Sea Power and the Ottomans 79

Chapter 3

Sea Power and the Ottomans in the Early Modern

Mediterranean World
Elina Gugliuzzo

Introduction

The Mediterranean was not a space dominated exclusively by political actors.

It is in fact of great importance to highlight the role of the networks of ransom,
trust, and credit of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian intermediaries, networks
that the sovereigns had to negotiate carefully as they in turn tried to impose
their vision of political interaction and exchange in the Mediterranean. In
­particular, many scholars now share the idea that cultural mediation has his­
torically occurred in what the literary critic Mary Louise Pratt famously defined
as ‘contact zones’, in a few words, “social spaces where disparate cultures meet,
clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of
domination and subordination”.1 Studies of Mediterranean cultural interac­
tion have often succumbed to a version of Orientalism themselves. Many of
them fail to distinguish between and properly historicize the categories of
‘Islam’ ‘Arabs’ ‘Turks’ and ‘the Ottoman Empire,’ and treat these sup­posedly
interchangeable categories merely as disembodied figments of European
imagination. More than other forms of knowledge and information, however,
captives played a central role in the production and transmission of strategic
information and knowledge. Captives sent home information about enemy
corsairs, movements of hostile fleets and plans of their captors to attack their
countries; but they also produced knowledge: maps, topographic accounts and
detailed programs explicitly geared towards conquest and defense. In occupy­
ing this role, captives were instrumental to the shaping and maintenance of
the Habsburg imperial boundaries in the Mediterranean. At the same time,
spies played a crucial role in early modern imperial rivalries: any particular
group of formal (such as dragomans whose service is thought to have been
introduced in the early sixteenth century, employing at the beginning espe­
cially converts: Yunus Bey, who died in 1551, was one of these dragomans of

1 M.L. Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, London 1992. See also M.E.,
Mudimbe-Boyi, Beyond dichotomies: Histories, identities, cultures, and the challenge of global-
ization, Albany 2002.

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Greek origin) or informal intermediaries was indispensable for diplomatic

communication.2 While past scholars have emphasized the Islam/Christendom
division in the Mediterranean, these go-betweens, who mastered the codes of
both cultures, easily crossed invisible boundaries between civilizations and
connected the Ottomans and the Habsburgs.3 Apart from providing both
empires with regular information on political and military developments,
these entrepreneur information brokers played an active diplomatic role
between two capitals and even participated in Ottoman factional politics.4 It
may be also interesting in order to better understand the captivity of Christians
in North Africa, on the one hand, and sixteenth century Mediterranean history,
on the other, if we try to approach these histories from a perspective of ‘con­
nected’ history.5 The practice of ransom put Ottoman and Habsburg elites into
contact because valuable prisoners-of-war generally ended up at the hands of
the other side’s elites who sought to preserve for themselves these prestigious
slaves with the hope that they could be ransomed for large amounts. The fact
that prominent people who constituted the human capital of both empires
were ransomed rather than eliminated demonstrates the cooperation between
imperial elites as much as a curious example where the financial motives of
individuals outweighed the raison d’état. According to a recent study, it should
be take into consideration the concessions and compromises which the
Ottomans and Habsburgs of Spain made in order to legitimate or justify their
rule in foreign territories.6 Moreover, any major military campaign or force in
the early modern Mediterranean was profoundly international in nature and
origin, as only by drawing resources from the numerous microecologies of the
‘corrupting sea’ could sixteenth-century armies and navies be sustained.7

2 M. Bowen et al., ‘Interpreters and the Making of History’, in J. Delisle and J. Woodsworth (eds.),
Translators through History, Amsterdam 1995, pp. 245-80.
3 E.N.  Rothman, ‘Interpreting Dragomans: Boundaries and Crossings in the Early Modern
Mediterranean,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 51, no. 4 (2009): pp. 771-800.
4 F. Tabak, The Waning of the Mediterranean, 1550-1870, a Geohistorical Approach, Baltimore 2008.
5 S. Subramanyam, ‘Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern
Eurasia,’ in Victor Lieberman, (ed.) Beyond Binary Histories, Re-Imagining Euroasia to c. 1830,
Ann Arbor, 1999, pp. 289-316.
6 Ö. Kumrular, Las Relaciónes entre el Imperio Otomano y la Monarquía Católica entre los Años
1520-1535 y el Papel de los Estados Satéllites, Istanbul 2003; D. Goffman, ‘Negotiating with the
Renaissance State: The Ottoman Empire and the New Diplomacy’, in V.H. Aksan and D. Goffman
(eds.) The Early Modern Ottomans: Remapping the Empire, Cambridge 2007, pp. 61-74.
7 P. Williams, Empire and Holy War in the Mediterranean: the Galley and the Maritime Conflict
between the Habsburg and the Ottoman Empire, London, New York 2014; B. Cianci, Le Navi della
mezzaluna. La marina dell’impero ottomano (1299-1923), Bologna 2015.

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 Sea Power and the Ottomans 81

The Rise of the Ottoman Naval Power

By the mid-fifteenth century, Ottoman-controlled territories had completely

enveloped Constantinople. Ottoman expansion at the expense of the Byzantine
empire was in fact further aided by the weakness of the heir of Roman glory.
Financially exhausted, internally corrupted, and politically separated from the
main European powers, the Byzantine empire was simply incapable of offering
a coherent and effective defense against the growing Ottoman forces.The city,
the Second Rome, capital of a by-then inexistent empire, fell in 1453 after a
siege. It is only then the Ottomans began a considerable and rapid shipbuild­
ing program, rising to challenge in the following century Venice in the
Mediterranean sea and the Portuguese in the Indian ocean. By conquering
Constantinople, however, the Ottomans gained more than some tacit recogni­
tion of their power. With the city under their control, the Ottomans inherited
not only a strategically located position dominating the straits but also a centre
of naval power. A testament of this change was the fact that, only a year after
the fall of Constantinople, Venice signed a commercial agreement with the
Ottomans, both parties more eager to maintain the flow of trade than to fight
for religious predominance.8 Venice had always been a part of the larger trade
networks of the Eastern Mediterranean, both in Byzantine as well as in
Ottoman times, and the political, cultural and artistic influences of the Eastern
Mediterranean on Venice, the celebrated ‘centre of mediation between the
West and the East’, had long been appreciated. For the Ottomans, the port
served as a ‘key commercial entrepot’ linking the Black Sea with the Mediter­
ranean. Moreover, the shipyards of Constantinople, together with their skilled
labour, remained mostly untouched by the siege and the conquest. The
Ottoman Empire now both had the ability and the need to turn its attention to
the sea, and the Sultan, Mehmed II, began a concerted effort to expand and
strengthen the Ottoman fleet.9 ‘It was their [Ottoman] recognition of the
importance of the sea and the decision to establish a navy which set the
Ottomans apart from the other Muslim empires: the Ottoman Empire became
a maritime empire’.10 The larger geopolitical context of Ottoman rise to power
influenced when and why the Ottomans decided to build a naval force. The
Eastern Mediterranean, which became the seat of Ottoman power, had been

8 G. Varriale, Arrivano li Turchi : guerra navale e spionaggio nel Mediterraneo (1532-1582), Novi Ligure 2014.
9 K. DeVries, ‘Gunpowder Weapons at the Siege of Constantinople, 1453,’ in Y. Lev (ed.), War
and Society in the Eastern Mediterranean, 7th–15th Centuries, Leiden 1997, pp. 343-62.
10 G. Ágoston, Ottoman Warfare in Europe 1453-1826, in J. Black (ed.), European Warfare, 1453-
1815, London 1999, p. 128.

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for centuries the key link between the Asian and European markets, and the
Ottomans simply replaced the previous holders of this position. Moreover, the
period of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century is characterized by dra­
matic geopolitical changes, fueled by technological advances and geographic
discoveries, and the Ottoman naval rise is in many ways a response to this “Age
of Discoveries”. In this ‘inclusive’ context it was possible that an Ottoman
scholar and sea captain such as Piri Reis might have access to new European
maps that remained quite unknown to scholars belonging to a less cosmopoli­
tan background. But it is only with the complete defeat of Byzantium, the
stabilization of the frontier on the Danube, and the removal of the threats
from the east and south that the Ottomans could consider a greater role on the
sea. In brief, before the 1450s the Ottomans did not need a navy to expand and
could not afford one given their main strategic concerns. But from 1450
onwards, the Ottoman empire needed a navy to maintain control over its
Eastern Mediterranean sphere of influence and, perhaps most importantly, to
respond to slow but dramatic changes in the larger strategic situation of
Eurasia.11 “The functions of navies can be conceived as a trinity, the idea of
three-in-one. The unity (the one-ness) of the trinity is provided by the idea of
the use of the sea[…]the character of the trinity is defined by the three charac­
teristic modes of action by which navies carry out their purposes: namely the
military, the diplomatic, and the policing functions”.12 There were two main
maritime vectors of Ottoman expansion: the Mediterranean and the Red Sea/
Indian Ocean. The former was dictated by a strategy of defense and consolida­
tion, while the latter was characterized by an offensive posture aimed at
recapturing a connection with Asia. There were profound differences between
these two theaters, and the Ottomans failed to adapt their Mediterranean tac­
tics and technology to the demands of the Indian Ocean. Building a navy is a
difficult process, and the Ottomans were not exempt from the technical chal­
lenges of shipbuilding, of developing navigation skills, and of training a
competent body of seamen. While the Ottomans had easy access to shipbuild­
ing material, they lacked technical know-how and were often forced to rely on
Western (often Italian) shipbuilders. Yet, their main technological weakness
was that the core of the Ottoman navy was a fleet of galleys, excellent at navi­
gating the narrow straits, long coastlines, and often windless waters of the

11 K. Roy, Military Transition in Early Modern Asia, 1400-1750. Cavalry, Guns, Government and
Ships, London, New York 2014, pp. 1-10.
12 K. Booth, Navies and Foreign Policy, Croom Helm, London 1977, p. 15, as quoted in J.B. Hat­
tendorf, R.W. Unger (eds.), War at Sea in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Woodbridge
2003, p. 15.

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 Sea Power and the Ottomans 83

Mediterranean sea, but unsuited for the rough open oceans. According to
Tuncay Zorlu the Ottomans, in their concept of civilisation at least in the clas­
sical period, had a general tendency to adopt easily all kinds of technical
knowledge or the products of technology, which were deemed beneficial to
humanity and environment irrespective of their origin.13 The attitudes of the
Ottomans towards western science and technology are also interpreted as a
“selective attitude” adopted by a powerful empire in response to the develop­
ments outside its own sphere and area of influence. The Ottomans started to
transfer European technology, especially in the fields of firearms, cartography,
and mining in the fifteenth century. Furthermore, the Ottomans had the
opportunity to become acquainted with the Renaissance astronomy and medi­
cine through the Jewish scholars who took refuge in the Ottoman Empire.14
Actually, under Mehmed II and Bayezid II, the Ottomans acquired the com­
mon naval technology of the Mediterranean, adopting the oared galley as their
principal vessel. From the 1560s, following their Mediterranean rivals, the
Ottomans too adopted the “al scaloccio” system, by which all oarsmen on the
same bench pulled a single oar. This arrangement helped to increase the num­
ber of oarsmen. Ottoman galleys usually carried a centre-line cannon and two
smaller flanking culverins. Impressed by the Venetian galeasses, the Ottomans
decided to imitate these large and heavily armed galleys that could fire broad­
sides. During the rebuilding of the fleet destroyed at the battle of Lepanto, the
Ottoman arsenals in Sinop and Istanbul constructed five galeasses. The size of
the Ottoman navy was already impressive under Mehmed II, who employed
380 galleys in his naval expeditions against the Genoese administered Crimean
port city of Caffa in 1475. A few decades later, during the 1499-1503 Ottoman-
Venetian war, Bayezid II considerably strengthened the navy, ordering the
construction of no less than 250 galleys.
Originally, galleys were derived from the Medieval Greek, galea, which was
a type of small Byzantine galley. Scholars, such as Lionel Casson, group galleys
as oar-powered ships, and classify them together with other oar-driven ships
like the Viking longships. But they are generally recognized as ships belonging
to a specific Mediterranean tradition. Since 1450, the Mediterranean powers
(the Ottomans, the Venetians, and the Habsburg Empire) featured galley ships
in their naval fleets. The use of cannons initially allowed for galley warships to

13 T. Zorlu, “Some Remarks on the Ottoman Perception of Science and Technology Transfer”, in
G. Koçan (ed.), Transnational Concepts, Transfers and the Challenge of Peripheries, İstanbul
2008, pp. 286-96.
14 J.I. Israel, Diasporas within a Diaspora: Jews, Crypto-Jews and the World of Maritime Empires
(1540-1740), Leiden 2002.

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become effective “mobile artillery platforms”. Moreover, the amphibious abili­

ties of galleys were enhanced as soldiers were able to efficiently assault
fortresses with the galleys’ artillery support as well defend the beached galley
ship in combat. Even assuming technical parity, by the mid-sixteenth century
the Ottoman navy had two clear advantages over its Venetian and other
Christian counterpart<s>. First, the Ottomans controlled most of the East
Mediterranean coastline. This allowed the Ottomans to hinder, and if neces­
sary block, European shipping, to control access to key shipbuilding resources
(especially timber which was in short supply in Italy), and to encircle the
Eastern Mediterranean making an Ottoman lake of it. The second advantage
stemmed from the Sultan’s reliance on North African Muslim corsairs, who
supplied him with manpower as well as new technologies. Manpower was
essential for a Mediterranean fleet. In the sixteenth century cost-containment
in the naval sphere was achieved through the cooptation by the imperial fleet
based in Istanbul of “corsair freelancers” whose fleets operated out of Algiers,
Tunis and Tripoli.15
The large armadas mobilized on both sides of the Mediterranean in the six­
teenth century were the result of a multi-party collaborative effort representing
the combined capacity of privately-operated and state-subsidized fleets. Ehud
Toledano has stressed the importance to understand Ottoman slavery “as a
social relationship, that is the dynamic take-and-give between owner and slave
in a variety of changing situations”.16 The importance of man-power of the
slaves in rowing on the ships is fundamental: the success of seapower depended
on this “human engine”.
J.H Pryor in a study focusing on the Ottomans’ presence in the Mediterranean
and contingent factors influencing the level of their naval activity, has shown
conclusively how physical, geographical and environmental constraints
imposed by tides, prevailing winds and other natural forces defined the role
they were able to play. Although Ottoman intentions in the Mediterranean had
been signalled by the conquest of Rhodes in 1522, it was only through a patient
and gradual building up of supply bases, especially in the Aegean – a process
continued in phases over the course of an entire century between the late
1460s and the fall of Chios in 1566 – that Ottomans were able to to position

15 L. Sicking, Islands, pirates, privateers and the Ottoman Empire in the early modern Mediter-
ranean, in D. Couto, F. Günergun, M.P. Pedani (eds.), Seapower, Trade and Technology.
Studies in Turkish Maritime History, Istanbul 2014, pp. 239-252.
16 E. Toledano, “The Concept of Slavery in Ottoman and Other Muslim Societies: Dichotomy or
Continuum?,” in M. Toru and J.E. Philips (eds), Slave Elites in the Middle East and Africa: A
Comparative Study, London and New York 2000, pp. 159-76.

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 Sea Power and the Ottomans 85

themselves to give adequate support to fleet operations in the mid-Mediterra­

nean. According to Pryor’s study, position was of equal importance to “a slow,
relentless and exhausting drive to gain possession of the bases and islands
from which war galleys could control the sea lanes”.17

Western Seafare

The early modern period saw both greater interaction between different parts
of the world and the rise of European influence and power. The two aspects
were linked. It was through the projection of European power that the “Old
World” and the “New World” were connected, and indeed that the ‘”New
World’” was created as an idea, since the moment in which, first Spain and
Portugal, and later, England, France and the Dutch conquered and settled
important portions of North and South America. It was through the projection
of Portuguese naval power from the 1490s that the Old World was reshaped and
that European trade and military strength began to make their impact in the
Indian Ocean. As Jeremy Black has pointed out the background of the European
warfare in this period included not only the response to Ottoman strength, but
also the continuing process of change in late medieval Europe.18 This owed
something to new technology, but was also a consequence of political develop­
ments, specifically the growing strength of a number of states in the fifteenth
century. It is necessary to think not in terms of the West versus the ‘Rest’, but of
specific western initiatives and their interaction with the complex rivalries and
relationships of local states, a point also true for the expansion of non-western
powers. In addition, non-western powers benefited from rivalries between the
western powers, although the overseas projection of western powers, directed
mainly towards the New World, was such that helped the resistance to western
expansion.
Empire-building was supported by an uninterrupted movement of men and
women between continents and through oceanic circuits. They played determ­
ing roles in other, mostly cross-cultural, dynamics. Seafarers were central
agents of all these technical, economic, anthropological, cultural and religious

17 The Ottoman navy transported the entire army and its siege train and isolated the island.
The main fortress was a fortification system of modern design, and the defenders stocked
abundant supplies well before the start of the operation. The siege continued on for five
months and drew out of the campaign season: J.H. Pryor, Geography, Technology and War:
Studies in the Maritime History of the Mediterranean, 649-1571, Cambridge 1988, p. 177.
18 J. Black, European Warfare, London 2002, p. 69.

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transfers and key elements of worlds built on the basis of maritime skills and
maritime dominion. They were not only “maritime agents”, but simultaneously
economic, social and cultural mediators; whether they were seafarers, eco­
nomic brokers, cultural mediators or informal and self-organized entrepreneurs,
they all played central roles as empire-builders among the different shores of
the Mediterranean and beyond.19 Thus, in spite of the different political and
religious legitimization involved, Ottoman attitudes towards plunder were not
so fundamentally different from those documented in the wars among
Christian princes. In the Ottoman instance, to be sure, booty gained in battle
with the ‘infidel’ (gaza malı) was a source of social prestige. All this means that
while Ottoman soldiers were concerned about booty-making, in this they were
not very different from their central European opposite ‘rivals’. In the first half
of the seventeenth century, Habsburg armies were still not fully state-con­
trolled, but had been organized largely by military entrepreneurs. These
commanders-cumbusinessmen supplied soldiers to a variety of rulers with the
hope of profiting from their investments, in terms of money and also of politi­
cal power. In the case of navies, it is possible to present a model of change
driven by military technology and operational considerations. Guilmartin’s
central concern is to analyze the impact of gunpowder weapons on this system
of war. Maintaining the galleys to move resources and men over the seas was
actually more important to the Spanish monarchy than conducting an unwin­
nable and risky holy war. One of the most important resources were cannons,
which galleys were quick to employ to the extent they could, by mounting
sometimes quite large artillery in their bows. Such guns were supposed to be
fired at point blank range, as an aid to boarding. Fleet tactics were calculated
to amplify the resulting shock. A well-ordered galley fleet advanced, like a land
army, in line abreast, so as to concentrate the fire of its guns (a consideration
that also explains the practice of stern-first defensive grounding, with all guns
pointing out to sea). Individual ships could then employ their oars to maneu­
ver at the last second, in order to bring their ordinance to bear most effectively
against their targets. Repeated long range bombardment was deemed point­
less, since a rowed galley could cross the effective range of existing guns in less
time than it took to reload them. In this model, the prime means of, and reason
for, change would be the rise in the sixteenth century of the large specialised
warship, built and maintained just for war, rather than also acting as a peace­
time trader.These ships, able to take part in sustained artillery duels at close

19 J. Fynn-Paul (ed.), War, Entrepreneurs, and the State in Europe and the Mediterranean, 1300-
1800, Boston Leiden 2014.

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 Sea Power and the Ottomans 87

range, were expensive to build, administer, and maintain. As a consequence,

the number of potential maritime powers was obviously restricted.

Conclusion

The most striking fact of Ottoman history is the rapidity of the Ottoman naval
rise. The Ottoman state was for more than a century focused only on territorial
conquests, and then, in the second half of the fifteenth century, it developed a
growing and increasingly more effective fleet. Very quickly, the Ottomans suc­
ceeded in challenging, and defeating, the main Mediterranean power, Venice,
and continued to be a serious threat to the other European powers. But the
maintenance of fleets in both empires required the delegation of authority to
private contractors and thereby reduced centralized state power. The circula­
tion of captives as well as exchanges between the captives of various forms of
information in a variety of textual genres across the sea, and the interactions of
captives with institutions such as the family, the Inquisition, and Maghribean
and Spanish political bureaucracies, brought the two Mediterranean coasts
into “creative contact”. Thanks to a substantial scholarship, today it is hard to
deny that the Ottomans enjoyed extensive commercial and diplomatic ties
with European states in the early modern period, while recent studies argue
for Ottoman contributions to innovations and developments which were long
assumed to be one hundred percent European products. Recent scholarship
has discredited the prevailing view that the Ottomans resisted innovations:
this older view provides much of the ‘evidence’ for Ottoman ‘decline’.20
Why did the Ottomans become the most serious muslim antagonist of the
western powers? Why and how did they become a naval power, capable of
instilling terror among European states and of projecting power across the
Mediterranean and as far as India? In the prologue to the elaborate history
which Kemal Pashazade wrote at the command of Bayezid II, the author com­
pares the Ottoman history with earlier Muslim dynasties and sums up under
three heads the reasons of their superiority. The Ottomans unlike other Muslim
dynasties, came to power not through the violent overthrow of older Muslim
states within the Islamic community, but through the conquest of territories

20 G. Ágoston, Guns for the Sultans: Military Power and the Weapons Industry in the Ottoman
Empire, New York 2005; B. Arbel, “Maps of the World for Ottoman Princes? Further Evidence
and Questions concerning the ‘Mappamondo’ of Hajji Ahmed” in Imago Mundi 54 (2002):
pp. 19-29.

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 88 Gugliuzzo

pertaining to the infidel world, the Dar al-Harb.21 In contrast there is also the
view that the Muslims did not really care much about Europe; or that, if they
did care, it was only from the point of view of trade. Secondly, according to
Kemal Pashazade in the Ottoman state the authority of the sovereign and the
validity of the laws were complete and absolute. Thirdly, the Ottoman state
was richer, more populous and more extensive than all others. No other state
possesses the military power of the Ottomans; the Ottomans have powerful
artillery and a great maritime power.22 But as Karen Barkey has pointed out
“The construction of this formidable political apparatus of authority was not
just the result of fire, plunder, rape, death and destruction. It was also the result
of brokerage among different religious, social, and economic groups that
formed new social relations, combining diverse ideas and practices and forg­
ing new identities”.23
With regard to the possible relationship between firearms and army growth,
we have seen that Ottoman military expansion was only partly due to external
military challenges and that domestic socioeconomic factors also played an
important role in the transformation of the sultans’ armed forces. In a parallel
fashion, battle against “the Turk” was also a potent means of asserting the legit­
imacy of the Habsburg rulers, and the Venetian tendency to place commercial
considerations over “holy war, Catholic style” was quite often the subject of
acerbic criticism.24 Among the major European kings, only François I of
France was bravely defying the widespread adverse publicity of entering into
an alliance with ‘the infidel’. Recent work has shown that sixteenth- and seven­
teenth-century French policy makers took the ‘propagandistic’ opposition in a
number of European countries to the Franco-Ottoman alliance quite seriously.
In order not to ‘lose face’ among Christian rulers, the kings of France, for
instance, were quite willing to allow their noble subjects to enlist in the Order
of Malta, and thus have French noblemen engaged in the ‘battle against the
infidel’ that the crown itself avoided because of its rivalry with the Habsburgs.25
However in the end, the anti-Ottoman alliances promoted by the popes were
mostly of short duration, with especially the Venetians tending to rapidly end
wars in which they had originally joined with much fanfare, in order to protect

21 A. Abel, “Dar al-Harb”, in C.E. Bosworth et al. (eds.) “The Encyclopaedia of Islam”, 2nd Edi­
tion, Leiden 1960-2002.
22 K. Pashazade, History of the House of Osman (Tevarih-i Ali Osman), Ankara 1970.
23 K. Barkey, Empire of Difference. The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective, Cambridge 2008,
p. 28.
24 J. Armingaud, Venise et le le Bas-Empire. Histoire des relations de Venise avec l’Empire
d’Orient, Paris 1868.
25 P. Contamine (ed.), War and Competition between States, Oxford 2000.

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 Sea Power and the Ottomans 89

their Mediterranean trade. In conclusion, the inter-imperial rivalry between

the Ottoman sultans and the Habsburg rulers, or between Ottomans and
Venetians, did not exclude an albeit limited appreciation for the military vir­
tues and artistic or craft skills of “the other side”. Perhaps by including the work
of outsiders into their court and treasury, the Ottoman sultans indicated that
they had truly conquered a “world empire”.

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