An Ottoman Ambassador in Granada

Although the connections between the Alhambra and the Maghreb and, more particularly, Morocco, were heavily marked by historical intimacy, the monument's cultural impact on the Arab and Islamic world throughout the nineteenth century extended all the way to the Orient – the Mashreq – and even beyond. Once again, the visitors’ book reveals the existence of many travellers from these faraway lands, whose inscriptions form expressions of a – sometimes silent – homage paid to this monument of Arabo-Islamic civilisation.

Rather surprisingly, the first Muslim visitors to appear on the pages of the visitors’ book of the Alhambra were not the Moroccans and other North Africans we have discovered in the preceding chapter, but Ottoman subjects coming from much more distant regions, both geographically and culturally. Of course, this statement is valid only as long as we exclude the Moroccan embassies from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries mentioned earlier. Nevertheless, if we limit ourselves to the romantic vision of the Alhambra created by French and British authors in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and which came to dominate the mindset of travellers signing the visitors’ book, one cannot help but observe that visitors from the Maghreb had disappeared from the scene, only to resurface – if my information is correct – in 1863. Yet it was twenty years earlier, on 19 July 1844, that the first Ottoman subject signed the visitors’ book. This visitor was Keçecizade Mehmed Fuad Efendi (1815–69), the ambassador sent on an extraordinary mission to Madrid to convey Sultan Abdülmecid's congratulations to Queen Isabella II (1830–1904, r. 1833–68) on the occasion of her coming of age, on 8 November of the preceding year (Figure 3.1).

Fuad Efendi had in common with the eighteenth-century Moroccan travellers and most of their successors of the second half of the nineteenth century the official nature of his mission, which set him apart from most of the Western visitors. From the Ottomans’ point of view, this was a first, given that his closest predecessor, Ahmed Vasıf Efendi (?–1806), sent to Spain in 1787, had not been to Granada.