Instead, she fumed: “Marrying a Turk! Bah! Unacceptable! A girl as clever and educated as you! What a shame!”

My tears swelled around my eyes and my hands holding the lokum package began to tremble.

“You are going to be beaten three times a day,” she continued forcefully, like a fortune teller. “Like a donkey!” she finished, culminating in irritation.

Her words, as you may guess, saddened me beyond description. Coming from a well-meaning, educated and gray haired person, her comments were hard to disregard.

She knew nothing of Ali, my fiancé, other than the fact that he was Turkish. Yet, this very little information had sent her into a fit that materialized into unleashed accusations as if she had decoded his DNA fingerprints: “Caution! Prospective Violent Husband!”

I left the box of lokum on her desk with the flickering hope that she would change her mind, take one and wish me happiness. I walked out of her office and wiped away my tears, which were now flowing down my cheeks unconstrained.

Since the first day that I broke the news to my family that a Turk had asked for my hand in marriage-as you may know, sensational news travel with the speed of light-I had to bravely face comments coming from all directions.

“Why marry a Turk? Is there a shortage of Albanian bachelors?” mocked my father.

“How will we communicate with him?” worried Mom. “We don’t speak Turkish. He doesn’t speak Albanian.”

My eldest sister wanted to see his picture before saying anything about the matter. As soon as I showed her one, she cried with relief: “Thank God, he doesn’t have a mustache!”

My second older sister, looking at the same photo commented: “He doesn’t look Turkish. Look at his green eyes and his light skin. Are you sure about his origin?” she teased.

My 80 year old grandmother wasn’t interested much in his good looks. “You have my consent” she said “only on condition that he will not force you to wear a headscarf over your hair.” My sisters very quickly assured her on my behalf that the future groom seemed a modern person and would never do such a “backward” thing.

My uncle complained that since the groom did not drink alcohol he wouldn’t be able to join his toasts at the table.

Obviously, our neighbors, who had witnessed me grow from a wailing baby to a well-mannered college student had something to say about this unusual betrothal. I overheard our next-door neighbor whisper to my mom: “The Turks are conquering us again, but this time …” she paused, nodding in my direction as I passed by, and continued “… from inside.”

My classmates gave me the thumbs up for finding a smart man-apparently his Ph. D. studies in physics in the U.S. proved that beyond a doubt.

“You are lucky!” one of the girls commented. “Life in America is worth anything.” She acted like I would still get a pat on the shoulder, even if I was to marry a drug dealer as long as I landed on the other side of the Atlantic.

My roommate made the most mischievous comment: “Our national hero Skanderbeg” she said, “is turning in his grave upon hearing that one of his compatriots is marrying a descendant of the Turks he fought against for more than two decades.”

She laughed hard when she saw that her words had distressed me. “Don’t worry,” she changed her tone. “Nowadays everybody is marrying anyone; Italian, German, Spaniard, Greek, you name it. The only thing that matters is love, isn’t it?”

I could come to terms with all these opinions, except my professor’s reaction, which was very hard to swallow. Why had she been so negative about the very idea? If my future unhappiness was so obvious, how come my family, the people who cared about me most, had never given me the slightest hint?

Was my professor simply envious? Could it be sheer ignorance? How could that be? She was a highly educated person. I knew she was Orthodox Christian. Could it be that she simply disliked Turks because they are Muslims?

A feeling of shame overtook me as soon as I realized that this line of thinking might lead me to commit her very mistake. It dawned on me that prejudice, as ugly as it is, could be sneaky as well, creeping into your conscience with no warning. Was it possible to be totally free from it?

I felt angry at my weakness. Why hadn’t I been brave enough to sit down and have a conversation with Professor Lydia? If I had talked to her, then at least I would have learned her motives.

“Don’t be silly!” My roommate commented when I shared my concerns with her. “Hers is just a stereotype! The Turks ruled Albania for five centuries and she doesn’t want to forget it! Why do you even bother to think about it?”

Could that be the reason? Or was it just another consoling prejudice? I wondered.

True, history had been taught as the Communists saw fit and the Turks had been given the worst share of the blame, a vivid description which materialized in one ominous, infamous sentence: “Where a Turk has stepped, the grass never grows back.” However, this phrase is defied not only by the country’s green pastures, but also by the school buildings, water fountains, bridges, hospitals, and clock towers built by the Ottomans that are still standing as silent witnesses; nonetheless, this terrifying description has been engraved in the minds of my Professor’s generation. It had never crossed my mind that history would be involved in my marriage.

The absurdity of it put a smile on my face; this didn’t escape my roommate’s curious eye. “See? All this silliness for nothing. You will probably laugh when you think about it ten years from now.”

And, right she was. Ten years later, I smile as I remember in retrospect all the fuss about my marriage. My family forgot all their worries and demands, pleased by Ali’s genuine respect and accented Albanian. He called my parents mami and babi-something my sisters’ husbands never did-and he became their favorite son-in-law. My uncle didn’t mind him toasting with a glass of coke either.

Everyone is happy, I, most of all. In my husband’s eye the measure of a man is the way he treats his wife, as suggested in the prophetic tradition: “The best among you is he who treats his wife the best.”

I have read somewhere that one simple way to know if someone is a good spouse is to look how the household greets that person when he/she comes home. Do they smile when they see him/her? Are they happy that they are back?

In the evening, as I witness our four children jump for joy and chant their happiness “Baba is here, baba is here” the moment they see their father’s car enter the driveway, my heart swells with love. My husband beams with happiness at this daily celebration and I am seized by a desire to travel all the way over the Atlantic, find my professor and have that delayed conversation I had no courage to have earlier. I owe this to the wonderful man I call my husband.

Mirkena Ozer had her major in Turkish language and literature. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

It is our observation that the popular image in Romania of the Turk as an enemy is a late, nineteenth-century acquisition, triggered by the political motives of contending Romanian groups at the time, and it has rolled on ever since with no real justification in “third-form History,” including in school textbooks. For the first four hundred years or so of common, close ties in Romanian–Turkish history there is no serious indication leading us to think that the Turk’s image was the image of the “enemy” for Romanians as a whole. The Turk’s image, as it emerges from the chronicles of the time, is essentially based on religious difference-he is “the Pagan,” the believer in a “wrong belief,” just like the Catholic (“the Papist”) or the Mosaic (“the Jew”). The difference in religion does not necessarily entail hostility or enmity.

Things change in the nineteenth century when Moldova and Walachia are disputed by the Russian and the Ottoman empires, to the point that legends of the Moldovan capital of Iasi say that the local princes had a huge double-sided painting with a portrait on one side of the Sultan and on the other side of the Tsar: according to which empire’s troops entered the capital, they would display one side of the painting or the other. This is probably a legend or an exaggeration, but it is illustrative of the political atmosphere in the extra-Carpathian Romanian Principalities, an atmosphere proper for the development of pro-Russian and pro-Ottoman partisan groups-political parties, in all but name. Later, there would also emerge a pro-Western “party.” It was in order to accomplish their immediate and local goals that the anti-Ottoman “parties” forged the image of the Turk as an enemy.

This image was forged against a rather favorable popular image the Turk had gained after centuries of rather tolerant suzerainty. A popular rhyme of the time-still quoted by the national poet Mihai Eminescu late in the second half of the nineteenth century-claimed that “Our affairs would have been prosperous if the Turk was not as he is; a master warrior, but a poor diplomat.” (“Bine ne-ar fi fost în toate, dacă turcul n-ar fi fost / Mester numai la războaie, da-n diplomatică, prost!”). The evaluation, while notably precise-the Ottomans fought bravely and successfully the Tsarist troops in the 1806–1812 war, but made a disadvantageous peace, handing over the eastern part of Moldova to Russia, on account of the betrayal of their grand dragoman, the Greek Nicolae Moruzi-does not lack sympathy and understanding for the Turk. But instead of this Romanian frustration taking an anti-Russian or even anti-Greek form, it took, thanks to “third-form history,” an anti-Turkish form. Like all biases, this one too proved to be self-entertaining, and rolled through the centuries with nothing to fuel it after the 1877 Romanian Independence war, a war of doubtful utility for Romania, in Mihai Eminescu’s opinion (as well as, modestly, in ours), since after the 1829 Adrianopolis peace, the advantages of Turkish suzerainty far outweighed the disadvantages.

But the change for the worse of the Turk’s image as a result of local political interests in the nineteenth century is frustrating to the truth-seeking researcher for reasons lying deeper in history, namely, the fact that the Romanian people owes to a degree the free conservation and development of its identity throughout the late Middle Ages to the full observation by the Turks of the original treaties between the two nations. We shall further develop this subject.

The original peace treaties between the Ottoman Empire and the principalities of Walachia and Moldova-the so-called “old capitulations”-were agreed by the Turks with the greatest princes in the history of these countries: with Mircea the Old for Walachia at the beginning of the fifteenth century, and with stefan the Great for Moldova, at the end of the same century. Both these treaties were agreed after the Romanians had obtained brilliant military victories against the Turks. Therefore, their accepting Turkish suzerainty was considered, according to Islamic principles, as willing surrender, not as surrender obtained by force. Walachia and later Moldova were thus considered “Dar-ul-Sulh,” Lands of Peace. According to the Qur’anic recommendations, such countries received much better treatment than countries conquered by the sword-“Dar-ul-Harb,” or Lands of War. This treatment was inferior only to that received by Muslim countries-“Dar-ul-Islam,” or lands of Islam. While the neighboring peoples-Bulgarians, Serbians, for a short time Hungarians-received the “Dar-ul-Harb” treatment and lost their autonomy, being ruled by Turkish generals, the Romanian principalities of Walachia, Moldova and for a short time Transylvania enjoyed the “Dar-ul-Sulh” treatment.

Practically, this meant three main provisions in the “old capitulations”:

a) the interdiction of Turks’ ownership of land north of the Danube (with the exception of four bridgehead cities-“raia”).

b) the interdiction of religious proselytism by Turks north of the Danube.

c) the political autonomy of the principalities, which were to be ruled by Christian princes.

Later, the “old capitulations” were repeatedly transgressed by the Moldovan and Walachian princes, allowing in principle the Turks to transgress in their turn the three above-mentioned main provisions. However, they felt Qur’an-bound and Islam-bound to continue treating the two principalities as “Dar-ul-Sulh.” It is our opinion that this constancy of the Turks in observing the treaties, namely the three provisions, allowed the Romanians to maintain and develop their national and religious identity during the late Middle Ages in much better conditions than the neighboring peoples.

And it is a pity that this merit of the Turks, and of Islam, does not find its way into “third-form History” textbooks in Romania for presentation to the young.

Died on January 8, 2009, Victor Nitelea was a former expert, Romanian Commission for UNESCO and a leading Romanian journalist.

In memory of a dear friend

Victor Nitelea (April 8th 1952 – January 8th 2009) was my best friend in Romania. He was a unique person in many ways-an intellectual with a vast ability to incorporate sound knowledge and wisdom in politics and history as well as in mathematics and engineering. When he told me that he had written a dissertation on table tennis, I told him that it would not be a surprise if he came out with another thesis on spacecraft.

The Great Stefan told his child with his dying breath, “You can always trust Turks as they never betray you.” Victor had a deep trust in me as his Turkish friend. We had long, delightful discussions. He was a good listener, while his knowledge was enough to be the only speaker in any conversation.

He wrote fourteen books, was columnist on several journals, and appeared regularly on TV shows. He had a beautiful mind and was a popular face in the community. It was very sad hearing the news that he had lung cancer. I could not imagine the coming days without his company. Romania was not only losing an intellectual but also a good believer. Victor was a monotheist, saying that God cannot be associated with partners. He had deep respect for the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him.

Before he died, he gave me an article about the relationship between Turks and Romanians. For him, it was because of Turks that Romania still exists as a nation and as a country. Sharing this essay with The Fountain readers is, I hope, a fair treatment of his legacy.

I had the chance to meet him many times. I hope this essays provides an opportunity for The Fountain readers to have a conversation with Mr. Nitelea.

Dr. Ahmet Ecirli, University of Bucharest, Department of Sociology

Montaigne says that the main motivation for writing his famous Essays was to end his great solitude. Why was he lonely? Why did he feel alone and prefer conversing with his readers in an attempt to reduce his isolation? The answer to this question again can be found in his writings. He came from a wilder region of France, from behind the Alps that divided Western Europe. Thus, he was protected from the ills that the Italian Renaissance had imposed on European mentalities. What made him feel lonely was the meeting of his country with these new ideas and sects, the murder of thousands of people in the war of Saint Bartholomew (1572) on religious pretexts, and the arrival of this “European” attitude to his hometown²

This isolation preserved Montaigne from the mental crisis that his contemporaries were experiencing. He looks at both the past and the present and future within the possibilities that exist in the “thought from the wilderness.” It is for this reason that he has no prejudices. He is a free man of the world. This fact is demonstrated in his attitude toward the Orient and in particular to the Ottomans, whose images had been so distorted because of established prejudices.

Islam in European Culture

The thesis that supports the idea that there were vital differences between European and Ottoman societies and cultures and the politics of positioning them as opposites who were not willing to come to an agreement should give way to the thesis that there are more complicated and closer relationships between them. A deeper investigation will even allow us to trace signs of a “modern” mentality in the Ottoman culture that reaches all the way back to the beginning of the sixteenth century³ The Ottomans were interested in European affairs. Many historical readings bring us to a point that the survival of Protestantism owes itself to Ottoman support. It is not too difficult to find other examples.

It is known that Postel and Jean Bodin admired the Ottoman state and its administration in the sixteenth century and they were desirous to transmit these thoughts to their political theory. Likewise, Alan Grossrichard had already demonstrated that the image of the East, which was the “tour de force” of Montesquieu in his Persian Letters, was the representative of a popular ghost-that of despotism-in Europe during the seventeenth century. There are many researchers, from Bryan S. Turner to John M. Hobson, who have stated that both the negative side of European thought, like Hegel, Engels, and Marx, and the positive side, like Max Weber, shared the viewpoint of Orientalism that was against the East and Islam, particularly against the Ottomans. Even now it is questioned whether there is implicit Orientalism in the writings of European travelers-including Lady Montague, who was a most objective person. This list can be easily extended: despite his play Mahomet, which took a very negative view of the East, Voltaire was an admirer of the morality and discipline of the Muslims and the Ottomans. Lord Byron was a lover of Ottoman and Istanbul civilization, despite his political animosity that derived from his love of Hellenism. The “poet of the lakes,” Lamertine was awarded with a farm house by Sultan Abdulmecid, as a sign of appreciation for his book A History of the Turks. The father of Jean Jacque Rousseau was a repairer of clocks in Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. Goethe learned to read the Qur’an and pray from the Bashkird Turks, who were among the Russians who invaded Germany. Campanella said in his La Citta del Sole (The City of the Sun) that the utopia he had fictionalized had been realized in this world by the Ottomans. The writer of Don Quixote, Cervantes, lost one of his arms in the war of Lepanto, which he fought against the Ottomans; he wrote his novels during his imprisonment after this war inspired by Algerian scholars. The philosopher Leibniz presented a treatise of conquest to the French King in which he discussed how to destroy the Ottomans.

Montaigne

We have to add a new name to this list: Michel de Montaigne. In spite of having a few prejudices, Montaigne was one of the few modern writers who did not let prejudices dominate his view. In the first sentence of his Essays he promised that this book was going to be an honest one. Indeed, he continuously revised and edited his books before each new edition was published, including his essays on the Ottomans. He questioned his thoughts with reference to new sources he read and added new essays⁴

In the revised and extended 1595 edition of his book, which was published after his death, he advised French soldiers, whose laxity he had observed during the civil war in Perigord, to take Turkish soldiers for their model. He said that all young French soldiers should learn discipline from the Turkish armies:

Their discipline is very different from and superior to ours. At times of war, our soldiers are more irresponsible and disorderly than at times of peace; on the other hand, Turkish soldiers are moderate and reluctant to behave so, because stealing from the poor is punished with a few lashes in peace time, but very severely at war. Taking away an egg by force without paying money for it is punished with 50 lashes. Moreover, those who steal the most insignificant thing that does not even satisfy hunger nor have any value whatsoever are sentenced to death. I am surprised to read about Selim that when he conquered Damascus on his campaign to Egypt none of his soldiers took anything from the peerless gardens of this city, even though they were unprotected⁵

Montaigne, then, was not aware of “Eastern despotism,” a thesis that had been influential since the seventeenth century. Distanced from the influence of this thesis, he mentions how the philanthropic activities of the Turks extended to include fauna and flora, stating that the Turks had charities and hospitals even for animals.

Montaigne was influenced by the unfavorable winds that blew against the Ottomans through France, but he desired to use the Ottomans against his own despots as a mirror. In other words, he used a method that was similar to that of most other French intellectuals, like Montesquieu, after him.

He was aware of the power of habits and how they can capture people and he emphasized how wrong it was to label everything that is opposed to local habit as barbarism. To quote Dr Zeynep Sayin of Istanbul University:

The universal certainty that Descartes tried to find seems impossible for Montaigne because he is not in favor of certainty that is independent from conditions. On the contrary he analyses humans and societies in their differences. “I am not mislead to think that everybody should be like me…It seems reasonable to me to think that there are thousands of different lives.”⁶

Finally, Montaigne was aware of the fact that judgments do not carry the claim of universality; they are limited to the conditions in which they emerge. He was not bounded by Eurocentrism and was aware that there are different worlds and different life-styles. He did not try to regulate world according to himself, but rather realized that it is essential to recognize differences. It is probably because of this attitude that Montaigne stands in an exceptional place in Western thinking and why he does not find a place in books of “history of Western philosophy.”

Montaigne and the Ottomans

It is thanks to the magnificent study of Clarence Dana Rouillard⁷ that we learn that in the great world of Montaigne the Orient was identical with the “Turk,” i.e. the Ottomans. We are able to see that the Ottoman grew like a flower in Montaigne’s works and that he revised his thoughts and prejudices with new contributions and information with every new edition.

According to Rouillard, Montaigne-like P. Villey who prepared Essays for publication-believed in the necessity of knowing something well before judging it. More importantly, the Orient he identified with the Ottomans played a significant role in terms of widening his vision as it broadened the horizons of his era. According to Rouillard, Montaigne owes the wide vision and pluralism in his essays to the Ottomans to a great extent.

Rouillard, who surprised us with this striking information, firstly analyses Montaigne’s acquaintance with the Ottomans. According to him it is very interesting to observe the development of Montaigne’s knowledge about the Ottomans. Prior to the first publication of Essays in 1580, the only information that we get about Montaigne’s readings is that he got his information on Turks from the Italian history of Guichardin, not from the classics or chronicle writers and historians like Joinville or Froissart. The only reference to the Turks in the 1580 edition was that they partook of food by reclining on comfortable sofas and their belief that Paradise was a sensual abode. However, Montaigne’s curiosity was not confined to the borders of Western Europe and was open to all human activities experienced in modern history.

It seems that Paul Villey, a Montaigne specialist, did not study the 1582 edition of Essays attentively enough. Though rare and insignificantly small, there are some new additions to this edition. We are able to conclude from some points in this new edition that Montaigne read a new study that had been written directly about the Ottomans. Thus we got a clue that Montaigne’s interest about the Ottomans had increased.

As a matter of fact, the number of these clues increases in following editions. For the first time Montaigne encounters direct material concerning the Ottoman world in a Polish history book that he studied and used in the third edition. In this book was an engraving that displayed the celebration held on the occasion of the circumcision of Murad III’s sons. This engraving made Montaigne to think of the Ottoman world, their costumes, and context in a different way. In the last edition to be prepared before Montaigne passed away, his interest in foreign places was at its peak. In this last edition, Montaigne found, read, and analyzed books in Latin that had been written, directly or indirectly about Ottoman history, including the book of Halkokondil on the foundation and rise of the Ottomans and Postel’s De la Republique des Turcs. (He knew Postel-one of the significant intellectual of his time-personally.) There were nearly 50 references to the Ottomans in the last edition of Essays.

“The Turk the warrior!”

It seems clear that Montaigne did not believe in theological explanations concerning the defeat or victory of the Christians against Muslims. For example, he commented very dryly-which is not what one would expect from a European-on the war of Lepanto in 1571 in which the Christians won and which was followed by days of festivities:

A maritime war was won against Turks in the preceding months under the commandership of Don Juan d’Austria; but God was pleased when we saw the reverse many times in the past.

Montaigne desired that his fellow countrymen not put so much importance on this victory because the Turkish army was still standing. He recognized explicitly that the Turks had developed a considerable military force that could only be explained on the basis of material and human power. He related the Turkish ability to establish such a great army to their discipline. According to him, the Turks knew how to use their minds as much as they knew how to fight and this is what made them different from an army of barbarians.

Montaigne thought the acts of the Turks were not restrained merely because of the heavy punishments that were imposed. They were also accustomed to rigid physical discipline and sobriety. This quality made them superior to Western soldiers. He expressed his thoughts as follows:

In order to verify to what extent Turkish armies are more intelligent and behave more reasonably than ours it is enough to say that besides their other virtues they drink only water and eat rice and salty meat. Thus, each of them can carry one month’s provisions with them.

Montaigne explained another influential factor in the success of the Turks which was the Sultan being in command of their armies. Selim I thought that victories that had been won without the sultans leading the armies were not complete and thought it was shameful to be proud of such a victory. However, Montaigne did not treat all sultans identically; he did not have a holistic perspective. He was well aware of the fact that all sultans had different tendencies. According to him, surprisingly, Beyaz›d II and his contemporary Murad III’s excessive fondness for natural sciences (s’amusants aus sciences) caused harm to their countries; they not only failed to lead their country, but also caused harm.

Montaigne was closely interested in the opinion that espoused that warriors should abstain from the fine arts. He returns to this subject again in his essay “On Pedantry” in which did not only criticize the mistakes and uselessness of a few scientists, but also went further to argue that all kinds of education are useless, if not fatal, especially if education goes beyond the scope of a very few aristocratic minds to reach the general public:

Examples show us that learning the sciences does not make hearts rigid or inclined to fight, but rather more effeminate. The most powerful state nowadays seems to be that of the Turks, and they value weapons and humiliate the arts and sciences.

Montaigne can be excused for this mistaken final sentence, as he was then too distant from the time when samples of Ottoman-Divan literature were to be made available to the European public.

While his contemporaries were calling this so-called aspect of the Turks barbarism-we will not discuss whether this argument was valid or not-Montaigne looked at the issue from a very different perspective, which he claimed was essential for a people to survive. This is an example of Montaigne’s contradictory opinions.

In his essay “On Virtue” Montaigne wrote about the story of a young Turk who dared to challenge the Hungarian King Hunyadi Janos at war, despite lacking experience. This youth, when questioned by Sultan Murad, answered that he learned to be courageous from a rabbit. Fate protected the rabbit from 40 arrows he had shot and allowed it to escape the hunting dogs. The young man believed that the arrow and sword could only function if this was written in fate, and thus fought fearlessly in wars from that day on. A belief in fate was widespread among the Turks. Turkish historians wrote that soldiers felt secure against danger because they believed that the days which they would live were immutable and had already been established.

What Montaigne did was not to accumulate systematic information on a certain topic, but rather he involved in mental exercises. He lists these as the basis of the Turk’s successes in the sixteenth century.

Moral aspects of the Ottomans and Islam

Montaigne preserved his objective standing toward the Ottomans at different times. Although he was critical of many aspects of Turkish society and character, he still did not adhere to extreme definitions or popular descriptions, like the “Barbarous Turk,” or the “Lover Turk.” He even tried to alter the image of the cruel Turk in his other essays. He emphasized, for instance, that the Turks had established charities and hospitals for animals.

The only reference to Islam in the first edition of the book is concerned with worldly heaven. Montaigne was an intellectual whose eyes had not been blinded by religious prejudices and he did not refrain from calling some of their religious bigotry “stupidities.” Even when he wrote about the superstitions of the Turks he did not explain the issue in defense of Christianity, but saw such things as errors that could be found on both sides. Thus he was able to preserve the balance that he wanted to establish in his book.

Montaigne was a devout Catholic. He not only dealt with Islam, but also Calvinism and Protestantism, which came to his country from behind the Alps and he criticized the translation of the Bible into local languages, praising the Turks for their respect of the original language of their sacred revealed text. In the end, in one of the best examples of tolerance in Essays, he reminds his countrymen that the Ottomans outstripped them in terms of some Christian values.

Do you want to see it with your own eyes? Compare our traditions and customs with those of a pagan or a Muslim. [You will see that ours is beneath theirs] Although his doctrine is superior, a Christian has to accept the fact that a Muslim we underestimate can teach him many things in terms of justice, affection, and virtues.

The references to Turks increase in later editions of Essays. An interesting letter sent to Mehmed the Conqueror by Pope Pius II and the response sultan gave him is contained in one of them. Another example is Bayezid I’s and Timur’s rejection of mutual gifts. As an example Montaigne shows the pride of Turks in the leader of the Janissaries Hasan Agha, who preferred to die after he had been severely reproved by Sultan Mehmed.

The virtue of the “eye of the wilderness”

What are the results that we may extract from Essays?

First of all, Montaigne was not looking at the problems within a fixed framework. He examined the Turks, arriving at rich observations and interpretations. He was basically interested in human nature, not religious doctrines. Was he not a believer then? Since it is impossible to call anyone who fought for the Catholic cause an unbeliever, we should rather say that Montaigne did not look at Islam and the Ottomans from the perspective of the prejudices of popular theology and religion. Though there are some fictive and incorrect statements in his essays, his perspective about the Turks and Ottomans is not derived from a single source. He was not bound with a systematic connection to a doctrine and he did not have an idae fixes. He came with a new perspective and a new interpretation every time. He learned long before Nietzsche not to look at information as natural facts. According to him there are only interpretations and the interpretations of these. He approached his subject knowing that most of the information he took in his book concerning Islam was not facts, but rather interpretations.

This is the privileged standing that differentiates Montaigne from others. Maybe this was the point that made him so alone-he had no one except his friend La Boetie. We owe Montaigne’s Essays to this solitude. Though he thought that his loneliness derived from his melancholic psychology, his seclusion could have been caused by his differences in his mode of thought and perception. He refrained from lies, i.e., the knowledge of his contemporaries, which he said were interpretations of interpretations, he focused on the knowledge of objects and directed his attention to the truth. He said that “we are making interpretations of the interpretations of objects.” He transmitted the information written in the books on the Ottomans, their histories, cultures, and moral qualities, but he did not adopt them, calling them rather “our stupidities.” He tried to pass beyond this wall of information that he felt had been built around him and to hear the voices of objects. This should be one of the virtues of the eye from the wilderness that he possessed.

Notes

1. Tugrul Inal, “Denemelere bir giris denemesi” (An Introductory Effort to Essays), Frankafoni, n. 5, 1993, p. 12.
2. Semiramis Kantel, “Montaigne ve dil” (Montaigne and Language), Frankafoni, n.5, 1993, p. 33.
3. Cemal Kafadar, “The Ottomans and Europe” in Handbook of European History, 1400-1600, v.1, ed. H. Oberman and others. (Leiden: Brill, 1994), p. 622.
4. Montaigne published his Essays four times with different and extended versions each time. Corrections and editions in the fifth edition (1595) were made by his adopted daughter after his death in 1592. Thus, the book extended to 3 volumes. See J.M. Cohen, “Introduction” in Montaigne, Essays, (London: Penguin books, 1966), p. 20.
5. Ali Celebi, “Montaigne’de Turkler” (Turks in Montaigne), Frankafoni, n. 5, 1993, p. 26-27. This article uses Rouillard, whom we will touch upon in depth in the following pages. Unfortunately, this study cannot go beyond a mere translation to become an original study.
6. Zeynep B. Sayın, “Yenicağ: Descartes ve Montaigne,” Cogito, n. 10, 1997, p. 158.
7. Clarance Dana Rouillard, The Turk in French history, thought and literature (1520-1660), Ancienne Libraire Furne, Paris: 1938.

In spite of their long history and culture, and except for the period of the Crusades, the Turks hardly figured in Western consciousness until the conquest of Constantinople. Most of the West’s information about them came from the travel or diary recollections of merchants and traders who travelled to the Middle East and the Levant. Later, more copious publications appeared: journalistic or pamphleteering papers; formal studies aiming to describe the history, government, manners, religion, etc. of the Turks; books specifically about Islam as the West wished to have it portrayed, and (later still) plays and operettas with lavish ‘Oriental’ settings with important roles for ‘Turks’ or ‘Moors’ (Aksoy, n.d., p.344).

The earliest English book on Turkish history, the General History of the Turks (1603), was widely used as a standard reference work in Europe. Despite the fact that it was praised by many literary figures like Johnson, Southey and Lord Byron, the work has subsequently been criticized as an outrageously prejudiced collection of bits and pieces. As Bisbee remarks (1951, p.7) ‘whenever an educated Turk (looked) into Western histories of civilization or books on Turkey, he ran into unpleasant passages about his own people.’

Increasing Western interest in the Ottoman system of government, Ottoman culture, traditions and religion, occasioned further studies: for example, The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1668), A Compendious History of the Turks (1660), Political Reflection Upon the Government of the Turk (1656). In seventeenth-century France too there were several publications which influenced opinion throughout Europe; the Ottoman Empire was at this time a still powerful entity and perceived by Christian Europe as a real threat.

During the eighteenth century, Ottoman decline allowed European powers to play the Ottoman government for their own (often conflicting) political interests. At the same time, literary attentions turned to the Ottoman territories as it became easier than before for travellers to go to Ottoman regions, particularly Istanbul, to satisfy their curiosity and fantasies about the ‘mysterious East’. A distinct fashion in literature became clearly established around 1775-1825 (Brown, Wallace, Cable 1936, pp.70-80). Among other well-known English travel writers of the period were Lady Mary Montague, Charles Thompson, Richard Pococke, Lord Baltimore, Richard Chandler, Elizabeth Craven, and Rev James Dallaway.

The negative image of the Turk in the West derived from the religious fanaticism of Crusaders who were taught to see Muslims as children of the devil or heretic followers of an impostor.

The word ‘Turk’ was thus mainly used either as a generic name for an Islamic state with its characteristic military and government institutions, or as a description of negative character type, of someone by instinct cruel, heartless, etc.

The best known literary images of Turks appeared in Elizabethan plays which used Turkish history as source material, generally turning on conflict or opposition between Christians and Turks. Simon Shepherd (1986, p.142) makes this interesting comparison between the ‘Turk’ and the ‘father’ figure in what he calls the Marlowe period.

There was a fashion for plays about the Turks (and other Islamic nations) in late Elizabethan drama. Similarly, many plays centred on the figure of a father, whereas after the 1590s young men became central. Turks and fathers are topics specific to the Marlowe period, although they are not necessarily connected…

Another significant analogy in those plays is made between Catholic cruelty and Turkish. In other words, Protestant propaganda could designate the alleged cruelty of Catholics in general and Spaniards in particular as Turkish. This contrasts with Foxe’s address to Protestants when he spelled out the true reality of religious intolerance among Christians: The Turk with his sword is not so cruel but the Bishop of Rome on the other side is more fierce and bitter against us…. Such dissension and hostility Satan had sent among us that Turks be not more enemies to Christians than Christians to Christians, Papists to Protestants… (quoted in Shepherd, 1986, p.144)

In most plays sensuality seems to be the dominant characteristic of the Turks. The plots of tragedies in particular turn on various ‘Turkish’ characteristics such as cruelty, revenge, intrigue, pride, passion, terror, treachery, and the like. The Turks are portrayed as the embodiment of such excesses in, for instance, Marlow’s Jew of Malta in John Mason’s The Turks, in Grevilles Mustapha, etc.

In other plays, a somewhat different Turkish stereotype is the figure of the wicked tyrant who is always either a Turkish Sultan or Pasha or general. He usually separates two virtuous lovers (the male character is the Christian Westerner, and the female one is a naive Turkish beauty) after becoming infatuated with the girl he has kept in his possession through force. The strength of the woman’s fidelity to her true lover is either rewarded by God with a happy reunion with him, or she prefers death to the tyrant’s love. Yet another stereotype is the intriguing woman who provokes rivalry among the courtlers enamoured of her. These rivals vie with each other to obtain her love but all fail, losing their lives in the struggle. (Aksoy n.d.,pp.343-8)

In the course of the nineteenth century as more and more people of different occupations and with different objectives travelled to Turkey, the use of these images and myths about the Turks in literary texts reached its height. It was quite the fashion to visit Ottoman lands in order that the travellers might, as it were, confirm for themselves, myths already mediated to them about the Turkish people, their culture, religion, language, etc.

Vathek, originally composed in French and published in London in 1786, was written by Beckford, who had not even once visited the region he was writing about. He used his own family home as the primary setting for his Eastern tale, colouring and transforming it with the resources of a vivid imagination; he is reported to have said: ‘I had to elevate, exaggerate, and orientalize everything’ (Beckford, n.d., p.9). The work reflects the characteristic themes of ambitious quest for power, sadistic sensuality, sexual perversity, etc., developed through a number of scenes and episodes and all wholly imaginary.

Having regarded Vathek as a model for his own work Byron chose a Turkish setting when telling a tale of horror during a contest with Shelley, Mary Shelley and himself. He set his story about a vampire in Izmir: this betrays all too clearly his association of Turkey with crime, horror and cruelty (Prothero, 1902, Appendix IX).

The Western image of the Ottoman world would, of course, be quite incomplete without the various feminine motifs of the veil and the harem and their associations of secret and/or forbidden eroticism, alongside vague notions of something religiously and culturally bizarre. The overwhelming impression from the nineteenth century travellers’ and Orientalists’ writings is that the women of the country were lecherous and voluptuous under despotic repression. In Byron, again, the heroines of the Turkish Tales, Leila, Zuleika, and Gulnare are represented as the beautiful, helpless victims of a despot for whose sake the Western protagonist, or the Byronic hero, confronts his antagonist. The romance turns upon ‘rescue’ from the ‘veil’ (the hidden) and the ‘harem’ (the forbidden).

During the year of the war (1854) and after, many Europeans of diverse professions came to Istanbul and witnessed the Ottoman Empire at the moment of its complete helplessness and (despite the rhetoric of modernizing reforms) inefficiency and administrative incompetence. All of which contributed to the final disenchantment with the myth of the powerful Turk. The books written at the time express a general disenchantment with the East, but particularly with the Turks, which was largely brought about by the defeat. Istanbul, once the fairy-tale location of the East, became the focus of that disenchantment.

Almost as a natural consequence of the Turks defeat, their image in the West shifted into often contemptuous, demeaning caricature. This is particularly noticeable among some Victorian writers such as Thackeray and Charles Dickens.

Thackeray satirizes the Oriental romance and the realities of travel in ‘Punch in the East’, a series of articles he contributed to Punch, and mocks the Byronic romanticization of Turkish themes in ‘Mehmed Ali and the Sultan’ (Spielmann, 1899). Dickens, in his ‘Roving Englishmen’, debunks the sea voyage to Istanbul through his description which ends ‘Oh no! we should have been off anywhere but in Turkey’ (Household Words, 1854-56, IX, p.143). Also (p.142) he describes Turkish soldiers–once powerful, barbarous, cruel, etc.–thus: ‘There is no enthusiasm in martial ideals of glory. Our friends will go listlessly into the battle and listlessly out of it.’ He adds; I know that in saying this, I am not according to popular or agreeable sentiment. The romantic notions of a Muslim warrior are very different; but I know the Turkish soldier pretty well, and pity him sincerely for I know the causes which have sunk him so low.

References

• Aksoy, Yildiz (n.d.) ‘The Turks in 18th Century English Theatre’ unpub. diss. Erzurum: Ataturk Unýversity, Dept. of English Language and Literature.
• Bisbee, Elenor (1951) The New Turks: Pioneers of the Republic (1920-1950), Philadelphia: Unýversity of Pennsylvania Pres.
• Brown, Wallace, Cable (1936) ‘The Popularity of English Travel Books About the Near East; 1775-1825’, Philological Quarterly, 15, p. 70-80.
• Shepherd, Simon (1986) Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre, UK: Teh Harvester Press.
• Beckford, William (n.d.) The Episode of Vathek, London: Stephen Swith.
• Prothero, Rownland (ed.) (1902) Byron’s Works: Letters and Journals; London: John Murray.
• Curzon, Robert (1897) Monasteries of the Levant, London :Georoge Newnes.
• Spielmann, Marion H. (ed.) (1899) Contributions of W.M. Thackeray to Punch from 1843 to 1848, London: Harper and Brothers.
• Dickens, Charles, (1854-1856) Household Words; IX.