The Turk of Early Modern FranceAuthor(s): Marcus Keller

Source: L'Esprit Créateur , Vol. 53, No. 4, The Turk of Early Modern France (Winter
2013), pp. 1-8
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26378861

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 The Turk of Early Modern France
Marcus Keller

T
HE CRITICAL FOCUS OF THIS ISSUE is the rich and complex his-
tory of the most pervasive oriental figure in French art and letters
from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth century: the Turk. The pro-
lific use of the Turk in early modern texts, often just evoked in this anony-
mous form in the singular, is a clear indication that we are confronted with a
highly imaginary figure, serving multiple, and at times competing, ideological
and aesthetic purposes.1 The Turk as he is understood here does not corre-
spond to any one historical reality. As the eleven case studies brought together
in this issue amply demonstrate, the vitality and longevity of the Turk in early
modern French writing and the arts are due as much to his imaginary mal-
leability as to the geo-political context in which he was created, the frequent
confrontations between European powers and the Ottoman Empire since the
fall of Constantinople in 1453. This versatility, in turn, is at the heart of what
could be called the paradox of the Turk of early modern France: as a projec-
tion, he is at once many and one, polysemous and yet identifiable. What ren-
ders the imaginary Turk so productive during this period is that he is no longer
just the Infidel—even though the rhetoric of the crusades remains quite viru-
lent well into the seventeenth century2—and not yet the object of the sort of
Orientalism that Edward Said has so astutely analyzed for the age of high
colonialism beginning at the end of the eighteenth century.3
The polysemy of the word Turc alone is a sure sign of the extent to which
ideas about the Ottomans, Islam, the Middle East, and North Africa are in flux
during the early modern period: Turc can simply designate any Muslim,
regardless of his origin. A member of the ruling elites in one of the Barbary
states could be called Turc, as could a subject of the Ottoman Sultan in the
Balkans. Likewise, Jews and Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire were
also often thought of as Turcs.4 This is one sense in which the Turc of early
modern France is more than one, and to those mostly interested in the histor-
ical referent of the name this semantic chaos might seem discouraging enough
to dismiss the notion of the early modern Turk altogether.
If we concentrate on the symbolic meaning of this figure, however, the
Turk begins to gain clearer contours and becomes an identifiable, and one
might add reliable, companion in early modern French writing and visual arts.
This is not to say that he becomes one-dimensional. The opposite is the case,
for as the following essays show—exploring a wide range of sources spanning

© L’Esprit Créateur, Vol. 53, No. 4 (2013), pp. 1–8

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 L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR

two centuries, from novellas and plays to pamphlets and ceiling paintings—
the Turk both maintains certain characteristics while undergoing some signif-
icant changes from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century. As we will see,
the reasons for the proliferation and transformation of this oriental figure are
rooted foremost in the dynamic of France’s relationship with the Ottoman
Empire during this period which, compared with that of other European
powers, was unique on several accounts.
In order to comprehend the Turk of early modern France as an aggregate
imaginary figure, then, we need to think of him as both stable and flexible,
predictable and unique, familiar and strange. This is another sense in which
he is both one and many. One reason for the stability of the Turk as the main
oriental figure occupying the French imagination is the dominance of the
Ottoman Empire in the Mediterranean and southeast Europe during the cen-
tury and a half that separates the first Ottoman siege of Vienna (1529) from
the second (1683). With one exception, the numerous sources critically
investigated here fall into this period. By the time Suleiman the Magnificent
ascended to power in 1520, Europeans had understood that the empire in the
East was a force to reckon with, even though very little was known about
it.5 Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth century, therefore, the Turk
was the object of persistent curiosity on the part of the French reading
public. Numerous scholars, diplomats, merchants, and artists would report
about the Ottoman Empire in text and image, among them Pierre Belon
(1517-64) and Guillaume-Joseph Grelot (ca. 1630-80), discussed in this
volume. Despite this genuine curiosity and a steadily growing stream of
information about the Ottoman Empire, some basic characteristics of this
imaginary figure remain the same over two centuries, a fact that adds to the
aforementioned paradox of France’s early modern Turk. As several contri-
butions highlight, ruthless violence and unbridled lust are the two traits with
which the Turk will consistently be associated, which threatens to turn him
into an uninspiring stock character. Such an outcome occurs, for example,
in the crude evocations of the Turk in the propaganda produced on both
sides during the Wars of Religion.6 To dismiss the Turk as a clichéd and pre-
dictable oriental figure without much interest, however, would ignore other
characteristics that add to his intriguing historical complexity, characteris-
tics that in fact make him one of the most fascinating figures populating the
early modern French imagination.
The imaginary Turk’s dynamic side is intimately related to the develop-
ment of Franco-Ottoman relations. Early on, these relations were unique
within Europe because Francis I, after having been taken captive at the battle

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 MARCUS KELLER

of Pavia in 1525 by Charles V, was the first and only Western sovereign who
forged a strategic alliance with Suleiman the Magnificent. They shared an
interest in containing the power of the Habsburg Empire in Europe and the
Mediterranean, as would their successors in the seventeenth century.7 In 1535,
a French embassy was installed at the Porte and quickly became not only the
most important representation of any Western power in Istanbul but also
“Europe’s window on the Islamic world.”8 While facilitating political negoti-
ations and commercial exchange, the embassy also actively promoted explor-
ing, and producing knowledge about, the empire. The French reading public
was soon able to consume treatises and travelogues such as Pierre Belon’s
Observations de plusieurs singularitez et choses memorables trouvées en
Grece, Asie, Judée, Egypte, Arabie (1553), André Thevet’s Cosmographie de
Levant (1554), and Guillaume Postel’s De la Republique des Turcs (1560).9
These and numerous other works were commonly printed in several editions
and were soon translated into other European vernaculars, which nurtured
French collective knowledge but also imagination about the Ottoman sultan
and his empire.10
With only a few interruptions the French kingdom would stay on friendly
terms with the Ottoman Empire throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
tury. France did not participate in the battle of Lepanto (1571), the first major
defeat of the Ottoman navy in modern history, nor in the battle against the
sultan’s army that ended the second siege of Vienna and foreshadowed the
empire’s dwindling influence in Europe in the eighteenth century. Contrary to
most other Western powers, France also never had any direct military con-
frontations with the Ottomans during the Renaissance. The French imagina-
tion during the sixteenth century, however, shared in a deeply rooted pan-
European fear of the Turk.11 This fear was fanned by the battle of Mohács
(1526), which led to the Ottoman domination of Hungary, and the first siege
of Vienna three years later.
These historical developments explain why, from the middle of the six-
teenth century on, curiosity about and serious engagement with the Ottoman
Empire, to which Belon’s Observations are a testimony, as Pascale Barthe
shows, existed side-by-side with popular and epic celebrations of the defeat
of the Turk at Lepanto, the focus of Phillip J. Usher’s essay. This essay
demonstrates how, even in the aftermath of victory, these celebrations indi-
rectly reveal the persistent fear about the Ottoman encroachment onto the con-
tinent. How far the ambivalence toward the Turk reaches in the sixteenth cen-
tury becomes clear if we compare the anonymous Ottoman in Marguerite de
Navarre’s Heptaméron (1558) with the personnel of the oriental tales in

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 L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR

François de Belleforest’s Histoires tragiques (1559-1583). Roughly contem-

porary fictional inventions, Marguerite’s Turk not only commands the sympa-
thy of the narrator, according to Mary B. McKinley, but also becomes crucial
for the transmission of knowledge and the preservation of truth. Being truth-
ful, however, is the least concern of the cruel and lascivious sultan of the His-
toires tragiques. In Oumelbanine Zhiri’s view, this prototype of the oriental
despot incarnates the dangers of absolute power. Zhiri also uncovers a signif-
icant difference in Belleforest’s collection between Turcs and Mores, the
rulers of Barbary states, giving an intriguing example of the ways in which
crude stereotyping can go hand in hand with the careful instrumentalization of
different oriental characters.
What emerges from the case studies of these sixteenth-century texts, then,
is a profound ambivalence toward the Turk. Because of his power and his
status as an ally as well as his relative obscurity and religious alterity, he
inspired fear and awe. Authors like Belleforest deployed him to evoke abhor-
rence and admiration in his readers, while Belon labors to solve the cultural
and symbolic enigmas he encounters in the Middle East in pursuit of a gen-
uine mutual understanding. This fundamental ambivalence will persist
throughout the early modern period, as the contributions centered here on the
seventeenth century confirm, but the sixteenth century’s fear of the Turk will
slowly subside as he increasingly becomes a subject of domination after the
turn of the century.
Examples of the violent and lustful Turk echo throughout the seventeenth
century, but he also takes on some new characteristics, as the essays dis-
cussing Turkish figures from the classical age demonstrate. What accounts for
these changes, however, is not the development of Franco-Ottoman relations,
but rather the gradual transformation of France into an absolutist state. The
consolidation of the French monarchy leads to the fostering of collective self-
esteem of which the changing treatment of the imaginary Turk can be taken
as a clear indication. Part of France’s rise under Richelieu, Mazarin, and Col-
bert involves the expansion of Franco-Ottoman trade relations, which culmi-
nates in the foundation of the Compagnie du Levant in 1670. As Michèle
Longino shows through the example of Grelot’s Relation nouvelle d’un
voyage de Constantinople (1680) and its graphic renderings of the Ottoman
capital, this intensification of exchange with the Porte feeds into the develop-
ment of a mentality that prepares the ground for French colonialism in the
eighteenth century. By the mid-seventeenth century the Turk had gradually
turned from a source of fear into an object of conquest. Around the same time,
the production of knowledge about the Ottoman Empire and its symbolic

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 MARCUS KELLER

presence in France through traded goods increase significantly. The heyday of

Turqueries had arrived.12
While French exposure to the Ottomans and their civilization intensified
during the seventeenth century, the symbolic Turk is increasingly kept at a
safe distance through different aesthetic means in an attempt to contain and
ultimately domesticate him. As Audrey Calefas-Strébelle argues here, after
the turn of the sixteenth century the Turk first becomes a nostalgic figure for
the aristocratic reading public. As nobles were gradually forced by the monar-
chy to give up their traditional freedom and autonomy and reinvent them-
selves as conformist courtiers, they saw in the often sensational portrayals of
valorous unbridled Ottomans a distant image of their feudal heritage and
former way of life. Accounts about contemporary Turkish cruelty in various
gazettes began to be associated with an obsolete past instead of being taken as
signs of an imminent threat as they would have been in the sixteenth century.
Theatricalization becomes a preferred way of keeping the Turk at a safe
distance. A ubiquitous figure in court ballets, he serves to assert French
supremacy, although in an increasingly self-conscious mode. According to
Ellen R. Welch, the staging of Turks in the seventeenth century often entailed
a critique of well-worn stereotypes while confirming the mastering of the
Turk by making him move and act at will. We can interpret a similar, if more
subversive, play with Turkish tropes that Toby Wikström detects in Mont-
fleury’s comedy Le Mary sans femme (1663) as yet another sign that by the
second half of the seventeenth century the symbolic domestication of the Turk
was accomplished.
Perhaps the most striking proof of how much, by the time of Louis XIV’s
reign, at least the official French attitude toward the Turk had changed since
the Renaissance is the presence of esclaves turcs and other images of sub-
jected Turks on medals, in almanacs, and all the way to the ceiling of Ver-
sailles. Gillian Weiss and Meredith Martin demonstrate here how these repre-
sentations were deliberately deployed to foster the Sun King’s image as a
Catholic crusader after being criticized for his friendly dealings with the
Ottoman Empire in an attempt to consolidate and expand his own power. To
fend off internal and international criticism of France’s continued alliance
with the Porte, the political and commercial rapprochement had to be paral-
leled by an increasing need for symbolic distance from the Turk.
Finally, François-Ronan Dubois’s reading of the Turkish prince Alamir in
Mme de Lafayette’s Zayde (1671) can serve as an example of the degree to
which the imaginary attitude toward the Turk had become pliable by the
second half of the seventeenth century. Portrayed as an honnête homme,

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 L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR

Alamir is even deemed capable of galanterie. Further feeding the fundamen-

tal ambivalence vis-à-vis the imaginary Turk that can be observed throughout
the early modern period, worldly assimilation through galanterie figures at
the one end of the spectrum of possible positions to take during the seven-
teenth century, the forms of distanciation described above being at the other.
But both, assimilation and distanciation, serve to achieve the same ultimate
goal: the Turk’s containment and domestication.
By the end of the seventeenth century, the Ottoman Empire’s influence on
Europe had peaked and so had the French interest in all things Turkish. While
turqueries remained part of the Rococo aesthetic, chinoiseries gradually
rivaled them in popularity and contributed to the extension of the imaginary
Orient to the Far East. India and Persia also began to challenge the Ottoman
Empire’s near monopoly over the French oriental imagination, especially after
Antoine Galland’s translation of Les Mille et Une Nuits (1704-17). Mon-
tesquieu’s fictional travelers to Paris were Persian, not Turkish (Lettres per-
sanes, 1721).
The Franco-Ottoman alliance would persist throughout the eighteenth
century. The first long-term representation of the Porte in France, the embassy
of Mehmed Effendi, beginning in 1720 and evoked by Jenny Mander, shows
how much the tables had turned since the Renaissance: Effendi was on a mis-
sion to find out about French savoir faire and thus help modernize the weak-
ening empire that sent him. In this context, the comedy Les Veuves turques by
Germain-François Poulain de Saint-Foix, performed for the Ottoman ambas-
sador in a private salon in 1741, can be understood, as Mander demonstrates,
as a testimony to the degree to which Franco-Ottoman relations had matured
by the mid-eighteenth century and had reached a level of mutual respect.13
The essays gathered here can provide only glimpses into the complex
early modern history of France’s involvement with the Ottoman Empire and
the changing imagination of the Turk that subtended it. They give us, how-
ever, a clear idea about the dynamic nature of this imagination that we have
just sketched, however rudimentarily. The case studies in concert also provide
a solid basis for the critical engagement with Edward Said’s influential theses
about Orientalism. Among early modernists it has become commonplace to
criticize Said for his sweeping and therefore ultimately untenable statements
about the early modern period which, in fairness, is not the focus of his study.
Following Said, if we understand Orientalism as a “system of thought” (333),
the essays here show that it is not a critical concept that can fruitfully be
applied to the early modern period.14 In a 1994 afterword to Orientalism,
which since its first publication in 1978 had provoked much controversy, Said

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 MARCUS KELLER

acknowledges, however, that there are “different styles of Orientalism” (336).

He also underlines that as a “cultural phenomenon” orientalist discourse is so
attractive because of its “variability and unpredictability” (339). While these
concessions seem to create new tensions within Said’s theory between Orien-
talism as a system of thought and a style of thought, it is in the sense of the
latter that we can understand the early modern texts and images of the Turk
discussed here as part of a much broader orientalist discourse, defined as open
and creative rather than systematic, predetermined since Antiquity, and, in the
case of France, leading straight to eighteenth-century colonialist ideology.
Last but not least, whether we comprehend the rich early modern French
imagination of the Turk as orientalist or not, the subtle insights of the analyses
that follow also offer important food for thought as we contemplate the
mutual images that underpin Franco-Turkish relations in our own post-9/11
world, in the context of a Neo-Ottomanism on the rise and an EU project more
than ever in search of itself.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Notes

1. See Clarence D. Rouillard’s substantial inventory of the Turk’s presence in French writing
in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, The Turk in French History, Thought, and Litera-
ture (1520-1660) (Paris: Boivin, 1941). Le Turc is clearly marked as masculine, and even
when authors evoke les Turcs, they almost always refer to men. To account for this aspect,
I will refer to this figure exclusively as “he.”
2. See Michael J. Heath, Crusading Commonplaces: La Noue, Lucinge and Rhetoric against
the Turks (Geneva: Droz, 1986); and Géraud Poumarède, Pour en finir avec la croisade:
mythes et réalités de la lutte contre les Turcs aux XVI e et XVII e siècle (Paris: PUF, 2004).
3. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
4. See Lucette Valensi, Ces étrangers familiers: musulmans en Europe (XVI e-XVIII e siècles)
(Paris: Payot, 2012), 12. Valensi observes that, with regard to their semantic fluidity, the
Moor in early modern English is comparable to le Turc.
5. The first comprehensive book in any language dealing with Turkish customs, government,
and religion, Teodoro Spandugino’s Genealogie du grant Turc a present regnant, was pub-
lished in Paris in 1519 (Rouillard 8). In its aftermath, French humanists became obsessed
with the origin of the Turks, a people not mentioned in any classical source. See Frank
Lestringant, “Guillaume Postel et l’obsession turque,” Écrire le monde à la Renaissance:
quinze études sur Rabelais, Postel, Bodin et la littérature géographique (Caen: Paradigme,
1993), 189-224. Italian sources also added early on to the general knowledge about the
Ottoman Empire in Europe, and interest in the Turk was of course a phenomenon across the
continent. For the purpose of this essay, however, I will limit my focus on Franco-Ottoman
relations without considering their European context.
6. See Rouillard, 407-18.
7. The Renaissance Franco-Ottoman alliance has received much critical attention lately. See
Edith Garnier, L’Alliance impie: François I er et Soliman le Magnifique contre Charles
Quint (1529-1547) (Paris: Félin, 2008); and Christine Isom-Verhaaren, Allies with the Infi-
del: The Ottoman and French Alliance in the Sixteenth Century (London: Tauris, 2011).

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 L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR

8. Philip Mansel, “The French Renaissance in Search of the Ottoman Empire,” in Re-Orient-
ing the Renaissance: Cultural Exchanges with the East, Gerald MacLean, ed. (New York:
Palgrave, 2005), 96.
9. The three authors belonged to the embassy of Gabriel d’Aramon (1547-54). One of the main
purposes of this mission was to generate knowledge about Ottoman government and soci-
ety. See Frédéric Tinguely, L’Écriture du Levant à la Renaissance: enquête sur les
voyageurs français dans l’Empire de Soliman le Magnifique (Geneva: Droz, 2000).
10. Among the avid readers of these texts was Montaigne. While the first edition of the Essais
in 1580 contained only three references to the Turk, he was evoked more than thirty times
in the posthumous 1595 edition. See Jean Balsamo, “L’Histoire des Turcs à l’épreuve des
Essais,” in Histoire et littérature au siècle de Montaigne: mélanges offerts à Claude-Gilbert
Dubois, Françoise Argod-Dutard, ed. (Geneva: Droz, 2001), 221-36.
11. See Jean Delumeau, La Peur en Occident (XVI e-XVIII e siècles) (Paris: Fayard, 1978), 262-
72; Almut Höfert, Den Feind beschreiben: “Türkengefahr” und europäisches Wissen über
das Osmanische Reich 1450-1600 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2003); and Nancy Bisaha,
Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks (Philadelphia: U
of Pennsylvania P, 2004).
12. See Ina B. McCabe, Orientalism in Early Modern France: Eurasian Trade, Exoticism, and
the Ancien Régime (Oxford: Berg, 2008); Nicholas Dew, Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
(Oxford: Oxford U P, 2009); and Lucien Bély, ed., Turcs et turqueries, XVI e-XVII e siècles
(Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2009).
13. See also Fatma Müge Göçek, East Encounters West: France and the Ottoman Empire in the
Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford U P, 1987).
14. I am quoting from the 1994 edition of Orientalism (New York: Vintage). For critical takes
on Orientalism by scholars of early modernity, see Nancy Bisaha, Creating East and West;
Michèle Longino, Orientalism in French Classical Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge U P,
2002); or Margaret Meserve, Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (Cam-
bridge: Harvard U P, 2008).

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