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Visualising “State-Building” in European-Ottoman Diplomatic Relations

Visual Ceremonial Descriptions and Conflicting Concepts of Early Modern Governance in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries

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Abstract

When the French ambassador travelled to Constantinople in 1724, he was instructed by Louis XV to ensure that “the power of the Turks always remains an object of fear to the House of Austria” (Mansel 2002: 45). This strategic thought indicates, on the one hand, a highly affiliated process of clear division of inner-European political entities, and, on the other hand, a more or less defined border between a European alliance and the Ottoman Empire in the first half of the eighteenth century. That implies the interests of different European courts in political relations to the Ottoman Empire being strongly related to intense competition and differentiation of European governments, and the diplomatic European-Ottoman court relations taking part in this process. This article concentrates on the political and diplomatic contacts between the European courts and the Ottoman Empire, and their visual representation in European media in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries because “the Ottoman Empire was not only a military power […] it also ruled an area of immense economic and religious significance to Christian powers. Constantinople became one of the diplomatic capitals of Europe.” (Mansel 1996: 44) Several studies have already recapitulated, in general, these close political, especially diplomatic relations between the Ottoman Empire and Europe (Coles 1968; Mansel 1996; Goffman 2002; Faroqhi 1999: esp. Chap. 7). The Ottoman Court at Constantinople was one important and central place of communications in the political process described by scholars as early modern European “state-building”. Hence, in the following I will describe this process as a communicational one, strongly related to diplomatic practice and media coverage. The article will outline possibilities and practices of certain types of image production in early modern European-Ottoman contacts, and most importantly, their functioning and efficacy in European court politics.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Notably, some German and Austrian historical research, until the end of the twentieth century, was affected by previous nationalist directions in the research of the early and mid-twentieth century, which led to a concentration on the history of the military and war between the Holy Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire. This often implies a preconception of the image of the “Turks” as a non-Christian and martial antithesis, a preconception which influences the analysis of sources, even in art history, i.e. Bernhart (1915), Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien (1983); critical and progressive: Kurz (2005). For a survey of the literature see Gräf (2005).

  2. 2.

    For current research discussions on these different perspectives, see Antje Flüchter’s introduction and Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger’s article in this volume.

  3. 3.

    Of course, visual media had already been used earlier, and commonly, to represent ceremonial acts in the form of historical paintings. Clearly, there is a strong connection between art and ceremonial, because of the contemporary belief in both kinds of communication basing their significance on aesthetic expression, and within this, their affect on the recipient. With the arrangement of space, decoration and time, the entire event was marked for contemporaries as a so-called “solemn” event, which means it was an extraordinary, juridically binding political act for all participants, and through the media this was represented to another public. For further reading, see Turner (1977), Rahn (2006).

  4. 4.

    We can also ascertain a change in the presentation of diplomatic practice at the peace treaties: not the oath—as yet a central ritual of peace-making—but the ratification of the treaties is shown more and more from 1700. The production and perception of this new representation concentrates increasingly on a more functionalised view of political acts, by focusing on political documents as the legitimisation of political systems, by reducing the diplomatic elite from their anciently representative aura to simple juridical functions, cf. Kaulbach (1997), Linnemann (2009). This last development is primarily an outcome of European visualisations of peace treaties, and is, for the most part, irrelevant for the discourse on European-Ottoman political contacts, because generally the court missions—also between European courts—were still referring to an anciently representative aura. Consequently, I would argue that European audiences and images of diplomacy were naturally varied, too, and adapted to different political contexts, e.g. the court public, diplomatic groups, or theoreticians of state; see Rahn (2006), Linnemann (2009).

  5. 5.

    Auguste Boppe first identified Vanmour as the painter of this series, cf. Boppe (1902). D’Andrezel passed the paintings on to his children who, impoverished, sold the art collection of their father to the Royal Collection. In 1803, the paintings were brought to Bordeaux, cf. Museum für Kunsthandwerk (1985: 192, No. I/4), Archives de la ville Marseille (1982: 198f).

  6. 6.

    The second illustration presents, in typical style, Sultan Ahmed III giving an audience to an unknown ambassador. The painting was brought to the Netherlands as part of the collection of the Dutch ambassador Cornelis Calkoen. His nephew Nicolaas bequeathed the painting in 1817 to the directorate of the Levant Trade Company in Amsterdam; cf. Gopin (1994).

  7. 7.

    These cases show the need for research which analyses the differentiated strategic system of creating “identities” and “alterities” among the Courts in Europe, particularly by means of media, cf. Kugler et al. (2006).

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  1. Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Domplatz 20-22, 48143, Münster, Germany

    Dorothee Linnemann

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    Antje Flüchter

  2. Karl Jaspers Centre, Voßstr. 2, Heidelberg, 69115, Germany

    Susan Richter

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Linnemann, D. (2012). Visualising “State-Building” in European-Ottoman Diplomatic Relations. In: Flüchter, A., Richter, S. (eds) Structures on the Move. Transcultural Research – Heidelberg Studies on Asia and Europe in a Global Context. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19288-3_13

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