Mediating Boundaries: Mediterranean Go-Betweens and Cross-Confessional Diplomacy in Constantinople,...

Journal of early modern history 19 (2015) 107-128

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© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2�15 | doi 10.1163/15700658-12342453

Mediating Boundaries: Mediterranean Go-Betweens and Cross-Confessional Diplomacy in Constantinople, 1560-1600

Emrah Safa Gürkanİstanbul 29 Mayıs University

Abstract

By drawing on documents from European archives, this article addresses everyday aspects of diplomacy in sixteenth-century Constantinople. It focuses on how various go-betweens mediated political, cultural, religious, and linguistic boundaries in the encounters between Ottoman grandees and European diplomats. By doing so, it shifts the focus from the office of the ambassador to a large number of informal diplomatic actors (Jewish brokers, dragomans, renegades, go-betweens, etc.) with different areas of competence, functioning in diverse networks of contact and exchange. Moreover, it accentuates the importance of Constantinople as a space of encounter between diverse ethnic and religious communities as well as a Mediterranean-wide center of diplomacy and espionage. The essay calls for a reevaluation of Eurocentric views that associate the birth and development of modern diplomacy only with Christian Europe and revises the historiography on Ottoman diplomacy by concentrating on vernacular diplomacy rather than the rigid theoretical framework drawn by the Islamic Law.

Keywords

Ottoman Empire – cross-confessional diplomacy – sixteenth century – Constantinople – dragomans – espionage – renegades – Jews – early modern Mediterranean

Introduction

Until very recently, for most Ottomanists studying diplomacy meant focus-ing on the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and other states. Such an approach constrained diplomatic historians to textual analysis of the

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‘ahdnames—commercial treaty-cum-peace agreements that the Ottomans extended to select European nations—without taking into account the intricacies of daily negotiations that gave birth to these documents in the first place. For instance, two comprehensive works on Ottoman-Polish1 and Ottoman-Venetian relations2 devote hundreds of pages to the transcription, transliteration, and thorough analysis of the ‘ahdnames that reveal very little of the negotiation process, each party’s diplomatic priorities, the balance of power between the signatories and, most importantly, of the individuals who were actually in charge of cross-confessional diplomacy. A recently published edited volume on Ottoman diplomacy similarly offers only limited theoreti-cal considerations on general characteristics and legal aspects of early modern Ottoman diplomacy, mostly from the perspective of Islamic Law.3

This impasse is mostly the result of the nature of documentation extant in the Ottoman archives: formulaic texts such as ‘ahdnames or the short sum-maries of official Ottoman correspondence with foreign powers do not reflect the dynamism of diplomatic negotiations. Any analysis based on such sources perforce masks a more diverse and varied reality. As the works of Akdes Nimet Kurat, A.H. de Groot, G.R. Bosscha Erdbrink, Daniel Goffman, Kemal Beydilli, and Güneş Işıksel have shown,4 the solution lies in a cross-reading of Ottoman

1 Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, Ottoman-Polish Diplomatic Relations (15th-18th century): An Annotated Edition of ‘Ahdnames and Other Documents (Leiden, 2000).

2 H. Theunissen, “Ottoman-Venetian Diplomatics: the ‘Ahd-names. The Historical Background and the Development of a Category of Political-Commercial Instruments together with an Annotated Edition of a Corpus of Relevant Documents,” Electronic Journal of Oriental Studies 1, no. 2 (1998).

3 A. Nuri Yurdushev ed., Ottoman Diplomacy: Conventional or Unconventional? (New York, 2004). The lack of innovative approaches in the field of Ottoman diplomacy is epitomized by the fact that two of the eight articles in this volume had originally been published decades ago: Rifa’at Ali Abou-El-Haj’s “Ottoman Diplomacy at Karlowitz” (here 89-113) was published in 1967 in the Journal of the American Oriental Society 87, vol. 4 (1967): 498-512, while Halil İnalcık’s “A Case Study in Renaissance Diplomacy: The Agreement between Innocent VIII and Bâyezîd II on Djem Sultan” (here 66-88) originally appeared in 1980 in the Journal of Turkish Studies 3 (1979-80): 209-230.

4 Akdes Nimet Kurat, Türk-İngiliz Münasebetlerinin Başlangıcı ve Gelişmesi (1553-1610) (Ankara, 1953); A.H. de Groot, The Ottoman Empire and the Dutch Republic: A History of the Earliest Diplomatic Relations, 1610-1630 (Leiden/Istanbul, 1978); G.R. Bosscha Erdbrink, At the Threshold of Felicity: Ottoman-Dutch Relations during the Embassy of Cornelis Calkoen at the Sublime Porte, 1726-1744 (Ankara, 1975); Daniel Goffman, Britons in the Ottoman Empire, 1642-1660 (Seattle, 1998); Kemal Beydilli, Büyük Friedrich ve Osmanlılar: XVIII. Yüzyılda Osmanlı-Prusya Münasebetleri (Istanbul, 1985); Güneş Işıksel, “La politique étrangère ottomane dans

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sources with documentation from European archives. However, in addition to the source base, it is also necessary to broaden the field of inquiry. For instance, working in the vein of New Diplomatic History,5 various historians research-ing in the archives around the Mediterranean, especially in Venice and Spain, recently began to shed light on actors other than the official diplomat, i.e. ambassador, who were central to diplomatic dealings in Constantinople and elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire.6

Following a similar path, this article relies on documentation from the Archivio di Stato di Venezia and Archivo General de Simancas. An analysis of what foreign ambassadors and spies reported to their governments regard-ing myriad forms of diplomatic maneuvers and strategic calculations invites a reconsideration of Ottoman diplomacy as it reveals unfamiliar facets of nego-tiations in Constantinople at the time when it was becoming a center of both diplomacy and espionage. The objective of the article is thus to shed light on the everyday aspects of diplomacy in the Ottoman capital and bring into relief a cross-confessional coalition among Ottoman grandees, European ambassa-dors, and several Jewish, Christian and renegade go-betweens. Their careers give us an alternative vision of political and diplomatic life in Constantinople and bring to the fore corporate interests and factional rivalries. However, before embarking on this larger task, it is necessary to outline the context in which these go-betweens who came to specialize in the cultural codes of both the “East” and the “West” functioned.

la seconde moitié du XVe siècle: le cas du règne de Selîm II (1566-1574)” (Ph.D. Diss., École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2012).

5 John Watkins, “Toward a New Diplomatic History of Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Europe 38, no. 1 (2012): 1-14. Also see other articles in this special issue.

6 See in particular Emilio Sola and José F. de la Peña, Cervantes y la Berbería: Cervantes, mundo turco-berberisco y servicios secretos en la epoca de Felipe II (Madrid, 1995); M.J. Rodríguez Salgado, Felipe II, el “Paladín de la Cristiandad y la paz con el Turco” (Valladolid, 2004); Emilio Sola, Los que van y vienen: Información y fronteras en el Mediterráneo clasico del siglo XVI (Alcalá de Henares, 2005); Eric Dursteler, Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity, and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore, 2006); Eric Dursteler, Renegade Women: Gender, Identity, and Boundaries in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore, 2011); E. Natalie Rothman, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul (Ithaca, 2012); Emrah Safa Gürkan, “Espionage in the 16th-century Mediterranean: Secret Diplomacy, Mediterranean Go-betweens and the Ottoman-Habsburg Rivalry” (Ph.D. Diss., Georgetown University, 2012); John-Paul Ghobrial, The Whispers of Cities: Information Flows in Istanbul, London and Paris in the Age of William Trumbull (Oxford, 2013).

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Negotiating across the Mediterranean Borderlands

In the sixteenth century, the Ottoman capital gradually became a center of diplomacy as European nations set up permanent diplomatic missions, pav-ing the way for regular contact and active social relations between European diplomats, their large retinues, Ottoman grandees, and all types of interme-diaries. Moreover, as the capital of a large empire and a strategically located Mediterranean hub, Constantinople was a meeting ground for people from all around the world.7 The freedom of movement and the easiness of com-munication rendered it a truly cosmopolitan city where people of different geographical, ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds intermingled with an ease and frequency that could not be imagined elsewhere in Europe. It was this uniquely chaotic plurality that not only made this imperial city a center of information, news, rumors, and ideas8 but also produced such a rich variety of intermediaries of different confessional and professional stripes that enabled cross-confessional diplomacy.

For European visitors, Constantinople was a foreign land, a once glorious city that had fallen under the rule of the Ottomans who had a different lan-guage, culture, customs, law, and religion. Cultural differences forced these short-term sojourners to rely on local know-how during their tenure; few ambassadors were frequent visitors of the city;9 even fewer strove to learn the Ottoman language.10 Their entourage was not more successful in familiarizing themselves with things Ottoman. Even the otherwise far-sighted Venetian pro-gram to train their own citizens as apprentice dragomans (giovani di lingua) to serve in the bailate failed due to lack of candidates and the spiritual dangers

7 Dursteler, Venetians in Constantinople, Chapter Six.8 See Gábor Ágoston, “Birodalom és információ: Konstantinápoly, mint a koraújkori

Európa információs központja,” [Empire and Information: Constantinople as Center of Information Gathering in Early Modern Europe], in Perjés Géza Emlékkönyv, ed. Gábor Hauser and László Veszprémi (Budapest, 2005), 31-60.

9 Both the Venetian diplomat Pietro Zen and the Austrian ambassador Bartholomäus Petz visited the Ottoman capital three times. See Eugenio Alberi, ed., Le relazioni degli ambas-ciatori Veneti al Senato durante il secolo decimosesto, vol. IX, XXIII (Firenze, 1839-1863); Hans R. Roemer and Albrecht Noth, eds., Studien zur Geschichte und Kultur des Vorderen Orients: Festschrift für Bertold Spuler zum 70. Geburtstag, (Leiden, 1981), 328-329.

10 Exceptions were the aforementioned Austrian diplomat Petz (Beschreibung der Reisen de Reinhold Lubenau, vol. 1, ed. W. Sahm (Königsberg, 1914), 200) and the French ambassa-dor François Savary de Brèves (Viorel Panaite, “A French Ambassador in Istanbul, and his Turkish Manuscript on Western Merchants in the Ottoman Mediterranean (late 16th and early 17th centuries),” Révue des etudes sud-est éuropeennes 42 (2004): 117-132, here 123).



that awaited young Venetians in this chaotic and gigantic city beyond the Universitas Christiana where traditional mechanisms of social discipline were lacking.11

On the other end of the spectrum, Ottoman grandees lacked necessary training and personnel to deal with European diplomats. Their classical Palace school (Enderun) education neither taught them European languages12 nor trained them as competent diplomats. The practical experience that they acquired on the battlefield or in provincial administration could only com-pensate for so much. To make things worse, following the fall of Grand Vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha (1579), the influence of palace creatures and imperial favorites (musahib) rose to the detriment of that of career viziers; this develop-ment meant that in the last two decades of the sixteenth century makers of for-eign policy and negotiators of diplomacy lacked even this practical experience.

Thus, both European ambassadors and Ottoman grandees had to rely on go-betweens who had the linguistic and practical knowledge necessary for successful diplomatic negotiations. As Natalie Rothman has demonstrated, in this era people with what she calls “trans-imperial life-trajectories” carefully positioned themselves as the liaisons between different polities and used their in-betweenness and liminality to weave dense networks of patronage across empires and in quite an entrepreneurial fashion brokered power, information, and diplomacy.13

DragomansOne particular group mediating diplomatic, cultural, and linguistic differences were interpreters, or dragomans as contemporaries called them, corrupting the Arabic word tarjuman or its Turkish equivalent tercüman. While the role of these dragomans as cultural brokers has recently sparked attention among

11 Francesca Lucchetta, “La scuola dei “giovani di lingua” veneti nei secoli XVI e XVII,” Quaderni di studi arabici 7 (1989): 19-40, here 25-26; E. Natalie Rothman, “Interpreting Dragomans: Boundaries and Crossings in the Early Modern Mediterranean,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 51, no. 4 (October 2009): 771-800; here 779.

12 Even though the Enderun curriculum included only Turkish, Arabic, and Persian, most of the Ottoman officials were converts and thus knew Greek, Albanian, Hungarian, and Slavic languages. However, these were of limited use when negotiating with European ambassadors.

13 Rothman, Brokering Empire, 186 (and 11 specifically on the notion of trans-imperial subjects and the importance of their life trajectories for Rothman’s overall analytical framework).

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historians of the early modern Mediterranean,14 it should not be forgotten that their primary function was diplomatic and that the differences in cultural and linguistic protocols of the Ottoman and European diplomacy made them key actors in negotiations.15

The case of Hürrem Bey, an interpreter working for the Ottoman government as Divan-ı Hümayun tercümanı, clearly illustrates the prominence of drago-mans in cross-cultural diplomatic negotiations and demonstrates their multi-faceted relations with European diplomats. This renegade from Lucca helped Philip II’s ambassador Giovanni Margliani during the painfully long process of secret negotiations for an Ottoman-Habsburg truce. On the one hand, Hürrem served the interests of the Spanish Habsburgs who paid him 500 ducats per annum since 1573.16 In 1577, he proved his worth by warning the Habsburg spymaster in Constantinople, Aurelio Santa Croce, that the Ottomans would not so easily believe that the Habsburg saboteur and spy Martin de Acuña was in fact Philip II’s long-awaited envoy, especially after they caught three of his men, one of whom confessed their plans of torching the Ottoman Arsenal. If he wanted to fool the Ottomans, Hürrem added, Aurelio would need a letter of credence.17 The next year, when the Catholic king sent the more reputable Margliani to negotiate a truce with the Ottomans, it was Hürrem again who familiarized him with the intricacies of Ottoman political culture and diplo-matic traditions and informed him of the Ottoman grandees’ thoughts and intentions. While seemingly serving Spanish interests at the expense of the Ottomans, however, Hürrem was also working for his master Sokollu Mehmed Pasha who was supporting these negotiations while certain palace factions fervently opposed them.

14 Anthony Pym, Negotiating the Frontier: Translators and Intercultures in Hispanic History (Manchester, 2000); Rothman, “Interpreting Dragomans”; Tijana Krstić, “Of Translation and Empire: Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Imperial Translators as Renaissance Go-Betweens,” in The Ottoman World, ed. Christine Woodhead (London and New York, 2012), 130-142.

15 Ottoman dragomans in the sixteenth century—all of whom were converts to Islam—such as Ali, Yunus, Mahmud, İbrahim, Murad, Kubad and Hürrem Beys, played pivotal diplomatic roles not only in Constantinople, but also in European capitals as Ottoman diplomats. For instance, according to Maria Pia Pedani’s list, in the sixteenth century dragoman Yunus Bey visited Venice six times, Ali Bey, Ibrahim and Kubad twice, Cafer Çelebi and another Ali once. Maria Pia Pedani, In nome del Gran Signore: Inviati ottomani a Venezia dalla caduta di Costantinopoli alla guerra di Candia (Venezia, 1994), Appendix I.

16 AGS, E 1071, fols. 171 (29 November 1573) and 189 (14 March 1578).17 AGS, E 1071, fol. 191 (5 March 1577).



Hürrem Bey’s diplomatic services were not only available to Philip II. He supported Florentine efforts to reinstate the former capitulations with the Ottoman Empire in 157418 and 1591.19 He also served the Austrian ambassa-dors in the Ottoman capital in the capacity of both interpreter and informant; he was rewarded 45 talers in 1583, for instance, “because of a communication regarding Spanish matters.”20 Finally, he regularly received “gifts” from the Venetians in exchange for his services.21

Frequenting Ottoman palaces and European embassies, these dragomans brokered information between parties and profited from each party’s curiosity about the gossip on the diplomatic circuit. For instance, Hürrem Bey usually joined the bailo (Venetian consul/ambassador in Constantinople) for dinner.22 He did not hesitate to relate what he heard from Ottoman dignitaries and other European ambassadors to the bailo and share with him copies of official letters, one example being the letter that Grand Vizier Siyavuş Pasha wrote in 1587 to then former Habsburg ambassador Giovanni Margliani regarding the renewal of the expiring 1584 truce.23 As the ones who were translating all offi-cial correspondence, dragomans had access to sensitive information, a good reason why European ambassadors found it expedient to buy their goodwill by making regular payments and acquiescing to their occasional requests for rewards and favors. Yet, one did not have to be an official ambassador to resort to their services. Jaime Losada, a Spanish spy sent to his former master Grand Admiral Uluc Ali in order to negotiate his defection to the Habsburg

18 Emilio Sola Castaño, Uchalí: El Calabrés Tiñoso, o el mito del corsario muladí en la frontera (Barcelona, 2011), 214.

19 ASV, Senato, Secreta, Deliberazioni, Costantinopoli [hereafter SDelC], reg. 8, c. 100r (23 June 1591).

20 Tobias Graf, “ ‘I am Still Yours’: Christian-European ‘Renegades’ in the Ottoman Elite dur-ing the Late Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries” (Ph.D. Diss., Universität Heidelberg, 2013), 223.

21 He leaked information regarding the truce negotiations that took place between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs in 1587 and 1590. ASV, Senato, Dispacci Costantinopoli [here-after SDC], fil. 25, cc. 195r and 197r (21 April 1587); fil. 32, cc. 52v-53r (4 September 1590). Satisfied with his services, the Venetians regulary sent him money: 30 ducats in 1585, 400 zecchini in 1587 and 200 ducats in 1592 in order to “conservarlo ben affetto verso le cose nostre”. ASV, SDelC, reg. 7, cc. 19v (7 September 1585), 71r (13 July 1587 and 15 July 1587), 80v (9 January 1587, more Veneto [hereafter m.v.]); reg. 8, c. 89v (23 September 1592).

22 ASV, SDC, fil. 23, c. 180r (16 April 1586).23 ASV, SDC, fil. 25, cc. 170r, 171r-v (16 April 1587).

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side,24 managed to corrupt a dragoman muy principal in order to learn what was being discussed in the Imperial Council; he got his money’s worth when the dragoman provided him with the details of the conversation between the grand vizier and the Venetian bailo.25

Even though the dragomans were medium-rank officers within the Otto-man military-administrative structure, their importance as go-betweens enabled them to enrich themselves and increase their influence. They were active political and diplomatic actors, favoring some ambassadors over others, lending the former their diplomatic skills and lobbying on their behalf in front of Ottoman grandees. Apparently, quite in accordance with the Zeitgeist of early modern Ottoman politics, they did not shy away from walking a thin line between appearing loyal to the Ottoman state and maximizing their interests by receiving financial benefits and favors from foreign sovereigns. For instance, after his death the Ottoman Grand Dragoman Yunus Bey left 200.000 ducats as well as several precious stones, surely a hefty sum for somebody who received 43 akçes26 per diem and was allocated a zeamet27 with the minimum value of 10.000 akçe per annum. According to Grand Vizier Rüstem Pasha, who confis-cated his property after his death, the deceased dragoman must have amassed his huge fortune thanks to many presents he received from European ambas-sadors.28 Similarly, Hürrem Bey was handsomely rewarded by the Habsburgs for his invaluable diplomatic services during the truce negotiations.29 More-over, he asked the Venetian government to contribute to his only daughter’s wedding. When the bailo vouched for him, stating that he deserved this favor given his long years of sincere service,30 the Venetian Senate authorized the dispensation of 400 zecchini, a significant amount.31

24 For a detailed treatment of the negotiations between the Habsburg authorities and Uluc Ali, a Calabrian renegade and a former Habsburg subject, see Emrah Safa Gürkan, “My Money or Your Life: The Habsburg Hunt for Uluc Ali,” Studia Historica: Historia Moderna 36 (2014): 121-145.

25 AGS E 1072, fol. 14 (15 December 1575).26 According to the same letter, 1 ducat equals to 60 akçe.27 One of the three categories of the timar system (the other two being timar and hass)

according to which sources of income were allocated to Ottoman officials in compensa-tion for their services.

28 ASV, Archivio Proprio Costantinopoli [hereafter APC], fil. 5, cc. 130r (20 June 1551), 136r (28 June 1551), 170r (19 July 1551).

29 AGS, E 1071, fol. 171 (29 November 1573).30 ASV, SDC, fil. 25, cc. 195r-197r (21 April 1587).31 ASV, SDelC, reg. 7, c. 71r (13 July 1587).



Another group of dragomans worked in foreign embassies in Constantinople. In the second half of the sixteenth century, European diplomats employed their own interpreters mainly from the Latin-rite community of Galata, the celebrated Magnifica Comunità.32 Unlike those diplomats whose tenure in Constantinople was only a couple of years long, these go-betweens and lin-guistic brokers were expert negotiators that provided the necessary continuity for European diplomatic missions. Versed in Ottoman court etiquette and dip-lomatic protocol, they provided European ambassadors with necessary knowl-edge on palace ceremonies, rituals, and diplomatic customs. Furthermore, linguistic troubles curtailed European diplomats’ communication skills, forc-ing them to rely on the intermediary services of dragomans in most dealings and thus relegating them to a (more) passive position. While European diplo-mats dealt with most sensitive issues with embassy dragomans at their side, most of the time they delegated minor issues to the latter who went back and forth between embassies and Ottoman palaces. Their cardinal role in daily ver-nacular diplomacy was also proven by the fact that sometimes they were the ones who followed the court when it was occasionally transferred to Edirne, leaving their masters, the official ambassadors, in Constantinople.33

In 1585, the Venetian Bailo Lorenzo Bernardo admitted his total reliance on his dragoman and complained that while negotiating in Constantinople he had to “speak with others’ tongue, hear with others’ ears, negotiate with others’ brain.”34 Their linguistic monopoly over the negotiations provided these entre-preneurial go-betweens with the opportunity not only to be present in every negotiation but also to be a part of them. Relying on their expertise in Ottoman political and diplomatic traditions and at times with their own distinct agenda, these dragomans did not hesitate to make their own contributions by making small changes during translations and deciding what and what not to trans-late. For instance, repeating the afore-mentioned phrase verbatim, the same Bernardo would report two years later how the French ambassador’s drago-man chose not to translate his master’s words properly in order not to offend the grand vizier; as he was a “Turk” and thus an Ottoman subject, he feared some misfortune would fall upon him. He was able to escape the grand vizier’s

32 See Eric Dursteler, “Latin Rite Christians in Early Modern Istanbul,” in Osmanli Istanbulu I: I. Uluslararası Osmanlı İstanbulu Sempozyumu Bildirileri, 29 Mayıs–1 Haziran 2013, ed. Feridun Emecen and Emrah Safa Gürkan (Istanbul, 2014), 137-146.

33 ASV, APC, fil. 5, 29r-29v (1 January 1550, m.v.). Cf. ASV, SDC, fil. 2, cc. 223v-223r (20 September 1567), 282r (25 October 1567).

34 ASV, SDC, fil. 22, c. 273r (6 December 1585).

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wrath, but the French ambassador dismissed him from his service after becom-ing aware of the situation.35

Jewish Power BrokersIn contrast to the widespread religious prosecution in most European states, Ottomans were pragmatic enough not to meddle with their non-Muslim tax-payers’ religious convictions. Early modern Jews, escaping from a wave of European religious persecution, thus migrated to Ottoman lands in great num-bers in the sixteenth century. Most of them were New Christians (Marranos) who were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula. As soon as they settled in Constantinople, they relied on their large households, financial means, and circum-Mediterranean trade connections to attain great political influence. They fulfilled several functions for the Ottoman state and its dignitaries. Some of the responsibilities that the Ottoman state leased to these Jewish house-holds were diplomatic.

Although Western historiography penned a number of books and articles on these Jewish power brokers, a comprehensive analysis of their place within the Ottoman military-administrative structure and their relationship with prominent Ottoman dignitaries is still missing. The following is a preliminary attempt to fill this historiographical gap.

Rich Jewish bankers proved themselves indispensable for Ottoman digni-taries who needed the quickest way of converting political power to financial power. In exchange for lucrative state contracts and certain political favors, these bankers would provide the dignitaries with cash, the sine qua non of political power in sixteenth-century Constantinople. Moreover, these Jewish entrepreneurs catered to the appetite of the Ottoman elites for luxury goods by providing them with wine, expensive clothes, jewels, and rare items.

By using their skills in finance and trade, these prominent Jewish figures managed to participate in Ottoman factional politics. For instance, Joseph Nasi played an important role during the Ottoman-Venetian War of 1570-1573 as a political adviser to Sultan Selim II whom he supported since the latter’s princely years.36 He was powerful enough to overcome Grand Vizier Mehmed

35 ASV, SDC, fil. 25, cc. 161v-162r (15 April 1587).36 Joseph Nasi was granted the island of Naxos as a fief with its ducal title, while rumors

tying him to the newly conquered island of Cyprus turned out to be false. There is a vast literature on this enigmatic power broker. Apart from two acclaimed monographs by Cecil Roth (The House of Nasi: The Duke of Naxos (New York, 1948)) and Pierre Grunebaum-Ballim ( Joseph Naci: Duc de Naxos (Paris, 1968)), there are several articles some of which date back to the 1890s. For an updated bibliography, see Nicole Abravanel, “João Micas,



Sokollu as part of a faction that supported the declaration of war against the Serenissima. Furthermore, Nasi’s household included several spies that gath-ered information throughout Europe and the Mediterranean.37 He used this information in order to manipulate the Ottoman decision-making process and shape the Ottoman strategy in accordance with his own political ends. Even though his power in court decreased after the War of 1570-1573, he retained some of his influence until his death in 1579. For instance, when he offered his diplomatic intermediation to Habsburg ambassador Giovanni Margliani, the diplomat declined, since in dealing with Nasi he ran the risk of alienating Sokollu. However, he still demonstrated his diplomatic acumen by paying a visit to Nasi. Margliani’s caution should be read as a sign of the Jewish broker’s ongoing influence in Ottoman circles.38

Another important Jewish courtier of the era was David Passi. His influence in the Ottoman capital between 1585 and 1592 is underlined by Grand Vizier Sinan Pasha’s anger directed at this outsider who gained so much power at the expense of the established Ottoman military and administrative hierarchy.39 When Sultan Murad III ordered his vizier to consult with David Passi in all mat-ters regarding the anti-Habsburg alliance between the Ottomans, the English, the French, and Dom Antonio, the pretender to the Portuguese throne, Sinan Pasha refused and attacked Passi with several anti-Semitic remarks, quoting Qur’anic verses and accusing him of being a Venetian and a Spanish spy.40

Similarly, Alvaro Mendes, a.k.a. Salomon Beniex, a Portuguese New Christian and formerly an advisor to the Portuguese king, attained much prestige and influence even before he arrived in Constantinople from France, evident from the fact that his arrival was anticipated by the Ottomans.41 Murad III even sent

duc de Naxos, ou l’odyssée des Marranes entre péninsule ibérique, Anvers et l’empire ottoman,” in L’Empire ottoman dans l’Europe de la Renaissance/El Imperio Otomano en la Europa renacentista, ed. Alain Servantie and Ramón Puig de la Bellacasa (Louvain, 2005).

37 See Gürkan, “Espionage in the 16th-century Mediterranean,” 377-384.38 AGS, E 1080, fol. 23 (3 February 1579).39 David Passi was not only entrusted with the imperial mint to farm, but he was also the

mastermind behind the disastrous Ottoman fiscal policy of the late 1580s. Pál Fodor, “An Antisemite Grand Vizier? The Crisis in Ottoman Jewish Relations in 1589-1591 and its Consequences,” in In Quest of the Golden Apple: Imperial Ideology, Politics, and Military Administration in the Ottoman Empire, ed. Pál Fodor (Istanbul, 2000), 191-206, here 197.

40 Koca Sinan Paşa’nın Telhisleri, ed. Halil Sahillioğlu (Istanbul, 2004), no. 8; Fodor, “An Antisemite Grand Vizier?,” 197-198.

41 See José Alberto Rodrigues da Silva Tavim, “La ‘Materia Oriental’ en el trayecto de dos personalidades judías del Impero Otomano: João Micas / D. Yosef Nasí, Álvaro Mendes / D. Shelomó Ibn Ya’ish,” Hispania Judaica 7 (2010): 214-232.

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a letter to Doge Nicolò da Ponte, indicating that he had invited Mendes and asking that he should safely be transferred with his family and belongings from Venice to Ragusa.42 Once in Constantinople, he further increased his influence by using his jewels to establish political connections with Ottoman grandees and even the sultan himself.43 He also played an important role in shaping the Ottoman strategy regarding the Indian Ocean where he had previously made a fortune mining diamonds.44

These Jewish power brokers also took up intermediary services between European diplomats and Ottoman grandees. While Jewish diasporic settle-ment provided them with strong trans-imperial connections throughout Europe and the Mediterranean, their cultural, linguistic, and social capital made them ideal brokers of cross-confessional diplomacy. For instance, a trans-imperial broker par excellence (a Jewish Venetian subject born in Udine, educated in Padua, living in Constantinople, but who had previously worked in Cracow), Salomon Ashkenazi played a decisive role during the negotiations that ended the War of 1570-1573. He was the middleman between the impris-oned Bailo Marc’Antonio Barbaro and Grand Vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha who wanted to secure an honorable peace that would end this war that he had not wanted to declare in the first place. As the medical doctor of both Barbaro and Sokollu, Ashkenazi served both sides, on the one hand by negoti-ating with the bailo on behalf of Sokollu for a possible peace treaty, and on the one other, by helping the bailo to smuggle his letters from his house to be dis-patched to Venice. When Ashkenazi was caught in the act and found himself in Ottoman prisons, it was the grand vizier himself who twice saved his neck,45 a fact that shows how factions could openly act in defiance of the formal state position (which was to keep the bailo incommunicado) as long as this suited their corporate interests. Anti-war Sokollu continued to support Ashkenazi; he entrusted the task of compiling the text of the 1573 Venetian capitulations and even finalizing the negotiations for the Dalmatian borders between the two

42 ASV, Documenti Turchi, b. 7, no. 931 (2-11 April 1584).43 ASV, SDC, fil. 23, cc. 355r-357r (15 May 1596).44 ASV, SDC, fil. 22, c. 382r (5 January 1585, m.v.) and fil. 23, c. 642r (22 August 1586). In 1588,

he was reported to be providing Grand Vizier Siyavuş Pasha with detailed information regarding Portuguese fortifications in the Indian Ocean. AGS, E 1090, fol. 9 (20 September 1588).

45 Benjamin Arbel, Trading Nations: Jews and Venetians in the Early Modern Eastern Mediterranean (Leiden, 1995), 79-80; Benjamin Arbel, “Salomone Ashkenazi: mercante e armatore”, in Il mondo ebraico: gli ebrei tra Italia nord-orientale e impero asburgico dal medioevo all’età contemporanea, ed. Giacomo Todeschini and Pier Cesare Ioly Zorattini (Pordenone, 1991), 111-128; here 116.



states to the Jewish doctor. In 1574, Ashkenazi arrived in Venice as the Ottoman envoy.46

However, his diplomatic achievements were not restricted to Ottoman-Venetian relations. Along with dragoman Hürrem Bey, he would play an instru-mental role in securing the truce between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs by helping Giovanni Margliani during the three-year-long negotiations. In 1578, he was helping Buongianni Gianfigliazzi, Francesco de’ Medici’s envoy.47 The next year, he wrote a letter to the Tuscan grand duke on behalf of his pro-tector Sokollu Mehmed Pasha and asked him to reopen negotiations for an ‘ahdname.48 Sokollu’s assassination later that year should have not only jeopar-dized the chances of a possible agreement, but also made Ashkenazi, who did not have an influential ally among Ottoman grandees at the time, an unlikely intermediary. Still, years later in 1591, it was again Ashkenazi and Hürrem who were negotiating with the grand duke’s men.49

Likewise, David Passi offered his diplomatic services to Dom Antonio, the pretender to the Portuguese throne, and lobbied for a military alliance between him, the Ottomans, the French, and the English against the Spanish Habsburgs. As Dom Antonio’s agent, he succeeded another Marrano broker, Alvaro Mendes.50 Passi’s entrepreneurship in influencing the Ottoman deci-sion making may even include causing an Ottoman-Polish War by conspir-ing with his brother at the Polish court and delaying the arrival of an official ambassador, an action which paved the way for his eventual downfall.51

Apparently, these Jewish brokers’ fates were tied to the fortunes of the factions to which they belonged. For instance, while the consolidation of Sokollu’s power resulted in the waning of Nasi’s influence, Ashkenazi had a hard time preserving his influence after his protector Sokollu was assassinated in 1579. He quickly lost ground to another Jew named Moses Benveniste who

46 Pedani, In nome del Gran Signore, 25-6. Even though he arrived in Venice with Sokollu’s letters and not those of the sultan, the Venetians immediately treated him as an official envoy (p. 166). Also see. ASV, SDelC, reg. 4, cc. 52v, 56v, 59v, 80v-81v, 84, 85, 88, 116.

47 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato, vol. 4274, fol. 23 (14 September 1578).48 AGS, E 1078, fol. 29 (April 1579).49 ASV, SDelC, reg. 8 c. 100r (23 June 1591).50 According to the Venetian bailo, Mendes had already broken with Dom Antonio before

he came to Constantinople. ASV, SDC, fil. 22, c. 466v (22 January 1585, m.v.). Still, accord-ing to Roth, Mendes represented Dom Antonio in Constantinople until 1591. He was also brokering between the Ottoman Empire and England where he had extensive political connections. Roth, House of Nasi, 208-210.

51 Fodor, “An Antisemite Grand Vizier?” 197; Sahillioğlu, Koca Sinan Paşa, no. 8.

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was a close confidant, familiar, of Siyavuş Pasha;52 it was this new power bro-ker who played an important part in the next round of Ottoman-Habsburg truce negotiations in 1584 and 1587. Throughout Siyavuş Pasha’s tenure in the grand vizierate, Benveniste provided a useful link between him and European ambassadors.53 Such services came at a price not only for the Ottoman gran-dees but also for foreign ambassadors. While the Habsburgs made regular payments to Ashkenazi and Passi54 and acquiesced to their requests for spe-cial favors and government intervention on their behalf,55 the Venetians kept Moses Benveniste on their payroll as stipendiato.56

Renegades within the Ottoman Administrative and Military Structure

The sixteenth-century Ottoman polity was governed by renegade elites, a direct result of Mehmed II’s (d. 1481) reforms in the central government that removed members of the established Turco-Muslim families from the higher echelons of central government and replaced them with members of the sultan’s household, procured from among the Christian population of the empire, mostly through a system called devşirme, the child levy. Even though most of the devşirme-based recruits came from the Balkan territories, the Ottomans also resorted to the services of renegades of Mediterranean and Western European provenance, usually acquired via corsair raids and slave markets. In the late fifteenth and throughout the sixteenth centuries, the Ottoman Muslim ruling elite was thus largely composed of converts or descen-dants of converts to Islam who spoke Slavic, Romance, Greek, Hungarian, or Albanian languages in addition to Turkish.

Recent studies have successfully shown that most of the time early mod-ern converts fell short of the “classical” Pauline model of conversion, a spon-taneous spiritual metamorphosis and a complete identity transformation, imposed by post-Tridentine sensibilities and deeply enshrined in Western thought.57 Even though conversion might mean “civil death,” it did not

52 ASV, SDC, fil. 22, c. 122r (2 October 1585).53 For example, he appears frequently in Venetian diplomatic dispatches as the baili often

relied on his diplomatic services.54 AGS, E 1529, fols. 51-3 (30 December 1583); E K 1675, fol. 131 (20 March 1592); E 1531, fol. 111

(7 August 1584); E 1537, fols. 206 and 207 (23 July 1586).55 AGS, E 1080, fols. 22 (29 January 1579) and 98 (1 April 1579).56 ASV, SDC, fil. 22, c. 122r (2 October 1585). He also asked for favors. ASV, SDC, fil. 23,

cc. 557r-565r (9 July 1586).57 Tijana Krstić, “Illuminated by the Light of Islam and the Glory of the Ottoman Sultanate:

Self-Narratives of Conversion to Islam in the Age of Confessionalization,” Comparative



necessarily entail “social death.”58 Most converts in fact did not sever ties with their pasts, but kept their memories and familial ties intact,59 remembering their maternal languages,60 faith,61 and even retaining their clothing habits.62 As they preserved their trans-imperial identities and connections, it should come as no surprise that renegades at every level of Ottoman administrative-military structure provided a bridge that enabled cross-confessional negotia-tions between the Ottoman Empire and European states.63

Metin Kunt argued that among the Ottoman devşirme there was solidarity along the common ethnic/regional background (cins) which produced rivaling

Studies in Society and History 51, no. 1 (2009): 35-63; here 44-45; Rothman, Brokering Empire, Chapter 3.

58 Gauri Viswanathan, “Coping with (Civil) Death: the Christian Convert’s Rights of Passage in Colonial India,” in After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton, 1995): 183-210; Tobias Graf, “Of Half-Lives and Double-Lives: ‘Renegades’ in the Ottoman Empire and Their Pre-Conversion Ties, ca. 1580-1610,” in Well-Connected Domains: Towards an Entangled Ottoman History, ed. Pascal W. Firges et al. (Leiden, 2014), 131-149; here 131-2.

59 Dursteler, Renegade Women; Sola, Uchalì; Antonio Fabris, “Hasan ‘il Veneziano’ tra Algeria e Costantinopoli,” Quaderni di Studi Arabi 5 (1997): 51-66; here 60-1, Hedda Reindl-Kiel, “Das Ende einer Kavaliersreise—Beginn einer osmanischen Karriere?,” in Deutsch-türkische Begegnugen/Alman Türk Tesadüfleri: Festschrift für Kemal Beydilli/Kemal Beydilli’ye Armağan, ed. Hedda Reindl-Kiel and Seyfi Kenan (Berlin, 2013), 106-187. For the most unusual meeting between the Ottoman Grand Admiral Cigalazade Yusuf Sinan Pasha and his mother aboard the Ottoman fleet anchored off Messina, see AGS, E 1158, fols. 186 (1 October 1598), 187 (15 letters dated September 1598).

60 For instance, Uluc Ali could still speak Italian, albeit imperfectly, in 1583, decades after his capture. Sola, Uchalí, 68, 366. In 1577, fourteen years after his enslavement and five years spent in the Ottoman capital, in the year when he was appointed first the governor of Thessalonica and then the governor-general of Algeria, Hasan Veneziano was reported to be able to speak no more than 25 words in Turkish: “. . . appena sa dir vinticinque parole in Turchesco.” ASV, SDC, fil. 11, fol. 103v (20 May 1577). The devshirme also did not seem to forget their language. Metin Ibrahim Kunt, “Ethnic-Regional (Cins) Solidarity in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Establishment,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 5, no. 3 (1974): 233-239, here 235.

61 Several renegades contacted Christian sovereigns and indicated their desire to return to Christianity. AGS is full with documents testifying to their genuine interest. Moreover, we know of converts who expressed their desire to introduce the religion they had aban-doned to the Ottoman sultan. See, for instance, Friedrich Seidel, Sultanın Zindandında: Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’na Gönderilen Bir Elçilik Heyetinin İbret Verici Öyküsü (1591-1596), trans. Türkis Noyan (İstanbul, 2010), 70.

62 Kunt, “Ethnic-Regional,” 236.63 See also the article by Maartje van Gelder in this special issue.

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factions.64 When this cins solidarity included renegades that shared a common background with foreign diplomats and thus extended beyond the boundaries and the subjects of the empire, it facilitated the conduct of cross-confessional diplomacy. For instance, in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, there was a Venetian network in the Ottoman capital, composed of prominent Venetian-Ottoman grandees such as the powerful Chief White Eunuch of the Palace, Gazanfer Agha, the Ottoman Grand Admiral and famous corsair Uluc Hasan Pasha (Hasan Veneziano), another eunuch from the Venetian island of Zara named Ömer Ağa, and a good number of Ottoman officials who held key posi-tions as governor-generals, governors, and commanders.65 While these former Venetian subjects-turned-Ottomans asked the Venetian baili for favors for rela-tives they had left behind in Venice,66 the baili in return sought to appease them with presents and bribes. Unsurprisingly, some of these renegades were always leaving the door open for a return to their fatherland if things took a different turn in the turbulent Ottoman capital.

Interestingly, in the Ottoman palace, there were also a number of influential female figures with “trans-imperial trajectories” to whose diplomatic services Europeans could resort. Confined to the imperial palace, these imperial ladies used European ambassadors to help their relatives on the other side of the frontier and procure luxury items such as European-style attire, art objects, as well as other prestigious items. Let us focus once again on the better- documented Venetian example. At a time when the established Ottoman mili-tary and administrative hierarchy was retreating in front of court favorites and imperial women, the baili realized the political and diplomatic advantages of keeping these influential ladies on their side. They continuously advised the Venetian government to accede to many of these sultane’s requests for pres-ents and other types of favors. The baili retained regular contact with them via other intermediaries, such as mutes, dwarves, eunuchs, the women servants of the harem (kethüda hatuns, vekilharcs or kalfas) or women who attended the sultanas such as the Jewish kiras, female go-betweens and Jewish power brokers.67 The baili even found a compatriot in the imperial harem: Gazanfer’s

64 Kunt, “Ethnic-Regional.”65 Maria Pia Pedani Fabris, “Veneziani a Costantinopoli alla fine del XVI secolo,” Quaderni di

Studi Arabi 15 (1997): 67-84.66 For instance, Gazanfer supported his brother-in-law Zaghis’ efforts to have a debt can-

celed by the Venetian state and to be awarded an important office. Dursteler, Renegade Women, 8.

67 Maria Pia Pedani, “Safiye’s Household and Venetian Diplomacy,” Turcica 32 (2000): 9-31, here 11.



sister Beatrice Michiel, a.k.a. Fatima Hatun, who after her conversion and mar-riage to an Ottoman janissary gained unusual access to powerful women of the harem. Fatima not only defended the Venetian interests in front of Safiye Sultan but also encouraged her powerful brother, who was usually careful not to give rise to rumors of being too pro-Venetian, to act in accordance with Venice’s interests. Her influence on perhaps the empire’s most influential man is evident from the risk Gazanfer took when he agreed to an unprecedented secret face-to-face encounter with Bailo Marco Venier inside the Topkapı Palace. It should not come as a surprise, though, that in exchange for their services, both Gazanfer and Fatima requested exceptional favors for their rela-tives in Venice.68

It was not only the Venetian ambassador who sought to conduct cross-confessional diplomacy via imperial ladies. Close relations between imperial women of trans-imperial background and European ambassadors could not have been established without the tacit approval of the Ottoman authorities. While demonstrating how British women in the Muslim rulers’ harems played an influential diplomatic role between Britain and North Africa, Nabil Matar has argued that it was their local ruler husbands who encouraged them to retain communication with their motherland.69 Even though Matar is describing a case where there was a decisive power imbalance between the two regions (England and North Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), his argument still stands in the case of the Ottomans. Although in the sixteenth century their political power secured them an upper hand in diplomatic nego-tiations, and they had no urgency to seek diplomatic accommodation in for-eign capitals, the Ottomans still capitalized on the imperial ladies’ connections while conducting diplomacy.

Moving from one site of Ottoman power to another, the Ottoman navy and the Arsenal were loci of cardinal importance to European ambassadors who wanted to use renegades from the Western Mediterranean in their diplomatic efforts. For instance, in 1550 Bernardo Navagero established amicable rela-tions with Cafer Agha from Catharo, once a favorite of the deceased Ottoman Grand Admiral Hayreddin Barbarossa and a man whom Navagero considered “very clever and experienced in affairs of the world,” (molto ingegno e prat-tico delle cose del mondo). Cafer provided the bailo with information not on only Ottoman maritime affairs but also on their strategic calculations and diplomatic priorities.70 The household of Grand Admiral Uluc Ali, himself a

68 Dursteler, Renegade Women, 22-23.69 Nabil Matar, Britain and Barbary, 1589-1689 (Gainesville, 2005), 100-102.70 ASV, APC, fil. 5, c. 26v (25 November 1550).

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Calabrian renegade, was an ideal recruiting ground, proven by the fact that the Habsburg secret service never ran short of agents who volunteered to provide Philip II with information or even offered to assassinate their master.71 The Venetian bailo much preferred to communicate with Uluc’s renegade lieuten-ants instead of directly dealing with the difficult corsair-cum-grand admiral, whose short temper was notorious and who was easily irritated by European diplomats’ protests against the corsairs’ infringement of ‘ahdname clauses. Lorenzo Bernardo expressed great discontent when the cantankerous Uluc dis-missed his Venetian steward Rıdvan who embezzled money from him. Losing a reliable informant from the center of the Ottoman maritime establishment, the household of Uluc Ali, the bailo now had to buy (acquistar) a replacement in the person of Hasan Corso, the Ağa of the Arsenal.72

Small-Scale Go-betweensLess visible are small-scale go-betweens, products of Constantinople’s unique plurality, i.e. merchants, ransom agents, spies, informants, sailors, travelers, Arsenal workers, wandering priests, soldiers, pilgrims, etc. When the figure of an official ambassador was absent, these trans-imperial entrepreneurs pro-vided necessary intermediary services in cross-confessional diplomacy. The Ottoman-Habsburg truce negotiations (1577-1581) provide us with the most illuminating example of men from all walks of life proving their acumen and relying on their connections in order to harvest political favor and obtain financial benefits from governments on both sides of the Mediterranean bor-derlands. As these negotiations were studied in detail before,73 let us look at other similar examples.

Throughout the sixteenth century, several intermediaries with no official tie to central governments brokered international treaties in the Ottoman capital, bridging communicative and diplomatic gaps between the two halves of the Mediterranean. In 1539, the Ottoman dragoman Yunus Bey resorted to a friend from his native Modon, Antonio de Modone, who came to Edirne to ransom some of his family members. Yunus asked him to tell the Venetians that they

71 Gürkan, “My Money or Your Life.”72 ASV, SDC, fil. 22, c. 225v (13 November 1585).73 Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II,

vol. II, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1966), 439-50; S.A. Skilliter, “The Hispano-Ottoman Armistice of 1581” in Iran and Islam: In Memory of the Late Vladimir Minorsky, ed. C.E. Bosworth (Edinburgh, 1971), 491-515; Rodríguez-Salgado, Felipe II, “Paladín de la Cristiandad y la paz con el Turco”; Gürkan, “Espionage in the 16th-century Mediterranean,” 291-312.



could send an ambassador to ask for a truce.74 In similar fashion, in 1564, there were rumors that the Ottomans entrusted the Habsburg spy Michel Černović with the task of instigating truce negotiations with Philip II.75

Sometimes the diplomatic community tried to undermine those interme-diaries whom they perceived as unworthy of being diplomatic negotiators. For instance, in 1577, a certain Pietro Amanati, known by his nickname Moreto, arrived in the capital with letters from the grand duke of Tuscany who was seeking the right to trade for his subjects, guaranteed by an ‘ahdname. Clinging to his privileged background and exceptional education, the Venetian Bailo Giovanni Correr rebuked this former prisoner-of-war. He was not a “man of affairs,” (huomo di negocio), and he did not know how to read or write. He was but a “petty soldier,” (soldatello), who undertook risky operations such as declaring when he entered the Ottoman Empire that he was French and car-rying important letters for Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, a ruse he devised in order to reach Istanbul.76 Despite not meeting Correr’s criteria, Amanati success-fully negotiated in Constantinople and convinced Sokollu to accept a resident ambassador from Florence.77

Not all unofficial intermediaries were considered (or considered them-selves) to be of lesser stature than the official ones. For example, in 1593, when Carlo Cicala arrived in Constantinople to spy for the Habsburgs and to visit his brother, the Ottoman Grand Admiral Cigalazade Yusuf Sinan Pasha, the rumor was that he came to negotiate a truce.78 It turned out to be false, but it is evident that Carlo saw himself as more than a spy or an informant. In spite of his lack of appropriate credentials, he refused, for instance, to walk in after the French ambassador and be seated in an inferior seat at the Venetian ambas-sador’s usual banquet.79

74 AGS, E 1314, fols. 126 and 131 (16 March 1539). ASV, Consiglio di Dieci, Parti Secrete, reg. 4, cc. 111v-112r (14 March 1539).

75 This rumor that Bailo Daniele Barbarigo related (ASV, SDC, fil. 4D (5 February 1564)) is plausible since the Ottomans treated this agent who had been sending information to the Habsburgs for years exceptionally well. They not only refused to hand him over to the bailo, thus saving him from Venetian prosecution, but also gave him a safe-conduct which would assure the cooperation of local authorities while leaving the Empire.

76 ASV, SDC, fil. 11, cc. 148r-149r (17 June 1577), 154v-155r (18 June 1577); Castaño, Uchalí, p. 255-6.

77 ASV, SDC, fil. 11, cc. 168r-168v (2 July 1577).78 Calendar of State Papers relating to English Affairs in the Archives of Venice [hereafter

COSP], vol. 9, 1592-1603, ed. Horatio Brown, British History Online, Matheo Zane, June 9, 1593. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=95458.

79 COSP, Marco Venier, May 3, 1594. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid= 95469.

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Conclusion

By focusing on various diplomatic dealings among Ottoman officers, European ambassadors and myriad go-betweens, this essay followed the path of New Diplomatic History and sought to shift the focus from the office of the “ambas-sador” to a large number of informal diplomatic actors: Jewish brokers, drago-mans, renegades, spies, soldiers, merchants, travelers, priests, pilgrims, sailors, and the like. Moreover, it tried to capture the complexity of everyday politics in the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire. Political actors, even when they belonged to the dynasty itself,80 held personal and factional interests over purported state interest. The Zeitgeist of early modern Ottoman politics dic-tated the centrality of presents, personal favors, and financial exchanges not only on the domestic level while engaging in factional struggles but also on the international level while undertaking diplomatic negotiations. In this world of self-promotion and interest-seeking, European diplomats could take part in Ottoman factional politics and penetrate the Ottoman decision-making process thanks to the mediation and brokerage of go-betweens. Such a blur-ring of the line between Ottoman domestic and foreign affairs is compatible with recent approaches to early modern diplomacy that accentuate the “close connection between foreign policy and the government of the state, between military and diplomatic choices and internal arrangements, and between negotiations, alliances and alignments on the one hand, and the dynastic and patrimonial concerns of the princes, or the political concerns of the republi-can patriciates, on the other.”81

Furthermore, the activities of these go-betweens and intermediaries and vernacular aspect of diplomatic interactions in the Ottoman capital shed a very different light on the traditional view of Ottoman diplomacy as informed exclusively by the precepts of Islamic Law that divided the world into an “Abode of War” and an “Abode of Islam,” and envisioned peace with non-Muslim poli-ties only as a temporary necessity. As it has been argued in this essay, studying Ottoman diplomacy based on documented practices, rather than timeless and

80 For instance, it was Safiye Sultan’s kira who informed the Austrian ambassador of Ottoman plans to attack Hungary right before the declaration of war. The kira was obvi-ously rewarded handsomely by the ambassador; but the sultana was directly involved as well. A.H. Wratislaw, ed., Adventures of Baron Wenceslas Wratislaw of Mitrowitz (London, 1862), 103, 109-116.

81 Daniela Frigo, “Introduction,” in Politics and Diplomacy in Early Modern Italy: The Structure of Diplomatic Practice, 1450-1800, ed. Daniela Frigo, trans. Adrian Belton (Cambridge, 2000), 1-24, here 5-6.



rigid theories and concepts of Islamic Law, reveals a more complex reality.82 It not only draws attention to the improvisational nature of early modern diplo-macy but also brings to the fore trans-imperial factions and alliances that cut across religious divisions.

Research that puts cross-confessional diplomatic contact undertaken by trans-imperial go-betweens at the center of inquiry also challenges the depic-tions of the Ottoman Empire as a ghazi state that recognized “no alternative but war for reaching any type of accord over territorial dispute” and failed to effectively use diplomacy.83 It demonstrates that contrary to the traditional accounts of diplomatic history, the existence of a European-style “formal appa-ratus” within an established administrative hierarchy and with its own profes-sional cadre was not a pre-requisite for the effective conduct of diplomacy.84 The Ottoman abstention from establishing resident embassies abroad should not obscure the fact that Constantinople was home to extensive diplomatic activity and was thus not so different from other European capitals. In fact, it could be argued that this intensity of diplomatic and espionage activity was what compensated for the lack of permanent Ottoman embassies abroad. Even though they waited until the final years of the eighteenth century to send resi-dent ambassadors, the Ottomans were no isolationists.85 Thanks to its unique characteristics, Constantinople not only provided them with the necessary human resources to deal with diplomatic tasks successfully into the nineteenth century, but it also figured as a laboratory in which an unprecedentedly diverse

82 A similar point was made by Costas M. Constantinou who stated that the participation of many Christians (as well as Jews and renegades, I would add) in the conduct of Ottoman diplomacy demonstrates the limits of its over-emphasized Muslim features. See his “Diplomacy, Grotesque Realism and Ottoman Historiography,” Postcolonial Studies 3, no. 2 (2000): 213-226, here 217.

83 Abou-El-Haj, “Ottoman Diplomacy at Karlowitz,” 498. For instance, Abou el-Haj states that the Ottomans “in the absence of necessity [ . . . ] had developed neither the formal apparatus for diplomatic communication nor the corps of trained personnel requisite for the negotiation of peace.” (p. 498-499). Although it was written decades ago, this article still preserves its relevance today (see fn. 3). More recently, Jeremy Black argued that the Ottoman Empire required diplomacy rather less than Tudor England, Valois France, or Sforza Milan. According to this, the strong Ottomans did not particularly need allies. Jeremy Black, A History of Diplomacy (London, 2010), 53-54.

84 Mattingly (Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (New York, 1988, 1st ed. 1958)) and Anderson’s (M.S. Anderson, The Rise of Modern Diplomacy, 1450-1919, (Harlow, 1993)) depiction of a linear progress toward the modern system of permanent representation has been challenged by John Watkins (“Toward a New Diplomatic History,” 4) and Jeremy Black (A History of Diplomacy, 54).

85 See also Mathieu Grenet’s article in this volume.

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number of intermediaries both implemented and defined essential aspects of early modern diplomacy. A closer examination of the numerous diplomatic practices elaborated and developed in Ottoman Constantinople could lead to a reevaluation of Eurocentric views that associate the birth and development of modern diplomacy only with Christian Europe.86

86 In a pioneering article, Daniel Goffman criticized the Eurocentric lack of attention to the Ottoman role in the development of diplomacy during the Italian Renaissance. According to him, Italian experiences in the Ottoman East were critical in the construction of a new diplomacy as they affected the formulation of some of the elements of the new diplomatic system such as permanent missions, extra-territoriality, reciprocity and the gathering of intelligence. Daniel Goffman, “Negotiating with the Renaissance State: The Ottoman Empire and the New Diplomacy,” in The Early Modern Ottomans: Remapping the Empire, ed. Virginia H. Aksan and Daniel Goffman (Cambridge, 2007), 61-74.

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