Landweber|219it, and the Turks do not bother their heads over whether I thought it or not. In
addition I wear the turban, as it is my duty to wear the uniform of my master.”
If to European Christians the turban demonstrated religion and nation,
to Ottomans turbans indicated rank and office. Bonneval began his career
among the Ottoman elite as a “two-tailed” pasha—meaning his turban had two
horsetails—and later was promoted to three-tailed pasha. Europeans little un-
derstood turbans beyond their symbolic association with Islam. However, they
could study these distinctions through costume guides, which were becoming
popular manuals for the new custom of masquerade balls. Artists who produced
fake portraits of Bonneval for the memoirs did just this. Using a 1712 French book
of Ottoman costumes, one plagiarized the illustration of a Turkish Janissary
commander (which Bonneval had effectively become) to produce the spurious
portrait in the 1740 Venetian and Turkish Anecdotes (see figure 15.2). Subsequent
editions of the Venetian and Turkish Anecdotes and its rivals then pirated that il-
lustration. But also around 1740 the Swiss painter Jean-Étienne Liotard met Bon-
neval in Istanbul and drew his portrait from life. Bonneval’s turban was notably
unlike the 1712 Janissary’s, and in an engraving published a decade later (see fig-
ure 15.3) we see Liotard’s influence: the toque-shaped turban has been redrawn to
reflect reality.
Illustrators also wrestled with another disturbing transformation to Bon-
neval’s appearance. Turkish men, unlike the French, shaved their heads and wore
beards. When Bonneval became Muslim, he followed suit to prove the sincerity
of his new Ottoman identity. The baldness, like the turban, dated to the hour of
his conversion: “While the witnesses were carrying word of my conversion to the
pasha of Bosnia, I shaved my head.” The beard took longer. The eighteenth cen-
tur y was a remarkably beard less period in European histor y. The only recognized
exceptions were Jews and Muslims; growing a beard marked Bonneval as one of
them. This fashion statement troubled contemporaries even more than his tur-
ban (see figure 15.2). All the memoirs initially depicted Bonneval with a mustache
and clean-shaven chin, as if the artists could not imagine the French nobleman
with a beard. Only after Liotard proved Bonneval’s beardedness did other artists
depict him correctly bearded (see figure 15.3).
Following his conversion to Islam, Bonneval renamed himself Ahmed. In
public, he followed the stock tropes, literally turning Turk in faith and politics,
exchanging the hat for the turban by altering lifelong habits. He exercised his po-
litical skills increasingly in favor of Ottoman interests; he studied the Koran and
Sufi mysticism; he wore a turban, beard, and Turkish robes; he abstained publicly
from pork and alcohol—in short, he appeared in all essentials to be an Ottoman.
But privately, the Frenchman prevailed. Although he assured his brother, “I am
the same comte de Bonneval as before. Clothes don’t make the monk,” his ac-
tions suggested otherwise. He settled in Pera, the European quarter of Istanbul.