British Encounters with Ottoman

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EARLY MODERN CULTURAL STUDIES 1500 –1700

British Encounters
with Ottoman
Minorities in the Early
Seventeenth Century
‘Slaves’ of the Sultan

e va joh a n n a hol m be rg
Early Modern Cultural Studies 1500–1700

Series Editors
Jean Howard
Department of English
Columbia University
New York, NY, USA

Holly Dugan
English Department
George Washington University
Washington D.C., WA, USA
In the twenty first century, literary criticism, literary theory, historiogra-
phy and cultural studies have become intimately interwoven, and the for-
merly distinct fields of literature, society, history, and culture no longer
seem so discrete. The Early Modern Cultural Studies series encourages
scholarship that crosses boundaries between disciplines, time periods,
nations, and theoretical orientations. The series assumes that the early
modern period was marked by incipient processes of transculturation
brought about through exploration, trade, colonization, and the migra-
tion of texts and people. These phenomena set in motion the processes of
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this series is to publish innovative scholarship that is attentive to the com-
plexity of this early modern world and bold in the methods it employs for
studying it.

More information about this series at

https://link.springer.com/bookseries/14956
 Eva Johanna Holmberg

British Encounters
with Ottoman
Minorities in the Early
Seventeenth Century
‘Slaves’ of the Sultan
Eva Johanna Holmberg
University of Helsinki
Helsinki, Finland

ISSN 2634-5897     ISSN 2634-5900 (electronic)

Early Modern Cultural Studies 1500–1700
ISBN 978-3-030-97227-1    ISBN 978-3-030-97228-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97228-8

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An early modern English traveller’s view of a Greek coloiero, one of the ‘slaves’ of
the sultan
 Acknowledgements

My ‘difficult second album’ is finally here! This book has travelled with me
from Turku in Finland to London and New York, back to Helsinki, and
then finally to Brighton, where I am now reminiscing about its journey
and the people who have helped along the way, during its tentative early
steps after my PhD when the Lehman Brothers had just collapsed and on
its final legs during the seemingly endless Covid pandemic. For providing
the first mobility grant, a postdoctoral fellowship, and then a major 5-year
research grant that moved my interests towards new paths (which all sub-
stantially enriched this book) my first thank you goes to the Academy of
Finland. To Miri Rubin and Peter Burke: thank you for your help during
my first years as a newly minted PhD, and for helping to carve my own way
in the world. To Jyotsna Singh, Gerald MacLean, Nandini Das, Matthew
Dimmock, Andrew Hadfield, Claire Jowitt, and Dan Carey, thank you for
fun detours, sage advice, and vital support along the way. Thanks are also
due to Lars Folke Landgren, Marjo Kaartinen, Sami Pihlström, Sari
Kivistö, Niklas Jensen-Eriksen, and Anu Lahtinen, who provided support,
encouragement, and the freedom to think at the University of Helsinki,
Turku Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and Helsinki
Collegium for Advanced Studies. I am very pleased that the book has
found a home in the Early Modern Cultural Studies 1500–1700 series
edited by Jean Howard and Holly Dugan, and I want to thank my editors
Eileen Srebernik and Raghupathy Kalynaraman at Palgrave, as well as the
two anonymous reviewers for their helpful and encouraging comments. I
also want to thank the Folger Shakespeare Library, The Wellcome
Collection, and the British Museum for granting me the rights to publish

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

images in their collections, and Studies in Travel Writing and its editor
Tim Youngs for permission to publish a revised version of my article ‘In
the Company of Franks: British Identifications in the Ottoman Empire, c.
1600’ (2012) as Chap. 5 of this book. A special thank you goes to John
Gage for language editing an earlier version, and to Dr Anders Ingram, for
careful copyediting and preparing the index during a busy time, thus help-
ing this to become a much more polished book than its pandemic-ridden
author would have achieved alone.
Numerous colleagues and friends have read drafts, listened patiently to
rants, given advice, formed panels around the world, and supported and
cheered me along. Thank you to Laura Williamson Ambrose, Lubaaba al-­
Azami, Anthony Bale, Caroline Bassett, Jim Bennett, Richard Blakemore,
Warren Boutcher, Wendy Bracewell, Anne Byrne, Rosi Carr, Nikki Clark,
Liesbeth Corens, Surekha Davies, Natalya Din-Kariuki, Hanna
Drummond, Minna Franck, John Gallagher, Elise Garritzen, Gábor
Gelléri, Peter Good, Laura Gowing, Jane Grogan, Kate Hodgkin,
Josephine Hoegaerts, Chloë Houston, Kat Hill, Michael Hunter, Anders
Ingram, Fanny Johansson-Stockford, Hanna Järvinen, Marjo Kaartinen,
Maijastina Kahlos, Samuli Kaislaniemi, Saara Kalajoki, Outi Kaltio, Sari
Katajala-Peltomaa, Sirpa Kelosto, Jesse Keskiaho, Johanna Kippo, Leila
Koivunen, Anna Koivusalo, Laura Kolbe, Anu Korhonen, Laura Kounine,
Jenni Kuuliala, Janne Lahti, Antti Lampinen, Mirkka Lappalainen, Hanna
Lepistö, Maarit Leskelä-Kärki, Tom Linkinen, Suzannah Lipscomb, Grey
Macartney (in memoriam), Iain MacDaniel, Angela McShane, Kirsi
Majantie, Charmian Mansell, Guido van Meersbergen, Heikki Mikkeli,
Emilie Murphy, Ladan Niayesh, Samu Niskanen, Sara Norja, Jo Paul,
Markku Peltonen, Chloe Porter, Anu Raunio, Tim Reinke-Williams, Katja
Ritari, Kirsty Rolfe, Martha Dana Rust, Päivi Räisänen-Schröder, Kirsi
Saarikangas, Aaro Sahari, Hannu Salmi, Stefan Schröder, Amrita Sen,
Edmond Smith, Adam Smyth, Alan Stewart, Paul Strohm, Laura Tarkka,
Eeva-Maija Viitanen, Maikki Viitikko, Anu Viljanen, Dan Vitkus, Brodie
Waddell, Mark Williams, Rachel Willie, and Soile Ylivuori. Thanks also to
my former and current academic homes and communities in Turku,
Helsinki, Sussex, and London: The School of History at Queen Mary
University of London, the members of Medieval and Early Modern
Orients, the council and members of the Hakluyt Society, the Institute of
Historical Research Society, Culture, and Belief, 1500–1800 Seminar,
numerous early modern #Twitterstorians, and especially the staff at the
British Library’s Rare Books and Music Reading Room, I could not have
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix

done this without you. This book is all the better for its many unexpected
encounters, movements, and changes of scenery.
Lastly, I want to acknowledge the constants: my family for always being
there, and Ned the rabbit for keeping me company (and nibbling on all
the books left lying around for too long). This book is dedicated to James
Chester, who I met just as I was about to publish my ‘first album’, and
who has patiently supported me and shared my mobile life ever since.

Twelfth Night, 2022 Brighton

 Praise for British Encounters with Ottoman
Minorities in the Early Seventeenth Century

“Seventeenth-century Ottoman Sultans ruled over thirty million people, many of

them Christians and Jews. Exploring how British travellers described these ‘non-­
Muslims,’ Eva Johanna Holmberg’s impressive study skilfully reveals the range and
limitations both of Ottoman diversity and toleration of difference and of travellers’
representations. Rich in archival discoveries, this study makes a valuable contribu-
tion to the history of early-modern cross-cultural encounters.”
—Gerald Maclean, Emeritus Professor, University of Exeter
and author of The Rise of Oriental Travel: English
Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580–1720.
 Contents

1 British Encounters with Ottoman Minorities in the Early

Seventeenth Century: ‘Slaves’ of the Sultan  1

2 Scattered Nations: Jews and Greeks 33

3 Eastern Christians 83

4 Viewing and Addressing Women129

5 Free Franks and Visiting Westerners171

6 Conclusion: ‘Sundry Sorts of Nations’193

Bibliography201

Index223

xiii
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 ‘A coloiero or a Greek preest.’ (Image published with the

permission of the Trustees of the British Museum) 60
Fig. 4.1 Folio 49r. Add. 23880. Or. 54. British Museum. (Published
with the permission of the trustees of the British Museum) 138
Fig. 4.2 Sandys, Relation, 80. (Published by permission of the Folger
Shakespeare Library) 153
Fig. 4.3 Cesare Vecellio, ‘Greca in Pera’. (Published by permission of
the Wellcome Collection) 154
Fig. 5.1 ‘Franco’. (Published by permission of the Wellcome Collection) 174

xv
 CHAPTER 1

British Encounters with Ottoman Minorities

in the Early Seventeenth Century: ‘Slaves’
of the Sultan

Introduction
Besides these Turkes, Moores, and Arabians (which are al Mahometans) and
Iewes (which are Talmudists) there are also sundry sorts of Christians in this
Countrey, which are of two sorts, either such as were borne, brought up,
and dwelled in the Countrey, or such as were borne in Christendome, and
only soiourne heere for a time to exercise merchandises. The first sort who
were borne in this heathen Countrey, and dwell there, are either Armenians,
Maronites, Iacobites, Georgians, Chelfalines, or Greekes; which are all
gouerned by their Patriarkes for Ecclesiasticall matters. But for ciuill gouer-
nement, both they and their Patriarkes are subiect to Turkish Lawes, yea
they are all slaves vnto the great Turk, whom they call their Grand Signior.1

Sometime chaplain of the Levant Company William Biddulph’s account

of the social fabric and religious diversity of Ottoman-ruled Aleppo is first
structured around religious divisions between ‘Mahometans’ (Muslims),
‘Talmudists’ (Jews), and Christians. However, the final category of
‘Christians’ also contains much diversity for Biddulph and his readers to
make sense of. First, he draws a division between those born in

1
William Biddulph, The Travels of Certaine Englishmen into Africa, Asia, Troy, Bythinia,
Thracia, and to the Blacke Sea (London: by Thomas Haueland, for W. Aspley, 1609), 75.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
E. J. Holmberg, British Encounters with Ottoman Minorities in the
Early Seventeenth Century, Early Modern Cultural Studies
1500–1700, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97228-8_1
2 E. J. HOLMBERG

‘Christendome’ (such as Biddulph himself), and the multitude of groups

of eastern Christians born ‘in this heathen Countrey’ (in which he includes
groups not born in Syria or even the Ottoman world). However, while
recognizing the sectarian diversity of eastern Christianity Biddulph both
gathers these eastern Christians together and makes the collective judge-
ment ‘yea they are all slaves vnto the great Turk’, although not all these
groups were even Ottoman subjects. For Biddulph, and his seventeenth-­
century English compatriots, these Christian minorities were both a puz-
zling diversity and a cogent group, to be viewed comparatively as
co-religionists but also as suspicious and foreign.
The expansion of the Ottoman Empire during the sixteenth century to
include new lands in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, North Africa, and
the Near East called for Europeans to take stock and re-assess what they
already knew about these lands and their inhabitants. By the turn of the
seventeenth century the Ottoman Empire had become a phenomenon to
be reckoned with, not just opposed. Following other Europeans, there
was an intensification of British contact with the Ottomans and the wider
Islamicate world, as increasing numbers of Englishmen (and some Scots
and Welsh too) ventured to the East in search of lucrative trade, gathering
reliable intelligence about Islamic empires on their way.2 Britons set up
diplomatic and trading outposts in Istanbul, Aleppo, and Smyrna (Izmir)
in the aftermath of the founding of the Turkey Company, which had been
chartered on 11 September 1581. This helped to facilitate both trade and
diplomacy, as well as the visits and longer sojourns of travellers.3 Whilst

2
This study mostly interprets material published after the Union of the Crowns in 1603. I
will use ‘British’, ‘Britons’, and ‘Britain’ to refer collectively to travellers although they were
mostly English and only occasionally Scottish or Welsh. Otherwise, I will favour the termi-
nology used in the original sources, admitting that the political concept ‘Great Britain’ was
still contested in the seventeenth century, cf. Hugh Kearney, The British Isles 2nd ed.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2012), 1–11.
3
On the British in the Levant and Islamic world see Jerry Brotton, This Orient Isle.
Elizabethan England and the Islamic World (London: Allen Lane, 2016); Sarah Searight, The
British in the Middle East (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969); Despina Vlami, Trading
with the Ottomans (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016); Christine Laidlaw, The British in the Levant
(London: I.B. Tauris, 2010); James Mather, Pashas. Traders and Travellers in the Islamic
World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009). On the Levant Company
(itself an amalgamation of the earlier Turkey and Venice Companies in 1592) see Mortimer
Epstein, The Early History of the Levant Company Routledge Revivals (London: Routledge,
2015) and Alfred C. Wood, A History of the Levant Company (London: Frank Cass, 1964).
On English representations of Islam, see Samuel Cleggett Chew, The Crescent and the Rose.
 1 BRITISH ENCOUNTERS WITH OTTOMAN MINORITIES IN THE EARLY… 3

Britons were becoming eager supplicants for lucrative trade deals and
political contacts with the Ottomans, this new relationship called for fol-
lowers, support, and more intelligence.4 All this activity helped to create a
demand back home for comprehensive and up-to-date vernacular infor-
mation about the Ottomans and all their subjects. To fulfil these needs,
Britons from a broad social spectrum and varied nationalities were not just
turning their gaze towards the Turks and Islam, but, during the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, began to fill numerous pages of their diaries,
letters, and other travelogues in which they described what they experi-
enced and everyone they encountered.
While this is not a study of ‘Englishness’ or ‘Britishness’, focusing
instead on their perceptions of foreign peoples, I will explore how ideas
and idealized imaginings about English/British national character struc-
tured these early encounters in Ottoman lands, shaping assumptions about
how subjects were to be treated in a multicultural and multireligious
empire. Despite English colonial presence in Ireland and early footholds in
the Americas there was not yet a British empire. Britons, however, often
seemed envious of the Turks for theirs, as has been shown by Gerald
MacLean.5 And even if these early travellers to the Ottoman lands were
perhaps not yet conscious of directly weaving the threads of the later
British Empire, they still form part of the longer story of trade and colo-
nialism. Before their own empire became a reality, these British authors
helped to make their readers more aware of the diversity of the world
around them, and often knowingly presented this diversity as an exotic
and confusing spectacle.6

Islam and England during the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937); Rhoads
Murphey, “Bigots or Informed Observers? A Periodization of (Pre-Colonial) English and
European Writing on The Middle East,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, 110:2
(1990): 291–303.
4
Daniel J. Vitkus, “Trafficking with the Turk: English Travelers in the Ottoman Empire
during the Early Seventeenth Century” in Travel Knowledge. European “Discoveries” in the
Early Modern Period, eds. Kamps, Ivo; Singh, Jyotsna G.. (Basingstoke & New York.
Palgrave, 2001), 35–52.
5
On the performance of ‘Englishness’ and ‘imperial envy’, see Gerald MacLean, Looking
East: English Writing and the Ottoman Empire before 1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave,
2007), 118.
6
For these developments during the seventeenth century, see L.H. Roper, Advancing
Empire. English Interests and Overseas Expansion, 1613–1688 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2017), 15–17; Alison Games, The Web of Empire. English Cosmopolitans in
an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008). For the often
4 E. J. HOLMBERG

British interest in the peoples of the Ottoman Empire had deep histori-
cal roots. The Ottoman Empire was fascinating to Europeans because of
its regions’ classical and biblical resonances, the remains of ancient civiliza-
tions, and long histories of trade and pilgrimage. The Mediterranean Sea
connected European Christians with the Ottoman Empire tangibly and
materially, not just conceptually and culturally. From the Ottoman con-
quest of Constantinople in 1453 Europeans, ranging from humanist
scholars to politicians and intelligencers, had been interested in the loyal-
ties, religious affiliations, and affinities of the people under Ottoman rule,
and in the nature of Ottoman rule and the Ottoman polity. For inhabit-
ants of the Ottoman-Habsburg border regions, the Ottomans were also
an existential threat and a cause for great concern.7
The Ottomans’ continuing encroachment on Europe and the impor-
tance of the empire’s trade attracted visitors, merchants, and scholars too,
impacting Renaissance Europe in many ways.8 This was reflected in a con-
sistent interest in the Old World over the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies; evident even in books treating the Americas. In France as well as
England, between 1480–1609 more travel books were published about
the Ottoman domains than about the Americas.9 This literary engagement
was complex and wide-ranging, and often crossed borders in translation.

ignored women travellers participating in such encounters, see Patricia Akhimie and
Bernadette Andrea, eds. Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the
Wider World (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2019).
7
For Renaissance humanist views and perceptions of the Ottomans in a wider European
context, see Margaret Meserve, Empires of Islam in Renaissance historical thought (Cambridge,
Mass.; London: Harvard University Press, 2008); Nancy Bisaha, Creating East and West.
Renaissance humanists and the Ottoman Turks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2004); Palmira Brummett, Mapping the Ottomans. Sovereignty, Territory, and Identity
in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Daniel
Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002). See also Jonathan Burton, Traffic and Turning. Islam and English Drama,
1579–1624 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005) and Jonathan Burton, “Emplotting
the Early Modern Mediterranean” in Remapping the Mediterranean World in Early Modern
English Writing, ed. Goran V. Stanivukovic (New York; Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2007), 21–40.
8
See Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and
West (London: Reaktion, 2000); Gerald Maclean (ed.) Re-Orienting the Renaissance.
Cultural Exchanges with the East (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
9
In France 180 new books on Asia and the Turks were published compared to some 40 on
the New World between 1480 and 1609. On this Europe-wide trend, see John Michael
Archer, Old Worlds. Egypt, Southwest Asia, India, and Russia in Early Modern English Writing
 1 BRITISH ENCOUNTERS WITH OTTOMAN MINORITIES IN THE EARLY… 5

Despite their importance to early modern Europeans, these encounters

with the Old World and its peoples were for a long while overshadowed by
modern historians’ interest in the post-Columbian encounter with the
‘New World’. In the words of Jerry Brotton, ‘the stories of cultural
encounters with the east lack the immediacy and vividness of the originary
dramas of discovery offered in the accounts of the New World, partly
because these encounters had been ongoing for centuries before the dis-
covery of America’.10 This unbroken contact had also created attachments
and narratives that went beyond the production and construction of
scholarly knowledge, touching the realms of the spiritual, the emotional,
and the imagined, which are also evident in descriptions of these encoun-
ters. At the same time, getting to know the Levant had a practical compo-
nent: British people wanted to trade and live there, and get to know the
region and its peoples to trade with them. Providing written accounts
about the Ottomans and their subjects was thus a service to many. It
enabled many travellers studied in this book to fashion careers, obtain
patrons, and to communicate with elites and the powerful back in Britain.
These varied motivations and aims also shaped traveller-authors descrip-
tions of the people they met.

‘Slaves’ of the Sultan: British Perceptions

of the Millet System

This book explores how Britons wrote about their encounters with the
non-Muslim peoples of the Ottoman Empire, who they conceived of as
slaves or living as if in slavery under the Turks. It is the first comprehensive
cultural historical account of how British travellers described the religious
and ethnic diversity of the subjects of the sultan. The descriptions of these
subjects, or as the British visitors often claimed, the ‘slaves’ of the Ottoman
sultan, open to view not only perspectives into how Britons saw the func-
tioning of the Ottoman Empire at a more microscopic level, but also on

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 1–2. On the national and ethnic origins of early
Levant travellers, see Stefanos Yerasimos, Les voyageurs dans l’Empire Ottoman, XIVe–XVIe
siècles: bibliografie, itinéraires et inventaire des lieux habités (Ankara: Société turque d’histoire,
1991), 9–13; Elisabetta Borromeo, Voyageurs occidentaux dans l’empire ottoman, 1600–1644
(Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2007); Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe. Book
1. The Visual Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 227.
10
Jerry Brotton, Trading Territories, Mapping the Early Modern World (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1997), 26.
6 E. J. HOLMBERG

how they produced taxonomies to describe peoples, religions, and poli-

ties, and used these accounts to tell bigger stories about empire, treatment
of ethnic and religious minorities, and to frame themselves in their own
accounts as dutiful servants of their own state.
British travellers’ descriptions rarely grasped the full extent and nuances
of the Ottomans’ actual treatment of their subjects or Ottoman social
structures at large. In Ottoman society subjects were distinguished from
slaves. The Ottoman elites consisted of the military, court officials and the
clergy, whereas the reaya were the tax paying lower classes consisting of
Muslims, Christians, and Jews, the latter two also referred to as the
dhimmi. Finally, there were the kul, that is, the slave class, which included
slaves who owed direct allegiance to the sultan, like the famous Janissaries,
and harem women.11 Chattel slavery and captivity created their own dis-
courses and narratives, but these are not the subject of this book.12 The
enslaved were mostly described by travellers in anecdotes, observed in
notorious slave markets stripped of their visible ethno-religious markers,
or were only discursively discernible by their new identity as slaves. In
British travel accounts, these actual slaves were utilized as an uncomfort-
able reminder of the risks of moving about in territories under Ottoman
influence, but also as examples that a convert could climb high and even
enter the spheres of Ottoman elites.13 As with the histories of these ‘abı ̄ds,
or kuls, a reader interested in the social and intellectual histories of the
‘real’ peoples of the Ottoman Empire can now consult a growing number
of excellent studies.14

11
On Ottoman categorizations of race, ethnicity, and religion, see Baki Tezcan, “Ethnicity,
Race, Religion and Social Class. Ottoman markers of difference,” in The Ottoman World. ed.
Christine Woodhead (London & New York: Routledge, 2012), 159–170; Suraiya Faroqhi,
Subjects of the Sultan. Culture and Daily Life in the Ottoman Empire (London & New York:
I.B. Tauris, 2005), 80–81.
12
See Daniel Vitkus, “Unkind dealings. English captivity narratives, commercial transfor-
mation, and the economy of unfree labor in the early modern period”, in Piracy and Captivity
in the Mediterranean, ed. Mario Klarer (London: Routledge, 2018).
13
The lived paths of the slaves and ‘Kuls’ of the sultan could be spectacular success stories.
See Tobias P. Graf, The Sultan’s Renegades. Christian-European Converts to Islam and the
Making of the Ottoman Elite, 1575–1610 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). On chat-
tel slavery in the galleys in the Mediterranean, see Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim
Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800
(Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 73–76.
14
See Bernard Heyberger, “Eastern Christians, Islam, and the West: A Connected
History.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 42:3 (2010): 475–78; Bernard
 1 BRITISH ENCOUNTERS WITH OTTOMAN MINORITIES IN THE EARLY… 7

According to Molly Greene, Ottomans classified their subjects ‘for pur-

poses of taxation and general regulation of status, strictly along religious
lines’ as ‘Muslims, Christians, and Jews, not Serbs or Arabs or Greeks or
Albanians’.15 Current research on Ottoman communities tends to be more
conscious of their fluid and porous boundaries, and the ways in which
complex local, communal identities were constructed.16 Jews and
Christians in the Ottoman Empire were officially afforded the status of
‘protected peoples’ (dhimmi).17 Islamic law and practice dictated the rela-
tionship between a Muslim state and non-Muslim groups. According to
this pact, ‘non-Muslims (dhimma) would be protected, could practice
their own religion, preserve their own places of worship, and to a large
extent, run their own affairs provided they recognized the superiority of
Islam’.18 Non-Muslim religious communities were also organized into
‘millets’ that had their own independent courts.19 Daniel Goffman has
characterized the Ottoman millet-system as a ‘structurally guaranteed
inequality system’. In it, Christians and Jews were guaranteed certain
rights but were also classified as ‘second-class citizens’.20 There are ongo-
ing debates in scholarship around the millet-system and how it affected

Heyberger, Les Chrétiens du Proche-Orient au temps de la Réforme catholique: (Syrie, Liban,

Palestine, XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles). (Rome: École française de Rome, 1994); Benjamin Braude,
Christians & Jews in the Ottoman Empire. Abridged edition (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne
Rienner Publishers, 2014); Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis (eds.), Christians and Jews
in the Ottoman Empire 2 vols. (New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1982); John-­
Paul A. Ghobrial. “Towards a New History of Christians and Jews in Ottoman Society 3–5
July 2017, University of Oxford.” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 4:2
(2017): 419–23.
15
Molly Greene, The Edinburgh History of the Greeks, 1453 to 1768, The Ottoman Empire
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 42–43; Kemal Kafadar, “Introduction: A
Rome of One’s Own: Reflections on Cultural Geography and Identity in the Lands of Rum”,
Muqarnas 24 (2007), 7–25.
16
See Tijana Krstic, Contested Conversions to Islam. Narratives of Religious Change in the
Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011); Helen Pfeifer,
“Encounter after the Conquest. Scholarly gatherings in 16th-century Ottoman Damascus,”
International Journal of Middle East Studies 47:2 (2015): 219–39.
17
See “Ḏhimmı ̄”, in Encyclopaedia of Islam. 2nd ed., Brill, accessed 13 September 2021,
https://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_DUM_0964
18
Karen Barkey, Empire of Difference. The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) 120.
19
Ronald C. Jennings, Christians and Muslims in Ottoman Cyprus and the Mediterranean
World, 1571–1640 (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 132–133.
20
Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe, 112, 206–207; Faroqhi,
Subjects of the Sultan, 40.
8 E. J. HOLMBERG

Ottoman religious minorities in the early modern period. Maurits van den
Boogert describes it as an Ottoman system for dealing with the empire’s
non-Muslim subjects and ‘administrative and fiscal communities of
Christians and Jews’. 21 In contrast, contemporary British observers, such
as Biddulph whom I quoted in the beginning, understood that non-­
Muslim peoples were subject to the Turks, but they conceptualized this
relationship as tributary slavery. By conceptualizing non-Muslim subjects
of the Ottomans in this way, travellers could construct ideals of civility,
unity, subjecthood, and the steadfastness and purity of their beliefs, and
even use these minorities as a foil through which to criticize faults
back home.22
In their writings, travellers often wondered about the power and influ-
ence that Ottoman rule had over their various subject peoples, and whether
these people could be trusted as friends in religion or partners in trade.
These Jews, Greeks, Armenians, Copts, Nestorians, and Maronites occupy
the pages of British travel accounts in many contexts. British travellers also
described meeting Kurds and Arabs, as well as groups that were harder to
categorize according to their religious beliefs, like the Roma, or as the
British called them, ‘Zinganaes’ or ‘Gypsies’.23 They are not left out of the
story but will crop up less frequently. We will also encounter the itinerant
‘Chelfalines’, mentioned above by Biddulph, even if technically as itiner-
ant long-distance traders they were not subjects of the Ottoman sultan.
These Chelfalines were itinerant Armenians living in a trading diaspora,
who had been settled from Julfa into Persia and the city of New Julfa
(‘Chelfa’) by Shah Abbas of Persia in the early seventeenth century, and

21
Maurits van den Boogert, “Millets: Past and Present”, in Religious Minorities in the
Middle East. eds. Anne Sofie Roald and Anh Nga Longva (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 25–45;
Benjamin Braude “Foundation myths of the millet system”, in Christians and Jews in the
Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society, vol. I: The central lands, eds. Benjamin
Braude and Bernard Lewis (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1982), 69–88. For a
critique of Lewis, see Barkey, Empire of Difference, 115–119. See also Daniel Goffman,
“Ottoman Millets in the Early Seventeenth Century”, New Perspectives on Turkey 11 (1997):
135–158; Michael M.O.H. Ursinus, “Millet”, Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd ed. Brill, accessed
14 September 2021, https://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_COM_0741; Ayse Ozil,
Orthodox Christians in the Late Ottoman Empire (New York: Routledge, 2013).
22
Similar binary oppositions are still with us today. See Shirin Khanmohamadi, In Light of
Another’s Word: European Ethnography in the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages Series.
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 29.
23
In this book I will not use ethnic slurs unless they are specifically quoted in the texts.
 1 BRITISH ENCOUNTERS WITH OTTOMAN MINORITIES IN THE EARLY… 9

whose trading networks reached from Christian Europe, and the Middle
East to the Indian Ocean.24
At a time when European rulers were forging new ways to treat the
varieties of religion among their subjects, they sought in the neighbouring
empire some models for such coexistence. Writing descriptions of the
non-Muslim minorities encouraged Britons to assess the Jews, Greeks,
Armenians, Copts, Jacobites, Maronites, and Nestorians, and a great vari-
ety of their characteristics from top to bottom. In addition to making
distinctions between them, Britons also compared these peoples to others
closer to home. Paying attention to the great variety of these ‘non-Turks’
in Ottoman lands, this book tells the story of how early seventeenth-­
century Britons encountered a multireligious and diverse society, and how
their own experiences became entangled with their expectations, memo-
ries, and prejudices. The often fuzzy distinctions between and overlapping
characterizations of the subject peoples of the Ottoman Empire reveal the
complex interplay between travellers’ eyewitness encounters and their pre-
conceptions, bringing to the fore a more diverse picture of the British
encounter with the Ottomans and their world than when we focus only on
encounters with the figure of the ‘Turk’ and Islam. By adding more layers,
voices, and characters to its cast, the book will contribute to the transfor-
mation of our understanding of the Anglo-Ottoman encounter, compli-
cating views that stressed divisions and binary oppositions between

24
Shah ‘Abbas I (1587–1629) had established ‘New Julfa’, as a suburb of Isfahan, and
forcibly settled Armenian long-distance traders there from the city of Julfa located in the
war-ridden Ottoman-Persian border regions. The ‘Chelfalines’ were thus not actually sub-
jects of the Ottoman sultan, even if they formed part of the Armenian millets when residing
in Ottoman cities and according to Aslanian were often ‘residents in multiple states, empires,
and regions simultaneously’ see Sebouh Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean:
The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 2014), 27–28, 66–68. See also Sussan Babaie, Kathryn Babayan, Ina
Baghdiantz-McCabe, and Massumeh Farhad. Slaves of the Shah. New Elites of Safavid Iran
(London & New York: I.B. Tauris, 2004); Ina Baghdiantz-McCabe, The Shah’s Silk for
Europe’s Silver: The Eurasian Trade of the Julfa Armenians in Safavid Iran and India
(1530–1750) (Atlanta, Ga: Scholars Press, 1999); Edmund M. Herzig, 1991. “The Armenian
Merchants of New Julfa, Isfahan: A Study in Pre-Modern Asian Trade.” PhD thesis, Oxford
University, UK. It is possible that although Biddulph referred to Armenian traders from
Julfa, he was unaware of their resettlement by Abbas. For the conflation of Armenians and
‘Chelfalines’, see Clifford Edmund Bosworth, Intrepid Scot. William Lithgow of Lanark’s
Travels in the Ottoman Lands, North Africa and Central Europe, 1609–21 (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2006), 72.
10 E. J. HOLMBERG

Christians and Muslims in the early modern period and showing how they
do not hold up when close reading this rich material.

The Travellers and Their Accounts

In the sixteenth century, texts about the Ottomans published in England
had mostly been translations from continental European printed books in
a great variety of genres ranging from histories, geographies, and religious
treatises to news pamphlets. From about the first decade of the seven-
teenth century onwards, British authors had taken over the subject in the
domestic market.25 The travellers whose accounts are studied in this book
are a mixed but roughly contemporaneous group, writing and publishing
at the turn of the seventeenth century. These pioneering accounts written
by ship captain Henry Timberlake, Levant Company clerk John Sanderson,
Levant company chaplain William Biddulph, traveller-author Thomas
Coryate, Scottish traveller-author William Lithgow, gentleman translator
and later colonist George Sandys, scholar and cleric Fynes Moryson, and
last but not least, gentleman courtier and lawyer Henry Blount are well
known to scholars and students of both Anglo-Ottoman history and early
seventeenth-century travel writing. They are studied together here because
their accounts were entangled not only as contemporaries, but because of
their shared experiences, personal contacts, and reading and citation of
each other’s works. There were feuds and rivalries between them too.26
All these travellers had travelled to write about it, but their accounts
were not alike in detail, framing, or erudition. Despite their many similari-
ties, their accounts differed because of their motivations and purposes, and
in what they wanted to achieve with their books. These purposes and uses
in turn shaped the way in which non-Muslim subjects of the sultan were
depicted as well. George Sandys (1578–1644), an educated son of an
archbishop, a translator of Ovid, and later investor and colonist in the

25
See MacLean, Looking East and The Rise of Oriental Travel.
26
On Dallam, Biddulph and Blount see MacLean, The Rise of Oriental Travel. On Sandys,
see Julia Schleck, Telling True Tales of Islamic Lands. Forms of Mediation in English Travel
Writing, 1575–1630 (Selinsgrove Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 2011); Jonathan
Haynes, “Two Seventeenth-Century Perspectives on the Middle East: George Sandys and Sir
Henry Blount.” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 3(1983), 4–22; Jonathan Haynes, The
Humanist as Traveller: George Sandys’s Relation of a Journey begun An. Dom. 1610 (New
Jersey: Associated University Presses, 1986); James Ellison, George Sandys: Travel, Colonialism
and Tolerance in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002).
 1 BRITISH ENCOUNTERS WITH OTTOMAN MINORITIES IN THE EARLY… 11

American colonies, was more likely to pepper his account with classical
quotations and bias against Jews and Greeks, but presented himself more
subtly, maintaining distance from the events he witnessed and the phe-
nomena he described.27 Chaplain William Biddulph’s epistolary cultural
observations from Aleppo might have been influenced by the famous
‘pseudo-letters’ of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, the sixteenth-century
Habsburg ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Like many travel accounts
of the time they had been composed after his travels, constructed as highly
choreographed letters to friends, and thus tied Biddulph’s observations to
earlier scholarly traditions and portrayals of the self. Similarly to Sandys
and Thomas Coryate, but catering to more vernacular readers, the Scottish
author and traveller William Lithgow’s fiercely Protestant anti-Catholic
outlook on Spain and Italy spilled onto his pages, and shaped his percep-
tions of peoples living in Ottoman lands as well. Lithgow gave more space
than Sandys to his own alleged eyewitness encounters and visceral bodily
experiences, but both authors’ literary ambitions and aspirations can be
easily deduced from their pages, their verses, and from their growing back
catalogue of books. 28
The travel accounts examined in this book include both highly erudite
as well as more popular or vernacular examples. Their format varies from
the modest quartos of the ship captain Henry Timberlake to more ambi-
tious, extensive, and, as a result, expensive folio-sized collections of travel
accounts such as those edited by Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas, or
the aforementioned Sandys. One striking element of British travel accounts
was the scarcity of visual images, probably due to the cost. One of the few
accounts that included maps and depictions was that of George Sandys,
also aimed at a wealthier readership. These books were both very different
from the contemporaneous French and Dutch accounts, and the lavish
continental book productions of the later seventeenth and early eigh-
teenth century, which were aimed at pan-European, religiously non-­
partisan consumers.29 Famous continental predecessors and role models
included Nicolas de Nicolay’s 1567 book of travels, which had been trans-
lated into English as Navigations into Turkie in 1585 and was sometimes
paraphrased or copied almost verbatim by later travellers. Similar to other

27
See Schleck, Telling True Tales of Islamic Lands, 31–60.
28
On Lithgow see Bosworth, Intrepid Scot.
29
See Benjamin Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism. Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early
Modern World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).
12 E. J. HOLMBERG

early modern composite genres or modes of writing, travel accounts com-

bined textual and visual elements from geographical atlases, religious and
political history, and pilgrimage accounts—often inspired by the pica-
resque and the chivalric—and were usually composed after travellers had
returned home. Their depictions of non-Muslim peoples were thus highly
mediated combinations of eyewitness encounters and sometimes a great
wealth of book-knowledge, following Europe-wide trends and traditions
of travel writing.
Most of these early seventeenth-century accounts circulated beyond
their first printing runs, gaining new editions, or were later abridged and
compiled into collections of travel literature like Purchas His Pilgrimes.
Some authors’ books enjoyed several editions, including those by Sandys,
Lithgow, and Henry Blount, with either minor or significant alterations to
their subject matter and tone. Many of these authors had already pub-
lished other books or translations, including Lithgow, Coryate, and Sandys
prior to their venturing to the Levant. For them, writing about the Levant
was a signpost in a longer career of writing, seeking literary patronage, and
making an impact on the domestic cultural scene. These motivations
shaped these texts, often almost as much as did their didactic and
knowledge-­ building aims of presenting Ottomans and their subject
peoples.
In contrast, the writings of Henry Timberlake, John Sanderson, organ-
ist Thomas Dallam, and merchant Peter Mundy were shaped more by
their professional backgrounds (in seafaring, trade, and artisanship) than
their education and prior literary ambitions. They owed to the literacy and
record keeping practices of the mercantile world, and were also motivated
by an impulse for life-writing, factors which also shaped their depictions.30
Because the layer of classical and biblical history is thinner in their accounts,
their depictions of non-Muslim peoples often seem less predetermined to
be biased and more focused on recording what they saw with their own
eyes. Despite their differences, gathering these accounts together provides
a fascinating laboratory setting in which to compare the ways these diverse
travellers described the ‘slaves’ of the sultan, themselves, and their travels
in their books and manuscript accounts.

30
See Eva Johanna Holmberg, “Writing the Travelling Self: Travel and Life-Writing in
Peter Mundy’s (1597–1667) Itinerarium Mundii.” Renaissance Studies 31:4 (2018): 608–25.
 1 BRITISH ENCOUNTERS WITH OTTOMAN MINORITIES IN THE EARLY… 13

Previous Scholarship on the English Encounter

with the Ottomans

Scholarship on the Anglo-Ottoman encounter and the travellers described

above has come a long way since Samuel Chew’s The Crescent and the
Rose. Islam and England during the Renaissance (1937), which was one of
the first efforts to chart and catalogue English literary engagements with
Islamic worlds but was also clearly a product of its time. Comparative
approaches to Ottoman history have in recent years expanded into a dia-
logue with scholarship on global and connected histories and literary and
cultural encounters. New studies about the Ottomans have made visible
the political ambitions, diplomatic and mercantile practices, and cultural
understandings that governed the relationships between Ottomans and
their subject peoples, and encounters with other polities too. Scholars are
asking important new questions about the ways in which early modern
people came into contact and communicated with each other, and how
changing material and cultural contexts shaped these encounters.31
Since the turn of the millennium, scholarship on British exchanges and
engagements with the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires has become
a flourishing interdisciplinary enterprise. The work of Edward Said, his
followers, and his critics has provided formative perspectives on cultural
encounters in the Levant and further afield. These studies have explored
British literature’s engagement with the Ottomans and Islam, Turks and
‘Mahometans’, as well as Persians and Mughals, in travel writing, news
pamphlets, religious tracts, histories, and performances on the stage.
Thanks to this joint effort, the study of how Ottomans, Persians, and
Mughals were understood by Britons now informs further histories of
contact between the so-called West and East. Most previous studies of
Anglo-Ottoman encounters have however so far focused on the

31
A short sample includes Natalie Rothman, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects
between Venice and Istanbul (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2012); John-Paul
Ghobrial, The Whispers of Cities: Information Flows in Istanbul, London, and Paris in the Age
of William Trumbull (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Brummett, Mapping the
Ottomans; Goffman, Britons in the Ottoman Empire; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Three Ways to be
Alien. Travails & Encounters in the Early Modern World (Waltham: Brandeis University
Press, 2011); Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Courtly Encounters. Translating Courtliness and
Violence in Early Modern Eurasia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012);
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Europe’s India. Words, People, Empires, 1500–1800 (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017).
14 E. J. HOLMBERG

representations of ‘Turks’ and Islam, placing them centre stage of schol-

arly attention.32 Ottoman subject peoples have usually been referred to in
the context of individual travellers’ portrayals of the whole of the Ottoman
Empire, adjacent to descriptions of and encounters with ‘the Turk’ or as
minor parts of studies of English engagement with the wider Islamicate
world. When discussing the non-Muslim subjects of the sultan, studies
have usually concentrated on one subject people at a time, rather than
drawing them into dialogue and comparison as I do in my study. Sometimes
genealogies of later nationalities and states have been sought in the

32
At the forefront of these studies are Nabil Matar’s trilogy Islam in Britain (1998), Turks,
Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (1999) and Britain and Barbary (2005), as
well as Gerald MacLean’s Looking East (2004) and The Rise of Oriental Travel (2004). Matar
and MacLean’s co-authored book Britain and the Islamic World (2011) analysed ‘the peo-
ples of the Islamic Empires’, and includes a chapter on British engagements with and repre-
sentations of Jews, Armenians, Shi’ites, Mughals, and a great variety of Eastern Christians.
See also Kenneth Parker, Early Modern Tales of Orient. A Critical Anthology (London:
Routledge, 1999); Nandini Das, Renaissance Romance. The Transformation of English Prose
Fiction, 1570–1620 (Farnham Surrey: Ashgate, 2011); Vitkus, “Trafficking with the Turk”;
Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theatre and the Multicultural Mediterranean (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Burton, Traffic and Turning; Jane Grogan, The Persian
Empire in English Renaissance Writing, 1549–1622 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014); Jonathan
Gil Harris, The First Firangis. Remarkable Stories of Heroes, Healers, Charlatans, Courtesans
& other Foreigners Who Became Indian (New Delhi: Aleph, 2015); Jonathan Gil Harris,
Indography. Writing the ‘Indian’ in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2012); Chloë Houston, “‘Thou Glorious Kingdome, Thou Chiefe of Empires’: Persia in
Early Seventeenth-Century Travel Literature,” Studies in Travel Writing 13:2 (2009):
141–52; Jyotsna Singh, Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues. “Discoveries” of India in the
Language of Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1996); Jyotsna Singh, ed. A Companion to the
Global Renaissance (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2009); Jyotsna Singh & Ivo Kamps, eds.
Travel Knowledge (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); Schleck, Telling True Tales of
Islamic Lands; Linda McJannet, The Sultan Speaks. Dialogue in English Plays and Histories
about the Ottoman Turks (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Bernadette Andrea,
Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007); Bernadette Andrea, The Lives of Girls and Women from the Islamic World in
Early Modern British Literature and Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017);
Matthew Dimmock, New Turkes : Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern
England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Matthew Dimmock. Mythologies of the Prophet
Muhammad in Early Modern English Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2013); Matthew Birchwood, Staging Islam in England: Drama and Culture, 1640–1685.
(Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2007); Bernadette Andrea and Linda McJannet. eds. Early
Modern England and Islamic Worlds (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Sabine
Schulting, Sabine Lucia Muller, and Ralf Hertel, eds. Early Modern Encounters with the
Islamic East: Performing Cultures (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012).
 1 BRITISH ENCOUNTERS WITH OTTOMAN MINORITIES IN THE EARLY… 15

r­enaissance, at the risk of producing a compartmentalized world where

perceptions and representations of Armenians, Jews, Maronites, and
Greeks are divided from each other and not compared. Although previous
studies address these same travellers and their encounters with both Jews
and Greeks of the Ottoman Empire, this book will be the first to bring the
British cultural encounter with Ottoman minorities and protected peoples
into comparative focus, investigating the meaning and purposes behind
their cultural representations of this, often dis-orienting diversity of
peoples.33
Seventeenth-century travellers certainly entered Ottoman territories—
the Mediterranean islands, the Levantine shores, the Ottoman capital
Istanbul, and the historical sites of the Holy Land and Palestine—with a
variety of expectations and preconceptions. It is no wonder then that they
were forced to reconsider what they had learned from books and heard in
sermons about the Ottomans. They also carried prejudices about Jews,
Greeks, and Catholics, which shaped their encounters with other, less
familiar, peoples in those lands. Such observations owed their meaning to
long-standing traditions of thought, to advancements in geography, and
to developing ideas about statecraft, rule, empire, and religious belief. My
interest here lies in the representational practices of travel accounts, their
authors’ personal and professional aims, but also more broadly in British
conceptualizations, prejudices, and curiosity about the surrounding world.
The book will show how long-standing cultural narratives and ethnic and
racial vocabularies were utilized in the encounter with and cultural descrip-
tions of the peoples of the Ottoman domains.

33
See Eva Johanna Holmberg, Jews in the Early Modern English Imagination. A Scattered
Nation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012) and Efterpi Mitsi, Greece in Early English Travel Writing,
1596–1682 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), which focus on English depictions and
imaginaries of Jews and Greeks respectively. Hélène Pignot has compiled and anthologised
English and French travel writings and their descriptions of Christians, but has not studied
perceptions of Ottoman non-Muslim subjects in a comparative way. See Hélène Pignot. La
Turquie chrétienne: récits des voyageurs français et anglais dans l’empire Ottoman au XVIIe
siècle (Vevey, Suisse: Xenia, 2007); Hélène Pignot, Christians under the Ottoman Turks:
French and English Travellers in Greece and Anatolia, 1615–1694. (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias
Press, 2009).
16 E. J. HOLMBERG

Writing the Ottoman World in the Early

Seventeenth Century
The strengthening of political and economic ties with the Ottomans
inspired a re-examination of the people living in the Ottoman Empire.
Some of the earlier pilgrimage accounts and travel reports reflected the
realities and needs of England before the break from Rome, and Protestant
travellers presented their practices and suspicion of Catholic pilgrimage
and rituals according to new demands being made of the genre.34 The
sixteenth-century expansion of Ottoman influence into European territo-
ries and the Arab world similarly called for the revision of much existing
geographical knowledge about the empire. There was also a need for new
eyewitness-based travel accounts to complement second-hand geographi-
cal and historical treatises. As stated by Samuel Purchas in the preface to
his Purchas His Pilgrimes (1625), his vast collection of travellers’ accounts
focussed on things the travellers had seen with their own eyes, ‘not by one
professing Methodically to deliuer the Historie of Nature according to
rules of Art, nor Philosophically to discusse and dispute; but as in way of
Discourse, by each Traueller relating what in that kind he hath seene.’35 It
seemed urgent that such intelligence be generated by Britons themselves.
The expanding print trade, and the increasing popularity of travel writing,
geographical literature, and treatises on comparative religion, facilitated
the growth of a new type of library.
I have chosen to focus on the early seventeenth century because it is
when British travel writing about the Ottomans and the Levant became a
more professional and methodical activity than it had been in the previous
century. Increasing numbers of travel accounts based on first-hand experi-
ence were then published in Britain by people who had travelled in order
to write about it as opposed to travelling for the purpose of diplomacy or
trade. Travel accounts were becoming a popular genre; references to read-
ing and recommending these books can be found regularly from invento-
ries and contemporary correspondence, too. At the same time, there were

34
See Paris O’Donnell, “Pilgrimage or ‘anti-Pilgrimage’? Uses of Mementoes and Relics in
English and Scottish Narratives of Travel to Jerusalem, 1596–1632,” Studies in Travel
Writing 13:2 (2009): 125–39.
35
Samuel Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimes vol. I (London: by William Stansby for Henrie
Fetherstone, 1625), sig. A4r.
 1 BRITISH ENCOUNTERS WITH OTTOMAN MINORITIES IN THE EARLY… 17

clearer generic expectations about what a travel account was supposed to

achieve and contain.36
One early modern genre was a particularly powerful shaper of British
travel accounts: Ars apodemica, or the art of travel, gave instructions on
what topics travel writing should include, how to rank them, and offered
advice on the mundane practices of travel as well.37 Thomas Palmer’s An
Essay of the Meanes how to make our Travailes into forraine Countries the
more profitable and honourable, from 1606, advised that in order ‘To get
knowledge for the bettering of himselfe and his Countrie’ a traveller ought
to seek information on six subjects, which he listed as ‘the tongue, the
Nature of the people, the Countrey, the Customes; the Gouernment of
the State; & the secrets of the same’.38 To determine the nature of a peo-
ple, travellers were to consider five things:

First, whether the people bee ciuill or barbarous. Secondly, whether they
bee free or seruile. Thirdly, whether religious or profane. Fourthly, whether
warlike or effeminate. And fiftly, of what condition of bodie, and disposition

36
There is vast scholarly literature on English travel literature and its modes during the
Renaissance. See Nandini Das, “Early Modern Travel Writing (2): English Travel Writing” in
The Cambridge History of Travel Writing, edited by Nandini Das and Tim Youngs
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 77–92; William Sherman, “Stirrings and
Searchings (1500–1720),” in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, eds. Peter
Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 17–36; Andrew
Hadfield, Literature, Travel and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance, 1545–1625
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Singh, Colonial Narratives; Melanie Ord, Travel
and Experience in Early Modern English Culture (Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008); Daniel Carey and Claire Jowitt, eds., Richard Hakluyt and Travel Writing
in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012); Kamps & Singh, Travel Knowledge;
Archer, Old Worlds; Anna Suranyi, The Genius of the English Nation. Travel Writing and
National Identity in Early Modern England (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008);
Rubiés, Joan-Pau, and Manel Ollé, “The Comparative History of a Genre: The Production
and Circulation of Books on Travel and Ethnographies in Early Modern Europe and China”
Modern Asian Studies 50:1 (2016), 259–309.
37
See Justin Stagl, A History of Curiosity. The Theory of Travel, 1550–1800 (Chur,
Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995), 71–81. See also the database The Art of
Travel. (https://artoftravel.nuigalway.ie) created by a project led by Daniel Carey, at
NUI Galway.
38
Thomas Palmer, An Essay of the Meanes how to make our Travailes, into Forraine
Countries, the more Profitable and Honourable (London: by H.L. for Mathew Lownes,
1606), 52–53.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
crumbed, but this is not a very usual mode of serving them.
Small soles, 6 minutes; large, about 10 minutes.
 TO BOIL SOLES.

The flesh of a fine fresh sole, when boiled with care, is remarkably
sweet and delicate: if very large it may be dressed and served as
turbot, to which it will be found little inferior in flavour. Empty it, take
out the gills, cut off the fins, and cleanse and wash it with great
nicety, but do not skin it; then either lay it into cold water in which the
usual proportion of salt has been dissolved, and heat it rather slowly,
and then simmer it from five to ten minutes, according to its size; or
boil it in the manner directed in the first pages of this chapter. Drain it
well on the fish-plate as it is lifted out, and dish it on a napkin, the
white side upwards, and serve it quickly with anchovy, shrimp, or
lobster sauce. It may also be sent to table thickly covered with the
Cream Fish Sauce, Caper Fish Sauce, or Lady’s Sauce, of Chapter
VI.; though this is a mode of service less to be recommended, as the
sauce cools more speedily when spread over the surface of the fish:
it is, however, the continental fashion, and will therefore find more
favour with some persons.
Very large sole, 5 to 10 minutes; moderate sized, 4 to 6 minutes.
 FILLETS OF SOLES.

The word fillet, whether applied to fish, poultry, game, or butcher’s

meat, means simply the flesh of either (or of certain portions of it),
raised clear from the bones in a handsome form, and divided or not,
as the manner in which it is to be served may require. It is an elegant
mode of dressing various kinds of fish, and even those which are not
the most highly esteemed, afford an excellent dish when thus
prepared. Soles to be filletted with advantage should be large; the
flesh may then be divided down the middle of the back, next,
separated from the fins, and with a very sharp knife raised clear from
the bones.[47] When thus prepared, the fillets may be divided,
trimmed into a good form, egged, covered with fine crumbs, fried in
the usual way, and served with the same sauces as the whole fish;
or each fillet may be rolled up, in its entire length, if very small, or
after being once divided if large, and fastened with a slight twine, or
a short thin skewer; then egged, crumbed, and fried in plenty of
boiling lard; or merely well floured and fried from eight to ten
minutes. When the fish are not very large, they are sometimes
boned without being parted in the middle, and each side is rolled
from the tail to the head, after being first spread with pounded
shrimps mixed with a third of their volume of butter, a few bread-
crumbs, and a high seasoning of mace and cayenne; or with
pounded lobster mixed with a large portion of the coral, and the
same seasoning, and proportion of butter as the shrimps; then laid
into a dish, with the ingredients directed for the soles au plat; well
covered with crumbs of bread and clarified butter, and baked from
twelve to sixteen minutes, or until the crumbs are coloured to a fine
brown in a moderate oven.
47. A celebrated French cook gives the following instructions for raising these
fillets:—“them up by running your knife first between the bones and the flesh,
then between the skin and the fillet; by leaning pretty hard on the table they
will come off very neatly.”

The fillets may likewise be cut into small strips or squares of

uniform size, lightly dredged with pepper or cayenne, salt and flour,
and fried in butter over a brisk fire; then well drained, and sauced
with a good béchamel, flavoured with a teaspoonful of minced
parsley.
 SOLES AU PLAT.

Clarify from two to three ounces of fresh butter, and pour it into the
dish in which the fish are to be served; add to it a little salt, some
cayenne, a teaspoonful of essence of anchovies, and from one to
two glasses of sherry, or of any other dry white wine; lay in a couple
of fine soles which have been well cleaned and wiped very dry, strew
over them a thick layer of fine bread-crumbs, moisten them with
clarified butter, set the dish into a moderate oven, and bake the fish
for a quarter of an hour. A layer of shrimps placed between the soles
is a great improvement; and we would also recommend a little
lemon-juice to be mixed with the sauce.
Baked, 15 minutes.
Obs.—The soles are, we think, better without the wine in this
receipt. They require but a small portion of liquid, which might be
supplied by a little additional butter, a spoonful of water or pale
gravy, the lemon-juice, and store-sauce. Minced parsley may be
mixed with the bread-crumbs when it is liked.
 BAKED SOLES.

(A simple but excellent Receipt.)

Fresh large soles, dressed in the following manner, are remarkably
tender and delicate eating; much more so than those which are fried.
After the fish has been skinned and cleansed in the usual way, wipe
it dry, and let it remain for an hour or more, if time will permit, closely
folded in a clean cloth; then mix with a slightly beaten egg about an
ounce of butter, just liquefied but not heated at the mouth of the
oven, or before the fire; brush the fish in every part with this mixture,
and cover it with very fine dry bread-crumbs, seasoned with a little
salt, cayenne, pounded mace, and nutmeg. Pour a teaspoonful or
two of liquid butter into a flat dish which will contain the fish well; lay
it in, sprinkle it with a little more butter, press the bread-crumbs
lightly on it with a broad-bladed knife, and bake it in a moderate oven
for about twenty minutes. If two or more soles are required for table
at the same time, they should be placed separately, quite flat, in a
large dish, or each fish should be laid on a dish by itself. On our first
essay of this receipt, the fish dressed by it (it was baked for twenty-
five minutes in a very slack iron oven) proved infinitely nicer than one
of the same size which was fried, and served with it. The difference
between them was very marked, especially as regarded the
exceeding tenderness of the flesh of that which was baked; its
appearance, however, would have been somewhat improved by a
rather quicker oven. When ready to serve, it should be gently glided
on to the dish in which it is to be sent to table. About three ounces of
bread-crumbs, and two and a half of butter, will be sufficient for a
large pair of soles. They will be more perfectly encrusted with the
bread if dipped into, or sprinkled with it a second time, after the first
coating has been well moistened with the butter.
 SOLES STEWED IN CREAM.

Prepare some very fresh middling sized soles with exceeding

nicety, put them into boiling water slightly salted, and simmer them
for two minutes only; lift them out, and let them drain; lay them into a
wide stewpan with as much sweet rich cream as will nearly cover
them; add a good seasoning of pounded mace, cayenne, and salt;
stew the fish softly from six to ten minutes, or until the flesh parts
readily from the bones; dish them, stir the juice of half a lemon to the
sauce, pour it over the soles, and send them immediately to table.
Some lemon-rind may be boiled in the cream, if approved; and a
small teaspoonful of arrow-root, very smoothly mixed with a little
milk, may be stirred to the sauce (should it require thickening) before
the lemon-juice is added. Turbot and brill also may be dressed by
this receipt, time proportioned to their size being of course allowed
for them.
Soles, 3 or 4: boiled in water 2 minutes. Cream, 1/2 to whole pint;
salt, mace, cayenne: fish stewed, 6 to 10 minutes. Juice of half a
lemon.
Obs.—In Cornwall the fish is laid at once into thick clotted cream,
and stewed entirely in it; but this method gives to the sauce, which
ought to be extremely delicate, a coarse fishy flavour which the
previous boil in water prevents.
At Penzance, grey mullet, after being scaled, are divided in the
middle, just covered with cold water, and softly boiled, with the
addition of branches of parsley, pepper and salt, until the flesh of the
back parts easily from the bone; clotted cream, minced parsley, and
lemon-juice are then added to the sauce, and the mullets are dished
with the heads and tails laid even to the thick parts of the back,
where the fish were cut asunder. Hake, too, is there divided at every
joint (having previously been scaled), dipped into egg, then thickly
covered with fine bread-crumbs mixed with plenty of minced parsley,
and fried a fine brown; or, the back-bone being previously taken out,
the fish is sliced into cutlets, and then fried.
 TO FRY WHITINGS.

[In full season from Michaelmas to beginning of February.]

Clean, skin, and dry them thoroughly in a cloth, fasten their tails to
their mouths, brush slightly beaten eggs equally over them, and
cover them with the finest bread-crumbs, mixed with a little flour; fry
them a clear golden brown in plenty of boiling lard, drain and dry
them well, dish them on a hot napkin, and serve them with good
melted butter, and the sauce cruets, or with well made shrimp or
anchovy sauce. A small half-teaspoonful of salt should be beaten up
with the eggs used in preparing the whitings: two will be sufficient for
half a dozen fish.
5 to 8 minutes, according to their size.
 FILLETS OF WHITINGS.

Empty and wash thoroughly, but do not skin the fish. Take off the
flesh on both sides close to the bones, passing the knife from the tail
to the head; divide each side in two, trim the fillets into good shape,
and fold them in a cloth, that the moisture may be well absorbed
from them; dip them into, or draw them through, some beaten egg,
then dip them into fine crumbs mixed with a small portion of flour,
and fry them a fine light brown in lard or clarified butter; drain them
well, press them in white blotting-paper, dish them one over the other
in a circle, and send the usual sauce to table with them. The fillets
may also be broiled after being dipped into eggs seasoned with salt
and pepper, then into crumbs of bread, next into clarified butter, and
a second time into the bread-crumbs (or, to shorten the process, a
portion of clarified butter may be mixed with the eggs at first), and
served with good melted butter, or thickened veal gravy seasoned
with cayenne, lemon-juice, and chopped parsley.
Five minutes will fry the fillets, even when very large rather more
time will be required to broil them.
 TO BOIL WHITINGS.

(French Receipt)
Having scraped, cleansed, and wiped them, lay them on a fish-
plate, and put them into water at the point of boiling; throw in a
handful of salt, two bay leaves, and plenty of parsley well washed
and tied together; let the fish just simmer from five to ten minutes,
and watch them closely that they may not be overdone. Serve
parsley and butter with them, and use in making it the liquor in which
the whitings have been boiled.
Just simmered from 5 to 10 minutes.
 BAKED WHITINGS À LA FRANÇAISE.

Proceed with these exactly as with the soles au plat of this

chapter; or, pour a little clarified butter into a deep dish, and strew it
rather thickly with finely-minced mushrooms mixed with a
teaspoonful of parsley, and (when the flavour is liked, and
considered appropriate) with an eschalot or two, or the white part of
a few green onions, also chopped very small. On these place the fish
after they have been scaled, emptied, thoroughly washed, and wiped
dry: season them well with salt and white pepper, or cayenne;
sprinkle more of the herbs upon them; pour gently from one to two
glasses of light white wine into the dish, cover the whitings with a
thick layer of fine crumbs of bread, sprinkle these plentifully with
clarified butter, and bake the fish from fifteen to twenty minutes.
Send a cut lemon only to table with them. When the wine is not liked,
a few spoonsful of pale veal gravy can be used instead; or a larger
quantity of clarified butter, with a tablespoonful of water, a
teaspoonful of lemon-pickle and of mushroom catsup, and a few
drops of soy.
15 to 20 minutes.
 TO BOIL MACKEREL.

[In full season in May, June, and July; may be had also in early
spring.]
Open the fish sufficiently to admit of
the insides being perfectly cleansed,
but not more than is necessary for this
purpose; empty them with care, lay
the roes apart, and wash both them
Mackerel. and the mackerel delicately clean. It is
customary now to lay these, and the
greater number of other fish as well,
into cold water when they are to be boiled; formerly all were plunged
at once into fast-boiling water. For such as are small and delicate, it
should be hot; they should be brought gently to boil, and simmered
until they are done; the scum should be cleared off as it rises, and
the usual proportion of salt stirred into the water before the mackerel
are put in. The roes are commonly replaced in the fish; but as they
sometimes require more boiling than the mackerel themselves, it is
better, when they are very large, to lay them upon the fish-plate by
their sides. From fifteen to twenty minutes will generally be sufficient
to boil a full-sized mackerel some will be done in less time; but they
must be watched and lifted out as soon as the tails split, and the
eyes are starting.
Dish them on a napkin, and send fennel or gooseberry sauce to
table with them, and plain melted butter also.
Small mackerel, 10 to 15 minutes; large, 15 to 20 minutes.
 TO BAKE MACKEREL.

After they have been cleaned and well washed, wipe them very
dry, fill the insides with the forcemeat, No. 1 of Chapter VIII., sew
them up, arrange them, with the roes, closely together in a coarse
baking-dish, flour them lightly, strew a little fine salt over, and stick
bits of butter upon them; or pour some equally over them, after
having just dissolved it in a small saucepan. Half an hour in a
moderate oven will bake them. Oyster forcemeat is always
appropriate for any kind of fish which is in season while the oysters
are so; but the mackerel are commonly served, and are very good
with that which we have named. Lift them carefully into a hot dish
after they are taken from the oven, and send melted butter and a cut
lemon to table with them.
1/2 hour.
 BAKED MACKEREL, OR WHITINGS.

(Cinderella’s Receipt—good.)
The fish for this receipt should be opened only so much as will
permit of their being emptied and perfectly cleansed. Wash and wipe
them dry, then fold them in a soft cloth, and let them remain in it
awhile. Replace the roes, and put the fish into a baking-dish of
suitable size, with a tablespoonful of wine, a few drops of chili
vinegar, a little salt and cayenne, and about half an ounce of butter,
well-blended with a saltspoonful of flour, for each fish. They must be
turned round with the heads and tails towards each other, that they
may lie compactly in the dish, and the backs should be placed
downwards, that the sauce may surround the thickest part of the
flesh. Lay two buttered papers over, and press them down upon
them; set the dish into a gentle oven for twenty minutes, take off the
papers, and send the fish to table in their sauce.
A few minutes more of time must be allowed for mackerel when it
is large, should the oven be very slow.
Full-sized whitings are excellent thus dressed if carefully
managed, and many eaters would infinitely prefer mackerel so
prepared, to boiled ones. The writer has port-wine always used for
the sauce, to which a rather full seasoning of chili vinegar, cayenne,
and pounded mace, is added; but sherry, Bucellas, or any other dry
wine, can be used instead; and the various condiments added to it,
can be varied to the taste. This receipt is a very convenient one, as it
is prepared with little trouble, and a stove-oven, if the heat be
properly moderated, will answer for the baking. It is an advantage to
take off the heads of the fish before they are dressed, and they may
then be entirely emptied without being opened. When preferred so,
they can be re-dished for table, and the sauce poured over them.
Obs.—The dish in which they are baked, should be buttered
before they are laid in.
 FRIED MACKEREL.

(Common French Receipt.)

After the fish have been emptied and washed extremely clean, cut
off the heads and tails, split the bodies quite open, and take out the
backbones (we recommend in preference that the flesh should be
taken off the bones as in the following receipt), wipe the mackerel
very dry, dust fine salt and pepper (or cayenne) over them, flour
them well, fry them a fine brown in boiling lard, drain them
thoroughly, and serve them with the following sauce:—Dissolve in a
small saucepan an ounce and a half of butter smoothly mixed with a
teaspoonful of flour, some salt, pepper, or cayenne; shake these
over a gentle fire until they are lightly coloured, then add by slow
degrees nearly half a pint of good broth or gravy, and the juice of one
large lemon; boil the sauce for a couple of minutes, and serve it very
hot. Or, instead of this, add a large teaspoonful of strong made
mustard, and a dessertspoonful of chili vinegar, to some thick melted
butter, and serve it with the fish. A spoonful of Harvey’s sauce or of
mushroom catsup can be mixed with this last at pleasure.
 FILLETS OF MACKEREL.

(Fried or Broiled.)
Take off the flesh quite whole on either side, from three fine
mackerel, which have been opened and properly cleaned; let it be
entirely free from bone, dry it well in a cloth, then divide each part in
two, and dip them into the beaten yolks of a couple of eggs,
seasoned with salt and white pepper, or cayenne; cover them
equally with fine dry crumbs of bread, and fry them like soles; or dip
them into clarified butter, and then again into the crumbs, and broil
them over a very clear fire of a fine brown. Dish them in a circle one
over the other, and send them to table with the Mâitre d’Hôtel sauce
of Chapter V., or with the one which follows it. The French pour the
sauce into the centre of the dish; but for broiled fillets this is not so
well, we think, as serving it in a tureen. The roes of the fish, after
being well washed and soaked, may be dressed with them, or they
may be made into patties. Minced parsley can be mixed with the
bread-crumbs when it is liked.
 BOILED FILLETS OF MACKEREL.

After having taken off and divided the flesh of the fish, as above,
place it flat in one layer in a wide stewpan or saucepan, and just
cover the fillets with cold water; throw in a teaspoonful of salt, and
two or three small sprigs of parsley; bring the mackerel slowly to a
boil, clear off the scum with care, and after two or three minutes of
slow simmering try the fillets with a fork; if the thick part divides with
a touch, they are done. Lift them out cautiously with a slice; drain,
and serve them very hot with good parsley and butter; or strip off the
skin quickly, and pour a Mâitre d’Hôtel sauce over them.
 MACKEREL BROILED WHOLE.

(An excellent Receipt.)

Empty and cleanse perfectly a fine and very fresh mackerel, but
without opening it more than is needful; dry it well, either in a cloth or
by hanging it in a cool air until it is stiff; make with a sharp knife a
deep incision the whole length of the fish on either side of the back
bone, and about half an inch from it, and with a feather put in a little
cayenne and fine salt, mixed with a few drops of good salad oil or
clarified butter. Lay the mackerel over a moderate fire upon a well-
heated gridiron which has been rubbed with suet; loosen it gently
should it stick, which it will do unless often moved; and when it is
equally done on both sides, turn the back to the fire. About half an
hour will broil it well. If a sheet of thickly-buttered writing-paper be
folded round it, and just twisted at the ends before it is laid on the
gridiron, it will be finer eating than if exposed to the fire; but
sometimes when this is done, the skin will adhere to the paper, and
be drawn off with it, which injures its appearance. A cold Mâitre
d’Hôtel sauce (see Chapter V.), may be put into the back before it is
sent to table. This is one of the very best modes of dressing a
mackerel, which in flavour is quite a different fish when thus
prepared to one which is simply boiled. A drop of oil is sometimes
passed over the skin to prevent its sticking to the iron. It may be laid
to the fire after having been merely cut as we have directed, when it
is preferred so.
30 minutes; 25 if small.
 MACKEREL STEWED WITH WINE.

(Very good.)
Work very smoothly together a large teaspoonful of flour with two
ounces of butter, put them into a stewpan, and stir or shake them
round over the fire until the butter is dissolved; add a quarter of a
teaspoonful of mace, twice as much salt, and some cayenne; pour in
by slow degrees three glasses of claret; and when the sauce boils,
lay in a couple of fine mackerel well cleaned, and wiped quite dry;
stew them very softly from fifteen to twenty minutes, and turn them
when half done; lift them out, and dish them carefully; stir a
teaspoonful of made mustard to the sauce, give it a boil, and pour it
over the fish. When more convenient, substitute port wine and a little
lemon-juice, for the claret.
Mackerel, 2; flour, 1 teaspoonful; butter, 2 oz.; seasoning of salt,
mace, and cayenne; claret, 3 wineglassesful; made mustard, 1
teaspoonful: 15 to 20 minutes.
 FILLETS OF MACKEREL STEWED IN WINE.

(Excellent.)
Raise the flesh entire from the bones on either side of the
mackerel, and divide it once, if the fish be small, but cut the whole
into six parts of equal size should they be large. Mix with flour, and
dissolve the butter as in the preceding receipt; and when it has
simmered for a minute, throw in the spice, a little salt, and the thinly
pared rind of half a small fresh lemon, lay in the fillets of fish, shake
them over a gentle fire from four to five minutes, and turn them once
in the time; then pour to them in small portions a couple of large
wineglassesful of port wine, a tablespoonful of Harvey’s sauce, a
teaspoonful of soy, and one of lemon-juice; stew the mackerel very
softly until the thinner parts begin to break, lift them out with care,
dish and serve them in their sauce as hot as possible. We can
recommend the dish to our readers as a very excellent one. A
garnish of fried sippets can be placed round the fish at will. A
teaspoonful of made mustard should be stirred to the sauce before it
is poured over the fish.
Fillets of mackerel, 2; butter, 2 oz.; flour, 1 teaspoonful; rind of 1/2
lemon; salt, cayenne, pounded mace: 2 minutes. Fish, 4 to 5
minutes. Port wine, two large glassesful; Harvey’s sauce, 1
tablespoonful; soy and lemon-juice each, 1 teaspoonful: 4 to 6
minutes. Mustard, 1 teaspoonful.
Obs.—Trout may be dressed by this receipt.