Jean de La Foret

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Letter from Sultan Süleyman to Francis I from 1536, with a report on his military success in Iraq and the recognition of Jean de La Forêt as the first permanent ambassador to France.

Jean de La Forêt , also Jean de La Forest († 1537 in Constantinople , Ottoman Empire ) was a French diplomat and the first French ambassador to the Ottoman Empire .

biography

After negotiations in Tunis with Chaireddin Barbarossa , to whom he offered military aid against the Republic of Genoa and advised him to attack Corsica and the coasts of Spain with his fleet , Jean de La Forêt arrived in May 1534 accompanied by his cousin Charles de Marillac (1510 –1560) and the scholar Guillaume Postel to Constantinople. He was sent there by King Francis I as the first ambassador of France to the Ottoman Empire, with the task of strengthening the Franco-Ottoman alliance . This alliance was directed against the hegemonic aspirations of Charles V and generally against the rule of the Habsburg monarchy in Europe (see Habsburg-French opposition ). The royal order, issued by Chancellor Antoine Duprat , contained the order to Jean de La Forêt to claim one million gold ducats from Sultan Suleyman I and that his army should march into Sicily and Sardinia and install a king appointed by La Forêt there.

De La Forêt accompanied the Sultan to Azerbaijan in the Ottoman-Safavid War , from where they returned to Constantinople together in the spring of 1536. After the establishment of a French embassy and a Christian chapel in the Galata district , and after negotiations in 1535 with the Grand Vizier Ibrahim Pasha , the ambassador was able to conclude a surrender on February 18, 1536, shortly before Ibrahim Pasha was murdered . It triggered the Third Italian War , which lasted until 1538.

According to this agreement with the Grand Vizier, of which only a draft has been preserved, the French were to be granted trading privileges in all Ottoman ports, exempted from the tax for those under protection and judged according to their own laws in an extraterritorial consular court. A similar treaty, which also granted tax breaks and trade concessions, had previously been signed between the Sublime Porte and Venice , and it was intended to serve as a model for the unequal treaties that were concluded between Western powers and Asian states in the 19th century.

The Spanish-born Antonio Rincon or Antoine de Rincon († 1541 in Rivoli ), who had worked as envoy in Constantinople from 1530 to 1533, succeeded him as ambassador after de La Forêt's death in 1537.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Charles A. Frazee: Catholics and Sultans. The church and the Ottoman Empire 1453-1923 . Cambridge University Press, London 1983, ISBN 0-521-24676-8 , pp. 27-28.
  2. ↑ Max Kunke: The surrenders of Turkey . J. Schweitzer Verlag 1918, reprint 2011.
  3. ^ Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw: History of the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey . Cambridge University Press, 1976. ISBN 978-0-52129-163-7 , p. 97.
  4. ^ Garrett Mattingly: Renaissance Diplomacy . P. 155
personal data
SURNAME La Forêt, Jean de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES La Forest, Jean de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French diplomat
DATE OF BIRTH 15th century or 16th century
DATE OF DEATH 1537
Place of death Constantinople