The Eighteenth Century: the Westernizers 401
such as Bonneval and Ragıb Pasha made serious efforts to reform the army, al-
beit in different ways. When war resumed, the issue of peace re-emerged, and
with it the new understanding of international politics as seen, for example, in
Bonneval’s work.
The channels connecting Western European thought with Ottoman liter-
ary circles did not cease; on the contrary, they grew increasingly influential. To
the works cited above should be added an Ottoman translation of Frederick
the Great of Prussia’s Anti-Machiavel (1740), a refutation of Machiavelli’s The
Prince (which also contains the Italian thinker’s text) from an enlightened
monarch’s point of view.38 The translation was probably made in the late 1750s;
the spirit of Frederick’s work fits quite well with traditional Ottoman politi-
cal thought, since it opposes the view of the monarch as necessarily wicked,
cruel, and devious while stating that the only appropriate way to act is with
justice and kindness. Nevertheless, the translator had to cope with terms and
ideas that were new to Ottoman political thought; the very fact that such a
text exists shows that this period was indeed one of significant translation ac-
tivity. To this should be added the multiplication of Ottoman envoys sent to
European capitals and the proliferation of their reports (sefaretname), which
were then often incorporated into official histories and thus made available to
an even wider audience.39 From among these ambassadors or rather, perhaps,
envoys, one could highlight Yirmisekiz Mehmed Çelebi, who visited Paris in
1721 and whose son Said Efendi (who had accompanied his father) was a close
friend and supporter of İbrahim Müteferrika (and his partner in the printing
enterprise until 1731, when he began to be sent as an ambassador himself ),40
the historian Vasıf Efendi, envoy to Spain, and Ebubekir Ratıb Efendi, who was
mentioned in the previous chapter and to whom we will return soon. Another
such ambassador, Ahmed Resmî Efendi, was also the initiator of a new under-
standing of international politics, in the vein of the remarks by Bonneval or
the anonymous author of the “Dialogue”, which may be seen as a stage in the
gradual “de-moralization” of the Ottoman conceptions surrounding external
38 Aydoğdu 2008. On the circulation of Machiavelli’s ideas in late eighteenth-century Greek
Ottoman circles, cf. Stavrakopoulou 2012, 44–45.
39 On such embassies and the relevant literature, see Berkes 1964, 33–36; Unat 1968; Ortaylı
2001, 40–41; Aksan 1995, 42–46; Aksan 2004, 15–16; Korkut 2003; Şakul 2005, 123–124 and
fn. 22; Ermiş 2014, 152–157; on the changing Ottoman attitudes regarding diplomacy,
cf. Işıksel 2010 and 2014. On Ottoman knowleedge of Europe in the mid-eighteenth cen-
tury, see Aksan 1995, 34–42.
40 Sabev 2006, 154–156, 168.