French Encounters with the Ottomans, 1510–1560 by Pascale Barthe (review)

The relationship between Europe and the Ottoman empire during the Renaissance has attracted increasing attention in recent decades, with scholars reassessing 'clash of civilizations' narratives and examining the complex place occupied by the Ottomans in the European imagination. Understandably, the Venetian context has been a salient point in this scholarly front-line, but more recent monographs have turned to how the Ottomans (or the 'Turks') figured in the diplomatic, cultural, economic, and literary life of early modern England, France, and Germany.

The French context is particularly valuable because Francis I's alliance with sultan Süleyman in the 1530s laid the foundations for a long-standing and complex relationship between the French and Ottomans. Yet, as Christine IsomVerhaaren noted in her seminal work, Allies with the Infidel: The Ottoman and French Alliance in the Sixteenth Century (I. B. Tauris, 2011), the historiographical representation of the Franco-Ottoman alliance often drew on Habsburg sources that represented it as a 'sensational aberration'. Isom-Verhaaren challenged such historiography by examining a broader set of French and Ottoman sources. Pascale Barthe takes up this work in the current monograph by looking at a diverse set of literary sources that suggest a Franco-Ottoman rapprochement leading up to the alliance and a shift in attitudes. Barthe focuses on the period 1510–1560, which she sees as one of 'covert and public collaboration between the Ottomans and French' (p. 159).

After an introductory chapter on the transition of France's relations with the Ottomans from crusade to alliance, Barthe explores how alliance between France and a Muslim power was possibly entertained in two early sixteenth-century texts. The first is an anti-papal polemic treatise written by Jean Lemaire de Belges in 1511 and that includes an appraisal of Louis XII alongside the Safavid shah Isma'il, as well as a vita of the latter. For Barthe, they reflect a 'textual rapprochement' between the French and Safavid rulers highly suggestive of alliance (p. 35). Chapter 3 examines Jacques de Bourbon's 1525 account of the fall of Rhodes to Süleyman. While the work sits within a long tradition of crusade narratives that contrast Christians and Muslims, Barthe argues this text also 'opened the door for an alliance' (p. 58). Next, Barthe turns to François Rabelais's Pantagruel (1532), in which the encounter between Panurge, one of the story's principal characters, and an Ottoman paşa, presents a blurring of Christian–Muslim identities. Bertrand de la Borderie's Le Discours du voyage de constantinoble (1542) is the focus of the next chapter. La Borderie's text reflects contemporaneous ideas of the 'Turk' as an 'oriental despot' and tyrant. Barthe contends that La Borderie was proposing imperial possibilities in the East to the French king. The final chapter looks at a remarkable boiserie owned by Jean Yverson, who accompanied a special mission to the Ottoman sultan. The panel comprises several blended scenes such as a muezzin calling people to prayer and a parade through Constantinople. Further, the panel's battle scene's blurring of Christian–Muslim identities engaged in a religious war conflates Protestants and Ottomans.

One concern with the book relates to some claims about the Franco-Ottoman relationship, particularly the presence of Ottoman/Muslim subjects in France itself. The reassessment of Europe's relationship with the Islamic world in the medieval and early modern periods is a laudable enterprise but one that should also attract caution. Barthe claims that as well as Ottoman 'merchants, scholars, and emissaries regularly active in commercial, intellectual, and political negotiations in France' there is 'enough evidence of individuals permanently settled in the kingdom' to suggest 'an absorption of Muslim and in particular Ottoman subjects into early modern French society' (p. 22). The author cites a wall in Marseille bearing Arabic inscriptions, as well as two young women kidnapped on an Ottoman vessel and later made...