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 extended to their practice of inoculating for smallpox; she had her own son inoculated in Constantinople. The Library edition is from 1764.

Out in the stacks, beyond the Safe, the situation grows more complex and interesting. The Ottomans are a vanished people, a ruling caste without legitimate heirs. Nobody speaks their language and, after Ataturk’s language reforms, few people read their books. The word Ottoman does not describe a place, but a sort of pouffe. Perhaps that’s why they don’t have their own shelf in the Library. You invariably discover something about the Turks and Caicos Islands, or Turkestan, as you browse. But to substitute ‘Turkey’ for ‘Ottoman’ sounds cleverer than it really is; the fit is only approximate.

In ‘History’ , for instance, you will certainly find those Ottomans lurking in the shelves devoted to Turkey; but they have invaded H. Hungary, too, and dominate H. Egypt. You knew that. The Ottomans held the Balkans, but that doesn’t mean you are about to go rushing off to H. Balkans. ‘Do you not breathe the Library’s air? And will you pay nothing for it?’ There is no H. Balkans. You search for the Balkan Ottomans under that splendidly idiosyncratic alias, Danubian Provinces. Unless, for example, it’s the siege of Belgrade you want, in which case it’s H. Serbia and Jugoslavia. Your admiration for Ottoman administration increases by leaps and bounds. But don’t think H. is the whole story.

I used to think Topography meant landscape features, murrains, glaciers and geology – until one day my pencil fell through a slot in the metal floor in History and I found myself, for the first time, among the travellers. The Library’s policy of never throwing out a book flowers in its full magnificence in Topography. You never know what you will find, or where. (If you expected to find Patrick Leigh-Fermor in Danubian Provinces, you’d be wrong; see T. Europe & Gen.). Mrs Harvey’s Turkish Harems and Circassian Homes (1871), with its beautiful colour plates, is under Turkey, as is S.S. Cox’s excellent Diversions of a Diplomat (1887). J.H. Skene was one of those snap travel writers who could always turn a jaunt into a book; his Frontier Lands of the Christian and the Turk (1853) is in two volumes. How did he do it? Perhaps his Anadol (1853) provides a clue, opening with his departure from Istanbul: ‘The full-cheeked Aeolus put his lips to the mouthpiece of the Golden Horn. ’

A generation of British Indian officers took the overland route to their regiments and provided a running commentary on the dissolution of the Empire. One of the last was ‘Selim’ , late of the Indian Army, who wrote A British Officer in the Balkans (1909). H.C. Thomson (‘author of The Chitral Campaign’) appears to have seen beyond those stock characters of Victorian travel, the lively Greek and the introspective Turk but, like Stowers Johnson’s Gay Bulgaria (1964), the title does not deliver. The Outgoing Turk (1897) is actually an account of Bosnia after the Ottoman withdrawal.

David Urquhart was a raving Turcophile and Russophobe, who designed the Circassian national flag and introduced Turkish baths to England. He built himself a palace in Watford and entertained there in the nude; Edward Lear considered him ‘very sufficiently mad’ . The Spirit of the East: Illustrated in a Journal of Travels Through Roumeli During an Eventful Period (1838) is not in fact in T. East, but in T. Greece. Lear is all over the place, but a good start is Susan Hyman’s Edward Lear in the Levant: Travels in Albania, Greece and Turkey in Europe, 1848–1849 (1988), which in spite of its title is not under Levant – no such shelfmark – nor indeed T. East, but T. Danubian Provinces (also note that Philip Mansel’s Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean, published in 2011, is in H. Europe & Gen.).

‘A Tartar Khan’, from Evliya Celebi’s The Ottoman Traveller (2010). © National Library of Sweden.

Then there’s the insider view, Evliya Celebi’s Rabelaisian The Ottoman Traveller: Selections from the Book of Travels of Evliya Celebi (2010); anyone who thought they knew the seventeenth-century’s most engaging Ottoman (from, say, Pallis’s In the Days of the Janissaries, 1951) should seize this translation by Robert Dankoff and Sooyong Kim.

Among the ‘Six Weeks in the Balkans’ style of writing, two stand out. One is that sly travelogue, Eothen (1844) by Charles Kinglake, purporting to be the travel memoir of an objectionable young Milord, who sneers at everything and everyone from excitable pashas to Lady Hester Stanhope. The interview with a pasha (Whizz! Whirr! All by steam!) remains one of the funniest scenes in English literature. But watch out – Eothen is shelved under Topography, East, alongside Marco Polo. Just next door is T. Egypt, with the bad-tempered memoirs, published in 1866, of Emmeline Lott, The English Governess in Egypt: Harem Life in Egypt and Constantinople (she was governess to the Khedive), and the tiny volume of letters, entitled The Englishwoman in Egypt: Letters from Cairo, which Sophia Lane Poole wrote ostensibly to, but actually with, her brother, Edward William Lane, author of Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1838). He co-opted his sister’s help to report on harems and bath houses.

Until recently, Edmondo De Amicis’ Constantinople (1877) was only available to Library members in Italian; then came the Stephen Parkin translation (2005). To read it is to be transported to nineteenthcentury Istanbul through a Magic Lantern, as you stand with Amicis upon the Galata bridge and watch humanity wash by you: the pasha on his curvetting white horse, the eunuch, the ladies in a purdah carriage, the porters, the beggars, the Circassians and the Albanian irregulars. De Amicis, who was a popular children’s author in Italy, did all this on a six-week visit to the capital, and it just goes to show that Victorian men of letters were giants.

Some, of course, took their responsibilities more seriously than others. Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall was a dragoman at the imperial Austrian embassy in Constantinople during the Napoleonic Wars, and in 1827 started publishing his Geschichte des Osmanisches Reiches, mixing the mortar for a relationship that was cemented by Kaiser Bill’s gift of a hideous fountain to the old Hippodrome in Constantinople. Poor old von Hammer. Three complete sets of his tenvolume history darken the shelves like a parody of German professorial dullness (perhaps Carlyle insisted on them?). I think they are not so much a history as a collection of translated firmans and palace documents, of the sort that would nowadays be cobbled together from the internet, but I haven’t read them. Nor, it seems, has anyone else. Few of these volumes have date-stamped stickers inside the flyleaf at all; others have not seen the light of St James’s Square since 1975. That might seem like yesterday to some members, but it is 37 years ago.

After the heady days when Sir Stratford Canning, known as the Great Elchi, almost personally directed Ottoman foreign policy, the British let the relationship cool; the result was that from a position of chumminess at Crimea in 1856, we sank into enmity and the Dardanelles in 1915. William Gladstone must bear some of the blame: his Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East (1876) was a frenzied condemnation of the Turks and set the tone for much that was to come. John Foster Fraser’s Pictures from the Balkans (1906) contains pretty views of Balkan life and a few shockers of Balkan strife; between ‘An Insurgent Band of Bulgarians’ and ‘Servian Village Scene’ comes ‘Slaughter of a Family through religious Animosity’ . The photos of corpses are reproduced with a dotted line along the spine and the queer assurance that ‘This page can be torn out and destroyed by those who find the pictures too horrible’ .

Browsers should remember that quarto volumes are shelved apart – Ottomanists will otherwise miss Carla Coco’s Secrets of the Harem (1997). Then it’s up to Biography to meet some of the great men of the empire – Suleyman the Magnificent, for instance, or Mehmed II. Lesley Blanch’s The Wilder Shores of Love (1954), which tells how the Empress Josephine’s childhood friend Aimée du Buc de Rivéry entered the Sultan’s harem, is also there. A run of Cornucopia, the magazine devoted to all things Turkish, is available in the Reading Room. There are useful books in Art, Architecture. One is W.R. Lethaby’s influential The Church of Sancta Sophia Constantinople (1894), which never mentions that Lethaby had to study the then mosque disguised as a woman.

Science & Miscellaneous might appear barren of interest to the Ottomaniac. But S. Food comments on that important ingredient in Ottoman culture, including Alexis Soyer’s A Culinary Campaign (1857), in which the great chef warns the British to feed their armies more like the Turks (it has already been explored by Jojo Tulloh in her piece on the Library’s culinary collections in issue 14). This shelfmark should have more on the subject: I recommend Ayla Algar’s Classical Turkish Cookery (1991).

Since von Hammer last saw daylight, the field has livened up considerably. In those 37 years we’ve had such important additions to the collection as Jeremy Seal’s A Fez of the Heart: Travels Through Turkey in Search of a Hat (1995), and Christopher de Bellaigue’s Rebel Land: Among Turkey’s Forgotten People (2009), alongside Mansel’s scholarly Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire, 1453–1924 (1995); the extent to which Greek and Balkan grandees were absorbed into the original Ottoman enterprises of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is provocatively explored in Heath Lowry’s The Nature of the Early Ottoman State (2003).

The empire was a vast and complex entity that endured six hundred years, and the Library’s collections reflect that fact. Arabia, Hungary, Serbia, Black Sea, Mesopotamia – they all have Ottoman secrets to divulge, and tracking them down is one of life’s great pleasures. How dull it would be to sit in front of a huge bookcase devoted to the subject: how dull, and daunting, and indigestible!.

‘The Ottoman State on the Move’, from Evliya Celebi’s The Ottoman Traveller (2010). © British Library Board, Sloane 3584.