What did it mean to write a book about the Ottomans in the seventeenth century? How did authors justify their writing or position themselves towards earlier books on the topic? The answers to these questions are often buried under the surface somewhat. They are however worth exploring because they offer us warning examples of how NOT to engage with earlier or new work in our field. My last blog post discussed the ‘Ottoman’ appendix of James Howell’s seventeenth-century travel guidebook, arguing that Howell had silently poached many ideas, themes, and topics from earlier writers about the Ottomans, including from one of the most popular seventeenth-century accounts of the empire, Henry Blount’s A Voyage into the Levant (1636). At the risk of turning into a version of an early modernist ‘Turnitin’^[1], revealing most seventeenth century authors on the Ottomans as serial-plagiarists and paraphrasers, it pays off to reflect a little bit more upon Blount’s book and what it was like, both back then and nowadays, to carve a space for writing ‘yet another book’ about encounters with the Ottomans.

Blount has been celebrated by both his contemporaries and later scholarship alike, as a ‘Baconian’ and empirical travel writer, who sought to understand the Ottomans based on his own eye-witnessing, and not by reading other people’s books.^[2]  In his own words, before setting out to the Ottoman Empire in 1634, Blount claimed that he would not

…sit downe with a booke knowledge thereof, but rather (through all the hazard and endurance of travell,) receive it from mine owne eye not dazled with any affection, prejudicacy, or mist of education, which preoccupate the minde, and delude it with partiall ideas, as with a false glasse, representing the object in colours, and proportions untrue (Blount, 4).

Blount here expresses widely shared early modern ideas about both distorting prejudice and the importance of eye-witnessing in a characteristically pompous manner. His denigration of earlier book-knowledge and education might strike us as surprising, at least until we consider that Blount was directing his words to ‘men of action’ who occupied the halls of power back home in seventeenth-century England, and not bookworms like ourselves. However, in what he was saying about travel, travel writing, or even the Ottomans in his book, Blount was far from entirely original (if we accept the existence of this often elusive and subjective quality). Instead, like early modern and later authors in general, Blount built knowledge on the basis of existing information, producing in the process an entertaining and idiosyncratic book, which silently referenced many earlier ones on the topic, including the travel advice literature of his times. I have argued elsewhere that Blount cleverly used his book to advertise his own qualities, making the Ottomans into a backdrop of his wit and situational awareness, to present himself as navigating Ottoman society with effortlessness and cunning.^[3] If Blount’s aim was to ‘fashion’ himself as a man of wit, lacking prejudice, and equipped with clear judgment, he seems to have been successful in his pursuit. These are all attributes that he would be praised for even centuries after he wrote his book by scholars of Anglo-Ottoman encounters. Be it as it may, I might have been slightly unfair to Blount in a recent book launch^[4], calling his book a ‘walking and talking CV’ (we all know those people…), but as it was still quite rare in the seventeenth century to earn a living by writing alone, patronage and audience mattered, and influenced the way authors portrayed themselves in their books, and Blount was no exception.

Reviewing the achievements of earlier travellers in his The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (orig. 1665), the diplomat and consul Paul Rycaut (1629-1700) dismissed all of them as ‘ingenious’, (meant negatively) and incapable of providing any authoritative knowledge about the Ottomans and their empire. The reason for this was that they, as short-term visitors and ‘passengers’ had relied too much on hearsay and were not able to judge the veracity of previous accounts, and thus:

…set down their Observations as they have obviously occurred in their Journeys; which being collected for the most part from Relations, and Discourses of such who casually intervene in company of Passengers, are consequently subject to many errours and mistakes.^[5]

The claims by both Blount and Rycaut were of course gestures to readers: ranging from old colleagues in Gray’s Inn and new potential patrons at Court to scholars occupying the halls of Oxford or Cambridge. Both men were carving out a space for their books in what seemed to have already become a crowded market. Some commentators like John Cartwright in his The Preachers Travels (1611) had even claimed that British trade with the Ottomans was already so well-known to not warrant any more discussion – a rather sobering idea for any later academic authors on these topics.^[6] However, instead of becoming discouraged by voices that warn us about crowded markets or well-tilled fields, then and now, all of us working in this field should regularly remind ourselves that re-writing histories is literally the job of the historian, even if conservative voices in our time might disagree. New generations of scholars, whether of Anglo-Ottoman encounters, premodern critical race studies, or the legacies of slave trade and empire, will always come up with new questions, angles, topics, and methodological frameworks, which did not occur to earlier ones, contributing to our shared knowledge of these complex pasts. We should aim to be a field that eagerly invites them and their voices to the table, and not be either a ‘Blount’ or a ‘Rycaut’. The work is far from done.

Dr Eva Johanna Holmberg is currently completing her second book, affectionately known as ‘the difficult second album’ but actually entitled British Encounters with Ottoman Minorities in the Early Seventeenth Century: ‘Slaves’ of the Sultan. It is due to come out in 2022 in the Palgrave series Early Modern Cultural Studies 1500–1700, edited by Jean Howard and Holly Dugan.

[1] For those not aware of Turnitin, it’s a plagiarism detection software in use in the UK and Australia (and probably elsewhere too).

[2] For characterisations of Blount as ‘Baconian’, see for example Nabil Matar, "Blount, Sir Henry (1602–1682), traveller," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 23 September 2004, accessed 9 April 2021, https://www-oxforddnb-com.libproxy.helsinki.fi/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-2687. See also Gerald MacLean, The Rise of Oriental Travel. English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580-1720 (Palgrave, 2004), 123, 130, 140, 176, 183.

[3] See Eva Johanna Holmberg, ‘Avoiding conflict in the early modern Levant. Henry Blount’s adaptations in Ottoman lands’, in Travel and Conflict in the Early Modern World, Gabor Gelleri & Rachel Willie, eds. (Routledge, 2020).

[4] See Book Launch: Travel and Conflict in the Early Modern World

Thu, Mar 11, 2021 5:00 PM.

https://www.crowdcast.io/e/book-launch-travel-and

[5] Paul Rycaut, The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1668), sig. A4r. The reference to ‘passengers’ is a direct stab at Blount, who had defended the perspective and observations of short-term ‘passengers.’ A passenger did not have time to become biased. According to Rycaut, only long-term residents (like him), could be well-informed enough to produce reliable knowledge about the Ottomans and their empire.

[6] See Cartwright, The Preachers Travels (1611), 8-9, who mentioned that Aleppo, ‘the trade and trafficke of which place, because it is so well known to most of our nation, I omit to write of.’