Staging the Ottoman Turk

1.1.3. Franco-Ottoman Relations

The Ottomans were first brought to the attention of France through the crusading expedition of a large body of French knights to aid the King of Hungary against Sultan Bajazed I in 1396 and through the chronicling of the subsequent events. As Froissart wrote in Les chroniques, the battle in the Nicopolis Crusade was a complete victory for the Ottomans over the Western knights who had attacked with a rekindled crusading spirit (Kinross 69). This marked the ending of the last of the crusades with a catastrophic defeat by the Muslims in the heart of Christian Europe. As the biographer of Boucicault, Marshall of France, who was saved at the last moment, put it: "ces chiens de Sarracins, laids et horribles, qui les tenoient durement devant ce tyran ennemy de la foy, qui la seoit" (Rouillard 17).

According to Froissart's records in the chronicles, however, the Duke of Nevers, known as Jean sans Peur, and other prisoners kept by the Ottoman Sultan, were "treated with chivalry worthy of the most civilized prince". Although the French nobles had suffered certain difficulties from "lack of wine and from spicy food 'hors de la nature de la France" they marveled at the size of the Sultan's army, the magnificence of his table" and his concern for justice. Through direct contact with the Grand Turk, the French nobles had realized that "this was not the barbarian enemy of popular imagination" (Rouillard 18). Later in 1453 when Mehmet II began his siege of Constantinople by controlling the Bosphorous and the Dardanelles, Charles VII who was retaking Bordeaux and Rouen from the English had "no desire to waste his strength on another Nicopolis" (Rouillard 22).

Up until the eighteenth century, the Ottomans had no permanent representation in Europe, unlike the Europeans with their permanent representatives in the Ottoman Empire. By the sixteenth century, all the leading states of Christian Europe had been forced to take into account the Ottomans, from a military if not a diplomatic and commercial points of view. Francis I had done so voluntarily as he had sought help from Suleyman I after his capture at Pavia in 1525. As Fatma Gocek writes:

The contact between the Ottoman Empire and Europe was established in the one direction, from Europe to the Ottoman Empire. As long as the Ottomans maintained their military superiority over Europe, this directionality did not create any problems in the Ottoman Empire (Gocek 3).

By the sixteenth century, the King of France soon established a permanent embassy in Istanbul with the first French ambassador, Jean de La Forest arriving in the capital city in 1536. In 1535 France had formed an alliance with Suleiman through the initiatives of his Grand Vizier Ibrahim—"good friend" (Kinross 204) to the King of France—following the Ottoman conquests of Belgrade and Rhodes. The 1535 treaty, which permitted the French to carry on trade throughout the Ottoman Empire, marked the beginning of a system of privileges to foreign powers known as Capitulations and enabled France to be the predominant and unrivalled foreign influence at the Sublime Porte. In 1579, during the reign of Murad II, King Henri II of France sent Ambassador Baron de Germigny to Istanbul to secure the renewal of Turco-French alliance, confirming the precedence of the French above other ambassadors in the Imperial Capital. The visit also confirmed the privileges of the French protectorate over all the Catholics in the Levant and the holy places of Jerusalem and Sinai under the Ottoman rule. Ultimately, France through her mediation had risen above the rest of Europe to an unchangeable position of influence and prestige at the Sublime Porte in Istanbul.

With no European power did the Ottomans have closer relations than with France as they shared a common bond of hostility to the House of Austria. At the height of Franco-Austrian hostility, the French ambassador had arranged for French ships to re-equip in the port of Istanbul, with the Ottoman fleet wintering in Toulon in 1543-44. As Philip Mansel writes:

The 'union of the lily and the crescent', as one French noble called it, became one of the fixed points in European politics—although the king of France, conscious of his titles of 'Most Christian King' and 'eldest son of the church', fearful of the criticism of Catholic Europe, evaded the written alliance repeatedly requested by the Sublime Porte [Ottoman government] (Mansel 1996, 44).

Thus, the traditional policy of France was to encourage the Ottoman Empire to become engaged against the adversaries of France and to cooperate with the Ottomans when French interests required it, but never enter into a formal alliance with them. For their part, the French ministers' and diplomats' main reason to befriend the Ottoman Empire was "the desire to protect and propagate Catholicism within its frontiers" (Mansel 1996, 45). Although the Levant trade was a second cause, the principal motive for d'Andrezel was to ensure that "the power of the Turks remain[ed] an object of fear for the House of Austria" (Mansel 45). Despite their different customs, languages and religion both the Grand viziers and the Imperial ambassadors in their spectacular and highly ceremonial meetings at the Sublime Porte spoke the same language of "power, profit and monarchy" (Mansel 45). As a cycle of 'embassy pictures' revealed the imperial city's political hierarchy and ceremonies, Western artists were commissioned to inform Europe of the "superiority of the ceremonial, customs and etiquette of the Ottoman court" (Mansel 49). In fact, in 1526, when Francis I sought the support of the Ottomans by asking the Sultan to attack the King of Hungary while he fought Charles V, Suleyman I's response to the King of France, revealed an Ottoman sense of superiority:

I who am the Sultan of Sultans, Soverign of Sovereigns, Distributor of Crowns to Monarchs over the whole Surface of the Globe, God's Shadow on Earth, Sultan and Padishah of the White Sea and the Black Sea, of Rumelia and Anatolia, of Karaman and the countries of Rum, Zulcadir, Diyarbekir, Kurdistan, Azerbaijan, Persia, Damascus, Aleppo, Cairo, Mecca and Medina, Jerusalem and all Arabia, Yemen and so many other lands ... [and] You, Francis, King of the Land of France, who have sent a letter to my Porte (Quoted from Clot, 131).

Suleyman, whose dynamic reign of forty-six years was the zenith of Ottoman political and economic expansion, was:

at least the equal of his Western contemporaries, Charles V, Francis I and Henry VIII. To the Western world, ignorant of the Ottoman laws and arts, but increasingly familiar with lavish descriptions of the Grand Turk at the head of his conquering armies ... he came to be known as Soliman the Magnificent, and nowhere his reputation was greater than France (Rouillard 67).

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, although the Ottomans had no permanent representation in Europe, Suleyman sent the first representatives to the King of France. The status of Ottoman diplomatic representatives sent to France was restricted to dispatches or rather envoys recruited from heralds, chamberlains and so forth. These envoys, trained in the Palace held symbolic functions such as delivering or receiving letters, acknowledging treaties or attending the coronation ceremonies of European monarchs. The diplomatic contact which had begun with Suleyman's dispatch to Francis I in 1533 was followed by Selim II to Charles IX in 1571, Murad III to Henri III in 1581, Mehmet III to Henri IV in 1601 and to Louis XIII in 1607 and finally Mehmet IV to Louis XIV in 1669. Of these, the last Ottoman representative Suleyman Aga not only aroused great curiosity in France but also invoked a new vogue 'à la turque' at the court of Louis XIV. In 1669 (just before Louis XIV had ordered Molière to write Le bourgeois gentilhomme) when the Ottoman Ambassador Suleyman Aga visited the French court, the Sun King went out of his way to impress the representative of the Grand Turk. In a fascinating welcoming ceremony, apart from a lavish feast prepared for the guest of honour, members of the court dressed themselves in fantastically elaborate costumes. As the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hugues de Lionne wore a long garment "embroidered with a silver Saint-Esprit Cross" (Behdad 37) the King dressed himself in all of his diamonds and wore an "exotic" crown decorated with feathers. Sitting on a silver throne, Louis XIV:

Paraissait dans toute sa majesté, revetu d'un brocart d'or, Mais tellement couvert de diamants, qu'il semblait qu'il fut environné de lumière, en ayant aussi un chapeau tout brillant, avec un bouquet de plumes des plus magnifiques (Œuvres 10).

By the sixteenth century, general interest in the Ottoman Empire was so great in France that the translations of the treatises written by the historian Paolo Giovio were published in France in 1538 and 1544 (Rouillard 17). Besides this principal source of historical knowledge of the Turks in mid-sixteenth century, a number of internal events of Suleyman's reign were also familiar to French readers through chroniclers or dramatists. The wide popularity of plays written about the Ottomans reflected the history of political, military, economic and cultural relations between the Ottoman Empire and Europe.

In French drama the image of the Grand Signor conveyed through a cycle of plays about Suleyman the Magnificent, beginning with Bounin's La soltane (1561), was in a constant state of flux between a powerful and rightful ruler and that of an unnatural despotic Eastern monarch. As Alain Grosrichard wrote in The Sultan's Court: European Fantasies of the East: "From the end of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth, a spectre haunted Europe: the spectre of despotism" (Grosrichard 3). In analyzing Montesquieu's conception of the constituents and mechanisms of "oriental despotism", Grosrichard has explored the documentary strata of travel accounts and descriptions of the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century. In spite of the fact that the concept of despotism had been around since Aristotle and was used through the Medieval and Renaissance periods with changing connotations, in the eighteenth century "oriental despotism" was particularly fashionable in France. For Grosrichard while Montesquieu had made the concept of despotism a permanent fixture in European political thought, "oriental despotism" was ultimately the concept of fantasy, the fantasy of pure power, through which Napoléon had pursued a mirage of Oriental glory by invading Egypt. Napoléon's Egyptian campaign, characterized by extremes of violence, bloodshed and brutal methods of warfare was conceived in a spirit of rivalry to British imperialism in India. It also extended French military ambitions beyond the limits of Europe to Africa. At last, the fully modernized forces of Napoléon clashing with the Ottoman troops, now lacking military discipline and strength, had marked the triumph of the French against the Ottomans and asserted the hegemony of a "superior" West over an "inferior" East. With the success of Napoléon's army, as a new French ambassador began to seal his country's influence at the Porte, the Ottoman Sultan was anxious to appoint a permanent Ottoman ambassador to Paris, as he could not disguise his fascination with all things French.

1.1.4. Decline of the Ottoman Empire

The eighteenth century marked the culmination of a great transformation in Europe, a revolution in scientific ideas, in philosophical and social thought, brought on by relativism born of geographic discovery and a shift in the perception of the universe due to the progression from Copernicus to Newton. Furthermore, the West had also witnessed the Ottoman failure in two wars against the Russian and Austrian Empires, which were concluded with the treaties of Karlowitz (1699) and Pasarowitz (1718). Since these two wars had led to a shift in the balance of power between the Ottoman Empire and Europe, the Ottomans, in order to maintain their territorial boundaries in the West, had begun to inquire into European military technology. Furthermore, in order to participate in Western diplomacy, they began to dispatch embassies to Europe. As Ambassador Yirmi Sekiz Celebi Mehmet Efendi was sent to France (1721) to inform the French that the "Ottoman State had authorized them to repair the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem" (Gocek 4), this was the "first window opening to the West" (Gocek 5) through France, the cultural centre of Europe and a potential ally to the Ottomans.

In this respect, Ottoman relations with Europe are characterized by two events, each representing a historical turning point for the Empire: the Treaty of Carlowitz (1699), establishing Europe's military superiority over the Turks and Sultan Selim III's Tri-Partite Defensive Alliance (1799) with Britain and Russia confirming the Ottoman defensive posture towards the West. The progression of events between 1699 and 1799 reveals that changes were made within the Ottoman Empire with respect to relations with Europe and the pattern of affairs in their diplomacy. Given Europe's military ascendancy which was confirmed by the Austrians at Passarowitz (1718), the Russians at Küçük Kaynarca (1744) and in Crimea (1783), and by the French in Egypt (1789), the Ottoman Empire ultimately became dependent on the European balance of power. According to Naff:

in the eighteenth century these determinants were located increasingly beyond the confines of Europe, in the Western hemisphere and Indian subcontinent where the rivalry between England and France unleashed external political and economic forces well beyond the ken or control of the Sublime Porte (Naff 90).

In the eighteenth century, what drastically tipped this balance of power was the difference in the international systems of the state-centred European countries and the Ottoman Empire. In the preceding two centuries, with the rise of strong centralized monarchies in Europe, several Western nations had achieved overseas exploration, colonization and commercial expansion. Furthermore, through the Reformation, by developing a secular, rational outlook, which promoted scientific discoveries, Europe underwent some major technological and industrial revolutions, which led to a more flexible economic system. As for the Ottoman system, it was imperial and Islamic, and foreign relations were inspired by religious precepts and often shaped and influenced by religious authorities. Although these differences complicated