Once Constantinople was under Turkish rule few
westerners were enthusiastic about attempting to regain it
for Christendom, despite some papal efforts to muster a
crusade in the 1450s and 1460s; most people were much
more concerned about the threat nearer home, as the Ot-
tomans menaced the heartland of Europe. Nonetheless,
there was some limited contact between Constantinople
and the West during the 16th century. The mercantile
nations such as England saw it as a promising destination
for trading missions, while other visitors, such as Pieter
COECKE VAN AELST, who went there in 1533, were inter-
ested in observing the exotic dress and rituals of the sul-
tan’s court. Diplomats who wrote of their experiences all
remarked on the elaborate protocol that governed recep-
tion at the SUBLIME PORTE. Merchants from the West were
keen to establish trading privileges that would enable
them to obtain the luxury items for which the Ottoman
capital was famous in the 16th century: textiles, carpets,
and ceramics. The Turks’ liking for sophisticated au-
tomata, often incorporating clocks, meant in turn that
there was a ready outlet for items from European work-
shops such as a clockwork model of a Turkish ship made
in Augsburg around 1585; it had two rowers, a monkey on
the prow, and an admiral pasha standing on top of the
cabin (the actual clock), all of which moved on the hour
or quarter-hour. As a diplomatic overture from England in
1599 Queen Elizabeth dispatched the organ-builder
Thomas Dallam with one of his instruments as a gift for
the sultan. Artistic contacts date from near the start of the
Ottoman period when Mehmet II invited the Venetian
Gentile Bellini (c. 1429–1507) to live at his court
(1479–81); Bellini’s portrait of the sultan is in the National
Gallery, London. However, it was artists in the entourages
of ambassadors who were the prime means by which im-
ages of Ottoman Constantinople were transmitted to the
West. One such was Nicolas de Nicolay, who visited in
1551 as part of Henry II of France’s embassy to the sultan;
he wrote a successful and much-translated book about his
stay in Constantinople, illustrated with engravings that
formed the stock images of Turks in the Western imagina-
tion for many years. Melchior Lorichs, who probably ac-
companied Ogier Ghislain de BUSBECQin 1555, drew the
architectural monuments of the city as well as producing
figure studies and a portrait of Sultan Suleiman the Mag-
nificent.
Further reading: Deno John Geanakoplos, Constan-
tinople and the West (Madison, Wis.: University of Wis-
consin Press, 1989); Stanley Mayes, An Organ for the11116 6 CCoonnssttaannttiinnoopplleeConstantinopleThis panorama by Pieter Coecke van Aelst, based on a drawing made during his visit in 1533, shows the western
European’s interest in the antiquities and buildings of the great city and the exotic appearance of its inhabitants.