Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [164]
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 underlying reality. He was