Читать книгу Staging the Ottoman Turk - Esin Akalın - Страница 8

Knowledge of the Turks was "almost nil in medieval England" (Beck, 29) to the extent that even the fall of Constantinople in 1453 had "passed without notice in contemporary English chroniclers" (Wood 1). This was not surprising considering that the efforts of the last Byzantine Emperor Manuel Palaeologus to seek help from the English against the Ottoman Empire were "fruitless" mainly because England had no direct commercial nor diplomatic relations with the Byzantines (Wood 1). Yet the establishment of the Ottoman/Islamic power over what had been the Byzantine/Christian Empire was deeply seated in ideology. Soon, the danger which the Turk represented was revealed to the consciousness of the English, particularly when the Ottomans invaded Europe. Geographically, however, the English were outside the periphery of the Ottoman peril. Furthermore, despite the appeal of the East, with its silks, spices, oils, carpets and mohair, which led to a growing interest in the commercial links with the Levant, England was reluctant to have diplomatic ties with the Ottomans, a nation that was notorious among the Christians as "heathen". As Chew writes in The Crescent and the Rose:

The fact remains impressive that the English government did not enter into diplomatic relations with the Porte till a hundred and thirty years after the fall of Constantinople; and at a much later date James I was reluctant to receive an emissary from the Sultan on the ground that to welcome an infidel would be 'unbecoming to a Christian Prince' (Chew 152).

England's first tentative approach to the Ottoman Empire had occurred in 1553 when Anthony Jenkinson had obtained from Suleyman the liberty to trade through the Ottoman dominions (Hakluyt 62-63). As Chew asserts:

Anthony Jenkinson's journey ... was probably undertaken with a view of obtaining information regarding the possibility of initiating local trade in Turkey and practicability of tapping some of the trade which came from the further East by way of Mesopotamia or the Red Sea (Chew 151).

The nascent trade that had begun between the Porte and England, however, would cease for the next thirty years for variety of reasons. First, the discovery and the development of the route to the east round of Cape of Hope by the Portuguese had facilitated the delivery of Oriental goods to Europe. Second—as discussed in the previous section on Venetian Ottoman relations—the peril of the Ottoman sea power had reached its zenith following the two wars with the Venetian Republic, which led to the Ottomans' loss of territory in the Aegean and the Mediterranean, such as Cyprus (1570). However, a more constant threat to the English was posed by the fleets of Barbary corsairs who had begun to disrupt trade initiatives by swamping the Mediterranean trade routes leading to the imperial capital Istanbul, Izmir (Smyrna) and Ottoman provinces such as Aleppo and Alexandria. During the suspension of trade with the Ottomans, although the English celebrated the Ottomans' defeat in Lepanto with bonfires and "a banqueting and great rejoycing" as the victory of the Venetians and the Spanish was of "so great importance to the whole state of the Christian commonwealth" (Lipson 335), England's interest in the Turk gradually continued to develop. Unlike France—and other states like Ragusa, Venice and Genoa—which had begun to establish themselves firmly at the Ottoman Porte through the Capitulations[15] (1536), which provided them numerous legal and economic privileges, Anglo/Ottoman relations were delayed to the closing decades of the sixteenth century. It was only in1580 that the English began to push their ventures into the realms of distant power like the Ottoman Empire.

As Sir Thomas Shirley writes in the Discours of the Turkes (1606-07), (Shirley 9-12) it was in the later half of the Elizabethan era that the relations between Protestant England and the Ottoman Empire had expanded. In Minchinton's view, the Mediterranean grain crisis of the 1560s had provided England with her entry into trade relations with powers in that region. Thus, the supply of grain for the Italians and the Ottomans had further fuelled the English commercial and economic interest in the Ottoman Empire (Minchinton 7). Once the formal entry of Anglo-Ottoman economic and diplomatic relationship occurred following William Harborne's visit to Istanbul in June 1580, enabling the English to have official access to the Eastern Mediterranean, Elizabethans looked to draw the Ottomans into their export market.

Essentially, the English interest in the "Great Turke" which grew slowly, only began to assume true significance in the final decades of the sixteenth century when the Ottoman Empire entered into a stable economic and political relationship with England following William Harborne's mission to the Sublime Porte (Burian 209). Although William Harborne was successful in receiving a favourable grant from the Sultan, a grant defining the "English liberties on the subject" at the Sublime Porte[16], it was the Venetian and the French ambassadors who would use their leverage against the English. The best means for England to counter the hostility of the Venetians and the French, who jealously guarded their economic rights in Istanbul, was to create a merchant monopoly, the Levant Company, which was initially called the Turkey Company. During the reign of James I, despite the anti-Ottoman sentiments and rhetoric against the Infidel from his Majesty who considered himself one of the defenders of Christian Europe, the survival of the Levant Company founded in Elizabeth's reign became crucial to the development of English exports and power. The economic incentive to fuel commercial relations with the Ottomans was overwhelming for the English considering that a single voyage to their ports (such as Istanbul, Alexandria, Tunis, Algiers and so on) "held the prospect of a profit of up to 300%" (Eysturlid 617).

Despite such outstanding returns arising from the lucrative nature of maritime commerce in the Mediterranean, which attracted wealthy investors in England, the risk involved in these voyages was too high. James I sought to end the English investments in pirate ventures, since they led England to have the reputation of a "nation of pirates" (Eysturlid 618). As for the Ottomans, their ships ranged from North Africa to Arabia and from the English Channel to the Spanish and Moroccan coasts; furthermore, their pirates captured single men and whole families, travelers and soldiers, traders and clergymen (Matar 1998, 5).

Since the first recorded visit of the Englishman, Anthony Jenkinson, to Istanbul in 1533 several merchants and seamen from England had been captured and converted to Islam. The extant records, biographies and autobiographies of England's early modern history repeatedly refer to such British captivities and conversions in the sixteenth century; the Levant Company representatives in Istanbul urged Queen Elizabeth to protect her subjects from any future enslavement in the Ottoman Sultan's dominions. As Epstein quotes in The Early History of the Levant Company, ransoming of the British captives had cost England:

four thousand pounds, and yet divers to this day remain there unrescated of which some (the more to be pitied) have turned Turks (Epstein 242).

"Turning Turk" was not only a puzzling issue but a distressing one for Renaissance England considering the frequency of Christians renouncing their faith for Islam (Matar 1994, 33). One of the topics that Sir Thomas Shirley, an English traveler who had visited the Orient in the late sixteenth century, touched on in the Discours of the Turkes (1606-07) was the issue that dominated the English Renaissance concerns of conversion. Although Shirley had no adequate reply, he analyzed the reasons for Christian conversions to Islam. From the beginnings of the Christian-Muslim encounter and the subsequent spread of the Ottoman danger, Islam was seen in the medieval way, as a movement of violence in the service of Anti-Christ. Since there were numerous incidents of English ships being captured by the Barbary corsairs, arrangements were made to redeem the Englishmen who were enslaved in Algiers "lest they follow the example of others and turn Turk" (Harrison 132).

In the Calendar of State Papers Domestic, James I, 1619-1629, it was cited that "the pirates of Algiers and Tunis had grown so strong that in a few years they have taken 300 ships, and imprisoned many hundred persons."[17] The Calendar of State Papers Domestic, Charles I, 1625-1626, stated: "The Turks are upon our coasts. They take ships only to take the men to make slaves of them."[18] Between1609-1616, it was reported that almost 500 British ships were pursued, captured and their crews enslaved by "Turkish pirates."[19] During the Jacobean period, the Englishmen themselves were also accused of committing piracies in the Mediterranean because of the "lucrative return it provided both business and government" (Eysturlid, 613). Yet, despite the epidemics of piracy in the open seas compounded by the problem of English conversions to Islam, the economic significance of British interaction with the Ottomans in the Mediterranean outweighed its risks. Despite the stream of anti-Turkish rhetoric directed against the "enemy of all Christendom" (Eysturlid 625) and the English fleet's inability to suppress the menace of piracy, enslavement and/or conversion of captives to Islam, the visible result was the growth of Anglo-Ottoman trade; and this meant increased economic power for England.