Turkey:  The threatening, exotic east
 

 

  

 

                                   

                            

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Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Penelope Aubin
Lady Elizabeth Craven
Olaudah Equiano
Women, Harem, Polygamy
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Introduction:  Turkey & Britain in the 18th Century

 

Welcome to the homepage for the "Turkey" section of this site, part of the class project for Lit400.03, Fall 2003.  Britain had a complex relationship with the Islamic East; thus, this page hopes to foster your understanding how 18th-century Britain perceived a part of this alien world.

This page has three parts:

Introduction

In the eighteenth century, Turkey held an important place both in world politics and in the imagination of Western Europeans.  It was the closest outpost of the exotic east, and thus a canvas upon which westerners could paint scenes of elaborate wealth, luxurious decadence, mysterious sexuality, and Islamic expansionist threat.  Turkey was the center of the Ottoman Empire, which lasted from approximately 1350 to 1922, and was ruled in the eighteenth century by Ahmed III (1703-30), Mahmud I (1730-54), Osman III (1754-57), Mustafa III (1757-74), Abdulhamid I (1774-89), and Selim III (1789-1807) (Sansal). Though declining from its former position of power and trade domination, the Empire still held important ports and was a crucial conduit between east and west.  It was part of the world known to the British as the "Levant," or the eastern Mediterranean.

Contact with West:
The Turks maintained a lot of contact with west.  Many trading companies set up offices there:  Britain's Levant Company was especially active during the eighteenth century, having been founded in 1581 to trade for silk and spices through the ports of Constantinople and Smyrna, as these products came in from India and further east.  Turkey's geographical position allowed it considerable trade control;  as Elizabeth Lady Craven states in her usual disapproving tone, Turkey held "a situation, which seems by nature formed as an universal passage for trading nations, which the inactivity of the Turks has too long obstructed" (Craven 289). But the cooperative world of trade also breeds the competitive world of conflict.  Turkey was a military threat to Western Europe throughout this period.  The empire was almost constantly at war with Russia and the neighboring Hapsburgs;  diplomat Edward Montagu was posted to Turkey as Ambassador in part to help smooth over possible hostility, though his mission failed.

Social organization:
The Ottoman Empire was ruled by a Sultan, accompanied by a prime minister-like figure, the Grand Vizier.  Below this position were other viziers and pashaws (or bashaws), who made up the nobility. Another powerful group was the military, especially the Janissaries, an elite group of fighters who served also as royal bodyguards, but also, during this period, for the degeneration of their code and conduct: "the Janissaries had once been an effective military force which fought at the center of armies and served as urban garrisons. By the eighteenth century they had become militarily ineffectual but still went to war" (Quataert 45). The Sultan and his court inhabited a huge insular household known as the seraglio, which 18th-century British writers confused with the harem:  Lady Craven observes, "It is strange, Sir, how words gain in other countries a signification different from the meaning they possess in their own. Serail, or seraglio, is generally understood as the habitation or rather the confinement of women, here it is the Sultan’s residence; it cannot be called his palace, for the kiosks, gardens, courts, walls, stables, are so mixed, that it is many houses in many gardens" (Craven 269). Within that complex, as in most upper-class households, there was the harem, or the women's quarters.

Islam:
While eighteenth-century Britons could be exposed to Islam in the Holy Land of Palestine or in parts of Africa (where Mungo Park encounters Muslims), Turkey was probably the most frequented Islamic nation in this period. Islam was little understood by Westerners;  few resided in Britain, so their religion and living habits were unfamiliar and thus open for speculation.  The Turkish-Islamic control over their Empire was tolerant, since "the Turks were few in number and lacking the governmental and technical skill of most of the people they subdued. ...[A]s Muslims, they had to heed the injunctions of the Prophet to protect 'people of the book'; adherents, that is, of monotheistic religions with written scriptures" (Scammell 7). Over the course of the Empire, Islamic lifestyles changed. For example, one of the characteristics of Islamic life that fascinated then as well as now is the place and behavior of women in Muslim societies. Fanny Davis notes that Muslim women in Turkey in the twelfth through fourteenth centuries were able to lead active public lives and did not have to be veiled in public, but "by the time of Suleyman the Magnificent in the sixteenth century the public role of women in the Ottoman Empire had come to an end" (Davis xiv).  The treatment of women in Christian and Muslim societies became a source of much discussion.  Because of the enduring legacy of antagonism between these two major religions abiding since the medieval Crusades, Islam was usually regarded by the British with suspicion if not open hostility—but though it caused distrust, it did not impede trade.

Brief timeline of major events:

11c 11c-13c 1520-1566 1669 1683 1683-99 1710-11 1717-30 1727 1736-92
Turkmen tribes invade Anatolia  Crusades Suleyman the Magnificent (the Lawgiver) rules Ottoman conquest of Crete Ottoman attempt of Vienna; defeated. European coalition formed; Engl neutral.  Disastrous wars with the Holy League Fights Russia and regains some territory  Tulip Period First books printed in Turkish language  Three wars with Russia; loss of territory. Decreasing power in Europe.

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Links to more information on Turkey:

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Purpose of this site: Perceptions of Turkey

In the pages that follow, we will note some common images that populated the writings of many eighteenth-century British writers:  Decadent sultans wealthy beyond imagination.  Lustful, tyrannical, predatory men. Passive, secretive, voluptuous women.  Ferocious and arbitrary justice.  The mystery and irrationality of Islam.

Many writers added to these common images by their travel narratives and letters, or their flights of fancy.  This site uses as its main texts four in particular:

  • Lady Mary Wortley Montagu writes about her travels to Turkey in 1717 in letters that are published posthumously in 1763 as the Turkish Embassy Letters.
  • Penelope Aubin publishes her romance The Strange Adventures of the Count de Vinevil and His Family in 1721.
  • Lady Craven writes a collection of letters about her travels in A Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople in 1789.
  • Also in 1789, Olaudah Equiano publishes his Interesting Narrative, part of which deals with his reception in and observations on Turkey.

To give some context for these images of Turkey, we will explore these writers' lives and works, as well as provide information about the historical and cultural issues upon which their works touch.

Others who perpetuated and modified the images of Turkey, the Ottoman and Persian Empires, and other Islamic milieux in eighteenth Britain were:

  • John Dryden (late 17th century: Conquest of Granada, Bajazet, and other works)
  • Antoine Galland, French translation of the folktale cycle known in English as One Thousand and One Nights, or The Arabian Nights (1704-17)
  • François Pétis de la Croix, Mille et un jours, contes persanes (1710-12)
  • Daniel Defoe, in Roxana: Or, the Fortunate Mistress (1724), has his protagonist wear Turkish clothing as a disguise
  • Montesquieu, via translations of his influential Persian Letters (1721)
  • Johnson and Rasselas (1759)
  • Beckford and Vathek (1786)
  • Sir William Eton, A Survey of the Turkish Empire (1799)
  • French travel literature about the Levant (in French, which most upper-class Britons would understand)

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Source of image:  http://www.turkeyinmaps.com/. This particular map was created in London in 1752 by Emanuel Bowen.

Background from:  http://www.lacma.org/islamic_art/intro.htm

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This section on Turkey was designed and created by Cheryl Wanko.
Last updated December 2003.