The Ambassador, the Spy, and the Deli: Self-Representation and Anti-Diplomacy in Nicolas de Nicolay’s Navigations

Voilà le fruit . . . des externes et lointains voyages de la terrestre et maritime pérégrination et revue du monde, à laquelle me semble être né et naturellement enclin tout bon et noble esprit de nature bien informé, par sa sublimité élevant son corps massif et le faisant mouvoir, et le transportant en divers lieux étranges et lointains par sa ravissante agilité, ainsi que le feu donne très soudain mouvement au pesant et immobile boulet d’artillerie.

Nicolas de Nicolay

Il [the war machine] serait plutôt comme la multiplicité pure et sans mesure, la meute, interruption de l’éphémère et puissance de la métamorphose. Il dénue le lien autant qu’il trahit le pacte. Il fait valoir une furor contre la mesure, une célérité contre la gravité, un secret contre le public, une puissance contre la souveraineté, une machine contre l’appareil.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

Introduction

Nicolas de Nicolay’s Les Quatre premiers livres des Navigations et Pérégrinations (first printed in 1567) is a curious hybrid that presents itself as both a travel book and costume book, while also providing a description of the second diplomatic mission to the Ottoman Empire (1551–1553) of Gabriel de Luels d’Aramon (d. ca. 1553). Thus far, analyses of the book have been largely focused on its representations of the other, especially on Nicolay’s overly pejorative depictions of the Ottomans.¹ Critics have sought to explain these representations as the products of actual circumstances, the vicissitudes of realpolitik and historical events. Thus, the present-day editors of Nicolay’s book Marie-Christine Gomez-Géraud and Stéphane Yérasimos attribute them to the slowing of diplomatic relations and the coming to a halt of military cooperation between the French and the Ottomans after the 1559 peace treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis.² Marcus Keller, who concentrates on the fifteen-year time lag between the mission and the publication of Nicolay’s book, attributes the vilification of the Ottomans to the effect of the French civil wars; he argues that for Nicolay the Ottoman Empire becomes an exotic screen onto which religious schism, moral decline, and the crisis of authority—all of which threatened France at the time of the book’s publication—can be projected, allowing Nicolay to promote the political model of a nation united by Catholic faith and common culture.³ While I appreciate these authors’ important historical contextualizations of the book, I argue that only by taking into account Nicolay’s own speaking position, as spy-turned-royal cartographer, can one explain some of the peculiarities of the text, namely the aggressive reduction of the Ottoman other to pejorative stereotypes and the seemingly contradictory tendency that aims to incorporate the non-French, non-Christian other. I show that the multiple narrative layers of the book are created by the author’s need to carve out a position from which to speak and, ultimately, to represent himself. The author’s self-representation within the narrative reveals itself best when compared to the authorial voice of the ambassador, Aramon, who is both a character in Nicolay’s narrative and the writer of diplomatic dispatches in his own right. I thus compare Nicolay’s narrative to Aramon’s letters addressed to the king. The role that Nicolay creates for himself in this narrative also explains some of the paradoxes of the book: If Nicolay praises the “familiarity” and “friendship” that the French cultivated with the Ottomans and does not spare his pen to relate some of the costly and lavish diplomatic ceremonies, then why does he describe these political “friends” of the French monarch in starkly hostile terms as infidels and barbarians? Also, given the pejorative view of the Ottomans, why do particular members of this group receive praise, especially the fierce frontier soldier (the deli) whom he encounters in Edirne? To answer these questions, we should regard Nicolay’s specific role in the diplomatic mission as well as the significance...