214 | Leaving France, “Turning Turk,” Becoming Ottoman
that a man as decisive and as determined as I would not have dithered fifteen
months about turning Turk, if such had been my intent in passing into the
lands of the sultan; and that I would not have waited for the moment when I
was to be handed over to the Austrians to declare myself such. This declaration
was the only means for saving myself from their clutches: I’d sooner be called
a devil then be dependent on Austrian mercy.Bonneval stresses that he never intended to convert to Islam when he offered his
services to the Ottoman sultan. In a letter to Voltaire he also made it plain that,
far from being religiously motivated, his conversion was an entirely political de-
cision: “I felt an interior movement of Turkish grace, consisting of a desire to box
Prince Eugene on the ears with several Turkish battalions behind me.”
During the early modern period, most European languages described any-
one suspected of converting to Islam as “turning Turk,” a phrase conflating reli-
gion with national identity to an unusual degree. Ever since the Ottoman Turks
assumed leadership of Sunni Islam in the sixteenth century, Turkishness, in
the European imagination, had become inseparable from Islam. Ostensibly, to
“turn Turk” was to change religion, but because from the European perspec-
tive the terms “Turk” and “Muslim” were interchangeable, it also strongly sug-
gested that one had switched national identities. Bonneval’s identity, which had
been muddied by his many adventures, became less so and clarified in ways no
one could have predicted when he turned Turk. But while Europeans thought he
had transformed his national identity by converting, to turn Turk was not actu-
ally to become Ottoman (which in any case was neither a national nor an ethnic
identity). “Ottomans” were the empire’s ruling elite, defined as those who served
the state in exchange for a paid office and tax privileges; served the religion by
being Muslim; conformed to Ottoman customs and etiquette; and mastered Ara-
bic, Persian, and Turkish. Bonneval would have to earn his place.
Abandoning Christianity for Islam did give Bonneval the right to protec-
tion from the Sublime Porte. Political instabilities kept him from Istanbul for
another year, until the new grand vizier, Topal Osman Pasha, invited him to the
capital to reform the Janissary artillery corps. Once there, Bonneval initiated two
projects. To introduce European techniques to the Ottoman army, he organized a
new corps of three hundred Bosnian bombardiers. To ensure this artillery squad-
ron would outlast his leadership, in 1734 he opened the Ottoman Empire’s first
military engineering school, in Üsküdar, across the Bosphorus from Istanbul.
These activities earned him the rank of humbaraci pasha (lord bombardier). Bon-
neval also made himself useful as a military and diplomatic consultant. At Sultan
Mahmud’s request, he wrote memoirs detailing the current military conditions
of France, Spain, Austria, Hungary, and Russia and other reports. His advice was
sought regarding the question of the Polish succession in 1733, and he tried to
shape Ottoman policy in the Austrian-Ottoman war of 1736–1739.