Writing the Ottomans

Turkish History in Early Modern England

Anders Ingram

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349581276, 9781137401526
• eBook ISBN: 9781137401533
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: Social Sciences

Histories of the Turks were a central means through which English authors engaged in intellectual and cultural terms with the Ottoman Empire, its advance into Europe following the capture of Constantinople (1454), and its continuing central European power up to the treaty of Karlowitz (1699). Writing the Ottomans examines historical writing on the Turks in England from 1480-1700. It explores the evolution of this discourse from its continental roots, and its development in response to moments of military crisis such as the Long War of 1593-1606 and the War of the Holy League 1683-1699, as well as Anglo-Ottoman trade and diplomacy throughout the seventeenth century. From the writing of central authors such as Richard Knolles and Paul Rycaut, to lesser known names, it reads English histories of the Turks in their intellectual, religious, political, economic and print contexts, and analyses their influence on English perceptions of the Ottoman world.

1

Turkish History in Early English Print

The 1540s was the first period in which general accounts of the Turks and their history began to appear in English. These accounts are characterised by the twin contexts of Ottoman expansion into central Europe and the intensity of the religious upheavals of the end of Henry VIII’s reign. The printers and translators that produced them responded directly to the Ottoman advance, often translating continental accounts, but the texts they produced cannot be understood without recourse to the English circumstances in which these figures worked, and it is the intersection of these influences that form the central theme of this chapter. However, before I can turn to the texts of the 1540s, and the religious characteristics that make them distinctive, I must first set the stage by surveying the very earliest accounts of the Turks to be printed in English and how these overlapped with the debates of the English Reformation.

In the half century following the capture of Constantinople in 1453 a sophisticated body of writing evolved on the continent, notably in Italy, describing the origins of the Turks, the Ottoman dynasty, their state, and its expansion into Europe. Writing the history of the Turks was an integral part of European attempts to contextualise and account for the Turkish advance. Descriptions of the contemporary Ottoman state or military overlapped extensively with more explicitly historical writing, frequently including discussion of the supposed origins of the Turks and their dynastic history. Similarly early ‘news’ (though the term is somewhat anachronistic), shared both topical and formal elements with chronicle writing, which also tended to focus in detail on military events such as sieges. Early histories of the Turks in England drew on all of these elements of wider continental writing, but they should also be understood as part of a more specifically English commentary on Ottoman expansion. Although no general account of the Turks or their history appeared in England until the mid-sixteenth century, the sack of Constantinople did generate interest and comment. In 1480 one of the earliest English printed books, William Caxton’s Cronicles of Englond, drawn from the earlier Brut Chronicle manuscript (c. 1461), included a description of the sack of Constantinople and the Sancta Sophia, one of the most famous churches in Christendom.

Aboute this tyme the cite of Constantinople whiche was imperiall cite in all grece was taken by the turkes infidels … And that riall chyrche of Sancta Sophia robbed and despoilled and the reliques and ymages and the Rode [i.e. Cross] draw[en] aboute the stretes whiche was done in despite of cristen feith, And sone after alle cristen faith in grece perisshed & cessid. Ther were many cristen men slayne and innumerable sold & put in captivite, by the takyng of this toune the turke is gretly enhau[n]sed in pride, And it is a grete losse un to all cristendome.¹

Nor was this the only reference to this event in Caxton’s output. His translation from William of Tyre, Here Begynneth the Boke Intituled Eracles (1481), opined that his own time ‘semeth moche semblable and lyke’ to the days of the First Crusade, when Christendom also fought against ‘mescreauntes and turkes’. The principal difference being that ‘at this daye it is so that they have comen over and goten that Imperial Cyte Constantynople.’² Although these references are brief they illustrate some central features of early English depictions of the Ottomans. The threat presented by the Turkish infidels is to the Christian faith and Christendom at large, a perception also reflected in a number of anti-Turkish indulgences printed in England in this period and well into the sixteenth century by Caxton and others.³ Ottoman expansion is understood as part of a longer pattern of conflict with the archetypal Islamic enemy of the crusades, and presented in a simple opposition as part of the ongoing historic tribulations and struggle of the church against the devil. The Ottoman Turks are synonymous with proverbial ‘Mahometan’ crusading opponents such as the ‘Saracens’, but also other previous Turkish dynasties such as the Seljuks, who had featured in the crusades. An important consequence of the elision of the differences between these groups was that the relevant backstory to explain and contextualise the advance of the Ottomans was an expansive ‘Turkish history’ – rather than history of the Ottoman dynasty per se. This broad remit of ‘Turkish history’ included elements as diverse as the humanist narratives on the origins of the Turks, which Margaret Meserve has argued proliferated following the capture of Constantinople,⁴ and accounts of crusade against ‘Turkish’ opponents such as the sieges of Nicaea (1097) or Antioch (1098). For early modern authors the ‘history of the Turks’ seemed a self-evident continuum stretching all the way from Herodotus’s Scythians, to crusades against the Seljuks, to conflict with the Ottomans at the battle of Nicopolis (1396), siege of Constantinople, and beyond.

The primary context in which contemporaries viewed the Ottomans was the threat they posed to Christendom. The subject of the earliest extant detailed account of the Ottoman advance to be printed in England was the unsuccessful assault on the city of Rhodes in 1480. John Kay’s The Siege of Rhodes ([1481–1484]) is a translation of Obsidionis Rhodie urbis descriptio (1480) by Guillaume Caoursin, the vice-chancellor of the order of the Knights of St John, the crusading order who garrisoned Rhodes.⁵ It is interesting and significant both for the level of detail it provides and for what it tells us about the means through which continental accounts of the Turks were transmitted to England and into English. Kay’s account begins with the wider context describing the Ottoman advance into Europe over the last 40 years, the ‘lamentable’ fall of Constantinople, and the recent death of ‘the grete Turke late named Mahumete’ (Mehmed II who had died on 3 May 1481). His account of the siege itself contains many tropes common to contemporary continental accounts of the Turks. Sultan Mehmed II is a ‘cruell tyraunt’ and ‘insacyable enemye to oure crysten fayth’. The Ottomans are the ‘rodde’ or scourge of God, used to punish wayward Christendom. The ‘noble cytee of Rhodes’, is described as the antimural, ‘the key & yate [i.e. gate] of all crystendome’, a metaphor that was often later applied to Vienna as the central bulwark against the Turkish threat. However, despite the oppositional tone, the account of the siege itself is more detailed and accurate than any previous account of the Ottomans to appear in England.⁶ Yet though Kay’s translation of Caoursin’s ‘dylectable newesse and tithynges of the gloryous victorye’ is vivid, the Ottoman threat he describes is also distant one, which Kay has only witnessed second hand in Italian pamphlets and tracts on the sieges of Constantinople, Negroponte, and Rhodes that he read while travelling in Italy.

I have seen & red in Italye of the oppressyng & captyvyte [i.e. captivity] by the sayd Turke of the worshipful cytee somtyme of Constantinople: and also not many yeres passed of the infortunate losse of the streng cytee of Nygrepount. For the Cardynale greke of Mycene made & wrode in latyne the lamentable captyvyte of Constantinople to the pope: and Balthasar perusyn wrote in the langayge Italyon of Nygrepount to the lord of Urbyn.⁷

The provenance of the sources Kay mentions illustrate the means by which a contemporary Englishman might access detailed accounts of the Ottomans. ‘Cardynale greek of Mycene’ is very likely a reference to Isidore (later of Kiev), who was born in southern Greece, had been a Metropolitan who favoured union with Rome, and later a Cardinal and Papal Legate to Constantinople, who wrote a Latin eyewitness account of the siege addressed to Nicholas V.⁸ ‘Balthasar perusyn’ is surely a reference to one of the outpouring of Italian news tracts that were printed in response to the Venetian loss of Negrepont to the Ottomans in 1470.⁹ Although little is known of Kay himself, he was evidently remarkably well informed for a fifteenth-century Englishman, having read at least three continental accounts of the Ottoman advance, including Isidore and Caoursin – representatives of a developing humanist historiography. However, the fact that the first detailed English account of the Ottomans exclusively references continental tracts encountered abroad is an indication of the rareness of this kind of material in contemporary England.

Reacting to the paucity of current accounts such as Kay’s, and reflecting perceptions of the Ottomans as the latest in a historical lineage of Islamic adversaries, English translators and printers turned to medieval material. Matthew Dimmock has argued that a number of texts reworking polemical lives of ‘Mahomet’ from medieval manuscript sources were published by English printers such as Caxton and Richard Pynson in response to Ottoman expansion in the late-fifteenth century, including Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon (1482), Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend (1483), John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes (1494), and especially the Travels of Sir John Mandeville, first printed by Pynson in 1496.¹⁰ Medieval chronicles that contained extended episodes of Turkish history also appeared, and Pynson printed two such translations in the 1520s: Here begynneth a lytell Cronycle (1520), a history of the Tatars containing much Turkish material,¹¹ and Here begynneth the thirde and fourthe boke of sir John Froissart (1525), which gives a detailed account of the Ottoman victory over a crusader army at Nicopolis in 1396.¹²

English perceptions of the Ottoman threat are also reflected in wider literature at this time. Alexander Barclay’s translation cum adaption of Sebastian Brandt’s allegorical satire The Shyppe of Fooles (1509) repeatedly references the Ottoman advance and the fall of Constantinople ‘lost of newe & … in the handes of these false turkes’. With no small amount of prescience Barclay intones, ‘O Rhodes defende well our fayth / and dystroye the unhappy turkes that dyspyseth our lawe’.¹³ The contemporary ‘metrical romance’ Capystranus (1515), which is loosely based on the deeds of Italian friar John Capistrano, who raised a peasant crusader army that lifted the 1456 Ottoman siege of Belgrade, offers greater detail. However, while Capystranus is historical in the sense that it describes a past event, it is primarily a romance. Sustained engagement with the history, state, or religion of the Turks is not the point. They are simply the villain of the piece; an Antichristian enemy whose role is to throw into relief the desperate heroism of the defenders, who are eventually saved by Capystranus’s miraculous invocation of divine aid.

The Ottoman Empire expanded to an unparalleled extent during the short but prodigious rule of Sultan Selim I (r. 1512–1520), who rapidly conquered Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and the Hejaz. However, it was not until the succession of Selim’s son, Suleiman I, when the Ottomans turned once more to Europe, taking Belgrade in 1521 and successfully besieging Rhodes in 1522, that these events were reported in English publications. In 1524 Roberte Coplande (fl. 1505–1547) translated and printed two texts together relating to this siege of Rhodes. The first was The begynnynge and foundacyon of the holy hospytall, a short account of the history of the Knights of St. John.¹⁴ The second, Here foloweth the siege, cruell oppugnacyon, and lamentable takynge of the cyte of Rodes, was taken from the eyewitness account of Jacques de Bourbon (d. 1527).¹⁵ Copelande’s tract is similar to Kay’s. They are translations that draw upon material from more than one source, and present accounts that though couched in oppositional language and rhetoric, are essentially detailed and relatively accurate, going far beyond either general awareness of the Ottoman advance, or presenting the Turk as a generic romance antagonist.¹⁶ However, while they in some ways anticipate important characteristics of the greater volume of English works on the Turks that would appear in the 1540s, one of their key features – their relatively unproblematic identification with Christendom – was to be shaken fundamentally by the Reformation.

The Reformation and the Turk

The massive expansion of the Ottoman Empire in the first half of the sixteenth century occurred concurrently with the Reformation in Europe. As Martin Luther posted his ninety-five theses in Wittenberg in 1517, Selim I wintered in Cairo, following the conquest of Egypt earlier that year. As Suleiman led successful European campaigns in the early 1520s, with the collapse of the medieval kingdom of Hungary following the battle of Mohács (1526) and the first siege of Vienna (1529), the Reformation gathered pace throughout Europe. By the final taking of Buda (1541) the English Reformation was well underway with the separation of the Church of England from Rome and the dissolution of the monasteries. The Ottomans were a topical concern for authors writing across the spectrum of the religious controversies of the early Reformation, and these religious upheavals were a crucial context for the publication of the first group of detailed works on the Turks and their history, which appeared in England in the 1540s.

While the histories and humanist tracts of the second half of the fifteenth century had been characterised by ongoing but broadly unsuccessful calls for a crusade in response to the Ottoman advance, the Reformation saw the recycling of images of an external Ottoman threat as a way of articulating the internal divisions of a Christendom riddled with religious, social, and political conflicts.¹⁷ Literal and figurative images of the Turks and their religion featured heavily in the English Reformation debates engaged in by Simon Fish, Thomas More, John Rastell, and William Tyndale.¹⁸ Although these arguments were conducted through the medium of polemic, their depictions of the Turks, and Islam, form an important intellectual context for the general historical accounts of the following decades.

Throughout this per...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and Conventions
• Introduction
• 1 Turkish History in Early English Print
• 2 Conflict, News, and History
• 3 ‘The Present Terrour of the World’: Knolles’s Generall Historie of the Turkes (1603)
• 4 Trade, Diplomacy, and History
• 5 The War of the Holy League 1683–1699
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index