French-Ottoman Alliance
The Franco-Ottoman or Franco-Ottoman alliance represented a in the early modern period for many years continuously reactivated political constellation. The Catholic France , at that time one of the great powers of Western Europe, was in a kind Einkesselungssituation between the possessions of the Habsburgs in Holy Roman Empire (the Habsburg hereditary lands, Austria, as well as the Habsburg part of the Burgundian inheritance , primarily in the present-day Netherlands and Belgium) and the Habsburg Spain. The Spanish world power was under Charles V.and among his successors involved in protracted, ever-flaming wars with the Kingdom of France. The Ottomans, on the other hand, had regained strength from the middle of the 15th century and intended to expand their sphere of influence in their European territories, with the main conflict in the 15th century initially in the wars against Hungary.
prehistory
Two developments played a role in the formation of the alliance: The battle of Mohács , 1526, in which the Hungarian king fell and made the Habsburgs by marriage to him into heirs of Hungary and thus direct competitors of the Ottomans, and the rise of the Safavids in Persia, the provided the Ottomans on their eastern border with an equal opponent for the first time since the time of Timur. One problem is the temporal dimension of the alliance. At times, an alliance in the form of a solid alliance, which developed from the beginning of the 16th century to the Napoleonic Wars, is assumed. This is partly formulated as a constantly renewed alliance, which gets to the heart of the matter. "Contrary to popular belief up to the present day, de jure a fixed Franco-Ottoman alliance did not exist either in the 16th century or at a later date."
The situation in France in the late 15th and early 16th centuries
France has been one of the most powerful states in Western Europe since the end of the Middle Ages. The Hundred Years War had contained this power and led to a focus on the conflict with England. After the end of the war in 1453, there was an increasing concentration of state power in the hands of the king in France. The last uprisings of individual feudal lords like the Ligue du Bien public were under Louis IX. dejected. Two developments became significant for the further course of French foreign policy: the continuity of the claim to the imperial dignity in the Holy Roman Empire by the Habsburg monarchy and the Habsburg presence in the Netherlands after the fall and division of the Burgundian state (after the death of Charles the Bold in the battle of Nancy , 1477) as well as the alliance of the Habsburgs with the newly unified Spain, which as a result of dynastic politics led to a personal union of Spain and the German possessions of the Habsburgs in the person of Charles V. Even before the reign of Charles V, France had major military clashes with the Habsburgs in the course of the Burgundian War of Succession and then the Italian Wars from the end of the 15th century. Since Charles V came to power, the conflict has intensified into a dispute over hegemony in the Western Christian world. Charles V, strengthened by the conquests in the wake of the discovery of America , leaned on the concept of a universal Christian monarchy . France, traditionally the strongest Catholic power in Western Europe, was the main obstacle. This conflict was reflected in the Franco-Habsburg conflict in the first half of the 16th century.
The Ottoman Empire in the late 15th and early 16th centuries
The Ottoman Empire has been in a phase of military expansion since the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 by Mehmed II . Mehmed defeated the Aq Qoyunlu in 1473 , relieving the Ottomans of a possible threat on the eastern border for decades. Since then, Hungary has been the main enemy in Europe. The mutual course of the Hungarian-Ottoman conflict ended in 1526 in the Battle of Mohács , in which the Hungarian king fell without direct heirs and the succession passed to the Habsburgs. The Ottomans were thus in direct opposition to the emperor. Not to be neglected is the expansion of the Ottoman sphere of influence into the western Mediterranean. The victory over the Mamluks and the conquest of Egypt in 1516 opened up new possibilities for influencing this area. The so-called barbaric states emerging in the Maghreb were partially nominally under the sovereignty of the Ottoman sultan and were closely linked to the Ottoman navy. The rise of the Safavids in Persia posed a threat to the Ottomans in that an opponent arose on the eastern border who pursued completely different goals both ideologically and religiously and politically. Although the Ottomans were able to defeat Ismail I in the battle of Tschaldiran in 1514, the Safavids still had control of Iraqi territory and parts of the Caucasian border regions as their target.
The Franco-Ottoman Alliance
The 1520s saw a continuation of the old lines of conflict (battle for northern Italy, especially Milan , as well as Hungary ). After the Battle of Pavia (1525) , in which Charles V had taken Franz I prisoner, Franz's mother, Louise of Savoy, got in touch with Suleyman I in order to persuade him to attack Austria. Suleyman I actually prepared for an offensive to Hungary in the winter of the same year, but the question must be asked whether the Queen Mother's request actually had a decisive effect on this. After the uprisings in Asia Minor had dissuaded Suleyman I from continuing the campaign, the next Ottoman advance into Central Europe took place some time later. In 1529 Vienna was besieged , but this had to be broken off. France and Habsburg signed the Cambrai Peace at the same time . In the period after the conclusion of the peace, Francis I used the Ottoman setback in front of Vienna in public as a great victory for Christianity. In the following years, free through the peace with France, Charles V undertook several attacks against Ottoman territory and Ottoman allies ( conquest of Tunis in 1535 ). At the same time a new war broke out in Azerbaijan between the Ottomans and the Safavids . After a phase of internal instability, Tahmasp I had gained the opportunity to launch a foreign policy offensive through the removal of Husayn Khan, the leader of the Qizilbash. At this time there was a diplomatic exchange between Habsburg and Persia, the aim of which was to take joint action against the Ottomans. The war lasted until 1536. Franz I was already prepared for a new war with the emperor in 1535 and therefore sought contact with Suleyman I.
The agreement concluded between France and the Ottomans in 1535 aimed at Ottoman attacks on the Habsburg possessions in Italy. There were also plans to involve the Maghreb corsairs in the fighting. Franz I also put forward the argument of the denominational split of the HRR to Suleyman I , through which the Protestant, mostly northern and central German princes would not support the emperor in the defense of the south-eastern border. None of these ventures were particularly successful. The prevailing interpretation is that a large part of this unsuccessfulness is due to the fickleness of Francis I, who, with a view to strengthening the French position, always saw short-term peace with the emperor as an option. Accordingly, Suleyman I was only able to meet the French side with limited confidence, especially since the propagandistic element of the " Turkish threat " could always be brought to the fore whenever politically opportune appeared at the moment. In 1538 Franco-Habsburg negotiations took place in Nice, which was followed by Charles V's long stay in France. It should be noted that in 1535 no formal alliance contract was concluded, as was often claimed later, but that only military cooperation was agreed.
In 1540 renewed tensions over possession of Milan bore fruit in relation to Ottoman-French cooperation. Francis I countered the new war with the emperor, starting in 1542, with a renewed offer of cooperation to Suleyman I. The renewed efforts in relation to an alliance led in 1543 to a union of the French and Ottoman fleets in order to undertake a joint attack on Nice . The well-known episode of the stationing of the Ottoman fleet in Toulon was significant here. The inhabitants of Toulon, an important French port city, were completely resettled in the years 1543-44 in order to be able to accommodate the Ottoman fleet in the city. You have to bear in mind that these in particular may not have enjoyed a particularly good reputation in Christian coastal regions.
In 1544, France and the emperor made peace again at Crepy. The French for their part brokered a peace between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans in 1545. This was of course only of short duration, because a new armistice was concluded between France and the Ottomans as early as 1547, to the displeasure of France, whose new king, Henry II, had another armistice due to the fact that French territorial gains in Italy and the Netherlands did not take place took up hostile policy towards the emperor. At that time, however, the Ottomans had to feel repulsed by the unreliability of the French, since France had left the war in 1544 after seeing its own territorial interests served. In addition, in 1548 a new war with Persia began. Suleyman I tried in the wars against Persia to play off his brother Shah Tahmasps Alqas Mirza against him and to use her as ruler of Iran in his place.
The Safavid invasion of Armenia in 1548 was however repulsed by the Ottomans. In the early 1550s the old cooperation was revived again. In the ongoing conflict with Habsburg, which in the meantime had defeated the Protestant princes in Germany, the French and Ottoman fleets worked together off Malta, but had no real success. In the period that followed, Ottoman-French cooperation was always an option, such as various offers by the Ottomans to France, e. B. after the devastating defeat in the naval battle of Lepanto , 1571. But the internal religious wars between Huguenots and French Catholics, in which the French kingship played a more than ambiguous role, made it impossible for France to take an offensive foreign policy position.
From a geopolitical point of view, an alliance with the Ottomans remained a game of thought for the following centuries. Approaches to this can be found e.g. B. with the French Huguenots or later with Louis XIV. However, it must also be emphasized that French troops partly assisted the Austrian to “defend the West in battles against the Ottomans” (as in the battle of St. Gotthard).
The contemporary "intellectual and ideological classification of Ottoman-French cooperation"
An alliance with the Ottomans had to cause difficulties for the Kingdom of France for weighty reasons. On the one hand, the French kings saw themselves as “the most Christian kings”, a claim that had a strong connection to right faith, particularly relevant in the time of the religious division in Western and Central Europe. Cooperation with the Ottomans, who were perceived by the public as enemies of Christianity, had to seriously shake this self-image, or at least make it appear untrustworthy in public. The Turkish danger already had the status of a culturally ingrained view in the 16th century. A crusade against the Ottoman Empire had already been launched in 1396. In the 15th century the Ottomans were then more and more perceived by the general public as a threat to Europe's eastern border. In particular, the fall of Constantinople and the fall of the former power of Eastern Christianity must have left traces in the consciousness of contemporaries.
In particular, the idea of a crusade, understood in the sense of a communal Christian war campaign, which no longer had any real comparison to the war campaigns of the Middle Ages, which were actually understood as a crusade, possessed an astonishing ideal power and had to become a latent threat to any cooperation with the Ottomans. Francis I himself had dealt with ideas of the crusade in the 1510s. The reason for this was the triumphant advance of the Ottomans against the Mamluks in the Orient, which threatened to increase the "Ottoman danger" again. Pope Leo X issued a bull in 1516 calling for a crusade. This measure was not unusual, the popes of the 14th and 15th centuries called for crusades against the Ottomans several times, so that the call in itself, devalued, must be seen more as a propagandistic element for internal Christian profiling, the realization of which seemed secondary to the popes . In December 1517, Francis I wrote a letter to the Pope in which he expressed his opinion on the crusade. Franz explains there that in the light of the "Christian ideal" it is initially more important to create inner peace between Christians. In the following, Francis I presented a detailed plan for the joint attack of the European powers on the Ottoman Empire. A crusade had to appear as a threat to the Ottomans again in 1538 when Charles V was staying in France for an extended period.
reception
The public assessment of the Franco-Ottoman alliance naturally had to meet with reservations in Western Christendom. With regard to the opinion of the Muslims in the Ottoman Empire, there is far less information to be found in the German or English-language specialist literature. On the one hand, the relationship with a Christian ruler had to offer a certain ideological-religious conflict potential, on the other hand, it must be asked whether the physical distance has not led to a certain pragmatism or indifference in the assessment of the differences. Other battlefields, such as the war against Shiite Persia and the propaganda confrontation there, may have received more attention than the perhaps less present alliance with France.
From the French point of view, the alliance resulted in a facilitated attack on core Europe, which France contributed to. Furthermore, the Christian population of the coastal areas of the Mediterranean had to refuse to join forces with the Ottoman fleet, as the latter had fallen into disrepute due to attacks and enslavement of Christian populations. The resettlement of the population of Toulon in particular must have had a major impact in this respect. France also used the alliance to attack a Catholic monarch with whom there were no religious differences. The Ottomans achieved a relief of the western border through the alliance, which they could use to war against the Safavids, who were already incredulous.
There are numerous critical assessments of the relationship with the Ottomans in Christian contemporary literature. The continuation of the idea of a crusade (against Islam in general, not yet against the Ottomans) leads Malettke (2000) back to Pierre Dubois (approx. 1255–1321). The occupation with the Ottomans (and thus the perceived threat posed by them) seems to have reached a high point in the first half of the 16th century, measured by the number of thematically related publications. Malettke names around 1000 known writings on the Ottomans from Western Europe for the first 50 years of the 16th century, but only 250 for the second half of the 16th century. In 1555 , the natural scientist Pierre Belon (1517–1564) commented disparagingly on the piracy under the auspices of the Ottoman sultan . The statement of the linguist Guillaume Postel (1510–1581) that the Ottomans did not have a completely negative attitude towards the Ottomans shows that in religious matters, e.g. B. towards Christians and Jews, appear tolerant in their domain. Postel also notes, however, that the widespread aversion to the Ottomans in Western Europe is due to the lack of neutral sources and thus assumes a general trend towards the demonization of the Ottomans in Europe. Looking separately at Franco-Ottoman cooperation in the Mediterranean, the verdict on France was usually negative.
literature
- Adel Allouche: The Origins and Development of the Ottoman-Safavid Conflict (906-962 / 1500-1555). Klaus Schwarz Verlag, Berlin 1993.
- Klaus Malettke : The Ottomans' advances in the 16th century from a French perspective. In: Bodo Guthmüller & Wilhelm Kühlmann : Europe and the Turks in the Renaissance. Niemeyer, Tübingen 2000, pp. 373-394.
- Anthony C. Piccirillo: A Vile, Infamous, Diabolic Treaty The Franco-Ottoman Alliance of Francis I and the Eclipse of the Christendom Ideal . Georgetown University, Georgetown