Download PDF | Daniel O’Quinn - Engaging the Ottoman Empire_ Vexed Mediations, 1690-1815, University of Pennsylvania Press 2018.
408 Pages
Introduction
It is the spring of 2013, the Rijksmuseum is still closed for renovation, but I am in Amsterdam to see a cache of paintings of Ottoman life by the French-Flemish artist Jean-Baptiste Vanmour. The curator in charge of the Calkoen collection has generously been standing by as I work painting by painting in the museum stores. On my final day she has kindly made an appointment for me to go to the office of the museum’s director to see one final painting. To my surprise, he is there. He walks over and greets me warmly, and the three of us stand back to look at the enormous View of Istanbul from the Dutch Embassy at Pera (ca. 1720–37), which is bolted to the wall opposite his desk (Plate 1). It is a labored, confused painting.
Time passes. In so many words, the director indicates that he will be happy not to look at this painting when he moves to his new office. Since I have occasioned reflection upon a daily irritant, I suddenly feel compelled to speak about this picture that I have only just seen, about why I am here. By any standards, Vanmour’s monumental landscape is a remarkably clumsy picture. Something about the task of representing Istanbul on this scale proved to be beyond his means. 1 The stone balcony in the foreground is perhaps the most discomfiting element of the painting: the tiles and stones defy any coherent sense of perspective and these spatial deformations are only exacerbated when we attempt to make sense of the roofs and houses beyond. Furthermore, the figures are not terribly well integrated.
The central group of Europeans discoursing about what lies before them seems to come from an entirely different representational economy than the laborer on the left and the man with the horse on the right. These figures appear to be directly out of contemporary costume albums, and there is no apparent rationale for their presence here except as signs of exoticism. One could say something similar about the smoking figure seated on the balustrade—unlike the Europeans whose gestures connect them to the scene, he could be anywhere in the Ottoman dominions. But these disjunctions between the figures and their relative distance from one another are revealing because they demonstrate a failure to successfully devise a pictorial solution for intercultural relations. The very thing that unsettles this picture—its dubious command of the foreground elements—points to that which unsettles any European artist’s practice in this space.
How can the descriptive techniques of Dutch and French painting (Vanmour was trained in these traditions), and the sociability that they imply, be modified to adequately render the artist’s and the viewer’s situation. I use the word “situation” advisedly because one of the thrilling things about this picture is the degree to which the image gains confidence the farther one moves into the landscape and away from the city. In other words, the evocative treatment of the mountains and the Bosphorus in the background highlights the aesthetic struggle to represent the urban world of Istanbul. That the primary elements that gave order to the Western aesthetic tradition—perspective and ocular description—are vexed by what would seem to be the simple task of rendering this balcony gives a very clear sense of the degree to which Vanmour and other cultural practitioners were forced to reimagine their practice. We could suggest that hybridizing the representational economies of landscape and the costume painting into the same picture has generated a spatial deformation, a kind of representational disturbance that actually captures the vexed relationship between European and Ottoman subjects in this represented space.
Europeans and Ottomans had a great deal of mediated social intercourse in the capital, but devising a genre capable of capturing this extraordinary ordinariness called into question the way that social relations were represented. Time and again in this book we will encounter examples of this kind of representational discord. My objective is to track these disturbances as they surface in order reflect upon what they indicate about intercultural sociability and about mediation itself. My contention is that these representational disturbances, or vexed mediations, offer auspicious sites for considering social relations beyond fantasies of the selfsame: they are historical gifts for a time when the urgency of speaking, living, and being with others demands a fierce reckoning with Europe’s own preconceptions of discursive legitimacy. Such an exercise poses significant challenges for historical narration and conceptual organization. Rather than offering a grand narrative of European-Ottoman relations or a rigid conceptual framework to organize the archive, I have chosen to explore a series of intimate encounters, some of which have large geopolitical ramifications, using the tools of microhistory and cultural analysis.
Thus, the overall effect is far more constellatory than cumulative. Every chapter of this book follows the fortunes of notable European—primarily British, Dutch, and French—diplomats to the Sublime Porte of the Ottoman Empire. These ambassadors were charged not only with representing their respective states at the Ottoman court, but also with maintaining vital trade relations in the Mediterranean. At times I look at their activities in great detail, because their complex mediatory role forces us to think carefully about intercultural communication itself, both in its intimate performance and in its geopolitical significance. 2 That said, every chapter of this book also attends to extremely important aesthetic representations of the Ottoman Empire produced by or under the aegis of these same diplomats. The European embassies in Pera were multifarious social spaces in which artists and writers engaged with the foreign world around them. Engagement in this sense has to do with how genres and forms of representation were deployed and modified to take stock of the spaces and subjects under Ottoman rule. As I work through a very mixed archive of drawings, maps, letters, dispatches, memoirs, travel narratives, engraved books, paintings, poems, and architecture, I argue that the repository of European representations of Ottoman culture constitutes a valuable resource not only for Ottoman cultural history but also for media archaeology in the eighteenth century.
One of the primary theses of this book is that engagement and the later disengagement with the Ottoman world forced symptomatic alterations and deformations in European genres and media. 3 By closely analyzing these deformations and modifications it is possible to scale out to larger claims, first, about intercultural communication and sociability and, second, about recurrent patterns of national and imperial exchange. In its most provocative moments, this book argues that understanding European modernity requires an engagement with the Ottoman Empire. These are large claims, especially since many of the materials I am analyzing here have either been marginalized in mainstream eighteenth-century studies, or they have only ever been handled in an illustrative fashion. 4 Some of the texts, paintings, and engravings that I deal with have appeared in essays and books as somewhat transparent representations of social practices —this is especially the case of the writings of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the paintings of Jean-Baptiste Vanmour. One of my primary objectives in this book is to radically complicate the relationship between these representations and that which they represent.
There is a referential relationship between the images and texts I consider and the subjects they represent, but that relationship is tempered as much by European practices and expectations as it is by any challenges posed by the referent. Yet those challenges are manifest. Engaging the Ottoman world involves combined acts of translation, mediation, and invention such that these representations often draw attention to their own vexed status. And that vexation is only complicated further by the changing political desires vis-à-vis the Ottoman state. The eight chapters that make up this book intermittently work very close to the evidence and draw back for the long view, a tactic employed by many of the representations I consider. What this means is that the book itself is faced with a challenging balancing act between historical narration and cultural analysis. It is my strong belief that achieving this balance is crucial for understanding the importance of the interface between European and Ottoman culture in this period for we will be encountering far more similarities than conventional wisdom and much scholarship has led us to believe.
In the ensuing sections of this Introduction I sketch out three primary propositions that weave their way through all of the chapters: (1) careful attention to formal problematics and generic change allows us to discern important social and cultural tensions in this mediated archive; (2) scrutiny of spatial and temporal itineraries reveals a complex relation to Europe’s past that haunts many of my primary observers’ present experiences in Ottoman lands; and (3) matters of affect and power are crucial for understanding both formal deformation and historical consciousness in these works because they are so thoroughly entwined with wartime. Formal disturbances and collisions often point to competing temporal itineraries that ultimately leave an affective imprint of deep historical significance. As these formal, historical, and affective concerns coalesce, I think we can discern crucial developments both in the formation of “Europe” as a concept and in the representation of the Ottoman Empire. In many ways, Europeans representing Ottoman culture and politics found themselves reexamining, or perhaps examining for the first time, the ways and means in which they represented themselves.
In some cases, this self-scrutiny led to remarkable acts of cosmopolitan imagination; in others, challenges to the self opened onto either hyper-aesthetic acts of introversion or genocidal fantasies of domination and extirpation of the Ottoman Empire. Significantly these two poles of engagement correspond to separate eras of intercultural exchange, and thus this book is divided into two sections: the first covers the period from 1690 to 1734, and the second focuses on the period between 1763 and 1815. 5 But before laying out the book’s structure and its overall narrative arc, I want to situate this book in relation to eighteenth-century studies and the scholarship on empire and globalization more generally. The following three sections of this Introduction elaborate on how form, historical itineraries, and emotion operate in this book. “I Am Now Got into a New World”: The Consolations of Form For scholars of the eighteenth century, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters is the most widely acclaimed record of intercultural encounter with the Ottoman world. 6 One of the earliest letters addressed from Ottoman territory declares to an unknown addressee that “I am now got into a new world,” and it is perhaps worth pausing over the modifiers that give the letter its aura of urgency and excitement. 7
The adverb “now” and the adjective “new” not only isolate her in an impossibly narrow present condition, but also disconnect the space she inhabits from its past, from its well-known history. Denys Van Renen argues that this clause “indicates that she is willing to let the setting dictate her outlook” and that “trying to make an impossible temporal category possible, Montagu employs her ‘now’ to create a perpetual present and to involve imaginatively the recipient in her experiences, eliding a past that interferes with ‘their’ total immersion in a new culture.” 8 It is important to recognize just how artificial this gesture is. Both the “now” and the “new” are counterintuitive constructions. Writing can never capture the present; it is precisely the time that eludes inscription, and this ostensibly “new” world had been in place for centuries. The Ottoman Empire was founded under Osmân I in 1299 in northwestern Anatolia; but from Mehmed the Conquerer’s conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the empire had exerted significant hold on the European imagination. As numerous scholars of early modern Europe have demonstrated, the “Turk” is almost coextensive with the imagination of Christendom itself. Significant recent arguments have shown that what we now identify as “news” came into full generic competence with the Battle of Lepanto. In the wake of that epochal event, the Ottomans became the preeminent example of a contemporary “empire” for the European imagination, only to be superseded by nascent imperial formations following the Seven Years’ War.
This is an important and often forgotten point. Empire, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, was generally the subject of comparative analysis. And, crucially, not all of the empires being compared were European. Prior to the Treaty of Westphalia—which ended the Eighty Years’ War between Spain and the Dutch Republic, established the precedent of peace treaties negotiated by diplomatic congresses, and ultimately instituted political order in Europe based on coexisting sovereign states—Europeans had direct political experience, affective involvement, and historical engagement with five very different imperial formations. 9 One, the Roman Empire, was inexorably a part of the past, but its cultural, legal, and social lineage remained imaginatively alive. Spain’s vast overseas empire signaled the renewed viability in the present of economic and territorial control on a global scale; although with that possibility also came the specter of religious tyranny.
This is not the place to survey the impact of the Spanish example on the political and social developments of every other region of what is now called Europe. At the risk of overstatement, no other imperial power had such wide-ranging effects on the domestic politics of regions outside its control, and this is why the Peace of Westphalia occupies such a constitutive place in the consideration of sovereignty, nationalism, and international law. The Dutch Republic’s mercantile empire of the seventeenth century offered a rather different model, whose legacy is felt most forcefully in the English and French mercantile networks of the first half of the eighteenth century. Two other empires—the Habsburg Empire and the Ottoman Empire—also engaged the European imagination during this period. Both predated and continued to operate outside the Westphalian system, and both laid claim to the frontiers between “Europe” and “Asia.” 10 But they animated the European imagination in radically asymmetrical fashion. Because the Habsburg Empire drifted in and out of the Holy Roman Empire, and perhaps because the Habsburg Empire’s statecraft did not cohere into an easily representable form until the late seventeenth century, it tended to disappear behind the alterity of its territorial rival. As numerous scholars have now demonstrated, the Ottoman Empire, by the time of the Battle of Lepanto, had very quickly acquired the status of Europe’s defining other.
With the Atlantic Ocean as that which brackets Europe’s western expanse, then the geographical location of the Ottoman Empire allowed it to operate as the eastern bracket required for a wide range of polities to see themselves as somehow related. Looking at the vast archive of maps from the early modern period, Palmira Brummett argues conclusively that the combined force of location and religious difference allowed French, Dutch, Italian, English, and German observers of the Ottoman Empire to overcome the sectarian differences that otherwise made “Europe” other to itself. 11 In that regard, Islam worked as the absolute other that enabled “Christendom” to cohere as an ideology and as a political project. Despite remarkable levels of social exchange and a long history of porous borders in eastern Europe, Ottoman rule came to stand for this difference. It is important to recognize that this opposition was largely a discursive effect, activated to legitimate aggression or to constitute sameness; thus declarations of a “clash of civilizations” mistake an effect for cause. Even a cursory analysis of the Ottoman example demonstrates an extraordinary flow of foreign subjects into and through its territories and a remarkable toleration of difference among its subject populations.
This book shows that this specious activation of “Turkish” alterity also permeates the history of both print and performative media. My intention is to correct the relative lack of scholarly attention, especially among cultural critics, that has been paid to the abundance of informational literature and media about the Ottoman Empire that circulated in eighteenthcentury Europe. Current secondary literature on “Turkish” topics in eighteenth-century studies tends to gravitate toward exoticism, the Oriental tale, and a generalized sense of the East as it registers in various fictional genres. Unlike scholarship on British India or on the circumAtlantic, a large proportion of this work does not deal with the Ottoman Empire as a political and economic reality, in part because there is a mistaken assumption that readers did not know this world. Yet accounts of the Ottoman world pervade the print culture of many European locales. After all, the Ottoman state was the subject of extensive historical inquiry in Europe almost from its inception.
It became a key comparator for Western theories of governance, and not only as the chief example of despotism. As numerous scholars have now shown, the highly organized Ottoman bureaucracy and its standing military were often as not seen as models of good governance. To put this provocatively, the Ottoman Empire, before the advent of modernity, carried much of the heterocosmic import of that term. A functioning empire, in existence now, operating according to decidedly alternative social, legal, and religious structures would have looked remarkable to a merchant in London or Leiden as much as to a courtier in France or Sweden. 12 It should thus come as no surprise that the Ottoman world was represented in—and influenced the development of—a variety of European media. For example, Brummett has shown the constitutive place of the Ottoman Empire for the history of cartography in Italy, France, England, the Low Countries, and the Habsburg Empire. We can observe a similar phenomenon in other media. Andrew Pettegree has recently demonstrated not only how instrumental the reporting of the Battle of Lepanto was to the formal development of the news, but also how crucial the reporting on conflict with the Ottomans was to newsletters and newspapers in the seventeenth century. 13 Taking my cue from these recognitions, this book opens by looking closely at the mediation of the Treaty of Karlowitz in a wide range of printed matter in order to establish the everydayness of this information for readers in London and Paris. By the time Lady Mary Wortley Montagu writes “I am now got into a new world,” this new world was old news. In fact, that is what allows Montagu’s text to stage its primary critique: she assumes that her readers have knowledge of the histories written by Richard Knolles and Paul Rycaut, of the journey writing of Jean de Thévenot, George Sandys, Ottaviano Bon, Aaron Hill, and others, of the maps coming out of Holland, of the plays and operas being acted in London and Paris, of the specific deployment of Ottoman examples in political treatises by John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and others, and in the routine presence of Ottoman affairs in the daily press. 14 In fact, the assumed level of knowledge in Montagu’s letters is no less a sign of epistolary intimacy than that rhetorically achieved by the temporal shifter “now” and the somewhat specious “new”: they are part of the same effect of writing that is based on extensive acts of collective reading. 15
Montagu’s Letter-book is a useful heuristic here because the slow shift in how her text has been read tells us a great deal about eighteenth-century studies. 16 In the immediate wake of Edward Said’s Orientalism and the postcolonial turn in cultural criticism, it makes sense that most essays and chapters on Montagu focused on specific scenes of exoticism, on acts of aestheticization, and on the deployment of the East as a utopic space. What is revealing is that the ensuing canonization of the Turkish Embassy Letters has been partial. Anthologies are content to give the hammam letter, the meeting with Fatima, perhaps the letter on the rights of Ottoman women in marriage. In short, attention to the book has been dominated by its most ideologically freighted space, the seraglio, and by its most fraught subjects, Ottoman women. 17 This disparity in the distribution of scholarly attention becomes all the more pronounced when we realize that more than half of the Turkish Embassy Letters focuses specifically on European spaces and social encounters. 18 When we grant the European sections of the Turkish Embassy Letters as much attention as scholars have paid to the Ottoman sections, we can see that Montagu soberly compares the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires in order to conduct a highly complex analysis of the ongoing war between the two powers that animated her husband’s diplomacy. 19 Van Renen argues persuasively that to ignore the European sections of the Letters is to shred the text of much of its political argument, which he locates in Montagu’s writings on fashion. In my fourth chapter, I will be pushing his argument much further by suggesting that Montagu addresses the issue of empire and war in the very historical discourses most conventionally utilized for these discussions—that is, epic poetry and classical history.
I feel that this is necessary because Montagu’s intervention has implications for the history of form, for aesthetics, and for the way that “European” discourses mediated their constitutive outsides. Every page of this book, every argumentative thread, follows the information networks through which Europeans represented the Ottoman world and carefully tracks the search for formal and generic aptitude. Because so much of this book turns on pivotal moments when peace dissolves into war or when violence haunts attempts to represent the real, “crisis” is an important concept throughout. Following Lauren Berlant, I see “crisis” as “not exceptional to history or consciousness but a process embedded in the ordinary that unfolds in stories about navigating what’s overwhelming.” 20 That navigation involves a careful attention to form and genre for, as she states, “Affect’s saturation of form can communicate the conditions under which a historical moment appears as a visceral moment, assessing the way a thing that is happening finds its genre.” 21 The cultural products that make up the archive for this book share a common revisionary relation to genre and form. Europeans visiting or residing in the Ottoman Empire attempt to adapt or modify familiar forms to render distinctly unfamiliar experiences—in some cases they even learn from specifically Ottoman cultural practices.
It is not an exaggeration to say that cultural difference was to some degree overwhelming for these observers, and we can trace the complex feelings instantiated by these encounters with social and historical alterity in the generic and formal innovations devised, on the spot as it were, to navigate this world. Caroline Levine’s capacious understanding of form proves to be useful in this context. For Levine, “‘form’ always indicates an arrangement of elements—an ordering, patterning, or shaping. . . . Form, for our purposes, will mean all shapes and configurations, all ordering principles, all patterns of repetition and difference.” Like Jacques Rancière, she understands politics as a matter of imposing order on space and organizing time. In other words, “There is no politics without form.” 22 This is a salient matter here because European representations of the Ottoman Empire involve colliding forms. European strategies of narration and description are used to render the forms of Ottoman sociability and statecraft with varying degrees of success. The formal structures of Ottoman state processions and celebrations will prove to be particularly important here because they constituted both a political and a formal challenge for European representation. Social performance is translated into a cultural artifact, and the formal translation will tell us a great deal about everyone involved. For this reason I pay a great deal of attention to the specific forms and media used to communicate information about the Ottoman Empire. How did Europeans in London or Paris learn about this faraway place? Much of the scholarship on European knowledge of the East focuses on travel literature and Oriental tales. The former, for all its inaccuracies and inventions, is usually treated differently than the latter, which is rightly traced back to the extraordinary commercial success of Antoine Galland’s Les mille et une nuit (1704–17), a proto-translation of the Layla wa Layla, which circulated in England as Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (1706). Recent scholarship on Oriental tales has shown that they were an extremely elastic genre, often deployed for scrutinizing or critiquing European governmentality and society. 23 In a sense their generic flexibility and their explicit relation to fantasy and magic made them suitable for a wide range of historical and political applications. At the same time that these kinds of writings were permeating the print culture of eighteenth-century Europe, another kind of textual and visual engagement with the Ottoman world was suffusing the mediascape.
There is a vast array of printed and visual materials purporting to offer more referential knowledge of the Ottoman Empire: travel narratives to be sure, but also engraved books, memoirs, scholarly disquisitions, histories, and new hybrid genres attempted to describe with increasing specificity a space and forms of sociability that most readers would never experience or see. This book is very much about these latter materials, and the changing status of description is a crucial issue throughout. As Cynthia Wall has cogently argued in relation to the development of prose fiction in this period and Svetlana Alpers has vividly shown with regard to seventeenth-century Dutch painting, description has a complex discursive and political history. 24 Not only does description itself change over time, its function within prose narratives and within visual art alters significantly as the century progresses. Benjamin Schmidt has argued further that the efflorescence of “exotic geography” in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries involved a rebalancing of narrative and description in favor of the latter that had a significant effect both on ethnography and geography itself. 25 We will be acutely aware of these epistemological and discursive changes across the century-long period of this book, but because my archive is both textual and visual (and sometimes a hybrid of the two) my consideration of description will be multivalent and often quite extensive. One of the things I want to argue here is that the frequent combination of textual and visual description in the archive I am considering opens onto metacritical reflections on the relationship between representation and referent. This reflection often takes the form of rather strange exculpations, because in many cases the authors and artists are describing events or people that they could not see. Because the referent—most famously Ottoman women—was inaccessible, description was either conducted at second hand or replaced by highly symptomatic forms of invention.
The former implies that the empirical act of description was always already mediated; the latter calls into question the epistemological basis of description itself. One of the most important things that we will see throughout this book is that the writers and artists I deal with were not only aware of these problems in representation, but frequently made them the occasion for considering representation’s volatile place in intercultural relations. Even though the powers of western Europe—Britain, France, and the United Provinces— did not hold territorial possessions in or near Ottoman lands, the Ottoman Empire is a crucial site of imperial fantasy. This is in part because the Ottoman Empire functioned as a preeminent example of empire, as discussed above; and it is in part because it was a site of projection for European fantasies about another, historical, preeminent example of empire: Rome. Anyone who wants to understand British imperial desires during this period, and especially how these desires get routed through Roman fantasies and the classical past, needs to look carefully first at how Rome was deployed to understand the Ottoman Empire and then how Greece was imaginatively extricated from Ottoman control.
In both cases, we get a new sense of the political function of classical material in eighteenth-century life. What I show in the last four chapters of this book is the degree to which that which is temporally distant comes to mediate that which is most difficult to reconcile in the present, namely, cultural difference itself. As we will see, allegory plays a vital role in this story and the complex temporal deferral at its heart is crucial to the historical melancholy that suffuses many of the texts I consider. It strikes me as somewhat counterintuitive that this study of intercultural exchange may help to reorient scholarship on philhellenism and the legacy of classical learning in the eighteenth century, but this is one of its inexorable conclusions.
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