Kowalczyk, Tomasz David.pdf (1.47 MB)
Edward Barton and Anglo-Ottoman relations, 1588-98
This thesis explores the unpublished correspondence of the second English ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Edward Barton. From 1588, Barton oversaw the flourishing of a diplomatic relationship between England and the Ottomans which outgrew its commercial roots during the 1590s to become a controversially close alliance. Barton had the unique ability of being fluent in Turkish; this, combined with his talent for creating and manipulating wide and varied epistolary networks, led to him becoming the most enmeshed European agent in Istanbul in the closing decades of the sixteenth century. Working from a rich yet largely unexplored archive of correspondence, this thesis examines Barton’s writing to determine the nature of his role as he balanced the interests of the English court with those of the Levant Company, which he also represented, and the Ottoman hierarchy. It asks to what extent Barton fashioned his embassy through writing, and finds that his constant reportage assumed a variety of forms to forge a role for him as a globally aware, linguistically skilled and unconventional ambassador. Growing out of the precedent set by his predecessor William Harborne and the ambassadorial ideals common to the period (Chapter One), Barton’s writing enabled control over wide-ranging networks of couriers, fixers, and forgers (Chapter Two); it also facilitated a remarkable embeddedness in the varied faith networks of sixteenth-century Istanbul (Chapter Three) which ensured his status as one of the most powerful intermediaries in the Eastern Mediterranean. In the case of his unauthorised 1596 journey into Hungary with the Ottoman army, his writing started to follow the conventions of travel writing as he attempted to make the case for the new kind of diplomacy he had come to embody (Chapter Four). As a result, his decade of office saw his embassy oversee an unprecedentedly close relationship between England and the Ottomans, facilitated and fashioned by his varied forms of writing. The thesis concludes that Barton’s correspondence shows us an agent who wrote his way to the top, using a variety of means; his methods tell us as much about early modern cross-cultural epistolary encounters as they do about the mechanics of the unlikely flourishing of the Anglo-Ottoman relationship.
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- Published version
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220.0Department affiliated with
- English Theses
Qualification level
- doctoral
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- phd
Language
- eng
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University of SussexFull text available
- Yes
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2020-12-19Usage metrics
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