Visualising “State-Building” in European-Ottoman Diplomatic Relations

Abstract

When the French ambassador travelled to Constantinople in 1724, he was instructed by Louis XV to ensure that “the power of the Turks always remains an object of fear to the House of Austria” (Mansel 2002: 45). This strategic thought indicates, on the one hand, a highly affiliated process of clear division of inner-European political entities, and, on the other hand, a more or less defined border between a European alliance and the Ottoman Empire in the first half of the eighteenth century. That implies the interests of different European courts in political relations to the Ottoman Empire being strongly related to intense competition and differentiation of European governments, and the diplomatic European-Ottoman court relations taking part in this process. This article concentrates on the political and diplomatic contacts between the European courts and the Ottoman Empire, and their visual representation in European media in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries because “the Ottoman Empire was not only a military power […] it also ruled an area of immense economic and religious significance to Christian powers. Constantinople became one of the diplomatic capitals of Europe.” (Mansel 1996: 44) Several studies have already recapitulated, in general, these close political, especially diplomatic relations between the Ottoman Empire and Europe (Coles 1968; Mansel 1996; Goffman 2002; Faroqhi 1999: esp. Chap. 7). The Ottoman Court at Constantinople was one important and central place of communications in the political process described by scholars as early modern European “state-building”. Hence, in the following I will describe this process as a communicational one, strongly related to diplomatic practice and media coverage. The article will outline possibilities and practices of certain types of image production in early modern European-Ottoman contacts, and most importantly, their functioning and efficacy in European court politics.