The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It - Course Information

24 ~ THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE WORLD AROUND IT ~
was at least one subtext of his story that here were potentially useful subjects of
the sultan, ‘infidels’ though they might be. 78 As to the city’s buildings, they were
interesting architecturally and well kept; in short, the place was a worthwhile
future acquisition. That Evliya thought in these terms becomes quite clear when
one reads the numerous sentences he devoted to the places in and around Vienna
linked in one way or another to Süleyman the Magnificent’s siege of 1529/
935–6. In a similar vein, one might interpret his account of the adventures of the
semi-mythical Kasım Voyvoda whose heroic death, supposedly within Vienna
itself, might be also be viewed as a kind of symbolic appropriation. I would
therefore submit that the tendency to view foreign lands in the hands of ‘unbelievers’
as possible objects of conquest in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
was common to certain Ottoman and European authors.
In Sultan Süleyman’s time the Ottoman Empire had been recognized, albeit
grudgingly, by European humanist authors such as Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq
(1522–92/928–1001) because of its superior military power, and the absolute
rule of the sultans admired as an ideal that the Habsburg emperor, confronted
with fractious nobilities, had been unable to emulate. 79 While Busbecq’s account
certainly is full of polemics, the ‘superiority complex’ that makes many travel
writers of the years after 1750/1163 such stultifying reading had not as yet come
into being. 80 Or to be more exact, this latter-day manner of viewing the world
only began to emerge in the seventeenth century and became all-pervasive in the
course of the later eighteenth. As Lucette Valensi has shown, the vision of the
Ottoman polity relayed by the Venetian ambassadors, whose views were to
become crucial for European political thinking down to – in some cases – the
twentieth century, began to change from admiration to abhorrence only around
1600/1008–9. 81
In this context it seems reasonable to take our brief from some recent work on
the genesis of European Renaissance artwork that stresses the numerous connections
with the Middle East and the use of Middle Eastern models in architecture,
metalwork, textiles, majolica and other media. 82 As late as the sixteenth century
there was a remarkably close relationship on the artistic level between Renaissance
Europe and the Ottomans. Jerry Brotton has a point in contradicting the
often-made claim that the rediscovery of the Greco-Roman world in the course
of the Renaissance resulted in an unbridgeable chasm between European and
Ottoman cultures. 83 Certainly I would think that he exaggerates for polemical
purposes when claiming that the reception of Greco-Roman texts and artefacts
had no impact at all on the genesis of Renaissance culture. Yet his point concerning
the importance of ‘the Ottoman connection’ is well taken. When it comes to
architecture, it has been pointed out that there is something resembling a subliminal
relationship between Sinan the Architect (c. 1497–1588/902–97) and his
contemporary Andrea Palladio (1508–80/913–88), although we can be certain
that there was no direct contact between the two masters. 84