EN GENERAL, LOS AUTORES DE OBRAS ARTISTICAS

Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, while ambassador in Constantinople (1555–62), a time which according to his memoirs he did not much enjoy, was concerned about the threat to European Christendom from the Ottoman Empire.8In his Letters, which began to be published in1581, he wrote, among other matters, of his diplomatic efforts to negotiate a truce and then a peace agreement between the Holy Roman Empire and the Ottomans, the gossip about the imperial court, Turkish costumes, exotic plants, and dancing elephants in Con- stantinople. On arrival in Istanbul, Busbecq, while looking at the ‘‘marvelously handsome dresses’’ thought it was the most beautiful spectacle he ever saw. He admired certain aspects of Turkish life: the court dress; modesty of behavior; absence of distinctions based on birth, wealth, or sale of office; the honest judicial system; the military and administrative skills; the absence of poverty; the fact that those who held the highest posts under the sultan were often the sons of shepherds and herdsmen; and the self-denial and discipline of the soldiers, the Janissaries, whom he contrasted with the behavior of European soldiers, more often drunk, debauched, and contemptuous of discipline. In the Ottoman Empire no person ‘‘owed his dignity to anything but his personal merits and bravery.’’ Nevertheless, on balance Busbecq was critical of the absolute power of the sultan; the opulence and extravagance of the court;

and the intrigues and murders involved in the power struggle for succession to the throne. He also argued that the ultimate objective of the Turks, whom he regarded as devoted to a false faith, was to prepare the way for the extinction of Christianity.

Giovanni Botero, in his comparative study of major social systems in the world, provided considerable geographical and anthropological information, in addition to an account of political economy and religion, all of which was helpful in explaining the degree of power of the different states and societies.9 Like some other writers, and anticipating one of the major propositions of Montesquieu, Botero argued that the large size and the climate of Asia were likely to lead to the formation and existence of great empires while the mod- erate climate of European countries favored smaller, diverse nations. Also, Botero believed that the peoples in the two areas had different skills and charac- ters, those in Europe being superior, technologically and politically, to those in Asia. Thus, for reasons both of geography and the human qualities of their populations, the West had superior strength relative to Asia.

Botero did use ‘‘despotic government’’ to refer to Eastern systems, except Persia, and also included other countries such as Ethiopia, Siam, India, and China. Botero saw the Ottoman Empire, within its territorial limits, as com- pletely despotic, and the Great Turk, the sultan, as absolute master of all things including private property because he owned everything. He generalized that Oriental systems were marked by excessive concentration of authority and control of revenues. Inhabitants of Ottoman society were slaves, not subjects; they were dependent on decisions by the despotic Gran Signor whose will was law. No person, however important, was safe or secure because all depended on the whim of the Gran Signor. Botero explained that the ruler maintained himself in absolute power by two means: not allowing his subjects to have weapons, and using, in order to protect himself, renegades, Janissaries, taken as children from their countries who were then raised to become loyal soldiers.10The Ottoman Empire had become great, partly through the success of these fighters and its own resources, and partly through the discord of Christian states at the time.

Botero, a Jesuit who left the order in1579, regarded, as did Busbecq, the Ottoman Empire as the terror facing Christian nations.11Differing from some other travelers, he characterized Russia, the Muscovy of Ivan IV, as well as Turkey and India as Oriental despotisms, but took a kindlier view of Persia where he saw the people as sociable, there was an honored nobility, and sub- jects took delight in cultural activities. By contrast, Botero’s portrait of the Ottoman Empire was totally negative. He saw the people there as slaves and as exploited; commerce was in the hands of foreigners; state officials were

corrupt; and order and discipline were so extreme as to foster injustice and lead to weakness. His empirical observations of the Ottomans were influential; they were seen by many as an accurate picture of Oriental despotism.12He clearly distinguished between Eastern regimes, in which liberty and the right to prop- erty did not exist, and Western regimes with legal constraints on power and where individuals had private property.

Between1631 and 1668 the Protestant merchant-ambassador Jean-Baptiste Tavernier traveled six times to Turkey, Persia, and particularly India, the country on which he wrote most in his Six Voyages (1676) a publication reprinted twenty-one times by the mid-eighteenth century.13He wrote not only about the political system but also about a variety of aspects of life in India, politics, the differences between Sunnis and Shi’as, art, architecture of towns, food, markets and trade, and very knowledgeably about precious and other metals. Tavernier, who had been invited to the emperor’s grandiose birthday festival in 1665, was one who, like Jean de The´venot and Edward Terry, marveled at the opulence and the power of the Great Mughal. This ruler was ‘‘the richest and most potent monarch of Asia, the greatest power in Asia, comparable to what the King of France is in Europe.’’ His enormous principal palace contained fine-cut stone, thirty-two marble columns, and thrones cov- ered with diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and pearls. When the emperor went out he had a bodyguard of five or six hundred armed men; when he went to the mosque, eight elephants announced by trumpet fanfares marched in front of him.14 Differing from Botero in his appraisal of Persia, Tavernier saw the government there as purely despotic: the king had the right of life and death over his subjects and was not limited by any council or procedures that might provide advice or by the kind of restraints customary in Europe.15The ruler killed members of his own family he suspected of wanting to assassinate him. Like many other commentators on the Orient, Tavernier concluded that the Eastern systems lacked hereditary nobility, a landed aristocracy, and private property in land.

Perhaps the most influential of the late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers on the Orient was Paul Rycaut, a diplomat of Huguenot extraction, who represented England for five years in Istanbul, during which he said he explored Ottoman registers and records to ascertain the true nature of the system. In an implicit warning to English decision makers of the pernicious nature of excessive absolutism, Rycaut portrayed the Ottoman Empire as an arbitrary, violent, cruel, corrupt, tyrannical regime where the ruler, devoid of reason or virtue, was absolute and above the law.16Ownership of all property, except religious prop- erty, was vested in the sultan: no independent control of lands and revenues existed. All the wealth of the empire went to satisfy the appetite of a single

man whose will and lusts were served. Unlike European countries, no noble class with ‘‘title of blood’’ was present to occupy high positions. In this system men were raised by adulation, chance, or the arbitrary favor of the ruler. Officials labored as slaves for their great patron and master. For Rycaut, the Turks exemplified the dictum of Francis Bacon, ‘‘a monarchy where there is no nobility at all, is ever pure and absolute tyranny.’’ The whole composition of the Turkish court was ‘‘a prison of slaves . . . a fabric of slavery.’’

In his analysis Rycaut was implicitly optimistic that the West would prevail over the Ottoman Empire, which was in a bad condition, economically and politically, though the military was strong. He saw this decline of the empire as a sign of divine displeasure. The empire would disintegrate: ‘‘This mighty body would burst with the poison of its own ill humors.’’ One of these ‘‘humors’’ was the ‘‘flattery and immoderate subjection’’ that had caused the decay of Turkish discipline in the sultanate of Ibrahim when women were very influen- tial (part of the ‘‘Sultanate of Women’’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- turies); in his own time Rycaut believed the contemporary Sultan Mahomet was advised chiefly by his mother, blacks, eunuchs, and handsome young male favorites.17 Rycaut ends his ‘‘epistle to the reader’’ by offering thanks to God for his having been born a Christian, in view of the ‘‘superstition, vanity, and ill foundation of the Mahometan religion,’’ and for having been born in a country, the most just and fair in all the world, instead of in a state (Turkey) exhibiting tyranny, oppression, and cruelty, and where reason ‘‘stands in no competition with the pride and lust of an unreasonable minister.’’

Similar conclusions about Asian systems, particularly about Mughal India, appear in the writings of Franc¸ois Bernier, who spent fourteen years, between 1655 and 1668, in various countries in Asia. His argument, in his Travels in the Mughal Empire, 1656–1668, which was to influence later writers, was that those systems were in rapid decline in a ruined and depopulated land.18 In India the Grand Mughal maintained his power with a large military force: two hundred thousand cavalry and three hundred thousand infantry. The financial situation of the Mughal Empire was not healthy. The ruler’s expen- diture was about the same as his revenue. Much of the revenue went into jewelry. The power of the ruler (Aurangzeb) was cruel and oppressive. Unlike the French situation, in India, and in other Eastern countries, private property, hereditary nobility, and parliaments or judges of local courts did not exist. Royal authority was sadly abused. The ruler claimed the property of all rents from the lands in the empire though, in arbitrary fashion, he made conditional grants to the military leaders, governors, and tax farmers of the provinces. For Bernier, the crucial fact was that the right to private property was not acknowledged.

For Bernier, the effects of the despotic power of the ruler were a disastrous economy, desolate regions unfit for human habitation, and poor cultivation of the land, which was seldom tilled except by compulsion. There was no incen- tive to engage in profitable activities. The state of slavery obstructed the prog- ress of trade and led to profound and universal ignorance. The country was ruined by the need to defray the enormous charges required to maintain the splendor of a vast court and to pay for a large, expensive military establish- ment. Moreover, independent chiefs and princes in the country added little to the revenue.

In this corrupt system the people, having no legal or institutional protection, were in subjection, suffering from the ‘‘use of the cane and the whip.’’ The Great Mughal was surrounded by slaves, who were ignorant, and by parasites raised from the dregs of society, unfamiliar with loyalty and patriotism. The king sat on his throne in the most magnificent attire surrounded by a vast collection of precious stones. In the East, the only law that decided all con- troversies was the cane and the caprice of the governor. Like other observers around the same period, Bernier wrote of the cruel process of succession to the throne during which brothers of the new ruler were killed.

Bernier knew India best, but he broadened his remarks to apply to other countries. The effects of despotic power, unrelentingly exercised, were to be seen by the condition of ‘‘Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Palestine, the once wonder- ful plains of Antioch.’’ The three countries, Turkey, Persia, and Hindustan (India), had no idea of private property, ‘‘the foundation of all that is good and beautiful in the world.’’ They all had the same faults and must, sooner or later, experience the same pernicious consequences: tyranny, ruin, and misery. Bernier warned that ‘‘actuated by a blind and wicked ambition to be more absolute than was warranted by the laws of God and of nature, the kings of Asia grasp at everything until at length they lose everything.’’ In what was perhaps an indirect warning or advice to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, minister of Louis XIV, who incidentally in the1660s encouraged the teaching of Oriental languages in Paris as well as trying to increase trade with the Eastern countries, Bernier called for moderation in economic policy, especially regarding taxation and private wealth. He concluded, ‘‘God forbid that our monarchs in Europe should also be the sole owners of all the lands which their subjects now pos- sess’’ and held that the decline of Asian states was due to the absence of private property and incentives. Bernier argued that European monarchs, contrary to the situation in Oriental despotisms, should ensure the existence in their regimes of private property and legal and civil rights.

Jean (John) Chardin, a Huguenot merchant and jeweler, and friend of Ber- nier, traveled to Persia, in whose language he became fluent, and India between

1665 and 1679, and then immigrated to England in 1681, where he was knighted by King Charles II, appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society, and became the East India Company’s representative to the Dutch. He was another observer to stress the impact of climate, writing that ‘‘the cause or the origin of the customs and habits of the Orientals’’ lay in the nature of their climate.19 Hot climates, present in Asia, enervated the mind as well as the body. This, Chardin believed, helped to explain the fact that Asian systems were despotic. The government of Persia, extravagant and arbitrary, was monarchical, des- potic, and absolute; all authority rested entirely in the hands of one man, in both spiritual and temporal matters, who was in all respects the master over the life and goods of his subjects.20 Chardin saw the King of Persia as the most absolute in the world, able to do whatever he said, and to see that his com- mands were always exactly executed. He was raised in an atmosphere of sen- suality. Asians, living in these systems ruled by one person, were incapable of conceiving of the administration of sovereign power by several men of equal rank.

Chardin, however, was more cautious than Bernier in generalizing about Oriental despotism and ownership of land. He implied that his view about despotism was pertinent only to the Safavid dynasty in the sixteenth and sev- enteenth centuries in Persia; it did not stem from the slavish nature of Asian peoples, but rather from the Shi’ite doctrine of the country derived from the authority of Muhammad. At one point Chardin suggested that for most people other than the great lords, the Persian government might more properly be termed military, arbitrary, and absolute rather than despotic. For the most part, the government was regulated by civil laws. He even said the condition of the Persian people was ‘‘more secure and gentle than in many Christian states.’’21 Chardin differed from other writers of the period such as Botero and Bernier in stating that land revenues went not only to the ruler but also to others in the country. He referred to Persians as tolerant, hospitable, pleas- ant tempered, the most civilized people of the East. Yet Chardin also wrote that the Persians did nothing out of magnanimity, a virtue almost unknown in the East.22 Seemingly contradicting his own opinion, and anticipating Montes- quieu, he wrote that as fortune and bodies were enslaved by an utterly despotic and arbitrary power, so were hearts and minds, which know only fear and hope.