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The Ottomans Part-3
simultaneously admiring and employing Byzantine, Bulgarian, Serb, west
European, and other Christians as soldiers, artists, and technicians. For
Europeans, including their descendants in the United States and elsewhere, the Ottomans were a vital means by which European culture defined itself as such.
Sometimes the Ottoman served as a model for qualities the Europeans wished to possess. Thus Machiavelli and later European political thinkers such as Bodin and Montesquieu praised the
Ottoman military and administrators’ incorruptibility, discipline, and
obedience in order to chastise Europeans.
All of them, different political thinkers in different eras, wrote about the need for effective administrators and an effective state. In an age when direct criticism of a king might
be dangerous, they used the example of the Ottomans to inspire European
monarchs and their soldiers and statesmen to better behavior.
These are the qualities, such writers were saying, which we in the West should possess. Further, as Europeans sought to define themselves, they did so in
part by describing what they were not. Many European writers made the
Ottomans the repository of evil; they identified the characteristics which
they wished to have by attributing the opposite to their enemy.
Thus, cruelty vs humaneness, barbarism vs civilization, infidels vs true believers. You could know who you were by defining who and what you were not. (In the places that we now know as England, France, and Germany, authors
had assigned this role of “other” to the Muslims of Arab lands during the
earliest days of Islam, back in the seventh century CE).
In the imagination of these writers and their readers whose identity as Europeans was still
in the making, the Ottomans (them) were described as possessing qualities which civilized persons (we) did/could not possess. In the world of the European mind, the Ottomans alternately were terrible, savage, and
“unspeakable” and at the same time sex-crazed, harem-driven, and debauched. Even in the nineteenth century, European imaginings marked the Ottoman East as the degenerate site of pleasures supposedly absent
or forbidden in the civilized and vigorous West, where Europeans by contrast allegedly were restrained, sober, just, sexually controlled, moderate, and rational.
In a truly intimate way the Ottomans became part and parcel of
everyday European life, usually in ways that today are overlooked or forgotten. For example, most west Europeans or Americans surely would fail to acknowledge their debt to the Ottomans for the coffee and tulips
they enjoy or the smallpox inoculations that protect their lives. But indeed, these are Ottoman contributions, arriving in western Europe between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries.
From early times the Ottoman Empire has been intertwined in the daily lives, religion, and politics of what became Europe. Usually, as a rule of thumb, the extent of 8 The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922 the intertwining is in inverse correlation to the distance.
Hence, probably, the Ottoman legacy is greater in present day Austria than in Denmark.
And yet, everywhere, including the United States where so many western European values have been maintained, the Ottoman presence is felt.
The Ottoman Empire played an important role in the European wars
of religion, serving a didactic function. During the Reformation era, the
Ottomans were the veritable scourge of God on earth for many of the contesting parties.
Some radical reformers, called Anabaptists, held that the
Ottomans were God’s sign, about to conquer the world. The Anti-Christ
then would come; the Elect would destroy the godless and bring about
the Second Coming of Christ.
Martin Luther, for his part, wrote that the Ottomans were God’s punishment for a corrupt papacy, an instrument of God’s anger. Catholics, from their side, considered these “Turks” divine
punishment for allowing Luther and his followers to flourish.
The Ottomans similarly are embedded in European popular culture.
In the seventeenth century, French imaginative literature frequently focused
on the sultans, for example in the story of Sultan Bayezit I (1389–1402)
in his cage and his captor, Timur (Tamerlane), which was published in
1648. Most stories, however, related the cruelty of these “Turks,” such as
that of Sultan S ¨uleyman the Magnificent towards his favorite, the Grand
Vizier Ibrahim.
Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror, who actually was a cosmopolitan, sophisticated, multilingual Renaissance prince, instead was portrayed as a cruel and brutal tyrant in a 1612 French play that depicted his mother drinking the blood of a victim. Other, equally bizarre and inaccurate tales related stories of Ottoman soldiers making sacrifices
to the Roman god of war, Mars. The receding of the Ottoman threat after the 1683 failure before Vienna, however, modified the image of the Ottomans.
