of War and Peace (1625), he asked ‘whether it was permitted to make treatises and alliances with those who are not of the true religion’. The issue was as relevant to princes making alliances across the European confessional divide as to powers making common cause with those outside Europe. Grotius’s answer was straightforward: ‘that caused no difficulty because, by the law of nature, the right to make alliances was common to all mankind generally, such that a difference of religion created no exception’. Even so, Grotius was obliged to refute the biblical arguments against the proposition, and to counsel caution. Prudence dictated, he advised, that one should not enter into such an alliance if ‘it put Pagans and Infidels in a position of overwhelming power’. Europe’s rulers should see themselves as belonging to a Christian family with a shared duty to ‘serve Jesus Christ’ and help one another when ‘an enemy of [their] religion smites the states of Christianity’. It was the customs of international diplomacy among the European ‘society of princes’, with their permanent embassies and diplomatic immunities, and shared (albeit often contested) conventions of precedence which the Ottoman state refused to acknowledge and participate in. In this respect Europe had created a sense of its political identity by 1650 which necessarily consigned the Ottomans (their political system now increasingly regarded as ‘despotic’) to the margins.
CRUSADING ECHOES
The rhetoric of anti-Turkish mobilization eventually wore thin through overuse as well as through an increasing mismatch between the idealistic commitments that it evoked and the political and strategic realities on the ground. The word ‘Crusade’ entered the English and French vocabularies in the later sixteenth century, just as the reality was vanishing over the horizon. But there would still be those in whom the call to war against the Infidel found an echo. Thomas Howard, duke of Norfolk, wanted to respond in 1529. Philippe-Emmanuel de Lorraine, duke of Mercoeur, was inspired to put the military experience he gained in the French Catholic League to good use in the Long Turkish War. Leaving France in 1599, he led the imperial forces which recaptured Székesfehérvár, home of the mausoleum of the kings of Hungary, from the Ottomans.
The dream of a Crusade in defence of Christendom infected the imaginations of more modest individuals too, both Protestant and Catholic. The Elizabethan adventurer Edward Woodshawe was arrested in 1575 for attempting to levy men in his English locality for a ‘journey against the Turk’. John Smith, whose expedition to Chesapeake Bay and survey of the lower Potomac led to the publication of the map of Virginia in 1612, earned his title of ‘captain’ by fighting the Ottomans in Hungary and Transylvania. In 1616, the Capuchin François Le Clerc du Tremblay was given a mission to Rome by Louis XIII’s new secretary of state, Cardinal Richelieu. He presented a project for a European Christian militia, open to both Catholics and Protestants, whose mission would be to protect Christendom against its Muslim aggressors. The scheme was the brainchild of Charles de Gonzague, duke of Nevers. The idea was to divert the destructive energies of religious discord into the common cause of a renewed Respublica christiana, albeit organized no longer under the banner of the Church but of those of its crowned heads. Meanwhile, the duke of Nevers sought the backing of the emperor and even equipped five galleons to transport the Crusaders to Greece in 1621. This was, perhaps, Christendom’s last truly crusading act. No sooner conceived, it was consigned to oblivion by the onset of war in Europe. The Thirty Years War demonstrated the destructive power of Europe. In doing so, it put paid to Christendom.
For nobles, the call of Crusade offered an opportunity to perfect their military training and to acquire chivalric glory. But the overwhelming majority of those who found themselves engaged in military or naval operations against the Ottomans were mercenaries for whom it was simply a campaign, the deprivations and brutality of which eroded any sense of idealistic engagement they might have had. Even the Knights of Malta (and their equivalent, the Italian Order of San Stefano) found their fervour fell on increasingly deaf ears towards the close of the sixteenth century. Christian corsairs disturbed ordinary commercial relationships, said Venetian senators, who succeeded in persuading the authorities to confiscate the property of the Knights of Malta. Their views were echoed by French consular representatives in the Levant in the early seventeenth century, Henry IV forbidding French subjects from undertaking privateering in the eastern Mediterranean. The papal Curia, anxious to protect the lives of Christians in Ottoman custody, not to mention its investment in the port of Ancona, multiplied its representations to the Grand Master of Malta against Christian corsairs.
COMMERCE, CORSAIRS AND CAPTIVES
For centuries, the papacy had forbidden commerce with the Infidel. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the prohibition was incorporated into the traditional annual Maundy Thursday bull (In Coena Domini) of excommunications and anathemas against all those who threatened Christendom. By the second half of the sixteenth century, the bull included injunctions against those who traded in weapons, horses and war supplies, and grouped together Protestant heretics with Saracens and Turks. Publishing and enforcing such measures, however, became an uphill task in the face of commercial pressures and princely resistance.
Even in the Italian and Spanish peninsulas, the prohibition encountered problems. Rulers in Venice, Naples and elsewhere turned a blind eye to contraband trading. Outside the Mediterranean, the bull was only patchily observed in the empire, ignored by France and mocked in Protestant Europe. One of the important bargaining counters used by the English and Dutch to secure a privileged position for their merchants in the Levant was their offer to furnish the high-grade armaments which the Ottomans needed. As Christendom waned, so did the capacity to hold any commercial front against the ‘common enemy’. That was even more notably the case in respect of trade in alum, the key chemical for finishing cloth. The Papal States had a monopoly on its production (from the alum deposits mined at Tolfa) so long as imported alum from the Levant was prohibited. Christendom was crystallized in a mineral salt, the profits from which went, said the papacy, towards Crusade. But the monopoly became a low-grade dispute between the papacy and the cloth-producing centres of Catholic Europe, while it was ostentatiously ignored in Protestant lands for which the cloth-trade with the Levant was a commercial opportunity.
The Ottoman state had long been accustomed to granting privileged access to its markets to selected merchant communities from the West. Genoese merchants had enjoyed a privileged status from 1352. The Venetians, Florentines and Neapolitans followed in the fifteenth century. The privileges were granted through ‘capitulations’ (a ‘charter’ with individual ‘chapters’), legal documents issued by the Turkish Porte and not strictly speaking diplomatic treaties. The purpose of these permissions from the Ottoman point of view was to regulate the status of those granted safe-conduct (aman: ‘amnesty’) to reside temporarily in the House of Islam although they were not Muslims. Capitulations granted merchants aman status in Ottoman lands without being treated as zimmi (non-Muslims, living under Islamic rule): subjects of the Ottoman state, and having to pay taxes and tribute accordingly. The capitulations were more concerned with merchant legal status than with granting advantageous conditions for the trade in particular goods to specific nations.
What changed in the course of the later sixteenth century was the granting of such privileges to mercantile communities beyond the Italian peninsula and (with it) the Ottoman state’s willingness to utilize capitulations as a political instrument. In 1569, the Sublime Porte granted capitulations to the French monarchy’s representative Claude du Bourg, part of the Ottoman attempt to divide its European neighbours on the eve of its assault upon Cyprus. The position of French merchants from Marseille in the Levant was strengthened just at the moment when the war between Venice and the Turks (1570–73) created a commercial opportunity for interlopers. That moment was not lost, however, upon English merchants, whose ships had started to sail to the eastern Mediterranean. Two English merchants in the Levant trade organized a safe-conduct for their factor William Harborne to travel to Constantinople, where he arrived in 1578. English policy-makers appreciated the significance of making common cause with the Turks against Spain. Queen Elizabeth’s letters addressed Sultan Murad III as ‘the most august and benign Caesar’. The sultan granted a capitulation to English merchants in 1580, and in his letters to Elizabeth I he lavished praise on the ‘pride of women who follow Jesus, the most excellent of the ladies honored among the Messiah’s people, the arbitress of the affairs of the Christian community’.
The English initiative opened up a race for competitive advantage. Not to be outdone, the French ambassador negotiated the cancellation of the English privileges and the granting of more exclusive terms to the French, including the requirement that other nations sail to Turkish ports under the flag of France. In 1583, Harborne returned to Constantinople as Elizabeth I’s ambassador to the Porte, the first of a regular ambassadorial presence that became, by the early seventeenth century, one of the most important diplomatic postings for the English state. The English Levant Company, formed in 1581 (united with the Venice Company in 1592), focused the efforts of English merchants trading in the Mediterranean. Taking advantage of France’s civil wars in the late 1580s and 90s, English merchants consolidated their presence in Turkish markets, dealing especially in importing currants from Patras, Zante and Cephalonia and exporting English cloth. In 1601, the English negotiated a reduction in customs dues on their traded goods to only 3 per cent, along with other commercial advantages which their rivals were unable to match before 1650.
In the first half of the seventeenth century, those rivals included the Dutch. Merchants from the rebellious provinces in the northern Netherlands began direct commercial contacts with the Ottoman empire in the 1570s. Ottoman strategists appreciated the significance of encouraging the enemies of Spain in northern Europe. So, when Cornelius Haga led a delegation from the Dutch Republic to Constantinople in 1612, generous capitulations to the Dutch followed. Haga became a permanent Dutch ambassador in Constantinople and, by the time he returned to the Netherlands in 1639, the Dutch had consular posts throughout the trading centres of the Ottoman empire from Patras to Tunis and Algiers and minimal customs duties, better than the French or Venetians. Europe’s trade with the Levant blossomed in the first half of the seventeenth century. Pepper and silk from the Far East were transacted through Ottoman ports, but the more important trades were in local products, including cotton from Anatolia, silk from Aleppo and mohair from around Ankara (‘angora’ being the English corruption of that place-name, dating to this period), dyes and Arabian coffee. By 1620, over 200 tons of raw silk was imported each year from Aleppo, with the French competing with the English for predominance in the trade.
The flourishing commerce between Europe and the Levant offered a tempting target for pirates. From the last decades of the sixteenth century onwards, the seizure of ships and their cargoes and the capture of their crews became a major source of concern for those engaged in the Levant trades, but also a stimulus to increased contact and cross-cultural trade between Europe and Islam. Privateering was a fact of life in both Atlantic and Mediterranean waters. Many thousands of Ottomans and Moroccans (including Jews and Orthodox Christians as well) were captured and sold as galley slaves on Maltese, Spanish, Italian and French ships. North African corsairs worked both Atlantic and Mediterranean waters, lingering off the Gulf of Gascony in summer months, and even plaguing the coasts of Ireland and Iceland, where one community of 400 people was seized in a single raid.
The public focus of concern in Europe was increasingly on the Barbary corsairs operating out of North African ports (Salé, Oran, Algiers, Bougie, Tunis, Djerba and Tripoli), who preyed on commercial shipping and ravaged Mediterranean coasts from Andalusia to the Abruzzi. The privateering exploits of the corsair states of North Africa were organized by Berbers, Arabs, Levantine and Sephardic Jews, Moriscos from Spain and Christians who had settled there and converted to Islam. Known as renegades, this latter group made up at least half of the Barbary corsairs in the early seventeenth century. They included sailors who had been captured at sea and enslaved, and who then converted as a way of recovering their freedom. Others were privateers who found it a path to riches and status. Jan Janszoon van Haarlem, commonly known as Murat Reis the Younger, for example, learned the tools of privateering in northwest Atlantic waters under a Dutch flag before making his way with the ship under his command to Salé on the Moroccan Atlantic coast. From there, he attacked Spanish vessels (his ship flying the Dutch flag) and others (flying the red half-moon Ottoman flag). He in turn was captured by Barbary corsairs in the Canary Islands in 1618 and taken as a slave to Algiers, which is where he converted to Islam. From there, he joined the privateering ventures of Sulayman Reis (Ivan Dirkie de Veenboer, also originally from the Netherlands) in the Mediterranean. Then, when Algiers concluded treaties with European powers, it was no longer a port where privateering cargo could be offloaded. So van Haarlem moved back to Salé and, calling himself ‘Grand Admiral’, led the ‘Salé Rovers’ in privateering operations over many years.
The conditions for enslaved Christians in North Africa were hideous. Relieved of their clothing, valuables and dignity and held in chains, once ashore they were treated as booty. Beautiful women or young boys were picked out for the harem and entourage of the local ruler (the ‘bey’, ‘dey’ or ‘pasha’). Skilled individuals were siphoned off to join the shipyards or local medical services. The rest were put up for sale in the local bazaar. Once they had been auctioned to their new master, their price was stamped on their heads or shoulders. They then worked as agricultural and domestic workers or on board ships, poorly fed and often brutalized. In Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli they were lodged at night for a fee, paid for by their owners, in special jails (bagnes or matemores), some originally designed as underground granaries. In fetid conditions they were chained to the walls each night and kept under close surveillance. Yet, through commercial intermediaries (for whom ransoming captives was part of the trading and money flows of the Mediterranean) and the activities of Catholic orders (whose mission was to highlight the plight of these slaves and achieve their release), they were often in touch with their friends, families and communities back home. Families realized assets to secure the release of captured relatives, aided by municipal and ecclesiastical institutions. Protestant traders in La Rochelle signed contracts to negotiate ransoms, and Catholic orders on occasion accepted alms from Protestants to release ‘heretics’ from enslavement, welcoming the occasion for proselytizing which it afforded.
Most releases occurred after negotiations which were part of wider commercial transactions. Arriving back home, ransomed slaves became the spotlight of publicity campaigns by the Catholic order which had organized their release. So, in an event that was far from unusual, over a hundred slaves redeemed from Salé arrived at Brouage on the western French coast in 1630. Their release had been negotiated by the Mercedarian Order, whose founder, Pierre Nolasque, had been canonized two years previously. From Brouage the redeemed captives were led in procession to Paris. As they passed through towns, they reenacted their freedom to cries of ‘Vive le Roi’. Published slave narratives and engravings depicting slavery and redemption became part of the publicity of the Mercedarian and Trinitarian orders, competing with each other to attract the patronage of those in authority.
The impact of this publicity was ambivalent. On the one hand, it revitalized an old story of crusading Christendom. The Mercedarian Pierre Dan’s History of Barbary and its Corsairs (1637) included gruesome engravings of slave tortures, compulsory circumcision and incarceration which evoked images of religious bloodshed from Christendom’s recent past, while coupling them with other images of ransomed slaves celebrating their redemption. Yet it was increasingly evident to contemporaries that ransoming Christian slaves was not a priority for Christian rulers. On the contrary, they were more concerned not to alienate Ottoman rulers or compromise their bilateral agreements with the chiefs of Barbary corsair strongholds in order to safeguard their own commercial interests. So, when ten corsair ships arrived in Dutch ports in the 1620s to sell their booty and repair the vessels, there was embarrassment among the Dutch authorities who were bound by their capitulations to treat them with respect, even though some of them were captured Christian ships with Christian slaves on board. King Louis XIII turned a blind eye to Capuchin reports of the suffering of hundreds of French slaves in Morocco and the plight of French subjects in Algiers until, with Huguenot resistance enfeebled, the French government offered limited support to local initiatives for ransom and repatriation. European states were aware that there was generally more to be gained from negotiation with local powers on the North African coast than from clumsy and counter-productive military interventions.
EUROPE IN THE OTTOMAN MIRROR
European powers increasingly regarded their trading links with North Africa and the Levant as advantageous. That led to a gap between popular perceptions of the Turks and the emerging, more complex reality. The stereotype of the Turks had deep roots in the past. The pervasive media of the period (pamphlets, ballads, stage-plays, sermons and even children’s games) reinforced it. But the image fragmented as different elements were superimposed upon one another, the process reflecting Europe’s changing perception of itself.
The perception of the Turk Infidel, the sworn enemy of Christendom, continued to carry weight. In his bull of 19 September 1645, Pope Innocent X authorized the levy of a subsidy of 400,000 crowns on the clergy to assist Venice in the war it had just declared against the Ottomans ‘since it is a well-known fact that the impious tyranny of the Turks seeks nothing other than avidly to launch itself against Christian people, exterminating the Christian religion and entrenching its abomination in its place’. The stereotype perpetuated notions of the Turk as cruel, barbarous and (increasingly after 1600) despotic. The narratives of naval encounters, battles and sieges with Ottoman forces rarely failed to evoke in gruesome detail the sufferings meted out by the Ottomans upon their Christian victims. Equally, the burgeoning accounts of those who had been captured by Barbary pirates or who had served as slaves in Ottoman service and then been repurchased almost always emphasized the arbitrary and despotic brutality of their captors. The ‘barbaric’ cruelty of the Turks was seen as a fundamental part of the Ottoman psyche, manifest in the arbitrariness of Ottoman politics and confirmed in the supposed Ottoman contempt for Europe’s cultural heritage. Polygamy and sodomy were treated as adjuncts of a barbarism that was as hard-wired into the Turkish psyche as savagery was into the American Indians’. Europe’s sense of its values and superiority was fashioned much more in the shadow of the Turkish Crescent than in the mirror of America.
The stereotype of the Turk endured despite an increasing fascination with Ottoman language, culture, institutions and religious beliefs. Humanists opened the door to comparing Christian and Islamic civilizations. But their comparisons also sharpened senses of difference, reinforcing existing preconceptions as well as enhancing senses of innate superiority. Francesco Guicciardini respected the achievements of recent Ottoman sultans in his History of Italy. But he also regarded Turkish society as aggressive, cruel and intolerant. The Flemish writer Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq and the French philosopher Guillaume Postel made the case for Ottoman justice, moral virtues and military excellence. But their admiration had another side to it. Postel’s influential work On the Republic of the Turks (1560) had as its stated goal to ‘provide, through a well-founded knowledge of the enemy, the means of resisting him’. Busbecq used his treatise on the Turks of 1581 to outline a plan for how Christendom could defeat the Ottomans. His famous Turkish Letters, published in the 1580s, praised Ottoman soldiery, the Turkish sense of social equality, and their hospitality to travellers and care for the poor. But he also emphasized the ruin of Christendom’s Greek heritage and the selfish reluctance of Christian princes to support a common cause to help Orthodox Christians.
The French geographer Nicolas de Nicolai had been part of an early French delegation to the Porte in 1551. His detailed Four Books of Navigations (1568) was a classic of the humanist science of travel and observation. Its detailed plates turned the work into a costume-book of Ottoman life. Those costumes were reproduced in London stage-plays, where Muslims figured with greater frequency, just as they appeared in the street scenes of Amsterdam when painted by Dutch artists in the seventeenth century. In real life, more citizens of London and Amsterdam would have encountered a Muslim abroad by 1650 than a Native American.
Ottomans and Europeans gradually found that they had interests in common. The humanist Paolo Giovio was one of the earliest to be fascinated by the Ottomans. His History of the Turks (1531) was at the beginning of what became in the course of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries a flood of ‘turcica’ – poetry, songs, lyrics, dramas, novels, broadsides and travelogues. He had eleven portraits of Ottoman sultans in his ‘gallery of the illustrious’ at Borgovico on Lake Como, copies of those presented by Barbarossa to Francis I at Marseille in 1543. Portraits of ‘The Great Turk’ (Suleiman the Magnificent) found their way onto the walls of English gentry. His presence in English parlours was complemented by Turkish carpets, silks, cushions and spices. Currants from Zante were a delicacy that fetched high prices in London. Meanwhile, in the Netherlands tulips became objects of fashion and obsession just as they were at the Ottoman court. The tulip was described in detail in Busbecq’s letters and, perhaps thanks to his influence, tulip bulbs made their appearance in Europe in the early 1560s. By 1630, ‘tulipmania’ had overtaken the Netherlands in what turned out to be one of the earliest speculative bubbles, imploding with an Amsterdam stock-market crash in 1636. The ‘Dr Tulp’ in the famous painting of the lesson in surgical anatomy by Rembrandt was so-called because he had changed his name to match the flower of his dreams.
The more thinking Europeans saw and heard about Ottoman society, the more intrigued and impressed they became. The French naturalist Pierre Belon, whose detailed account of his voyage to the Levant was published in 1553, had much to say in their favour. They were everything that Europeans ought to be, but so often were not. Their houses and streets were clean (babies were even put in nappies so as not to spoil the carpets). They ate healthily (garlic and onions) and did not drink. Their goods were well crafted and their clothing beautiful. Jean Bodin (who read the travel accounts of Belon) saw much to admire in Ottoman society and government. He compared the sultans to French kings, neither of them tyrants, both applying good laws with humanity. But the French monarchy lacked the military discipline of the janissaries. Equally, no European state could seemingly match the financial resources and efficiency of the Ottoman empire. Its forced recruitment of young Christian boys by talent scouts to be trained up in a competitive environment to provide the best administrators, scholars, military commanders and naval officers (devshirme) was universally condemned as a barbarous slavery, but there was a sneaking admiration for a system in which (Christian) merit trumped family, patrimony and inheritance. ‘The Turkes are the only modern people, great in action, and whose Empire hath suddenly invaded the world,’ wrote the English traveller Henry Blount in 1636. He reflected a European orientalism of respect tempered by anxiety.