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EARLY MODERN CULTURAL STUDIES 1500 –1700
British Encounters
with Ottoman
Minorities in the Early
Seventeenth Century
‘Slaves’ of the Sultan
e va joh a n n a hol m be rg
Early Modern Cultural Studies 1500–1700
Series Editors
Jean Howard
Department of English
Columbia University
New York, NY, USA
Holly Dugan
English Department
George Washington University
Washington D.C., WA, USA
In the twenty first century, literary criticism, literary theory, historiogra-
phy and cultural studies have become intimately interwoven, and the for-
merly distinct fields of literature, society, history, and culture no longer
seem so discrete. The Early Modern Cultural Studies series encourages
scholarship that crosses boundaries between disciplines, time periods,
nations, and theoretical orientations. The series assumes that the early
modern period was marked by incipient processes of transculturation
brought about through exploration, trade, colonization, and the migra-
tion of texts and people. These phenomena set in motion the processes of
globalization and racialization that remain in force today. The purpose of
this series is to publish innovative scholarship that is attentive to the com-
plexity of this early modern world and bold in the methods it employs for
studying it.
British Encounters
with Ottoman
Minorities in the Early
Seventeenth Century
‘Slaves’ of the Sultan
Eva Johanna Holmberg
University of Helsinki
Helsinki, Finland
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2022
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electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
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The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
An early modern English traveller’s view of a Greek coloiero, one of the ‘slaves’ of
the sultan
Acknowledgements
My ‘difficult second album’ is finally here! This book has travelled with me
from Turku in Finland to London and New York, back to Helsinki, and
then finally to Brighton, where I am now reminiscing about its journey
and the people who have helped along the way, during its tentative early
steps after my PhD when the Lehman Brothers had just collapsed and on
its final legs during the seemingly endless Covid pandemic. For providing
the first mobility grant, a postdoctoral fellowship, and then a major 5-year
research grant that moved my interests towards new paths (which all sub-
stantially enriched this book) my first thank you goes to the Academy of
Finland. To Miri Rubin and Peter Burke: thank you for your help during
my first years as a newly minted PhD, and for helping to carve my own way
in the world. To Jyotsna Singh, Gerald MacLean, Nandini Das, Matthew
Dimmock, Andrew Hadfield, Claire Jowitt, and Dan Carey, thank you for
fun detours, sage advice, and vital support along the way. Thanks are also
due to Lars Folke Landgren, Marjo Kaartinen, Sami Pihlström, Sari
Kivistö, Niklas Jensen-Eriksen, and Anu Lahtinen, who provided support,
encouragement, and the freedom to think at the University of Helsinki,
Turku Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and Helsinki
Collegium for Advanced Studies. I am very pleased that the book has
found a home in the Early Modern Cultural Studies 1500–1700 series
edited by Jean Howard and Holly Dugan, and I want to thank my editors
Eileen Srebernik and Raghupathy Kalynaraman at Palgrave, as well as the
two anonymous reviewers for their helpful and encouraging comments. I
also want to thank the Folger Shakespeare Library, The Wellcome
Collection, and the British Museum for granting me the rights to publish
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
images in their collections, and Studies in Travel Writing and its editor
Tim Youngs for permission to publish a revised version of my article ‘In
the Company of Franks: British Identifications in the Ottoman Empire, c.
1600’ (2012) as Chap. 5 of this book. A special thank you goes to John
Gage for language editing an earlier version, and to Dr Anders Ingram, for
careful copyediting and preparing the index during a busy time, thus help-
ing this to become a much more polished book than its pandemic-ridden
author would have achieved alone.
Numerous colleagues and friends have read drafts, listened patiently to
rants, given advice, formed panels around the world, and supported and
cheered me along. Thank you to Laura Williamson Ambrose, Lubaaba al-
Azami, Anthony Bale, Caroline Bassett, Jim Bennett, Richard Blakemore,
Warren Boutcher, Wendy Bracewell, Anne Byrne, Rosi Carr, Nikki Clark,
Liesbeth Corens, Surekha Davies, Natalya Din-Kariuki, Hanna
Drummond, Minna Franck, John Gallagher, Elise Garritzen, Gábor
Gelléri, Peter Good, Laura Gowing, Jane Grogan, Kate Hodgkin,
Josephine Hoegaerts, Chloë Houston, Kat Hill, Michael Hunter, Anders
Ingram, Fanny Johansson-Stockford, Hanna Järvinen, Marjo Kaartinen,
Maijastina Kahlos, Samuli Kaislaniemi, Saara Kalajoki, Outi Kaltio, Sari
Katajala-Peltomaa, Sirpa Kelosto, Jesse Keskiaho, Johanna Kippo, Leila
Koivunen, Anna Koivusalo, Laura Kolbe, Anu Korhonen, Laura Kounine,
Jenni Kuuliala, Janne Lahti, Antti Lampinen, Mirkka Lappalainen, Hanna
Lepistö, Maarit Leskelä-Kärki, Tom Linkinen, Suzannah Lipscomb, Grey
Macartney (in memoriam), Iain MacDaniel, Angela McShane, Kirsi
Majantie, Charmian Mansell, Guido van Meersbergen, Heikki Mikkeli,
Emilie Murphy, Ladan Niayesh, Samu Niskanen, Sara Norja, Jo Paul,
Markku Peltonen, Chloe Porter, Anu Raunio, Tim Reinke-Williams, Katja
Ritari, Kirsty Rolfe, Martha Dana Rust, Päivi Räisänen-Schröder, Kirsi
Saarikangas, Aaro Sahari, Hannu Salmi, Stefan Schröder, Amrita Sen,
Edmond Smith, Adam Smyth, Alan Stewart, Paul Strohm, Laura Tarkka,
Eeva-Maija Viitanen, Maikki Viitikko, Anu Viljanen, Dan Vitkus, Brodie
Waddell, Mark Williams, Rachel Willie, and Soile Ylivuori. Thanks also to
my former and current academic homes and communities in Turku,
Helsinki, Sussex, and London: The School of History at Queen Mary
University of London, the members of Medieval and Early Modern
Orients, the council and members of the Hakluyt Society, the Institute of
Historical Research Society, Culture, and Belief, 1500–1800 Seminar,
numerous early modern #Twitterstorians, and especially the staff at the
British Library’s Rare Books and Music Reading Room, I could not have
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix
done this without you. This book is all the better for its many unexpected
encounters, movements, and changes of scenery.
Lastly, I want to acknowledge the constants: my family for always being
there, and Ned the rabbit for keeping me company (and nibbling on all
the books left lying around for too long). This book is dedicated to James
Chester, who I met just as I was about to publish my ‘first album’, and
who has patiently supported me and shared my mobile life ever since.
3 Eastern Christians 83
Bibliography201
Index223
xiii
List of Figures
xv
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Besides these Turkes, Moores, and Arabians (which are al Mahometans) and
Iewes (which are Talmudists) there are also sundry sorts of Christians in this
Countrey, which are of two sorts, either such as were borne, brought up,
and dwelled in the Countrey, or such as were borne in Christendome, and
only soiourne heere for a time to exercise merchandises. The first sort who
were borne in this heathen Countrey, and dwell there, are either Armenians,
Maronites, Iacobites, Georgians, Chelfalines, or Greekes; which are all
gouerned by their Patriarkes for Ecclesiasticall matters. But for ciuill gouer-
nement, both they and their Patriarkes are subiect to Turkish Lawes, yea
they are all slaves vnto the great Turk, whom they call their Grand Signior.1
1
William Biddulph, The Travels of Certaine Englishmen into Africa, Asia, Troy, Bythinia,
Thracia, and to the Blacke Sea (London: by Thomas Haueland, for W. Aspley, 1609), 75.
2
This study mostly interprets material published after the Union of the Crowns in 1603. I
will use ‘British’, ‘Britons’, and ‘Britain’ to refer collectively to travellers although they were
mostly English and only occasionally Scottish or Welsh. Otherwise, I will favour the termi-
nology used in the original sources, admitting that the political concept ‘Great Britain’ was
still contested in the seventeenth century, cf. Hugh Kearney, The British Isles 2nd ed.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2012), 1–11.
3
On the British in the Levant and Islamic world see Jerry Brotton, This Orient Isle.
Elizabethan England and the Islamic World (London: Allen Lane, 2016); Sarah Searight, The
British in the Middle East (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969); Despina Vlami, Trading
with the Ottomans (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016); Christine Laidlaw, The British in the Levant
(London: I.B. Tauris, 2010); James Mather, Pashas. Traders and Travellers in the Islamic
World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009). On the Levant Company
(itself an amalgamation of the earlier Turkey and Venice Companies in 1592) see Mortimer
Epstein, The Early History of the Levant Company Routledge Revivals (London: Routledge,
2015) and Alfred C. Wood, A History of the Levant Company (London: Frank Cass, 1964).
On English representations of Islam, see Samuel Cleggett Chew, The Crescent and the Rose.
1 BRITISH ENCOUNTERS WITH OTTOMAN MINORITIES IN THE EARLY… 3
Britons were becoming eager supplicants for lucrative trade deals and
political contacts with the Ottomans, this new relationship called for fol-
lowers, support, and more intelligence.4 All this activity helped to create a
demand back home for comprehensive and up-to-date vernacular infor-
mation about the Ottomans and all their subjects. To fulfil these needs,
Britons from a broad social spectrum and varied nationalities were not just
turning their gaze towards the Turks and Islam, but, during the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, began to fill numerous pages of their diaries,
letters, and other travelogues in which they described what they experi-
enced and everyone they encountered.
While this is not a study of ‘Englishness’ or ‘Britishness’, focusing
instead on their perceptions of foreign peoples, I will explore how ideas
and idealized imaginings about English/British national character struc-
tured these early encounters in Ottoman lands, shaping assumptions about
how subjects were to be treated in a multicultural and multireligious
empire. Despite English colonial presence in Ireland and early footholds in
the Americas there was not yet a British empire. Britons, however, often
seemed envious of the Turks for theirs, as has been shown by Gerald
MacLean.5 And even if these early travellers to the Ottoman lands were
perhaps not yet conscious of directly weaving the threads of the later
British Empire, they still form part of the longer story of trade and colo-
nialism. Before their own empire became a reality, these British authors
helped to make their readers more aware of the diversity of the world
around them, and often knowingly presented this diversity as an exotic
and confusing spectacle.6
Islam and England during the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937); Rhoads
Murphey, “Bigots or Informed Observers? A Periodization of (Pre-Colonial) English and
European Writing on The Middle East,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, 110:2
(1990): 291–303.
4
Daniel J. Vitkus, “Trafficking with the Turk: English Travelers in the Ottoman Empire
during the Early Seventeenth Century” in Travel Knowledge. European “Discoveries” in the
Early Modern Period, eds. Kamps, Ivo; Singh, Jyotsna G.. (Basingstoke & New York.
Palgrave, 2001), 35–52.
5
On the performance of ‘Englishness’ and ‘imperial envy’, see Gerald MacLean, Looking
East: English Writing and the Ottoman Empire before 1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave,
2007), 118.
6
For these developments during the seventeenth century, see L.H. Roper, Advancing
Empire. English Interests and Overseas Expansion, 1613–1688 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2017), 15–17; Alison Games, The Web of Empire. English Cosmopolitans in
an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008). For the often
4 E. J. HOLMBERG
British interest in the peoples of the Ottoman Empire had deep histori-
cal roots. The Ottoman Empire was fascinating to Europeans because of
its regions’ classical and biblical resonances, the remains of ancient civiliza-
tions, and long histories of trade and pilgrimage. The Mediterranean Sea
connected European Christians with the Ottoman Empire tangibly and
materially, not just conceptually and culturally. From the Ottoman con-
quest of Constantinople in 1453 Europeans, ranging from humanist
scholars to politicians and intelligencers, had been interested in the loyal-
ties, religious affiliations, and affinities of the people under Ottoman rule,
and in the nature of Ottoman rule and the Ottoman polity. For inhabit-
ants of the Ottoman-Habsburg border regions, the Ottomans were also
an existential threat and a cause for great concern.7
The Ottomans’ continuing encroachment on Europe and the impor-
tance of the empire’s trade attracted visitors, merchants, and scholars too,
impacting Renaissance Europe in many ways.8 This was reflected in a con-
sistent interest in the Old World over the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies; evident even in books treating the Americas. In France as well as
England, between 1480–1609 more travel books were published about
the Ottoman domains than about the Americas.9 This literary engagement
was complex and wide-ranging, and often crossed borders in translation.
ignored women travellers participating in such encounters, see Patricia Akhimie and
Bernadette Andrea, eds. Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the
Wider World (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2019).
7
For Renaissance humanist views and perceptions of the Ottomans in a wider European
context, see Margaret Meserve, Empires of Islam in Renaissance historical thought (Cambridge,
Mass.; London: Harvard University Press, 2008); Nancy Bisaha, Creating East and West.
Renaissance humanists and the Ottoman Turks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2004); Palmira Brummett, Mapping the Ottomans. Sovereignty, Territory, and Identity
in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Daniel
Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002). See also Jonathan Burton, Traffic and Turning. Islam and English Drama,
1579–1624 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005) and Jonathan Burton, “Emplotting
the Early Modern Mediterranean” in Remapping the Mediterranean World in Early Modern
English Writing, ed. Goran V. Stanivukovic (New York; Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2007), 21–40.
8
See Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and
West (London: Reaktion, 2000); Gerald Maclean (ed.) Re-Orienting the Renaissance.
Cultural Exchanges with the East (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
9
In France 180 new books on Asia and the Turks were published compared to some 40 on
the New World between 1480 and 1609. On this Europe-wide trend, see John Michael
Archer, Old Worlds. Egypt, Southwest Asia, India, and Russia in Early Modern English Writing
1 BRITISH ENCOUNTERS WITH OTTOMAN MINORITIES IN THE EARLY… 5
This book explores how Britons wrote about their encounters with the
non-Muslim peoples of the Ottoman Empire, who they conceived of as
slaves or living as if in slavery under the Turks. It is the first comprehensive
cultural historical account of how British travellers described the religious
and ethnic diversity of the subjects of the sultan. The descriptions of these
subjects, or as the British visitors often claimed, the ‘slaves’ of the Ottoman
sultan, open to view not only perspectives into how Britons saw the func-
tioning of the Ottoman Empire at a more microscopic level, but also on
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 1–2. On the national and ethnic origins of early
Levant travellers, see Stefanos Yerasimos, Les voyageurs dans l’Empire Ottoman, XIVe–XVIe
siècles: bibliografie, itinéraires et inventaire des lieux habités (Ankara: Société turque d’histoire,
1991), 9–13; Elisabetta Borromeo, Voyageurs occidentaux dans l’empire ottoman, 1600–1644
(Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2007); Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe. Book
1. The Visual Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 227.
10
Jerry Brotton, Trading Territories, Mapping the Early Modern World (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1997), 26.
6 E. J. HOLMBERG
11
On Ottoman categorizations of race, ethnicity, and religion, see Baki Tezcan, “Ethnicity,
Race, Religion and Social Class. Ottoman markers of difference,” in The Ottoman World. ed.
Christine Woodhead (London & New York: Routledge, 2012), 159–170; Suraiya Faroqhi,
Subjects of the Sultan. Culture and Daily Life in the Ottoman Empire (London & New York:
I.B. Tauris, 2005), 80–81.
12
See Daniel Vitkus, “Unkind dealings. English captivity narratives, commercial transfor-
mation, and the economy of unfree labor in the early modern period”, in Piracy and Captivity
in the Mediterranean, ed. Mario Klarer (London: Routledge, 2018).
13
The lived paths of the slaves and ‘Kuls’ of the sultan could be spectacular success stories.
See Tobias P. Graf, The Sultan’s Renegades. Christian-European Converts to Islam and the
Making of the Ottoman Elite, 1575–1610 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). On chat-
tel slavery in the galleys in the Mediterranean, see Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim
Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800
(Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 73–76.
14
See Bernard Heyberger, “Eastern Christians, Islam, and the West: A Connected
History.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 42:3 (2010): 475–78; Bernard
1 BRITISH ENCOUNTERS WITH OTTOMAN MINORITIES IN THE EARLY… 7
Ottoman religious minorities in the early modern period. Maurits van den
Boogert describes it as an Ottoman system for dealing with the empire’s
non-Muslim subjects and ‘administrative and fiscal communities of
Christians and Jews’. 21 In contrast, contemporary British observers, such
as Biddulph whom I quoted in the beginning, understood that non-
Muslim peoples were subject to the Turks, but they conceptualized this
relationship as tributary slavery. By conceptualizing non-Muslim subjects
of the Ottomans in this way, travellers could construct ideals of civility,
unity, subjecthood, and the steadfastness and purity of their beliefs, and
even use these minorities as a foil through which to criticize faults
back home.22
In their writings, travellers often wondered about the power and influ-
ence that Ottoman rule had over their various subject peoples, and whether
these people could be trusted as friends in religion or partners in trade.
These Jews, Greeks, Armenians, Copts, Nestorians, and Maronites occupy
the pages of British travel accounts in many contexts. British travellers also
described meeting Kurds and Arabs, as well as groups that were harder to
categorize according to their religious beliefs, like the Roma, or as the
British called them, ‘Zinganaes’ or ‘Gypsies’.23 They are not left out of the
story but will crop up less frequently. We will also encounter the itinerant
‘Chelfalines’, mentioned above by Biddulph, even if technically as itiner-
ant long-distance traders they were not subjects of the Ottoman sultan.
These Chelfalines were itinerant Armenians living in a trading diaspora,
who had been settled from Julfa into Persia and the city of New Julfa
(‘Chelfa’) by Shah Abbas of Persia in the early seventeenth century, and
21
Maurits van den Boogert, “Millets: Past and Present”, in Religious Minorities in the
Middle East. eds. Anne Sofie Roald and Anh Nga Longva (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 25–45;
Benjamin Braude “Foundation myths of the millet system”, in Christians and Jews in the
Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society, vol. I: The central lands, eds. Benjamin
Braude and Bernard Lewis (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1982), 69–88. For a
critique of Lewis, see Barkey, Empire of Difference, 115–119. See also Daniel Goffman,
“Ottoman Millets in the Early Seventeenth Century”, New Perspectives on Turkey 11 (1997):
135–158; Michael M.O.H. Ursinus, “Millet”, Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd ed. Brill, accessed
14 September 2021, https://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_COM_0741; Ayse Ozil,
Orthodox Christians in the Late Ottoman Empire (New York: Routledge, 2013).
22
Similar binary oppositions are still with us today. See Shirin Khanmohamadi, In Light of
Another’s Word: European Ethnography in the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages Series.
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 29.
23
In this book I will not use ethnic slurs unless they are specifically quoted in the texts.
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äänellä harvinaisesta tapahtumasta, joka oli saanut heidät liikkeelle
näin keskellä yötä.
— Eteenpäin!
Mutta sekään ei ollut mikään helppo tehtävä, sillä ovi oli tehty
paksuista tammilankuista ja nauloitettu lujasti isoilla nauloilla, joihin
kirveet ja tapparat eivät pystyneet. Vahvimmat miehet hyökkäsivät
kerran toisensa jälkeen ovea vastaan, mutta turhaan. Ovi oli
sisältäpäin varustettu rautaisilla puomeilla, ja sitäpaitsi oli sitä
vahvistettu tikapuilla. Butrymit kaikesta huolimatta vimmoissaan yhä
hakkasivat sitä. Domaszewiczit ja Gosciewiczit olivat hyökänneet
keittiön ovelle.
— Kunniasanani!…
— Vannokoot sitten!
— Mahdotonta!
— Minä.
— Oletteko varma?
— Näkyy, että ette ole ollut Orszassa, koska sitä epäilette… Minä
en ole ainoastaan varma, vaan minä säälin teitä, sillä olen kuullut
kehuttavan teitä urhoolliseksi soturiksi. Sentähden sanon nyt
viimeisen kerran: jättäkää minut rauhaan! Me emme tunne
toisiamme, miksi siis menisimme toistemme tielle? Miksi olette
hyökänneet minun kimppuuni?… Neiti Billewicz kuuluu minulle yksin
testamentinkin mukaan, niinkuin tämä maatilakin, ja Jumala voi
todistaa, että olen ottamassa vain omaani… Totta on, että minä
kaadoin Wolmontowiczen aateliset, mutta kuka sai ensinnä kärsiä
vääryyttä? Olivatko upseerini ilkivaltaisia vai ei, siitä nyt viis, pääasia
on, että he eivät tehneet kenellekään pahaa, ja kuitenkin tapettiin
heidät kuin koirat siksi, että he tahtoivat vain tanssia tyttöjen kanssa
kapakassa. Veri verestä! Sitten tapettiin myöskin minun sotilaani.
Vannon kautta Kristuksen haavojen, etten tullut tänne missään
pahassa tarkoituksessa, ja kuinka otettiin minut täällä vastaan?…
Paha maksettakoon pahalla! Olen kuitenkin valmis suorittamaan
vahingonkorvausta… hyvän naapurin tavoin. Parempi on, että…
— Yhtä kaikki.
107
— Ottakaa ylös!
Ensin näytti siltä, kuin Kmicic olisi syössyt hänen kimppuunsa
aseettomana. Hän seisoi jo valmiina hyökkäämään, ja herra
Wolodyjowski odotti nostettuaan miekan kahvan rintaansa vastaan ja
suunnattuaan miekan terän vastustajaansa. Mutta Kmicic sieppasi
miekkansa maasta ja karkasi peloittavaa miekkailijaa kohti.
Ritari toisti:
— Malttakaa mielenne, armollinen neiti. Jumala on nähnyt
viattomuutenne. Te olette vapaa ja voitte palata Wodoktyyn.
— Kuka te olette?
— Elääkö hän?
— Elää.