Diplomatic Cultures at the Ottoman Court, c.1500–1630

Tracey A. Sowerby, Christopher Markiewicz, Tracey A. Sowerby, Christopher Markiewicz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367767426
  9780367429324
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000391916
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

In the sixteenth century, the Ottoman court in Constantinople emerged as the axial centre of early modern diplomacy in Eurasia. Diplomatic Cultures at the Ottoman Court, c.1500-1630 takes a unique approach to diplomatic relations by focusing on how diplomacy was conducted and diplomatic cultures forged at a single court: the Sublime Porte. It unites studies from the perspectives of European and non-European diplomats with analyses from the perspective of Ottoman officials involved in diplomatic practices. It focuses on a formative period for diplomatic procedure and Ottoman imperial culture by examining the introduction of resident embassies on the one hand, and on the other, changes in Ottoman policy and protocol that resulted from the territorial expansion and cultural transformations of the empire in the sixteenth century. The chapters in this volume approach the practices and processes of diplomacy at the Ottoman court with special attention to ceremonial protocol, diplomatic sociability, gift-giving, cultural exchange, information gathering, and the role of para-diplomatic actors.

1 Persian Secretaries in the Making of an Anti-Safavid Diplomatic Discourse

Christopher Markiewicz

Introduction: New Diplomatic History and Ottoman Terra Incognita

Ottoman secretaries of the Imperial Council were busy in the weeks and months following the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in early 1517. The defeat of the Mamluk forces outside Cairo followed the Ottoman victory at Marj Dabiq in northern Syria the previous summer and spelled the end of the Mamluk Sultanate which dominated Egypt and Syria since the mid-thirteenth century. From a diplomatic perspective, these were military victories and conquests that needed to be handled delicately. The offensives in Syria and Egypt required peace in the Balkans through careful management of relations with Christian powers, such as Venice, Hungary, and Poland.¹ Yet the campaigns also required perhaps even greater care with respect to Muslim neighbours and potential allies to the east. After all, through these campaigns against other Muslim rulers, the Ottoman sultan Selim I (r. 1512–1520) risked tarnishing the long-cultivated image of Ottoman sultans as warriors of the faith.² With this in mind, the campaigns were justified and celebrated through victory proclamations (fethname, sing.) composed by secretaries and sent to allies and rivals alike. In the immediate wake of the Ottoman arrival in Cairo, secretaries composed victory proclamations of recently conquered lands in Persian for Muslim courts in Iran and India, and in Arabic for the noble families of Mecca. One of the crafters of these victory proclamations subsequently described the frenzied and enthusiastic atmosphere in which the scribal corps took up its task. The secretary, a man named Qazizada, a recent Persian émigré who joined the Imperial Council (Divan-ı Hümayun) at the outset of Selim’s second eastern campaign in 1516, recalled how, in the months following the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in early 1517, he and his colleagues were ordered to formulate victory proclamations destined for the four corners of the Earth, at which they set about composing ‘expressions sweeter than honey and clearer than the virtues of decorum and hope’.³

Qazizada’s recollection of this activity underscores the importance of the royal letter, and especially its form, in advancing Ottoman diplomatic interests during this energetic and tumultuous period. It also helps shift the focus away from the ruler and leading statesmen as the principal agents of Ottoman diplomacy and towards the frequently anonymous role played by scholar-secretaries in their capacity as learned and skilled stylists capable of composing appropriately ornate and diplomatically complex messages destined for foreign powers. For even if these letters were ordered and issued by the Ottoman sultan, their form, style, aesthetic outlook, and epistolary technique were all the product of the individual secretaries who composed them. They were also important instruments of diplomacy during an eight-year reign that witnessed not only the conquest of Egypt and Syria, but also initiated the first of many major Ottoman military and ideological confrontations with Safavid Iran in the sixteenth century.

More than skilled stylists, scholar-secretaries were, in fact, instrumental in shaping the Ottoman diplomatic discourse concerning Selim’s wars with the Safavids and Mamluks. Some of this legitimating discourse may be registered directly in the letters between Selim and his Safavid and Mamluk rivals in the months and days before battle, and indeed, this is an aspect of Ottoman diplomacy—or its breakdown—which has been examined by a number of historians.⁴ Significantly, throughout these years of tumultuous conflict, the Ottoman Sultanate also developed and maintained a much broader correspondence with other eastern polities and prominent notables in an effort to explain and legitimise its campaigns and conquests, to obtain logistical support and intelligence from local allies in Iran, and to initiate military alliances with other major powers designed to bring about a decisive end to the rule of the Safavid shah Ismail (r. 1501–1524). Crucially, secretaries, and especially Persian émigré secretaries such as Qazizada, were central to the realisation of these objectives. In their work within the Ottoman chancery, these secretaries drew upon their deep and varied learning, literary skill, and mastery of epistolography (insha) in composing Ottoman royal letters, the form of which contributed significantly to their political or diplomatic function. In composing these documents, these émigré secretaries frequently drew upon decades of administrative experience within courts in Iran and rekindled their trans-imperial networks of scholarly and professional affiliation in an effort to mould a unified international discourse of anti-Safavid opposition and advance the quickly evolving and complex Ottoman ‘eastern policy’ of Selim’s reign.

Despite the frequent anonymity of these secretaries, examination of their work within the culturally inflected practices of Ottoman diplomacy permits us to expand the purview of diplomatic agents beyond rulers and leading statesmen to explore the roles played by largely forgotten actors who were, nevertheless, central to diplomatic processes and practices. In this sense, the approach draws clearly upon the re-evaluations attendant to the new diplomatic history of the last two decades.⁵ In contrast to previous focus on the goals and outcomes of diplomacy, historians working in this manner are equally attuned to how relations between polities were conducted, in other words the socio-cultural aspects of diplomacy are equally important to their political outcomes. Within an Ottoman context, such re-evaluations have been taken up most enthusiastically with respect to the roles of trans-imperial intermediaries—whether dragomans, merchants, renegade women, slaves, or spies—who undertook important work in the establishment and maintenance of European relations with the Sublime Porte.⁶ Significantly, such re-evaluations have contributed to broader reassessments of the development of European diplomacy between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries and in so doing have situated firmly Ottoman diplomatic activities within an emerging pattern of diplomatic practice of the early modern period.⁷

Yet the focus on Ottoman relations with European powers belies the full range of diplomatic activity undertaken by the Ottoman court during these centuries. The focus, no doubt, arises partially from the nature of the sources. Rich European state archival materials offer unparalleled access to the thought and activities of the full range of personalities connected with diplomacy. In most cases, these are people whose traces, especially before the mid-sixteenth century, were largely overlooked by their contemporary Ottoman recordkeepers and investigation of their diplomatic roles leads necessarily to study of Ottoman relations through records produced for Venice, Habsburg Austria or Spain, France, England, or the Netherlands.⁸ Not surprisingly, the central questions of Ottoman diplomatic history in this vein revolve around issues of cross-cultural mediation and exchange or socio-cultural commensurability that challenge facile dichotomies. In other diplomatic contexts though, the Ottomans clearly did belong to a wider cultural complex and diplomatic practices in this realm assumed markedly different forms than they did with European powers. However, since the quality and quantity of archival materials relating to these practices is paltry in comparison, the insights and interests of new diplomatic history for the Ottomans outside of Europe remains largely terra incognita.

Even so, certain aspects of the new diplomatic history offer a clear way forward. John Watkins has identified ‘the integration of literary and historical methodologies that have so productively transformed the study of other aspects of early European society’ as a key feature of new diplomatic history.⁹ After all, as Tracey Sowerby reminds us, ‘early modern diplomacy was in part a bureaucratic practice; successful diplomacy depended upon successful textual strategies’.¹⁰ Indeed, immersion in textual strategies is particularly well-suited for the study of Ottoman diplomacy outside of Europe since the highly formalized and literary royal letters sent to and from the Ottoman court are abundant, even as the more quotidian, fine-grained materials common in European archives are largely missing. In past generations, these elaborate letters were often overlooked since their overly wrought, dense prose and poetry appeared to offer little in the way of concrete (positivist) historical information. More recently, historians working with Ottoman and Islamic materials have re-evaluated these sources by examining them within the highly formalized literary and rhetorical parameters in which they were conceived, composed, and read.¹¹ In other words, the form of ornate prose in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish is now understood as an integral component of the personal, political, and diplomatic functions it served. By extension then, the secretaries behind the composition of royal correspondence played an equally integral role in the diplomatic process.

Beyond the significance of the royal letter, there are several other features of the personal and professional experiences, outlooks, and values of secretaries that rendered them particularly central to Ottoman diplomatic practice with other Muslim polities, especially during the Ottoman eastern conquests of the 1510s. Indeed, the erudite and learned values expressed through the letters connected secretaries in Ottoman service with a much broader cosmopolitan community of learning. Not only the forms of diplomatic correspondence but the authoritative scholarship and lived experiences of their formulators shaped Ottoman diplomatic processes during these years. Many of the most skilled secretaries were also scholars in their own right capable of deploying forceful religio-juridical concepts and terms within their epistolary prose. Moreover, many of these ‘Ottoman’ secretaries, like Qazizada, hailed originally from Iran or elsewhere and in this manner their personal and educational backgrounds, intellectual interests, cultural commitments, and religious convictions connected them with a much broader Persian cultural cosmopolitanism—a veritable ‘Persian cosmopolis’ in the formulation of Richard Eaton and a number of scholars—that was at the root of much Ottoman diplomatic practice during this period.¹²

Within a European context, Daniel Riches has examined this connection between cultural cosmopolitanism and the formation of a distinct diplomatic culture, specifically in the Pro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Note on Transliteration
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Constantinople as a Centre of Diplomatic Culture
• 1 Persian Secretaries in the Making of an Anti-Safavid Diplomatic Discourse
• 2 Languages of Diplomatic Gift-Giving at the Ottoman Court
• 3 Art and Diplomacy: Pieter Coecke van Aelst’s 1533 Journey to Constantinople
• 4 Beyond Topkapı: Ottoman Diplomacy Through Venetian Eyes
• 5 The Foundation of Peace-Oriented Foreign Policy in the Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Empire: Rüstem Pasha’s Vision of Diplomacy
• 6 The Benefits and Limits of Permanent Diplomacy: Austrian Habsburg Ambassadors and Ottoman-Spanish Diplomacy in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century
• 7 Without ‘Conformitie of Companie’: English Religious Identity and the Diplomatic Corps in Constantinople, 1578–1597
• 8 The Tricks and Traps of Ad Hoc Diplomacy: Polish Ambassadors’ Experiences of Ottoman Hospitality
• 9 Sociability and Ceremony: Diplomats at the Porte, c.1550–1632
• Bibliography
• Index