Landweber|215However, Bonneval’s reform efforts were short-lived. His corps disbanded
after five years, and in 1750 the army and the ulema (religious authorities) shut
down his school. Bonneval’s diplomacy and policy-making work, also once
thought substantial, has been similarly reassessed as very minor in shaping
Ottoman statecraft. His own plan to invade Hungary was never realized. Yet if
Bonneval’s services to the Ottomans no longer carry much weight among mili-
tary historians, his newly recognized role as cross-cultural icon makes him of
greater interest than ever before to cultural historians. Upon becoming an Otto-
man, Bonneval was expected to honor his French Catholic past and yet preserve
its memory apart from his new political-religious affiliations. His prestige in Is-
tanbul stemmed, paradoxically, from his insider’s knowledge of European affairs.
As an insider he was welcomed easily to the sultan’s court, which had long staffed
its bureaucracy and military from an ethnically diverse group of slaves converted
to Islam. These men commonly found political advantage in keeping their native
connections, customs, and languages. Bonneval’s insistence on retaining French
habits and befriending European travelers fit in well. Even his conversion to Is-
lam mattered more for political than religious reasons; professing faith in Islam
was a display of loyalty to the Ottoman dynasty, and the depth of one’s religious
convictions was seldom questioned.
Bonneval’s story soon captured the collective European imagination when
several unauthorized “autobiographies” were published in Holland, Germany,
and England. These works challenged Bonneval’s professed disinterest in reli-
gion and ongoing claims to Frenchness. To their authors, multiple political and
national identities seemed inconceivable and affiliation with more than one re-
ligion an irreconcilable conflict. With prurient curiosity, they framed the issue
of his identity around the question of whether he was circumcised as part of his
conversion. Muslim circumcision fascinated early modern Christian Europeans,
to whom it signified the sin of apostasy and demanded a peculiar identification
with an alien nation of “Turks.”
The memoirs selectively mixed facts from Bonneval’s life with fantasy, de-
pending on the authors’ interpretations of his conversion. The first Memoirs of
the Comte de Bonneval (1737) sought to challenge Bonneval’s French identity and
defame his character beginning with his very birth:
When I came into the world a terrible storm was raging, which knocked down
the crosses on the church steeple and on the church-front. The parish priest
cast my horoscope [as a] diagram of an eagle, carrying in his beak a lily sur-
mounted by a Crescent.This diagram would puzzle the character Bonneval for many years, but the
reader already knew that it represented the three powers he would eventually
serve: France (the lily), followed by the Hapsburg emperor (the eagle), both to be