Download PDF | (Early Modern Literature in History) Anders Ingram - Writing the Ottomans_ Turkish History in Early Modern England-Palgrave Macmillan (2015).
205 Pages
Introduction
the mightie Empire of the Turks ... is from a small beginning become the greatest terror of the world, and holding in subjection many great and mightie kingdomes in Asia, Europe, and Affricke, is growne to that height of pride, as that it threateneth destruction unto the rest of the kingdomes of the earth; labouring with nothing more than with the weight of it selfe.!
The emergence of the Ottoman Empire as an expansionist military, economic, and political presence in central Europe and the Mediterranean in the first half of the sixteenth century forced European authors to engage heavily with these events and their background. By the early seventeenth century, when Richard Knolles wrote the above passage, the overweening power, wealth, and size of the Ottoman Empire, ‘the greatest that is, or perhaps that ever was from the beginning’,” was axiomatic to European contemporaries, inspiring not only fear but also fascination. References or allusions to ‘the Turks’ became ubiquitous and might occur in virtually any genre or context. However, historical writing, which both described and sought to account for the Ottoman advance, was particularly well suited to addressing the fundamental questions that Europeans asked in the face of their expansion. Where had the Turks come from and who were they? How had they conquered such a vast area so rapidly? What should be done about them? As John Shute wrote in 1562:
these Bokes ... declareth fro[m] whence the Turckes came: when they fyrste came into the lesse Asia, of what condition they were, the warres that they made and upo[n] what nations they made them, the victories that they obtayned: and howe they used them, & the whole meanes wherby they attained to that mightie seate in the whiche they nowe sytte and commaunde...?
This is a book about English attempts to write Turkish history in the period of Ottoman expansion into Europe, from the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the treaty of Karlowitz in 1700. It argues that English authors adopted the forms, conventions, and content of a continental discourse of Turkish history, which had developed in response to the Ottoman advance into Europe, and adapted it to take on new meanings in English contexts. It then addresses why this topic was important to English authors, recovers the materials they drew upon, explores the contexts in which authors and publishers worked, and contrasts and compares English reactions to Ottoman expansion to the accounts of the Turks that emerged from the developing AngloOttoman trade and diplomatic relationship. Beyond these specifics I argue that historical writing was a central part of how early modern English authors understood and wrote about the Ottoman Empire, one which modern scholars have neglected — if not quite ignored — and one that shaped early modern English engagement with the Turks.
Central to this argument is the contention that historical writing not only described the supposed origins and dynastic history of the Ottomans, but explained and contextualised their aggressive advance across the globe by imbuing these events with deeper significance within wider moral, religious, philosophical, or political frameworks and narratives. Amongst the vast mass of early modern English works that depicted or described the Turks, historical writing produced some of the most cogent, detailed, and rhetorically accomplished accounts, and often served as source material for writing in other genres from travel narratives to drama. It is no coincidence that the two leading early modern English authorities on the Turks both wrote histories. Richard Knolles (d. 1610), who wrote the first major English account, was drawn upon, quoted, referred to, and appropriated by a very large number of early modern authors well into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when he was referenced approvingly by Byron, Samuel Johnson, and Robert Southey.’ For his part, Paul Rycaut (1629-1700), the first Englishman to produce a systematic general account based largely on first-hand knowledge, influenced the writing of Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Racine, Leibniz, Temple, Locke, Cantemir, Byron, and Louis XIV’s Prime Minister Bourbon, and his Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1666) was printed in no less than six European languages.
Historical writing, its forms and conventions, its leading lights and lesser known names, played a crucial role in describing and defining the significance of the Ottoman Empire in early modern England.
History and discourse
My approach in this book builds upon the work of previous scholars in this field, but complements these by drawing upon methods and approaches from intellectual and book history. Rather than conceiving of the Turk as a figure in early modern writing and exploring the complex commonplaces, associations, and tropes that were clustered around it, I will focus upon English writing on Turkish history, examine the contexts in which such works were produced, and the debates in which they engaged. This approach is centred upon the authors and their contexts, but also the generic forms their writing took, their rhetoric and language, the sources they drew upon, and how their works were read by contemporaries. I will also address the context in which these books were produced as material objects, who they were printed by and for, what formats they took, and how writing on Turkish history fitted into the wider book world of early modern England.
To illustrate this approach consider Richard Knolles’s colourful description of the Ottomans as ‘the terror of the world’, cited by virtually all the scholars in the field including Samuel Chew, Gerald MacLean, Nabil Matar, Daniel Vitkus, Matthew Dimmock, Matthew Birchwood, Richmond Barbour, Jonathan Burton, and Ash Cirakman. These scholars have generally treated this expression as either emblematic of English attitudes to the Turks, or part of general discourse in which the figure of ‘the Turk’ was a marker of otherness or difference. In contrast I will show this expression (‘terror of the world’) to be a literary commonplace present in numerous of Knolles’s sources, and discuss how his use of this trope reflects his depiction of the Turks in relation to contemporary debates. Further, while none of the above scholars undertake a detailed account of Knolles’s work or its intellectual or book history contexts, I will explore its sources, publishers, legal history, piracy, and readership in detail. Though I build on the work of all the above scholars, I hope my shift in emphasis towards intellectual history will bring new contexts to bear on the study of English writing on the Turks.
When English authors wrote histories of the Turks they drew upon an existing body of previous European historiography with its own images and structural and rhetorical models. On a more immediate level, they also derived from this discourse normative assumptions, debates, and facts, in the sense of particulars or discrete details taken to be true and widely repeated. For example, a common normative assumption was that the government of the Ottoman polity was characterised by ‘the Tyranny, Oppression, and Cruelty of that State’.° Here ‘Tyranny’ was not simply a term of abuse, though it did carry a pejorative force. Rather, as a neo-classical political category it implied a matrix of underlying structural relationships that shaped descriptions and observations of the Ottomans throughout the period. Alongside such conceptual baggage English authors also took on a vast range of established or assumed details. The widespread assertion that the Turks were ‘lineally descended fro[m] the Barbarous nation of the Scithians’,” was inherited from the debates of an earlier generation of Humanist historians. Alongside such commonplaces an array of historical dates, names, places, anecdotes, and so forth were seemingly endlessly repeated and recycled (e.g. ‘Tangrolipix’, founder of the Seljuk Sultanate). English writers incorporated ‘facts’ such as these, drawn from existing continental books, with other elements, details from news or travel writing, or personal observations, in ways that reflected both their intellectual contexts and English historical and social mileu.®
As Englishmen read, translated, and reworked material from continental accounts of Turkish history their perspective, motivations, expectations, and methods were shaped by a contemporary discourse as to what constituted ‘history’ as a form of writing. These self-same continental histories of the Turks also contained many ideas as to the purposes of writing history, methods, approaches to assessing evidence, and appropriate forms and styles of writing. This is not the place for an extended digression on the development of the early modern ars historica, however, commonplace humanist views of the value and purposes of history, of the kind that became established from around the mid-sixteenth century, were both a clear and explicit context for many English authors writing Turkish history, and thus merit a brief discussion.’ This tradition had tended to draw from classical antecedents, most notably Stoic teaching on rhetoric, which viewed history as a source from which to draw moral examples for public and private life. In particular Cicero’s De Oratore 2.36 was so widely quoted that it became used as an aphorism summarising the conventional tropes of the utility of historical works. Hence, for instance, the English dedication to A shorte treatise of the Turkes chronicles (1546), a translation of Paolo Giovio’s Commentario de le cose de Turchi (1532), which riffs repeatedly upon the theme of the value of history over the underlying melody of these lines of ‘the eloquent oratour and famous clerke Cicero’: An hystorie is the witnes of tymes, y[e] glasse of trueth, the keper of reme[m]brance, y[e] guyde of our life, and the messinger and tydinges teller of all antiquytie.1°
For the translator Peter Ashton, Giovio’s account is worth translating into English as much because its account of Ottoman history is a store of moral examples, as for the topical interest of the material itself. Whether by framing the events of Ottoman history within a providential narrative such as the biblical prophecy of Daniel, using specific episodes as moral exempla (e.g. the story of Tammerlane and Bajazet to illustrate hubris before a fall), or drawing lessons in statecraft or military organisation, a fundamental assumption permeating most English accounts of Turkish history was that historical writing itself ought to teach valuable moral lessons for public and private life, or demonstrate religious examples. True ‘History’ was not merely the recounting of past events, but, more profoundly, it was expected to be an account of the meaning of those events in terms of their embodiment or illustration of moral or religious precepts.
This study will focus upon three broad overlapping categories of English material in which the discourse of Turkish history featured. The first is works explicitly addressing the history of the Turks as their topic, including both overviews such as Knolles’s Generall Historie of the Turkes (1603), and more specific works such as Abraham Hartwell’s translation of Giovanni Tommaso Minadoi’s The History of the Warres Betweene the Turkes and the Persians (1595). The second category is tracts describing events involving the Ottomans, such as news pamphlets, especially those containing descriptions of events of the kind that were the mainstay of contemporary historical writing, that is, military campaigns and dynastic change. The overlap with news is inescapable as throughout the early modern period news pamphlets served as sources for longer accounts and shared many of the tropes and images common to the latter. However, the basic category of ‘news’ was extremely fluid across the period, and as such the gradual evolution of print culture, the news pamphlet, the periodical, and newspaper, is interwoven with the story of how the English wrote on Turkish news and history.!! The third category is simply other works that contain substantial sections on Turkish history or events involving the Ottomans. In this final category we can include general works on the Ottomans, which although not addressing explicitly historical topics contain notable amounts of history, such as Rycaut’s The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1665). I shall also examine numerous more general works, for example, many works of travel writing such as George Sandys’s Relation of a Journey (1615) contain historical sections. Although these general works are not the focus of this study, by exploring how historical writing on the Turks overlapped with other related fields, such as writing on Islam, political philosophy, geography, and travel writing, we are able to view this historiography in its broad intellectual, social, and cultural contexts. I will not attempt the vast task of exhaustively surveying and summarising all English writing on the Turks across the period 1453-1700. Instead I will focus upon three periods of acute conflict: the 1540s, 1590-1610, and the 1680s. These intervals demand our attention as they produced the most intense spates of English writing on the Ottomans. However, focusing upon them also allows the kind of close reading and contextualisation required by dense and complex materials such as histories.
European historiography on the Turks
English historical writing on the Turks was part of a wider European intellectual response to the expansion of the Ottoman Empire into Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and their continuing presence as a major European power. In 1453 the city of Constantinople fell to the forces of Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II (‘Fatih’ or ‘the Conqueror’), and the shockwaves of this event reverberated across Europe. Numerous texts lamenting the city’s sack were composed and James Hankins has shown that the crusade literature of the latefifteenth century was at least equal in volume to all that that survives from the high Middle Ages.” A major part of this European intellectual response to the Ottomans was the development of a historiographical tradition depicting their origins, character, and recent expansion.
This historiography has been examined in the scholarship of Nancy Bisaha who explored Humanist reactions to the late-fifteenth-century Ottoman advance, and Margaret Meserve who has traced its roots back to medieval chronicle precedents.'? Both of these scholars argue that early Humanist discussions of the Turks were shaped by the rhetorical need to paint the Ottomans as a dangerous and barbaric enemy. This objective was met by tracing the origins of the Turks back to classical ‘Scythians’, as described by Herodotus, and linking these to the seventhcentury Khazar peoples who had allied themselves with the Byzantine emperor Heraclius, though Meserve shows that this genealogy does not in fact reflect the ethnic origins of the Oguz Turks from whom the Seljuk and later Ottoman Turk dynasties had descended.!4 The Humanist debates surrounding the origins of the Turks, and the general consensus that they were ultimately descended from ‘Sycthians’, became mainstays of historical writing on the Turks as it developed in the sixteenth century, and were adopted from continental sources by English authors. Consequently ‘Turkish history’, as conceived of in early modern England, was not merely the story of the Ottoman dynasty, but extended back to their supposed nomadic origins as ‘Scythes’, taking in the history of the Khazars and Seljuk state as it survived in medieval chronicles.
By the early-sixteenth century a new breed of European historiography on the Ottomans was evolving. Authors, such as Marcantonio Sabellico (1436-1506) and Marino Barlezio (d.1512/1513?), combined material from older authorities, and the debates on origins with which they were so concerned, with contemporary sources like news reports, accounts of travellers and diplomats, captives tales, and practical crusade treatises. Following a period of relative consolidation in the late-fifteenth century the Ottoman Empire expanded rapidly giving European historical writing on the Turks a new impetus. In the reign of Selim I (1. 1512-1520), Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and much of the Arabian Peninsula (notably the Hejaz) were conquered. Selim’s successor Suleiman I (1.1520-1566), extended the Empire into central Europe with the capture of Belgrade (1521) and Rhodes (1522), the collapse of the medieval kingdom of Hungary following the battle of Mohacs (1526), and the final taking of Buda (1541). Historians, such as Paulo Giovio and Francesco Sansovino, who responded to and described these events became key sources for English historical writing on the Ottomans as it evolved from the 1540s, as did the likes of Barlezio, Sabellico, Flavio Biondo, Andrea Cambini, and Giovanni Battista Cipelli, all of whom were later drawn upon as sources by Richard Knolles. By the mid-sixteenth century there had evolved an established and sophisticated body of European historical writing on the Turks that was not only drawn on for material for translations, or assimilated into accounts by English authors, but also served to establish the key reference points for what constituted the subject of Turkish history.
English writing on the Ottoman Turks
English historical writing on the Turks evolved out of a wider European discourse. However, it was also part of a much larger body of English writing on the Ottoman Turks that included not only scholarly accounts such as histories but also news, religious and political polemic, sermons, ballads, plays, travel accounts and geographies, and diplomatic accounts. Indeed these are only the most prominent examples, as the topic of the Turks was so widely discussed that passing mentions might occur in almost any context. Although English writing on the Turks in its broadest sense is a prohibitively large topic, recent advances in the digital humanities have opened up new techniques through which we can assess the scope of English engagement with the Ottomans in ways hereunto not possible. This in turn has important implications for how we approach the more specific discourse of English historical writing on the Ottomans.
Andrew Hardie working at the University of Lancaster has developed a Corpus Linguistics query processing tool named CQPweb, which (amongst other applications) enables scholars to survey a very large Corpus, representing nearly a tenth of extant early modern works (not including multiple editions).!5 We can use this tool at a very basic level to illustrate some key features of the extent of English writing on the Ottoman Turks. I searched this Corpus for the term ‘Turk’ and its variants, and then plotted these results chronologically by decade using the bibliographical details of the original works.!° I then normalised these figures to remove chronological variation in the sample size (i.e. number of texts and words per decade) by calculating frequency of the term ‘Turk’ per million words in the database per decade.!” The resulting graph (Figure I.1) shows the intensity of usage of the term ‘Turk’ by decade, in 3,548 texts, from a survey of 12,284 early modern works.
Although this kind of survey is very general and best used as a means of framing more traditional techniques of research and analysis it illustrates two extremely important points very clearly. The first is simply the massive scale of English writing on the Turks: 3,548 works mention the term ‘Turk’ out of a survey of more than 12,284, a figure that implies that the total number of extant early modern English works that refer to Turks is in the tens of thousands. This is a powerful affirmation of the importance of the work of scholars such as Matar, Mclean, Dimmock, and Birchwood who have all argued that tropes of the ‘Turk’ played a prominent, if largely forgotten role in early modern English cultural life.’ The second is that English interest in the Turks is not consistent across time periods, but rather peaks at specific points, in particular in the 1600s and the 1680s, a conclusion that supports my previous research.!? This phenomenon is of especial interest as both the 1600s and the 1680s were periods of intense Hapsburg-Ottoman conflict: the Long War 1593-1606 and the War of the Holy League 1683-1699. A closer examination of the works from which these hits are drawn confirms a preponderance of texts written in response to these military crises, as well as a more general trend towards writing on the topic of military conflict in works written in these periods.
As the most natural vehicle for discussing military campaigns, battles, leaders, and relations between nations, historical writing and news (which often also served as source material for history) was a fundamental part of this response. However, while the importance of historical writing on the Ottomans has been acknowledged by other scholars writing in the field, it is fair to say that no study has engaged with the topic in a way comparable to the attention Bisaha and Meserve have directed toward early Italian Humanist historiography.
Critical approaches
Since the publication of Nabil Matar’s Islam in Britain, 1558-1685 (1998) a sizeable body of scholarship has grown up on the topic of English perceptions of and engagement with the Ottoman Turks, Islam, and the wider Muslim world in the early modern period. As this field has developed a number of broad trends have evolved in its theoretical basis and assumptions. The first is a disciplinary commitment towards literary studies. Foundational works such as Samuel C. Chew’s survey The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England during the Renaissance (1937) and the literary critic Edward Said’s strongly polemical Orientalism (1978) established a literary basis for the study of English and European depictions of the Ottoman world and ‘east’ more generally. The literary origins of this field are perhaps one of the reasons why studies of early modern drama are so well represented.
A second major trend is the influence of postcolonial writing and broadly psychological, or indeed psychoanalytical, theoretical models to describe and explain the salient features of English and European depictions of the Ottomans and Islam. While few scholars now try to anachronistically apply Said’s ‘Orientalism’ to the early modern period, the impulse to provide a single overarching explanatory model to define the topic remains potent and continues to shape critical accounts.?! For many scholars the preferred model has been a simplified Lacanian notion of the ‘Other’, positing the Turks as a reference point against which English or European identities defined themselves, a process echoed at more localised levels of confessional or political identity.”
The ‘Other’ has certain strengths as a model, particularly in the nuanced and refined versions of this model discussed by Vitkus, Maclean, and others. It is general enough to reflect, if perhaps not quite accommodate, the intrinsic variety and complexity demanded by such a large topic. It provides a schema in which to consider some of the very broad commonplace features of English and European ideas of the Turks, associations and images such as tyranny, rapacity, greed, arrogance, deviant sexuality, turbans, circumcision, apostasy, scimitars, wealth, carpets, piracy, slavery, absolutism, and so forth. Above all it is a useful tool for describing and deconstructing the complex and multifaceted meanings that were attributed to the figure of the Turk in early modern polemical writing from the Reformation onwards.”
However, the ‘Other’ model also has weaknesses. Though it might be seen to provide a coherent overview to a massive and deeply complex topic, one might sensibly ask if this is in fact a false sense of coherence. Given the ubiquity of the Turk as a figure in early modern writing, occurring in many thousands of separate works, the value of a single heuristic model to summarise the supposed central features of such writing is surely questionable. More specifically the ‘Other’ does very little to draw us towards the contemporary debates, concepts, and contexts through which early modern English authors engaged with and depicted the Ottoman Turks and their past. It tells us nothing about the relationship between English sources and the continental texts that they translated, drew upon, and assimilated. It also does not require us to ask about the genres and forms of writing through which English authors systematically considered the Turks, or how generic rhetorics and conventions shaped these accounts. Furthermore, because of its wide usage in postcolonial studies it is difficult to separate the concept of the ‘Other’ from a range of comparisons to later eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth-century European imperialist involvement in the Islamic world and modern Middle East.74 Such comparisons require careful handling if they are not to seriously distort our understanding of the context in which early modern Englishmen encountered and engaged with the Ottoman World. In contrast, while this book builds on previous scholarship, the approach I have outlined above, drawn from intellectual history, avoids these issues. It does not attempt to further theorise the complex figure of the ‘Turk’ in early modern literature as a whole, instead focusing upon the more specific discourse of Turkish history. By focusing upon authors, the language they used, and the contexts in which they wrote and were read, it foregrounds contemporary concepts, images, and debates, rather than advancing broad psychological or anthropological motivations for these depictions.
English historical writing on the Ottoman Turks
The chapters that follow are broadly chronological tracing the development of English writing on Turkish history from its earliest roots, to the Ottoman expansion into Europe in the early-sixteenth century, and up to the end of the seventeenth century, when the Ottoman position in Europe altered radically following the treaty of Karlowtiz (1699). In particular I will examine the 1590s—1600s and the 1680s, two periods of Ottoman military involvement on the continent that stimulated extensive historical writing, and the longer term context of the AngloOttoman economic and diplomatic relationship as it evolved across the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”°
Chapter 1 addresses early English printed works on the Turks, up to the 1540s, which was the first decade during which a substantial number of historical works in English appeared in response to the final collapse of the medieval kingdom of Hungary in the face of the Ottoman advance. It begins with the earliest English translations of historical material in the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries. The chapter then explores how the twin contexts of the Ottoman advance and Reformation played out in print in late years of Henry VIII's reign. Specifically I argue that a clique of strongly reformist printers, who had previously enjoyed the patronage of the State, used the topic of the Turks to continue producing an evangelically committed output in the years following the fall of Cromwell, when Henry VIII had pulled back from further religious reform. I end by comparing and contrasting two contemporary English translations of Paulo Giovio’s Commentario de la cose de Turchi, showing how the language and imagery associated with the Turks — from the scourge of God, to the apocalyptic dragon — could be appropriated in differing contexts for aims as divergent as religious polemic and flattering a monarch.
Chapter 2 deals with English writing on the Ottoman-Hapsburg Long War of 1593-1606, a period that stimulated an unprecedented flood of English writing on the Turks. It concentrates on two related forms of writing, that is, news and history. The first section analyses the transmission and translation of continental news accounts in England. I also read these accounts in the parallel context of the evolution of news as a print genre in this period, when it was undergoing radical transformations in content, physical form, and market. This section is centred upon the printer and bookseller John Wolfe who was at the heart of these developments. The second part of this chapter looks at longer historical accounts of the Turks published during the Long War and often explicitly referencing it (several of which were also published by John Wolfe). I read these in the patronage and print contexts in which they appeared and argue that they reflect not only the Ottoman advance into Europe but the socio-historical contexts in which they were produced.
Chapter 3 focuses upon the crucial and yet critically neglected figure of Richard Knolles, English historian of the Turks, and author of the Generall Historie of the Turkes (1603), the most authoritative and widely read English account of Turkish history in the early modern period. The chapter addresses Knolles’s biography, sources, intellectual foundations, and method, relating his writing to its continental chronicle sources and contemporary notions of history and historical writing. Following from this it analyses the structure, content, and rhetoric of the Generall Historie, focusing on key concepts such as providence and tyranny, through which Knolles’s structured his account of the Turks, their state, and history, and attributed meaning to them. The chapter ends with an appraisal of the legacy of this influential work through the ways in which it was read, cited, and appropriated by authors throughout the seventeenth century.
England was geographically removed from the borders of Ottoman territory, and Anglo—Ottoman trade and diplomacy was negligible until after William Harborne’s acquisition of trade capitulations in 1580.7¢ However, in the seventeenth century the Levant trade developed into one of the central contexts in which the English encountered and engaged with the Ottoman Empire. Trade, the diplomacy it required, and the travel it facilitated, also acted as spurs to English writing. Chapter 4 assesses the influence of trade, diplomacy, and travel on historical writing. However, it also conversely argues that the forms, tropes, and example of historical writing had a formative effect on many accounts of the trade. One result of this interrelationship was that many authors who wrote promoting or justifying the trade had ambivalent or negative attitudes towards the Turks themselves. Hard-headed advocacy of trade could, and did, sit comfortably with deeply held pejorative commonplaces and stereotypes. The first section looks at the representation of the Levant trade in the works of Richard Hakluyt, a prominent geographer and publicist for colonial and commercial ventures. Hakluyt balanced his desire to promote the trade, in which his patrons were centrally involved, with the need to defend the probity of diplomacy with the Turks, against a backdrop of rumours of anti-Spanish Anglo-Ottoman collusion. The chapter then turns to the continuations appended to later editions of Knolles’s Generall Historie in 1606, 1610, 1621, 1631, 1638, and 1687 and argues that, as they were increasingly informed by documentary materials generated by diplomacy, they came to reflect the concerns and issues central to those negotiations, notably the problem of Barbary piracy. The third and final part of this chapter concentrates upon Paul Rycaut, one of the most important and influential English authors to write on the Ottomans and their history. Rycaut’s accounts of the Ottoman state were based on his time as secretary to the Ambassador Heneage Finch; however, they were also heavily shaped by the politics of the Restoration, and the influence of previous English historical writing on the Ottomans, particularly that of Knolles, whose structure and style his later works adopted, at the insistence of his publisher.
Chapter 5 focuses on the extraordinary outpouring of writing on the Ottoman Empire in response to the War of the Holy League 1683-1699, and the second siege of Vienna (1683). It argues that the major territorial losses suffered by the Ottomans at the Treaty of Karlowitz (1699), following which the Ottoman Empire ceased to be a major central European power, were reflected in a dramatic shift in European perceptions of the Turks going into the eighteenth century. Similarly to the early Long War 1593-1606, explored in Chapter 2, the War of the Holy League stimulated a sizeable literature of historical writing on the Turk. Indeed these later works have much continuity with the writing of the previous century. In particular they drew upon the established structures, content, and tropes of earlier histories of the Turks, in order to contextualise and understand contemporary Ottoman military involvement on the continent. However, despite these formal similarities, the historical works of this period also reflect a profound change in attitudes to the power and status of the Ottoman Empire, and these developments mark the beginning of a new phase of English writing on the Turks and their history.
Note on nomenclature
The Ottoman Empire was comprised of far ranging territories in Asia, Africa, and Europe, and its population was made up of diverse and overlapping linguistic, ethnic, religious, cultural, and social groups. The ruling elite called themselves Osmanli, or ‘Ottomans’ in western parlance, a term originally denoting ‘the followers or household of Osman’, the eponymous founder of their dynasty (c.1300). With the integration of local elites as the empire expanded territorially and the adoption of the practice of devsirme,?’ this ruling elite was no longer necessarily, nor even primarily, ethnically or linguistically Turkish. In classical Ottoman usage the term ‘Turk’ might even take a pejorative sense, referring to the Anatolian peasantry. However, contemporary sixteenth and seventeenth-century western usage in the main treated the terms ‘Ottoman’ and ‘Turk’ as synonymous, and this was true even amongst authors such as Richard Knolles who was aware of this issue of nomenclature.”8 Furthermore, western authors also commonly elided the differences between the Turks of the Ottoman Empire and pre-Ottoman ‘Turks’ such as the Seljuks and even Khazars - a continuity that represents a fundamental assumption about the origins and nature of the Ottoman Turks in early modern European historiography.
In addition to referring to Turks in an ethnic or linguistic sense (i.e. speakers of Turkic languages) the term might be used by early modern European writers to refer to members of the Ottoman hierarchy (regardless of ethnic background), converts to Islam, and even Muslims in general. In eliding ‘Turks’ with Islam (‘the Turkish religion’), and especially converts who had ‘turned Turk’, the term came to take on a broad range of figurative, rhetorical, and polemical usages, associated with deception and apostasy, which also tended to acquire a stronger resonance in periods of crisis such as the 1680s when the Ottoman Turks were topical (e.g. ‘Turkish whigs’).2? Nonetheless, despite these generalised and figurative usages, by the late sixteenth century many English authors in fact often used terms such as ‘Turk’, ‘Moor’, and ‘Saracen’ in specific and differentiated ways.*° When dealing with historical literature, it should therefore not be assumed that these terms were synonymous with either each other or Muslims more generally.
This is a study of English depictions of what they perceived as ‘Turkish History’ rather than of Ottoman History per se (in the sense examined by Ottomanists). For the sake of clarity I have followed my sources in using the term ‘Turks’ to apply to not only ethnic and linguistic Turks, but Ottomans, and pre-Ottoman Turkish dynasties such as the Seljuks. Terms such as ‘Seljuk’ and ‘devsirme’ have been rendered in modern Turkish spellings. Dates have been transcribed as Common Era rather than Islamic. Where place names of locations differ from modern transcription the modern name is given in brackets at the first mention, for example, Smyrna (Izmir).
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