With the power structures rapidly changing in the Mediterranean, the end of the sixteenth century saw a shift in European and Ottoman strategies in claiming power and territorial suzerainty. As we saw in Chapter 2, Grand Vizier Sokollu Mehmed’s grand plans were aborted by his adversaries at Selim II’s court—to give primacy to, for instance, the Ottomans’ Cyprus campaign. However, the repositioning of Ottoman interests was inevitable after the 1570s in general: due to the growing lack of societal, technological, and financial means to continue full-scale Ottoman expansion, from the late 1570s onward the empire’s greater wars on the western front and in the East with the Safavids were fought mainly for the maintenance of the empire’s territorial status quo. In the meantime, as the technological center of costly modern warfare moved to northern Europe, politics exchanged arms for the negotiating table in the Levant, leaving the Mediterranean as a playground for minor-scale, “unofficial” armed conflicts fuelled by piracy. In the last decades of the sixteenth century and onward, for western polities and the Ottomans the way to go in the eastern Mediterranean was by means of diplomacy and direct trade as opposed to expensive and debilitating maritime warfare.
(Ottoman ahdnames granted to the Italian city states in the late fifteenth century were followed by the Franco-Ottoman negotiations of 1535-36, and ahdnames ratified with the Dutch and the English at the beginning of the seventeenth century.) While Venice’s maritime and commercial dominance over the region was waning due to the city-state’s losing its Levantine colonies to the Ottomans and her economic focus contracting to the terraferma, lesser powers such as Tuscany, the Papal State, England, the Dutch, and the Knights of St. John of Malta came to fill the breach. I argue that the new era, which showed a decline in Ottoman and Venetian imperial
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195 exclusionism in the Mediterranean, demanded revised ways of claiming power and territorial legitimacy. To illustrate this point, in this chapter I will explore the 1582 Ottoman Sur-i Hümayun, or imperial circumcision festival, where a performance aimed to demonstrate Ottoman mastery of modern weaponry was believed by the western audience to feature Cyprus.
I also explore how, in a wider perspective, this performance came to being as a part of an early modern western festival tradition and what may account for the performance’s ill-decoding by westerners.
5.1 A Performance at the Sur-i Hümayun
On June 9, 1582 Prince Mehmed mounted his grey stallion which was dressed up in festive manner in silver robes ornate with precious stones.568 The fifteen-year-old şehzade, wearing a gold-embroidered red ceremonial kaftan stitched with gemstones and a princely turban of two black feathers on top, amidst his retinue rode out of the gate of the Eski Saray (Old Palace), where he had paid his mother a customary farewell visit. Holding a gold-plated mace in his hand and wearing on his side a jewelled sword and a hançer, Mehmed moved with the procession led by the carriers of the four nahıls (festival trees) which had been prepared in
568 The date of Prince Mehmed’s entry to the Hippodrome has been wrongly identified by Joseph von Hammer, who claims that it took place on June 2 in Joseph von Hammer, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches,
grossentheils aus bisher unbenützten Handschriften und Archiven vol. 4 (C. A. Hartleben’s Verlage: Pest, 1829), 121. I have chosen to refer to the more reliable date given by İntizami in the Austrian National Library’s MS ÖNB Cod. H. O. 70 entitled Surname-i Hümayun, 10v published in Das Surname-i Hümayun: Die Wiener Handschrift in Transkription mit Kommentar und Indices versehen, ed. Gisela Procházka-Eisl (Istanbul: Isis Verlag, 1995), 81.
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196 his celebration.569 When he arrived at the Hippodrome, where foreign and Ottoman guests had been gathering for ten days, the dignitaries of the empire came forth on foot to greet him. He rode to the İbrahim Pasha Palace, kissed his sultan father’s hand, and took his place next to him on the palace’s balcony overseeing the square. This was the day when Prince Mehmed’s circumcision festival, the greatest public festivity Istanbul ever saw during its Ottoman history, began.570
The festivities were organized to celebrate the rite of passage of Prince Mehmed (later Sultan Mehmed III), and lasted for fifty-two days, each day being occupied by processions, theatrical performances, fireworks, and mock battles. One of these events is almost exclusively referred to in modern-day scholarship as a re-enactment of the Ottoman siege of Cyprus and, even more specifically, that of the city of Famagusta. Fitting into the range of mock battles performed during the festivities, this performance is claimed to have been intended to demonstrate to the western, but particularly the Venetian spectators, Ottoman military superiority over Christendom. However, the differences in contemporary accounts of the event and present-day scholarship’s unanimous interpretation of the performance is puzzling, and requires a dialogical revision on the basis of both western and Ottoman contemporary sources.
One of the most oft-cited sources describing the performance which is in the focus of this chapter is Edward Grimeston’s 1635 English translation of Michel Baudier’s turcica the
569 Nahıls were Ottoman symbols of fertility, and inevitable attributes of circumcision festivals. See a discussion of nahıls in Suraiya Faroqhi, Subjects of the Sultan: Culture and Daily Life in the Ottoman Empire (London: L. B.
Tauris, 2000), 165.
570 For the şehzade’s entry see İntizami, Surname-i Hümayun (ÖNB Cod. H. O. 70), 10v-13r in Das Surname-i Hümayun: Die Wiener Handschrift, 81-84; Selaniki Mustafa Efendi: Tarih-i Selaniki vol. 1, 133-35; Hammer, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches, vol. 4, 121; Emine Fetvacı, “Viziers to Eunuchs: Transitions in Ottoman Manuscript Patronage, 1566-1617” (PhD. diss., Harvard University, 2005), 215-16; Mehmet Arslan, Osmanlı Saray Düğünleri ve Şenlikleri vol. 2 (Istanbul: Sarayburnu Kitaplığı, 2009), 15.
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197 Histoire générale du sérail et de la cour du grand Turc (1626), in which the performance is described on as a ferocious battle in which
Occhiali Bassa great Admiral of the Sea, exceeded by his industrie, the Vezir’s invention. Hee caused to come rowling into the place, a great Island, admirably well made of boords, and pastboord, which represented Cypres: Two powerfull Armies held it besieged, the one by Sea and the other by Land: There was artificially seene their descent into the Island, the siege of Famagouste, the sallies, skirmishes, batteries, counter-batteries, mines, counter-mines, breaches, assaults vpon assault, fire-workes, and whatsoeuer the furie of Warre cound inuent.571
The Admiral of the Navy Uluç (“Occhiali”) or Kılıç Ali Pasha’s float, according to Baudier, was a model of the island of Cyprus, made of a wooden frame with pasteboard cast over it outside the Hippodrome. When the time of the admiral’s performance had come, the model was rolled into the square to be besieged “by sea” and “by land”. At the dramatic height of the performance, writes Baudier, “time, force, and the want of succours made them [the Cypriots]
receiue the composition which they [the Ottomans] offered them,”572 and the story takes a conspicuously programmatic turn when the Ottomans, in spite of the truce, make some of the defenders “slaues, and the rest they put to the Sword”.573 Curiously, eventual divine intervention, which can be presupposed on the basis of the account’s moral overtone, does not take effect only within the dramatic confines of the performance, and not only on the Ottomans:
571 Michel Baudier, The History of the Imperiall Estate of the Grand Seigneurs: Their Habitations, Liues, Titles, Qualitis, Exercises. Workes, Reuenews, Habit, Discent, Ceremonies, Magnificence, Judgements, Officers, Fauourites, Religion, Power, Gouernment, and Tyranny, trans. Edward Grimeston (London: William Stansby, 1635), 85-86.
572 Ibid. p. 86.
573 Ibid.
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198 The wonder of this artificiall representation did much please the Sultan,
reioyced the people, and reuiued in the Christians minds the griefe of their losse:
Heauen would haue it so to punish their great curiositie, for assisting with these infamous Mahometans, and to be spectators with them at the Pompes of their Superstition. But hee did not suffer their insolencie to be vnpunished; [...] The Canonadoes [...] flue many of these takers of the Island in the Picture vpon the place, & wounded a great number.574
Baudier’s account of God’s abrupt punishment on the Ottoman actors and spectators, as well as the Christian guests for their perfidy of merely watching the performance is, of course, idealistic enough to be read without reservations. However, the Histoire générale du serial.., which was probably one of the most popular works of its time about the Ottoman court, first in French and later in other vernaculars, is only a second-hand account of Prince Mehmed’s circumcision festival. The book is based on travellers’ memoirs, and the source for Baudier’s account of the performance would have most likely been Jean Palerne’s eye-witness account.
Jean Palerne, the secretary of Francis, Duke of Anjou, attended the circumcision festival during his pilgrimage from Paris to the Holy Land. In Palerne’s Peregrinations dv S. Iean Palerne (1606) the Ottomans’ intention to vex their western guests with the performance is as apparent as in Baudier’s account. According to Palerne, the mock-battle staged by Kılıç Ali Pasha not only surpassed that of Grand Vizier Sinan Pasha, which took place immediately before the “siege,” but it also
[...] renewed [...] an inexpressible grief in the Christians’ soul for the memory of past misfortunes, because it represented ingenuously the taking of Cyprus,
574 Ibid.
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