The Background War of the Early Modern Era: Christian and Muslim States in Contest for Dominion, Trade, and Cultural Preeminence

James D. Tracy

One reason history always has to be rewritten is that histori­ans start from preoccupations of their own moment in time. In our moment of time bookstores receive a steady stream of studies on Islamic history. As a Europeanist, I admire colleagues who work in those difficult languages beyond my ken -- Arabic, Turkish, and Persian. Yet I also have reservations about one of the main trends in current research on the early modern era. While an important new overview of Europe’s interactions with the Islamic world in this period sees a gradual repudiation “of the entire conception of a warlike relationship between Christendom and the Ottoman empire,”¹ mono­graphic studies tend to emphasize the peaceful contacts that brought Christians and Muslims together,² or the propagandistic hostile images of “the other” that helped keep them apart.³ Needless to say, no one of any sense wants to see in our times a “clash of civilizations” between the Islamic world and the West.⁴ But by playing down the reality of conflicts in the past we may create the false impression that achiev­ing peaceful coexistence in today’s world is a simple matter of mutual good will. How can we understand contemporary Muslim fears about the dominance of the infidel West if we fail to appreciate how much a Christian West once feared the dominance of infidel Muslims?

From about 1500, three Islamic empires bestrode the Eurasian con­tinent: the Ottomans; the Safavid empire of Persia, founded in 1501 by a dynasty of Shiʻite shahs; and the Mughal empire in India, starting from Babur’s conquest of Delhi in 1526. Thriving ports in these realms passed on to the West only a small fraction of the silks and spices of the East. Their rich agricultural lands supported immense armies, steeled by the discipline of slave-soldiers, yet flexible in adopting new weaponry developed in the West, like musketry and field artillery.⁵ Of this layered Islamic power, stretching deep into Asia, the Ottomans were the spearhead of advance into infidel Europe. At first just one of many Turkish dynasties fighting for control of western Anatolia, the Ottomans gained a foothold on the European side of the Bosporus in the 1350s, and most of Serbia fell into their hands at the battle of Kos­sovo Pole in 1388. Though Belgrade resisted two sieges, in 1455 and 1464, Sultan Mehmet II realized a millennial Islamic dream in 1453 by conquering “Rome,” that is, Constantinople. To challenge Venice’s hegemony in the eastern Mediterranean, Sultan Bayazit II (1481-1512) built a mighty war fleet.⁶ By defeating the new Shah of lran (1514), Sul­tan Selim I (1512-1520) extended his boundaries to the limits of the modern Turkish Republic. By defeating the Mamluks, a rival Muslim empire based in Cairo (1517), he became ruler of Syria, Lebanon, Pal­estine, Egypt, and parts of Arabia, including the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Selim’s son, Suleiman the Lawgiver (1520-1566), sub­dued Belgrade in 1521, and the next year his war galleys drove the Knights Hospitaller of St. John from their island fortress of Rhodes, long a base for corsair raids in the crusading tradition. In 1526, the sultan and his huge army overwhelmed the forces of Hungary, leav­ing King Louis II Jagellio and some 15,000 of his men dead on the Hungarian plain.⁷ Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, Emperor Charles V’s brother (1503-1564), was left to claim what he could of the old kingdom of Hungary, not including Transylvania, a province hence­forth ruled by Magyar princes who paid tribute to the Sublime Porte.⁸ In 1534, Suleiman extended his rule in North Africa by co-opting a North African corsair chief, Kheireddin Barbarossa, as his Admiral of the Sea; meanwhile, in a lightning strike from Mosul, he subdued Baghdad. Suleiman thus bequeathed to his heirs a dominion that ran from Algiers to the Persian Gulf, and from the Red Sea to the northern shore of the Black Sea.⁹

Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor (1519-1556) and king of Cas­tile and Aragon, presented himself as Christendom’s champion. But if Castile, his richest realm, had annual revenues of about 2,500,000 Spanish ducats,¹⁰ the receipts of Sultan Suleiman’s state treasury were credibly estimated at about 7,000,000 Venetian ducats,¹¹ not counting land-taxes that supported  tens of thousands of cavalry,¹² or the jew­els and gold bars accumulated over generations in the sultan’s private treasury.¹³ The tercios of Italy -- some 5,000 to 6,000 Spanish and Ital­ian veterans, normally on garrison duty in Milan and Naples -- gave Charles a formidable strike force, so long as he kept up their wages.¹⁴ Suleiman had 87,000 regulars who were almost always paid punctually, four times a year,¹⁵ including the Janissaries, a corps of slave infantry rarely bested by infidels.¹⁶

Yet by about 1700, the world had a very different look. When Poland’s King Jan Sobieski broke up the second and last Ottoman siege of Vienna (1683), European counter-attacks followed: armies of the Holy Roman Empire advanced into Hungary and Transylvania; Sobieski reclaimed formerly Polish lands along the lower Dniester; and Venice planted the standard of St. Mark in southern Greece and the Aegean. Some of these gains were rolled back, but Hungary and Tran­sylvania were lost to the Ottomans for good.¹⁷ This military advance by states facing the Ottoman Empire was paralleled by a growth in the mercantile power of European states facing the Atlantic. By about 1700, England and the Dutch Republic were the dominant trading nations throughout the Ottoman lands,¹⁸ even as the merchant ships from the East India Companies of these same two nations, bristling with guns, enforced their trading privileges by blockading Surat, the Mughal Empire’s greatest entrepot.¹⁹ One thus sees an overall shift in the balance of power, from the Muslim East to the Christian West.

How does one explain a change of this magnitude? Europeanists have often argued, in the language of business plans, that occiden­tal institutions had some competitive advantage, whether in military technology,²⁰ or the social organization of warfare,²¹ or a system of property rights guaranteed by law,²² or the economic rationality of state-chartered corporations, like the East India Companies.²³ Otto­manists, while rejecting the idea of a general “decline” in the empire’s capacity to maintain itself,²⁴ have pointed to reasons for “decadence” or “destabilization” in particular spheres, such as Sultan Suleiman’s decision to favor the succession of an incompetent younger son (the child of his beloved wife),²⁵ or the debasement of the currency under Sultan Murad III (1585/1586),²⁶ or the decision, from the 1590s, that future sultans should be reared in the seraglio, with no experience of the world outside.²⁷ Institutions do matter in history, and so do the decisions and the personalities of individual rulers. But arguments of this kind entail a certain determinism, that is, a tendency to think that precedents once established have an enduring power either to stifle normal human creativity, or to guard against the consequences of nor­mal human incompetence. In fact, if Asian or Islamic economic insti­tutions were inferior, why did Europe’s chartered companies compete successfully against Indian merchants only in those trades where their naval power was of some use?²⁸ If Asian or Islamic military institu­tions were inferior, how was Kara Mustafa, the dynamic grand vizier of an indolent sultan, able as late as 1683 to bring the Ottoman army within sight of a great victory at Vienna?²⁹ If Asian or Islamic politi­cal institutions were inferior, why did French and British observers see in the Indo-Afghan empire of Nadir Shah Afshar (1741-1745) an achievement others might emulate?³⁰ If we need analogies for compe­tition among states in the past, let us think not in terms of a business plan, but a retail season: only at the end of the season can one dis­cern the circumstances that prove decisive, but are seldom foreseen by any business plan. In other words, instead of a sociological history that looks in the past for institutional forms that can be used to pre­dict the future, we need, dare I say, a historical history, one that takes the kaleidoscopic shifting of events on its own terms, looking not for explanations of human behavior in general, but for an understanding of outcomes specific to the past.

In working toward a descriptive history of this kind, one must start with the fact that Europe’s Christian states pursued distinct and often conflicting strategies in their dealings with the Ottomans. At a mini­mum, one may speak of a “Habsburg” pattern (Spanish or Austrian), with endemic border fighting punctuated by major wars;³¹ a “French” pattern, involving an alliance with the Porte that sometimes extended to military cooperation against the Habsburgs;³² a “Venetian” pattern, in which the effects of constant border fighting and occasional major wars were tempered by fear of provoking a powerful neighbor, and by deep involvement in the Levant trade;³³ and finally an “English”³⁴ or “Dutch”³⁵ pattern, featuring trade and friendly relations with the Ottomans, but also a commercial strategy that undermined the trade not only of European rivals but of the Ottomans themselves. To get a sense of the larger picture, I use the correspondence of ambassadors from rival European states at the Sublime Porte.³⁶ This essay offers a preliminary overview. What I see is a pattern of conflict between two worlds, each of which shared a religious identity -- in other words, a conflict of civilizations. Yet this conflict of civilizations was only occa­sionally at the forefront of attention; more often, statesmen, mer­chants, and religious thinkers, European and Ottoman alike, were preoccupied by enemies or rivals of their own faith. Thus the wider confrontation between Christendom and Islamdom is best described as a background war, an ongoing conflict that usually came to the fore only when others were in abeyance. I will briefly describe four dimen­sions of this background war: cross-border raiding, holy war, com­mercial rivalry, and a contest for cultural preeminence.

I. ENDEMIC WARFARE: BORDER RAIDERS AND CORSAIRS

Border zones between hostile states were inherently dangerous. The fundamental problem was that warfare was on both sides a business proposition: commanders kept their men contented with booty.³⁷ As one Habsburg diplomat with experience of the Hungarian frontier put it, those responsible for raids back and forth across the border were men who “obey neither the sultan nor the king of the Romans,³⁸ but give themselves license to do as they please.”³⁹ A further problem was that frontier-dwellers always saw themselves as innocent victims of unpro­voked aggression,⁴⁰ while holding in high regard those brave captains who from time to time exacted from the vile infidel a just retribution.⁴¹ In the 1580s, there was a sancak or district-governor in Ottoman Dal­matia whom Venetians accused of personally organizing raids into their territory with as many as 300 armed men. In response, Ottoman officials gathered testimony of a previous raid by 500 armed Venetian subjects; these reports, according to Venice’s bailo (ambassador) in Constantinople, were surely a fabrication.⁴² Meanwhile, far to the east in Podolia, along the lower Dniester, raids by the Tatars of Crimea, an Ottoman vassal state, were repaid with interest by the Zaporizhian Cos­sacks, Ruthenian (Ukrainian) in language and Orthodox in religion, but subjects of Poland-Lithuania.⁴³ Far to the west, Habsburg Spain’s Moriscos, expelled in 1609, helped found a new corsairing base at Salé on Morocco’s Atlantic coast.⁴⁴ All along the border between Christen­dom and Islamdom one finds populations whose way of life was shaped by raiding.

The border zone where “the two competing military machines were at their most extensive” was in Hungary. Here, the Ottoman thrust cre­ated a large semi-circular salient, governed for the sultan by the pasha of Buda,⁴⁵ whose border with surrounding Habsburg lands extended for hundreds of kilometers (Ferdinand and his captains held western Croatia, western and northern Hungary, and, in the east, the valley of the Tisza river, dividing Transylvania from Ottoman Hungary). By the middle of the sixteenth century, some 17,000 Habsburg troops, divided among 120 border fortresses, faced off against 30,000 Ottoman regu­lars, plus another 10,000 garrison soldiers.⁴⁶ In Croatia (a province of Hungary), people driven out by Ottoman raids gathered in the small, inaccessible mountain town of Senj; from the 1530s, these “Uskoks” (from a Croatian word meaning “to jump in”) supported themselves by plunder in Ottoman lands.⁴⁷ The Hayduks -- Calvinist peasants who had also been dispossessed by the Ottoman advance -- evolved into a disciplined force whose fighting qualities were much appreciated by Habsburg captains (except when Ferdinand wanted to enforce a truce with the Ottomans).⁴⁸

Not surprisingly, there was no end to hostile incursions from both sides. In 1545, notwithstanding a temporary truce granted by the pasha of Buda, the duchy of Carniola⁴⁹ was assaulted by a force said to consist of 6,000 cavalry, authorized by the sancak of Bosnia; “seventeen vil­lages were devastated and put to flames,” and “hundreds of souls car­ried off into captivity,” with their flocks and other belongings.⁵⁰ On the other hand, Habsburg officials professed to have no control over Count Nikola Zrinski, the ban of Habsburg Croatia, and his followers: “these men say openly they are not subject to your majesty [Ferdinand], or to the emperor of the Turks; their ancestors lived from banditry, and they intend  to pass this manner of life on to their heirs.”⁵¹ The Ottomans had the better of things -- the pashalik of Buda continued  to expand its borders, e.g., after Ferdinand failed in an effort to gain possession of Transylvania (1552). But in the correspondence between the court in Vienna and its envoys at the Porte one finds not just repeated lists of fortress towns wrongfully taken by the Turks,⁵² but also transla­tions of complaints from the pasha about the lawless incursions by Habsburg castellans, including one who had his men dress in Turkish garb.⁵³ In 1547, the two sides signed an eight-year truce. Oghier Ghislain de Busbecq, the ambassador who would subsequently publish a much­-read account of the Ottoman realm, went to the Porte in 1555 and finally brought back a renewal of the truce in 1562.⁵⁴ Yet real peace was an illu­sion. Geza Palffy characterizes the period between 1568 and 1591 as “the era of small war [Kleinkrieg].” In 1576 alone, Habsburg officials counted some fifty Ottoman incursions in Hungary; but rather than measuring his army against that of the sultan, Emperor Rudolph II (r. 1576-1609) chose to open discussions for another renewal of the truce.⁵⁵

The sea lanes lying between Christian and Muslim powers were no safer. Uskoks and Cossacks were especially known as raiders on the sea, using small, swift barks that could outrun Venetian galleys in the Adriatic, or Ottoman galleys in the Black Sea.⁵⁶ For govern­ments of this era, piracy was evil only up to a point. While corsairs who raided one’s own merchants or maritime villages were heinous criminals, the daring mariners who gave infidel dogs a taste of their own medicine were heroes of the nation and defenders of the faith. The Uskoks, though Habsburg subjects, enjoyed wide support in Venetian Dalmatia, so long as they refrained from attacking fellow Christians. Similarly, in the harbors of Ottoman Greece, corsairs who carried on the war against the infidel were warmly received by Turkish officials, despite the sultan’s commands against piracy.⁵⁷ In the 1570s, Francesco de Medici, grand duke of Tuscany (1574-1587), wanted Florence’s mer­chants to have the same advantages as other nations trading in the Ottoman empire. Yet he also had a duty to the military order founded by his father, the Knights of St. Stephen,⁵⁸ whose four war galleys often went corsairing with those of the Knights of St. John, now based on Malta. Thus the Capitulations of 1578 provided that Florentine mer­chants would not be molested because of harm done by the galleys of St. Stephen, so long as the grand duke armed no other vessels against the sultan.⁵⁹ One may assume that the reason Ottoman officials were so accommodating was that they understood the grand duke’s dilem­ma.⁶⁰ The men identified as pirates by European envoys often were Ottoman squadron commanders; they made sure the sultan’s officials had a share in the profits of their private sailing ventures.⁶¹

These local battles on land and sea fitted into a bigger picture by giving the self-professed standard-bearers of Christendom and Islam­dom -- Habsburg Spain and the Ottoman Empire -- opportunities to harass the infidel without having to go to war. The reason that Sultan Suleiman extended his protection to Kheireddin’s Barbary corsairs was to encourage raids from Algiers and Tunis, and keep Charles V’s galleys too busy in home waters to go adventuring into the eastern Mediterranean.⁶² In the 1620s, Spain subsidized Poland’s Cossacks, so as to keep busy in the Black Sea Turkish galleys that might other­wise descend on the coast of Spanish Naples.⁶³ Finally, if statesmen on either side wanted a full-scale war, incessant border raids and corsair plundering meant that there were always fresh atrocities to provide a plausible pretext. In Hungary, the era of “small war” (1568-1591) gave way to the Long Turkish War of 1591-1606.

II. HOLY WAR IN THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES

Christian and Muslim versions of the idea of holy war emerged simultaneously. The Quranic idea of warring on the path of God -- often called the lesser jihad -- evolved amid struggles between the Prophet’s men and their Meccan kinfolk, after the hijra to Medina (622).⁶⁴ Mean­while, Emperor Heraclius, known to later Christian warriors in the East as “the First Crusader,” made his campaigns against Sassanian Persia (622-628) a holy war against infidel fire-worshippers who had stolen the True Cross from Jerusalem.⁶⁵

But the question is whether these ideas from the past were still per­tinent to a sixteenth-century world whose hard-headed statesmen were mainly concerned about enemies closer to home, among their co-re­ligionists. The Porte looked anxiously toward eastern Anatolia, where Shiʻite Islam was deeply rooted, and where Iran’s Safavid dynasty had much support among Turkoman warrior clans. This “threat to the very foundations of the Ottoman Empire”⁶⁶ explains the campaigns against “heretic” Persia by Selim I (1513/1514) and Suleiman the Law­giver (1533-1536, 1548-1552).⁶⁷ When high officials told French envoys seeking a campaign against the Habsburgs that Persia was a more important problem,⁶⁸ they were not just making excuses. In 1555, the shah’s ambassador brought a richly embellished Koran, asking to be shown the verses that proved that Shiʻite worship contravened the laws of the Prophet. Sultan Suleiman would not give heretics the courtesy of a debate. Instead, he had the Chief Mufti issue a fetwa authorizing Muslim warriors to take slaves in the lands of heretic Shiʻites, no less than in the lands of infidel Christians.⁶⁹ If it took two months for an Ottoman army marching from Istanbul to reach Habsburg Austria, the Persian frontier was even farther from the capital, roughly a four month march.⁷⁰ Nonetheless, while large Ottoman armies campaigned in Hungary or Austria during twenty-one years between 1520 and 1640,⁷¹ during the same period Ottoman armies were either marching toward Persia or engaged in active fighting for thirty-six campaigning seasons.⁷²

As for Europe, most wars from about 1500 to about 1650 had to do at least in part with rivalry between the Habsburg dynasty and its many foes. Charles V’s direct descendants controlled Spain and its overseas empire, plus the Low Countries (until the revolt that began in 1568), much of Italy, and, from 1580 to 1640, Portugal and its overseas empire. Their Austrian cousins, the Holy Roman emperors, controlled Austria, Bohemia, and parts of Hungary. French dip­lomats saw Charles V and his successors as aspiring to a “monarchy” over all of Europe, if not the whole world.⁷³ France thus maintained a long-term alliance with the Porte. Venice, as the major independent power in a peninsula where Spain and her clients held sway, regarded the Habsburgs with a profound suspicion that was repaid in full from Madrid. In 1571, just days before the battle at Lepanto, mutual recrim­inations between Spanish and Venetian commanders almost erupted into open fighting.⁷⁴ Moreover, since Habsburg Spain championed the Catholic Counter-Reformation, Protestant states like England and the new Dutch Republic made common cause with Catholic foes of the Habsburgs, as during the Revolt of the Netherlands (1568-1648), and the Thirty Years’ War in Germany (1618-1648).

Are we to conclude, then, that a medieval era of holy war had given way to a modern and secular world, whose only law was reason of state? Not quite. One problem with textbook formulations of this kind is that the Middle Ages were not so simple. Most wars fought by medieval European states also sprang from rivalries close to home -- France vs. England, Castile vs. Aragon, or Venice vs. Genoa; one might describe the Crusades⁷⁵ as the background war of the medieval era. Moreover, Crusades in the formal sense -- wars against the infidel proclaimed by the popes -- did not end with the fall of Acre in 1291. Some later campaigns ended in disaster, like the rout at Nicopolis in modern Bulgaria (1396), but others, like the defense of Belgrade in 1455, retarded the Ottoman advance. Between the relief of Smyrna (1344) and the great victory of Venetian and Spanish galleys at Lepanto (1571), there were thirteen latter-day crusades.⁷⁶

Emperor Charles V took little part in the struggle against Ottoman power, until his alliance with Andrea Doria, the Genoese admiral, gave him a capacity to project naval power into the eastern Mediterranean.⁷⁷ The great age of Mediterranean naval warfare began with Kheireddin’s conquest of Tunis for Sultan Suleiman (1534), and ended not with the great Christian victory at Lepanto in 1571,⁷⁸ but with the Ottoman reconquest of Tunis from Spain in 1574. On the Spanish side, naval commanders of this period functioned as independent contractors, hiring oarsmen and soldiers for their galleys, and keeping the men content with their own credit whenever royal payment orders were slow in coming.⁷⁹ By contrast, when war galleys were to be fitted out at the Ottoman arsenal in Pera, oarsmen were found by decreeing an avariz, an extraordinary provisioning tax that was never to be levied in successive years in the same province.⁸⁰ Venetian observers thought this system allowed the Turks to arm war fleets as often as they liked, and “at little cost.”⁸¹ Indeed, in the forty years between 1534 and 1574, the Ottomans had fleets of between 100 and 300 war galleys at sea during nineteen sailing seasons.⁸² But neither the Ottoman Empire nor Spain could continue to sustain Mediterranean naval warfare at this level of intensity. In Anatolia, Ottoman officials had trouble getting localities to meet their quotas of oarsmen, and the cash they sent instead was not enough to attract volunteers for the back-breaking and dangerous work of rowing a war galley.⁸³ By the turn of the seventeenth century, the galleys that could be manned and put to sea were often needed in the Black Sea, either to ferry supplies to armies on the march to Persia, or to combat Cossack raiding, a threat to the grain supply of the capital.⁸⁴ Between the 1570s and the early seventeenth century, Spain’s galley fleet shrank from an average of 116 vessels to an average of 68; the Atlantic fleet, challenged first by the Dutch and the English, drew off more and more of the kingdom’s resources. With both empires having new priorities, Spain and the Ottomans concluded the first of many truces in 1578, thus diminishing their Mediterranean commitments.⁸⁵ Partly in consequence of this partial withdrawal of the great powers, from about 1580, Mediterranean corsairing degenerated into “a systematic plunder transcending religious barriers.”⁸⁶ No one could tell any more who was or was not a corsair: mariners from Marseilles dressed as Knights of Malta to go corsairing, and Turkish pirates hired English galleons to “prey on the nation of merchants.”⁸⁷

Yet the disengagement of the great powers from Mediterranean warfare did not mean an end to major fighting across the religious frontier. In fact, the most protracted struggles between Ottoman and Christian armies came after Lepanto, not before. In the Long War of 1591-1606,⁸⁸ Ottoman and Austrian forces fought to a standstill. In 1645, the Turks invaded Venetian Crete, quickly capturing all but the great fortress of Candia; they took Candia, too, but only after a siege that lasted twenty-four years.⁸⁹ Finally, in 1683, Kara Mustafa’s march up the Danube was ardently promoted by a renowned court preacher, Sheikh Mehmet Vani Effendi, even as Marco d’Aviano, a fiery Capuchin friar, traveled Europe’s roads like the preachers of old, rousing Christendom’s fighting men to take up arms for the faith. When Jan Sobieski charged down from the Vienna Woods to break up the siege, he understood himself as a crusader.⁹⁰

More so than the Venetian-Spanish victory at Lepanto in 1571, Sobieski’s charge may be reckoned a turning point in Europe’s long struggle with the Turks. But, without minimizing the importance of military outcomes, scholars interested in weighing the relative balance of power tend to give particular attention to the phenomenon of attrition, the gradual wearing-down of a state’s capacity for making war. In Spain, the price of nearly continuous warfare during the sixteenth century was first a devolution of the crown’s fiscal resources into the hands of aristocrats and entrepreneurs, and second, bankruptcy for some of the Genoese firms that had financed the king’s wars. Spain fought on into the seventeenth century only because the Cortes of Castile was prevailed upon to vote new taxes managed by the deputies, and new bankers were found to float even larger loans.⁹¹ On the Ottoman side, by contrast, the state treasury contained riches beyond the imagining of any European ruler.⁹² One Venetian bailo judged, not unreasonably, that the Grand Turk had enough treasure on hand to fight wars “for thirty years.”⁹³ But not even this treasury could sustain the series of major campaigns that Ottoman armies fought against the Persians (1578-1598), then against the Austrians (1591 -1606), and against the Persians once more (1624-1639). To make matters worse, the so-called Çelali revolts that broke out in 1596 and lasted for a decade impeded collection of the land tax that supported the regular cavalry, at least in Anatolia.⁹⁴ Still, officials at the Porte put the budget on a new footing by converting the revenue allotments formerly held by military men to tax farms, thus enabling the sultan’s armies to fight on into the seventeenth century.⁹⁵

This was why the claims of European diplomats about an imminent collapse of the Grand Turk’s empire must be put down to wishful thinking, as will be noted below. Yet I wonder if they might not have been right on one point. In Europe, governments had long been accustomed to fighting their wars on credit, placing future revenues in the hands of lenders.⁹⁶ Since no sovereign prince could be constrained to keep promises to creditors, prospective lenders often demanded supplementary assurances from intermediary bodies acting on the crown’s behalf, like town councils, or provincial parliaments, or corporations of crown officials.⁹⁷ By the latter decades of the sixteenth century, the Ottoman government, too, had to start borrowing against future revenues; there are references in the secondary literature to forced loans or other credits provided by merchants and officials,⁹⁸ and the sultans also made payments to the public treasury from their private treasury, classified as loans, but evidently not repaid.⁹⁹ But French and Venetian diplomats reported that officials acting for the Ottoman state treasury could not find lenders in local capital markets.¹⁰⁰ This was not because the sultan was less trustworthy as a borrower than any other ruler of the age; lenders everywhere knew better than to put their trust in a piece of paper signed by the sovereign. The point is that the Ottoman state seems not to have had the kind of quasi-autonomous intermediary bodies that could (as in Europe) calm the fears of prospective lenders by interposing their own credit. This apparent distinction between east and west is worth pondering, not merely in its own terms, but also because it brings out the close connection between a state’s war-making capacity and its capacity to draw on the wealth of its subjects.

III. COMMERCIAL RIVALRY

According to a noted historian of world trade, the idea that the interests of merchants and states could be ‘fused together’ began with the rivalry between Genoa and Venice during the medieval centuries.¹⁰¹ Each city, with a network of armed settlements in the east, sought to control the sea lanes along which merchants brought luxury goods from Europe, like soap and high-grade woolens, in exchange for silk, spices, and grain. For the best families of both cities, a mercantile apprenticeship in the east was often the first stage of a long and honorable career.¹⁰² But this Italian hegemony in the Levant trade was a function of naval power; it depended on the fact that regional states of the era were seldom able to challenge Genoa’s war galleys in the Black Sea, or Venice’s war galleys in the eastern Mediterranean.¹⁰³ This was why the rise of the Ottoman empire created a whole new environment for trade. Immediately following his conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Mehmet II signaled a change by granting trading privileges not merely to his Genose allies but also to their Venetian rivals.¹⁰⁴ For the Ottoman treasury, trade with western nations boosted customs revenues in Istanbul, and in Anatolian entrepôts like Bursa or Smyrna. Subsequently, by conquering the empire of the Mamluks (1517), Sultan Sehim I also gained control of customs at Damascus (later Aleppo), where traders brought silk from Persia, and at Alexandria, site of the Venetian factory or trading compound that had long supplied Europe from Asia. But trade also had a political dimension. By Islamic law, strangers from “the Abode of War” could be granted amnesty, permitting them to travel freely within “the Abode of Islam,” once they had pledged friendship and goodwill.¹⁰⁵ Sixteenth-century Ottoman policy aimed at rewarding infidel states that were, in fact, friendly to the Porte -- mainly the European powers that lined up against the Habsburgs: first Venice and France, later England and the Dutch Republic. By contrast, once Andrea Doria allied with Charles V (1528), the Genoese were not welcome. Meanwhile, the sultan’s admirals made the Black Sea an Ottoman lake, and picked off, one by one, the island bases that Venice used to secure its routes to Syria and Egypt; from about 1500, they also increased the size of their war fleet.¹⁰⁶ At Prevesa (1538), Kheireddin Barbarossa was able to inflict damage on a larger Habsburg-Venetian war fleet and escape unharmed;¹⁰⁷ by now, the sultan was master of the Levantine seas as well as of the Levantine lands.

In each region of this vast empire, European merchants adapted to new circumstances, some more willingly than others.¹⁰⁸ In the Balkans, the Republic of Dubrovnik (Ragusa), an Ottoman tributary since 1438, took full advantage of intermittent warfare between its Ottoman patrons and its historic foe, the Republic of Venice. Though tonnage estimates remain somewhat speculative, it seems that in the middle decades of the sixteenth century this tiny state had the largest merchant fleet in the Mediterranean. Ancona, in the Papal States, was Dubrovnik’s partner; the short trajectory across the Adriatic was increasingly preferred by merchant-shippers, because it obviated the growing dangers of a long sea voyage.¹⁰⁹ To counter the Dubrovnik-Ancona connection, Venice had to tone down its historic antipathy to Jewish merchants, who now came to Italy in increasing numbers, bringing goods from Ottoman lands.¹¹⁰ Split (Spalato), in Venetian Dalmatia, had hitherto been a port of merely local importance. But in 1589, the Senate accepted proposals made by an Iberian Jew based in Bosnia: Venice enlarged Split’s harbor facilities and trading privileges, and the pasha of Bosnia guaranteed the security of caravan traffic to and from Sarajevo. By 1620, the Sarajevo-Split-Venice route -- with Venetian woolens and Murano glass moving in one direction, Turkish camels and hides in the other -- was responsible for about 25% of the value of goods entering the Venetian harbor.

For European traders, the vast entourage attendant on the sultan at Topkapi Palace was important as a market for high-grade silks and woolens. Coastal regions to the north and south of the capital (the Black Sea and the Aegean) were vital as sources for much-needed grain. But as the sultans nurtured their capital from a population of 40,000-60,000 under the last Byzantine emperor to about 500,000 in the 1520s,¹¹¹ its care and feeding became a state priority. This was bad luck for those who depended on grain from the east, especially the Venetians.¹¹² Once the Ottomans secured the mouth of the Dniester (1484), westerners had no access to or egress from the Black Sea, save by permission of the sultan’s officials. The Aegean, too, was now an Ottoman lake, though not to the same extent: Ottoman garrisons were thinly scattered among many islands, some of which (especially those with Latin-Christian populations) welcomed traders from the west. Through the first half of the sixteenth century, trade in grain continued in the Aegean, sometimes involving shipments from the estates of Ottoman officials. Thereafter, threats of scarcity prompted a general ban on exporting grain to the west, even if regulation did not always prevent the Venetians and others from getting what they wanted: they cultivated ties among Greek skippers, and offered prices higher than those officially decreed. On one occasion, a grand vizier not unreasonably accused the Venetians of taking away vital grain supplies in exchange for mere “fripperies,” like fine silks. The bailo, noting his interlocutor’s brocade vest, had a ready reply: “Indeed so; we take away grain in exchange for such fripperies as Your Magnificence is wearing.”¹¹³ Meanwhile, Venice’s import trade was threatened by merchants from Marseilles -- subjects of the sultan’s faithful ally, the king of France -- who brought customers at the Porte fabrics that counterfeited the best work of Venice’s silk-weavers, at lower prices.¹¹⁴

Syria and Egypt always had been the center of gravity for Venice’s Levant trade, and in both areas Ottoman rule created a more favorable environment for doing business. By incorporating within the limits of one realm both the eastern marches of Anatolia, and the formerly Mamluk province of Syria, the sultans encouraged caravans of Armenian merchants to bring their silk from Shirvan to Aleppo, where (from 1548) Venice’s consul for Syria fixed his residence; meanwhile, Europe’s growing industries demanded larger and larger quantities of raw silk, including the Persian variety. By the 1590s, sixteen Venetian trading houses were represented in Aleppo, each doing 100,000 to 200,000 ducats a year in trade. In Alexandria, Venice’s spice trade had been undermined as Portugal seized control of traffic in the far-off Spice Islands, culminating in the capture of Melakah (1511).¹¹⁵ But the Ottomans were better than their Mamluk predecessors had been at projecting their power into the Indian Ocean; though defeated by the Portuguese at the coast of Gujarat (1538), they conquered Basra (1546) and Aden (1548), thus keeping open the sea lanes that fed into major caravan routes to the Mediterranean. The revival of Alexandria’s spice trade (especially for pepper, whose sources of supply were not controlled by the Portuguese) was a direct result.¹¹⁶ By 1560, the value of Venetian spice exports from Alexandria was greater than it had ever been. In 1585, Philip II of Spain, in his capacity as king of Portugal,¹¹⁷ offered to sell his royal monopoly on spice imports from the Indies. But Venice declined; with an estimated 4,000 Venetian subjects living in Ottoman Egypt or Syria, it was not thought prudent to make this kind of bargain with the sultan’s Portuguese foes.

Until about 1500, trade between east and west was largely managed by Italians. Under Ottoman rule, Ottoman subjects who controlled particular routes or commodities -- Arabs, Armenians, Greeks, Jews and Turks -- were in a better position to bargain with European merchants. In fact, under these conditions both the value and the volume of traffic in key commodities like silk and spices reached new highs. This will not be a surprise to economic historians, for whom a pooling of the local knowledge of various merchant communities could be expected to promote trade, by reducing transaction costs.¹¹⁸ But what struck Italians of the time was their loss of control over the movement of goods. Young men of noble or patrician background stopped going east to begin their careers,¹¹⁹ and the Venetians in particular complained bitterly about the “decline” of their Levant trade.¹²⁰ But worse was still to come.

Because Portugal’s trade to Antwerp was disrupted by the Dutch Revolt, English merchants started coming to the Mediterranean for spices and other goods around 1580.¹²¹ They came in the heavily armed, high-sided Atlantic galleons known in the Mediterranean as bertoni.¹²² In seas where war galleys had long been the main source of firepower, ships of this type could do as they pleased.¹²³ Thus the ban on grain exports, at best difficult to enforce, was now a dead letter; one hears of a Greek entrepreneur who hired a bertone to go about commandeering grain from smaller ships, or of a “great Genoese ship” (built in the new style) that calmly drove off three galleys of the Ottoman empire’s Aegean squadron as it loaded grain on Chios.¹²⁴ There was, thus, less grain available for urban populations exposed to periodic grain shortages, and for Ottoman armies marching off to the Hungarian or Persian frontier. Atlantic galleons also began taking over the transit trade, even for the hallowed pilgrimage to Mecca.¹²⁵ Meanwhile, in Syria, English and French merchants started bringing cheaper broadcloths that undercut Venice’s staple trade in fine woolens; also, unlike the Italians, they were willing to pay cash for their silk instead of insisting on a trade in goods.¹²⁶ Finally, from the 1590s, the Dutch East India Company challenged Portugal’s hegemony in the far-off Spice Islands. By about 1615, the Honorable Company, applying Portugal’s strong-arm methods with a Dutch thoroughness, had become Europe’s sole supplier for fine spices, and was beginning to dominate in the supply of pepper.¹²⁷ In Alexandria, while Arab merchants shifted from the spice to the coffee trade, the Venetians went home, to pursue investments in other sectors of the economy.¹²⁸ In Venice itself, silk-weavers looked for work in other lands, including England,¹²⁹ and Jewish merchants relocated from the Venetian ghetto to Livorno,¹³⁰ England’s favored port in Italy.

In sum, while the Habsburgs (and sometimes Venice) measured their war-making resources against the Ottomans in a battle of endurance, Christian states friendly to the Porte -- the English, the Dutch, and to a lesser extent the French -- undermined the eastern Mediterranean trade on which the prosperity of the empire depended in no small degree. English and Dutch merchants never imagined themselves to be working hand in glove with Spain, or with Cossack corsairs on the Black Sea. But to understand the great shift in the balance of power that occurred during this period, trade must be seen as working in conjunction with warfare and piracy. European observers were often impressed by the speed and efficiency with which the vast resources of the Ottoman empire could be mobilized in time of war.¹³¹ Yet how could any sultan or vizier deal with an array of rivals, each conspiring against all the others, yet somehow combining to undermine the Ottoman state? In the end, Europeans came to outmatch the Ottomans not by working together, but by working at cross purposes.

IV. THE CONTEST FOR CULTURAL PREEMINENCE

Governments competed not just on battlefields and in customs houses but also in the carefully managed creation of favorable public images. For the princely courts of early modern Europe, the study of public ceremonies and festivities has become “something of a growth industry.”¹³² To be sure, the political implications of royal ritual have long been understood; the guiding conceptual framework was worked out at German universities decades ago, before the catastrophe of the 1930s.¹³³ The recent flowering of interest in such matters reflects broader scholarly trends.¹³⁴ For example, political scientists now argue that favorable public opinion represents a “soft” power that is in some ways no less important than the “hard” power based on military strength.¹³⁵ But current studies of European princely festivals -- while broadly comparative -- make little or no reference to the Ottoman court ceremonies that always made a vivid impression on European observers. In fact, the Ottomans, too, competed on this terrain, and they were better at the game than any of their European rivals.

To judge from European accounts, it would seem that sultans of the first half of the fifteenth century showed little interest in the trappings of majesty. For example, when Murad II (r. 1430-1451) was approached by an ambassador from the duke of Milan, the sultan graciously rose from his throne and took him by the hand; the ambassador tried to kiss his hand, but Murad would not allow it.¹³⁶ The conquest of Constantinople (1453) was long thought to have marked a turning point; Mehmet II (r. 1451-1481), the Conqueror, was also the builder of Topkapi Palace, larger and more splendid than any Byzantine palace.¹³⁷ But Konrad Dilger has shown that the “Book of Laws” attributed to Mehmet II -- with a description of the ceremonies to be observed at court, and of the sultan’s audience hall -- cannot have been written prior to the 1530s.¹³⁸ According to Dilger, the decisive change in court ritual came under Selim I (r. 1512-1520), the greatest of all Ottoman conquerors. Bartolomeo Contarini, sent from Venice to Sultan Selim in Cairo (1519), is the first European envoy known to have been subjected to what would henceforth be a required routine: to his great surprise, Contarini was grabbed at the arm by two strong attendants and carried before the throne, where he was made to kneel and kiss the sultan’s hand. In effect, soft power reflected hard power; Selim I and his successors demanded a new level of respect from infidel envoys because “they now deemed themselves far superior to the Western powers.”¹³⁹

During the reigns of Selim’s successors (Suleiman I, 1520-1566, and Selim II, 1566-1574), European accounts of embassies to the Porte make it clear that this obeisance to “the ruler of the world” was meant to be the climax of a great public spectacle.¹⁴⁰ In the first court of the Topkapi seraglio, 4,000 Janissaries stood at attention, “without making any noise, or moving a muscle.” In the second court, some 6,000 soldiers and officials were placed according to rank, each with its distinctive garb and headgear. To the left, under a small portico, the grand vizier and his five colleagues held public divan or council four days a week, dispensing the sultan’s justice; behind them stood secretaries and keepers of the state treasury, ready to execute documents or payments as ordered. In the magnificent third court, through the Sublime Porte, the sultan received foreign dignitaries in his audience hall, seated on a bejeweled throne, surrounded by “his principal gentlemen” and court eunuchs vested in gold and silver, each slightly bowed, hands folded across his chest “in token of great reverence and submission.”¹⁴¹

Ottoman subjects (and foreigners) who never set foot in the palace could see much the same spectacle enacted every time the sultan made a solemn entry to his capital, as in April 1560, when Suleiman I and his court, accompanied by the Persian ambassador and his suite, made an occasion of returning from the hunt. The van was made up of persons of lesser rank, like the sultan’s 500 falconers, or the 800 slaves of his grand vizier, Rüstem Pasha, “well dressed, but without the gold caps” suitable for a higher station. The Admiral of the Sea turned out 2,000 of his war-galley soldiers “in beautiful order,” in ranks of arquebusiers, archers, and pikemen, adding, says a European observer, to his favor with the sultan. After the sons of leading Turks, vested in cloth-of-gold, because “they are not slaves,” like other soldiers, came 6,000 Janissaries, with swords and arquebuses and “very unusual pikes,” with the points “so high they are taller than a man on horseback.” The civil officials were led by the fourth and fifth pashas, followed by 60 treasury clerks, garbed in various cloths of gold, “for since they are seen by the sultan every day they have to be clothed honorably.” Surrounded by the men of his guard the sultan rode “a gorgeous horse, with a gold saddle full of jewels.” The Italian author adds details about the rich fabrics that marked officials of different ranks, many of which would have been supplied by Venetian merchants.¹⁴²

Charles V could claim to rule even more of the world than Suleiman I, and in his entourage, too, there were men who claimed for their master a “world” or universal monarchy.¹⁴³ While the emperor’s grandeur was proclaimed in various ways, Charles’ three dozen public entries to cities made him the European “champion” for public spectacles of this kind.¹⁴⁴ One finds in these rituals visible results of the Renaissance study of ancient Rome.¹⁴⁵ Here they are important in affording comparison with Ottoman ceremony, and there are indeed similarities. For the emperor as for the sultan, local dignitaries showed their respect by advancing some distance beyond the city walls to greet him.¹⁴⁶ In both cases the ruler rode at the mid-point of a long train whose successive units embodied, for all to see, his invincible military might and his impartial justice. At Bologna (1529), where Charles was to meet Pope Clement VII, he processed through Porta San Felice in the midst of his army, each unit recognizable by a distinctive garb and array of weapons; the emperor, surrounded by his chief officials and great nobles, carried his scepter, and rode a horse caparisoned with cloth-of-gold, embroidered with jewels.¹⁴⁷ The effect on spectators was surely comparable to that of a grand Ottoman display. In 1539, when political circumstances permitted Charles to progress through France en route from Spain to the Low Countries, the city of Paris paved streets along the route, and arranged for guilds, ecclesiastical corporations, and civic bodies to march out to greet the emperor in the Faubourg St. Antoine -- a procession that lasted several hours. Along the procession route onlookers crammed every vantage point -- streets, windows, and roofs¹⁴⁸ -- just as they did in Constantinople whenever it was announced that the sultan would make an entrance.¹⁴⁹

But there were also important dissimilarities. If Suleiman made his entries into a capital that was greater by far than any city in Europe, Charles had as many as eight capitals,¹⁵⁰ and thus made entries to many different cities, each of which orchestrated and paid for the ceremonies. Charles reciprocated with a courteous curiosity: coming to a triumphal arch, he would often pause for an explanation of its decorations.¹⁵¹ This is but another way of saying that Charles’ empire -- unlike Suleiman’s -- was made up of heterogeneous territories that preserved important elements of political autonomy, and fiscal responsibility. Charles also lacked the wherewithal to maintain, in any of his residences, the kind of magnificence that was regularly on display at Topkapi Palace. In his report to the Venetian Senate (1573), bailo Francesco Badoer seems to have gotten things right: “All Christian princes must yield in magnificence to the Ottoman Porte, for I do not believe any other court, even with great labor and preparation, can match what is to be seen on an ordinary day in the seraglio of the Gran Signore.”¹⁵²

If neither Charles V nor his European rivals could support a court worthy of comparison with Topkapi Palace, they and their loyal subjects had other resources for waging a campaign in the theater of public opinion -- foremost among which was the printing press. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europe’s presses churned out a vast descriptive literature about the Ottoman world.¹⁵³ These accounts often represent the individual adventures of a merchant or a former slave,¹⁵⁴ and only a small fraction of them had anything to do with the service of a particular prince.¹⁵⁵ But, with or without official sponsorship, works of this kind had a polemical edge, even when an author’s portrayal of Turkish life and culture was on the whole sympathetic,¹⁵⁶ and they provide a necessary intellectual background for European diplomatic correspondence from the Porte. To be sure, for those who had lived for a time in Ottoman lands, many of the conventional stereotypes were no longer credible. For example, although published works routinely described Turkish law courts as corrupt, diplomats had to make use of Ottoman due process in order to safeguard the interests of their nationals.¹⁵⁷ But men accredited to the Porte also knew (or at least were told by high-level sources) that continuing penetration into infidel Europe remained a settled policy of the empire.¹⁵⁸ Diplomats were thus well placed to frame Europe’s collective brief against the Ottomans, and this they did in good portions of their reports back home.

There is space here for but one strand of this argument, having to do with the idea of a law of nations that is recognized among Europeans but not among Turks. Habsburg envoys sent to the Porte had to contend with the fact that Ottoman officials professed no respect for the confidentiality of official correspondence.¹⁵⁹ In 1566, when the grand vizier demanded to see a letter carried by the emperor’s ambassador, the latter insisted on giving it to the sultan to whom it was addressed, for by “the law of nations” this was an ambassador’s duty.¹⁶⁰ A few years later, Venice’s representatives contended that a disputed Dalmatian town could not be a “territory,” as that term was used in a draft treaty, for “all nations” understood that a town was a “territory” only if it had villages under its jurisdiction.¹⁶¹ When a Turkish merchant claimed that the Venetian consul in Cairo had insured his cargo, subsequently lost to corsairs, he could not be correct, for “all men in all places” agreed that for valid maritime insurance there had to be a written contract, with a quotation of the rate.¹⁶² In 1615, the Dutch ambassador reported to the States General on how “high lords of this empire” had been tyrannically abused by the pasha of Cyprus; “Their High Mightinesses” must understand that it would be futile to send a consul to Aleppo, in the expectation that representatives of “Christian foreign nations” would be treated any better.¹⁶³ In 1620, when the grand vizier levied a fine on the bailo and ordered him to pay it immediately, the French ambassador intervened on his colleague’s behalf: not giving the bailo time to consult his principals, he said, contravened “the law of nations.” When the Polish ambassador was imprisoned, the same French ambassador got him out; to superiors in Paris, suspicious of Poland, he explained that he was merely preventing “the law of nations” from being trampled underfoot.¹⁶⁴

In these texts, Europeans claim that what they see as right is right because it is accepted as such by the consensus of civilized peoples. In the ancient Roman understanding of law, valid law had to be promulgated by a constituted authority, but it also had to be known and accepted by the free citizens who were subject to the law. Rather like the philosophical idea of natural law, first developed by the ancient Stoics,¹⁶⁵ the juristic idea of a law of nations fulfilled the second of these conditions if not the first. To be sure, the ancient authors were read in the Muslim east as well as in the Christian west; Greek philosophy was preserved and studied by Arab scholars long before it was taken up by scholars in Latin Europe. But while study of the ancient authors remained a focus of education in Europe, even more so as the Renaissance humanist curriculum took hold, it was over time marginalized in Islamic schools, where the Qur’an provided the foundation for legal reasoning.¹⁶⁶ Trained in the humanist classicism of their time,¹⁶⁷ European diplomats at the Porte were, in effect, claiming for Europe the heritage of Greco-Roman civilization: Europe thus stood not just for the Christian religion, but also for certain universal truths, including an ethos of civility first articulated by the ancient pagan thinkers. The point was to set off Europe’s heritage of lawfulness against Ottoman arbitrariness. Incidents that seemed to confirm this contrast were carefully recorded. For example, in 1566 the grand vizier, disregarding the imperial ambassador’s assertion about the law of nations, had his letter-casket broken open; while others might have their laws, he said, this was how things were done at the Sublime Porte. In 1615, the Dutch ambassador at the Porte put things in more general terms:

I must remind Your High Mightinesses how different the government of these lands is from all Christian polities, in which one has a care not only for what is profitable but also for what is honorable. Here, by contrast, nothing is done for the sake of honor [propter honestum], and everything is done for profit [utilitatis casusa]; private good takes precedence over the common good and the welfare of the people, for even in matters of justice it is a custom among the Turks to begin and end each proceeding with gifts.¹⁶⁸

If Europe’s ways truly were founded not just on the Christian religion, but on a universal sense of what is lawful and right, did not justice demand that Europe must triumph sooner or later? In fact, the writers of diplomatic letters and memoranda often asserted that the mighty Ottoman empire must eventually be brought down by its own indolence and arbitrary power. In the 1530s, a Venetian secretary claimed that despite their natural bravery, Turks would never make soldiers as good as Germans or Spaniards, “for it has ever been the style of the Ottoman prince to abase his subjects.”¹⁶⁹ In the 1550s, bailo Bernardo Navagero drew hope from his observation that the Ottoman army had an order of march, but no order of battle (ordinanza); one could thus expect European troops fighting in proper battle order to prevail, for “one sees clearly from histories ancient and modern that he who confides too much in the number of his soldiers, not in their quality, comes out the loser.”¹⁷⁰ In the 1570s, bailo Antonio Tiepolo saw how difficult it was to recruit oarsmen for Turkish galleys; he also had reports of villagers relocating from Ottoman Greece to Venetian Corfu, so as to escape the devshirme, a periodic levy of Christian children for training as slave-soldiers. In his report to the senate, Tiepolo fused these incidents into a picture of an empire “despoiled of inhabitants” by the tyranny of its rulers; “God willing, there is some beginning of decline.”¹⁷¹ Twenty years later still, the French ambassador, Savary de Brèves, saw an empire governed by men who were both “stupid” and “foolishly proud.” By these “signs of disorder in this empire,” he believed, God was calling on France to resume her historic role, not as the Porte’s principal ally in Europe, but as the leader of Christian princes in a great war against the infidel Turk.¹⁷² In light of the staying power of the Ottoman empire, all such predictions of decline must be seen as wishful thinking.¹⁷³ But wishful thinking or not, they give voice to a cultural offensive in which all Europeans -- Habsburg or Habsburg-foe, Protestant or Catholic -- spoke a common language.

CONCLUSION

This essay has covered a broad canvas, but it should be even broader. The one major European power that has not figured in this account is Muscovy. Czar Ivan the Terrible’s conquest of the Tatar Khanate of Astrakhan (1556) brought Russian authority down the Volga, to the borders of the Caspian Sea. This made the Tatar Khanate of Crimea, Astrakhan’s neighbor across the steppes, Muscovy’s natural enemy. The Porte took note of these developments,¹⁷⁴ especially after a Russian raid in 1559 reached the mouth of the Don and the Sea of Azov. Nonetheless, major confrontations between Russia and her Muslim neighbors -- Crimea, the Ottoman Empire, Iran, and the Khanate of Bukhara -- did not come until the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries; in typical European fashion, Muscovy first had to deal with Poland-Lithuania.¹⁷⁵

In the Indian Ocean, local conflicts along Islamdom’s southern border were often drawn into the rivalry between Ottomans and Europeans. At the northern tip of Sumatra, the sultan of Aceh, Alauddin Riayat Syah al-Kahhar (1539-1571), built a spice- and pepper-trading empire to rival that of the Portuguese. Seeking Muslim help for a planned attack on Portuguese Melaka, he sent an embassy to the Sublime Porte in the 1560s; the Porte sent cannon-founders and artillerymen to help Aceh counter Portuguese firepower.¹⁷⁶ In the Red Sea, Ottoman authorities in the Hijaz supported the imam of Adal, Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi (1527-1541), in his campaigns against Christian Ethiopia (1527-1541). King Lebna Dengel (1508-1540), overcoming suspicions of Portuguese interference, summoned help from Lisbon; four hundred musketeers led by Christovão da Gama (son of Vasco da Gama) helped defeat the imam’s forces (1541).¹⁷⁷

Finally, on the Indian subcontinent, Muslim sea-going merchants were the natural foes of European interlopers. In the face of Portuguese aggression, one Mamale (d. ca. 1528) led Mappila traders of the Malabar coast in taking over the port of Cannanore, to battle the infidels at sea; his collateral descendants, known as the Ali Rajahs of Cannanore, fought the Dutch and the British when they took over this region from the Portuguese.¹⁷⁸ In Madurai, the Tamil-speaking Maraikayyar merchant community, led by the family of Shaykh Abd al-Qadir, sometimes resisted the rising influence of the Dutch East India Company, and sometimes allied with the company against their common enemy, the Catholicized Paravas, who were supported by the Portuguese.¹⁷⁹ In Gujarat, merchants of the Islamicized Bohra community were the chief indigenous rivals of the European companies. In the great entrepôt of Surat, Muslim and Christian traders kept their distance, each group preferring to use Hindu or Jain merchant-bankers for credit, and for contacts with local producers of indigo or cottons.¹⁸⁰ Throughout the Indian Ocean region, even in places where Muslim and Christian merchants dealt with one another as a matter of routine, Muslims referred to Europeans as “Franks,” using a terminology derived from the Crusades, while Europeans referred to Muslims as “Moors,” using an even older terminology, derived from the Muslim conquest of Spain. This instinctive mutual hostility did not imply a lack of enlightenment, or some deficiency in the milk of human kindness. It simply recorded the fact that Muslims and Christians were indeed enemies, in a background war that spanned much of the globe.

Endnotes

1. Géraud Poumarède, Pour en finir avec la Croisade (Paris, 2004), 621. I am grateful to Prof. Poumarède for sending me a copy of his book.

2. Cf. the focus on life in post-conquest Ottoman provinces; e.g., Ronald C. Jennings, Christians and Muslims in Ottoman Cyprus and the Mediterranean World, 1571-1640 (New York, 1993); Molly Greene, A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Princeton, 2000).

3. Marlene Kurz, Martin Scheutz, Kal Vocelka, and Thomas Winkelbauer, Das osmanische Reich und die Habsburgermonarchie (Vienna & Munich, 2005) has sections on “Contacts and Conflicts,” “Images of the Turk,” “Diplomacy,” “Travel Literature,” “Translators,” and “Southeastern Europe,” but there are no essays on war or religion.

4. A debate touched off by Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York, 1997).

5. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Vol. III, The Gunpowder Empires and Modern Times (Chicago, 1974); Rhoads Murphey, Ottoman Warfare, 1500-1700 (London, 2000); Jos Gommans, Mughal Warfare: Indian Frontiers and High Roads to Empire, 1500-1700 (London, 2002).

6. Palmira Johnson Brummett, Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Diplomacy in the Age of Discovery (Albany, NY, 1994); Carla Rahn Phillips, “Navies and the Mediterranean in the Early Modern Period,” Naval Policy and Strategy in the Mediterranean, ed. John B. Hattendorf (London, 2000), 3-29.

7. At Mohács (29 August 1529), west of the Danube where it flows north to south.

8. A double marriage of 1515 had joined Austria’s Habsburgs and the branch of Poland’s Jagellonian dynasty then ruling in Bohemia and Hungary (Ferdinand married Anna Jagellio, Louis Jagellio wed Ferdinand’s sister Mary). The marriage treaty provided that should either groom die without issue, his lands would pass to his brother-in-law. After the catastrophe at Mohács, Ferdinand was acclaimed king by the estates of Bohemia, but in Hungary his claim was contested by the voivod of Transylvania, Janos Szapolyai, who pledged allegiance to the Porte in return for recognition by the sultan as king of Hungary.

9. The first volume of a comprehensive Turkish-language history of the empire has now appeared in English: Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, ed., History of the Ottoman State, Society and Civilisation (Istanbul, 2001). For a recent brief survey, Justin McCarthy, The Ottoman Turks: An Introductory History to 1923 (London, 1997). In European languages, the classic extended treatment is still Joseph Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches, 4 vols. (Prague, 1834-1836).

10. James D. Tracy, Emperor Charles V Impresario of War: Campaign Strategy, International Finance, and Domestic Politics (Cambridge, 2002), 102.

11. Bernardo Navagero, Relazione (1553); Eugenio Alberi, Le relazioni degli ambasciatori veneti al Senato, 15 vols. (Florence, 1838-1865) [hereafter abbreviated as Alberi], III: 37-39. (The ratio between the Spanish and Venetian ducat was roughly 10:9.) Navagero claims to have seen the tally of expected annual revenue in the books of the hazineh, here meaning the state treasury. Halil Inalcik, Suraiya Faroghi, et al., An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1997), I: 82, according to Ottoman accounts for 1527/1528, total revenue for that year was the equivalent of slightly less than 10,000,000 ducats, including approximately 61% for the state treasury, and 36% for the timars held by cavalry commanders. The vicebailo Andrea Dandolo, Relazione (1562), Alberi, IX: 190-91, was more skeptical, finding that for the year ending 1 July 1561, the state treasury took in the equivalent of 4,330,396 gold scudi, and spent 4,131,639, leaving a surplus of only 200,000 -- not the vast sums often imagined. According to Ottaviano Bon (1605), the hazineh was housed in its own building in the third court of the seraglio, next to a building for the sultan’s wardrobe: The Sultan’s Seraglio: An Intimate Portrait of Life at the Ottoman Court, introduced and annotated by Godfrey Goodwin (London, 1996), 26.

12. Inalcik, Economic and Social History, I: 78, cites European estimates of 5,000,000 ducats for the state treasury and 10,000,000 for the timars held by cavalry commanders (Ramberti, 1534), and 4,000,000 for the state treasury and 8,000,000 for the timars (Postel, 1560).

13. Andrea Badoer, Relazione (1573), Alberi, III: 357-58: In addition to the great quantity of gold and silver coin, bejeweled swords and other precious objects, visible through the open door of the state hazineh when Ambassador Badoer paid his respects to the sultan, “what is worse, I have learned (though this is kept very secret) that there is also a great quantity of gold bars left by previous emperors.” Paolo Contarini, Relazione (1583), Alberi, VI: 225-26, reports that twice during his two-year stint as bailo it had been necessary to take from the Seven Towers “money placed there by Sultan Mehmet [II] when he conquered Constantinople.” Cf. Gianfrancesco Morosini, Relazione (1585), Alberi, IX: 278-79: the interior or private hazineh does not have as much wealth as people think, for its current income is limited to the tribute from Egypt (500,000 ducats) and presents to the sultan.

14. For the tercios of Italy, Geoffrey Parker, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, 1567-1659 (Cambridge, 1972). King Francis I of France, Charles V’s chief foe, had a standing army of about four thousand men, whose pay was usually in arrears. Philippe Hamon, L’argent du roi: les finances sous François I (Paris, 1994), 22-24.

15. Inalcik, Economic and Social History, I: 88-93: for an official list of 1528, there were 50,000 salaried troops (including the Janissary infantry), and 37,000 cavalry supported by provincial timars. Murphey, Ottoman Warfare, 38-45, finds a total of 89,608 men, but counts only the Janissaries and certain other units (cavalry regiments of the Porte, artillerymen) as the “standing” army (18,689 men); the rest were cavalrymen or commanders holding timars, that is, the right to collect land taxes for their support.

16. Godfrey Goodwin, The Janissaries (London, 1994).

17. McCarthy, The Ottoman Turks, 180-83. The best overview of military developments (with good maps) is Murphey, Ottoman Warfare.

18. Richard T. Rapp, “The Unmaking of the Mediterranean Trade Hegemony: International Trade Rivalry and the Commercial Revolution,” Journal of Economic History 35 (1975): 499-525; C. H. H. Wake, “The Changing Pattern of Europe’s Pepper and Spice Imports, ca. 1400- 1700,” Journal of European Economic History 8 (1979): 361-404.

19. Ashin Das Gupta, Asian Merchants and the Decline of Surat, c. 1700-1750 (Wiesbaden, 1979). In Iran, the Armenian merchant community, set up by the great Shah Abbas I (1588-1629) as a royal corporation for the silk trade, was now in business for itself, collecting offers from the Dutch and the English East India Companies: Ina Baghdianz McCabe, The Shah’s Silk for Europe’s Silver: The Eurasian Trade of the Julfa Armenians in Safavid Iran and India (1530-1750) (Atlanta, 1999).

20. Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1996), chap. 4.

21. Victor Davis Hanson, The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece (Berkeley, 2000).

22. Douglass C. North, Robert Paul Thomas, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History (Cambridge, 1973).

23. K. N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660-1760 (Cambridge, 1976).

24. Linda Darling, Revenue Raising and Legitimacy: Tax Collection and Finance Administration in the Ottoman Empire, 1560-1600 (Leiden, 1996), 2-8.

25. Patrick Balfour Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries (New York, 1977), 241.

26. Mevket Pamuk, A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge, 2002), 131-38.

27. McCarthy, The Ottoman Turks, 158-61.

28. Sinappah Arasaratnam, Merchants, Companies and Commerce on the Coromandel Coast, 1650-1740 (Delhi, 1986).

29. Michael Hocheldinger, Austria’s Wars of Emergence: War, State and Society in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1683-1797 (London, 2003), chap. 5.

30. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “‘Un grand dérangement’: Dreaming an Indo-Persian Empire in the 1740s,” Journal of Early Modern History 4 (2000): 337-78.

31. From about 1550, the Medici grand dukes of Tuscany, with a long coastline to defend against Ottoman corsairs, emulated in some ways the policies of their Spanish patrons; previously, the Republic of Florence had mainly been interested in trading with the Ottomans. One may make a similar distinction in the history of the Republic of Genoa, before and after Andrea Doria placed his war galleys at the disposal of Charles V (1528).

32. On the Franco-Ottoman alliance, Géraud Poumarède, “Justifier l’injustifiable: l’alliance turque au miroir de la chrétienté (XVI^e-XVII^e siècles),” Revue d’histoire diplomatique (1997): 216-46. Cf. the principality of Transylvania, nominally a part of Hungary, but from 1527 tributary to the Porte: Graeme Murdock, “Freely Elected in Fear: Princely Elections and Political Power in Early Seventeenth Century Transylvania,” Journal of Early Modern History 7 (2003): 213-44.

33. Paolo Preto, Venezia e i Turchi (Florence, 1975). For the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania, which (like Venice) usually saw the Habsburgs as more of a threat to its interests than the Ottomans, Dariusz Kolodziejczyk, Ottoman-Polish Diplomatic Relations (15^th-18^th Centuries): An Annotated Edition of Adhnames and Other Documents (Leiden, 2000).

34. S. A. Skilliter, William Harborne and Trade with Turkey, 1578 -1582: A Documentary Study of the First Anglo-Ottoman Relations (Cambridge, 1977).

35. For the Dutch Republic, a Protestant commercial power fighting for its independence from Spain, Alexander H. De Groot, The Ottoman Empire and the Dutch Republic: A History of the Earliest Relations, 1610-1630 (Leiden, 1978).

36. For this essay, Eugenio Alberi: see note 11 for full citation; Archivio di State di Venezia, “Archivio Proprio degli Ambasciatori” and “Dispacci degli Ambasciatori al Senator, Costantinopoli,” hereafter abbreviated as ASV-AP and ASV-DAC; Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Rue de Richelieu), Salle des Manuscrits, “Manuscrits Français,” hereafter abbreviated as BN-MF; E. Charrière, Négotiations de la France dans l'Orient, 4 vols. (Paris, 1848-1852), hereafter abbreviated as Charrière; Srećko Dźaja, Günter Weiss, Mathias Bernath, Karl Nehring, eds., Austro-Turcica 1541-1552: Diplomatische Akten des habsburgischen Geschandtschaftsverkehrs mit der hohen Pforte im Zeitalter Suleymans des prächtigen (Munich, 1995), hereafter abbreviated as Austro-Turcica; Haus- Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Vienna, “Turcica,” hereafter abbreviated as HHSA-Turcica.

37. E.g., a sancak who is said to have “contracted” to “populate” his desolate border district at no expense to the Ottoman state treasury, meaning that he knew how to raise money to pay his troops: from Paolo Contarini, 13 October 1582, ASV-DAC, 16, 189-91. Cf. Pedro de Navarro’s contract for the conquest of Oran, 1509: Tracy, Emperor Charles V, 133.

38. In 1532, the diet of the Holy Roman Empire elected Ferdinand king of the Romans, or heir-apparent to the imperial throne.

39. L. von Fels to Ferdinand, end of May 1545, Austro-Turcica, Letter 22, 69-70; cf. Ferdinand’s instructions for G. M. Malvezzi, his envoy at the Porte, 23 January 1548, Austro-Turcica, Letter 62, 202-03: as for Ottoman complaints about border raids by Habsburg subjects, Rüstem Pasha [the grand vizier] will understand how hard it is to control “all these thieves and bandits who have for so many years lived by robbery and taking captives, hiding in the woods and sallying forth here or there to practice their thievery.”

40. Perhaps the more so when this natural anger was spiced by religious hatred; cf. reports of smearing excrement on Muslim or Christian holy sites: Charrière, I: 350, Journal of Saint-Blancard (1537); Charrière, II: 486, from de la Vigne, July 1558.

41. In 1573, Venetian and Ottoman statesmen worked to save a projected treaty that was “widely condemned by the common people on both sides” of the frontier in Dalmatia: translation of a Turkish-language memorandum [arz] (October 1573) presented at the Porte by special ambassador Andrea Badoer and the two baili, Marcantonio Barbaro and Antonio Tiepolo, ASV-DAC, 6, 359v-361.

42. From Contarini, 13 October 1582, ASV-DAC, 16, 189-91v; from Giovanni Morosini, 2 January 1583, ASV-DAC, 16, 335-35v.

43. Serhii Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine (Oxford, 2001), 19-21, 29-31; p. 18, “Cossack,” originally a Turkish word, meant either a “free man,” not subject to a lord, or a “bandit.”

44. Phillips, “Navies and the Mediterranean,” 22.

45. The Ottomans extended their zone of control in the Hungarian plain after failed efforts by Ferdinand to take Buda from the heirs of Janos Szapolyai (1540, 1541).

46. Geza David and Pal Fodor, eds., Ottomans, Hungarians and Habsburgs in Central Europe: The Military Confines in the Era of Ottoman Conquest (Leiden, 2000), “Introduction,” xvi-xvii. The part of western and northern Hungary held by the Habsburgs was roughly equivalent to modern Slovakia.

47. Catherine Wendy Bracewell, The Uskoks of Senj: Piracy, Banditry and Holy War in the 16^th Century Adriatic (Ithaca, NY, 1992), chap. 3.

48. For the Hayduks, see the references in Graeme Murdock, Calvinism on the Frontier, 1600-1660: International Calvinism and the Reformed Church in Hungary and Transylvania (Oxford, 2000). Cf. HHSA-Turcica, I-14, Kolvolut 1, fols. 137-40: Ferdinand to Archduke Maximilian [his son and heir], Augsburg, 29 March 1559: in preparation for a prospective prolongation of the truce, Habsburg captains are to be instructed not to take on “free and wandering foot-soldiers,” or “free and wandering Hayduks.” Some years earlier, Geraard Veltwyck, Ferdinand’s envoy to the Porte, recommended striking from a proposed truce the customary language about hanging Hayduks caught as bandits, “for this way we lose many brave men who can later be useful for war”; Veltwyck to Ferdinand, Constantinople, 7 December 1547, Austro-Turcica, Letter 58, 195.

49. Modern Slovenia.

50. Ferdinand’s instructions for N. Sick, Worms, 21 May 1545, Austro-Turcica, Letter 21, 65-7; cf. L. Vels to Ferdinand, end of May 1545, Austro-Turcica, Letter 22, 69-70; and Ferdinand’s instructions for G. Veltwyck, 13 July 1546, Austro-Turcica, Letter 34, 102-3.

51. N. Sick to Ferdinand, from Edirne, 10 November 1545, Austro-Turcica, Letter 27, 79-80 (in context, Sick is explaining why Rüstem Pasha insists that Zrinski not be included in a truce under discussion).

52. HHSA-Turcica, I-12, Konvolut 2, fols. 272-75v, Vranĉić, Zay and Busbecq to Ferdinand from Constantinople [undated, but prior to Busbecq’s return to Vienna in August 1555]; I-13, fols. 32-35, Archduke Maximilian to the pasha of Buda, 14 February 1558; I-14, Konvolut 3, fols. 10, Ferdinand to Busbecq, Vienna, 2nd letter of 10 July 1559; I-14, Konvolut 3, fols. 72-74, Ferdinand to Busbecq, 11 November 1559.

53. HHSA-Turcica, I-11, Konvolut 2, fol. 154, pasha of Buda to Ferdinand, 9 September 1554; I-11, Konvolut 3, fols. 2a-b; I-12, Konvolut 1, N. Vranĉić and F. Zay to Ferdinand, Constantinople, 26 July 1555 (the two ambassadors have been haled before an Ottoman judge to answer the complaints of a certain Demetrios relating to an attack on his village some years previously by the catsellan of Gran).

54. For Busbecq (or, in the modern Dutch of his native Flanders, Boesbeeck) and his Litterae Turcicae, see Ogier Ghislin van Boesbeeck, Legationis Turcicae epistolae quattuor/Vier brieven over het gezantschap naar Turkije, with an Introduction by R. W. M. Zweder von Martels, ed. and trans. by Michel Goldsteen (Hilversum, 1994).

55. Hammer-Purgstall, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches, II: 455.

56. Ottaviano Bon, 8 March 1605, ASV-DAC, 61, 17-20v: the Cossacks on the Black sea “are bandits, exactly like the Uskoks.” For Cossack Black Sea expeditions, Plokhii, The Cossacks and Religion, 19, cites Guillaume Le Vasseur, Sieur de Beauplan, Description d’Ukraine (Paris, 1660); there is now an English translation: Description of Ukraine, ed. and trans. Andrew B. Pernal and Dennis F. Essar (Cambridge, MA, 1993). See also the references given by Mikhail B. Kizilov, “Slave Trade in the Early Modern Crimea from the Perspective of Christian, Muslim and Jewish Sources,” Journal of Early Modern History 11 (2007): 1-32.

57. Bracewell, Uskoks of Senj, 273-76; Faroghi, Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, II: 482.

58. On the Knights of St. Stephen, Niccolò Capponi, Victory of the West: The Great Christian-Muslim Clash at the Battle of Lepanto (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 109-11.

59. Charrière, III: 747/153, from Juyé, 20 July 1578: the four galleys of St. Stephen, which the grand duke maintains “comme chose d’église,” may do as they please, so long as he arms no other ships against the grand seigneur; Hammer-Purgstall, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches, II: 463. Cosimo de Medici, the first grand duke of Tuscany (1535-1574), founded the Knights of St. Stephen (1562) to counteract the raids of Barbary and Ottoman corsairs. On Tuscan corsairs in the eastern Mediterranean, Jennings, Christians and Muslims, 363-66. This double-mindedness of the grand dukes continued into the next century. From Cèsy, 27 June to Louis XIII, also to d’Harbault, and to Louis XIII, 9 August 1627, BN-MF 16150, 673-75, 676-78, 691-93: even as a Florentine ambassador arrives for peace talks, six Florentine galleys capture twenty-seven Turkish ships great and small, “in sight of” the Dardanelles castles.

60. Faroghi, Economic and Social History, II: 481-82: “Certain items in the capitulations ran counter to the deeply held convictions of provincial and local officials. Muslim religious law (Sharia) assumed that Holy war (gaza) against infidels was permanent. ... Occurrences of this kind become more comprehensible when one remembers that they had their counterparts on the Venetian side of the frontier.”

61. From Navagero, 13 August 1550, and 17 December 1550, ASV-AP, 5, 5v-7v, 19-22; Antonio Erizzo, Relazione (1557), Alberi, IX: 141-43 (why commands against piracy are not obeyed); Venier, 13 March 1594, ASV-DAC, 39, 16-19v: rejecting a request from the Kapudan Pasha (Admiral) for funds, the Caymacam (standing in for the absent grand vizier) tells the former he has kept back enough booty for himself to have paid all the Arsenal’s debts.

62. Kheireddin, known in Europe as Barbarossa (ca. 1467-1546).

63. From Cèsy, 5 October 1625 and 22 February 1626, BN-MF 16150, 431, 479. Cf. Cèsy to Villeauxclercs, 5 October 1625, BN-MF 16150, 431-32v: for only fifty thousand ecus a year, France could keep “la principale force du Turc” occupied in the Black Sea, to defend the entrance to the Bosporus, only four hours from the Sublime Porte. Then he admits (14 April 1626, BN-MF 16150, 498-500) that the time has not yet come for France to divert Ottoman forces in preparation for a grand attack, because the “ambition demesuree” of the House of Austria still keeps Christendom divided.

64. Reuven Firestone, Jihad: The Origin of Holy War in Islam (New York and Oxford, 1999); cf. 16-18: “the greater jihad” refers to the struggle against evil in oneself.

65. Geoffrey Regan, First Crusader: Byzantium’s Holy Wars (Phoenix Mill, Gloucestershire, 2001).

66. Adel Allouche, The Origins and Development of the Ottoman-Safavid Conflict (906-962/1500-1555), Islamkundische Untersuchungen XCI (Berlin, 1983): 65 (the quote). It was in this region that Shaykh Junayd (r. 1447-1460) formed a largely Turkish-speaking militia known as the Qizilbash, which then became the spearhead of Safavid power under Shah Isma’il (1487-1524): Ira M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies (Cambridge, 2002), 285. Shah Isma’il was also a member of the Bektaşi Sufi order, popular among Janissaries: Capponi, Victory of the West, 24. European observers noted a preference in parts of Anatolia for Persian or Shiʻite rule, even long after the Ottoman conquest of 1514: Bishop of Maçon to Francis I, 29 May 1535, Charrière, I: 264; Domenico Trevisan, Relazione (1554), Alberi, III: 168-71.

67. For the Ottoman-Safavid wars, the only monographic study I know of in any European language is the one by Adel Allouche (note 66).

68. From Aramon 4 April 1547, and from Morvilliers 3 May 1547, Charrière, II: 48-56: because Suleiman is so eager to march against Persia, it is not possible to dissuade him from accepting the truce offered by the emperor; cf. Suleiman’s letter to Henri II explaining his decision to make war against Persia [and thus not against Charles VI, October 1555, Charrière, II: 324-26; from Giacomo Soranzo, 21 June 1566, ASV-DAC, 1, 180-81v, because of a threat to “Babylon” (Baghdad), Sultan Selim II orders the cavalry of Anatolia and Kamamania to withdraw from the Hungarian front; from Morosini, 15 January 1583, ASV-DAC, 16, 381-84: the Ottomans want a renewal of the 1578 truce with Spain so as to continue the war in Persia; from Ottaviano Bon, 2 July 1605, ASV-DAC, 61, 235-38v (Sultan Ahmed I curses the vizier thought responsible for the Long War, because while the Hungarians are merely defending their liberty and their state, the shah [Abbas I], who made war “without reason,” merits the “anger and revenge” of the sultan).

69. Martines to Lodève, 20 May 1555, Charrière, II: 339-41; on the fetwa, Navagero, Relazione (1553), Alberi, III: 86; Trevisan, Relazione (1554), Alberi, III: 168-71; from Codignac, 3 April 1554, Charrière, II: 310; cf. Suleiman to Henri II, October 1555, Charrière, II: 324-6. Also Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire (London, 2002), 121: in light of the shah’s claim to semi-divine status as head of the Safavid Order, the same Chief Mufti, Ebu’su’ud, declared in 1548 that the Safavids were “rebels and, from many points of view, infidels.” According to Capponi, Victory of the West, 26, Sultan Selim I obtained a similar decree against the heretical Shiʻites before launching his Persian campaign in 1514.

70. Murphey, Ottoman Warfare, 22, counts 52 days’ march (plus 67 days of rest) from Edirne (only a few days from Istanbul) to Esztergom on the Hungarian frontier, as against 121 days’ march (plus 76 days of rest) from Üsküdar to Baghdad. Hammer-Pursgstall, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches, II: 487, counts 57 “campings” between Istanbul and Erzerum, arsenal for the eastern marches of the Ottoman state, and 69 between Erzerum and Persia’s northeastern frontier, scene of the fighting between 1578 and 1590.

71. 1526, 1529, 1532, 1537, 1540-1542, 1593-1606.

72. 1513-1514, 1533-1536, 1548-1552, 1578-1590, 1606-1607, 1616-1618, 1623-1624, 1626, 1630, 1635, 1638.

73. Tracy, Emperor Charles V, 27-28; cf. BN-MF 16150, 451-475, Cèsy’s memoir (1626) opposing a proposed Hispano-Ottoman entente.

74. Capponi, Victory of the West, 245-47.

75. For current scholarship, Jonathan Riley-Smith, ed., The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades (Oxford, 1995); see especially Riley-Smith’s introductory essay, “The Crusading Movement and Historians,” 1-12.

76. Hammer-Purgstall, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches, II: 419; Kenneth Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, 1204-1271, 4 vols. (Philadelphia, 1976-1978).

77. Tracy, Emperor Charles V.

78. Capponi, Victory of the West, is by far the best account, both for the battle itself (chap. 9), and for abiding suspicions among the Christian states that (briefly) agreed to join forces (chap. 2-8).

79. I. A. A. Thompson, War and Government in Habsburg Spain, 1560-1620 (London, 1976); there is, alas, no modern monograph on Doria’s campaigns, but cf. John Guilmartin, Gunpowder and Galleys: Changing Technology and Mediterranean Warfare at Sea in the 16th Century (London, 2003).

80. Darling, Revenue-Raising and Legitimacy, 27, 82, 87-88, 90, 93. The avariz, which could be levied to provision the army or to build roads as well as to man the fleet, was commuted to a cash payment during the course of the sixteenth century. Muslims as well as non-Muslims paid. Near the end of the sixteenth century, perhaps during the Long War against Austria (1591-1606), the avariz became an annual levy throughout the empire.

81. Marco Mincio, Relazione (1522), Alberi, IX: 73-74: the “whole country” is obliged to provide “one man, paid for four months,” from every ten; from Navagero, 25 November 1550, ASV-AP, 5, 22-26v: explanation of how avariz is levied, asserting that Christians must pay the cash equivalent per head, while Turks pay a flat fee per household; Relazione of Domenico Trevisan (1554), Alberi, III: 142.

82. 1534 (conquest of Tunis), 1535 (vain attempt to relieve Charles V’s siege of Tunis), 1536 (landing in Calabria), 1538 (battle of Prevesa), 1539 (reconquest of Castilnuovo, taken by Andrea Doria for Charles V in 1538), 1543-1544 (Ottoman fleet winters at Toulon), 1550 (conquest of Tripoli from Knights of Malta), 1551, 1552, 1553, 1556, and 1558 (all at the behest of France’s King Henri II), 1560 (Ottoman victory at Djerba), 1565 (failed siege of Malta), 1570 (conquest of Venetian Cyprus), 1571 (battle of Lepanto), 1572, 1573, and 1574 (conquest of Tunis).

83. Domenico Trevisan, Relazione (1554), Alberi, III: 238, ship captains are allotted 1,000 akça to hire an oarsman, and can find good men for 700-900; from Vettor Bragadin, 14 March 1566, ASV-DAC, 1, 39-42 (for want of oarsmen, the Kapudan Pasha delays sailing for the Black Sea); from Barbaro and Tiepolo, 10 April 1574, ASV-DAC, 6, 387v-389 (for a planned war-fleet of 300 galleys, oarsmen have arrived for only 30); an undated “Summaria della Militia Turchesca dal ... Antonio Tiepolo al ... Jacopo Boncompagno,” BN-MF 20982, 205v: the Turk has timber and other materials for 300 galleys, but not enough men; from Marco Venier, second letter of 14 April 1594, ASV-DAC, 39, 143-48v (of the oarsmen commanded by avariz, not one has come; instead various cadis bring cash), and 4 June 1594, ASV-DAC, 39, 349-54v (the official keeping the books at the arsenal tells Venier that oarsmen cannot be found for 3,000 akça, though galley-captains have been allotted only 1,500 per man); from Cèsy, 4 March 1625, BN-MF 16150, 377-78 (those sent to Anatolia to bring back oarsmen find the country so ruined and depopulated they bring none back).

84. From Germigny, [ca. June 1580], Charrière, III: 887: no bread is to be found in Istanbul, because of storms said to have caused the loss of forty or fifty ships on the Black Sea.

85. Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde Méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, 6^th edition, 2 vols. (Paris, 1985), II: 415-50, 467-69. While Spain was preoccupied by the Dutch Revolt, the Ottomans saw a chance to strike at Persia during the regency for a new Safavid shah. Cf. Thompson, War and Government in Habsburg Spain, Tables D and E, 294-95 (a comparison of expenditures for galleys and for the Atlantic Fleet), and Table H, 300-01 (number of galleys in service).

86. Alberto Tenenti, Piracy and the Decline of Venice, 1580-1615, tr. Janet and Brian Pullan (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967), 86, endorsed by Phillips, “Navies and the Mediterranean,” 20.

87. From Cèsy, 12 May 1625, BN-MF 16150, 275; from Bon, 4 July 1605, ASV-DAC, 61, 264-65v.

88. Jan Paul Niederkorn, Die europäische Mächte und der ‘Lange Türkenkrieg’ Kaiser Rudolfs II, 1593 -1606 (Vienna, 1993).

89. Ekkehard Eickhoff, Wien, Venedig und die Osmanen: Umbruch in Südost Europa, 1645-1700 (Munich, 1970).

90. Erich Feigl, Halbmond und Kreuz: Marco d’Aviano und die Rettung Europas (Vienna, 1993).

91. Thompson, War and Government in Habsburg Spain, “Conclusion.”

92. G. M. Malvezzi to Ferdinand, Constantinople, 22 November 1548, Austro-Turcica, Letter 110, 315: two çavuş (official messengers) have come to the Porte from the Persian front, with orders from Sultan Suleiman to withdraw from the treasury 500,000 ducats in gold, and the equivalent of 700,000 in silver akçe, together with cloths of silk for his janissaries and courtiers.

93. Marino Cavalli, Relazione (1560), Alberi, III: 280.

94. Karen Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Path to State Centralization (Ithaca, New York, 1994).

95. Darling, Revenue-Raising and Legitimacy.

96. Tracy, Emperor Charles V, chap. 3.

97. E.g., the so-called rentes de l’Hôtel de Ville in France, from 1522 (crown revenues were placed in the hands of the Paris city council, which then sold rentes [bonds] backed by these revenues): Martin Wolfe, The Fiscal System of Renaissance France (New Haven, 1972); for provincial parliaments in the Low Countries, James Tracy, A Fiscal Revolution in the Habsburg Netherlands (Berkeley, 1985); for corporations of crown officials in the reign of Louis XVI, Mark Potter, Corps and Clienteles: Public Finance and Political Change in France, 1688-1715 (Burlington, VT, 2003).

98. Inalcik, Economy and Society, 98, citing a work published in Turkish in 1939: “Reference is made [1590s] to loans from leading merchants during war time”; Darling, Revenue-Raising and Legitimacy, 47 n. 73 (forced loans).

99. From Germigny, 1 December 1579, BN-MF 16143, 2-7; from Venier, 19 May 1594, ASV-DAC, 260-67v; from Berthier, 5 February 1586, Charrière, IV: 471; from Lancosme, 2 April 1586, Charrière, IV: 488; Hammer-Purgstall, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches, II: 589 (1593); from Venier, 19 May 1594 and 4 June 1594, ASV-DAC, 39, 84, 349-54v; from Bon, second letter of 31 May 1605, ASV-DAC, 61, 187-96v; from Zorzi Giustinian, fifth letter of 5 March 1622, ASV-DAC, 61, 33-36v.

100. From Cèsy, 27 June 1627, BN-MF 16150, 665ff: “Comme la foy publique ne s’observe iamais en ce pays, on ne trouve point de partisans pour fayre des avances d’un escu.” Cf. Hammer-Purgstall, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches, II: 338, 612.

101. K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean (Cambridge, 1985), 16; Chester Starr, The Influence of Sea Power on Ancient History (Oxford, 1989), provides some negative support for this argument by showing that only Carthage -- not Rome or Athens -- used naval power to promote its trading interests.

102. The best overview is Eliahu Ashtor, The Levant Trade in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, 1983).

103. John H. Pryor, Geography, Technology and War: Studies in the Maritime History of the Mediterranean, 649-1571 (Cambridge, 1997).

104. Kate Fleet, European and Islamic Trade in the Early Ottoman State: The Merchants of Genoa and Turkey (Cambridge, 1999), chap. 1, 10.

105. Inalcik, Economic and Social History, I: 188-89.

106. Brummett, Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Diplomacy; Geo Pistarino, Chio dei Genovesi nel tempo di Cristoforo Colombo (Rome, 1995); Pryor, Geography, Technology and War.

107. Capponi, Victory of the West, 32, 64-6.

108. Save as noted, this paragraph and the next two are based on Tracy, “Il commercio Italiano in territorio Ottomano, 1450-1620 ca.,” in Il Rinascimento Italiano e l’Europa, vol. IV, Commercio e cultura mercantile, ed. Franco Franchetti, Richard A. Goldthwaite, Reinhold C. Mueller (Treviso, 2007), 425-54.

109. The popes of this era, sponsors of crusades against the infidel, also wanted their subjects and their treasury to share in the profits of trade with the east: Poumarède, Pour en finir avec la Croisade, “Les Levantins du pape,” 342-80. For a possible overture to the Ottomans from the entourage of the anti-Habsburg Pope Paul IV (1555-1559); Capponi, Victory of the West, 79.

110. For the Senate’s grant (1541) of a “factory” or walled-off quarter for “Hebrew merchants,” on the site of an old foundry known as the ghetto, Jonathan Israel, Diasporas within a Diaspora: Jews, Crypto-Jews, and the World Maritime Empire (1540-1740) (Leiden, 2002), 67-74. Cf. Marino Cavalli, Relazione (1560), Alberi, III: 274: a decline of Venice’s trade in Constantinople is said to be due to competition from Jewish merchants -- but also to the laziness of Venetians, who let Jews do the real work.

111. Robert Mantran, Histoire d’Istanboul (Paris, 1996), 196-202, 227.

112. Maurice Aymard, Venise, Raguse, et le commerce du blé pendant la seconde moitié du XVI^e siècle (Paris, 1966), 125-41.

113. Information from Fleet, European and Islamic Trade; Faroghi, Economic and Social History, II; and Luca Mola, The Silk Industry of Renaissance Venice (Baltimore, 2000). For the quote, from Bon, 15 March 1605, ASV-DAC, 27-30v.

114. Katsumi Fukusawa, Toilerie et commerce du Levant: d’Alep à Marseille (Paris, 1987).

115. Most traffic between the Spice Islands and India (whence spices were shipped on toward Alexandria or Damascus) passed through the Straits of Melakah (Malacca): for Portugal’s empire in the east, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500-1700: A Political and Economic History (London, 1993).

116. Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford, 2010); I am grateful to Prof. Casale, my colleague at the University of Minnesota, for letting me read an earlier version of his work.

117. Spain ruled Portugal and its empire from 1580 to 1640.

118. Frederic C. Lane, Profits from Power: Readings in Protection-Rent and Violence-Controlling Enterprises (Albany, NY, 1979); Douglass C. North, “Institutions, Transaction Costs, and the Rise of Merchant Empires,” The Political Economy of Merchant Empires: State Power and World Trade, 1350-1750, ed. James D. Tracy (Cambridge, 1991), 22-40.

119. Eric P. Dursteler, Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore, 2006), chap. 1: the Venetian colony was now made up not of patricians (those eligible for office) or native-born citizens (eligible for civil-service positions) but of men who had acquired Venetian citizenship.

120. Carlo Livi, Domenico Sella, Ugo Tucci, “Un problème d’histoire: la décadence économique de Venise,” in Aspetti e cause della decadenza economica veneziana (Rome-Venice, 1961), 287-317.

121. Alfred C. Wood, A History of the Levant Company (New York, 1935, rprt. 1964), chap. 1, “The Foundation of the Levant Company.” For later developments, Alastair Hamilton, ed., Friends and Rivals in the East: English and Dutch Trade in the Levant from the Seventeenth to the Early Nineteenth Century (Leiden, 2000).

122. Tenenti, Piracy and the Decline of Venice, 52, defines the bertone as “a type of Atlantic ship with high sides, adopted by all navies ... used to impart new vigor to piracy.”

123. For a reservation on this point, Capponi, Victory of the West, 181.

124. From Matteo Zane, aboard ship, 23 March 1594, ASV-DAC, 39, 32-33; from Bon, 23 August 1605, ASV-DAC, 61, 315-23.

125. Faroghi, Economic and Social History, II: 488.

126. Domenico Sella, “The Rise and Fall of the Venetian Wool Industry,” in Crisis and Change in the Venetian Economy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. Brian Pullan (London, 1968), 106-26.

127. Niels Steensgaard, “The Growth and Composition of the Long-Distance Trade of England and the Dutch Republic before 1750,” in Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350-1750, ed. James D. Tracy (Cambridge, 1990), 34-101, here 108-23.

128. Brian Pullan, “The Occupations and Investments of the Venetian Nobility in the Middle and Late Sixteenth Century,” in Renaissance Venice, ed. J. R. Hale (London, 1973), 379-408; Nelly Hanna, Making Big Money in 1600: The Life and Times of Isma’il abu Taqiyya, Egyptian Merchant (Syracuse, 1998).

129. Rapp, “The Unmaking of the Mediterranean Trade.”

130. Israel, Diasporas within a Diaspora, 74-76.

131. E.g., Sinan Pasha’s mobilization of the fleet, army and supplies needed for his successful expedition against Tunis: from Tiepolo, 18 May 1574, ASV-DAC, 6, 396v-398; from François de Noailles, bishop of Dax, 19 May 1574, Charrière, III: 486-94.

132. James R. Mulryne, “Introduction,” Court Festivals of the European Renaissance: Art, Politics and Performance, ed. James R. Mulryne and Elizabeth Goidring (Aldershot, 2002), 1.

133. Percy Ernst Schramm, Der König von Frankreich: das Wesen der Monarchie vom 9. bis 16. Jahrhundert, 2 vols. (first published 1939, rprt. Weimar, 1960); Ernst Kantorowicz, Laudes Regiae: A Study in Liturgical Acclamations and Medieval Ruler-Worship, University of California Publications in History 33 (Berkeley, 1946). The first important book of this kind by an American was by a scholar who had worked with Prof. Kantorowicz at Princeton: Ralph E. Giesey, The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France (Geneva, 1960).

134. Mulryne, “Introduction,” 4-5; see also James R. Mulryne, Helen Watanabe O’Kelly, and Margaret Shewrings., eds., Europa Triumphans: Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Aldershot, 2004).

135. Walter Russell Meade, Power, Terror, Peace and War: America’s Grand Strategy in a World at Risk (New York, 2004), 24-44. The distinction comes from Joseph S. Nye, The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone (Oxford, 2002), which includes economic as well as military power under “hard power.” Meade prefers to distinguish between sharp power (military), sticky power (economic), and sweet power (cultural).

136. Konrad Dilger, Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des osmanisch Hofzeremoniells im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1967), 61, 70, citing the travel journal of a French nobleman accompanying the ambassador, Bertrandon de La Brocquière, Voyage d’Outremer, ed. Charles Henri Auguste Schefer (Paris, 1892).

137. Gulru Necipoglu, Architecture, Ceremonial, and Power: The Topkapi Palace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Cambridge, MA, 1991).

138. Dilger, Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Hofzeremoniells, 4-8, 20-27, 31-33, and 87-92 (the first description of the audience hall comes from a man who was captive in Istanbul from 1532-1540, Luigi Bassano da Zara, Costumi et i modi particolari della vita de’ Turchi [Rome, 1545]).

139. Dilger, Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Hofzeremoniells, 70-71. Envoys from the Shiʻite Shahs of Iran -- rival claimants to the title of padişah-i alempah (universal ruler who protects the world) -- were not subjected to this indignity: Antony Black, The History of Islamic Political Thought from the Prophet to the Present (Edinburgh, 2001), 205; and the unpublished paper by Sinem Arcak of the Art History Department of the University of Minnesota, “Of the Kind One Prince Sends Another: The Gift of an Islamic Manuscript in 1567.”

140. Save as noted, this paragraph and the next two are based on Tracy, “An Element in the Liturgy of Great-Kingship: Proskynesis from Persepolis to the Sublime Porte.”

141. Blended from Andrea Badoer, Relazione (1573), Alberi, III: 355-66, and Saint-Blancard’s journal (1538), Charrière, I: 376-78. See also the first chapter of Bon, The Sultan’s Seraglio.

142. “Avisi per littere a Costantinopoli,” addressed to “Doctor [Ulrich] Zasius,” HHSA-Turcica, I-14, Konvolut 4, fols. 62-62v.

143. Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 115-27, especially 125-27; Tracy, Emperor Charles V, 27; Alfred Kohler, Karl V, 1500-1558: eine Biographie (Munich, 1999), 94-102.

144. Bonner Mitchell, “Carlos V como Triunfador,” in Carlos V Imperador, ed. Pedro Navascuès-Palacio (Madrid, 1999), 213-51, here 213.

145. E.g., for his entry into Rome (1536), Charles was greeted at the gate by officials clad in togas, and passed through the city along the ancient via triumphalis, specially cleared for the occasion: Mitchell, “Carlos V como Triunfador,” 234, and Roy Strong, Splendor at Court: Renaissance Spectacle and the Theater of Power (Boston, 1972), 94.

146. R. J. Knecht, “Charles’s Journey through France, 1539-1540,” in Court Festivals, ed. Mulryne and Goldring, 157-70, here p. 164 (Charles’ entry into Paris).

147. Juan Carlos D’Amico, Charles-Quint maître du monde: entre mythe et realité (Caen, 2004), 72-73; see also Strong, Splendor at Court, 84-87; Mitchell, “Carlos V como Triunfador,” 223-25.

148. Knecht, “Charles’s Journey through France, 1539-1540,” 163-65; the figure of 200,000 onlookers mentioned by an Italian observer seems unlikely.

149. For Suleiman’s grand entry in 1551, ASV-AP, 5, 71-74v, dispatch from Bernardo Navagero, 29 April 1551.

150. Aachen (Holy Roman Empire), Valladolid (Castile), Zaragoza (Aragon), Brussels (The Low Countries), Dôle (Franche Compté), Palermo (Sicily), Naples (Kingdom of Naples), and, from 1535, Milan (Duchy of Milan).

151. Bonner, “Carlos V como Triunfador,” 222: “This respectful curiosity was one of the keys to his political influence.”

152. Badoer, Relazione (1573), Alberi, III: 355-56.

153. Vol. I of Carl Göllner, Turcica, 3 vols. (Bucharest, 1961), gives a bibliography of all treatises published prior to 1600.

154. E.g., Georgius de Hungaria (1422-1502), Tractatus de Moribus Turcorum, ed. Reinhard Klockow (Cologne, 1993); for a different kind of slave narrative, Bartolomé Bennassar, Les Chrétiens d’Allah: l’Histoire extraordinaire des renégats, XVI et XVII^e siècles (Paris, 1989).

155. For works by the four scholar-envoys sent as part of Henri II’s legation to the Porte in 1555, Frédéric Tinguely, L’Écriture du Levant à la Renaissance: Enquête sur les voyageurs français dans l’empire de Soliman le Magnifique (Geneva, 2000).

156. For two examples: Albrecht Classen, “Georgius de Hungaria’s Tractatus de Moribus Turcorum,” Journal of Early Modern History 7 (2003): 257-79; Busbecq, Legationis Turcicae epistolae quattuor, as cited above, note 54.

157. From Barbaro and Tiepolo, 29 April 1574, ASV-DAC, 6, 391v-392: justice for western Christians is possible in a cadi’s court “if the man is the defendant, but almost impossible if he is the plaintiff.” Cf. from Navagero, 1 January 1551, ASV-AP, 5, 29-34v.

158. For the principle that religious law does not permit a territory to be relinquished permanently to infidels if it has ever been under Muslim rule, or if a mosque has been built there, from Badoer, Barbaro, and Tiepolo, 28 September 1573, 19 December 1573, 15 January 1574, and 23 January 1574, and from Tiepolo, 24 November 1574, ASV-DAC, 6, 365v-66, 370v-72, 378-80, 381-82, 433-35; Barbaro, Relazione, 1573, 326-27, and Bon, 31 May 1605; cf. Hammer-Purgstall, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches, II: 455.

159. E.g., Busbecq to Ferdinand, Constantinople, 23 January 1555 HHSA-Turcica, I-11, Konvolut 5, fols. 20-21; Busbecq, Vranĉić and Zay to Ferdinand, Constantinople, 15 July 1556, I-12, Konvolut 5, fols. 168-71.

160. From Bragadin, 29 April 1566, ASV-DAC, 1, 110-13v.

161. Arz presented by the two baili, Marcantonio Barbaro and Antonio Tiepolo (September 1573), ASV-DAC, 6, 353v-355.

162. From Ottaviano Bon, 11 March 1605, ASV-DAC, 61, 5-10v.

163. Cornelis Haga to the States General, 2 January 1615, Nationaal Archief, The Hague, “Notulen van de Staten-Generaal, Liassen Barbarije, Italie, en Turkije,” no. 1689, 4-5. One might note that having a Dutch consul in Aleppo would have diminished the authority and the emoluments of Haga’s position in the capital.

164. From Cèsy, 26 February 1620 and 4 August 1624, BN-MF 16150, 10-12, 301-05.

165. Philip Wiener, ed., Dictionary of the History of Ideas, 6 vols. (New York, 1973), II: 687-91.

166. After about 1300 ancient philosophy (Falsafa) was studied mainly by certain Sufi orders and in Shiʻite Iran: Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, 209-16, 297-98; Hodgson, Venture of Islam, III: 42-46, 66. Cf. Black, History of Islamic Political Thought, 188: “Islamic political thought from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries is thin compared to what had gone before and what was to come after. There were few new ideas after Ibn Taymiya [1263-1328] and Ibn Khaldun [1332-1406], just as there was little development in philosophy or the natural sciences”; and 217: Kinalizade [1510-1572] “was the only link between classical Falsafa and Ottoman political thought. Thus Ottoman thinkers took their founding concepts from Tusi, the great Shiʻite who had helped in the destruction of the ‘Abassid Caliphate, via two lesser intermediaries. Their intellectual nourishment was classical Falsafa dried and reconstituted.” The science of cartography was a notable exception to this pattern of stagnation: Jeremy Brotton, Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World (London, 1997), chap. 3, “Disorienting the East: The Geography of the Ottoman Empire.”

167. Italian humanists of the fifteenth century had set the fashion for referring to the Ottomans not just as infidels but also as “barbarians,” meaning enemies of civilization: Nancy Bisaha, Creating East and West: Italian Humanists and Ottoman Turks (Philadelphia, 2004).

168. Cornelis Haga to the States General, 6 February 1615, reference as in note 163, 6. From the latter decades of the sixteenth century, the classical distinction between honestum and utile was an important element of Neo-Stoic political theory. For a modern edition of a key text, Justus Lipsius, Politica: Six Books of Politics or Political Instruction, ed., trans. and intro, by Jan Waszink (Assen, 2004).

169. Daniele de’ Ludovisi, Relazione (1534), Alberi, III: 18, 10. As a member of the citizen class, De’ Ludovsi could rise to a position in the civil service, like that of secretary, but only patricians could hold elective office, including the offices of bailo and ambassador. From the few examples printed in Alberi’s Relazioni, citizen Venetians may have been more sanguine about the Republic’s prospects in a possible war with the Porte than their social betters were.

170. Navagero, Relazione (1553), Alberi, III: 58-61 (the order of march), 64-65 (the quote). Navagero seems to anticipate the argument of Victor Davis Hanson, The Western Way of War.

171. Copy of Tiepolo to the bailo of Corfu (January 1574), sent with his dispatch of 3 June 1574, and from Tiepolo, 3 June 1574, 9 October 1574 (the quote), ASV-DAC, 6, 400-02, 419v-22, and his Relazione (1576), Alberi, VI: 134-37. Cf. the undated “Summaria della Militia Turchesa dal ... Antonio Tiepolo al ... Jacopo Boncompagno,” BN-MF 20982, 204-07v.

172. Savary de Brèves, 17 September 1595 and 9 April 1600, BN-MF 16144, 250-52, 283.

173. Cf. Darling, Revenue-raising and Legitimacy, 2-8, “The Myth of Ottoman Decline.”

174. E.g., from de la Vigne, 18 June 1558: 25,000 Poles join 150,000 Russians to avenge a Tatar raid of the previous year, and Rüstem Pasha fears a possible alliance of Muscovy, Poland, and Emperor Ferdinand I, which (if Moldova and Wallachia also rebel against the Porte) could put “500,000 cavalry” into the field; from Dolu, 5 February, 18 February, 5 March 1561, the Ottomans will send ten galleys carrying Janissaries plus ten other galleys to Caffa, to defend Crimea’s chief port after a Russian assault; from Tricquerie, 22 December 1570, Charrière, III: 140- 42, the Porte will not support a Tatar attack on Muscovy; and from the Bishop of Dax, 21 April 1573, Charrière, III: 375-82, the grand vizier does not want a Russian prince elected king of Poland, for Muscovy is the Porte’s “strongest foe by land.”

175. Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries, 262-64, 314-15; Benson Bobrick, Fearful Majesty: The Life and Reign of Ivan the Terrible (New York, 1987).

176. From Petremol, 5 July 1563, Charrière, II: 772; for the fullest account of these events, see Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration; Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 133-35, notes that the enduring result of this mission was closer contact between Aceh and the Red Sea ports under Ottoman control.

177. Richard Pankhurst, The Ethiopians: A History (Oxford, 1998), 84-93.

178. Stephen F. Dale, Islamic Society on the South Asian Frontier: The Mappilas of Malabar, 1498-1922 (Oxford, 1982); Geneviève Bouchon, “Regent of the Sea” Cannanore’s Response to Portuguese Expansion, 1507-1528, trans. Louise Shackley (Delhi, 1988); K. K. N. Kurup, The Ali Rajahs of Cannanore (Trivandrum, 1975).

179. Markus Paulus Maria Vink, “Encounters on the Opposite Coast: Crosscultural Contacts between the Dutch East India Company and the Nayaka State of Madurai in the Seventeenth Century” (Ph.D. Diss., University of Minnesota, 1998), I: 47-49.

180. Das Gupta, Asian Trade and the Decline of Surat; James D. Tracy, “Asian Despotism? Mughal Government as Seen from the Dutch East India Company Factory in Surat,” Journal of Early Modern History 3 (1999): 256-80.