France-Turkey Relations - The Influence of Turkish Culture in French Culture

The Influence of Turkish Culture in French Culture

The Franco-Turkish alliance established in 1536 between the king of France Francis I and the Turkish sultan of the Ottoman Empire Suleiman the Magnificent lasted for more than two and a half centuries. Turquerie was a fashion in Western Europe from the 16th to 18th centuries for imitating aspects of Turkish art and culture. Many different Western European countries were fascinated by the exotic and relatively unknown culture of Turkey, which was the center of the Ottoman Empire, and at the beginning of the period the only power to pose a serious military threat to Europe. The West had a growing interest in Turkish-made products and art, including music, visual arts, architecture, and sculptures. This fashionable phenomenon became more popular through trading routes and increased diplomatic relationships between the Ottomans and the European nations (Franco-Ottoman alliance). Coffee is an example of a commodity that became more popular as Europeans “discover” it in Ottoman lands and experience it.

Perhaps the most influential transformation into the turquerie vogue in Europe was done by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. In 1718, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu reported that the Turks had a tradition of deliberately inoculating themselves with fluid taken from mild cases of smallpox, and that she had inoculated her own children. The Anatolian Ottoman Turks knew about methods of inoculation. She witnessed inoculation being practiced by Ottoman Turks physicians in Istanbul,and was greatly impressed. This kind of inoculation and other forms of variolation were introduced into West by Lady Montagu, a famous English letter-writer and wife of the English ambassador at Istanbul between 1716 and 1718, who almost died from smallpox as a young adult and was physically scarred from it. She came across the Turkish methods of inoculation, consenting to have her son inoculated by the Embassy surgeon Charles Maitland in the Turkish way. Lady Montagu wrote to her sister and friends in England describing the process in details. On her return to England she continued to propagate the Turkish tradition of inoculation and had many of her relatives inoculated. The breakthrough came when a scientific description of the inoculation operation was submitted to the Royal Society in 1724 by Dr Emmanual Timoni, who had been the Montagu's family physician in Istanbul. Inoculation was adopted both in England and in France nearly half a century before Jenner's famous smallpox vaccine of 1796. Since then vaccination campaigns have spread throughout the globe, sometimes prescribed by law or regulations (See Vaccination Acts). Vaccines are now used against a wide variety of diseases besides smallpox.

At first, In France, considerable opposition arose to the introduction of inoculation. Voltaire, in his Lettres Philosophiques, wrote a criticism of his countrymen for being opposed to inoculation and having so little regard for the welfare of their children, concluding that "had inoculation been practised in France it would have saved the lives of thousands.". Inoculation grew in popularity in Europe through the 18th century. Louis Pasteur further developed the technique during the 19th century, extending its use to killed agents protecting against anthrax and rabies. (On June 8, 1886, the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II awarded Pasteur with the Order of the Medjidie (I. Class) and 10000 Ottoman liras.)

On the other hand, Lady Montagu's collected letters while there, describing Turkish fashion, were distributed widely in manuscript form. They were then printed upon her death in 1762. Her letters helped shape how Europeans interpreted the Turkish fashion and how to dress. This phenomenon eventually found its way across the Atlantic and in colonial America, where Montagu’s letters were also published.