The Ottoman Empire And The World Arount It

In a sense, this study deals with one of the oldest and most often studied topics in
Ottoman history. From the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries onwards, European
ambassadors, merchants and other travellers made it their business to write about
their various receptions in the Ottoman lands and, analysed with due caution,hese accounts are germane to our topic. On the other hand, Ottoman writers of
the sixteenth or seventeenth century In a sense, this study deals with one of the oldest and most often studied topics in
Ottoman history. From the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries onwards, European
ambassadors, merchants and other travellers made it their business to write about
their various receptions in the Ottoman lands and, analysed with due caution,
these accounts are germane to our topic. On the other hand, Ottoman writers of
the sixteenth or seventeenth century, as the perusal of their chronicles shows, certainly
focused on Istanbul and the sultans’ court, but did not totally ignore the
world outside the Empire’s frontiers either.1 After all, the very stuff of such
works consisted of campaigns, conquests and the incorporation of foreign territories.
But on occasion, these authors also could not avoid including defeats, the
losses of provinces and the truces and peace treaties that, provisionally or on a
long-term basis, ended inter-state conflicts. All these warlike encounters can be
viewed as a way of relating to the outside world: no conquest without something
‘out there’ that is still unconquered.2 Certainly the situation at European courts
and – albeit to a lesser degree – the institutions characteristic of European societies
only became a major topic of Ottoman written texts in the eighteenth century.
But given their close concern with war and conquest, it is an exaggeration to
claim that the authors of earlier chronicles had no interest at all in what went on
outside the borders of the sultans’ empire.

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