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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/03/19, SPi
USEFU L EN EMI ES
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/03/19, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/03/19, SPi
NOEL MALCOLM
USEFUL
ENEMIES
Islam and The Ottoman Empire in Western
Political Thought, 1450–1750
1
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/03/19, SPi
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp,
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© Noel Malcolm 2019
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First Edition published in 2019
Impression: 1
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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/03/19, SPi
Contents
Preface ix
Preface
x Pr e face
are; nevertheless, I am glad that I did not rush into print. I feel sure that the
work which I have now written is less unsatisfactory than it would have
been seventeen years ago, even though I am very conscious of the fact that
it gives a summary account of various interesting and important matters,
compressing some things that I do know, and, doubtless, leaving out others
that I do not. Specialists in particular topics will be conscious of my con-
tractions and omissions, and of innumerable nuances which I have not had
space to explore (to say nothing of all the detailed references to their own
writings which I have failed to make; I have had to adopt a fairly minimalist
approach to such reference-giving, having many topics to cover and no
wish to clog the pages unnecessarily with bibliographical material). But
I hope they may also feel that there is some benefit to be gained from placing
their special topics in a broader perspective and a longer narrative.
Arranging that narrative has not been easy; here too I must ask for some
indulgence. While the overall treatment is chronological, from the fifteenth
century to the eighteenth, it has been necessary to devote individual chapters
to particular themes or traditions. Sometimes—especially when covering
the sixteenth century, when so many significant intellectual developments
took place—I must follow one of these subjects for a hundred years or so,
and then double back chronologically to pick up the story of the next one.
None of these topics and traditions existed in a watertight compartment,
of course, and some writers (such as Jean Bodin) feature in my accounts of
more than one of them; a certain amount of referring back and referring
forwards is unavoidable, therefore. But I am certain that the alternative,
a single onward-moving account of everything in mere chronological order,
would have been much less helpful to the reader.
The title of the book requires a little elaboration on several points. First,
the word ‘enemies’: I seriously hesitated over using this term, as I did not
and do not want to give the impression that enmity was the only essential
relationship between the Ottoman and Islamic worlds and the West
European Christian one. As my previous book Agents of Empire makes clear,
the spectrum of interactions between the two did include various kinds of
positive collaboration and cooperation in the early modern period. But the
subject matter of this book is not the entire historical reality of relations
between them, but rather the mental world of those in the ‘West’ who
wrote in a political way about the ‘East’. A degree of enmity was built
into the assumptions of the overwhelming majority of them; and even
when writers praised Islam or the Ottoman system, as a significant number
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/03/19, SPi
Pr e facexi
of them did, they could assume that this would have all the more impact
(as part of a critical argument about their own society) precisely because
Western readers took them to be praising an inimical religion and an
enemy state.
Secondly, the dates used in the title have been chosen merely as round
figures. For practical purposes 1450 is a proxy for 1453, the year of the
Ottoman conquest of Constantinople; and 1750 is close enough to 1748, the
date of publication of Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois—a work which took
the long-standing tradition of theorizing about Ottoman ‘despotism’, devel-
oped it further, and, by means of the reactions which Montesquieu provoked
to his most extreme claims, helped to bring about its end.
Thirdly, ‘Western’ is used here primarily in contradistinction to the
Ottoman world, and more specifically to refer to Western Christendom.
Writings by Orthodox Slavs and Orthodox Greeks are not considered here;
some of the former and most of the latter were, in any case, living under
Ottoman rule. And while ‘Western political thought’ was certainly no
monolithic entity, my focus has to be mostly on tendencies in the overall
development of political thinking in Western culture. This is not a history
of everything that was thought, in political terms, about Islam and the
Ottomans by anyone living in ‘the West’. The Ottoman history written in
Hebrew by the sixteenth-century rabbi Elia Capsali, for example, is a text of
great intrinsic interest, written in a territory which can be described as
‘Western’ (the island of Crete, under Venetian rule); but that work, like some
other little-known Hebrew texts, played no role in the development of
Western thought more generally, so it is not discussed here.1
Fourthly, I should emphasize that the phrase ‘political thought’ in the title
has been deliberately chosen in preference to ‘political philosophy’ or
‘political theory’. The ideas of several major theorists and philosophers are
discussed in this book, but its scope is not confined to any canon of abstract
theoretical works. Many different sorts of material contributed to the devel-
opment of political thought, in a broader sense: descriptive writings by
travellers, speeches by diplomats, polemical pamphlets, millenarian treatises,
and so on. Although my coverage of them cannot be systematic, I have tried
to do justice to the range of forms in which political thinking about, or in
1. On Capsali and his work see the recent monograph by Aleida Paudice, Between Several Worlds,
esp. pp. 1–2, 79–86, 99–127.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/03/19, SPi
xii Pr e face
relation to, Islam and the Ottoman Empire took place in the culture of early
modern Europe.
Yet I must immediately add—again, emphatically—that this is only a his-
tory of political thought, broadly conceived, not a general cultural history
of Western Europe’s experience of the Ottoman and Islamic worlds. (This
point is also relevant to the choice of source materials: playwrights, for
example, may often have reflected cultural assumptions about ‘the Turk’ in
interesting ways, but that is not the same as making original contributions
to Western political thought.) To discuss all the ways in which early modern
Europe absorbed and reacted to Islam and the Ottoman Empire would
require a book of much greater length, and of a much more capacious char-
acter. Where Islam is concerned, the history of Western religious thought
about it in this period extends far beyond the political or politically related
aspects that I discuss here; major areas of theological debate have to be left
aside in this account. And as for the actual human interactions, the experi-
ences of Muslim slaves in Europe, Christian captives in Muslim territories,
Moriscos in Spain, missionaries in the Ottoman Empire, and others: I dis-
cussed these topics in another lecture series, the Trevelyan Lectures, which
I gave at Cambridge in 2010.That was a very different project, and will lead,
in due course, to a very different book.
On one other point I should emphasize what this book is not. It is a study
of Western political thinking about Islam and the Ottoman Empire in the
early modern period, not a study of Islam and the Ottoman Empire in their
own right. There is a wealth of scholarly writings on the Muslim and
Ottoman historical realities; I have benefited greatly from reading such
works, and refer to them in many places in this book. Nevertheless, their
value to the argument of this work is mostly indirect or supplementary.
Historians of the Ottoman Empire do not write directly about the history
of Western political thought, and I do not write directly here about the
history of the Ottoman Empire.
Finally, a few linguistic points. All material from foreign-language sources
is given in translation in the text, with the original supplied in the notes; the
translations are mine, unless otherwise attributed. In early modern texts in
most West European languages the word for ‘Turk’ (‘turc’, ‘turco’, etc.) was
seldom used with the ethnic-linguistic or national meaning that it now has;
the usual sense was either ‘Ottoman’ or ‘Muslim’, and I have translated it
accordingly. Similarly, phrases meaning ‘the Turk’ or ‘the great Turk’, and
versions of the formula ‘le grand Seigneur’, were used to mean ‘the Sultan’,
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/03/19, SPi
Pr e facexiii
xiv Pr e face
one
The fall of Constantinople,
the Turks, and the humanists
1. Setton, Papacy and Levant, ii, pp. 138–40; Schwoebel, Shadow, pp.1–4. For the first reactions
see Pertusi, La caduta; for reactions in the Eastern Orthodox world see Dujčev, ‘La Conquête
turque’. Franz Babinger comments that ‘Everywhere it was felt that a turning point in history
had been reached . . . With good reason the year 1453 has been designated as the dividing line
between the Middle Ages and the modern era’ (Mehmed, p. 98).
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/03/19, SPi
2 Use f u l E n e m i e s
for Ottoman help in suppressing their own rebels. During the previous
century large parts of the Balkans had been taken over by the Ottomans, who
had seized Thrace and Bulgaria, reduced Serbia to vassal status, conquered
Salonica from the Venetians, taken control of most of Albania, and inter-
vened repeatedly in the kingdom of Bosnia.2 In purely strategic terms the
capture of Constantinople was a mere mopping-up operation. Nor had the
Western powers that mourned the loss of the Byzantine capital made much
effort to save it. One Genoese commander did supply a contingent of sol-
diers at the start of the campaign; but thereafter both Venice and Genoa, the
major commercial powers (and fierce rivals) that operated in Constantinople
and the Black Sea, stayed their hands until it was almost too late, finally
sending or loaning small groups of ships that could make no difference to
the final outcome.The Pope had sent a more or less symbolic contingent of
200 armed men in 1452, and his modest naval contribution in April 1453
was also too little, too late.3 Other Western powers, to whom the last
emperor, Constantine Palaeologus, had sent desperate requests for help, had
done even less.
To some extent, therefore, the sense of dismay and grief expressed by
many Italian and West European rulers may have been quickened by a feel-
ing of bad conscience. (This was perhaps especially true at the papal Curia,
where the official policy for several decades had been to insist that the
Byzantine authorities fulfil their pledges of ecclesiastical union with Rome
as a condition for any help.4) Another factor contributing to the emotional
reaction was the nature of some of the early reports, which were filled with
stories of atrocities—stories which, in turn, were taken up and amplified by
those activists in the West who wished to galvanize their rulers. It was
claimed that 40,000 men had been either blinded or killed by the Ottomans,
that nuns and virgins had been raped on church altars, that monks had been
hacked to death, and that rivers of blood had flowed through the streets.5
Acts of violence, desecration, looting, and killing certainly took place dur-
ing the three days of plunder which Mehmed granted to his army. This was
standard procedure for a city which had resisted calls to surrender, and over-
all the devastation may have been less severe than that inflicted on the city
by its Catholic, West European invaders 249 years earlier. The population
T h e fa ll of Consta n t i nople3
was indeed seriously depleted, not by mass murder but by the carrying away
of captives for sale as slaves. But Mehmed took quick action to secure the
future of Galata, the neighbouring city dominated by Western merchants;
within less than a year he also appointed a new Greek patriarch and guar-
anteed the essential rights of his Church, to reassure the Orthodox popula-
tion, and concluded a treaty with Venice, granting it full trading privileges
in the Ottoman Empire.6 Within a fairly short time, therefore, those West
European powers that had direct commercial links with Galata and Istanbul
would have been aware that the Sultan was a rational, pragmatic ruler, keen
to promote prosperity and stability in his new possession, not a monster
driven by fanaticism and a thirst for blood. And yet the tendency to portray
the fall of Constantinople as a cataclysmic event continued unabated.
Part of the reason for this was symbolic. Although there was little Western
interest in the history of the Byzantine Empire—which would remain a
curiously neglected subject until the last part of the sixteenth century—
there was of course a general understanding that Constantinople was the
city of Constantine, the son of St Helena (finder of the True Cross) and the
first emperor to favour Christian worship throughout the Roman Empire.7
It was the ‘New Rome’, which had maintained the Roman imperial tradition
after the barbarian invasions of Italy and the Western Empire, and it was the
seat of the patriarch of a major Christian Church, albeit a schismatic one.
These facts gave Constantinople a historico-symbolic importance of a kind
that a city such as Salonica could never attain. When Niccolò Sagundino, an
experienced Greek official in Venetian service, addressed an admonitory
‘oration’ to King Alfonso V of Naples at the beginning of 1454, he explained
that Mehmed II was influenced ‘by certain prophecies and preachings that
promise him the conquest of the kingdom of Italy and the city of Rome; he
has said that the seat of Constantine was granted to him by heaven, and that
that seat is not Constantinople but Rome, and that it seems to him both just
and very appropriate that, having taken the daughter-city by force, he may
also take the mother-city.’8 As we shall see, the notion that Ottoman sultans
4 Use f u l E n e m i e s
might claim the historic rights of the Roman emperors would trouble a
number of Western writers over the next century and a half.
The main fear, though, arose simply from contemplating the power of the
Ottoman military machine and the likely direction of its future attacks.
Although the defence of Constantinople had been thin in terms of man-
power, the city’s massive fortifications had posed a challenge which any
Western army of the period might have found insuperable. Mehmed’s army,
estimated at more than 200,000 men, was of a size that none of the West
European powers could possibly match; and his mastery of the latest artil-
lery technology equalled that of the best of them. With the seizure of this
city, he consolidated his position in the Balkans (making it easy to pick off
other minor Christian outposts to the east, on the Crimean coast and at
Trebizond); his future advances, once the south of Greece was fully con-
quered, were naturally assumed to be westward. Twice in the previous sixty
years European powers had mounted large campaigns against the Ottomans,
fighting them at Nicopolis, on the lower Danube, in 1396, and at Varna, on
the Black Sea coast, in 1444. Both had ended in heavy defeats for the
Catholic Christians, but in each case this happened only after an offensive
by a crusading force which had penetrated deep into the Balkans. Now all
the indications were that in future the offensive campaigns would be
launched in the opposite direction, by the Ottoman Sultan against Catholic
Europe. It was military reality, much more than any concern about the
revival of imperial rights, that made Western thinkers and rulers so suddenly
fearful and, for the first time, so very defensive. A fundamental shift in the
balance of power had taken place—or rather, had finally become impossible
to ignore. Soon after the fall of Constantinople, the Venetian chronicler
Languschi wrote of Mehmed II that ‘he now says that the times have
changed, so that he is to move from east to west, just as the westerners went
eastwards in the past.’ As Enea Silvio Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II,
wrote to Leonardo Benvoglienti in September 1453: ‘the Italians used to be
the masters of the world; now the empire of the Turks is beginning.’9
For people whose historical understanding was, at its deepest levels,
shaped by religious belief, such a momentous change had to have a theo-
logical explanation.The easiest way to account for the fall of Constantinople
9. Pertusi, La caduta, ii, pp. 64 (Piccolomini: ‘Fuerunt Itali rerum domini, nunc Turchorum inchoa-
tur imperium’), 70 (Languschi: ‘Hora dice esser mutato le saxon [sic: for ‘stagioni’] di tempi,
sì che de oriente el passi in occidente, come gli occidentali in oriente sono andati’).
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/03/19, SPi
T h e fa ll of Consta n t i nople5
was to blame the sins of the Greeks, who had been viewed as schismatics
since the eleventh century, and most recently had rejected the pledge given
by their own representatives at Florence in 1439 to accept union with the
Roman Church. This approach chimed with a longer tradition of anti-
Greek feeling in the West, as exemplified to a rather startling degree by the
poet Petrarch, who, in the mid-fourteenth century, had denounced the
Orthodox Greeks as the worst sort of heretics and had called repeatedly for
a crusade against Constantinople.10 Such attitudes also helped to shape some
of the earliest Western attempts to account historically for the rise of Islamic
power in the East at the expense of the Byzantine Empire: writing in the
1430s, when attempts to pressure the Greek Church into union with Rome
were at their most intense, the Augustinian friar Andrea Biglia had con-
cluded that the Eastern Christians had lost control over so many of their
territories as a punishment from God for the heresies into which they
had fallen.11
One of the earliest accounts of the conquest of Constantinople, by the
eyewitness Leonardo Giustiniani, Catholic Archbishop of Mytilene, confi-
dently ascribed the Ottoman victory to the fact that God had withdrawn
his support for the Greeks when they refused to implement the union with
Rome agreed in 1439.12 (Soon afterwards, the Orthodox Metropolitan of
Moscow based the same conclusion on the opposite premise: God had pun-
ished the Byzantines for having agreed to union with Rome in the first
place.13) The prominent humanist scholar Poggio Bracciolini, writing in
1455, accused the Byzantine Greeks of sabotaging the Crusades, reneging on
their promises of union, and, for good measure, being so avaricious and so
lazy that they refused to spend their own immense wealth on the defence
of their city, preferring to beg for help from the Papacy instead.Their defeat
occurred, he concluded, ‘not by chance, but by divine judgment’.14 Other
writers agreed: Ubertino Puscolo, a humanist scholar from Brescia who was
studying in Constantinople at the time of the conquest, wrote that if an
angel had appeared, promising to drive away the Ottoman forces so long as
the Greeks agreed to union with Rome, they would have accepted Ottoman
rule instead. (The question of union had in fact bitterly divided the Greek
churchmen, and it was true that some preferred the temporal rule of the
10. Bisaha, Creating East and West, pp. 120–1. 11. Webb, ‘Decline and Fall’, p. 207.
12. Meserve, Empires of Islam, p. 30. 13. Strémooukhoff, ‘Moscow’, p. 88.
14. Meserve, Empires of Islam, p. 30 (Giustiniani); Bisaha, Creating East and West, p. 126 (Poggio).
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Jollei ottanut lukuun jomotusta polvessa, ei elämä tuntunut
hullummalta — elämän suruilla ei ollut suurtakaan sijaa tämän
nuoren miehen valvotuissa öissä. Itse asiassa ei hänellä suruja
ollutkaan. Hän oli juuri päässyt asianajajain kirjoihin, hänellä oli
kirjallisia taipumuksia ja koko maailma avoimena edessään. Isä ja
äiti olivat kuolleet, hänellä oli tuloja neljäsataa puntaa vuodessa. Mitä
siis merkitsi, minne hän matkusti, mitä teki tai milloin jotakin teki?
Hänen vuoteensa oli kova ja se varjeli häntä kuumeelta. Hän loikoi
valveilla, hengitti yön tuoksuja, joita tulvi huoneeseen avoimesta
ikkunasta aivan hänen päänalaisensa vierestä. Jollei ottanut lukuun
pientä harmintunnetta matkatoveria kohtaan, mikä oli niin
luonnollista, kun muistaa ystävysten olleen jo kolme päivää kahden
matkalla, Ashurstin muistot ja näyt olivat tuona unettomana yönä
leppoisia, kaihomielisiä ja liikuttavia. Varsinkin hän näki edessään
selvästi ja aiheettomasti — sillä hän ei ollut aikaisemmin ollut
tietoinen siitä, että olisi pannut niitä merkille — pyssyä puhdistavan
nuorukaisen kasvot ja niiden tarkkaavan, levollisen ja kuitenkin
säikähtyneen ilmeen tämän siirtäessä katseensa keittiön ovesta
tuoppeja kantavaan tyttöön. Tuo punakka, sinisilmäinen naama,
vaaleat silmäripset ja rohtimien kaltaiset hiukset olivat syöpyneet
hänen muistiinsa yhtä varmasti kuin tytön kasteenraikkaat kasvot.
Viimein hän näki uutimettoman ikkunan neliön vaalenevan ja kuuli
unisen, käheän kukonkiekaisun. Sitten seurasi hiljaisuus, joka oli
yhtä kuollut kuin ennen, kunnes mustarastas, tuskin vielä hereillään,
uskalsi rikkoa sen laulullaan. Ja tähystellen ikkunan kehystämään
valkenevaan päivään Ashurst vaipui uneen.
"Hän tarkoitti, että olette sellainen tyttö, joista heidän oli tapana
laulaa."
"Uskoisin kyllä."
Megan hymyili.
"Ei."
"Toverini tarkoitti, että Joe muistuttaa niitä miehiä, jotka tulivat
Englantiin noin neljätoistasataa vuotta sitten ja valloittivat maan."
"Vai niin."
Tuo "vai niin" huvitti Ashurstia. Se oli niin tuore ja rakastettava, niin
päättäväinen ja kohteliaan myönteinen, huolimatta siitä, että se
kohdistui asiaan, joka oli tytölle hepreaa.
"Hän sanoi, että kaikki toiset pojat olivat oikeita mustalaisia. Sitä
hänen ei olisi pitänyt sanoa. Tätini kyllä nauroi, mutta hän ei pitänyt
siitä, ja serkkuni suuttuivat. Enoni oli maanviljelijä, eivätkä
maanviljelijät ole mustalaisia. On väärin loukata ihmisiä."
"On toki."
"Kauniita elukoita!"
Ontuvan miehen kasvot kirkastuivat. Hänellä oli silmissään
ylöspäin kääntynyt katse, jollaisen pitkäaikainen kärsimys usein
aiheuttaa.
"Ohoh"
"Mikä mustalaiskummitus?"
"En tiedä, en ole koskaan itse nähnyt. Megan sanoo, että sen on
tapana istua täällä. On vanha Jimkin sen kerran nähnyt. Se istui
tuossa sen päivän edellisenä iltana, jolloin poni potkaisi isää päähän.
Se soitti huilua."
"En tiedä."
"Mikä se on?"
"Mutta pelkään pahoin, etten saa sitä nähdä, sillä minun kai täytyy
pian lähteä täältä pois."
"Joko nyt?"
"Kyllä."
IV.
Ashurst vietti seuraavan viikon samoilemalla lähitienoilla
vakuuttautuakseen jalkansa paranemisesta. Kevät oli tänä vuonna
hänelle ilmestys. Kuin juopuneena hän saattoi seistä katselemassa
myöhästyneen pyökin punavalkoisia silmuja, kun se ojenteli oksiaan
auringossa taivaan sineä kohti, tai harvojen skotlanninkuusten
runkoja ja oksia, jotka hohtivat ruskeina voimakkaassa valossa, tai
toisin ajoin nummea ja myrskyn tuivertamia lehtikuusia, jotka
näyttivät niin eloisilta, kun tuuli puhalteli niiden nuoren vihreyden läpi,
joka levittäytyi ruosteenväristen runkojen yllä. Tai hän loikoi maassa
tarkastellen nurmikon sinisiä orvokkeja tai sanajalikossa hypistellen
vaaleanpunaisia, läpinäkyviä silmuja, käkien kukkuessa, rastaiden
säksättäessä ja leivon sirotellessa lauluhelmiään korkealta pilvistä.
Tämä kevät oli erilainen kuin kaikki edelliset, sillä kevättä oli myös
hänen rinnassaan eikä vain hänen ulkopuolellaan. Päiväsaikaan hän
tuskin näki perheenjäseniä, ja kun Megan toi hänen ateriansa, tällä
näytti aina olevan niin paljon puuhaa talossa tai pihalla, ettei hän
voinut viipyä kauempaa eikä jäädä juttelemaan Ashurstin kanssa.
Mutta iltaisin Ashurst istahti keittiön ikkunapenkille polttelemaan
piippuaan ja puheli ontuvan Jimin tai rouva Narracomben kanssa,
tytön istuessa ompelemassa tai liikkuessa huoneessa korjaamassa
illallisen tähteitä. Ja toisinaan hän oli havaitsevinaan, tuntien
samantapaisia tunteita kuin kehräävä kissa, että Meganin silmät —
nuo kasteenharmaat silmät — olivat kiintyneet häneen viipyvin,
lempein katsein, jotka omituisesti mairittelivat häntä.
"Vai niin, kuulin, että olitte kuun kanssa öisellä kävelyllä. Söittekö
illallisen jossakin?"