LE SYMPOSIUM INTERNATIONAL LE LIVRE. LA ROUMANIE. L ...

70 SÜER EKER
and an artist is praised, traces of a disappointment that is ongoing become
evident. the reason for this may be linked to the fact that Kantemiroglu,
who spent a substantial part of his life in Istanbul, established close
relations with the ottoman bureaucracy and the élite of the time, and was
twice appointed the Moldovan Voivode by the Sublime Porte, took sides
with russia during the turkish-russian War of 1711 for the purpose of
achieving his country’s independence, upon the promise of the russian
tzar peter who was deploying a policy of expansion towards the South,
and also to the fact that some issues in his works relating to turkish history
and culture were regarded as biased by some circles in turkey.
Many europeans of hungarian, polish, French and German origin
were assigned to political, administrative and military posts of the
ottoman empire. yet a significant number of them embraced Islam,
thereby disappearing in the ottoman society in the following first or
second generation. 1 however, Kantemiroglu, who arrived at Istanbul with
a different status, differs from the others for he has offered, despite in a
discontinuous fashion, his intellectual growth, obtained during the long
years he spent in this city, and his observations, analyses and notes on the
social, religious, political and military structure and characteristics of the
ottomans, to the attention of the russian and Western world.
there exists no concrete evidence that the evaluations of Kantemiroglu,
although distressing, paved the way for an analysis of the circumstances
or feedback for the ottoman turks who, until the defeat in Vienna, felt
themselves superior to the West and who, for this reason, did not take
advantage of the developments. under the patronage of the artist and artlover
Sultan Ahmed III, Kantemiroglu took his place in turkish cultural
history more as the son of the Voivode Kantemir. It is interesting that,
although he was not aware, Kantemiroglu may be regarded as one of
those who paved the way for the short-lived period known as the Tulip
Era (1718–1730) in turkish history, referred to by some as the Ottoman
Renaissance or as the Ottoman Enlightenment.
1 In a similar manner, Charles Fonton (1746–1753), who arrived at Istanbul
thirty-six years after Kantemiroglu and stayed there for seven years, also produced a work
which aims to introduce classical turkish music to europe, titled Essai sur la Musique
Orientale Comparée à la Musique Européenne (paris, 1751), the original copy of which
is available at Bibliothèque nationale de France (see Fonton 1981). Kantemiroglu’s
contemporary, lady Mary Worthley Montagu (1689–1762), who arrived in Istanbul only
five years after Kantemiroglu and wrote the travel book titled Letters: Accounts of the
Policy and Manners of the Turks (london, 1763), has a similar mission of turks being
objectively and positively recognized by the europeans (see MontAGu 1998).