A Frenchman in Constantinople: The Embassy of Jacques de Germigny (1578-1584)

My paper follows the experience of Jacques de Germigny, the French ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1578 to 1584, in Constantinople. Until recently diplomats have been studied as windows of foreign policy and the motivations of their sovereigns. Only recently have historians (such as Daniel Goffman, and Eric Dursteler) started to investigate the experience of European ambassadors in the Ottoman Empire. Both Goffman and Dursteler, for instance, focus on the English factors and the Venetian subjects as a whole in Ottoman lands during the early modern period. My microhistory will focus just on the embassy of Jacques de Germigny. I hope to illuminate the individuals he interacted with the most, the conditions under which he did so, the factions with which he sought to align himself—in other words, the degree to which and how he inserted himself into the Ottoman political world.

My project has much in common with the Cooks’ Good Faith and Truthful Ignorance primarily because of the source base. Certainly the Cooks’ sources were court records, and my sources are diplomatic correspondence, but in many ways they are similar. In both, the witness or ambassador is interacting with an authority figure who has significant control on the outcome of his/her situation, making the information they provide biased in that it is self-interested. Also, similar to the Cooks’ sources, mine are voluminous. I’m using three manuscript collections: FR 16143, FR 4125, and NAF 22048, which contain 73-148 letters which span from one folio in length to four folios front and back. Included in these letters are the king’s correspondence to the Germigny, Germigny’s personal and professional correspondence, and even his ledgers of expenses during his time in Constantinople (which I just realized existed in the back of one of the collections). I was overwhelmed by the information when I realized one of the collections was twice as long as I expected, and included much more than just the letters from the King and Queen Mother of France. Suffice it to say, I have more than enough information to reconstruct the ambassador’s experience.

These sources are incredibly rich and provide in-depth discussions of regular meetings between Germigny and Ottoman leaders—some of which were secretive and under the veil of darkness and disguise (but to be fair these were rare—and the contents of the conversation. Incredibly careful reading is important here because to my knowledge nothing of the sort exists in the Ottoman archives to check Germigny’s statements (and even if they did, I do not currently have access to them). The best I have is a Muhhimmi Defteri from the same period, which is the imperial register that provides summaries of outgoing orders from the imperial council. These allow me to roughly check Germigny’s statements on general Ottoman policy to understand how well/poorly informed or—the opposite side of that coin—how much he exaggerated/caricatured Ottoman politics.

So far I’m very pleased with my research, even though I have so much more to do (seriously, so much more reading). Right now Germigny’s experience has much to say about Europeans in the Ottoman Empire. One of the historiographical arguments recent historians like Dursteler began pushing against was that Europeans interacted little with Ottoman Muslims but used minority ethnic/religious groups as go-betweens. Germigny’s experience demonstrates very clearly that was not the case for him. Quite the opposite, so far my research indicates that Germigny interacted frequently with Ottoman Muslims, and that he understood Ottoman politics well enough to align his interests with those factions in Constantinople that most closely shared them.