Staging the Ottoman Turk

Of more tangible significance was the transfer to Istanbul of the standard and cloak of the Prophet, relics whose possession symbolized the status of sultans as protectors of the holy places of Mecca, Medina and the pilgrim routes of the Hejaz, hence Islam in general (Kinross 170).

In this context, it is crucial to emphasize that it was only from the nineteenth century onwards that the Ottoman Islamic world system was overwhelmed by forces from the West, driven by capitalism and empowered by the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution. As for 1798, it was a symbolic moment when not only did the leader's standards pass to Europe, but when Western standards, Western armies and Western capital overran the Ottomans with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, which had been an Ottoman province since 1517.

The Ottoman success in withstanding the Western challenge had continued until the end of the seventeenth century. Yet, the Ottoman defeat at the second siege of Vienna (1683) against a combined Habsburg-Polish army and the subsequent treaty of Karlowitz (1699) marked the beginnings of the long and slow retreat of the Ottoman Sultanate from their European conquests. By the close of the eighteenth century, Western Europe, with its gun-power revolution and superior naval technology was invulnerable to the Ottoman power. Ultimately, as the Ottomans became politically and economically dependent on Europe, they began to adapt themselves to the challenge of Western superiority (Inalcik 1994, 3).

Although Said's main focus is on the post-Napoleonic period in which the European powers have begun the process of imperialism and colonization of the East, his work has been applied to the studies of Western encounters with Islam of different periods. In this respect, his overgeneralization of the Orient is problematic and his general claims, made through a rough historical overview, are misleading. Said's binary opposition of the East and West through configurations such as weak and strong, inferior and superior, etc. should be more "complex and multifaceted" as Vaughan has shown in her historicist analysis of Othello, which exemplifies the English concern about the power of Ottoman Islamic imperialism (Vaughan 27). Renaissance curiosity and anxiety about the Ottomans produced an outpouring of texts in the form of travel narratives, historical and political studies, polemical and religious tracts, ballads, poetry, fiction and drama, perhaps the best way of conveying ideas and knowledge about the Turks, who inspired fear and fascination in Europe.

Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, while the Christian West was conquering indigenous populations in the New World, the Ottoman power had already pushed beyond the Mediterranean, as far as the walls of Vienna and had even crossed the English Channel. After Columbus' conquest of America, while the Europeans ventured across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and "took possession" (Greenblatt 9) of the peoples they encountered, the Ottomans with their formidable army held power over Europe, conquering, capturing and converting Christians to Islam in large numbers. If Christian Europeans, as Greenblatt asserts, "felt powerfully superior to virtually all the peoples they encountered" because of their conviction that they had the "absolute and exclusive religious truth" (Greenblatt 9), there were similar attestations to the Muslim sense of certitude and superiority over the Western world. By a curious irony, Said's radical theory and views about the Orient are clearly evident in the following statement, which represents a construct, not a reality, and his own stereotypical and mythic East of the past:

The other feature of the Orient was that Europe was always in a position of strength, not to say domination. There is no way of putting this euphemistically…the essential relationship, on political, cultural and even religious grounds, was seen—in the West, which is what concerns us here—to be one between a strong and weak partner (Said 40).

Considering the political significance of the Ottoman-European trade relations and "the fierce competition among" (Naff 100) European countries to appear in treaties as the Ottomans' "most favoured nation", the essential relationship between the East and the West was one in which the Ottomans were "in a position of strength". Ultimately, in Eastern and Western commercial relationships, it was the Ottoman sultan who was the "strong partner" as he ruled the Ottoman lands that extended from Istanbul to Aleppo, a crucial link in the silk route that led to China. Among these lands were Cairo, a trade centre; Jerusalem, the Holy Land; Algiers, "the whip of the Christian World, the wall of the Barbarian, terror of Europe" (Purchas 278) to name just a few. As the Englishman, Thomas Fuller wrote in awe:

[I]t is the greatest and best-compacted (not excepting the Romane it self in the height thereof) [Empire] that the sunne ever saw. Take sea and land together (as bones and flesh make up one bodie) and from Buda in the West to Taris in the East, it stretches about three thousand miles: little lesse in the extent thereof North and South. It lieth in the heart of the world, like a bold champion bidding defiance to all his borders, commanding the most fruitfull countreys of Europe, Asia and Africa: Onely America (not more happy in her rich mines then in her remoteness) lieth free from reach thereof.[12]

1.1.1. Ottoman-Venetian Relations

The Ottoman Empire had inherited the power of the Romans; Neither the Church nor a Christian prince had been able to resume the Roman conquest and unify the entire world. What was at stake in Venetian minds was to anticipate who would establish a universal monarchy. A vision of world history inspired by the prophecy of Daniel was then still popular in Europe. The four pagan monarchies—Babylonian, Persian, Greek and Roman—were to be followed by the establishment of the fifth empire

(Valensi 1990,180).

In assessing Ottoman-Venetian relations, it is imperative to expand the boundaries of Western historiography by incorporating the Ottoman Empire into the constructions of sixteenth-century world order as a major protagonist, and then to contextualize its role in a commercial zone that stretched from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. As Palmira J. Brummett observes:

The success of the Ottomans in overcoming the military challenges of European states, in uniting the Holy Land to the rich agricultural heart-lands of Eastern Roman Empire, and in gaining effective control over the outlets to the eastern trade, focused the attention of Europe in a dramatic fashion just when its internal social unity was being fragmented by Reformation. At the same time, the Ottomans developed a navy which threatened European control of the western Mediterranean. These accomplishments reinforced notions of the Ottoman state as a military juggernaut before all else—notions which were articulated in the European diplomatic correspondence and chroniclers for rhetorical political purposes (Brummett 180).

As a commercial empire, since the regime of the Venetian Empire rested upon capital investment in long-distance trade, Venice had entered diplomatic relations with the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the fifteenth century. In fact, among the earliest cultural links between the Ottoman Empire and Europe were evidently those that were provided by Venetian traders and artists. Like the Genoese, Venetians first secured trading privileges in the Ottoman Empire and Ottoman merchants were also a common sight in the Piazza San Marco, as, for instance, they are depicted in Bellini's Procession Before San Marco. When Mehmet II, a man of culture, had invited Bellini to paint a portrait of him as well as the frescoes of the Topkapi Palace, the Ottomans with their ceremonial and elaborate costumes were a potent source of fascination and inspiration for the Venetian artist. By the fifteenth century, in the art of Italy, and of Venice in particular, Ottomans would most often be depicted through distinctive modes of dress, which included the turban and other headgear.

What Venice knew about the Ottoman Empire, "she owed to the quality of the dispatches and letters her ambassadors sent during their long sojourns in Istanbul" (Valensi 1990, 177). In Venice, for every patrician that embarked upon a career in politics, the position of "bailo"[13] in Istanbul was the "most prestigious and most important" appointment for which he could hope (Valensi 1990, 177). Venetian ambassadors, bearing the title of "bailo" were the sons of all the most highly educated elite and thus belonged to Venice's erudite circles. As they "stood at an intersection of three spaces, those of empirical observation, political action and humanism" (Valensi 9) they were in a favourable position to appreciate Ottoman culture. Their residency in Istanbul allowed them to make sufficient contacts in the city and "personally collect the most accurate data on the most powerful empire of the times" (Valensi 1990, 176). As every Venetian ambassador was obliged to present a report before a public session of the Senate and in the presence of the doge, Contarini upon his return from Istanbul stated that the Republic has "before its eyes, as in a theatre, a representation of the world, nature, and the laws and styles of various peoples" (Valensi 41). Venetian fascination with the Ottomans resulted in the first instance from the extraordinary power of the Grand Signor and the vastness of his empire. As Valensi concludes, the collection of Venetian accounts covering the Ottomans:

insisted on the comprehensiveness of every single part of the whole: the empire included 'all of Greece', 'all of Asia Minor', 'all the coasts of Africa and the Mediterranean', 'all the borders of Venetian dominions' and so forth (Valensi 1990, 179).

As Paolo Contarini wrote in 1538: "a large part of Africa, the major part of Europe and a very large part of Asia find themselves today under the obedience of this Empire" (Valensi 180). For Barbarigo three elements made the Grand Signor invincible: "so many territories, so much money, and so much an abundance of obedient men" (Valensi 181). Apart from its opulence and exotic ambiance, the Ottoman Empire, a military giant, was, by the sixteenth century, a source of great anxiety for the Venetian Republic. Particularly in the years following Mehmet II's death in 1481, as the Ottoman fleet began to challenge Venice in the open seas, the Venetians had to demonstrate their effectiveness in meeting the crises of enormous Ottoman danger which had begun to play an increasingly important role in European politics. The Turks are the greatest fighters in the world" wrote Cavalli in 1560; "one should not fight them but fear them" (Valensi 181).

In the second half of the fifteenth century, as the Ottomans set out to make the Mediterranean a Turkish lake, Venice, was the only important Christian power in the region. In that respect no other Christian power had "spent so heavily on defense and war against" (Hale 26) the Ottomans as Venice whose fundamental basis of fortune and power was the Mediterranean Sea.

The Ottoman Empire, which had occupied the heel of Italy in the late fifteenth century and used the French port of Toulon as a naval base in the sixteenth, was in essence a military adversary to the Venetian Republic. In 1453, following Mehmet II's conquest of Constantinople, although the Ottomans' trading, cultural and ambassadorial contacts with Venice had increased, the Venetians were evidently alarmed by the military strength of the Ottoman Empire, which aspired to bring the whole Mediterranean basin under one power.

In the sixteenth century the Ottoman Empire not only posed a serious threat to European sovereignty but also played a great role in rivalries for commercial hegemony in the economic space stretching from Venice to the Indian Ocean. The objectives of Ottoman expansion in its claims for universal sovereignty, Levantine power politics, and the struggle for control of oriental trade, however, were not different than those of "European voyages of discovery: wealth, power, glory, religious legitimation" (Brummett 2).

The Ottoman State's energies for territorial expansion were geared towards acquisition of fertile lands to broaden the tax-base that was used to support the ruling elite. Yet, the Ottoman State was not merely a land-based military state. It was a sea-based power, whose motivation for expansion was directed towards dominating and controlling the trade centres and networks in various commercial zones. And these commercial zones were pivotal for the Venetians' own indigenous merchant networks in long distance trade. In this sense, as "a merchant state endowed with economic intentionality" (Brummett 3), the development of Ottoman sea power was crucial in the reconfiguration of the early sixteenth-century balance of power, which culminated in the subordination of the Venetian Republic.

In 1571, however, a Christian fleet led by the papacy, Venice and Habsburg forces sailing under the flag of the Holy Roman Empire virtually destroyed the ships of the Ottomans in Lepanto. This marked a crucial moment in the history of Venetian Republic. For the Venetian merchants and Genoese captains who competed with the Ottoman traders and ships for silk, spice and other goods in Aleppo and Damascus and Alexandria (all Ottoman provinces by then) the triumph in Lepanto, however, was only symbolical. Like the Venetians, the Ottomans were also a commercial power, whose military ruling class (members including the sultan, his sons and high-ranking dignitaries such as pashas, etc) accumulated wealth that could be and was invested in commercial enterprises. In other words, despite the tendency of European historians to dismiss Ottoman mercantilism in the international scene during the sixteenth century and its commercial hegemony from Genoa and Venice to the Indian Ocean, the Ottoman Empire with its ruling elite military class was a significant merchant state. As Brummett points out, the Ottoman State invested part of its accumulated wealth in trading ventures for profit. Furthermore, the State competed with other states for the control of commercial revenues and designed its foreign policy with a clear purpose of gaining control of sources for commercial revenue rather than simply acquiring land with the intention of colonization and agricultural exploitation (Brummett 5).

Following the Western victory over the Ottomans in Lepanto, although major hostilities were suspended in the Mediterranean Europe and the Ottoman Empire, another danger, piracy the "second form of war" (Braudel 865), persisted. In the first half of the fifteenth century Ottoman sailors were no match for the fleets of the Italian mercantile cities Genoa and Venice, whose state-owned galleys provided unrivalled transport for freight traveling to Alexandria, Syria and Istanbul. In the sixteenth century, however, with the decrease of the Venetian prominence among European countries and the Ottomans' quick revival of sea-power, the "Barbary states were in the same league as naval powers as England and France" (Earle 46). As for Venice, not only had her immensely expensive war of 1570-73 with the Ottomans consumed her wealth, but the Ottoman Empire had now begun to engage in commerce in "Venice's traditional sphere of action" (Hale 38). Following their conquest of Syria, Palestine and Egypt, the Ottomans made an alliance with the Barbary pirates, who placed much of the naval resources of North Africa at their command. As doge Nicola Dona wrote:

In the days before the war with the Turks, all was grandeur, utility, emolument, commodity, honour ... everyone was interested in sea voyages, in business, in everything appertaining to the existence and good of the fatherland (Chambers 194).

Ultimately, the Ottoman-Venetian wars, had not only increased the interest of the merchants of Marseilles, Ragusa and other places in the Levantine trade, but also had encouraged England to enter directly into trade with the Ottomans. As Nicolo Molin, the Venetian Ambassador to England, wrote to the Venetian Senate in late 1605 about his concerns about the piracies committed with "mixed crews of Englishmen and Turks" in the Mediterranean: "...everything [was] weighed in the scales of Material interest."[14] This correspondence was essentially the embodiment, though simplified, of what was deemed to be the nature of England's 'friendship' with the Ottoman Empire, which was one coveted by all the trading nations.

1.1.2. Anglo-Ottoman Relations

Knowledge of the Turks was "almost nil in medieval England" (Beck, 29) to the extent that even the fall of Constantinople in 1453 had "passed without notice in contemporary English chroniclers" (Wood 1). This was not surprising considering that the efforts of the last Byzantine Emperor Manuel Palaeologus to seek help from the English against the Ottoman Empire were "fruitless" mainly because England had no direct commercial nor diplomatic relations with the Byzantines (Wood 1). Yet the establishment of the Ottoman/Islamic power over what had been the Byzantine/Christian Empire was deeply seated in ideology. Soon, the danger which the Turk represented was revealed to the consciousness of the English, particularly when the Ottomans invaded Europe. Geographically, however, the English were outside the periphery of the Ottoman peril. Furthermore, despite the appeal of the East, with its silks, spices, oils, carpets and mohair, which led to a growing interest in the commercial links with the Levant, England was reluctant to have diplomatic ties with the Ottomans, a nation that was notorious among the Christians as "heathen". As Chew writes in The Crescent and the Rose:

The fact remains impressive that the English government did not enter into diplomatic relations with the Porte till a hundred and thirty years after the fall of Constantinople; and at a much later date James I was reluctant to receive an emissary from the Sultan on the ground that to welcome an infidel would be 'unbecoming to a Christian Prince' (Chew 152).

England's first tentative approach to the Ottoman Empire had occurred in 1553 when Anthony Jenkinson had obtained from Suleyman the liberty to trade through the Ottoman dominions (Hakluyt 62-63). As Chew asserts:

Anthony Jenkinson's journey ... was probably undertaken with a view of obtaining information regarding the possibility of initiating local trade in Turkey and practicability of tapping some of the trade which came from the further East by way of Mesopotamia or the Red Sea (Chew 151).

The nascent trade that had begun between the Porte and England, however, would cease for the next thirty years for variety of reasons. First, the discovery and the development of the route to the east round of Cape of Hope by the Portuguese had facilitated the delivery of Oriental goods to Europe. Second—as discussed in the previous section on Venetian Ottoman relations—the peril of the Ottoman sea power had reached its zenith following the two wars with the Venetian Republic, which led to the Ottomans' loss of territory in the Aegean and the Mediterranean, such as Cyprus (1570). However, a more constant threat to the English was posed by the fleets of Barbary corsairs who had begun to disrupt trade initiatives by swamping the Mediterranean trade routes leading to the imperial capital Istanbul, Izmir (Smyrna) and Ottoman provinces such as Aleppo and Alexandria. During the suspension of trade with the Ottomans, although the English celebrated the Ottomans' defeat in Lepanto with bonfires and "a banqueting and great rejoycing" as the victory of the Venetians and the Spanish was of "so great importance to the whole state of the Christian commonwealth" (Lipson 335), England's interest in the Turk gradually continued to develop. Unlike France—and other states like Ragusa, Venice and Genoa—which had begun to establish themselves firmly at the Ottoman Porte through the Capitulations[15] (1536), which provided them numerous legal and economic privileges, Anglo/Ottoman relations were delayed to the closing decades of the sixteenth century. It was only in1580 that the English began to push their ventures into the realms of distant power like the Ottoman Empire.

As Sir Thomas Shirley writes in the Discours of the Turkes (1606-07), (Shirley 9-12) it was in the later half of the Elizabethan era that the relations between Protestant England and the Ottoman Empire had expanded. In Minchinton's view, the Mediterranean grain crisis of the 1560s had provided England with her entry into trade relations with powers in that region. Thus, the supply of grain for the Italians and the Ottomans had further fuelled the English commercial and economic interest in the Ottoman Empire (Minchinton 7). Once the formal entry of Anglo-Ottoman economic and diplomatic relationship occurred following William Harborne's visit to Istanbul in June 1580, enabling the English to have official access to the Eastern Mediterranean, Elizabethans looked to draw the Ottomans into their export market.

Essentially, the English interest in the "Great Turke" which grew slowly, only began to assume true significance in the final decades of the sixteenth century when the Ottoman Empire entered into a stable economic and political relationship with England following William Harborne's mission to the Sublime Porte (Burian 209). Although William Harborne was successful in receiving a favourable grant from the Sultan, a grant defining the "English liberties on the subject" at the Sublime Porte[16], it was the Venetian and the French ambassadors who would use their leverage against the English. The best means for England to counter the hostility of the Venetians and the French, who jealously guarded their economic rights in Istanbul, was to create a merchant monopoly, the Levant Company, which was initially called the Turkey Company. During the reign of James I, despite the anti-Ottoman sentiments and rhetoric against the Infidel from his Majesty who considered himself one of the defenders of Christian Europe, the survival of the Levant Company founded in Elizabeth's reign became crucial to the development of English exports and power. The economic incentive to fuel commercial relations with the Ottomans was overwhelming for the English considering that a single voyage to their ports (such as Istanbul, Alexandria, Tunis, Algiers and so on) "held the prospect of a profit of up to 300%" (Eysturlid 617).

Despite such outstanding returns arising from the lucrative nature of maritime commerce in the Mediterranean, which attracted wealthy investors in England, the risk involved in these voyages was too high. James I sought to end the English investments in pirate ventures, since they led England to have the reputation of a "nation of pirates" (Eysturlid 618). As for the Ottomans, their ships ranged from North Africa to Arabia and from the English Channel to the Spanish and Moroccan coasts; furthermore, their pirates captured single men and whole families, travelers and soldiers, traders and clergymen (Matar 1998, 5).

Since the first recorded visit of the Englishman, Anthony Jenkinson, to Istanbul in 1533 several merchants and seamen from England had been captured and converted to Islam. The extant records, biographies and autobiographies of England's early modern history repeatedly refer to such British captivities and conversions in the sixteenth century; the Levant Company representatives in Istanbul urged Queen Elizabeth to protect her subjects from any future enslavement in the Ottoman Sultan's dominions. As Epstein quotes in The Early History of the Levant Company, ransoming of the British captives had cost England:

four thousand pounds, and yet divers to this day remain there unrescated of which some (the more to be pitied) have turned Turks (Epstein 242).

"Turning Turk" was not only a puzzling issue but a distressing one for Renaissance England considering the frequency of Christians renouncing their faith for Islam (Matar 1994, 33). One of the topics that Sir Thomas Shirley, an English traveler who had visited the Orient in the late sixteenth century, touched on in the Discours of the Turkes (1606-07) was the issue that dominated the English Renaissance concerns of conversion. Although Shirley had no adequate reply, he analyzed the reasons for Christian conversions to Islam. From the beginnings of the Christian-Muslim encounter and the subsequent spread of the Ottoman danger, Islam was seen in the medieval way, as a movement of violence in the service of Anti-Christ. Since there were numerous incidents of English ships being captured by the Barbary corsairs, arrangements were made to redeem the Englishmen who were enslaved in Algiers "lest they follow the example of others and turn Turk" (Harrison 132).