Читать книгу Staging the Ottoman Turk - Esin Akalın - Страница 7

The Ottoman Empire had inherited the power of the Romans; Neither the Church nor a Christian prince had been able to resume the Roman conquest and unify the entire world. What was at stake in Venetian minds was to anticipate who would establish a universal monarchy. A vision of world history inspired by the prophecy of Daniel was then still popular in Europe. The four pagan monarchies—Babylonian, Persian, Greek and Roman—were to be followed by the establishment of the fifth empire

(Valensi 1990,180).

In assessing Ottoman-Venetian relations, it is imperative to expand the boundaries of Western historiography by incorporating the Ottoman Empire into the constructions of sixteenth-century world order as a major protagonist, and then to contextualize its role in a commercial zone that stretched from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. As Palmira J. Brummett observes:

The success of the Ottomans in overcoming the military challenges of European states, in uniting the Holy Land to the rich agricultural heart-lands of Eastern Roman Empire, and in gaining effective control over the outlets to the eastern trade, focused the attention of Europe in a dramatic fashion just when its internal social unity was being fragmented by Reformation. At the same time, the Ottomans developed a navy which threatened European control of the western Mediterranean. These accomplishments reinforced notions of the Ottoman state as a military juggernaut before all else—notions which were articulated in the European diplomatic correspondence and chroniclers for rhetorical political purposes (Brummett 180).

As a commercial empire, since the regime of the Venetian Empire rested upon capital investment in long-distance trade, Venice had entered diplomatic relations with the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the fifteenth century. In fact, among the earliest cultural links between the Ottoman Empire and Europe were evidently those that were provided by Venetian traders and artists. Like the Genoese, Venetians first secured trading privileges in the Ottoman Empire and Ottoman merchants were also a common sight in the Piazza San Marco, as, for instance, they are depicted in Bellini's Procession Before San Marco. When Mehmet II, a man of culture, had invited Bellini to paint a portrait of him as well as the frescoes of the Topkapi Palace, the Ottomans with their ceremonial and elaborate costumes were a potent source of fascination and inspiration for the Venetian artist. By the fifteenth century, in the art of Italy, and of Venice in particular, Ottomans would most often be depicted through distinctive modes of dress, which included the turban and other headgear.

What Venice knew about the Ottoman Empire, "she owed to the quality of the dispatches and letters her ambassadors sent during their long sojourns in Istanbul" (Valensi 1990, 177). In Venice, for every patrician that embarked upon a career in politics, the position of "bailo"[13] in Istanbul was the "most prestigious and most important" appointment for which he could hope (Valensi 1990, 177). Venetian ambassadors, bearing the title of "bailo" were the sons of all the most highly educated elite and thus belonged to Venice's erudite circles. As they "stood at an intersection of three spaces, those of empirical observation, political action and humanism" (Valensi 9) they were in a favourable position to appreciate Ottoman culture. Their residency in Istanbul allowed them to make sufficient contacts in the city and "personally collect the most accurate data on the most powerful empire of the times" (Valensi 1990, 176). As every Venetian ambassador was obliged to present a report before a public session of the Senate and in the presence of the doge, Contarini upon his return from Istanbul stated that the Republic has "before its eyes, as in a theatre, a representation of the world, nature, and the laws and styles of various peoples" (Valensi 41). Venetian fascination with the Ottomans resulted in the first instance from the extraordinary power of the Grand Signor and the vastness of his empire. As Valensi concludes, the collection of Venetian accounts covering the Ottomans:

insisted on the comprehensiveness of every single part of the whole: the empire included 'all of Greece', 'all of Asia Minor', 'all the coasts of Africa and the Mediterranean', 'all the borders of Venetian dominions' and so forth (Valensi 1990, 179).

As Paolo Contarini wrote in 1538: "a large part of Africa, the major part of Europe and a very large part of Asia find themselves today under the obedience of this Empire" (Valensi 180). For Barbarigo three elements made the Grand Signor invincible: "so many territories, so much money, and so much an abundance of obedient men" (Valensi 181). Apart from its opulence and exotic ambiance, the Ottoman Empire, a military giant, was, by the sixteenth century, a source of great anxiety for the Venetian Republic. Particularly in the years following Mehmet II's death in 1481, as the Ottoman fleet began to challenge Venice in the open seas, the Venetians had to demonstrate their effectiveness in meeting the crises of enormous Ottoman danger which had begun to play an increasingly important role in European politics. The Turks are the greatest fighters in the world" wrote Cavalli in 1560; "one should not fight them but fear them" (Valensi 181).

In the second half of the fifteenth century, as the Ottomans set out to make the Mediterranean a Turkish lake, Venice, was the only important Christian power in the region. In that respect no other Christian power had "spent so heavily on defense and war against" (Hale 26) the Ottomans as Venice whose fundamental basis of fortune and power was the Mediterranean Sea.

The Ottoman Empire, which had occupied the heel of Italy in the late fifteenth century and used the French port of Toulon as a naval base in the sixteenth, was in essence a military adversary to the Venetian Republic. In 1453, following Mehmet II's conquest of Constantinople, although the Ottomans' trading, cultural and ambassadorial contacts with Venice had increased, the Venetians were evidently alarmed by the military strength of the Ottoman Empire, which aspired to bring the whole Mediterranean basin under one power.

In the sixteenth century the Ottoman Empire not only posed a serious threat to European sovereignty but also played a great role in rivalries for commercial hegemony in the economic space stretching from Venice to the Indian Ocean. The objectives of Ottoman expansion in its claims for universal sovereignty, Levantine power politics, and the struggle for control of oriental trade, however, were not different than those of "European voyages of discovery: wealth, power, glory, religious legitimation" (Brummett 2).

The Ottoman State's energies for territorial expansion were geared towards acquisition of fertile lands to broaden the tax-base that was used to support the ruling elite. Yet, the Ottoman State was not merely a land-based military state. It was a sea-based power, whose motivation for expansion was directed towards dominating and controlling the trade centres and networks in various commercial zones. And these commercial zones were pivotal for the Venetians' own indigenous merchant networks in long distance trade. In this sense, as "a merchant state endowed with economic intentionality" (Brummett 3), the development of Ottoman sea power was crucial in the reconfiguration of the early sixteenth-century balance of power, which culminated in the subordination of the Venetian Republic.

In 1571, however, a Christian fleet led by the papacy, Venice and Habsburg forces sailing under the flag of the Holy Roman Empire virtually destroyed the ships of the Ottomans in Lepanto. This marked a crucial moment in the history of Venetian Republic. For the Venetian merchants and Genoese captains who competed with the Ottoman traders and ships for silk, spice and other goods in Aleppo and Damascus and Alexandria (all Ottoman provinces by then) the triumph in Lepanto, however, was only symbolical. Like the Venetians, the Ottomans were also a commercial power, whose military ruling class (members including the sultan, his sons and high-ranking dignitaries such as pashas, etc) accumulated wealth that could be and was invested in commercial enterprises. In other words, despite the tendency of European historians to dismiss Ottoman mercantilism in the international scene during the sixteenth century and its commercial hegemony from Genoa and Venice to the Indian Ocean, the Ottoman Empire with its ruling elite military class was a significant merchant state. As Brummett points out, the Ottoman State invested part of its accumulated wealth in trading ventures for profit. Furthermore, the State competed with other states for the control of commercial revenues and designed its foreign policy with a clear purpose of gaining control of sources for commercial revenue rather than simply acquiring land with the intention of colonization and agricultural exploitation (Brummett 5).

Following the Western victory over the Ottomans in Lepanto, although major hostilities were suspended in the Mediterranean Europe and the Ottoman Empire, another danger, piracy the "second form of war" (Braudel 865), persisted. In the first half of the fifteenth century Ottoman sailors were no match for the fleets of the Italian mercantile cities Genoa and Venice, whose state-owned galleys provided unrivalled transport for freight traveling to Alexandria, Syria and Istanbul. In the sixteenth century, however, with the decrease of the Venetian prominence among European countries and the Ottomans' quick revival of sea-power, the "Barbary states were in the same league as naval powers as England and France" (Earle 46). As for Venice, not only had her immensely expensive war of 1570-73 with the Ottomans consumed her wealth, but the Ottoman Empire had now begun to engage in commerce in "Venice's traditional sphere of action" (Hale 38). Following their conquest of Syria, Palestine and Egypt, the Ottomans made an alliance with the Barbary pirates, who placed much of the naval resources of North Africa at their command. As doge Nicola Dona wrote:

In the days before the war with the Turks, all was grandeur, utility, emolument, commodity, honour ... everyone was interested in sea voyages, in business, in everything appertaining to the existence and good of the fatherland (Chambers 194).

Ultimately, the Ottoman-Venetian wars, had not only increased the interest of the merchants of Marseilles, Ragusa and other places in the Levantine trade, but also had encouraged England to enter directly into trade with the Ottomans. As Nicolo Molin, the Venetian Ambassador to England, wrote to the Venetian Senate in late 1605 about his concerns about the piracies committed with "mixed crews of Englishmen and Turks" in the Mediterranean: "...everything [was] weighed in the scales of Material interest."[14] This correspondence was essentially the embodiment, though simplified, of what was deemed to be the nature of England's 'friendship' with the Ottoman Empire, which was one coveted by all the trading nations.