Between 1675 and 1676, the English traveller George Wheler (1651-1724) journeyed throughout large parts of Greece and Asia Minor in the company of the French doctor and antiquary Jacob Spon (1647-85). In 1682, six years after his return to England, Wheler published an account of his travels in the eastern Mediterranean, which he entitled A Journey into Greece (1682). In this account, Wheler wrote at length about Eastern Christianity and Islam, both of which he had encountered and studied first-hand during his time within the Ottoman Empire. In one of his more revealing sections, Wheler discussed the vibrancy of the Ottomans’ intellectual culture, thereby challenging long-standing Western stereotypes about the Ottomans’ hostility towards learning, and their consequent ignorance of the refined arts and sciences. Wheler’s observations in this regard are an important reminder of the diversity of early modern English views of the Ottomans. They also highlight how increasing contact with the Ottomans stimulated debates among English thinkers as to the nature of the ‘Turks’; debates that frequently moved the English away from long-standing Medieval and polemical rhetoric.

In his Journey, Wheler offered a relatively favourable depiction of ‘Turkish’ or Islamic intellectual culture. Shortly after deriding ‘the gross Ignorance’ of the Greeks, for example, Wheler discussed the ‘Turks Religion and Learning.’ In this section, Wheler claimed that when he was overseas, he met a Scottish traveller named ‘Mr. Watson’, whose identity is otherwise sadly unknown. According to Wheler, Watson had lived in Turkey and Egypt for between four and five years, and had therefore ‘perfected himself in the Turkish and Arabian Languages’. Watson ‘surprized’ Wheler and Spon ‘with an Account he gave of their [Ottoman and Arab] Learning, beyond the ordinary Opinion of the World.’ Watson informed Wheler that ‘at Constantinople there was a Bazar (or Exchange) for Manuscript Books … of different Sciences, in the Turkish, Arabian, and Persian Languages’, though ‘it was dangerous for Christians’ to visit. The Sultan also employed ‘Historians and Writers’ in his palace, where they kept ‘annual Registers’ of major events affecting the Empire, which could be purchased ‘for Two hundred Crowns’. Watson also claimed to have acquired ‘a Chest full of Turkish and Arabian Books’, containing a Turkish-Arabic dictionary and several Turkish-Persian grammars, in addition to works covering history, politics, art, music, religion, anagrams, astrology, astronomy, chiromancy, chemistry and talismans. In Cairo and Constantinople, Watson had encountered ‘publick Professors’ teaching ‘Astrology, Astronomy, Geometry, Arithmetick, Poetry, [and] the Arabian and Persian Languages.’ The Scottish traveller even suggested that the Italian scholar Giambattista della Porta (d. 1615) had relied on Arabic works for his own book about talismans, and that ‘Hugo Grotius had stollen all his Principal Arguments for the Truth of the Christian Religion out-of [unnamed] Arabian Authors’.^[1]

Wheler’s report of his encounter with Watson, in which examples of ‘Turkish’ scholarship arrive thick and fast, testified to the strength and breadth of late seventeenth-century Ottoman intellectual culture. Wheler’s dialogue with the Scot therefore challenged one of the most enduring Western stereotypes about the Ottoman Empire: that it was hostile towards education and culture and sought to keep its subjects ignorant and subdued. This reputation stemmed partly from the work of early humanists, who accused the Ottomans of destroying books and libraries, and partly from well-established Christian invective against Islam, which argued that leading Muslims, inspired by the example of the Prophet Muhammad, were invariably quick to discourage education or intellectual pursuits among the masses, which they feared would undermine the ignorance that sustained their religion.^[2] The idea that Ottoman society was intellectually underdeveloped was still current by the time that Wheler travelled to Turkey. In his Remarks Upon the Manners, Religion and Government of the Turks (1678), Thomas Smith, whom Wheler cited repeatedly in Journey, wrote that the Ottomans had ‘neither leisure nor inclination to entertain the studies of Learning or the Civil Arts, which take off the roughness and wildness of nature, and render men more agreeable in their conversation.’^[3] Furthermore, although Sir Paul Rycaut had detailed various aspects of Ottoman education and intellectual culture for readers of his Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1668), he also wrote of the Ottomans’ lack of ‘refined Arts’, and their ignorance of ‘Sciences [such] as Logick, Physick, Metaphsick, Mathematicks, and other … University Learning’.^[4] Wheler’s account of his conversation with Watson therefore defied English pre-conceptions about the state of Ottoman knowledge. As we have seen, Wheler mounted this challenge consciously, noting that his information from Watson was ‘beyond the ordinary Opinion of the World’.

Eighteenth-century portrait of Sir George Wheler. Wheler had been knighted in 1682, following the publication of his A Journey into Greece (1682). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

A map of Achaia, Greece, where Wheler travelled widely, from Wheler’s Journey. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The Sultan Ahmed Mosque, also known as the Blue Mosque, in Istanbul, from Wheler’s Journey. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

[1] George Wheler, A Journey into Greece, by George Wheler Esq; in Company of Dr Spon of Lyons (London, 1682), 199–200.

[2] Noel Malcolm, Useful Enemies: Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450-1750 (Oxford, 2019), 234–35. For early humanists accusing the Ottomans of hostility towards education, see also Nancy Bisaha, Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks (Philadelphia, 2004), 64–69; Margaret Meserve, Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (Cambridge, 2008), 66.

[3] Thomas Smith, Remarks upon the Manners, Religion and Government of the Turks: Together with a Survey of the Seven Churches of Asia, as They Now Lye in Their Ruines, and a Brief Description of Constantinople (London, 1678), 2.

[4] Sir Paul Rycaut, The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (London, 1668), 32 ('refined Arts'), 67-68 ('Sciences').