Anglo-Turkish Society

Dr Philip Mansel online lecture: ‘The Lily and the Crescent: Louis XIV and the Ottomans, Culture, Commerce and Crusades’, 15 December 2020 - flyer: - slides:

Presenter’s website:

1- The origin of the Franco-Ottoman alliance was an agreement established in 1536 between the king of France Francis I and the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire Suleiman the Magnificent. The alliance was exceptional, as the first non-ideological alliance between a Christian and Muslim state, and caused a scandal in the Christian world. It lasted pretty much for more than two and a half centuries, until the Napoleonic campaign in Ottoman Egypt, in 1798–1801. Clearly the first move must have been very brave for both parties. Was the main driver an expansion of trade or containment of common enemies?

It was containment of common enemies, initiated by Francois I’s mother, after his capture by the Emperor Charles V at Pavia in 1525. Fear of the House of Austria was lone the principal motive of the alliance. Trade came later.

2- Louis XIV like all French Kings before him was an absolute ruler who would not tolerate any internal dissent. But was he also able to silence the Pope who clearly would see the Ottomans as a mortal danger to Western Christendom? Did Louis XIV cast a ‘web of lies’ to conceal the obvious wide gap between his ambitions and his professed protection of Eastern Christians and his promoted eventual aim of ‘liberating the holy lands’?

Even to his own diplomats he denied the existence of an alliance. There was a web of lies. Many protestations of Catholicism and desire to save Vienna in 1683. In reality he wanted to maintain war in the Balkans, in order to leave for France to have a free hand in the Rhineland.

3- Under Francis I there was intense naval collaboration with the Ottomans but by the same token France many have allowed the strengthening of Muslim buccaneers and pirate commanders under Ottoman protection the most illustrious being Barbarossa. This power dynamic eventually led to the development of the Barbary coastal states of Algiers and Tunis, leading to centuries of damage to Christian including French shipping. Were French kings and Ottoman rules pragmatic in solving conflicting interests for the sake of the bigger alliance?

Yes extremely pragmatic and the Kings of France even on occasion gave back to the Sultan Ottoman vessels captured by the Knights of Saint John.

4- During the reign of Louis XIV the port of Marseilles was greatly expanded and became a free port chiefly trading with the Levant. Was this push a major factor in the decline of rival maritime powers such as Holland and Venice?

Yes, also the rise of England hastened those powers’ decline. France called the Levant ‘our India’ and came to dominate foreign trade there by 1789.

5- During the reign of Louis XIV the Consuls of France in Levant ports were obliged each to supply the French Navy with 50 ‘Turkish’ slaves a year, yet it is supposed to be an ally operating with great trade privileges in that country. Do you think the word ‘Turkish’ covered other less problematic ethnicities such as Circassians or Arabs or do you think possibly local ‘bought’ officials turned a blind eye to the removal of ‘undesirables’ such as prisoners and rebels?

I think some might have been Turkish. Experts on the Mediterranean slave trade were not surprised when I asked them. I think profits came before religion. Christian consuls and merchants also traded in Christian slaves, Greeks or Russians. More research needs to be done. The market trumped religious rules.

6- King Jan Sobieski of Poland probably saved the Austrians from annihilation with his arrival in 1683 during the Ottoman siege of Vienna, yet Sobieski was also supposedly an ally of France. Louis XIV was clearly very annoyed with that but do you think this extreme real politic showed he couldn’t grasp the gravity of potentially the Ottomans then being able to threaten Italy, the Papacy and also his own Kingdom?

All foreign governments underestimated Ottoman power and endurance. Louis XIV in particular thought his army was a match for any other. Above all he wanted to weaken Austria.

7- In 1686 the Austrians take Budapest and raid deep into Ottoman Balkan lands and the French Ambassador in Constantinople is alarmed by this turn of events and the French naval mission do a great survey of the Ottoman ports in case things unravel in the future and there is a scramble by various powers for choice pieces of a disintegrating Empire. Was Louis XIV good at both personal rationalisation of the moral hazards of alliance with an Empire whose supposed basis was the spread of Islam and also being able to sub-compartmentalise a what-if insurance policy away from the diplomatic corps, thus avoiding internal tensions?

Yes it was normal to pursue a triple policy or more, as some powers do today. And different ministers pursued different agendas, then and now. After France signed an alliance with Austria in 1756, Louis XV had a secret foreign policy at variance with official foreign policy, in support of Poland and the Ottoman Empire.

8- Britain seems to have stayed out of all these complicated alliances centred around enmity to the Austrian Empire and thus possibly giving it a clearer reign in developing its own independent Ottoman and other oversees relations. Do you think Britain therefore was less well informed of these tangled webs and it was only the rupture of French revolution that set it on a course to dominate the Eastern Mediterranean trade in the 19th century?

Yes, France beat Britain for dominance in the Levant trade before 1789. French coffee from the Carribean was sold in the empire cheaper than Arab coffee from Mocha, which came from much nearer. The Revolution killed French foreign trade, and, for a time, the ports of Bordeaux and Marseille.

9- Louis XIV was very well travelled in France and clearly had a circle of able advisors in foreign policy. But was the King and the establishment dismissive of the bulk of his subjects who could be termed as ‘peasants’, not encouraging them enough emigrate to their colonies in the Americas like the British did and so relieving population expansion pressures and making France reliant again and again to vulnerable imports of grain chiefly from Anatolia? Was bread and its lack the Achilles heel of France that was one of the driving factors for the revolution which clearly none of the aristocracy was able to foresee? Could you argue that under Louis XIV too much of France’s energy was expended in expanding the lands to the East and too little spent on alleviating poverty and food insecurity?

He himself admitted this on his death-bed, saying that he had not done enough for the poor, and had waged war too often. Colbert was more realistic, nothing went well for France after his death in 1683. The French were encouraged to emigrate, but few took up the government’s offers. The climate in Louisiana and Quebec was bad. Bad finances weakened the French government even more than the economy or the price of bread.

10- Under Louis XIV the connections with the various Greek Catholics of the Aegean Islands and Catholic Armenians of Anatolia increased as well as the wider Eastern Christians and many students from these communities were educated in Paris. Do you think this spiritual and intellectual fostering was purely benevolent protection of co-religionists or do you think there was also a longer term plan of creating internal cracks in the Ottoman Empire which France could benefit from in the future?

A bit of both. French officials wanted to enhance the King’s role as protector of Catholics in the Ottoman Empire, but also wanted to use those Catholics as a pro-French factor, and woo Ottoman Christians from support for Russia. This policy continues until this day – viz Macron’s visit to Lebanon.

11- Why did Louis XIV did nothing to stop William of Orange leave from Holland to England and successfully challenge and defeat King James II who was replaced by his Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband, William of Orange. Was Louis XIV so focussed in saving the Ottoman Empire who would remain a thorn against the Holy Roman Empire and accept a Protestant King to his north as a ‘fair trade’?

He may have believed James II would stand and fight and England would therefore be immobilised for a generation by civil war. No one – except perhaps William III - anticipated that James II, who had been a brave soldier when young, would run away in 1688.

12- Clearly the French merchants in the Levant did very well under and before the reign of Louis XIV through the various capitulation privileges. Was there a ‘push-back’ by Ottoman authorities against this seemingly one sided gain by this growing community amassing wealth in their own lands or did the Ottomans tolerate this as a price worth paying in dealing with bigger mortal dangers such as Austria and Russia?

I think it was useful to the Ottomans as it strengthened the alliance, which supplied them with grain and anchors etc. in time of war, and they still paid customs dues. And were not yet dominant in the Ottoman economy. There was no push back. Successive French ambassadors in Constantinople claimed the Ottoman government agreed to all their requests.

Questions by Craig Encer, December 2020