The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It - Course Information

~ ON SOVEREIGNTY AND SUBJECTS ~ 37
The mid-sixteenth century: foreign subjects present on
Ottoman territory – and those who were conspicuously
absent
Probably the middle years of the sixteenth century, when our story begins, are the
time at which ‘Ottoman centralism’ was at its height. These years also form a
period during which many of the later European ‘players’ in the contest for commercial
supremacy, and who in the eighteenth century developed political
ambitions as well, were not as yet present on the Ottoman scene. Or at the very
least, these states and merchants were still comparatively weak. The interest of
English and Dutch merchants in the eastern Mediterranean lands lay in the
future. In consequence, there was no involvement in Ottoman affairs on the part
of the young Queen Elizabeth I, who ascended the English throne in 1558/965–6.
As to the Northern Netherlands, popularly called Holland, they had only just
begun their long struggle for separation from Philip II’s Spanish Empire.
Even the one ally of the sultans in the world of western Europe, namely the
kingdom of France, had as yet only very limited concerns in the eastern Mediterranean.
By the 1560s/967–77, it had become obvious to high-ranking Ottoman
officials, including the current Grand Vizier Sokollu Mehmed Paşa, that the successors
of King François I were neither able nor willing to go through with the
commitments that the founder of the Valois dynasty had made to Sultan Süleyman
with respect to the common struggle against the Habsburgs. 36 Due to
intermittent civil war between Catholic and Reformed nobilities, Catherine de
Medici, first as regent for – and later as advisor to – her sons, most of the time
allowed the French embassy in Istanbul to languish because of insufficient funds.
Or rather adventurous projects were suggested: in 1566/973–4, the ambassador
Grantrie de Grandchamp attempted to gain Ottoman consent for the establishment
of a large number of Huguenots, as well as French and German Lutherans,
in Moldavia. These families were supposed to form a military colony against the
Habsburgs, while removing a source of contention from the French kingdom.
Grantrie de Grandchamp even took a personal interest in this scheme, attempting
to marry the sister of the voyvoda of Moldavia, and at one time offered to fill the
position of voyvoda himself, paying an annual tribute of 20,000 ducats. Apparently
these projects resulted from the queen mother’s and Charles IX’s
(r. 1560–74/967–82) desperate attempts to retain control of the volatile situation
in France, and were not taken very seriously at the Ottoman court. 37
As far as the Habsburgs themselves were concerned, the activities of merchants
from their territories in the Ottoman lands were mostly limited to border
trade. That commercial contacts did not expand was due to the frequency and
destructiveness of war. After 1526/932–3, when the Ottomans swept away the
army of the Hungarian King Lajos II, and the young ruler himself was killed in
battle, the Habsburgs attempted to take over Hungary on the basis of a previously
concluded treaty of inheritance with the but recently established Hungarian royal
house, now extinct in the male line. This ambition resulted in a spate of