French Commercial Navigation and Ottoman Law in the Mediterranean according to the Manuscrit Turc 130 (Bibliothèque Nationale de France). (original) (raw)
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The Ottoman Mediterranean was a place of intense imperial interest in the eighteenth century, yet our understandings of that century are still overshadowed by European naval ascendance, the defeat at Çeşme in 1770, and the beginnings of reform under Selim III. However, this paper will demonstrate the eighteenth century was a period of significant investment in naval resources, and development in maritime legal practices. Linked to new notions of maritime sovereignty and territoriality that emerged from concurrent ideas on land following the treaties of Carlowitz (1699) and particularly Passarowitz (1718), naval protection missions (Bahr-ı Sefid muhafazası) took on a new purpose of not simply defending Ottoman coasts and waters, but asserting maritime territoriality. The endemic threat of foreign corsairs, particularly Maltese, and local pirates, especially Maniots, necessitated increasing investment in naval patrols as a regular safeguard for trade and sovereignty, ensuring a regular imperial presence in the coastal provinces. In addition to this threat, the numerous wars between friendly European powers, particularly the British and French, saw increasingly destructive privateering wars that affected Ottoman shipping and subjects. This resulted from the 1690s in 'maritime regulations', şurut-u derya, that forbade armed European ships from entering extended Ottoman maritime space in times of war. Based on research on the administrative and legal documents relating to the Ottoman navy throughout the eighteenth century, this paper will chart these two concurrent developments-enhanced naval patrols and legal innovation-between 1690 and 1790 to demonstrate that the Ottoman state reacted to both foreign and domestic challenges in its maritime spaces (coastal and in the open sea) in the Mediterranean by using force, law, and diplomacy to enforce and consolidate its claims over its littoral territory and maritime trade routes and to solidify a dependent relationship local actors in the provinces.
Algerian Review Of Ottoman and Mediterranean Studies, 3/2: 79-92, 2023
This note focuses on the intertwined activities of Ottoman and Portuguese pirates and privateers in the Eastern Mediterranean in the second half of the 15th century and early 16th century. Their actions had impacts on the Portuguese-Mamluk conflict, which expanded in the Red Sea and the western Indian Ocean in the early 16th century. The growth of this Portuguese piracy was linked up with Portugal‟s political and military ambitions in the central and eastern Mediterranean at the beginning of the 16th century. To achieve this strategy, they wielded enormous influence within the Order of St. John of Jerusalem. This article deals with two prominent Portuguese privateers and nobleman : André do Amaral, Chancellor of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem (in Rhodes), who defeatead the fleet of the Mamluk sultan Ḳānṣawḥ al-Ghawrī‟s in the Gulf of Ayāz (1510). This defeat strongly contributed to increasing the dependence of the sultanate on the Ottomans, thus preparing the conquest of Egypt by Selim I in 1517. With regard to Diogo Fernandes de Almeida, it is worth clarifying that he was the brother of the first Vice-roy of the Estado da Índia (i.e. the Portuguese Empire in Asia).
The chapter begins with an analysis of the diplomatic education of the French corps diplomatique around 1700, focusing on the French ambassador at the Ottoman Porte d’Andrezel. Wicquefort, Grotius, and Pufendorf were central for the doctrine that (only) sovereigns were represented by their ambassadors and Edouard de La Croix represented the most advanced author printed usable for the Porte’s ceremonial rules. Three levels of performance of sovereignty in the Eastern Mediterranean are of interest. The French role as mediator in the negotiations between Russia, the Holy Roman Emperor, and the Ottomans in the 1730s reveals how the state system became (re-)hierarchized during that period, with a scrupulous distinction between the ‘big four’ and others concerning the East. Secondly, the triangular relationship between France, the Barbary States (Tripoli and Tunis), and the Ottoman Empire concerning French complaints about piracy around 1728/29 highlights how the French tried to formalize an asymmetrical relationship between the regencies and Versailles, not least by incorporating publicized forms of Islamic acts of penitence. Thirdly, the chapter delves into the relationship between inter-state and intra-state forms of performing, attacking, and claiming sovereignty, particularly in the context of confessional conflicts in the region. The question remains to what extent diplomatic forms and concepts such as the state system and of sovereignty were truly ‘translatable’ between the West and the East.
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Passes," 170. 52 The threat to captured sailors is best exemplified the British context which mirrors much of what is happening in Denmark. "If seized at sea and held in North Africa, it was extremely unlikely that a common seaman would be able to assemble his own ransom. Unlike prisoners taken in a conventional European war, he could rarely hope to be exchanged for men from the other side. And even if they got to learn of his predicament, his family back in Britain would find it hard to raise money on his behalf. So when the authorities in London were slow to intervene, Barbary captives could be stranded and enslaved in North Africa for many years, and sometimes for ever." Colley, Captives, 54. 53 Gøbel, "Algerian Sea Passes," 171.