Dimitrie Cantemir and the Islamic world 9781463225414

Citation preview

Dimitrie Cantemir and the Islamic world

Analecta Isisiana: Ottoman and Turkish Studies

Collections of thematic essays focused on specific themes of Ottoman and Turkish studies are brought together in Analecta Isisiana. These scholarly volumes address important issues throughout Turkish history, offering in a single volume the accumulated insights of a single author over a career of research on the subject.

Dimitrie Cantemir and the Islamic world

By

Cristina Bìrsan Preface by

Mihai Maxim

1 a o r t a s press

T h e Isis Press, Istanbul 2010

Gorgias Press LLC, 954 River Road, Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA www.gorgiaspress.com Copyright © 2010 by The Isis Press, Istanbul Originally published in 2004 All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise without the prior written permission of The Isis Press, Istanbul. 2010

o

ISBN 978-1-61719-085-8

Printed in the United States of America

Cristina Bîrsan, born in Bucharest, Romania in 1968 is a graduate of the Faculty of Letters of the University of Bucharest and holds a Ph.d. from the same university (2002). Since 1997 she has been a Research Assistant at the G. Calinescu Institute of Literary History and Theory. She regularly contributes to Romanian Radio and Television. She is a member of the International Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, (ISECS). A Romanian version of this book will be published later this year in Bucharest by Editura Academiei Românie under the title Dimitrie Candemir ,j/ lumea islamicâ.

To my mother loam

I J K M K T It IV 8 Ä * SlAl'l '

á ( ' , \ X T K Ml ! î M PK l i l ì

^tS^-^M/^Jf-^

ï i i m.M iu >" NMOÍ1 M \n

^ ""V

-% f S / < • / # I SMî

/ ili\>HI

CONTENTS

Foreword Introduction The Tradition of the Histories of the Ottoman Empire A Possible Evolution Historical Controversies Dimitrie Cantemir - Paul Rycaut: Interferences About Djafr Islamic Theology in Cantemir's Writings Anecdotica in the History of the Othman Empire

9 15 21 31 45 55 65 71 81

Conclusion Appendix: The History of the Othman Empire in Romanian Criticism ..

105 109

Bibliography Index of Names

125 133

FOREWORD

It gives me great pleasure to introduce a new study on Prince Dimitrie Cantemir (1673-1723) 1 , a pioneer of the dialogue between Christianity and Islam or, in N. Iorga's words, a "Dragoman of the West and of the East". As Professor Halil Inalcik wrote, "Cantemir was a product of the cultural and intellectual life of Istanbul as much as he was one of those who gave direction to the new cultural orientation at the Ottoman capital" 2 . Spending some 20 years of his life in Istanbul, Cantemir, whose ancestors were — according to some indications — Christianized and "Romanianized" Tartars (Kantemur=Kan+demir= "Iron blood"), became closely acquainted with the Ottoman political, economic and cultural life, as well as with Ottoman-Turkish language, music and institutions. The crude and unfair accusation made by Hammer in 1824 3 , namely that Cantemir (characterized not as "eminently erudite", but as "eminently ignorant") did not have a profound knowledge of the Ottoman-Turkish language and institutions — which was absolutely inexplicable for someone who spent so long a time in Istanbul — proved itself to be wrong and unjust after the discovery, in 1984, by Professor Virgil Candea of the final Latin manuscript of Cantemir's History of the Ottoman Empire at Harvard's Houghton Library 4 . "A comparison of the Latin original with the English version of the 1734-1735 — wrote Prof. V. Candea — brings to light the unexpected fact that Tindal, and after him all the translators who used his 'See Mihai Maxim, art. "Kantemiroglu (Dimitrie Cantemir)", in: TDVislam Ansiklopedisi, vol. 24, Istanbul, 2001, pp. 520-522. ^Halil inalcik, Foreword to: Dimitrie Cantemir, Historian of South East European and Oriental Civilizations. Extracts from "The History of the Ottoman Empire", edited by Alexandra Dufu and Paul Cernovodeanu, A.I.fi.S.E., Bucharest, 1973, p. 7. J. von Hammer, "Sur l'histoire ottomane du Prince Cantemir", Journal Asiatique, Ille serie, IV, 1824, pp. 24-45. 4 Dimitrie Cantemir, Cre^terile }i descregterile Imperiului otoman. Textul original latin in forma flnala revizuita de autor. Facsim.il al manuscrisului hat. - 124 de la Biblioteca Houghton, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., publicat cu o introducere de Virgil Candea, membru al Academiei Romane (Demetrius Cantemir, The Growth and Decay of the Ottoman Empire. Original Latin text of the final version revised by the author. Facsimile edition of the manuscript Lat - 124 at Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., with an introduction by Virgil Candea, member of the Romanian Academy), Roza vanturilor, Bucute|ti, 1999, 1064 p.; Demetrii Principis Cantemirii Incrementorum et Decrementorum Aulae Othman[n]icae sive Aliothman[n]icae Historiae a prima gentis origine ad nostra usque tempora deductae libri tres. Praefatus est Virgil Candea, critice edidit Dan Slu^anschi, Editura Amarcord, Timijoara, 2001, 549 p.

10

D I M I T R I E C A N T E M I R AND THE I S L A M I C

WORLD

edition, published only a truncated version of the book. Tindal omitted some passages from the original text, operated unwarranted modifications, and failed to reproduce the quotations in Arabic letters f...) 1 " (my emphasis M. M . ) . So, the learned Prince correctly reproduced the Ottoman-Turkish terms both in ductus Arabicus and in the Latin transliteration as well; consequently, the blame on Cantemir's "faults" and "ignorance" must be transferred to his first editor. According to Professor Andrei Pippidi (1988), The History of the Ottoman Empire was written firstly in Greek, between 1706 and 1710, and later completed and translated into Latin in Russia, after 1714, "when the author had already started editing the notes into Latin" 2 . In this case, one can wonder why Cantemir's written sources (firstly, the Ottoman-Turkish ones) are only very few and even these are not very exactly quoted. Perhaps, we must admit that after the Stanile§ti catastrophe, the former voyvoda of Moldavia, confused and hurried in his flight to Russia, could not take with him this first version of The History of the Ottoman Empire and other different documentary materials and, consequently, in Russia — where Cantemir admitted to not having the benefit of neither large libraries nor cultural exchanges as he had in Istanbul — he was forced to write his History based firstly on his large erudition and experience in the Ottoman capital, as encapsuled in his very numerous and large notes. This is the reason why his Ottoman History is valuable and, in my opinion, will remain so thanks to these Notes (Annotationes), while the text itself quickly became obsolete. Perhaps, for the same reason we cannot find in Cantemir's history any mention of such an important Ottoman author of the XVIIth century, as Katib £ e l e b i (died in 1657). Known in Europe as Hadji Khalfa, the famous polihistor wrote in 1648 Takvim ut-tevarih (The Calendar of histories), where he used some 1300 sources, including some European ones (a number revealing the Ottoman libraries' richness), and which contains the idea of the cyclical evolution of states and societies ("like individuals, all states and societies have three ages: growth, stationary phase and collapse") 3 and, accordingly, heralding the third age — that of decay — reached by the 1 Virgil Cândea, Introduction to the facsimile edition of the Latin final manuscript of Cantemir's History of the Ottoman Empire (see supra note 4 p. 9), p. CI. 2 Ibidem, p. C, note 112. See also Andrei Pippidi, Ideea de "credere" }i de "decâdere" în istoriografla occidentals din sec. XVI- XVIII. Rezumatul tezei de doctorat (The Idea of "Growth" and "Decay" in the Western Historiography of 16th-18th centuries. Summary of the Doctoral Dissertation), Cluj-Napoca, 1981. 3 Apud Kâtib Çelebî, Seçmeler (Selected Works), edited by Orhan §aik Gôkay, Istanbul, 1968, p. 115.

FOREWORD

11

Ottoman state of his time. This vision can also remind us of Cantemir's Incrementa et Decrementa (the Growth and Decay) 1 . But this liaison between Kâtib Çelebî and Dimitrie Cantemir is only a hypothesis which remains to be demonstrated. In Cantemir's Notes we can find a lot of information about Ottoman civilization, so badly known in the Europe of his time. " Une autre multitude de connaissances curieuses qui se trouvent recueillies dans les Notes du Prince Cantemir, — wrote the abbot Prévost in 1740 — , regarde l'état des Arts et des Sciences en Turquie. Nous ne figurons point qu'il y ait des Collèges dans les principales villes de ce grand Empire, une éducation régulière et des sources de lumière qui se communiquent à ceux qui veulent en profiter [...]" 2 . Voltaire himself was struck by the spirit of tolerance of Cantemir's Ottomans, usually presented in Europe as fanatical : "Les Ottomans ont permis qu'on fondât dans ce quartier (Phanar) une académie où les Grecs modernes enseignent l'ancien grec qu'on ne parle plus guère en Grèce, la philosophie d'Aristote, la théologie, la médecine ; est c'est de cette école que sont sortis Constantin Doucas, /Nicolas/ Maurocordate et Cantemir, faits par les Turcs princes en Moldavie" 3 . The extraordinary discovery of the Latin original manuscript of Cantemir's History of the Ottoman Empire "compensates" to some extent the scarcity of the documentary materials concerning the Romanian Prince, scholar and musician extant in the Turkish Archives. To date only a very few such documents were found: some of them were discovered by Akdes Nimet Kurat and used in his well-known book Prut Seferi ve Bari§i 1123 (1711) (The Prut Campaign and Peace ...), 2 vols., Ankara, 1951-1953 — documents pertaining to Cantemir's appointment as Voyvoda of Moldavia and his official relationship with the Ottoman authorities (1710-1711) 4 ; two other documents were published in 1984 by Tahsin Gemil: one of them (dated 1696) is referring to a loan given by the Cantemir brothers to the Greek Patriarch of Jerusalem, another one (dated 1712) concerns Dimitrie Cantemir's estates at Ortakôy (now in Istanbul) confiscated by the Porte after his "defection" 5 . As for me, during my long research at the BOA (Basbakanlik Osmanli Arsivi), in

See Mihai Maxim, Review on : Cronici turce§ti privimi Tarile romàne (Turkish Chronicles concerning the Romanian Principalities), vol. II, edit, by Mihail Guboglu, Bucure§ti, 1974, 539 p.; in: Revista de istorie, t. 29,10/1976, p. 1615. Apud Dimitrie Cantemir, Historian of South East and Oriental Civilizations (see supra note 1 p. 9), p. 323. 3 Idem, p. 329. 4 Akdes Nimet Kurat, Prut Seferi ve Barici 1123 (1711), TTK Basimevi, Ankara, I. cilt: 1951 II. cilt: 1953, passim (p. 34, 177, etc.). 5 Tahsin Gemil, Relajiile Tàrilor Romàne cu Poarta Otomanà in documente turcesti (16011712), Bucure§ti, 1984, doc. nr. 214 , 236.

12

D I M I T R I E C A N T E M I R A N D THE I S L A M I C

WORLD

Istanbul, I was very disappointed in my investigations into Ruznamge Defterleri (Registers of daily revenues and expenses of the Ottoman Public Treasury) or into Tahvil (Ni§anci) Defterleri (Registers of appointments and transfers) of 1121-1123 A.H. (1709-1712 A.D.), including that period (17101711), when Dimitrie Cantemir was — admittedly, for a very short time — a public person, as Voyvoda of Moldavia, who supposedly would be mentioned in public records. However, I could not find anything on him, while for many voyvodas of the XVIth-XVIIth centuries I found in these collections exceptionally interesting documents. On the other hand, in other funds, namely Maliyeden Miidevver Defterler (Registers transferred from the Financial Department), Muhallefdt (Inheritances) and Kamil Kepeci (KPT) I did discover an extraordinary inventory of estates of his rival Constantin Brancoveanu, Reigning Prince of Wallachia (1688-1714), seized by the Ottoman Public Treasury within the framework of the Islamic institution of miisadere (confiscation of the properties of "traitors") and a lot of other documents pertaining to this seizure. 1 Some of these documents are referring to Dimitrie Cantemir's brother, Antioh, a former Voyvoda of Moldavia (16951700 and 1705-1707), resident in Istanbul in 1714- 1715 (when Dimitrie himself was in Russia), and who was accused of receiving some gold and jewelry belonging to Brancoveanu, but seized by the Ottoman State because of his "treachery and rebellion (hiyanet ve fesadat). On this accusation Antioh Cantemir was even "imprisoned (habs olunub)" for three months. 2 Here there are new proofs 3 of the existence — after the conclusion of the alliance between Dimitrie Cantemir and Peter the Great (April 1711) — of a certain "cooperation" between Brancoveanu and the Cantemirs to whom were given some loans and subsidies. While I was writing this foreword, a new, unexpected discovery was announced: in the Manuscripts Section of the Library of the Romanian Academy two extracts of Dimitrie Cantemir's essay Sacrosantae Scientiae indepingibilis imago were found — an autograph manuscript written by the Prince himself at Istanbul in 1700 and which reveals us a 37-year old lucid

' Mihai Maxim, Romano-Ottomanica. Essays & Documents from the Turkish Archives, The Isis Press, Istanbul, 2001, p.172-197. 2Mihai Maxim, Brancoveanu ¡i Cantemiregtii. Documente noi din arhivele turcejti (Brancoveanu and the Cantemirs. New Documents from the Turkish Archives), in Festschrift: Istoria artei-arta istorici, essays in honor of Prof. Räzvan Theodorescu, member of the Romanian Academy, Edi tura Enciclopedica, Bucure§ti, 2004. 3 S e e also: Ion Radu Mircea, "Rivalitate sau colaborare?", in: Magazin istorie, X, 1986, nr. 3, p. 11.

FOREWORD

13

philosopher, whose image as an intellectual seems to be a different one from that we have hitherto known. 1 * *

*

Ms. Cristina Birsan graduated in 1993 from the Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest, Department of Romanian and Persian Languages. In 1992 she was awarded a Ph.D. degree (Magna cum laude) with Dimitrie Cantemir lumea islamica (Dimitrie Cantemir and the Islamic world), under the supervision of Professor Dan Horia Mazilu (University of Bucharest, Faculty of Letters). Ms. Birsan is not an Ottomanist nor a historian. Yet her essay on Cantemir is most useful, because Cantemir's writings and his role in the dialogue between Christianity and Islam are little known today both in the Christian and the Islamic world. As Ms. Birsan writes, her aim is to provide "an objective and carefully place for Dimitrie Cantemir's works about the Ottoman Empire in their proper European context". From this point of view, the chapter Dimitrie Cantemir-Paul Ricaut: Interferences offers a good comparison of these two great orientalists. On the other hand, Dimitrie Cantemir's contributions to Ottoman history could be also placed in their Ottoman-Turkish context (see above my hypothesis on a possible Katib Celebi-D. Cantemir liaison), but also in their Romanian context. For instance, all important Moldavian historians of the XVIIth century (Grigore Ureche, Nicolae Spatarul-Milescu, Miron Costin) did pay a special attention to Ottoman history. In Ureche's "Annals" (Letopisets) we can find a chapter on "The Realm of the Turks Since Their Inception and on Their Growth, How They Began and Grew Up to Reach Such Greatness and Honour and Might"2. Ms. Birsan's analysis of Cantemir's "Notes" (Annotationes) offers a good opportunity to turn to good account these "Notes". As she writes, "we have organized these notes in an annotated system that allows the reader to see exactly what area they cover".

See: "O descoperire senzationalâ: D. Cantemir, un manuscrit necunoscut. Un interviú eu Vlad Alexandrescu, realizat de Ioana Pârvulescu (An extraordinary discovery: D. Cantemir, an unknown manuscript. An interview of Ioana Pârvulescu with Vlad Alexandrescu)", in: Romania literara, 17-23 martie 2004 (anuí XXXVII ), p. 16-17. 2 See Alexandra Duju, Introduction to Dimitrie Cantemir - Historian of South East European and Oriental Civilizations, p. 11.

14

D I M I T R I E C A N T E M I R AND THE I S L A M I C

WORLD

Ms. Bîrsan has insisted not only on the famous History of the Ottoman Empire, but also on Cantemir's other, lesser known work, namely The Mohammedan Religious System, published in 1722 at Sankt-Petersburg, in Russian. One must not forget that Cantemir did need the approval of the Great Holy Synod of the Russian Church for this publication and that, despite Peter the Great's personal intervention in favor of Cantemir, the Prince was forced to conceal his remarkable tolerance towards Islam. Yet, he spoke about the beautiful Turkish-Muslim calligraphy (husn-ti hat), about the superiority of the dervishes over the monks, about the remarkable beauty of the Holy Qur'an's language, about the interdiction of the forced conversion to Islam, etc. All in all, we must be grateful to Ms. Bîrsan for offering us this good opportunity to have a new "reading" of Dimitrie Cantemir's main writings on Islam, in a time when we have so much need of (at least) this spirit of tolerance. Perhaps this was the first reason why Demetrius Cantemir's name was engraved on the stone-wall of the Sainte Geneviève Library in Paris, alongside with these of Leibniz and Newton.

Mihai Maxim Bucharest, March 2004.

INTRODUCTION

In 1689 a 16 year-old youth passed through the gates of Istanbul. He was the son of a Romanian Prince and had been sent as his father's agent. This young man was to use his time for his own instruction as well, as he had proven to be inclined to studying. An observer was to say about him two years later that, "...although young he was surrounded by books and weapons. Hence we can suspect that he was applying himself to the study of both branches of learning." Dimitrie Cantemir (October 26, 1673 — August 21, 1723) was indeed to oscillate between his scientific and his political preoccupations throughout his life, while at the same time writing books and trying to get himself appointed to the Moldavian throne. Yet at first, he remained only two years in the Capital of the Ottoman Empire, during which time he learned Turkish and Latin, and broadened his knowledge under professors from the Greek Academy at Fanar. He returned to Moldavia in 1691 for an interval that would prove, again, to be for no more than two years. This period came to an end with the death of his father, Prince Constantin Cantemir, and with a very short experience as ruler himself (three weeks, in March and April of 1693), a reign unconfirmed by the Ottomans. Afterwards, the Prince once again left for Istanbul, where he resided until 1710, with a short intermission between 1699-1700, when he returned to Iassy in order to marry Casandra, one of the daughters of §erban Cantacuzino, formerly ruler of Wallachia. A long and interesting period in the Prince's life began at this time; when it ended, the youth had become an erudite and a valued statesman. In Istanbul, he continued to study other Oriental and European languages as well, along with philosophy and history, in which he had a special interest. His philosophical studies bore fruit in the form of several works written during these young years, which were either summaries or paraphrases where the young writer's style and his Latin rhetoric were being harmonised {Sacrosanctae scientiae indepingibilis imago [The Unpaintable Image of Sacred Science], Compendiolum universae logices institutiones [A Compendium of the System of General Logic], loannis Baptistae van Helmont Physices universalis doctrina [The Universal Doctrine of J. B. van Helmont's Physics]). These were written after 1698, when a bilingual GreekRomanian edition of Divanul sau Galceava irtfeleptului cu lumea [The Wise

16

D I M I T R I E C A N T E M I R AND THE I S L A M I C

WORLD

Man's Argument or Squabble with the World], a Christian philosophical writing, had appeared. As for his history books, he wrote these later on, several years after his departure from Istanbul, where he had gathered all his information, having reached a breadth and depth of science that matched his intellectual aspirations. On one hand, he was interested in writing a history of the origin of the Romanian people (Hronicul vechimii romano-moldo-vlahilor [The Chronicle of the History of the Roman-Moldavian-Wallachians]) and in order to do that he studied both the classic historians of the Ancient World (Strabo, Dio Cassius, Thucydide, Plinius the Old) and the Byzantine ones (Georgios Sphrantzes, Nicetas Choniates, Nikefor Gregoras). He also studied European historians such as Calvisius, Cluverius, Petavius, Bonfinius, along with Russian, Polish, and Hungarian chronicles. On the other hand, Cantemir took an interest in Ottoman history and read both the Ottoman chroniclers and the European historians, as shown later on. An interesting area of investigation — which has not been examined in the present work — would be to determine the capacity of the Imperial capital to offer Cantemir access to the entire bibliography he read during these years. Since his out-of-town trips were sporadic and it would be difficult to believe that the Prince could find all that he wanted to read in Iassy or during the campaign of 1697, the hypothesis must stand that Istanbul indeed was, at the beginning of the 18 th century, a city where all the works of the above-mentioned historians could be found. To be sure, the Prince must also have had a gift for forming and maintaining social relationships. Not only an erudite, he was also an interesting and pleasant partner of conversation and he befriended many foreign ambassadors (Jakob Colyer, the Dutch ambassador, Piotr Andreevitch Tolstoi, the Russian ambassador, and especially Charles d'Argental, Marquis de Ferriol, who offered his protection during a dangerous situation by sheltering the Prince in the French embassy). He was also on excellent terms with Ottoman dignitaries such as Mehmed £erkes Pasha, Ahmed Pasha Kalayhkoz, Mehmed Pasha Baltaci Tiirbedar, Davul Ismail Efendi, Latif (^elebi, Daltaban Mustafa Pasha, or Firari Hasan Pasha, and even with the relatives of his political adversaries (Toma Cantacuzino, Constantin Brancoveanu's cousin). Due to the many acquaintances and friendships he made during his twenty years in Istanbul, Cantemir had access to Ottoman libraries and was able to reascend the Moldavian throne. This social effervescence, so to speak, produced two more books: Kitab-u 'ilm. il musiki'ala vedjh-il hurufat [The Book of the Science of Music By the Type of Letters], written at the behest of his Ottoman friends and as a consequence of the Prince's skill in playing the tanbur (as well as, certainly, of his knowledge of the subject,

INTRODUCTION

17

since his book turned out to be an extremely useful text); and lstoria ieroglifica [The Hieroglyphic History], an allegorical novel with animal characters describing the intrigues triggered by the appointment (followed by the recall) of a new Prince to the Moldavian throne in the years 1703-1705, machinations in which the Moldavian and Wallachian boyars, the Wallachian Prince, and the Ottoman dignitaries played prominent parts. Dimitrie Cantemir was eventually appointed to the throne of Moldavia in 1710. Seventeen years had elapsed since the Sublime Porte had (upon Brancoveanu's suggestion) rejected the Moldavian boyars' proposal, but the Prince returned now to the throne as a man trusted by the Ottomans, during a troubled period when they needed stability in the buffer-state next to the border of Peter the Great's Russia. In the intervening seventeen years, however, Dimitrie Cantemir had learned history, had lived in the heart of the Empire, and had taken part in a military campaign where the Ottoman Empire had been bitterly defeated (1697, Zenta). All of these had caused him to observe the decline of the Empire and he was returning now to Moldavia in order to secure a greater independence for his country by entering an alliance with a Christian state, Russia, rather than to defend the Ottoman interests in the region. So, Cantemir betrayed the Ottoman Empire by signing a secret treaty with Peter the Great in April 1711, at Luck, but the improper organisation of the ensuing campaign led to a Russian defeat. The Moldavian Prince escaped unharmed, but he would have to remain in Russia as a refugee for the rest of his life. This historian-Prince believed too much in the theory of the progress of history; he believed that an Empire in ascension such as Peter the Great's Russia could surely defeat a declining Empire. He also wished to take part in this historically rational step and, perhaps, even to hurry it up. But, sadly enough for him, history was not to unfold in accordance with his thoughts. The following years were very difficult. The Prince felt exiled, his wife and eldest daughter died, and his faithful followers gradually returned to Moldavia. The Tsar had provided him with the wherewithal his rank required, but neither the company nor the estate could compare with his milieu and residence in Istanbul. Perhaps paradoxically, during these last twelve years of his life, Cantemir managed to write most of his important books (Hronicul vechimii romano-moldo-vlahilor [The Chronicle of the History of the RomanMoldavian-Wallachians] with a first shorter Latin version, Historia moldovlahica, Descriptio Moldaviae [The Description of Moldavia], lstoria Imperiului otoman [The History of the Ottoman Empire], and Sistemul religiei muhammedane [The Mohammedan Religious System]), in addition to

18

DIMITRIE CANTEMIR

A N D THE I S L A M I C

WORLD

several other shorter ones. Whether by coincidence or not, they are equally divided, as we can see, between Romanian and Ottoman history and civilisation, the two cultures in which he had been educated and from which he was now parted. Hronicul circulated in manuscript and would become a fundamental work for Transylvanian historians, when they defended the Latin origin of the Romanian people. Descriptio Moldaviae shows that the relatively few years Dimitrie Cantemir spent in his own country were well spent, since his work presents a coherent, realistic and significant picture of the Romanian people and its customs, in a book that also contains a good map of Moldavia, drawn by the author's hand. His election in 1714 to the Berlin Academy no doubt gave fresh impulse to the Prince's rich scientific activity, a domain in which Dimitrie Cantemir felt rewarded. After 1718, he decided to become involved in the political life of the Russian Empire, and consequently moved to Sankt Petersburg, where he married Anastasia Ivanovna Trubetskoya, a princess who was 30 years his junior, and was appointed member of the Senate, secret councillor to the Tsar, and specialist in Oriental issues. Peter the Great's interest in the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea made Dimitrie Cantemir an important aide to the Tsar and no doubt acted as an impetus toward the publication in 1722 of The Mohammedan Religious System, despite the Russian Synod's objections to the publication of a book with an Islamic content. Cantemir accompanied the Tsar in the 1722 expedition to collect data about the peoples and civilizations in the Caspian region. These observations were published posthumously in 1728 under the title De moro Caucaseo1, in Gottlieb Siegfried Bayer's edition, to whom the manuscript had been entrusted by the author's youngest son from his first marriage, Antioch, the future Russian ambassador to London and Paris, an important poet of the Russian litterature, who took it upon himself to see his father's works published. The fatigue of this last campaign, however, worsened the Prince's diabetes; he set for home in December 1722, where he died toward the end of the summer in 1723. His books were to prove more or less fortunate: The Wise Man's Argument... and The System were published during his lifetime, The History of the Othman Empire eleven years after his death, while the others had to wait for the 20 th century to be properly edited. Although he was recognized as a historian of the Ottoman Empire and the Romanian people, although The Chronicle... proved to be useful even in manuscript copies, Cantemir's greatest regret today would probably be that his unpublished novel, [The Hieroglyphic History], with the neologisms and the sentence structures 1 De moro Caucaseo ; ed. by T.S. Bayer, in Comentarii Academiae Scientiarum Petropolitanae, vol. I, St. Petersbourg, 1728, p. 425-463.

INTRODUCTION

19

he had proposed in it, could not contribute to the development of literary Romanian as he would have wished. *

The present work stemmed from a sharp sense of contrariety I experienced years ago, when, at the beginning of my studies of Dimitrie Cantemir, I was often puzzled by the fact that especially in his "Islamic" works, the Prince was regarded as a sort of island in an ocean, without either predecessors or noteworthy followers. Yet this position did not seem realistic. Dimitrie Cantemir, at the beginning of the 18 th century, could not have been the first important writer about the Ottoman Empire. From the middle of the 7 t h century (the beginning of Islam) or that of the 15 th (the conquest of Constantinople), some type of consideration and interpretation of Islam and the Ottoman Empire must have existed. Within this current of opinion, Dimitrie Cantemir would have his own place. If from the point of view of the scientific space in which this work was written (that of Romania), it was necessary to moderate certain views and to bring them in line with a more realistic and human dimension, from the point of view of the rest of the world, the important task was to describe the part played by Cantemir's writings and the place they occupied in the development of the historical perspective on the existence of the Ottoman Empire. Fortunately, the following pages function both ways and suggest an objective and carefully verified placement of Dimitrie Cantemir's works about the Ottoman Empire in their proper European context. Secondly, a grouping of the information contained in Cantemir's works was considered necessary for making critical observations. The importance of the notes in The History of the Othman Empire was remarked upon from the very beginning, but their exact value could hardly be gauged without a coherent picture of these notes. Therefore, we have organized these notes in an annotated system that allows the reader to see exactly what area they cover. Also, it seemed meaningful to conduct an extended study, based on Virgil Candea's observation concerning the closeness between certain fragments from Rycaut and Cantemir, in order to find out what was the mechanism of these loans and their adaptation. This was a continuation of my preoccupation to verify, with as many reference points as possible, the importance and originality of these two works. Another loan, this time from Moslem literature, raised another more difficult problem. This was represented by several pages in The Mohammedan Religious System that Cantemir had transcribed from a cryptic text on the

20

DIMITRI E C A N T E M I R AND THE I S L A M I C

WORLD

Apocalypse. The relatively short bibliography I was able to collect with no small degree of difficulty allowed no more than an outline of the theoretical framework of this question, since Cantemir's source and the meaning of the text remain obscure. The overall goal of the considerations included in this work was, as already mentioned, to place Dimitrie Cantemir's writings in their European context. Dimitrie Cantemir and the Islamic World thus represents an assessment of Cantemir's place not within the Islamic world itself, but within the Islamic world as seen from the Christian perspective of his time, in front of which Dimitrie Cantemir had to present his books and to whose standards he adhered.

THE TRADITION OF THE HISTORIES OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

When Paul Rycaut's book The Present State of the Ottoman Empire1 appeared in 1668 (a book which was to mark a turning point in the manner of writing about the Ottoman Empire and which Dimitrie Cantemir was to read attentively), its author could write that he would not reiterate already familiar information about the Prophet's life, but that he would proceed directly to those facets of the Islamic religion that were less well-known. This was an indication that the study of the Islamic faith had preoccupied Europeans for quite some time, and that understanding of this subject had attained a reputable level for the criteria of the times. It had already been 500 years since the first translation of the Koran into Latin (1146), begun on the initiative of Peter of Cluny and realized by two translators of the Toledo school. This translation would later be re-edited by Bibliander (Machumetis Saracenorum principis, eiusque succesorum vitae, ac doctrina ispeque Alcoran..., Zurich, 1543; 2nd ed., Bale, 1550)2. More than 150 years later, on the initiative of Raymond Lull and Roger Bacon, the Vienna Council (1311-1312) decided to establish several Oriental language departments (Hebrew, Chaldeian and Arabic) at the Universities of Rome and Paris. Yet this was not a field of study rooted in pure scientific curiosity; its basis was practical and political. After the Arab conquest of Spain the successfull Ottoman offensive caused Europeans to study this extraordinary military phenomenon more closely. Thus languages were studied in this order of priority -Arabic first, then Persian and Turkish, as Arabic was the language of the Koran and the interests of the Europeans were aimed primarily in the theological direction in order to fight against Islam. Rycaut and Postel, in their renowned books 3 , made a general presentation of the Ottoman society of Sonia P. Anderson, in An English Consul in Turkey: Sir Paul Rycaut at Smyrna, 1667-1668, Oxford, 1989, pp. 42-43, has noted that the edition which is recognized today as the first edition is, in reality, the second, the first having been printed at the end of August 1666 and bearing the date 1667 on the title page. But that edition burned before being distributed and only 22 copies remained. A

At the same time, the printing of certain versions in the German language was forbidden, as they would then be accessible to a larger readership (and would thus have become more dangerous). Therefore it was considered right that only theologians (readers of Latin) should be exposed to this book — to attack it, of course. 3 P. Rycaut, The Present State of the Ottoman Empire and G. Postel, De la République des Turcs.

22

DIMITRIE CANTEMIR

A N D THE I S L A M I C

WORLD

their time, with a mixture of historical and religious elements. Thus, at the beginning, there were two different branches of argument, the historical and the religious. The history of religious polemic began, as we will see in the following chapter, about a century after the appearance of Islam (beginning with St. John the Damascene) and would appertain only to theologians, first those of the East and then those of the West. Later on, in the 18 th century, when the study of Islam was no longer the exclusive domain of theologians, it would lose its tone of polemicism and become more descriptive in nature. Historical data about the Ottomans appear, naturally, much later, after the formation of the Anatolian principalities, as well as after the confrontations between the Byzantines with Osman and Orhan. But up until that time the religious polemic had had time to crystallize 1 . In the case of the Ottomans, of course, the European religious and historical perspectives would reciprocally strengthen. There were two important historical moments in which the European interests in the Ottoman Empire were powerfully stimulated: these were, naturally, the conquest of Constantinople and the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent. At the same time as the first wars against the Turks there appeared the first European prisoners. They would become slaves and would follow their masters in all their adventures; those most educated were to remain at the Sultan's court or with his highest dignitaries. They, who were to live a goodly part of their lives in the Ottoman society, were those who would write the first Western chronicles about that society. (We must note here that we refer only to Western writers who wrote about the Ottoman Empire, amongst whom Dimitrie Cantemir was one. Byzantine chronicles, obviously older, pertained to another tradition.) This would be the case for Johann Schiltberger (1391-after 1438) and Giovanni Maria Angiolello (1450-1525). Schiltberger was taken prisoner by Beyazid the First in the battle of Nicopolis (1396), and would become, after the battle of Ankara (1402), a slave of Timurlenk, with whom he would travel through Armenia, Georgia and Siberia until 1427, but his writings were not to be published until 1859 2 .

1 See Adél-Théodore Khoury, Polémique byzantine contre l'Islam (VIII'-XIH" siècles), Leiden, 1972. 2 Reisen des Johannes Schiltberger aus München in Europa, Asia und Africa von 1394 bis 1422, published by Fr. Hermann, München, 1859. A better edition, Hans Schiltberger Reisebuch, published by Dr. Valentin Langmantel, appeared in 1885 in Tübingen.

THE H I S T O R I E S OF THE O T T O M A N E M P I R E

23

Angiolello, taken prisoner in 1470 during the battle of Negroponte, was to be given by the Sultan as a gift to his son. He would later be at the battle between §tefan eel Mare [Steven the Great] and Sultan Mehmed the 2 nd , and was an eyewitness to Mehmed's death on May 3,1481. 1 Less known, but to all appearances more interesting and pertinent for the 15th century, were the observations of Georgius of Hungary (1422-1502), who was also known as Father Gheorghe of Transylvania (whence he came), in his Tractatus de Moribus Condicionibus et Nequitia Turco rum2. A slave for 20 years (1438-1458), his is the oldest description of the dance of the Whirling Dervishes (the Mevlevi). Half a century later Lodovico Varthema, who left from Venice in 1502, would be the first European to be present (in disguise) at the rituals in Mecca 3 . Here closes the era of the "slave writers". Naturally this was not a case of Histories, but rather of observations from their own personal experiences, of the mores and the occurrences of the time, to which they were witnesses. They were not even attempting to write with an historical scope, but only to describe an exotic society. After these "slave writers" would appear the adventurers, who were to try even harder to accentuate the exoticism of these places so as to make their "aura" even more exotic. John Smith (1579- 1631), as an example, always has to fight with one Turk or another, and is always saved by a lady4. Beginning in the 16 th century those who were to write about the Ottoman Empire would be, for the most part, emissaries: secretaries, translators, consuls and ambassadors. The great intellectuals, authors of world history, appeared at the same time (as, for example, Paolo Giovio, the author of Historiarum Sui Temporis, Libri XLV, 1551), who would write about the Ottoman Empire without even crossing its borders. And, also in the 16 th century, university-level education in Oriental languages was begun at the Collège de France. Its first professor of Arabic was Guillaume Postel (15101581), about whom we shall discourse further on. We should also not forget the good diplomatic relations between France and the Ottoman Empire during ' His descriptions were published in Historia turchesca (1300 - 1514), Bucharest, 1909, by N. A. Ursu, who attributed this title to Donado da Lezze, pointing out that Angiolello was only the author of the memoirs which had been integrated into the contents of the chronicle. ^ Published by Bibliander at the same time as the republication of the Cluny text, using the pseudonym Captivus Septemcastrensis. See Al. Stan, "Preotul Gheorghe, islamist transilvanean in secolul al XV-lea [Father Gheorghe, a Transylvanian Islamist in the 15 th century]" in Studii teologice [Theological Studies], 3-4, 1970, pp. 291-298. This work is also recognized by N. Daniel who considered that, in general, travelers had better and more independent viewpoints than other foreigners as far as facts concerning daily life (but less so in questions of dogma, theory, etc.). See N. Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image, p. 282. 3

See L. di Varthema, Travels, 1503-1508, London, 1863. Càlàtorii stràini despre Tarile Romàne [Foreign Travelers about the Romanian Principalities], 1972, Vol. IV, p. 515.

4

24

DIMITRIE CANTEMIR

AND THE I S L A M I C

WORLD

the reigns of King Francis the First and Suleiman the Magnificent, to whom Postel would be a witness, traveling to Istanbul in 1538 in the suite of Ambassador Jean de la Forêt. Hans Dernschwam 1 (1494- 1568) was a transitional personage between the centuries. His writings retained the descriptive style of personal memories and thoughts, characteristic of the 15 th century "slave writers", but was from an entirely different social status; he accompanied the Imperial Embassy to Turkey in 1553 and returned later on his own. Even he was not very interested in the Empire's history or data, but rather in its antiquities, the beauty of the Siileymaniye Mosque, the lives and the varied peoples of Istanbul (Greeks, Jews, Turks), and the situations of various ambassadors. He was to see Suleiman the Magnificent's festive procession after the war against the Persians. He mentioned his contemporary, Imperial Ambassador Busbecq, himself the author of a volume of letters from the period of his ambassadorial service. Unfortunately Dernschwam's memoirs were not published until 1923 2 . Yet books about the Ottoman Empire were usually published more quickly, during the author's lifetime or at most, as in the case of d'Herbelot, in the year of his death. A phenomenon which had its beginning in the 16 th century and flourished in the 17 th century was the large number of republications and translations. Well-known books about the Ottoman Empire would reappear at several-year intervals after their first publication and in 3- 5 editions, sometimes even more, during the following centuries. Likewise these same books, considered to be somewhat important, were translated relatively rapidly into another European language and, though after a longer interval, were translated a second or third time, either from the original or from a previous translation. Latin appears to have been the preferred language in the 16 th century, but modern languages were to take its place in the following century. Several fundamental translations were made into Latin during that period: Philippus Lonicerus 3 and Johannes Leunclavius (Hans Lôwenklau) 4 made the first translations of Turkish chroniclers. The chronicle of Laonic

1 See N. Iorga, "Encore un voyageur en Turquie au XVI e siècle: Dernschwam", in Revue historique du sud-est européen, 1933, pp. 144 - 155. 2 Tagebuch einer Reise nach Konstantinopel und Kleinasien, 1553 - 1555, publ. by Franz Babinger in Studien zur Fuggergeschichte. 3 Chronicorum Turcicorum in quitus Turcorum origo, principes, imperatores, Francofurti, 1578. 4 Annales sultanorum Othomanidarum, Francofurti, 1588; Historia Musulmana Turcorum, Francofurti, 1591, 1596.

THE H I S T O R I E S OF THE O T T O M A N

EMPIRE

25

Chalkokondylas was also translated in 1556, and would be published in numerous French editions during the 17 th century 1 . Guillaume Postel's De la République des Turcs was to appear in 1560. This work, in the opinion of this writer, is one of the most essential books on the subject, one which marked an important turning point in the Western perception of the Ottoman Empire. But again it is not a history, but an overview of Ottoman society (yet at a higher level than those of the preceding century) as Rycaut's book would be a century later. Right from the beginning Postel stated his objectivity and his intention to be truthful, writing only about what he had seen himself or what he had learned from the harem's eunuchs or from trustworthy sources. It is true that although this book seems to appeal to mass popularity, beginning as it does with something he thought most attractive to readers (that is, a description of Islamic marriage), he proves to have been quite knowledgeable about the nuances of many of their customs, such as: the dowry that the husband would set aside for his wife in case he divorced her, the repudiation which could only be done in front of the kadi, the temporary, kebin, marriage and the obligations issuing from it, Postel's information is correct and well-nuanced, and the Turkish words were properly transliterated. (Cantemir was also to write about "kepin" marriage, using information garnered from Rycaut 2 .) Postel also was familiar with the custom of women dyeing their hair and hands with henna, he knew in detail the ritual and significance of the bath, and that one only spoke in whispers in the harem 3 . These details not only stir up the reader's interest, but also confirm the veracity of his writings. His formal training as an Orientalist eliminated the nuances of exotic curiosity with which his predecessors of the previous century looked at Turkish customs. The 17 th century was marked by large progress in the understanding of Islam 4 . By then there had formed somewhat of a tradition of study, a bibliography, a specialized system of learning. There were fundamental 1

L'Histoire de la décadence de l'Empire Grec et establissement de Celuy des Turcs, 1556, then 1620,1622,1650,1662. 9 Rycaut, op. cit., "kebin", p. 154. 3 Also in Cantemir, The History of the Othman Empire (HOE), p. 219, n. 3 (ms. Annotationes ad Historiae Othmanicae, Lib. II, Cap. V, a. [d], pp. 234 - 235). Throughout the rest of this work, along with the princeps edition known as The History of the Growth and Decay of the Ottoman Empire, London, 1734, will be referred to as "HOE", and we will provide parenthetical indications to the manuscript, Incrementorum et Decrementorum Aulae Othmannicae sive Aliothmanicae historiae...libri très (accessible in the facsimile variant of 1999 or in the printed version of 2002) in order to ensure correctness. 4

A. Pippidi: I deea de "cre§tere de cadere" ... p. 13, "a series of ideas have been clarified and institutionalized." V.V. Barthold, La découverte de l'Asie, p. 140: "Au XVII e siècle, apparaissent les premiers exemples de voyages européens en Orient exclusivement dans un but scientifique." N. Daniel, op. cit., p. 294: "During the seventeenth century much more authentic information became available than had been made so since the thirteenth century."

26

DIMITRIE CANTEMIR

A N D THE I S L A M I C

WORLD

translations, translations of the Koran and dictionaries. But the Ottoman Empire had passed its "epoch of glory" and Europe had been accustomed to this neighbor whose borders had become relatively stable; the repeated failures of the siege of Vienna had proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they could not be extended further. There is also the fact that the Ottoman Empire had no intention of isolating itself from Europe or of promoting the "Turkization" or "Islamization" of the populace (except when it rebelled). The Empire's geographic position made commercial collaboration inevitable, as well as the free circulation of traders and the establishment of treaties and consulates. In the 17 th century there appeared a new series of "tools of the trade" which were more "high-performance" and indispensable: Turkish grammar texts (Megiserus, Leipzig, 1612; Du Ryer, Paris, 1630; Seaman, Oxford, 1670), dictionaries (Meninski, Thesaurus linguarum Orientalium, Vienna, 1680- 1687, the second edition of which appeared a hundred years later under the title of Lexicon Arabico-Persico-Turcicum), translations of the Koran (Du Ryer, 1647; Al. Ross, 1649; Marracci, 1698). The Occident discovered the bibliography of Kâtip Çelebi, and proceeded to study and translate many of the manuscripts mentioned here. The history, religion and customs began to be known and to be studied objectively, without any denigratory spirit; the idea that difference meant inferiority was renounced. Even if Marracci published a refutatio to the Koran, he made his refutation verse-by-verse from his own translation of the original Arabic, thus not avoiding any possible observations 1 . It was also he who gave Europe the first biography of Mohammed, written after Islamic sources 2 . The names of many of the authors still significant today belong to the 17 th century: Lodovico Marracci, Paul Rycaut, Barthélémy d'Herbelot and Antoine Galland. They, as well as others, strove continuously for improvements, and their works always reflected upon those of previous or contemporary authors, with the expressed intention of writing a yet better work and, often, criticizing the inexactitudes of older works (even if, from our viewpoint we can see a rhetorical stratagem). They continued their efforts to write a history of the Ottoman Empire from its beginnings to the present, in compilations which were more or less stated as being so: Michael Baudier, Inventaire de l'Histoire Générale des Turcs, tiré de Chalcondile Athénien, 1 Although he was very well informed he brought back the medieval tradition, in the opinion of N. Daniel, op. cit., p. 298. An opinion that grants more importance to Marracci's knowledge of Islam (and not only to his anti-Islamic position), in Y. Mobarac, Recherches sur la pensée chrétienne et l'Islam, p. 142. 2 Y. Mobarac, op. cit., p. 141. Amongst other things, Marracci helped in the revision of the Arabic translation of the Old and New Testaments and, towards the end of his life, taught Arabic at the University of Rome.

THE H I S T O R I E S

OF T H E O T T O M A N E M P I R E

27

Paul love, Leunclavius, Lonicerus, etc., 1617; Richard Knolles, The generall Historié of the Turcs, 1637; the Histoire of Chalkokondylas, continued by Artus and Mézeray up to their time, published in a French edition in 1650. As we have mentioned before, the dimensions of these books were impressive: Knolles — 1,500 pages, the Histoire of 1650 — 1,600 pages, d'Herbelot's Bibliothèque Orientale (1697) — 1,000 pages. We are not attempting to make a connection between the number of pages and the quality of the writing 1 , yet their efforts at documentation are remarkable and obvious. The books in question become yet more complex: the Bibliothèque Orientale is a veritable encyclopedia of the Orient (yet, again, written by someone who was never in the Orient). The Histoire of 1650 comprises, primarily, a history from the beginnings of the Empire until 1647, written by Chalkokondylas, Artus and Mézeray, then a description of the harem by M. Baudier (with details provided by Blaise de Vigenaire), descriptions and drawings of the costumes worn by the inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire by N. de Nicolay, and, finally, a timeline of the various prophecies about the end of the Empire and the translation of some Turkish annals from Latin into French. These two volumes are accompanied by an alphabetical index of the most significant events of the period, a fact which, given the size of the work, shows a remarkable organizational effort and is a sign of the modernization in compiling an edition. We must not forget in this succinct inventory Antoine Galland, who translated the 1001 Nights into French, and lived for several years in Istanbul and Smyrna, or members of the Pétis de La Croix family, father, son and grandson, who also wrote about the Ottoman Empire, being interpreters as well as professors of the Turkish and Arabic languages. The last on our list is Paul Rycaut (1629-1700), who was both author and statesman. Secretary of the British Ambassador in Istanbul from 1660 and the Consul at Smyrna between 1667-1678, he wrote the well-known book The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (from which Cantemir drew inspiration in his Sistemul religiei muhammedane [The Mohammedan Religious System]), and History of the Turkish Empire (1680-1700) 2 . Rycaut's The Present State of the Ottoman Empire is in three parts (Politics, Religion, and The Army), and has been published in numerous editions and translations. The Romanian Academy Library has 7 editions in three languages, all printed between 1667-1682, a period of only 15 years. Sonia Anderson has enumerated the following editions: 12 in English, 14 in French, 1 The works of Postel and Rycaut are of modest dimensions ("small, imperfect works", as they were referred to by Antoine Galland in his Preface to the Bibliothèque Orientale). 2 This book comprises the period between 1623 - 1699.

28

DIMITRIE CANTEMIR

AND THE I S L A M I C

WORLD

4 in Italian, 3 in German, 2 in Dutch, and one each in Russian and Polish 1 . Rycaut's concise and limpid style, not at all characteristic of his predecessors, makes this book easy to read, and his direct sources from whom he gathered his information make it a book worthy of credence, even if there are some dubitable phrases here and there, as for instance, "the Ottomans' expansionism is a punishment for Christians". Most interesting and valuable are the chapters about the Dervishes, whom Rycaut had seen and talked with, and about whom very little was known at that time 2 . *

Within this scientific and editorial system, which had existed for nearly two centuries 3 , Dimitrie Cantemir's History of the Othman Empire (1734) is included 4 . Although, as was not usually the case, this book would have to wait until ten years after its author's death to enter into European circulation, it was then to be published rapidly: translated from Latin into English and printed within two years, it would also be published in French and German within the next ten years. Therefore, when we speak of "Cantemir, the historian of the Ottoman Empire" we cannot ignore the tradition which preceded him in this domain. His especial merit consisted in elevating the level of "professionalism" in the studies of the Ottoman Empire a step higher. Those subjects which had been merely parts of others' books were to be, for Cantemir, a trilogy, with separate books about history, religion and institutions. His history of the Empire was already divided into its "growth" and the "decay", thus proving the beginnings of the interpretation of historical facts 5 . The freedom he had in researching Ottoman libraries was indeed rare and unusual. While other authors quietly traced the course of history, the footnotes in The History of the Othman Empire prove that Dimitrie Cantemir was constantly steeped in a multitude of details, of descriptions, of explanations, of stories, that could not be contained within the framework of the main part

1 Sonia P. Anderson, "Sir Paul Rycaut ", in Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of London, 5/1970, pp. 464 - 491. Several years later she was to find 17 editions in English and only one in Dutch, An English Consul at Smyrna: Sir Paul Rycaut, 1989, pp. 294 - 295. 2 See infra. 3 Beginning with Guillaume Postel (we refer here to the emergence of the type of scholar to which Cantemir belonged also, who had traveled to the Ottoman Empire and knew the languages of the Orient). 4 We are considering this date as the beginning of the circulation of this book. 5 Contemporary historians have not found this concept in the text of the History, since Cantemir confined his reference to it to the title; also, the date Cantemir suggested for the "decay" - 1672 — is no longer considered accurate by today's historians.

THE H I S T O R I E S

OF THE O T T O M A N E M P I R E

29

of the page, that is, the "official" part 1 , but he wanted to include all of these nevertheless. The genuine fame which this book enjoyed was within an era in which the scientific world already knew very well the rest of the literature. The confrontation between Western and Oriental historians (a confrontation of texts which appears in Cantemir's work), was without precedent, and its fruits were to be seen in its greater accuracy. Even if the manner of writing histories were to have been the same, Dimitrie Cantemir's experience in Istanbul could not have been compared to any other European man of culture. Likewise, he consummated the renewed desire to write about the history of the Ottoman Empire "from beginning to end", something which had not been accomplished during the 17 th century with the exceptions of compilations or completions of older texts, as in the case of Chalkokondylas. Regardless of the exactitudes or inexactitudes of certain data, this book breathes with that absolute surety of interpretations and explanations which only an author extraordinarily familiar with his subject matter could convey.

1 As we now know, Cantemir's manuscript in fact contains its notes at the end of the book. The History and the notes are approximately equal in size.

A POSSIBLE EVOLUTION

The first noted commentator on The Mohammedan Religious System, §t. Ciobanu, remarked upon Cantemir's often favorable attitude towards Mohammed and Turks — unlike many of his predecessors —, stating "...he was unable to maintain a note of contempt towards Mohammed; [...] he let himself be seduced by the Islamic sources by which he was surrounded, and even a note of sympathy towards the Prophet made its way into many passages in his writings". 1 He also went on to write, "In some places it seems as if the writer was a friend of the Islamic people, who sympathized with their lives." 2 The single person which §t. Ciobanu mentioned as having been amongst those who shared "the most erroneous opinions about Mohammed" is Voltaire, who wrote after Cantemir, and is known in modern criticism as having been the last illustrious person to promote a medieval-type attitude towards Islam 3 . The same author discreetly passes over the scandalous episodes told by Cantemir 4 . "Here the author tells us about Mohammed's daughter, about the number of his wives, about his death. These are beliefs that Cantemir gathered from the talk of the people." 5 From where did this attitude of contempt and negation of Islam come? Naturally, we must not ignore the normal reaction of scorn and great circumspection towards an unknown culture. This reaction is even greater when the other culture has a different religion, which presupposes an essential difference at the highest spiritual level. But, in the case of Islam, the contact with Christianity was not only a cultural problem. As modern researchers have shown 6 , this attitude was formed right from the first century of Islam's existence by the Christians in Syria, at the time of their occupation by

1 §t. Ciobanu, lstoria literaturii romane vechi [The History of Old Romanian Literature], p. 592 Bucharest, 1992. 2 Idem, p. 597. On this topic, see Djavad Hadidi, Voltaire et I'Islam, Paris, 1974. 4 This concerns the stories about Mohammed's sensuality as well as that of his daughter Fatima, about the husbands' excessive duties in the polygamous marriage, or about the secret practices in the harem. The irony and sarcasm employed by Dimitrie Cantemir in his narrative are stylistically delectable; however, from a scientific point of view, they are inappropriate. It has been said that these stories were introduced for Peter the Great's amusement and delectation; however, it is certain that Cantemir will always be reproached for those passages. 5

§t. Ciobanu, op. cit., p. 593. The works to which this writer has had access are by Norman Daniel, Youacchim Mobarac and Adel-Theodore Khoury. 6

32

DIMITRIE CANTEMIR

AND THE I S L A M I C

WORLD

Arabs 1 . He who laid the foundation and traced the directions of Christian polemics was St. John the Damascene (655-749), in his work De Haeresibus, Chapter 101, dedicated to Islam (although there is some doubt as to the paternity of this chapter). It is to him that is due the consideration of Islam as a heresy from the theological point of view, and as the coming of the Antichrist from the eschatological point of view2. Thus, aside from the theological differences between Christianity and Islam, the armed danger represented by Islam led to the distortion of the perception of the beliefs of those people who were considered enemies. This "Eastern" perception later migrated to the West, entering Europe via Spain and imposing itself as an European viewpoint, gradually becoming a genuine canon about what the Islamic peoples believed (in the Christian opinion). During the following centuries Byzantine theologians mapped out a strategy for combating Islam, based on three fundamental elements: the demonstration of the falsity of Mohammed as a prophet, of the Koran as a holy text, and of Islam as a religion.3 But nevertheless, even in the West, access to the original texts had been available for a long time. We will make a single, but illustrious, mention; the body of texts edited in Cluny in 1146, amongst which was the translation of the Koran from Arabic into Latin. Yet the problem in these first centuries was not the knowledge of these texts, but their interpretation. The interpretations of Islamic theologians were completely ignored while a new Christian interpretation was formulated, oriented at selecting those elements susceptible to being used as proof of the spiritual and moral inferiority of Islam. It is certain that the essentials of Islamic belief were known to those scholastic and other educated authors who took a serious interest in the subject [in the 12 t h -13 t h centuries]; much was even published by popular writers. There was not, of course, any very subtle appreciation of the niceties of Islamic doctrine, and there was not usually a great desire to understand what was known. This knowledge served a polemic cause and the data were assessed in ways which must be unacceptable to Muslims. 4

This same phenomenon manifested itself in the Byzantine era. "Les arguments qui militent en faveur de la vérité du Christianisme servent aussi, comme une lame à deux tranchants, à prouver la fausseté de l'Islam."5 * N. Daniel, op. cit., p. 2. Youacchim Mobarac, op. cit., p. 4. 3 Mobarac has also presented some Christian texts that contain opinions favorable to Islam. ^ N. Daniel, op. cit., p. 45. 5 A.-Th. Khoury, Polémique byzantine contre l'Islam (VIIe - XIF siècles), Leiden, 1972, p. 12. 2

A

P O S S I B L E

E V O L U T I O N

33

Even with this distorted perspective, which selected and augmented facts relevant to polemics while ignoring others, one can say that Islam, between the 12 th and 14 th centuries, began to be treated in a more serious manner. The literature pertaining to it was constantly developing and becoming more profound, and the fantastic elements were abandoned in time. We shall not present this evolution in detail (its essential elements having been mentioned in the preceding chapter), but shall hurry on to Cantemir's time. It should be mentioned that, during the 16 th and 17 th centuries, the number of texts which approached the subject of Islam from, we shall say, a scientific rather than theological manner multiplied. More descriptive works appeared about Islam and its practices (prayers, the muezzin's call, ritual bathing, and the practices of the Dervishes). While the theologians' works were more focused on combating dogma than on the study of customs (within the limits in which there was a dogma to combat — ritual bathing is nothing but a simulacrum of baptism 1 , for example), those who began to write in this period — educated men, diplomats, and even adventurers, albeit people without specialized theological training — were interested in what they saw, in customs they had witnessed themselves, in the people's costumes, and the differences amongst the Dervishes they saw on the streets of Islamic cities. And, on the front of religious study, the theologians' contact, being purely through books, (theologians studied Islam; they didn't travel) was supplemented with direct experience (as much as possible, although nevertheless in a rather superficial manner). During this era most of what was written were chapters or sections within a work which dealt with "de la religion des Turcs", as are the books by Postel and Rycaut. More rare were books about Islam which did not put together all of the author's knowledge about the subject, including all its domains, but which more or less equally combined the theoretical part of the religion as well as the elements of its practice. We do not contest the value of the chapters under discussion, yet we wish to emphasize the differences of perspective pertaining to this subject in the cases of authors who proposed to write an entire book about this theme, in an attempt to combine the knowledge of the theologian with that of the humanist. While researching the card catalogue at the Romanian Academy Library, a work made itself very apparent by the date of its publication — 1721, a year before the printing of The Mohammedan Religious System. It was, in fact, a translation into French of a work which had appeared in Latin in 1705, in a second edition in 1717, and, if we are to believe the translator, it 1

Postel drew a parallel between baptism and circumcision (De la République des Turcs, p. 39).

34

D I M I T R I E C A N T E M I R A N D THE I S L A M I C

WORLD

had already appeared in German, Dutch and English editions 1 . Also noteworthy was the fact that the author's name had not been included in any Romanian bibliographies, but only in two very specialized foreign works — Youacchim Mobarac, Recherches sur la pensée chrétienne et l'Islam, Beirut, 1977, and Mohamed Abdel-Halim, Antoine Galland — sa vie et son œuvre, Paris, 1964. This meeting with a work from the same time as Cantemir would prove to be extremely fruitful. The author in question is Adrien Reland (1676-1718), a Dutchman and professor of Oriental languages at the University of Utrecht, and his work is entitled De Religione mohammedanica2 (La Religion des Mahométans, exposée par leur propres docteurs, La Haye, 1721, in the edition studied for this work) 3 . It must be stated from the beginning that the translator, David Durand, provides us with the "popular" version of the Latin edition (as he himself confesses 4 ), motivated by the fact that scholars knew Latin and could therefore have access to the more elaborate text and to its citations in Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and Syrian, while those who were not scholars, but were nevertheless educated men and interested in the subject, would prefer a more succinct version 5 . The book is in two parts (we will not discuss the part added by the translator): "Le catéchisme des Mahométans (abrégé)" (Compendium theologiae mahommedanicae, a bilingual Arabie — Latin text) and "Éclaircissemens sur les opinions qu'on leurs a faussement attribuées" (De religione Mahommedanica Liber II — agens de nonnullis, quae falso Mahommedanis tribuuntur). The first part is a translation of an Arabian manuscript (his making an Islamic text available corresponded with the author's idea of studying Islam through its texts, as expressed in the Preface), a succinct manuscript of twelve chapters: "Idée generale des Principes de la Religion", "De la Foi en Dieu", "Des anges", "Des Livres Sacres", Des Envoyez de Dieu", "Du Dernier Jour", "Des Secrets de Dieu", "Des Lavemens 1 The 1712 English translation was done from the 1705 Latin edition, and the French translation was done from the 1717 edition. 2 j n S pite of the book's qualities, Reland uses in its title - and not only there - the improper term "mahomedan". But also, the same misusage appears in H.A.R. Gibb's otherwise excellent book, which was published in the 20 th century. (See Bibliography). 3

This book is known and appreciated in other works: "Reland's de religione mohammedanica (1705) is certainly the most important of several that helped to clear away legend and substitute fact, and only fact." (N. Daniel, op. cit., p. 295). 4 "J'avoue que j'ai poussé mes libertez encore plus loin. Car non seulement j'ai retranché de ma Traduction tout ce qui est purement Arabique et Rabbinique, ne voulant pas me donner des airs qui ne me conviennent pas; mais je vous confesse encore qu'à l'égard de ces Eclaircissemens, ce n'est pas proprement une Traduction-, ce n'est tout plus qu'une Imitation." (Reland, La religion des mahométans, Préface du Traducteur, pp. XIV - XV). 5 Nevertheless, the translator's attitude seems excessive even for the 18 th century. He modified much of the text through vulgarization, added a part which seemed useful to him and which he put before everything else, and wrote a preface so large as to be way out of proportion with the book itself (one third of the entire text).

A

POSSIBLE

EVOLUTION

35

ou Purifications", "Des Prieres", "Des Aumônes", "Des Jeûnes", Du Pélérinage de la Mecque". Certain Arabie formulae come through clearly even in French: "à être persuadé dans le cœur et à confesser de la bouche" (p. 13), "à croire dans son âme et à confesser de la bouche" (p. 25), "les purifications que nous (italics ours) sont prescrites" (p. 35), "notre sonna" (p. 37). The second part, "Éclaircissemens", 41 in number, contain the authors clarifications of certain false opinions about Islam, rooted in European scientific tradition. These roots, writes Reland, consist in the severely distorted knowledge of the Islamic religion and civilization (a deliberate distortion, in N. Daniel's opinion). This distorted knowledge was caused by the fact that the translations were scarce and inaccurate (and the student was referred to these rather than to the originals); by the relative lack of contact with the Islamic world; and above all, by the preconceived notion that the latter was "bad" or "inferior" 1 . Christians who go to the Orient, says the author in his preface, do not know Arabic. This was, in fact, the reasoning behind the idea that Islamic people did not want to talk about their religion. Reland does give some positive examples in R. Lull and L. Marracci. In the past, he wrote, there even existed a tradition of written disputation 2 . Another group was also to blame for the lack of understanding — the Greek Orthodox population. The bad impression about them was general: Reland, "a lack of education and culture", the author of the Preface, "ridicules", "ignorants et vindicatifs" 3 . Reland agreed that it was a bad religion, 4 but contended that it was neither ridiculous nor primitive. "Si tout cela est bien vrai, on a peine à 1 His admirable tolerance is echoed in the following phrase. "C'est le sort de toutes les Religions, qui ont jamais été, ou qui sont encore aujourd'hui en quelque vogue, dans le Monde, d'avoir été mal comprises d'abord, et ensuite maltraités, par leurs adversaires, avec beaucoup de passion et d'iniquité." (A. Reland, op.cit., "Préface de l'Auteur", p. XCIX). See also N. Daniel, op. cit., p. 1: "The earliest Christian reactions to Islam were something like those of much more recent date. The tradition has been continuous and it is still alive." i ^ For more on this, from the bibliography consulted for this work, see Manuel II Paléologue, Entretiens avec un musulman, 7e Controverse, texte critique, traduction, introduction et notes par Abdél-Théodore Khoury, Paris, 1966. Manuel the Second spent two winters (1390 - 1391 and 1391 - 1392) in the camp of Baiazid the First at Ankara, during which time, as a guest of a mudarris, he was asked to explain to him the elements of Christianity. The dialog took place in public and was mediated by an interpreter. From A-Th. Khoury's introduction, we find out that 26 of these genuine debates took place. These debates having taken place on Ottoman territory, they are totally lacking in the usual invectives of Byzantine texts on this same subject. See also, later, E. de Hurmuzaki, N. Iorga, Documéntele privitoare la istoria românilor [Documents Pertaining to the History of the Romanian People], vol. XIV, Bucharest, 1915, p. 412 (cited by V. Cândea, introductory study to The Mohammedan Religious System, 1977,' p. XXVII): in 1709, Hrisant Notaras discussed eschatological problems with Islamic theologians. See also Cantemir himself, HOE, p. 31, n. 7 (ms. Armotationes Lib. I, Cap. Ill, a. [h], p. 15) and HOE, p. 162, n. 36 (ms. Annotationes, Lib. 11, Cap. Ill, a. [qq], pp. 163 - 165). 3

Rycaut was of the same opinion, op. cit., p. 80 (see infra). Any Christian author of these centuries who proposed to write about the Islamic religion in as objective a manner as possible considered that he had to plainly affirm his Christian faith. Here, perhaps, even more so because the author was Protestant, and in the controversies between Catholics and Protestants, the first accused the others of similarities with Islam (among others, Marracci, as mentioned by Reland). 4

36

DIMITRIE CANTEMIR

AND THE I S L A M I C

WORLD

comprendre que tant de Nations diverses aient pu embrasser une Religion si absurde." 1 Several years earlier Antoine Galland had said the same thing in a more general manner. "Les Orientaux ne sont moins partagés d'esprit et de bon sens que les autres nations qui nous sont plus connues à cause de leur voisinage." 2 The second part of the "clarifications" comprises a diverse set of themes. Here are some of the titles: "S'il est bien vrai que les Mahométans croyent un Dieu corporal", "Si les Mahométans font Dieu Auteur de Péché", "Si les Mahométans adorent Vénus", "S'ils font profession de croire que Dieu lui-même prie pour Mahomed", "Si les Mahométans s'imaginent que les ordures de l'âme soient lavées par les ablutions du Corps", "Si les Mahométans vont à la Mecque, pour visiter le Sépulcre de Mahomed", etc. The structure of the chapters is as follows: he enumerates authors and the works in which they made such affirmations (the most well-known amongst these authors are St. John the Damascene, Anna Commena, Abraham Echellensis, Seldenus, Nicolas de Cues, Thomas Artus, Du Ryer, Pocock, Marracci, and Rycaut; naturally, the less important authors being his most frequent "victims"); then he shows the verse from the Koran upon which these affirmations were based and how their meanings were twisted, either by translation or by interpretation. To contradict so many Christian authors with the Koran in one's hand was a revolutionary idea, even for the 18 th century, and even if the purpose was strictly scientific. Reland was, depending on the case at hand, sarcastic, precise, or revolted towards the attitudes of Europeans: • God "est envelopé dans ce Globe massif que lui prête Euthymius" 3 ; • "L'Accusation précédente [the belief that God is the author of Sinl est atroce, Théologiquement parlant; mais celle-ci [that they adore Venus] est grossiere" 4 ; and elsewhere, "L'Accusation précédente [that they negate

1

Reland, op. cit., Epistle to Pierre Reland, p. V. "Avertissement" to Les Paroles remarquables, les Bons mots et les Maximes des Orientaux (translations), Paris, 1694 (cited by M. Abdel-Halim, Antoine Galland - sa vie et son œuvre, Paris, 1964, p. 158). 3 Reland, op. cit., p. 94. An analysis of this subject is to be found in A.- Th. Khoury, Polémique byzantine contre l'Islam, pp. 338-341. Using as a starting point the erroneous translation of one of the names of God (samad), some Byzantine authors (Nicetas of Byzantium, Euthymius Zigabenus) sustained that Mohammed had effectively said that God was of a spheroid and compact nature. 4 Idem, p. 99. However strange it may seem, this supposition sprang from the celebration of Fridays |Tr. n.; In many European languages the word for "Friday" has as its root the name of the goddess Venus (Latin "Veneris dies", French "Vendredi", Romanian "Vineri", for example); this applies even to English in its own way, as Friday is named after the Norse goddess Freya, the Nordic counterpart of Venus] as holidays/feast days, combined with the Europeans' eternal fascination with the fact that polygamy was allowed in Islam. 2

A POSSIBLE

EVOLUTION

37

Providence] est odieuse, mais elle est compréhensible. Pour celle-ci [that they believe that God Himself prays for Mohammed], elle ne l'est point du tout" 1 ; • "La Malice est-elle pardonnable à un Chrétien et l'ignorance à un Traducteur? Pourquoi mettre, dans le titre, ce qu'on ne met pas dans le texte ce qui n'est pas conforme au titre? N'y a-t-il pas des Dictionnaires Orientaux, ou d'autres Livres Arabes, qui nous avertissent de faire cette distinction [between demons and spirits]?"2 ; • An author, Grelot, in Voyage de Constantinople, describes Mohammed's grave in Mecca in great detail (this grave is, in reality, in Medina) and considered the pilgrimage to Mecca as a visit to the Prophet's grave 3 . Reland explains this by a parallel to a Christian practice. As monks journeyed to Jerusalem to visit the Holy Sepulchre, the same thing was thought about the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca. He makes another parallel with Christianity, but in the sense of a correct interpretation, when he writes, "Croire en Dieu, en style Musulman, n'est pas croire seulement que Dieu est, mais c'est croire qu';7 est tel que les Mahome'tans le décrivent"4, exactly as the words of Saint Peter refer to Christians. • And a final example, "Ce n'est pas assez de rendre les Mahométans odieux dans leurs Principes de Théologie et de Morale; ce n'est pas assez de les faire tout à fait volupteux jusques dans le Ciel; il faut encore les abrutir sur la Terre et leur faire manger jusqu'aux Chiens et jusqu'aux Loups."5 It is easy to observe that this book has nothing in common with the work of Dimitrie Cantemir, in structure. It is comprised of 6 books: "About the False Prophet Muhammad" (his life, morals, receiving of the Law, his journey to Heaven, his miracles, etc.), "About the Curan" (its teachings, demonstration of the falsities in the Koran, its style, the difficulty of the language), "About the Muhammedan Apocalypse" (premonitory signs of the end of the world), "About Muhammedan Theology" (God, Providence, angels, devils, Adam and Eve, Noah, Moses, David, Solomon, Saint Mary, Jesus, the Last Judgement, the River Araf, Heaven, Hell), "About the Muhammedan Religion" (prayers, the hadjdj, the Koran's commandments, etc.), "About Other Practices in the Muhammedan Religion", (marriage, divorce, burial, 1

Idem, p. 115. Idem, p. 133. About the bad faith of some Christian researchers there are still echoes in the 2 0 t h century, as in Titus Burkhardt, "Comment ces orientalistes peuvent-ils croire que d'innombrables savants musulmans - d'hommes qui craignaient Dieu et l'enfer - aient pu délibérément fabriquer des sentences prophétiques ? On dirait que la mauvaise foi est la chose la plus naturelle du monde ; mais les "spécialistes" n'ont guère le sens des incompatibilités psychologiques." Introduction aux doctrines ésotériques de l'Islam, Paris, 1996, pp. 55-56 note 2

2. 4 5

Idem, p. 175. Postel, for instance, knew what the difference was (op. cit., p. 41). Idem, p. 77. Idem, p. 194.

38

D I M 1 T R I E C A N T E M I R AND THE I S L A M I C

WORLD

holidays, the Dervishes, etc.)- Thus the first part of Reland's work, a short translation from Arabic, corresponds to Books IV and V of The Mohammedan Religious System, but the second part, that of polemics, has no equivalent in Cantemir, who flatly stated that his was not a book of polemics, but a descriptive one, and who generally avoided the errors pointed out by Reland. Its citation here is due in part to its contemporaneity, but mostly due to its similarity in attitude — the desire (and scientific capability) to present another culture as it was. Reland's work points out how many authors attempted to write about Islam and how errors were transmitted from one work to another. It also points out that this state of matters had become intolerable, both for the scientific spirit of the 18 th century and because of the already existing research tools. At the same time, these two books are a proof that the same subject can be viewed from different angles, but with equally adequate results. One could say that Dimitrie Cantemir was in step with the spirit of the times, meant in the highest sense of the phrase. In order to understand the importance of the evolution and the change in attitudes which are due to the savants of the 18 th century, we can compare Reland's work with a book written approximately 80 years earlier: Michel Baudier, Histoire générale de la Religion des Turcs, avec la naissance, la vie et la mort de leur Prophète Mahomet; et les actions des quatre premiers Caliphes qui l'ont suivy; ensemble le tableau de toute la Chrétienneté à la venue de Mahomet, Paris, 1632. We must note that Michel Baudier (d. 1645) had no specialized training in the field of Islam and that his works about the Ottomans were not original: his Inventaire de l'Histoire générale des Turcs (1617) is a compilation (so stated by the author) after works of L. Chalkokondylas, Paolo Giovio, Leunclavius, Lonicerus, etc., and his Histoire générale du Serrail probably has comparable sources. In Larousse du XXe siècle, the work in question (dated 1626, and probably a previous edition than the one at the Bucharest National Library which was consulted for this work) is considered to be a translation from Arabic, which is highly improbable due to its contents. We see in this author a tendency toward "general histories", a common tendency of the era to write histories of the Ottomans "from their beginnings to the present". This tendency undoubtedly sprang from the hope that this "general knowledge" would lead to an explanation of the success of this Empire. Even the religion was considered to be "of the Turks", and not "Moslem" or even "Mohammedan". It must be mentioned that, in Reland's book, the word Islam appears as the name given by Arabs to their religion 1 , but the term was not used in Europe. It is the only place we have come across this word in the older 1

A. Reland, op. cit., p. 3, n. 4 (Latin edition of 1717, p. 4, n. a).

A

P O S S I B L E

EVOLUTION

39

books (although Cantemir mentioned a syntagma, dinislamden, "perfect Moslem" according to his explanation1). At first sight we notice, among other differences, the much longer title of this work as compared to Reland's (a sign of its being closer to an older practice) and the fact that it is twice as long in content (at least in the edition studied for this work). It comprises six books with a relatively classical structure: I - About Mohammed II - About the Koran; The Five Pillars of Faith; About Djihad III - Moslem Hierarchy; Dervishes; Shiites IV - The Creation of the World; Elements of the Koran (Personages from the Old Testament) V - The New Testament - Elements Found in the Koran V I - T h e End of the World Book I also contains a history of Christianity at the time of the coming of Mohammed. Even in the "Table of Contents" the negative connotations are numerous: Mohammed and "sa trompeuse Religion", "contes fabuleux de sa naissance", "les contes extravagantes de ce voyage" [his voyage to Heaven], "les opinions ridicules qu'il a de Dieu", "l'effroyable façon" through which Christians renounce their faith, "les sales exercises" of the Dervishes, as opposed to one note of admiration: "l'admirable modestie" with which they pray2. Some of the themes combated by Reland are to be found here, too: the belief that water cleanses the soul, facing South while praying3, the belief that God is corporeal. We notice that he refers to bairam as Easter, the same as Guillaume Postel, his contemporary who was much more knowledgeable in Oriental studies4. But this is, of course, a question of the more or less normal attempt to equate Islamic and Christian customs. Also amongst the "Christianized" observations are the memories of saints. The erroneous information that the forbidden fruit was a grain of wheat is also found in Cantemir5. In Cantemir we also find the idea that, for the Turks, the killing of The Mohammedan Religious System (referred to hereafter as MRS), p. 170. References are to the pages of the first edition, published in 1722 in Saint Petersburg. Both Romanian editions of the MRS mention this numbering. 2 The Islamic mode of praying was also admired by another author, cited (in the Translator's Preface and in the notes) by Reland - Jean Chardin, Voyage de Perse. Chardin (1643 - 1713) was a French traveler who stayed six years at Isfahan. 3 Also in Postel, who mentioned also that Mecca lay in that direction (up. cit., p. 45). 4 G. Postel, op. cit., p. 63. ^ MRS, p. 110. This error was pointed out by Yves Goldenberg, "Notes en marges de quelques écrits roumains sur le Coran at l'Islam", in Analele Universitajii Bucureçti. Limbi clasice ¡i orientale [Annals of the Bucharest University. Classical and Oriental Languages], 1972, pp. 121

40

DIMITRIE CANTEMIR

A N D THE I S L A M I C

WORLD

one Persian (one Shiite) was worth the same as the killing of 70 Christians (in the Holy War, of course). Alongside the subjective negative connotations and the fantastic themes mentioned, there was another defect in Baudier's writing; the aberrant orthography of Islamic names, which, in some cases, disfigured them completely: Manuhias, Alhacem, Sedishah, Hagipetesh, Geomailers. We are far from criticizing Baudier's work. The fact that he dedicated an entire book to this subject was already, as has been mentioned previously, a sign of the manifest interest in the subject. Yet in a short time this type of "patchwork" information, collected from here and there, from actually hearing about it or not, lacking all critical sense, and with the purpose of pleasing the reader with the most fantastic stories, would make way for a more scientific attitude. *

We have seen how the evolution of thought about Mohammed, the Koran and Islam proceeded until Cantemir. We will now direct our attention to the first two books of The Mohammedan Religious System. Within these theoretical chapters (about Mohammed and the Koran) we can best see the nuances of Cantemir's attitude towards Islamic doctrine. Mohammed was obviously considered a false prophet and the Koran a false holy book, in accordance with the old medieval tactics of negating the legitimacy of Islam by negating its very foundations. Yet in Cantemir's work the syntagma "the false prophet Mohammed" seems to have been a title already in wide usage. This title had been legitimized by the demonstrations of preceding centuries and was used as it stood, indifferent to whether the context was favorable or not to the Prophet. Moreover, we come across situations in which the "welding" of the Islamic text (probably taken from another source) with the formula of Christian attitude is evident (and contradictory), as in the following: Through these words of Gabriel and through clear proofs which strengthened himself and made himself certain, he [Mohammed] began to feel the power of God acting within himself, in order to search, to penetrate and to learn the deep and hidden mysteries of the understanding of God and to propagate the Mohammedan Law, first to the Arabs at Mecca, amongst whom many, in only a few days, converted to his superstition [italics ours]. 1

1

MRS, p. 11.

A

POSSIBLE

EVOLUTION

41

Cantemir wrote that he had taken Mohammed's biography from the book Muhammediye, yet the tone of these first pages show us that it is not a question of a rewriting with commentary, but of a summary, and a summary of mere fragments he had read: Dust never fell on his face, which shone like the Sun; and the glow of his face reached back to the nape of his neck, so he could be entirely illuminated." 1 "He had only a single hair on his chest, which opened up into another forty very fine strands, and they were so luminous that they seemed to be made of pearl."2 "Gabriel taught him to know the whole Koran by heart and explained its mysteries to him. God gave him six virtues: first, to be a gatherer of men by his deeds and words; second, to be always a victor; third, to take the whole world to the mescid\ fourth, to have part of his enemies' wealth; fifth, to be the intermediary between all men and God; sixth, to be the final Prophet.3

How far we are now from the "reversal of hagiography" that medieval thought propagated 4 ! Naturally Cantemir was not in agreement with the citations just given from his book, yet he had the capacity of the man of science to re-present texts and facts about Islam exactly as they had been before. An example of his analytical power comes immediately, in Chapter V, where, in order to improve upon Moslem chronology, he juxtaposes different dates — the year of the Hegira, how old Mohammed was when he began to be a prophet — and certain historical events along with which these had been reported as coinciding. It is interesting that even in Cantemir we find an expression that was quasi-universal during his time, but not only then: lies "worthy of being laughed at" 5 . The generally accepted European word was the French adjective "ridicule". This formula was used extremely frequently in connection with the Islamic faith and customs: by Baudier, Voltaire, Pascal and Reland (who negated this line of thought). The same formula can be found in modern studies, when it is said that the Koran became the object of ridicule because it was unfamiliar 6 . Aside from these tendentious syntagmas (which are, in fact, very few) the text flows smoothly, relating Mohammed's journey to Heaven and his miracles, until Chapter X. But before we even think about making any commentary about the stories contained here we should read this chapter's 1 MRS, p. 7. ^ Ibidem. 3 MRS, p. 8. 4 "It was appropriate, and therefore true, that the enemy of Christ should be in every way and as much as possible unlike Him." (N. Daniel, op. cit., p. 246). 5 MRS, p. 10. 6 N. Daniel, op. cit., p. 77.

42

DIMITRIE CANTEMIR

AND THE ISLAMIC

WORLD

introduction attentively. "In addition to those stories mentioned, many others are circulating, to the great wonder of simple people, while educated people ignore them, and those who hear them do not readily cock their ears to listen [...]. We will add some of them here, for those more curious." 1 Thus Cantemir gives no guarantees for what is related, but quite the opposite 2 . These were, in fact, medieval reminiscences of writings at the lowest scientific level, in the same category as explaining revelations by epileptic seizures — authentic men of science have never accorded them any credit. But one of the episodes most used in the fight against Mohammed's image — his marriage with Zaynab — was ignored by Cantemir. In the chapter about the Koran we find two of the typical medieval accusations in reference to Mohammed: "He was called [...1 the final prophet or apostle, but was sent without any evident miracles (italics ours) and thrived more with his army (italics ours) than with his miracles." 3 As far as the Koran, it is called repeatedly "the Word of God" 4 , but Cantemir did not make the mistake of confusing the personages 5 (as, for instance, Oliver of Paterborn: "Muhammad says in his Qur'an..."): ... the next day Mohammed came to the assembly and said that he had written the verse on paper, but that the author of the words was not he, but God, the Builder of all. 6

Another affirmation — " Mohammed not being consistent, it can be seen in other places in the Koran that he admitted that all people could be saved through the laws of their forefathers" 7 — had already been clarified by Reland. Yet Cantemir believed that Abu Bakr was the true author of the Koran, thus repudiating both the idea of its being a "revealed" book as well as its being attributed to Mohammed. A final argument for his abandonment of the medieval mentality is: As the Holy Scripture of Our Lord Jesus is the truest of all truths and human knowledge, the Koran is without a doubt untrue, and its author will be considered a liar, because any teachings which go against the teachings of the Scripture or are not in agreement with its truth, as are the teachings of the Koran, are lies [...]. But this argument of ours is strong and

1

MRS, p. 27. This, however, did not prevent Cantemir's presentation of the respective anecdotes from gravely affecting his credibility in the Islamic scientific world, even up to today. * MRS, p. 44. 4 MRS, pp. 3 8 , 4 1 , 4 3 , 4 4 . 5 The Koran is a "revealed" text. Neither Mohammed nor anyone else could be its author. 6 MRS, p. 43. 7 MRS, p. 39. 2

A POSSIBLE

EVOLUTION

43

indisputable for a Christian [...] while for a Moslem |... | it counts for nothing." 1 If, in the case of The History of the Othman Empire, the notes and the confrontations between the European and Ottoman bibliographies make it a remarkable work, the step taken in The Mohammedan Religious System is even greater. Although the study of Islam was older than the historiography pertaining to the Ottoman Empire, its mentality remained far behind, summed up for a long time — as a general opinion — as a polemic of theologians. Works which were to describe the Islamic religion in a less polemic mode, written by authors who were not theologians, would appear only later, with Rycaut and Reland. Yet Rycaut treated this question only fragmentarily, and in Reland we confront a translation of small dimensions as well as an extremely interesting part, but still based on a polemic — even if it is a somewhat inverse polemic, of the "rehabilitation" of Islam. A book with the structure of The Mohammedan Religious System, which proposed to deal with the question of Islam in a complete manner, setting itself apart from European fables, starting with the fundamentals and ending with the practices of the Dervishes and heresies, is not to be found during that era. Nothing that could be labeled as medieval conception is met in Cantemir except in a fragmentary and punctiform manner. His book garners the contents of all the works mentioned herein: the theoretical description (of their beliefs) of Reland, the practical description (of the Dervishes) as in Rycaut; likewise, as in The History of the Othman Empire, what has been taken from other sources has been taken from both "camps". In a following chapter we will analyze what he gleaned from Rycaut in detail; but nothing has yet been said about what he took from Islamic literature. There are two texts which Cantemir admitted to using — Muhammediye2 and Esrár-i djefr-i rumüz3, but it is the opinion of this writer that these rewritings also contain fragments quoted as such. 4 There still remains a single fact to discover: why did Dimitrie Cantemir, in his The History of the Othman Empire, give references to other authors, indicating volumes, chapters and pages while, in his The Mohammedan Religious System, not a single author is named, although it is patently obvious that he worked with Rycaut's book on his table? There could * MRS, pp. 46. N. Daniel states, "Scripture was the framework of all medieval thought.", op. cit., p. 253; "Arguments to defend Scripture were illogically based upon Scripture." (p. 271)! 2 This is a didactic poem (9109 couplets) authored by Mehmed Yazidji-oghlu (d. ca 1451), which presents the Islamic doctrine, as it is handed down by the Koran and by tradition. Thè poem was widely known and even made it into print in mid-19 th century. See Fr. Babinger, in Enciclopédie de l'Islam. 3 Esoteric writing that belongs to the Shiite tradition, dealing with the end of the world. See T. Fahd, "Djafr", in Encyclopédie de l'Islam, vol. II, p. 386. 4

As has been demonstrated in the portrait of Mohammed; also see the later chapter about djafr.

44

DIMITRIE CANTEMIR

A N D THE I S L A M I C

WORLD

be two explanations: whereas The History of the Othman Empire incorporates certain traditions, The Mohammedan Religious System was the beginning of a new path. Knowing this, Cantemir did not cite his sources, which perhaps seemed minor to him in any case, taken separately. Another possible explanation could be that Dimitrie Cantemir, in an attempt to consolidate the image of an extremely learned man (which image he already had in Russia, and that was probably the only thing he could depend on), simply remained silent about his sources. In any case, it is certain that this book, which could have represented an important step for the study of Islam in Europe, was not able to pass over the cultural boundaries which the Russian edition of 1722 had fixed. It would doubtless have been considered more important than The History of the Othman Empire and would have better stood the test of time had it been known. Not a single Russian scholar understood its importance at the time, and Antioh 1 , who probably would have thought of The Mohammedan Religious System after The History of the Othman Empire had been published, died shortly after the first book was published.

1 Antioh Cantemir (1708, Istanbul - 1744, Paris), Dimitrie Cantemir's youngest son from his first marriage. Russian Ambassador to London (1732 - 1736) and Paris (1736 - 1744). He is regarded as the founder of modern poetry in Russian literature.

HISTORICAL CONTROVERSIES

The aspects discussed until now in connection with The History of the Othman Empire have not broached the essential subject of this work, which is, evidently, relating the historical events of the Ottoman Empire. It was only natural that the works of Dimitrie Cantemir should be works of his own time, therefore containing errors in dates and information which have since been corrected by contemporary historiography. In this work we do not propose to analyze this aspect, which, on the one hand, we consider to pertain strictly to the domain of history, and, on the other hand, has already been plentifully discussed by historians themselves 1 . Instead, in this work we propose to determine Cantemir's place among the intellectuals of his time and his contributions to changing the means of understanding Islam and the Ottoman Empire. There are several "nevralgic spots", stated as such by Cantemir, the careful study of which has proven to be full of interesting (and, many times, unexpected) knowledge. By this we mean the different ways of relating events by Christian and Ottoman historians — how Cantemir analyzed these differences and to which of them he preferred to give credence. This is what we wish to clarify in our continuation. For someone who has read the notes to The History of the Othman Empire, especially those in the first part, it is obvious that Dimitrie Cantemir worked with Christian and Turkish books side-by-side, which enabled him to compare them and to cite from them. This scientific procedure of his was one of the most serious up to then, and the names he mentions belong to an elite: Chalkokondylas, Sphrantzes, Gregoras, Lonicerus, and Busbecq on the one hand, Sa'adeddin Mehmed Hodja Efendi and Hiiseyin Hezarfenn on the other. His book has a more pronounced Ottoman allure than other Occidental works, as he usually gave the variant of Turkish chroniclers as the principal version (in the text, but not in the notes). He considered these to be more rigorous and more informed, and gave the dates of events using the Turkish calendar (again, 1 See Maria Matilda Alexandrescu-Dersca Bulgaru, "Dimitrie Cantemir - istorie al Imperiului otoman" [Dimitrie Cantemir - Historian of the Ottoman Empire], in Studii. Revistà de istorie [Studies. Journal of History], 5/1973, pp. 971 - 990; Franz Babinger, "Izvoarele turce§ti ale lui Dimitrie Cantemir" [Dimitrie Cantemir's Turkish sources], in Arhìva romàneasca [The Romanian Archives], 1941, pp. 1 - 11 (see Bibliography for the German version); Mihail Guboglu, "Dimitrie Cantemir Istoria Imperiului otomari' [Dimitrie Cantemir and The History of the Othman Empire], in Studii ji articole de istorie [Studies and Articles about Historyl 11/1957, pp. 1 7 9 - 2 0 8 , etc.

46

D I M I T R I E C A N T E M I R A N D THE I S L A M I C

WORLD

in the text, while sometimes dates from both calendars were used in the marginal notes — thus, as a sort of irony of fate, even the date of the conquest of Constantinople is given in the Turkish way; 20 Djemazi-yel-evvel 857H 1 ). The name of §tefan eel Mare [Steven the Great] is given in the manuscript in an Ottomanized orthography (and even in the Arabic alphabet) as "Istefan" 2 . One can affirm that the citation of sources and their critical analysis showed a modern scientific attitude, something not much noted in previous works about Cantemir which rather emphasized his errors in dating 3 . This is, at the same time, proof of his erudition (which no longer needs to be proven) and is also a method of working which permits us to follow the Prince's train of thought, his method of structuring what he knew. For each of the historians he cites Cantemir has an appreciation, a word of praise: Gregoras, "so frequently mention'd by us with honour" 4 , Lonicerus 5 , "a diligent collector of the Turkish affairs" 6 , Saadi Effendi of Larissa, "learned" 7 , Hezarfenn, "the faithful Turkish historian" 8 (in the manuscript, "historicus maximae inter Turcas fidei"), "an accurate Turkish Historian" 9 . It is obvious that Dimitrie Cantemir's bibliography was much richer, although he limited himself to citing illustrious historians. Yet there are times when he mentions those on the bottom rung of the ladder: Orbin of Ragusa 1 0 , "disgrace to all historians" 11 , and about some Turkish historians, "of little authority" 12 . 1

HOE, p. 103 (ms. Lib. II, Cap. I, p. 87). HOE, p. 47 (ms. Lib. I, Cap. V, p. 38). Also pointed out by P.P. Panaitescu and M. Berza. 3 It is worth posing the question as to how much Romanian historiography was influenced by Hammer's article about The History of the Othman Empire ("Sur l'Histoire Ottomane du prince Cantemir", in Journal asiatique, 1824, pp. 32 - 45) . As much as historians have criticized this article, they nevertheless have also usually used Cantemir's mistakes, rather than his innovative contributions, as a starting point (M. Guboglu, "Dimitrie Cantemir - orientaliste" mentions Pascu, Minea, Panaitescu; Maria Matilda Alexandrescu-Dersca Bulgaru, op. cit., mentions Iorga. See also Appendix.). 2

4

HOE, p. 34, n. 1. (ms. Annotationes Lib. I, Cap. IV, a. la], p. 18). All the subsequent English quotes from The History of the Othman Empire in this chapter, are from the 1734 London edition, and therefore are in the English of the time. (tr. n.). ^ In the "Epistle of Dedication" of Lonicerus' work Chronicorum Turcicorum, 1578, p. 3, there is an extremely interesting formula: "incrementa & decrementa regni Sarracenici & Turcici ex certiis historiis excepta". We see here the use of the celebrated expression "growth and decay" long before Cantemir and Montesquieu, and even quite prematurely given the state of the Empire at that time, as, in 1578, only 12 years had elapsed since the death of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Sultan during the Golden Age of the Empire; Cantemir put the date of the turning point at 1672 - the battle of Kamenitsa. 6

HOE, p. 30, n. 8 (ms. Annotationes Lib. I, Cap. V, a. [h], p. 37). HOE, p. VII (ms. Praefatio, p. 16.) 8 HOE, p. 47, n. 2 (ms. Annotationes Lib. I, Cap. V, a. [b], p. 34). 9 HOE, p. 203, n. 71 (ms. Annotationes Lib. II, Cap. IV, a. \AA], p. 218). Mauro Orbini, II regno degli slavi, Pesaro, 1602. 11 HOE, p. 43, n. 25 (ms. Annotationes Lib. I, Cap. IV, a. [B], p. 30). 12 HOE, p. 185, n. 42 (ms. Annotationes Lib. II, Cap. IV, a. \ic! 278] (ms. Annotationes Lib. Ili, Cap. I, a. | e [ pp. 5 - 6), but is contradicted by Dora d'Istria in op. cit., pp. 8 - 9 . 5 HOE, pp. 435 - 436, n. 50 (ms. Annotationes Lib. III, Cap. IV, a. [El, pp. 175 - 179). 6 HOE, p.437 , n. 52 (ms. Annotationes Lib. Ili, Cap. IV, a. [G], pp. 179 - 180). 2

92

DIMITRIE CANTEMIR

AND THE I S L A M I C

WORLD

Besides these tenebrous intrigues so often woven at Sultans' courts, The History of the Othman Empire also contains some fascinating biographies featuring adventurers such as Grigore Ghica, Prince of Wallachia in the second half of the 17 th century. Having become a ruler after plotting against his father, Grigore Ghica betrayed the Turks and ran over to the Austrians although his wife and children were hostages in Istanbul. After a while, Ghica wished to return to Istanbul, but the Austrian Emperor did not grant him permission to do so. Ghica then resorted to a very complex way of escaping: by saying he wanted to become a Catholic and remarry, he was received by the Pope in Rome for an audience and from thence went to Venice, supposedly in preparation of his wedding. One day, he boarded a ship and in a matter of days was back in Istanbul. Shortly thereafter, aided by a very influential Greek named Nicussios Panaiotis, Ghica obtained the Sultan's pardon, but was poisoned to death by a doctor corrupted by the Cantacuzino family 1 . About Panaiotis, who figures only in passing in the above-mentioned story, there is a very ample note only a few pages earlier 2 . According to Cantemir, he owed his exceptional status at the Ottoman court to his truly Greek wiliness. Beneath the walls of the city of Candia during the time when he held the post of dragoman (which post he occupied between 1661-1673, before Alexandra Mavrocordat) he saw that the army was about to give up the siege, and came up with a subterfuge that led to the city's capitulation. Passing himself off as a true Christian and an ally of the besieged city, he succeeded to meet in secret several times with the city commander and to persuade the latter to surrender, on the grounds that a French fleet was just about to join the Turkish forces. The Turkish commanders had actually been informed that a French fleet was headed to Candia, but as an ally and not an enemy of the city under siege. It was the despondency caused by this news in the Turkish camp that gave Panaiotis the idea of using it to his advantage in the first place. Naturally, Morosini, the Governor of Candia, did not believe Panaiotis' report at first, but the Ottomans, whom Panaiotis had instructed in this as well, sent a few ships to sea and had them return to port while flying the French flag. When he saw the salute of peace exchanged by the two fleets, Morosini believed the lie and capitulated. The most fascinating element in this artful deception was that the very fact that triggered it never actually happened: the Turks had been misinformed and the French had never actually left for Candia. The surprising solutions he brought to difficult situations, it was said, as well as his special gift for clairvoyance (he was rumored to have predicted his own death) made Panaiotis invaluable at the Ottoman court, which granted him seldom-bestowed favors, even for the Turks. 1 2

HOE, pp. 277 - 278, n. 4 (ms. Annotationes HOE, pp. 258 - 264, n. 6 (ms. Annotationes

Lib. Ill, Cap. I, a. [d], pp. 3 - 5). Lib. II, Cap. XII, a. [f], pp. 265 - 277).

"ANECDOTICA"

93

Yet again we must ask how it was possible for Cantemir to have learned so many hard-to-know details. This time, we have the answer, too: Panaiotis' servant during the siege of Candia, Maxut 1 , had come to serve at the Moldavian court when Cantemir was an adolescent. Whether learned from home, from conversations and Turkish libraries, or even from first-hand experiences at Istanbul, these stories that are both fantastic and real give us a true sense of the writer's literary talent, while at the same time show us the rhythm of daily life for the Istanbul elite, a tempo many may have imagined as being closer to Oriental slowness.

" The 1001 Nights" The stories that I have grouped under this "Arab"-flavored title are those that have the structure of Oriental tales, displaying a subtle blend of realistic, legendary, and fantastical elements. The story most aptly placed under this heading would seem to be the one about the spoon maker's diamond 2 . During the time of Mehmed the Second, a young man found a huge diamond among the ruins of a former Byzantine palace, which he took to be an ordinary crystal. He sold the stone to a spoon maker for twelve spoons; in his turn, the latter wanted to sell it to a Jewish peddler, but, surprised by the Jew's readiness to pay him whatever amount he asked, the spoon maker wised up and changed his mind. With the perfect ease encountered only in fairy tale, the Jew wrote the Sultan, who, naturally, reacted immediately. The end of the story is more abrupt, however, and lacks the customary twists and turns of the fairy tale, as well as a negative character — the Sultan took the diamond and rewarded both the spoon maker and the Jew. In another story, an artist is saved by demonstrating his art. A painter who was commissioned to paint the portrait of Timurlenk, noticing that the latter was somewhat lame in one leg and blind in one eye, drew him in an attractive manner in the position of an archer, kneeling on one knee and keeping an eye shut; thus the artist managed to stay alive 3 . Pashas hold an important place among the eccentric characters: thus we learn about §i§man Ibrahim Pasha that he suffered from a kind of pathological obesity and would ultimately die because of this corpulence 4 , or about Amca Oglu Hiiseyin Pasha, a great drinker (under pretext that he was ill, he had * This History. 2 HOE, 3 HOE, 4 HOE,

is Cavalry Commander Maxut, portrayed as Ciacalul [The Jackal] in The p. 98, n. 9 (ms. Annotationes Lib. II, Cap. I, a. [ij, p. 84). p. 53, n. 17 (ms. Annotationes Lib. I, Cap. V, a. [r], pp. 38 - 39). p. 281, n. 11 (ms. Annotationes Lib. Ill, Cap. I, a. [1], p. 9).

Hieroglyphic

94

DIMITRIE CANTEMIR

A N D THE I S L A M I C

WORLD

obtained the Sultan's permission to stay home in the afternoons, when he drank without measure), who, by wishing at all cost to return to observing the Moslem rule, had caused his own death by lack of alcohol, as he refused to recant his decision to stay dry 1 . The portraits of these "Pantagruelian" Pashas are joined by that of a Pasha who was a good general, but an immeasurably arrogant and extremely avaricious man — Kara Mustafa Pasha, who hid 3000 bags of gold under the pavement of his bathroom 2 and then killed the entire team of workers who had laid the tiles, a fact which was learned after his death. Another portrait is that of Kopriiluzade Nu'man Pasha, Mehmed Pasha's great grandson, an unusually learned Pasha, who nevertheless was somewhat deranged. Cantemir wrote, "...by applying himself too closely to his lucubrations whilst he was at Constantinople, he contracted such a ridiculous fancy...", that he believed a fly rested on his nose at all times 3 . Also mentioned is Daltaban Mustafa Pasha's traitor — it is said that he died shouting his master's name, shortly after the latter's demise 4 . We will pass by the anecdotes whose protagonist is Nasrudin since these have already been studied elsewhere 5 , and will pause to mention two exemplary tales on both Moslem and Christian religious themes. The first tale 6 refers to the fanciful origin of the great Islamic schism between the Sunnis and the Shiites, which was supposedly caused by a character with the generic name of §eytan Kulu. Exiled from the Empire, he had taken refuge in Persia where, by means of a miracle (which in the Turks' opinion was a false miracle), he converted the population to Shiism: hiding within the hollow of a tree a blank book and a Koran in its traditional form, after 40 days he took out of the hollow the new Koran, written in a different calligraphy, and the old Koran, now erased. The tree was burned so as not to become a place of worship, as the Persians say, or to hide the existence of the books hidden there by §eytan Kulu's hand, and not replaced by a divine power, according to the Turkish version.

1

HOE, pp. 377 - 378, n. 1 (ms. Annotationes Lib. Ill, Cap. Ill, a. [a], pp. 104 - 105). HOE, p. 292, n. 28 (ms. Annotationes Lib. Ill, Cap. I, a. [dd], pp. 25 - 26). 3 HOE, p. 449, n. 7 (ms. Annotationes Lib. Ill, Cap. V, a. [h], pp. 204 - 206). 4 HOE, p. 431, n. 39 (ms. Annotationes Lib. Ill, Cap. IV, a. [rr], pp. 169 - 170). 5 Gheorghe I. Constantin, "Dimitrie Cantemir §i [and] Nastratin Hogea", in Revista de istorie teorie literarä [Journal of History and Literary Theory], nr. 2 / 1973, p. 209 -212. See also its French translation "Démètre Cantemir et Nasr ed-din Khodja", in Türk kültüru araçtirmalari, 1-2 / 1976, Ankara. The author shows that Dimitrie Cantemir was the first European to take note of this character and that, of the three anecdotes he related, only one of them - the one about Timurlenk and the figs - would become widely known. 6 HOE, pp. 133 - 135, n. 4) (ms. Annotationes Lib. II, Cap. II, a. [tt], pp. 128 - 134). 2

"ANECDOTICA"

95

The second tale 1 is somewhat in the same vein, since it recounts the case of a flag bearer who, after betraying a city, was punished with a serious illness. An old monk advised him to convert to Christian Orthodoxy, and, as the flag bearer took the advice, he was miraculously cured.

The Life of the Christians in the Ottoman Empire In 1453, the city where the most important Orthodox Patriarch resided, Constantinople, fell into the hands of "the infidels". Beyond the stereotype of the terror unleashed by the Turks against all Christianity, the two religions inevitably became cohabitants of the same city. In The History of the Othman Empire, Cantemir did not set out to examine this particular aspect of daily life in Istanbul, but rather followed the "rise" and "fall" of the Empire and to a lesser extent the social and religious life. However, his notes shed light on the "details" of the Empire's life, details which will prove essential. Thus, from the bits and pieces that can be found all over the book, from the cited stories, anecdotes, and documents, as well as from the conversations between characters, there emerges a clear enough structure of the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and its Christian subjects. A first pact dates from 1453 and is also mentioned by Dimitrie Cantemir. Only a share of the churches in the Byzantine capital would be turned into mosques, as a consequence of the fact that a part of Constantinople was conquered in battle while another part of the city capitulated. Here, the churches would remain Christian, observing the customary rites, the gates of the city being permitted to stay open during the three nights of the Easter celebration, in order to allow free access to the patriarchal church 2 . This pact was in force until the time of Sultan Selim the First — so for no more than 60-70 years — who ordered that all stone churches be turned into mosques 3 . Christians had to content themselves with their wooden churches. The story,

1

HOE, pp. 383 - 384, n. 10 (ms. Annotationes Lib. Ill, Cap. Ill, a. [kj, pp. 109 - 110). HOE, p. 101 (ms. Lib. II, Cap. I, P- 86): "So from Akserai to Sancta Sophia, all the Churches were tum'd into Jami, but from the Temple Suly Monastir to Ederne Capu, all reraain'd to the Greeks.'" HOE, p. 104, n. 17 (ms. Annotationes Lib. II, Cap. I, a. [r], pp. 93 - 95): "[...] the Feast oi Easter should be kept with full Liberty, and for that purpose the Gate Phenar left three days open for the Christians to come from the Suburbs, and join in the nocturnal Devotions of the Patriarchal Church." 3 HOE, pp. 102 - 105, n. 17 (ms. Annotationes Lib. II, Cap. I, a. [r], pp. 90 - 96). 2

96

D I M I T R I E C A N T E M I R A N D THE I S L A M I C

WORLD

which Cantemir took from a historian, AH Efendi 1 , goes on to tell about the Mufti's and the Grand Vizir's stupefaction in front of this despotic decision that at first also included provisions for forced conversion to Islam. The meeting between the Sultan and the Patriarch turned into a veritable trial where a few venerable soldiers were called as witnesses, where the Patriarch cited the Koran, and the Sultan had to admit at least partial defeat. No later than 1520, then, all stone churches except one became mosques. The exception had a singular destiny because it had been given as a present, together with the street it was located on, to the Greek architect who had designed a beautiful mosque 2 . However, even this church would be at risk during Ahmed the Third's reign, when Dimitrie Cantemir himself presented the letter of donation to the Grand Vizir (Jorlulu Ali Pasha, "which after he had carefully read, three times kissed, and as often rubb'd his Face with, he gave it back into my Hands, and ordered the Turks to give the Christians no farther Molestation" 3 . The image of the physical existence of churches as buildings, beside their transformation into mosques, is completed by the hatt-i sherif decreeing that an old church could be remade by its parishioners on condition that the material they used be the same as in the old church 4 . This situation could be improved by a gift made to mimar-aga, the city's chief architect. This order was practically annulled during the time of the Grand Vizir Kdprülüzade FazilMustafa Pasha, about whom it was said that he built more churches than Justinian. Mustafa Pasha keeps an entire discourse in Cantemir's book: "They were fools that first made use of that form, and they are no wiser who have followed them. For how can wood, after it is rotten, be restored to its former strength, so as to be able to support what is ready to fall; or lime, after it has been worn out by time, be so tempered as to be sufficient not only to raise a new building, but also to secure the crevices against the injuries of the weather?"5

' The identification of the historian Ali Efendi of Filipopoli, secretary of the Treasury (Hazine-i defterdar) during the time of defterdar Ferhad Pasha (d. 1525), ex-governor of Rumelia (15161521), is also very difficult. Cantemir states that this Ali Efendi's chronicle, preserved in a single manuscript copy that he had obtained from a Greek man in Filipopoli, dealt with the reigns of Mehmed II, Beyazit II, Selim I, and Suleiman, which would constitute one more argument to those cited by Fr. Babinger [in "Izvoarele turcegti ale lui D. Cantemir"] in order to distinguish him from Mustafa Ali (1451-1599), whose chronicle, Kiihn iil-ahbar, contains the history of the sultans up to Mehmed III (1595-1599)." (Maria Matilda Alexandrescu-Dersca Bulgaru, op. cit., p. 979) 2 HOE, p. 105, n. 17 (ms. Annotationes Lib. II, Cap. I, a. [r], pp. 95 - 96). HOE, p. 109, n. 31 (ms. Annotationes Lib. II, Cap. I, a. [ii], p. 100). 3 HOE, p. 109, n. 31 (ms. Annotationes Lib. II, Cap. I, a. [ii], p. 100). 4 HOE, pp. 294 - 295, n. 32 (ms. Annotationes Lib. Ill, Cap. I, a. [hh], pp. 28 - 29). 5 HOE, p. 368, n. 20 (ms. Annotationes Lib. Ill, Cap. II, a. [x], p. 90).

A N E C D O T I C A "

97

During the time of another Vizir, a completely opposite attitude would prevail. This Vizir made the Christians wear a kind of uniform, a dark and rough vestment, and even to wear a bell tied to the wrist; they were also obliged to walk barefoot at the public baths, which was uncomfortable since the pavement of the baths was hot. This last discriminatory measure was quickly abrogated, though, because the Christians no longer frequented the public baths, whose income supported the mosques. Thus the Moslems themselves had to ask the Sultan to abandon this decision. In the Ottoman Empire, Christians had a choice between converting to Islam and paying tribute. The tribute had been instituted by the Prophet himself, who had established it at 13 silver drachmae. In time this amount went up, and the Grand Vizir Kopruliizade Fazil-Mustafa Pasha established three categories, based on income brackets 1 . Besides paying this tribute, the Christians' life was relatively quiet. Socially, they made up most of the merchant and skilled craftsmen, as the military was reserved for the Moslems. Among the occupations traditionally left to the Christians that could lead to great honors were that of architect and dragoman. There was a purely economic relationship between the Empire and the Christian populace as, one could deduce from such facts as those related above: the collection of tribute and confiscation of churches which could be regarded, for example, as an investment. The adverse relationship that did exist at deeper levels though becomes manifest when we learn that it was forbidden to greet a Christian with the formula Salam aleykum — "Peace be to you" — even if he was a friend, as Cantemir was to Ibrahim Beg 2 . We then learn that on the site of the former Blacherne Monastery (which in truth had been in ruins before the conquest of Constantinople) there lived some Gypsies, that all that was left of the monastery was a fountain, and that, ironically, a Turk sold its water to the Christians 3 . Interferences were of course inevitable: thus we encounter personalities of the Ottoman Empire who were converts, and these were not only Albanians or Greeks (reference is made here to voluntary conversions and not the forced conversions practiced in devshirme) but also Poles and Italians. We encounter Turkish scholars who admired Christianity, such as Misri Efendi, who wrote mystical poetry with Christian influences 4 , and Cobisi Agemu, who was beheaded because he claimed that Christianity was superior to Islam 5 . Actually, mixed theological disputes had been banned since the time of 1

HOE, " HOE, 3 HOE, 4 HOE, 5 HOE,

pp. 366 - 367, n. 19 (ms. Annotationes Lib. Ill, Cap. II, a. [u], pp. 86 - 88). p. 76, n. 17 (ms. Annotationes Lib. I, Cap. IX, a. [s], p. 64). p. 106, n. 18 (ms. Annotationes Lib. II, Cap. I, a. [s], p. 97). pp. 386 - 388, n. 16 (ms. Annotationes Lib. Ill, Cap. Ill, a. [q], pp. 112 - 115). p. 181 (ms. Lib. II, Cap. IV, p. 159).

98

DIMITRIE

CANTEMIR

AND

THE

ISLAMIC

WORLD

Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-1566) under penalty of death. There is a unique case of such a dispute in which Sultan Mehmed the Fourth said to the defeated Turkish scholar: "Did not I tell thee, thou couldst not dispute with this infidel? For the future leave him alone" 1 , as was also unique, as we already know, the personality of Panaiotis, the Christian "infidel" in this anecdote 2 . The most revered saints were St. George and St. Dimitrie, with Islamicized names, considered Moslem 3 and important because each year their feast days marked the beginning and the end of military campaigns. The other saints just stimulate the popular curiosity, as in the case of the visit to the relics of St. Eufimia 4 or that of the superstitious fear inspired by St. Foca 5 . The Ottomans' permanent financial interest was evident in the case of the move of St. Parascheva's relics from Istanbul to Iassy, when Vasile Lupu paid 300 bags of gold because the Turks had invoked the rule according to which a dead body could not be transported within the Empire for a distance greater than three miles, with the exception of the Sultan's body 6 . We shall only mention those superstitions regarding Christians; superstitions which Cantemir also said were not believed except by Turks of an inferior condition, for example: the belief that the Pope was immortal 7 and the belief that some monks could fly 8 . The dissolution of the Byzantine Empire and the existence of the Ottoman Empire were doubtlessly to suffocate Christianity in that part of the world which was very important to Orthodoxy. The richness and effervescence of the Christian spirit would be destroyed, yet, aside from certain times of oppression, Christianity would be able to survive with its traditions. Cantemir never made ampler commentaries upon the essentially tragic situation of this center of Christianity. His notes, whether short or detailed, were merely explanatory notes to the principal text, in which the political evolution of the Ottoman Empire with its power structure is studied; the spread of Islam is left for a secondary place. Nearly all that Cantemir relates about this theme can be found in the classical attitude (based on the Koran and on tradition) of Moslems toward their Christian subjects, an attitude that is contained within the concept of dhimma (in Turkish, zimma), and these subjects were called zimmi. It was not, 1

HOE, p. 262, n. 6 (ms. Annotationes Lib. II, Cap. XII, a. |T], p. 275). HOE, pp. 258 - 264, n. 6 (ms. Annotationes, Lib. II, Cap. XII, a. [f], pp. 265 - 277). 3 HOE, p. 247, n. 9 (ms. Annotationes Lib. II, Cap. X, a. [i], p. 253). St. Dimitrie - "Cassim Giuni"; St. George - "Hydyrlez" . 4 HOE, p. 106, n. 20 (ms. Annotationes Lib. II, Cap. I, a. [u], p. 97). 5 HOE, p. 212, n. 103 (ms. Annotationes Lib. II, Cap. IV, a. 115], pp. 228 - 229). 6 HOE, p. 334, n. 83 (ms. Annotationes Lib. Ill, Cap. I, a. p. 60). 7 HOE, pp. 88 - 89, n. 38 (ms. Annotationes Lib. I, Cap. IX, a. [pp], p. 74). 8 HOE, p. 31, n. 17 (ms. Annotationes Lib. I, Cap. Ill, a. [h|, p. 15). 2

" A N E C D O T I C A "

99

in fact, a question only of Christians, but also of Jews, the so-called ahl alkitab (People of the [Holy] Book), who enjoyed better treatment that the pagans. The Ottomans did nothing but apply this Islamic behavior to their multinational subjects: Orthodox Christians of different ethnic groups, Armenians and Jews. The single flagrant flouting of this precept was the devshirme system (designated by historians as an "Ottoman invention" 1 ), which presupposed forced Islamization. We shall look at the rules of this behavior toward the zimtni. First and foremost was the fact that the aforementioned practice of forced Islamization was forbidden. Unlike pagan polytheists, Christians and Jews had the right to freedom of religion. The astonishment that Selim caused when he proposed forced Islamization was due, therefore, to the fact that he had overstepped the bounds of an old tradition, not the broadening of the horizons of general understanding of the Turks. Yet, naturally, they (the non-Islamic people) were considered as being of lesser rank, in both social and spiritual matters, than those of the Islamic faith. This inferior status manifested itself in many ways. They (the non-Islamic people) were not allowed to display any luxuries that surpassed those of the Moslems; sometimes they were forbidden to wear certain colors, and sometimes they were forced to wear certain colors or to wear distinguishing symbols; the building of new places of worship was forbidden. But the best-known and most stable form of discrimination was of a fiscal nature — djizya, the poll-tax (capitatio) paid by "infidels". After a certain point the financial importance of these taxes to the Court budget could have been a strong enough argument in favor of the acceptance of the zimmi. Within this extremely well-organized bureaucracy there were accounting books in which were registered the continued payments of this tax even by newlyconverted Moslems at times when the number of new converts had increased suddenly. At one time we see Cantemir providing the Grand Vizir with an order regarding a particular church in Istanbul, so that it could maintain its special status. But we find Patriarch Theoleptos the First in a less fortunate situation when, in 1519, he had to present Selim the First with the order that Mehmed the Second had supposedly given for the official recognition of the Orthodox Church. The Patriarch could not find the document, yet it is interesting to note that this episode of a confrontation between the Patriarch and the Sultan is identical with that previously mentioned, taken from a modern edition that cites Cantemir's story 2 . The same episode (the meeting of the Patriarch and 1

Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire (ed. by B. Braude, B. Lewis), p. 12. Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, p. 79 and note 65 on p. 87, where Tindal's edition is cited (pp. 102 - 102, note 17). 2

100

DIMITRIE CANTEMIR

AND THE I S L A M I C

WORLD

Selim the First) is retold by S. Runciman in a form much closer to Cantemir's version (from which Runciman quotes). In Runciman's retelling the Vizir is horrified at the Sultan's idea to convert the Christians to Islam, and Theoleptos summons three old Janissaries, "...the tottering janissaries swore on the Koran that they had been in the Conquering Sultan's body guard when he was waiting to enter the city in triumph, and they had seen a number of notables from various parts of the city come to him bearing the keys to their quarters as a sign of surrender. Mehmed had therefore allowed them to keep their churches." 1 The problem of the churches in Istanbul and to whom they should belong began with the conquest of Constantinople, and was also due to the deviation from traditional comportment. This tradition provided that the churches were to be kept by the residents of a city that had surrendered, whereas, in the case of a city's conquest, the churches were to be turned into mosques. Although Mehmed had conquered Constantinople he left the churches in the custody of the Patriarchy, a gesture which was to have two consequences in the course of time. The first was the hypothesis (which can be seen in Cantemir's writings also) that the city had been only partially conquered thus, following tradition, leaving the churches in the hands of the locals, at least in part. The second being the repeated attempts to impose the common rule, that is the transformation of Christian places of worship into mosques. This was not something which was to happen only during Selim's reign, but also in 1538, during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, as well as whenever relations with the Greek minority became strained for one reason or another. Finally a fetva was decreed in the aforementioned year that justified the situation by stating fictitiously that the Jews and Christians had made a secret pact with Mehmed the Second before the fall of Constantinople 2 . We shall quote from S. Runciman's report of the fetva: "... as far as is known the city was taken by force. But the fact that the Christians have been left with their churches proves that it surrendered by capitulation" 3 . The Sultan's decision to save as much as possible of his future capital led to the establishment of some privileged relations with the Greeks. There was the attempt, in the first few days after the conquest, to name Lucas Notaras as the city's prefect and as the one responsible for its re-population (an attempt which was abandoned and ended up with Notaras' execution). There

1 S. Runciman, op. cit., p. 201. This author very much respected the History of the Othman Empire, which he considered " a work of great importance" and Cantemir "a man of immense learning", even if he did call him "Greek, with Tartar blood". 2 H. Inalcik, "The Policy of Mehmed II toward the Greek Population in Istanbul and the Byzantine Buildings of the City", in Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 23 - 24 / 1 9 6 9 - 1979, p. 248. 3 S. Runciman, op. cit., 201.

"ANECDOTICA"

101

were also the designation of Georgios Scholarios as Patriarch, which, by extension, made him head of the Greek community, the liberation of those members of the aristocracy who paid their own ransoms, and the appeal to Greek refugees at the end of 1459 to return to the city. The relative religious tolerance of the Ottomans resulted in a better understanding between them and the Orthodox Patriarchy than with the Western Christians. Mehmed was counting somewhat on this Christian schism when he named Scholarios as Patriarch, as Scholarios was known for his hostile attitude toward any unification with Rome. This attitude would be maintained for a long time. When one of the Greek regions under Ottoman rule (Morea) was conquered by the Venetians, twenty years later the local citizens were to beg for the return of the old rule. The Venetians had put the Orthodox priests under the domination of the Catholic Church and had begun vigorous missionary activities 1 . Certain religious preferences manifested themselves within some professions. The army and the administration were Islamic, commerce remained in the hands of the Christians (Greeks, Genoese and Venetians; many ships sailed under the Ottoman flag in order to pay the smaller customs taxes of residents of the Empire), and the banks belonged to the Jews and Armenians. Christians from the Empire could obviously do business with the rest of Europe more easily than could Moslems. Therefore diplomatic relations at Istanbul were also kept up through the use of minority-group members as intermediaries. At first these were translators and interpreters, but they were to be replaced later by subjects from the embassies' respective countries who knew Oriental languages, as, for example, Rycaut, Galland and Petis de I,a Croix. As we have established, Cantemir's stories, even though they are not formally structured, reflect this entire gamut of data (from the "classical" to the more "popular") and variations of nuances. The situation of the Christians in the Empire was regulated by shariya, to which was added Mehmed the Second's particular attitude toward Constantinople and the Orthodox Patriarchy (as a means of their representation). The liberties Mehmed took with the rules of shariya were, over the course of centuries, reduced by more rigorous Sultans, just as some Christians with a certain social status (ex-dignitaries of conquered provinces, owners of timars) converted to Islam. At the same time a solution for survival and for living together was found.

1

R. Mantran (ed.), op. cit., p. 304.

102

DIMITRIE CANTEMIR

AND THE I S L A M I C

WORLD

The Ambassadors Constantinople continued to be the capital of a mighty Empire even after having been conquered. As it was situated in a very advantageous military and commercial position, the major merchants of the time — Venetian as well as Genoese — tried right from the first days of the summer of 1453 to establish economic supremacy in the area, soliciting the new rulers to sign trade pacts. The power they had had during the Byzantine era would diminish, but commerce as well as craft were to remain Christian pursuits in the Ottoman Empire. By the same token the Empire's military might would force the European countries to send representatives to the Sultan's Court quickly enough. Constantinople found itself in a somewhat paradoxical situation because, although it was an important city and was frequently visited by Europeans, it nevertheless remained under the rule of non-Christians; an Oriental rule which Europeans understood very little at the time, and which was, more often than not, understood incorrectly. Therefore the European ambassadors were usually men of exceptional character who, on the one hand, had lived for many years in the Orient and were familiar with the local customs, and, on the other hand, knew that they could also allow themselves certain extravagant gestures in their positions of ambassadors. The most extravagant of all was, without a doubt, the French Ambassador Marquis de Ferriol1. Profiting, beginning at the time of Suleiman the Magnificent, from the special status accorded to the representative of France, Ferriol would overstep his bounds so much that ultimately he had to pretend to be insane in order to escape unpunished. Even his first visit to the Sultan was disturbed because the Ambassador flatly refused to enter the reception hall unarmed; such a thing was utterly prohibited. Ferriol was bodily carried out of the Palace and the Sultan returned the gifts he had received. Ferriol accepted them, saying that they had been purchased with his money in any case, not with the French Crown's money. It was only with great difficulty that a method for smoothing out this conflict was found; it was said that Ferriol had read in a report written by the previous ambassador that he had been received by the Sultan while carrying a small weapon hidden in his clothing. But Ferriol also was to build a boat identical to the Sultan's, roofed in purple silk, at the same time swearing that he would not travel by sea in anything else. He was to keep his word, too: he always made a detour on the bridges of Istanbul, as he was, naturally, forbidden to travel in that boat. It was perhaps his singular nature that determined him to protect Dimitrie Cantemir, hiding him in his palace when he was threatened with being imprisoned.

1

HOE, pp. 423 - 425, n. 33 (ms. Annotationes

Lib. Ill, Cap. IV, a. [Ill, PP- 161 - 166).

"ANECDOTICA"

103

The Dutch Ambassadors would also be subjected to some interdictions. One of them, unnamed by Cantemir 1 , would be granted the Sultan's permission to enter a mosque in Jerusalem in which it was said that a gigantic block of stone had been suspended in the air ever since Archangel Gabriel had commanded that it stay there. But he was not to receive the permission of the city's Governor to leave the mosque (a detail which was not precisely stated in the Sultan's hatt-i sherij). More well-known is the case of Colyer, another Dutch Ambassador. He was not permitted to live in the palace of the Grand Vizir Aynaci Siileyman Pasha, which he had bought, because Çorlulu Ali Pasha thought it a sacrilege that someone should drink alcoholic beverages and eat pork in the former palace of a Grand Vizir 2 . We also have information about the other ambassadors Cantemir knew, William Paget and Piotr Tolstoi, but they fulfilled their missions without any notable incidents. It was perhaps the author's Moldavian roots speaking when he wrote about the hubris of the Poles, who had come with a delegation of 700 men, and whom the Grand Vizir greeted in this manner:"...tell the ambassador, that if he meant to use so numerous a band to take Constantinople, his followers were very few; but if he intended to salute the lofty threshold of the sublime porte, he had brought too many with him." 3 *

The rigorous historical verification of these anecdotes would constitute a most fascinating pursuit, but it cannot be completed except by way of a study equally persévérant and lucky. In the case at hand, this was made possible primarily due to the bibliography which appeared in the second half of the 20 t h century, but also (we must confess) by means of assiduous research, Cantemir's stories being either corroborated or invalidated in very hard-to-find works. The results were very often unexpected. If we did not expect that Dimitrie Cantemir had "fabricated" Alexandru Mavrocordat's genealogy (as his descendents demonstrated) 4 , we expected even less that the legendary personage from whom Murad the Fourth learned to drink wine would be the subject of an article contained in the Encyclopédie de l'Islam5.

* HOE, p. 95, n. 51 (ms. Annotationes Lib. I, Cap. IX, a. [II, pp. 81 - 82, "Belgicus legatus"). HOE, p. 384, n. 12 (ms. Annotationes Lib. Ill, Cap. Ill, a. [m], p. 111). 3 HOE, p. 287 (ms. Lib. Ill, Cap. I, pp. 258 - 259). 4 We have been unable to discover anything about the origins of Alexandru G. Mavrocordat's father and grandfather in a third, objective source. What is certain, though, is that Ruxandra was married to Alexandru Cuconul before Matei Basarab ascended to the throne. ^ Encyclopédie de l'Islam, 1, p. 1196 "Bekri Mustafa Agha", F. Gieze. 2

104

D I M I T R I E C A N T E M I R A N D THE I S L A M I C

WORLD

Most of these anecdotes owe their existence not so much to the structural norms imposed upon the approach to this genre, but primarily to the author's literary talent, which needed to find its place, even if that place be in a historical work. Nevertheless, the possible "fables" were much fewer that we were perhaps tempted to believe at one point, such as the details concerning the conquest of Candia and the adventurous lives of Bogdan H m e l n i t s k i 1 or Grigore Ghica 2 . The impression of sensationalism is frequently due, for the most part, to the author's style; the same stories could be told in an objective, historical manner, or in a manner more exciting. In exchange, Cantemir provided us with one of the most comprehensive images of the state of the Christian population in the Ottoman Empire, and is cited in this sense even in modern works. That which we have presented represents only a part (yet certainly the most important part) of the stories in The History of the Othman Empire. The manner of their presentation which is always interesting gives us a reflection of the way of life in Istanbul, and of the mores of the times and place. Cantemir's complex personality — constantly oscillating between studying the libraries from the Empire's beginnings and political fighting, giving music lessons and attempting to dethrone Brancoveanu, collecting works of art and hiding himself away in ambassadorial palaces, conversing with the Grand Vizir and conniving with the future Count Tolstoi — found a favorable environment in the potpourri of the Istanbul of those times, in which the poor son of a peasant from Albania or Bosnia could become the Vizir while the Sultan's brother was confined for life. The most important quality of this work is the contemporary character of its descriptions — colorful, alive, passionate, with reconstructed dialogues and commentaries on the very thoughts of the personages — a contemporary character maintained even in cases in which the author was separated from various events by several decades. This trait brings The History of the Othman Empire close to the domain of literature, yet without breaking away from the domain of history, thus adding this book to the series of Cantemir's other books which cannot be pigeonholed into a single genre.

1 2

HOE, p. 288, n. 23 (ms. Annotationesm Lib. Ill, Cap. I, a. [y], pp. 19 - 21). HOE, pp. 277 - 278, n. 4 (ms. Annotationes, Lib. Ill, Cap. I, a. [d], pp. 3 - 5).

CONCLUSIONS

Intended as a study of Dimitrie Cantemir's place and importance among the Western historians of the Ottoman Empire, this work has naturally followed two main analytical direction: the study of the related Western historiography up to the 18 th century, and the analysis of Cantemir's work based on the results of this study. Thus the first chapters present the directions from which the Ottoman Empire was studied: historiography and Islam. According to the prevalent views of that period, these were the two coordinates that ensured the proper functioning of the best-organised Empire of its time: the material aspect — history, wars, sultans — and the spiritual one — religion. With respect to the latter, Cantemir's predecessors in the 16 th and 17th centuries regarded Islam as primarily a Turkish religion, since at the time the most significant part of the Arab space — Mecca, Medina, Baghdad — was already within the Ottoman Empire, and the Persians were too far away and were Shiites, which made them Europe's allies rather than its adversaries. It is interesting to remark that in these centuries, historians paid more attention to the study of religion than to that of the Ottoman administration and its army, which were the real "secrets" of Ottoman success. As each had had its start only shortly after the apparition of the Ottoman Empire (of Islam, respectively), these themes already had a traditional bibliography in Cantemir's day. The rich collection of rare books at the Library of the Romanian Academy as well as the modern books obtained through inter-library loan have allowed me to draw a coherent picture of the most important moments in this tradition, initiated by the Byzantine chroniclers on the one hand and by St. John Damascene on the other, and sustained for centuries afterwards with great efforts in data-gathering (these include the numerous years some authors spent in the Ottoman Empire) and editing (let us remember the number of monumental editions). Where The History of the Othman Empire is concerned, my conclusion is that it represents a crucial moment in the transition from historical compilations to histories written on the basis of Ottoman sources, and is in this respect unique. It inherits and values the tradition, to which it added new sources and an interior perspective. It is not a trailblazing work (and could hardly have been, four hundred years after Osman's principality was born) but it does modify the direction of the historical trail, toward a better and more

106

D I M I T R I E C A N T E M I R AND THE I S L A M I C

WORLD

documented understanding. It is also the fulfilment of an 17 th century aspiration — to write an integral history of the Ottoman Empire, from its beginnings to the present day. In what The Mohammedan Religious System is concerned, there had already been an essential change in the traditional approach of the subject. Islamic studies had moved from the stage of theological rejection to the stage of descriptions made by non-theologians. However, the effects of the negative impact of the two religions were still felt in what researchers later called "the medieval attitude" of perpetrating, among others, the unlikeliest untruths. We have demonstrated that The Mohammedan Religious System shows only formal and isolated reminiscences of this attitude. As a plus, its wellarticulated structure was a premiere at the time of its writing. We have also remarked upon two fragments which, in my opinion, are lifts from quoted Moslem texts rather than adaptations of those texts, since they contain turns of phrase that could not have belonged to Dimitrie Cantemir, however far he may have been from the old mentalities (expressions referring to Muhammad and the Islamic faith as well as fragments from a cryptic text). To verify once more the scientific tenor of The Mohammedan Religious System, I have brought up for discussion a work that was its contemporary, Reland's De religione mohammedanica. The conclusion of these two chapters is that both works by Dimitrie Cantemir represent decisive moments in the evolution of a more exact perception and understanding of the Ottoman Empire. The following chapters ("Historic Controversies", "Cantemir — Rycaut: Interferences", "About djafr") are applications to text analysis, in the sense of a critical reading of a text as made by Cantemir. We have remarked on his capacity to handle both Western and Ottoman sources. This can best be seen when his sources contradict one another: with an almost flawless intuition for history, he chooses the correct version (as accredited by modern historiography), often in the case of events that had occurred soon after the birth of the Ottoman Empire, hence all the more difficult to clarify. Moreover, he is the first European historian to mention the first reign of Mehmed the Second (followed by his father's return to power, although he had voluntarily abdicated earlier), and the first historian to suspect the interpolation of the chronicle of Georgios Sphrantzes (the interpolated version being the one in use at the time, hence also by Cantemir). As we have shown, this was demonstrated only as late as the inter-war period in the 20th century. As for the fate of the churches in conquered Constantinople (versus the part of the city that capitulated), we have seen that even twentieth-century historians such as S. Runciman could not sort this out entirely, even if other historians regard the alternative as entirely fictitious (H. Inalcik).

CONCLUSIONS

107

All of these results were obtained through both science and a scientific attitude that I regard as modern and that had not been sufficiently highlighted up to now. The History of the Othman Empire was always regarded as a good source of atmosphere stories and anecdotes, but as an outdated scientific source, which was excused through the general scientific level of Cantcmir's epoch. Nevertheless the finest clarifications and most interesting intuitions can be found in this very part of the work— its "dusty" scientific side. Which of the European historians would have dared put an order in the chronology of Osman's and Orhan's reigns? Before jumping to point out Cantemir's errors when compared to modern historiography, it would have been more useful to remark which were the corrections he brought to the science of his time. Dimitrie Cantemir knew how to choose the correct text out of two conflicting versions in the case of not only different sources, but also in that of critical analyses. I am referring to the selective loans from Rycaut for The Mohammedan Religious System's chapters on dervishes. The paragraph-byparagraph analysis of the two authors clearly showed the passages that Cantemir copied, adapted, ignored, or contradicted. The chapter "About djafr" also deals with a loan, in this case from an Ottoman manuscript. If in the case of Paul Rycaut, Dimitrie Cantemir could have a critical opinion, in the case of this latter text we can say that no European held the key to unlock its meaning, since it involved a version of the Apocalypse that employed a whole range of cryptic symbols grouped in Islamic literature under the name of djafr. So far my researches have not led to a deciphering of the text, due to the multiple interpretations of the mysticsense to be ascribed to every letter of the alphabet. The number of these interpretations grows gradually as this type of literature descends among the masses, where the reading often becomes circumstantial. Instead, I have found an explanation as to why these passages were introduced in The Mohammedan Religious System. The chapters entitled "Islamic Theology in Cantemir's Writings" and "Anecdótica in The History of the Othman Empire" leave the vast domain of the tradition and bibliography of Cantemir studies, in order to focus exclusively on his work. Their goal has been to organise in a relevant manner the information sprinkled throughout The History of the Othman Empire. The first of these chapters does this in order to identify a common body of information between The History of the Othman Empire and The Mohammedan Religious System, while the second, in order to inventory and verify (as much as possible) the truthfulness of the "stories" in The History of the Othman Empire on the basis of modern sources. It is interesting to remark that on certain topics, such as the life of Christian communities within the

108

DIMITRIE CANTEMIR

A N D THE I S L A M I C

WORLD

Ottoman Empire, the organisation of the information offered by Cantemir throughout his work brings to light a coherent system of rendering his data, containing all the points of a modern analysis of the subject and retaining the validity of its observations. Of course, this work would have been incomplete without an updated and comprehensive review of the Romanian contributions to the study of this topic. Every chapter represented a new beginning in a new direction of study, a new specialisation (be it in history, religion, cryptic texts, or the history of ideas), and showed once more that the contact with a text written by Dimitrie Cantemir was no easy matter. Here is the time and place to add that without the modern bibliography obtained through inter-library loan from abroad (including volumes that came from Paris, Lyon, Strasbourg, London, New York, and Tubingen), this work would have lacked its objective-historical side, would have found it impossible to establish new co-ordinates, and to advance new conclusions. Cantemir is placed here between two reference points: what was written before him and what was written in our days. My conclusion does not differ from the notorious one: Dimitrie Cantemir represents an essential moment, a turning point from the Middle Ages to the modern era, in the field of Islamic and Ottoman studies. But if up to now this was more or less an a priori tenet, now it is a systematically demonstrated verity, backed by concrete and pertinent evidence. If Osmanistic studies have experienced a difference in perspective and method between the 17 th and the 20 th centuries, this difference begins with Dimitrie Cantemir.

APPENDIX

The History of the Othman Empire in Romanian Criticism

Well-known in the 18th century, The History of the Othman Empire entered a cone of shadow in the 19th century as European historiography advanced 1 . First published in Romanian as late as 1876, this translation did not turn out to be of great use for philologists or historians because of the inexactitudes it contained (begun or propagated by earlier editions in other languages) and the language and artificial spelling adopted by the Romanian Academy at the time. The book did not receive significantly more notice in the 20 th century, which produced only an incredibly small number of studies, mostly written by illustrious figures in Romanian culture either separately of as part of larger works. Some were remarkably accurate while others contained inevitable inexactitudes. Strangely enough, the fate of Dimitrie Cantemir's other work about the Ottoman Empire, The Mohammedan Religious System, was constantly to remain opposite to that of The History of the Othman Empire. Published in Saint Petersburg during the author's lifetime (The History of the Othman Empire was published, as previously noted, posthumously), this Russian edition, however, was not circulated at all in Europe at that time 2 (and it concerned a domain which was even less understood than Ottoman history); yet two critical editions were published in the 20 th century3.

For a history of its reception in that period, see Paul Cernovodeanu, "XVIIIth Century Echoes", in Dimitrie Cantemir - Historian of the South East European and Oriental Civilizations, 1973, pp. 319-329; Virgil Candea, "The original manuscript of The History of the Ottoman Empire by Dimitrie Cantemir", in lncrementorum et Decrementorum Aulae Othmannicae. Libri tres, Roza Vanturilor Publishing House, Bucharest, 1999, pp. LIX-CII. 2 For more about its minimal circulation, see "Studiul introductiv la Sistemul Religiei Muhamedane [Introductory Study to The Mohammedan Religious System]", Ed. Academiei Romane [Romanian Academy Publishing House], 1987. The situation is unchanged today. While The History of the Othman Empire and Cantemir's work about Turkish music have attracted the attention of specialists in the 20th century, The Mohammedan Religious System remains completely ignored. 3 1977, Minerva Publishing House, and 1987, the Romanian Academy Publishing House. Both editions were edited by Virgil Candea.

110

DIMITRIE CANTEMIR

A N D THE I S L A M I C

WORLD

Significant Romanian contributions to the analysis of The History of the Othman Empire began in the 1920s1. The most important was by Nicolae Iorga, (who was himself a historian of the Ottoman Empire), in the chapter he dedicated to Dimitrie Cantemir in Istoria literatura romanean [The History of Romanian Literature]2. Iorga's study laid out an analytical structure that would be followed for a long time afterwards (dates, sources, reflections on the history of the Romanian people in The History of the Othman Empire, etc.) and laid the groundwork for some value judgments, many of which are still propagated up to the present date. Analyzing the time of its writing, Iorga concluded that Cantemir had collected his material during the time he lived in Istanbul, but worked on it in its entirety while in Russia. Iorga also claimed that he did not believe in the existence of a request from the Berlin Academy to write The History of the Othman Empire3. This is a very important fact in light of what many have said afterwards, namely that Dimitrie Cantemir wrote most of his important works at the behest of the Berlin Academy (which supposedly suggested their topic), thus turning Cantemir into a sort of "writer by command". Taking into consideration the events recalled in The History..., Iorga reached the conclusion that it had been written in 1715-1716, and established the date of its completion as having been between August and November 1716 4 , a final date with which other researchers would later agree (P.P. Panaitescu). Moving on to the question of sources, Iorga mentioned Leunclavius, Lonicerus, Busbecq, and the Byzantine chroniclers — Gregoras, Sphrantzes, Chalkokondylas — and launched the hypothesis that the first part was just a translation of a chronicle by an author Cantemir mentioned many times — Saadi Efendi of Larissa: "I believe that I am not mistaken in saying that up to his time, that is, to the second half of the 17 th century, Cantemir merely translated or paraphrased a compilation of Turkish history already circulating in Constantinople in his time." 5 Up to now, historians have not been able to find out for certain who this character was. J. von Hammer was the first to suggest a name, and the list became longer in time; Franz Babinger even hypothesized that the name had been invented by Cantemir. 1 In honor of the 250 th anniversary of Cantemir's birth (1923), in the opinion of Virgil Candea. References to Iorga's work usually pertain to the 2 nd edition of 1928. However, the 1 st edition appeared at the beginning of the 20 th century, in 1901. Although the second edition was announced as being "extensively enlarged" in terms of the subject matter examined here, the difference consists in just one paragraph, which will be pointed out later on in this work. 2 Vol. II, Bucharest, 2 nd ed., 1928, pp. 310-458. N. Iorga, op. cit., p. 424: "Nowhere does Cantemir talk of a request from Berlin to write The History of the Othman Empire, and I do not believe this request existed." 4 N. Iorga, op. cit., p. 426. 5 N. Iorga, op. cit., p. 428. Let us remark the prudent wording of this statement.

APPENDIX

111

The translation theory persisted up to the time of P.P. Panaitescu 1 , who regarded the first part as an abridgement of a Turkish history, and only the notes as Cantemir's original contribution. Thus he reached the conclusion that the errors within the text could not be attributed to Cantemir, since they were corrected in the notes, his sole original contributions to the first part! Criticism of this part was extremely sharp in Iorga's chapter: He was to write his history the same way his Oriental predecessors did, on the basis of the same information, and even, in order to keep the tone he deemed most suitable for this kind of book, in the same spirit and with the same exterior forms. With the official attitude of the palace chronicles, the book parades the old as well as the newer Sultans before the reader as expressionless characters without any depth, without distinguishing traits, with the same banal haloes of glorification which, after having been passed on from one Turkish chronicler to the next, must needs be reproduced in this latest Latin paraphrase. The judgments are those dictated by tradition, the description of events, those dictated by custom; the epithets arc the classical ones [...]. This is how Cantemir believed that Ottoman history should be written; rewriting Turkish works according to the norms established by the nation's historiographers. When his opinion differs from that of his sources, we see him sneaking in a timid note; it is as if he were writing for Sultan Ahmed the Third, and not for the Christian "men of letters" he was addressing! Written in this manner, Cantemir's great opus could not have a lasting success 2 . It is worthless as far as all of the old history, such as the period before 1650, or even 1670. [...1 For a short while only, the non-Latin reading public as well as some of the lazier scholars looked for some clarifications from Oriental sources in his work that could also have been found, and with much greater certainty, from Leunclavius' beautiful works." 3 Despite his "angry" voice, we must notice that Iorga also confuses two Turkish historians who are made clearly distinct by Cantemir. About the History that was Cantemir's inspiration, Iorga says: "It is the abridgement of the Ottoman History by Sadi-Efendi of Larissa, printed (sic!)4 in 1696 and

' P.P. Panaitescu, op. cit., p. 174. Most histories of Romanian literature restated the same idea. See to this effect Hammer's famous criticism: "Il y a peu de livres qui aient joui d'une réputation moins méritée. [...] il a passé jusqu'ici pour un oracle." ("Sur l'Histoire ottomane du prince Cantemir", in Journal asiatique, tome IV, 1824, pp. 32-45). 3 N. Iorga, op. cit., p. 429-430. ^ Published, not printed. The printing press would not arrive in Turkey until later, and Ion Matei claims that Yanyali Es'ad Efendi, Cantemir's friend, was the first copy editor of this printing press ("Le maître de langue turque de Dimitrie Cantemir: Es'ad Efendi", in Revue des études sud-est européennes, 2/1972). Iorga certainly knew this, but the lack of precision in the term he used would have further effects. 2

112

D I M I T R I E C A N T E M I R AND THE I S L A M I C

WORLD

dedicated to Sultan Mustafa: Tagiut-tevarik."1 In Cantemir's work, though, there are clearly two characters named Saadi: the one from Larissa, author of the work Synopsis historiarum, and Saadi (Sa'adeddin Mehmed Hodja Efendi), author of Tadj-ut-tevarih [The Crown of Histories], mentioned as a source of the former Saadi 2 . As for the idea that only the lazy scholars consulted it, we must say that national tongues had become languages of culture as early as the 16 th century (although Latin would retain its authority and erudite connotation until the 17 th century) 3 . Despite Iorga's criticism of Cantemir's work, which was caused, perhaps, by his admiration for Cantemir and conviction that the latter could have done more, he formulated an opinion which would be shaded and — in essence — contested by later critics. Speaking about the idea of growth and decay, Iorga says: "It is an original conception that would be passed on, through the manuscript of this work, which was to be found in the hands of Dimitrie's son Antioh, ambassador to Paris, to the latter's friend, Montesquieu himself. " 4 This opinion would be contradicted by many corroborative affirmations made in the second half of the 20 t h century, such as: • The conception cannot be found in the text. It is expressed only in the title. P. P. Panaitescu 5 shows that by "decay", Cantemir did not mean the decline of the Empire, but its territorial shrinkage (establishing, as a date of reference, the year 1672 — the battle of Kamenitsa). • Montesquieu did not borrow the idea from Cantemir, since his work had been printed before Cantemir's; this was a type of thinking which was common to all of the 18 th century Encyclopaedists. • As Virgil Candea demonstrated, Antioh no longer had the manuscript in Paris (to give to Montesquieu), since it had remained with Tindal 6 ; otherwise, the French translation would have been done from the manuscript rather than from the English version. 1

N. Iorga, op. ext., p. 428. The History of the Othman Empire, p. VII (ms. Praefatio, p. 16): "...the most learned Saadi effendi of Larissa, in his elaborate Synopsis Historiarum (publish'd in 1696, and dedicated to Sultan Mustapha, Brother and Predecessor of the present Sultan Achmet) collected from the most celebrated Historians, Mevlana Idris, Neshrin and Saadi Tajuttevarich, and Pechovi and Hezarfen...". 3 It is obvious that Antioh Cantemir and the editors of The History of the Othman Empire considered it more useful for that era to translate the work into modern European languages. Cantemir's book had been written in Latin and, without a doubt, would have been easier to print without having had to call upon translators, if the Latin had not already been considered a less functional version. 4 N. Iorga, op. cit., p. 431. This passage was added to the 1 s t edition and represents the only difference between the two editions with regard to The History of the Othman Empire. ^ P. P. Panaitescu, op. cit., p. 179. 6 Virgil Candea, "The Original Manuscript...", in lncrementorum..., 1999, p. XCII - from a letter by Antioh in 1737. 2

APPENDIX

113

Nevertheless Iorga shows that the year suggested by Cantemir — 1672 — is too late as a year of decline. He also remarks the increased historical value of the second part and the special significance of the notes throughout the entire work: "Without using those notes, the Turkish history of the 17th century cannot be written."1 An important number of pages is taken up by Romanian history as it appears in The History of the Othman Empire, but this question is outside the subject area of the present work. Unfortunately, when it comes to The Mohammedan Religious System, Iorga knew very little, and that only from hearsay: "It is spoken of [italics ours] as a mine of information about Turkish life in its entirety [...]. A part of the Latin writing was offered in Russian in Moscow in 1722; another part is preserved in manuscript only." 2 Actually, they were two versions of the same text, as we know today (the first version, smaller, in Latin; the second one, printed in Russian); but the final announcement at the end of The Mohammedan Religious System — "End of Volume I" — produced this confusion, which was also the expression of wishful thinking. Ilie Minea's work, Despre Dimitrie Cantemir. Omul. Scriitorul. Domnitorul. [About Dimitrie Cantemir. The Man. The Writer. The Ruler.], published in la§i in 1926, is a copious, well-informed and well-oriented study. Although he also confuses Sa'adeddin Mehmed Hodja Efendi with Yanyah Es'ad Efendi (a general mistake at the time), the new clarifications that he brought show not only the quality of the information he acquired, but also an understanding of Cantemir's spirit (as for instance when, with regard to The Mohammedan Religious System, Minea says that "Cantemir's temperament always colors the narrative" 3 ). I. Minea was the first Romanian scholar to name Paul Rycaut and Adrien Reland, two important authors, the latter having been previously ignored completely by Romanian researchers. In Paul Rycaut's case, Minea even gives a summary of the editions of his works 4 . With regard to The Crown of Histories, the author notes that it had appeared (but not that it had been printed!) and represented a stimulus for Cantemir: "The author [Cantemir] had become more and more independent of the models he possessed." 5 Minea's statements are qualified and truthful: "The History of the Othman Empire is the most valuable work that the generation of the late 17th century left us about the Moslem world." 6 "The field of Oriental studies 1 2 *J

N. Iorga, op. cit., p. 432. Idem, p. 446.

I. Minea, op. cit., p. 295. Idem, p. 62. /r Idem, 1p. 62. Idem., p. 63.

4

5

114

D I M I T R I E C A N T E M I R AND THE I S L A M I C

WORLD

was not a 'no-man's-land' awaiting its first explorers. Many books which were widely sought had been written." 1 The Mohammedan Religious System is summarized chapter by chapter, and its unique character duly noted. Another important contributor to the topic is §tefan Ciobanu, whose work Dimitrie Cantemir in Rusia [Dimitrie Cantemir in Russia] (a lecture delivered at the Romanian Academy, June 11, 1924) 2 , brought to light much previously unknown information. It was he who initiated the exaggerated value judgment that would perpetuate itself for a long time. Ciobanu wrote: "Until the publication (1835) of the Turkish History of the celebrated Austrian Orientalist J. von Hammer-Purgstall (1774-1856), Dimitrie Cantemir's History of the Othman Empire was the only source of information about that powerful Empire's past" 3 . This was an erroneous statement that was impossible to support, even if only the sources Cantemir had himself cited were taken into consideration. Like Iorga, Ciobanu thought that Cantemir had written The History in Russia, after having collected the material in Istanbul, but he nuanced Iorga's statement about the link between Cantemir's ideas and Montesquieu's. He wrote : "The very title of this work anticipates [italics ours] the philosophical ideas of Montesquieu and especially of G. B. Vico." 4 Next to these names, it would be interesting to add Voltaire's, who wrote to Antioh in 1739 about the book's interest 5 . After a brief explanation of the book's structure and some comments on the importance of the notes, Ciobanu discusses its sources, mentioning the Byzantine and the Western ones especially, and makes two important affirmations about the Oriental sources. He is, to our knowledge, the first to mention the Muhammediye, and he makes a clear distinction between Sa'addedin Mehmed Hodja Efendi, author of The Crown of Histories, and Saadi Efendi of Larissa, whom he considers to have been, however, the Prince's professor of the Turkish language. "His main source is a compilation by Saadi Efendi of Larissa, which refers to the Ottoman history and was known under the name of Synopsis historica. This author, who wrote his compilation on the basis of works written by the most famous Turkish historians, was Dimitrie Cantemir's friend and teacher." 6

1

Idem, p. 285. References are to Istoria literaturii romane vechi [The History of Old Romanian Literature], the edition by Dan Horia Mazilu, Hyperion, Kishinev, 1992. 3 §tefan Ciobanu, op. cit., p. 586. 4 Idem, p. 586. 5 H. inalcik, "Eastern and Western Cultures in Dimitrie Cantemir's Work", in Revue roumaine d'histoire, 1/1974, p. 35. 6 §t. Ciobanu, op. cit., p. 589. We shall mention here that in The History of the Othman Empire there are four men named Saadi, who can be easily distinguished. They are Saadi Efendi of Larissa, Cantemir's mysterious source, Sa'adeddin Mehmed Hodja Efendi, the renowned historian, Yanyali Es'ad Efendi, Cantemir's friend (identified by Ion Matei), and Saadi, the Persian poet. 2

APPENDIX

115

As no other researcher before him, §t. Ciobanu spent more time analyzing The Mohammedan Religious System than The History of the Othman EmpireMoreover, these pages prove that Ciobanu had read very closely the work, which he summarized in some detail, offering quotes as well as personal views that are original and to the point. A master of this subject, Ciobanu discredited the idea that The Mohammedan Religious System was a translation of the Koran 2 and was very prudent when saying that it was written at Peter the Great's "command" ("as it appears from an official letter sent by the author to the Russian Synod" 3 ). He also noted the praise that Cantemir gave to the Ottomans for their hospitality, their schools, their rhetoric, etc., and remarked in a truthful and pithy manner that the first three books (which, from a theoretical standpoint, are the most important) barely make up a fifth of the whole work, while the others (in which Cantemir could draw from his own life experience in Istanbul) are more consistent. At the time of their publication, these pages on The Mohammedan Religious System were essential and unique, since their author brought forth original information and formulated views that have withstood the test of time. Thus Ciobanu's study is one of the most valuable contributions of the inter-war period to the research on Cantemir's works. He also mentioned a book about music written by Cantemir, but knew nothing more of it. In his article, promisingly entitled "Izvoarele turcegti ale lui Dimitrie Cantemir" ["Dimitrie Cantemir's Turkish Sources"], the specialist in Turkish studies Franz Babinger 4 appeared rather critical toward the Romanian author and stirred up a wave of criticism with two of his claims. The first claim was the possibility that Dimitrie Cantemir had invented his principal source (since this historian was not mentioned in a fairly systematic Ottoman historiography), and the second was the observation that all Romanian biographers of Cantemir made the so-called mistake of saying that Saadi's work had been printed in 1696, whereas the printing press was not to appear in Turkey until 1724. (In reality, this error had been committed, as seen before, only by Iorga.)

1 Eight pages as compared to five, in the edition cited. This impression came, perhaps, by the fact that the Latin version of The System was entitled Curanus. 3 Idem, p. 591. ^ In Arhiva romaneasca

1942, pp. 1-11.

116

D I M I T R I E C A N T E M I R A N D THE I S L A M I C

WORLD

Marcel Romanescu's study Cantemir, Montesquieu si [and\ Marsigli1 wished "to discover the genealogy of a title and the origin of an historical concept that circulated widely in all of Europe at the beginning of the 18 th century" 2 , namely the idea of "the growth and decay" of an empire. His research (based on Montesquieu's activity and on Antioh Cantemir's and Abbot Guasco's letters) determined him to contradict the theory that Montesquieu had been influenced by Cantemir and to advance the hypothesis that Marsigli may have been the one who introduced this concept, in his book entitled L'Etat militaire de l'Empire Ottoman, ses progrès et sa décadence (La Haye, 1732), and that there was a chance that Marsigli may have known Cantemir in Istanbul 3 . The 1950s brought the contributions of M. Guboglu and P. P. Panaitescu. In an article 4 and a lecture 5 , M. Guboglu reaffirms the importance of The History of the Othman Empire for its time: "[...] the first systematic exposition of the political and military development of the Ottoman feudal state before the European scientific world, [...] although with some flaws, Cantemir's Ottoman history is the most valuable work that the generation of the early 18 th century left us about the Turkish-Ottoman world" 6 . We notice once again the exaggeration of the importance of Cantemir's work, which will gradually result in Cantemir's isolation from his predecessors. If The History of the Othman Empire is the "first systematic exposition", one can only wonder what the other Histories were. Even if they had more errors, they were doubtlessly attempts at a systemization that sought to include, as has been shown, the entire history of the Ottoman Empire as well as elements of civilization and organization. Yet, besides all this, we agree with the statement that The History of the Othman Empire was the most important work of the 18 th century in its domain (and, actually, the most important systematic exposition up to its time). Very succinctly, M. Guboglu drew up a history of the works dedicated to this book. It contains the following headings: • a history of the eulogies of the time having Cantemir as their object (taken from Hammer); 1

In the Volume in Honor ofC. Giurescu, Bucharest, 1944, pp. 413-434. M. Romanescu, op. cit., p. 413. 3 He also notes that the printing press was introduced in the Ottoman Empire only later and discovers some slips in Cantemir's translation (Turkish slurs aimed at Moldavians and Christians). 4 "Dimitrie Cantemir §i Istoria Imperiului otoman [Dimitrie Cantemir and The History of the Othman Empire] ", in Studii §i orticole de istorie, 11/1957, pp. 179-208. 5 "Dimitrie Cantemir - orientaliste", published in Studia et acta orientalia, 111/1961-62, pp. 129160. 6 M. Guboglu, op. cit., p. 179. 2

A P P E N D I X

117

• a history of Ottoman historiography, showing that this was in a relatively advanced state, with 250 chroniclers up to that time (1736); • a history of the European historiography concerning the Ottoman Empire — listing a few authors, some more important than others, chosen by means of a rather random selection: Leunclavius, Lonicerus, Crusius, Bratutti, Rycaut, Sagredo, Verdier; • a history of Romanian criticism concerning the place and time of its writing: in Russia (G. Pascu, §t. Ciobanu, P.P. Panaitescu, N. Iorga) or merely continued in Russia (I. Minea). M. Guboglu shows more evidence in support of the latter opinion. He also remarks on the year 1672 as a demarcation between the rise and the fall of the Empire, on the importance of the notes and the dates concerning Romanian history. We feel that his most important contribution is the clarification of certain names and dates, supported by a modern bibliography. In Dimitrie Cantemir — viafa opera [Dimitrie Cantemir — His Life and Works] by P.P. Panaitescu, the preoccupation for the philological and cultural aspects of The History of the Othman Empire begins to take center stage, thereby broadening its area of interest. Panaitescu gives a history of all the translations and editions of The History of the Othman Empire, something neither Iorga nor Guboglu, being more interested in the historical than in the editorial aspect, had done. He also examines the date of its writing (following Iorga) and remarks that both praises and criticisms came relatively late. In Hammer's case he correctly identifies the weak point of his attitude (Hammer's critique is unfair because it analyzes a book that is older than a hundred years from the standpoint of later scientific progress)1. Panaitescu also follows Iorga when he states that the first part of The History of the Othman Empire (the main text) is a translation after Saadi Efendi of Larissa, supporting this with arguments. The years are given using the Islamic calendar (Iorga had made the same remark); proper names are recorded in their Turkish form (§tefan eel Mare - Istefan) 2 . As mentioned earlier, P.P. Panaitescu reaches the surprising conclusion that the errors in this part of the book cannot be attributed to Cantemir, since they belong to the source of his translation, and are corrected by the notes, which are Cantemir's. P.P. Panaitescu enumerates several illustrious names as some of Cantemir's predecessors in this activity: Leunclavius, Lonicerus, Rycaut, Petis de La Croix. The sources he mentions are the classical ones, with the following observations: he no longer confuses Idem. p. 173. Actually, Hammer was justified in criticizing the errors of this most illustrious book about the Ottoman Empire in order to emphasize the importance of his own work. However, concealing the qualities of this book was unjustified, as was the tone of his article, in which Hammer wrote Cantemir off as "not eminently erudite, but eminently ignorant." 2 Idem, p. 174.

118

DIMITRIE CANTEMIR

A N D THE I S L A M I C

WORLD

(as did Iorga) Saadi Efendi of Larissa with Sa'adeddin Mehmed Hodja Efendi; he introduces, curiously, the Persian poet Saadi among the sources (it is true, though, that a few of Saadi's lines are quoted in The History of the Othman Empire)-, he makes the mistake of calling Busbecq a traveler in the Orient, when he was in fact Emperor Ferdinand I's Ambassador 1 . P.P. Panaitescu does coin a phrase that is worth remembering: he deems The History of the Othman Empire to be a valuable contribution not because of the sources it employed but rather by virtue of "the Prince's Ottoman memoirs" it contained 2 . The chapter about The Mohammedan Religious System is not subdivided, but does include a history of the book's versions and of its writing (historical circumstances, issues related to its printing), and a description of its structure and dedications. Panaitescu adds that the purpose of this work was to inform, not to persuade, by providing exact data, even if at first contact the attitude seems inimical. A small chapter deals with the studies Cantemir undertook in the Caucasus. The treatise published by the Romanian Academy on The History of Romanian Literature (1970) merely restates the accepted opinions of Cantemir scholars to date 3 . It supports the hypothesis that the first part of The History of the Othman Empire was a translation of a work by Saadi and it discusses the political motivation behind the book's writing, namely to demonstrate that the moment of the Ottoman Empire's defeat had arrived 4 . The year 1973, the 300 th anniversary of Dimitrie Cantemir's birth, was an important moment in the advancement of research concerning the Prince's work. Many articles, studies, and new editions were published, and the two works about the Ottoman Empire also enjoyed special attention. In the commemorative volume 300 de ani de la na§terea lui Dimitrie Cantemir [300 Years Since the Birth of Dimitrie Cantemir] Mihai Berza deals directly with The History of the Othman Empire in a portion of his discourse 5 . He points out some of the problems of dating and establishes the year 1672 as the beginning of the Empire's decline. Here is a short excerpt from this work: "Cantemir pushed his erudite coquetry or his search of a kind of 'local color' to the point of giving the date of the Tsar's coming to Moldavia in years since

1

Idem, p. 177. Idem, p. 178. 3 About The History of the Othman Empire, see pp. 574 - 576; about The Mohammedan Religious System, see pp. 580 - 581. 4 In our opinion, we cannot accept that the entire work was such a demonstration, and it is difficult to believe that a book of this size could have been written solely for propagandistic reasons. This is the purpose only of some pages. 5 M. Berza, "Activitatea istoriografica a lui Dimitrie Cantemir [Dimitrie Cantemir's Historiographic Activity]", pp. 17 - 19. 2

A P P E N D I X

119

the Hegira or calling Spain 'Endelos' and the Venetians 'Ifrengi'." 1 Also in 1973, there appeared an English edition that was intended to highlight the most interesting notes from The History of the Othman Empire, thus being merely a fragmentary and thematic re-publication of the first edition 2 . One worthwhile study that deserves praise for the systematic way in which it presents various issues and for its accuracy appertains to Maria Matilda Alexandrescu-Dersca Bulgaru 3 . The author bases her analysis on Tocilescu's manuscript and makes cross-references to the English edition. The list of works she cites is rich, as the author is among the few researchers who have actually studied the books Cantemir used as sources. The purpose of her article is the analysis of and commentary on the sources. The identities of the two mysterious (and very important, to him) historians named by Cantemir — Saadi Efendi of Larissa and Ali Efendi of Philippopolis — continue to remain unknown. For Saadi, Maria Matilda Alexandrescu-Dersca Bulgaru draws up a history of his many hypothetical "identities", showing that Babinger had demonstrated that he was not Sa'adeddin, as Iorga believed 4 , and that Hammer's version was also incorrect. Bulgaru also provides a valuable perspective on the debate over Ali Efendi of Philippopolis. According to her, he was the source or had a common source with Hiiseyin Hezarfenn, one of the important Ottoman historians also cited by Cantemir. She backs her claim with the observation that the fragment from Ali Efendi cited by Cantemir can be found in the same form only in Hezarfenn (this is the fragment about the conquest of Constantinople and its subsequent division). She also advances the hypothesis that Dimitrie Cantemir might have known Hiiseyin Hezarfenn (who died in 1691), seeing as though the latter was acquainted with other Western scholars as well (Marsigli and Galland). After having reviewed both the Byzantine and Occidental sources (showing that Dimitrie Cantemir's admiration for Chalkokondylas was what caused him to accept the latter's fantastical story about the origins of the Ottoman dynasty, a story that can be found in other authors' works as well), Bulgaru appreciates Cantemir's documentation as having been more than

1

M. Berza, op. cit., pp. 24 - 25. Dimitrie Cantemir - Historian of the South East European and Oriental Civilizations, Bucharest, 1973, with a foreword by Halil Inalcik, preface by Al. Duju, and a collection of echoes from the period by Paul Cernovodeanu. 3 "Dimitrie Cantemir, istoric al Imperiului otoman [Dimitrie Cantemir, Historian of the Ottoman Empire]", in Studu. Revista de istorie, tome 26,5/1973, pp. 971 - 989. 4 Babinger was actually inclined to believe that Cantemir had invented this character, an unlikely hypothesis since the Prince would not have invented his sources. In the case of Iorga's confusion, there was nothing to demonstrate, as Cantemir stated that one historian was the other's source.

120

DIMITRIE CANTEMIR

AND THE ISLAMIC

WORLD

ample for his time, even if he was unable to read the works of the Ottoman chroniclers who had written about (or had even tried to analyze) the decline of the Empire (Mustafa Selaniki, Mustafa Ali and Kogi Bey). Finally, she contradicts P.P. Panaitescu by stating that the text of the first part is not a translation, but rather a compilation, of Turkish sources especially. She also contradicts I. Minea and M. Romanescu, stating that Dimitrie Cantemir had not written the text in Istanbul and the notes in Russia. Less known that The History of the Othman Empire, The Mohammedan Religious System was to have a critical edition by Virgil Candea published in 1977, an edition which was to be improved and reprinted in 1987 in the series of Complete Works published by the Romanian Academy Publishing House. This was preceded by an article in the journal Romano-arabica1 entitled "Cantemir et la civilisation islamique", in which Virgil Candea reviewed the history of The Mohammedan Religious System's reception at the time of its writing (a minimal reception, as we know), as well as the history of Romanian efforts in this direction (§t. Ciobanu, I. Minea, P.P. Panaitescu, and I. Georgescu's translation). An interesting detail is worth noting: Dimitrie Cantemir had initially left a blank space for Rycaut's name in the Latin version, whereas in the printed version the syntagma "one of the Christians" appeared instead of Rycaut's name 2 . Part of the rest of the data can also be found in the "Introductory Study" to the previously mentioned editions of The Mohammedan Religious System3. An essential year for the fate of The History of the Othman Empire was 1984, when Virgil Candea discovered 4 the manuscript of The History of the Othman Empire's final version in the United States at Harvard University's Houghton Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Aside from the intrinsic value of this discovery, an additional observation would soon make it even more valuable. Tindal, the translator of the first edition to which all commentaries had referred, had often strayed from the original text; thus Cantemir's original had not been known accurately and in its entirety. The translation into Romanian of the preface (done by Dan Slujanschi) and the first commentaries (V. Candea) subsequently appeared in several issues of Manuscriptum5. These commentaries contain, for the first time, the reconstitution of the actual itinerary of the manuscript (to the extent possible)

1 Virgil Cândea, "Cantemir et la civilisation islamique", in Romano-arabica, 2 (1977), pp. 1541. 2 Idem, p. 23. 3 Echoes of this edition can be found in Paul Cernovodeanu, "Dimitrie Cantemir et l'Orient musulman", in Revue des études sud-est européennes, 1-2/1991, pp. 87-92. 4 5

"A sensational discovery" - Dan Slujanschi, in Manuscriptum, 2/1985, p. 17. Manuscriptum, 2/1985,1/1986, 3-4/1990.

APPENDIX

121

from Antioh to Harvard University (Tindal — Count Friederich von Thorns — Otto Harrassowitz's antique shop in Leipzig), as well as the observation that the itinerary that had been previously considered correct was in fact false (this itinerary led to Russia, where Antioh's archives returned after his death in Paris). The facsimile of the original manuscript was printed in 1999, thus rendering it accessible to the public at large for the first time 1 . The introduction to this edition provides much new information and an admirable systematization of the various pieces of data about The History of the Othman Empire. Besides reiterating the description of the manuscript's itinerary, V. Cándea describes in detail the editions of that epoch (with their various printings and booksellers), draws up a short history 2 of its editions in Romania (providing a new piece of information here as well: the four pages Asachi published for the first time in 1833 did not come from the Latin original, but were a translation into Latin from either the French or the German version 3 , thus a counterfeit, as we would say today), describes in detail the reactions to the publication of the European editions (also remarking an unusual detail — the book's citation in an Amsterdam publication during the author's lifetime, in 1722, when The History of the Othman Empire was, as we know, still in manuscript; however, it was attributed to Nicolae Mavrocordat). Romanian contributions are not covered in this study 4 . To return to the manuscript, this was — as Professor Cándea remarks — the precise copy of the author's draft, executed by two copyists who left the paragraph titles, the illegible words and the Arabic words to be filled in by Cantemir himself. The article concludes with some remarks on Tindal's translation: "Tindal omitted some passages from the original text, operated unwarranted modifications, and failed to reproduce the quotations in Arabic letters and the interesting drawings on page 613 5 (see p. 124 supra). By dividing the first section 6 , Tindal obtained four sections, in disagreement with the very title of the work: Incrementorum [...] libri tres"1, and also turned the endnotes into footnotes, a solution observed by all subsequent editions. *

1

The original Latin manuscript was printed in 2002 under Dan Slu§anschi's care. ^ Short because of the small number of editions. 3 Incrementorum..., 1999, pp. LXXXIII - LXXXIV. ^ The present chapter is an attempt to cover them. ^ See Illustrations. 6 The nine chapters of Book I were divided after Chapter 5. 1 Incrementorum..., 1999, p. CI.

122

D I M I T R I E C A N T E M I R A N D THE I S L A M I C

WORLD

Thus we can discern a few points of interest that have focused the attention of Romanian scholars. In the first place, the issue was one of literary history 1 — when and in what circumstances had The History of the Othman Empire been written. N. Iorga, G. Pascu, §t. Ciobanu and P.P. Panaitescu consider the date of its writing to have been between 1714-1718, hence in Russia (of course on the basis of the material he acquired in Istanbul), while I. Minea and M. Guboglu believe that the work was only continued in Russia 2 . This was followed by historical issues: the question of sources (Babinger, Guboglu, Maria Matilda Alexandrescu-Dersca Bulgaru) with the related questions about the translation of the first part (Iorga, P.P. Panaitescu) and the rendering of episodes from the history of the Romanian people (Iorga, Ciobanu). Remarks on the mistakes regarding Ottoman history (Guboglu) were also included. A third aspect that interested Romanian scholars was the history of the editions of The History of the Othman Empire (V. Candea, begun by P.P. Panaitescu). The most thoroughly discussed aspect of The History of the Othman Empire was the historical one. Because of its main subject matter this book elicited the greatest interest among historians, who in their turn were most interested by the specialized, that is to say, the scientific, aspect of the book, which proved to be its most impermanent aspect. However, Cantemir was more than an historian; he was a man of culture, and if we measured The History of the Othman Empire against the scientific criteria of what a history book should be, we would deprive it of its most interesting features. Certainly, this historical work was essential and not at all easy to complete, but it was only the foundation of the study of The History of the Othman Empire. What should have been built on this foundation has not been accomplished yet except to a small degree, and the space given to The History of the Othman Empire or The Mohammedan Religious System in various Histories of Romanian Literature is a symptom of this incompleteness 3 .

1 Adriana Babcti includes these issues in the chapter on the "prehistory" of the research on Cantemir. A pertinent general analysis of the evolution of Cantemirian studies (with an especial accent on Istoria ieroglifica [The Hieroglyphic History] and Divanul [The Divan] ) can be found in Bataliile pierdute [Lost Battles], Timifoara, 1998 (pp. 245-280, "indreptar de can temiro logic [Handbook for Cantemirian Studies]"). 2 Andrei Pippidi expressed a third opinion according to which The History of the Othman Empire was first written in Greek in Istanbul between 1706-1710, then translated and finished in Russia after 1714. The notes would have been written at that same time, but directly in Latin. See Ideea de "cre§tere" $i "scadere" a Imperiului otoman in istoriografia occidentaladin sec. al XVI lea - al XVIII-lea [The Idea of the "Growth" and the "Decay" of the Ottoman Empire in the Occidental Historiography of the 16th to the 18th Centuries], doctoral thesis summary, pp. 18-19). 3 For a complete list of consulted works, see the Bibliography.

APPENDIX

123

r4i C?M rV»« .fu'à jut t4-6«i> i'.( Ji^oUy»» _ /(fi»» :>£- . ta S> _1 y ÌK \b\ Jfivt*

^ t ^ **