In some of my previous MEMOs blogs, I discussed how the reproduction of medieval crusading ideals in early modern literature and drama cannot simply be “dismissed as crude, second-rate narratives that unquestionably reproduce established ideologies” (Nicola McDonald, 2013, p. 5), given the renewed interest in the Ottomans. In the first half of the seventeenth-century the resurgence of the Crusades (1095-1291) as a historical context in early modern English literature is testimony to a renewed interest in Ottoman culture (Lee Manion, 2014), very likely determined by the anxieties emerging from contemporary Anglo-Ottoman trade arrangements (Ágoston, 2013; Erkoç, 2016). Turks were, indeed, as Tiryakioglu highlights, compared to “the rampaging Goths, Vandals, and Lombardswho were blamed for the destruction of ancient Rome” (Tiryakioglu, 2015, p. 65). Through the crusading discourse, it is possible to trace the roots of early modern representations of Turks back to the religious and cultural history of medieval Europe, when the First Crusade was seen as a means to relieve the Orient from what European Christians perceived as barbarism. McDonald’s study, then, links to Manion’s questioning of “crusading’s narrative power and cultural influence in literary texts” (Manion, 2014, p.5). It is very likely that the English interest in the Turk and their empire, their culture, and their Islamic customs increased alongside Anglo-Ottoman encounters (mainly in the context of trade) during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Matar’s Turks, Moors, and Englishmen (1999), Britain and Barbary, 1589-1689 (2005), as well as his article entitled ‘The Barbary corsairs, King Charles I and the civil war’ (2001) are all key studies in understanding the effect that North African piracy had upon early modern England’s economy. The now-influential Ottoman Empire was not one that “England could possess, but one it had to watch and guard against” (Matar, 1999, p. 82). The identity of the Muslim Other, as Englishmen discovered in their voyages between “London and Salee, or Plymouth and New England, or Bristol and Guinea”, was complicated as they became all of the following to English merchants: “buyer and seller, partner and pirate, captive and captor” (Matar, 1999, p. 82).[1]

Alongside piracy on the Barbary coast, the Levant trade was a prevalent factor in shaping the way in which early modern Englishmen conceptualised the Turk during the first half of the seventeenth-century. According to Anders Ingram, the Levant trade “served as a facilitator to those travelling in or writing on the Levant, easing the movement of men and their observations, preconceptions and impressions along the trade routes” (Ingram, 2009, p. 45). It also functioned to some degree as a source of inspiration for early modern dramatists to write on inhabitants of the Levant.

It was during the final ten years of the sixteenth century that references to the Levant trade started to become evident in literary and dramatic works, given that it had been initiated in the year 1580 (see MacLean, 2004; Ingram, 2009). However, these references were not abundant and references, instead, to the Ottoman-Habsburg ‘Long War’ (1593-1606), according to Ingram, feature in twenty-two of fifty-four works recorded in the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London (1591-1610). It appears that the Ottoman-Habsburg conflict “highlighted a ‘gap in the market’ for works [written] in English on the Ottomans, which was exploited by authors, printers, and publishers” (Ingram, 2009, p. 369). Many of these publications were Austrian works which were later translated into English, one example being the History of the Warres between the Turkes and the Persians translated into English by Abraham Hartwell (1595). However, a call for original English accounts of the ‘Long War’ and the issues that the Ottomans posed to the Occident, such as the Policy of the Turkish Empire (1597) written and published by an anonymous author, all became prevalent at this time.

Whilst accounts like Richard Knolles’ The Generall Historie of the Turkes (1603), as well as seventeenth-century travelogues written by those such as Henry Blount and William Lithgow, provide recounts of Anglo-Ottoman encounters mainly between traders, and therefore mainly between male figures, critical interest in the representation of early modern female Turks or Christian women in contact with Turks is also worth exploring. To acknowledge these encounters as they were recorded by influential English, and Ottoman, female figures “corrects misrepresentations (of women Eastern and Western)” and misrepresentations of Anglo-Ottoman contact “culturally-inculcated by male-authored narratives” (Sidney L. Sondergard, 2008, p. 1390). The recognition of said encounters also “counters the tendency in postcolonial analysis to anticipate the development of England's imperialist enterprise”, especially when examining the nature of the contact pre-eighteenth-century England had with the Mughal and Ottoman Empires (Sondergard, 2008, p.1391). These are all historical contexts and concerns upon which I will draw in my next blog post, and as I further research and analyse the nuanced representations of Turkish characters in the dramatic works of Fulke Greville, Thomas Goffe, and Roger Boyle.

[1] It is interesting, in addition to the resurgence of medieval crusading ideals which contributed to the demonisation of  Ottomans in Early Modern English fiction, to note the factual connection between early modern Atlantic and Mediterranean slavery and the Mediterranean prior to 1500 (see Fynn-Paul, 2009; see Rotman, 2014). 

Title Image: Peter the Hermit, miniature from Egerton Manuscript 1500, folio 45 verso, France, 14th c. Accessed Wikimedia Commons