Bernard Lewis
In the six centuries of its history the Ottoman Empire fought a long series of wars, first during the swift advance of the Turks into Europe, then during their slow and hard-fought withdrawal. In most of these wars, they fought alone—sometimes against one, sometimes against several enemies, but virtually without allies. This was natural enough, since in his own percep- tion and that of his people the sultan was the sovereign of the House of Islam engaged in perpetual battle against the unbelievers in the House of War. Occasionally, letters preserved in the Ottoman and other archives show some awareness of European conflicts and rivalries, and even hint at collaboration against a common enemy. A good example is some royal letters from Istanbul to Queen Elizabeth I of England in the late 16th cen- tury, referring to their common enemy, Spain. But little if anything came of all of this. Despite this ongoing struggle, the Ottomans showed remark- ably little interest in what was happening among the unbelievers inside Europe. Even a major event like the Thirty Years War, just beyond their frontiers, evoked only the briefest mention in the generally very detailed Ottoman historical literature. Even the very idea of Europe appears to have been unknown. Europe is after all a European idea, conceived in Greece, nurtured in Rome, raised to maturity in Christendom, and, after many vicissitudes, approaching old age in secular, primarily economic community. Asia and Africa are also European ideas, merely European i.e. ancient Greek ways of describing the Other. Asia simply meant not Europe East; Africa meant not Europe South. Obviously, neither constitutes a cohesive entity comparable with Europe, and both names were unknown to the inhabitants of Asia and Africa until they were brought to their attention by Europeans, first, briefly, in antiquity, then, more pervasively and more permanently, dur- ing the age of discovery and expansion. With the advent and spread of Islam, this European terminology was confined to Christian Europe. The name Asia disappeared entirely; the name Africa, in the form of Ifriqiyya, survived as the name of the region nowadays known as Tunisia. It was not until the early 19th century that the name Europe, along with other items of Western classification and terminology, appeared in Ottoman 10 bernard lewis
Turkish and, rather later, in other Islamic languages. By now, this Greek invention of the three continents of the Old World has come to be uni- versally accepted. At the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries, during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the Ottoman Empire found itself militarily involved more than once in European battles, first against Napo- leon and then against the British. In these wars the Ottoman Empire had, so to speak, co-belligerents who were waging war against the same enemy, but one cannot speak of a true alliance. By now, the Ottomans, keenly aware of their relative weakness, were trying to modernize, which in prac- tice meant Europeanize, their armed forces, and for this purpose sought the help of European military and naval experts. Some of these European military delegations even amounted to government-appointed missions, but still fell far short of anything that might be termed an alliance. With the outbreak of the Crimean War between the Ottoman Empire and Russia in 1853 an entirely new situation arose. A few months later, Britain and France both declared war on Russia and dispatched substan- tial naval and military forces to the Ottoman Empire to join in battle. For the first time, the Ottoman Empire was involved in a major war, with European great powers as allies as well as enemies. The presence of large numbers of Western Europeans on Ottoman soil and the close involve- ment with Western allies greatly accelerated and intensified the process of change in the Ottoman Empire. Some changes were immediate. In 1855 the telegraph was extended to the Ottoman Empire, which was thus brought into immediate con- tact with the outside world. British and other Western newspapers sent war correspondents to cover the fighting, and, as a spin-off, provided a news service to the Turkish press, whose coverage until then had been limited and intermittent. For the first time Muslim readers in a Middle Eastern society became accustomed to a daily diet of fresh news. The war also gave the Ottoman government, for the first time, access to the money-markets of Europe. A first foreign loan was raised in London in 1854, to be followed by many others. The Ottoman and later the Egyp- tian governments discovered the opportunities and in time also the per- ils of international finance. The Ottoman economy, no longer isolated, was now part of the international economic community and subject to all the hazards, as well as the benefits, that this conferred. And in the peace that ended the war, the Ottoman Empire was formally admitted to that concatenation of discords known as the “Concert of Europe.” Accord- ing to article VII of the treaty signed in Paris in 1856: “Her Majesty the