Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam

by Andrew Wheatcroft

  But with The Pilgrimage to Jerusalem, both author and illustrator had seen the sights—at the time this was highly unusual. Reuwich’s depictions became one standard source for future images of the East. His Turks and Saracens wore turbans and flowing robes. They were all armed, with characteristic bows and “scimitars.” Their faces were lean and hawkish. Yet not all readers would see the same images when they read Breydenbach’s text. The French edition published in Lyons in 1488 was a free adaptation by Nicholas le Huen, with fanciful copper engravings instead of Reuwich’s woodcut originals. Over time the range of images supposedly depicting the Ottomans, some based on “Eye Evidence,” increased enormously. Indeed, these depictions came to epitomize the mysterious East in all its aspects. In many biblical scenes, Jews of the time of Jesus Christ wore the flowing robes and capacious turbans of sixteenth-century Turks.

  These same elements—robes, curved swords, and turbans—became (with the omnipresent crescent) the emblems of a mortal enemy. In Othello, Shakespeare succinctly described the enemy (the “circumcised dog”) in terms his audience would recognize. He calls him “a malignant and a turbaned Turk.”18 Suggestive details were essential. In 1522, the well-known Nuremberg artist Hans Sebald Beham produced a single-sheet engraving of the contemporary Turkish attack on the island of Rhodes, then occupied by the Knights of St. John. Some of the details seem out of place. Beham’s besieged city of Rhodes looks like a south German town. His Turks fire Western-type field guns, and advance like the German mercenary infantry, known as landsknechts, on the breaches in the city walls. Their ships at sea are potbellied Atlantic vessels, not sleek Mediterranean galleys.

  But a few deft symbolic touches specified an unmistakably Eastern and mighty enemy.19 The attackers all wear turbans, they carry curved swords. They have Eastern-style war tents, each decorated with a crescent half-moon, while on the foreshore an unfortunate (and we presume) Christian has been impaled on a stake. The Turks appear as disciplined and implacable opponents. Beham’s large engraved image was intended for an affluent audience, but similar visual components appeared on numerous cheaper pamphlets and broadsheets in Germany in the first half of the sixteenth century. Also in 1522, an anonymous pamphlet called A Little Book About the Turks: A Useful Discourse or Conversation Among Several People went through four editions, and was reprinted again in 1527 and 1537.20 There were many more “informative” publications, all dwelling on the new Turkish danger, a powerful enemy who had captured the impregnable island of Rhodes and the well-defended fortress of Belgrade within a few months. Most of these had very short texts of four or five pages only, and many had illustrated covers or some engravings within.

  How people “read” these pamphlets and illustrated books is impossible to know.21 But the images themselves seem to me to provide the key. Michel de Certeau devised a wonderfully vivid phrase—“a laminated text”—to describe the situation where two different and contrary types of material are bonded together.22 He was thinking about types of written text and not of the relationship between image and text, but the tensions I found were similar to the examples that he gave. Laminating an image to a text on the same page creates instability. The text is read sequentially, from the top left to the bottom right of the page; anything interrupting that flow distorts meaning. So even the most appropriate image is never wholly harmonious with the text. The image is there to attract attention. It is read or understood in ways very different than the words that surround it.

  The repertoire available to a woodcut artist was much more limited than the resources available to a writer. In practice, woodcuts were intended to be simple and dramatic, and so often, in this context, heightened the fierce and bellicose qualities of the Muslim infidels. When the printer Johann Haselberg wrote and published his own pamphlet in 1530, exhorting Emperor Charles V to attack the Turk, he commissioned a front cover depicting the two armies. The turbaned host led by Sultan Suleiman, “the arch-enemy of the Christian faith,” confronts the forces of Christendom led by Emperor Charles. The latter wears peacock’s feathers on his helmet, symbolizing immortality and resurrection. The cover image strongly influenced how the inside text was understood. Then, as now, a reader absorbed the text with that image in mind.

  In the period bounded by the Turkish destruction of the Hungarians at the battle of Mohacs in 1526 and the Turkish defeat at Lepanto in 1571, ever more potent and complex ways of portraying the malevolent and powerful Ottomans were devised. Beham’s fairly simple imagery was superseded by increasingly convoluted designs. At the end of the sixteenth century, the court artists of Charles V’s great-nephew Emperor Rudolf II got to work on the “Turkish menace,” and produced Baroque masterpieces. However, despite their sophistication, the images were still governed by the same limited range of basic themes that reached back to the incunabula, the very first printed books. Jan Müller’s engravings from this era show swords and scimitars, bows and arrows, and even grander turbans. These elements remained the fundamental visual signature of the Turk.

  The arrangement and deployment of these symbols—weapons and costume—began to alter subtly in the first decades of the eighteenth century, in part, remarkably, as a result of a shared interest in flowers. Flowers had been highly visible in the Ottoman capital from the mid–sixteenth century. By the 1630s the famous Turkish traveler Evliya Chelebi was estimating that there were some 300 florists in Constantinople. The open meadows along the Golden Horn were filled with tulips and lilacs in the spring and the lilacs’ scent was intoxicating. The introduction of the tulip to Europe from Turkey in the mid–sixteenth century, first to Augsburg in 1559, then to Antwerp and the Habsburg domains in the Netherlands between 1562 and 1583, revived a passion for flowers and gardens in the West. Mass production of blooms developed into an industry in the Netherlands, and tulip bulbs were exported across Europe. The Margrave of the small state of Baden Durlach had more than 4,000 tulips in his garden by 1636, all carefully listed in his garden registers.23

  This “Tulipomania” that gripped Europe during the seventeenth century eventually subsided (after making many fortunes and breaking many more). But it had an aftershock in the Ottoman domains early in the eighteenth century. Sultan Ahmed III had an excessive passion for tulips, and his reign, between 1703 and 1730, became known as lale devri, “the Tulip Era.” The blooms that decorated his palaces were not the wild native Turkish or Persian varieties but the products of European horticultural ingenuity. These exotic (and often diseased) specimens, as gaudy as parrots, marbled in different colors, were called “bizarres” or “fantasticks.” They were very different from the simple slender flowers long revered by the Turks. Yet they were ravishing and infinitely seductive to the Ottoman taste. The French ambassador reported in 1726 that there were

  500,0 bulbs in the Grand Vizier’s garden. When the Tulips are in flower and the Grand Vizier wants to show them off to the Grand Seigneur [the sultan] they take care to fill any spaces with Tulips picked from other gardens and put in bottles. At every fourth flower, candles are set into the ground at the same height as the Tulips and the pathways are decorated with cages of all sorts of birds. All the trellis work is bordered with flowers in vases, and lit by a vast number of crystal lamps of various colours.24

  This was not quite the old image of cruel barbarity.

  It is impossible to be precise about the date but certainly beginning in the Tulip Era the symbolic connotations of “the Turk” began to gather new and extended meanings. The similarity of the tulip’s appearance to a turban was first noted by the Habsburg ambassador to Constantinople Ghislain de Busbecq in the 1550s. He was passionate about flowers and, based upon this visual connection, mistakenly gave the tulips their name—a corruption of the Turkish for turban, tulban. But turbans, once the symbol of Eastern violence, now acquired an additional, softer connection. When the first Ottoman embassies came to France in the 1720s, turbans, heavy silks, furs, and flowing robes suddenly became immensely desirable. The fashion for being painte
d in Oriental dress, à la Turque, spread throughout Europe’s aristocracies. For the West, flowers, silks, and flowing robes suggested an indolent life rather than the rigors of the field of battle (although the evidence of earlier images showed that turbans and kaftans had done nothing to hinder the Ottomans in war).

  À la Turque was also a fashion suggestive of the boudoir, and highly eroticized images of the Ottomans began to proliferate. Where once the limitless and boundless energy of the sultan and his pashas had evoked blood and gore, now images of them suggested ravening lust, raw sex, and brutal passions in the harem.25 Early in the nineteenth century, Thomas Rowlandson’s satires in The Harem depicted this connection with an obscene directness, but the same association appeared in myriad if less direct images. The scene had shifted from the field of glory to the bedroom. The “young sultanas in the seraglio” in the harem of little girls (and the harem of little boys) in the marquis de Sade’s One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom were the dark side of à la Turque.26

  THERE IS NO ACCURATE TOTAL FOR IMAGES MASS-PRODUCED IN THE Western world between 1480 and 1800. In seventeenth-century Netherlands alone the number reaches the many millions.27 Cheap popular literature often had a decorative cover image, often disconnected from the detail of the text. The picture defined the genre, such as a horrible murder or a romance. But by the eighteenth century a more elevated role for the printed image had also emerged. The “pattern book” for this concept of publication was the great Encyclopédie published by Denis Diderot between 1751 and 1772, in seventeen volumes of text and eleven volumes of plates.28 Diderot had originally intended a close integration between words and images, but the circumstances of the publication of the Encyclopédie and the physical separation of images from related text made this impossible. In handling words and images together the Encyclopédie had a number of successful precursors. One of the most ambitious was The Ceremonies and Religious Customs of the Various Nations of the Known World, in seven volumes, published by the noted engraver Bernard Picard.29

  Picard was born a Catholic in Paris. His dazzling talent as a draftsman first emerged during his training at the Académie Royale. But in his thirty-seventh year he settled in Amsterdam and converted to Protestantism. He was already an established and successful engraver when he conceived the idea of a comprehensive and comparative study of all the religions of the world. The nineteenth-century Catholic writer Count Joseph de Maistre lambasted Picard’s “Protestant burin” because he attacked the Spanish Inquisition which Maistre sought to defend.30 This trivialized Picard’s objective, which was to depict all religions equally. The texts of the many editions of the book vary considerably. The first version, published in Amsterdam between 1733 and 1743, was the work in the form that Picard intended. In the second part of the seventh volume, in a note to the reader (Avis au lecteur), he denounced the 1741 French edition, which had been “adjusted” to meet the requirements of the censor. The Amsterdam volume reprinted the new material that had offended Picard. The various English editions were abridged and reworked. But while the texts altered, the pictures remained. In one sense, this is not surprising: Picard’s renown was as an engraver, and the texts were written and rewritten by a number of different authors, around his images.

  However, it is odd that one particular illustration, perhaps the most sophisticated in the entire work, should have escaped the censor’s attention. In the seventeenth century the frontispiece—inside the book, usually facing the title page—had developed as a visual epitome of the book, rather like the dust jacket in the twentieth century. By the eighteenth century readers had become used to these visual arguments.31 Picard’s engraving was extraordinarily complex, and to make sure there was no ambiguity he provided a long caption. But he did not describe in this everything that he showed. Protestant sectarians stand side by side with the bishops and priests of the Catholic Church. Behind them are pagodas and fanciful idols, while to one side animists worship animals and the powers of nature. But in the foreground there is a little cliff, no more than a few feet high, and on the ground at the foot of that cliff sit the Muslims.32 The reader immediately inferred by their clothes, weapons, and wild look that these were Muslims. Another sure sign was that they are grouped around a signature camel. It was no accident that they sit next to the mouth of hell, with the anguished faces of the damned grimacing through the thick iron grille. This single image, unlike any other in the many volumes of Picard’s “scientific” history, captured an idea that every Christian would recognize: the Muslim infidels were “below” every other faith and they were close to hell’s mouth, through which they might soon pass. This was an impression that any Western reader would receive from this frontispiece, the essence of the entire work. It expresses the great power of the infidel stereotype, built up over centuries, despite Picard’s intention to cleanse himself of all prejudice.

  The Ceremonies and Religious Customs is an early example of the Enlightenment’s desire to document the known universe in all its aspects. This vast task included recording the mysterious world of the East, but this project was flawed. Europeans instinctively believed in the immutable timelessness of the East, and this attitude suffused many of the great projects of accumulated knowledge. One of the first was Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli’s survey of the military power of the Ottoman Empire. Marsigli had made a surreptitious visit to the Ottoman lands between 1679 and 1680, and wrote the text of his report on his return.33 Fifty years later, two years after Marsigli’s death in 1730, it was published. He had been working on the illustrations up to a few days before his death.34 But by that time, the military structure of the Ottomans was not the powerful machine it had been in the period before the disastrous failure outside Vienna in 1683.

  Nothing of this decline appears in the book as published. It was copiously illustrated, and Marsigli’s manuscripts in the library of the Royal Armory in Stockholm show a neatly handwritten text with drawings and watercolors in position. For the rest of the eighteenth century (and bizarrely, beyond) Marsigli’s seventeenth-century vision was taken to be a largely up-to-date statement on Ottoman military might. His book was published in French, then in Italian, and even, in 1737, in St. Petersburg in a Russian edition.35 A more remarkable suspension of temporality took place with the translation of the imperial ambassador Busbecq’s famous Latin Letters into English. Busbecq described the Ottoman Empire as he remembered it from the 1550s. In 1744, his Letters were marketed in English by an enterprising bookshop/publisher as “containing the most accurate account of the Turks, and neighbouring nations.”36

  Through the eighteenth century an ever-growing number of Western artists visited the Ottoman domains and painted or drew what they saw. Some, like Jean-Baptiste Van Moeur and Jean-Etienne Liotard, spent long periods in Constantinople, but the world they depicted was part real and part fantasy. Liotard, and others, specialized in painting Westerners in Constantinople dressed in authentic Ottoman costumes. Antoine de Favrey’s picture of 1754 was entitled Turkish Women, but it is highly unlikely that his models were, as he suggested, Ottoman Muslim women. The images these artists created were much more exact and “accurate” than those produced a century before. But they also painted for a market that demanded that they portray what they could not possibly have seen. No male artist could have entered a woman’s bathhouse or the private quarters of an Ottoman house where the women and children lived. Fleeting impressions became fixed as an immovable depiction of the empire. The artists painted the formal ceremonial court dress of Ottoman officials on grand state occasions. The Western audience assumed that these were the clothes Ottomans wore every day, winter and summer. European artists lived among Western diplomats and expatriates, or among the Ottoman Christian or Jewish communities. Not surprisingly, they reflected the mores, interests, and prejudices of their hosts.

  However, there was one huge work in the eighteenth century on the Ottoman Empire that presented what the author, Ignatius Mouradgea d’Ohsson, saw as the empire’s under
lying reality. He was determined, for the first time, systematically to show the Ottoman world to the West, faithfully illustrating the text so that word and image told the same story in a General Picture [Tableau général] of the Ottoman Empire, Divided into Two Parts, of which One Contains the Muhammadan Legislation, the Other the History of the Ottoman Empire. This aim was born out of frustration. Half-Armenian, half-French, Catholic, born an Ottoman subject, and spending his life until middle age in the Ottoman domains, he was increasingly angered by the plethora of books and images that failed to portray that world as he knew it. In his preamble (Discours préliminaire) he was very precise about his intention. Other authors, he declared, had only looked at the surface of this vast state, “without understanding the [underlying] causes. Illusions and error result from these distant, superficial and fleeting perspectives.” This misapprehension had serious consequences. “Absolute ignorance” and “barbarism,” said d’Ohsson, were the usual epithets applied in Europe to the Ottomans. In reality he was even more of an enthusiast for the empire than most Muslim Ottomans. One, Ebu Bekir Ratib, Ottoman ambassador to Vienna in 1792, wrote that “God knows, he is so zealous for the Sublime State that if I say [he is] more so than we [are], I would not be speaking falsely.”37

  D’Ohsson’s ambition for his project knew no bounds. His book was to be published by the royal press, the Imprimerie de Monsieur, using the finest printers in Paris, run by the Didot family. The engravings were to be carried out by Charles-Nicolas Cochin, the best practitioner of the day. The three elephant folio volumes, and the seven smaller octavo volumes of the “popular” edition, contained only the smaller part of his vaunting vision.38 Carter Findley described this as “a vast never-to-be-completed survey of Islamic and pre-Islamic history, from ancient Egypt and Iran to the Mongols; this was to be followed by a history of the Ottoman Empire [from distant origins to 1774], and then—this part being the Tableau général—the legislation of the Ottoman Empire.”39 Thus, only one aspect of the grand plan ever emerged into print in its full glory. Reading it now, it seems like a precursor (in publishing terms) of the grandest publication of the nineteenth century: the French imperial Description of Egypt (Description de l’Egypte). D’Ohsson’s first two huge volumes, published in the late 1780s, must have been known to Napoleon as he planned to immortalize his own entry into Egypt in 1798–9.