The Taming of the Turk

PERCEPTIONS OF ‘THE TURK’

The springboard for this book is dramaturgic. It all began with the Danish playwright Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754). In 2006, as one in a series of new interpretations of Holberg’s plays, Danish regional Aarhus Theatre produced the little-known tragicomedy Melampe (1724).1 During the preparatory process, it gradually became clear that a crucial key to understanding the plot – which takes place among aristocratic circles in Southern Italy and is played out in high-flown Alexandrine verse – is the absence of the head of the family, brave Pandolfus senior, for the very reason that he is involved in battles between Christians and Muslims in North Africa. This is stated in Holberg’s script. We also know that shackled Turkish and Moorish prisoners of war appeared on the eighteenth-century Danish stage performance of this tragicomedy. These surprising, but on the face of it somewhat peripheral, details provoked a more thorough enquiry. One line of investigation led back to passages about fear of the Turk in Holberg’s comic epos Peder Paars (1719–1720); and this led even further back to the writings of Martin Luther (1483–1546), which proved to be of fundamental significance for various identifications of ‘the Turk’ as figure of fear in a larger world drama stemming from religious concepts, and also with ramifications for secular power configuration.

Fig. 1  Scenefoto of Ludvig Holberg’s tragicomedy Melampe. Aarhus Theatre, 2006. Merete Hegner as Dorothea, flanked by Rolf Hansen and Pelle Nordhøj Kann as Turkish prisoners of war. Photo: Jan Jul.

This world drama is sustained by an eschatological temporality – with a term derived from the Greek word eschatos, meaning ‘last’ and denoting a view that treats of the end times, the Second Coming of Christ and the Day of Judgement – critical events that can be presented in an apocalypse, an exposition of the ultimate count-down.

At the root of the universal drama, therefore, was a perception of history as a process, a battle between divergent forces working their way towards a definitive outcome: resolution of conflict, the restoration of order. This particular reading of time, discord, development and final destination, which is fundamentally dramaturgic, is very much culture-based. The idea that history has an objective and a purpose runs deep. It even influences the writing of history, which at some level must involve a dramaturgy, a lens that sees one element as being more important than another element.

The year after our Melampe production, I was working on the libretto to Jens Baggesen’s and F.L.Æ. Kunzen’s opera Holger Danske (1789; ‘Holger the Dane’), in which the ‘Turkish’ dimension is highly relevant to the plot. The eponymous hero is in conflict with more than one sultan. I learned, to my surprise, that confrontation with the Turk was not just something that took place on stage, an element of the plot. Denmark as warring party during the period under consideration was also in a formal state of war with Turkey. This was not an area within the scope of my historical compass, to say the least.

The accumulation of connections between the stage references on the one hand and an underexposed historiography of the nation’s dealings with an Ottoman Empire on the other, became so insistent that a more comprehensive reading of the different forms of material available was inevitable – and this material ended up stretching from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.

THEM AND US

The term ‘the Turk’ has now been used several times. It denotes the image of an exotic or threatening figure that features in, for example, religious or fictional contexts: a construct or stereotype, distinct from the actual Turkish people, and inhabiting the realm of the imagination. In earlier times ‘the Turk’ was applied across a broad front, particularly with reference to exotic foreigners, and primarily – but not exclusively – those with connections to the Ottoman Empire. As mental picture, ‘the Turk’ represents menace and also the menacing, malignant turbaned foreigner with his moustache and scimitar – who might in fact be Turkish, North African or sometimes almost anyone from the East. Muslim is, however, probably the most prevalent supra-category.

‘Turkey’ as location is similarly varied. Algeria might be Turkey. Holberg had once almost been captured by Turkish pirates and had envisaged spending the rest of his days in Algeria. Danish sailor Hark Olufs (1708–1754) did indeed spend years in Algeria, as a slave; the account he wrote of his travels, published in 1747, tells about the time he spent in Turkey. Ship’s chaplain Nicol Seidelin Bøgh (1717–1778), having been on a 1746 negotiating trip to Algeria designed to conclude a peace and trade treaty, wrote that “Europa vi forlod, vort Ansigt dermed vendte/ Og rejste hen mod det barbariske Tyrkie.”2 (Europe we left, our face thus turning/ And journeying on towards the barbaric Turkey.) All this refers to the Ottoman Barbary Coast, the North African Barbary States. Furthermore, in this real world, the ruling class of the Ottoman Empire comprised those people served by the slaves – by the Nordic slaves, for example, who later wrote about their incarceration – and these masters were in fact Turkish.

The ‘Turkey’ of popular belief was an even more horror-fairytale place. In the theatre, ‘Turkish’ was a category covering everything that was not ‘Antiquity’, ‘Gothic’ or ‘Spanish’, and was thus in some sense ‘Asian’ or ‘exotic’.

The term turquerie will also be used: the fascination, via fiction or fashion, with that which is ‘foreign’; the Occidental mirroring in all things Oriental. Briefly: there is a fictional-world of difference between ‘Turk’ and ‘Turks’, between turquerie and Turkey. ‘The Turk’ can be rendered as pure fabrication or can be configured in performative contexts: be it in royal ritual settings, be it in actual theatre productions, be it somewhere between these categories.

It should be noted that ‘job titles’ – emperor, king, sultan, queen, and so forth – have a small initial letter, whereas the historical person and the fictitious character are referred to as Emperor, King, Sultan, Queen, and so forth, where the actual name of the person/character is not applied. The conventional Ottoman titles are used for jobs and official posts; however, quotations retain appellations used at the time – for example, the Sultan of Morocco was called “Kejseren” (Emperor) in eighteenth-century Denmark, and thus keeps that title in the relevant quotations. The ‘meaning’ of the verse quotations being paramount, their translated versions have of course not been rhymed. Quotations are given both in the original and in translation; references are provided in the footnotes – with the exception of a few quotations in the Introduction, where their purpose is purely to illustrate differences in style.

Two scenes have to be set: the Turkish and the Danish. What is more, they have to be seen in an overall context of confrontation between empires: the Ottoman Empire versus the Germanic-Roman, Habsburg Empire. In this perspective, the history of the Roman Empire is a crucial component to the backdrop. The Empire was split into two parts in Late Antiquity: a Western and an Eastern. The decisive event in this respect took place on May 29, 1453: the fall of the Eastern Roman – or Byzantine – Empire when Sultan Mehmed II (1432–1481), the Conqueror, captured – or liberated – the capital, Constantinople. Seen from a Christian point of view, the city had fallen to the Antichrist. The catastrophe was God’s retribution; the Turk was the scourge of God.3 By late July the awful news had reached as far as the North. Mehmed subsequently took the title Rum-Kayseri, Roman Caesar. The title was passed on to his successors. The Western Roman Empire had been carried forward via the Germanic emperors. The point being: Mehmed saw himself as the heir to the Eastern Roman emperors, and the Habsburgs saw themselves as heirs to the Western Romans. In the longer view, it was here that the basis for an antagonistic dynamic was laid. The Eastern Empire pursued a mission to unify the territories by conquest of the Western component. The Sultan took the Western Emperor to be nothing but an Austrian duke or German king. And conversely: the Western Roman Empire had an underlying notion that the empire should be made complete; the lost Eastern part had to be won back so that the empire could be made whole – the Germanic-Roman Emperor assumed the title ‘King of Jerusalem’, for example. Both sides came with a religious rationale of delivering the territories into the true faith: Islam and Christianity, respectively.

The ruler in the Ottoman Empire was the sultan; his power was absolute and had religious validation. The state was a manifestation of the divine order. Reform was therefore problematic. Defeat was the result of treachery. Several sultans were overthrown, typically by the otherwise loyal corps of elite warriors, the Janissaries. The sultan was served by a grand vizier for consultation and exercise of power, and also drew on an advisory council, the Divan. The centre of power was the sultan’s Topkapi palace, originally Yeni Sarayi, the New Palace, built on the orders of Sultan Mehmed II. The Turkish word for palace is sarayi, hence the westernised form ‘seraglio’ or ‘serail’. Central state administration was named after the entrance to the domicile...