The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580-1720

Flawed prisms

In February 1599, Thomas Dallam, a musician and craftsman, undertook the arduous sea journey to deliver to the Sultan, Mehmed II, on behalf of his Queen, Elizabeth I, an elaborately ornamented organ which he had himself built. In the same year, the Reverend William Biddulph travelled to Aleppo to become the resident cleric to its expatriate community. In 1636, Sir Henry Blount made his way to Turkey to learn all he could about that rival to his country's ambitions. And in 1648, TS, a young Englishman, who had been seized by the Turks off the coast of Barbary and enslaved, rose within five years to become a senior adviser to a pasha in Algiers. It is enlightening to read an analysis of the accounts which four Englishmen rendered of their encounter with one of the commanding heights of Islamic civilization, the Ottoman Empire. The Rise of Oriental Travel by Gerald MacLean analyses the travellers' tales and illuminates their often dense personal and political subtexts.

While retracing the steps of Dallam the intrepid artisan, Biddulph the pompous clergyman, Blount the politically astute lawyer, and TS, the wildly fabulating adventurer, MacLean remains acutely aware of the narrators' backgrounds and of the nature of the places through which they journeyed. Although a sharp detector of the self-deceptions and a prioris with which the chronicles are riddled, he also points out where the travellers' observations are confirmed by the evidence on the ground and where they appear to reach for a level of objectivity about the alien culture.

Dallam boarded the Hector, the pride of the Elizabethan fleet, to accompany his organ to the Sultan's Court and to install it there. The instrument was of some significance as the English envoy, Sir Henry Lello, had had to wait to be presented at the Topkapi because of the absence of a suitable gift from his Sovereign, and had been outshone by the Venetian bailo and by other European diplomats seeking the Grand Signor's favours. The organ's arrival meant that the English diplomatic mission could at last be placed on a firm footing. To Lello's consternation on the day of the unveiling, it was Dallam who was ushered into the Sultan's presence and asked to perform while the envoy and his retinue were confined to an outer chamber. So great was the Court's enthusiasm for Dallam's skills that courtiers plied him with sweetmeats and privileges, including a peek into the harem. Task fulfilled, the musician was keen to leave Istanbul, but was prevented from doing so for two and a half months not by the Turks but by his superior, Lello, who wished him to be at hand to please the Sultan.

The main theme of Dallam's chronicle is that while glad to have been of service to his Queen and to have witnessed wonders in the Turk's domain, he was more than a little relieved to have returned home. Alone of the four Englishmen, he never published his adventures. This might have been through reticence or because its primary purpose -- to educate his family -- had been achieved. And it is a mark of the friability of the diplomatic mission that the organ was destroyed by Mehmed's religiously zealous successor, Ahmed I.

MacLean has the least sympathy with Biddulph's Travels. The cantankerous clergyman arrived in the Levant at the same time as Dallam, but stayed for eight more years. Although different in tone from the artisan's tale -- it has many cultural and theological cavils -- Biddulph's is similarly anchored in the belief that his countrymen should count themselves fortunate not to live under the Sultan's tyrannical and impious regime. The chaplain's attitudes were hidebound: he chose to have as little contact as possible with local inhabitants and hated Papists and Jews. MacLean eventually pricks the bubble of Biddulph's self-importance by digging up a third-party account in which, much the worse for wear, the cleric is caught consorting with a prostitute.

MacLean clearly regards Sir Henry Blount's Voyage (1634-6) as the model of the manner in which a gentleman of the period should behave in a foreign culture. Sir Henry adopted local dress, spoke to women and children and avoided expatriate communities. He ate the food he found and shared the billet of senior officers of the Turkish army. He also exploited every opportunity to gather information, so much so that he was frequently accused of being a spy.

Unlike Biddulph, who went out of his way to confirm his worst prejudices about the Ottomans -- their venality, their cruelty, their licentiousness -- Sir Henry's working method was pragmatic: to assess the people and their culture and to draw objective conclusions from the available data.

After careful examination of the picaresque tale "The Adventures of TS, an English Merchant Taken Prisoner by the Turks of Argiers (sic)", Gerald MacLean decides that the young Englishman's tribulations are little more than a literary confection designed to titivate a libertine Restoration readership. He does not rule out the veracity of some of its sources, but discredits both TS's account of sexual slavery and of his being attacked by such a chimera as a flying serpent.

The Rise of Oriental Travel is a beautifully written monograph on the attitudes which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Westerners revealed as they explored the Ottoman Empire. Its strength lies in its ability to evoke with deft touches and telling anecdotes the social climate in which the four texts arose. The book boasts a generous selection of colour and monochrome plates, a workable index and copious notes but lacks a modern map of the regions in which the four travellers, with their sometimes inadequate, sometimes suave mental luggage sojourned. As a study of the flawed prisms through which the English writers saw their hosts, it also makes us wonder to what degree our own view of Islam may be diffracted.

Antoine Laurent has recently completed a novel, The Year of the Dog.

• Read more about this book