All Mehmed's Men
Hywel Williams: As beauties or beasts, Turks have fascinated the west. Established cultures need their enemies. The barbarian at the gate is a useful tool when there's a need to manufacture unity within the territorial limits.
Established cultures need their enemies. The barbarian at the gate is a useful tool when there's a need to manufacture unity within the territorial limits. Inside there may be strains and conflicts that threaten the dominant elite. But the governing conspiracy can be self-protective as it turns to exploitative portrayals of the beasts who are out there seeking those whom they may devour.
Enemies without can become enemies within, as miners and migrants know. But the problem with the technique is that it makes the governors look negligent: they're the ones who allowed the virus inside the body politic. Far better to maintain that all the flesh-creeping material is outside, near enough to frighten but far enough to allow exploitation.
Turks, the Royal Academy's current exhibition, is a 1,000-year exploration of the people who emerged from central Asia in the middle of the first millennium, only to fade away as a threat to the west once they were defeated at the siege of Vienna in 1683. The danger was real - a question of the westward geo-political push of the Turkic tribes from the steppe. The Turks' greatest victory came in 1453 when the Ottoman Turkish forces took Constantinople and the sultan Mehmed II walked into Hagia Sophia where, ever since, Islamic cartouches hang where once the incense of the Christian mass ascended.
Some very early legends, reported in Chinese sources, claimed Turks were descended from wolves. The idea of animal vigour in the genes suited the nascent conquering sense. A 6th-century stone image from Mongolia shows a Turkic child being fed by a she-wolf. What could be seen as an insult became self-image.
But, as the Turks in their various territorial and dynastic forms consolidated into patrons of the arts, it made less sense for them to be understood, or present themselves, as brutes. They could, after all, help the west. It was a Turkic military caste - the Mameluke rulers of Egypt - who stopped the westward advance of the Mongols in 1260. The Christian west and its secular successor powers have none the less persisted with the idea of the Turk as a feared outsider, whose threat makes him a useful consolidator of the idea of Europe. That Lepanto moment, when the naval forces of the west defeated the Ottoman Turks in 1571, continues today with the French and German hostility to Turkey's EU entry. But from the 16th century on, the western picture of the barbarian becomes a more ambiguous, if equally self-serving, fabrication. The beast was now allowed to be beautiful.
Shakespeare's Othello is a colonial picture of the "Moor" lost in a superior culture. Othello is admirably proud, but also a cutie and not that bright. The same sense that the potential invader combines danger with amusement value is there in the explicitly Turkish sexual politics of Mozart's Entführung and in the central character of Osmin, a joke figure but also a menacing presence.
Painting, too, records the growing western respect for the Turk. One of the very few western images in the RA exhibition is Bellini's portrait of Mehmed II, painted 27 years after the fall of Constantinople. The terror of the west has become a reflective middle-aged man. Perhaps, a generation hence, some similarly sensitive commissioned portrait of Osama bin Laden will hang in a London exhibition.
Enemies without can become enemies within, as miners and migrants know. But the problem with the technique is that it makes the governors look negligent: they're the ones who allowed the virus inside the body politic. Far better to maintain that all the flesh-creeping material is outside, near enough to frighten but far enough to allow exploitation.
Turks, the Royal Academy's current exhibition, is a 1,000-year exploration of the people who emerged from central Asia in the middle of the first millennium, only to fade away as a threat to the west once they were defeated at the siege of Vienna in 1683. The danger was real - a question of the westward geo-political push of the Turkic tribes from the steppe. The Turks' greatest victory came in 1453 when the Ottoman Turkish forces took Constantinople and the sultan Mehmed II walked into Hagia Sophia where, ever since, Islamic cartouches hang where once the incense of the Christian mass ascended.
Some very early legends, reported in Chinese sources, claimed Turks were descended from wolves. The idea of animal vigour in the genes suited the nascent conquering sense. A 6th-century stone image from Mongolia shows a Turkic child being fed by a she-wolf. What could be seen as an insult became self-image.
But, as the Turks in their various territorial and dynastic forms consolidated into patrons of the arts, it made less sense for them to be understood, or present themselves, as brutes. They could, after all, help the west. It was a Turkic military caste - the Mameluke rulers of Egypt - who stopped the westward advance of the Mongols in 1260. The Christian west and its secular successor powers have none the less persisted with the idea of the Turk as a feared outsider, whose threat makes him a useful consolidator of the idea of Europe. That Lepanto moment, when the naval forces of the west defeated the Ottoman Turks in 1571, continues today with the French and German hostility to Turkey's EU entry. But from the 16th century on, the western picture of the barbarian becomes a more ambiguous, if equally self-serving, fabrication. The beast was now allowed to be beautiful.
Shakespeare's Othello is a colonial picture of the "Moor" lost in a superior culture. Othello is admirably proud, but also a cutie and not that bright. The same sense that the potential invader combines danger with amusement value is there in the explicitly Turkish sexual politics of Mozart's Entführung and in the central character of Osmin, a joke figure but also a menacing presence.
Painting, too, records the growing western respect for the Turk. One of the very few western images in the RA exhibition is Bellini's portrait of Mehmed II, painted 27 years after the fall of Constantinople. The terror of the west has become a reflective middle-aged man. Perhaps, a generation hence, some similarly sensitive commissioned portrait of Osama bin Laden will hang in a London exhibition.
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