HIDDEN CORNERS
Ottomania Jason Goodwin finds that seeking out Ottoman titles among the different shelfmarks of the Library is an epic adventure in itself
Map from John Foster Fraser’s Pictures from the Balkans (1906).
At the height of its sway in the sixteenth century, some 36 nations enjoyed Pax Ottomanica or, if you prefer, groaned under the Turkish yoke. Richard Knolles described an empire ‘holding in subiection many great and mightie kingdomes in Asia, Europe, and Affricke, ... [by] the greatnesse whereof is swallowed vp both the name and Empire of the Sarasins, the glorious Empire of the Greekes, the renowned kingdomes of Macedonia, Peloponesus, Epirus, Bulgaria, Seruia, Bosna, Armenia, Cyprus, Syria, Ægipt, Iudea, Tunes, Argiers, Media,
Mesopotamia, with a great part of Hungarie, as also of the Persian kingdome. ’ Knolles was a Sandwich schoolmaster whose Generall Historie of the Turkes (1603) bears out the remark of the London Library’s founder, Thomas Carlyle, that ‘The good of a book is not the facts that can be got out of it but the kind of resonance that it awakens in our own minds’ . The Library’s 1673 edition, two folio volumes in red and black letterpress, charts the rise of ‘The glorious Empire of the Turkes, the present terrour of the world’ . The resonance is
palpable. At the midpoint of the Ottoman enterprise, the Empire, far from being the sick man of Europe, seemed to be setting a jewelled slipper on its throat. Dr Johnson objected in 1751 that Knolles’s gifts had been ‘wasted upon a foreign and uninteresting subject, recounting enterprises and revolutions of which none desire to be informed’ , but the Library gives him the lie. The Ottomans did not take over the world, but they may seem to have taken over the Library. Sir Paul Rycaut was a Levant merchant, based in Smyrna, who introduced the duvet to England. He updated The Generall Historie in 1700, by which time the Ottomans no longer terrorised Europe; they had entered what older historians call their long decline, and the more fashionable describe as a period of adaptation. They still maintained the grand style, though. Describing the arbitrary Ottoman taxes loaded on to foreign merchants, Rycaut has the Vizier say: ‘Do you not breathe the Gran Signor’s air? And will you pay him nothing for it?’ A subsequent generation – which included Edward Gibbon – could turn to Prince Dimitrie Cantemir’s History of the Growth and Decay of the Othman Empire (1734), whose increasingly voluminous footnotes eventually overwhelm the text; Cantemir was Prince of Moldavia, spoke 11 languages and developed a notation system for Turkish music. Now that the foot was off the pedal, the world was also ready to be enthralled by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s celebrated Turkish Embassy Letters (1763), which set up a vogue for Turquerie. Lady Mary found the Turks charming rather than fearsome, and as a woman she could give her readers delicious peeps into Ottoman home life. Her enthusiasm for things Turkish
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