The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It - Course Information

6 ~ THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE WORLD AROUND IT ~
~ A few ground rules of Ottoman ‘foreign politics’
When it comes to Ottoman views of their neighbours, most of our information
concerns those living to the west and to the north; but even in this limited sphere,
there are serious deficiencies. While numerous envoys/messengers (çavuş) visited
Venice in the 1500s and early 1600s/X.–early XI. centuries, and one or two
of them showed up in France as well, written reports about these missions do not
seem to have survived. 13 Only in the early eighteenth century did Ottoman
ambassadors begin to write in extenso about their experiences in foreign parts,
with the well-known Yirmisekiz Mehmed Efendi pioneering the rather novel
genre of embassy reports with an account of his visit to Paris in 1720/1132–3. 14 It
was at this time too that the authors of Ottoman chronicles made occasional comments
about the activities of this or that foreign ambassador present in Istanbul;
in earlier periods these men were simply not considered important enough to figure
in formal writing. If European ambassadors and their personnel had not
written so much about their missions to Istanbul, we would simply have to confess
our ignorance and leave it at that; but as these men did write a good deal, and
usually had a rather narrow horizon, a book of the kind undertaken here must
attempt to redress the balance and highlight the Ottoman viewpoint by means of
whatever sources are available. 15
Matters are complicated by the fact that in some early modern polities, even
foreign relations in the narrow sense of the word were not always the exclusive
province of the ruler and his closest official advisors. This applied, for instance,
to the French monarchy of the seventeenth century. Every reader of Alexandre
Dumas’ novels knows that a foreign queen, such as Anne d’Autriche (1601–66/
1009–77), the consort of the French ruler Louis XIII, herself a member of the
Habsburg dynasty, was easily suspected of politically disloyal relations with her
natal family. Moreover it was not only the queen, who after all possessed some
official status, who might be involved in the foreign relations of the kingdom of
France; even aristocratic ladies, whose power over this or that minister, or else
the king himself, was purely de facto, might extend patronage to noblemen who
hoped to be appointed ambassadors. 16
A similar situation obtained in Istanbul, where, as is well known, members of
the sultan’s household might use their familial relations in Venice for purposes
that were political at least in the wider sense of the word. 17 All this appears
strange to us, as we are not accustomed to seeing rulers as the heads of extensive
households that in their entirety are active in state politics. We are even less willing
to admit that members of these households can have a voice in foreign policy,
considered a particularly ‘sensitive’ domain. If members of a royal household
became involved in foreign politics – certainly not an unheard of occurrence at
European courts of the later nineteenth century – the ruler and his prime minister
would probably be denounced for allowing their camarilla too much ‘influence’.
However, the role of the sultans in heading households whose bureaucracies
formed part of their ‘patrimony’ has been much studied in the Ottoman case, and