Chapter 1
Americans, Greeks, and Ottomans before 1821
American merchant David Offley first established a commercial house in the bustling Turkish city of Smyrna in 1811.1 Though Offley had expected building his new business in the Ottoman Empire to be a challenge, he was surprised by the friendships he had cultivated within the local community. Forming such friendships, however, sometimes gave family at home cause for concern. “Turned Turk” or “taken the turban” were contemporary phrases used by Western Christians to describe those who had abandoned their faith and converted to Islam.2 Early Americans and Western Europeans expressed fear of such a transformation in those who encountered Muslims or immersed themselves in lands dominated by the faith. Writing to his sister in 1818, Offley teased that his enthusiasm for the company of the locals had led her to “believe me to be a Turk.” He acknowledged to his sister, “With my Turks and Turkish principles, I am like to fill up my letter, & perhaps to a good Christian, so much praise of Infidels may look too much like Infidelity.”3 Offley’s enthusiasm for local customs was not just born out of a cultural interest, however. An understanding of local culture and business practices, Offley believed, would assist him in the success of his commercial house.
Despite his sister’s concerns, Offley continued to relate to her that he had developed a respect and admiration for many Muslim locals he had encountered, referencing several occasions of hospitality “that astonished even me.” Offley also explained that he had begun to earn the respect of Ottoman officials, whose favor he required in order to continue to build his business connections in the region. While at Constantinople, he had received unusual and flattering attention from several Turkish high officials, which led him to conclude that his hard work had begun to pay off. “The name of American is becoming a title of respectability,” he explained to his sister, and “ere long, to be a Citizen of the Republic of America will excite as much attention as ever was received by a Roman.” Though Offley did not intend to draw a comparison between the imperial successes of ancient Rome, he did envision the United States as one day holding a globally significant place among other major commercial powers of his time.
American interest in the Ottoman Empire and its domains was in part inspired by global efforts to intervene in a declining Ottoman state. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire increasingly had become a pawn in a much larger European struggle for dominance and power. This was both in terms of potential territorial expansion into the Balkan Peninsula, as well as access to trade with the Sublime Porte, the central ruling authority of the Ottoman Empire. Russia, Britain, and France were among the more dominant European nations with interests in the Ottoman Empire. To their consternation, the United States began to make official efforts in the early nineteenth century to gain access to trade with the Sublime Porte. Ottoman officials frequently felt pressure from these European powers, but if an alliance with the United States would benefit its own interests, the Sublime Porte was willing to entertain such a relationship. Merchants such as David Offley played a pivotal role in these negotiations.
David Offley’s reference to ancient Rome in his letter to his sister would have been considered random neither to his sister nor to his contemporaries. In the early years of the United States, the patriots of the American Revolution and the framers who wrote the U.S. Constitution looked to a classical past rooted in the ancient Roman Republic rather than in ancient Greece. The founding generation preferred republics to democracies, believing that a republican form of government best preserved the public good through the representation of a virtuous citizenry. Democracies, on the other hand, were thought of as unpredictable and susceptible to mob rule. References to the Roman Republic would have still been in the ascendancy when Offley wrote home to his sister, and she would have understood that her brother meant that he desired to achieve the same kind of success as associated with the Romans.
Yet the classical tradition in America was not static. The development of a republican tradition inspired at first by Rome eventually gave way to a Grecian influence in the early nineteenth century. The infusion of Greece into the American classical tradition expanded the appeal of the classical world beyond educated elites and made the ancient world more accessible to the masses. Where the founding generation drew a distinction between Roman and Greek political thought in the eighteenth century, Americans of the nineteenth century increasingly viewed the classical tradition as a melding of both Greek and Roman traditions. After around 1800, Americans moved away from exclusive interest in the Roman Republic and came to a larger, albeit sentimental, appreciation of ancient Greece. In fact, a demand for Greek fashions, architecture, and literature swept through popular culture in both Europe and the United States. This change influenced how the American public viewed civic duty and political activism by the 1820s.4
For many Americans in the 1820s, the Greeks were the descendants of an ancient people who had provided the cornerstone of American government and society but had come to be oppressed by the Ottoman Turks, a group of people that represented the antithesis of everything the United States was not. In addition, early Americans frequently described the Greeks as being white or claimed that the Turks were of a separate race, referencing their nonwhite as well as non-Christian status in American society. This contrast was frequently reaffirmed through contemporary literature and travel narratives.
American philhellenism was at first derived from European origins but became a separate creature by the 1820s. More than just an intellectual movement, American philhellenism was inspired in part by American contact with the Ottoman Empire and the Barbary States, not only through military conflict but also from early missionary interests and commercial trade. As American merchants initially struggled to find autonomy in commercial markets dominated by European powers, they discovered a love for the East as well as a dread of Muslim pirates.
American philhellenism also influenced some of the early interest in expanding into the eastern Mediterranean as well. American missionaries saw Western Asia, as it was frequently called, as a prime location to spread the gospel not only because of the presence of Islam but also because they perceived the Greeks as being especially deserving of salvation from the Turks. At about the same time David Offley wrote his sister optimistically about the expansion of American commerce in the Levant, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) had raised funds and organized its first mission to that part of the world. Ironically, such a mission was made possible by the religiously tolerant Ottoman government. As long as Christian missionaries did not interfere with the operations of the Ottoman government, they were able to move freely within the Levant, distributing Bibles and other religiously educational literature.5 Armed with Bibles and commercial ledgers, early Americans entered Western Asia in the early nineteenth century.
The Global Political Circumstances of the Ottoman Empire
By the late eighteenth century, the Ottoman Empire’s expansive empire had been contracting for more than one hundred years. The Ottoman Empire first emerged under the rule of Turkish leader Osman I, who became sultan in 1300. Early Americans often referred to Muslims living within the Ottoman Empire as “Turks.” By the eighteenth century, however, the original Ottoman family who founded the empire had intermarried with neighboring groups of people for centuries and was thus no longer the same Turkic group that had founded the empire. The word “Turk” came to be synonymous with “Muslim” by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and was used by eastern and western Europeans alike. In reality, the Ottoman Empire was multiethnic. While the government was an Islamic theocracy, it was also multireligious.6 In 1453 after the Ottomans overthrew the Byzantine capital, Constantinople, the sultan’s palace was also placed in this location. As the empire expanded over time, territorial governors, or pashas, residing in places such as Egypt and Algiers managed the power and influence of the Ottoman Empire as regencies.7
The Ottoman military defeat at Vienna in 1683 marked the beginning of the initial decline in Ottoman power.8 The rise of European powers during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially Russia, threatened the stability and strength of the Ottoman Empire.9 After a century of problems, the Ottomans suffered yet another setback when Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt in 1798, beginning a period of struggle to keep this territory under Ottoman control.
By the time of the Greek Revolution, the Ottoman Empire’s ability to assert itself against European powers had declined not just commercially and politically but intellectually as well. Sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808–1839), who ascended to the throne in the midst of internal political conflict and rebellion, had a difficult situation on his hands. For example, Ottoman officials increasingly felt pressure from European powers to submit to unequal commercial agreements. In addition, the influence of the Enlightenment and ideals of the French Revolution had mobilized a desire for reform throughout the multiethnic Ottoman Empire. While Mahmud II desired to exercise more influence and power over his court, he and his government simultaneously had to deal with several groups of subjects in rebellion in addition to the European and American actors with interests in the Levant. The Greek Revolution, in many ways, became the moment when the Ottoman Empire was forced to grapple with European concepts of nationalism and modernization.10
There were also internal conflicts within the Ottoman Empire. The janissaries, which had once been a formidable fighting force, became a liability by the eighteenth century, threatening the sultan’s ability to rule effectively.11 Traditionally, sultans looked to the past for guidance when faced with internal conflict and corruption, but the late eighteenth century marked a transitional moment when sultans looked for reformist ideas in the West. Interest in Westernization first stemmed from the obviously superior technology in the militaries of Europe, especially in France. In addition, France was the traditional ally of the Ottoman Empire, dating back to the sixteenth century under King Francis I and Sulieman the Magnificent. This traditional alliance, combined with the desire to reform, made French military advancements obvious ones to emulate. The janissaries viewed military reform as a threat to their interests and power, frequently overthrowing sultans who tried to implement such reforms. Sultan Ahmet III (r. 1703–1730), for example, risked angering his janissaries for the sake of incorporating elements of Western military reform. Though Ahmet III’s efforts at Westernization ultimately failed, subsequent wars with Russia in the late eighteenth century convinced future sultans that European-style military reform was a necessity.12
Another problem the sultan increasingly faced was the loss of political supremacy within his empire as regional governors, pashas or deys, threatened his authority. Beginning in 1721, Ahmet III and his grand vizier, Ibrahim Pasha, negotiated power with the sultan’s pashas in a manner similar to what Louis XIV had done at Versailles with his subordinate officials. During what became known as the Tulip Period, Ahmet III tried to negotiate power over his pashas through a display of mass consumption, which included not only the cultivation of tulips but also art, cooking, luxury goods, clothing, and the building of large palaces.13 Ahmet III positioned himself at the center of a consumptive performance, attempting to dominate the social center of the Ottoman Empire as a model to emulate. This method of soliciting allegiance worked, at least for the time being, as the sultan and his pashas sought to both enhance and legitimize their political statuses.14 The sumptuous consumption and extravagance in the Ottoman court also influenced European aesthetic taste in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For Ahmet III, however, this approach proved ineffective, eventually costing him the throne at the hands of the janissaries.
Western ideas of nationhood and revolution also threatened the sultan’s authority. Greece had long been a part of the Ottoman Empire. Prior to the revolution, Greek subjects, or reaya, were classified as zimmis (protected minorities) within the Islamic state. Under this status, it should be noted that the Greeks could not be enslaved. Only through rebellion or support of a belligerent power against the Islamic state could the Greeks be put to death or enslaved. In return for their accepted subordinate status they were granted freedom of worship and of property.15
Clergy within the Orthodox Church, headed by the patriarch in Constantinople, aided the sultan in his exercise of power over Christian reaya within the empire. Through administering the power of the sultan, church clergy also ensured their own ideological and political interests, making...
